When we look at the nature of reality, of heaven's laws, we find that it's kind of a combination of "oneness" and "multiplicity." We're told in ACIM there are many creations of God, plus our own creations, plus the Holy Spirit. There's a permanent trinity. So there's many things going on. But at the same time, it is all one.

The thing that's really super difficult to conceive of is how it's possible for one thing to be two things, while still being one thing. Like, how one son of God can be an individual, and another son of God can be an individual, but still at the same time there is effectively no boundary preventing them from being completely one.

I think that what this implies is reality really is paradoxical. The special "something" that allows one to be two, and two to be one, transcends all possible explanations. You can talk about one aspect of it at a time, such as focusing on the one. Or focusing on the many. And you can sort of tie them together by describing their holographic relationship. But there's no way whatsoever to blend those two into a single 'theory'.

Jesus actually refers to the special "something" that allows each soul to have everything simultaneously, as "the miraculous power of the soul." Somehow there is some way, in reality, without breaking any laws, for God to create many beings, WITHOUT in any way reducing or limiting the fact that they are STILL completely 100% one with him. They are joined, but they are not joined, and yet they are joined. He calls that "miraculous power".

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul." I think that truly, what this reveals is that first of all, as you approach God you're approaching a transcendental, omnipresent, paralogical and paradoxical state, in which all rules and limits just fly out the window. This actually literally forces it to be IMPOSSIBLE to come up with a "universal theology".

I think it may even be correct to say there will NOT EVER be a "unified theory of everything", scientifically speaking. When you approach reality everything becomes everything else. It becomes a kind of infinite blur. It is specific, yet abstract. It is personal, yet impersonal. There are many parts, yet they are all one, and each part is the one whole. And it also means one number equals all numbers. You can't even do math at that point.

So really the nature of reality is that it literally cannot ever be explained. This isn't actually a matter of whether people are smart enough, or whether they can study it, or whether there are things they can or cannot say about it, or whether words or formulas are satisfactory. It's simply that the NATURE of God is so transcendental that it utterly defies any attempt whatsoever to pin it down, limit it, confine it, label it, put it in a box, or break it up into nice little pieces. It's nature is just so incredibly "everything at once" that you just can't MAKE a concept about it.

I think also that this "true nature" of reality is very appropriately described as "miraculous". It seems as though its nature is utterly impossible. Yet at the same time, it is possible. It seems impossible that one thing can be two things, or two things can be one thing, while still being two things. But somehow this is the nature of reality. Every son of God is the whole kingdom. And yet there are many sons. And what makes that possible at all is so beyond and defying all possible explanations that you really have to just say, it is miraculous in the true sense. It utterly defies explanation.

Because of that, I think we can say that it cannot EVER be understood. Not that it can't be KNOWN, or make sense to those who experience it, but there can never be a theory accurate or encompassing enough to describe it. You will never find a full definition of "what makes it possible" in any text book.

An extension of that is, that quite possibly, even after years of trying, the answer may be that we CANNOT UNDERSTAND MIRACLES. They have a nature which transcends all logic. Even very advanced paralogical reasoning simply reveals that reality is more than just "one or two", it's BOTH one AND two at the same time, and there will not ever be a way for anyone to get their head around that. This is why I think in ACIM Jesus says that you do not understand miracles.

So I think we've spent so much time and years trying to understand what a miracle is, how it works, what makes it function, how to do them etc, and ultimately it's actually a fact that we cannot ever understand them. The Holy Spirit knows them and so dose Jesus and perhaps when we reach a state of total enlightenment it will dawn on us that WE simply ARE miraculous and our natural way of expressing in that state of sharing has miraculous qualities. But HOW that's actually possible I think may remain so transcendental that no-one will ever be able to truly explain it.

I think in some ways we can get close to it, we can come up with models and symbols to try to reveal some of its properties. We can see that it seems to be a paralogical, paradoxical, omnipresent, holographic kind of a system. Where seeming impossible things become possible. But I don't think we can get much closer than that. Which means if you really want to be intimate with it you're going to have to live it, experience it, and be it.

Separation HAS occurred? Sort of.

Some people claim that it is impossible to explain the "tiny mad idea". It seems logical at first, because when the ego asks a question like "what if", it's not really a question, and the tiny mad idea hasn't "really" happened in reality. It has no real consequences in reality, and it's just a dream.

But the tiny mad idea HAS happened in IMAGINATION. It HAS happened in your mind, and you've "made it real to you". That is why you are sitting there right now reading this on your screen, which *seems* real. A dream "at all" wouldn't even be possible unless God gave you free will to choose to mis-create and dream.

"Whatever is true & real is eternal, & cannot change or be changed. The Soul is therefore unalterable because it is ALREADY perfect, but the mind can elect the level it chooses to serve. The only limit which is put on its choice is that it CANNOT serve two masters."

Your mind has FREEDOM, and therefore can be used to choose EITHER to will with God's will, or to will against it. Either in service to the soul/spirit, or in service to a fictional ego. This freedom granted you the very REAL "possibility" of being ABLE to make this choice, to use will against will, and to mis-create. God would not give you an `option` that could *actually* hurt you at all, and it has not, but this freedom HAS given you the ability to OPT not to laugh at the idea of separation, if you choose.

Jesus also describes below how while you have free will, it is necessary to choose both FOR (toward) God and AWAY from the option of ego/dreaming.

"While the ballot itself is a secret one, and the right to vote is fully protected, voting ALWAYS entails both election AND rejection. If two candidates are voted for for the same position, the machine cancels the ballot automatically.

This is necessary, because a split vote does not represent ANY REAL allegiance.

Free will is the attribute of the mind, NOT the Soul. The Soul always remains changeless, because it never leaves the sight of God.

The Creation of the Soul is already fully accomplished. The mind, if it votes to do so, becomes a medium by which the Soul can create along the line of its own creation. If it does not freely elect to do so, it retains this creative ability, but places itself under tyrannous rather than authoritative control. As a result, what it creates is imprisonment, because such are the dictates of tyrants."

So you can see here that the mind actually has the freedom to "choose to dream" if it wants to. It CAN place itself under tyrranical rule and seem to "sleep". Of course this dreaming is FICTIONAL and it is not REALLY happening in reality, it has no real consequences in heaven, but it IS still a "valid option" that you are free to entertain or ELECT.

This essentially means that, the tiny mad idea is a POSSIBLE CHOICE, but it is not a REAL choice. That's a vital distinction. You COULD choose to dream if you want to, to mis-create, to opposte God's will (or try to), but it's not a REAL option. It's an option of unreality that the mind is quite capable of making if it chooses to. This is why "heaven is a choice I must make" - the mind HAS to freely, willingly, elect to choose heaven, ie the only real option, and not the ego, which is an imaginary option you've tried to MAKE real.

Does this mean the dream "has happened"? It has not happened IN REALITY, but it HAS occurred within the context of the mind's freedom to dream. It doesn't have REALITY to it, but it IS something you are CAPABLE OF PRODUCING through mis-creation. And when you DO freely choose it, with your free will, it will become seemingly real to you because what you accept into your mind becomes your reality.

"To "change your mind" means to place it at the disposal of True authority. The miracle is thus a sign that the mind has elected to be guided by Christ in HIS service. The abundance of Christ is the natural result of choosing to follow him."

The mind has to ELECT (choose) to be under service to Christ. This IS a free-willed choice, not something forced upon you. God does not create slaves.

"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny mad idea"

There DID creep an idea, a thought, an imagining, into the mind, because IT COULD. The mind CAN DREAM. But the dream that it produces is not real or like God. Elsewhere Jesus refers to it as "an order of reality", meaning that you gave reality TO it to try to turn it into reality, through belief, but the belief is based on a false premise, so it is ultimately unfounded and fundamentally unreal at its core.

"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny mad idea", at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. Together, we can laugh them BOTH away, and understand that time can NOT intrude upon eternity. It IS a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which MEANS there is no time."

I will leave you this statement by Jesus:

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

What he means here, is not that the separation is REAL, but that in the MIND, it HAS OCCURRED as a thought, an idea, an IMAGINED possibility. There HAS been an attempt to usurp God's will. There HAS been a "dream". Not REALLY, but ... in the proper context, in the mind, this IS something that we CHOSE, something we TRIED TO MAKE REAL, something we tried to DO, to will it, to mis-create. We DID mis-create. That's the ONLY reason that you are able to be sitting there seeming to be a body reading this text right now. But the ultimate truth is, this is a dream, an unreality, it's ultimately based on a false foundation or premise - that there is an alternative to God's will, and because that is untrue, it is not REALLY REAL. So it hasn't REALLY happened in truth, in the biggest picture.

You DO, in a sense, dream a dream. But you CAN stop dreaming, by changing your mind. Dreaming is a state of MIND, of insanity, believing that time can replace eternity and space can replace God's presence. Effectively, there HAS been a "fall of man", but the fall is imaginary. It is ONLY an idea, but it IS an idea, not less than that. The "existence" of this idea, however, must be temporary, because it is an idea of being temporary, and is naturally limited and finite. It is therefore INEVITABLE that the dream will end and the IDEA - in which this entire physical universe dwells - will disappear.

Our mind has impeccable logic. The thought system of the Holy Spirit has impeccable logic. Everything which extends from God has impeccable logic. The metaphysics of the course is PERFECTLY logical. If something does not correlate logically it is false.

"The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite. Fear is the opposite of love. If love has an opposite it creates a state which does not exist." ergo.. logically... fear does not exist.

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

Our mind has this capacity for perfect logic because it is perfect. However, when we are in the ego, the ego also USES our perfect logic to develop its entire thought system. Every single part of the ego's thought system is derived perfectly logically from an initial false premise.

All aspects of separation, the reason for the making of matter, the result of sickness and death, the making of an artificial world, all wars and conflicts, all dynamics of interpersonal relationships, all specialness and attack, is ALL - ABSOLUTELY ALL - based on a progression of IMPECCABLE LOGIC.

This world coming about and the arising of bodies and the invention of sickness and war and death can ALL be explained using nothing but logical statements. No interpretation or "fluffy glue" or fanciful ideas needed to make sense of it. It is all BLACK AND WHITE.

The belief that you are guilty because you sinned, is logic. The belief that your real sin affected God and therefore God is justified in a counter attack, is logic. The idea of denial is a logical split with entirely predictable logical consequences. Every consequence and result that has come about from the separation from God, can only happen ONE WAY and with ONE RESULT because it is all derived LOGICALLY.

If you can see the logic, you are seeing the METAPHYSICS.

"The ego has a purpose, just as the Holy Spirit has. The ego's purpose is fear because only the fearful can be egotistic. The ego's logic is as impeccable as that of the Holy Spirit because your mind has all the means at its disposal to side with Heaven or earth, as it elects. But again, let us remember that both are in you. In Heaven there is no guilt because the Kingdom is attained through the Atonement, which releases you to create. The word "create" is appropriate here because, once what you have made is undone by the Holy Spirit, the blessed residue is restored and therefore continues in creation."

I used to be really pretty vague about what the Atonement was or how it was really accessed or applied. People would say, "claim the atonement" or "accept the atonement". Forgiveness processes would say, do these steps, then "accept the atonement". The accepting of the atonement was never really explained and just seemed like some 'thing' that requires you to do some 'thing' to make it happen, and ... well, what the fuck is it?

I see now that the atonement literally means "nothing happened", in that, QUITE LITERALLY, this entire universe has not happened. All of history has not happened. The planets have not happened. Bodies, people, lives, events, NONE OF IT IS TRUE.

It's pretty extreme. It's pretty radical.

It HAS to mean that separation, sin, guilt, fear, punishment, suffering, sickness, loss, death, bodies, worlds, events, ALL have to be UNREAL, in order for the atonement to be the truth.

When I was attempting forgive, within the context of being in this "real world", where real-seeming people would be real-seeming assholes, and I would have to real-seemingly "DO" a real process to "undo" my belief that they were guilty etc... taking back projections and all that, claiming responsibility etc... the fact was that claiming responsibility for having been the cause of something REAL was still upsetting. Not a final solution.

It is CLEAR now, that the Atonement literally means this:

1) God does not believe whatsoever that you have sinned.

2) Your innocence is permanent.

3) Separation has not happened even slightly.

4) There has NOT been a physical universe created to symbolize the separation.

5) Sin, guilt, fear, punishment and death are not reality.

6) Bodies, matter, worlds, the universe, and everything that seems to happen in and to it, is not reality.

7) You cannot do anything wrong because there is no real place where anything wrong can REALLY happen.

8) You have NEVER really sinned.

9) Anything you thought you did, was an illusion. Sorry.

10) Your innocence is permanent and GUARANTEED.

This means to accept the atonement, you're going to have to literally question how and why you believe this "world" is reality. In your forgiveness, you need to get to where you are not just owning up to sins, but where you're owning up to having NOT sinned. You're not going to really convince yourself fully that you haven't sinned if you believe still that sin is real. You'll be saying it, but not really believe it. And you'll stop there.

The only way to do that is to recognize it was NOT actually a sin, because it was only an ILLUSION OF SIN happening. And that's because this whole world is an illusion and not real. To accept that everything you've been working to forgive DID NOT EVEN OCCUR, that's the atonement.

So if you can wind up after your forgiveness at THAT place, with THAT perspective, that NOTHING HAPPENED, and to realize WHY nothing happened (because it was illusion not reality), and to truly believe that this whole world is an illusion, THAT is accepting the atonement. That is what Jesus did. And Jesus now IS the atonement. He IS the demonstration that this universe does not really exist, and only GOD'S TRUTH is true.

Nothing happened because sin is not real because the world is not real.

From "What is forgiveness:"

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in that view are all your sins forgiven. " - ACIM

How is it possible for what someone does to have NOT OCCURRED? Like, 100% has not occurred? Because it's not REALITY! If your forgiveness process does not recognize that the world is not real, it is not a complete forgiveness and you are failing to accept the atonement. To accept it is to understand, know, experience, and recognize as TRUE, 100%, that nothing has gone wrong but in an ILLUSION of it going wrong, which isn't real, so there's nothing to worry about! Then you can celebrate real freedom from the INSANE belief that the physical universe is reality.

The Course uses the term "Sons" 82 times.

The Course uses the term "children" to refer to the "children of God" 42 times.

The term "Sonship" is used 104 times.

The course also uses the term "parts", "minds", "aspects", "extensions", "channels", "brothers", "God's thoughts", "souls", and more, on multiple occasions.

All of these are plural. There are HUNDREDS of references to the fact that God created MANY SONS. Many extensions, many minds, many souls, many parts/aspects of the sonship.

The sonship having multiple parts does NOT mean the parts are separate, or separated by bodies, or estranged from each other by illusions of ego, or illusions of multiplicity, or any other form of separation that we would recognize as separation.

The sonship, in Heaven, in its entirety, experienced all simultaneously by God, is often referred to as "THE Son of God" or the "One Son". This does NOT erase or cancel out the fact that God created MANY Sons. It is simply talking about how ALL of the Sons are capable of SHARING equally, how they experience a Oneness with all parts of God's creation.

Oneness does not mean... one big blob. If it did, God would not have ANY SONS. Not even ONE. If God is oneness, then there is not even a Son of God. Clearly that would be severely against the Course's teaching. It does not teach that there is "no son". In fact, it teaches that because of what it is, LOVE MUST EXTEND and be shared, and it must CREATE, and the natural result of that is the creation of AT LEAST one Son. And the Course has explained that there are MANY, MANY, MANY Sons, many minds, many souls, which GOD CREATED, and which are whole in and of themselves.

The problem our ego minds have, is that we can't get our head around this idea:

There are many sons, who are simultaneously ONE, and who experience oneness, and are each a whole, and yet also are part of a combined whole, yet each is still an individual will free will. .... The ego has NO WAY to understand how that makes sense or is possible, especially when it considers any HINT of "separation" or "multiple" to mean... some kind of ego concept.

That we can't understand logically HOW this makes sense, or how it is possible, or what it means, does not mean it is lying to us. The Course is not lying to us. This is simply one area that the ego cannot easily get its head around. The ego cannot understand oneness. So to dismiss is on grounds of EGO LOGIC, which arrives at a false conclusion here, is a mistake.

"But how can God have multiple Sons if Oneness is a single thing" ..... this is the same question as, "How could the tiny mad idea happen". The ego is asking. The ego wants to figure it out. The ego thinks that it is capable of seeing WITHOUT separation, and that when it LOOKS AT the Sonship - the multiple Sons of God one with each other, it is CAPABLE of seeing the truth. It can't. When the ego looks at Oneness, ALL IT SEES IS SEPARATION. It will never be able to SEE the oneness of the sonship at the same time as recognizing that God created MANY SONS WITH FREE WILL.

To then base an entire theological understanding of what the Course says and means, on the idea that there are NOT multiple sons, and none of them have free will, and any way that they are distinct is "separation" and therefore illusion, WILL RESULT IN a very warped interpretation of the Course's metaphysics.

When there is no room in the ego's grasp of the Course to accept multiple sons, there is no way to explain properly how perception works or how minds work or what illusions are or how people have free will or who is dreaming what or who is responsible for what sickness or who is making what body appear. It ALL becomes confused in one big blur.

