No matter what you do you are innocent!

This is true, but it is grossly misunderstood and misused by the ego.

In order for this truth to apply, you have to BE in your innocence. It can't be intellectual. You can't use it to justify murder.

You first have to get yourself into your innocence, so that your innocent isn't just an informational fact, it's an experiential fact. And in order to experience innocence, that places you in the mind and being of LOVE.

It is not possible to experience such innocence without aligning yourself with love.

Therefore, once you ARE aligned with love, you are in your innocence, and whatever you do WILL be innocent. Or to put it another way, no matter what you do, it WILL be loving - and it will never prove you are guilty.

It's only when you take this fact and try to apply it to life without the experience/alignment with its truth (truth is an experience not intellectual information!), that you distort it and then use to justify actions that you perform not based on love, such as that it is okay to hurt someone or "do bad things" etc.

When you do that, you have "level confusion". You've attempted to take something that it is a truth on a higher level of metaphysics, which can only be *experiential*, and are attempting to apply it to a level of existence that is not experiential, where there is separation between you and the truth. And that's why it turns into justification for war. And this is also why religions have led to more wars than most any other cause.

No matter what you do, you are innocent, free, forgiven, loved and loving. But if you're not truly authentically living from such a state of being, then beware your ego's misuse of it.

The truth is not information. It is not an idea or a thought. It is not a fact, like a statement about something. It is not some piece of information you can learn mentally through studying it. It isn't a bunch of metaphysics or a discussion.

The truth is an EXPERIENCE. It is experiential. It is being. It is reality. You BE IT.

In order for your mind to be healed and for the Holy Spirit to heal you, you need to gain access to an EXPERIENCE of the truth. This truth exists not as some downloadable information but as a sort of 'state of reality' or a 'place'... or maybe you could call it Heaven. It is an existence. It is something you can experience and live and be and unite with.

You can't learn truth mentally or through thought or understanding. It doesn't matter how proficient you become at grasping all the logic and metaphysics of a path like A Course in Miracles or any other.

In order to shift your mind from believing something that is false, to believing something that is really true, you cannot just replace one piece of information with another. You cannot just make affirmations or try to convince yourself. You need to find a way to COMMUNE with the truth. You need to get your mind to open up so that it can join with the truth, access the truth, and allow the truth to be PRESENT in your mind.

It is the PRESENCE of the truth that heals you.

The Holy Spirit IS this presence of truth. He is not just a memory of God like some kind of file stored on a computer. He IS the presence of God. He is something you need to access, experience, join with, commune with, unite with. You do that with your very being, not your intellect.

The Holy Spirit HIMSELF is the ANSWER that God has provided. Not an answer like, 1+1=2, that's completely powerless to do anything. The Holy Spirit is an ACTIVE answer, a CORRECTION, an EXPERIENTIAL ANSWER which dispels illusions by its mere presence, and the atonement principle that he governs is itself a POWER which - when you are in the PRESENCE of it... shines a light in your mind. It is this light which shows you the truth.

The light of truth is what sets you free. Without the actual LIGHT, you can't see. Without the light, you can't increase your awareness. Without the light, you can't see what is clearly the truth and what is clearly false. But when you DO allow this light to enter your mind, when you allow Holy Spirit and invite Him to come in and heal you simply by BEING WITH HIM, and when you open up to and trust Him to do whatever, and when you surrender your EGO, now you're getting somewhere. Now you're allowing THE ANSWER (Holy Spirit) to be received and experienced, and His Light now shines away the darkness simply by its presence and by showing you - revealing to you - what is true. And that is not just some analysis or label or description of truth, it is an immediate LIVEABLE TRUTH - an experiential reality.

The truth needs to be experienced, and in the experience of it your BEING is somewhat 'reprogrammed' just by being `shone upon`. It sheds light on who and what you are in truth. And this truth is convincing - very convincing - even more convincing than any lie. Its presence has an automatic sense of recognition and power to it which is far stronger than any dark false belief or attitude. It is when this light is PRESENT in your awareness, to any degree, that it shows up the flaws in what you were mistakedly believing was the truth - substitutes for the truth that you invented as snippets of information or bits of belief systems.

I have not once failed to EXPERIENCE a psychological transformation, an awareness of how OBVIOUS it is that my false belief IS false, and a subsequent WILLINGNESS and READINESS to surrender it to Holy Spirit, as a result of actually connecting to the truth - opening up to it, reaching out to it, aligning with it, resonating with it, even affirming it so that I can get my mind to be at least a little AWARE that it exists. This is how you let the light in, and the light does the rest.

This is what you MUST do (Holy Spirit's words) in order to awaken from the dream - to apply A Course in Miracles to your EXPERIENCE of reality.

The Truth IS GOD.

Jesus is literally asking us to become spirit-identified rather than body-identified, to recognize that our body is merely an image being projected by our mind (which we can stop projecting at any time), and to learn to stop seeing ourselves AND others as bodies.

That's no small request either. We are so used to being bodies and seeing bodies, we think it is normal and natural.

One thing to realize is that a body is not a first-hand experience and it is not the origin or source of a person. It is a secondary layer placed OVER the inner spirit to try to hide it.

So when you are looking at a body and you see fish and bones and eyes and a face and you think that as you look at THAT, you are SEEING the person, you are not. You are seeing a wall of denial and separation. A disguise. It's designed to BLOCK you from seeing the person that is "trapped" inside, locked up in the body and unseen by anyone.

The body is a device for separation. And the golden rule always applies. What we see in others we see in ourselves. In order to become aware that we are not a body ourselves we have to overcome all forms of separation and all attack. And only when we can not see ourselves as a body will we be able to see past the bodies of others.

This is also the meaning of "God is in everything I see because God is in my mind".... ie, if you can get to where you have awareness of God in your mind, you will STOP seeing bodies entirely because God is not a body. If you are seeing God, you are not seeing form. You cannot see two worlds. So this does NOT mean that you see God "in the world", it means that God is ALL THERE IS and THERE IS NO WORLD.

It's a huge challenge to actually get to an experiential state where a) you do not believe you are a body at all (genuinely), b) you do not see your body as your self, c) your sense of identity is not attached to the body whatsoever, d) you do not see others as their bodies, e) you recognize that all bodies are fictional puppets that people dangle in front of them to pretend to interact, and f) that you do not need a body at all in order to exist as divine spirit.

Overcoming the body is the same thing as overcoming death. If you can become free of the body consciously and deliberately without using death to do so, you no longer need a body and can make it disappear. It will become transparent and will vanish.

Ok so, various people have expressed doubt that there are "levels" in ACIM or that this is in any way important or useful. So I thought I'd ramble on a bit about this from my point of view. I can see this being somewhat controversial.

The first thing is this.

Jesus wrote ACIM and he is not in a body, and throughout the Course we're taught we are not a body. That's even today's workbook lesson - I am not a body I am free. That doesn't mean, oh, you're still IN a body but it's not you. Also the course says at no time does the body exist. Ok. So.... WHERE do you exist? Where is there no physical matter? Not this universe.

Clearly this means there is some other seeming 'place', if you will, in which mind - spirit - is able to exist, which does not require a physical form and has nothing to do with the physical world, which, by the way, is not real.

So here we at the very least have 2 `levels`. The level of the physical world of form, and some other spiritual level. Sort of like a 'dimension' if you will. It's non-physical. It's where you end up when your body dies. And its the stopping off point between lifetimes.

Now, each 'level' has to be like a 'place' of sorts.. which the Course refers to as a 'universe'. And if you read the text carefully, when it mentions universe it uses that exact same word even though it's sometimes referring to the universe of form, and sometimes referring to the universe that God created. ie reference to at least some other non-physical level or experiential existence.

So if you don't believe there are levels, and you read the course talking about 'universe' in this way, and you don't discern exactly what that relates to given the context, then you're going to assume it's always talking about the physical universe. And then when it makes statements about 'universe' it's going to throw you into a whole bunch of confusing misunderstandings and ego interpretations. You'll attribute all kinds of 'truth' to the ego universe because you think the course is telling you this is the case.

The course is often quite subtle about this, and it also shifts around quite a lot between which 'level' of experience it's referring to, without necessarily giving you a nice obvious disclaimer that it's doing so.

Now, this other universe, the spiritual universe, also has to be broken down into sub-levels because there are parts of the course which speak of certain truths which cannot possibly apply to a separate place like that. For example whenever the Course speaks of 'heaven', and of 'souls', and of 'Gods Creation', and of 'knowing', and 'oneness' and all these interesting things, they often refer to the very highest 'level' of the metaphysics - heaven if you will.

But then at other times the course speaks of things like the sonship, alluding to you having multiple brothers, a brotherhood, not in terms of all brothers being ONE SON, but in terms of a multitude of sons. Also the urtext speaks of multiple souls. Now, in terms of the metaphysics, it does not make logical consistent sence to group together references to these 'sub-level' ways of looking at things with the highest-level way of looking at things. If you do that, then when the course refers to something like heaven or knowing or whatever, or the son of God, you will lump it all together under a general umbrella of 'heavenly spiritual stuff' and make the only distinction that this apparently is 'not the ego' level. This will result in all manner of confusions, misunderstandings of meaning, wrong implications, false conclusions and just a big mess. The metaphysics will break, the course will become inconsistent and you won't be able to understand it.

So now at the very least, there is a level of heaven, a level where the sonship exists as multiple sons, a level of christ where there is only one son, and a level of the physical universe where the ego plays out in duality. This is all quite clearly in the course text throughout and referred to in multiple ways and in multiple contexts. And if you read it and if you understand what it means, then when you read about christ you know that its referring to the unified one son and when its referring to sonship or brotherhood you know its referring to the level of multiple sons.

So there is a level of the metaphysics, which has its own 'universe' and its own 'state of mind', like a 'place' of experience if you will, for each of these aspects of the course. This is the structure of the dream that the ego made. Different levels of 'splits' in the one mind. And these are on a colossal scale. Astronomical. The ego dream comprises separation from God, resulting in a separate son 'level', and then a split into a sonship/brotherhood which is a whole other universe/level, and then there's the level just above the physical (level 2) where the holy spirit resides, and then the physical level. All of these levels are explicitly referred to in the course and if you really can grasp the logical and subtle implications of every thing Jesus says in each section, you can tell that these levels 'exist' in the metaphysical structure.

So now, if you don't believe in these levels, then as mentioned, you will draw all kinds of false conclusions. It results in all kinds of behaviors where you try to attain states of mind/being/experience which are extremely far beyond the 'level' of the dream that you find yourself on. You generally can only transition to the next highest level, one level at a time, you can't easily jump to the top - to heaven. Holy Spirit is on level '2', in a different 'dimension' if you will, which is where we all are being asked to get to as our main next step. When we try to move beyond that to things like awareness of the sonship, total equality, oneness, christ-mind, etc... we basically CANNOT do it and it leads us into all kinds of ego deceptions - a spiritualized ego.

The spiritualized ego is what happens when the ego, or shall we say the mindset, of a given 'level 'of the ego's total dream, attempts to transfer itself to a higher-order level of existence. It tries to KEEP its mindset (e.g. level 1 ego duality) but at the same time take itself to the next level where there is really a totally different mind (Holy Spirit's mind). But this is impossible, of course, but this doesn't stop it trying. And this creates a great amount of specialness and fake spirituality and fake progress and ego images and behavioral fuckups which call for sacrifice and illusions and all kinds of madness. It's not possible. We have to let the 'mindset' of level 1 - the ego - we have to let it GO, detach from it, so that who WE are can travel up to level 2 and proceed from there.

So anyway... if there's only one level, or even only 2 levels, you will develop a spiritual ego from it because it will lead you to so many false conclusions and so many attempts to greatly spiritualize lower-order levels of existence that cannot contain those truths. The lower mind cannot grasp and experience the higher states.

If you read the Course with these levels in mind, it is much more clear where and when Jesus is referring to certain specific levels of the dream - different dimensions, different universes, different mindsets and different aspects of the metaphysics. Also if you look at your own 'course attitude' based on these levels, you will see that you've been attempting to become an achiever of very high-level metaphysics but still while being a level-1 identity/mind. This produces bliss-ninny spiritualization of the ego, and it is rife in the course community. And in myself as well. I'm just starting to realize how far this has gone.

So anyway. The levels are just a way to map actual levels of experiential existence in the hierarchy of the total dream, which comprises several 'dimensions' of which the physical universe is only one, and therefore it's really just a clear and truthful acknowledgement of this fact, allowing you to navigate realistically and to understand what the heck the course really means when it says something. Very high-level truths are of NO USE TO YOU when you are on level 1. You cannot be christ when you are a level-1 ego. You have to become level 2, then 3, then 4, then 5. It is also a relief to let go of the pressure of trying to attain such impossibly high spiritual states which are out of reach of the level-1 mind. You can attain them but your ego cannot, and until you let go of 'level 1' thinking you cannot get to level 2 yet alone up to heaven.

Repeatedly Jesus instructs us in ACIM to demonstrate that you are invulnerable.

He says that we are to show our brother that nothing he has done has had ANY effect on us.

He says that we are to demonstrate that we are innocent and our brother is innocent.

He says we are to show our invulnerability by having no effects of attack.

He says we need to be completely unaffected by the world and "I am not a victim of the world I see". Not a victim AT ALL.

He wants us to basically stand there, while the world and its people are doing absolutely whatever they want to do, and be absolutely unaffected, unchanged, undisturbed. Our peace is meant to be so rock solid that we are not moved by anything.

This really means we're being called to NOT play the game of "I am suffering" or "I've been victimized" or "I'm unfairly treated" or "You did something to me" or "I am this way because of someone else" or "I didn't ask for this" or "I've been changed by the world" or "There are effects in me that I didn't put there".

Jesus repeats this theme when he says that nothing happens to us without our consent, we always get what we ask for and we never get what we do not ask for. He goes on to tell us to make sure never to give any belief or reality to the suggestion that the Son of God has been or can be affected by anything, including having absolutely no belief in sickness or separation.

He asks us to see no blame whatsoever in our brother or ourselves. To see ourselves as completely blameless and guiltless.

Innocence doesn't just mean 'you didn't do anything', its an experiential state of INVULNERABILITY and IMMORTALITY, in which quite literally you recognize nothing can or has happened to you.

But who is the 'you' that nothing happens to? It's not the you that you think you are. It's your real self.

I received this inspired definition of what A Course in Miracles is today.

A Course in Miracles says it is a "required course", that you do not have any option on whether or not to take it, and that only the time that you take it is voluntary. It says there is a curriculum which you must follow which you do not have any say in defining, meaning there are no other curriculums.

This is a point of much controversy and misunderstanding. But Jesus is telling the truth.

The "Course", if you will, the actual Course that Jesus is referring to in the book "A Course in Miracles", is not a Course that exists AS the book, but the book is REFERRING to the Course.

The Course, the one curriculum, is referring to every metaphysical truth and every metaphysical step which must at some point be taken in order to return to God. This applies to everyone, everywhere, all the time. There are no exceptions or options. It doesn't matter who you are, what religion you belong to, what you believe, you do NOT have a say in determining what the metaphysics of existence is, how it operates, what the laws are, or how you are meant to function.

There IS only one truth. And from that One Truth, following the separation, extends all of the metaphysical levels and layers and facts, which are on an absolutely colossal scale in the trans-personal, trans-temporal mind of the One Son of God. The structural composition of the levels of mind, the stages of separation, the steps that you have to go through in order to fall asleep, the things you MUST experience if you take those steps, are all absolutely irrefutable FACTS. There is a "WAY", there is only ONE way, and it is this one way that Jesus has labelled "A Course in Miracles".

Stop right there before you associate the book form with what the Course is. Jesus, outside of the book, is referring to the metaphysical structure of reality and the illusion and everything that can possibly take place in it, the "true nature" of existence, and in His book titled "A Course in Miracles" He has chosen to NAME that experiential metaphysical structure "the curriculum." There is no room for bending the rules or breaking the laws of the curriculum.

As a result of choosing separation, certain things came into existence which have a certain structure, a certain behavior, a certain inter-relationship with each other, and it is all entirely based on metaphysical facts. Everything that seemed to happen after the separation happened according to completely clear-cut causes and effects. Basically, by choosing ego, you MUST experience very exact "effects", and it is only by reversing those exact effects that you can be free of the ego. You took 3 steps forward, you MUST take 3 steps back.

Therefore there IS only one real curriculum. Either you are moving away from God or toward God. Movements toward God are the curriculum. This applies to everyone in all walks of life regardless of whether they heard of "A Course in Miracles" or not. In a way, though, Jesus has associated the term with the curriculum, because at the beginning He says:

"This is a Course in Miracles. It is a required Course."

Therefore Jesus is really referring to the one universal curriculum, the one universal metaphysics, and the steps required in order to follow the curriculum, as "A Course in Miracles". Not the book per se. The metaphysical structure of the dream and all of its levels and layers and facts and side-effects is all what defines the fixed curriculum, and taking a "course" in that, is the "Course in Miracles".

It is called a Course in MIRACLES because if you take an actual step in following the curriculum, making actual metaphysical progress in awakening, no matter what belief system you are surrounding those steps with, you are performing miracles. Corrections of mind.

It must be true that you are ALWAYS inside of the curriculum, you are always taking the curriculum, and you are alway bound by its rules. However, the option you have is whether or not to LEARN, i.e. take the curriculum, and so you are free to choose WHEN to learn it, i.e. when to take the next steps toward God. You do not get to choose what those steps are because they are based on the metaphysics. You can continue to be in DENIAL of this truth, which is an attempt to not take the curriculum, but you cannot CHANGE this truth, and sooner or later you MUST take it.

The curriculum therefore exists outside of the "book" of the Course, and applies in ALL belief systems at all times. There is only one "real" path to God. There are corrections necessary in order to awaken to the one truth. Whatever so-called path you are using, even if you never heard of A Course in Miracles, it MUST contain at least some metaphysical truth IF it is going to WORK at all. If it is not in alignment with the metaphysical truth and if it does not advance you along the ONE curriculum, then it CANNOT work.

Also different belief systems and religions either make the metaphysical truth clear, or obscure it, to varying degrees. Some belief systems obscure more than others and may obscure heavily. For example, satanism most likely is going to be very effective at denying the curriculum and electing "not to take it yet". Similarly there are many other delaying maneuvers.

However, what we see as the BOOK, "A Course in Miracles", the FORMAT it takes, and the way it describes the metaphysical truth, is perhaps one of, if not THE, most effective, clear, inspired, ACCURATE, least obscuring, and maximally EFFICIENT formats on the planet today. It can save significant time, because it very closely aligns to the one curriculum, and very effectively teaches about what the metaphysical truth is.

The BOOK, "A Course in Miracles", is piggybacking, or describing, the "real course", which is the curriculum, which is experiential and applies to everyone at all times. The book itself is not necessarily "required" to be read or followed in order to awaken. HOWEVER, whatever FORM of a path you choose, whatever the belief system, whatever theology, it MUST, *ABSOLUTELY MUST* correspond to the metaphysical truth taught in A Course in Miracles if it is going to WORK at all, and if it does not, it will NOT work and will only delay your awakening by producing more delusions.

You can wake up to the ONE TRUTH, through many many many paths. In fact, "all paths lead to God" is true because even the most obscure, highly delaying, extremely denying paths still have at least some amount of the curriculum applying to them, still present lessons, still offers the truth in some small way, and is still governed by the same ONE metaphysical system.

For example, Christianity's interpretation of the metaphysics is correct in some areas and a little off in others. It is correct that there is One God, and that Christ is God's One Son. It is also true that as Jesus (as Christ) said, He is THE way, THE truth, and THE light. Not one of many. THE ONLY ONE. And it is also true that no-one can come to the father but by Him. HOWEVER, Christianity is mistaken in its claim that this means you are forever separate and non-equal with Christ, that other FORMS of paths to God are wrong, that the Christian religion is the only "way" to God, and that all other paths are evil. That's not true.

Christianity CAN be an effective path to awakening and to becoming equal with Christ, but in many many of its flavors and interpretations, it is riddled with a heavy weight of delusion, illusion, confusion, and deception, which masquerade as truth but actually are part of the delaying maneuvers which attempt to PUT OFF the true curriculum. The only way Christianity can WORK is when it is in correct alignment with the truth that has been described in the book "A Course in Miracles", and is following the ONE CURRICULUM which Jesus has basically named "A Course in Miracles" (beyond the book).

Effectively that means that anyone who takes the Christian path (or any other religion or system), CAN ONLY wake up to the truth IF they have actually either inadvertently or on purpose taken the One Curriculum, which IS actually A Course in Miracles. Remember that Jesus begins the Course with "This is a course in miracles. It is a required Course." He goes on to say this is the only curriculum and that you do not have an option about what the curriculum entails. That means, if you woke up "through" Christianity, you actually DID take A Course in Miracles - the metaphysical, experiential, spiritually corrective path back to God, which is present in EVERYONE's mind and MUST be followed in order to return to God.

In this respect, A Course in Miracles, the one true curriculum, IS the only way to God, it IS the way that Jesus is referring to that HE woke up to being Christ, it IS the way that Buddha woke up, it IS the way that any other ascended master woke up, and It MUST be the way that everyone wakes up.

All of the rest of the descriptions and forms and formats and supposed ILLUSIONS of separate paths that people seem to be taking, where they might claim "I am not doing A Course in Miracles", or that they don't believe in it, or that they aren't taking the One Curriculum, are heavily clad in ILLUSIONS that make it seem like they are not taking the One Curriculum, BUT THEY ARE.

*cue meme with "there is no escape" and evil laugh*

Either you are taking A Course in Miracles and learning the metaphysical truth and following the one curriculum and are waking up to God, which is THE ONLY WAY, which does not necessarily have to entail having anything to do with the book whatsoever,

OR

You are delaying the one curriculum, are attempting not to take the "Course", and are in denial.

