"The world you see (with ANY kind of perception) is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death."

This is talking about THIS world, Earth, its physical nature, its inherent cruelty. Jesus goes on to say something which COMPLETELY bypasses any idea of having thoughts ABOUT the world, it being merely an emotional statement, or something to do with perceptual states...

"***Children are born into it*** through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. ***Their minds are trapped in their brain***, and its power declines if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And ***their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground***, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel. "

"If this were the real world, God WOULD be cruel. For no father could subject his children to this as the price of salvation, and be loving."

Notice here the profoundly obvious references to things happening on a PHYSICAL level, within an environment He is referring to as "the world". He isn't speaking in metaphors or poetry or internal interpretative states. He's referring to this PLANET.

He mentions children being born "into it". This has absolutely nothing to do with your perception or attitude about the world. He's talking about child birth. The PHYSICAL birthing of human babies.

He mentions minds being trapped in brains. This CLEARLY distinguishes that the MIND, which might be the realm where you claim to have an attitude "about the world", is completely distinct from "the brain". And I think we all know that the brain is NOT a reference to an ATTITUDE. It's talking of the physical blob of brain tissue in the physical head of the physical body. And these bodies, which house these brains, are part of the physical world that is being referred to as THE WORLD THAT IS CRUEL.

Further He mentions about how the bodies become frail, wither, suffer and die, and are laid in the ground. Unless you have a graveyard IN YOUR HEAD, this is again a direct reference to MULTIPLE bodies (not just yours) being laid in the PHYSICAL SOIL of the ground. As an aspect of this WORLD that he is making reference to as CRUEL.

All of these references are clearly speaking of a world, the PHYSICAL world, where children are born through human child birth, people's minds seem trapped in their physical human brains, and their physical bodies grow old and die and are buried in the physical soil of the ground. None of this is metaphorical, poetry, fluffly language or indirect. It is totally literal and plain as day.

THAT WORLD, where all this stuff happens, is being referred to as CRUEL, and NOT a world that God would create. For God to create a world where children are BORN, where minds are stuck in BRAINS, and physical bodies become sick and die and are buried in the GROUND, God would have to be a CRUEL FATHER. Because all of this IS cruel. At the PHYSICAL level. This has nothing whatsoever to do with perception or attitude or meanings you give to things.

"If this were the real world, God WOULD be cruel."

This is fortunately NOT THE REAL WORLD. It is not reality, God is NOT cruel, God does NOT subject His children to this madness, and REALITY is nothing like this hellish world. The dream of death is not God's will. It was made to oppose His will. "The world was made as an attack on God." IT IS madness to think of life as being born, suffering, and dying in the end. It is completely unnatural.

This world is not the Kingdom of Heaven. Regardless of how you look at it, perceive it, think of it, interpret it, project onto it, or have attitudes or meanings given to it, it STILL remains what it IS, which is an unnatural artificial world of cruelty. Even teachers of God look upon it and RECOGNIZE THIS, and are NOT DECEIVED BY IT'S LIES.

"God's teachers choose to look on dreams a while. It is a conscious choice.For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences.The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are?Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die.Yet they are not deceived by what they see."

Why are they not deceived? Because they RECOGNIZE that the world MUST BE A LIE, is NOT showing them reality, and does NOT contain the truth. They look upon THE DREAM (this world) and recognize it is FALSE. It is the ego's world of cruelty and hell. And even when forgiven it remains nothing but an ILLUSION of a world.

"Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."

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

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt."

Notice that it says THOSE, meaning the world is made by multiple individuals.

"Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death. Children are born into it through pain and in pain."

Notice that it talks about children being born INTO the "world" that is being referenced. AND that as they are born they are born IN pain THROUGH pain. And I think we all know that this is talking about planet earth, with physical bodies, women giving birth to babies, and is nothing to do with internal perceptions or interpretations.

"Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death."

Notice again that it confirms the world being referenced is the one where bodies die. That's the physical world.

"Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its power declines if their bodies are hurt."

Notice this is also true of anyone who has a BODY, a physical human organic organism, with a BRAIN, and therefore is definitely talking about the physical body of flesh and bones, living in the world that is outside of it - planet Earth. The container of the bodies.

"They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more."

Yes where do these once-children's bodies get laid in the ground, the physical soil? On planet earth, at a physical level. Also notice that he says basically that bodies withering and gasping and dying in the ground IS CRUEL. It's not something natural or something that God would want for you. And IF that happens to your body, you MUST be believing that God is cruel because if death happens THAT IS CRUELTY.

"Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel."

If this were the real world, God WOULD be cruel. For no father could subject his children to this as the price of salvation, and be loving."

Notice that therefore in this reference, where Jesus has CLEARLY set up the fact that he's talking about the physical planet where human bodies are born, suffer and die, the same bodies that have brains and which grow old.... THAT WORLD.... would have to be coming from a CRUEL God, IF God were to be the creator of it. Because only through such a cruel creatorship and intention could such cruel things come about.

It would be thoroughly unloving for God to create a world where you lose things, you wither, your brain is attacked and diminishes, the body grows old and weak and sick, or where death happens at all. God simply WOULD NOT create such an environment. Such an environment IS cruel and not even remotely divine and holy. Not even slightly the hallmark of a totally loving God.

Also notice that it states IF this was the real world, ... meaning IT IS NOT the real world, and reality is ANOTHER WORLD that is NOT planet earth. NOT physical. With NO bodies and no death.

"LOVE DOES NOT KILL TO SAVE. For if it did, attack WOULD be salvation, and this is the ego's interpretation, not God's. Only the world of guilt could demand this, for only the guilty could CONCEIVE of it."

Notice that it also refers to this physical planet as "the world of guilt", just as it also refers to it elsewhere as "the world of sin" and "the world of death". And God would NOT create a world of guilt, sin, or death.

"This world..."

(which we now know is referring to the very physical earth world of human bodies)

..."IS a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

So now the physical world, is a picture of crucifixion. A PHYSICAL picture. The crucifixion is BUILT INTO MATTER. That has nothing to do with "how you are perceiving". It is purely to do with the form of the physical planet itself. It's a picture of crucifixion, not a picture of heaven.

"And until you realize that God's Son cannot be crucified, this is the world you will see."

Notice that this states if you believe God's Son can be crucified, ie believe in attack and sin at all, YOU WILL be forced to SEE this physical world THAT YOU MADE. And this confirms further that God DID NOT create this physical planet. And this also implies that if you DO NOT believe in the crucifixion of God's Son you will STOP seeing this world THAT YOU MADE. You made the physical world and everything in it.

"But you will not realize this, until you accept the eternal fact that God's Son is NOT GUILTY. He DESERVES only love, because he has GIVEN only love. He cannot be condemned, because he has never condemned."

Recognition of immortality, holiness and innocence is the key to NOT SEEING THIS WORLD and instead seeing the Son of God in its holy home.

"The Atonement is the final lesson he need learn, for it teaches him that, never having sinned, he has no NEED of salvation."

Ahhhh.. "Dreams of death are not left by death, but by truth."

The world you made, which God did not create, which is the world of bodies, which is also the world of sin guilt and fear and death, is NOT GOD's world, because it IS a cruel world and it would be cruel to ACCUSE God of creating such a place.

The Kingdom of God is your home. It is not like this world at all. "God does not will that you suffer" or die.

He also says nothing can happen without your decision to make it happen, and what you choose to happen must happen, and nothing else can happen. There are no accidents or victims.

This completely flies in the face of the typical experience of most people, whose lives seem filled with cases of apparent victimhood, victimization, unfairness, accidents, things going "wrong", blame for responsibility, and all manner of lies which cannot be true.

But how is it possible that someone chooses death?

Imagine a perfectly happy, sane person who absolutely deliberately wants to die, just for fun. Imagine that this person very carefully orchestrates a plot, which allows them to seem to be killed by someone else, with absolutely no involvement of their own. This person puts on such a powerful "performance", like an actor in a play who pretends to die, that most bystanders believe wholeheartedly that the person died against their will.

But imagine that you know better, and that you know every single part of this person's death was chosen by themselves. That they literally did it to themselves. And there wasn't even the slightest bit of room for error, or mistakes, or other people being involved. And yet, this person very very cleverly painted a picture for the whole world to make it seem like they absolutely did not want this. "Poor me, woe is my, how could you do this, gasp etc".

And so this person puts on a spectacular show, for example entering into tremendous fear, getting down on their knees and begging for their life, when secretly they know exactly what they are doing and absolutely cannot be killed by anyone else. Yet they try to make it look like someone else is doing it to them. They will even hide their own tremendous power, they will shove all of their sense of responsibility under the carpet, trying to create the *illusion* that they are not choosing this at all. And the only part of themselves which they will allow the world to see is a tiny spec of identity represented as an innocent victim, who did not choose this terrible end.

So basically, this is someone faking their own death, or at least the circumstances of how or why they died. It's a huge story they made up, a lie, to cover up the fact that they themselves were the one who dealt the final blow to themselves. And yet, all these other people came to be blamed, all these other people became involved and falsely accused, and absolutely nobody suspected that this person made this happen on their own.

If everyone else involved were awake, they would not for a second buy this story, and would not be participating, and nobody would take this person's melodramatic self-destruction seriously. Nobody would become lost in the story of it, the illusion of it, and nobody would for a second be convinced that this person isn't doing it to themselves. All the facts would be out in the open for everyone to see.

Yet when other people are also asleep, and do not see the whole picture, and do not recognize how the person is making choices, and do not recognize freedom, they too will seem to "participate" in the story and make it seem much more plausible that the person is not the one destroying themselves. They believe that the person is a victim and is suffering death against their will, because THEY TOO believe in being victims who are destroyed against their own will, and do not want their own cover to be blown.

