Ego is a device for separation. It is like a stained glass window made of many fragments and different types of filters. Each colored panel obscures and distorts the light behind it and changes it, filtering out what it does not want to see.

When the ego attempts to hold itself up to the light of God, to heaven, to creation, and attempts to look at it, it looks through this stained glass window. It CAN ONLY see separations. It is INCAPABLE of seeing unity. It thinks it is objective and impartial and unbiased but it is absolutely incapable of ever seeing and recognizing the nature of Oneness correctly.

All it sees are separations, partial truths, information which is left out and distortions that have been added. It is literally impossible for it see oneness, wholeness, truth, or consistency.

When the truth of Heaven is that God creates and has many sons and they each have individual free will, the ego looks at this through its stained glass window. All it sees is, oh look, there seems to be a correlation between the different pieces of glass and the idea of "many sons".

You can be sure that, if the ego ever looks at Oneness and sees something CORRELATING to its way of looking, that it is seeing separations, you know that something is UNTRUE. The ego cannot see God and understand it. If it is seeing something "in" God and saying, that it matches up to how the ego sees in fragments, IT IS NOT SEEING the truth.

All we can say for sure is, the ego can never see God correctly, cannot understand Oneness correctly, cannot comprehend how God has many sons without it being a separation, and therefore we need to TRUST and have FAITH that God's many sons is a truth the ego will never accept.

We are to accept the truth as it is presented. The course is telling us God has many Sons. Jesus is not a liar. Therefore, it's telling the truth. And somehow, all of those sons are "one", yet still distinct with individual free will. We have to simply accept this is true even if our egos don't understand how.

"To know reality is not to see the ego and its thoughts, its works, its acts, its laws and its beliefs, its dreams, its hopes, its plans for its salvation, and the cost belief in it entails."

"Where there was darkness now we see the light. What is the ego? What the darkness was. Where is the ego? Where the darkness was. What is it now and where can it be found? Nothing and nowhere. Now the light has come: Its opposite has gone without a trace. Where evil was there now is holiness. What is the ego? What the evil was. Where is the ego? In an evil dream that but seemed real while you were dreaming it. Where there was crucifixion stands God’s Son. What is the ego? Who has need to ask? Where is the ego? Who has need to seek for an illusion now that dreams are gone?"

"Do not perceive ANYTHING God did not create, or you ARE denying Him."So you can PERCEIVE something God CREATED, which is in heaven?

"ALL His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other because they were created neither partially nor in part. ... The Holy Spirit enables you to PERCEIVE THIS WHOLENESS NOW."

These statements clearly tell you that you are able to PERCEIVE the contents of heaven. To perceive Christ. To perceive Creation.

This doesn't mean that perception is the same as knowledge. "To perceive the truth is not the same as knowing it". But this again implies that you CAN perceive the truth - and God is truth.

"God is in everything I see because God is in my mind?" should perhaps read "I can use perception to perceive God."

"Perception, at its loftiest, is never complete. Even the perception of the Holy Spirit, as perfect as perception can be, is without meaning in Heaven. Perception can reach everywhere under His guidance, for the vision of Christ beholds everything in light. Yet no perception, however holy, will last forever."

I did a very in-depth study of EVERYTHING that ACIM says about "the real world". It seemed ultimately very clear that the real world is a little removed from heaven itself. e.g "The real world still is but a dream."

It also became clear that there is such a thing as perceiving the "face of Christ". Yet.... Christ is in heaven, so are you not perceiving heaven?

I STILL keep coming back to this idea, that the real world, the reflection of heaven, the face of christ, the perception of truth, perceiving God, seeing the Son of God, etc.... is in some manner... YOU LOOKING AT HEAVEN, but THROUGH the filter of perception.

This would seem to make more sense in terms of the "real world" being used a a term (which is not the same as the forgiven world). The forgiven world is the overlooked ILLUSORY world (earth etc), while the real world is the PERCEPTION or vision of reality. Appropriately named "real" as in, it reflects reality or is "true". True perception can perceive the truth.

We know that the real world is a "borderland of thought" in between the illusory world and heaven. Just outside the gates. But we also know it is so much on the 'border' of the illusory world of dreams that it is practically outside of it and beyond the VEIL of illusions, which was covering the face of Christ. ie it IS the face of Christ.

It makes more sense also to say that the FACE of christ, is the PERCEPTION of Christ (which is not the same as the KNOWLEDGE of Christ). And that the real world isn't just some static state, but is you looking AT heaven through perception.

"You will first dream of peace (heaven) then awaken to it."

I continue to come back to this idea that the "real world" really is a kind of "window shopping" into heaven. Like looking into heaven from the outside, from a vantage point of separation. Because "perception is a separated state." It is like an IMAGE or a photograph of heaven. A reflection in a mirror. Just once removed slightly from the actual thing.

It's appropriate to then say that the REAL real world is heaven, and "the real world" we PERCEIVE through interpretation, is "the real world" ie the light seen through the filter of consciousness. This is also why ACIM says that "nothing there but shines and shines forever" and that everyting in the real world IS ETERNAL.

If eternal means PERMANENT, the real world HAS to be a perception OF that which is permanent (heaven)... even though the real world "state of mind" ITSELF is temporary, because it's happening via perception. So what you see in true perception is heaven, eternity, but through a judgement/interpreration based way of seeing, which is itself removed from the direct experience.

In the first quote above, it is implied that you CAN see things that God created. I also did a very deep study of all terms relating to VISION, and SEEING within heaven, and there is very strong evidence that congition is able to SEE... the mind can SEE... in reality. This seeing isn't PERCEPTION, which is an interpretative function and a substitute for knowledge. "Nothing there is perceived, only known."But knowing, cognizing, is a direct awareness of what is really there. e.g. "The soul never leaves the SIGHT of God." And we're told many times that Christ lends us HIS EYES. There is a whole lot of material about being able to see in reality, without a need for perception. There, seeing is KNOWING what is there.

We should then perhaps think of "the real world", aka the face of christ, or the "interpretative image of heaven", as an actual PERCEPTUAL experience of the Kingdom. It's not quite the same as being IN the Kingdom or KNOWING it, but it is very closely correlated. "Those who perceive still need healing."

And as another quote says, perception can reach ANYWHERE under the Holy Spirit's guidance. That should include being able to perceive the Kingdom. And how would the Holy Spirit look upon CHRIST, given Christ is IN the Kingdom?

There is a curious line, like this, for example, which perhaps is literal, relating to seeing gardens and endless dancing brooks..."When you have looked on what seemed terrifying, and seen it change to sights of loveliness and peace; when you have looked on scenes of ****violence and death, and watched them change to quiet views of gardens under open skies, with clear, life-giving water running happily beside them in dancing brooks that never waste away****; who need persuade you to accept the gift of vision? And after vision (knowing heaven), who is there who could refuse what must come after? Think but an instant just on this; you can behold the holiness God gave His Son. And never need you think that there is something else for you to see."

It also clues you in that when the course talks of "you cannot see both worlds" and "beyond the world there is a world I want" etc... it's ACTUALLY referring to the comparison of Earth vs Heaven, but it saying that you can at first PERCEIVE heaven using vision/true perception, THEN go there. ie the perception of the real world is not like an internal vision inside a closed box where you see the interior walls, like its own 'state'. It's actually like a GLASS ROOM where you can perceive heaven beyond it, so clear that it's almost like being there.

So what if, false perception shows you the unforgiven world, earth. .... true perception renders the false world untrue and forgiven, recognized as an illusion, overlooked, and seen beyond, and true perception/christ vision also allows you to look to the LIGHT of heaven beyond the world, to christ and God, which you first perceive, then know. ie we're being asked to see the IMAGE or REFLECTION of heaven, using perception, before we cross over into it.

If we say that seeing the face of Christ, is really a use of perception from WITHIN the realm of perception, INSIDE the separation, LOOKING OUT BEYOND the separation at heaven OUTSIDE the bubble of spacetime and matter, then the true perception we are cultivating is really an ability to SEE Christ, who is OUTSIDE the dream, FROM the inside. The veil of matter becomes invisible, like a glass room, allowing you to look OUTSIDE its walls.

This renders "the real world" - a perception - not as simply some kind of "inbetween state", where all it sees is its own content, but rather than it is a PERCEPTION of reality, seen from a separated vantage point, but with such clarity and accuracy and openness that it is like peering into heaven itself. There is no perceptual function IN heaven (where you have true sight), but there is a perception OF heaven from the outside looking in.

And so forgiveness brings the ability to SEE truth, reality, love, light, heaven, holiness, christ, God, peace, perfection, etc."The miracle perceives everything (in heaven) as it is. If nothing but the truth (heaven/reality) exists, right-minded seeing cannot see anything but perfection. I have said that only what God creates or what you create with the same Will has any real existence. This, then, is all ***the innocent can see*** (can see perfection, which is in heaven). They do not suffer from distorted perception."

I am guilty, I will only be able to see guilt in other people. I will not be able to tell if they are *really* guilty because I am seeing through a filter of guilt, like a stained glass window, which only lets in certain colors of light.

If I take the filter off my mind and stop being guilty myself, recognizing my innocence, I will ONLY be able to see innocence everywhere. I won't be able to see guilt in anyone because I do not see guilt in myself.

God is innocent and God is in my mind and if God is in my mind then I will see God in everything - innocence in everything - because God is in my mind.

If God is not in my mind, because I'm shutting out the awareness of God with guilt, then I will see guilt everywhere because guilt is in my mind.

Therefore, your mind is not CAPABLE of separating itself from what it perceives. If the mind contains guilt you WILL see guilt, guaranteed, whether there is any out there or not. If the mind contains innocence, you will ONLY see innocence no matter what is out there or what other people are doing.

So you see, it's kind of like, never is it possible to take a 'peek' behind the curtain to figure out if someone else is actually guilty or not. You don't have a faculty that is capable of doing that.

You can't sort of put your own innocence on hold, retain it, and simultaneously look at someone else to see if there is guilt in them. You can't have both innocence and guilt in your awareness at the same time.

So there really is no way of knowing, if other people are innocent or guilty. There's absolutely no way to tell. You can only see what's inside you.

If you're guilty or you're having a shitty day, you will see shit in everyone. Everyone will be filled with turds. If you're having a good day, you will see goodness in everyone regardless of what they seem to be doing.

You do not have the ABILITY to separately perceive the true nature of another person, separate from your own nature. To believe that you have this ability is EGO.

The ego is all about separation, and therefore is all about something applying to one PART of existence that does not apply to another part. That is a complete illusion and a lie, because even while it is pretending that some rules can apply to one person and not another, the rules STILL apply equally to both. And this is why when you think you are hurting someone not yourself, you really are hurting yourself.

I cannot tell if anyone is guilty or not. All I can do is choose whether to believe in guilt or innocence. And whatever I believe in will apply to me, AND to everyone else. And I will SEE what I have believed in, in myself AND in everyone else.

So really I can't tell is so-and-so is guilty. The only thing I can do is choose innocence for myself and therefore recognize the innocence is equally in them, regardless. Or I can choose to join in guilt and be guilty along with them. And then I will believe and perceive that we're both guilty, even if they are not.

Either way, I have no way to discern the there is some kind of 'truth' that they are guilty. I cannot have that illusion of objectivity or detachment. I can deceive myself to think I can, but it doesn't really work.

As you do unto others you do unto yourself. They are you. If you treat them as innocent you are treating yourself as innocent. If you treat them as guilty you're treating you as guilty. There are no loopholes.

tl;dr ... but it's a forgivable mistake.

Heaven is an environment of spirit, of sharing and openness, of oneness and love. It permits the shared overlapping presence of many created beings. All of spirit PERMEATES each other and PASSES THROUGH each other.

Remember that "nothing real can be threatened." Heaven does not permit any part of the environment to act against any other part. It does not put up boundaries, there are no walls to keep things out or in.

Everything has access to everything at all times. There are no prisons, nothing to imprison, and nothing to attack the prison. There are no objects that are solid, with surfaces that collide, or which can attack or damage other objects.

In heaven, there is nothing acting against the freedom of will. There is nothing to oppose the will of God. There is no way to will against anyone. This produces an environment where there are no COLLISIONS between things, there are no hard surfaces that keep things out, there are no separate wills or forces which can act upon objects and cause them to change or move against their will.

In the separation from God, we introduced an idea of SIN. It's the idea that will can be used against will, that you can attack and affect something without be affected, that one thing can act upon another without its consent, that something can be hurt with no power to stop it. It's an idea of destruction and damage, of sickness and death.

This idea alone produced what we call SPACE TIME, a whole second order of "reality" rooted in the idea that one part can be separate from another, that one thing can act upon another without its consent, and real irreversible effects can be produced. Where one thing can act upon another thing against its will and change it forever.

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

SPACE TIME is an environment, a system of thought in mind, completely dependent on the idea of sin. The idea of attack. That one thing can act against another. That there can be a war, a conflict, and a COLLISION. It is a world of attack on the will of God.

"The world (spacetime) was made as an attack on God."

This is why we have here physical matter, with objects which can act upon other objects without their consent. A rock can fall down a mountain and slam into a tree. The tree didn't ask for this. The tree is changed irreversibly. This is sin. Physical sin. One thing acting upon another without its consent.

It requires that there be solid surfaces. There has to be a resistance that is strong enough to REPEL something. This is why physical matter has atomic forces. The repulsion, a form of unwillingness, PUSHES AGAINST other things. It allows two objects to push against each other, thus affecting each other, moving each other, changing each other. Without solidity, sin is impossible. Without OPPOSING FORCES (wills) solid matter cannot exist and cannot have any properties.