THAT is the true nature of A Course in Miracles. It is not just a Course that you are only taking IF you are doing your forgiveness or IF you own the book of IF the book is in your hands with you studying it. It is ALWAYS the course, whether you like it or not, and you are always taking it, whether you like it or not!

It is not just a book. It is not just a bunch of text and a set of lessons and a manual. That's just one format. One expression of ACIM. It's one way of explaining what the Course is, one way of TEACHING what the Course is. The Course is the one metaphysical curriculum for awakening which applies to everyone at all times. There are many ways to teach it. The BOOK "A Course in Miracles" is Jesus's way of teaching it, and is a very accurate way. There are an unlimited number of ways of teaching it. Some will appear to be extremely close to the true nature of the one curriculum, and some will seem to be so far removed that you would not say it is the one curriculum at all. But there is no escaping the one curriculum.

This is the metaphysical nature of A Course in Miracles. And this is why it is REQUIRED, and this is why Jesus said it is required. He is not lying. You just have to get your definition of what the "Course" is correct so that it makes sense.

If Christians are making ANY headway towards God, they are taking A Course in Miracles. If Muslims are making ANY headway toward God, they are taking A Course in Miracles. If Hindu's are making headway toward God, they are taking A Course in Miracles. What Jesus has described AS A Course in Miracles is the one, the only, the profound metaphysical teaching, which is completely factual and 100% FIXED and cannot be changed and has no exceptions. That's what He has revealed to us and has attempted to outline and teach in the book. Whether you opt to use the book or not, you are still bound by the curriculum and you still cannot take any other curriculum that works without it being a curriculum in miracles.

The thought system of heaven and the thought system of the ego, both follow perfect logical reasoning. Impeccable logic in fact. The only difference is that God’s thought system begins with truth, and the ego’s system begins with what is false. From the premise, an entire creation arises. The outcome or result of each system is the only outcome possible according to its premise. God’s system produces eternal life. The ego’s system produces death. Both are logical conclusions that can be traced back to their origin.

Every step in the separation from God followed LOGICAL steps, concluding one false conclusion after another. And with each false conclusion, your STATE OF MIND changed to reflect that conclusion. Each reasoned progression of thought took you with it into hell. You didn’t merely think logically, you produced experiential states that are the "embodiment" of your false conclusions. Yet because the ego’s premise is false, and its entire system is based on untruth, we can also logically conclude that everything within it IS A LIE. And the recognition of that simple black and white fact is forgiveness and the atonement.

"From the belief in sin, the faith in chaos must follow. It is because it follows that it seems to be a logical conclusion; a valid step in ordered thought. The steps to chaos do follow neatly from their starting point. Each is a different form in the progression of truth's reversal, leading still deeper into terror and away from truth."

"The ego's logic is as impeccable as that of the Holy Spirit, because your mind has all the means at its disposal to side with Heaven or earth, as it elects."

"The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily, and as well, as does the ego, except that HIS conclusions are NOT insane. They take a direction EXACTLY opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death."

"You HAVE carried the ego's reasoning to its logical conclusion, which is TOTAL CONFUSION ABOUT EVERYTHING."

"Now take this personally, and listen to Divine logic"

"And reason now can lead you to the logical conclusion of your union."

"Upside-down logic produces this kind of thinking."

"This is perfectly logical, though clearly insane."

It's not just a matter of me taking back responsibility for everything in life, and then sitting there all by myself.

There is instead a shift away from ego-self and towards being aware of and TRUSTING in God.

It's not just a matter of realizing the cause of things is in my mind, not out there, although that's necessary.

What is cause? It's not just some idea or decision. GOD is cause.

It's also not just a matter of removing blocks to awareness of love. What happens when the blocks are removed? Love/God shows up. And that's no small matter.

I've relied on my intellect, on my ego's abilities, on my separate intelligence, on my self-taught learning. But this is all essentially because I am not depending on God.

Independent thinking... okay... highly overrated. It's actually a substitute for being connected to, trusting in, and having real faith in God.

I'm opening up to a willingness to surrender, and to actually believe and stay unwavering in, a knowing-based trust that God is taking care of things.

It's not God that wavers or fails, it's my selfish ego trying to do everything on its own.

I have to let go. I have to surrender. And I have to stop being the one who has all the truth all gathered up in my separate mind like a big database of information.

Truth as information is a substitute for truth as an experiential relationship with God. It is a substitute for being WITH God, intimately. For being AWARE of God's real presence and communicating with Him and being directed BY Him.

It really boils down to a simple either-or question. Either I trust in my own abilities, or I trust in God. Either I think that I have to control and enforce everything myself, or I let go of the reigns and let God.

And in that trust, in that surrender, it's not that God just sits there idle. To trust that he is taking care of things, that he can heal all situations, requires strong faith and belief and certainty and loyalty. And that also means, knowing that God actually IS taking care of things... even worldly things, even worldly problems.

This is the next stage in the development of trust. I have to learn to step aside and not only 'let God' but actually trust God, believe God, and put aside my own little fears and worries about how God won't help or isn't in charge or can't heal things or whatever.

It's about opening up to relying on God, knowing that God goes with me, allowing God, being intimate with God and allowing myself to be supported BY God. And this has everything to do with working miracles, which REQUIRES faith and firm belief and TRUST in God.

My lack of faith, is what it comes down to. As Jesus says in the course we have placed great faith in the ego, in our own selves, in intelligence and thinking and learning, that we have displaced our faith away from God.

I/we must learn that God really is on our side, really is our partner, that we really are taken care of by Him, that he really can and will do what He says he can and will do, and to trust Him to manage life for us.

It's not just that we are separate from God and have to live in separation and maybe get some input from God once in a while. That isn't the LIFE that we are meant to live. We are meant to team up with God and be loved and united with Him, and actually have Him IN us and working THROUGH us FOR us, without us having to carry the entire weight of the world by ourselves.

How can I trust God unless I am willing to let go of control of life and actually allow Him to do this? How can I trust unless I am 'hands off'?

God repeatedly says to me, "let me". And I did not really understand what this meant. I didn't know if it meant he would do something through me if I did something. I didn't know if it meant he was 'maybe' taking care of something, and then me having no faith in that entering into fear and believing that He wasn't doing anything.

If I don't have trust and faith that God can take care of things, I in effect block God's power and actually do fail to RECEIVE God's blessings.

Anyway.

Today I am grateful and thankful that God HAS delivered, God HAS provided, God IS taking care of situations, and I am not alone any more.

If you were witness to a miracle happening, you would probably be simultaneously in awe, perhaps frightened, stunned, and it would also defy a whole bunch of 'laws' that you believe are true.

If it seems that it can't be possible that someone's broken leg is suddenly healed, there is just "no way" that you can accept that this is possible, and yet it happens in front of your face, or even to your own body, this is going to produce a whole bunch of reactions.

One of the things that witnessing a miracle will do is it will DEMONSTRATE to your mind, factually and experientially, that something has just happened which does not FIT into your belief system or your idea of reality. Something just occurred which defies all of the laws that you thought were real. That alone will EDUCATE you, by demonstration and experience, that the laws you thought were true cannot be.

It will also cause your mind to become momentarily aware of a state of being which transcends form. "Miracles are temporary shifts into invisibility, that is why they heal" - ACIM.

"Principle 16 - Miracles are teaching devices" - ACIM

If one moment your hand is burnt, and then in the next moment your hand is suddenly not burnt, this miracle will defy and transcend all physical laws. Your mind will not be able to process this at the ego level. It will be bypassed. Your mind will become aware even if just briefly, that bodies can't be real, or at least that physical form can't be 'stuck' being in a certain state, and this will give you access to TRUTH experientially. This will undermine possibly everything you believe in, but you won't be able to deny it. (The attempt to then DENY this 'attack by truth' will make you sick. ;-)

This is similarly what happened when Jesus went through the crucifixion. He did it to demonstrate that the body is not real and death is not real. When one moment the body seems to be being tortured and killed, and then seems to die, and then a few days later shows up again as though nothing happened... it's not just a matter of oh look, there's Jesus.. your mind instead is going to have an instantaneous shift in awareness.

If Jesus is showing you to your face, that bodies can be switched on and off at will, one moment being dead and the next moment being perfectly alive again, you aren't going to initially be able to comprehend HOW, and just the mere fact of you experiencing this will SHOW YOU and make you aware that the body CAN'T be real - that death CAN'T be real, because here is the PROOF of that staring you in the face.

This has a profound healing effect on the mind and CAUSES awakening.

This is why miracles are also teaching devices because they demonstrate the truth and bypass all of the ego's laws and give examples of, experiences of, the truth in action. They educate by example that the physical laws CANNOT be true. And so they have the potential to instantly awaken and to instantly destroy illusions and false beliefs.

If Jesus showed up next to you right now, and then told you to shoot him dead, and you did it, and then he got up and there was no bullet hole and he was perfectly fine, it would blow your mind. Your mind would HAVE to expand in order to accommodate the evidence. It would show you perhaps for the first time in your life a demonstration of how bodies are not real. And you would've been always assuming that bodies are fixed and objective and constant and all the other illusions about them. And now suddenly Jesus shows you that they are nothing but images which can be flipped into any state at a moment's notice... that totally blows your entire world view about what bodies are. It's highly educational.

That's why Jesus uses miracles for TEACHING, because they demonstrate the truth and teach by experiential example, which defies the ego's thought system and baffles onlookers, causing them to be forced into an awakening.

This is also why many Course students DO NOT REALLY BELIEVE IN MIRACLES, because it is such a world-defying, body-defying, mind-warping, totally transcendent experience that the ego cannot conceive of it, does not support it, doesn't believe in it, can't be open to it, and doesn't understand it. So there is a LOT of resistance against the idea that Jesus LITERALLY is teaching us to perform such miracles.

Who am I?

What you are, is immortal spirit. You are capable of experiencing, because you have awareness, and you perceive reality. You share the Will of God.

The ego is an illusion. It is not capable of experiencing, it has no awareness of its own, it does not perceive and has no will of its own.

The ego is nothing more than a device, a tool, a machine, which if you choose, you can pick up and USE.

Since the ego is the opposite of who you are, it is impossible for you to use it while you are being yourself. To use it, you must block awareness of your true self.

Once you decide to associate yourself with the ego, it's like picking up a pair of dark-tinted sunglasses. As you put them on and perceive through them, they show you a dark world.

Yet, there you are, as innocent, shining, immortal spirit, wearing a pair of shades. With the glasses on, you can no longer see your illuminating brilliance because the dark glasses seem to filter your perception.

While wearing the ego, you will contribute your experiential awareness, your will and your power, and "bring it to life". You will extend yourself through it.

However, because it is a mechanism for distortion, you will experience a shift in perception from truth to lies, a darkening of your awareness, a loss of your real identity, and a shutting out of God.

In this state it will seem as though the ego is now who you are. Seeing through it, whatever it is designed to see, will become your perception. If it believes in being sinful, you will see yourself as sinful. If it believes in a guilty self that must die, you will believe that about yourself.

Your sense of Self - identity - is brought with you as you wear the ego, and your USE of it appears to modify your sense of self. Your take on an identity unlike your real identity and believe it is you.

Your belief in what the ego shows you causes you to forget who you are, you no longer recognize yourself or the truth, and you now perceive the truth of your very own real self as your enemy.

When the truth comes along to remind you of the fact that you can just drop the ego glasses and return to full awareness, you will resist it. You have chosen to take on the ego's perceptive mechanism, and believe that what it perceives is true reality.

You will see darkness in the truth which is not there, because the ego glasses show you a dark version of the world. And you will reject it and want to get away from it, because it will look frightening.

You will see it as saying that the ego self does not really exist, and you - aligned with the ego - will interpret this to mean that YOU do not exist. And you will defend against that by producing sickness.

Being in the ego you will defend the ego because you think that the ego is your self. You will side with it, protect it, reinforce it, and not want to let it go. You think that doing so is letting your self go. You are not really interested in protecting the ego, only in protecting your SELF, but you think that you and it are the same.

If you are believing you are the ego self, you will believe you're a sinful guilty self. That this is true of you. It's not, but while you are identified with the ego you'll agree with it.

ALL you need to do is to learn what is the difference between your REAL identity and the identity you have when you're wearing the ego filter. This is the difference between God's truth and the ego's truth.

The ego isn't anything. If you were to realize you are not it, and accept what you really are, taking off those sunglasses, you would easily and instantly see yourself correctly and know it to be true. The ego would have no defense against this.

It has no will of its own, no power of its own, no purpose of its own and no life of its own. It is borrowing yours for as long as you choose to keep using it. As soon as you drop it, it is a lifeless machine that is not even functioning. It definitely is not experiencing anything, because the ability to experience is coming from your immortal spirit.

This is why you need to learn to withdraw belief that everything about the ego is TRUTH, or REAL, because while you believe that, you will see your sense of Self as being tied to it. You'll believe that its perception is your perception. You'll see how it sees, and your identity will be its identity. And that will produce tremendous resistance to awakening. Not because YOU are resistant, but because your USE of it makes you confused.

Also when you've tied yourself to the ego thought system, if you start to try to become spiritual WITHOUT letting go of the ego, and WITHOUT undoing the belief that what IT sees is reality, you will produce a "spiritual ego". You will spiritualize the illusions the ego sees, will give them special value, and will polarize your experience.

You'll then believe that you're becoming more yourself or more spiritual, but if you're not letting go of USING and identifying with the ego, all you're doing is changing the ego from one state to another, it is NOT really becoming spiritual, and you are just spinning your wheels.

The ego cannot EVER become spiritual because it doesn't even have a life of its own. It does not exist as anything other than an illusory device for changing perception. That's all it does, like a pair of sunglasses. It is lifeless. No will, no life, no power, nothing.

YOU are the one who gives those properties TO it and tries to MAKE IT be your reality. Your MAKING of the ego is what seems to animate it and transform yourself into it. It has no power over what you are and is completely meaningless without you.

So you need to get past the spiritualization of the dream and the ego, which will show up ANYWHERE in your experience where you're both holding onto some ego and trying to be spiritual at the same time.

The ONLY true way to become spiritual is through the letting go, surrendering, relinquishing, and stoping using of the ego entirely. That is true awakening FROM it, not with it. It cannot awaken because it is not anything. A pair of sunglasses cannot wake up. But the person wearing the sunglasses can take them off and see the light of truth.

So really it all boils down to this. Just discerning who you are. Are you the real truth as God created it, OR, do you really believe that you ARE this ego identity which has no real life and is an idea of death? You cannot change your ego self into your spiritual self, but you can surrender your USE of the ego.

Using the ego is merely an act of not being true, not being honest, not being real, and not being who you are. It is dishonesty. It is denial. It is unconsciousness.

Nothing about the ego can STOP you from waking up. The sunglasses aren't glued to your head. YOU are entirely in the driver's seat, you are the one who is putting the filter over your vision, and you are the one who is trying to PUT power and will and life and reality INTO the ego. You are the one who is trying to MAKE IT your Self.

So you're doing it to yourself. And once you take the ego off your identity and stop BELIEVING that you are IT, by stopping believing that you are everything that is ITS truth (sinful, guilty, fearful, separate etc), that's all that's needed to return to the awareness of your true identity as God's Son.

What has happened to you while you wore sunglasses? Nothing. You just looked cool for a while. You take them off, you're still you. Nothing happened.

Our opinions don't mean anything at all. They are absolutely worthless. It doesn't matter what your truth is or what my truth is or what anyone's truth is. It's all bullshit. An opinion is the delusional voice of the ego.

In attempting to express what we think is right or true, we actually are covering up the truth. We are replacing the truth with a viewpoint of what we want the truth to be. These expressions of "my truth", which come across as "this is what the truth is", are actually censorship of real truth.

Then there are those who say that everyone's truth is different or unique and to have your own truth. That's insanity. And then there are those who say no-one knows or can know the truth - not quite true - you CAN know the truth, it's just that hardly anyone is willing and we've become expert at obscuring it.

More and more I see that the truth - as God - simply 'is'. There is absolutely nothing we can do to change or define what it is. It can either be accepted, or denied, but nothing else.

We don't get to decide what God is. We don't get to decide what reality is. We don't get to decide what is true or false. We don't get to decide who we are. We don't get to decide where we came from or what our characteristics are. We don't get to decide God's will for Him. And we don't get to change God in any way. We also don't really get to be separate from God or have our own separate existence or "my life" that I've taken possession and control over.

"There is no life outside of Heaven" - ACIM

"I am as God Created me." - ACIM

"Only the truth is true." - ACIM

Fortunately for us, the gift that God has given us is so perfect and amazing that we couldn't really want for anything else, and nothing else is better for us. It is an absolute blessing and an act of grace. We should be overjoyed to accept what He has deemed us worthy of.

The truth is fixed. It is permanent. It doesn't change. God doesn't change. And no matter what anyone's opinion is, no matter what my opinion is, it's not going to change the truth.

It is actually insane to insist that I or anyone knows what the truth is IF it is not actually aligned with what the truth is. It is, however, sane to know the truth when it is clear and correct and in full acceptance of what the truth actually is.

The more that I allow Jesus and Holy Spirit to express through me, with less censorship and less desire to change what they say, the more "raw" their message becomes. The more completely blunt and unhidden and direct and factual it becomes. I see myself wanting to cover things up and not say some things and not be so brutally honest but they urge me to stop saving face and let the raw truth out.

I expect Jesus to have some kind of persona or way of softening the blow, but He is just like.... in your face! This is what the truth is, boom... take it or leave it. Totally exposed and out in the open with nothing to hide and no attempt to cover anything up.

If something is true and we try to avoid it or deny it or reject it or cover it up or disbelieve it or try to make something else true in order to claim it is false, we're being nothing but arrogant and we have an authority problem.

It's not going to matter whatsoever whether someone claims to know the true version of ACIM or any other teaching, or not. The truth is true. It can only be what it is and it can only be experienced "as-is". The truth itself will be the true measure of who is correct or not - you could call that "judgement day" in a symbolic kind of way. The truth knows what the truth is. The rest of us just get to accept it or attempt to block it and pretend we know better.

But this at least means that the truth is accessible, and you can accept it, and if you are willing to accept it you can align with it and it can be shared with God. Truth is sharing. But you can't have an isolated truth of your own. Isolation is not sharing and puts you into a private world where your own opinion seems to mean something. Your opinion doesn't mean anything at all.

God knows.

God just is, like it or not.

God has given His Creation. He has created us. He has shared everything with us. He has defined what we are forever. The course says something like - think not that you can improve upon Heaven, you cannot add anything to the truth that is more valuable than what it already contains.

We literally therefore must SURRENDER to the truth, lay down everything we want to believe that opposes or blocks or changes it, and simply allow it, accept it.

Related to this, when A Course in Miracles begins it says "This is A Course in Miracles, it is a REQUIRED COURSE." Do you think Jesus is being factual, literal, and absolutely truthful? It is a required course because it is part of God's plan for awakening, and what God says goes. It is inescapable. We have a curriculum for awakening and we must take it and we will take it. It is God's will. you can't avoid it. You can't pretend there is some other completely separate path that doesn't include the curriculum somehow.

The metaphysics of the truth as laid out in the Course is completely true. There are steps in awakening. There are things you have to admit to. You have to learn to admit to the real truth - not a truth that one book says or another argues with. The experiential factual real LIVING truth. You can deny it all you want but you cannot change it or define it. Other pathways may also lead to God but only if they include the same factual real truth.

This is why the "only" path to God is really A Course in Miracles, or to put it another way, it's not the form of the Course but.. "the course" is the "divine curriculum" which is "required" no matter what form your path takes or what materials you use or what books or what teachers. All paths - all forms of paths - lead to God, but some obscure it more than others. You cannot wake up without taking the one curriculum, either directly or inadvertently. And you can be an ACIM student and avoid the curriculum for a long time. ;;-)

This leads me to a different but related point.

I was asking Jesus about how I can possibly accept that someone is sick. If acceptance of the truth is so important, surely I would be better off not resisting the fact that someone is sick? Surely I would be more at peace if I stop fighting with the sickness? Can it be possible that I can come to a complete acceptance of and allowance of that sickness?

Jesus said no. How can I accept something that is false? Jesus speaks of His inability to tolerate the absence of truth in himself or others, and asks us to join Him in the great crusade to correct error in everyone. "As you share my unwillingness to accept error in yourself and others, you must join the great crusade to correct it; listen to my voice, learn to undo error and act to correct it. The power to work miracles belongs to you." - ACIM

I cannot accept someone being sick because the sickness isn't real. I can't simultaneously believe that it is real and be at peace. I can accept that they really DO NOT have sickness. I can accept that they are NOT sick. I can accept that they are One with the truth, in truth. But the sickness, the illusion of sickness, it is intolerable IF it is real. Fortunately it is not real, and that is what can be accepted. But then ... Love compels a desire to perform miracles.

"How can I help?"

The seeming battle going on is really between what is true and what is false.

What is true is Holy Spirit's reality. It is all based on truth. Truth means, it is actually real. Factual reality. Perfect honesty and clarity. A truth that is so permanent and absolute that nobody can change it, because God put it in place.

Down below this, in the battlefield, aka 'level 1' or the ego world or the physical universe, it's all about not-truth. Another word for that is 'false'.

In falsety, there is no actual reality, no facts, and nothing is really happening. In falsety, there is only lies, deception, illusion, deceit and distraction away from truth. This 'level' of the ego is a withdrawal away from God and away from truth, attempting to be its opposite.