It is a cover-up, with accomplices. And so there are roles to be played and even contracts formed, by the person, to arrange a hitman so that nobody else suspects that they were arranging their own death. And at the last minute the hitman would be blamed and scapegoated and the person would be laughing all the way to the grave.

This is what happens, every single time that someone dies.

Death cannot happen if you do not choose it. But that choice is very extreme, as Jesus says, very absolute. It is not by half measures. Any choice for the ego is a choice for death. Any belief in illusions is a choice for death. And any belief that false lies are the truth, leads to death.

So if you are awake, let's say you are Jesus, looking upon a person who has gone through an extraordinary sequence of 'events' and transformations, to make themselves look like a terrible victim, on purpose, by choice, and yet at the end of this process most people are believing the person is a 'genuine victim',... Jesus would look and he would SEE the whole truth, he would RECOGNIZE the person's absolute freedom, and he would KNOW that every single step of everything that has happened has been by the person's choice. No matter how it seems on the surface. The person has created such an impressive illusion of death and victimhood that everyone falls for it and only the awakened can see through it.

And so if the person were to attempt to "die", or even if they seem to bring about their death, Jesus could be standing there taking none of it seriously, laughing at death, taking it as the con and the joke that it is, the deception and the lie that it is, believing it not even for a second. And then Jesus might say, as he did, "get up and live", or "Lazarus, stop being an idiot and pretending to be dead, come back to life. It's a lot easier".

And then the person would suddenly miraculously 'come back' to life. Or rather, they would own up to the fact they were doing this to themselves, AND that death is not FINAL because death is just denial of life not its removal... and would snap out of their silly mood and perk right up. And everyone would be like, well that's a miracle right there. Jesus raised the dead. Well, death is not permanent, and it is just a performance, underneath which is an immortal spirit pretending to be dead - an eternal unkillable being pretending that it can die. So yeah.

Death is not the end. It is not real. And you cannot seem to go through it unless you choose to. So you literally are faced with a life or death choice. Do you choose to live forever, or pretend to die (again)?

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

This is one of those 'clincher' statements about the world which make it SO clear that he's talking about the physical world, and NOT some kind of interpretation of the world.

Children are PHYSICALLY BORN into it, through physical pain and in physical pain.

The children's PHYSICAL bodies grow and suffer.

Their minds are trapped in the PHYSICAL brain.

Their PHYSICAL bodies become hurt.

Their PHYSICAL bodies wither and die.

These are not perceptions. These are physical states.

And because of this, because of these things happening, PHYSICALLY, with actual physical matter going through these things, people would believe that God is cruel.

This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with having false perceptionr OR true perception ABOUT the world. It is merely a statement of facts about the PHYSICAL. Physicality, ITSELF, is cruel, and if it were real, God would be its creator, which would make God cruel. And everyone who DOES BELIEVE that the physical world is reality, MUST believe that God is cruel.

Either the world is reality and God IS cruel. OR, the world is NOT reality and God is loving. Since the world IS PHYSICALLY cruel, regardless of anyone having any perceptions or meanings of projections or interpretations or judgements of it, PHYSICAL DEATH IS A CRUELTY, if such things are real then God must be cruel.

And this is why so many people legitimately recognize that because the physical world IS fundamentally, INHERENTLY cruel, a loving God CANNOT have created it. If God had created it, God MUST be cruel, because the world is physically cruel.

And this is why many people become disillusioned with God existing, because they reason that since the world IS cruel, God must either exist AS a cruel creator - which we rightly would want nothing to do with, and would be justifiably angry at, OR God does not exist at all.

But of course the alternative option which many overlook, is that God DOES exist, and IS NOT cruel, and HAS NOT created this world, because the physical world IS NOT reality. The assumption that it is real has to be questioned in order to arrive at any sense of what can possibly be NOT cruel - a loving experience, a loving God.

When you attune to the loving God, your interpretation of or use of this cruel physical world changes, and you RECOGNIZE it as cruel, and not of God, while simultaneously being in a greater state of love WITHIN yourself. The world then appears to take on what we might call a less harmful registering with the mind. But it is still always PHYSICALLY cruel even if it is interpreted as not psychologically cruel. It is then a STRANGE combination, like a "beautiful tragedy", or a "happy dream of death".

And who wants a world that is a contradiction anyway. A world that a loving God creates cannot even entertain the merest POSSIBILITY of cruel things occurring, such as damages or breakages or loss or getting stuck or attack or harm or decay or weapons or war or forms of sickness or pain or misery or death. These things cannot even be CONCEIVED OF by a loving God, yet alone exist.

If God is loving, there can BE no real explosion, no real wars, no real sicknesses, no real missing limbs, no real deaths, no real losses, no real attacks or lacks or limitations of any kind, no physical plane crashes, no broken bodies or bodies at all. And that means there can be NO PHYSICAL WORLD. Because physicality itself is literally a state of separation and sin. And without the idea of death, spacetime would vanish completely along with all its contents.

Earth IS NOT heaven. At best it can reflect heaven when you look at it lovingly, but in and of itself it is nothing but an illusion of a system of death and destruction. And it will end. Just as space and time will end. Nothing unreal lasts forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"YOU SEE THE WORLD YOU VALUE. On this side of the bridge, you see the world of separate bodies, seeking to join each other in SEPARATE UNIONS, and to become one BY LOSING. When two INDIVIDUALS seek to become ONE, they are trying to DECREASE their magnitude. Each would DENY his power, for the SEPARATE union EXCLUDES THE UNIVERSE. Far more is LEFT OUTSIDE than would be taken in."

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

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

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

"The unholy instant IS the time of bodies."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its power declines if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel."

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

Let’s take a closer look at this.

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

"If this were the real world, God WOULD be cruel. For no father could subject his children to this as the price of salvation, and be loving. LOVE DOES NOT KILL TO SAVE. For if it did, attack WOULD be salvation, and this is the ego's interpretation, not God's."

Now. THINK about this for a moment. Jesus is describing a world in which children are born. These children are born in pain. They grow. They have bodies. They have brains. Their minds are trapped in their brains. They wither and suffer. And they go through bodily death.

Now, WHICH world is that talking about? What world is it WHERE THIS HAPPENS? It should be PLAIN AND SIMPLE. It is obvious! This is talking about planet Earth. In common parlance, "THE WORLD." Earth, the physical planet. "The world" that pretty much anyone would refer to as the world. The world where children are born, have brains, grow old, and die. It is THAT WORLD that is being referenced. The world where YOU WERE BORN, into the body of a child, with your mind trapped in your brain. THAT WORLD. **THIS WORLD**. Earth. Not an interpretation OF it. THIS WORLD. ITSELF. The planet.

And THAT WORLD..... THIS WORLD....is very very clearlly being described by Jesus, as a CRUEL WORLD. He is also clearly talking about that world, where children are born, as being the kind of world that God COULD NOT HAVE CREATED. Otherwise, if He would have created such a world, HE WOULD BE CRUEL. Creating a world where children are born as bodies with brains who grow old and die, IS A CRUEL WORLD, the likes of which a LOVING FATHER would NEVER EVER EVER CREATE. Never. God would NEVER create a world where ANYTHING is born, where ANYTHING has its mind trapped in a brain, and where ANYTHING grows or dies. God does not create such cruelty!

"This world IS a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

"If this were the real world, God WOULD be cruel."

THIS WORLD, EARTH, IS NOT REAL!!!!!!

This is not in any way talking about a world of ego perception. It is not talking about dream interpretations of Earth. It is not talking about your projections onto the world. It is not talking about any kind of perception. It is not talking about an internal private world that you project onto the "Real world of earth". Earth is NOT THE REAL WORLD. It is NOT created by God.

If you assign Earth to God’s creation, you are claiming literally that God is CRUEL because a world where CHILDREN ARE BORN, GROW OLD, AND DIE, IS A FUCKING CRUEL WORLD!!!! If you then attempt to NOT claim he is cruel while assigning the world to him, you are in DOUBLE DENIAL, wearing rose tinted glasses and glossing over the sheer cruelty and suffering that is INHERENT to this entire universe. When was the last time you saw a living dinosaur? Never. Why? Massive cruelty. Massive death. It’s not cruel merely because "ego interprets it as cruel". It is fundamentally cruel. To say it is not cruel and "love it" is UTTERLY INSANE. You cannot love death and it is insane to do so.

God did not, would not, can never, will not, has not and does not desire to, create a world where CHILDREN ARE BORN AND DIE. At all. In any way. God does not create babies! God does not create ANY KIND OF BODY. Not humans, not animals, not insects, not planets. "God did not create the body." God did not create ANY children’s bodies. Not one. Not even yours. God does not create a WORLD where children are born and die, where creatures have brains, or where there are bodies of ANY KIND. God does not create cruel planets with mass extinctions and being snuffed out in a supernova!!

Some people really seem to defend against this. But if you think the world IS NOT CRUEL, in an attempt to make it OKAY WITH GOD, and to justify that God MUST have created it because YOU think it is heaven on earth, there is a really profound level of denial happening. The world is *exremely* cruel. And I do not say this as a judgement or an unforgiveness. It simply is not heaven. Or heaven like. Not even remotely. The world is made of the idea of death. "Without the idea of death there is no world." Even true perception will ONLY reveal the TRUTH ABOUT this world, which is that it is FALSE, UNREAL, DOES NOT EXIST, IS NOT GOD’S NATURE, AND IS NOT LIFE.

God’s world is Heaven. It is not Earth. It is another realm unlike this universe. Nothing there but shines and shines forever. If you think God made the Earth, you have NO IDEA what God is like. A loving father could never create such mayhem and conflict and mindless destruction.

In this world, all things lead to death. It's as though a missile has been fired, flying through the sky, and hurtling toward the ground. There is a sense of inevitability of decay, that everything will just gradually erode and age and suffer and die eventually. As though this is the way of the world.