"The world of bodies is the world of sin. For without a body sin is impossible."

A body, a solid material physical object, be it human or animal or a mountain or a planet, is required in order to have sin. There has to be a separation, to keep the things apart. This takes the form of materials which seem to have mass and solidity. These two "separate" things can now act upon each other independently, not sharing a will, not sharing a mind, not sharing interests. They are in CONFLICT with each other constantly.

Conflict and war and murder and attack and sin are BUILT IN TO SPACE TIME. It is its fundamental nature. The entirety of spacetime is an hallucinated image, a PICTURE, of what it would look like if heaven (God's Son) were attacked against its will, complete with forces acting upon each other and opposing each other and conflicting and damaging and destroying.

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

One thing acting upon another thing against its will. That's the root of all of spacetime, the tiny mad idea, the violation of God's will, the attempt to oppose reality. The mere idea of FORCING something to happen TO something OTHER than (separate from) oneself. The idea of sin, of murder, and of death.

Because now if you can use power to cause/will a change in something else, and it changes, and the change is IRREVERSIBLE, that is the idea of sin. If I throw a brick through a glass window and the glass is broken and the brick is chipped, these are effectively PERMANENT changes. The broken window is now THE PROOF OF SIN, and testifies that someone DID throw a brick through the window. So long as the window remains broken, the proof is still there. And the window will never be the same again.

The ability to DAMAGE, to destroy, to attack, to rot and decay, to change anything at all, is the idea of sin. It's sort of like, we've tried to suggest that heaven can be attacked, hurt, changed, destroyed, and mangled into some new form. The entirety of spacetime is testifying to this at all times without end. Even when the objects are not touching. Even when they do. Even when the planets are far apart from each other. They are still at war.

It is an entire system of war, conflict, attack and death. The important thing to realize is that WITHOUT the idea that will can act against will, ALL of this is impossible. You cannot have WALLS, you cannot have OBJECTS, you cannot have BODIES, you cannot have PLANETS, you cannot have attack or murder or destruction, you cannot have MATTER, without the idea of sin.

Heaven is a system of total access. Spacetime is a system of denied access. Heaven is a system of everything being shared. Spacetime is a system of nothing being shared. Heaven is a system of nothing being separate or kept apart of unable to merge or overlap. Spacetime is a system where everything is kept apart and nothing ever joins or shares. They are TOTALLY OPPOSITE to each other in nature.

This also means that you CANNOT take Earth, bodies, space or time, INTO heaven, and keep it. They are absolutely incompatible. One denies the other. Sin is a "lack of love". You cannot take a lack of love INTO love and have it still BE a lack of love. Nothing about its LACK nature can be maintained if there is love. Just as light shines away darkness and REPLACES the darkness. You cannot take the darkness into the light and have it still retain its dark properties.

Earth, human bodies, space and time, are all ideas of sin and darkness and a lack of love. They will NEVER be that which they deny. They cannot be integrated into heaven because they ABSOLUTELY REQUIRE and DEPEND ON a LACK of heaven for their nature. As soon as you introduce the oneness, sharing, lack of walls, lack of hard surfaces, lack of collisions, lack of spatial separations, that is true of heaven's nature, there is nothing left to SUPPORT matter existing at all in ANY way. Earth DISSOLVES in the light and CEASES to exist. It is made of separateness.

You will not be able to "walk on the surface of the earth" in heaven's reality under heaven's laws. There are NO surfaces. There is NO gravity. There is no COLLISION between feet and ground. There is no SEPARATENESS to keep you from sinking into the planet. There is no POSSIBILITY of Earth or bodies whatsoever there.

What you CAN do, is you can adopt heaven's laws and viewpoint and look up the world of sin with forgiveness. It forgives the world BECAUSE of the world's limitations. It recognizes that the world (spacetime/earth) is not REAL sin, it is an ILLUSION of sin. And that really it is just A MISTAKE. Earth is a mistake. Spacetime is a mistake. It is FALSE. Not attacked, not condemned, simply nothing.

This is a key point which people need to really deeply realize. Spacetime is totally opposite to heaven. "Earth, which is heaven's opposite in EVERY way." There are no collideable solid material objects in heaven's reality. The world, earth, space and time, all bodies, must eventually be LET GO AND FORGOTTEN. Because they are nothing. And they cannot exist WITHOUT sin and death.

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

"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master. And this unholy instant SEEMS to be life. An instant of despair, a tiny island of dry sand, bereft of water, and set uncertainly upon oblivion. Here does the Son of God stop briefly by, to offer his devotion to death's idols, and then pass on."

"And FROM this error does the world of sin and sacrifice arise."

"A mind and body cannot both exist. Make no attempt to reconcile the two, for one denies the other can be real. 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."

"From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not."

"To see a SINLESS body is impossible. For holiness is POSITIVE, and the body is merely neutral. It is NOT sinful, but neither is it sinless."

"Sit quietly and look upon the world you see, and tell yourself, "The real world is not like this. It has no buildings"

"How long can contradiction stand, when its impossible nature is clearly revealed? What disappears in light is NOT attacked. It merely vanishes, because it is not true."

"The body is NOT attacked, but merely PROPERLY PERCEIVED."

"The world will end in an illusion, as it began. Yet will its ending be an illusion of mercy. The illusion of forgiveness, complete, excluding no-one, limitless in gentleness, will cover it, hiding all evil, concealing all sin and ending guilt forever. So ends the world that guilt had made, for now it has no purpose and is gone."

"The world will end with the benediction of holiness upon it. 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 body is the symbol of the world. Leave it behind. It cannot enter Heaven."

"Forgiveness is this world's equivalent of Heaven's justice. It translates the world of sin into a simple world, where justice can be reflected from BEYOND the gate behind which total lack of limits lies."

"Forgiveness turns the world of sin into a world of glory, wonderful to see."

"Let us unite in bringing blessing to the world of sin and death."

"They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant, and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause. For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

Let's take a look at these statements about overcoming death.

1) "When you learn to make ME manifest, you will never see death. For you will have looked upon the deathless IN yourself, and you will see only the eternal, as you look out upon a world that cannot die."

2) "The body cannot live nor die, because it cannot contain you who are life. If we share the same mind, you can overcome death because I did."

3) "The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use if for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all."

These statements make sense when seen from the perspective of True Perception. Bear with me while I think out loud...I'm still fleshing this out....

I will use an analogy to describe what the illusion of a world is. Imagine that the entire world is all one color. It's made of all one single material. It is mostly transparent. Let's say absolutely everything is made of glass. All the trees, bodies, animals, clouds, oceans, mountains, everything is made from this same material and it all looks the same.

Other than certain shapes which are formed by this worldwide material, there is absolutely nothing different about any part of it. It's all made of the same stuff. Also within this world, any illusions of one object causing another are completely overlooked and ignored.

In no way and under no conditions can any part of this world do anything TO any other part. ALL of it is just an effect, inert, lifeless, void of will. It is just a static image. It does nothing at all. There is nothing attacking anything else, because you recognize that all parts are coming from the same material, made by the same person, seen in the same way, and nothing can really do anything to anything else. There is no cause within that image of a world itself, the cause of it is outside of it. It is being PROJECTED within your mind and you are its sole cause. A frozen dream.

This is basically what you will see the world AS when you attain full True Perception. When you then look from this perspective, you will see that ALL illusions within the world are equal. In this way, THERE IS NO DEATH. Ie, this image cannot live, this image cannot die, it just remains being an image. This image cannot contain you in any way, who are life, because what is LIFE has nothing to do with forms or bodies or images. Images of bodies being in one state or another are all the same.

That said, as Jesus explains, when the mind is not using the body for sin, which means, attempting to confuse levels and reverse cause and effect and to make out that some part of this IMAGE of a world is able to attack another, then the IMAGE of that body will change to represent sickness and death. It will be seen as containing weakness, and thus it will seem to weaken, become sick, and die.

When it is not being used for purposes of *false perception*, it will not be distorted or unnaturally forced to be SICK. It will just be seen as perfectly neutral and free of attack. And because it is free of attack, it cannot be attacked. Or rather, in recognizing attack is not REAL, symptoms of attack will not show up in the image. Thus the body image will show up as having "natural health".

Jesus talked about how when he recognized his body for what it is, it could not disintegrate. It was not alive because illusions are not life. It could not die because there was no attack projected onto it. He therefore simply saw the end of its usefulness, laid it down and MADE IT DISAPPEAR, because he saw it was nothing but an illusion/image which was *not really there*. The image of the body, while showing up as part of the dream world, was essentially incapable of sickness, aging, change, or death, even within time and space.

I feel I don't quite have this whole picture yet, but it's a work in progress. Feel free to correct or add to this if you see fit. I'm gradually forming a clearer picture of how this all fits together.

THE OMNIPRESENCE OF GOD (and why many sons)

Understand omnipresence and you will understand how God created many sons.

The course appears here to contradict itself, saying there is only one son, and yet that there are many sons, in the same paragraph. But it is not contradictory...

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

Here it is further clarified that God has one son AND many sons (souls) all of whom make up the sonship....

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

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The question is, how it is possible for God to have one son AND many sons and for both facts to be true at the same time, without contradicting?

God is omnipresent. What does that mean? It means God is fully present everywhere. But let's draw some analogies to what the ego thinks that means, to show why it is not what the ego thinks it means.

A cloud .... may seem to be the same everywhere. Today here the sky is overcast and gray, as if one cloud. But there are particles of cloud "over there" which are not "over here". All of the particles are separated out and cut off from each other. It is an illusion of oneness, simply a gathering of many separate parts huddled together. This is not what omnipresence means.

A human body - may seem to be "one body", joined together with its arms and legs. But the arms are not the legs. The hands and feet are separate. A hand is not a foot or vice versa. All of the parts are separated out. They seem to share to some degree but there are clear separations between parts. What is in the hand is not in the foot. What is in the eye is not in the knee. This is an illusion of a "blob", or semi-oneness. A collection of parts again huddled together to make an illusion of a whole or sharing, but where there is no sharing at all. All of the body's cells and particles are separate. It is a collections of separate parts. This is ego.

Omnipresence is not like this. Omnipresence defies every single property of matter. It transcends space time. The laws of omnipresence totally ignore every single law of physicality and physical limitation.

In omnipresence, it is possible, for the entirety of God, to be entirely present in one location. This sounds reasonable to the ego so far. But what does not sound reasonable is this additional fact: While God is being fully and completely present in one location, showing up with all of his being and all of his attention in that location, He is ALSO SIMULTANEOUSLY fully showing up and fully present in another location. ALL of His presence and attention and being are in that other location AT THE SAME TIME.

To the ego, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It can only think in terms of finite amounts or volumes. To it, if God is fully present over here, there is nothing left to be present over there. Or rather, this is the idea of conditional love, in that there is only so much "amount" of love to go around, so if all the love is showing up in one place or given to one person, it must be exclusive, and there is no love left for anyone else. This is not what God is like.

God loves unconditionally. A part of unconditionality means that God can FULLY LOVE every single PART of existence. Without reservation. This does not mean He is spread thin, either. He has no limitation. It does not mean He has a really great big huge amount of love, like a 10 gallon container of water, and happens to be so much "bigger' than a row of glasses that he can fill all of them and have some left over. That's more ego logic. What really happens is, God puts ALL of Himself into every glass, to the point where there should to the ego be nothing left to put in another. And yet, there's God, fully present in the other glass. And all the rest equally. ALL OF HIM, IN ALL LOCATIONS, SIMULTANEOUSLY. This concept is completely alien to the ego.

If you can get a sense of this in your mind, it will help you to understand the metaphysics of God's creation, and will allow you to make sense of HOW it is possible that God has MANY SONS, and how all of them are also simultaneously one.

If God shares ALL of Himself, in order to create "the first son", the ego will then say, well, God just used up all of what he has, and now there is nothing left to share with any other son or to create again. But this is not true. God has not reduced whatsoever by sharing Himself. He has in fact increased. "Creation is increased only by sharing". AND, his omnipresent nature means He is perfectly capable of putting ALL of Himself into A BILLION SONS, without diminishing in any way, and without lacking anything, and without "running out" of Himself. Every single one of them has ALL of Him.

And here is the crucial point, as to why God creates MANY Sons and not just one...

When God shares all of Himself to create the first son, this in no way - due to his omnipresent nature - confines him or limits Him. He is able to be FULLY PRESENT and to create wholeness, EVERYWHERE, simultaneously. The creation of one son is merely the radiation of God in "one location", and... there are a lot of other locations! Other locations can simultaneously express all of God, to create a Son, in EVERY location. Simultaneously.

Here is an analogy.

A single point of light may seem to create a single photon. That photon is one created son. However, if the light source spans a large volume of space, such as a fluorescent tube, or an array of LED's, then it is capable of producing, simultaneously, an extraordinary number of photons i.e. creations. This is completely NATURAL to the nature of God, to simultaneously create MANY instances/wholes, because God is actually INFINITE in His ability to be present fully in every location. It is totally natural to God to create INFINITE SONS and to create each of them unlimited.

It is not natural for God, to claim that He can only therefore "create one son" and, be confined to that. That's as if to say, He uses all His creative juice, because the fullness of him is a limited "amount" (ego logic) and therefore if He puts all of Himself into ONE son, there is nothing left. BUT THERE IS. Not only is there something left, EVERYTHING IS LEFT. God has not reduced AT ALL. And as such, God goes on CREATING MULTIPLE SONS... perhaps INFINITE SONS.