So down here in the ego's world we're commonly dealing with illusions, lies and deceptions. We're lost in separation, duality, unreality. Things seem to happen which aren't really happening. Problems seem to appear out of nowhere which aren't even really problems. Our vision becomes fixated on form/matter - "the form of error", since all of it is error - untruth, falsety.

So now really your entire 'spiritual path' can be summarized quite succinctly by saying, it is the transition from false to true. It is your movement away from what is false, which means everything ego, and toward truth, which is everything Holy Spirit/God.

The truth shall set you free, as in, if you access the truth you are accessing a plane of freedom. Truth is an experiential freedom. A state of being. You do not so much need to learn to accept what is false, but only to accept that it IS false, and therefore accept that "only the truth is true".

And so this takes a lot of 'sorting out' of what is actually true and what is not true. You do not get to decide what is true. This is what the Course means by "you cannot establish the curriculum". The curriculum is the subject of truth which you need to learn. You do not get to define what the truth is, that's God's job. You only get to learn it, or to decide "when you take it".

And as you're sorting out, you're mostly going to be dealing with the ego in terms of its mess and its idea of how to wake up, which is to shift around between different forms of falsety masquerading as 'more true'. It will try to become spiritual. It will try to wake up. It will try to access the truth. But it cannot. Ego cannot be truth. Ego = that which is not true. So the problem is that we are attached to the ego mindset - to the false, and we want to KEEP it by holding onto it, and take it into a state where truth exists. It cannot go there. It does not exist anywhere in truth. There is no falsety in the truth.

So it's not that we need to change - ie the ego cannot truly change from being ego. That which is false is always false. Sorry ego, you are not allowed in Heaven. But that means, YOU, what you really are, which is not the ego, but the 'decision maker', needs to decide whether to stay with the ego in ego-land, or leave the ego and go to the 'Holy Land' (in your mind, sorry Isreal but you're just a lump of dirt).

So when 'we' are trying to access the truth or wake up to the truth, to reality, 'we' think that 'we' are going to be able to take whatever it is that 'we' think 'we' are, to the truth. But this 'we' comprises the real you PLUS the ego you. Two identities, not one, but pretending to be one. And this is the main mistake we all make, trying to drag the ego along for the ride. Its sole purpose as 'the false' is to drag us away from truth, and that is all it can ever do. We need to 'separate from it' and change hands, and go be with Holy Spirit instead.

It's good to attach to and identify with Holy Spirit. Notice though that 'you' don't really get to have a separate existence. Either you're immersed in the ego's thought system or you are immersed in Holy Spirit's thought system. And each thought system has its own thoughts. Holy Spirit's thoughts come from God. So that means, either you are going to be filled with ego thoughts or God's thoughts. There are no thoughts that are 'yours' separately - that's an ego lie.

Anyway, rambling on a bit. Wake up to truth ;-) It's good for you.

I think most of us are heavily doing a spiritual bypass. We are not asked to do a spiritual bypass. We are not asked to throw course quotes at the world to make it go away. We are asked to REPURPOSE the world and the body, in time, to USE them differently for a higher purpose. Using the body for a higher purpose does not mean throwing the body in the trash, or throwing course insults at it.

We are asked to first become able to see this world through forgiving eyes, to see the forgiven world. If we cannot see the forgiven world, which is a beautiful sight in the present where we see FROM love and light, then our mind cannot be in a sufficient state of forgiveness and healing to be able to awaken FROM the world. Seeing the forgiven world FIRST is a REQUIREMENT, not an option. We cannot bypass this, or just write the world off as "not real" at this point.

The only point at which the world is acknowledged as completely unreal and forgettable is when you are ready to leave it completely. That's the only point at which these proclamations become valid and experiential. When the world is ACTUALLY disappearing from your sight. Until then, harping on about how there is no world or how it's all unreal or the body doesn't exist is a spiritual bypass. Its DOES exist for you while it's there.

We have work to do, there is healing to be done, there is therapy that is needed, there are miracles that need to be performed, there are relationships which must be experienced, there are lessons that must be learned, there is mind-training to be accomplished. This is accomplished HERE IN A BODY, in this life, in this world.

We are asked to express the LOVE OF GOD through the body, from us to another, in this world, using the body for what we call communication which really means healing. We are asked to be teachers of God in this world, to be healers, and to bring the Holy Spirit and Christ to others. To follow his directions and to be truly helpful, HERE, in this world.

There is an atonement plan for our lives and our future. We are supposed to placing our future in the hands of God and trusting the Holy Spirit's guidance. We are supposed to purify and forgive our grievances and undo our secret sins and hidden hates so that we can become able to SEE again, but NOT at the expense of just sacrificing and hiding from life here. We approach the forgiven world FIRST, WITH a body, before we can get fully out of it.

There is a huge amount of spiritual bypassing in the ACIM community and probably in a lot of spiritual paths, where the ego is quite happily and arrogantly trying to shoot for very lofty ideals and advanced spiritual theories and states. Trying to act and express and live as if it is already completely advanced and awakened, spouting off quotes and statements as if they are dispensing with the world which is still hated and believed in, with coldness and lifelessness and no spirit. A denial of life and a total bypassing of WHERE WE ARE AT RIGHT NOW.

We are supposed to be becoming happier people, not just more peaceful and certainly not more conceptual. We're supposed to be laughing more, enjoying more. We're supposed to be LIVING more. Both in terms of spiritual force and health and also in terms of this life on this planet. We have to find a way to LOVE THIS WORLD, even if "it is unreal" in the ultimate sense.

There is far too much drive to dissociate from the world and body and disappear off into the intellectual realms of righteousness, as though this means we are making progress. We need GROUNDING. We need to stop trash-talking the body and world and find a way to USE IT properly, as intended by Jesus, not as intended by a wide variety of misled students and teachers who are heavily bypassing and use the course as an ego weapon.

We're here for a reason, we have a life for a reason, we have a body for a reason. We all keep wanting to skip to the end, to have no body, to have no ego, to be done with all this. We are NOT READY to do that, and we don't want to admit it. We definitely are not ready if we can't even see the forgiven world, if we can't even extend God's love through the body, if we can't even perform miracles that heal other people. We are not the advanced amazing superhero spiritual ego that we want to think we are.

We are NOT at that level of advancement, in a genuine way. We need more time, we need more lessons, we need more training. And that means we're going to have to HAVE A LIFE in this world for some time longer. And the ego, which is largely "doing the course" in most cases, really hates the insulting idea that it is not spiritual enough, not advanced enough, not awake enough, not ready enough. Always skipping ahead and wanting the end to happen now.

We're all trying to run before we can walk. Pulling up all these advanced lofty ideals and trying to hold them as wholly true and make them apply, when we can't even love each other properly. Or even to love ourselves properly. When we can't even heal anyone. When we can't even let the Holy Spirit work through us yet. We're like still operating with training wheels but trying to hurl along at 100 miles an hour like we're some kind of ascended master or something. It's gotta be slowed down, and we have to admit we are NOT THAT ADVANCED YET. And for most of us we may never be that advanced in this lifetime. That's the sorry fact.

There is much purification work to do. Miracles and mystical healings and advanced christ vision and total forgiveness and disappearing the universe and all that is lovely and cool but hardly anyone is ANYWHERE NEAR that point. I know I'm not. We need a whole heck of a lot more therapy and inner work and forgiveness practice before we can even approach the kind of states necessary for seeing the forgiven world, or performing supernatural miracles, or overcoming death forever. We will get there, but we're NOT there now, or even close. We don't need another even loftier concept or ideal to chase.

We need to take a breather and just relax and be a bit more normal and have a normal life, have a body, enjoy things, play more, laugh more, have fun and lighten up about all this serious spiritual study. We're missing some major point here - that we are supposed to be more full of LIFE. How can we be more full of life when we're not even willing to life THIS life and keep trying to escape from it on the basis of some high-level metaphysics?

We're just making another ego persona out of this whole thing. There is an atonement plan that we need to trust. A plan for our lives, here, in a body, which we agreed to before we came. We have to live that out, instead of trying to escape from the classroom at every turn. Gotta bring this whole course waaaay back down to Earth.

Ok. Think about all the ways that people try to understand ACIM. All the opinions. All the "figuring out" what it means. All the discussion, debate, arguments and disagreements. And still it seems no-one quite knows the whole picture.

Well none of that is necessary. In fact, behind all of the words of ACIM there is a purely logical metaphysical structure and progression of thought, which if followed precisely will automatically reveal the components of separation, why bodies show up, what the world is, aspects of creation etc. All of it follows IMPECCABLE LOGIC.

All you need to do therefore is discern, from a completely sane and logically-sound starting point (God), what is the progression of logical outcomes or consequences. All of God's creation and everything about it proceeds according to perfectly logical rules. Additionally the separation from God, the ego, the ego thought system, sin and death, all proceed according to perfect logic.

For example, the idea of an "opposite" to reality, which is the separation idea, is a logical argument suggesting that something *COMPLETELY* opposite to God's nature can exist. And this for example is reflected "Earth, which is heaven's opposite in every way". .. because Earth is the logical outcome of the separation thought system and must be opposite to God's conclusion.

It is a "black and white", very clearly defined "state". And as the ego progresses in its thought system, it produces states of MIND, which correspond to logical conclusions and consequences.

All you need to do is learn this logical structure, what specifically MUST be the outcome and logical conditions that arise based on each step towards death, and the entire picture of existence is revealed, with everything in its right place and everything understood in its relationship to the rest.

This then forms "the metaphysics" of the course, which is kind of a living experiential description of the "states" of mind which have arisen, what they are based on, and how they are corrected. Once you get this underlying structure, which is deeper and less removed than words, you can take any statement in the course and fit it into the picture accurately and understand it far better than any other "random" or disjointed attempt to form an opinion.

You don't then even need an opinion. All you need is to comprehend the logical basis for things. This circumvents all discussions, debates, arguments and misinterpretations. You can also then USE the logical basis to evaluate any new statements, or to base expressions on that structure in order to "extrapolate" the course or say things about it which are completely in accord with the Course's teaching.

Jesus in the Course is extremely logical and clear. For example:

"Perfect love casts out fear. If fear exists, Then there is not perfect love. But: Only perfect love exists. If there is fear, It produces a state that does not exist."

This is a progression of pure logic. There are many many other examples. Below, Jesus talks about LOGIC and how everything proceeds according to logic...

"The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily, and as well, as does the ego, except that HIS conclusions are NOT insane. They take a direction EXACTLY opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death. We have followed much of the ego’s logic, and have seen its logical conclusions. And, HAVING seen them, we have realized that they can NOT be seen but in delusions. "

"In one sense, the ego’s fear of the idea of God is at least logical."

"From the belief in sin, the faith in chaos MUST follow. It is because it follows that it seems to be a logical conclusion; a valid step in ordered thought. The steps to chaos DO follow neatly from their starting-point. Each is a different form in the progression of truth’s reversal, leading still deeper into terror, and away from truth. Think not one step is smaller than another, nor that return from one is easier. The whole descent from Heaven lies in each one. And where your thinking starts, there must it end."

"Upside-down logic produces this kind of thinking."

"Yet the logical outcome of your decision is perfectly clear, if you will LOOK at it. By deciding AGAINST your reality, you have made yourself vigilant AGAINST God and His Kingdom. And it is THIS vigilance that makes you afraid to remember Him."

"You HAVE carried the ego’s reasoning to its logical conclusion, which is TOTAL CONFUSION ABOUT EVERYTHING."

"Now take this personally, and listen to Divine logic: If, when you have been forgiven, you have everything else, and

If you have been forgiven

Then you have everything else.

This happens to be the simplest of all propositions.

IF P then Q

P

Therefore, Q

The real question is, is P true. If you will review the evidence, I think you will find this inescapable. I went on very personal record to this effect, and I am the only completely True Witness for God."

"This is perfectly logical, though clearly insane. The ego draws upon the one source which is totally inimical to its existence FOR its existence."

So if you have a "question" about something in the Course and you're sure where it fits in relation to something else, or what it means, or how it's structured, or whether something is on a certain level or another level etc... once you get a visual of the logical layout in your mind, you can quite easily determine where things go and what they MUST mean, due to logical conclusions that are sound.

But of course to do this you HAVE to develop a very clear sense of what logic IS, and be very careful to discern when you are making logical errors. This means you have to be careful with reasoning, be aware of skipping around in levels, beware of trying to make "glue" that ties stuff together that doesn't go together, etc. There doesn't have to be any fuzzy boundaries or blurry conclusions that you're not quite sure about. It all makes SENSE.

The ego thought system, the mind with which you operate most of the time, and the system of perception or 'world view' which governs most of your decision making, is completely the opposite of the truth.

The mind which uses the egoic mind, still experiences, interacts and expresses itself, but the egoic mind acts as a reversal of cause and effects.

This generally means that instead of creating what you truly want and causing it to come into being as a direct effect of your power, you instead cause to come into being exactly what you did NOT seem to ask for, do not want, and are in fact trying to get away from.

Most of this world is heavily engaged in a state of consciousness where they do not realize that they are miscreating or mis-using the mind's power, and are therefore inadvertently creating and manifesting expressions which they are in conflict with. They are literally bringing into expression everything they do not want, not realizing that they are doing so, and then are fighting with those expressions.

When the egoic mind expresses and therefore fails to express what should have been a miracle, it instead expresses the opposite, manifests it, makes it seem real, and the result is that you produce stuff you do not want. The perception and experience then that stuff is happening that you do not want and did not intend, further reinforces your belief that there is a disconnect between what you are causing and the effects you are producing.

Since your effects do not seem to match your awareness of how you are causing, you conclude that these effects are happening against your will, are not things that you wanted or asked for, and therefore you are being unfairly treated. You will then react to this by fighting with and waging war against these effects, as though they have come with an "alien will" to have power over you, to threaten you, to disturb your peace, and to bring death.

And so in this confused state, few realize that they themselves are actually, literally, directly, causing to happen ALL of the effects that they are experiencing. The unconsciousness with which these effects are being produced, and their apparent opposition to what the person is aware of desiring, amplifies the sense of disconnect and disownership, leading to victim consciousness.

Since you do not see the mechanism by which you are choosing everything that happens to you, by which you are experiencing exactly what you are asking for, and by which nothing is happening to you against your own will, is simply evidence that you are not AWARE of the way that you are using your own will and power against yourself. You are your own, and only, enemy.

Since you think that there are powers outside of the scope of your will, which you really share with God, that are capable of preventing your will, or which interrupt it, or which interfere with it, you also attribute responsibility for the deeds of such a will to other people, mother nature, random chaos, sudden events and so on. Or perhaps even a devil. But ultimately it is YOU who are doing all of this.

You just do not realize just how powerful you are, the fact that you are very creative, the fact that you are expressing your desires correctly, and the slight 'error' that you are making expressions through the ego mind, which is interfering with the outcome of what you want. It is because your ego mind filters and interferes with and reverses and opposes and turns upside-down everything you are flowing outward, that you keep seeing and experiencing results which seem to be what you do not want to happen. And as such, apparently outside of your awareness - unconsciously - you keep choosing to be sick, to suffer, and to die.

Jesus reminds me, we are but doing this to ourselves, and awareness of this fact and ownership of this fact and complete experiential living out from this fact, is the secret to salvation.

What if everything that ever happened was done by yourself? What if everything that ever happened to you, seemingly, was actually chosen and done by you, even if you did not seem to want it, even it was torturous and horrible? What if you asked for every single person to treat you the way they did, and they did so faithfully? If this is true... then there are absolutely NO GROUNDS WHATSOEVER on which you can claim that you are a victim.

This might seem horrifying at first, to reclaim responsibility for what you seem to have done to yourself, and to let everyone and all external causes off the hook, but it also means it's opening the way for you to accept your power, to become clear that you CAN and DO do things to yourself, and that you can now choose to treat yourself with love and respect. Then once you put down your own weapons, there ARE no other weapons or sources of attack that can come to threaten you. And you are invulnerable.

Immortality.

Let's make it clear now, that the Holy Spirit has SUPERNATURAL POWERS.

Through the Holy Spirit, any act of healing or correction is possible on any level, including what we call the physical body level.

There are many things in ACIM which many people don't believe can be literal because it seems to be so radical and unbelievable to the ego, way outside your comfort zone, and just too 'unreal' to seem real.

But the Holy Spirit is not a metaphor. He is not just some Course lingo for some fiction aspect of an imaginary trinity that doesn't really exist in Oneness.

Also, by the way, Jesus had supernatural powers because of the Holy Spirit.

Turning water into wine, is not a metaphor. Healing the blind and sick and deaf is not a metaphor. Raising the dead is not a metaphor. Turning a stick into a snake and back is not a metaphor. The resurrection from the cross is not a metaphor. Multiplying some fish and bread to feed 5000 people is not a metaphor.

These are not just conveniently dismissed and put into a nice tidy box just to fit into our nice protected little ego frameworks of how much truth is acceptable.

ACIM says "I do not feel guilty, because the Holy Spirit will undo all the consequences of my wrong decision if I will let Him. I choose to let Him, by allowing Him to decide for God for me."

Now. Get this. When you surrender, a lot, with a genuine willingness to admit to the truth and to let go, this opens the door for the Holy Spirit to come in. He can then join with you, and He then also has access to your mind, your feelings, your energy, and your body, and also to various aspects of events and situations in your life.

If you think the Holy Spirit is inactive, passive, just an observer, or just a lifeless metaphor - some fictional concept that makes it easier to grasp metaphysics, think again.

The Holy Spirit is God's ANSWER to the separation. The answer to the ENTIRE separation. Not just an answer like some piece of information. He is an experiential answer, the actual correction OF the problem. He has the power to undo the entire universe. He has the power to correct all problems. He has the power to reverse all sickness and suffering and signs of disease on any level. He has the capability to perform MIRACLES.

Now, when you surrender a lot and relax and INVITE HIM IN, and are genuinely open to allowing Him to work in you, He can and WILL come into you. "Holy Spirit, come", is a very simple invitation. And if you are genuinely open to this, He will enter your mind/emotions/body and start to do healing on you. He can remove stuff for you. He can cancel out negative feelings. He can heal physical sickness. He can correct the body in any way needed. And this has nothing to do with the pros, cons, rights or wrongs or whether it is okay or not to heal the body. Fuck that. He just does it, ok? Get over yourself.

Now. Willingness plays into this, therefore, because if you are not willing to surrender your ego activities, you are not allowing Him to decide for God for you. And another way to put that is, if you are in control and won't let go, He can't help you. But if you DO let go, then He has access and can help you. And you will find as you develop a relationship with Him, that he can quite literally heal you, correct you, and restore you, not just on a level of thoughts or mind, but on all levels - mental, emotional, physical. It is ultimately irrelevant whether these levels a actually REAL or not, and we know that these things are still illusions, but nevertheless He can, does, and WILL bring about healing on any level if you are willing.

Again, this is only possible because He is NOT a metaphor. He is not just some concept to make it easy to explain the Course. He is not a principle. He is an intelligence, a power, a spiritual presence. He is an aspect of God, for Heaven's sake, having been created by God as the answer to ALL illusions. And there is nothing He cannot do to correct or change them for any reason. If there were anything He could not do to alter illusions, the Son of God would be trapped in hell forever with no way to go Home. And fortunately for us that's not the case.

Holy Spirit is here not just as a friend and comforter but as your healer, guide, mentor, and liberator. You don't have to just struggle through this on your own trying to have the proper thoughts or the right perceptions. You need to surrender and get into some serious teamwork. Let Him help you. Let Him do the work of directly correcting you... supernaturally... not just like, oh well, you know that's not the right answer, 3 points off.... try again. It's more like.... you will experience a supernatural electrical power flowing through you that literally purges you of all of the "consequences of your wrong decision". Mental, emotional, physical, it doesn't matter.

Miracles, my friends. Miracles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ego is a belief that you are sinful and guilty. It really believes this is true. It believes in attack, that it has attacked, and that therefore it is sinful, is due for some punishment, and someone is going to deliver it.

When YOU, who are not the ego, are identifying yourself with it, and are confused in believing that what applies to IT applies to YOU, you will experience whatever applies to it.

So if someone comes along and attacks or targets "you", this will be an attack on the ego. The ego will believe it is real, and valid, and justified, and that it is the truth about you. The sin and the guilt that it believes in makes the attack real, and produces effects within itself. Thus it is vulnerable, and seems to suffer and feel hurt.

When YOU, who are not the ego, are identified with it, when it perceives attack, YOU will also experience what the ego is experiencing. Therefore you will perceive that YOU yourself are actually being attacked, because you are sinful and guilty. Your ego sin and guilt will fly up in your face, you will be upset, hurt, and perceive that you've been damaged. But you're only able to experience this because you are aligned with, attempting to be one with, the ego, and to share in its perspective. However, YOU are not the ego.

What YOU are, is a being, a mind, which is able to choose to either align itself with God, or pretend to align itself with an imaginary mind - the ego. But who you are, is not really the ego, and can choose to unalign itself from the ego and return to alignment with God.

When you do this, through forgiveness, it entails that you come to the awareness that sin is not real, which therefore means that you are not really guilty, and need not be afraid. Who you ARE, is not the ego collection of thoughts and beliefs that are composed from sin/guilt/fear. Instead, if sin is not real, then separation can't have really happened, the events that led to the guilt cannot have really happened, therefore the sin and guilt are invalid. They cannot apply to you, define you, represent you, describe you, or modify you to fit them.

If you can see that YOU do not have to be defined by the ego, and do not have to stay associated with its thought system, you can come to recognize that you are innocent. God's truth describes you are innocent, always loveable, already forgiven, and completely invulnerable to attack. It also gives you the recognition that the ego is nothing more than an illusion, because sin and guilt are illusions. They aren't real.