I was asking God sincerely last night, that He heal a specific person. I explained that this person had been limited for a long time with suffering and needed help. I went to quite some lengths to detail the things they were experiencing and why it was all so unnecessary. I finished with a definitive question, can you please just heal them? What do you think God's answer was?

No.

I wasn't very happy about this. I confessed that I'd been trying to get healing for this person for a long time and just wanted to be helpful, so how was it possible to be helpful?

I was then told that when someone is ready, they will receive it.

Then Jesus popped in, and what I was shown was that everyone is choosing* everything* that happens. Even down to the suffering they experience or the things they seem not to want. It's all chosen, deliberate, intentional.

This then revealed the question, is it then possible to help anyone if they don't choose something themselves? How can anyone get any kind of help when they are not able to choose their own healing?

Jesus then spoke to me about how there were several villages which He had to pass by where He could not perform any healing whatsoever. He said the people were so adamant in rejecting Him that they did not want anything He had to offer. He had to respect their decision and move on.

He then told me, clarifying, that love isn't forceful. That you can't force someone to heal against their will. You can offer love and love has tremendous power to heal, IF there is some amount of willingness to receive it.

There is a correlation between how 'open' someone is to receive, and how much they may receive. Not because there are orders of difficulty in miracles, but because to truly RECEIVE the benefits, the person has to be WILLING, otherwise love cannot enter where it is not welcome.

Jesus reminds me now of the saying, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

I also was then reminded of a couple of parts in the Course where Jesus says, that if you are ready and willing Jesus will help you, but if you are not, he will wait until you are. I also was then reminded that God has infinite patience and while He is willing to welcome us immediately, we may not yet be willing to allow it, putting up defenses against it.

God's love is powerful and it is unconditionally given, and it can heal miraculously. But people can choose whether they want to accept it or deny and reject it. Being on planet Earth we've for the most part rejected it, which is why we're asleep. It's not that a tremendous miraculous power isn't being given, it is given all the time. It's that we don't want it.

I felt sad about this, because it means that certain people are choosing not to want to be helped. And that meant, I was going to have to let go and "allow them" to suffer for longer, due to their own unwillingness to receive help.

But then Jesus commented that their situation was a lesson, meaning that it wasn't a loss or necessarily an unfair suffering as such, it was actually an educational tool which was being used to help the person learn the truth, no matter how it looks. In that sense, it is helping them, but also in that sense, they "need" the lesson in order to learn to be open to receive healing.

Our desire to take away people's lessons, given the ultimate truth that no-one needs to suffer for any reason, can compel us to want to fix and heal and help and to stop people's suffering. But there is some lack of wisdom there. Time is needed. The person may simply not be ready or willing yet to be able to accept the help.

It's not that you help can't help, or that it can't do something for the person that they must do themselves. A person with serious disease could approach Jesus and have some faith and ask Jesus to help, and He could remove the disease - something which they didn't seem to be "able" to do. Miracles are gifts from those who temporarily have more given to those who temporarily have less.

This means that a person doesn't have to necessarily "choose" the entirety of the healed state all on their own. If they have enough willingness or a little faith, or even just a little willingness, the "open door" can be used to bring in much more help and healing than the person could muster on their own.

We can get help from outside, which really brings us to the point that the Holy Spirit is here as our Divine Helper. He can help in powerful, "supernatural" ways, IF we are willing and ready to receive that help. And that actually often entails surrender, more than a 'doing', in order to be open to receive the help.

Help is available, love loves to love, and love heals. But if we reject it and don't want it, it will not "hurt us" by doing something to us that we don't want, and even healing and help can be experienced as unwanted.

This is a difficult lesson for me and probably for many. We want to take away the suffering of the world. People are dying. Bad things are happening. But these are our own illusions and our own issues and reactions to perceptual errors that we need to correct.

There is a plan in place, the plan of the Atonement, which Jesus is in charge of. He knows who is ready to receive miracles and He can direct us to those people at the right time.

The idea that we can use our EGO to go around healing people "against their will" left right and center is really the ego's attempt to use the Power of God for its own entertainment. I'm not in ANY way saying not to perform miracles for people, just that they need to be properly framed in service to God and respecting "free will."

This does mean realizing that you might not be able to help a whole group of people if they are not really willing enough to be helped. Which means that miracles aren't imposed upon people against their will, they must be receptive to them, and if they're not then.... you don't get to work miracles for them.

I was also then told by Jesus that something I needed more of in order to be more miraculous, is to trust God, and the key point that God must be involved for miracles to happen. Holy spirit - God's Voice/expression - is the mechanism of miracles. He must be a part of it. And that means, miracles don't come from ourselves as some special power that we gain, although it is an "ability" which we can develop.

Beware the ego. You bring it with you into the Course, and it will do everything it can to delude you, confuse you, distract you, blind you, and make you use the Course as a weapon.

One of the main ways that it does this is by engaging the intellect. Whatever you are experiencing right now, that is your most real-seeming experience and represents your current truth/beliefs. In order to really change that experience you have to undo some ego, which will shift you to experiencing something else.

The ego doesn't like that. The ego wants to keep the ego and increase itself. A major way it does this is through shifting into concepts. In essence, attempting to take on board "truth" which is too far outside the envelope of what you actually are experiencing, it shifts awareness into the intellect. You can "conceive" of the thing being talked about, but you cannot experience it.

The intellect is the ego's attempt to bridge the gap between where you are most authentically at, and where it pretends it wants to be. It is a tool for dissection and analysis and trying to find answers in illusions. It's a mechanism for judging, it experiences reactions, and tries to make realities. It's part of the dreaming mind.

What happens unfortunately is that the intellect becomes strongly engaged by studying the Course. There are so many concepts, theories and ideas in the Course. There are so many quotes which say or thing or another. A student will amass an internal library of all these things, and then the ego will use them as weapons and justifications.

What happens is, because the intellect takes you away from the present experience and into fantasy, the intellect becomes a way for the ego to avoid the present. The intellect loves to be a quotation machine, it loves to get hung up on the form of words, it loves to fixate on what is specifically in or not in the course, and it loves to be the ultimate judge or the authority or thing which figures out and decides what is true or not.

What I've seen is, some Course students become so lost in the form of the Course's words, the theology, the quotes, the concepts, that their intellect goes into overdrive. When you try to hold a normal conversation with these people, there is practically nothing you can say which won't be picked apart. You can't speak to these people with normal words because if there is any overlap with course words or if the course seems to have a redefinition of a term, they will see the use of the word as an error.

What then happens is they will have a reaction to a perceived error, will use the course to back up "why" its an error, and then the conversation will shift away from presence and into the course concepts where they'll assert all the reasons/quotes as to why what you said was wrong. You don't even really know what it was you said, being normal, that was so erroneous, and then you end up being bombarded with all this "correction" that you didn't even need.

Another favorite ego tool is to jump around in the levels. This is a classic move. Basically you're talking about something within a given context. Maybe you're discussing the ego or the world or something. You say something. Their ego intellect kicks in and sees a opportunity to be right, or basically pulls up a quote or course concept which they believe has truth to it, and they then use it as a weapon. They'll jump out of the `level` or context you're discussing on, and jump into some super-high conceptual level of the course. This "trumps" whatever you said, and seems to render you in error, or less true, and therefore you're wrong.

For example, you could be talking about forgiveness or how to apply it to something, and you say something, they get triggered, and then they suddenly come out with something like "that doesn't exist" or "nothing happened" or something... something at a higher level, which basically ultimately is true, BUT, it's being used as a way to discredit and overly dismiss whatever you said that wasn't even a point of contention. The person positions themselves with weapons of truth, concepts, in order to have the best most high trump-cards possible, so that no matter what you try to discuss with them, they will constantly undermine you. There is no way to hold a normal conversation with such people.

I think we all do this to some extent. But Course students especially are prone to this. It is so easy to get hung up on what the Course said on some matter and to then use it as a way to be subtly right, to use it against other people, to make people wrong etc.

I recently was in a group of people discussing ACIM stuff. I was shocked. I couldn't believe how much of this intellectual prostrating was going on. It seemed practically impossible to say anything without some person jumping all over it and pulling it apart, with a sort of "I've got a better truth" attitude. Even saying things which were absolutely nothing to do with the course whatsoever, which suddenly were turned around and explained to be false or in error because of something it contained. It turns into an addiction to correcting people.

The intellect can be used by the ego to really firmly latch onto the concepts as though they are the truth. They are held onto like precious jewels. And then they are used as weapons. The concepts are not the truth itself. Truth is an experience. Getting lost in debating the Course is very easy to do. It's possible to amass a considerable body of conviction about what the Course is saying or meaning and to then be so rigid and fixed in that that you can no longer talk to people normally or allow them their mistakes.

One person I was talking to was so distracted by intellectual positions that it was almost like talking to no-one. I would say one thing, they would do an instant bypass, find some other quotation or concept to go against it, and throw it back at me. I also wrote a few posts which were clear and obviously correct. But what happens is, people will then read it, sort of quietly refuse it, find one word you said which was slightly "not pure course-correct lingo", and then go in a diatribe about how you were wrong, completely glossing over and ignoring what you actually said or whether it was true.

This is what the ego does. It creates diversions. Distractions. Cover-ups. It makes noise about something, anything, other than what is immediately present. It pulls you away from the here and now. It takes you out of conversations and into wars. It uses its prowess to launch counter-attacks to perceived attacks, which it itself put out there with its mis-perceptions and judgements, and then reacted to.

You have to beware of the ego doing this. It will try to use the Course to point out the ways that people are wrong and then react to this perception by trying to correct them, when in fact it is your own mind which is at fault. It's just another way the ego projects responsibility and blame.

"Some of them are shared illusions, and others are part of your personal hell."

It's a very common belief that there is only one dreamer of the dream of separation. This is not true.

Nor is it true that "the one son" dreamed the dream. Only individual portions of the sonship chose freely to entertain the idea of separation, not all of them. And some angels also bought into it and others did not.

The dream has MANY AUTHORS. This is possible because we OVERLAP, because we share minds. So there can seem to be one dreamer or it can seem in an awakened experience that you are responsible for "all of the dream", but *ALSO* others are responsible for all of the dream as well! You overlap, you share, you collaborate, you join wills and join forces and this world was made by MANY MINDS.

The misunderstanding of this, due to poor reasoning, has led to many people to be CONFUSED and to adopt beliefs about what ACIM is teaching that are mistaken.

For example, people say "other people are me" or "we're all one person" and therefore, this leads to conclusions like... I am responsible for what other people are doing. Or, I must be responsible for making someone sick. Or, if I change my mind about the dream, it will automatically somehow magically "heal" everyone and all of the sicknesses will magically disappear and I'll be looking at a world where everyone is healthy and happy. NOOOO. That does not happen.

You waking up as "author" of this dream only means that you are a CO-AUTHOR, and you've waked up from the PART you played in its making. This is why Jesus was able to wake up FIRST without others waking up, and it's also why you must accept atonement for YOURSELF. Many individuals have to accept the atonement, otherwise if "one" of them accepted it, it would literally be instantly accepted for all, and we wouldn't be sitting here 2000 years after Jesus atoned still deciding whether or not to wake up.

This has led to some quite distorted conclusions about what needs to happen to your perception in order to produce a forgiven world or a happy dream or a world without sickness or bodies. It makes people OVERLY responsible for the choices of other FREE WILLED INDIVIDUALS. This is actually a fault, because YOU are supposed to be claiming and taking full responsibility for what YOU are choosing or doing to yourself, and you can't DO that if you're telling yourself that you are responsible for the other PARTS and CAUSES that are in the world. If you tell yourself, you're responsible for someone else's choice to die, because it's so-called "your dream", then you're going to be in for a surprise.

This has also led people to conclude that when Jesus was performing miracles, he somehow "did not see" bodies or was not able to discern "sickness" at all, and they've justified and rationalized and explained this away as some strange twist of perception, that he could not SEE what was "wrong" with them and could not tell that they needed help. This is CLEARLY not in accord with what ACTUALLY happens in experience, and even people who have had awakenings through ACIM have said that they still can SEE. Perception merely becomes MORE ACCURATE, it doesn't make you BLIND to what OTHER PEOPLE ARE CHOOSING.

Miracles would not be able to supply a lack to those who temporarily have less from those who temporarily have more, if we did not have free will. There could be no teachers or students or people meeting to learn lessons. There HAS to be a provision for individual choice, in terms of what YOU are responsible for and what OTHERS are responsible for.

This is why Jesus says that when you accept the atonement for YOURSELF, you become part of the atonement and then must go help OTHERS. Many people now believe that when you accept atonement you are accepting it as "the one son" and therefore it ENDS the whole process, the dream disappears and "your dream" exists no more, therefore you're done with your task. This is NOT what happens. You become part of the atonement PLAN, and you must then go HELP OTHERS, help those who HAVE NOT YET ACCEPTED IT. This is only possible because everyone has free will and because we are CO-CREATORS of this dream.

You can wake up from YOUR dreaming or your BELIEF IN the dream being real, but that doesn't mean other people have woken up, it does not force them to wake up, nor does it mean the dream is over. The only reason people have come to believe that there is ONE DREAMER or ONE SON is because of FALSE TEACHINGS that have been perpetuated about the course, from even the most famous of teachers. It makes sense to the ego, but the ego is insane, so it is nonsense. It also is based on denial of souls and individual free will, which is the underlying foundation for WHY what other people choose is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.

I never really knew how much my 'mind' seems to think that it has an answer about everything. It can't seem to shut up. I am completely addicted to the belief that "thinking equals knowing". And it's becoming apparent that it will come up with an answer even if it has really no grounds for knowing. And it will share that answer like it's some kind of fact. I go around clucking like a chicken making all these mental noises and thinking that I'm actually speaking truth, when in fact all of the things that come out are just stories and ego-based comments. I'm some kind of babbling idiot.

All of these activities seem to make up a 'me' that I really thought was aware and speaking truth. But everything coming from my ego mind is deception and illusion. In every way possible, my mind is constantly attempting to seek for the truth outside of it, and separate from where truth is.

I realize more and more, that God is the ONLY location of truth. The ego quite literally is running around this world believing 'it' knows everything, when in fact it knows absolutely nothing. It thinks it knows what is true, but it absolutely doesn't know any truth at all because truth is GOD!

The ego is not a faculty of knowing and the ego mind is NOT CAPABLE of knowing anything. All it can do is imagine and think and believe that it can obtain and hold the truth. Yet it is not a faculty of connection to Truth (capital T). It is not a device that can even perceive what the truth really is. It is obsessed with finding partial answers in amongst an absolute minefield of fragmented possibilities, seeking deeply to have the 'intelligence' to 'solve' apparent problems by delving into them even deeper, which makes them worse, and which turns into an exasperatingly frustrating experience of loss and failure.

It relies completely on analysis of the situation. In other words, it has already made everything seem real and now goes into detail trying to explain 'why' whatever is happening is happening. And as it digs for this answer in a swampland of confusion, it always comes up empty handed. It never finds any sense of absolute certainty, although instead it comes up with what it thinks is certainty, which is really, honestly, not complete certainty. And no matter how many times I take this trip with it, even if it comes up with what the world would think of as 'the' answer, it STILL is not the answer.

There is still no sense of completion in the search, no sense of complete acceptance, no sense of finding a truth which encompasses everything so fully that there is no doubt left. It is quite literally incapable of finding such a Total Truth within the realm of partial ideas, partially perceived distorted perceptions, false ideas, cleverly imagined possibilities, carefully explained analysis or any other approach to trying to find truth IN the illusion. All the time this ego mind has been looking for truth outside of it, in everything and everywhere other than in God, believing it is actually POSSIBLE to find truth outside of itself.

All of this activity is geared towards a completely impractical waste of time, to always avoid a real solution or answer, to avoid healing, to ignore God and to shut out the correction which would undo the perception of there being a problem in the first place. The ego is absolutely not interested in truly solving any problems whatsoever, or of really succeeding at finding 'the' answer that gives a satisfying and acceptable explanation for 'what is' (i.e. it is not interested in accepting God). It is only interested in dissecting and studying them deeply, wearing a hat which says "worlds best problem solver" on it. It seeks and does not find, all of the time.

It constantly fails to find a real answer, anywhere, about anything, in spite of the fact that it fervently believes it CAN find an answer, which makes it an obsession. And since the answer can never be found, going looking for it (seeking) always comes up empty handed, frustrated, lost and confused, obsessed over why there 'should' be an answer, and simply not letting go of the total absorption with its own reliance on itself.

Absolutely every ego activity, thought, behavior and process, entirely stems from this ... insane search, which is absolutely guaranteed to fail, because the very thing that would actually conclude the search and bring an answer is the very thing which would inherently UNDO the entire ego. God is the answer and God is the only truth. God is the only place where you will experience a sense of wholeness or completion or a sense of peace at having 'found' something which actually completely SOLVES all problems. And the problem is only solved by rejoining and being one with God/Holy Spirit, which the ego has absolutely no interest in.

The ego would have to SURRENDER, which means stopping searching, stopping seeking, stopping looking for, stopping figuring out, stopping imagining outcomes, stopping trying to control the situation, stopping giving energy to fruitless pointless conceptualizing and storytelling, stopping running away from God, and stopping believing in separation in all its forms. The ego mind is only even in a state of doing things 'on its own' BECAUSE OF the separation from God which gave birth to it. The separation from God was a separation from truth, answers, facts, reality and peace of mind. For the ego to believe it can find any of these things is insanity.