That is his Omnipresent nature. To create many children, not just one. If there will be creation at all, given the massive expanse of God, and given that God will create in ALL locations simultaneously, and that He will give ALL of Himself in EVERY location, he will create WHOLE SONS in every single location.

Each son is a WHOLE, because ALL of the Father is shared with Him. Not just some parts. Not just a little bit of God. ALL of God is shared with every created soul. And every single soul has EVERYTHING, lacking nothing, because it does not lack ANY of God. The fullness of God is in every part of His Sonship. His entire creation thus contains many, many, many sons, each one of them is experiencing ALL OF GOD, simultaneously, and yet each one is therefore a WHOLE in and of itself. It must be, because God is a whole and can only create more wholes. Again, this makes NO SENSE to the ego's way of thinking, but it makes perfect sense holographically. The all is in every part and every part is a whole.

There is no "unnatural division" in this (ego separation). There is only "natural division".

The so-called "one son", aka Christ, is simply the entire "sum total" of all the individual free-willed Sons that God created. Yet it is more than just a sum of its parts. Again this is to do with holographic creation. Since ALL of God is in EVERY Son, adding up the number of Sons does not tell you what is there. The sum total of all Sons is not the totality. Since every sons SHARES ALL OF GOD, there is MORE to each Son than just "himself". He is SHARING GOD. So the Sonship, is more than the sum of its parts, because they are all sharing and extending a wholeness which is far bigger than any of them - the One Father.

To God, since he is IN all of the sons fully, shared with them, one with them, yet they are distinct, his experience of "all the sons" is simultaneous. As such he experiences the total as "one son" or "one unified experience". Another word for this one son is Christ. It is a sense of, every son sharing one parent. Of every son having ALL of God in them. That unity, that, connectedness, is "christ". But the christ is not just "one son", it is the immediate shared experience of the fact that ALL of God is in every son. Every son experiences and shares the whole of creation.

So it then is true to say, that each individual son, is in fact

1) A distinct son, a whole, containing the whole of God or made from the whole of God

and

2) Also intimately connected to and sharing God with every other son, as christ.

Therefore every son is christ. He is both "the whole sonship" AND "one son" simultaneously. The all, and the part, simultaneously.

Every creation of God also inherits God's omnipresent nature. Every single son, every being of light, every angel, every son of a son of a son, is OMNIPRESENT as well. It can be everywhere. And it can manifest multiple occurrences of images of an identity simultaneously, at any point in time or space, if needed. For example, angels are capable of being with MANY people simultaneously. This is only possible because they are omnipresent, otherwise they'd be jumping all over the place trying to keep up. This is true of them and it is also true of every Son.

Jesus is able to appear to MANY people individually, simultaneously, because he is EVERYWHERE, and is OMNIPRESENT, and is not limited in these finite ego-logical ways. Jesus can be FULLY present here with me right now, and be FULLY present with you right now wherever you are. This is NATURAL for all creations of God. This is part of our divine nature.

It is only this world of FORM and matter and time and objects and bodies, that APPEARS totally the opposite of this. In form, it is suggested that what is in one location IS NOT in any other location AT ALL. Matter also suggests that there *IS* no "all" in ANY of the parts. That all parts are separate, all parts are NOT JOINED, none of the parts are SHARING at all, and there is NO ONENESS. That was the POINT of making this universe of illusion, to be the TOTAL OPPOSITE of the nature of Heaven, God, and the Sonship.

Every single object in this world testifies that there is no God and that every son is separated. Every single body demonstrates this. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards". The planet itself, Earth, is a physical expression of the idea of separation, in which it is "OPPOSITE TO HEAVEN IN EVERY WAY", because it does not demonstrate ANY omnipresence whatsoever. It does not appear to be a hologram (though it is), it does not show that the all is in any of the parts, no two parts share anything, there is no true joining, nothing overlaps, and basically every single physical particle of matter says "God is not here".

This is why this world is a bullshit lie, and no matter HOW you look at it or perceive it, its FORM is fundamentally in opposition to the nature of Heaven and God and the Sonship. It is NOT divine. It opposes divinity in every way. Every single particle of matter or energy is an expression of the idea of separation. Every subatomic particle. Every wave. Every quantum. However you deep you want to go, this universes is the OPPOSITE of omnipresence. And that was on purpose. The ego MADE THIS on purpose to try to create a picture of SHUTTING OUT GOD.

This is also the meaning of "this world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son". In every way, the separateness of matter is an attempt to claim that the son is CUT OFF from his father, because he no longer shares anything with the whole and no part contains ANY of God. That is an idea of the DEATH of God's Son, portrayed as physical particles which make up a demonstration of the Son being so completely devoid of God's presence that he must not be alive at all.

This is why we are not to make this world SPECIAL, or to worship it, or to want to keep it, or to try to have it somehow turn into heaven, or to put it on a pedestal, or to suggest God created it, or that it will be a permanent part of Creation. It CANNOT BE, because ALL that it is made of is this suggested idea of being UNLIKE HEAVEN. So there is no way that it can BECOME like heaven and still exist. Its entire NATURE is to be OPPOSITE TO HEAVEN. It exists AS "what God is not like". ... so it can't be IN what God is like and still exist. It cannot enter heaven or be part of it. This is why ... "THERE IS NO WORLD."

God's creation is one of holographic omnipresence. Every one of his MANY sons is a holographic omnipresent creation. Every single part of God's creation is the same everywhere and fully present in all parts. This is utterly IMPOSSIBLE to be expressed in form or matter, although any of God's children DOES have the ability to materialize illusory forms in any and MANY simultaneous locations if they choose to do so.

In the ego's world, someone has to be to blame for everything that happens. It's way of thinking is a very closed system. No matter what happens, if something happens, someone is to blame for it, even if that person had barely any control over it or much to do with it at all. To the ego, this is responsibility.

The ego wants you to confess that you are, in fact, guilty, and that you do, in fact, deserve punishment, because you did, in fact, separate from God and make all manner of shit happen. To the ego, this is being responsible and 'mature'.

In the ego's model there is zero room for forgiveness. Absolutely no forgiveness whatsoever. Everything that 'happens' in the physical world is proof, to the ego, that it has caused "real consequences" to occur as a result of separating from God. It is evidence of sin, and proves that everyone involved is guilty without question. To the ego, anything 'happening' in this world is a sin, and only sin can happen. To the ego, nothing unsinful can ever happen and God is impossible, meaning innocence is impossible.

So to the ego, when someone makes a mistake, maybe they bump into the fridge and it knocks a glass tray that was resting on the top and it crashes to the floor, you can bet, to the ego, that person is "responsible" for this entire thing. Not just the accidental bumping, not just the item falling down, not just the smashing, but all of it. Every single bit of it. And, to the ego, every single bit of it was ON PURPOSE, completely deliberate and intentional, producing real irreversible effects. It will point the finger in condemnation and declare "you have sinned". The ego has no concept of `not on purpose` or `unintentional` or `accidental` because that would suggest not guilty, which it refuses to accept.

To the ego there is no room for anything happening without it being involved in guilt in some way. To the ego, nothing occurs but without someone's deliberate intention and involvement, and therefore every single thing proves that someone is guilty. The ego claims that if you own up to this and "accept responsibility" for this and take full responsibility upon yourself for every single part of what happened, then and only then might you be excused or let off. If there is even the slightest hint of what seems like a resistance to accepting this "responsibility" it will condemn you further for avoidance and irresponsible carelessness. It demands you must own up to what you did (sin), that you must completely admit to it (it happened), that you did it intentionally (its your fault) and that you should enter into shame and guilt and suffering because you DESERVE it.

This is not responsibility. It is condemnation. It is a death sentence. When you hold other people to these standards, where the ego exalts the idea of getting someone to admit to being wrong, you hold yourself to that standard also and therefore find yourself constantly guilty for every little thing you do. You don't really want that. It's a way to be a victim and to be constantly tortured and therefore in need of being constantly 'good' in order to avoid making even a tiny mistake.

It's okay to make mistakes and break shit and do things wrong and be in error and not know everything and not be accountable for every single little consequence of events set in motion. You're not guilty for clouds moving, or objects falling, or people bumping into each other. You're not even guilty for seeming to deliberately do something wrong. Why does mistakedness have to always call for judgement and attack and the 'justice' of punishment? Punishment is never justified and it fails to correct anything, so it does not really stand for a pure or right way of living but only for how to get fucked over when you step out of line.

True responsibility MUST include the concept of you being 100% innocent. True responsibility must mean that no matter what you did or what effects it had or how serious or whatever, you are still innocent. It must mean you are unconditionally innocent. There is nothing like this in the ego's repertoir. To let you off the hook here and there it would see as begrudging pardons, or stern warnings, and it would never ever consider that you could be wholly found innocent for EVERYTHING that you seemed to do as a blanket statement. Yet Holy Spirit sees only your innocence.

Do you deserve judgement, condemnation, proof of fault, the justice of punishment, self hatred and shame, or some horrific shock treatment in retaliation for an accident? Nope. You're not guilty, no matter what. You made a big giant mess? You deserve love. You totally fucked up your life? You deserve love. And you broke everyone else's favorite toys? If they have a shit-fit that's not exactly your responsibility. Not to justify any behavior. But you're always innocent. Always. And only by being innocent can you be truly responsible. Because you have a responsibility to BE INNOCENT.

People that make mistakes need to be returned to a corrected state of not making those mistakes. They need to be returned to love. This is in the best interests of everyone. It is completely against everyone to punish that person or to feed lies and attack into them. That causes them to become your enemy. You don't want that. It's in everyone's interests that everyone be forgiven and reminded of the truth of who they are. We all need to own up to being God's innocent child. We all need to take responsibility for being who we authentically are, not who people condemn us for being. Responsibility WITHOUT the guilt.

True responsibility means ownership without blame. It also means that only the extension of God happens and there aren't any other consequences. It means everything is correctable. It means mistakes call for forgiveness and love, not punishment. It means you are let off the hook even before anything happens. It means that when stuff happens, you should be laughing, because it does NOT prove anything about your worth. It also means that you're not guilty when you make mistakes and you do not need to claim the guilt that surrounds them. You can own up to being mistaken, which is helpful, but this should never mean "I really did it".

For many years I have thought that there are kind of 3 states. There is false perception, then true perception, then heaven. And this is kind of true, and some aspects of ACIM support this.

However, what there really is are just two states. Heaven and hell, reality and illusions. Life and death. Knowledge and Perception.When we think about true perception it's easy to think of it as a state in and of itself. But we need to remember we're talking about PERCEIVING. And that means it's much more to do with "looking at" something.

If you ask yourself, what does false perception LOOK AT, it really kind of looks AT itself. Because false perception IS an internalized, isolated, exclusive state, where perception feeds upon itself and is blinded by form. It does not really see anything, and it cannot see reality. It is selfish and self-deceptive. It's like an obsession with itself, a closed perception that does not see.

When you then look at what the course says about true perception, it's much more to do with NOT dwelling on itself. NOT dwelling on the body. Looking BEYOND illusion. Overlooking. Seeing past. And there is a great deal of evidence that it entails an ability to literally SEE reality. To see God, Christ, the Sonship, perfection, etc, which are IN heaven.

The more I look into it the more it makes sense. Perception is about "what you look at" or how you look at it. Yes you have states of mind - for example wrong mindendess (or closed mindedness) produces false perception. While open mindedness or miracle/right mindedness produces true perception. But from these seeming "states" or the states from which perception EMITS, perception itself LOOKS and is a form of vision. So it needs something to look AT. So let's say...

False perception LOOKS AT HELL.

True perception LOOKS AT HEAVEN.

While there seem to be two "states of mind" within dreaming, ie wrong-mindedness and right-mindedness, really when it comes to perception there is either "the inability to see reality' (per the body which cannot really see reality), and the vision of christ which can see christ. "Love looks upon love" etc.

If wrong mindedness CAUSES perceptual blindness and an inability to see PAST the illusions of falseness itself, right mindedness CAUSES vision and an ability to see PAST illusions. The only thing that is BEYOND illusions, is GODS KINGDOM.

This seems to in many cases line up with what the course says and in its wording, as to how "the real world" is a PERCEPTION OF THE KINGDOM. That the innocence can see God. That perception can even see "the real world" (heaven) under the holy spirit's guidance. That you can see the face of christ, who is in heaven. etc.

So again I come back to, false perception being like living in a prison cell inside a room with no windows. And true perception is like living in a glass greenhouse where you can see THROUGH the walls and see the outside environment (heaven). The PERCEPTION OF the real world - the perception OF heaven, using perception TO see, is still an illusion. "The real world still is but a dream"... BUT, it IS a perception ABOUT heaven - reality. And it is so close to true sight that it makes crossing over to reality easy. It's like window-shopping then going inside the store.

I don't really see anything that contradicts this model. In fact I see MORE contradictions in the model that true perception is "cut off from heaven" completely. As though, we're hiding inside a completely dark room the whole time with NO ACCESS whatsoever to reality, and only upon leaving the room AFTER true perception do we experience even a hint of God. This seems to fly in the face of so much of what the course says, about you bringing light to the world, a reflection of heaven on earth, how earth can reflect heaven's light, how the light of heaven can shine into the world, how love of God can shine into the world, etc. Heaven clearly LEAKS INTO the dream realm through its radiance. That's how you be the light of the world.

I am finding that this simpler model of "two states", heaven and hell, or reality and illusions, makes things a lot SIMPLER to deal with. We can just look to "what is true in reality" versus "illusions which are false". Or look to God's laws and the nature of the soul, versus the laws of the world and the nature of the ego. It's a much easier comparison, between opposites.