This means you now realize that you never really were guilty, never really can be guilty, and sin that could possibly ever prove your unworthiness cannot be true of you. You simply have not sinned. Therefore YOU are not made of sin, and you are not made of guilt. That's the same thing as saying, you do not really have an ego. And that also means, you therefore cannot be targeted or attacked in the way that the ego attacks itself through belief in attack.

It is not that you have to do anything special to the ego to defend yourself against it. It is not that you need a special barrier of protection. It is not that you need to constantly put in effort to maintain a certain kind of thought system in order to not slip up and allow attack to get you. Rather, when this all becomes clear, that you are not sinful at all and never really could be, and that God sees you as PERMANENTLY INNOCENT, your identity can no longer contain "ego".

So now, when someone comes along and they do some activities that you previously would've thought of as an attack, and reacted to, there won't be sin and guilt in you. You will know through experiential fact that you are permanent innocence, therefore any claims by anyone that you are sinful or guilty or unworthy or worthy of attack MUST be false. They simply cannot apply to you.

So when someone claims "you are guilty" in some way, what they're really saying is "you are made of guilt", and this is not true. So they're referring to someone by the name of "guilt", and it's not you, because obviously you're innocent. So they're not even talking to you. Your name is innocence, and you will only respond to confirmations of your innocence.

Any reference to a guilty person cannot be a reference to what you are, therefore it does not even REGISTER with "you" as being about "you", because it's not. Your identity is not what they are targeting. You suddenly realize that they are apparently targeting SOMEONE or SOMETHING, but it's certainly not YOU! And since nobody else is around, it is clearly obvious they are actually just having a spazz and attacking themselves, projecting their own guilt all over the place believing it applies to you. And there you are, invulnerable, bullets bouncing off left and right, because you are inaccessible to the idea of attack.

What becomes clear, simply through clarity alone, with no need to have any thoughts about it or interpretations or it or special treatment of it, is that... simply.... in all truth and clarity, when you are sane. ..... the ego simply is not real. Attack is not real. It cannot and does not do anything to you. It only ever seemed to do something to a sinful guilty self, which is no longer what you are. And never were.

The ego, when seen with True Perception and perfect clarity, is RECOGNIZED as being 100% illusion, 100% not the truth, 100% artificial and unreal. Therefore it is simply just clear, and obvious, that it does not apply to you. It can do nothing to what you are. What you ARE is perfect innocence, holiness, immortality, eternal life. You ARE as God created you. There is not a single illusion that can ever claim anything true about you and therefore can never apply to you. And knowing this, you have the peace of God.

Illusions cannot assail the Kingdom of heaven. The ego will never enter it. The kingdom is perfectly protected without any defenses by the sheer fact that all attack is not real and does not apply! It's just simply the truth. The truth is safe from all lies and all corruption. This is why you are forever immortal, forever safe, forever innocent, and if you will let go of your false sense of identity as "sinful, guilty, afraid", you will experience an invulnerability that you never thought was possible, and which is completely void of any trace of vulnerability or susceptibility.

You cannot be attacked because you are not attackable, because attack is not real and it does not apply to those who are innocent.

There are two approaches to ACIM. One is to learn the theory about what is true or false. The other is to actually change your mind and transform your awareness so that you wake up to experiencing it.

Theory is learned on a horizontal level. It involves the intellect. It involves trying to understand what ACIM says and means. It's analytical and it studies the words, the levels, the structures, the relationships of things, the definitions of words and the "description" of the truth. it dwells on the form and the word choices and so on.

Some people have an easier time learning the theory than others. Some people are not as intellectually able to get their heads around the intricate depths and nuances of Jesus's genius. For some the theory seems complex and off-putting. And many people get the theory profoundly wrong, while others are very accurate in their discernment of it.

Sometimes there are debates and fights about what the course says and means. This is all to do with the horizontal approach. It's an intellectual battle in which sides try to convince each other that their understanding of the course is the correct one. And in many cases some people may well be correct while others are very lost. There are some people who are so incredibly lost on the theoretical level that they are practically learning a totally different belief system. They think they're heading toward reality while heading away from it.

Then there is a vertical movement away from hell toward heaven, away from darkness toward light, away from ego towards the Holy Spirit, away from the body towards the soul, and away from the world towards the Kingdom of God. This is a transformational movement which does actually require a vertical change of mind, an awakening, a willingness, an opening, and a trust.

In the vertical learning we actually have to apply the theory. The mind has to be transformed. Beliefs have to be undone. Healing has to take place. Your life and your curriculum presents you with challenges and lessons which you have to learn. Your relationships have to change and your sense of identity has to alter. This is not achieved through theory.

Some people struggle to accurately understand the course's theories on the horizontal level, and turn a blind eye to this fact by trying to focus on something more experiential. They may focus on love or feeling. This can produce progress upwards to some extent, but then the faults in the theory hold them back.

It can hold them back such as, for example, someone believing that Earth is God's Kingdom, which is going to pull the person in the completely wrong direction. So while they're trying to go up, faults in the theory are pulling them down. It's like a handicap. There are some quite loving-seeming people doing ACIM who nevertheless say things which are profoundly wrong and delusional.

On the flip side, there are also people who become expert at the horizontal theory. Great intellects and scholars and theologians who are very good at discerning accurately the logical structures and relationships of things. Of realizing how everything fits together and correctly putting everything in its proper place. Some people are very good at this. But at the same time, those same people can at times become lost in this understanding and fail to apply the course to move vertically. The "study" of the course then becomes a handicap that keeps them from opening their minds and actually encountering reality.

I think for the most part the ideal is to be proficient at both. We need theory in order to help us to make sense of things, to guide us in the right direction, to clarify meanings, to have a proper framework so that you know what you're supposed to be doing and why. But to also then take that and use it, apply it, live it, look at how it works in your life, use it to change your mind, to develop trust, to actually open up to reality, to a different kind of vision, and to shift your sense of identity away from the body. As the workbook begins:

"A theoretical foundation such as the Text is necessary as a background to make these exercises meaningful. Yet it is the exercises which will make the goal possible. An untrained mind can accomplish nothing. It is the purpose of these exercises to train the mind to think along the lines which the course sets forth."

So yes you need to be pretty accurate with the theory, but the purpose of that is so that you can be more effective and efficient in your application of it to your life. Your living curriculum of lessons, holy relationships and life events is where you will be having to apply the principles.

"The miracle is the means, the Atonement the principle, and the healing is the result."

It's not enough to be excellent at the theory and not apply it to change yourself. It's not enough to try to change yourself while being absolutely all over the place on the theory. If you really want to shoot for the stars you need to understand the course in principle, and apply it in practice. The two work together to atone your mind correctly, heading in the appropriate direction for the appropriate reasons. Otherwise it's like sailing your boat in the wrong direction.

As Jesus once said to me, "you understand it, now you just need to apply it."

When I think about how I used to practice forgiveness, it all seemed so mechanical. I didn't really understand what forgiveness was, even if some version of it was spelled out in various books. I didn't understand what part Holy Spirit played, or what to expect of Him. It seems to have taken a very long time to refine this.

At first, I understood forgiveness was about 'it hasn't really happened' and forgiving for what people have NOT done, and that this entailed some form of taking back projections and stopping scapegoating. I tried various people's techniques and so on for releasing what I'd taken back, and sometimes it seemed to work a bit, not often. Most of the struggle seemed to be remembering to even forgive at all, or how to do it.

Over time I adopted another method which I felt provided new insight into how this works, and that involved some fairly clear steps to take, including going into the feeling and finding out where it came from and seeing that I did it to myself and then trying to see out 'the truth' about me. And in some ways that seemed to be quite powerful. But it still was pretty much me doing this on my own.

If I would ask Holy Spirit to help me forgive, he would perhaps help me with insights or wording and so on. But still it seemed to all be about me changing my perception, finding the real cause, stopping believing things that weren't true, discerning what was true or false etc. And still Holy Spirit was sort of more of an advisor or guide.

More recently, however, I became willing to start to experiment with allowing Holy Spirit to come into me, Himself, and to do whatever he needed to do. It was kind of baby steps at first. Just exploring and learning to trust. I would invite Him into my 'body' and He would seem to move in me and do some energetic/emotional changes, if I was willing. Sometimes he would do this 'flush' thing where, once he has done some setup, excess emotions/fear/stress drain out of me. Or, he would lift this 'stuff' up from my feet all the way up to and out of my head.

While this was helpful to me I didn't know why other people weren't talking about this or doing this. I didn't know in what way it fit with ACIM, and yet I knew it was Holy Spirit doing this. He would say "surrender" or "relax" and I pretty much knew that right after that he was going to perform a healing of some kind. But like anything, in order to 'open up' to this stuff it requires willingness, trust, curiosity and the ability to listen, to ask questions and build a relationship.

More recently I gradually have received more clarity from various sources about forgiveness, what it is, what it does, and what other aspects of Holy Spirit's thought system I need to align with, such as taking responsibility, being unconditional, acceptance, etc. Michael Murray has a good handle on those 'tools' and the metaphysics behind it.

What came to me then was that instead of attempting this kind of mental-oriented process of forgiving through thought and perceptual adjustments, which is very head-oriented, I would begin to open up my heart to Holy Spirit and become willing to *receive* His healing. I think the turning point was when I realized that "He will correct all the consequences of my wrong decision if I will let Him" really literally means that HE will do the correction, not just of my perception, but also of all the side effects, symptoms or consequences that came about as a result. And that includes things going on in my body, my emotions, and the world around me.

He began to literally 'cleanse' me of guilt and sin instead of me trying to wrap my head around them or see them from a different vantage point. I could talk myself into higher truth in an intellectual way, but here Holy Spirit was starting to stir in me and move through me and heal me. Preparing the way perhaps for working through me on behalf of others. This was something I desired and wanted to explore and open up to. Now when I forgive, I know that toward the end of it, and maybe even before I get done with 'my part', Holy Spirit is going to likely step in and do something. And I mean, DO something. Action.

As I explore this more, and open up to miracles, and make myself a channel of Holy Spirit's healing power, I am allowing my 'forgiveness' to be more a practice in, ultimately, receiving healing from God (mental/emotional/physical) rather than me trying to use my head to figure out how I'm innocent. It is more experiential. I want to *experience* God. I want to *experience* truth and not have it just be some mental exercise in discernment. And it's even more than that.

What about God? What about love? I feel a stirring that I want to spend the rest of my time simply focusing on .. how to be unconditionally loving, how to receive and extend God and His miracles, and how to just love love love love love. It's not mental. It's not intellectual. It's in the HEART. God is love. I want to be in the love with God. I want everything to be focused around and centered on love. And I want to be open to God being the one who heals my mind and emotions and body, and those of others too. I want to share in God's love and receive it, instead of thinking (with ego) I have to do all this work myself. Yes I need to still take some steps and have a willingness, but I realize more and more that 'waking up' isn't anywhere near as heart-felt a 'concept' as being reunited with God. Who wants to clinically wake up unless it's all about a grand reunion?

I want God to be in my practice of A Course in Miracles, and that has much less to do with the methodical mechanical forgiveness processes I used to think were 'the way to do it'. Maybe I needed them in order to realize they are unrefined or less effective than God's way. We are meant to open up to allow Holy Spirit to flow through us fully and openly, to direct us, to speak for us, to heal through us, and to be our mind. All this 'doing it on my own' stuff is very tiresome and unnecessary.

Thank you God for revealing the truth of your light and love experientially in my life and extending it all those I meet. As Jesus outlines in the beginning of the Text about miracles (in the unsanitized version):

"You should begin each day with the prayer 'Help me to perform whatever miracles you want of me today."" - Jesus.

"I do NOT feel guilty, because the Holy Spirit will undo ALL the consequences of my wrong decision IF I WILL LET HIM. I WILL to let Him by allowing Him to decide for God for me."

The Holy Spirit is a real spirit from God that has unlimited power. He can heal anything. He can undo anything. He can also move mountains. There is nothing he cannot do. The Holy Spirit is with you and would like for you to develop trust in him, to the point where you might be willing to allow him to enter you and help you on a practical, experiential level.

It is a matter of willingness, trust, letting go, surrendering your ego attempts to fight with everything, and allowing the Holy Spirit to come into you. He is invited every time you show at least some willingness to move in the direction of atonement and forgiveness. But without your "permission" or your knowing that it's safe to allow Him to help you in a supernatural way, He will not take those measures because He knows that you might be frightened.

I was having a period of time that was very difficult emotionally and kept turning to the Holy Spirit to help me to forgive and to let go. In heated moments of tremendous emotional upset I started to say over and over again, "I surrender". Or, "I let go". I would say it repeatedly many times, and would start to experience a sense of relief. Because if there's one thing the ego does is it controls, holds on, attaches, clings, manipulates, bears grudges, resists, fights, and tries to dig in its heels. By surrendering willingly, you cut right to the core and drop the ego activities quickly.

I did this many weeks, often at night before falling asleep. And each time I would ask the Holy Spirit to help me to forgive and let go. I know he helped me with thoughts and insights and so on. But what was more important, was that over time, each time I went and surrendered, he often would start to remind me to surrender. He would say "relax" or "let me". And so I would relax, physically, because when you relax the body physically it also is a sign that you are willing to receive. Physical tension can be a sign of active resistance. So I would physically relax and let go and just focus on surrendering over and over and over.

And as it turns out, this gradually developed to where my surrendering of ego was, in a way, also an opening up to or surrendering to the Holy Spirit. I was moving away from ego, towards Him. And in surrendering, as you let go, you become more allowing, more trusting, more willing to step aside, more open to receiving love and support and help. And so I developed trust in the Holy Spirit, to the point where I would start to ask Him, willingly, but tentatively at first, to "come into me and heal me". To help me to heal. And in fact, I started to experience things happening.

At first it would be that my hands would shake, involuntarily. Or maybe my feet. And I didn't really know what this was "doing" but I learned that it was a side effect of whatever He was doing. And so I gradually learned to let go more and more and trust Him more, that He knows what He's doing. Over time this increased and the vibrational, spiritual, supernatural healing intensified and became more effective, stronger and more powerful. My whole body would shake and vibrate in ways that I cannot re-enact. And after this period of activity, actual emotional energy would have been significantly reduced, maybe even removed completely, resulting in me laughing, without having to go through the normal processes to release it.

This also escalated through further trust and willingness to allow Him to help me to heal with physical maladies, pains, symptoms and effects in the body. He is just as capable. If I am willing, and not afraid, and trust, and open myself up, I can let Him heal sickness of all kinds. I'm not quite to the point of trust yet where I can let something just disappear instantly but I'm working towards it, continuing to deeper my trust and openness to allowing the Holy Spirit to work miracles through me. And it also has been starting to extend to others.

I say all this not to brag and ONLY to ENCOURAGE that any and everyone try this for themselves if you have not done so already. I have no idea how people relate to the Holy Spirit but I do know that until I invited him to come into my "body" and "do whatever he wants", all of this supernatural healing was not happening. He wasn't seemingly "removing all the consequences" for me, and only through surrender and trust did I start to be WILLING to allow him to actually remove all consequences, emotional or physical or otherwise, FOR ME, through no effort of my own.

Before, I thought I had to do all the correcting and undoing on my own, which was my ego trying to do the course by itself. If you have never experienced the Holy Spirit actively DOING SOMETHING, in ways that have manifestations that you can SEE and FEEL, then you are in for a surprise. There is literally nothing He cannot do if you will let him. He frequently says to me, when I am tempted to solve or fix something myself, "let me", I stop and allow, and immediately he shakes me all over the place (side effects) as he proceeds to heal it for me. I don't have to do anything but allow and try to not interfere, and stay relaxed.

Have a go, if you have time. Spend time time each day surrendering and letting go, feel the relief, open up to allow and trust and invite the Holy Spirit to work in and through you. Put aside fear of "disembodied spirit doing stuff"... you have to learn to trust past that. Spirit is perfectly capable of doing ANYTHING, it's only a matter of how much we are willing to get out of the way and LET HIM. If you develop this trust far enough there is no miracle you cannot perform, nothing you cannot heal and no limits to what He can do through you for others. I've already started to allow Him to heal others through me, and he is quite effective.

I have been noticing in myself lately that I keep being judgemental. My thoughts feel like judgements. Even just basic thoughts of "what something is" feels like a judgement. I wondered to myself why I seem to be judging all the time. I hadn't realized just how judgmental I seem to be all the time.

This could be in the form of just having some opinion about everything. It didn't even necessarily need to be in terms of anger or projecting blame, just a kind of incessant "believing I know". Just constantly and consistently labelling everything in terms of what I believe it means.

I would just keep labeling everything in course terms. "That's an illusion", "They're level confused", "This is unreal", etc. I seemed to be just using the whole course to add a layer of naming and shaming to everything I was aware of.

I noticed also that I couldn't seemingly just look at something without "coursifying it". I couldn't just enjoy something or do normal activities without having to have an ACIM commentary running alongside it. Just constantly trying to "counteract" the world and everything I see with statements, trying to deny it, trying to change it, trying to push it away.

This also seems to be tied into a general sense of unhappiness about everything. My ego would sometimes really flare up with attack thoughts which clearly were attempts to increase separation. It increased a sense of being alone, and further justified a sort of seeming "bitterness" about the world. It kind of felt like kind of slipping down further into hell rather than rising out of it.

I also have been growing weary of ACIM, quite honestly. I've chewed on its words and metaphysics and have written about it to such an extent that I was becoming tired of it. Tired of thinking about it. Like I'd done it all and seen it all and there was nothing left to figure out. As if figuring it out, or understanding it, was the whole point.

I wanted some kind of more direct, simplified experience. Something more practical that works. Something more direct, that didn't have a layer of interpretation or second-hand thinking alongside it. I didn't want more affirmations or course statements flying around in my mind. I didn't want just another commentary or people just parroting the course's words as if knowing what it means. I and I didn't want to keep doing forgiveness on the basis of some bunch of statements, trying to use words to fend off ego attacks.

I had to step away from all this for a bit to just settle down and get a sense of something more basic and simple and fundamental. And this is when I started opening up to wanting the Holy Spirit to inform me of a better way. I wanted to see things how he sees things and to join with him more, to just very simply take some small little step that would be enough to fix my mind without all the psychobabble. Some kind of simple something I could just "do" that would produce a happier experience without all the course crap alongside it.

I saw that having conversations about the course just wasn't really working. Everyone's just talking about it. We use its statements as if they are magic wands. But I wasn't seeing a satisfying effect from this. Just figuring out what it means and repeating its words didn't do much. I didn't want to be just another parrot regurgitating the same stuff while staying entirely confined in this same "way" of trying to apply it. I wanted something much closer to my being, that I didn't have to think about. Something much more basic and intimate that I could "live" without mental gymnastics.

This is when I started to discover that I was in general laying an entire interpretation of everything on top of it. This interpretation was based on my thinking that I knew what things were. An attempt to understand it. I saw that I was giving everything meaning through this interpretation. I was deciding that things sucked or were negative and was then reacting to my own decision as to what I thought it was. My interpretation of everything was being mistaken for the thing itself.

So then I considered the fact that every single time that I was less than happy in any way, it was a part of this "way" that I was interpreting. I was filtering or translating or changing, twisting, whatever was "out there", into some kind of decided-upon "version" that I was then experiencing as my "perception of it". Because if you remember, "perception is a result not a cause" and "projection makes perception".

It's really what I project that produces perceptual issues. If I perceived a result or conclusion of "unhappy", I must have projected and wanted that. If I was interpreting that something happening "meant" that I should be afraid, I must've decided that it meant this. I gave it this meaning. And this meaning changed my perception and produces "experiences" or effects which were generally unpleasant.

In the truest sense, I was doing this to myself, as in the secret of salvation, because it was this whole "layer" of interpretation, coming in between me and the world so to speak, that was responsible for causing my "experience" of the world to be faulty. I was willing to consider that any time I was not happy I MUST have mis-interpreted and had come up with some kind of MISTAKEN opiniion about what it MEANS.

I had to be willing to recognize that it was my chosen interpretation that was entirely responsible for the "effects" of that interpretation upon myself, the seeming ego reactions or fears or upset emotions or any kind of annoyance or disturbance. All of my suffering was really rooted in that layer of interpreting, NOT in what lied "beyond it" as the world. And that meant that I was making a lot of mistaken interpretations, resulting in a lot of unhappiness.

Light a light-switch, I then found that simply by recognizing I had made an interpretation, and just being willing to admit that it was the entire reason why I was not happy, my mind would become open to just "letting that interpretation go." I didn't seem to have to do anything else for this to happen. As they say, "illusions recognized must disappear." My interpretation IS the illusion. It was a way of turning "reality" into something it's not. Just recognizing it as an illusory, self-made, made-up, filtered "view", was enough to make it disappear.

As soon as it would just disappear, immediately my mind would light up with light and happiness. It would seem as though a higher me, rooted in the "back" of my mind, would suddenly shine outward. It was as if secretly behind all my ego upset sense of self, there was this higher me that was just always happy and filled with light and wasn't taking anything seriously. It seemed to already be there. I didn't invent it myself. Perhaps this was the real me.

This has started a revolution in my mind and in my outlook and in my way of experiencing the world. It isn't a forgiveness based on some kind of long-winded, elaborate story that I have to tell myself, trying to deprogram myself, trying to counteract perceived problems with a long litany of affirmative statements, or trying to remember course principles, or trying to grasp at straws to make it go away.

It was very very simple. It was much more a sort of change in how I EXPERIENCE what's going on. And that was far more immediate. More like just a kind of attitude change. Not something "thought about", or arrived at through understanding, or made out of complicated metaphysics, or logically deduced. It was a kind of forgiveness that was just a much more intimate matter of psychological engagement.