It seems to want to now be in the driver's seat, in charge of running the show, playing God, depending on its own prowess and utilizing its own separate intelligence and intellect to solve aaaaaaaaaall of the problems that have arisen because of its own seeming existence. How can the ego solve its own existence when IT is the problem it's trying to solve? How can it be free of a problem when its attempt to solve it creates it? How can it pursue the truth where it is not, expecting to find it, and have any hope of doing so?

The only truth is God. The only answer is love. The only response to any situation is love. The only sane practical solution is to extend God. The only response to the world is unconditional love. The only practical and wise response to any problem is to HEAL IT NOW through the miracle. And the only way for the problems to all 'go away' is for the EGO to go away. It is our very own ego self, our intellectual mind, our reliance on our separate faculties, and our intent to never surrender to actually ASK GOD FOR THE ANSWER, that ensures we will just keep spinning our wheels in suffering.

The ego will never be the truth. It will never find the truth. It cannot know the truth. And it is not the truth. The ego is FALSE. Your ego self is false.

Your TRUE SELF is in God. The truth is in God. And who you really are is in God. The answer to every problem is in God. The end of suffering is in God. The practical application of healing and correction that truly ANSWERS all problems is in God. And God is all there is.

The way the ego thinks about oneness is fraught with massive mistakes and assumptions and faulty conclusions. And a lot of people do this.

It seems simple enough to aim to "become oneness". But the way the ego thinks causes this to mean some things that it does not really mean.

And the aim often tends to be to get rid of the ego, but this is also then lumped in with self as though we are to have no self at all. And being one seems to imply that you cannot have a self, which is false.

There are numerous things wrong with this because not only does it erase the self that God created, it equates you with being entirely the same thing as God.

Now, in truth you actually are the same thing as God, up to a point, because you have all of God in you and are part of him. But God created you and you did not create him, so you are not his equal, and he IS greater than you.

This might imply you cannot be one with God, therefore, because if you are not totally the same as him how can you be one? But this isn't true either. You can be entirely fully one with God and still be secondary in creation. You can still be entirely one with God and still have a self.

I know it sounds paradoxical and nonsense but anything that is true sounds nonsense to the ego, just as anything the ego believes IS nonsense. And the egos beliefs ABOUT oneness are completely nonsense.

God is a holographic system of creation in which the whole is in every part and every part contains the whole. What oneness means in such a system is not the same as what it would mean in spacetime. The whole of God is in each of us, and each us of is whole and contains the whole - a shared whole. In this system, we DO have a self, AND we are one, and we are not, and we are.

What often happens is many people conclude that in order to gain oneness they have to give up self, so then there is this whole drive to destroy the self. This can only lead to more depression because self-repression is not natural. It's not natural because God created you to have a self. "I am still as God created me."

But we have to then reconcile how we can be one and still have a self. And that's easily explained by the fact that God's reality follows the holographic principle. Each individual part of God contains all of God.

"The whole power of God is in every part of Him"

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

So we don't actually want to be trying to get rid of self, but we also don't want our sense of "type" of self to be getting in the way of being able to be united with, one with, in communion with, the whole of God and creation.

We can be a part and a whole at the same time. That's the truth. It's only when we try to be a part that is NOT the whole that we move into ego. A partial part is a selfish part which is trying not to share with the rest. It's rejecting wholeness.

All we have to thus do to become one, is to reclaim and own and unite with the wholeness, while still being a part. We remove the egotism which is the idea of being apart-from the whole, which is the walls we surround ourselves with to shut it out. But we do not get rid of the prisoner in the prison cell - only the cell walls need removing, and then the sense or type of self is purified.

If we aim to be one with everything and have "no self at all", we're only getting half of the story. We are supposed to be full of self, not having no self. But some people teach and practice a non-dual view of having no self at all. This obliterates God's creations. Just because you're not an exclusive self doesn't mean you're not an inclusive self, and the opposite of false self is not no self - it's true self.

We don't want selfishness, but selfishness is an attitude problem, not a problem of what you are.

Trying to see yourself as "one", as the whole, as the entirety of everything, TO THE EXCLUSION OF selves, will result in further insanity twisted around to make it seem like there is a spiritual awakening while continuing to deny God's creation.

Being ONLY oneness is not the answer. You have to be oneness AND twoness. A self that shares, a self that unites, a self that gives, a self that relates, a self that includes, a self that loves. A self that knows it is one with and like its creator, but also knows its been given the freedom to be its own self, with free will, which is a gift from God. We are not supposed to be throwing the gift of having been created away.

So there is risk in focusing entirely on oneness, or on non-duality, because it can deny the self to such an extent that you end up with a sense of having none at all, which is not what God wills. You do have a self, it's just a very open shared self that includes others within it.

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

"Your brother is your Friend BECAUSE his Father created him like you. There IS no difference. You have been GIVEN to each other that love might be extended, NOT cut off from one another."

A major mistake I keep making, or at least am starting to notice I'm making, is trying to find answers in the world.

Jesus is often hinting to me that I'm doing something wrong when I do this.

I'll be lost in the middle of trying to figure something out or decide between two things, or determine what the "real reason is", or find a cause, or basically find any sense of truth to do with anything in this world.

It's difficult because my mind is so used to thinking this way - looking outside of myself for truth, for salvation etc. I'm so accustomed to being in this "mode" of "is it this or that?"... when in fact BOTH of those things are not the answer.

It also happens any time I am in any amount of fear, which is often, whereby Jesus will poke me because I'm once again lost in doubt and trying to decide something. It's really a state of indecision and because of the presence of fear, there is literally no way I can see clearly or find a completely convincing truth.

It often takes several winks and nudges before I I might suddenly have enough awareness to even realize that "I'm doing it again". ... I'm basically trying to find some kind of truth or answer in the world.

A reason why someone is sick. A cause for why something happened. A truth that explains which path to take. Some evidence that shows me something is correct. A sense of certainty that cannot be found in uncertainty. A clear and obvious answer which is profoundly elusive in the presence of fear.

I get lost in all these ways, in what basically is a state of split ego mind, where I am just lost and looking in all the wrong places for a truth that isn't really there.

When I finally am nudged enough by Jesus to look at what I'm really doing, and I've run out of attempts to find answers to what it is that I am doing wrong (lol), and I have pretty much no other option left as to what it is that Jesus is trying to get at, THEN I might suddenly realize..... oh... I'm doing it again.... I'm trying to find truth in the world.

And so what has been really coming to me big time lately, totally unexpected, is this idea that... absolutely everything in this world is NOT THE TRUTH. And cannot be. And it is not real. No matter how it looks, no matter how convincing it is, no matter how well explained, no matter whose credentials are behind it, no matter how real it seems, no matter how I can pinpoint physical causes, no matter how explainable or understandable it seems to be, IT IS STILL NOT THE TRUTH.

It is not God's truth. And God's truth is the ONLY truth. There IS no truth in the world, EVER.

This is quite surprising to me given how much I've been used to finding answers (salvation) outside of myself. It's the totally automatic mode of the ego to find truth externally, or to explain situations, or diagnose sicknesses, or find the "real cause" of stuff. All that is doing is the ego is trying to give truth to its illusions, trying to make mistakes real, making sickness real, making the world real, and that is NOT forgiveness.

Forgiveness HAS to recognize that the ENTIRE WORLD and EVERYTHING IN IT is an illusion, is not the truth, has no truth to it, cannot provide an answer, is not the "final answer", an therefore there is ANOTHER TRUTH which goes beyond this world.

There is a truth which is of God. It is a truth which transcends the world. It is a truth of immortality, eternal life, absolute peace, total happiness, invulnerability, christ consciousness, oneness and love. This is THE ONLY TRUTH.

And so as I've been really really used to finding "some" of the truth outside of me, in the world, in explanations and what appears to be cause and effect in the illusion, where one thing appears to cause something else to happen, THAT is not truth. So I am now going into this process of quite literally becoming clearer and stronger in my discernment that EVERY attempt to find truth in the world will fail, and will only tell me something that is - in God's reality - not the REAL truth.

This is the foundation for miracle mindedness, because miracle mindedness completely defies the laws of physics, chemistry, biology. The laws of nature. The laws of what appears to be separate causes and effects. All rules. All results. All effects. All stuff that seems to "happen" in this world, it is all NOT the truth of God. And therefore, God has power OVER all of it!!!

This is why in order to perform MIRACLES (!!), we need to get our mind into a place where we're very clear about the fact that this world is NOT REAL, that there is NO truth to how it appears whatsoever, that sickness is just a fake image which can be easily changed, that the body is just a fake image which can be easily changed, and that, as ACIM says very early on, "there is nothing my holiness cannot do."

While I'm looking for truth in this world, in all the things I rely on and think are sources of certainty and reality, I am distracting myself from the truth of God. And that means I am not being miraculous. Miracles, the power of God's love, will flow IN SPITE of this world, and with DOMINION over this world, and with a POWER that this world has absolutely no idea about.

And therefore no matter what state or condition this world is in, and no matter how it appears, and what seems to be the "finality" of it, or bodily states which seem irreversible, or even DEATH as a statement of "you can't do anything about this because its real".. THATS BULLSHIT! God CAN do something about it, because God does not buy the lie that this world is reality. And that means miracles can happen, and people CAN be raised from the dead, temporarily or otherwise if its preferable, and you are NOT at the effect of this world.

A Course in Miracles thus makes no sense whatsoever UNLESS this world is an illusion, and unless this world has absolutely no truth to it whatsoever. Only then can it be possible that everything ACIM claims can be true, and only then is it possible that natural MIRACLES can happen, ALL THE TIME!

Hallelujah!

"Anger is never justified. Attack has no foundation."

"Perhaps it will be helpful to remember that no one can be angry at a fact. It is always an interpretation that gives rise to negative emotions, regardless of their seeming justification by what appears as facts..."

"...All of these reactions are the same. They obscure the truth, and this can never be a matter of degree. Either truth is apparent, or it is not. It cannot be partially recognized. Who is unaware of truth must look upon illusions."

---------

The justification for anger can be explained purely in metaphysical logic.

A mind which is whole is wholly aware of all there is. This awareness is an awareness of all the facts, all the truth, the entire picture. Nothing is hidden.

Since nothing is hidden, it is obvious that anything you experience is chosen by yourself, you get everything you ask for, you never get anything you do not ask for, and all prayers are answered. There are no victims in heaven.

In this awareness is also the awareness of the secret to salvation, that nothing can happen to you unless you are doing it to yourself.

When some of the truth becomes hidden, through a block to awareness, or implementation of the ego thought system, the mind goes into darkness and cannot see the whole truth.

It therefore has only partial information. It is only partially aware. This means something is hidden from its awareness.

The mind always believes that it is aware of everything there is to be aware of, and assumes it is seeing the whole picture. Even when it is severely blocked, the mind still believes it is seeing the whole picture and is being completely objective.

It's awareness of what it does see, is used as a basis for its logic, and it makes sense out of the information it has. It thinks that what it sees makes sense to it, since it believes in it. It always thinks it is aware of the whole truth and all the facts, even if it is not.

When events transpire and something happens which appears not to have been caused by ones own self, this appearance is due to not being aware of how you do things to yourself. It means the mind has lost the ability to notice its own causing and asking and praying.

So now something happens and it seems like the mind did not ask for it to happen. It now seems as though it is getting something it did not ask for. Effects are showing up which it did not cause. At least to its perception. It is unconscious of the fact it did cause it.

Making sense of this lack of facts, this reduced picture, there essentially is no real explanation for how these events transpired. But the mind did not see that it itself was the cause of them. And so... it concludes completely "rationally", naturally, that it must have been a cause outside of itself.

This actually is not only the basis for all anger it is also the basis for projection of causality and sin outside of oneself. Since we do not see that we chose or caused things, it makes it very easy to assume that there is an external cause.

So now, since it was not myself that made me be attacked, to my knowledge, it must've been someone else. And since I did not cause or ask for this attack, it was UNJUSTIFIED.

What also will be unjustified is pinning the cause for the effects onto something external, because even if you can find a scapegoat to blame it on, you will never be wholly certain that it was them, because it was not them, and so this will engender automatic fear that you are accusing the wrong person. It can only ever loosely make sense as to who caused it, and so in this projection there is always uncertainty.

If it were true, that I am attacked by a cause other than myself, it means my innocence was unfairly treated, I was willed against my will, and someone has sinned against me.

THIS, automatically gives me the logical justification to be upset and angry. In fact, it is merely the perception that cause must have been outside myself, that automatically made me PERCEIVE, that I am "at the effect of the world". So now effects are starting to show up inside myself, I am started to be changed into an effect, I'm experiencing emotional reactions which are effects (which I'm putting there), and it SEEMS like it is being done to me by someone else.

It then seems to make perfect sense that someone is attacking you without just cause and this completely justifies your own upset, your own retaliation, all sense of needing revenge, all anger, all rage, all blame and scapegoating, all projection of sin, all making someone wrong, and the supposed need to "address the imbalance" by "compensating" for the attack with a counter-attack.

Anger then simply seems to be rational, seems to make sense, seems justified, normal, natural, and completely well founded, based on the lack of awareness and limited perception.

This means anger is NEVER justified, because it is always a FALSE CONCLUSION, and a false premise. It never is founded in the whole truth. It is never founded in all the facts. It is always founded in a victim mindset from someone who has a limited perspective of themselves, who does not see that they CAN only attack themselves, and that no-one else has the ability to attack them.

The people who become angry, while not being justified in the anger, ever, nevertheless DO NOT KNOW that they are making this mistake. There is information OUTSIDE OF CONSCIOUS AWARENESS, that they do not currently have access to. There are some FACTS, which they have no knowledge of. There is key evidence, proof, which has been concealed.

And so they are simply MISTAKEN, not guilty or sinful, just mistaken, because they're trying their best to make sense of their limited experience of the whole. This is why Jesus tells us to "forgive them for they know not what they do"... because literally, they DO NOT KNOW what they are doing. They are acting erroneously, based on not enough factual information. And they don't even realize it, because of that block to awareness.

No-one in their right mind would become angry, ever, or attack anyone, for any reason. No-one in their right mind would ever justify anger on any basis. The fact is, people WILL, even MUST, become angry, or at least projecting of sin (cause), outside of themselves, when awareness is blocked. The projection of cause is AUTOMATIC as soon as awareness of the facts are blocked, because these blocks make you unaware that YOU are the cause of everything. This is the core root of all projection.

So simply, those who are angry, are not making sense, they do not know they are not making sense, and they are trying their best to make sense out of being in the dark. They are confused, lost, afraid, alone, separated, seeing themselves threatened and victimized, do not realize they have done all of this to themselves, and are not even AWARE that they are doing ALL of it to themselves.

This, if you can recognize it, is the justification for FORGIVENESS, in which FORGIVENESS IS ALWAYS JUSTIFIED. Forgiveness is always justified because no-one who attacks is EVER in their right mind, and no-one who attacks is EVER fully aware of all the facts, and no-one who attacks WOULD EVER attack if they had access to the truth.

Therefore, attack is not PERSONAL, or about you. It's always about the person attacking and their attempt to deal with the strange twisted view of reality they are experiencing, in which they are simply freaking out because they've lost a sense of proper perspective, context, and contrast to what is true. All of their reactions are COMPLETELY PREDICTABLE, based on the metaphysical state their awareness is in. No-one who has a block to awareness can escape coming to false conclusions and then feeling justified in revenge.

So if we can recognize, attackers are only attacking themselves, and they are not in their right mind, and they do not know what they are doing, and they are literally unconscious to some degree, and that if they HAD all the facts they would instantly AGREE with you (if you are in truth) that you do not deserve attack and you are not at fault, then you would be willing to RECOGNIZE your brother's innocence, and also acknowledge the impossibility of being attacked by them in the first place.

Essentially, everyone deserves forgiveness simply on the grounds that no-one ever attacks on a basis of awareness of reality, only because they are undergoing a state of sleep and their view of reality has become distorted. They are simply insane. All attack is insanity. And they cannot really be held accountable for acting on a basis of not being in their right mind.

Those who are angry simple need healing and an increase in awareness. To accept the truth and admit to their inherent invulnerability as lovable children of God.

In A Course in Miracles, forgiveness is a movement away from believing that illusions are true and real, towards recognizing that they are in fact not true or real. This becomes clear when your awareness increases sufficiently to reveal a larger truth, which shows you the ways in which the "smaller truth", i.e. illusory lies, are in fact limited and untrue.

Forgiveness, as a process, is also a movement from unawareness, in which you don't see clearly or fully, to a state of expanded awareness where you see more of the whole picture and with greater accuracy. As you go through this, what seemed to be true of your illusions starts to be recognized as being not as true as the larger truth.

It's a matter of becoming clear about what REALLY is true, and what is actually false. Getting truth and illusions confused is the ENTIRE content of the ego, and the entire content of the separation from God - which is you trying to make illusions become reality.

As you become more aware of what the truth really is, and less convinced about what the truth is not, your discernment of true vs false becomes clearer. You learn to recognize the truth for what it is (not the illusion you thought it was), and recognize the illusion for what it is (not the reality you thought it was).