We can also then see that forgiveness really is about overlooking illusions entirely, looking BEYOND them, and there's nothing beyond them but reality. So forgiveness, ie atonement as acceptance of truth, is really about reaching out to heaven from WITHIN the dream. Sitting in the dream with goggles on, looking out beyond the walls of spacetime, to heaven... which is truly "the real world". A reality.

This also then makes more sense in terms of how the course says that God gave the real world to his son.... if the real world is a state in the middle of two other states, it would imply god created the real world to be a permanent creation, which it cannot be.

The quesiton then becomes much easier to think about. Are you aligning with God, or with ego? With life or with death? With light or darkness? With truth or lies? And as you APPRAOCH total alignment with truth you are still within the realm of perception, up until the end, when you cross over into heaven completely. This is akin to walking towards the transparent walls, then passing through the door into the reality of the kingdom beyond.

It's then not so much to do with trying to aim to enter a state of forgiveness or atonement, but that you want to become ABLE TO SEE REALITY, to see past this world to the Kingdom. This also reveals that "it its impossible to see two worlds" and "beyond this world there is a world I want" ties into wanting the Kingdom, or at least a perception of it, NOT some kind of pretend "in-between" state. An inbetween state has no meaning of its own and is logically unsupported. It means nothing other than to say it LOOKS AT one of two opposites. There is either the Kingdom or not the Kingdom, there is nothing else.

"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."

Jesus here tells us that this world, Earth, which comprises homes and cities and roads etc, has the mark of death upon it. That even from the start, even when it was made, it already had death and disappointment infused into it. It was made in an idea of death, being the idea of the opposite to eternal life. This is because "Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem." and so an illusory world is really a dream of death.

"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****."

Recognize then that by death he's talking about the fact that everything in spacetime, including spacetime itself, is founded on the idea of an interruption to life, or an attempt to change the eternal into the temporary. Things coming to an end. Things changing over time. Things decaying and rotting and dying. Things becoming sick. Things lacking and sacrificing and losing. Even things growing and transforming. All various forms of limitation. A limit on life and on eternity. A notion of "not forever".

One thing that I've been doing lately is just accepting the fact that this world's laws, the laws of physics, are just automatically set up to fail. Chaos becomes possible because of the way that objects interact with each other seemingly randomly. Your car breaks down. Objects fall on the ground. You bump into things. Stuff breaks. Your new toy has a mark on it. Your clothes wear out. Your food rots. Your house needs repairs. Your kitchen smells bad. And your clothes are all dirty.

We could struggle against such things as if we have an expectation that the world can be perfect or free from defects. And some people try to control the world and twist it into an illusory palace of perfection. But the problem is, it can't be that. It is fundamentally rooted in the idea of death, of interruption and inconsistency and difference and change and transformation. All the royal castles crumble. Always there is the drive to become something it's not now.

If we try to expect that we can make a life where these things are avoided, or you can make a little oasis or illusion of safety and security, you really are in denial. Sooner or later the grim reaper is coming to look for you and yours. Either in terms of bodies dying or in terms of melting your phone or sickening your pets or scorching your grass or breaking your flowers or freezing your toes or puking in your shoes or whatever.

"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."

It's better to recognize this is the way of the world, based on its laws. It's just how it is. It's how this whole system, this whole universe, functions. There's no point in being mad about stuff breaking, or things falling on the floor, or stuff getting trapped in the door, or physical objects doing their quirky strangely annoying things, especailly when you're in a bad mood. They kind of can't help it. They are governed by rules that force them to "behave" this way, like they always will. Even in a forgiven world, the cookies still crumble.

I've been finding a lot more patience and forgiveness in just accepting that this is the functioning of this whole world. It just is broken from the start. The laws of physics are simply "at it again". Gravity is messing with you. Forces and energies are messing with you. And none of it is really "personal" because it's just doing what it does blindly and mindlessly. To expect it to ever not be like this must be some kind of insanity because a separated world cannot help but act this way.

We do need to accept that we did in fact make a fundamentally broken world. A world that does not really function properly according to the laws of God. A world where stuff is pretty much destined to change and break and grow old and die eventually. Where things collide and conflict and seem to attack, and where you can seemingly even be hurt - a notion which is utterly impossible in heaven's reality.

"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 laws of chaos govern ALL illusions. Their forms conflict, making it SEEM quite possible to value some above the others."

Jesus is clear that you cannot really want this world, because it is not a perfect world. It is not heaven. It was made in a mad idea of rebellion against reality. It is a protest against harmony and peace. It was made to attack God and to attempt to depict the death of his creations.

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

"YOU DO NOT WANT THE WORLD. The only thing of value in it is whatever part of it YOU look upon with love."

"Here is the world you do NOT want"

We have to be willing to look at this. The world is not EVER going to satisfy you and make you happy. It is not ever going to give you what you want. It is not ever going to feed your properly. It is not ever going to make you well or heal you or fix your problems. It has a neverending supply of madness and problems and difficulties. ALL its roads are pointed towards change, dissolution and death. Even planets and stars and galaxies die off eventually. And problems are completely built into its chaotic systems.

"You on earth have no conception of limitlessness, for the world you seem to live in IS a world of limits. In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur."

"Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped."

The world does not really give you any real choice, because ALL of its options are rooted in death. This isn't a pessimistic or negative view either. It is an honest and truthful view. The entire system was set up on a basis of separation and attack. Everything about it is aimed towards punishment for original sin, trying to bring about the death of life and the end of God.

"The ego's laws are strict, and breaches are severely punished. Therefore, give no obedience to its laws, for they ARE laws of punishment." "The laws of sin DEMAND a victim. WHO it may be makes little difference. But death MUST be the cost and MUST be paid."

"Sin calls for punishment"

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

"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."

Can you accept that everything in this world was set up to die, right from the start? That this its inherent NATURE? Because only by looking at that and recognizing "there is no way out", on its terms, can you be willing to seek for a better way.

This is just how the world is set up. There is no point in denying it. There is no point in expecting it to behave differently. The laws of physics work how they work. The only reason we become angry about stuff breaking and things failing and attacks happening and so on is because we have an unrealistic expectation that the world isn't going to be like this. That somehow in the world we can make a little safe corner where the bad things don't happen, to fend off death and keep attack at bay. Good luck with that delusion.

Now, of course if this were the only state of affairs then we would indeed be screwed. But fortunately we are not stuck inside this closed-loop of hell. There is another way. There is another perception and another belief and another reality. This other way, however, isn't a rose-tinted glass of pretending in denial that the world isn't a world of death. Nor is it a form of denial that says it's okay that things die and suffer. Or an attempt to dress up the world or to expect it to be something it's not. The world can't work because it began with an impossible goal.

We can become miraculous, in that we can in fact override the laws of death. We can overcome the laws of physics. We can see past what the world was made to see. We can see with a mechanism of vision that doesn't depend on the physical eyes. We can overlook and not hold the world against itself, or condemn it for its shortcomings. We can recognize that a world made in error cannot help but be mistaken. And we can disregard notions that the world is real in its sin and attack. Indeed we are supposed to do this in order to be forgiving and to be set free from suffering.

For me lately, I have been doing a lot of physical stuff. Rearranging the house, buying and assembling new furniture, throwing out old stuff, cleaning, organizing, moving things around, and to some extent enjoying new stuff. But I've also become aware that all of these things are already fundamentally limited in what they are and can be. I'm not in denial or pretending that they can be perfect.

The furniture with the dents in it, the gaps between the planks of wood, the poorly written instructions, the missing parts, the slightly wrong color, the stuff that doesn't fit, the wrongly shipped item, the misunderstood specs, all the ways that there is shortcomings and failures and forms of death. Lacks of perfection and order.

But I feel mostly unbothered by all these things because I am no longer expecting the world to be capable of better. It is not capable of being perfect, so I now accept that "good enough" or "less than perfect" is the best it can acheive. And then I can let it go instead of trying to find perfection where it is impossible.

We made a broken world. It can't fix itself. And it's not capable of taking on a form of perfection. It will not ever fully satisfy us. And even in forgiveness where it is seen beyond and reflects heaven, even then it still falls short in its forms and its functioning. Ultimately, the world cannot make you happy. It cannot give you peace, or take it away. It cannot be the cause of anything. Nor can it really have any meaning of its own.

At best it can reflect meaning you give to it, and that is all, because by itself it is an empty void. We made a meaningless, chaotic, broken world, and we need to simply recognize this about it. The world is not our home.

"When he is NOT in a state of grace he IS out of his natural environment, and does NOT function well. Everything he does becomes a strain, because he was not created for the environment which he has made. He therefore CANNOT adapt to it, nor can he adapt IT to HIM. There is no point in trying. 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."

The sooner you realize this the better, provided you also realize what CAN make you happy. What makes you happy is to laugh at the fundamental brokenness of the world. To realize the WHOLE THING is limited and false and can't do what you hoped it could do. The whole world is handicapped and disabled, falling short and incapable of eternal life. That's all it can be. And yet there is another world, a world we want, where this need not be.

"You on earth have no conception of limitlessness, for the world you seem to live in IS a world of limits. In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur. The miracle, therefore, has a unique function, and is motivated by a unique Teacher, Who brings the laws of another world to this one."

"But we are thankful, too, the need is done to walk the world of limits, and to reach the Christ in hidden forms and clearly seen at most in lovely flashes. Now we can behold Him without blinders, in the light that we have learned to look upon again."

"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. Yet the REAL world HAS the power to touch you even here BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT. 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, but 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."

"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?

One of the major teachings of A Course in Miracles, also present in Buddhism and Hinduism and many other belief systems, even present in the very first lessons of the Workbook, is that the physical world is a world of illusions. That many different objects only appear to be different, and their differences are meaningless.

In effect, the teaching is that you cannot judge a book by its cover, and you absolutely cannot take the objects of the world at face value. While most of the world believes that the world contains many many different things, different forms, objects, bodies, types, shapes, sizes, configurations, combinations etc, in truth there is actually only one thing here.

At first, to a person who is somewhat "blinded by perception of form", the world appears to be a tremendously complicated place filled with many different things. The differences are identified by how they appear, or what materials it seems to be made of, or how it behaves, or how it's constructed, or what it is used for, or what the symptoms seem to be etc. But these are all disguises.

Such a person will then believe that there really is a major real difference between a hammer and a screwdriver, between a car and a house, between a man and a woman, between a cake and some icecream. Places will all seem to be different and offer different seeming experiences. The next new toy will appear to be something you've never seen before. And everywhere you turn every single object seems to be distinct, separate and unique.

In such a view, uniqueness is valued highly, as though being unique and different sets you apart and identifies you and defines you. As if you stand out and be yourself by being unlike anything else. This merely emphasizes the sense of separateness between things and reinforces the belief that space and time are real.

The more a person thinks that there really are real differences between things, the more they will buy into what we call the "hierarchy of illusions". That is where some things are considered to MEAN something different to others, such as that a death is far "worse" than a mild headache, or that a million dollars is better than 1 dollar, or a burning house is a far worse problem than just that your fingernails need clipping.

For such a person, the world is seen as having the power to cause them, to victimize them, to do things to them. They see the world as both offensive and attractive. Some parts of it they will separate out and label as desirable, wanted, meaningful and valuable. At the same time other things which induce more unpleasant reactions will be relegated to hell and labeled as unwanted.

A person then will be living half a life, separated off, trying to maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff. Always on the run and living in fear, trying to hide from and prevent all the terrible suffering and tragedies that happen, while simultaneously strongly investing in, believing in and wanting to keep, the very same world which induces these things - for its supposed benefits.

This is clearly an insane state of mind, in which a person is in a relationship with a fickle, unpredictable, demanding, controlling, overpowering world, which sometimes throws them a bone and gives them something to seemingly celebrate, while quickly turning around and slapping them in the face the next day with some horrifying problem.

Such a life is a rollercoaster of constantly being thrown around by the waves of whatever's next, with no real peace and no consistency and no true invulnerability. It is a life of fear, wrapped up in an interpretation which frames parts of it as a life that is wanted. A life of judgement, in which some aspects of the world are despised and rejected while others are overly embraced and absorbed into. This is not a spiritual life, it's a life of contradiction and conflict.

What we have to all come to realize, and what a person generally WILL realize given enough time, is that the offerings of the world are not REALLY different things. It may take exposure to a great many things the world seems to separately give, in order to "tire" of the lure of these differences, to transcend them, to see through them, and to realize they are all the same.

This is real spiritual progression, where a person begins to see that the differences between objects are all artificial and meaningless. That having that super precious rare gem is not really that important, versus having a glass of water. Where the extremes of the values of things versus others, flattens out, and a person becomes far less attracted to, or put off by, any particular "temptation" that the world is offering that day.

What this means is that the learning becomes generalized. As a person matures more spiritually they will realize there isn't really a significant difference between things. That in order to retain a sense of integrity, peace, consistency and honesty, the difference forms of things have to be ignored. In order not to be constantly thrown around on the rollercoaster of hell, reacting to everything as if it means something, you have to learn to become more stable and unconditional.

Not changing moods based on conditions, not adapting to what's happening, not allowing the world to do things to you, not seeing yourself as either victimized negatively OR positively, not giving power TO the world to change or define you, not allowing circumstances to dictate what will happen, not giving away power to the extremes of the hierarchy of illusions, and no longer falling for the temptation to believe that the world in certain configurations means hell on earth.