Either I was interpreting or I wasn't. Either I had chosen to invent some kind of "meaning" for something, or I had let it go. Either I was filtering and believing I knew what something was, or I was just willing to stop doing it. It wasn't a matter of replacing it with something or justifying it or explaining it or writing a book about it. It was kind of like just stepping back. Getting out of my analysis. Stopping my self-made attempt to determine what something is.

The bizarre thing is just how effortless it is and how immediately a whole world of low-level ego experience, suffering, upset and darkness, is immediately overruled by a much much higher bright light of happiness and lightness.

It almost seems wrong, in that the light-heartedness of it doesn't even seem to care to "address"the many doubts and fears and concerns that the ego had. It just sort of leaps above it and pays no attention to it. Like, who would have thought THAT would be a solution? Not to change the ego but to just get OUT of it? To just leave the desert without even dealing with all the many loose ends and questioning fears.

I think for a ton of years now I've generally been locked into the ego mind. Regardless of how lofty my thoughts have been, and regardless of efforts to forgive. It's always still been accompanied by ego feelings, upsets, emotions, fears, reactions, ego rebounds.

I was just kind of getting fed up with the fact that every time I tried to do anything with the course, it ALWAYS had a stupid ego rebound afterwards. Catharsis, release, upset emotions, fear reactions etc. It was just so annoying. I was kind of getting tired of the course in this sense because I couldn't seem to do any of it without having this sense of ... I just don't want to do this. My ego self or whatever just is wired against God and does not want to wake up, and can't. "I", mixed up in that sense of lower-suffering-self, couldn't stop being the way it was.

So there's been this tug of war between the part of mind that just basically couldn't care less about the course and just wants to live a normal life in a body, versus this constant barrage of attempts to awaken to some kind of higher life and perspective that's totally incompatible. The contrast between the two was becoming very acute and I couldn't find a way to satisfy both. I had to even take a break from ACIM for a while and just be in "my ego" to just be normal and stop hitting it over the head with a hammer of spirituality.

But I think what's come out of that now is this very very unexpected movement in which I let the ego stuff remain ego and just seem to step outside of it. It's quite odd. Because I now see that within myself there's this sort of self-contained internal bubble of my suffering self, complete with all the ego emotions and upsets, which is generally most of the time unhappy, riddled with fears and grief and uncertainty and so on. And it seems like this is all within my body. And then somehow there's this higher me that is totally outside of all that, shining a light from a vantage point of not even trying to understand or interpret anything.

It has raised questions of, who even am I. What aspects of myself or of my experience actually is "the ego" and should be something to "get rid of", versus what aspects of this is actually a permanent part of my true nature? Are my emotional reactions just an ego thing? Is this sense of "me suffering" the ego? In particular, where do I draw the line?

But I'm finding that maybe I don't actually have to answer that in terms of a description of it. Because what I seem to be realizing is that ALL of that internal seeming "struggling self" is entirely sort of the "byproduct" of this whole "thinking I know" thing. This whole interpretation of everything. Having a judgement about what everything is. Labelling everything in course terms. Trying to describe everything in explicit detail.

That whole approach of trying to "understand" the world and everything in my experience, is precicely what CAUSES all of the suffering. It's as if, when I try to interpret "reality", it produces generally negative forms of consequence, in a cause-effect kind of way. And the outcome of that is what we might call "the ego" in me. It's this collection of reactions, emotions, upsets, perceived threats, fears, guilts, etc... which all seem to revolve around victimhood and being at the effect of something. That all seems to actually be the END RESULT OF, my minds attempts to INTERPRET reality.

So I put out some kind of negative faulty mistaken interpretation or effort to understand what something is, this results in a false perception, which in turn results in a bunch of suffering, which in turn assembles as a collection of unhappy elements that bundle together as an "ego experience". And that ego experience seems like it's somewhat outside of me. And when my mind is going there, it seems that I am the one having this experience, that my identity IS the suffering, that I AM the upset and the unhappiness. And that anchors and confines and limits my whole awareness INSIDE OF that whole viewpoint.

So if my view is so narrow and limited and false, producing heavy false dark perceptions, then my whole sense of self seems to become imprisoned and confined, alone and afraid, small and weak and vulnerable. It seems like my entire life has been spent accumulating sufferings in this little internal storehouse, surrounding and forming this confused and separated-off sense of self or of "my experience" of life. All gathered up in a ball, even which seems to be housed within my body and especially within the "emotional center" in the stomache area.

If this ENTIRE experience of life is the end RESULT, ie perceptual consequence of, the various mistaken MEANINGS that I keep putting onto things, then it stands to reason (lol) that if I fundamentally CHANGE my entire approach and alter the process of "giving meaning", then it's going to totally override that ENTIRE realm of expeirence.

It's going to basically switch off the ego experience, it's going to totally override all the upsets and reactions, all the unhappy emotions etc. Because it was as though, all along, all this time, ALL of my sufferings have been the RESULT of the meaning that I'VE been giving to everything.

I've become very good at describing things, explainig things, analyzing the world, picking apart illusions, labelling stuff, counter-attacking attacks, and generally just reacting to MY OWN decisions. And suddenly I seem to be embarking on an entirely different ballgame. I guess it can be described as moving above the battlefield in a way. It's like a HUGE stepping back and just stopping trying to fucking figure everything out. Not just because it can't be figured out but because the act of trying to do so is BLOCKING me. It shuts down my light and decreases my awareness and turns me into a judger.

So now for me, this whole course thing, it's turning into something very very simplified. It's just some basic sort of flip of the switch thing, between whether I want to carry on with my faulty judgements/interpretations/translations of what's going on, or whether I want to just let those go.

As I let them go, it's like a huge cloud of psychological blockage is lifted away. A bright HAPPY light switches on out of nowhere, as if I'm getting back in touch with the REAL me that is in the back of all this, and has been there all along covered up by all the mental distortions. It immediately feels remarkably happy and light, regardless of how heavy and dark the ego experience was "before" I stepped out of it.

What the ego is, I think it really is just the "effects" that are produced when we try to "narrow" (Jesus interjected) reality down to being this or that, to describe it, to judge it, to assess or evaluate what stuff "is". The labels and meanings we keep trying to give things. And then mistakedly confusing that effort for reality, believing that reality now inherently IS the meaning that WE decided it has. That produces all the ego reactions, all suffering, all unhappiness and dissatisfaction.

When we stop producing these illusions of interpreation, trying to think we know what things are, trying to understand the ego and the world, trying to filter what's happening, trying to insist that something is what we think it is, trying to be right about our labels and projections, all that just immediately switches off the "ego effect" and puts our mind back in touch with cause.

We settle back into reality, we return to our baseline, we get back in touch with who we are BEHIND all these layers of interpretation, and the clouds part and the light comes shining forth. And it feels SO much happier than the deluge of suffering that ALL interpretations produce.

So it's not a matter of trying to get "that ego" to change and grow and wake up and become spiritual, the ego is just the result of "shutting down". If we are to "open up" we have to be willing to actually be open all the time. Because any time we judge or label or describe or analyze or think we know about or seem certain of what stuff is or means, we are actually narrowing and closing down, casting anchors into the wind. And that just diminishes our light and makes us feel dark and alone and afraid.

We step out of the ego by stepping into the light of "not knowing", of forgetting what you taught yourself, or letting go of thinking you know, and of learning NOT to try interpreting anything. When you stop projecting your made-up meanings onto everything, you leave an open space for the Holy Spirit and God to project THEIR meaning instead, in the emptiness that you've left there. In the space you've provided for light to shine through you. Really it's more like, getting out of your own way.

I am finding this is what forgiveness means to me now. It's the simple movement away from having made the mistake of deciding what something must mean, which is pretty much always in error and leads to suffering, and just being willing to not do that. My own meanings are what blocks my sight. My own judgements of reality are what keeps reality from me. This is how we undo perception itself, by undoing the basis for judgement. And it takes no more than a slight willingness to recognize my self-inflicted suffering is coming from my self-imposed meanings, to let them disappear to reveal the light within.

Yesterday I saw for the first time, myself just pivoting differently, in a situation where someone had clearly "done something wrong", breaking some rules. I could've "held it against" the person, and yet somehow I remembered that this entire experience of it being "wrong" or sinful was a meaning I was giving it, and as I stepped back from that I found myself expressing that the person was still lovable regardless of this mistake, and it was only a mistake. It was as kind of "experiential forgiveness", so basic and simple, a psychological act of just "withholding judgement" in a way, that I felt it produced some kind of miraculous effects afterwards. And it felt good.

Ultimately it all boils down to the simple idea that we have en experiential realitionship with truth and reality, and we are either going to be fully open it and let it be what it is without trying to define it, or we're going to narrow our perception and lay judgements and labels on it, trying to dissect it. And as soon as we do that we will shut down our light and go into darkness (ego). If we want light and happiness, we have to learn to just accept reality in the fullness of "what is" (not the world as such), by not "having an opinion about it". Not laying a meaning on it. So that the light can fully shine and illuminate our happiness.

"Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing. It offends no aspect of reality, ****nor seeks to twist it to appearance that it likes.**** It merely looks and waits and judges not. ****He who would not forgive must judge****, for he must justify his failure to forgive. But he who would forgive himself must ****learn to welcome truth exactly as it is.****"

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

"The reflection of God NEEDS no interpretation. IT IS CLEAR. Clear but the mirror, and the message which shines forth from what the mirror holds out for everyone to see, NO-ONE will fail to understand. It is the message that the Holy Spirit is holding to the mirror that is in HIM. He recognizes it, because he has been taught his NEED for it, but knows not where to look to FIND it. Let him, then, see it in YOU, and share it WITH you. Could you but realize, for a single instant, the power of healing that the reflection of God, shining in YOU, can bring to all the world, you COULD not wait to make the mirror of your mind clean, to receive the image of the Holiness that heals the world."

WHAT ARE THE LEVELS?

1. God is the primary level of reality. God "causes" the 2nd level.

2. Creation, heaven, Holy Spirit, Sonship. This is a permanent pre-separation state where many children of God live in harmony. Each child has a mind, and some of those minds chose to believe in mis-creating another level.

3. This universe, including Earth and all human bodies. The "purest" way to experience this level is in true perception, a reflection of heaven, the face of Christ, once-removed from Heaven. Being in this world you still have a choice whether to be in true perception or false perception. The making of this level introduced or came from "level confusion".

4. False perception produces hallucinations and distortions of imagined worlds laid on top of or as a "perception of" the world. This is the experience of hell on earth. The world itself is still an illusion shared by the many sons of God, so now there's illusions on top of illusions.

In ACIM Jesus is NOT always talking about the same level. Each level is a different CONTEXT, and each is kind of "inside" the one above it. So if he's talking e.g. about your perception of the world, he's talking about you being in false perception and transitioning to true perception. If he talks about "the world IS perception" he's now talking at a higher level than that - level 3. If he talks about "there is no world" he's talking even higher than that, at level 2.

If you read ACIM believing that there is "only one level" or that everything it says is "true everywhere" or in all contexts, you WILL become confused and mistaken. All kinds of false conclusions come from this.

Another very common mistake is "hopping around the levels" during mid-sentence in order to try to justify or justify-against something being true. We've all done this ;-) For example "the body isn't real so why bother healing it" or "the world doesn't exist so why perform miracles". That's an intellectual straddling of two simultaneous levels and trying to make the truth of one override the other. That is an error in logical reasoning. Some people aim straight for higher level non-duality kind of truth being the only valid level, which produces profound denial and level confusion.

WHAT IS LEVEL CONFUSION

The first level confusion occurred when we as God's "effect" (creation) turned around and pretended that we, on a "lower level" could be the CAUSE of the higher level that caused us. Our attempt to "cause God", or to will against God, or affect God (sin), is the authority problem, and it is also level confusion.

So level confusion means that someone is confused about which level causes which other level. What is cause, and what is effect. A common way this plays out is someone takes something Jesus says at some higher level, and then attempts to "apply it to" a lower level context, in order to "explain away" there being any relevance to anything said about the lower level. This is a classic intellectual defense, and an error in reasoning.

An example might be, the course says I am not a body so I will stop eating. Or, the course says my hobbies are not real so I am not going to do them. Or the course says I'm not a body I am free, so when anyone says anything about bodies I'm going to overrule them and trump their claims by *switching context*, ignoring the context of the conversation, and pretending that the higher truth is the only one that applies here - this is intellectual arrogance.

Confusing cause and effect leads to the belief in magic, which is the belief that something which is actually an effect, is causing you, and producing effects in you. It also means you have turned yourself from "cause" into an effect. It also relates to how you see God, believing you are the cause of Him and therefore can produce effects in Him (sin) - which leads to the death wish.

And as Jesus says, "all sickness comes from a confusion of the levels." Which means, ALL forms of sickness (body or otherwise) show up when you believe that you are NOT the cause, and instead something BELOW you is the cause of you, making you its effect. It's the same thing as believing the BODY causes the MIND and can make itself sick against your will. It's as if you have switched the higher and lower levels around. Jesus also talks about how MIRACLES restore the "order of the levels". Ie, they put causality where it belongs (e.g. in the mind) and effect where it belongs (e.g. the body/world).

Fixing a faulty perception of cause-effect rearranges the levels into their natural order and prevents you from seeing yourself as "at the effect of the world I see." It places you back in the driving seat of recognizing that nothing happens to you against your will. Your mind is on one level, your body is on another. Similarly, your mind is on a level BELOW or WITHIN God's level. Your mind is also below the level of your soul (the soul never leaves the sight of God, each soul has their own mind which can choose whether to accept God's will or not).

So level confusion began with the separation idea. And it will continue until you are in the atonement. Until then, you likely will continue confusing levels and seeing things "backwards".

This is why we have to learn to discern WHEN Jesus is talking at one level, and when He is talking at another.

It can SEEM as if Jesus is contradicting Himself if He says one thing and then later says another. But these two things would ONLY contradict if they were on the SAME level. When you realize they are NOT on the same level, it makes more sense. For example when He says the body is not real and God did not create it, that is a higher level truth. When he says the body can be used as a communication device to extend love, that IS on a LOWER level. And therefore it IS confined to and limited to the context of having a body, and all the truths Jesus teaches about the body's unreality/inimportance/nothingness are STILL true. So you have to beware of which level he's talking at and when.

Just even realizing that the course HAS levels was really eye opening for me a few years ago. Until then I just lumped everything together. When you realize Jesus is teaching at and talking in different contexts, it really really clarifies a lot of things. Many people struggle with this, and it's why a lot of the course didn't seem to add up for me for many years.

One final note. When we use higher level concepts to "dismiss" the validity of anything at a lower level, that too is level confusion, and a form of denial. e.g. "there is no world, why bother healing people" is level confusion. Within the context of the world, WHILE there is a world, we ARE to heal people. UNTIL there is no world level, it's not our experiential truth that there is no world. AFTER the world has disappeared, there will be no more need for these miracles. You have to remember what is happening WHEN and where you actually ARE in the context of levels. Otherwise the result of this is just more split mindedness and denial.

To be awake in the atonement is to have NO level confusion. That means you realize you are the CAUSE of everything you experience. It means you know NOTHING can happen to you against your will, and never has. It is the secret to salvation - that you must have done it all to yourself, and you now choose again. It also means you now have POWER OVER THE LOWER LEVEL, which makes you a MIRACLE WORKER who can now break and override ALL of the ego's laws, including laws of physics, time, space, biology, etc.

The ego has built some very terrible things which we regard as extremely real. These include pain, disease/sickness, fear, death, emergency, intensity, attack, and separation. When these things seems to be happening, the ego is sending out a very strong message to us.

The message says, "you should stay the hell away from this it's really bad". (Beware, this advice may be misleading ;-)

Pain quite literally tells you in an experiential way that it is something you do not want. And nobody wholeheartedly wants to be sick or dying. And attack can be particularly upsetting. The ego keeps reinforcing the idea:

"This is really really terrible and it's really happening and you should want it to stop" (Beware again, this ego advice may not work ;-)

And so typically that is the reaction that we have. If I've got pain, I want it to go away. If someone is attacking someone, I want them to stop doing it. If I am sick or diseased, I want to get rid of it.

The trouble is, these attitudes... These reactions... These ways of experiencing these 'temptation', is precisely the OPPOSITE of what will actually HELP the situation. The ego's counsel is ALWAYS completely opposite of the truth and leading you down exactly the wrong path that results in things becoming far worse. What it claims will save you, and what it claims will heal you, and what it claims will fix the situation, DOES NOT, and so you seek for but you do not find peace.

So let's look at the opposite, which the ego warns you against.

If you are in pain, love the living FUCK out of it. Welcome it. Don't resist it. Drop all desire to get rid of it. Don't make it wrong. Don't judge it as bad or a mistake or something that shouldn't be there. And in particular, stop being a victim and OWN the CHOICE to put it there.

Instead of being a passive victim of it, instead be proactive in choosing how you wish to perceive it. It is also useful to extremely exaggerate how much you WELCOME the problem. For example:

"I am choosing this pain (or whatever the thing is)."

"I really wanted to have this and this is what I've received."

"This pain is absolutely beautiful and lovely and I love it with all my heart."

"I am the one who chose this pain and I've done a really excellent job of choosing it."

"This pain is absolutely amazing I totally love it and welcome it and want it."

"I allow this pain to stay for as long as it wants to, it is completely free to do so and I don't even want to get rid of it or make it go away."

"I feel really happy about this pain being there, and I am truly grateful that it has shown up just like I planned."

"I love this pain. This is the best pain I've ever created. This pain makes me completely happy because it is exactly how I wanted it to be and it has met all my conditions."

"I accept this pain and allow it to remain."

"I let go of resisting this pain or trying to make it go away."

"I let go of labelling this pain as negative or a fault or something I did wrong, there is no guilt in it at all. I am completely innocent."

"I surrender all attack on this pain and give it to you Holy Spirit."

"I am open to being completely still with this pain and simply observing it without any desire to change it or judge it."

"I surreneder this pain to you God, please heal it in my mind and I gently let it go to you now."

Notice that we're having an ATTITUDE which is completely the opposite of what the ego says your attitude SHOULD be. When something goes wrong, the ego puts it into the hierarchy of illusions and tells you exactly what kind of severity of reaction this calls for. If you let it, you'll react according to this hierarchy and be a victim. So the ego says this pain is not something you can possible want - that YOU are not something you can possibly want - so go ahead and WANT IT, to defy the ego and reverse its assertions.

The keys here are you need to include:

1. Complete ownership for having created this

2. Complete ownership for actively still creating it and wanting to

3. Gratitude for having created exactly what you wanted

4. Openness and welcome that is heartfelt

5. Allowing and accepting whatever it, letting it BE without you changing it

6. Surrender of all of the reactions you were having about it and all the ways you were making it out to be something wrong

7. Willingness to let it be free so that you can be free

8. Offering it up to Holy Spirit now that you have LET GO OF IT and have stopped trying to attack it or make it wrong or get rid of it yourself

9. Willingness to ASK Holy Spirit/Jesus/God to now heal it and take it from you

10. Actually DOING SO and letting go of it in peaceful surrender.

To the ego this is total madness. It will tell you if you try to accept or allow something that's clearly bad or awful, that you have regarded as real and upsetting, you will just condone it and keep it. This is not true. It will tell you that you should stop even trying to 'live with it' because if you do, you literally will be stuck keeping it and have to live with it. This is also not true.

The reason the ego's attitude is false is because there are a whole shitload of attitudes that you are having which are REINFORCING the pain and making it worse. In fact, you are the one who put it there. But while you keep REACTING to its appearance, which typically is "I want to get rid of it because it shouldn't be there", that just makes it worse and keeps it. When you lift away all of those reactions and layers of condemnation, judgement, guilt and wrongfulness, you are stripping away layers of 'making it real' and holding it in your mind, which actually FREES YOUR MIND from the illusions surrounding this. So you're actually undoing your reactions, seeing innocence and harmlessness in the thing, and thus getting yourself to the point where you can LET GO of it. You can't be free while you won't let IT be free.

The reason for this is that whenever there is pain or suffering or sickness, it is because there's some part of you that you do not LOVE. Some part of you where you see guilt or wrongness or non-acceptance or sinfulness. So that part of you that you refuse to accept HURTS and turns into sickness. This may or may not produce physical sickness but often it does. So you're not really dealing with your body being sick, you're dealing with your mind being sick - some part of YOU (not the body) needs love. So as you look at the body sickness and you keep launching counter-attacks and defenses against it, all you're doing is hurting the part of you that hurts, even more. That only compounds it and keeps it. Plus it makes you very unhappy because the ego's default reaction to pain and sickness is unhappiness. And yet the fact is, it is a choice to BE unhappy by not loving a part of yourself that MAKES the sickness appear in the first place.

Do you really HAVE to be unhappy and afraid and guilty and lost and hopeless 'because of' a pain or sickness? Do you not have any choice in the matter? At the very least, even if changing your attitude about it does not have any effect on making the sickness BETTER at all, physically, at least you will FEEL GOOD instead of feeling like shit. It IS far better for you to choose to be happy because of sickness than to add a layer of feeling shit on top of the physical sensations or symptoms. Having a headache is one thing, but also having a headache and feeling depressed and unhappy is a whole extra layer of despair. You don't HAVE to have that experience. And what you might find is, if you CHOOSE to have a happier experience about what is happening - a more welcoming, loving, open, allowing experience, then maybe, just maybe, your body will fall into line and actually HEAL to match your change in attitude. Since the physical sickness is just a symptom/projection of your unhealed attitude about yourself, internally, changing your attitude MUST change the projection.