Through forgiveness you will eventually reach a truly, fully "forgiving" state of awareness, which recognizes ALL of the truth, which is that nothing has really happened, there is only innocence, and therefore there is nothing to forgive.

Now, there are a couple of pieces of the puzzles of performing miracles which I did not really get, but which certain Christian practitioners tried to describe. They would say that you have to a) believe in Jesus ("be a believer"), and b) have "faith". Since their belief in Jesus was heavily wrapped in Christian theology, I had trouble discerning exactly WHAT it was about Jesus that I was supposed to believe - such as that He died for our sins and such, which is not an ACIM teaching. I also have never really 'got' what faith means, because it was never explained in a clear context.

But I've become clearer on this now.

The only way that "believing in Jesus" and "having faith" become meaningful, is when you can discern that the ENTIRE WORLD IS AN ILLUSION. It is necessary to have a really strong clear distinction between what is TRUE, and what is FALSE. So as you go about your life believing in the world, (even if you're trying to learn not to believe in it you probably still do), while you're in this sort of in-between phase of "some of the truth is true, but some of it I don't get", you will also be similarly confused about what it means to believe in Jesus, and what faith is.

If parts of the world are real to you, in spite of what you might claim otherwise, this HAS to mean that you in part also believe that God is not entirely real. It also means that you have 'faith in' the ego, and faith in sickness and death.

Now, this isn't something that people want to admit but, the simple fact is, either you believe that God is real, fully, or in some way you don't believe it. And that displaced belief will be put into a conviction that the ego is real - that it is truth, and that everything it claims is true. That will go on to mean that when shit happens in the world and it seems real, part of you will be trying to look to God for a way out of it, but part of you will be attached to believing in it. And so you are now torn, or your faith is divided. And Jesus says faith cannot serve two masters.

So what needs to happen is, through proper forgiveness, we need to become REALLY CLEAR about the distinction between reality, and illusions. We can' have this mishmash of partial reality and partial illusion. It will confuse us and rob truth of meaning.

To be able to believe in Jesus, means that you believe Jesus is 100% reality, He is 100% love, He is 100% truth, 100% immortal, 100% innocent, 100% at peace etc. He shares this truth with God 100%.

IF that is true, if that's your definition of truth, then it HAS to mean, that anything not of God is not truth. So now you need to be very clear, WHAT is not of God? Because if you go on believing God created the world, and yet the world seems to be the place where things fuck up big time, then... well, now you are super confused. And of course you are confused because it makes no sense that God would create a world with sickness in it, because that means God creates sickness. So now if you were to follow that truth, and you were trying to find some healing or peace from experiencing sickness, how the heck would you have any kind of power to turn to if that power believes in sickness? You'd be hopeless.

So... to believe in Jesus means to believe in God, that God is the one and only truth, and only things which are completely in accord with unconditional love are of God. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else at all can be permitted to take up the label of "real" or "true".

So then you have to ask yourself, did God create the world? No. He did not. So that means the world is not real. And that's mind-blowing, if you really take in deeply. It completely undermines your entire view of reality - or rather, your mistaken view in which you think illusions are reality. Because all this time you've been thinking you're living in a 'real' world and now you find out, it's a tricking illusion pretending to be real!

But this is how you can then have faith. You can have faith because, now that you believe in God's truth, and you know that God's truth is the only truth, and that this world is NOT a part of God's truth, that means whenever any shit happens in the world, you can BYPASS it, OVERLOOK it (forgiveness), and HOLD STRONG to the truth as God would have it be. That means, NO MATTER WHAT is in front of your face, no matter what happens, no matter how serious it seems, no matter how final - even death, YOU DO NOT BELIEVE IN IT, because believing in it would have to mean - you really do not believe in God all the way.

But if you DO believe in God, then.... no matter what happens, no matter how serious, you do NOT pay it attention, you do NOT believe in it, and you instead express and extend GOD'S REALITY in place of it. You cancel it out. You overwrite it. You clarify that the problem is NOT real, is NOT the truth, and you replace it with love. This shows the nothingness of the illusion, puts everything in its correct order, and corrects all confusion. It also produces miracles.

So you have faith by believing that God's truth is true, and that this is shared by Jesus.... and you have faith by holding true to that fact regardless of how the world seems to be. The only question of your faith wavering is when you believe the illusion enough that your belief in God's power wavers, and that means you've temporarily forgotten that God's truth is true. You've believed in the ego again. So you lose faith when that happens.

This kind of faith in God is not blind faith or just 'hope'... it is CERTAINTY, it is KNOWING, it is TRUTH, and it is CORRECTION.

Holy Spirit interjected while writing that the word "trust" is really what faith means. Trusting God. Trusting the real truth. Trusting that BECAUSE of what the truth is, that "this problem" is not insurmountable or irreversible. It is that knowing of the truth, that trust in the truth, which powers miracles.

So forgiveness leads you to miracle mindedness, a clarity about what is true and what is false gives you miracle mindedness, and a certainty about the truth being true (and that therefore the world is not real) gives you the foundation for faith. Your trust/faith in God's Way gives you miracle-working capabilities.

To get there you're going to have to question the validity of every way that you're trying to find truth in the world, because it means that you're looking for truth in an illusion. It means you're not clear yet about what is true and what is false. The world is false - head's up!. Entirely false. It is entirely an illusion that doesn't really exist or mean anything at all. Every time you 'seek' for truth in it, you will not find it, because it is not there. You need to learn to stop trying to do that and instead believe in God.

The miracles will flow from there.

This pretty much explains why you have the freedom to deny God.

"If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of suffering. But to do this, you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgment of your Father IS the acknowledgment of yourself as you ARE. Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free.

You do not realize how much you have denied yourself, and how much God, in His love, would not have it so. Yet He would not interfere with you, because He would not know His Son if he were not free. To interfere with you would be to attack HIMSELF, and God is not insane. When you denied HIM, you WERE insane. Would you have Him SHARE your insanity? God will never cease to love His Son, and His Son will never cease to love Him. That was the condition of His Son's Creation, fixed forever in the Mind of God. To know that is sanity. To deny it is insanity. God gave HIMSELF to you in your Creation, and His gifts ARE eternal. Would you deny yourself to Him?"

Note also that "separation" as in the theoretical idea that you CAN BE separate (which is impossible), is totally different from "THE separation", which is another name for the fall of man, the tiny mad idea. We DID in fact have the idea, we DID believe it, and we DID "fall". This is why there appears to be a facebook. BUT, the fall is not actual real separation, it's just belief in it and a denial that actual separation is impossible.

"The Separation (not ACTUAL separation, but the state of believing it's possible) HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial. However, to concentrate on error is merely a further misuse of legitimate psychic mechanisms. The true corrective procedure, which has already been described as the proper use of the spiritual eye (or true vision), is to accept the error temporarily, BUT ONLY as an indication that IMMEDIATE correction is mandatory. This establishes a state of mind in which the Atonement can be accepted without delay."

So we did have the tiny mad idea, we did go into it through belief (which is really denial), and we did find ourselves in a "lower order reality". But this state in which we SEEM separate is not ACTUAL separation or real separation, which is impossible. It's just us MISTAKEDLY believing that it's possible and happening.

THE separation, the fall from Heaven, did occur. But it was not an actual separation.

"The separation was not a loss of perfection, but a failure in communication. "

The failure to communicate (to receive, to give equally), resulted in a state of denial, not listening, being unaware of perfection, a breakdown in the experience of oneness. It did not change anything perfect, it just closed the communication channels to a degree.

"What God DOES know is that His communication channels are not open to Him, so that He cannot impart His joy and know that His Children are wholly joyous. This is an ongoing process, not in time, but in eternity. God's extending outward, though not His completeness, is blocked when the Sonship does not communicate with Him as one. So He thinks, "My Children sleep, and must be awakened.""

"Those who communicate fear are promoting attack, and attack always BREAKS communication, and therefore makes communion impossible."

"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. Together, we can laugh them BOTH away, and understand that time can NOT intrude upon eternity. It IS a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which MEANS there is no time."

"Adam's "sin" could have touched none of you, had you not believed that it was the FATHER Who drove him out of Paradise. For it is in that belief that knowledge of the Father was lost, for it is only those who do not understand Him that COULD believe it."

"When the "lies of the serpent" were introduced, they were specifically called lies because they are not true. When man listened, all he heard was untruth. He does not have to continue to believe what is not true, unless he chooses to do so. All of his miscreations can disappear in the well known "twinkling of an eye", because it is a visual misperception.

Man's spiritual eye can sleep, but as will shortly appear in the notes (reference Bob, elevator operator) a sleeping eye can still see. One translation of the Fall, a view emphasized by Mary Baker Eddy, and worthy of note, is that "a deep sleep fell upon Adam". While the Bible continues to associate this sleep as a kind of anaesthetic utilized for protection of Adam during the creation of Eve, Mrs. Eddy was correct in emphasizing that nowhere is there any reference made to his waking up. While Christian Science is clearly incomplete, this point is much in its favor."

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

"We have discussed the fall or Separation before, but its meaning must be clearly understood, without symbols. The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought that is PERFECTLY real in time, though not in Eternity. All beliefs are real to the believer.

The fruit of only ONE tree was "forbidden" to man in his symbolic garden. But God could not have forbidden it, or it could not have BEEN eaten. If God knows His children, and I assure you he does, would he have put them in a position where their own destruction was possible?"

"Eating of the tree of knowledge is a symbolic expression for incorporating into the self the ability for self-creation. This is the ONLY sense in which God and His souls are NOT co-creators. The belief that they ARE is implicit in the "self concept," a concept now made acceptable by its WEAKNESS, and explained by a tendency of the self to create an IMAGE of itself."

"Until the Separation, which is a better term than the Fall, nothing was lacking. This meant that man had no needs at all. If he had not deprived himself, he would never have experienced them.

After the Separation, needs became the most powerful source of motivation for human action. All behavior is essentially motivated by needs, but behavior itself is not a Divine attribute. The body is the mechanism for behavior."

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

"You who prefer specialness to sanity could not obtain it in your right minds. You were at peace until you asked for special favor. And God did not give it. For the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this of a Father who truly loved His Son. Therefore, you made of Him an UNloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father COULD give. And the peace of God's Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his REAL father, having attacked his glorious equality WITH Him.

In peace he needed nothing, and asked for nothing. In war he DEMANDED everything, and FOUND nothing. For how could the gentleness of love respond to his demands, EXCEPT by departing in peace, and returning to the Father? If the son did not wish to REMAIN in peace, he could not remain at all. For a darkened mind cannot live in the light, and it must seek a place of darkness, where it can believe it is where it is NOT. God did not ALLOW this to happen. But you DEMANDED that it happen, and therefore believed that it was so."

"Whenever projection in its inappropriate sense is utilized, it ALWAYS implies that some emptiness (or lack of everything) must exist, and that it is within man's ability to put his own ideas there INSTEAD of the truth. If you will consider carefully what this entails, the following will become quite apparent:

First, the assumption is implicit that what God has Created can be changed by the mind of Man.

Second, the concept that what is perfect can be rendered imperfect (or wanting) is intruded.

Third, the belief that man can distort the Creations of God (including himself) has arisen, and is tolerated.

Fourth, that since man can create himself, the direction of his own creation is up to him.

These related distortions represent a picture of what actually occurred in the Separation. None of this existed before, nor does it actually exist now."

"The Garden of Eden, which is described as a literal garden in the Bible, was not originally an actual garden at all. It was merely a mental state of complete need-lack. Even in the literal account, it is noteworthy that the pre-Separation state was essentially one in which man needed nothing."

"Free will is the attribute of the mind, NOT the Soul. The Soul always remains changeless, because it never leaves the sight of God.

The Creation of the Soul is already fully accomplished. The mind, if it votes to do so, becomes a medium by which the Soul can create along the line of its own creation. If it does not freely elect to do so, it retains this creative ability, but places itself under tyrannous rather than authoritative control. As a result, what it creates is imprisonment, because such are the dictates of tyrants.

To "change your mind" means to place it at the disposal of True authority. The miracle is thus a sign that the mind has elected to be guided by Christ in HIS service. The abundance of Christ is the natural result of choosing to follow him."

So you see, we are IN a state of sleep, dreaming, denying, pretending not to be as God created us, imagining things are true which are not, being unwilling, and trying to give it reality through belief. But none of it is true, or really happening, what it represents (an actual separation) is fictional, and it's just an illusion masquerading as a separation.

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

IT DOESN'T MATTER WHICH VERSION OF THE COURSE YOU USE

THEY ARE ALL THE SAME! THE COURSE IS NOT A BOOK.

A Course in Miracles is a metaphysical course. It is also holographic.

If you were to "get" a single sentence Jesus has spoken in its fullest meaning and accept it, you could wake up. It does not require you to study specific words or versions. It does not require you to do the entire workbook.

I know this may sound controversial. At some point you are supposed to even leave the course behind and go to God with empty hands. The course is a stepping stone, a guide. It is not an experience of the truth.

The course is holographic in that the whole truth can be found in each part. Holograms make no sense to the ego because it has attempted to demonstrate through physical objects, that what is true of one thing is not true of another. It sees only separate problems defined by their FORM, the solution to which fixes on isolated problem and not any others - a learning which cannot be generalized.

Physical objects are the mind's way of projecting an image in which it seems like God does not exist anywhere, by making it appear that there is nothing the same anywhere. God is the same everywhere, he is the All in All. And he is fully present in all parts. The ego does not understand this because it will ask, how can All of God be in one part, and All of God be in another part? But God can, because God is omnipresent.

Similarly with the Course book(s), Jesus has expressed WHOLE TRUTH, using various words, many times over. The reason the Course repeats so much is because the SAME CONTENT is expressed in many different ways. So as you read it, it builds upon itself, because really, what you are learning is a "core truth" which is very, very simple and deep and profound yet which is expressed over and over again.

It is almost like a fishing net, which has been cast outward in many seemingly different "forms", talking on what seem to be many separate topics, in great detail, so that the MANY VARIED EGOS in various states and conditions can start with where they are AT, taking the course to be a specific form, and then WORKING THEIR WAY TO THE SOURCE, by realizing that each part IS NOT SEPARATE from the rest, and that there is a common thread, a very abstract yet wholly simple truth, hiding behind every single word. One Truth. One Answer.

Jesus in fact expressed the entire Course from a single state of mind, from love. In ego terms, that should mean that He only needs one expression, one WORD, which would be sufficient for you to awaken. As Jesus explained, even the term "God is" is sufficient. It contains the WHOLE TRUTH. The Complete truth. There is nothing missing in that.

Similarly for example, "nothing real can be threatened", contains the whole truth. Every aspect of that truth is reflected in it. If you could just GET that one thing, and get it really deeply and fully and really grasp the totality of it, the absoluteness of it, then you would be done waking up. So do you really need thousands of pages of text? Do you really need 365 workbook lessons?

Jesus didn't write a linear book. He didn't take the route that most authors take where they write things in a sequence along a timeline, with separated out content, and where each piece of content is tied to a particular form, and therefore to digest the "full story" you have to read the entire book, every word. Jesus's book is totally different to that.

Even though it seems to speak on many many different ILLUSIONS of topics, such as ego, mind, death, sickness, healing, miracles, heaven, worlds, separation, holy instants, brothers, etc... He is expressing ALL of it from ONE truth, one perspective (sitting in Heaven sipping tea), and that ENTIRE truth is contained in each part. You could get by with a single page of the text and wake up from it.

This is why the course is so DEEP. It has nothing to do with the HORIZONTAL digestion of the Course, how many words there are, how many words you read or practice, how much you memorize, which parts you quote in isolation, or which version seems more or less original. The course does not proceed in the horizontal. It is NOT attempting to get you to make "horizontal progress"!

It does not care how much time it takes or how many lessons you've done or which version's material was left in or out. That is not the DIRECTION in which your mind needs to progress in order for you to wake up! Your mind does not need to take on board 10,000 words. Your mind needs to TRANSCEND THE WORDS. To generalize the learning.

To transform what APPEARS to be thousands of words and to consolidate and reduce them down, boil them down, to a VERY, VERY SIMPLE core truth. You do that by going INTO the course, not moving through the material sideways or in a linear fashion!

The metaphysics of the course is DEEPER than the words, the meaning of the words is DEEPER than the words. There is an ABSTRACT TRUTH being presented here, a truth which *SPANS* the entire book, and is THE SAME EVERYWHERE. Page 1. Page 100. Page 1000. It's all the SAME CONTENT!

You are supposed to be GENERALIZING the learning. What that means is, you see SIMILARITIES in many different seeming parts of the book. Over here in chapter 1 Jesus talks about a miracle in this way, over there in chapter 12 Jesus talks about a miracle in that way. They correlate and are BOTH fragments of the same truth expressing. A piece of the hologram.

BOTH of them point to the same thing. If you are understanding the meaning of what's being said, your mind will develop a CONNECTION between the parts, and will therefore move towards a MORE ABSTRACT TRUTH than either of the parts suggest in their form. Your mind will start to build a "picture" or an overall concept or piece of the metaphysics, based not on a single quote or piece of form in isolation or certain versions, but based on the UNITY between them which transcends the forms of the words.