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

When you look at the world in this way you can't really help but notice this is the case, except if you are denial of this fact. And while in that denial you might be thinking the world isn't so bad, except that eventually it proves itself. "Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer.

ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives. Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped. Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to GAIN that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. All of them will lead to death. On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes."

I recognize that when I am looking with my ego, or my worldly earthly body-identified 'normal view', this is the view I am adopting. I am going along with this "plan" of the world that everything before my eyes will wither and die. "The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

This is just how the world functions. It's how we set it up. It's what we call "natural". So when the leaves fall from the trees we think this is totally normal. When the bodies lay in the graves we think this is totally normal. But this entire system is entirely unnatural and not at all like God's reality.

"Without the idea of death there is no world." When you are aligning yourself with God's reality, with heaven's true nature, you are in support of life. In fact you support eternal longevity. You reject all notions of decay, degradation and death. In fact you not only move away from the downward "arc" of death's direction, you move UPWARD in a direction towards God. In this direction there is an arrow pointing toward the sky, as things which were death come back to life, and life is restored, and things are working out, and there is healing and miracles and reasons for happiness.

After a while of trying to recognize that God's ways are upward-bound, and earth's ways spiral into the dirt, the two "systems" of thinking become more clearly distinguished. And they are very much opposed to each other. The contrast between the two "modes of perception" becomes more intense and obivous.

"Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point. This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight. The alternating investment in the two types or levels of perception is usually experienced as conflict for a long time, and can become very acute."

The world might be giving a message like "this is just going to get worse until there is death". But a God-aligned mind is asserting life, saying "This is going to get better and better until there is immortality." The two paths or viewpoints do not meet in the middle, they do not converge or agree with each other at all. They point in totally different directions - toward heaven or hell, towards life or death.

If you look at something happening and you say to yourself, this is real, and it's true, and this is natural, and this is how it's just going to be, and there is no hope and no future and eventually there's going to be death, then you're in the ego. You're falling for TEMPTATION. You're getting lost in the world and doing nothing to counteract its lies. Because the world is NOTHING like heaven and all its efforts are attempts to prove that sin is real and death is justified.

"This IS the "natural" condition of the separation. And those who learn that it is NOT natural at all, seem to be the UNnatural ones. For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true. In Heaven, where the meaning of love is known, love is the same as UNION. Here, where the ILLUSION of love is accepted IN ITS PLACE, love is perceived as separation and EXCLUSION."

To be in this world but OF ANOTHER WORLD, to be of God and heaven and yet with your feed on the earth, is to be UNNATURAL in terms of what the world thinks is natural. But in fact it is to be ABOVE the nature of the world - which means super-natural. It is the world that is unnatural. It is the world that is false and a lie. To recognize it for what it is, one has to adopt the upward-pointing resurrective miraculous path. Otherwise you are simply heading for the grave.

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

"They take a direction EXACTLY opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death. We have followed much of the ego's logic, and have seen its logical conclusions. And HAVING seen them, we have realized that they can NOT be seen but in delusions. For there alone their SEEMING clearness SEEMS TO BE CLEARLY SEEN. Let us now turn AWAY from them, and follow the simple logic, by which the Holy Spirit teaches you the simple conclusions that speak for truth, and ONLY truth."

It is clear from what Jesus says, and metaphysically, that physical matter, space and time are entirely illusions, made to oppose reality. The term physical always refers to literally PHYSICAL objects. Matter, bodies, planets, galaxies, animals, trees, flesh and bones, brains and so on.

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

"Children are born into it through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its power declines if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel." ... "If this were the real world, God WOULD be cruel. For no father could subject his children to this as the price of salvation, and be loving."

Some people do not like this definition that PHYSICAL MEANS LITERALLY PHYSICAL, because they think that the ACTUALLY physical is somehow God's creation that we're misperceiving. And to justify this they'll come up with ingenious forms of denial to try to frame the term "physical" as meaning ... ANYTHING BUT physical. This is a TOTAL reversal of what physical means. When Jesus says physical he means physical. When he says Earth he means planet Earth's physical matter. When he says body he means the physical flesh and bones body.

It's fairly obvious when such a huge modification to the meaning of words is happening, that it's going way outside of what Jesus ever intended it to mean. To claim that "physical body" is not referring to your actual flesh and bones physical body but some kind of esoteric mental identification, is a major form of denial. Body identification means identifying WITH the physical, not that the body itself is a mental construct. Or that the "body's eyes" is some kind of "false mind eyeballs" that doesn't refer to the actual PHYSICAL eyeballs and their biological sight.

Yes in some way the physical is just thought and dream and illusion and is in the mind, but this can't be used to ever frame them as being truly spiritual, holy, perfect, or permanent. Physicality entirely depends on space and time, to keep the atoms separated and prevent a massive nuclear explosion. Without the illusion of space, matter is not possible and all physicality cannot seem to exist at all. And space itself is nothing but a belief.

That which is physical is FALSE PERCEPTION. "The world is false perception". It is the granite block of sin. "The world of bodies is the world of sin". It is the veil which covers over reality and the face of christ. It is the gap of separation which splits the mind and comes between you and your NON-physical brothers. Nothing physical is real. Everything physical is an illusion. And the physical flesh and bones body can only see the physical world, not reality.

If physical matter is TRUE, and is REAL, then physical matter HAS TO BE GOD. And this means God HAS TO be decay and torture and scarcity and limitation and suffering and sickness and death. This simply does not fly. The physical Earth is nothing like God. "Earth, heaven's opposite in every way."

"Ultimately, of course, space is as meaningless as time. The concept is really one of space-time BELIEF. The physical world exists only because man can use it to correct his UNBELIEF, which placed him in it originally. As long as man KNEW he did not need anything, the whole device was unnecessary. "

"Attack is ALWAYS physical. When attack in ANY form enters your mind, you are EQUATING YOURSELF WITH A BODY. "

"When you look upon a brother as a physical entity, his power and glory are lost to you and SO ARE YOURS."

"Thought cannot be MADE into flesh except by belief, because thought is not physical."

"The body cannot create, and the belief that it CAN, a fundamental error responsible for most of the fallacies already referred to, produces all physical symptoms."

"All physical illness represents a belief in magic. The whole distortion which created magic rested on the belief that there is a creative ability in matter, which can control the mind."

"Physical medicines are a form of "spells.""

"Corrective learning always begins with awakening the spiritual eye, and turning away from belief in physical sight."

"What the physical eye sees is not corrective, nor can it be corrected by any device which can be physically seen. As long as a man believes in what his physical sight tells him, all his corrective behavior will be misdirected."

"Power, fame, money, physical pleasure; who is the "hero" to whom all these things belong? Could they mean anything except to a body?""Like all expressions of love, which are ALWAYS miraculous in the true sense, the exchange reverses the physical laws."

"A miracle is a reversal of the physical order because it brings more love to the giver AND the receiver."

"This is the basic distinction between intellectualization and thinking. One creates the physical, and the other the spiritual, and we believe in what we create."

"Man believes that what he cannot see does not exist, and his physical eyes cannot see in the dark."

"It frequently happens that an individual asks for physical healing, because he is fearful OF BODILY HARM."

"However, at the same time, if he WERE healed physically, the threat to his thought-system would be considerably MORE fearful to him than its physical EXPRESSION."

"The first involved the fallacy that only the physical is real.""The third involves the endowment of the physical with non-physical properties."

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

"His "birth trauma", another valid idea, was also too limited, in that it did not refer to the Separation, which was really a FALSE idea of birth. Physical birth is not a trauma in itself. It can, however, remind the individual of the Separation, which was a very real cause of fear."

"The confusion of miracle impulses with physical impulses is a major perceptual distortion. Physical impulses are misdirected miracle impulses."

"You can use your body best to help you enlarge your perception so you can achieve real vision, of which the physical eye is incapable."

"The body is merely part of your experience in the physical world. Its abilities can be and frequently are overevaluated.""The so-called "battle for survival" is only the ego's struggle to preserve itself, and its interpretation of its own beginning. This beginning is usually associated with physical birth, because it is hard to maintain that the ego existed before that point in time."

"The purpose of the world you see is to obscure your function of forgiveness, and provide you with a justification for forgetting it. It is the temptation to abandon God and His Son by taking on a physical appearance. It is this the body's eyes look upon."

"Attack is always physical. When attack in any form enters your mind you are equating yourself with a body, since this is the ego's interpretation of the body. You do not have to attack physically to accept this interpretation."

"If you are physical, your mind is gone from your self-concept, for it has no place in which it could be really part of you. If you are spirit, then the body must be meaningless to your reality."

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

We may not think that people are trying to destroy themselves. People can seem relatively happy, fairly sane, living a seemingly active life, enjoying success in their career, raising families and so on. But the fact of what is happening in the big picture is still there.

God's Kingdom is the realm of creation, of the constructive use of the power of the mind. It is there that life is wholeheartedly supported and sustained eternally. Any degree of suffering or sickness is completely impossible. Everyone enjoys perfection and eternal life and immortality.

But in the separation, all who participated in it did reject the Kingdom, and thus rejected immortality and perfection. This rejection of God was a rejection of life, a rejection of innocence, and a rejection of existence. It thus led to a death wish, or a desire to not create. The opposite of creation is destruction, and it was the destruction of God and Self that was the aim.

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

"The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

"This is a dream of death."

And so we entered into dreaming, in which all dreams are based in the rejection of creation and life. And so all dreams are dreams of death. And the physical universe is a system of death. All its laws are based on death, and all its roads lead to death.

We seem to have a seeming escape for a while, a kind of in-between state where we have a "life", before we die. But this is still essentially a period of dying. And it still leads to the grave, which is something we can deny and avoid but this denial doesn't stop it happening.

Nevertheless, this all only happens as a result of choosing death, ie choosing the opposite of creation. Choosing to not be with God. Which means choosing self destruction.