The more support for sickness you can strip away the better, and all of your default negativity and victimhood about being sick DOES compound and support and reinforce it. What happens when you withdraw that support? How can a sickness have a strength, when you weaken it by withdrawing all of your mind's support for it? Make no mistaken, seeing yourself as victimized BY sickness or BY attack or BY someone dying or whatever, that very much strengthens the EFFECTS of that thing happening. Choosing to be happy and loving toward it, instead, which is completely against the ego and does take some WILL (affirmations help too), CANCELS OUT your belief in the effects. When you deny that something has affected you, the cause is undone and you are HEALED.

Jesus DOES ask us in ACIM to cancel out all of the effects of things in order to undo them and to DEMONSTRATE that you are invulnerable. You can't do that if you insist that there's no way you can love or be happy about whatever seems to have gone wrong. You've got to start somewhere. Worth a try?

How much of your life have you spend in the default reactionary space of feeling shitty about bad things that are happening? Has it worked? How much effort have you spent fighting against things that have gone wrong and failed and that are malfunctioning? Has that really helped at all? It has not worked. Try something radical. Try the exact opposite way of dealing with it and see what happens. Holy Spirit can amplify the effects of your willingness to SEE YOURSELF AS WHOLE AND HEALED, because it is in line with the truth.

The only thing you need to be wary of is the ego turning this into a reason to become SARCASTIC, which means that you're saying one thing and believing another. You need to find some amount of belief and meaning in what you're affirming. And because you're trying to UNDO the beliefs you already put in place in your negative reactions, it may take some effort of will and persistence to change your beliefs and to actually FEEL that what you're saying is true. After a while of saying it and MEANING it, you should feel a growing sense of peace and acceptance about the issue, and it should seem easier to be less upset about, and to surrender all of your counter-attacks upon it. Then you will have a GENUINE WILLINGNESS to hand it over to Holy Spirit.

Go for it.

Jesus asked me to write this.

You are immortal spirit, pretending not to be. You may not think that immortality is a real thing, but it is the only reality, and everything else is unnatural.

Being immortal spirit, you are real, and nothing real can be threatened. What is immortal has no enemies, is innocent and pure, has divine health, lasts forever, is always happy, is incapable of sin or attack, cannot be hurt, is incapable of victimhood, and cannot be sick or die.

This is what you are. This is what it means to remain as God created you. God does not create things which perish and suffer and die. God gives eternal life forever, divinely protected and permanently perfect. Your soul or spirit cannot be changed. "Spirit is in a state of grace forever."

Feel this for a moment. The inability for anything to ever happen to you. The inability to be sick or dead. The inability to attack or harm. The total absence of needs of any kind. This is the true meaning of "I need do nothing". That which is immortal has no needs, lacking nothing.

That which is immortal does not need a spiritual path. It does not need magical solutions. It does not depend on anything of this world, not even food or water or air. That which is immortal is already complete, already done, already totally what it naturally is and always has been. It needs no correction or healing or help.

God created you to be permanently as God intended for you to naturally be. It is in fact 100% impossible for you to stop being the way God intended. It is impossible for you to destroy yourself or others. It is impossible for you to be attacked or hurt in any way. You cannot remove from yourself the divinity that God created you as. Nor can you put it into you or earn it or build it or get it from somewhere else.

There is a place in you where the love of God has not been forgotten, where there is perfect peace and sanity, here you are utterly invulnerable, where nothing can affect you and where you have no needs at all. You cannot undo or remove or delete this core nature - it is your eternal spirit. And this spirit is not just some esoteric concept or puff of smoke, it is everything that you are. A living being of light and love, given free will by God to create and extend in joy.

There is nothing you can do to stop being immortal. You cannot change the truth. You cannot undo God’s will or make it different. You cannot stop being alive forever. God’s will for you is eternal, permanent happiness. And God’s will is already done. It is more permanent than sin, more rock solid than matter, and has no flaws or uncertainties.

So here you are, this being who seems to be in a strange alien world, clawing at survival, trying to defend yourself from what seems to be the possibility of real threat, not remembering that it is absolutely impossible for you to change. That it is impossible that you die or suffer in any reality. That if it seems that you are experiencing anything other than perfection and immortality, it must be some kind of illusion because it cannot be true.

You literally are immortal. You are immortal spirit pretending that it’s possible to not be immortal. Pretending that reality can be threatened and that something unreal exists. Pretending that you are capable of death. Pretending that you can be victimized, that things can happen without and against your will, and that there is nothing you can do about this.

You are lying to yourself. Did you forget that you are immortal? That you have no needs and no lack and already have been given everything by God? That there is nothing else you can add to heaven but its extension? That it is literally, ultimately, absolutely impossible for sin, guilt, fear, suffering, sickness and death to ever be real? You are trying to convince yourself that the impossible is possible. You are putting on a pretty good show.

Look at the trillions of immortal beings who have pretended to come into a body, to suffer a while, and die. Every single one of those performances was fake. Not one single person ceased to exist. Not one single soul has ended. Death is a most fantastic lie. Actors in a play can pretend to demonstrate a most elaborate and convincing death, convincing even to themselves perhaps, only to suddenly get up off the stage and take a bow at the end.

You can’t die. Death isn’t real. Nothing real can be threatened, and you are real. Being immortal means living and demonstrating at all times that you are as God created you, that you are perfect invulnerable, can never be sick, cannot be hurt or suffer in any way, are not at the effect of any "causes" in the world, that you are utterly beyond the reach of death or any form of attack, that you have zero needs and have total power over everything.

I find it is always very helpful to remember the truth. To recall into my awareness the basic fact, that I and everyone else are immortal. That nothing can or has happened to anyone. That there is no sin, no suffering, and no death. This gives a sense of perspective. It is only through denial and unconsciousness that we have lost all sense of perspective and do not have a rock-solid truth to compare things to.

Having even a conceptual idea in your mind that you are immortal, and using it to contrast what you are experiencing, reveals to you what is actually happening. If it is true that you are immortal, that sense of unfair victimhood you are experiencing is immediately shown up for the fake lie and self-deceiving performance that it is.

Remembering you are immortal, when you are experiencing sickness, shows you that this sickness cannot be true or real, because the immortal cannot become sick. Recalling your immortal invulnerability when you are tempted to believe someone caused you upset, immediately incites a reality check and admittance to the fact that you can’t possibility have experienced something against your divine will. And therefore you must have made this decision yourself, to experience what you are experiencing, not matter how much it appears that someone else chose this for you.

This is not just a course in miracles. This is a course in immortality.

You think the idea of death not being real is controversial? How about the idea of real experiential and demonstrable immortality? How many people in this world believe in real death vs how many people believe in real immortality? How many people consider immortality a fantasy best left for tv shows and movies? This is a world of death believers. People come here to suffer and be sick and die. Where are the demonstrators of immortality and invulnerability and miraculous power?

Immortality is the core truth about you and about everyone. Everything else is absolutely bullshit. The biggest charade imaginable. Billions of humans pretending to demonstrate that what is immortal can die. All of it is a lie. Death is impossible. "It is the world you see that is impossible." Remember that you are immortal at all times and absolutely anything else that’s seeming to be true for you, must be a lie that you are perpetrating. Your body cannot even suffer or be sick or age or die if you use it to demonstrate your immortality.

This is the core truth of existence. God creates eternal life. Eternal life cannot be attacked. Nothing unreal exists. You cannot stop being immortal but you can pretend not to be, and you are doing a lot of pretending. You are going to have to own up to being immortal, and demonstrate it, and have it be your only acceptable state of being, on a permanent basis, if you are to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and stay there. It is a kingdom of immortality and only the immortal can live in it, and live forever. And it is where you really are already.

"You are immortal because you are eternal, and "always" must be now."

"What is the ego? But a dream of what you really are. A thought you are apart from your Creator and a wish to be what He created not. It is a thing of madness, not reality at all. A name for namelessness is all it is. A symbol of impossibility; a choice for options that do not exist. We name it but to help us understand that it is nothing but an ancient thought that what is made has immortality. But what could come of this except a dream which, like all dreams, can only end in death?"

"What has life has immortality."

"The goal of the curriculum, regardless of the teacher you choose, is KNOW THYSELF. ***There is nothing else to learn.*** Everyone is looking for himself and the power and glory he thinks he has lost."

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

Jesus defines the course's ultimate goals in different ways, but a very significant angle is that we're trying to remember who we really are. We're trying to tune back into our real identity, to stop believing things are true of us which aren't, and wake up to our real self - a shared identity in Christ.

In the separation we denied who we really are, and pretended to be something we're not. This confused us greatly. Whatever you believe is true, you will believe must be true of you. As your sense of truth and reality shifted from heaven to hell, your whole sense of who and what you are went with it. Including a sense of "where" you are.

As your idea of truth shifted towards spacetime, toward bodies and the ego, it seemed as if your whole sense of self was flung out of heaven and transported into bodies. Having asserted "bodies are true", you believed they were true of you, which placed you in them.

All the things of spacetime, including the world and all bodies and the ego, are not of God. They are not created, or real. Since they are governed by time, they always change and are fickle, so they never have any sense of permanent identity. Even the notion that you are one of the things suggests you will die because your self is irrevocably changed against your will.

We have come to identify with the ego and the body because we think they are the truth. We've confused the truth with false things. Part of sorting out what is true and false is figuring out what category these things belong to. But at the same time, it's going to mean sorting out what category your identity belongs to. As your sense of truth changes, so must your identification with what's true.

The question then is, are you an aspect of a dream? Are you an artificial fake image of a body? Are you a fictional evil selfish ego? And by extension, anything that these things seem to do or experience or feel or think, must surely be NOT a part of your real self, if these things are not part of reality.

By saying you are not a body you're saying you are spirit. Your whole sense of "who and what I am" shifts away from the physical towards something spiritual. This HAS to entail an actual experiential sense of being something of spirit. The feeling of "this is my self" or "this is what I am". This locking-in of identity and self and home and a sense of where you belong, has to become anchored to your soul. So that you actually believe and recognize that you ARE a spirit being. So that you can SEE yourself.

To gain an understanding of what your real self's true nature is, and therefore what you should be trying to tune INTO, and to grasp what things are illusions which you should be tuning OUT of, you need a good sense of the nature of reality. God created you as a permanent, unchangeable, immortal, invulnerable, perfect, loving, powerful, happy being of light. That is what you must come to believe is your actual nature.

God did not create the world or the body, or the ego. He did not create suffering or sickness or death. He did not create unhappy feelings, sad emotions, grief or loss. He did not create sin or guilt or fear. He did not create any kind of suffering, any kind of selfishness, or any kind of specialness. So all of these things cannot be a part of the spirit-being that you are. They cannot truly be a part of your identity.

When you are believing that these false things are TRUE or real, you will identify with them. Anything you GIVE truth to you are trying to be ONE with. You embrace it and accept it and identify WITH it. You resonate with it and agree with it and want it for your own. You see your own reflection in it, and you merge with it. Therefore if you merge with illusory evil ego things, you start to become them.

This leads to experiences such as "I am suffering" "I am feeling unhappy" "I am sick" "I am having a broken body" "I am angry" "I am grieving" etc. And in this experience you will have become ONE with the ego so much that you will believe all of these experiences are literally YOU. That you are having them, you are the one feeling them, you are the one being victimized, and you are the one suffering. But this is because you've merged yourself WITH the ego and the body and have identified them AS you.

"if you are to RETAIN guilt, as the ego insists, YOU CANNOT BE YOU. Only by persuading you that IT is you, could the ego possibly induce you to PROJECT guilt, and thereby keep it in your mind."

"The ego believes that this is what YOU did, because it believes it IS you. It follows, then, that if you identify WITH the ego, you MUST perceive yourself as guilty."

What we have to realize then is that when we're in an "I am suffering" perspective, it is the EGO that is suffering. Because "only the ego can experience guilt." Only a weak frail unwanted miserable false self can possibly experience hell. Only the ego vantage point can make everything into hell. If you are therefore feeling like "I AM [fill in the ego attribute]", you have made yourself one with the ego and have taken it as your own identity. You are clinging to it to save you.

So then we have to realize that we are NOT this. We are not the sufferer. We are not the dream content. We are not the body. We are not the world. We are not that which feels guilt. We are not capable of grief and loss. We have to remember all of the true attributes of Christ and recognize that we ARE those things. We have to become ONE with Christ again, to merge with Christ and claim ownership of being Christ, unite with Christ, accept that everything true of Christ is purely true, and that it is true of us.

If God's truth is the only truth, then our immortal invulnerable self cannot POSSIBLY ever suffer in any way. Any sense of unhappiness, unworthiness, pain, despair, loss, fear, guilt, shame etc must NOT be a part of us. We cannot experience it from a vantage point of being perfect. It must be part of a dream, part of a fiction, part of the ego thought system. You cannot FEEL it if you are NOT that. It cannot BE there if it is unreal.

So now we have to sort out, who am I? What am I? What is true? What is true of ME? What is my real self? What is the nature of the soul that God created me to be as a son of God, as a part of Christ and as heaven? What is the only truth about me that I will accept as the definition of myself? What will I identify WITH which is real and true and permanent? And am I willing to let go of the ego, disconnect FROM it, separate it out from what I believe is part of myself, stop trusting it, stop using it, and stop being it?

Who are you really? You are the perfect child of God which God created to live forever. There is no darkness in you. There is no evil in you. There is no sin or guilt in you. There is no basis for you to fear or suffer. There is no possibility you can ever be sick or die. And nothing can ever attack or hurt you. You cannot BE hurt and you cannot FEEL unhappy. Only a false artificial self could be such things. Only a fictional self could suffer. Only a fake self could have attributes which are not of God.

You tried to reinvent yourself in the separation. You tried to be your own creator. You wanted to be different to how you were created. You wanted to redefine what is true and decide what you are, to make of yourself whatever you wanted to be. Anything except God-like. And so you have spent all this time making yourself into a body, turning yourself into the anti-christ, and trying to be dead. That is not who or what you are. It is not POSSIBLE.

"Now is our Source remembered, and Therein we find our true Identity at last. Holy indeed are we, because our Source can know no sin." "Father, You know my true Identity. Reveal It now to me who am Your Son, that I may waken to the truth in You, and know that Heaven is restored to me."

"Your altar stands serene and undefiled. It is the holy altar to my Self, and there I find my true Identity."

"But we have listened to Your Voice, and learned exactly what to do to be restored to Heaven and our true Identity."

"My true identity is so secure, so lofty, sinless, glorious and great, wholly beneficent and free from guilt, that Heaven looks to It to give it light. It lights the world as well. It is the gift my Father gave me, and the one as well I give the world. There is no gift but This that can be either given or received. This is reality, and only This. This is illusion's end. It is the Truth."

"Again, how simple is salvation! It is merely a statement of your true identity. It is this that we will celebrate today."

"We sing the song of thankfulness today in honor of the Self Which God has willed to be our true identity in Him. Today we smile on everyone we see, and walk with lightened footsteps as we go to do what is appointed us to do."

"For he who can accept his true identity is truly saved."

God has absolute power. And yet, God shares all of His power with us. And this doesn't mean, in some watered-down version or less capable version, but we actually in our natural divine state are meant to fully share all of God's power, and to extend it. This means, creatively, the ability to do anything. It also gives us an incredible experiential strength, an invulnerability, an immortality, eternal life, and nothing short of the complete inability to be affected by anything. We're talking, beyond superhero status here. Miraculous, complete unwavering certainty and absolute knowing.

Now, this generally isn't the kind of experience that most of us are having day-to-day. Most of the time we're in a state of quite significant dis-empowerment. Somehow we seem to be out of touch with a sense of certainty, we're not confident, we feel vulnerable, we see ourselves as weak victims, easily affected by the world and quite easily losing our peace over stupid little things. We quite literally walk the earth in basically a state of immersion in FEAR, with a sense of dread and foreboding about going anywhere and doing anything. We don't really feel like we're some kind of master of reality or that we're completely impenetrable and invulnerable. So how did we get into this state?

Basically, any way that we use or side with the ego and its thought system, undermines us. It always entails some form of denial, blockage, shutting out, disowning of one's self, self-rejection, censorship, unconsciousness, a projection of the power of 'cause' onto external people and events, seeing oneself as victimized and affected by the world, suffering in the body, things happening that we didn't choose, the list goes on. All of these things, if we believe and involve ourselves with them, cause us to seemingly experience a state of disempowerment. In other words, we've at some point actually chosen to deny and project our power onto others, so that we appear to be weak and afraid. On purpose. So yes, we actually choose to be victims and we live a fearful life thinking this is normal.

So now the question is, how do we get that power back? Well, for starters, we're going to begin by noticing that we currently believe we can't get our power back because a) we don't even recognize that it is OUR power, b) we've locked it up tightly in the hands of other people, c) we don't think we have the power to take it back, d) we think we're going to have to muster some incredible courage to confront some terrible enemy in order to win it back (which we don't have nearly enough of, making the prospect of it seem terrifying). None of these things are true, but this is what we're starting with in our 'forgiveness process'.

So we actually need to question whether these perceptions and beliefs are actually true. Rather than simply react to them or think that we have to go up against them, we need to stop, backtrack, and ask ourselves, is this even true? Is it really someone else's power? Is it really not my own power that I'm afraid of? Is my fear even really 'because of' the power I see projected or is this state of fear maybe a device that CAUSES me to lose my power? Did someone take this power from me or did I actually willingly give it away? Is there really a big reason why I can't take it back?

The truth is, only you have ever tried to give your power away, and only you have ever accomplished the illusion that you can do this, and only you can undo this by changing your mind. Only you have done this to yourself. So taking your power back is going to mean a) being more honest about what you did to yourself, b) being more responsible for everything you are experiencing, c) recognizing the innocence of others because they are not the cause of your disempowerment, d) recognizing with greater clarity that you are afraid of your own power not the power of others, e) discerning that the power you see out there is in fact YOUR power that you disassociated from, and f) taking steps to reclaim ownership rights of that power and g) admitting to who you really are.

You are a powerful child of God. Not some weak scared child of God. POWERFUL. Compared to most people who live in a state of fear 24/7, even the ones who fake it by pretending to be confident or arrogant, they too are just as much under the belief that they are victims - they've just become a bit better at being victimizers too as a defense mechanism. It pales in comparison to the sense of certainty, stillness, presence, confidence, knowing and truth, that will reside in you when you actually perform forgiveness properly and reclaim what is rightfully yours.

You must therefore learn to see yourself not as a victim. You must drop the victim role and become more responsible for everything you are experiencing. When you are engaged in ego with someone or having a fight or arguing or are upset by someone etc... those are precisely the times where you need to learn to exercise greater honesty, responsibility and awareness, that no you are NOT upset because of that person, they are NOT the cause, and what you're feeling is YOUR responsibility. You are doing this to yourself. You have to become willing to accept this at all times, in all situations.

What happens if you cannot accept that you are completely responsible for your life? It means that you believe other people are responsible for it. If they're responsible for it, they have the power to determine what happens to you and what you experience. Thus they have power over you. And you will become terrified and weak. You must choose not to see yourself this way. You must remember to take full ownership of who you really are.

The entire purpose of all your projection, all your scapegoating, all your self dis-empowerment and all your efforts to 'get rid of' what is inside you, is basically just another part for your attempted *suicide*, as part of your *death wish*, in which you are trying to stop being the Son of God. Trying to get rid of yourself and give all of yourself away to other people for them to dictate who and what you are, is just a part of you trying to destroy yourself. You must stop this.

And so this means that when you stop doing that, what you're doing now is owning up to who you really are, you're being true to yourself, you're not abandoning yourself, you're reclaiming responsibility for the power that God is sharing with you, you're being restored to a position of being UNAFFECTED by anything external, and thus you are reclaiming your INVULNERABILITY and your IMMORTALITY (not that they could ever be truly lost, lol).

What you WILL find, I promise, and I say this because this is what I am experiencing myself, is that when you keep taking this responsibility and ownership of the truth in you, taking back your power, being true to yourself, being even more honest about the fact that only you can do stuff to yourself and everyone else is NOT the cause, the more EMPOWERED you are going to feel. And this is actually going to feel like you have some kind of ... power, inside you, some kind of invulnerability... some kind of strength of certainty... some kind of sense of joyful knowingness... that seems to just be there naturally without you having to do anything else. You didn't have to build it up, you didn't have to increase it or focus on it or amplify it with affirmations. It's your NATURAL STATE and it simply feels like you are psychologically strong, immoveable, and unaffected by anything.

And if like me, you do this, you will start to be quite surprised at how you have a lot less FEAR when you are out in the world. You will feel more sure of yourself. You will have more confidence to talk to people. You will have this sort of sense of, I can't be attacked - invulnerability - a sense of being SAFE - that allows you to then have the confidence to approach people. And you will also find as I am, that you will approach people from a place of greater love, you will become much more willing to express the truth and say loving things right out in the open, and be far far less concerned about the stupid victimization attitudes such as 'what will they think of me', 'I better not be myself in case I upset someone', 'I better be very controlled in case I make someone hurt me', 'I hope it's safe to go there', etc.... all of those things start to melt away, replaced with a POWER that just beams with a sense of joy and confidence.

The only thing that needs to happen to 'acquire' access to this power is to STOP DISEMPOWERING YOURSELF. Stop going along with the ego. Stop listening to it. Stop using it. Stop being irresponsible. Stop blaming people. Stop believing that people affect you. Stop projecting causes outside yourself. Stop literally 'giving away' all of the power that you have to choose everything that you experience. As soon as you think someone else has control of it or is responsible for it, that's in, you're instantly disempowered and in a victim role, fearing for your life. You don't want to be there. It feels like SHIT to be disempowered. And once you are disempowered you will strongly believe that OTHER PEOPLE have CAUSED YOU to lose your power. That they scared you, did something to you, took it away from you, showed prowess over you, threatened you, or whatever. All of those beliefs are BULLSHIT. Nobody has any power to do anything to you whatsoever unless you GIVE IT TO THEM.