Just as the Course says you could gain vision from looking at a table in the correct way, so too you can gain vision from looking at a single sentence in the course in the right way. This is why a statement like "there is no sin" gives you a sigh of relief. It is HEALING, not because of what the words say or which words are used. It is healing because it is ABSOLUTE TRUTH expressed in one of many forms, reminding you that something FAR DEEPER than the form is real.

It does not matter which version of the form of the course you use or work with. It does not matter who edited in or out anything it says. It does not matter who influenced it or which forms are more original or less edited or which predate others. It is irrelevant. The course is RESILIANT and RESISTANT TO EDITING, because you cannot EDIT OUT the holographic truth.

A feature of holograms is that THE WHOLE TRUTH is present in every part. If you remove some of the parts, it DOES NOT DIMINISH the whole truth. Every OTHER part that remains, still has the WHOLE TRUTH in it. If you know anything about holograms such as those little 2D ones used on credit cards - when you move your vantage point you see a DIFFERENT SIDE of a 3D OBJECT... because every little particle of the holographic image CONTAINS THE ENTIRE OBJECT, making it possible to see multiple different perspectives at the same time. Try it yourself. To the ego, this should be impossible.

The course is the same way. If you take out AN ENTIRE CHUNK of it, just chop out 90% of the chapters in the text, YOU WILL NOT be removing even 1% of the CONTENT of the course that remains. The WHOLE TRUTH can still be found in the remaining content. You could even pare it down to just 2 words, like God Is, and THAT STILL contains the ENTIRE COURSE. So to think that someone's editing, even aggressive editing, has POWER OVER THE TRUTH, to strip out and steal away and leave out ANYTHING MEANINGFUL, is absolute bullshit ego drama. The truth is INVULNERABLE!

Taking out or changing some words WILL NOT, and SHOULD NOT (for anyone discerning) confuse or distract anyone from the truth. Believing otherwise means you are obsessed WITH FORM and are TOTALLY MISSING the content, which means you're NOT EVEN GETTING THE COURSE from the parts that you DO have access to! The Course contains such a STRENGTH and CLARITY of truth, do you really think that changing a bunch of words can corrupt it beyond all recognition, beyond all usefulness? You cannot remove the ALL from every part without changing EVERY SINGLE WORD. And then you might as well read the phone book. And even the phone book can be used to wake up.

The truth is not a form. It is not a version of some words. The metaphysics is essentially THE SAME in every single version ever released. If you think the differences are important, then you are not transcending the form and are not seeing the metaphysical foundation. WHOLE TRUTH cannot be edited out!

The metaphysics are based on extremely absolute logical progression, which is absolutely black and white with absolutely no wiggle room or room for confusion or misunderstanding.

The metaphysics explains the entire separation and every facet of the ego's working, as a logical progression, because all thought systems are logically consistent throughout. Once you can see the logical CLARITY, which is why Jesus uses extremely black and white terms as much as possible, you will GET the metaphysics and be able to see it and USE it, to clarify the MEANING of the words. The words do not provide meaning! The meaning provides the words! Content over form.

It is not necessary for anyone to read the entire text. It is not necessary for anyone to do the entire workbook. It is not necessary to read the manual for teachers, or absorb every word of every pamphlet, or listen to every single publication by well-known teachers. All you need is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit IS THE ANSWER TO THE SEPARATION.

The Course is only meant to put you in touch with Him and to recognize Him as your teacher and healer and helper, and to learn to allow Him to HELP YOU WAKE UP. Being in touch with Him and relying on and developing TRUST in Him, is MORE IMPORTANT than any words in any version of the Course anywhere. He is the ONE who Jesus appointed to help us. He is the ONE who will awaken us. He is the ONE who heals us. He is the ONE who KNOWS EVERYTHING and who can tell us anything we need to know, and direct us very specifically.

"I don't need to know what to say or what to do knowing He goes there with me. I will heal as I let Him teach me to heal" etc...

It is THE EGO that wants to hang onto every word and quotation of the course, to take parts of it in ISOLATION and dwell on the FORM, in order to SEPARATE the course out into multiple separate problems, to confuse and obscure the message and the meaning.

It does not matter WHAT WORDS Jesus wrote. It does not matter what they mean in English language. It does not matter that you try to "let the words" tell you the truth without you interpreting. That STILL won't get you to be awake. You have to go beyond the words. They are just symbols, pointing you to the truth.

For some people, reading the entire text is helpful. Maybe many times. For some people, doing every single workbook lesson is helpful, maybe even many times. But NOT EVERYONE needs that. What is NEEDED, what is required, is to learn your personal curriculum which you will experience in your regular daily life, learn your lessons, apply the course principles and demonstrate the truth. Be a living example of the teaching, not someone who bashes others over the head with a book. There are already enough bible bashers in the world.

Sometimes people "get" the meaning of the course much quicker than others. It totally depends on the person. Sometimes there has been enough gained from the course writing itself that you no longer "need" to go do lessons or read the words. The core truth is generalized and the abstract nature opened up to. You get in touch with the Holy Spirit who is God's APPOINTED TEACHER, and you listen to Him and allow Him to TEACH YOU DIRECTLY. To help you to forgive and heal. To help you to APPLY it, and to RECEIVE HEALING.

What's right for one person may not be right for you. You have no idea. One person may need years and years of pouring over the urtext. Another may need just one reading of a FIP version. Someone else might need constant references to a sparkly or original or whatever edition. It doesn't matter. OUR CURRICULUMS ARE DIFFERENT, so there is NO ONE RIGHT BOOK to recommend for everyone to use, or which everyone should be using. And NONE of the books contain the experience of the truth.

All who are to meet will meet. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. There are no accidents in salvation. We are all on seemingly different paths, all leading to God. And no-one will be left behind. But don't fall into the trap of turning the course into FORM or having IDOL WORSHIP of it, or hero-worship of the people who we've made SPECIAL for having worked on certain versions. Much appreciation to them for their SERVICE, but they are NOT IMPORTANT. All that's important is that YOU become WILLING to accept the atonement yourself.

I wasn't intending for this post to be elaborate but I LOVE how this analogy unfolded to explain the body, sickness, death, miracles, and awakening.....I think that I might even write a whole book based on this analogy alone, it's so clear and exact.... Thanks to Holy Spirit for the nudges and corrections.

...

Computers are strangely similar in their following of rules as we are in our responsibility for choice. And similarly, our bodies do exactly what we tell them to and nothing else.

A computer doesn't do anything whatsoever without a decision being made. When a decision is made, when the computer is told what you want, it produces exactly that result. The language used to tell it what to do is absolutely specific. And it only produces the exact result that was asked for. It is almost annoyingly specific in its requirement for precise instruction.

The computer doesn't really decide on its own to do anything else. It is very true to the programmer's instructions. If it seems to be doing something else, some illusion of a higher-level functioning has arisen. It's really still just processing binary data, 1's and 0s', yet produces what looks to be much more sophisticated results. Images on a screen, objects moving around, sounds happening, it's all an ILLUSION.

When the computer seems to do something it was not supposed to do, this is actually impossible. If there is a bug in the software, the computer still does what the bug tells it to do. It doesn't decide not to do bugs, and it doesn't decide to do bugs on its own. It faithfully follows instructions. That's all it can do. It has no real intelligence. It is just a machine. You get out what you put in.

The body is similar in that it is your faithful machine, and it literally only does what your mind tells it to do. It does not have a will of its own. It does not invent bugs on its own. It doesn't malfunction on its own. It only follows the program that is given to it. It is always 100% correct in carrying out orders. It does not complain or have an opinion or make judgement about rightness or wrongness of the program. It just EXECUTES.

It is a device, that you use for various purposes. Some of those purposes are malicious and as a result, they lead to the body seeming to produce malicious states of being. But regardless of these states looking like a high-level sophisticated problem, it is still just the body following orders. In this way, the body (like a computer) is completely neutral. It is your servant and you are the one operating it.

This is also exactly the same as the fact that, as Jesus tells us in the Course, you always get exactly what you ask for, you only ever get what you ask for, and you never get anything that you do not ask for. Therefore what you get and what happens is 100% your responsibility. If the body seems to go wrong or do bad things, it is because the programmer told it to.

Just as it is the responsibility of a computer programmer to give it the exact-right specific instructions for behavior, so too do you give your body exact instructions for behavior. This is why as Jesus says, if the body is exhibiting signs of sickness or disease, it must mean that the mind has given it a program where you've asked it to be sick and diseased. It is just following your request, to the letter. A sick body is a sign of a sick mind, because the programmer of the body has to be sick in order for sickness to show in the body.

This also shows us the way out of the illusion of stuff happening that allegedly shouldn't be happening. There is not ANYTHING happening in the entire world that has not been asked for by a mind. There is nothing happening in your body that you have not asked for in your mind. You put it there yourself through your instructions - your creative power and freedom. And you have received exactly what you asked for. It is a TOTALLY reliable system.

"Ask and you shall recieve" does not mean that sometimes you ask and sometimes you receive, it means you are always asking and you are always receiving and it is not even possible to not receive what you've asked for. There also therefore is never a situation where you might not receive what you've asked for, where you are in doubt, or thinking that you have asked the wrong question or don't know how to ask etc. You ask nevertheless, and everything you are experiencing right this very second, you have asked for. You can't blame the RESULTS for being something you do not want. YOU need to find out how and why you are programming the system to produce an output of suffering.

If stuff seems to be happening in the body which you don't prefer, you cannot blame the body for it, and you cannot look to outside causes to find out where the symptoms came from. There is only one program and you wrote it. Symptoms are just correct outputs, based on the program you have given the body and the request you have made.

Sickness is a correct output! Death is a correct output! If you ask for it, you shall receive it. If you say, body, you will die, it will die. If you say body you will live, it will live. This is why the illusion of things being right or wrong is 100% bullshit delusion, because there is nothing BROKEN about this system. You are giving it instructions unconsciously to produce HELL, and if that's not what you want, you need to program something else.

As explained in the Song of Prayer, you are constantly praying, constantly asking, and constantly receiving what you are asking for. Therefore, learn to pray a higher prayer. Prayer is PROGRAMMING! As Jesus says, prayer is the medium of miracles, because prayer is the act of CHANGING THE SOFTWARE! This also means that in the prayer you do not beg or request or have fear about what you are asking, you CHOOSE the results you would receive with total certainty that the system MUST produce what you have requested, and therefore you believe 100% that you MUST receive it, and YOU SHALL RECEIVE THE MIRACLE!

This also explains why really nothing has gone wrong and nothing is really happening at all. If the computer is just faithfully doing what you TOLD IT TO, nothing has gone wrong, even if what you told it to do (express a world of separation) was a pretty wacky idea for a program. This also shows why you have not gone off the path, plus there is no reason to be afraid that you cannot get back Home, because it is ALWAYS true that you are receiving what you're asking for and you can always choose again. Therefore, by choosing God's "program", you need not produce programs of suffering and death. NOTHING CAN STOP YOU FROM CHOOSING NOT TO PROGRAM DEATH! All death is a choice. All death is suicide.

This is why there is never anything out of place, there are no accidents, nobody dies without their own consent, and nothing happens without you making it happen. You are causal. You cause things. You produce. You direct. It is all extremely specific, 100% specific. Every single thing that seems to happen in illusions is put there on purpose. There are absolutely no victims whatsoever. Every notion of victimization, accidents, right/wrong, good/bad, should have happened or not, things unwanted, events you resist, etc.. it's all an effort by an unconscious programmer to fix the program by fighting with the output, instead of changing the program!

You have dominion over the body and over the Earth. You have power over all sickness and death because you MADE THEM with your programming, and you can UNMAKE them just as easily. If stuff is happening which, when you look at the results, you do not want, then you need to change your programming. You need to erase the instructions that you keep giving (false beliefs, delusions, ego), and replace it with a higher, more orderly program (Holy Spirit's mind, right-mindedness, sanity, truth).

Your body does not have bugs. Your programming of the body has bugs. Your life does not have bugs. Your programming of your life has bugs. You need to go fix your errors, your mistakes in thinking, which are producing exactly the correct output given the input. If you don't like the output, change the input, don't fight with the output like some victim that has no power to choose again.

You cannot keep looking at the output and saying, this output is not supposed to be happening, this output is wrong, this output is not what I asked for. That's a victim, which is a mind who has forgotten that they are the instructor and the INPUT to the system, and they are the ones who are causing the OUTPUT from the system, but they've forgotten that they're doing this. It's like they fed in a program (the script), walked away from the control system/terminal, and looked at the screen to see what results were coming out, saw something crazy coming out, and then having forgotten that they ASKED FOR IT, start freaking out and blaming the problem on 50 billion other reasons why the output is wrong.

The output is ALWAYS CORRECT based on the input, even if its an output of death. So who is really RESPONSIBLE for writing dodgy programs?! You are.

What you put in, you get out. If your mind is feeding input to your body and your life with unloving, unforgiving intentions, then you are going to be writing scripts which are filled with chosen suffering. You're going to be writing scripts, programs, which contain outputs that are unpleasant. You're going to even write scripts which create illusions that you're not the script-writer and that you did not ask for the output. You can even produce outputs which disguise the fact that there was ever a programmer!

So once you start getting SHIT come out of your printer, you probably can tell that shit was fed INTO the printer and you need to correct that. It's not the printer's fault. It's not the body-computer's fault. It's not other people's fault or life's fault or the environments fault or food's fault or anything's fault.

This is just a simple cause-and-effect system. It functions like a computer. There are decisions being made, there are inputs being given to the system, and it is producing exactly the output that was requested. There is not even a single interference with that. There is no corruption on the disk drive, there are no viruses infecting things, it's all running perfectly. EVERY prayer is being answered. EVERY request is being granted. You just keep making stupid-ass requests!

This is why if you really want to change the output, i.e. change the world or the body or any other effects, the ONLY real way to do that is to get back to the mind - to the programmer, get the programmer's mind corrected so they're not writing ridiculous programs, and then feed a new program into the system. A more truthful, orderly program. And this MUST (not sometimes, not maybe, but MUST) produce a corrected OUTPUT in the form of the "symptoms" or "effects" seen as the body. Remember Jesus's principle, "If miracles are not happening, something has gone wrong" - meaning, there is NEVER a wrong output given the input, so if you are not seeing a miracle, YOU CORRECTLY ASKED FOR SOMETHING OTHER THAN WHAT YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE ASKING FOR! And you WILL receive it.

Even in the bible it says that if you ask, and believe that you have received it, you will receive it. This suggests it's possible to not receive if you do not believe enough, which is not true. The correction for this is to realize, YOU MUST and ARE receiving exactly what you actually are asking for, so if it "looks like" you are not receiving what you want, you MUST be the one who is out of touch with what you want, and you're asking for stuff unconsciously that your conscious mind is in denial of.

Attempting to mess with what output you got, or what your body state is, or what your life looks like, from the end of the system that is the output of instructions, you are hitting your head against a wall and are attempting to perform magic. Magic means that you are believing that the output came from a non-obvious source, that the system is broken, and that you need to "patch it up" with some kind of bypass that messes with the output and mangles it to make it look like what you thought should have come out. That, however, does not fix the faulty PROGRAM, or the programmer that's nuts who is writing the faulty program, and so it will likely still keep producing the same output eventually. You can actually remove the effects of "sin" but if the person continues to "sin", i.e. write programs of separation, they will keep reproducing the same effects and symptoms.

A miracle, is simply the mind choosing to cause a different output. Writing a different program. Fixing bugs in its own software. When these changes show up in the output, it's amazing, like someone just rewrote all the rules, all of the old rules were broken, and the design of the whole system has been overridden. We call this miraculous. Some "super-natural" power from outside of the entire "matrix" of the system has just flipped some switches and changed the INPUT, and therefor the output has to fall into line.

Another way this can show up as miracles is that the programmer of the system can decide to rearrange space or time, can insert and remove objects from the scenery, can manipulate any piece of 'data' in the system, can modify absolutely anything in the system, and can convert anything into anything else. These are the powers that Jesus has demonstrated through miracles. He got in touch with the programmer's chair, sat down and started rewriting the programs. Everyone has the freedom to do this, we just have to get back into the chair and write programs from love!

We are not getting anything out of this system that wasn't put in, or that wasn't asked for. The computer is not broken. The hardware is not broken. We have a software problem. We keep writing faulty software. Software is PERCEPTION. The content of spacetime is DATA. Software operates on the data. True perception means seeing the program clearly and being able to do anything to modify it at will, producing different data - a different output.

We need, therefore, to tap into the assistance of a superior software writer, aka Holy Spirit, Jesus, God, who are capable of not only writing or changing portions of our program for us (collapsing time, rearranging space, etc), but can also guide and assist us with "correction" of our programming expressions. Thus we gradually can write a happier dream, leading up to a final climax.

The ultimate release from this whole CLOSED SYSTEM (it's closed because it's all happening inside of God and there are no hidden rules or secret wills and everything is very exact), is when you decide to ERASE ALL PROGRAMS. A complete reboot. A total fresh start. A renewing of everything. Not just a correction of all software bugs, but a complete realignment of the state of the system with God's truth. When this happens, basically the hard drive (body) is erased, the memory (ego) is erased, and all that is left is the hardware.

Then, the only thing running is the operating system - GOD, who has programmed Christ - the perfect program, to produce the perfect output - Heaven.