So if you are willing to look, you'll notice that everyone who is here is in various degrees or stages of self attack and punishment. This is not something pretty to look at. Many people are so riddled with guilt they can't even look you in the eye.

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

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end?"

Why does this happen? It happens because each individual person believes they are a sinner. And in whatever way, somewhere in the mind there is a belief that sin is real and true, has happened, has had real irreversible consequences, and that they can never return to God.

But even moreso, we believe we actively deserve to be punished for it. That we want the punishment and want to suffer, because it is expected of us and we agree with it. And so the people inflict self attack upon themselves in all manner of ways and this eventually leads to the death of the body. And all of this is chosen and self inflicted. And if it were not for this, there would be no suffering or sickness or death.

The simple thing to realize then is that this whole world is filled with people who are trying to die. "a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures come to die." Where we come to hate a while, wither and die. Jesus doesn't pull any punches on this stuff, he's very blunt about it.

So you've got a world full of sacrificial lambs, people destroying themselves in various ways, all manner of self attack, and all of it is essentially suicide. "You cannot die unless you choose to do so." "No one dies without their own consent." Which means that all of the sickness, all suffering, all forms of unhappiness, all death, is all a choice made by people who believe they deserve it.

Except that, they don't deserve it. No-one does. No one deserves suffering even if it's an illusion of suffering. No one deserves to be punished in any way. No one deserves to have to go through any kind of psychological hell or experience of pain or disfigurement or disability or disease. These are all forms of self abuse. Every single example is someone trying to hurt themselves.

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt."

We're a world filled with self attacking, self hurting, self abusing, self harming, self destructive, self sabotaging, self denying, self hating, self loathing, self corrupting people, all of whom think they deserve to suffer because they're guilty. But they're not really guilty, and the ENTIRE thing is just one huge mistake.

Sin is not real, or possible. Meaning attack on God is not real or possible. Meaning there is never justification for guilt, meaning there is never a PURPOSE for suffering, to inflict just desserts or due justified punishment. There is never a valid grounds for unhappiness or disease or depression or anything less than God's will that we be happy and healthy. The whole thing is a giant mistake.

So all that's really happening is that everyone is seriously mistaken, confused, lacking recognition, insane, unclear, uncertain, afraid, not sure of anything, and really kind of lost in a nightmare of their own making. All as a result of denial and an unwillingness to look at their own innocence. Which in a way is kind of funny, because if we'd just look at the fact that we could never have sinned, we'd stop trying to kill ourselves over it.

"What if you looked within and saw no sin? This "fearful" question is one the ego never asks. And you who ask it now are threatening the ego's whole defensive system too seriously for it to bother to pretend it is your friend."

Death isn't real, and nothing real can be threatened. But we certainly can go through the motions and try to make it happen, to have the experience of being a corrupt body, feeling pain and sensations, torturing ourselves in our dreams. All of which is unnecessary. All that's needed is the awakening to the truth. The acceptance of the facts. The recognition of what really is real and what is not. Because there really is no sin, in reality. And that means there is no grounds for any kind of self punishment, suicide or death.

No-one needs to be dying. No-one needs to be suffering or sick. No-one needs to be unhappy. We all just need forgiveness - the recognition of sin's impossibility, and the continuance of our absolute immortal endless innocence. And those who are innocent can never suffer, nor do they want to or choose to.

Because if you are just as perfect now as when God created you, and if you have never done anything to anyone, and if nothing you thought you did ever even happened, then all that's left is to thank God that you have been given eternal life.

Each to their own. But for me, I cannot reconcile how God can be purely benevolent, peaceful, loving, gentle, kind, happy, soft, life-affirming, life-giving, joyful, etc. ... and in ANY WAY, even CONCEIVE OF .... a thought, idea, creation or otherwise, which could take on the form of things like weapons, pain receptors, teeth, explosions, problems, colliding objects, damage, sickness, death, incompatibilities, conflict and war etc. ALL OF WHICH MUST BE HIS WILL if he created it.

If God is truly truly so incredibly unconditionally loving at all times, incapable of anything BUT love.. .. HOW "on earth" is it ever possible that a world, an environment, a perfect home created just for you, could emerge from his mind and heart, created from that same love and tenderness, and produce horrifically un-traversible landscapes, widespread droughts and lifeless frozen tundras, scorching deserts of starvation and thirst, war zones and stinking trash heaps, the "fetid scent of death", rotten corpses, and all manner of murder.

ALL OF THAT would have to come FROM GOD, by his will, from the purity of his absolute love and gentleness, without a single ounce of cruelty or malice or viciousness or vindictiveness or meanness. There is simply NO WAY... NO WAY EVER, that a benevolent loving God could come up with, condone, allow, permit, cause, will, want or create, an environment in which it is even POSSIBLE... yet alone whether it happens or not, POSSIBLE.... to even have such things as weapons or destruction or things that die.

To claim that this is possible is to claim that God's OWN NATURE, entails and includes, fickle transformations, unstable changes, contradictions, self attack, insane murderous intentions, threat and danger, corruption and malice. ONLY such a nature could ever give rise to such things as machine guns and atomic bombs. ALL of which, if part of HIS world, are part of HIM.

I don't know why anyone reading A Course in Miracles, would EVER come up with a notion that God could have created planet Earth, space or time, along with all of its horrendous malfunctions, limitations, problems, difficulties, cruelties and inherent conflicts. A person would have to conceive of God not as purely absolutely unconditionally gentle and loving and kind, but as some kind of bizarre mysterious twisted strange maker of nightmares and awful landscapes of torture and twisted shapeshifting bullshit. No perfect loving harmless peaceful God, could EVER EVER EVER create this planet and its contents.

This has nothing to do with perception either. It doesn't even require the presence of a single human being standing on the planet looking at it. If we were all wiped out the world would still be horribly cruel, with no-one around to re-interpret it. Because its NATURE is cruelty and punishment and death. This will ALWAYS be its nature because it is made from the idea of an OPPOSITE to beautiful perfect harmony and effortless safety and loving joy of God.

We ARE asked to see this world differently. We ARE asked to not judge it, hate it, attack it, or regard it as real sin - instead to see it as a MISTAKE. We ARE asked to love toward it, thinking more charitably toward it, and even to repurpose it to help us to return to HEAVEN where we belong. But at no time are we asked to WANT the world, to KEEP the world, to MAKE the world be heaven, to TRANSFORM it into something God has created, or to MISTAKE it for heaven. Even a happy interpretation of a broken planet still shows a broken planet.

No amount of forgiveness is EVER going to stop airplanes from crashing, or tigers from ripping the living guts out of live animals, or people shooting each other with guns, or starvation and lack of food, or diseases, or the eventual death of the planet when the sun swallows it whole after burning it to death. You can forgive it, you can bring light to it, you can carry peace to it, you can envelop it in love and happiness, but it's still going to function the same way because that is its non-God-given nature.

God could not, would not, never has, and never will, create a world such as this. If could could or would or had, God would be a complete and total murderous asshole. And I don't think we want that.

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end? We have asked this question before, but now we need to consider it still more carefully. It is the one fixed, unchangeable belief of the world that all things in it are born only to die. This is regarded as "the way of nature," not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the "natural" law of life. The cyclical, the changing and unsure; the undependable and the unsteady, waxing and waning in a certain way upon a certain path, - all this is taken as the Will of God. And no-one asks if a benign Creator could will this." UrM28A1

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death. Children are born into it through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its powers decline if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel." UrT11J2

"Death is the symbol of the fear of God. His Love is blotted out in the idea, which holds It from awareness like a shield held to obscure the sun. The grimness of the symbol is enough to show it cannot co-exist with God. It holds an image of the Son of God in which he is "laid to rest" in devastation's arms, where worms await to greet him and to last a little while by his destruction. Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death. Devouring is nature's "law of life." God is insane, and fear alone is real." UrM28A3

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way." UrW131L7

"This IS the "natural" condition of the separation. And those who learn that it is NOT natural at all, seem to be the UNnatural ones. For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true. In Heaven, where the meaning of love is known, love is the same as UNION. Here, where the ILLUSION of love is accepted IN ITS PLACE, love is perceived as separation and EXCLUSION." UrT16F3

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

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

SO.....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THIS WORLD, is NOT God's creation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All sense of loss arises from believing that a changing world is real. If it is real, and if something goes away, a part of reality has been lost. If it is real, there has been a real separation. And if that's true, you absolutely must be in a state of deprivation. Time itself induces loss every second, and time is death.

"The world you see is merciless indeed, unstable, cruel, unconcerned with you, quick to avenge and pitiless with hate. It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while. No lasting love is found, for none is here. This is the world of time, where all things end."

Something that you thought was real and valuable has been taken away. A part of reality or God itself has been destroyed and kept apart. The mind reasons that, because it's real and because it's not there, there is an absence, and a part of yourself has been ripped away.

The feelings of grief then rise up to correspond to that belief that something real is lost. The mind invents them to make sense of the situation. Then people in the world who believe in bodies will tell you that it's completely normal and natural to grieve. It does make perfect logical sense, given the premise that this world is real and loss has happened, but it is not natural at all.

In God's immortal reality nothing real can ever be lost, suffer attack, be ripped away or destroyed, forgotten about or separated from. No-one can suffer or be sick or die. Everyone is a part of everyone forever, by God's will. Impermanence of any kind is impossible, and nothing real can be threatened.

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die. I am not a body. I would recognize my reality today."

What it then boils down to is, that if you to any degree believe this world or bodies is reality, you will be constantly in varying degrees of loss. If anything at all so much as moves an inch, it implies a separation. If something bigger and more important seems to go away, you will miss it. If a body person dies off and stops being around, you'll notice it intensely. And then there will be the logical conclusion of a loss of something real - a real loss and a real grief.