Being deceived by the forms and differences of the world is unconsciousness. It is a state of unawareness and spiritual irresponsibility. It indicates a person who is selfish and wants to get things from the world, but at the same time doesn't want the world to give them the wrong things. It's a person whose relationships are all based on specialness and unholiness, a person who is themselves not whole, who is in denial of wholeness and therefore distanced from God in their "independence."

In order to wake up to reality, a person has to learn that this world isn't really offering anything different. It is really regurgitating the same stuff. It spews out the same illusions in different forms. Masses of materialistic products are made in which everyone now tries to create every single possible variation of a thing. And how many such variations does anyone really need? Their differences are insubstantial and superficial. Their different appearances are regarded as the defining factor as to how valuable they and what price tag they come with. But it's all made of the same lies and untruths.

The real truth is that there IS no difference between anything in the world. All appearances are illusions. All forms and shapes and sizes and amounts and values are utterly deceptive. They are all designed to tempt you to believe, to deceive you into believing, that physical reality is real when it isn't. That there is a world of many things, all of which are unlike the others, offering you constant distractions and side-quests and tempting pathways, all of which lead to the same ultimate end in death.

The truth is that there is not really any choices in the world. ALL of the things the world offers lead to death and destruction. Whether it appears to temporarily give you something you want or to take it away quickly, all forms end in death. They are made of death because they are made of the attempt to separate things out, to attack the other, to be unlike, unequal, in a constant state of war and conflict, incapable of peace and never offering anything consistent.

Fluctuating illusions cannot be reality. If something can change its form and be something one day and something else the next, it has no real permanent identity. A flower goes from a seed to a bloom to a wilted mess and not one of those states is reality. It is all the same thing. Be not deceived by what you see in the world. The world presents a picture of nothing pretending to be something, and it has absolutely no meaning.

The entire drive of A Course in Miracles is to teach us and help us to practice NOT being deceived by physical differences, by appearances, or by any sense of there being any variation in importance or relevance between one object and another. As we look around the room and OVERLOOK any particular reason to categorize things or to say they are more or less applicable to the ONE truth, we are training ourselves to no longer be deceived by the world and its lies.

"The belief in order of difficulties is the basis for the world's perception. It rests on differences; on uneven background and shifting foreground, on unequal heights and diverse sizes, on varying degrees of darkness and light, and thousands of contrasts in which each thing seen competes with every other in order to be recognized. A larger object overshadows a smaller one. A brighter thing draws the attention from another with less intensity of appeal. And a more threatening idea, or one conceived of as more desirable by the world's standards, completely upsets the mental balance. What the body's eyes behold is only conflict. Look not to them for peace and understanding."

"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."

"Appearances deceive BUT CAN BE CHANGED. Reality is changeless. It does not deceive at all. And if you fail to see BEYOND appearances, you ARE deceived. For everything you see will change, and yet you thought it real before, and now you think it real again. Reality is thus reduced to form, and CAPABLE of change. Reality is changeless. It is this that MAKES it real, and KEEPS it separate from all appearances. It MUST transcend all form to be itself. It CANNOT change. The miracle is means to demonstrate that ALL appearances can change BECAUSE they are appearances, and CANNOT have the changelessness reality entails. The miracle attests salvation FROM appearances by SHOWING they can change."

"But appearances are shown to be unreal BECAUSE they change."

"Nothing so blinding as perception of form. For sight of form MEANS understanding HAS BEEN obscured. Only MISTAKES have different forms, and so they CAN deceive. You CAN change form, BECAUSE it is not true. It COULD not be reality, BECAUSE it can be changed. Reason will tell you that, if form is NOT reality, it MUST be an illusion. And is Not THERE to see. And, IF you see it, you MUST be mistaken, for you are seeing what can NOT be real, as if it WERE. What cannot see BEYOND what is not there, MUST be distorted perception. And must perceive illusions AS THE TRUTH. Could it, then, RECOGNIZE the truth?"

"Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. It sees their nothingness, and looks right through the thousand forms in which they may appear. It looks on lies but it is not deceived."

"Applying the same idea to each of them separately is the first step in ultimately recognizing they are all the same."

"Everyone in this world seems to have his own special problems. Yet they are all the same, and must be recognized as one if the one solution which solves them all is to be accepted."

"This world SEEMS to hold out many purposes, each different, and with different values. Yet they are all the same. Again, there is no order, but a SEEMING hierarchy of values."

"The spark of beauty, or the veil of ugliness; the real world, or the world of guilt and fear; truth or illusion; freedom or slavery, - it is all the same. For you can NEVER choose EXCEPT between God and the ego."

There may be a few I missed but this is most of the references to SOULS in A Course in Miracles. Souls are God's Children, they are permanent creations of light, and there are MANY of them.

"Revelations induce complete but temporary suspension of doubt and fear. They represent the original form of communication between God and His Souls, before the intrusion of fire and ice made this impossible."

"The Revelation unites Souls directly with God."

"The Miracle unites Souls directly with each other."

"Miracles praise God through men. They praise God by honoring his Creations, affirming their perfection. They heal because they deny body-identification and affirm Soul-identification."

"By perceiving the Spirit, they adjust the levels and see them in proper alignment. This places the Spirit at the center, where Souls can communicate directly."

"Eternal validity belongs only to the Soul. The miracle acknowledges only the Truth. It thus dispels man's illusions about himself, and puts him into communion with himself and with God."

"The Soul never loses its communion with God. Only the mind and body need Atonement."

"The miracle restores the Soul to its fullness. By atoning for lack, it establishes perfect protection."

"The strength of the Soul leaves no room for intrusions."

"The forgiven are filled with the Soul, and their Soul forgives in return."

"The soul is in a state of grace forever. Man's reality is ONLY his soul. Therefore, man is in a state of Grace forever."

"The miracle worker can only bless, and this undoes the curse and frees the soul from prison."

"HIS slip (rivet) was an expression of a Soul gaining enough strength to request freedom from prison. It will ultimately DEMAND it."

"The Soul is therefore unalterable because it is ALREADY perfect, but the mind can elect the level it chooses to serve. The only limit which is put on its choice is that it CANNOT serve two masters."

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

"The Creation of the Soul is already fully accomplished."

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

"Most of the abilities man now possesses are only shadows of his real strengths. The Soul knows, loves, and creates. These are its unequivocal functions."

"Perception did not exist until the Separation had introduced degrees, aspects and intervals. The Soul has no levels, and ALL conflict arises from the concept of levels."

"The Soul does not need healing, but the mind DOES."

"Any attempt to endow the ego with the attributes of the Soul, is merely confused thinking."

"The mind returns itself to its proper function only when it WILLS TO KNOW. This places it in the Soul's service, where perception is meaningless. The superconscious is the level of the mind which wills to do this."

"The mind DID divide itself when it willed to create its own levels AND the ability to perceive them. But it could NOT entirely separate itself from the Soul, because it is FROM the Soul that it derives its whole power to create."

"Even in miscreating, will is affirming its source, or it would merely cease to be. This is impossible, because it IS part of the Soul, which God created, and which is therefore eternal."

"But I was a man who remembered the Soul and its knowledge."

"God and the Souls He created remain in surety, and therefore KNOW that no miscreation exists."

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

"Strong wills can do this NOW. And you WILL find rest for your Souls. God knows you only in peace, and this IS your reality."

"Never forget that the Sonship is your salvation, for the Sonship is your Soul."

"Your Soul does not need salvation, but your mind needs to learn what salvation IS. You are not saved FROM anything, but you ARE saved FOR glory"

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

"But if you hate part of your own Soul, ALL your understanding is lost, because you are looking on what God creates AS YOURSELF without love. And since what He created IS part of Him, you are denying Him His place in His own altar."

"The peace of YOUR Soul lies in its limitlessness."

"Limit the peace you share, and your own Soul MUST be unknown to you."

"Every altar to God is part of your Soul, because the Light He created is One with Him."

"We have repeatedly emphasized the fact that one level of the mind is not understandable to another. So it is with the ego and the soul, and with time and eternity. "

"Eternity is an idea of God, so the soul understands it perfectly. Time is a belief of the ego, so the lower mind, which IS the ego's domain, accepts it without question."

"The Holy Spirit is the mediator between the interpretations of the ego and the knowledge of the Soul. Its ability to deal with symbols enables it to work AGAINST the ego's beliefs in its own language. Its equal ability to look BEYOND symbols into eternity also enables it to understand the laws of God, for which it speaks. It can thus perform the function of RE-INTERPRETING what the ego makes, not by destruction, but by understanding."

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

"We have also emphasized that man, insofar as the term relates to Soul, has not only been fully Created, but also been created perfect. There is no emptiness in him."

"The Soul, because of its own likeness to its Creator, is creative. No Child of God is capable of losing this ability, because it is inherent in what he IS."

"With full recognition of its transitory nature, (a recognition which I hope you both share), Helen offers a very good teaching example of alternations between Soul and ego, with concomitant variation between peace and frenzy."

"In answer to Bill's question, it is perfectly apparent that when she is ego-dominated, she DOES NOT KNOW her Soul."

"Man reacts to his ego much as God does to His Souls, - with love, protection, and great charity."

"The ego's ceaseless attempts to gain the Soul's acknowledgement and thus establish its own existence are utterly useless."

"The Soul in its knowledge is unaware of the ego. It does NOT attack the ego. It merely cannot conceive of it at all."

"While the ego is equally unaware of the Soul, it DOES perceive itself as rejected by something which is greater than itself. This is why self-esteem in ego terms MUST be a delusion."

"The religiously ego-oriented tend to believe that the Soul existed before, and will continue to exist afterward, after a temporary lapse into ego-life. Some actually believe that the Soul will be punished for this lapse, even though in reality it could not possibly know anything about it."

"The term "salvation" does NOT apply to the Soul, which is not in danger and does not need to be salvaged. Salvation is nothing more that "right-mindedness" which is NOT the one-mindedness of the Soul, but which must be accomplished before one-mindedness can be restored."

"Attack is ALWAYS made on a stranger. You are MAKING him a stranger by misperceiving him, so that you CANNOT know him. It is BECAUSE you have made him into a stranger that you are afraid of him. PERCEIVE him correctly, so that your Soul can KNOW him."

"To be fatigued is to be DIS-spirited, but to be inspired is to be IN the spirit. To be egocentric IS to be dispirited. But to be self-centered in the RIGHT sense is to be inspired, or in the Soul. The truly inspired are enlightened, and cannot abide in darkness."

"He can speak from his Soul or from his ego, precisely as he chooses. If he speaks from his Soul, he has chosen to "be still and know that am God."

"Your real worth IS your divine authorship, and your Soul is its acknowledgement. I cannot guide your egos EXCEPT as you associate them with your Souls."

"Chesterton wrote an excellent description of Cervantes and his perception of his "unheroic hero," a view of man which the ego tolerates all too frequently, but the Soul NEVER countenances."

"The ego may will them because the ego IS both lean and foolish. But the Soul CANNOT embark on them because it is forever UNwilling to depart from its Foundation. The journey to the cross should be the LAST foolish journey for every mind."

"The soul's true functions are knowing, loving, and creating."

"Note again that the functions of the Soul were not referred to as abilities."

"The clear-cut implications of relativity, which properly inheres in this statement, DEMONSTRATE that abilities are not functions of the Soul. The Soul's functions are NOT relative. They are ABSOLUTE. They are OF God and BY God, and therefore God-like."

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

"Peace is a natural heritage of the Soul. Everyone is free to refuse to accept his inheritance, but he is NOT free to establish what his inheritance IS."

"Remember that the Soul knows no difference between being and having. The higher mind thinks according to the laws which the Soul obeys, and therefore honors only the laws of God. To Him, getting is meaningless, and giving is all."

"Having everything, the Soul HOLDS everything by GIVING it, thus creating as the Father created."

"Can the Creations of God Himself take joy in what is not real? And what is real except the Creations of God and those which are created like His? Your creations love you as your Soul loves your Father FOR THE GIFT OF CREATION. There IS no other gift that is eternal, and therefore THERE IS NO OTHER GIFT THAT IS TRUE."

"In every case you have thought wrongly about some Soul that God created, and are perceiving images your ego makes in a darkened glass."

"It is possible even in this world to hear ONLY that voice and no other. It takes effort and great willingness to learn. It is the final lesson that I learned, and God's Sons are as equal as learners as they are as Souls."

"What profiteth a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own Soul?" This means that if he listens to the wrong voice, he has LOST SIGHT of his Soul. He CANNOT lose it, but he CAN not know it. It is therefore LOST TO HIM, until he chooses right."

"In contrast, the Soul reacts in the same way to everything it knows is true, and does not respond at all to anything else. Nor does it make any attempt to ESTABLISH what is true. It knows that what is true is everything that God created. It is in complete and direct communication with every aspect of Creation, because it is in complete and direct communication with its Creator."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before the separation, you were simply in heaven having a great time. Immortal, invulnerable, happy, loving, full of life.

Then the separation happened and we produced a state exactly opposite to heaven - heaven's logical opposite. A physical world in which bodies gave us constant "false perception", deceived by everything, seemingly at the effect of everything and prone to attack.

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

"For this world is the opposite of Heaven, being made to be its opposite, and everything here takes a direction exactly opposite of what is true."

"Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusion stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. Illusions are but forms. Their content is never true."

"Heaven remains your one alternative to the strange world you made."

These are really the only two states. These are the two worlds, heaven and hell.

The question then becomes, how do you get out of the second world and go back to the first?

As the course says, you might find a sudden leap into heaven as frightening, if you retained your ego and interpreted it through it. In fact the ego interprets heaven as hell, beings its unwanted opposite.