A Course in Miracles itself is over 550,000 words of deep and dense material. It appears filled with meaning dripping from every word, and seems to talk on many topics. But really the entire thing has very simple origins and a very simple goal.

You simply started off in heaven's reality with God, and then you tried to rebel against his will and put yourself to sleep. You had a strange dream of mortality, and now you're trying to remember what your immortal reality is like again, so that you can wake up. It's no more complex than that.

Jesus even summarizes what the course/atonement is encouraging you to accept, in just 4 words, as "only reality is true." Or similarly "only the truth is true and nothing else is true." Or "I am under no laws but God's."The "truth" is what is "real", what is actual, is the most encompassing and the least interpreted. Just simply, what really exists as given by God. That which is actually happening and its truest actual meaning without distortion or denial.

The whole course is simply saying that you fell into a strange sleep where you appear to be insane and have lost touch with reality. And now he is trying to help you to become sane again. It's funny when after a while he says: "you are no longer WHOLLY insane."

"Not wholly mad, you have been willing to look on much of your insanity, and recognize its madness. Your faith is moving inward, past insanity and on to reason."

"For you are no longer WHOLLY insane, and you WOULD recognize the guilt of SELF-betrayal FOR WHAT IT IS."

But it's worth realizing that words are symbols of symbolic things - dream things. Just as the body is a dream, it symbolizes separation and ego. And the word "body" symbolizes that symbol. And A Course in Miracle as a book of 550,000+ words is filled with symbols.

Symbols always point beyond themselves to something else that they represent. They are not ends in themselves and don't really have their own meaning. They are representatives of a state prior to themselves, from which they express. Just as the body is a symbol and an expression which represents the mind from which it comes.

Jesus teaches that "nothing so blinding as perception of form". And that believing form is real or true is false perception. So when you look at the forms of the words in the course and you take them to be the truth, in and of themselves, based on the form they take, you are in fact blinded by perception of form.

Some people become very enamored with the choice of symbols in the course, the beauty of its seeming artistic poetry, and its mastery of language. But it only appears this way because it came from an origin higher and beyond and prior to itself, who articulated otherwise random symbols into seemingly symbolic arrangements to convey a message.

It's possible to mistake the words in the book for the truth itself, to idolize those words, to put them on a pedestal and think of them as the word of God. It's also possible to then become blinded by them, unable to look deeper or see the meaning on which they are based. Ultimately the purpose of the course is to make itself unnecessary, all of it has to eventually be let go and all of its words overlooked through forgiveness.

There becomes fanatical defense against the words being changed, the preservation of the words, and the attempt to prove logical arguments based on whether or not the words show up in the book. But this is all a false perception of the course, taking an illusion to be reality.

What is really needed, to go deeper, is a forgiveness even of the course itself. What begins as false perceptions of very sophisticated wordings must at some point move past the appearance of its symbols. To mistake a symbol for the thing it symbolizes is a mistake.

If you want to really find out what things mean, where they came from, why those symbols were chosen, or what they are expressions of, then you have to move beyond the words. You have to overlook their form and not get hung up on whether or not something is explicitly written, or whether it's in its original form, or whether it's been edited all to hell.

Jesus expressed A Course in Miracles from a very lofty vantage point, a point in which words mean nothing. He translated his awareness and experience into symbols upon symbols and into sequences of symbols, to try to speak a language that you might understand, or which might at least serve as an in-road towards their origin.

The words in the book are signposts and pointers, aiming in the direction of the truth. But they are not the truth itself. Nor are they even capable of accurately representing that truth, although Jesus has done an exceptional job of being very careful to convey meaning as accurately as possible. But you still have to learn to look past the words if you want to find out what they really mean, otherwise the course is just another idol.

What I personally found is that behind all of the words in the book, there is a deeper metaphysics. There is a logic which is amazingly impeccable and self evident, a living logic. There are natural structures and perfect extensions of truth. That even God is a logical premise with a logical conclusion.

There are reasons for everything being the way it is in reality, and in the ego's realm. Even the separation and the nature of this world are a progression of logical reasoning. The descent into hell was a procession of logical steps leading away from the truth, and all of this can be carefully detailed.

"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."

What you eventually have to do is a total rewind of all learning back to the origin, back to the nature of God and his reality. You have to then look logically and with reason, and very carefully, at how and why God is the way he is. To look at what it means to be absolute, infinite, unlimited, immortal, eternal and so on. There are laws behind all of this.

This is because God is actually the logical premise of all reality. It is his nature which dictates the entire laws that heaven is based upon. He is the truth and the source of all reality. If you understand why he is the way he is, then you can begin to logically reason why everything else must be the way it is. Because everything began with God and everything else followed very precicely.

Even if you completely forget everything you ever learned in ACIM and just start over from the very beginning, with the nature of God's reality, and reason out from there, you will surprisingly find that you'll come to the exact same conclusions that are written in ACIM.

Thats's because everything ACIM is saying is logically perfect. It is completely true. And if it weren't, the logic would be out of alignment with it and show why it is flawed. But it's not flawed, because Jesus is not flawed, and he knew exactly what he was talking about, as he still does.

In fact the entire nature and structure of creation, of all real relationship, including the shared sonship and the laws of heaven, all derive according to very simple and clear logical rules. These rules and their extension can be followed perfectly and make absolutely perfect logical sense. They are completely impeccable and flawless in their clarity that only a fool would argue against them once explained.

When you take these very simple logical foundations and you look at what they mean and imply, and then you take A Course in Miracles and you look at what it says about God's reality and nature, you find that they EXACTLY match in every case. They validate each other. Which means that everything in reality is perfectly logical, is exactly is the way it is, and can only be that way, and cannot be any other way. And that therefore ACIM is in fact based on the real truth.

Looking to these logical foundations, the logic can be expressed in simple words or diagrams, and it can be shown step by step, exactly why God is the way God is, exactly why and how he creates, exactly what must be created and its nature, and why the Kingdom of God operates the way it does. It can all be accurately described, and in far less words than are in ACIM. The basics are quite simple.

When you get all the words out of the way, so to speak, and see the deeper connection or basis for all of it, then you realize that Jesus really is just basing all his expressions on very simple concepts. Seeing past the complexity of the many ways it has been expresed, and not being blinded by its forms is the hard part. And it can take many years to try to find the needles in the haystack.

See, Jesus doesn't really write at the level of the words. It's not like some regular human who is sitting in this world at a typewriter pounding the keys and coming up with an egoic novel about ego stuff. He has written the course from a maximally high level, translating truths into an elegant breakdown of its aspects. How it applies to the world, how it applies to the body, how it applies to relationship etc.

He's done this so that you can be reached wherever your starting point is, and in terms you are familiar with, and using language and references you can understand. But the purpose isn't to leave you there poking around in the dirt and arguing over words, but to raise you up and bring you closer to the origins of the course. To the state of reality Jesus shares, and to its divine truth.

The metaphysics that the course is based on, shows that the course itself is an expression of something higher and deeper. It comes from a source that is very simple and is in touch with reality. Just because a person is putting the same teaching into over half a million words, or even a trillion words, doesn't mean that even more than a few words are needed to convey the whole truth, such as that "God is".

You don't necessarily need all those words. You don't really need to learn every single word form or memorize every quote or only quote from a specific version. In fact if you cannot use reason to determine WHETHER or not something is true and accurate, you are already in a state of not only depending entirely on but being blinded by the words themselves. You're supposed to see the logic behind them.

You don't really have to even read the whole book. It has a holographic nature reflecting the holographic nature of reality, such that the whole truth is in every part, because every part is an expression from the whole truth, given wholly and truthfully. Jesus wrote it all from a single whole truth and all of it expresses a cohesive single message, which you can find on every page.

You do need to fully apply it yes. You need to fully learn the simple truth, the basic nature of your self. You do need to shift allegiance from the forms of error to the unified reality. And you do need to develop trust and learn to relate with actual love and so on. But you don't need hundreds of thousands of words to do that. Maybe at first it seems you do, then later you realize you don't.

What I'm doing in the book I'm working om right now, is stripping away all the words entirely and "starting over" with pure logic. I'm examining what is deeper than all these words. I'm going to present extremely clearly what the real logic of God is and what reality's nature is.

I'll be explaining in simple clear steps exactly how heaven came to be and why it is run by the laws that it is. How creation comes of it and what must be true of you. This can all be arrived at through simple logical steps. Even God's nature can be logically and accurately described, because what you find out is that reality is in fact a living logic system of divine states, with very specific rules.

The aim is to come up with a "reformulation" of the form of the course's teachings, in far fewer words and in much simpler terms. A deep look at the ideas behind its many words. A formulation which still represents the truth with perfect accuracy, but which can be learned very quickly and easily in its more purified form.

Really the metaphysics behind the course is very simple and clear-cut, its not all that complicated once you can see it. But for many people, seeing through the fog of the course's words can be a hurdle in itself. It needs to be laid out in the simplest and clearest way possible, to save time and effort and to provide accuracy and clarity. And it has to bypass the entire realm of "opinion" - the logic has to stand on its own two feet and speak for itself.

That's why I'm making the book that I'm making right now. It will cut through all the noise and all the opinions and all the ego arguments and all the confusion. It goes deeper than debate and countless theories and interpretations that are hung up on word choices.

It's kind of like brushing away all the many forms that have covered over the course's true origins, to reveal what's behind it at all. I hope it will act as a "primer" and easier introduction, especially for those who are newer to the course.

You'll see, once you read it, and as you follow its reasoning, that it is extremely hard to deny what it says, and it is ultra clear in making total sense. I'm deliberately making it so that it is practically impossible to find fault in it. The logical is very flawless, not because I'm "expert" at it but just because reality's laws are themselves flaweless. Such that the true metaphysics of the course will be revealed in the light and seen for what it must be, completely accurately and consistently.

Then the really interesting thing is that, once armed with this tool, a kind of magnifying glass for the course bringing its depths totally into the light, it actually shines a light of clarity onto all that the course says. It helps to frame its meaning, to clarify intentions, to properly identify what Jesus meant in his wordings, and to steer away from common misinterpretations. The logic even helps you to realize things which must be true, which may not even be written in ACIM itself, yet are completely consistent with it.

The book itself actually stands alone in that it comes to the same conclusions as the course through its own process. It doesn't even rely on the course or anything the course says, to make its points. It doesn't need any quotes from the book either. It simply uses clear reasoning to come up with a clear metaphysical foundation.

Then it looks to what the course says to find out IF it agrees. And it happens to validate and agree with everything it says. And both of them reflect each other perfectly because they're based on the same exact truth.

Did you know you're living inside a giant hologram?

(this may take a bit to explain, so bear with me)...

Actually, that's only the half of it. There's a reason why you are inside a hologram, and there's a motive for making it that the ego wants to keep a secret.

The purpose of the physical universe, as a hologram (a holographic dream), is to profoundly obscure awareness of God. The ego has used it to create a way of experiencing which seems to be completely devoid of God. The physical universe was made to literally shut God out and to make it look like He does not exist. And it's done a pretty good job, because we all believe it. And you don't even realize you believe it.

As Jesus says in ACIM: "Nothing so blinding as perception of form".

So, how does this work and how does it obscure God, and why is form (physical matter) blinding? And what's this got to do with holograms?

Ok so bear with me as I try to explain, this is VERY hard to explain because it defies a lot of ego logic, so let me know if I lose you.

First we define what God is like.

God is oneness. God is omnipresent, meaning He exists everywhere. And God is whole and completely equal everywhere. What this means is, if you could think of God as occupying 'space', no matter where you are in that space, God is *exactly* the same there as He is in any other part of it. Over here He is God, over there He is God. No matter where you are in God, it's exactly the same as everywhere else.

It's kind of like if you were to take a road trip inside God you'd be driving for a while and then remark to yourself, you know what, this place looks exactly the same as the place we just came from. Exactly. Then you drive some more and it still looks exactly the same. It's almost like you aren't going anywhere. Ok so God is the same everywhere.

Now there's another part to this. This may be hard to imagine, but ALL of God is in all *parts* of God. (NB: The ego will say this is IMPOSSIBLE!) As you think of God as occupying space, and you're driving in that car to different parts of God, and its all the same, you might still be tempted to believe each 'part' or 'location' in God is actually a DIFFERENT part, but just 'looks' the same. Like, as if the whole landscape is a giant set in a movie and its all painted in white paint. You're accustomed to thinking that the stuff 'over there' is not the same as the stuff 'over here', in some way. Its sort of similar with God.

ALL of the properties of God are everywhere. ALL of the awareness of God is everywhere. ALL of the attention of God is everywhere. So then when you ask yourself, what parts of God are 'here', in this location, the answer is, ALL of Him. And when you then ask yourself, well what parts are over there in that other part, the answer is also - ALL of Him. And what about those parts you were driving through 50 hours ago... ALL of Him was there.

To the ego this would have to mean, well, if all of God is here, then there's no other parts left to be elsewhere, so elsewhere there is no God. But in God's reality, in God's 'universe', somehow God is capable of being fully present in every single part of it at the same time. In this sense its almost as if God is PERSONAL, personal and local to every single part of existence, and yet, simultaneously personal to ALL parts at the same time. (Revelations speak of this intensely personal quality.)

You could kind of think of God as though there are trillions of copies of Himself, which the ego mind might be able to grasp. Except that in God there are no separations. Absolutely all of God's being, all of God's mind, all of God's identity, all of God's wholeness, is SHARED by all parts of existence. And when you try to think of this in terms of what you are USED TO, in the physical world, you can only relate to like a large stretch of land that you call 'The United States', within which there are many different distinct places. But if this land were God, everywhere would be the same and there would only be ONE of anything. Hard to get your mind around!

Now, this is where the ego comes up with a device to shut God out.

As we know, the ego's only tool is "separation". What the ego does, is it tries to take the omnipresent oneness of God and start to make it `look like` God maybe ISN'T the same everywhere, or ISN'T fully present everywhere. The only way it can obscure God, i.e. make it seem like God has gone away, or that God does not exist at all, is to go against the nature of God. So if the nature of God is, all of Him is the same everywhere, the ego's attack will entail the idea that only PART of Him is PARTIALLY present in each location. And this implies that God is riddled with contradictory differences. (The ego is contradictory, God isn't).

So now it's kind of like, you're driving in that car through God and you notice that, some of these hills are starting to take on a different shade of color. There's some slight differences in how things look over here than how they looked back there. At first, the separation isn't strong or well defined. In fact it starts out very subtly with just a 'hint' of differences. Then as you keep driving the intensity of the separation increases, and it really starts to stand out that different parts of God are different in quite noticeable ways.

What's happening at the same time is that the ego is now suggesting, by manipulating your perception, that maybe God is not fully present here. Maybe God has some parts of Himself which are sort of 'tied up' elsewhere, or occupied or busy with something else, so he can only be partially present. And also the ego is suggesting God isn't the same everywhere. The way God is over here is not quite the same as over there, and the over-there parts are somehow distracted from being fully present here.

This is how the holographic dream is born. A hologram is the concept that "the all is in every part" - which is pretty close to the way I described God being if God were a 'space'. i.e. All of God is fully in every part of existence. If you want a primer on holograms or whatever maybe check out The Holographic Universe which is quite an interesting book.

Anyway. Basically, at the early stages of the hologram forming, a lot is still shared and things are still almost-one. But the 'density', if you will, of the hologram, increases by continued ego belief in separation. The ego starts noticing and emphasizing the ways in which different parts of existence seem not to be the same. And as this grows stronger, it starts to seem more and more as though only a small part of God is still present here, because all the `other parts of God` are apparently quite different and have become quite finite and specific, and they're all localized to other parts of existence. So what exists over there maybe does not or cannot exist over here.

As this progresses, in the mind, the hologram 'solidifies' more and more. Or another way to describe it is that, formless reality in which everything is the same everywhere starts to 'descend' into localized properties, differences, separations, divisions, fragmented identities. The more separate and clearly defined these differences become, the more the awareness of God's omnipresence, God's total attention, God's total awareness, and God's equal presence everywhere, APPEARS to be shut out of awareness. If it seems true to you that differences are real, and that you start to look AT those differences and breathe reality into them, then you will become fixated on the ways in which God is NOT THE SAME ANYWHERE.

Not only is God not the same anywhere, but this also has a dire conclusion. If you really strongly believe in the reality of differences, you must start to fixate only on the appearance of what's left. All of the different 'forms' of difference. And those forms of difference is what we call PHYSICAL MATTER. The solidification of wholeness into locality, the contraction and density of 'energy' if you will, is what happens in the 'lower levels' of the hologram. The further into separation and differences you go the more 'solid' everything starts to look, and the less there is any evidence or awareness that God is present, even AT ALL. At a certain point you would be forgiven for even believing that God does not exist AT ALL because ALL you can see are the intense, real-seeming differences of physical matter. The physical universe 'stops' God from being able to be in all places at once, or in all places equally, or in all places fully, replaced with the idea that everything is separate from everything else.

So while holograms start out subtle, or what scientists call 'diffused', the lower levels of the holographic 'dream' are much more divided and separated out and form 'images'. When you see the little images on your credit card which look 3d when you see them from different angles - those are a form of holograms. You see an image, and yet when you look from another angle, you see another image. Its as if ALL of the images are somehow 'in' the one location, SHARED. But on the level of physical matter, you can only ever see ONE of the versions of the image at a time. You can't see the 'all'. You can't see all of the angles of the little dove or whatever it is in the hologram, because it is obscured by the rules of the physical universe.