The problem we have is that we're still working on waking up to God's truth and we still believe in bodies. We still confuse people for their physical bodies and still regard this world as reality. And that sets us up for the consequences of our wrong decision. It means that we're primed to experience losses before they even happen. We've set ourselves up for a fall, by choosing to believe that something temporary can be depended upon forever.

It's our attachment to bodies, our valuing of bodies, and our confusion of bodies with souls/minds, that lays the foundation for devastation and despair and grief. If and when they do go away, which everything in the world of form does eventually, its cruelty will induce all manner of egoic reactions.

"They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel."

An important dynamic that I've experienced is the belief that the person dying is causing you to be upset. If they have gone way, they have attacked you and caused you to grieve. How dare they die. And how dare they stop being there. This will produce anger and resentment. And of course this means you will scapegoat the dead person and project guilt onto them to blame them for causing a loss, which will have nothing to do with them at all and everything to do with you trying to get rid of your own guilt.

Then even further, underneath the anger will be a sense of hurt, as though you have been hurt by the death. And of course that boils down to a belief that the death of anything can infect you and cause you to die along with it. And so now the person who has left the body has returned to life in heaven, and you are left behind in a state of death and suffering, and you are the one who is dead.

"The black-draped "sinners," the ego's mournful chorus, plodding so heavily AWAY from life, dragging their chains and marching in the slow procession that honors their grim master, lord of death."

Death isn't real and doesn't really exist. It doesn't do anything to anything real and nothing real can ever die. But if you believe in a world that dies all the time, you can be sure you'll be upset before long. This is why the world is a constant disappointment, because you expect it to last forever. You'll be torn between efforts to wake up and acknowledge God's truth, and the continued belief that death is real which constantly pulls you back into hell like an anchor.

To try to forgive death really means forgiving the entire world of space and time and everything in it. To focus on the reality that a person has not really died, still lives on, and is still a part of me in communication and sharing is of course helpful. But at the same time, the other part of me which is ego aligned and trusts death, is continually pulled into the consequences of that belief. And that means the constant nagging reminder of "yes she really is dead isn't she!"

Feelings of grief, loss, absence, deprivation, anger, etc arise. The seeming "fact" that a person has died slaps you in the face, telling you that you have "suffered" a serious loss. As if the serious loss has happened to you against your will. You might be in grief and feeling like a victim, but at the same time it's true that nothing has really happened. And how can you have been caused to grieve against you will?

But this focus on truth can cause a hurdle to the grieving, because while you try to align yourself with God's truth of immortality, the rest of you is pulled horribly into a dark place of sadness and hopelessness and loss. You can't properly deal with the loss, in a typically dysfunctional way at best, because trying to be holy and perfect all the time makes it seem like a guilty sin to give it any time and attention. And yet it calls to you constantly to deal with it.

At some point then, if you're going to persist in believing in the world, you have left yourself with little choice but to go through a grieving process. If you are not yet ready to completely eradicate all belief in death and thus spacetime ("without the idea of death there is no world"), you're probably going to have to settle at least in part for second-best, failure, impossible struggle, and forced grief that seems pointless. If the world is real and the body is real and the body is lost, your ego is going to suffer about it.

So then at some point you have to turn to the grief and just go through it and feel the horrible shit, acknowledge it and be terribly upset. And this is the part that people call natural, but it is far from it. It's like being stuck in a state that you're not supposed to be in and having to deal with it in a totally conflicted way. And even when you egoically have a total spaz about it, which seems to make it go away for a while, it still doesn't solve it completely.

You can't possibly find peace and acceptance about the situation if the situation is real. There is no atonement there, so there is no cure. Grief will keep regurgitating and producing more upset emotions. There is no freedom while the world is still a reality. So then you're in a situation where you can't find peace and are forced face-to-face with a horrible loss, and all you can do is cry and feel unhappy and be a victim.

People will tell you that you then must allow yourself to grieve - embrace the victimhood, as though this is healthy, and perhaps it is at least better than bottling it up or going into less healthy forms of handling it. You are just going to have to feel it, grieve, and go through the loss. And that does indeed totally suck because it's not really a sane solution. And that means turning away from the constant barrage of God-truths and forgiveness statements and just letting yourself feel the horror for a while. Sometimes you just have to do something even if it's bullshit.

So then you cry, and you cry again, and you do some more and you have a huge catharsis. And somehow this is what the world calls healing. And supposedly you adjust and adapt, as though that's some kind of transformation or coming to terms with it, but that really isn't an awakening either.

It's more like a putting up with and a tolerating and a gradually undoing of the special relationship dynamics, attachments and so on. It's more like learning to let the person be ripped away and trying to just tolerate the pain of that until it stops hurting so much. And until the separation is truly undone it will keep coming back and haunting you for years to come.

It then seems like you pretty much have to grieve and be miserable and mourn and all that, which is a total course failure given that it means you're now part of the "black draped mourners" who are in the funeral procession and not doing God's will, per ACIM's teaching. But since you are where you are with this whole thing, and are not ready to totally surrender into atonement, you just have to go through the bumpy road rollercoaster of despair until it eases up somehow. Hopefully you can use all this as an opportunity to forgive and let go of the belief in death and the world.

"One thing is sure; God, Who created neither sin nor death, wills not that you be bound by them. He knows of neither sin NOR its result. The shrouded figures in the funeral procession march not in honor of their Creator, Whose Will it is they LIVE. They are not FOLLOWING it; they are OPPOSING it. And what is the black-draped body they would bury? A body THEY dedicated to death, a symbol of corruption, a sacrifice to sin, OFFERED to sin to feed upon, and keep ITSELF alive. A thing condemned, damned by its maker, and lamented by every mourner who looks upon it as himself."

I'd like to say I personally am beyond all this but I'm definitely not. Last week was horrendous, entering into states of victimhood and terrible strong emotions and crying and being bedridden for several days trying to avoid vertigo and sinus stress. The body wasn't too happy about the grieving process either - feel the feelings and it becomes stressed out - don't feel the feelings and it develops physical symptoms instead. It's a lose-lose situation until you somehow just get through it. And it keeps coming.

Moral of the story is, if you're not enlightened it's going to suck. And that's your fault because you chose it, and you're not ready to stop choosing it, so get ready to suck. And then hopefully after some severe sucking you can free yourself from death's nipple and actually find some sense of happiness again.

You'll have to just deal with an impossible situation as best you can until it sucks less. And meanwhile do your forgiveness shit and hopefully someday you'll find true salvation about it all. You can't avoid the inevitable production of grief feelings if you believe there has really been a loss, and until you can face the fact that you do believe there's been a loss and feel through it, you'll just be in denial.

At least something we have to look forward to is the day when we remember to laugh at all this and realize that none of it was ever true anyway.

Let's take a good hard look at something that very few people want to ever admit. Something dark and awful, but true.

Planet Earth, and the rest of this universe, were made in a thought of opposition to Heaven. This was an attempt to make hell real, by dreaming up a world that runs completely opposite to the beautiful divine nature of the Kingdom.

To do this, an opposite to life had to be invented - death, and the entire system of thought had to be based on not only the belief in this but the attempt to make it as real as possible. To bring it about. This alternative world was an attempted weapon to destroy the Kingdom and destroy God, if that were possible.

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

Because of this, everything in this world runs contrary to life and is governed solely by the laws of death and destruction. The world is an attempt not to exist and to destroy the Son of God.

"The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

The world wasn't made in order to have a place to live forever. Heaven is where you live forever. The world was made to kill you. Everything in it, even those things which seem to begin or are born, are automatically infused with death right from the outset.

Death, separation, limitation, spacetime, conflict, attack, are all built into every single part of the system. Even the most beautiful flower, the cutest puppy, the loveliest sunset, are made of the illusion of death. They take on forms whose appearance is designed to tempt you to believe they are desirable, valuable, wanted. But they are nothing but illusions, designed to distract and deceive you and keep you in hell.

The fact is, that everything in this universe dies sooner or later. It does not matter what it is, or how long it takes. Planets die. Galaxies die. People die. Animals die. All of it. Sooner or later, death is going to fully express itself, as the entropy and decay gradually erode whatever illusion of life there is. And as Jesus says, this world is "at best an illusion of life, at worst death", since it cannot be alive at all.

"There is no life outside of heaven."

Jesus asks that we take a good hard look at this, because we seem to be quite deceived and deluded in believing that the world can offer us something valuable. We are constantly tempted by its attractions and exciting adventures. It offers us toys and objects and pointless things to keep us entranced. But most of it, is attempts to convince us that avoiding death here is possible, if we will just put our faith in the ego a little while longer, until death arrives.

And so one of the biggest problems we have, is that we do not recognize this world is ENTIRELY made of death, or that ALL its roads lead to death, or that there is NO ESCAPE from this hell if you play by its rules. The idea of "living here" is ridiculous. It can never be experienced as a true home. And everything it does is a murderous attack on your happiness and wellbeing. The world eats you alive. And it is designed to do nothing but destroy you. At least, eventually, when it's done pretending to be your friend.

The problem we have is that in our deception and rose-tinted blind optimism, we keep believing that this world can be or do something that it can never be or do. We keep trying to turn it into heaven. We keep trying to wrap it up and dress it up to be what it's not. In a state of denial. One more flavor, one more combination, one more appearance, one more new distraction, one more toy, one more desirable temptation to lure you in. And by believing that you can achieve some kind of escape from death through this means, the world has deceived you for a while, and you think you like it here. Until it fails. Which it will.

Make no mistake. This world was designed to result in, lead to, culminate in, and guarantee, one thing only. The death of God and his son. It has no other ambition. It has no other direction. It will always enforce this ambition sooner or later. You might spend most of your life pretending that this is not the case, avoiding the inevitable, but regardless of your outlook the world is run by laws of death.