And when you give power to others, you are literally giving it to the EGO. It is the EGO that you are EMPOWERING, when you give your power away. Do you think the ego loses out on the deal, or that it's only you that suffers? Nope. You empower the ego. You make the ego seem like it has control over you. You make the ego seem like it can tell you what to do and scare the living shit out of you. It has no ability to do this. Only you can seem to create the illusion in your own mind that it has this ability, or that it has done so. And then you're literally listening to one part of your mind have power over the other part, pretending that the two are not even associated. This is a split mind.

Take your power back. It's yours. Nobody has any rights to it. Nobody has power over your power. You will be thrilled at how much better it makes you feel to not live like a victim your whole life. It's a strength you never imagined you could experience. And it is the missing piece of the puzzle that you could never seem to find to help you to feel confident around people, or to have enough 'balls' to talk to them the way you want to, or to set boundaries, or to have healthy relationships of any kind. This all comes as a natural side-effect of taking your power back and realizing you have far more true power than you ever thought possible, if you'll just stop disowning it.

And let's finish by acknowledging, this strength is actually not your 'own' strength. It's a strength you SHARE with God. God, as love, gives you this strength, when you love yourself. And he gives you this strength so that you can share it with others to increase the strength within them. And so becoming empowered HAS to also mean, relinquishing control over your life, relinquishing reliance on your separate ego self, on your own separate mind and thoughts and abilities, and instead placing yourself into God's hands. Then you truly become empowered above and beyond anything any ego could ever dream of. The big ego trap of becoming empowered is to suggest that *separate you* can become powerful - thats the spiritual ego. It's bullshit. You don't want that. You want to share the power of God. It's the only way to truly experience eternal life.

"I am not weak but strong. I am not afraid but all powerful" - ACIM

"You are safe in God, dreaming of exile, but perfectly capable of waking to reality."

"Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see."

The world in which we think we live, is nothing but a dream. But we're so used to being in it, that we refer to it as real. We think it has real buildings, real people, real cars and real trees. We think we are eating real food, having real sickness, working at real jobs, and that bodies really die.

To align ourselves with the truth, however, we need to properly identify what this world is. This world is UNREAL. It's a hallucinated dream happening in the mind of someone who doesn't want to accept reality. Reality is the Kingdom of God, beyond space and time. The contents of this world are false.

"The only effort you need make, to give this world away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

"And what you seem to WAKE to, is but another FORM of this same world you see in dreams. All your time is spent in dreaming. Your sleeping and waking dreams have different forms, and that is all. THEIR CONTENT IS THE SAME. They are your protest AGAINST reality, and your fixed and insane wish to CHANGE it."

Jesus is pretty blatant here, saying that even when you wake up from sleeping at night, you are STILL dreaming. This world which you think is real and is your real life, is STILL a dream. It has the same content because it's made of the same illusions, it just differs in its forms. It's so elaborate, so detailed, so seemingly separate, and so seemingly huge, that you don't suspect it's not even real.

We should properly identify then that this world IS a dream, it is UNREAL, and it is FALSE. It has no truth, because its contents are invalid. It is a false world because it opposes heaven. "Earth, which is heaven's opposite in every way." It is not created by God, so it can't really exist. It's more like a strange realm of illusions and dreams, images and fantasies, whisps of deceptive smoke and mirrors, in which figures come and go as if by magic.

"Time is a trick; a sleight of hand, a vast illusion in which figures come and go as if by magic."

"When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was."

Mind went into a sleep state, it dreamed of time (and space), it made up events which don't really exist anywhere, with consequences that have no real effect, with changes that are completely substanceless, and which will merely disappear into nothingness when we wake up to reality.

This means that, everything in this world is NOT a "real" anything. So all the things we think are real, need to be re-labelled as not real. For example, sickness is not REAL sickness. I don't mean that a person is pretending to be sick, in the context that there IS a real sickness that they're mimicking. But that ALL "actual" sickness is NOT real.

Cancer is not real cancer, it's fake cancer. Brain damage is not real brain damage, because "the body is a dream." Broken limbs are not real breaks, because the limbs are fictional. The graveyards are all fake and all the funerals are meaningless. Nothing is ever really dying because it can't, it just changes from one illusion to another, and it's just a neutral nothingness. Every kind of sickness or suffering is an illusion and NOT A REAL ONE. And there is no counterpart as a REAL sickness or suffering of any kind.

None of these things can exist in reality. In heaven there is no sickness or suffering, no attack or death, nothing goes wrong, there are no problems, there's no job to work at or house to maintain, there's no stores to buy crap at or streets for cars that break down. There isn't even a real sun.

"The real world is not like this. It has no buildings, and there are no streets where people walk alone and separately. There are no stores where people buy an endless list of things they do not need. It is not lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. There is no day that brightens and grows dim. There is no loss."

So in this world, when you look at anything, you should really be recognizing that it is a DREAM OF something. A sick broken body is not a REAL sick broken body, it's a fake body pretending to be sick. A dead body is not a REALLY dead body, it's a DREAM IMAGE of a dead body pretending to look like it's dead. It's no different than a living one because they're both totally fake. Their forms different but they don't really mean anything different.

This also why there is really no death, because all of these things which we think "die" are just dreams. Reality cannot die because it cannot be threatened. They're figments of the mind. They're just images and holograms floating around in a fictional environment. This is why ACIM also teaches that the body cannot really die, OR live, because it is nothing. It is meaningless.

"The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."

"Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have It not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die."

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is NOT in Heaven is not ANYWHERE. Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible, and beyond ALL reason, and yet perceived as an eternal BARRIER to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it. The last one had gone. It was laid in the tomb, but there was nothing left to bury. It did not disintegrate because the unreal cannot die. It merely became what it always was. And that is what "rolling the stone away" means. The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness."

What we need to learn as teachers of God, is to recognize and be aware that we're literally hanging out inside a giant DREAM right now. This world ISN'T real. Spacetime isn't real. Physical matter isn't real. Objects and bodies aren't real. Your body isn't a REAL body. There are no such things as real bodies. Your sickness isn't a REAL sickness. There is no such thing as a real sickness. Your sins aren't real either, because there is no such thing as REAL sin.

It's a complete reframing of this whole "reality", this whole experiential realm of mind or system of thought. To realize that since it is opposite to reality, it is UNreality, and is just a dream. We try to GIVE it reality to MAKE it real, but we only do this BECAUSE it's not real. We want to believe in it and value it, only because it HAS no value of its own. It's a meaningless world, made of nothing, an illusion of nothing appearing to be something. A tiny mad idea.

To recognize the world for what it IS, you have to categorize its ENTIRE CONTENTS as unreal. Everything the body can see with its physical sight has to be recognized as NOT REAL, and NOT TRUE, and NOT ACTUAL.

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. ****But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal.**** This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world. And of these two but one is real. Just as reality is wholly real, apart from size and shape and time and place, for differences cannot exist within it, so too are illusions without distinctions. The one answer to sickness of any kind is healing. The one answer to all illusions is truth."

So we should get our mind into the habit of regard the things of this world as DREAMS. As fiction. Properly labelling them as artificial fake things. If your partner has a physical sickness in their body, they DO NOT have a REAL sickness in a REAL body. It's an illusion of sickness in an illusory body.

You wake up in the morning and brush your dream teeth and eat your dream breakfast and drive to your dream job, you do your dream work and drive your dream car home and eat your dream supper. Then you go to dream sleep in your dream bed and pretend to dream within a dream.

It's precisely BY recognizing that a sick body does not have a REAL sickness, that all power is stripped from the sickness and it is recognized as nothing. This is part of the healing approach of a miracle worker. When sickness is realized to be FICTION, it holds no weight and has no power and is nothing at all. "Illusions recognized must disappear" and what is recognized as nothing must vanish. You weaken and withdraw power from the sickness by regarding it as NOT REAL SICKNESS. Real sickness does not exist anywhere, just the illusion of sickness pretending to be sickness. It is empty.

"Here is the CAUSE of unreality. And it is here that it will be undone. YOU are the dreamer of the world of dreams. No OTHER cause it has, nor ever will."

"You will first DREAM of peace, and THEN awaken to it. Your first exchange of what you made for what you want is the exchange of nightmares for the happy dreams of love. In these lie your true perceptions, for the Holy Spirit corrects the world of dreams, where ALL perception is."

"Yet nothing in the world of dreams remains without the hope of change and betterment, for here is NOT where changelessness is found. Let us be glad indeed that this is so, and seek not the eternal in this world. Forgiving dreams are means to step aside from dreaming of a world OUTSIDE yourself. And leading finally beyond ALL dreams, unto the peace of everlasting life."

Jesus said this:

"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."

Here we’re told that God created "man’ (souls) and gave man (souls) the ability to create, when in his right mind (as God intended). All of this is taking place within God’s realm, the Kingdom of Heaven. Heaven also IS God’s Creation and everything in it including the souls.

The souls together comprise "the sonship" and since they share oneness with all of Creation, they are all "the One Son" ie the one/united creation. At this point it has absolutely nothing to do with physicality or planet Earth or separation.

"The latter (man’s ability to create in his right mind) required the endowment of man by God with free will because all loving creation is freely given."

So we know that it is natural to have free will, for each "individual soul", who is part of oneness, and who is also christ. Each individual soul is therefore "free" to independently dream or not.

At this point, pre-separation, in my opinion all of this is encompassed within God’s Kingdom, Heaven, which IS the sonship and IS creation and INCLUDES all souls. All as one Sonship, one creation, on being, on sense of identity yet still many parts. (I know I know, suspend disbelief).

All of this content, is what the Course originally refers to as WORLD. This was God’s world, God’s creation. What really exists. (Not the "real world"). This is the same thing as "the universe" of God.

God gave a world to His Son, spoken of here:

"The statement ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life’ needs only slight correction to be meaningful in this context; ‘He gave it to His only begotten Son.’"

I believe, the world referred to is simply the Kingdom of God, heaven. It is the only place where there is everlasting life. This is true in both versions - that "God gave His Son" = world (God’s created universe, not earth, God expressed/gave the Sonship), and that "God gave the world to His Son" = God’s creation, heaven, given "to" his Son to SHARE and be a part of as God’s Kingdom/expression. This has nothing to do with the physical universe, a world made by separation, or planet Earth in any way.

At this Level, Heaven, Creation, God, Sonship, The Son, The Sonship, Souls, Reality, Universe, World, Eternity, Oneness, Christ, Children of God, and Christ’s Creations, and the creations from Souls, are essentially all part of a single experiential realm or state of mind/being in which there is perfect sharing, multiple minds, yet all sharing and reflections of God’s mind as well.

"God has but one Son, knowing them all as one."

"It should especially be noted that God has only one Son. If all His creations are His Sons, every one must be an integral part of the whole Sonship. The Sonship in its oneness transcends the sum of its parts."

ie, "the son" IS the sonship, which contains multiple sons of God, all equal, and perhaps there is no single "first begotten son" kind of identity. Just the multitude souls? Yet every soul is fully one with the whole sonship, sort of implying two levels or aspects to identity? "Soul-self" and "shared-self’? And that when the "sharing" is severed, what’s left is the soul estranged as a separated son, still having its own identity but seemingly disconnected from the whole.

Then there was the separation...

"All fear is ultimately reducible to the basic misperception that man has the ability to usurp the power of God."

Or to put it another way, each soul can choose to sleep (or they all slept at once?), and "dreaming" (authority problem, separation, sin, level confusion, fear) is the mis-creation of each soul’s free will. Each soul tried to "withdraw" from the unity of the whole sonship, going into a state of isolation with artificial walls around it (later to become bodies), seeming to no longer be part of oneness, no longer sharing, no longer connected.

Jesus says this:

"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, possible of both accomplishment and real effects."

Notice it says "the son of God". Given all souls form the sonship and together they are collectively "the son of God", along with whatever else God created (angels etc?), does this not mean that all (or some of?) God’s "Creation" collectively had the tiny mad idea? Ie we’re not just talking about a single son, but many sons "falling" together?

We’re also told this:

"What God does know is that His communication channels are not open to Him, so that He cannot impart His joy and know that His children are wholly joyous….God's extending outward, though not His completeness, is blocked when the Sonship does not communicate with Him as one. So He thought, "My children sleep and must be awakened."

So we’re told there that when some parts of the sonship (souls) are blocking, the entire sonship is affected and so God then knows he needs to create the Holy Spirit.

Here is the version from the urtext, which is more clarifying:

"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. However, it loses this special state as long as any of its parts are missing. This is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved until all of the individual parts of the Sonship have returned. Only then, in the true sense, can the meaning of wholeness be understood."

When the sonship, or even one part of it, still believes in separation, is dreaming, unaware of the whole, or rejecting the sonship, the sonship is incomplete. In this state, what the sonship experiences now is the "fall" into, and the dreaming OF, collectively, the "second world".... the world of death and separation.

This second world comprises everything that is "inside" the tiny mad idea, all thoughts of sin and death, the entire physical universe which was made a "place" (actually a state of mind) in which God seems not to exist. This second "world" is the world in which we experience perception (of all kinds). This "world" is the entire physical universe. It may additionally comprise further fake universes in higher dimensions because the separation from God progressed through various stages.

So then there are two worlds. God’s universe/creation/heaven, and the illusory universe/what we made/physical universe which is artificial ("Earth is opposite to heaven in every way"). We typically think of world as the planet, but it means the entire realm in which we seem to exist. All of the "universe" we think is the universe, all planets and stars, all galaxies and nebula and civilizations. And all of the massive expanses of space and time. All of this is "the world" - the world WE MADE, which God DID NOT CREATE. A world of separation. And within this world, this realm, planet Earth is just one of many illusory locations.

There is a series of workbook lessons, I posted about this recently, which tell us 1) we’re experiencing a hell of false perception laid on top of the world we made, 2) true perception is then introduced as an alternative way to view "this world" (this fake universe), 3) we’re guided to experiment with discerning true from false, 4) we’re then told about how HEAVEN is ANOTHER world (a 3rd experience, beyond false and true perception) reachable when "this world" is left behind (the world/realm/universe we made).

The lesson "No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth" specifically describes us leaving this "world" and returning to Heaven, to the realm of Creation, to God’s universe. Which is not the Earth or even the physical universe.

This also means that, the collective "Son of God" dreamed the fictional "world" which houses the fictional planet earth (there is no world). This also means then that if true perception shows you the "accurate perception" of the world YOU MADE (physical universe), to see accurately/truly the world you made is to see what THE SON projected. Since this "world", the physical universe, is the "One Son’s dream" or, the collective dream of the Sonship, which we all made together, and since the course says "The world IS perception", seeing this world with true perception is us perceiving PERCEPTION. Perception twice removed!

As individual souls we’re looking upon what the One Son projected as a fake universe. Within this context alone, we EACH have a false perception OF the One Son’s perception. A false perception of "the world" (and you can include Earth in that world). False perception ADDS a "personal layer" on top of the world we made, true perception removes that layer and reveals what is "there" without distortion. Yet this world we’ll see, the "real world", is STILL within perception. It is STILL the 2nd world, the one WE MADE, not the one God created.

We will disappear this 2nd world. This 2nd world is one we made up, invented, it is a DREAM. An illusory universe. It doesn’t really even exist at all. IT is the opposite to the nature of heaven in EVERY WAY. It is not a part of heaven now, and it will never be. Being an illusion, it must disappear entirely. Being literally NOTHING, it never was, does not exist NOW, and never will. It simply will vanish when recognized in the light of truth. The light will shine it away. It will be no more because it never was. We don’t need it.

God has created a "world" - Heaven - a "place" (as much as any, though different to the physical experience), "fit for a King" ... a realm of permanent joy and love and eternal life. It is EVERTHING, where the "world" we made is nothing. The world we made is not real. "There is no world" is a direct statement speaking to this - this world we made, which includes planet Earth and more, does not exist. "The world holds nothing that I want" ... not just the world of false perception, OR the world of true perception. The world we made, to replace God’s world, holds nothing that I want. The "real world" is an illusion, not a reality. God’s reality is the REAL, real world.

These are, to me, essentially the two worlds. And within the world we made, because perception is selective and has degrees, there is a really screwed up state of false perception (hell), and a much more preferable and closer-to-reality state of "true" perception. As clear a state of perception as we can possibly have while still being OUTSIDE of heaven. And "there is no life outside of heaven", because the world we made is not life.

I guess I’m just putting this out there. FInding my way to a clarity about this which makes sense to me. Take what you like leave the rest.

For a while now I've been experiencing the Holy Spirit working in me quite actively to clear and heal my mind, emotions and body. And I've been unsure how this correlates with A Course in Miracles because I don't hear hardly anyone talking about having interactions with Holy Spirit that involve any kind of manifest 'activities'.

Indeed many people still think Holy Spirit is just some kind of metaphor or inaccessible state of mind. Much of the ACIM community has a very cerebral, nervous, intellectual relationship with Holy Spirit, if at all. So I've been reluctant to share about it thinking myself to be doing something 'weird'. But maybe I am pioneering.

For me, this seemed to begin quite naturally as the next step in my exploration of trusting Him. I think that some day when I lay down to sleep I just had this idea to ask Holy Spirit to help me in some way, or to heal whatever I was feeling, and it was part of me opening up to exploring whether He would take some steps on my behalf.

Previously I think that I believed and acted as though my forgiveness process was something that I would do on my own and that any 'progress' or 'results' from it were due to my own willingness to see differently. But this then shifted, because after a certain point, after enough surrender and willingness and development of trust, I started to get this sense that Holy Spirit was meant to do more than just be an onlooker or advisor.

The first few times this happened I felt what I would probably describe as an 'energy' or a sensation of energy moving, through what seemed to be my body. It was sometimes accompanied by little jerks or motions in my hands or feet. Sometimes some subtle contractions of muscles. But over time, this has greatly increased.

I started then to learn to simply 'invite Him in' or to ask Him to come into me or to join with me. I didn't know if this was 'proper' or allowed or normal or anything but I was willing to explore it. I would invite Him in. He would quite often then say to me, "relax" or "surrender". And it seemed in a way that this was either a 'condition' or a prerequisite for supporting this thing happening. So I'd do some surrendering and relax my body physically. And then stuff would start to happen.

I will sincerely invite Him into me and then I will relax and allow and I will start to feel 'energy' move, whatever that is. Manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes this takes a pattern where it starts at my feet then works its way up my legs. As it goes, these limbs become more tensed as though sort of 'electrified'. Holy Spirit's energy is like electricity in a way, or how you might imagine someone if they were being electrocuted... but in a non-harmful non-painful way. Often my legs all the way up into my hips and pelvis will 'energize' and tense, seeming to form a certain specific 'posture' which, once established, immediately begins to 'drain' energy out of my upper torso, particularly any negative emotions or upset energies. These just flow down and out through my root chakra or feet like someone is flushing the toilet.

Then after a while this electricity will come up through my upper torso and into my arms and chest there can be at times some quite vigorous shaking, tensing and pulsing of stomache muscles, and various energetic changes taking place. When it works its way up to my shoulders and head area, I quite often now will experience what I can only describe as a very rapid intense oscillation/vibration of my head, which will suddenly shake at a very fast rate, as though something is being dislodged and removed upward. After this process is basically done I will be 'buzzing' somewhat and yet usually feeling quite peaceful and relieved, especially if upset emotions were healed in the process.

Now, not only does this happen for me on almost a daily basis now, but also it is becoming much easier for me to 'access' this electrical energy - in other words, to work with Holy Spirit 'supernaturally' in me, by just my mere willingness to allow Him to do something. And I'm finding that this is making it possible to apply this to any particular seeming condition that's going on in my body. For example I might have stuffy sinuses from eating some icecream, and if I'm willing I will sort of give a brief 'nod' to Holy Spirit, and he will instantly start to shake something and energize something and extract all of the symptoms. Or lets say I am under slept and I turn to Holy Spirit and he 'zaps' me, lol, I do my little shaky thing, and then I'm not longer experiencing that tiredness.

Also this is manifesting in the healing of others now, where I have an increasingly spontaneous willingness to lay my hand on a person and allow Holy Spirit to be immediately engaged through me to heal something. This has been developed somewhat through my openness to explore supernatural healing and commanding away sickness and so on. By developing some trust in that area, I am now growing in 'strength' and confidence in that if I simply do my part and join with Holy Spirit, miracles can happen, without any preparation whatsoever. God doesn't need preparation. God is ready to heal right now!

In particular, I've also been inviting Jesus into me, and I ask him to come in and heal certain feelings I feel in my torso. And immediately he comes in and makes corrections, which I may experience as tightening of muscles or pulses in the stomache area or contractions and other shaking, and then somehow these negative feelings will have simply disappeared without me really noticing how or when, and I will feel happy and start to laugh. And so I've been exploring that more too. What is the next step?

Well, I've also more actively started to invite GOD to come into me, to be in me, to dwell in me, to shine through me, to love through me. God is the one whose presence regularly moves me to tears. Realizing that God is HERE right now, and that it's really me that believes in separation or unawareness of God's PRESENCE. So as I open up to accepting and being aware of and open to God's presence here, I have to open to God being inside of me also, in my 'body' and mind. And so I invited God to be in me.

Then instead of referring to Holy Spirit as Holy Spirit, I referred to Him as 'Spirit of God', to make that kind of 'connection' between the two, which maybe I wasn't making before. So I invited 'spirit of God' to come into me, while also affirming "I receive God's healing". And let me tell you, the amount of activity that Holy Spirit them did in me was probably the most intense I've ever experienced. All up my spine I felt this intense presence and electrical energy radiating out of both sides of my spine all the way up and down several inches, accompanied but much more intense body-part shaking and energy dislodging. You have to really try to just trust and allow and relax while He's shaking the crap out of your body, literally. And afterwards, I felt healed and renewed and peaceful.