So when the Course is saying, nothing so blinding as perception of form, what it's saying is, physical matter is a very dense level of a holographic interpretation of God, which has the effect of completely obscuring any trace of oneness or all-ness, so that you fixate on only one version of one image, in which it seems like NOTHING is shared and therefore there is no God. 'Sharing' is the same as 'Oneness' so if there is no sharing (co-existing in the same space) then God doesn't exist.

In the physical world, an object does not seem to have anything shared with another object. There is no sense of there being any unity between them. There is nothing 'the same' that is exactly the same in both. This defies the property of God that all of him is everywhere. And then because the stuff that is `in` one object is NOT the stuff that is `in` another object, defies the property of God that all of his same properties are in all objects at the same time. So if you look at that matter and you BELIEVE the illusion that it is trying to SHOW you, its statement of 'what is', you will be blinded from seeing God.

Physical matter LITERALLY was made by the ego to make the properties of God totally obscured and distracted away from. If you believe physical matter does not share anything, you do not have awareness of God. It blinds you. If you do not believe that physical matter contains all of something which is also fully present in other parts of matter, you are blinded to God. Matter, in all its forms, is a giant blanket of the 'undoing' of God's reality, God's omnipresence. It is a physicalization of the idea of separation, but even moreso, the idea that God's law-defying everywhereness is NOT what existence is like, and therefore God does not exist.

It is designed SPECIFICALLY to shut out the awareness of God's presence so that, IF your mind is aligned with it and IF your mind functions according to the 'laws of matter' then you WILL NOT SEE GOD. If you SEE MATTER, you do not see God. Not fully. If you do not see PAST matter, you do not see God. If you fixate ON or look AT matter, you will not see God. Your mind needs to become able to OVERLOOK (forgive) the ILLUSIONS that are presented to you BY MATTER ITSELF.

This isn't just a matter of fixing your mind and staying in the world and not seeing God. Your mind needs to go back `up` the hologram to the point of Oneness, eventually, so that your awareness is able to discern that a) God is fully present, b) All of God is here, c) All of God is everywhere, and d) All of God is the same everywhere. If you believe that MATTER IS REAL or MATTER IS TRUE, then you cannot be aware of God. If the form of matter dictates how your mind perceives or you believe in its ILLUSION, you cannot see God. Matter is BLINDING. That is its function. And it will never have another function until it is undone.

What the ego in your mind does, is it looks at matter and uses it as a 'model' for what is true about your mind and what is true in your perception. Its illusion infuses into your mind and you take it at its word and consider it 'reality'. You buy into its illusion, its way of obscuring God, and its statements of the ways in which God is not here, God is not everywhere, God is not ALL in ALL. That is matter's message. That is the 'state of existence' of the physical universe, designed solely to shut God out - IF you believe it is real.

This also leads to another way to say, the physical universe is just a holographic dream, and it is just an illusion designed to obscure God, and NEVER will it be Heaven (because heaven is formless), and THE WORLD IS NOT REAL. Matter is not real. Separate forms are not real. Bodies are not real. Planets are not real. Physical matter is AN ILLUSION AND NOTHING ELSE. It is the illusion that God is dead and can never be real.

These are all ways of expressing the idea that God is not God, and that can never be true. And this is why eventually the physical universe WILL DISAPPEAR.

I have no idea if I explained this well or conveyed what I wanted to. I had a profound experience a few years ago which SHOWED me an EXPERIENCE of this - I experienced what it was like to go up the hologram in my mind, back toward Oneness, and how this allowed me to be AWARE of God's presence - all of His presence in every part of the dream, and how this totally defied what 'form' was trying to telling me was the truth of existence. So I speak from experience, but these things really defy the ego's logic so it's very hard to put into words. Let me know if I need to clarify something.

All is not as it seems in this world. The physical world ITSELF IS the 'form' of the egos attack on God, and IS its defense. You think you only have defenses in your mind inside your body. But the physical universe as a whole is a giant defense mechanism - IN the larger mind of the Son of God. You're literally looking at the MIND of the Son of God attempting to shut God out. That's what this world is.

Sorry this is a bit longish... it's hard to explain.

The physical world is a holographic dream. But the way that it is holographic isn't very obvious. And most people do not believe it is a dream!

Firstly, a hologram is not a projected 3D image. It is not the hollywoodized concept of an artificial three-dimensional object projected in space that you can view from any angle. That very loosely is tied to the idea of a hologram and they just ran with it and turned it into a marketing exercise.

Holograms have some interesting properties which describe the way that this world is put together, and the reason why it is a dream.

You will see a hologram on most credit cards. It's the little shiny symbol in the corner which, if you look at it from different angles, appears to let you see a virtual object suspended in space. You actually seem to be able to look at it from different angles, even though it's a flat image. They use this on cards because they are hard to manufacture, requiring precise laser technology, so this offers a certain level of protection against fraudulent cards.

The idea of a hologram is that information about the whole of something is present in all of the parts. On your credit card, information about the image of an object as viewed from countless different angles, is embedded into each tiny particle of the image. It's as though there were thousands of cameras recording images of the object from different angles, and then all of these images were overlaid on top of each other. Therefore each part of the image contains a ton of information, much more than just one particle of image.

One way to produce a hologram like this is to create tiny 3-dimensional bumps which you project different images onto from a specific direction. When your viewing angle changes, you see a different side of the bumps thus forming a different image. That's a very loose approximation of how a hologram works.

One of the properties of a hologram, therefore, is that if you remove a physical portion of the holographic image, it does not lose a specific portion of the information stored in it. That's because the same information is present in all of the other parts of the image. It's like storing the same piece of data a thousand times scattered across the surface. Chopping off a part of the object does not lose information stored in that part, it only reduces the overall sum total of occurrences of the information.

In the book, The Holographic Universe, it was described for example that a person had a portion of their brain removed. It was believed by science that certain memories were stored in that part of the brain, and that removing it would definitely produce a memory loss. However, afterwards, the person still could recall the memory, it was just a little fuzzy. That's because the memory was actually stored throughout the brain in a holographic manner, meaning that "all" of the memory was stored in "every part" of the brain. Removing one part of the brain did not remove a specific portion of the memory. The memory could still be recalled and reassembled because all of it was stored in all parts. Just with a little less clarity. The brain is holographic.

So in a hologram, each specific part of an object isn't JUST that part of the object, it is also connected to and shares information with all of the other parts. This is also similar to the scientific theory that matter is energy which exists as a kind of field of potentiality, which, when you look at it with consciousness, it condenses the field into a tight point and shows up as a particle. The particle then seems to be the only part visible so you think that that's all there is to it, but the particle actually is still intimately connected to and extends into the field. Thus there is an extension beyond the form of matter.

Another word that describes this extension beyond the form, and the idea that the part contains the whole, is a "symbol". Symbols are representations of something greater beyond themselves. They are not the thing, but they're sort of a condensed representation of the core qualities of the thing. They allude to something beyond themselves, and they point in the direction of the whole of the thing they represent. They don't show up as the thing in its entirety, only as a small image which "symbolizes" the thing. And what is it that we know of that are built from symbols? Dreams.

Now, the reason that we can't usually tell this physical universe is a holographic dream, is because as much evidence as possible that each part (particle) is connected to the "all" has been squeezed out. The matter that shows up, as form and objects and bodies and worlds, are symbols representing energies that are far bigger than the objects themselves, and which connect the objects together. In other words, there is a lot of SHARING going on behind the scenes, but by the time the energy field coalesces into tight concentrations - as matter - you only see the concentrations ie forms, and you don't realize that these forms are symbolic of something more beyond them. You fixate on the form of what is visible and think that this is all there is, as though the symbol is not really a symbol but is actually the whole 'thing' in completeness.

So at the most extremely spread out end of the hologram, which is the physical universe, it APPEARS that there is no sharing. Particles do not seem to share the same space. They do not seem to be connected. Everything seems to be separated out. Objects do not really touch each other, but are held at a distance by forces. And so this makes us believe that each object does not share anything with other objects, particularly if you fixate on the object's form and appearance. This is an ILLUSION. It's an illusion composed of SYMBOLS, which you have interpreted incorrectly to be NOT symbolic, and instead see only the condensed form of the hologram, which makes you think that physical matter is entirely fixed and is showing you all of what exists.

This illusion, then, that matter is all separate and that there is no sharing going on, deceives you to believe this world is not a hologram, because you don't SEE the ways that the particles are joined together, or joined to the whole. You also don't see the ways that the whole is present in every part. You don't recognize, and your body can't show you, that this so-called reality is actually just a SYMBOLIC collection of temporary images, not a final end-state in its own right but a place that points beyond itself.

Just as your dreams at night are highly symbolic, so too the physical world is completely symbolic. There are established massive symbols in this world which represent all kinds of aspects of the separation idea. For example, outer space, empty and black and cold, symbolizes the unconscious mind, whereby instead of there being light everywhere, light is denied and reduced to tiny concentrations - which you call stars, which are symbols of the ego and the conscious mind as separated selves. If you go into it, there area many many symbols in this world representing the structure of the ego and its interpretation of the truth. The body is a symbol of the idea of separation from the whole environment, for example. It is not just a form and a finite thing in its own right, it REPRESENTS the idea in the mind that you are separate from the whole. It is a symbol with a hidden background.

Most people do not think they are inside a dream. They think that there are no symbols anywhere. Yet they might loosely say from time to that that something seems symbolic. When you have synchronicities and things seem to correlate and be "connected", that's you starting to realize and tap into the hologram, into the field of energy, which is diffused beyond just physical appearances. You're sensing and noticing that, uncannily, two seemingly separate symbols are actually related. ie you start to realize that there is something CONNECTING things together in a semi-meaningful way (synchronicity is "meaningful coincidence"), and coincidence means co-incidence, ie two things correlating, because they share a holographic background.

Dreams at night occur at what you could call a higher level of the hologram. As such, in a night dream, the seemingly concrete, fixed quality of matter is not as "dense" as in the physical universe. Therefore the reality of the dreams are much more highly and obviously symbolic, not just that the objects and events in them symbolize things you experienced in the daytime or whatever, but that they actually represent things. Dream interpretation isn't just an attempt to derive meaning from something that has no meaning, it is actually based on the fact that dreams are entirely composed of SYMBOLS, and those symbols are the structure of "dream reality" because dream reality is holographic, objects and events are representations and not things in their own right, and everything is joined together beyond just the appearance of its form.

Sometimes you will notice that you have dreams which are far more symbolic than others. Sometimes you'll have a dream where it seems effortless for objects to transform bizarrely into other objects. I remember having a dream where I walked out the front door and there was like a dog barking and something changed in my mind and the dog turned into a small child and started to talk to me and then something else happened and the child turned into an adult. This is possible because in these dreams, the "form" or the fixed condensed material quality of the reality experience, the holographic reality, is not as dense and not as concrete. Abstract weird stuff happens.

It's much easier at that level, where matter has not concentrated so tightly, for forms to SHIFT and change quite naturally and normally. Forms that shift and change, by the way, is the foundation of all "life forms" that GROW and change over time, demonstrating that their reality is not actually fully fixed. And symbols can more easily transition into other symbols at the deeper level of the abstract hologram. The very form of objects can convert into other objects, as symbols shift around.

I also had a dream once which explicitly explained to me the holographic nature of dreams. In this dream I stood on a small bridge. There was nothing else in the scene. Then around me in all directions were apparently images, but each of these images was a symbol. It wasn't that I took the appearance of the image at face value, but instead, I recognized that the images were symbolic and therefore they "led" to something that they REPRESENTED. I could literally FEEL and sense that these symbolic images were not only connected to "other realities", but that the way the image was showing up wasn't "the whole" of what existed. It was just one finite expression of what it represented.

So it was possible to actually sort of "go into" the image, into the symbol, which caused it to expand as I moved closer to the environment that the symbol represented. I was able to travel through holograms this way. And it was then possible to take some other part of the environment, and go into it in similar fashion, upon which it would also expand out or elaborate into an entire scene based on that chosen focus. This showed me that the dream reality is highly holographic and fluid and symbolic and that everything is connected together behind the appearance of the symbols.

The physical world is less obviously symbolic and holographic because it is more DENSE, and that means the shared energy field - the all - has been very strongly broken out, to create the ILLUSION that each part barely has any trace of a connection to any other part. The extreme of separation is so strong between parts that you would be forgiven for being convinced not only that each object is not a symbol at all, but that there is nothing "beyond" the form of each object, nothing is shared, nothing is connected, and there is no reality beyond appearances. This is the lowest "level" of the hologram, where the unfied field, the shared symbolic nature of this dream, has become so cemented and "physicalized" that it barely seems possible to you that it is a dream at all. So extreme is the degree of concentration and contraction o the energy here, that it's almost undetectable to sense or tell that everything is joined.

That is, perhaps, unless you are an "empath", which is someone whose mind is able to sense where the symbols lead, and can expand upon what lies beyond them as though tuning into the hologram's symbolism and travelling in Spirit to its source. This is also why empaths are able to actually tune into "real people" that show up on television recordings or in movies, because even though the recording was done in the past, there is STILL a symbolic holographic connection between that IMAGE and the actually thing it represents. The mind can go into that image and sense and explore things about what the image shows, navigating through the symbolic hologram.

This highly obscuring, difficult to discern, God-blocking, reality covering, immense illusory dream, which seems to have solidified into a consistent solid world, is precisely what you wanted! This is why you used a holographic dream to create a world of separation, an illusion, where the illusion IS that the world is NOT symbolic, it is NOT a dream, and it APPEARS to be solid and real with everything separate.

We've pushed the hologram to the limits of physical density, causing particles to remain very fixed-seeming in their arrangements, which has created the ILLUSION of a place of form where consistency is very very sustained over long period of time. Objects don't apparently change into other objects, and you as a limited mind do not SEEM to have hardly a trace of power to change objects into other objects, because they're being held in a physicalized state very strongly, unlike the conditions in a nighttime dream which is much more maleable. Unless you're Jesus ;-) Events mostly do not seem to be symbolic. Bodies seem to function based on non-holographic laws. And nothing seems to be connected to a greater whole.

Then you are left only with the appearance of the physical matter, you make up laws about it based on its behavior, and then you justify that your science is correct based on its illusion of consistency, and have moved into the "linear" perspective. But the truth is lateral, vertical, because if you move out of the physicalized EFFECT and back towards the abstract CAUSE, you become able to modify the physicalization of matter to take on a different form. And this would be considered miraculous.

This therefore shuts out the idea of GOD, which is a reality where everything is shared. This is because the world was made as a defense against God and as a way to OBSCURE the truth that God is omnipresent, that ALL of Him is fully present in all parts. In physical matter, this could not be more obscured as an illusion that the all is NOT in ANY part, and therefore that the all does not exist. That was the PURPOSE of the physical world. To hide God from awareness.

So just because you think this world is an objective, verbatim kind of reality, it's not. It's a holographic dream. And sometimes this holographic dream actually does shift and change in symbolic ways that defy all logic and scientific explanation. Quite literally, sometimes, people report cases where an entire building which did not exist the day before, suddenly materializes in a known location that simply was not there. Somehow, it simply shows up in the dream hologram because of some kind of shift in the energy focus.

Also quantum physics is starting to reveal how objects at a distance can share the same reality - that a particle of light can be in two places at once, and that changes to the particle in one location AUTOMATICALLY changes the particle in the other location with NO TIME DELAY. This is "physically" impossible, in terms of a fixed dense world of form and matter, but in terms of holographic dreams, it is TOTALLY NORMAL! In fact, that this isn't happening more often is very abnormal, and shows you the extent to which we have designed this "world" (which is nothing more than an illusory dream) to APPEAR to be very fixed and separated.

In higher, more symbolic night dreams, it's possible to do things to bend reality, modify objects, transcend physical laws, transform one thing into another etc... all quite naturally, because that's what's possible when you know that everything is ONE, and everything is joined together. Form, matter, objects and appearances, including bodies and worlds, are nothing more than SYMBOLS, and those symbols can easily shift and change "form".

Having mastery over this dream illusion gives you the ability and mastery to defy all of the so-called "physical" laws, which are merely laws based on visible concentrations of the one field, and to do things like walking on water, changing objects into other objects, disappearing sickness, reversing death, etc. The miracles Jesus demonstrated merely shows us that this dream is a holographic illusion which is completely malleable, its form is nothing more than a temporary expression of an idea, and everything can be modified.

This world isn't real. It is a dream. It's an illusion of a world. It's a temporary concentration of an idea of separation, an idea that "the all" does not exist, and the idea that nothing is shared. It takes the form of a hologram which goes from a state where everything is one, to a state where nothing is one, and every level in between. The all IS in every part, because every part is not the WHOLE, it's just a portion of the whole. You are not seeing the whole picture! And if you believe solely based on "appearances" that physical matter is all that there is, you are completely falling for the holographic illusion that nothing is connected.