When you don't recognize the world's "nature", its complete failure to accomplish anything, its automatic built-in destruction, and its inability to be heaven, you enter into wishful thinking, delusions, denial, and start down a fairy-tail road of spiritualized egos and thinking that this time you'll win. If you play in the ego's sandpit you will die, by its rules, when it wants you to die.

Expecting the world to be something it's not, can only make you frustrated, and disappointed. You might hope that it can be something, that you can succeed, that you can have your cake, that you can win, that you can escape somehow, but sooner or later it comes crashing down, it turns out to be an empty promise, something you don't really want, and then it breaks, and it fails, and it dies again. Wanting it to be otherwise will only frustrate you. Not recognizing that this is the only way it can be, and letting go of the wish to have it be different, simply traps you in it more.

The world WILL disappoint you, if you try to build your house on its unstable rock. It WILL disappoint you if you forget for a moment that perfection is impossible here. It WILL disappoint you when you start to become attached to hopes and dreams which are later dashed against the rocks. And it WILL disappoint you when you thought that next toy you buy was going to be your salvation, only to discover it was the wrong one, or it broke, or it didn't quite do what you thought it would do.

Nothing really works in hell, it's all broken. How many times will you have to go through the same lesson of expecting it to not be hell, only for it to result in hell, before you you learn? And no this is not an attempt to make hell REAL, it is a reminder that hell IS AN ILLUSION, and to not fall for its tricks. Because hell's biggest weapon is to make itself seem like heaven, something you want, and somewhere you want to live forever.

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

We need to at least acknowledge this. We need to recognize it, see it, notice it. We need to realize this is its nature. The world is not a perfect living place. It's a place of destruction and conflict and incompletion and damage and problems and everything going wrong. It can't be any other way. All illusions have this nature built into them, because they lack the harmony, perfection and love of the Kingdom.

THE WORLD JUST SUCKS It simply does. It can't not suck. But by recognizing it inherently sucks, you can at least let go of the expectation of it not sucking. Which in fact is a truer perception, a more accurate way of looking at it. The world was made to be hell. If you can recognize that, you can be free of it. NOT recognizing illusions deceives you. And "Illusions recognized must disappear."

You are only trapped in it if you resist it, make it real, believe it's true, consider it heaven, or mistake it for God's creation. And you only keep holding onto it if you think you want it or it offers you something of value. But it cannot. Ever.

"This world holds nothing that I want."

"Teachers of God are willing to give up all the pleasures of the world."

"It takes great learning to both recognize and accept that the world has nothing to give."

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. All its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives. Seek not escape from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped. Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to gain that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. ***All of them will lead to death.*** On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes."

Jesus isn't being negative here. He isn't being judgement or closed-minded. He's not in ego. He's being very truthful and honest and sane. He's simply pointing out what the world's nature is, without flinching or looking away or being in denial about it. The world was made from the idea of death and everything in it is designed to fail and die and cease existing. That's just how it is. It can't be any other way.

Even in the happy dream, or the real world, the laws of the physical world still remain in effect. Trees still die in storms. Animals get eaten. Planets die in supernova explosions. Stars get swallowed in black holes. Your car rusts, your shoes wear out, your food rots, and people die. It's supposed to happen this way. It's not fate, but it is an illusion of fate, based on the idea of sin being real. The wages of sin is death, and everything in this world is designed to make death and sin real.

"The world of bodies is the world of sin. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place?"

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

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

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end? We have asked this question before, but now we need to consider it more carefully. It is the one fixed, unchangeable belief of the world that all things in it are born only to die. This is regarded as "the way of nature," not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the "natural" law of life. The cyclical, the changing and unsure; the undependable and the unsteady, waxing and waning in a certain way upon a certain path, - all this is taken as the Will of God. And no one asks if a benign Creator could will this."

When you "get excited" about something, there's a very high likelihood that you will enter into disappointment. Maybe it's a new car. Maybe you're going on a wonder vacation. Maybe it's a new pet or some new food you're trying. And maybe it will seem to you that these things are great and enjoyable and nothing to complain about. But then, maybe ignorance is bliss and you didn't notice the experience of HEAVEN that you did not have, while these falling-short substitutes came to drag you into hell.

I got a new car. Winter came. The snow and salt fucked up the interior. Oh well. I got a new fish tank. A fish died, plants died, it didn't go quite to plan. Oh well. I ordered items online, they came, they were the wrong items. Oh well. This is the kind of stuff that happens here. But if you expect it NOT to happen, you are expecting some kind of spiritualized salvation and external perfection, which is setting you up for total disappointment. The more you worship idols and seek for external saviors, the more you will be let down. And even your most valued teachers have their skeleton-full closets hidden away.

"God's teachers choose to look on dreams a while. It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences. The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are? Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. ***They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die.*** Yet they are not deceived by what they see."

Even for a teacher of God, a highly healed and awakened individual, the world continues to SUCK AND DIE!

THE WORLD SIMPLY SUCKS ASS! It was designed that way. It will never not suck. Even if you are happy. Even if you are truly forgiving and loving. It will still keep doing what it does until it finally vanishes into nothingness. Waking up doesn't stop the world from killing 130,000 people a day. Waking up doesn't repair everyone's broken limbs. Waking up doesn't make waterfalls flow uphill or prevent planets from colliding. Stuff still keeps ticking over, per the laws of death, and there is no hope here.

This is essentially the crux of the matter. The belief that there is hope, faith, trust, in the ego and its death world. That it has a redeeming quality, some possibility of being heaven or home, and a chance of escape from God. It's this wishful thinking that just maybe, you can get away with murder, just maybe you can be God, and just maybe you can overthrow the Kingdom and prove the Son of God is dead. Or that this world can be perfect. But you can't. And you never will. So the whole endeavor is pointless.

There is no hope in the world. Hope is of God. There is only hop because the wrold is NOT real and its illusions of hell are fictional WHEN RECOGNIZED. If you want hope, you have to look beyond the world, and forget the world and all its twisted ways. We can but recognize the world's limitations and laugh at them. The world will end in laughter because it is a place of sorrow. In laughter we will shine it away because of its fundamentally unhappy nature. The world will never be your home. You do not belong in hell.

Is it not far saner to recognize and accept that no matter what you do in this world, its laws will steer it towards failure? Because if you expect the opposite, you will be disappointed, again and again and again. This does not mean there is no hope at all. Only that trying to find it where it is not, cannot work. God and His Kingdom are your only home and your only happiness.

"The thing to do with a desert is to LEAVE."

"A Son of God is happy only when he knows he is WITH God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond ANYTHING that he can make."

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

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

"There is no life outside of Heaven. 2 Where God created life, there life must be. 3 In any state apart from Heaven life is illusion. 4 At best it seems like life; at worst, like death. 5 Yet both are judgments on what is not life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. 6 Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. 7 Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusion stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. 8 Illusions are but forms. 9 Their content is never true.

T-23.II.20. The laws of chaos govern all illusions. 2 Their forms conflict, making it seem quite possible to value some above the others. 3 Yet each one rests as surely on the belief the laws of chaos are the laws of order as do the others. 4 Each one upholds these laws completely, offering a certain witness that these laws are true. 5 The seeming gentler forms of the attack are no less certain in their witnessing, or their results. 6 Certain it is illusions will bring fear because of the beliefs that they imply, not for their form. 7 And lack of faith in love, in any form, attests to chaos as reality.

T-23.II.21. From the belief in sin, the faith in chaos must follow. 2 It is because it follows that it seems to be a logical conclusion; a valid step in ordered thought. 3 The steps to chaos do follow neatly from their starting point. 4 Each is a different form in the progression of truth's reversal, leading still deeper into terror and away from truth. 5 Think not one step is smaller than another, nor that return from one is easier. 6 The whole descent from Heaven lies in each one. 7 And where your thinking starts, there must it end.

T-23.II.22. Brother, take not one step in the descent to hell. 2 For having taken one, you will not recognize the rest for what they are. 3 And they will follow. 4 Attack in any form has placed your foot upon the twisted stairway that leads from Heaven. 5 Yet any instant it is possible to have all this undone. 6 How can you know whether you chose the stairs to Heaven or the way to hell? 7 Quite easily. 8 How do you feel? 9 Is peace in your awareness? 10 Are you certain which way you go? 11 And are you sure the goal of Heaven can be reached? 12 If not, you walk alone. 13 Ask, then, your Friend to join with you, and give you certainty of where you go."

I'm posting these quotes which focus on the ways that this world - Earth - is not created by God, is unlike God, and is the world WE made.

I'm posting these not in order to "be negative" or to attack the world or to make the world out to be something it's not. Nor am I trying to correct perception with these quotes - the true-perception view of this world is an entirely different topic.

I'm just offering a willingness to LOOK AT and recognize that ACIM is teaching that God DID NOT create this world, and that this is clearly stated. If God HAD created this world, the world itself would be perfect and would NOT be something requiring forgiveness, or needing salvation, and there would be no function for the Holy Spirit. The world HAS to be opposite to God's will in order for there to be any point to forgiveness at all.

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

"The world stands like a block before Christ’s face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear."

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

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

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

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world."

"Love always answers, being unable to deny a call for help, or not to hear the cries of pain that rise to it, from every part of this strange world you made, and do not want. The only effort you need make, to give this world away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make, is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

"To give this sad world over, and exchange your errors for the peace of God, is but YOUR will."

"He MUST deny the world of pain, the instant he perceives the arms of love around him. "

"Your Father knoweth that you have need of nothing. In Heaven this is so. For what could you need in eternity? In YOUR world you DO need things, because it is a world of scarcity, in which you find yourself BECAUSE you are lacking."

"God’s Son is not a traveler through OUTER worlds. However holy his perception may become, no world OUTSIDE himself holds his inheritance."