And I can tell you one other thing that I am noticing, is that... because of these 'sessions' of healing, I think... I'm noticing more often now moments where I just feel... calm, present, and there aren't any thoughts happening. It's quite unusual and unlike any other 'mode' of functioning that I am used to. Like, as if I am ALWAYS thinking, and then... there isn't any thinking happening, and I'm like... what is this? It's a feeling like there is this 'love' present, and it's just very calming and relaxing. And I've remarked to myself, that this is like the 'first time' that I am 'being', aware, without having any thoughts about anything. Also last night I was doing this and also experimenting with 'not controlling anything' and I heard myself exclaim, "this is the first time I am actually finally RESTING." To be aware, relaxed, and to have no sense of having to do do do do do anything, and just BEING there. Ahhhhh. Felt like real rest and relief. Relief from the ego mind. For the first time ever!

So what's on my mind now is... the interesting transition from ... doing forgiveness mentally, taking steps in changing perception....following some procedure (which still helps)... versus.... starting to be transformed SUPER-NATURALLY, by Holy Spirit directly. I used to not really ask Holy Spirit to 'do' the healing in me, thinking that I just needed to change my perception and accept my innocence etc, and that Holy Spirit was just sort of looking on from above and guiding me with word phrases and so on.

But then I came to realize, particularly spurred by some other people who ask Holy Spirit to actually do something, that Holy Spirit is not only meant to do something but to actually supernaturally HEAL me. And not just a little bit. I completely saw one passage of ACIM in a different light when it says "Holy Spirit will undo all the consequences of my wrong decision IF I will LET HIM" - and "I choose to LET HIM, by allowing Him to choose for God for me". This for me has become, to let Him choose for God, to decide my innocence, AND THEN TO COME INTO ME AND PERFORM HEALING MIRACLES - which quite *literally* remove the consequences of my wrong decision - literally the healing and removal of upset emotions, the correction of body sickness, all of it! And this all entirely hinges around "If I will LET HIM." He isn't the one who lacks an ability to heal EVERYTHING... we are the ones who won't conceive of, allow or open up to letting Him wield his unlimited POWER in our lives.

I have a little willingness, then he does some super amazing - I have no idea what He really does - THING - and then I am better off. Yes I continue to do forgiveness in a more formal sort of sequence of perceptual corrections, but I am opening up more now to, what Holy Spirit just told me... "direct transfer", of experiential truth - the healing power of love - the presence of the One Mind - to accept and receive God's healing directly and to then extend it, rather than this whole ACIM thing of some kind of monotonous, intellectual, do-it-yourself 'study' of a book or manipulation of thoughts or thinking that YOU do the healing and correction. YOU do not heal. God is the healer. God has appointed Holy Spirit to HEAL YOU, FOR YOU. So this requires you to let go of even the process of your own forgiveness, to LET HIM actively work in you and through you. Otherwise you are just staying separate and missing out on a HUGE amount of support and divine help in your process of awakening. You don't have to do this all yourself, and in fact you HAVE to relinquish doing it yourself in order to open up to accepting and allowing God's love!

I'm sharing this because I feel more confident over time that regardless of what I am experiencing, it is real enough to me and transformative enough to me, that I think other people are supposed to know more about this. There isn't enough of an awareness of the Power of Holy Spirit in the ACIM community, especially not in terms of performing miracles and other super-natural manifestations. Some branches of religion are much more familiar with this than most of us are. But I said to Holy Spirit, I don't know how I could possibly 'teach this' to anyone, because it's not like it's based on some kind of metaphysics or logic or whatever. I have no idea what Holy Spirit actually does or how He does it. It's much more of an experience that I sort of stumbled into.

Then Holy Spirit simply said, and this is His instruction to YOU:

"Invite me in."

"Let us not forget, however, that words are but symbols of symbols. They are thus twice removed from reality." ALL words in ACIM are symbols TWICE removed from the truth.

The word "apple" is twice removed from reality. The thing it represents, the actual apple itself sitting in your fruit bowl, is once removed from reality. Notice that words are symbols OF SYMBOLS. Therefore the apple itself is a symbol, and is NOT reality. Everything in this world is symbolic, just as all dreams are made of symbols.

"The body is the symbol of what you THINK you are."

"The body DOES appear to be the symbol of sin"

"The body is the symbol of the ego"

"As nothingness cannot BE pictured, so there IS no symbol for totality."

"Give welcome to the Power beyond forgiveness, and beyond the world of symbols and of limitations."

"The body can become a **sign** of life ... and by its health and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that ***it represents***." (symbolizes)

Symbols are not an end in themselves. They don't have their own identity. They represent something else. They serve as a reflection or representative for something they point to. The body for example is not a THING in its own right, it is not an end. It SYMBOLIZES something else, and therefore is an effect of something else.

"Regarding the body as an end, it has no real use for it at all, because it is not an end. "

The metaphysics of ACIM does not really exist at the level of words twice removed. The metaphysics is once removed from reality. The words themselves, SYMBOLIZE, the metaphysics. They are expressions FROM or structured BY the metaphysics. Behind the words, deeper than the words, there is a core metaphysical structure which the course's expressed statements are BASED ON or coming from.

Or to put it more accurately, the ACTUAL metaphysics takes place as STATES OF MIND, as REALITIES, as WORLDS, playing out in the mind as SYSTEMS of logical thought. A THOUGHT of separation produces an ENTIRE WORLD representing that LOGICAL STATE. So what is this "deeper" metaphysics? There is a perfectly pure LOGICAL SYSTEM, underlying both reality and illusions. But the system is not a concept. It actually takes places as STATES of mind. As experiences of "realities". Conclusions have effects because PREMISES ARE CAUSES!

Both God's thought system and the ego's thought system are based on a LOGICAL premise. God's premise is Himself. His nature establishes the laws of what is TRUE. As He expresses/creates, His thought SYSTEM functions, and follows the laws established in his nature. The OUTCOME or "logical conclusion" of His system of thinking, MUST be in accord with his nature and be THE ONLY possible outcome that could come from such a starting point.

Because God is eternal, the outcome of His thinking must be eternal. Because God is alive, His thoughts must be alive. Because God is love, His thoughts must be made of love. Because God is happy, His thoughts must be happy and lead to happiness. Because God is a creator, the living beings He creates must be creators also (co-creators).

Everything that comes FROM Him is in accord with His Will and nature, and is in his perfect LIKENESS. It HAS to be in His likeness because in a logical system, everything that comes from the ORIGIN of the system stays WITHIIN the confines of the system and thus is governed by the same laws.

These FACTS, have nothing to do with interpretations, ideals, made-up spirituality, theory or theology, or any other kind of conceptual make-believe. These are ACTUAL FACTS of reality. And "metaphysics" is based on irrefutable FACTS. It is a fact that God is a creator, and therefore it MUST be a fact that God's creation is also a creator. Regardless of whether ACIM ever mentioned that in its words at all, that HAS to be true.

ACIM happens to say "A co-creator with the Father must have a Son." But you can DEDUCE this, LOGICALLY, by following God's system of thought. Simply, God is a creative father. He passes on Himself to whatever He creates. Therefore, logically, if God Himself has a nature which results in a Son, then the Son MUST have a nature which results in a Son of a Son. YOU, as a Son, MUST therefore have creations. This isn't true just because ACIM says so in its words. It's true LOGICALLY. And that is the deeper metaphysics. Jesus has BASED those quoted statements ON that logic.

Let's look at another example, the separation from God. Without even considering anything ACIM says about separation, let's assess it with purely impeccable logic and see what we get.

Ok so God wills eternal life because God IS eternal life. God wills happiness. God wills a total lack of limits because He is unlimited. God gives freedom, because God IS freedom. The co-creative living entities that God MUST create, therefore must have His freedom. But this also means, they are free FROM any kind of limitation or restraint. The only truth is that they must function WITHIN the system of God. They cannot leave God. BUT, they can exercise their co-creative ability to freely choose to try to DENY or oppose God's will and nature, thus opposing their own. What would HAVE to happen if you did that?

Look at it purely logically. Reality is ..... light, life, happiness, peace, love, unlimited, constant, unchanging, equal/harmonious, permanent, truthful, open, immortal, etc. BECAUSE, this is what God is. So everything IN God's system must be this too. What would an OPPOSITE to this be? What would you get, if you DENIED this system and tried to bring about an OPPOSITE system?

Well, an opposite system would have to be based on the "belief" that all of the nature of God is NOT true or real. It has to be a PREMISE, that OPPOSES God's premise. So the premise is, ... darkness, death, unhappiness, conflict, hatred/fear, limitation, change, inequality/difference, impermanence, everything is false, closed, mortality, etc. Because these are the LOGICAL opposites to God's nature. And if this collection of "unpleasant" CONDITIONS is the PREMISE of the entire ego SYSTEM, everything WITHIN this "line of thinking" MUST RESULT IN, all of these things. DEATH, is the logical outcome of the ego thought system.

So the question is, does this logical conclusion LINE UP with what A Course in Miracles says. And the answer is YES. It does. In fact Jesus even says so.

"From the belief in sin (the premise), the faith in chaos MUST follow. It is because it follows that it seems to be a ***logical conclusion***; a valid step in ordered thought. The steps to chaos ***DO follow neatly from their starting-point***. Each is a different form in the **progression** (logical thought process) of truth's reversal, leading still deeper into terror, and away from truth."

"The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily, and as well, as does the ego, except that HIS conclusions are NOT insane. They take a direction EXACTLY opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death."

"The logic of the world MUST therefore lead to nothing, for its GOAL is nothing."

So what you find is, if you can get a grasp of the PURE LOGICAL BASIS of God's system, and if you can then grasp the idea that the "separation" is simply the idea of AN OPPOSITE TO REALITY, you can LOGICALLY come to conclusions. And the fact is, that these conclusions EXACTLY MATCH what Jesus has described in A Course in Miracles. WITHOUT ERROR. They totally correlate to the separation, the result of separating, the OUTCOME of starting on a basis of sin.

"The wages of sin is death - ie, if you start with sin (which is the idea "an opposite to God is possible", you must end with death". Death is the suppression and denial and NEGATING OF, God's reality. It is the "end of life" because it OPPOSES GOD'S WILL which supports life.

Therefore, and this is a metaphysical FACT.... a belief in separation MUST LEAD TO a seeming "world" or "logical state of mind", wherein everything is based on an idea of sin and death. e.g. "Without the idea of death there is no world." "The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son" - ie its the idea of God's LIVING son, pictured in a condition OPPOSITE to living. Similarly "the world was made as an attack on God" is based on the LOGIC that by trying to OPPOSE THE TRUTH, you "attacked" the premise of the truthful thought system (God), by trying to establish another SYSTEM that was totally opposite.

For example, Jesus says "Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way". Why is Earth OPPOSITE to Heaven? Because it is part of a "world" or STATE of OPPOSITION to THE TRUTH. The world is thus a logical outcome of the ego thought system. It is MADE OF DEATH. It is made of denial. It is made of sin. This isn't something I need to say based on ACIM saying it. I can make this "claim", IMPERSONALLY, WITHOUT OPINION, because the METAPHYSICS accurately indicates that this MUST be the case.

Now, here is the interesting thing about metaphysics. The underlying core logic describes VERY accurately, PERFECTLY, not only the nature of God's "system" or world, and the nature of any world that tries to oppose it. Through LOGICAL REASONING, which must be "impeccable", you can actually make "statements"- symbolic word expressions once removed from the metaphysics, that were never written IN the Course itself, but which are TOTALLY in line with it. This is not an opinion or a matter of making something up. The LOGIC tells you, BY ITSELF, WHAT MUST BE TRUE.

For example we could say, anything that is opposite to God who is eternal life must be incapable of living forever. It doesn't necessarily explicitly SAY that in the course, but it MUST be true. It does however say basically the same thing in other words, e.g. "there is no life outside of heaven."

We could also say, "everything in this world opposes reality". It doesn't necessarily say that in the course. But it MUST be true. The metaphysical LOGIC, the impeccable reasoning, TELLS YOU, that it MUST be true because it is perfectly sound logic. And this world IS A LOGICAL SYSTEM BASED ON AN ENTIRELY LOGICAL PREMISE.

The really interesting thing is, the metaphysical LOGICAL SYSTEM completely removes the need for OPINIONS. Of any kind. If God is truth, anything not of God is not true. That is purely logical. It's not an opinion. In fact the LOGIC is such a COMPLETE system, with no strange fuzzy exceptions or loopholes or things unaccounted for, totally black and white in its perfect clarity and precision, that it leaves NO ROOM for ANY INTERPRETATION. NONE.

And this is why the multitude of "interpretations" of the course, ALL of which are NOT really based on pure logic, are faulty and OF THE EGO. And this inevitably results in conflict and arguments because it inherently leads to CONTRADICTIONS. The ego cannot even reason correctly. Our normal ego thought processes don't even typically function "LIKE GOD THINKS", and therefore comes to FALSE conclusions about His system of logic. Frequently. And you can see by all the debate and WAR in this forum the sheer extent of this CONFUSION, which has resulted from NOT SEEING THE METAPHYSICAL FACTS CLEARLY, errors in logical reasoning, and false conclusions that EGOs have arrived at. There is ONLY ONE TRUTH.

All we can do is look at the logical system and let IT TELL US, what the truth MUST be. If we don't, and we start trying to MAKE UP TRUTH, or DECIDE what the truth is, we are now delusional and are not following the logic and are not having REASON. We then will not MAKE SENSE and this leads to all confusion. That means, the logical conclusions being drawn here, or by anyone who can reason impeccably, COMPLETELY TRANSCENDS opinion. It REFLECTS the truth. It is FACT. That means it is not MY opinion, or yours, or anyone's. It is how things actually are.

Therefore, if you can grasp this and SEE the sense in it, you can USE the metaphysical logical BASIS of everything the course says as a TOOL. You can USE it, practically, to inform you of what the course MUST BE MEANING. You can actually hold up a quote, and COMPARE IT, to the metaphysical structure, and provided your grasp of the structure is accurate, it will TELL YOU the context in which the quote is placed, the meaning of the references, what it is referring TO, and thus what it MUST MEAN.

If you get used to doing this, you will find gradually that everything Jesus says in the course is BASED ENTIRELY ON logical reasoning. Jesus is an absolute MASTER of this. And you will then realize that all of the WORDS in the course are in fact expressions OF the metaphysics. The number of ways and forms of expression OF those FACTS, is largely unlimited. Jesus wrote a huge book expression FROM the facts. He could've written more. If you "get the facts straight", and are not in denial or making logical errors, you can evaluate everything the course's WORDS say, and CORRECTLY RECOGNIZE what they MUST MEAN, in light of what the logical truth says MUST be true.

This however is one area that we are all struggling with, because most of us do NOT think logically or impeccably enough. We make a lot of errors. And the main reason for that is simply NOT SEEING the core logical BASIS behind the ENTIRE metaphysics of the course. And so instead, we'll try to "put together the pieces" from the bottom up, starting with loose ends, trying to assemble a cohesive picture, and making a lot of errors along the way. We then depend too heavily on the WORDS. The wordings. The phrasing. What it SEEMS like it says. And we will find that sometimes the CHOICE of words can seem misleading, when you compare it to the metaphysical meaning.

What the logic can do for you though, is it can provide you with a powerful tool for discernment, it can guide you, it can tell you what Jesus's words mean, it can clarify what the words CANNOT mean, and it can help you to get past all the nit-picking arguments and disagreements that come from MULTIPLE OPINIONS, all of which result from a LACK OF true facts and too much faulty reasoning or "blindness" to the LOGICAL METAPHYSICS. All of the discussions about "is it this or that" come from this "difficulty" with seeing the logic behind it.

Does A Course in Miracles line up with a PURELY LOGICAL set of conclusions, a logical system of black and white conclusions? YES. It totally does. Was this world made as a result of a LOGICAL conclusions? YES. Does death occur because of the conclusion that MUST come "inevitably" from a premise of real sin? YES. Would we make BODIES as a logical CONCLUSION in a thought system? YES, because they are the "natural outcome" of WALLS THAT BLOCK TRUTH, as "separation devices". Bodies ARE the idea of the rejection of wholeness. They ARE limitation, as an experiential idea or state of mind.

The atonement is logical too. It is nothing but the recognition that only the truth is true. There is no real sin. An opposite to what is all encompassing does not exist. It is the TRUTH. It represents God's PREMISE and therefore results in the resuming of the extension of creation. IT HAS TO. That's part of its logical basis. This is also why by "denying the denial of truth", you LOGICALLY cancel out the denial. Because you took what is FALSE, and you tried to make it TRUE, in order to deny that the truth is true. So if you REVERSE that by DENYING that the false is true, you deny the denial of the truth, restoring the truth as the only truth. This is entirely logically based.

To restore you to reality, you must UN-OPPOSE God. You must stop "negating" the truth". You must stop believing in sin, which is the idea of God's system having been destroyed and opposed. You must surmount death, which means resurrection is nothing but an assertion of TRUTH, which is life. Everything to do with God's creation, everything to do with the separation, everything to do with the descent into the ego and death, and everything to do with healing and awakening to reality, is all ENTIRELY the interplay of PURELY LOGICAL SYSTEMS or states.

Awakening is even logical and inevitable because you, being an effect of God, must FOREVER be an effect of God, since God never changes, and therefore CANNOT ever stop being God's son. Your reality is SECURED as a result of the logic of the system. The ending of death is just as inevitable, because when you get yourself into a logical STATE of ONLY TRUTH, there cannot be a state of an opposite to life, and death is therefore "snuffed out" as Jesus puts it.

Jesus's choice of words is masterful, but sometimes potentially misleading. There is a lot of material to digest. There seems to be a lot of stuff to figure out. Sometimes things seem contradictory which are not. And our egos make a TON of logical errors. Error, ie sin, is nothing but a logical mistake. You cannot oppose God's will, so it is "error", logically, to CONCLUDE you can. Healing is therefore the undoing of error, by re-establishing the facts of reality and accepting God's premise as the only true one.

This is all the metaphysics. It's behind the words. When you GET it, you can express FROM it, and be coming from the truth. You can express 100,000 books BASED ON this and every single one will be in line with ACIM. We're inside a logical system of thought, albeit based on a FALSE starting point, resulting in FALSE experiences, and FALSE outcomes. A false outcome is SUFFERING. Suffering is inevitable when the entire SYSTEM is founded on opposition to health and life. Suffering means you are "suffering from" being mistaken about the facts of reality.

If you want eternal life and happiness, you must open up to accept the REASONING of the Holy Spirit, which is the SAME as God's SYSTEM or WAY of thinking. Thought BASED ON TRUTH will set you free.

ALL of the conflict in the ACIM community is based on NOT SEEING and NOT ACCEPTING the purely LOGICAL CORE TRUTH in A Course in Miracles. All of the disagreement about what it says, what it means, what it implies, is all based on NOT being logically sound. ALL OPINIONS ARE MUTE! Your opinion has no value, and nor does mine. We are supposed to get away from having opinions. We are supposed to recognize the FACTS OF REALITY, instead of trying to MAKE UP interpretations. Interpretations are entirely ego. The course HAS NO INTERPRETATIONS. The course is based on FACTS. It is based on TRUTH.

And truth is not an intepretation. It is an expression FROM THE PURE LOGIC SYSTEM OF GOD'S THINKING. When everyone finally recognizes this and accepts the ONE CORRECT metaphysics, there will be no more NEED for conflict, no more BASIS for confusion, no more REASON to fight about it, and no more DEBATE about what it means. Behind all the seemingly varied WORDS in the course, behind all the many EXPRESSIONS, behind the choice of phrases and the language and the way Jesus speaks, there is a PURE METAPHYSICAL CLARITY.

Do not be DECEIVED by the ILLUSION OF DIFFERENT FORMS in the course. Do not be deceived by taking the WORDS too literally. The WORDS ARE NOT THE METAPHYSICS. They are only based on it. And if you base your entire understanding on THE WORDS, you will very likely come to false inconsistent conclusions. When you get bogged down in isolated quotes, inconsistent reasoning, things taken out of context, and all the rest of it, you are missing the CLARITY of the course's truth.

Go deeper. Get behind the words. SEE the logical structures. Recognize the metaphysics. It's beyond words. It's beyond those symbols. The course is PURE TRUTHFUL FACT and it is totally consistent without contradiction. If you are confused, wondering about meanings, uncertain about structures, or any other reaction to what's said, you are not using logical reasoning and so are using blind ego interpretation. If you see contradictions, you made a logical error.

If something doesn't fit, you haven't seen the logic behind it clearly enough. And if you conclude things OUT OF ACCORD with what the LOGIC says, you are mistaken, regardless of what the words seem to say. Jesus is 100% perfectly ACCURATE in every single thing he has expressed FROM a PERFECT GRASP of the PERFECTLY CLEAR metaphysical basis of truth. HE has not made any errors. His expressions in words are not erroneous. He is PERFECTLY CORRECT. Our only challenge is coming to SEE, RECOGNIZE and ACCEPT, the CORE TRUTH behind the entire course. REASON will allow you to literally SEE SENSE.

"The introduction of reason into the ego's thought system is the beginning of its undoing. For reason and the ego are contradictory. Nor is it possible for them to co-exist in your awareness. And reason's goal is to make plain, and therefore obvious. You can SEE reason. This is not a play on words, for here is the beginning of a vision that has meaning. Vision is sense, quite literally. If it is not the body's sight, it MUST be understood. For it is PLAIN, and what is obvious is not ambiguous. It CAN be understood. And here do reason and the ego separate, to go their different ways."