So instead, we gradually transition towards heaven. But let's be clear that heaven IS your only alternative to the physical world. There is no other place to go. It's one or the other.

It's also a fact that the world you made is false, and heaven is true. In the denial of God and the rejection of heaven, you came to believe that a world of lies and illusions is true and real.

That puts you in a position where, to return to a full awareness and acceptance of heaven's truth, you're going to have to both invest belief and acceptance in heaven's truth, while shifting your whole focus away from the physical.

As the course describes, beginning to do this begins the process of "opening the spiritual eye" and "weakening the investment in physical sight".

"Eventually everyone begins to recognize, however dimly, that there must be a better way. As this recognition becomes more firmly established, it becomes a turning point. This ultimately reawakens spiritual vision, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight. The alternating investment in the two levels of perception is usually experienced as conflict, which can become very acute."

Now, we need to keep in mind that you are either in a realm of perception or a realm of knowledge. We really only made false perception, built into the functioning of the body senses. And leapt straight from heaven to false perception, placing us in bodies.

"The ability to perceive made the body possible, because you must perceive something and with something."

"The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and complete idea."

Your goal, really, is to return to heaven. The goal of God. Any goal less than this is not enough. You are to return to your original state of reality and immortality. To identifying as Christ. To being as God created you and co-creating with Him in reality.

But trying to leap into heaven from a perspective of false perception, which is total confusion about what is true, would be too jarring. The contrast is too great, and we have gone deeply into the ego thought system.

Instead, there is a seeming path, the atonement plan, the personal curriculum, which lays out a more gradual transition. This is partly because the use of your free will choice is required in order for you to make any changes in your beliefs at all.

So it seems that, in time, we gradually then progress from abject hell, which is a heavy identification with a body, special relationships, attack thoughts, fear of death, sickness and suffering seeming real, etc, towards a more God-given inheritance of perfection and immortality.

This doesn't just mean you're going to run up against the "ceiling" or external walls of the perceptual realm, before experiencing ANY heaven. It means that you need to transition so that you are experiencing ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY heaven, just before you leave this world.

But how do you do that? How do you move "towards heaven", towards reality and truth and immortality, while still being within the realm of perceptual dreams? How do you become heaven-like or as close to your original nature as possible, while still being in a state which is fundamentally separate?

"Perception is a separated state. Those who perceive still need healing."

It's going to entail some kind of re-purposing of perception, some way to use it against itself. To use what we made, to undo what we made, from the inside out. We need a reinterpretation of the meaning of the world. Or a different vantage point or way of looking, that makes it seem like hell has been turned into something similar to heaven.

"Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego. You need but leave the mirror clean and clear of all the images of hidden darkness you have drawn upon it."

What we find out now is that there are kind of two components to what we're experiencing. There's whatever "the world is" that we made, and then there's our interpretation of it. We seem to be able to change its meaning or how it looks to us.

What we're then told is that there is a "forgiven world" or a version of hell which, seen with some kind of light, or seen with loving eyes, doesn't look like hell anymore. It's still a dream world, still an illusion, still unreal, and still false, but seems to reflect heaven's innocence.

So where does this light come from, or this loving perspective? Well, a clue is that "Perception is a result, not a cause". And "projection makes perception". We look within first, at our idea of what truth is, and then we broadcast that out, and the end result is a kind of hallucinated image, which we call perception.

So the main deal is, the question of whether when you look within you see a belief in the reality of the world, that false things are true, that you yourself are something false and evil, or whether when you look within you see sinlessness, a lack of guilt and fear, innocence and holiness. Those spiritual attributes are not attributes of a dream figure, they are attributes of YOUR SOUL, which needs to come into your awareness while you're still dreaming.

How do you go about changing your inner landscape, so that it contains only attributes which seem to reflect the state of heaven, so that when you look out you see then projected?

Well if you remember, perception is always essentially false, and the realm of knowledge is always true. The illusory world is always illusory, and heaven is reality. So in order to transition your inner world so that it "matches" heaven or is heaven-like, you're going to have to reach out beyond the illusory world and start identifying with God's creation.

"The world you see must be denied" "Beyond this world is a world I want." "No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth."

So now you're in a position where, you're inside a dream, and trying to shift your attention to not only see but identify with, to recognize as true, and to accept, a reality which is entirely OUTSIDE of the dream.

"The miracle is taken first on faith, because to ask for it implies the mind has been made ready to conceive of what it cannot see and does not understand. Yet faith will bring its witnesses to show that what it rested on is really there. And thus the miracle will justify your faith in it, and show it rested on a world more real than what you saw before; a world redeemed from what you thought was there."

You're trying to learn what you ARE in the Kingdom, while still being inside of the classroom of hell. Your real identity is your soul which God created which has inherited its truth from Him.

In order for you to transition your inner identity to christ, you're going to have to start identifying with something that isn't even in the world.

The best analogy I've come up with is the comparison of two rooms. We made a room with no windows, inside heaven, kind of like a prison cell. It's a dark room which shuts out the light. The walls seem solid and impassable. There is no awareness of what is outside the walls. Your whole identity seems bound to a lump of matter, the same thing that the prison seems to be made of.

Then as you begin to reach out beyond the dream, beyond the prison, beyond believing the walls are true - the granite block of sin, the veil which hangs before the face of christ, the walls of the prison begin to become transparent. They lose their heaviness and solidity. Even your own body seems to start to disappear.

This happens only by extending your mind past the separating limits of the walls, reaching out (or in) to heaven's truth, and latching onto (identifying with) the ever-growing awareness of who you are outside the prison. Your real self, which God created, and which stands beyond the world of form.

As your mind starts to associate with being a christ-soul, and starts to believe in God's truth, and starts to accept that only heaven is real, and shifts all of its attention away from the tempting deceptions and lies of physical matter, it puts its faith and belief in reality and love and light. Things which are not even INSIDE the dream world.

"Love was never in the world of dreams."

While still inside the prison, which is fast becoming a glass room with a door, enabling you to see through the walls and beyond them to the light with "christ vision", you become able to see again.

You can see a light beyond the body and beyond the world, beyond the room, and your sense of "who and what I am" or "what is true of me" is shifting away from the body and onto spirit - a spirit which is well outside of the room entirely.

Eventually this room, which acts like a veil covering up the greater environment of heaven, becomes so transparent that it disappears, and finally you are able to see christ clearly. To recognize what you are. And to see the contents of heaven. You then move through or past the walls of the room, the room disappears, and you find yourself squarely and fully in the shoes God created for you to fill.

We may talk about true perception, atonement, forgiveness, salvation, right mindedness, miracle mindedness, sanity, the spiritual eye, and various other aspects of the awakening mind. But ultimately true perception is an act of OVERLOOKING the realm of perception, overlooking hell, overlooking the opposition to God, and fixating on the Kingdom.

Essentially, true perception is a re-purposing of perception, such that it actually UNDOES ITSELF. Similarly to how forgiveness is way of using illusions to point AWAY from illusions. True perception is a cancellation of perception. Just as false perception was an attempt to fixate perception on itself and make perceptions real. True perception points AWAY from the realm of perception entirely, and towards the light of God, beyond the dream.

"Forgiveness is illusion that is answer to the rest."

"Forgiveness sweeps all other dreams away, and though it is itself a dream, it breeds no others."

"Forgiveness is the end of dreams, because it is a dream of waking."

"Forgiveness is the only road that leads out of disaster, past all suffering, and finally away from death."

To dream of awakening, which is the happy dream, is to dream of what it is like to BE AWAKE. To be awake is to be IN HEAVEN. Therefore, forgiveness is a dream in which you imagine yourself to be NOT ASLEEP. To be similar to the way you actually are in reality, outside of dreaming. It is a dream based on the knowledge of heaven, in which, while still technically being in a dream-perception realm, you dream a dream so close to heaven that it's almost like being in heaven itself.

Just prior to leaving the prison, with sight firmly fixed on christ, who is in heaven and not in the world, you see the face of christ through the perceptual system (based on judgement/evaluation), and this "vision" is "the real world". It's you being able to see. "God is the light in which I see."

The real world is really heaven. It is the only reality and the only world truly deserving of being described as real. From within perception we see it through a perceptual filter, then we leave perception behind and KNOW its reality. "First you dream of peace, then awaken to it."

To see the real world, is to look out from within spacetime, within the perceptual realm, using perception, but using it in a special way which enalbles you to look OUTSIDE the perceptual realm. To peer into heaven beyond the separate bubble of spacetime. You don't actually become able to BE IN heaven at this point, outside the dream, but you stand within the dream, looking through its transparent walls like an window onto God.

As you do this, as you open up to reality while still dreaming, as you disbelieve in the solidity of the prison walls, as you form a bridge to the Kingdom, as you reunite gradually with God and with love, light seems to stream into your mind.

In fact an awareness of God gradually seems to return to your mind, and starts to be "seen in" the things you see. "God is in everything I see because God is in my mind." Eventually God is ALL that you see, which causes the "things you were seeing him in" to disappear.

So what we're really doing is, shifting our attention, away from hell, towards heaven. Shifting it away from God's absence, towards God. Away from body identification to spirit identification. Away from darkenss to light.

Away from fear to love. God, christ, soul, spirit, light, love, truth and everything real, is squarely NOT a part of the illusory prison world. It is "outside" of it, psychologically. So our job is to "position" oursleves in heaven, while still in the separated realm, and shine our light from heaven, into this world, erasing it.

This is why the closer your mind comes to aligning with God's will, with heaven's light, the more that light and love are able to stream into the dream through you.

The miraculousness of heaven begins to seep into the dream. The laws of spacetime begin to be overruled as you learn "I am under no laws but God's." You start becoming able to do things which "are not of this world." Your body returns to health as a symbol of eternal life. And you become empowered to overrule death.

To be the light of the world, is to extend heaven's light into the dream. To shine into the darkness, to illuminate it and shine away death. "Eternity will shine away the world." "The stars will disappear in light."

As your perception becomes "truer", it simply means that you are not mis-perceiving, so become able to "accurately" perceive what God created. This isn't the same as knowing what's there, but we can use perception to interpret what's there. "To perceive the truth is not the same as knowing it." - but you CAN perceive the truth, which is heaven.

As the walls of spacetime melt, as the granite block of sin turns to whisps of smoke easily dispelled, as the light of God shines into the world through forgiveness, and as the hell we made no longer has internal sin projected onto it, the world is seen as beautiful and forgiven. A beautiful illusion. Yet "A world forgiven cannot last" because it's still an illusion of a world. And it will disappear.

"Illusions recognized must disappear."

"The old one has left no trace upon it in its passing."

"Idols must disappear, and leave no trace behind their going."

"And you will be with him when time is over and no trace remains of dreams of spite in which you dance to death's thin melody."

"Heaven is all that remains."

"When your body and your ego and your dreams are gone, you will know that you will last forever."

This is pretty much the "model" of the course's levels and metaphysics that I've converged towards over time. Simply that there are only two states, realms or worlds. They are logical opposites. And while we're in the world opposite to heaven, we gradually transition our truth, reality and identity over to the other world, such that toward the end we are almost entirely heaven-identified and vigilant only for the Kingdom.

Our task is simply to ANCHOR ourselves into our soul, remember who we really are outside of the perceptual dream environment, tune into God, leave all perception of form behind, forget the world and embrace our true nature, inherited from God.

You are the spirit that God created. You are the reality that God established. You are the power that God extended. You are the will that God has expressed. You are the light which God radiated. You are the truth which God gave you. You are nothing and have nothing that does not come from God. And nothing in the world of illusions has ever changed that.

"So fearful is the dream, so seeming real, he could not waken to reality without the sweat of terror and a scream of mortal fear, unless a gentler dream preceded his awaking, and allowed his calmer mind to welcome, not to fear, the Voice that calls with love to waken him; a gentler dream, in which his suffering was healed and where his brother was his friend. God willed he waken gently and with joy, and gave him means to waken without fear."

"Dream softly of your sinless brother, who unites with you in holy innocence. And from this dream the Lord of Heaven will Himself awaken His beloved Son."

Salvation is SO simple, that it can seem difficult to grasp, especially when we are so used to being deceived that there are many separate, different, isolated problems. When the form of the problem deceives you, which is believing that illusions are real and true, you do not recognize the problem. And when it seems there are an endless string of different problems, escape from suffering seems hopeless.

You think the problem is about what the form says the problem is about. But the form is a disguise. The form is made to deceive you to believe the problem is specific and confined to one thing. And when you seem to solve that one thing you do not really solve the real problem.

The problem we need to recognize is the single problem, the only problem, which is believing that the world is true and real. Not recognizing it is a failure to recognize that this is only a dream, not a reality. That there is no world. When we do not recognize this problem, this one belief, we become lost and confused in the many forms of the world, we buy into the hierarchy of illusions, different situations seem separate, and the form they take starts to dictate the solution.

If you were to recognize the true problem, the separation idea, which is the belief that the world is true and real, or that an opposite to God exists, this recognition alone would solve the problem. The problem really, then, is the LACK OF RECOGNITION of what the situation IS, causing your mind to become tangled up in and lost in a world of a seemingly endless string of disconnected pieces and specific problems.

If the only problem really is that you have swapped what is true and what is false, what is real and what is unreal, then it is easier to solve. If the only problem is that you have assigned EVERY attribute of God and reality TO that which is not God and is unreal, and you have assigned every aspect of what is not God and is unreal TO God, then the simple solution is to reverse this reversal of the recognition of what is really true. That only the truth is true and only the false is false.

Salvation is in fact then incredibly super simple. All you have to do is un-swap the true and the false, the real and unreal. To correctly distinguish between the true and the false, so that the truth is recognized AS true - God's truth - and the false is recognized AS false - the illusory dream world which doesn't really exist.

"For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM. The ego sees SOME good, but never ONLY good. That is WHY its perceptions are so variable. It does not reject goodness entirely, for this you could not accept, but it always ADDS something that is NOT real TO the real, thus CONFUSING ILLUSION AND REALITY. For perceptions cannot be partly true. If you believe in truth AND illusion, you CANNOT TELL WHICH IS TRUE."

"But HIS (Holy Spirit's) function is to distinguish only between the false and the true, replacing the false WITH the true."

This is all that is needed to be set free from ALL FORMS of suffering, no matter the form they take. This ONE LESSON is all that need be learned, and applies to all situations no matter the form they take. The lesson is the re-framing of the WHOLE world, the entire picture, the changing of the PREMISE of everything that seems to be happening, so that you recognize again that IF this entire world is ONLY a dream, not a reality, this completely invalidates ALL forms of suffering and problems.

You can go through life tackling individual problems till the cows come home to die. You can get lost and deceived in the many ways that EACH problem seems different. You can fear the onset of the next big problem, which you fear will be different to yet just as threatening as the last, or moreso. And how will it be solved differently than the one before? Problems can take on the form of a person who has a broken leg, which seems to be different to, the tap is leaking, which seems different to, the car needs fixing, which is different to, someone just threatened me with their contagion.

And an endless string of individual SPECIFIC FORMS are presented by the ego, IN the world, AS the world, which is a horizontal experience of the world, with never-ending supply. Like taking a road littered with constant obstacles, where each one throws you off in a different direction or hurls you off-center right after getting done dealign with putting out another fire of a different form. When will it end? How many DECEPTIONS of specific problems, all of which are unreal, do you need to experience before you realize THEY ARE ALL DECEIVING YOU into believing there are MANY problems, and NOT ONE OF THEM IS TRUE?

It ends when you start to not be deceived by the FORM the problems are taking, and instead start to question the validity of ALL problems, by changing your mind ABOUT THE WORLD. This is the shift from false to true perception. If you can rise up above ALL problems, have no reaction to ANY problems, then there is nothing to fear and you cannot suffer. If ALL the problems are ONE problem, once recognized as false, then EVERY problem is simultaneously solved through ONE change. And this one change is the recognition - enlightenment - that NO PROBLEMS EXIST because there is no "world of problems".

Forgiveness, then, to redefine it in clearer terms, is merely the recognition that there is no world, there are no real problems, none of the forms are true, there are no differences between forms, every problem is the same problem, the whole world is unreal and untrue, there is no reality to sin, sin does not exist, and there is no suffering at all. It's the recognition that this IS ONLY A DREAM. And therefore, every single thing that seems to happen has its MEANING entirely changed, because of the change in the premise of the whole thing.

If the world WERE real and true, and a war were happening, this would be a nightmare. But the instant that you recognize that the world IS NOT real or true, and is just a dream, this utterly changes the meaning of the entire event. Not only is the event not happening, it is having no real consequences, there is no real suffering, there IS NO WAR, and nothing is happening. Upon THIS recognition, you cannot react, and you cannot be afraid. Because you WOULD NOT REACT AT ALL to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. And now the ENTIRE war and every part of it IS INVALIDATED.

You can only be afraid if you believe that the dream world, which is an illusion of a world, has reality. The instant you believe it has reality, truth, cause, power, will, mind, existence, life, presence, happening, effects, etc... you have become confused, are insane, will now be lost in illusions, taking forms to be real, and will be deceived. And now you MUST be in fear because something which does NOT exist appears to exist. Something NOT OF GOD seems to be happening, which is terrifying. And now the form of every problem will stand out as DIFFERENT to the others and will deceive you into an endless road of suffering.

"Deny anything not of God any power to affect you."

Everything in the course points towards the SIMPLICITY of salvation. It is the transcendence of form. Moving beyond appearances. Recognizing that THIS IS ALL A DREAM. Recognizing that the entire world is based on a FALSE PREMISE. It is NOT real, and God DID NOT create it, and IT DOES NOT exist. Which changes the meaning of everything that seems to be happening. To such an extent, that you cannot possibly have grounds for reacting to anything, or being upset by anything, or hurt by anything, because there is NOTHING THERE. And when "nothing unreal exists", you HAVE to be happy, safe and at peace.

The world, essentially, is nothing more than an hallucination. It is a dream you are having IN YOUR MIND. It isn't a world of existence and it is not part of existence. It is entirely contained in your imagination, in thought. "You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts." "There is no world apart form what you wish." "The world is false perception". You project a world and perceive WITHIN your mind. "The world IS perception." There is no world here at all, really. We are just dreaming of a world, in our mind, in a state of sleep. And if you believe this illusion of a world HAS ANY REALITY, you are lost in the dream and WILL suffer.

All salvation therefore, the escape from suffering, the escape from sleeping, the escape from insanity, the escape from sin and death, entails nothing more than recognizing IT IS NOT GOD. It is not real or true. It is not really there. You must take AWAY from it all the power you gave to it. You must take away from it all the sense of truth, reality, power, causality, presence, life, will, mind, spirit, union, consequence, existence, that you GAVE to it, when you confused illusions with the truth.

"Nothiing in the world has the power to bring oppression ... to make you ill or sad or weak or frail" ... "but it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see".

When you took what is true and what is false, and swapped them, which is ALL THAT HAPPENED in the separation from God, which is responsible for EVERYTHING that seemed to arise from the separation, you CONFUSED the true with the false, you stopped distinguishing between them, and you believed true things were false and false things were true. And so you MIXED truth into the false and tried to GIVE the false reality. This has to be undone. It is simply undone by reversal of the denial of God, and the acceptance that ONLY THE TRUTH IS TRUE, and nothing else is true. That is the atonement.

Your challenge now is to learn to NOT be deceived by the FORM of multiple separate illusions, separate events, separate problems, separate bodies, and instead to see that THE WHOLE WORLD and your belief in it is the problem. You suffer because you believe in the PREMISE of this world. You suffer because you think this stuff is ALL HAPPENING. You suffer because you HAVE TO react to the world in fear and stress IF you believe it is real. And you suffer ONLY because you think there is TRUTH to appearances.

Salvation is simple. Salvation is singular. Salvation is abstract. Salvation is ONE solution to ONE problem. The belief that a world opposite to God is real, is the one problem. This produces EVERY form of suffering, because form is made real. The recognition that the world IS NOT A REAL OPPOSITE to God (who is all encompassing and has no opposite), sets you free from ALL suffering NO MATTER what form it takes in the dream. Awareness of dreaming recognizing this IS just a dream, and sighs with relief that nothing unreal exists.

"The real world is all that the Holy Spirit has saved for you, out of what you have made, and to perceive only this is salvation, because it is the recognition that reality is ONLY WHAT IS TRUE." ... This is a very simple course. Perhaps you do not feel that a course which, in the end, teaches nothing more than that only reality is true is necessary. BUT DO YOU BELIEVE IT?"

"How simple is salvation! All it says is what was never true is not true now, and never will be. The impossible has not occurred, and can have no effects. And that is all. Can this be hard to learn by anyone who WANTS it to be true? ONLY unwillingness to learn it could make such an easy lesson difficult. How hard is it to see that what is false can not be true, and what is true can not be false? You can no longer say that you perceive no differences in false and true. You have been told exactly how to tell one from the other, and just what to do if you become confused. Why, then, do you persist in learning not such simple things?"

"How simple, then, is God's plan for salvation. There is but one response to reality, for reality evokes no conflict at all. There is but one Teacher of Reality, Who understands what it is. He does NOT change His mind about reality, because REALITY does not change. Although YOUR interpretations of reality are meaningless in your divided state, His remain consistently true. He GIVES them to you because they are FOR you."

"The Holy Spirit will repeat this ONE inclusive lesson of deliverance, until it has been learned, REGARDLESS of the form of suffering that brings you pain. Whatever hurt you bring to Him, He will make answer with this very simple truth. For this one answer TAKES AWAY the cause of every form of sorrow and of pain. The form affects His answer not at all, for He would teach you but the SINGLE cause of all of them, no matter WHAT their form. And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo.""

"Salvation lies in the simple fact that illusions are NOT fearful, BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT TRUE. And they but SEEM to be fearful to the extent to which you fail to recognize them FOR WHAT THEY ARE. And you WILL fail to do this, to the extent to which you WANT them to be true. And, to the same extent, you are DENYING truth, and so are making YOURSELF unable to make the simple choice between truth and illusion, fantasy and God."

"We have repeated how little is asked of you to learn this course. It is the same small willingness you need to have your whole relationship transformed to joy. The little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit for which He gives you everything. The very little, on which salvation rests. The tiny change of mind by which the crucifixion is changed to Resurrection. And, being true, it is so simple that it cannot fail to be completely understood."

"Have faith in nothing, and you will FIND the treasure that you sought. Yet you will add another burden to your mind, ALREADY burdened, or you would NOT have sought another. You will believe that NOTHING IS OF VALUE, and will VALUE it. A little piece of glass, a speck of dust, a body, or a war, are one to you. For if you value ONE thing made of nothing, you HAVE believed that nothing CAN be precious, and that you CAN learn how to make the UNtrue true. The Holy Spirit, SEEING where you are, but KNOWING you are elsewhere, begins His lesson in simplicity with the fundamental teaching that TRUTH IS TRUE. This is the hardest lesson you will ever learn, and in the end the ONLY one."

"Simplicity is very difficult for twisted minds. Consider all the distortions you have made of nothing; all the strange forms and feelings, and actions and reactions, that you have woven out of it. Nothing is so alien to you as the simple truth, and nothing are you LESS inclined to listen to. The contrast between what is true, and what is not, is PERFECTLY apparent, yet you do NOT see it. The simple and the obvious are NOT apparent to those who would make palaces and royal robes of nothing, believing they are kings with golden crowns BECAUSE of them. All this the Holy Spirit sees, and teaches, simply, that ALL THIS IS NOT TRUE."

"The quietness of its simplicity is so compelling, that you will realize IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DENY THE SIMPLE TRUTH. For there IS nothing else. God is everywhere, and His Son is IN Him WITH everything. Can he sing the dirge of sorrow, when THIS is true?"

"Today I would remember the simplicity of salvation by reinforcing the lesson that there is one problem and one solution. ... The problem is a grievance; the solution is a miracle. And I invite the solution to come to me through my forgiveness of the grievance, and my welcome of the miracle which takes its place."

"A problem cannot be solved if you do not know what it is. Even if it is really solved already, you will still have the problem because you cannot recognize that it has been solved. This is the situation of the world. The problem of separation, which is really the only problem, has already been solved. But the solution is not recognized because the problem is not recognized.

Everyone in this world seems to have his own special problems. Yet they are all the same, and must be recognized as one if the one solution which solves them all is to be accepted. Who can see that a problem has been solved if he thinks the problem is something else? Even if he is given the answer, he cannot see its relevance."

"We will try to free our minds of all the many different kinds of problems that we think we have. We will try to realize that we have only one problem, which we have failed to recognize. We will ask what it is, and wait for the answer. We will be told. Then we will ask for the solution to it. And we will be told."

"Be not deceived by the form of problems today. Whenever any difficulty seems to rise, tell yourself quickly:

"Let me recognize this problem so it can be solved.""

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences. 2 But the mind that has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. 3 There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. 4 But the healed mind will put them all in one category; they are unreal. 5 This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world. 6 And of these two, but one is real. 7 Just as reality is wholly real, apart from size and shape and time and place—for differences cannot exist within it—so too are illusions without distinctions. 8 The one answer to sickness of any kind is healing. 9 The one answer to all illusions is truth."

I took a deep dive into every single statement about "the real world", to find out all possible implication of what it IS and IS NOT referring to.

It is clear to me that what Jesus calls "the real world" IS "the borderland of thought" in between the world we MADE in false perception, and the reality of Heaven. The real world is a REFLECTION of heaven, seen in forgiveness through the eyes of Christ. It includes your ability to see WITH love, looking with forgiveness upon/past the world you made, so that the world you made in attack is seen in the holy instant present as the forgiven world.

The real world also clearly comes BEFORE your re-entry to heaven, and this is backed up in numerous statements. It is entirely within the realm of perception and consciousness, as the highest state of consciousness possible prior to awakening to knowledge. It is still a DREAM but it is a happy dream, a forgiving dream, in which there is no idol worship or illusion or fantasy. And Jesus does distinguish that it has "reality" to the extent that it shares or reflects the reality of heaven.

The real world was also given by God to REPLACE the world you made. In essence, you MADE hell, which is an illusory world of sin and death. Then the Holy Spirit answered this in the co-making of the real world, which is like an alternative dream. A dream of forgiveness and light and love. It REFLECTS heaven, but is not heaven. It is true perception, salvation, atonement, the miracle, right mindedness, and is GIVEN by God. God GAVE you this real world to replace the one you made, made by the Holy Spirit.

God loves the real world, because it is seen WITH love, and seeing the world you made WITH love makes it impossible to see the world of sin and death. Forgiveness overlooks bodies and looks beyond to the light of the real world, the face of Christ. BY loving the world, the UNREAL world is not seen, because love influences perception. And by projecting love, the HOly Spirit projects the real world for you to see, IN PLACE OF the unforgiven world.

What I found also are many statements clearly discerning that the term ILLUSION refers to an UNFORGIVEN world only, to false perception. The world we originally tried to make without God/Holy Spirit. The world of sin and death and sickness. The world of bodies and forms and planets. That is the world WE made, through unforgiveness, and through attack and guilt and sin and fear.

Jesus refers to THAT world as "an illusory world" and quite consistently, all references to ILLUSION appear to refer ONLY to that world, not the forgiven/real world. Because IN the "real world" state you reflect truth and DISPEL all illusions, RECOGNIZING what is there. This is why true perception is ACCURATE perception.

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it." thus refers to the false perceptual world of bodies, UNFORGIVEN, unreal, untrue, in which the truth is obscured and lies seem like truth. A world seen without any reason or sanity or light. A world of deception. When you approach true perception, ILLUSIONS are seen through and undone and removed, and so true perception does not see an ILLUSORY world, it sees "the real world". The world as it is WITHOUT the distortion of illusion, and free from the ego's shadow. It's kind of like the world with minimal ego.

The real world, or the sense of it "having reality", doesn't mean it IS reality as in Heaven, but it does mean it is "as is", founded on love, and is not MIS-perceived. True perception is accurate perception and LINES UP WITH what knowledge or direct sight would see. It is truthful.

I also saw references indicating that THE VEIL, which is a reference to the physical world hanging in front of the face of Christ (whereby the face of christ is another synonym for the real world/true perception), refers ONLY to the unforgiven world. The veil entails the world of bodies, the granite block of sin, the forms of error, the gap, etc.

This veil is SEEN THROUGH AND PAST to see the real world/face of Christ. Also when you see the real world you DO NOT SEE the unforgiven world of sin and bodies. It is forgotten. And in its TOTAL forgetting you ONLY see the real world. And as Jesus says, you will barely have time to thank God for this before he takes you home. The veil of illusions parts, the real world is seen, then you go to heaven.

There are numerous references to you FIRST arriving at the real world, the borderland of thought between the world of sin that you made, and actual Heaven which is God's Kingdom, and THEN God taking the last step to take you home. Out of time, into eternity. Out of bodies, into the light of eternal life. There is a clear distinction between Heaven and the real world, whereby the real world is at most Heaven's REFLECTION, and is seen through the eyes of Christ. And also interestingly, we are to recognize Christ FIRST, before we move onto the love of God.

So the "real world" is a state of light and awareness and wakefulness, WHILE still dreaming. It is a DREAM OF being awake. And in this sense as you approach the real world you DO seem to be waking up, becoming more aware. And at the real world you are practically fully awake, but slightly asleep still. Only moving on from the real world INTO heaven do you fully awaken. But prior to this you can be exceedingly wakeful while still in a body.

The real world, being a reflection of heaven, also is a state that reflects sharing. Holy relationships reflect real relationships. There is equality and a kind of oneness. There is a lack of separations and divisions. A kind of unity is seen spread across chaos. And what used to be a world of sin and death is reinterpreted in such a way that a hidden song of gratitude and light is seen and heard radiating from it. Sights of war and death are reinterpreted, through perception, as harmless and gentle and welcome. And the healed peaceful mind projects peace and love and sees only peace and love in it.

Note that seeing from love, you look toward love, which is a light BEYOND BODIES. The illusory world, the veil, is seen through, and overlooked, by forgiveness, through extension, which is christ vision. The world is seen as "forgiven" because it is recognizes as an illusion and is not seen as real sin. It is seen PAST. And this overlooking makes the illusory world seem holy and forgiven. But simultaneously sight (spiritual eye) reaches beyond the illusory world TO the light of the real world. Eventually it sees ONLY this light, as the veil disappears, fully revealing the face of Christ.

After this, the real world DOES END, because it IS a dream, except for the eternal love that was reflected in it through thoughts of love, which are saved as gifts. Because the real world IS still a dream and it vanishes as true perception is converted into knowledge. Being FULLY in the real world is like being on the OUTSKIRTS of the world, standing on the edge, not involved, not confused, not caught up in the world. Being passer by. Seeing from love and truth. Illusions recognized and dispelled. In a state of mind outside of separateness and form. Awareness of dreaming. A borderland of thought just shy of heaven and outside of heaven's gate.

I have a lot of quotes, but here's a handful of the clearer snippets that I highlighted along the way...

"Only this is the real world, and perceiving ONLY this will lead you to the real Heaven"

"The real world is all that the Holy Spirit has saved for you, out of what you have made"

"your new and ONLY real perception"

"For as Heaven and earth become one, even the real world will vanish from your sight."

"In the real world, there is no sickness, for there is no separation and no division."

"For you share the real world as you share Heaven"

"When you perceive yourself without deceit, you will accept the real world in place of the false one you have made. And then your Father will lean down to you, and take the last step for you, by raising you unto Himself."

"If only the loving thoughts of God’s Son ARE the world’s reality, the real world MUST be IN HIS MIND"

"God DOES love the real world, and those who perceive its reality CANNOT see the world of death."

"For death is not OF the real world, in which everything is eternal." (eternal means something a bit different than "will be there forever", because the real world does end).

"God gave you the real world in exchange for the one you made, out of your split mind, and which IS the symbol of death."

"relinquish your investment in the world as YOU have projected it, allowing the Holy Spirit to project the real world TO you"

"Make the world real (loving, innocent etc) unto YOURSELF, for the real world is the gift of the Holy Spirit"

"In His sight, the Son of God is perfect" "He will SHOW you the real world"

"The awakening of His Son begins with his investment in the REAL world"

"And then the real world will spring to your sight, for Christ has never slept. He is waiting to be seen" "He looks quietly on the real world, which He would SHARE with you"

"we will look upon the world as God "created" it together. Through the eyes of Christ, ONLY the real world exists, and can BE seen"

"The real world was given you by God, in loving exchange for the world YOU made, and which you SEE. But take it from the hand of Christ, and look upon it. ITS reality will make everything ELSE invisible, for beholding it is TOTAL perception"

"And perception has never been. Being corrected, it gives place to knowledge, which is forever the ONLY reality."

"as His from Love. And He sees FOR you, as your witness to the real world. "

"Even in sleep has Christ protected you, ensuring the real world FOR you when you wake" (sleep means false perception, waking is true perception, but is not the FINAL awakening FROM sleep)

"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."

"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.

"The real world is the way that leads you to remembrance"

"You will first DREAM of peace (the real world), and THEN awaken to it (heaven)."

"This loveliness is NOT a fantasy. It is the real world, bright, and clean and new, with everything sparkling under the open sun. Nothing is hidden here, for everything has BEEN forgiven, and there ARE no fantasies to hide the truth. The bridge between that world and this is SO little and SO easy to cross that you could not believe it is the meeting-place of worlds so different. Yet this little bridge is the strongest thing that touches on this world at all. This little step, so small it has escaped your notice, is a stride through time into eternity, and beyond all ugliness, into beauty that will enchant you, and will never cease to cause you wonderment at its perfection."

"The real world, in its loveliness, YOU learn to reach. Fantasies are all undone"

"by YOUR OWN forgiveness, you are FREE TO SEE. And WHAT you see is only what YOU HAVE MADE, with the blessing of your forgiveness on it."

"the REAL perception, born of the new perspective he has learned, has served its purpose."

"The perception of the real world will be so short, that you will barely have time to thank God for it. For God will take the last step swiftly, when you have reached the real world, and have been made ready for Him."

"The real world is attained simply by the COMPLETE forgiveness of the old; the world you see WITHOUT forgiveness"

"All this beauty will rise to bless your sight, as you look upon the world with forgiving eyes. For forgiveness literally TRANSFORMS vision, and lets you see the real world, reaching quietly and gently across chaos, and removing all illusions that had twisted your perception, and fixed it on the T(634) - 461 - past. The smallest leaf becomes a thing of wonder, and a blade of grass a sign of God’s perfection. From the forgiven world, the Son of God is lifted easily to his home (heaven). "

"For salvation IS the end of dreams, and, with the closing of the dream, will have no meaning. Who, awake in Heaven, COULD dream that there could ever be NEED of salvation? "

"The spark of beauty, or the veil of ugliness (the veil is the unreal world seen in false perception only!); the real world, or the world of guilt and fear; truth or illusion; freedom or slavery"

"The holy relationship, a MAJOR step toward the perception of the real world, is LEARNED. It is the old, unholy relationship, transformed and seen anew."

"In your relationship, the Holy Spirit has gently laid the real world; the world of happy dreams, from which awaking is so easy and so natural."

"The dream of waking is easily transferred to its reality. For this dream comes from your will, JOINED with the Will of God."

"This world of light, this circle of brightness, is the real world, where guilt meets with forgiveness. Here, the world OUTSIDE is seen anew, WITHOUT the shadow of guilt upon it."

"There is a borderland of thought that stands between this world and Heaven. It is not a place, and WHEN you reach it is APART from time. Here is the meeting place where thoughts are brought TOGETHER; where conflicting values MEET, and ALL illusions are laid down beside the truth, where they are judged to be untrue. This borderland is just beyond the gate of Heaven. Here is every thought made pure and wholly simple. Here is sin denied, and everything that IS, received instead.

This is the journey’s end. We have referred to it as the "real world.""

"Salvation IS a borderland"

"Salvation (real world/forgiven world) stops just short of Heaven, for only perception NEEDS salvation. Heaven was never lost, and so can not be saved. "

"The real world is the second part of the hallucination time and death are real, and have existence which can be perceived. This terrible illusion was denied in but the time it took for God to give His Answer to illusion"

"The real world still is but a dream. Except the figures have been changed. They are not seen as idols which betray (idols are part of false perception)"

"And what was once a dream of judgment now has changed into a dream where all is joy, because that is the PURPOSE that it has. Only forgiving dreams can enter here, for time is almost over. And the forms which enter in the dreams are now perceived as brothers, not in judgment, but in love."

"The real world is the state of mind in which the ONLY purpose of the world is seen to be forgiveness. "

"No-one outside of Heaven knows how this can be. For understanding this is Heaven itself. Even the real world has a purpose still beneath creation and eternity. But fear is gone, because its purpose is forgiveness, NOT idolatry."

"The real world is a state in which the mind has learned how easily do idols go when they are still perceived, but wanted not."

"Thus is the real world’s purpose gently brought into awareness, to REPLACE the goal of sin and guilt. "

"Here is the real world given in exchange for dreams of terror"

"This understanding is the ONLY change that lets the real world rise to take the place of dreams of terror."

"The real world is achieved when you perceive the basis of FORGIVENESS is quite real and fully justified."

"As the world I see arises from my thinking errors, so will the real world rise before my eyes as I let my errors be corrected. "

"Today the real world rises before us in gladness, to be seen at last. Sight is given us, now that the light has come. We do not see the ego's shadow on the world today. We see the light, and in it we see Heaven's reflection lie across the world."

"and the sight of the real world which has come to replace the unforgiven world you thought was real."

"Healing might thus be called a counter-dream which cancels out the dream of sickness in the name of truth"

"Just as forgiveness shines away all sin, and the real world will occupy the place of what you made, so healing must replace the fantasies of sickness which you hold before the simple truth. When sickness has been seen to disappear in spite of all the laws which hold it cannot but be real, then questions have been answered."

"Christ's vision pictures Heaven, for it sees a world so like to Heaven that what God created perfect can be mirrored there. The darkened glass the world presents can show but twisted images in broken parts. The real world pictures Heaven's innocence."

"The real world is a symbol, like the rest of what perception offers. Yet it stands for what is opposite to what you made. Your world is seen through eyes of fear (world you made without hs, false perception), and brings the witnesses of terror to your mind. The real world cannot be perceived except through eyes forgiveness blesses, so they see a world where terror is impossible, and witnesses to fear can not be found."

"The real world holds a counterpart for each unhappy thought reflected in your world"

"The real world shows a world seen differently, through quiet eyes and with a mind at peace. "

"There are no cries of pain and sorrow heard, for nothing here remains outside forgiveness. And the sights are gentle. Only happy sights and sounds can reach the mind that has forgiven itself."

"The real world is the symbol that the dream of sin and guilt is over, and God's Son no longer sleeps. His waking eyes perceive the sure reflection of his Father's Love; the certain promise that he is redeemed. The real world signifies the end of time, for its perception makes time purposeless."

"hymns of gratitude the world is singing underneath the sounds of fear. There is a real world which the present holds safe from all past mistakes. "

"How surely, therefore, must the real world come to greet the holy sight of anyone who takes the Holy Spirit's purpose as his goal for seeing. And he cannot fail to look upon what Christ would have him see, and share Christ's love for what he looks upon."

"There is no point at which the contrast between the perception of the real world and that of the world of illusions becomes more sharply evident."

"RIGHT-MINDEDNESS listens to the Holy Spirit, forgives the world, and through Christ's vision sees the real world in its place. This is the final vision, the last perception, the condition in which God takes the final step Himself. "

"Both this world and the real world are illusions because right-mindedness merely overlooks, or forgives, what never happened. Therefore it is not the ONE-MINDEDNESS of the Christ Mind"

"Consciousness has levels and awareness can shift quite dramatically, but it cannot transcend the perceptual realm. At its highest it becomes aware of the real world, and can be trained to do so increasingly. "

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality."

"THE FACE OF CHRIST has to be seen before the memory of God can return. The reason is obvious. Seeing the Face of Christ is perception"

"But the Face of Christ is[5] the great symbol of forgiveness. It is salvation. It is the symbol of the real world."

"Whoever looks on this no longer sees the world. He is as near to Heaven as is possible outside the gate. Yet from this gate it is no more than just a step inside. It is the final step. And this we leave to God. "