"Salvation FROM the world lies ONLY here. My peace I GIVE you. TAKE it of me, in glad exchange for all the world has offered but to TAKE AWAY."

"The world is false perception. It is born of error, and it has not left its source. It will remain no longer than the thought which gave it birth is cherished. When the thought of separation has been changed to one of true forgiveness, will the world be seen in quite another light; and one which leads to truth, where all the world must disappear and all its errors vanish. Now its source has gone, and its effects are gone as well."

"The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear. And what is fear except love’s absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him. Here was perception born, for knowledge could not cause such insane thoughts. But eyes deceive, and ears hear falsely."

"We must save the world. For we who made it must behold it through the eyes of Christ"

"The world you see cannot be the world God loves"

"It is not the world that makes peace seem impossible. It is the world you see that is impossible."

"I am come as a light into the world which DOES deny itself everything. It does this simply by dissociating itself from everything. It is therefore an illusion of isolation, MAINTAINED by fear of the same loneliness which is its illusion."

"My purpose, then, IS to overcome the world. I do not attack it, but my light must dispel it because of WHAT IT IS. Light does not ATTACK darkness, but it does shine it away."

"The world MUST despise and reject me, because the world IS the belief that love is impossible. YOUR reactions to me ARE the reactions of the world to God."

"My Kingdom is not of this world because it is in you. And you are of your Father. Your Kingdom is not of this world because it was given you from beyond this world."

"If you will accept the fact that I am with you, you are denying the world and accepting God."

"The world can add nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons, but it can blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it."

"You cannot behold the world and know God. Only one is true."

"The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist."

"This world is not where you belong. You are a stranger here."

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

"Except for God’s teachers there would be little hope of salvation, for the world of sin would seem forever real. The self-deceiving must deceive, for they must teach deception. And what else is hell?"

"The world will end in an illusion, as it began. "

"The world will end when all things in it have been rightly judged by His judgment."

"When not one thought of sin remains, the world is over. It will not be destroyed nor attacked nor even touched. It will merely cease to seem to be."

"The world will end when its thought system has been completely reversed."

"The final lesson, which brings the ending of the world, cannot be grasped by those not yet prepared to leave the world and go beyond its tiny reach."

"The world will end in joy, because it is a place of sorrow. When joy has come, the purpose of the world has gone. The world will end in peace, because it is a place of war. When peace has come, what is the purpose of the world? The world will end in laughter, because it is a place of tears. Where there is laughter, who can longer weep?"

"The stars will disappear in light, and the sun, which opened up the world to beauty, will vanish. Perception will be meaningless, when it has been perfected. For everything that has been used for learning, will have no function."

""What profiteth a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own Soul?""

"The world is very tired, because it IS the IDEA of weariness. "

"Memory rises in your mind, peace must still surmount a final obstacle, AFTER which is salvation completed, and the Son of God ENTIRELY restored to sanity. For here your world DOES end."

"It seems to you the world will utterly abandon you, if you but raise your eyes. Yet all that WILL occur is YOU will leave the world forever. This is the re-establishment of YOUR will."

"The world is nothing in itself. "

"Perhaps you think you did not make the world, but came unwillingly to what was made already, hardly waiting for your thoughts to give it meaning. Yet in truth you found exactly what you looked for when you came. There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly."

"There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again."

"Today’s idea is true because the world does not exist."

"Others find it in experience that is not of this world, which shows them that the world does not exist because what they behold must be the truth, and yet it clearly contradicts the world."

"There is no place where you can suffer, and no time that can bring change to your eternal state. How can a world of time and place exist if you remain as God created you?"

"There is no world because it is a thought apart from God, and made to separate the Father and the Son, and break away a part of God Himself and thus destroy His wholeness. Can a world which comes from this idea be real? Can it be anywhere? Deny illusions, but accept the truth. Deny you are a shadow briefly laid upon a dying world."

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

"Never forget the world the sightless "see" must be imagined. "

"This they do not believe. And so they keep the world they learned to "see" in their imagination, believing that their choice is that, or nothing. They hate the world they learned through pain. And everything they think is in it serves to remind them that they are incomplete and bitterly deprived. Thus they DEFINE their life and where they live it, adjusting to it as they think they must, afraid to lose the little that they have. And so it is with all who see the body as all they have, and all their brothers have. They try to reach each other, and they fail. And fail again. And they adjust to loneliness, believing that to keep the body is to save the little that they have."

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

"If this were the real world, God WOULD be cruel. For no father could subject his children to this as the price of salvation, and be loving. LOVE DOES NOT KILL TO SAVE. For if it did, attack WOULD be salvation, and this is the ego's interpretation, not God's. Only the world of guilt could demand this, for only the guilty could CONCEIVE of it. 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."

"This world IS a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son. And until you realize that God's Son cannot be crucified, this is the world you will see. But you will not realize this, until you accept the eternal fact that God's Son is NOT GUILTY."

"In this strange world which you have made, the Son of God HAS sinned. How could you see him then? By making him invisible, the world of retribution rose in the black cloud of guilt which you accepted, and you hold it dear. For the blamelessness of Christ is the proof that the ego never was, and can never be. Without guilt the ego HAS no life, and God's Son IS without guilt."

"Deny YOUR world, and judge him not."

"Let me accept the strength God offers me And see no value in this world, that I May find my freedom and deliverance."

"Illusions will not last. Their death is sure and this alone is certain in their world. It is the ego’s world because of this. "

"In a world of form the ego cannot be denied for it alone seems real. Yet could God’s Son as He created him abide in form or in a world of form? "

"Judgment, like other devices by which the world of illusions is maintained, is totally misunderstood by the world. It is actually confused with wisdom, and substitutes for truth. As the world uses the term, an individual is capable of "good" and "bad" judgment, and his education aims at strengthening the former and minimizing the latter."

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

"The unreal world IS a thing of despair, for it can never be. And you who share God’s Being with Him, could never be content WITHOUT reality. What God did not give you has no power over you, and the attraction of love for love remains irresistible."

"The real world was given you by God, in loving exchange for the world YOU made, and which you SEE."

"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you really understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who seem to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are wholly unreal? Could you have faith in what you see, if you ACCEPTED this? And would you SEE it? Hallucinations disappear when they are recognized for what they are. This is the healing and the remedy. Believe them not, and they are gone. And all you need to do is recognize YOU did this. Once you accept this simple fact, and take unto yourself the power you GAVE them, YOU are released from them."

"Hallucinations serve to meet the goal of madness. They are the means by which the outside world, projected from within, adjusts to sin, and seems to witness to its reality. It still is true that nothing is without. Yet, upon nothing, are ALL projections made. For it is the PROJECTION which gives the "nothing" all the meaning that it holds."

"And all the figures in the dream in which the world began go with it. Bodies now are useless, and will therefore fade away, because the Son of God is limitless."

"But in this world there ARE no simple facts, because what is the same and what is different remain unclear."

"There is no basis FOR a choice in this complex and over-complicated world. For no-one understands what is the same, and seems to choose where no choice really is. "

"Only the Oneness of Knowledge is conflictless. Your Kingdom is not of this world because it was given you from BEYOND this world. Only IN this world is the idea of an authority problem meaningful. The world is not left by death but by truth, and truth CAN be known by all those for whom the Kingdom was created, and for whom it waits."

"God's laws do not obtain directly to a world perception rules, for such a world could not have been created by the Mind to which perception has no meaning."

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

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other’s sorry outcome which is Heaven’s opposite in every way."

"Jesus is the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, Whom he called down upon the earth after he ascended into Heaven, or became completely identified with the Christ".

""Heaven and Earth shall pass away" means that they will not always exist as separate states."

Personal note: For me it is perfectly clear that God did not create the Earth or this world. We made it as an attack on God and a defense against the nature of Heaven. As such it is a dream illusion, which does not really exist. Our task is to learn to see it in a different light (that's a whole other post), so that we can learn to recognize its unreality and go home to Heaven.

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began."

Let me first just say that I don't intend for this to be a "negative" post. Nor is it being pessimistic. But it's going to point out the inherent negativity of the world. Not to try to make it real or be drawn into despair over it, but to just recognize it for what it is. And there is no need to react to it with assertions of "happier interpretations."

There is a tremendous need for us to stop believing that the world is something we WANT. Or something that can offer us any redeeming qualities or content. Jesus actually wants us to learn to recognize that this world has nothing to offer, nothing to give, does nothing, means nothing, and is nothing.

Jesus frames the world - by which I mean EARTH and its physical neighbors regardless of your perceptions - as nothing. And that we are to recognize its nothingness in order to realize that giving it up is not a sacrifice. And that by giving it up, we stand to GAIN EVERYTHING by accepting the reality of the Kingdom that God created for us.

"The world I see has nothing that I want."

"But if I see no value in the world as I behold it, nothing that I want to keep as mine or search for as a goal, it will depart from me. For I have not sought for illusions to replace the truth."

"It takes great learning both to realize and to accept the fact that the world has nothing to give. What can the sacrifice of nothing mean?"

ACIM is teaching that the world is nothing, it has no value, and everything in it is a pain. It says you do not want this world. That even though you made it you do not want it. And even that you made it BY not wanting it - by not wanting what was in your mind, which you projected outward as a world to try to get rid of it.

"the cries of pain that rise to it, from every part of this strange world you made, but do not want."

We are confused and caught up in the world because we keep believing that it can offer us salvation, something of value, something beneficial, something we want. And before you start dreaming up denials via the repurposing of the body and world, let just just clarify that the purpose of the world does not change what it IS.

"The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

Our problem is that we do believe the world has something to offer. That it is a great place to live forever, and never leave. That it has real pleasures and that its pleasures entail no pain. But Jesus also teaches that even the pleasures of the world are really pains in disguise, because the cost is that by indulging in temptation you are separating from God, and real pleasure only comes from doing God's will. Pleasure binds you to the body and takes you away from reality, just as pain does.