Everything is connected. All is One. At at the very peak of the hologram, everything is shared everywhere. God is omnipresent. All of God is in all parts fully, and this completely defies all physical laws. The physical laws do not apply to MIRACLES because miracles are expressions of the abstract source of the hologram, from the field of mind and energy which transcends particles and concentrations of matter, and which all of the symbols POINT TO.

So yes, you're dreaming. You're inside a symbolic dream right now, right where you are, as you read this, with your holographic dream body. All is not what it seems. There is reality beyond this apparent world, and appearances are not reality. Thus there is no real world here. At most, this world is a SYMBOL, and not a finite concrete objective wholeness. And yet even as a symbol it is just a symbol in a dream, and this dream is not real, because DREAMS ARE NOT REAL. That is why there is no real world here, no real death, and no real sickness or suffering.

We are meant to wake up from the entire holographic projection and return to the abstract source of truth where ALL IS ONE.

(this will be a fairly long post, so please bare with me)

The ego thought system is based on separation. Separation resulted in space and time. In space, spatial relations are HOW the ego thinks. The physical universe IS its thought system.

This includes physical objects, which are separated out, where an object is EITHER HERE OR THERE, (but not in both places). This is a "natural" ego thought process. One thing seems to exist in one location only and not all locations. One thing is NOT something else, and all things are DIFFERENT, separate, and kept apart.

The entire physical universe is arranged according to this WAY that the ego thinks. It regards the entire thing as structured by SEPARATIONS. One object versus another. One location versus another. And then it draws comparisons, and has reasoning, and finds conclusions, based WITHIN the framework of separation.

So you, in your ego thought processes, then start to THINK this way. You think in terms of EITHER THIS OR THAT. And this seems to make SENSE to you because it maps directly to how the world is arranged. It then becomes "second nature" to think of anything in the world in SEPARATE terms.

For example, I parked my car in the first spot, not the second. I ordered the fries instead of the onion rings. My car is red, not blue. This is my body, not your body. Earth is not Mars. etc.

Our whole WAY of thinking runs according to these rules, based on SEPARATING things out, sectioning them off, isolating them, keeping them APART, emphasizing their differences, and locking them up in little prison boxes. And we think this is a natural way to think, to relate, to communicate, to reason.

Then we go about USING this way of thinking, to think about EVERYTHING. Not just to think about things which ARE based on a thought system of separation, but even to think about things which are completely BEYOND the ego thought system.

"It is the part that believes your existence means you are SEPARATE. Everything the ego perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships (sharing) that imply BEING."

This may not seem to present any problems when you use SEPARATION-BASED reasoning to discuss the things of space and time, but it COMPLETELY misses the mark when you think this way about heaven, God, creation, sonships, sons, souls, etc.

The Kingdom of God is a thought system, and God similarly has a WAY of thinking. His WAY of thinking is NOT based in the idea of separation. It is NOT based on the limitations of space or time or spatial relations. It does NOT separate things off, make them different, put them in SEPARATE BOXES, or keep them apart.

God's thought system/reality also does not demand that something HAS to be separate from something else. It does not require something to be EXCLUSIVE to one box and not another. Nor does it assert that everything that exists MUST be partitioned off into EITHER one state OR another. God simply does not THINK in terms of "either this or that".

God's mind, his creation, his way of THINKING, is actually based on a totally different kind of reasoning. This reasoning is INCLUSIVE, rather than exclusive. It also completely embraces the idea of SHARING. The ego's thought system completely blots out ALL suggestions of sharing, overlap, simultaneity, unity or oneness.

In God's system, it is NATURAL for there to be one thing, which SHARES all of itself with another. It is natural for one thing to GIVE all of itself and STILL RETAIN all of itself without loss. It is natural for TWO things to BE one thing. It is natural for one thing to be in ALL locations simultaneously. It is natural for one thing to be in one box, AND in another box, at the same time. It is natural for something to SPAN and TRANSCEND separations.

The Golden Rule, the law of God and of equality, simply states that what is true of one thing is true of another. Whatever is true of God is true of His Sons. Whatever is true or me is true of you. This is equality. God treats all his creations the same way. The Golden Rule reflects this, because it is a rule based on INCLUSION. We are both included in the same truth. The ego however is COMPLETELY AGAINST sharing and inclusion. And so is this world.

In reality, God THINKS in a holographic way. In a hologram, the whole is in every part, and every part is a whole in its own right, and every part shares the entirety of the whole with the whole. ACIM confirms that this is the way by which God thinks, and NOT through a process of separation:

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

This means for example that GOD IS WHOLE, being infinite. And God as a creator therefore extends and creates ANOTHER WHOLE. His Son, is a WHOLE SON. A full creation. As described here:

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

"There can BE no disinherited parts of the Sonship, for God is whole, and all his extensions are like Him."

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

However, for God to BE whole, and to CREATE wholly, and thus to create another WHOLE.... becomes TOTAL NONSENSE to the way that the EGO thinks. And if you think in the same separation-based way that the ego thinks, this FACT registers to you as total nonsense. You will reason, "how can it be possible that there are TWO wholes, that makes no sense!". It makes no sense to a thought system of separation, yes. But God's reality is NOT based on that kind of system. God is not limited by separation or spacetime.

In order to recognize AND accept, that God's mind and creation DO NOT follow the ego's rules, and that God does not THINK or create like the ego would, and God's Kingdom is NOT spatially separated out like the physical world is, you will have to become willing to think massively outside the box. You CANNOT use separation-based logical reasoning to evaluate the truths or falseties of reality.

Let's look at what happens when you try to shove God into a box-based thought system. God for example gives ALL of Himself when he creates. His Son inherits EVERYTHING. But... if you are thinking with the ego, you SHOULD conclude that by God giving all of Himself AWAY, there SHOULD be nothing left. Thus God should snuff out of existence and only His Son should remain. This is LOGICAL to the ego because the ego believes in SACRIFICE AND LOSS, which is inherent to a box-based world. But it is complete nonsense.

Similarly, you could suggest that if God gives EVERYTHING to ONE SON, there is NOTHING LEFT to give to another Son. This is how the ego would think in finite terms. However, God has ALL of Himself left to give again to ANOTHER son, and another, and another, without any reduction at all in Himself. And this is how the Kingdom INCREASES. And by giving ALL of himself away, reality is increased. As stated here:

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

"To have all, give all to all."

You can see that if you think in exclusive, separating terms, you WILL come to FALSE conclusions about what's happening in reality. You'll conclude that if I have everything, you have nothing. But in reality, as Jesus describes in ACIM, me having everything DOES NOT prevent you from having everything also. How is it possible that we BOTH simultaneously have everything? Because we SHARE IT. And this sharing does NOT mean compromise or that we each only get half.

Sharing is the way by which God's Kingdom INCREASES. Because if it weren't for the ability to share, there would be no logical way for God to ever create anything more than just God, because he is already unlimited and everywhere. As this states:

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

If SHARING, INCLUSION, BOTH/AND is the natural thought SYSTEM of Heaven's reality, and it follows that thought PROCESS when it reasons anything, then SELFISHNESS, EXCLUSION, EITHER/OR, SEPARATION is the natural thought system of spacetime. And they are TOTALLY opposite. They are opposite because "this not that" is a direct reflection of the separation idea of "ego not God" or "death not life" or "non-existence not existence." The ego thought system is the NEGATION of reality.

If God creates two sons, who are brothers, and both are whole beings who have and share everything, co-creating with God, and then we look at this fact WITH THE EGO, we will see false conclusions. For example we'll say that there can't BE two sons. Or that if there are two sons, that's "duality", because now the two sons are KEPT APART in separate boxes meaning duality.

But this is not how it works at all. The fact that there are two, WHO SHARE, violates the boundaries of those boxes. One son is IN the other son and vice versa because they share everything. So there are two sons, who are ALSO each other.

"One brother is all brothers. One mind is all minds. Such is the truth."This also extends to the relationship you have with God. Those who think LIKE the ego, will reason that EITHER.... God is all there is, OR there is a separation. Or similarly, EITHER God and I are one thing, OR we are two things. Or that, if you get rid of all separations, you will end up with oneness.

There is a major flaw in that reasoning. The ego first establishes that you MUST think in a separating way, in which there is duality, and all things are kept apart. THEN it has you DESTROY all of the other parts except for one of them, by getting rid of the idea of separations between the parts. But it will not have you get rid of the ego thought process. Then it concludes falsely, that when you remove the separations, you end up with ONE THING. And this one thing is thought to mean "oneness", or to represent God.

This however is a false conclusion, because now "separate boxes" have been mapped onto God, and God has been shoved into a separate box, all by himself, and there is no creation and no sonship and NO SHARING. And the ego rejoices that it has imprisoned God this way, in the name of freedom.

When you look at what ACIM says, Jesus DOES NOT say that God is alone, or that he is separated off from creation, or that he has no creations. Instead it tells you in fact that God has a huge family and is simultaneously one with them. And that His oneness DOES NOT ERASE their manyness.

"Heaven is the sum of all God's thoughts, in number infinite."

"We are the Kingdom, WE, the Sons of God."

"The Kingdom of God includes all His Children and their creations."

This does not mean the Kingdom is duality or that it contains separate boxes. It means it contains overlapping shared beings who ALL have everything and ARE everything, seemingly as OPEN boxes who are not in any way confined, yet are still many things. HOW that's possible, is due to heaven's miraculous nature.

Ego thought processes do not allow this to be true. Nor does ego thinking allow it to be possible that when you are "one with God", you still have an individual self. EGOS then become AVERSE to any notion of individuality, which is self destructive, which the ego loves. You being one with God, DOES NOT ERASE your individuality.

"This appears to contradict another statement: "I and my Father are one." It doesn't. There are still separate parts in the statement, in recognition of the fact that the Father is GREATER. Actually, the original statement was "are of one KIND."

There ARE STILL "separate parts" in the statement, AND in some ways God is NOT totally like His sons, in terms of function or role. Meaning, YOU still exist as a distinct entity, AND God exists as a distinct entity. And what you SHARE between you, is your oneness with each other, AS TWO BEINGS. That is what ACIM teaches. And its definition of oneness is not "one thing being alone", it is EQUALITY. Being of THE SAME KIND. And an equality which is more than just two separate boxes next to each other - an equality where you SPAN the boxes.

Similarly, the ego will falsely conclude that if God and His Son are TWO things, this is duality. It is not, because we're again jumping the gun and projecting separate boxes onto heaven. Just because they are TWO, does NOT mean they do not share, and does NOT mean there is no unity. The Father and the Son are one, but there is still a Father and a Son. Just as WE will ALWAYS be brothers even in heaven.

In fact, the way by which God is everything, AND YET, His children are also FULLY created beings, who are also everything, is the course's definition of MIRACULOUSNESS. This miraculousness is completely alien to the ego thought system and all separation-based reasoning. The ego has NO CLUE, how it is possible, that God could have even created ANYTHING, yet alone multiple beings who somehow have been added-on to an already infinite reality. Nevertheless:

"MIRACULOUS CREATION was his own Source, and also his own real function.""Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human (ego) thinking"

"Miraculousness", is the nature of God's reality. UN-miraculousness is the nature of spacetime. Everything in God's MIND and reality is permanently miraculous. It is miraculous because it makes possible what the ego says is IMPOSSIBLE. Just as the ego is the idea of impossibility.

For one soul to be a whole being, that shares everything with another whole being, as brothers, and with God, without a loss of self or individuality, and without ceasing to be "separate", and without being CONFINED to separate boxes, is miraculous.

This miraculousness is also reflected in THE MIRACLE. And in true perception. And in learning to THINK LIKE GOD, which the course asks you to do. In order to think like God, you have to TRANSCEND the "separating off and putting in boxes" nature of the ego and its thoughts. And that includes thinking of souls as separate bodies.

This entails overlooking separations and seeing unity beyond it. It requires you to not be blinded by perception of form, because form is anchored in separation. Your whole perception has to become similar to heaven's reality, which breaks all the ego laws. And this is also why miracles break all the laws of space and time AND of ego reasoning.

Becoming able to THINK LIKE GOD, requires you to align with the truth of the Golden Rule, in holy relationship, where what is true of you is true of all others. Where differences are completely ignored. Where no-one is IMPRISONED in a box. And where your whole way of REASONING is LIKE God's.... that is, based on "paralogical reasoning" - or AND/BOTH reasoning, rather than either/or.

We could say, THE ENTIRE COURSE is geared towards developing this BOTH/AND kind of perception, thought and experience, for all students. We are supposed to stop thinking with the ego, OR LIKE the ego. And we are supposed to learn that we are undo no laws but God's, and HIS laws are NOT laws of separation, exclusion, spatial relations, or limitations.

In order to fully grasp ANYTHING that ACIM says about the pre-separation state, God, the Kingdom, oneness, sonship, sons, souls, creation, extension, holy spirit, etc..... any of that non-ego stuff, you CANNOT USE the ego-based reasoning method. If you do, you will fail. Guaranteed. And you will see truth that is false, and what is really true will appear false to you. That's how BACKWARDS the ego thought system is.

Any conclusions you come to about God or oneness etc, if it's rooted in "either this or that", IS WRONG. Guaranteed 100%. Only when you start to think in terms of BOTH.... me AND you.... WE.... only then do you start to approach the NATURAL way of thinking like God, which is a miraculous state of mind. And ONLY by thinking that way will you understand and grasp the metaphysical facts of God's nature.

Non-duality for example is complete bullshit. It is bullshit because it is the result of an EGO thought process. The ego reasons, well, I believe all things are separate, so if we attack all the parts and end up with one victor, this ONE THING that's leftover, which is practically nothing, but is a single thing, symbolizes God. Because to the ego "less separation" is equated with spirituality or simplicity. So it will then map this "one thing" idea of oneness onto God and claim God is one thing - that there is NOTHING ELSE other than God. That God is SEPARATED OFF. That is NOT what ACIM teaches at all!

God is not only a creator and a father, God has a HUGE family of whole beings, all of whom are co-creators with each other. You and your brother co-create your creations. You and God and your brother co-create together. Even the holy spirit is a co-creator. And we all have this HUGE family of created beings in heaven. This is utterly incompatible with both the traditional idea of "oneness" and the idea of "non-duality".

And ALL of those beings are of ONE KIND, and SHARE EVERYTHING, and yet ARE SIMULTANEOUSLY MANY. Because that is HOW GOD THINKS. A holographic thought system in which the whole has created many parts and each part shares the whole with the whole of the rest. That is what ACIM says! And in order to INCLUDE all of what ACIM says, WITHOUT EXCLUDING any material or any factual statements, you will ONLY be able to accept ALL of what it says if you think in a non-separating way.

As soon as you get the simple idea that heaven's reality is based on BOTH/AND, rather than either/or, it will all fit into place and become clear. Because everything real is based on a both/and system of reason and thought processes. Creation ITSELF is based on sharing between two. God SHARES HIMSELF, in order to create, and He does not will to be alone. The natural logical outcome of that is that WE, as many permanent brothers, in the sonship which God DIRECTLY created, are all "one" (equal/sharing) because we share everything.

If this does not make sense to you, it is because you are thinking with the ego. If it seems like nonsense, it is because the ego is projecting its separation ideals onto it. If you cannot follow it, either I explained it poorly or you can't get past your ego thinking. But either way, God's entire reality is NOT LIKE EARTH, and you have to learn to RADICALLY think WAAAAAAY outside the realm of boxes if you want to recognize its true nature. Heaven is not spacetime!

"Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way."

This is more than just another way to think or use the intellect. This ties into how you should PERCEIVE, how you experience the real world, how you tune into the miraculous state of mind, the nature of the miracle and the atonement, all holy relationships, living by the golden rule, holy spirit's thought system etc.. It's all based on heaven's nature which is NOT based on a world of separate boxes.

"The separation IS the notion of rejection. As long as you teach this, YOU still believe it. This is NOT as God thinks, and you must think as He thinks if you are to know Him again. Any split in will MUST involve a rejection of part of it, and this IS the belief in separation."

"Exclusion and separation are synonymous."

"Can you who see yourselves WITHIN a body, know yourself AS AN IDEA? Everything you recognize you identify by EXTERNALS, something OUTSIDE itself. You cannot even think of GOD without a body, or some form you think you recognize."

"To you the miracle cannot seem natural, because what you have done to hurt your mind has made it so unnatural that it does not remember what is natural to it. 2 And when you are told what is natural, you cannot understand it. 3 The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part is perfectly natural, for it is the way God thinks, and what is natural to Him is natural to you. 4 Wholly natural perception would show you instantly that order of difficulty in miracles is quite impossible, for it involves a contradiction of what miracles mean. 5 And if you could understand their meaning, their attributes could hardly cause you perplexity."

"God's miracles are as total as His Thought, because they ARE His thoughts. God shines in them all with perfect light. If they recognize this light anywhere, they know it universally. "

"For you cannot understand Wholeness unless YOU are whole, and no part of the Son can be excluded,"

"the whole Kingdom as literally PART OF YOU."

"For in your part lies ALL of it, without which is no part complete, nor is the whole"

"One brother is all brothers. One mind is all minds. Such is the truth.""If they are deprived, their perception becomes distorted. When this occurs, the whole family of God, or the Sonship, is impaired in its relationships.""Though every aspect IS the whole, you cannot KNOW this, until you SEE that every aspect IS THE SAME, perceived in the SAME light, and THEREFORE one. "