He wants us to recognize that pain IS pain, and pleasure IS pain, because truthfully we actually don't quite recognize what anything is. We think that pain is pleasure. We even think that sickness is saving us from life, and death is salvation. In our confusion we keep trying to dress up this world and frame it as somewhere that you can enjoy the full fruits of heaven. But as Jesus aptly explains, you CANNOT ESCAPE from the world's suffering by staying in it.

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives. Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped."

Much of our problem then is that we think there really is a way to be in the world that fixes it up and makes it great and provides room for an entire civilizations to emerge. A massive attempt to tame hell and "civilize" it. But this is really a form of DENIAL. The truth is that ALL of the world's roads lead to death, suffering, loss and disappointment. If you are willing to look at it you'll see this is true. And it will just keep on disappointing you until it disappears. That is its NATURE. It is a device for guaranteeing death.

"The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it"

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

These are the facts. Everything in spacetime is limited, it is not even really life (only eternal life is life), bodies are mostly destined to die, flowers can't bloom without dying off, entire planets cease to exist after a while, there is decay and destruction everywhere, sacrifice is built into spacetime itself, and there is scarcity everywhere. The world is TURD floating in cess-pool toilet-bowl of spacetime. Failure is inherent to the entire cosmos. This is not being negative about it either, it's being honest and truthful. This is a dream of mortality.

"Here the world of idols has been set by the idea this power and place and time are given form, and shape the world where the impossible has happened. Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

If we go into DENIAL that the world is basically a one-way trip to hell and death, we will start trying to find ways to PRETEND it's not true. We in fact have built up what we call a "civilized society" (a dysfunction), complete with the "comforts" that avoid as much pain as possible, the clever manipulations of matter that result in seeming "fixes" for problems, we've found all kinds of distractions and ways of making life seem "interesting", and have discovered every imaginable toy and play-thing to occupy our time. And yet all the while death can strike at any instant in any number of ways. And no-one knows what the heck they're doing.

"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."

The world really, in truth, is fundamentally broken, and it was broken from the start. It was made from the idea of the malfunction of reality. It was an attack on order and peace and love and harmony. Its separations are constant and relentless. Its isolation and exclusion are rampant. And not one single particle in all of spacetime is without a form that symbolizes separation, repulsion and rejection. The world is made of denial, and it even denies its own existence.

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What ***denies its own existence and attacks itself*** is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and ***earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite*** in every way."

If you look, you'll notice that the world has a plentiful supply of problems lined up for you, and even if you seem to solve one using a highly specific customized solution made just to perfectly fix this one problem, it WILL NOT EVER stop the onslaught of all the other problems it has lined up for you. Not to mention death. The one problem that everyone seems to be in TOTAL denial about, as if it doesn't matter because it's off in the future. And so we pretend we won't die, while nevertheless rushing towards it and making sure it happens.

We have to be willing to put aside all of these adjustments, these wishful thinkings, these rose-tinted glasses, the ignorant bliss, the framing the world as heaven, the trying to make it be our home, our adjustments to it and our attempts to make it out to be a great place. It is nothing. It can be forgiven, like all illusions can, but its nothingness is what makes this possible.

"YOU make the world and THEN adjust to it."

Adjusting to the world, trying to cope with the world, trying to make it more palatable, trying to make it softer and safer and seem to be a place that's not all that bad, is all forms of denial. The desire for the nice materials, the riches, the shiny objects, the fancy cars and expensive buildings, it's all an attempt to pretend that the world is desirable and that it WON'T disappoint you, as you seem to enjoy SHORT LIVED temporary reprieves from its hell-bent destructiveness. And as you hide behind the next "new thing" which claims to offer escape from death.

It is an avoidance of the fact that the world is just fundamentally not EVER going to really work correctly. It cannot function correctly because it is based on an idea of death and destruction. It is fundamentally a world of suicide and self-attack. Everything in it will always go wrong sooner or later. Expecting it not to will make you suffer.

This isn't a pessimistic view, by the way. This is a truthful view. I am not saying that we should be sad and unhappy and despairing because of it. Or that there is no alternative. In fact, Jesus is trying to get us to look at this truth SO THAT we can be recognize it is something we DO NOT WANT, so that we will in turn change our minds and choose the one reality that God created for us. And in which we will be infinitely happy forever. We only keep choosing the world because we mistakenly think it is WORTH HAVING, but how can you want a world made of rejection?

The world is not supposed to be your home, the thing you are in love with, your special adored idol, or your salvation. If you watch honestly you'll see that everything just goes wrong, eventually. It happens, again and again. Stuff breaks. Things get lost. Objects fall off tabletops. Food splats on the floor. The clothes become worn. The beds become mis-shapen. The roofs leak and cave in. The cars break down. The rust creeps in. I like to say, "there goes the physics again". And the assault of time, which is the idea of change and therefore death, guarantees that everything comes to an end.

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

Shall we live in denial that this is true, that the world can NEVER BE HEAVEN? Shall we live in denial that everything in the worl WILL END? Or even that it has death built into it from the start? That it can never turn into a perfect society or an ideal civilization or even a safe place? We try to make it safer with our defenses and castles and our potions and rituals and our avoidance of dangers, but it remains an unsafe place. Can you escape a supernova?

"The world provides no safety. It is rooted in attack, and all its "gifts" of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. It attacks and then attacks again. No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus."

The world cannot GIVE us what we want. It cannot make us happy. It cannot provide us with peace. It cannot satisfy us. It gives only to take away. It fails in order to disappoint. Every road, path, way, direction, goal, ambition and achievement in the world is pointless. Yet the world can present seeming illusions of "things going well", for a while, before it attacks and destroys what it has given. It can tempt you will fake happiness and fake values and fake salvation, only to fail you once again and deceive you in doing so.

"On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once."

"The world you see is merciless indeed, unstable, cruel, unconcerned with you, quick to avenge and pitiless with hate. It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while."

Jesus is not being negative when he describes the world like this. The world IS like this, isn't it? It's not a matter of how you look at it. There is no real loss in admitting to this, nor is this an attack upon the world. It isn't an unforgiving accusation. It is just a simple clear look at the world we made, its inherent nature, and its limitations. It is a world of limits, not a world of freedom, which is why it is like a prison for everyone in it.

"Are you not weary of imprisonment? God did not choose this sorry path for you."

"If it (mind) does not freely elect to do so, it retains this creative ability, but places itself under tyrannous rather than authoritative control. As a result, what it creates is imprisonment, because such are the dictates of tyrants."

The world itself is tyrrannical. It is selfish and separate. Each part of it is separate and at war with every other. Even the forms of objects are in conflict, which is why they are different. Conflicting shapes, sizes, colors, textures, they are all forms of war. Everything the body sees is a form of conflict. Every atom is at war. You cannot turn something that is fundamentally conflicting into something that isn't, because this will erase all of its properties and it will cease to exist.

It is by recognizing the world as "the hell you made", that we might be willing to go the other way. It is when we sugarcoat it as "not hell" in a spiritualizing pretense to make it seem wanted and worthy, that we put ourselves to sleep. We are blinded by perception of form and tempted by its luster and flair. Its picture frame of jewel-encrusted death suggests it is not a world of death but our most cherished possession.

We are to correctly identify that the world IS meaningless and IS nothing and HAS nothing that we want and DOES nothing for or to us and ISN'T our inheritance from God and IS NOT real and HAS no power and is basically absolutely NOTHING. The recognition that "there is no world." How can a world which does not really exist appeal to us and be something we want INSTEAD OF God? At the cost of heaven? And in a bargain where we "gain the whole world and lose our soul"?

True escape from the battleground does not entail the faulty belief that the battleground can be made into a pleasant place. You can rise above it, and you can leave the desert, and you can see it in a better light. But you cannot change what it IS. And denying what it is merely keeps you in hell for longer. And that isn't going to make you very happy.

"The world you see must be denied."

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

"A desert is a desert is a desert. You can do anything you want in it, but you CANNOT change it from what it IS. It still lacks water, which is why it IS a desert." ... "The thing to do with a deserve is to LEAVE."

"Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to GAIN that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. All of them will lead to death. On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes."

"A Son of God is happy ONLY when he knows he is WITH God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond ANYTHING that he can make."

"That is the only environment in which you can be happy. You cannot make it, any more than you can make yourselves. But it has been created for you, as you were created for it. God watches over His children and denies them nothing."

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

"God's teachers can have no regret on giving up the pleasures of the world. Is it a sacrifice to give up pain? Does an adult resent the giving up of children's toys? Does one whose vision has already glimpsed the Face of Christ look back with longing on a slaughter house? No-one who has escaped the world and all its ills looks back on it with condemnation. Yet he must rejoice that he is free of all the sacrifice which its values would demand of him. To them he sacrifices all his freedom. To them he sacrifices all his peace. And to possess them must he sacrifice his hope of Heaven and remembrance of his Father's Love. Who in his sane mind chooses nothing as a substitute for everything?"

"What is the real meaning of sacrifice? It is the cost of believing in illusions. It is the price that must be paid for the denial of truth. There is no pleasure of the world that does not demand this, for otherwise the pleasure would be seen as pain. And no-one asks for pain if he recognizes it. It is the idea of sacrifice that makes him blind. He does not see what he is asking for. And so he seeks it in a thousand ways and in a thousand places, each time believing it is there and each time disappointed in the end. "Seek but do not find" remains this world's stern decree, and no-one who pursues the world's goals can do otherwise."

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end?"

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

"YOU DO NOT WANT THE WORLD. The only thing of value in it is whatever part of it YOU look upon with love. This GIVES it the only reality it will ever have. ITS value is NOT in itself, but yours IS in you."

"What is meaningless is neither good nor bad. Why, then, should a meaningless world upset you? If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy."