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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few quotes about working miracles for others...

"In time, you have been told to offer miracles as I direct, and let the Holy Spirit bring to you those who are seeking you. (T-15.V.10:7)

And you will offer miracles because you are one with God. (W-pI.77.1:3)

No one can ask another to be healed. But he can let himself be healed, and thus offer the other what he has received. (T-27.V.1:6-7)

Today I let Christ's vision look upon all things for me and judge them not, but give each one a miracle of love instead. (W-pII.349.Heading)

Offer Christ's gift to everyone and everywhere, for miracles, offered the Son of God through the Holy Spirit, attune you to reality. (T-13.VIII.7:2)"

Unless we are in heaven with God right now, and only that, and have relinquished all of the ego and its world, we are in a state of DEATH right now. Fictional death yes, but still death.

This is why we need RESURRECTION. Resurrection wouldn’t even be called for if we were already ALIVE. Resurrection means to BRING BACK TO LIFE from a state of death, aka "raising the dead".

What you think is life in this world (earth) is not life. It is death. People are already dead. Bodies are already walking around dead. There are degrees of death, it seems, but actually even a newborn baby is *already in death*. ALL BODIES ARE FORMS OF DEATH.

We do not recognize what death is, because we are deluded by the ego’s illusions about what is life. It has attempted to make an ILLUSION OF LIFE from death.

This entire universe is a dream of death. We are not living here. There are no life forms here. There are only forms of death. That is why we should not WANT this world.

If we do not recognize the LIE the ego has made, to try to suggest that this universe contains LIFE, then we will be deluded and deceived and will buy into this illusion. We will think our body is life or we are living. We are not. This world is not a place of living.

We will then start to think that parts of this world are more alive than others, that there are life forms, that there is "nature", that the little cute puppies and kittens are "alive". This is not life. These are just IMAGES the ego made as SUBSTITUTES FOR ETERNAL LIFE.

Mortal life is not life. It’s an idea of dying. The world is RUN by laws of death, not laws of life, or laws of life and death. Just death. But if we do not recognize it AS death, we are going to think, we’re already alive and therefore DO NOT NEED RESURRECTION. And so we will KEEP DEATH by keeping the ILLUSION OF LIFE, and WILL END UP IN THE GROUND!!

We do not have to be like this. God has a creation for us to live in, our HOME, in heaven, where there is REAL LIFE. It is a "place" (state) of perfect joy, peace, love, happiness, eternal safety, completely harmlessness, innocence, and it is 100% ALIVE! And you are part of that! It’s the only reality. This world is NOTHING in comparison.

We need resurrection beacuse we are mostly dead and heading for death. BUT we know, death is illusion, so NOTHING TO FEAR OR HAVE A REACTION ABOUT ;-) .... but we do need to still choose God again. Or rather, stop being in denial that we DO HAVE eternal life already and can never die.

Resurrection restores life where there was death. Raising the dead is NEEDED in this world to REVERSE SIN AND DEATH in all ways imaginable, both in mind and in body. This is why Jesus speaks of miracles as drops of healing rain which bring signs of live back to a dead world.

It can be very important for your life to totally fail sometimes. It's good for the ego to totally fuck up.

It is important that you come to realize that what you've been trying to do DOES NOT WORK.

You will initially feel like this is absolutely the worst case scenario, where everything is falling apart and going to shit, and nothing is working how it's supposed to.

BUT...

This is very important.

It means you will come face to face with the fact that your ego method of dealing with things is completely flawed. And, there is an extremely powerful (yet painful) potential in that.

Only when you can fully ADMIT to yourself that your ego behavior is flawed - such as an attitude of trying to fix and save everyone - believing you are the source of everything - thinking you have authority and control over your life - believing you are in charge of your existence - when these FAIL you STOP BELIEVING that these approaches work.

You surrender them. Possibly on your knees. In tears.

And it seems right then that you are absolutely at your worst, BUT, you are mere millimeters away from something truly marvelous.

Because, when you DROP the ego tools that you have come to realize do not work, you surrender trying to do this all yourself, you withdraw all of your conviction and value and faith from these broken lifestyles, and this puts you in a position for SOMETHING ELSE.

And guess what... that something else is then ready to come flooding in. If you've seen clearly that trying to fix everyone is fundamentally totally flawed because it just makes the situation WORSE, then.... naturally... the opposite must be true. Stopping fixing must HELP.

But it's more than this. Ultimately it means, you are coming face to face with your authority problem over God, the power you think you have over your life, and you are FORCED to surrender it.

You think this is terrible, like your life is destroyed. But then you realize... wait a minute.... there is another option open to me. What if I let God be the authority? Wait a minute.. what if God has the power I've been trying to have and I can share it with Him? Wait a minute... what if I can actually be happy if I stop trying to do this myself and I instead align with His will? .... all these popcorn insights start to fire off as you suddenly realize that your ego strategy was actually a CLOSED DOOR which was shutting out the EASE of being with God, making your life difficult and driving you nuts.

So now you rip the door off its hinges, the light floods in, you suddenly realize THERE IS A BETTER WAY, and hey presto, suddenly you find real relief and your will has become aligned with God's will. And now you can actually enjoy the journey of returning to God and heading in the direction of union with God, rather than always trying to run the other way. Yay!

So your life fails... its a blessing in disguise. Looks awful, feels crap, you don't want it, but you don't realize what it's leading to. It NEEDS to fail, so you can be set free.

Sometimes the ego breaking down can seem like a messy shitty mess. With extra shit in it.

When the ego's thought system is confronted with reality, i.e. the Holy Spirit's thought system, it has absolutely no way to understand it.

This also happens when some tightly held 'ego tool' that you've been using just keeps failing to work. And then you end up feeling like you're totally screwed because nothing works. This is VERY GOOD in terms of you coming to LET GO of that broken tool, which was never really there to help you, SO THAT you can open up to a whole new way of being and seeing.

But in the meantime, while the tools are breaking down and you're seeing just how insane everyone seems to be and how an invitation to eternal life by Holy Spirit is interpreted with the terror of "it means death".... that's not a particularly enjoyable experience.

There is an old analogy actually that springs to mind where someone feels like they are about as far away from God as they could possibly be. They feel like they're heading down a dark tunnel to hell. And that they'll be smashed against the rocks. Nothing works. No hope left (of the ego's solutions working), and presently not seeing a better way. And yet, in that moment, there is an incredibly opportunity to be alleviated of the ego's promises - for them to be brought into question.

Sometimes you just have to really clearly see the ego's system breaking and failing and not working and being utterly shit, in order for you to LET GO OF IT and want something else. Seeing the ego's horrifyingly broken mechanics is NOT PRETTY!

You might not even know what that something else is, but it can't be this. That certainty of 'this tool doesn't work' is a great way to see through it and withdraw all your allegiance from it. And then, guess what surprise is just around the corner? What happens when you surrender and you let go finally of this broken tool? The clouds part and God pops his head out with a smile and says "peekaboo", and suddenly a light dawns on you and you move forward in a whole new way - because it was the ego's strategies that were actually the problem - and you just let them go.

You thought you were crashing against the rocks, when in fact it was the ego breaking down because it needed to, so that you could be set free of it. And while you thought you couldn't be further from God or further from the truth, because of how the nightmare APPEARED, you were actually just a tiny step away from a revelation that would set you free.

The ego is never comfortable when you try to step out of its thought system. It always seems to have interpreted what that would mean as the 'worst' thing that could happen or precisely what you DO NOT WANT. Of course... because the ego has reversed truth and lies and thinks that truth is a lie. It doesn't want it. And it can't see it for what it is.

You are being loved and supported even when you think you are being condemned and persecuted. Because you are mistaken. And maybe that breakdown where all hell breaks loose is really a healthy expression of stuff that you needed to FINALLY acknowledge, so that you can be free of it.

I had no idea, that I had been spending vast majority of my life attempting to use the ego's persona in order to 'make life better'.

All the times that I people-pleased to try to make bad people go away.

All the times that I tried to fix everything bad that ever seemed to be happening.

All the times that I tried to appear to be innocent and yet was acting like a victim.

All the times that I tried to look pleasing to others so that they would maybe not hurt me.

All the times that I thought I had to give others what they wanted, and that I was not inherently wanted in a loving way - only in terms of what others wanted to take from me.

There was even a time in my life that was especially low where I felt so bad about myself, such low self 'esteem', ie shame and unworthiness, that I believed I did not deserve any love, and that the only people who would 'want me' were those who wanted to use me or take from me or have me be a slave to. It was tremendously disempowering.

Ultimately this was all because I had such a strong belief that my personas (personii?), were actually capable of IMPROVING my life, making things more palatable, protecting me or defending me from what I did not want. I wanted to simply shut out all the bad icky stuff and focus solely on the good stuff.

And I remember actually believing that I was becoming 'very spiritual' by rejecting even the everyday egos of other people, which I relegated and judged and condemned for 'being ego' or 'being selfish' etc. This sort of twisted double-edged idea of spirituality arose out of this in my late teens where I was simultaneously terrified and hounded by scary stuff in my mind, while thinking that I was also having deep spiritual insights. And maybe I was in a way, but it was strongly dualistic, and my mind was very split. There was a 'rift' in my life, a strong sense of separation, and that persona of exalted, lofty specialness, really holier-than thou, simultaneously felt like I was approaching death.

I used the persona to get rid of and attack everything that I was against, believing that what I 'kept' was all good and acceptable and allowed. BUT, the more that I got rid of... and believe me I included a LOT of stuff in the list of what I rejected, way above and beyond normal classifications (ie most of the world), the more what I had LEFT OVER got smaller and smaller. The more I found myself in a hole of isolation and loneliness. And the more I became depressed. I felt like this impending sense of everything coming to an 'end'. My whole reality just felt like it was saturated with a sense of impending doom, with no way out. Because I was hiding in the persona and not being authentic at all, even though I felt justified by my pain.

I was repressing so much and rejecting so much, perhaps in attempt to heal myself of strong wounds, which I had projected onto everyone else, that I was perhaps trying to find a way to get away from it all and at least 'fake' that I was healing, as a starting point. Very much fortunately, things gradually started to turn around at that point, massively fuelled by my meeting my beloved wife who came into the darkness like an angel of light. Then the healing commenced.

Now, looking back, I can see how my entire time was spent choosing the persona, putting on a fake image, trying to give people what they wanted, trying to please, trying not to upset anyone, trying to maintain status quo or 'peace' by never asserting myself or standing out, etc. It was a rough lesson! And all of that resisting, all of that... rejecting of life... merely diminished my own. Now I am learning that using the persona at all is an attack on myself. It is a way to buy into the belief that I need to cover myself up because there's something wrong with me. As self-love increases - genuine honest God-shared love - so too does the need for these masks diminish.

I am seeing clearer and clearer that all of the confidence, all of the fearlessness, all of the certainty, all of the clarity and strength, that I thought I was going to find by using rejection, separation, persona denial, etc... are actually already IN ME... it was being denied BY the use of the persona. I just needed to learn WHERE the truth is, what WHAT the truth is. I was looking in the wrong place for my whole life - outside of me, and was rejecting myself the entire time.

Now I see that if you stand with yourself in your truth and don't reject yourself, you don't even NEED any of the persona masks, because you already HAVE what God has given you, you already ARE powerful and safe and strong. You don't need to hide from people, because you are unconditionally loving yourself. You're saying, I'm going to ALWAYS be real, true and honest, in all situations and with all people. I am ALWAYS going to come from unconditional love no matter what. And in that, you not only drop all of the efforts to 'get rid of bad stuff', you also drop all of the efforts to 'choose only the good stuff'. And along with that goes all sense of depending on, or caring about, what anyone else thinks of you or what you do. It is a freedom. In a sense, an independence - being set free from the energy-sucking vampire that the ego is and being AVAILABLE now to God, to allow Him to live through you.

It wasn't getting rid of bad stuff that made my life better. Trying to do that made it worse. Accepting myself fully is the goal.

It's not where I thought life would go. But this is where it is heading for all of us. Back to our true selves. Back to love.

Jesus describes the process of becoming sick...

"Sickness is a decision. It is not a thing that happens to you, quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. It is a choice you make, a plan you lay, when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind, and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall. Now are you sick, that truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more."

What happens is, we're in a deluded mindset (ego) and are misperceiving and misinterpreting reality. Then we are exposed to the truth, but in our thought system what is actually true is perceived as "false", because we see truth in what is false and vice versa. That's part of our delusion.

So instead of seeing the truth for how it really is, we see it as an enemy. In particular the ego sees the Holy Spirit as an enemy, just as the ego sees the miracle as an enemy.

By misperceiving the truth, i.e. filtering it and reinterpreting it and coming to a conclusion that it has properties of "falseness", in our twisted thought system this means it is an enemy, or it's evil, or its attacking what we are, or is against us in some way.

The "natural reaction" to this PERCEPTION (albeit a mistaken one), which is totally understandable, is to DEFEND YOURSELF. You tend to want to get away from what you believe is false, and draw yourself towards that which is true for you. Whether or not your idea of truth is back to front or not is a different matter.

So your natural reaction to your OWN misperception of the truth, is to defend yourself, because you see attack IN it, which you have projected onto it. You therefore believe you are seeing an enemy, and you want to escape.

You want to get away from that which you see as false, because it is evil, riddled with darkness, vicious and sure to threaten you. In the interest of preserving your sense of SAFETY, and in effort to DEFEND THE TRUTH (at least, your delusional truth), and in the interests of maintaining your sense of INNOCENCE (albeit mis-identified), you use your creative powers to put up a DEFENSE.

This defense is something you do with your mind. It is resistance. It is denial. It is an attempt to disassociate yourself from the truth, to put distance between you, to emphasize the separation between you and it, and therefore effectively SHUT YOURSELF OFF FROM LIFE. Truth is life, i.e. God, so as you defend yourself against God, you produce the opposite of life - a movement towards death. All forms of sickness are partial deaths. There is not really such a thing as sickness, only life or death - and death is an illusion.

Therefore you believe that you've actually done the right thing, that you've defended yourself, that you've upheld the truth, that you've maintained innocence, and that you've blocked out some vicious murderous God who wants you dead. You really believe that you've actually made a wise move and that you are BETTER OFF being rid of, or having escaped, the terrible monster that you MIS-INTERPRETED the truth as.

As you continue with such delusions, you can drive yourself to death, believing fully that you are all the while defending the truth, upholding innocence, protecting reality, and thwarting the 'real menace' of God. People commit suicide every day. Every person who dies is choosing to die in order to escape from God. Death is a choice for self-murder, to escape Life, because Life has now been wrongly perceived as DEATH. Life and death have been flipped, their roles and meanings inverted, and you are now convinced that dying is actually a choice for life - that it is your SALVATION, and that it will bring you PEACE! Hah.

So you can see how deluded we can be, that the truth contains horrors we do not want. But the fact is, the truth is a blank mirror, in which we see a REFLECTION of all of our own delusional beliefs. When it looks frightening, it is ONLY because it does not support, uphold, or even acknowledge, the egoic belief system and all that it believes in. Thus when we are ego-identified, we believe we are defending ourselves from a separate enemy, but we're actually running away from our own SHADOW.

This is why we need to forgive God, i.e. undo our delusion that illusions are real, or that there is a truth other than God's truth. It is also why we need to have "a little willingness" to be mistaken - that our sense of truth may not be the real truth, and become open to accepting God's truth as our truth - sharing truth with Him. This opens the way for healing miracles. But even moreso, it is the RESURRECTION of the Son of GOd.

The sick are merely delusional and self-deceived in what the truth really is, believing that the opposite is true. They do not realize they are choosing against the truth, and that by doing so it produces sickness. And then sickness seems to come about almost accidentally through mis-creation. Before you know it, you're sick and suffering and heading for death. But this can ALWAYS be corrected, and you can ALWAYS choose again.

Correction is needed, and that is all.

Holy Spirit is the answer. He is here to help awaken you from the ILLUSION that death is real, that death will protect you from death, and that God is evil.

God is love. Love is all there is. Love is what you are.

We are responsible for creating this world, not God.

We are responsible for creating our bodies and everything that seems to happen here.

This entire universe would not exist AT ALL if it were not for Sons of God dreaming it.

Prior to this dreaming there was no universe here. This universe only does and only is what we imagine it to be and what we've made it to be.

We are the ones who manifest and materialize sick bodies. We are the ones who cause bodies to age and die. We are the ones who have invented everything that ever happens in this world.

However.

What happens very often in this world is that we get this idea... I want to be more at peace, I want to be happier, I want to be more spiritual, I want to not care so much about wars, etc.

But where do you go? How do you "get away from" this stuff? When it still seems real to you, when you are still in unconscious denial about putting it out there in the first place, what is your ego solution?

The only solution you have is to create a PRETEND HEAVEN in the midst of hell. To back yourself into a nice cozy little corner and pretend to yourself that you are happy and at peace.

The result of this is a kind of separation which occurs, between you and the world. A separation of causality. It's almost an attempt to disown what you made. It's also a disownership of the fact that YOU are putting this stuff out there.

So if your body is sick, and you decide, well, I'm going to be at peace with this. You are not. You are going to try to pretend that you're okay with it. Maybe to some degree feel more accepting about it. But if that sickness remains, something is not right in your head.

Or like, you are heading towards death, and because you think that this is inevitable and natural and there's nothing you can do about it (yah right), you start to prepare yourself for "accepting" the idea that it's going to happen.

Essentially what you are doing is trying to talk yourself into seeing ego bullshit illusions, appearing real, as if they are heavenly and acceptable. You're trying to pretend that it's totally okay with you if you are still sick and suffering, as a kind of coping mechanism. But these coping mechanisms are ego coping mechanism which not only do not work, they do not fix anything, they simply resign to tolerating suffering and keep the inevitable plan of death waiting in the wings.

Becoming at peace with bullshit manifestations, sicknesses which demonstrate your mind is warped, and death which demonstrates you do not believe in God, is not going to ultimately set you free from hell, nor is it capable of bringing you lasting peace.

There are profound numbers of people in this world who believe that this kind of "spiritual escape" within this "real" world is actually spirituality. It's like, if you can just skew your perception in just the right way, you can see it in such a way that it seems tolerable to you. This is all to do with the ego trying to become comfortable with, accepting of, and having no intention of undoing, the demonstration of attack that it wants to keep.

So you have entire religions who practice things like meditation and such in an attempt to transcend the bullshit, to get to a place of non-duality, where they are okay with "whatever happens". This falls short of waking up from the dream. It keeps you stuck in reincarnation. And it perpetuates death.

People will also believe that their mind is separate from their body and "I am not a body I am free", therefore concluding that I'm not supposed to be a body and the body is not my self and therefore I should kind of ignore whatever the body is doing. This is crap. This is denial. You are putting the body there, in whatever condition it shows up, on purpose, and for a reason. To then put it on a shelf and pretend that you are not the one who made it, not the one who maintains its sickness, and not the one who makes it die, is denial.

This world does not keep ticking over on its own. It is not self-propelled. It does not have a will or a mind of its own. It does not cause anything on its own. And it is nothing but an effect. That means somewhere someone is dreaming this world and making shit happen. On purpose. So there is something faulty about that person's belief system.

To demonstrate sickness is an attack. To demonstrate death is an attack. To demonstrate suffering of any kind is an attack. To have attack thoughts, ego thoughts, thoughts of enemies, thoughts of victimhood, or any kind of ego emotional reactions, is an attack.

These things ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO STAY. If you are waking up from this dream, then you are supposed to stop producing these "symptoms". You are meant to demonstrate that you TRULY BELIEVE in God's good nature, to such an extent, that you will ACT based on what you believe and SHOW everyone what the truth is. This is what demonstrations of miracles are for.

There are no angry thoughts in a loving mind. There are no ego thoughts in a loving mind. There is no sickness in the mind or body of an awakened master. There is no death for those who have chosen immortality, not at the bodily level or at the spirit level. Trying to tolerate these things, accept these things, put up with these things, make these things okay, justify these things, rationalize these things, or make these things out to "not matter because I am at peace" is a delusion, and symptomatic of a mind which still believes in separation from God.

NO ONE in their right mind would demonstrate that you can be hurt, that you are broken, that you can be sick, or that you can die. It is insanity to do so. These things are not something we're meant to escape from into some kind of mental state that appears to be okay with them happening. We are meant to not only realize they are illusions and not real, but to ALSO DISAPPEAR THEM. Illusions recognized MUST disappear, and that means, if they are sticking around when we're claiming to be enlightened, there is ego lurking somewhere.

Beware that the ego has an idea of heaven on earth which is not the same thing as heaven on earth, which is really a fake illusion of heaven on earth, in which you become comfortable or are seemingly not at war with people or you aren't having bad things happen right now or your mind seems relatively peaceful. You don't need to do mental gymnastics in order to be at peace. You simply need to be natural, God-given, the way God created you. It is effortless. And all else follows. Health, happiness, abundance, miracles.

"There is no death. The son of God is free." does not mean the Son of God is okay with the body dying. It means THERE IS NO DEATH because the Son of God does not choose to cause death, and therefore DEATH IS IMPOSSIBLE.

It is easy to offer guilt as a way to atone for doing something wrong or not doing what you were supposed to. We give little 'gifts' of guilt. We're trying to say, ok, I acknowledge that I failed in some way, so to make it up to you, I'm going to enter into guilt and have a 'guilty conscience' (bullshit), and then to atone for this sin I'm going to have to SUFFER by doing some shit to make it up to you. I'm going to position myself as worthy of guilt and suffering in order to make it up to you, and this is my offering to you to atone for my mistake.

A 'guilty conscience' is actually a bullshit ego device designed to always find you partly innocent when you are not doing anything, and wholly sinful when you step out of line. It demands that when you make mistakes you should be punished mercilessly, and that you are supposed to be ashamed, and that you are supposed to feel guilty. It says you deserve this guilt because you made a mistake. This is absolute bullshit and is not true at all. It leaves no room whatsoever for forgiveness or unconditional love.

Mistakes call for CORRECTION, not punishment, and punishment in ALL its forms does not lead to correction. It can appear to lead to correct only by inflicting additional damage and suffering which can only later yield even more mistakes in retaliation and grievance. (This is why hitting kids is nothing other than pointless abuse - an illusion of obedience arises out of fear and trauma and now the original error persists and has been joined by a second layer of self-hate - an illusion of obedience at the price of suffering and unlove, which only leads to resentment and being even more error-prone.)

Being in guilt does not make it up to anyone. Being in guilt means you are offering guilt as a gift and are giving guilt as a statement of what you are worth and what everyone is worth. It could only possibly please a sick-minded person to enter into guilt in attempt to atone for an error. And entering into guilt can only reinforce and offer sickness to that person. If you are sane, you do not want people to be guilty on your behalf, you want them to ... as the bible terms it.... repent ... i.e., stop choosing sin and choose love. If the 'error' is that they chose not to love, then the correction you should truly seek is to see them being loving - for themselves, and for you.

It would be far better when you make a mistake or fail or do something 'wrong' to offer up your innocence and love instead, to position yourself as wholly worthy of forgiveness, and to choose-again to extend love instead of punishment. That would be loving. That would be an offering of love which could truly ATONE for i.e. UNDO what you think you did wrong.

It should be in everyone's best interests that when someone does something in error, they are loved and forgiven, and in turn they are encouraged to return to love and to offer love as a way to 'make up for' the error. (This is kind of like being forced to do pushups as atonement knowing that the exercise actually helps rather than hurts.) The error is hardly corrected by admitting to guilt or demonstrating that you deserve punishment. That is an offering to a false God of hate. God holds nothing against you and only wants you to claim your innocence, unconditionally.

It is also in everyone's best interests that you choose love instead of guilt or punishment, because, literally, we are all ONE, we are joined in the mind, we SHARE an identity, and what you do to yourself you do to everyone. This goes against the ego's law that everyone is separate and that individual can suffer in isolation. If you choose guilt for yourself, you DO choose it for everyone else as well, and that is not only an additional layer of attack but also an offering for everyone to join in your suffering. Nobody wants to first be attacked and to then have the attacker turn around and attack a second time to try to make up for it! How ridiculous is that. This is also why prisons are ridiculous - when an individual suffers everyone suffers.

Mistakes call for love and forgiveness, not punishment and despair. Look at your close relationships and notice all the times that you enter into guilt as a 'worthy' response and way of 'agreeing' that you have sinned, and how you wallow in guilt in order to atone for the mistake, thinking that doing so is actually giving people what they want. If people want you to suffer in guilt, THEY are in error and do not deserve your offering.

We all mistake guilt for love because this is how the ego's thought system functions. I don't want anyone's guilt. You should not want to give anyone your guilt. It is far better that you seek true correction through the truth of Holy Spirit and return to offering love, which is truly worthwhile and valuable. You do not have to be guilty EVER AGAIN. When you make a mistake, immediately remind yourself,

"because I did this [whatever the fuck-up was], it proves I am completely innocent and I choose to love myself instead".

(This doesn't justify it being okay to be an asshole - if you're heading to that conclusion, STOP and seek correction - it's level confusion.)

Choose only love, for that is what you are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somewhat channeled just now... Thanks Holy Spirit.

Fear is a protection against guilt. It is put in place to hide guilt. If the guilt were to be revealed, it would condemn you and you would "find the guilt" i.e. "be found guilty."

We put fear into place because we do not want to deal with the guilt that has created the fear. Guilt always is the source of fear because Sin confirms something really happened, guilt confirms that what you did was wrong and you're to blame, and then because of that you can't help but be afraid of punishment in the future.

Anyone who has guilt will become afraid.

So we actually use fear to put a layer of protection and disguise on top of guilt, to cover it up. Then we dwell on how afraid we are. And we project the fear as well because we don't want to live with the fear either. We don't want to be "found fearful". So then we try to get rid of the fear too by projecting onto others and accusing them of causing it.

The whole point of that projected fear, then, is to reverse cause and effect, to make it seem like the cause of the underlying guilt is someone else, and not ourselves. When we do this we're throwing a decoy out there and trying to pin blame on it. IF we can blame someone else for causing our fear, i.e. if we can project responsibility for the fear onto someone else, then we can find them GUILTY. Its then their fault. They seem to be causing the fear. They seem to also be threatening to 'create' the punishment that you believe you deserve (because deep down you feel guilty).

So then having projected fear and blamed its cause on someone, covering up your secret plan to use it as a cover for guilt, you'll believe that they are the ones who are 'making you be afraid' - because by projecting you are completely "disowning" the fear and are trying to get rid of it. So if you can pull off this deception, even deceiving yourself, that someone else is causing this fear, then you've accomplished a tremendous switcharoo... a wonderful coverup story that prevents you from having to go back and look at the GUILT that caused all this fear in the first place.

Other people are not making you afraid. They are not turning you into fear. They are not attacking you or getting ready to punish you. But you'll still believe in punishment forthcoming while you cover up the guilt and don't heal it, because fearing that punishment (which HAS to come if you believe you are guilty) doesn't really get rid of the cause of the fear, and you still believe in guilt, and even though you're trying to make out that other people are the ones who are sinning against you, it STILL does not convince you that you are safe or innocent.

You'd rather be afraid than be guilty. Even though the fear is really about you becoming WORSE OFF than when you were 'just guilty', because now you are guilty AND afraid, the fear pretends to hide the guilt and make it 'unconscious', so that you seem to not be aware of it, so that you can pretend that you are ONLY having to deal with fear. And then of course you are ONLY having to deal with the idiots that you project the fear onto - its all about them, having disowned responsibility for the fear as well.

So even though fear sucks, and fear of punishment sucks, and being so afraid and so PROJECTING of fear that you believe you're actually WITNESSING the people show up who are there to come and punish you (for you, so that you can blame them ;-), you'd still rather be in fear and projecting of fear than be guilty.

You don't want to look at the fact that you CANNOT BE AFRAID unless you are guilty. Who can have anything to fear if they are innocent? Who, who believes they are not guilty, can possibly have a NEED for an ego device that *seems* to alleviate the guilt by covering it up and turning it into fear?

You also cannot be PUNISHED if you are not afraid. The only way you can find punishment is by projecting your fear onto other people, effectively recruiting them as your attackers to do your dirty work for you, WITH your will, pretending that it is against your will. If you are not afraid there is nothing to project, which means you will not READ INTO other people a suspicious frightening motive of bringing down GOD's WRATH of punishment for your sin.

Remember this all goes back to the underlying belief that you sinned by separating from God. That's what this is entirely all about. All the guilt is about that. All the fear that comes from the guilt is about that. All of the projection of fear is about that. And all of the punishment that you're sure will be forthcoming because of how guilty you are, is all about that. It's all about what you think God will and should do to you, which you are deciding FOR Him on His behalf - i.e. on your own. Which is a mistake.

So where are you on the scale of forgetfulness? Are you in the separation stage? Have you turned your experience into one of sin? Have you gone further and blamed yourself for the sin, demanding that you be responsible for it? Have you taken the guilt even further and realized that it means you must be punished, which induces fear? Are you in fear mode? Or have you taken fear and projected it onto others outside of you, describing all the ways that it is their fault that this whole thing is happening? No matter where you are on that scale, right now, you CAN get back to God's love by retracing your steps.

And that means, if you are terrified of punishment, you're pretty sure to be in a state of projected fear right now. You need to take back that projection so that you at least own the responsibility that the fear is yours, its in you, and you made it up. Then you need to rewind that more and ask yourself, WHY am I afraid? It ABSOLUTELY IS NOT because of any projected reason or outside person. Ever. Absolutely not. That's heading in the wrong direction TOWARD the ego. You need to turn around and go the other way, back the way you came. Back toward the Holy Spirit. Retrace... if I am afraid now, it's because I believe I SHOULD be afraid because I believe I AM GUILTY.

Under the fear is guilt. What is it you are so guilty of that it requires such a fear of terrible punishment? Why are you so fervently TRYING to orchestrate that punishment, bring it on, and make it happen, forcing it to occur, through the device of fear and fear's projection? Why do you deserve such a punishment? Did you sin? Did you do something wrong? Do you have a false BELIEF that says you're a guilty sucker and don't deserve FORGIVENESS? You always deserve forgiveness. Always. There is ALWAYS a way to return safely to God's welcoming love.

Retrace those steps. Go backwards. Undo the fear by undoing the guilt. Get out of the fear by recognizing you are NOT GUILTY and therefore have NOTHING to be afraid of. Recognize your innocence. Holy Spirit recognizes it for you while you pretend otherwise.

You are perfectly safe in God's love and He will not condemn you of the things that you think you are condemned for. You are certain that there is NO WAY you can be forgiven for what you did, and NO WAY that it can be TRUE that you are innocent and deserving of love. This is your mistake. This is what must be corrected. You MUST find a way to remember you are not guilty, or you will just keep feeling afraid.

You don't need to 'deal with' your punishing attackers. If you stop projecting your shit onto them you will not see them AS attackers and it won't be their fault you are afraid. You also don't need to really work on the fear, because if you get rid of the GUILT then the fear will automatically disappear completely. It has no foundation. And you don't even especially need to work on guilt because if you have NOT DONE ANYTHING WRONG, you have not sinned, and you have not separated from God, then there isn't any call for guilt and you are perfectly innocent.

Choose again. You are not stuck and you are not being victimized by anything but your own certainty that you deserve it. Choose again. You are worthwhile and lovable and deserve complete forgiveness.

God loves you still. There is a way to be free of this whole nightmare. Choose in the DIRECTION of the Holy Spirit and your way will be made straight.

God is the truth. Originally there was only the truth. But then we made up an opposite. We thought there could be something false as well, a falseness which had truth to it.

"For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM." UrT10H2

And so we swapped what is true and what is false, and confused them. We took all the attributes of truth (God) and assigned the to something untrue (an illusory world). And then we took all of the attributes of illusions (non-existence, death, evil etc) and assigned it to God.

So there was this huge reversal in our minds. Not only did this put us out of touch with reality, which meant we were insane, we also were extremely confused and lost. We became lost because we could no longer tell whether something is true or not. We lost track of which way is up, what God is really like, etc.

This meant we lost the ability to properly discern the difference between what is true and what is false. It meant we developed a belief that God is cruel and evil and wants us dead. And it also means we invested all our sense of value and attraction into a false world in order to stay as far away from him as possible.

"You HAVE carried the ego's reasoning to its logical conclusion, which is TOTAL CONFUSION ABOUT EVERYTHING." UrT7J9

So now when you look at death, you actually do in your mind believe it has some properties of life and truth and reality. And when you look at attack you think it is salvation. And when you look at hell you think of it as heavenly. And when you look at suffering you think it is atonement. And when you look at God you think he is an evil enemy to be avoided.

So then you have this sort of totally mixed up radar. Your whole navigation system of "what you want to go towards" is all thrown off by a kind of huge magnetic storm, which is affecting your compass. All your arrows which point in directions you think you want to go, are actually pointing in the opposite direction from where they're supposed to point.

The problem is because you're so lost in the woods you can't tell which way the arrows are supposed to point. So everyone in the world keeps making suffering for themselves because they keep choosing things which they believe are good and true which are not. And people will create sickness because they think that getting away from God (life, health, wholeness) is saving their lives. And people will even destroy and kill the body believing that it's going to set them free.

So there's not only a huge amount of confused and lost people in the world, all these people have a backwards upside-down thought system. They don't recognize what they are actually choosing in the big picture, and believe they're making excellent choices in the narrower picture. But the ego temptations are leading them down dark paths under the guise of making good progress.

This is really the problem of the world. That we're all mis-creating very faulty outcomes, poor choices, which are bringing us suffering, because in the big picture we are actually choosing suffering but we don't recognize that we are. We think we're making choices that will lead to us being better off. We are deceived, confused, insane, and lost. We don't know which way to get home, so we keep heading down a dark tunnel to death.

This also brings with it a huge amount of resistance and unwillingness to go towards God. It creates a fear of being helped. It can cause people to suspect that a miracle is going to destroy them. That the Holy Spirit is a threat. That God is not going to love them. Who would stay away from God's love unless they thought that it would make things worse for them? But that's what people believe.

So when you go to help people often they do not want the help because they see it as harm or as a threat, as if its going to take away their treasure. And they want to keep their suffering and keep trying to destroy themselves because they think that's in their best interests.

You've got a world full of very confused backwards-thinking people who don't know what they are doing or why they are doing it, but they think they do, so they keep blindly choosing very poorly and ending up suffering, having not mastered their creative power.

What we need is to get our minds straightened out and to learn to recognize again what is really true. But that's going to mean that you have to question what you believe, and be open to the possibility that you are VERY mistaken, and you have to then be willing to want something better. Not something you think is better, but something actually better in God's terms. And you will resist that and NOT want it.

It will literally be like you're being asked to go towards the very thing you want to get away from. You will advance in fear and see the destination as a threat to your existence. This is because the ego is so backwards and has framed God as the opposite of love. All of this confusion has to be sorted out and undone. And that's really all we have to do. A lack of recognition is the problem.

This is why we are to learn that "only the truth is true", ie to find out that only God's truth is true, and it's a loving truth. And to recognize also that false things ARE false and ARE unreal. Such as this world, and the body. Because while we believe we are a body in a real world we'll want to KEEP that, because letting it go or questioning it would be a threat to our entire existence.

This is why there is a lot of reluctance in some people to question whether this world even exists, and they'd rather stay asleep in a pleasant dream of a physical reality and not upset the apple cart. Some people are just not ready for the higher truth.

It also means that because people are confused, they do not recognize they are confused, and they believe they have the whole truth already when they don't. It requires great humility to be willing to be mistaken and to become open to something you were heavily resistant towards before. Everyone will get there eventually but it will take a lot of time for everyone to overcome their reluctance to go home to heaven.

"ALL are called but few choose to listen. Therefore, they do not choose RIGHT." The "chosen ones" are merely those who choose right SOONER." UrT3F23

In your attempt to move away from God, you are basically trying to disown yourself.

You do this by denying who you are, covering up awareness of who you are, and displacing your sense of self onto anything that you perceive as "not me".

What you do is you take part of your mind and retain it as conscious awareness (your persona), and then shield it from the rest of your mind which becomes unconscious (your shadow).

The unconscious part of the mind is disassociated from, denied and rejected. You hide it from yourself so that you can pretend to be only a limited identity.

What is then part of your own unconscious mind then seems to "project" outward, creating hallucinations of an external world. Since you've placed a barrier between your conscious awareness and "the rest of yourself", you do not experience what's out there as yourself.

So now it seems like there is an entire world that is not you, filled with identities and people who are not you.

At the same time, in order to disown yourself, you have to give ownership of yourself away. That means your sense of identity has to become the possession of some other self, namely the ego.

It is not that the ego has any power of its own to take possession of you. Your attempt to disown your own self produces the ego. You make it everything it is on purpose. And yet at the same time as disowning yourself, you appear to grant it permission to possess you.

It seems then that the ego is a separate entity, largely in your unconscious, filled with all the unwanted parts of yourself which you judge as unacceptable, wrong, bad, guilty etc. Yet at the same time, the ego is also in the conscious persona which is at war with the unconscious. It is the separation between them that is the ego.

This unconscious repository of darkness is your "pain body". At times your pain body, the emotional body of the ego, will take possession of your conscious mind/persona, becoming extremely anti-persona and believing the exact opposite of what the persona-self believes.

When this happens it quite literally is like being possessed by some kind of dark twisted being who is very strongly in denial, very deeply opposed to any kind of truth, and it can flood the mind with negative fearful thoughts.

It in a way feeds off of you, in that by throwing your own repressed stuff into your awareness (ultimately as an act of attempted healing), your mind becomes overwhelmed with fearful reactions and this generates a negative energy which it appears to feed off.

Depending on how much separation you have experienced in your existence, will somewhat determine the 'body' of pain i.e. everything you judged or rejected, which has become stored any our unconscious and which needs to be purified and released.

Going through this process is often something that is randomly triggered and seemingly unwanted and horrifying, because it is as though a person can become literally possessed by some dark being, losing significant awareness, going into an unconscious state of paranoia and fear and guilt and dwelling upon the past.

For some people the pain body is so strong that it can produce violence and suffering, while for others it may come and go more quickly. It returns to being somewhat dormant if the person is able to maintain a non-reactionary consciousness, i.e. awareness. But if it is allowed to take over awareness it can turn a person into seemingly someone possessed, who you may barely recognize, and who may suddenly become what many people would consider either depressed or mentally ill.

These periods of "release" of unconscious dark baggage are punctuated after a usually short period of time with a period of relief in which a lightness and happiness takes over. This is similar to what happens when you have a cathartic cry, which initially is painful and dark and upsetting to go through, but at the end once the energy is cleared out you may find yourself laughing.

Ultimately this is a process of healing and release and a way for a person to let go of a large body of unconscious pain which needs to be permitted, allowed, accepted and observed, without becoming too lost in the clouds along the way. Since we repress a great amount of negativity into the unconscious, or otherwise known as the "shadow", there can be a lot of self abuse to be cleansed.

Ultimately the ego itself is not an entity and nor can it truly possess you against your will, but since it is something that you yourself set in motion and gave power to, you have to go through a process of allowing the shadow and persona to cancel each other out. The conscious mind is overcome by what appears to be mind-altering and even behavior-altering unconsciousness, but it is only happening because the person has become ready to work through their baggage and release it.

If this is happening to you or to people you know, you might think they are crazy or that something terrible has happened medically. No many people understand this. But at some point sooner or later you as you progress on your steps towards returning to your true self, reclaiming your identity, waking up to reality and accepting God's truth, it's going to mean you need to purify and flush out all of the ways in which you have created separation in yourself, and so it's as though the lid is lifted off your denial, producing a profound release. And so this really is a part of the awakening process.

This may be the way that you proceed in your path, to varying degrees, or it may not be. It can be very difficult and extremely confusing to go through. But we are all heading home to God one way or another and for some people it takes a direct expression of unconscious fear, guilt and rage, in order to cleanse the mind of the darkness which has been stored there. We all have our skeletons and we all could use a closet spring-clean.

None of use are stuck in the ego. Nobody is a victim of evil. Nothing is happening in our mind that we haven't put in place. And our own ego, our alternate identity, is just a part of our own self that we've pretended to split off. It is no more a separate entity than that it is our own self pretending to not be our own self. And so it's an interesting paradox that as we attempt to disown ourselves, we become owned by ourselves, albeit around a wall of unawareness. Moral of the story being, you cannot stop being what God created.

We're all loved by God and there is no real way to be separate from Him.

When you think of guidance you think of you being separate from the source of guidance - God, and attempting to receive some kind of communication. You hope at first to get any kind of communication at all, and later that you MIGHT actually listen to it and act on it.

I can tell you honestly and personally that even though I receive a lot of guidance in this way, in which it seems to be a separate communication to me, I do NOT always believe it or act upon it, because I still have an ego. Sometimes I struggle with it significantly or outright resist accepting it, and can fight with it for days or weeks before finally doing what it says.

There is a vast spectrum between what you could call a state of 'no guidance' and a state of 'total guidance'. The ego separated state, in which you are identified with ego and see yourself as very separate from God, is a state of no or low guidance. And because of how separate you believe you are, and how unconscious you are, you would be scared by more direct forms of guidance and intimacy. So in that state, it can be appropriate for you to receive guidance in a 'form' that you can accept. And at first that might be simply some synchronicities or some subtle intuitions or insights. Whatever you can accept. And likely you will be quite confused by it and mis-trusting of it and not very likely to listen to it.

It takes a lot of ego-undoing, a lot of surrendering, a lot of developing of trust, a lot of healing, a lot of relinquishing control of 'your life', a lot of opening up to love, and a lot of waking up, in order to get to a point where the 'gap' between you and God closes to such an extent, that there is no longer any NEED for guidance. Instead, in the ultimate state, God is one with you, lives through you, your will is God's will, you simply DO God's will immediately and spontaneously, and you have no need to get some kind of special messages that you might be prone to reject. Instead, you have full acceptance and full openness and trust, so you simply LIVE a divinely directed, divinely orchestrated, and divinely 'guided' life. This is God living in and through you, and you expressing and extending His Kingdom. Total oneness.

So most people are somewhere in-between these two extremes. And depending on where you're at, you're going to have various spiritual lessons and things that you're going to have to go through in order to 'enhance' your guidance. That is, to open up to and trust most in ... what essentially is... your relationship with God. Guidance is just another word for communication, and communication is just another word for your direct experience of and intimacy with God. So to whatever extend you are open to God, that is how much you are going to be guided, and the extend of that guidance, and what form it will take. So long as you are heading in the direction of HEALING your relationship with yourself and God, you are moving in the direction of enhanced guidance, or rather, an enhanced UNITY with God, joining with and accepting His will as your own.

So you don't need to necessarily have 'courage to act' on guidance, as such. You only are doubtful because you don't yet trust its source enough. Which really means you still listen to the ego or trust the ego too much, or rather, you rely on yourself - your own guidance - too much. It's a toss-up between whether you will follow the guidance or whether you'll do what 'you' think is better. You learn to trust guidance by getting in touch with guidance that comes from TRUTH, and which is based in LOVE, otherwise you cannot develop trust. So the source has to be loving. Or at least, more awake than you are. You need to keep discerning that it is acting in your best interests or is on your side or is 'trust-worthy', and not just blindly trust it at first without having some scrutiny. The scrutiny comes from your ego but you kind of need it at first in order to sort of prove to yourself that it CAN be trusted. Ultimately each step you take towards trust development is a step in your willingness to let go of the ego and to become more 'dependent' on the guidance. If the guidance has your best interests in mind and does not hurt you and does not deceive you and, over time, helps you and heals you, then it will earn your trust and you will open to ever increasingly deep levels of... communion with its source.

So if at the moment you are at the stage where you are experiencing what you call 'noise', and are trying to discern what is guidance or what is not.... I am guessing the ego is interfering with your efforts, which is normal. In other words, parts of you still rely on your own mind. Your mind, your intellect, because easily engaged in trying to figure out stuff on its own. Make it shut up. Make it quiet. Or rather, watch for it trying to do that. Stop trying to fix and solve and figure out. You can't be guided if you are trying to figure out what to do of your own capacity to understand the problem or know what to do.

So to some extend the mind that you have, has become 'posessed' by the ego and is being used for control. This is not natural. And it does this because it is DISCONNECTED from Holy Spirit. Or seems to be. He who perceives and experiences himself as 'separate' HAS to depend on his own ego abilities, the ego use of the mind, to try to survive and get through life or make sense of things. But you're not MEANT to be in that mode of functioning. The mind is supposed to be in service to God, in which God - Spirit - informs the mind of what it needs to know, and USES IT, utilizes it, like a tool, to work THROUGH.

This is the natural, healthy use of the mind, and it requires that the ego is not trying to control the mind or use it for its purposes. So you have to practice this, and this is ultimately all to do with your entire spiritual path and growth - learning to trust Spirit, to trust God, learning to let go of ego control, learning to surrender, learning to LISTEN, learning to DISCERN THE TRUTH, etc. YOU need to learn to discern what is true and what is false so that you can be open to the truth, which means the truth can then direct you, NOT so that you can then act on it in separate isolation.

As the Course says a few times, you will be told SPECIFICALLY what to do. And this is also why this prayer has deep meaning:

"I am here only to be truly helpful.

I am here to represent Him Who sent me.

I do not have to worry about what to say or what to do,

because He Who sent me will direct me.

I am content to be wherever He wishes, knowing He goes there with me.

I will be healed as I let Him teach me to heal."

This is kind of a statement of what it is like to be in TOTAL UNION with Holy Spirit, where your mind is completely under the direction of spirit, with no ego. You won't be able to really 'get' or 'do' this prayer and actually act this way until you've completely surrendered the ego - which I have not.

Miracle principle 4: "All miracles mean life, and God is the Giver of life. His Voice will direct you very specifically."

Being directed specifically is ultimately what we will experience when we becoming willing enough, trusting enough, open enough.

If you are in a state of having too much 'noise' then you are listening to the ego too much and still believe the ego too much, which means it's just going to have to take some time (not essential but likely) to continue waking up and developing trust, in order for that noise to become... sorted out.... for you to USE the opportunity of ego interference to continue to discern what is true, what is false. Over time your guidance will become stronger and clearer and you will experience it more as your open invitation for Spirit to live through you rather than you getting occasional text messages.

In other words, don't think of the ego noise as just interference - that's the ego's use of it - instead USE it as an opportunity to sharpen your discernment skills, what is true and false, to sharpen your listening skills, your surrendering skills. Use it to improve your TRUST in and DISCERNMENT OF real guidance. The ego is really just there to stimulate you, to act as a catalyst, to help point you in the right direction by tempting you in the wrong direction - if you use it that way.

Living with God is your natural way of life.

I used to attack myself pretty severely through the fear of being judged by others. I was painfully shy and perceived a need to withdraw in an effort to protect myself, but all this did was hurt myself deeply.

My shyness was a coping mechanism for protecting my sensitivity. I had failed to learn how to express myself fully, and it didn't help that I was an introvert. I had trouble learning social skills and asserting myself. Every social interaction was literally painful.

I did not realize what I was doing to myself. My perception was that other people were perceiving me in a certain way, which I was simply trying to get away from.

After a social encounter, particularly one with strangers or where I had to go into someone else's home or be surrounded by a crowd, I would feel deeply, deeply hurt. I would become strongly embarrassed in the midst of the situation, would tense up, become very quiet (paralyzed) and experience things as though everyone was judging me.

I would return home with a very very deep inner emotional pain, a feeling of "hurt", that was so strong I had no choice but to have a deep cry in order to deal with it. Every social encounter seemed like a total failure and something I did not want to be a part of, making me avoid them even more. It was deeper and stronger than any other emotional upset about any other situation in life. It felt absolutely horrible.

When strangers would even walk past I would immediately cringe and feel attacked. I suspected they were a threat, and saw them as enemies or someone I did not want to be around. They seemed to have power over me and I hid away and withdrew in an effort to avoid people.

I had no idea what was happening in my perception or what I was doing to myself. I only thought that other people were hurting me and causing me to feel like shit. It seemed to all be their fault, and they were the ones who we being judgmental.

But over time I have gradually, slowly learned, that this is not the case. It was difficult to come to realize this.

I saw that I was in fact judging everyone else. I saw them as judged in some way, although this seemed to be subtler and concealed behind my reaction to this perception. Seeing them as judgers automatically meant I was judged by them and therefore at their effect. The effects this produced in my own self was the deep hurt.

I had to realize that in order to see them as judgers, I had to believe they were the ones being judgmental, which was in fact my own belief. I was making them out to be judgers. And that meant, I was simultaneously judging my own self by seeing myself in the role of "judged" by them.

It never really had anything to do with other people judging me either. In fact, probably in 99% of cases they were not being judgmental at all. They were not even interested. They weren't saying anything about me or pointing a finger or anything. But I had this "mental illness" of strongly believing that I couldn't go anywhere without being under attack. And it wouldn't matter if someone pointed out that no-one really cared to judge me because they were too busy with their own selfish interests, I couldn't see it.

What I was really doing was seeing myself as judge-worthy, disassociating a part of my mind and projecting it onto others, seeing them as the judger rather than myself, and then creating the effects within myself that correspond to how I perceived others to be perceiving me. I literally was hurting myself. The hurt I did to myself was far worse than anything anyone else ever did, and it was all because of how I was mis-perceiving.

Underneath this fear of judgement there was a belief that I deserved to be judged, because I believed I had sinned and was guilty. I didn't see myself as worthy of love and therefore perceived that others agreed with me. My direct self-attack turned into indirect self-attack that appeared to be coming at me from other people, but was really coming at me from within a part of my mind that I did not recognize as myself.

I was being both the judger of myself, and the one who was judged. Or in other words, a victimizer and a victim. I played both roles but only saw myself as playing the victim role, and unfairly so. The mere act of perceiving oneself in a victim role automatically creates effects in yourself, typically emotional reactions which try to correspond to the causes that you see as outside of yourself. Because I saw others as judging me severely, I felt severely hurt. Truth is, both the perception that others were judging and the hurtful effects of the judgement were both put in place simultaneously by myself.

I needed to forgive myself. And this has taken a very long time and it's been a very gradual slow process. Over the years, a sense of being separate from others has diminished. A sense of being trapped in myself has diminished. A sense of frustration at not being able to fully express has diminished. A sense of it not being okay to simply be the way I am has diminished. In fact, recently there has been a growing, wonderful freedom, of finally not giving a fuck.

This funnily enough manifested in recent hairstyles. It suddenly became fun to play with looking ugly, rather than trying to look pleasing. And I don't mean this ugliness is another judgement, just that, I've found myself being really "ok" with looking whatever way I look without it meaning anything or causing a judgement.

This is so freeing. It now becomes more of a "playful" experience, where it doesn't matter one way or another, and where I'm growing stronger in my willingness to present myself in whatever way I like without caring (worrying) about what people will think of it.

You may have noticed over time that in my writing I now swear a lot more often. I used to be so repressed that I would never swear, and thought I was more special or holier than others by not doing so. It's now more of a pleasure to swear. To some this may seem like I'm turning 'evil' but that's not the case. I'm becoming more authentic and more myself, censoring myself less and recognizing that I am free.

Taking responsibility for everything I am experiencing shows me that I can only be upset if I hurt myself, no-one else is the cause of what I feel, and therefore I am set free of concern for massive people pleasing or not showing up fully as myself. I was trying to be everyone but myself, to be something I am not, and to disown myself. There is nothing but pain and suffering there when we do that.

There are some people out there especially those who are painfully shy, who appear on the surface to be sweet and nice but have a strong persona, a facade of everything being alright all the time when underneath there is a searing self hatred and repression and sense of unworthiness and of not being "allowed" to do anything. It's a state of self imprisonment. I still at times struggle with limiting myself and Holy Spirit having to remind me "you are allowed". I often thought I was imprisoned by someone else in life, but really it was my own doing.

Some of these people who are suffering from self-inflicted unworthiness and quiet suffering, turn to suicide as an escape. My own life became one of depression and despearation and a growing feeling that I was approaching some kind of "end". If I had not met my wife at about that time I probably wouldn't be here.

A sense of an "end" was a sense of intense separation, isolation and being cut off from everyone. I was ostracized "by society" for an earlier "accident", but really it was a way for me to do this to myself, to give me a good reason why I should suffer in silence and be unhappy. I have had to crawl out of my own self-inflicted hell-hole. Some people are not able to do this. There was a guy at my workplace who was similarly shy who no one would suspect was suffering painfully every day through false perceptions, and he shot himself.

I am thankful for the Holy Spirit and Jesus who have helped me immensely to come out of my nightmares and into a happier place. I still have work to do but everything keeps heading in the direction of heaven. A Course in Miracles has been a God-send in terms of correcting my perceptual distortions and helping me to undo the grossly self-inflicted false beliefs that torture and condemn from the inside out. I am so different to how I used to be now that I don't recognize myself in photos.

Freedom and relief from suffering comes from the recognition of what we are doing to ourselves. We are the ones who need to forgive ourselves and undo our own self attack. There is a way out of hell, because we are the only ones keeping us in hell. No-one is keeping us here but ourselves. Fear of judgement is secretly the fear of being judged by God, which is an attempt not to go Home by justifying self attack. But there is a better way. And that means, if we will become willing, we can go Home to God and be happy. Thank God for that!

I want to tell you about a way in which I used my persona to destroy myself, and how I am learning to overcome it. This was actually a very very painful long-term lesson, so it is hard to write about.

I grew up as a highly sensitive person, who experienced everything in an intense, overwhelming, overpowering way. In order to try to cope with this, I developed the use of my persona. The persona is the side of the ego split-mind that focuses on specialness, goodness, success, social acceptability, favoritism, pleasantness, etc. So I went very strongly into 'people pleasing'.

What I'd do, quite automatically/unconsciously, was I'd put on this facade, literally a 'false face', where I'd smile a lot, become very quiet, try to appear pleasant, try not to upset anyone, look unthreatening and harmless, as though 'showing this' to people would deflect them and therefore protect me. It was my attempt to be invisible. This included a really intense repression of myself. Basically I was using this to hide my Self.

In any public situation I would put on this persona mask and make it appear that nothing was wrong, that everything was good and normal, nothing to see here, being nice to everyone and don't say a single word, and not get hurt. But there were many times this blew up in my face.

Once I was on a bus heading into town and it stopped at the hospital. A man got on the bus and sat nearby. He said that he had just gotten out of the hospital from his 3rd heart attack. This alone was enough to trigger me to hide myself even more than I already was. So I smiled a lot. He, having just gone through life-changing events, started up a conversation with me, which was horrifying. He saw I was smiling and thought that it meant I was happy, and therefore wanted to know what my 'secret to a happy life' was. This put tremendous extra pressure on me (as I saw it) and I just wanted to get the hell out of there. To do this, I intensified even more this persona of hiding myself, which was an attempt to reject him, smiling even more, being very tight-lipped, and just wanting the ordeal to end. I just became more and more quiet. For some reason I seemed to just do this as an automatic defense that I'd learned.

Once I got off the bus, I was just about ready to hurl. I put so much effort into psychologically rejecting the man, and hiding myself, that I felt literally sick. I reached/retched uncontrollably for several minutes before I could calm down. This put a huge damper on my day and was somewhat traumatic. But this wasn't the only effect of this.

See, when I used my persona to hide my real Self, this wouldn't just mean rejecting the other person, it would mean rejecting me. The more I tried to shut them out, the more I shut myself out. I had no idea I was doing this. But what I did know was how it felt. Absolutely horrible. I would come away from bad experiences like this, which occurred many many times in all kinds of public scenarios, with a feeling of tremendous tension in my head from intense embarrassment/shame/humiliation. I'd get a horrible headache, but even worse, I would feel deeply, deeply, deeply hurt. This hurt was more intense and horrible than ANY other emotion I have ever felt for any reason. Psychologically it was like I had experienced every single form of rejection, abandonment, hurt and pain all at once. The absolute only way to move past this was to have a huge cry.

So, as a result of putting on a persona and pretending to be someone I was not, regardless of whether that fake self seemed to be 'nice' or 'kind' or anything anyone values, the only way I could appear to be literally 'someone else' was to horrendously suppress, deny, reject and abandon myself. I thought I was using separation 'against' other people to separate myself from them in order to protect myself, but this separation did nothing but hurt me.

I also had a huge fear of other people judging me, and a fear of rejection. What I didn't realize was that each time that I tried to put on a persona mask of nice, likable, happy-smiley, quiet or whatever, I was buying into an ego thought system. And by doing that, I was taking a gamble. Either I would 'get' the result I wanted which was that people would be deflected and ignore me and I would pass by 'safely', OR other people would attack me or pressure me in some way and I'd end up suffering. By believing in the potential of being seen to be accepted or liked or pleasing to others, I was also simultaneously believing in the 'potential' that others would judge me. I wanted them to judge me favorably, which would feed my 'goodie goodie' persona, which meant I had to believe in judgement. And because I believed in judgement, I lived in fear of it.

So I thought I had an issue of being afraid of judgement from others. A fear of rejection. And this fear of rejection cycled around in a vicious cycle, compelling me to want to NOT be rejected, and therefore to put on a smiley persona face in order to get other people to not reject or hurt me. But of course that merely put me closer in touch with rejection and judgement, if not by others then much moreso by myself. The amount of rejection I experienced from myself TO myself as a result of self-suppression, was far worse than anything anyone else did. So this strategy really didn't actually work, even though I kept trying to use it, and each time it got worse. Over time I just became more and more uptight and quiet and withdrawn from society, eventually jobless and depressed and deeply unhappy and unable to see a way to be different.

Over time, through various avenues of healing, not least of which was the support by my wife who showed up right when I was at my worst, I gradually have learned about the dynamics of what I do to myself versus what I thought other people were going to do to me. I learned painfully and slowly to see that I only saw other people as 'attacking judging strangers' because *I* had already attacked them first. Through the years of working with A Course in Miracles and various other things I've come to very gradually realize exactly why my use of the persona is completely self-defeating and does not help at all. All the persona does is section off everything I think is wrong with me into a tidy little box and shove it away into the dark recesses of my mind, later to surface as pain and suffering.

Yet, over time I've still held onto a belief that I am mainly afraid of rejection or judgement, rather than realizing that my attempt to use the persona is what actually causes the problem. Every time I try to do what other people would want, or make myself like able, or appease others, or focus on what other people like or would buy, or whether I'd get approval, or showing only the parts of myself that I think are acceptable to others, this AUTOMATICALLY creates a fear of rejection and judgement. Because really, by using the persona (i.e. wanting to feed it by creating a self-image/persona of being pleasing) I am actually already rejecting myself and judging myself. Why would I want to put a facade on myself to cover up my True Self? Why would I want to soften the blow of someone else's attitude by abandoning myself first, so that I then need a defense?

The truth that is starting to reveal itself to me now, is that if I actually just be true to myself, and completely drop all need to use the persona to be 'likable' or 'acceptable to others' or 'what they want' etc, I actually stay in a STRENGTH and a authenticity that empowers me and completely overrides the apparent need, either for a fake persona self, or for a defense against rejection. And so this reveals what really is underneath all this.

If I reject myself FIRST, I will then believe I have to use a false self-image-persona to show other people a version of me that they will like, so that they won't point out how shitty I am. Once i'm in persona mode, I cannot escape the fear of rejection because I've already rejected myself and more will be forthcoming through the projection of it.

So the task in front of me now is, to learn to accept myself fully, to be true to the truth in me, to open up to reveal and expose who I really am, to 'let loose' without any shame or censorship, to stop trying to hide myself for any reason, and to basically 'be myself'. But it also HAS to mean, a willingness to stop putting on a show, to stop presenting myself in a fake way, to stop trying to 'appear' likable, to stop people-pleasing, to stop trying to feed my persona image, to stop trying to get everyone to approve of me, and to just drop that whole pile of horseshit. I only enter into a perception that I need 'protection' when I have already judged myself and have seen myself as vulnerable. I am not vulnerable if I am truth-filled. And I don't need to please anyone.

So the key to FREEDOM in all this, is awakening into Holy Spirit's view of me, in acceptance of the truth of me, and in completely surrendering BOTH the fear of rejection AND the attempt to 'win approval' through the persona. By stopping using a persona this solves every problem that ever arose out of its use. What I thought was helping me was hurting me deeply. And stopping the use of the persona stops the creation of the shadow (pain) as well.

Standing firmly in who I AM, brings all of the certainty, strength, assertiveness, disregard for other's opinions, invulnerability, and empowerment, that seemed to be MISSING when I chose to use the ego. And which could never be fulfilled by using the ego. Because once again, it's a case of seek and do not find. "I don't have to worry about what to say or what to do knowing He goes there with me" - ACIM, i.e. I am in my true self and my true self is completely uninterested in pretense or rejection.

Who knew - trying to please people makes you rejected!!!

Learning to love myself more. Learning to drop the ego more. Learning to be what I am, instead of trying to be something I'm not. And in that, there is no fear.

There is a view of what ACIM says, based around the idea that this universe is all there is.

It's a view that God created this universe, and thus created all the galaxies and planets, all bodies and objects etc.

People with this view will adopt a model of ACIM in which perception is projected onto God's creation.

They will then believe that false perception means a misinterpretation OF God's perfect creation, and a true perception means a perfectly accurate view of God's creation.

They also will then believe that knowledge is merely a slightly different or more direct way of seeing the SAME stuff that you saw with true perception. That this same world is kept and known.

And therefore to these people, forgiveness means that you forgive the world instead of attacking it, BECAUSE it is real. Because it is God's Kingdom, it's thought to to be your job to "forgive the Kingdom" and stop attacking it. As if "forgiveness means to "be loving toward what's really there."

Another side effect of this view is the belief that, in the separation from God, we DID NOT make a second world. There was no making of space or time by us. There was no forming of galaxies or planet Earth by us. There was no making of human physical bodies by us.

Essentially that there was no result from opposing God, no other world made, no effect producing a dream world, other than that you entered into some kind of egoic state of mind where you don't see heaven correctly. And then the correction of this lets you see heaven directly.

This leads to yet another strange occurrence, whereby since there is no "second world" covering over heaven, and you didn't make THIS world, any references in the course which refer to "the world" are now grouped together with references to egoic perceptions.

So when Jesus says something about "the world", which would be referring to the second world we made without God, and since it's believe such a world was never made be us, those same quotes are now thrown into a "must be an ego interpretation" bucket.

If any such statements suggest that "the world" is not real, is not created, is cruel, is in denial, attacks itself, is contradictory, or anything else that seems un-God-like, then such believers now have to put ALL of those statements into a "false perception" bucket. They have to be interpreted as being egoic mis-perceptions of what would otherwise be recognized as a perfect creation.

As such, since in this model there is no second world to assign anything to, and there is only the first world of the Kingdom of God, anything speaking about "this world" in a less than holy way is thought to be part of the ego's use of it, and NOT a statement about the world itself. Thus false perceptions/interpretations and projected meanings are now MIXED IN with factual statements about the INHERENT nature of the world.

This of course then strips away every single statement which might suggest "this world" is not God's Kingdom, and shuffles all of those facts into an ego bucket where they are safely tucked away and brushed under the carpet. If there is no second world, there is no world to ATTACH them to or associate them with or see them referring to, except "the ego's world".

The end result of all this is that, if you believe there never was a second world made in the separation, and if you believe that Earth is therefore literally God, as God's creation/extension, then you will be completely unwilling to question this world's authenticity.

Forgiveness then becomes a love-affair with the planet, in which we think that we should love what God created, and keep what God created. And forgiveness is no longer seen as UNDOING something that's unreal, but rather as "correctly seeing" something that IS real.

The fact that forgiveness would make what is forgiven DISAPPEAR, because you can ONLY forgiven illusions, becomes swept under the carpet. The notion that the world will disappear when recognized for what it is, as NOT God's creation, now becomes completely denied. There is no place for such a notion in a mindset that cannot accept that we made this world.

So now instead of forgiving the world in order you undo it, we would see our function as forgiving it as though it's something completely perfect and real that we've been mean to and need to apologize to and come to love again. Our entire relationship to this world and what it is thus vastly different when you think of it as God's creation and will, rather than the antithesis of God's nature.

In this model, which seem simple, there is simply God's creation and our perception of it. If we perceive it as anything other than God's perfection, we're seen to be doing something wrong. And if we perceive it as holy and perfect then we're doing something right. And direct cognition or knowledge is then thought to be almost identical to true perception - that true perception shows you what you will still continue to see in a state of knowledge.

But while this model seems simpler and, in and of itself has internal consistency, it still flies in the face of a great amount of what A Course in Miracles says. ACIM actually does say many many times in many many ways that we produced a second world. It says that we made a world opposite to God's world.

It also distinguishes clearly that this second world was DISTINCT from the ego's USE of this world. That ego projected meaning onto this world AFTER it was made by us. And that the Holy Spirit's REPURPOSING of what we made, is NOT a repurposing of the ego or of false perception, but a repurposing of a second world. We can see Earth reflecting heaven or hell, due to its neutral nothingness.

If God truly had created this world, the course would actually be somewhat easier to grasp. We would simply need to realize that we should love everything we see with the body's eyes. That it is all real. Another problem arises though, that the course does not speak well of the body. It even states that it does not really exist and is not God's creation.

In a mindset that thinks that this world IS God's creation, references to "the body" HAVE to take on a different meaning. If the course says the body "is nothing, which it is", this doesn't fit with the idea that God created the physical world. So then we have to shift the body once removed from the world, ie think of the term "body" not as referring to the physical "God created" body but rather to some kind of internal EGO PERCEPTION. And now, this should mean, that all references to "the body" are NOT talking about the physical body, bur about some internal interpretative state.

This kind of shifting of levels, this displacement of meaning and the need to completely redefine basic recognizable words, is an unfortunate side effect of this warped view of the course. Changing the meaning of words becomes necessary otherwise they would indeed imply that physical things are not God's Kingdom.

Indeed, "The body is clearly destructible and therefore not of the Kingdom" tells us that all physical things are not the Kingdom of God. And yet a belief system bent on believing the opposite to this will refuse to accept this meaning. Instead, "body" will be redefined as "must be something the ego is doing", because we don't like the idea that the actual human body is being identified as inauthentic and not of God.

In fact, what we find is that in many many areas, believing that God created this world leads to a completely OPPOSITE belief to what ACIM is actually saying. It produces beliefs which are absolutely and completely diametrically OPPOSED to the teachings of A Course in Miracles. 180-degrees opposite, heading AWAY from the truth instead of towards it.

So when the course tells us that Earth and the body are not of God, such a believer will believe they ARE of God. And when the course tells us that WE made this world, such a person will believe we DID NOT. And when we're told that false perceptions look at an illusion and make it seem real, such a person will invert this to mean that a false perception happens when you're looking at something REAL in an illusory way. And now as someone develops a special-love relationship with the planet, they THINK that they're entering into a genuine and holy relationship with it.

This whole view of ACIM leads to a complete flipping upside-down of almost everything it teachers. It puts reality and creation where it does not belong. It fails to see that the Kingdom of God is not like this world. It cannot comprehend that the physical body is not of God and nothing like our true nature. It completely reverses the meaning of false and true perceptions. It suggests that keeping the world is atonement, instead of its undoing. And it finds no reason to leave this world behind.

In this estimation of the world, it also includes having to believe that things which die are a part of God. That the seasons are God's will. That murder and rape and torture are entirely within what God allows to happen. That war and conflict and destruction are completely normal and natural. And that if you're not accepting them with love then you must be perceiving them with the ego.

As such, believers of "Earth is God" will insist that all of the dark twisted things of the world, when seen with true perception, will be seen as so holy and perfect that they will be deemed on par with God's will and nature. That it is absolutely natural for leaves to fall from trees, for animals to be squashed on roads, for weapons to be manufactured and guns shot towards bodies, for explosions to destroy buildings and for wars to destroy cities. These "destructions", these physical events and objects, are considered to be absolutely divine creations. And it should be fairly obvious that such a suggestion implies that God is far from sane.

It is one thing to forgive a world in which these things occurs, on the basis that they are NOT God's creations, which leads to seeing them in a better light with more forgiveness. But only as a stepping stone toward their dissolution. It's quite another to suggest we would not only love these things but even desire to KEEP THEM FOREVER, as an inherent part of what God is like. The PURPOSE of forgiveness is no longer seen as the end of even the potential for destruction, and instead is seen as a way to recognize that from God's view, destruction IS creation.

"You have expressed surprise at hearing how VERY different is reality from what YOU see. You do not realize the magnitude of that ONE error. It was so vast and so COMPLETELY incredible, that from it, a world of total unreality HAD to emerge. What else COULD come of it? Its fragmented ASPECTS are fearful enough, as you begin to LOOK at them. But nothing you have ever seen BEGINS to show you the enormity of the ORIGINAL error, which seemed to cast you out of Heaven, to shatter knowledge into meaningless bits of disunited perceptions, and TO FORCE YOU TO FURTHER SUBSTITUTIONS."

The aim of our purification, of sorting out the true from the false, is to become fully committed only to the truth. This means purifying or filtering out anything which is not of God, and accepting everything that is of God.

It's kind of like firmly taking sides. You are to fully and completely side with heaven, and completely refuse to accept anything illusory. To become completely 100% clear about what is true, totally distinct from what is false. Having absolutely no false mixed in with the true, and being entirely clear about the difference.

"For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM."

Being able to work miracles for example requires maximal love, which is a state in which there is no fear at all. When there is some fear mixed in, you're essentially an unhealed healer, and can only partly heal. You call forth two simultaneous opposing goals, and so you ask for healing and attack at the same time.

"The way out of conflict between two opposing thought systems is clearly TO CHOOSE ONE AND RELINQUISH THE OTHER"

So there is one goal of the Holy Spirit which is pure life, and the ego's goal is pure death. And we're talking here in the extreme of contrast. In accepting truth, we need to accept all of the truth and nothing but the truth. And we need to properly use denial to reject anything that is not true. And you can be sure that ALL illusions will tempt you toward the false.

"It is in the sorting out and categorizing activities of the mind that errors in perception enter. And it is here correction must be made."

"But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal. This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world."

"The first step toward freedom, then, MUST entail a sorting out of the false from the true."

Until we get there, to that place of certainty and doubtlessness, of acceptance and clarity, of clear recognition and the Holy Spirit's perfect judgement, we will find ourselves in a kind of muddy middle ground. We will in our minds have some commitment to some of the truth, and some to lies. We'll be partly convinced by the ego and the body and the world. We'll fall into temptation and be deceived.

"The reason this is upsetting you is because the Atonement is a TOTAL commitment."

"I have no function but the one God gave me. This recognition releases me from all conflict, because it means I cannot have conflicting goals." "Doubt is the result of conflicting wishes."

"You, then, have two conflicting evaluations of yourself in your minds, and they CANNOT BOTH BE TRUE."

When we are in this in-between state we are "in two minds", because it means the mind is split between two masters. It is trying to achieve two opposing goals at the same time, producing tension and thwarting and cancellation of power. In this "untrained" state we are ineffective and disempowered, we keep hurting ourselves by mistake, and we are frequently lost and confused.

"You cannot be faithful to two masters, who ask of you conflicting things."

"An untrained mind can accomplish nothing."

This middle-ground is where most of us find ourselves most of the time, perhaps sometimes moving closer to a clearer unequivocal immersion in reality, and at other times descending into the darkness of false perceptions. In this state we are not certain, which means we are afraid. We are not clear on what is what, so we are confused, and as a result are able to be deceived, and so fall for temptation only because we don't recognize what's happening.

"A mind and body cannot both exist."

"Time and Eternity cannot both be real, because they contradict each other."

"The power of decision is all that is yours. What you can decide BETWEEN is fixed, because there are no alternatives, EXCEPT truth and illusion. And there is no overlap between them, because they are opposites which CANNOT be reconciled, and CANNOT both be true. You are guilty OR guiltless, bound OR free, happy OR unhappy."

Without a clear full and firm commitment to truth and reality and the laws of God, our whole perception falls down into a fight with the world. We see bodies and suffering and enter into false empathy. We become forgetful of who we are. We buy into mortality and fear. And then we have reactions based on making illusions real, trying to solve unsolvable problems and trying to escape from hell.

"Both are not true, yet either one will seem as real to you as the amount to which you hold it dear. And yet their power is NOT the same, because their real attraction to you is unequal. You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began."

The only reason for this is because we have our feet in two canoes at once, and they're heading in different directions. We want the world and we want heaven. We want the mind and the body. We want bodies but without problems. We want worldly magical solutions to make bad stuff go away so that we can get what we want. And so we are torn and adrift and lost.

It is clear then that in order to really access the power of God, to work miracles, to have conviction and fearlessness, to be certain and empowered, to be not deceived or tempted, we have to more consistently side with God. We have to be more fully vigilant for the Kingdom as the only reality and the only truth. It's always when we're in this no-man's-land of in-between that we can't tell which way is up.

"If you believe in truth AND illusion you CANNOT TELL WHICH IS TRUE."

I find that when I am more firmly siding with the truth I can dispel illusions more easily. I can rise above the battlefield, pay less attention to bodies, be less deceived by what I see and assert more strength and light. When I become out of touch with heaven I sink into the darkness and lose sight of the truth, becoming confused and tempted, deceived and lost, and this arising of false perceptions always leads to suffering.

It's salvation that we really need, and salvation is true perception. It is also miracle mindedness. But we can only get into that state and stay there if we're really fully committed to the whole truth all the time. To get there and stay there will take a lot of purification because every attitude, every grievance, ever unforgiveness, has to be purified of its support for death, its siding with darkness, its choice for fear and for guilt.

"Forgiveness, salvation, Atonement, true perception, all are one."

We are moving into the light. When we are fully in the light there will be no more hesitation, no more guessing, no more uncertainty or temptation. Until we get there, we will continue to be thrown around on the rollercoaster. Tempted into the belief that the world is hell, and tempted away from the recognition that it is nothing. Only as we rise above and into the light do we regain our sanity.

"Miracles are seen in light, and light and strength are one."

So ideally, in the long run, we want to get into miracle-mindedness and stay there all the time. Into forgiveness, the state of christ vision. To stay above the battlefield, away from deception, identified with spirit, owning of our immortality and siding with God's laws only. That's how you are fully siding with reality and full against unreality. A clear distinction between what is true and what is false.

"The former needs YOUR careful protection, because it is a state of miracle-READINESS. This is what the Bible means in the many references to "Hold yourself ready" and other similar injunctions.

Readiness here means keep your perception right side up, (or valid), so you will ALWAYS be ready, willing, and able. These are the essentials for "listen, learn, and do."

"As long as perception lasts, prayer has a place. Since perception rests on lack, those who perceive have not totally accepted the Atonement and given over themselves to truth. Perception IS a separated state, and the perceiver DOES need healing. Communion, not prayer, is the natural state of those who know. God and HIS miracles are inseparable."

"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."

In the separation from God, we attempted to make a world completely opposite to God, in every way possible. Where God expressed eternal life, we wanted death. Whether God was permanent, we wanted everything to change. Where God was immortal, we wanted everything to be attackable. Where God was innocent, we wanted everything to be sinful.

We projected out a world, made from the idea of sin and death. "Without the idea of death there is no world." This isn't merely a substitute for heaven, it is heaven's OPPOSITE. Everything about it is opposite. A world more like hell than heaven, where the immortal come to die and the existing come to cease existing.

"For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true."

Having made a world opposite to heaven, which is "the hell you made", planet Earth, we then populated it with bodies. The body has a very specific design to serve the purpose of trying to make this unreal world seem real. The body was made to deceive us, not just a little bit, but completely. It reports everything that's false (the whole world) as if it is true.

"The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

It takes illusions and presents them as if they are totally real. It sees things happening which are absolutely impossible in reality, and looks upon them as if they are really happening. It witnesses sins and attacks and wars and murders as if they are absolutely proven, with evidence to back it up as the bodies lay on the ground to show you their truth. And everything the body senses is reported as though absolute undeniable fact.

The body doesn't especially care whether to judge or not, it just judges all the time. It is locked into false perception. "These eyes made not to see will never see." The way the body sees the world, through physical and biological means, based on the "rejection of light" as photons bounce off illusory objects, is entirely designed to give credit to illusions. It is an illusion-detector, which having sensed illusions presents them to the mind as though they are totally real. And it can see nothing else.

"The body's eyes see ONLY form. They cannot see BEYOND what they were MADE to see. And they were made to look on error, and NOT see past it. Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see ONLY illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside FORM of nothing. To this distorted form of vision, the OUTSIDE of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true."

The body is actually incapable of seeing actual reality, at all. "The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen." If you think about that for a moment, the body is 180-degrees opposite to the truth, everything it reports is a lie, everything it sees or senses is 100% locked into being blinded by form, and it is absolutely incapable of being "awake" to any kind of real truth. It has its head shoved into a darkened box, permanently.

So then we place ourselves in these bodies and we peer out at a seeming world and the body shows us what's happening. It shows us things which cannot happen, states which are impossible, events which must be nowhere, and people seeming to walk around as if they live there. And not one single shred of this is true or real, or even really exists.

So when we use the body, when we listen to the body's input, when we take its sensory messages and decide what they mean, it is very very easy to be deceived. Not even just a little deceived, but 100% completely deceived. What the body shows you is absolutely TOTALLY OPPOSITE to what is true and real. The body cannot discern, and it never forgives. It is blind, and all it can see is an unreal world, masquerading as though reality.

It's the most bizarre thing, and this is why it's such a challenge for us to wake up. We actually need to find a way to recognize in the mind, that everything the body reports is false. We have to find a way to categorize every sensory input as not true, not real, and not happening. The body CANNOT tell the truth.

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal.

"This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world. And of these two but one is real."

This is SO strange to us. Basically we are immortal beings in heaven who temporarily are placing a part of our minds inside these body devices. The devices show a COMPLETELY BACKWARDS view. They turn reality upside down, they swap all opposites, they make everything that's impossible seem possible, and everything truly possible seem impossible. They hide all real meaning, shut down vision, make it impossible to see reality at all, and lock your entire focus onto the form of objects. As if the form that something takes IS its meaning. They are prisons for the mind, and their every perception is back to front.

Through the body's eyes, every single thing you see is fixated on its form, it shape, its physical behavior. As if you have COMPLETELY failed to forgive, have entered into the most extreme false perception, have had your mind strapped into virtual-reality goggles, and are forced to look at scenes of a world that doesn't even exist. It's like having your head totally buried in the sand. An extreme denial of reality. As if you judged the whole world from a perspective of separation and sin, accused it of being entirely devoid of light, and rendered it a living hell.

That's what the body is equipped to do, and that is all it can do. Its limited senses cannot be expanded. Its eyesight is incapable of seeing reality, ever. It cannot detect real light. It cannot even really think, it has no mind, and can make no decisions. It's like a lifeless automaton, a zombie, with no real life of its own, inert and mute and blind and incapable. The body was made like this on purpose to LIMIT those who are immortal and unlimited.

"It is only the awareness of the body that makes love seem limited. For the body IS a limit on love. The belief in limited love was its origin, and it was MADE to limit the UNlimited. Think not that this is merely allegorical; for it was made to limit YOU."

"God cannot come into a body, nor can you join Him there. Limits on love ***will ALWAYS*** seem to shut Him out, and to keep you APART from Him.""

There is no way to transform the body into a detector of reality. There is no way to change its senses or how they work. There is no way to make it wake up. There is no way to get it to be aware of God. It exists solely as a device for separation and will always be a device for separation. In and of itself, it is just a piece of machinery designed to make hell seem real and completely ignore heaven. It is a "hell validator", utterly biased and completely incapable of questioning anything it senses. "To sense is not to know" - to sense, is to reject all real knowledge.

The only hope that we really have, is the fact that we are not the body, and our mind is free to decide what meaning to give to everything the body tells us. It is the mind that decides whether to believe what it is being shown by the senses. It is the mind that decides whether to give it reality or not. It is up to the mind to be the one to either recognize the body's inputs as true, or as false.

The body cannot determine this for us, because it's going to keep feeding us absolute BULLSHIT forever. We have to decide mentally what to do with everything the body claims, because the body is permanently anchored to the battlefield.

"Jesus remains a Savior because he saw the false without accepting it as true. And Christ needed his form that He might appear to men and save them from their own illusions."

Think about that for a minute. Jesus, as mind, entirely dependent on God, able to see and experience God through spiritual vision, believing he was under no laws but God's, still temporarily utilized a "reality inverter" body, so that he could meet with other embodied people and help save them from their bodies.

And all this time, everything that Jesus saw THROUGH the body, registered to his mind as FALSE. Every single thing he looked at that was physical, his mind said "that is not true". Every sight, every body, every sickness, every situation or location, his mind recognized "that's an illusion, it's false". All sickness was recognized as unreal, all physical ailments as false, all damage as fake, he even recognized that dead bodies were not "really dead".

Can you imagine how profound that is to be seemingly in a world, not of it, and so OPPOSITE to its nature, feeling like it is not your home and you do not belong there at all, that you basically "disagree" with every single thing the body seems to report. Where not one thing you witness to is considered real or true. An entire world regarded as unreality and as false to your awareness. Where the body is used/repurposed ONLY so that you can interact with other embodied people, to use it against itself to undo itself and point away from bodies entirely.

That's where we are heading. Lifting our minds up out of believing what our bodies are telling us, out of hell, out of seeing the world as true or real, and into a state of totally dismissing the entire world as a false unreal world. That's actually forgiveness, because forgiveness recognizes illusions as illusions. The world IS an illusion of a world, and recognizing it for what it IS is to forgive it. And "a world forgiven cannot last" because "illusions recognized must disappear."

We are to simultaneously forgive the world, AND recognize it as FALSE, and NOT believe anything that seems to happen in it, and look upon it through forgiving eyes so that we are not tempted or deceived by any of it. To not believe ANYTHING the body reports, using its inputs ONLY to navigate the physical realm temporarily, knowing the entire place is an illusion. Firmly rooted in ANOTHER WORLD, in another reality, another kingdom, under God's laws only, completely denying the physical world and all it entails.

It is the body that seems to make forgiveness difficult. But only if the mind believes what the body is reporting. The mind does not have to go along with the body's reports. It's like, you have to learn how to receive reports from "the field", handed to you on pieces of paper, take the input and assess it, recognize that none of what it says is true, dismiss it, and then use it temporarily only for the purpose of getting others to leave the world with you.

The body is saying "there's a war out there". Your mind has to be saying "war is impossible, there is no war." So long as you use the body it will STILL report lies to the mind, and the mind is going to have to learn to be COMPLETELY OPPOSITE to how the body functions.

To use denial properly to deny the denial of the truth, which is the basis of miracles. To deny that the world is real or true. "The world you see must be denied, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision." And so we need to develop ANOTHER WAY TO SEE that CAN see reality and DOES recognize the truth and doesn't invert everything back to front.

"Beyond this world there is a world I want.

I choose to see that world instead of this,

For here is nothing that I really want."

This may not be popular.

True relationship is between one person and everyone, simultaneously. The human body was constructed in order to disrupt this relationship, and to focus on isolation, so that rather than being in relationship with everyone, you are in relationship with typically only one other person.

By becoming closer to their body, and attempting to unite with the body, there is actually an attempt to move AWAY from everyone else. Far more is excluded than included. By attempting to join with "only one", 99.99% of the rest of existence is left out. One winner and billions of losers, as is always the result of competition. And so the sex act is a total opposite of true joining.

Bodies cannot join, they cannot even share the same space. One part protrudes, another caves in, there seems to be a surface friction but there is never a true merging. The ritual of the sexual act is really a ritual to death and sin, whereby the body is emphasized over spirit in order to move towards the body, towards sin, towards hell, and towards death.

Intercourse is movement towards death because it emphasizes that the body is real, it highlights sensations over knowledge, it shuts spirit out of awareness, focuses on the body's sensors, eyes, touch and so on, and makes you "lose your mind." It produces and increases body identification, believing you are the body and that you are interacting with a person who is a body. This closes the spiritual eye, shuts out life, and proceeds towards death.

You could say that by a man and woman copulating, they are performing a death ritual, in which they are attempting to manufacture a separate self, born from death, born in pain, and produced as a result of an illusion of joining made to actually prevent joining. The separation then increases, there is a fragmentation, and another "entity" shows up as the result.

This is very much no different to the illusion of cell division, in which separation is used to split cells in order to multiply them. This is called reproduction, but it is the opposite of creation of life. Bodies come together and do not join and some matter is transferred and some illusory biological processes occur and another body appears, increasing bodies. But what has actually occurred is separation has been used to testify to the end of God and a symbol of the separation has emerged. It's called birth, but it's an eruption of death.

All sexual acts involving a person attempt to utilize the person's body to get something, to meet a perceived need, or to mutually take from each other. Since the body is a picture of selfishness, resulting from specialness, sin and isolation, both body identified persons see themselves as lacking and limited, and want to fulfill themselves by getting something out of the activity. Of course, we then imagine that if we "only give and don't receive" this is somehow more loving, but giving without receiving is sacrifice, and you can be sure the ego is right there to emphasize it.

More or less, everyone with a body is interested in self gratification, a kind of masturbation, in which ultimately they seek through the body to experience something external, to sense something, to have something happen to them which they find to be preferable. For some the "happens to me" might be painful, sadistic and twisted, while for others they might seek what appears to be an illusion of "love making". But rest assured, sex is murderous and cannot in any way create love.

"What is not love is murder" is based on the Golden Rule, that what applies to one applies to another equally. When this law is broken by our egos, we move into a state of imbalance where something is more for one and less for another, there is finite limitation, there is "give and take", and attempts to believe something is true of one person not the other. "It's my turn" is selfish. Two people copulating is an attempt on both parts, typically, to gain something which the other is perceived to give them, both taking from each other, usually under the guise of giving.

Bodies cannot create. They do not create life. Life forms are not alive, they are death forms. Illusions of life. Babies bodies are just as much illusory as adult bodies. Bodies reproducing is a testament to the ego's attempt to produce alternative, different, unique, separated off identities. Little walking prison cells for the mind to inhabit. There is no particular glory in the production of an allegedly "god given" (ego given) baby any more than there is glory in those children becoming adults and trying to merge back together. You'd think it should be obvious that the bodies should not have been produced through separation in the first place if later a "re-joining" is the supposed goal.

Bodies cannot join. Just so you know, no two atoms of matter can ever touch each other. They are repelled by nuclear forces. The sensation of someone touching you is not really them touching you, it's the force fields repelling your force fields and causing there to seem to be a sensation of collision. No two bodies have ever touched and lived to talk about it, because this would result in a nuclear explosion. And the earth does not "move" this way.

For the most part, most of us body identified people are rather self absorbed with our bodies. Men and women alike preen and prune as if attempting to allegedly attract a mate, but quite honestly, almost all of it is self adoration. Because it is the body that we are in love with, not people. Bodies are idols to worship and we worship no bodies more than our own.

Most of what we allegedly do to prepare ourselves for a partner (an excluder) is of no interest to them and they probably can't relate to it. We bolster ourselves up in our vanity and egotism so that if we approve of our own condition, we're satisfied. We're all a bunch of egomaniac vain self-obsessed fools, falling over ourselves to manipulate someone into doing something to us that we prefer so that we can get our own rocks off - a form of positive victimhood.

Having become body identified, we have identified with being separate. The bodies are literally separate. There is space between them and the bodies will never touch. There is even a line in the course that says God is the only one who has ever touched his creations. Going into body mode, we then go through this process of trying to hump the brains out of all the other body identified people, in an attempt to overcome the very separation that we bought into in the first place, without doing so.

And there really is no real attempt TO do so, the whole purpose of it is to STAY SEPARATE. The whole dynamic of bodies joining is an attempt to KEEP the separation going, to reproduce the separation, and to produce more separate things. "Babies" come from this, as an increase in the population of ego flesh suits, ready for the next mind to be trapped in a brain and ready to suffer.

You could say, that the more an intimate couple focuses on the body, the less connected they are. The more they focus attention on sex, the more love is shut out. The more they make the body real, the more disconneced they become and have no real relationship. Then it becomes just about the physical sex, which is not love. They come together, almost literally, to separate from each other. Only love joins people together, not the body. And by starting out by going into body identification, they have already moved away from love, away from relationship and away from true joining. You could even say that this is a form of sickness.

In holy relationship there is no interest in the body for its own merits or purposes. It is recognized that the body is not inherently pleasurable, and anything related to it is not the cause of joy. In fact, the body would diminish true pleasure (which comes from doing God's will), by shutting God out of the equation in order to "sin together." Is it any wonder that a vast majority of sexual practice occurs in the dark, under the sheets, behind closed doors, in guilt and shame and fear, perhaps even with eyes closed? What is there to hide? Or rather, what are we hiding from? God?

The sins of the flesh, so to speak, include temptation. The temptation to believe that a son of God is a body. To then relate to their body as if it is the person, which is really an attack on the person and an attempt to imprison them. And to even ignore their body and focus on your own, for what it is getting from them. What you think you're getting from them is the rest of your self, which they stole, and housed in their body, which you hate them for and want to destroy them for, and you plug yourself into them in an attempt to regain what you think you do not have.

Being tempted by physical form is also another example of the rejection of Christ Vision and a willingness to be blinded by perception of form. As we oogle the nude pictures or watch the naughty porn movies or get all excited upon seeing a physical specimen we like, we are quite strongly falling for illusions, entering into body vision, losing sight of the truth, losing our minds, losing sanity, losing sight of the light beyond the body, and preferring bodies to God.

Of course, all of this is enough to induce guilt and make everyone feel like dirty little sinners. Which the ego is perfectly happy to label you with. Let's say that there is nothing at all wrong or sinful about any such activities because they are not real. And you can bet that millions of people are still "doing it" right now and will continue to do so for a long time to come. Course students included. But it is what it is.

Sex is something we invented, for a purpose. The only HOLY use of the body is for extending love and perhaps, if conception happens in such a way as that the persons are in christ vision and barely even noticing the body at all, you could call this the ultimate use of the body for procreational purposes only. But we have to also realize that the entire functional mechanism of what causes a man to inseminate a woman for example, is entirely based on sensations, body senses, chemistry, physical interaction, and usually hormonally driven, testosterone powered desire. And that's all at the level of ego body stuff. And it's selfish.

In essence, in truth, there were never supposed to be bodies in the first place. Yet alone to use them for separation, to make bodies real, to mistake subtle pain for pleasure, or to mistake copulation for love. There isn't anything love related about a sexual act. Unconditional love has nothing to do with it. It's purely a physical, biological, sensory process. Producing feedback, perceptions and justifying certain behaviors. You can do the same exact procedures with or without love being present.

Of course, someone who is loving, truly, unconditionally, may well enjoy the sexual performance with less guilt, more joy, greater fearlessness and confidence, but the point will come eventaully where what the body "offers" is so pale in comparison to what the spirit offers, that all desire for intercourse will end. Spiritual marriage, mind-to-mind joining, oneness with God, are orders of magnitude more meaningful and enjoyable than anything the body has to offer with its parody of love. "A teacher of God is willing to give up all the pleasures of the world." Knowing that you are gaining far more than you are giving up.

This is not to say, you have to give up sex right now. I'm not going to and nor is most of the planet. But we ARE in a process of learning what it really IS, and what it is not, as part of our journey home towards true union with God. And we can use this information to help move our special, sexual relationships, with others or self, towards a more innocent, holy experience, as we transition onwards its eventual total relinquishment.

At some point we will come to recognize it is not possible to do ANYTHING REAL with the body, and so will stop using the body entirely. Until then, boink your brains out if you so choose, or not. It's up to you - free will. But keep in mind, your MIND is more important than your body, and if body identification is increasing as a result of how you look at what you're doing, you're heading in the wrong direction.

In heaven there is no sex. In heaven, there is the constant bliss of needing nothing and being permanently fulfilled. Surely this is better than an occasional splurt at the end of a long road of effort. And certainly better than the frustrations and failures of sexual attempts to separate from God.

I think that for years I have been mistaken about the course. Mainly in terms of the orientation of my mind and the direction in which it was heading.

We start out in false perception, in ego, in body identification. As if we are down in hell at the bottom of a ladder. And then we think of heaven or light or truth or atonement as being higher up the ladder, and so we start the process of climbing out of hell.

Along the way we're told of particularly "high" things which become goals to strive for, like true perception, accepting atonement, the real world, christ vision. And we wonder how to achieve these things. We kind of come at it from a "I don't have it, how do I get it?" point of view.

But the thing is, this is all backwards. We're literally starting out in a backwards thought system, moving in the wrong direction, looking in the wrong direction, and trying to get our heads around what the truth is.

I think as we gradually learn more about the truth, God, soul, reality etc over time, we open up to it more. We do more forgiveness, we heal, we let go of old pain etc. Our identity starts to shift away from the body. We begin questioning the reality of the world etc.

Then at some point, perhaps a kind of tipping point, where for a while we've had our feet in both worlds - heaven and earth - we start to lean more towards reality. We start to side more with the truth than with the false. We develop more truth and find a surer footing that anchors us in reality.

The interesting thing then is that our whole orientation seems to do a 180 degree shift. We start looking from the top down instead of from the bottom up. And we feel more secure in the truth of God and more accepting of what's real as "where we are coming from".

I have found it extremely helpful and clarifying to spend time investigating the nature of God, heaven, creation, souls, sonship, mind, free will, causation, etc. Not the things of this world. This has really fleshed out some solid "facts" that I can depend upon.

I see the simple truth that God, who is truth, has extended himself to create me, and whatever is true of me ONLY comes from God. And that I in turn ONLY have what I inherited from God, and can only be and extend that which I have been given. This has now become a kind of "starting point" for me. A rock solid core of truth within my being. Not even I have any real say in what I am or what I can do.

Now I find myself basing my whole thought process on that truth. Regarding myself as not of this world. Recognizing that only the Kingdom is real. Feeling into and aligning myself with God's will and with my real function. Embedding myself in heaven and looking outward from there. This is orienting me from "the top down" to look at everything the course says from a new vantage point. And it's as if I am seeing things in a way I never saw before.

I'm finding is just an avalanche of clarification and insight about what it's getting at. I find for example that while many "bottom-uppers" believe their whole mission is to escape from hell and return home, really the whole course is aimed towards anchoring yourself in your true nature and expressing that, shining a light into the world to produce healing. As if what's at the top of the ladder reaches down to the bottom of the ladder, to either shine it away or raise it up.

There are in fact many parts of the course related to bringing heaven into the world. Shining God's light as a reflection of his being. The extension of miracles which we are literally told fall DOWN like drops of healing rain FROM heaven ONTO the earth.

The fact that christ works through our bodies, that the holy spirit uses the body for his purposes, and that we extend through the body to form holy relationships. Even forgiveness is a matter of allowing the light of heaven's truth to infuse the mind to correct it's perceptions. Where do we get any kind of truth from if not from outside of perception itself? Truth is of God!

It's not so much a "let's just get out of here" thing. It's more of a, let's remember who we really are anchored in heaven's reality and shine outward from that core truth into the world, to be the light of the world, a healing presence, a teacher/extender of God into the dream, and to help shine away the world. This isn't escape from hell, it's a DISPELLING OF DARKNESS by shining the light of heaven onto it. And this will seem "backwards" to those who believe their only goal is to get out of here asap.

I also think that all the discussions about true perception, christ vision, the face of christ, the real world, atonement etc, are all quite misleading. Mainly because it's very clear to me now that true perception is merely a SIDE EFFECT of a mind which is anchoring itself on the OTHER side of the separation. A mind which is identifying with the spirit being that is BEYOND the realm of perception entirely.

Even the perception of the real world is clearly infused with the light of heaven and is really just a stopping point just prior to entering heaven, on the way to TOTAL immersion in heaven. It just represents a state of being ALMOST entirely spirit identified. And giving yourself over entirely to the atonement merely means becoming FULLY dependent on the truth, having been previously only "mostly" dependent upon it. And truth is not of this world.

"Since perception rests on lack, those who perceive have not totally accepted the Atonement (but have partly accepted it) and given themselves over to truth. Perception is based on a separated state, so that anyone who perceives at all needs healing. Communion, not prayer, is the natural state of those who know."

This really tells us that the acceptance of atonement is at first a GRADUAL TRANSITION out of hell towards heaven, out of false perception towards truth, and it is only FULLY or FINALLY accepted at the end, where you are 100% willing to accept the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Until then, you are PARTLY atoned, just as Jesus says you are "not now wholy insane." Truth has corrected your mind to SOME extent.

Indeed the whole idea of forgiveness is riddled with confusion and misunderstanding. To forgive really means, that you recognize what is true - which IS HEAVEN, and to then "defend" that truth through the proper use of denial, to REJECT that anything not of God is real or has any power. It's a recognition that illusions are false, BECAUSE OF what is true. AND what is true is God - not of this world. Forgiveness thus is rooted in and depends on recognizing God's nature, which is itself BEYOND forgiveness.

The most obvious point is that, here we are in bodies starting out in false perception, blind to God and in denial of reality. The question then is how do we solve that. And obviously the only real way to solve that is in "leaving the desert". That means that in order to become more loving, more light, more truthful, more sane, you have to actually identify with something BEYOND the dream, with a real eternal truth that is entirely OUTSIDE of perception, so that your perception transforms to line up with it. The blueprint for right mindedness is the one mind.

You can't just work on perception in a closed box. True perception in fact has to be BASED UPON knowledge. And knowledge is the real truth. Believing that the real truth is true - a truth which is OUTSIDE of spacetime - causes perception to be transformed to line up with it. It's almost like, you have to reach outside of ALL perception first, get a hold of reality, then infuse that reality into your mind so that your perception becomes lighter. This was not at all evident in years of past study and in the common interpretations of the course.

We're also told about miracle working and the fact that miracles in fact come from God and fall down from heaven like healing rain, onto the earth. This is similar to how forgiveness works, in that the light that is higher and more true, shines into the mind and into the world, and bestows life where there was death.

Because "Miracles mean life and God is the giver of life" and "Miracles are a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers". That means they're starting out IN HEAVEN and are expressing FROM God through our minds, transforming perception and healing the world. That's a TOP DOWN mechanic, which is why they cannot be received when fear (false perception) is too strong.

I've also found that until you can get a really solid metaphysical, logical grasp of the nature of God and creation, you can't really have anything clear and true enough to compare anything to. You really need a solid idea of the light, in order for it to clearly contradict the darkness. You need to know the truth of heaven and of your being and nature, in order to compare that to other things that happen in the world, to recognize WHY those things are false and unreal. You can't just compare illusions to true perception, you have to compare them to God, then perception will follow.

"Perception (even true perception) is a RESULT, not a cause".And so it sort of comes down to not just the question of what things are, but of the question of WHY they are that way. The understanding or logical reason that they are based on. Illusions are illusions BECAUSE of what the truth is. Sickness is unreal BECAUSE of the immortal nature of God. The world is a dream BEACUSE reality is not like it. Miracles can raise the dead BEACUSE of their expression of eternal life. If you don't have your mind anchored in heaven, you really don't have any solid ground to stand on at all.

For me, my whole orientation with the course is quite strongly transitioning to a totally top-down view at the moment. This reflects the changes in myself which are transitioning to a "going within in order to be able to express outward", or seeking the higher mind in order to shine FROM it into the world. Or aligning myself with a higher light, so that I can shine darkness way. I am finding out WHO I AM, so that I can REJECT what I am not.

"Yet when they find their own Reality is even here, then they step back and let It lead the way. What other choice is really theirs to make?"

"And so again we make the only choice that ever can be made; we choose between illusions and the truth, or pain and joy, or hell and Heaven."

Ultimately what we're really doing is we are rising up from the pits of hell and ascending into heaven. But the closer you get to heaven the more you feel like you are IN heaven, looking back downward towards hell. It's most like returning to HERE, having been AWAY. Or becoming more PRESENT, having been absent. Or becoming more authentic, having been artificial.

That orientation of "peering out from the truth" or "operating under the laws of God" or "being true to yourself first" or "having innocence in you first which you project out", is what MAKES the real world and true perception be what they are. They are reflections of the light that is IN you, which you have stepped into and are radiating. The love which you give in order to see love. "Love looks upon itself."

So it's really about you deciding to change which ROOM you are located in. Are you in hell, or in heaven. When you seek for a better way than suffering, to any degree at all, you are seeking to be in the room of heaven, where you are happy. And then you start to move between the rooms. You want to get yourself as much immersed in heaven as possible, so that almost all of you is very close to being in heaven just before you leave the world. That means you are practically a REFLECTION OF DIVINITY, while in the dream, allowing you to perform miracles and heal the world. To extend God's love and light and to keep illusions from tempting you.

It's all top-down. All the correction is top-down. All the extension of love and light and power is top-down. All of the being true to yourself is top-down. All of the health of the body is caused from the top-down. All dispelling of illusions and the sanity of the mind is brought about from the top-down. Death is conquered throught the top-down expression of eternal life. True perception and the forgiven world and the real world all come about through the top-down application and expression of your true nature. And eventually the goal is to be SO completely vigilant for the Kingdom, or to seek first the Kingdom of God, so that you put God FIRST in all things, and everything else just follows naturally from there.

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK."

Your mind in its natural healthy state, extends outwards and joins with other minds, connecting to them intimately. Your mind extends past your body, past the body of others, and joins with the holiness in them. It shares itself with them and thus unites with the Holy Spirit in them.

But if your mind is not allowed to fully extend all the way to the other mind, past all physical obstacles, your mind "falls short". It seems to focus on something "in between" you and another. Whether it be that you are focusing on the body of another, or your own body.

This focusing on the obstacle between you, usually bodies, means you actually have dipped down into false perception. And now your mind is blinded by perception of form. And that means you are failing to OVERLOOK or extend or fully move past the obstacles. Your mind basically "stops at" the outside surface of apparent forms and bodies.

This lack of full extension, sort of stopping off along the way to pay attention to form, is a state of mental sickness. It really only occurs due to some kind of "withdrawal" from others, an unwillingness to share, a lack of openness, a lack of joining. Which means that you have pulled back from the relationship and are only going part way towards union with them.

That's a problem, because that means part of your mind is in your brother, and part of it is now "separated off" within yourself, and the two parts are not connecting fully. And this "gap" forms, the separation gap, in which the body exists. And now you perceive obstacles and appearances and bodies "in between" you and the REST of you.

Having done this, you are now sick, and your mind is now starting to TARGET the body. It's becoming blocked by form and "blinded" by sight of form. Your perception is dropping into false perception and you're dipping down into ego. And by doing so, you are now making illusions seem real to you.

Sight of the body now becomes an obstacle, and a target, and a weapon, and something used to SEPARATE you and your brother, or you and the rest of you. And this is the use of body for attack. And by doing this you are kind of holding the body up in-between you and your brother and are pretending it is a picture of your self. And it now becomes a picture of crucifixion.

Since your mind is no longer extending fully all the way to the light in another mind, instead of going OUT, it is not aimed DOWN. And it starts heading into the darkness rather than the light above.

This is going to push the body into states of darkness and distortion, and the body now literally becomes sick. And the mind is now USING the body for attack, by making it real, and focusing on it. And by so doing the body will now turn into the absence of health and healing.

You then enter a state which is familiar to most of us, where you now seem to "have a problem", and the problem seems real. Your body is sick and having issues. And your attention is on it. And it seems real. And you can't seem to get past it. And seeing it frightens you. And now you begin looking for solutions.

The ego solution at this point is to try to ATTACK the BLOCKAGE that you're seeing, ie target the body or the apparent sickness, with weapons of truth, trying to make it go away. You can hurl courseisms at it in the hope that you will undo it. Like you can say ok, this sickness is not real, it's an illusion, it's not really there etc. But this all still depends on believing that it IS THERE. And having failed to overlook it is really the problem in the first place.

So what is the trick to it? This will sound a bit counter intuitive but essentially, in order to heal the body you have to not make it real. You have to stop focusing on it. Stop making it an obstacle coming between you and others. And stop using it as proof that your mind is not REACHING your brother. If it is seen as an obstacle, and in fact if it is seen AT ALL, your mind is not fully extending.

It's really only the mind's choice of whether to fully extend, or partly extend, which produces health or sickness in the body. When it fails to extend fully (to give unconditional love), it falls short and "invents" separation devices in-between itself and others. And this shows up AS A BODY, and proceeds to turn from a healthy body to a sick body. The more you make this obstacle real the worse it gets, until it dies from attacking it.

So in fact when the mind RETURNS TO EXTENDING, which essentially IGNORES the body entirely, overlooking it, looking PAST it to the light, that is what "indirectly" heals the body. It lifts away from the body all of its attack and its use of the body for separation. So by practically forgetting about the body completely and SEEING PAST it to the light in another mind, joining with them, the body moves into INVISIBILITY. And it is this that is miraculous and heals the body.

So the trick is to actually just LOOK PAST the problem, push beyond the obstacle, see THROUGH the physical matter, seek out THE LIGHT beyond, and focus ONLY on that (seeking the Kingdom first), and this automatically heals the body. It heals because the mind is not not an attacking mind, it's a whole mind, a sane mind, and a whole mind has a HEALING EFFECT on the body as it "passes through it."

So there's a knack to it because there's great temptation to make the body REAL and THEN try to heal it, which locks in the sickness. And now you're at war with it which is a double denial. You have to stop being blocked by it, stop focusing on it, expand your mind, focus on the light, and therefore OVERLOOK the body. That is FORGIVENESS. And this UNDOES all of the strange distortions of sickness in the body because now a non-attacking, HEALTHY mind is moving through it.

The Holy Spirit in fact, when using the body solely for communication, communicates ONLY HEALING, and recognizes essentially that the body is NOT important AT ALL. This isn't a spiritualization of the body, it's more like IGNORING IT completely. It is recognized as having NO FUNCTION. And the only thing happening is the mind basically ignoring it and moving PAST it to do its business. This then heals the body because it is not given any reality.

"17. Miracles are the absence of the body. They are sudden shifts into invisibility, away from lower order reality. That is why they heal."

"It is still true that the body has no function of itself. This is because it is not an end."

"Your brother's body is as little use to you as it is to him. When it is used only as the Holy Spirit teaches, it has no function. For minds need not the body to communicate. The sight that sees the body, has no use which serves the purpose of a holy relationship. And while you look upon each other thus, the means and end have not been brought in line."

"But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. "

"Learning must lead beyond the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it. This can be accomplished only if the mind EXTENDS to other minds, and does not ARREST ITSELF in its extension. The arrest of the mind's extension is the cause of all illness, because ONLY EXTENSION IS THE MIND'S FUNCTION. Block this, and you have blocked health because you have BLOCKED THE MIND'S JOY."

"To see a body as anything EXCEPT a means of pure extension is to limit your mind and hurt yourself. Health is therefore nothing more than united purpose. If the body is brought under the purpose of the mind, it becomes whole because mind's purpose is one."

"Freedom from illusions lies only in not believing them. THERE IS NOT ATTACK, but there is unlimited communication and therefore unlimited power and wholeness. The power of wholeness is EXTENSION. Do not arrest your thought in this world, and you will open your mind to Creation in God."

"Healing is when two minds recognize their oneness and become glad."

"You have done miracles, but it is QUITE apparent that you have NOT done them alone. You have succeeded whenever you have reached another mind, and joined with it. When two minds join as one, and share one idea equally, the first link in the awareness of the Sonship as one has been made."

"Christ's vision has one law. 2It does not look upon a body, and mistake it for the Son whom God created. It beholds a light beyond the body; an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes, and fearful thoughts of guilt from dreams of sin. It sees no separation. And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees."

"The miracle-worker begins by PERCEIVING light, and translates HIS perception into sureness by continually extending it, and ACCEPTING ITS ACKNOWLEDGMENT. Its EFFECTS assure him IT IS THERE. The therapist does not heal; he LETS HEALING BE. HE can point to darkness, but he CANNOT bring light OF HIMSELF, for light is NOT of him. But being FOR him, it MUST be for his patient.

The Holy Spirit is the ONLY therapist. He makes healing PERFECTLY clear in ANY situation in which He is the Guide. The human therapist can only LET HIM FULFILL HIS FUNCTION. He needs no help for this. He WILL tell you EXACTLY what to do, to help ANYONE He sends to you FOR help, and will speak to him through you, IF YOU DO NOT INTERFERE. Remember that you ARE choosing a guide for helping, and the wrong choice will NOT help. But remember also that THE RIGHT ONE WILL. Trust Him, for help is His function, and He is of God."

Many people teach about the course in such a way, that it all seems to be about going up towards God.

This seems to make sense in many ways. We're told to take illusions to the truth and not the other way around.

We're told the world doesn't exist and that it's not our home. That we have added all these blocks on top of our love and need to remove them.

It all seems to focus on an undoing process. The whole "impression" you get of the course then it that it's ENTIRELY about this undoing and removing ego and going within and stepping back from the world.

But what is not taught enough, is the whole PURPOSE of doing this process.

The purpose of the course isn't simply to remove and undo. The purpose of the removing and undoing is so that LOVE CAN SHINE. The undoing itself is just clearing the way for EXPRESSION.

Everything about love shining is NOT in an upwards direction, nor is it in an inwards direction, nor is it to do with taking yourself away from the world, nor is it to do with simply reaching a "state" where you are sort of sitting on the fence just observing everything and waving.

What ACTUALLY happens is that as you remove these blocks to love, as you shift your perception seemingly "toward" God more, LOVE EXTENDS THROUGH YOU MORE.

Far too much emphasis has been placed on the process of the removal of blocks, to such an extent, all this focus on forgiving and purifying and undoing ego etc, that we can actually miss the POINT of all this. Which is that we're doing this SO THAT the love, which has been blocked, can FLOW FREELY.

Love flows OUTWARD. It is shared. It is given. It heals OTHERS. It produces MIRACLES.

Projection, as defined mainly in the course, is an act of denying the presence of love, which creates a sense of emptiness/lack/sin, which results in displacing that sin externally. So then people think that this was the only function of the mind. It's not.

The mind can either CREATE, OR project. And it has free will to choose which process. Miracles come from the creative/extending function of the mind, illusions/ego comes from the projecting function. We've become so busy with fixing the false projections, that we forget that the mind in its natural function actually is creative, expressive, giving, extending, radiating, healing, unifying, miraculous.

So it seems a bit paradoxical but, as you lift away blocks in the mind which seemed to project outward, it actually uncovers LOVE and then love extends outward. As you get closer to God, you become more loving. As you have more awareness, you become more miraculous.

Many teachers and students actually have adopted this kind of idea that the only point of the course is to get your ass out of here and go home. Like, you're only supposed to do the forgiving part, the undoing part, the fixing of your mind, the stripping away of ego and all this reducing. But this leaves a HUGE gaping hole in the rest of the story. It turns the atonement into a totally selfish goal that you "accept for yourself and no-one else".

And this is because THE EGO is a ONE-DIRECTIONAL thought system where giving and receiving are separated. The Holy Spirit's thought system is BI-DIRECTIONAL, meaning that giving and receiving are EQUAL. The EGO interprets the course to mean, we are only moving in the direction of God. Holy Spirit sees it differently. In fact, you could say, the only TRUE nature of spirit is that it INCREASES OUTWARD. That's totally opposite to what the ego is trying to do with the course.

It successfully also denies major aspects of the course which is the OUTGOING of love, and everything that comes from that. Which, VERY importantly, includes the PERFORMING OF ACTUAL MIRACLES. Miracles are such an outward expression of love that all this "taking back" and "going inside" and "returning home" malarky doesn't even touch on it. You can do all this retracting and get to a point of sitting on a fence having a personal peace experience with not a single miracle coming out of you. Something is wrong with that!

There are entire audiences now following various teachers who preach this one-directional movement away from the world and towards God. It SEEMS to make sense, after all we came from God and want to go home. But it is not in our NATURE to head in the direction of God. The only reason we're heading toward God is because we left. It's in our NATURE to EXPRESS AND EXTEND God. It's entirely an outward expression of love.

There's a really interesting section in the course which I posted about recently, which goes something like this. When the mind is naturally extending fully THROUGH the body, it heals the body and flows past/overlooks/forgives the body and flows OUTWARD beyond the body, extending to others and seeing the same love in others. This produces perfect healing of oneself and others, it produces miracles, it maintains the body in perfect divine health. ie the body is a MEDIUM through which love radiates and is used as a COMMUNICATION device to TRANSMIT.

But any time that you start to make the body the focus, any time there are blocks to awareness, any time you start identifying with being the body, or you start blocking the outflowing of love, the mind starts to "stop at" the body and, in a sense, collide with it. The blockages are like acts of will against the flow of will. This causes "attack", and the body thus becomes a kind of target. It thus becomes sick and weak and suffers, and eventually dies.

THAT DEATH RIGHT THERE is actually the logical RESULT of only fixating on the INWARD direction of movement away from the world. And that is PRECISELY why there are many gurus and others who have had a measure of awakening who LATER DIE without having performed a single miracle. Leaving the world is only half of the story. And if all your focus is on leaving the world, it CAN result in death, especially if your belief system is then really focused on NOT HELPING OTHERS and not demonstrating the overcoming of the world by BEING ENTIRELY CAUSAL. We are not asked to being NEUTRAL. This is a course in CAUSE, not effect or neutrality.

It makes the self too special. It's an imbalance between giving and receiving. When the blocks are removed, love NATURALLY flows outward because of what it is, and there is all this outpouring of LIFE and POWER and MIRACLES. There is this radiance, this shining, this blessing of yourself and everyone. The body becomes healed by the sane mind as the mind flows past it, carrying love with it, and flows it out PAST self to others.

So we really need to look at this and be careful about this. When ALL that we focus on is the "undoing", which in a sense is the same thing as "the ego getting what it wants without giving", we SHUT OUT any of the GIVING, because we equate it with some kind of "doing" which we think is sinful. Jesus says in the course that the undoing aspect of the miracle IS important, but that the DOING aspect is FAR MORE important.

The only REASON there is such a huge course book here which is helping to remove blocks to awareness of love, which seems to be a major point of the course, is to REVEAL the love and to let it SHINE. Because the course can't teach the meaning of love, and focuses heavily on the removing of the blocks to awareness, this leads so many people to think that "removing blocks" is the SAME THING AS being natural, or being healed, or getting out of this world.

The ONLY PURPOSE of removing blocks is SO THAT you can fulfill your function as the light of the world and so that the love IN you can EXPRESS and HEAL and BE MIRACULOUS. To essentially, "bring heaven to earth", supernaturally, while people are still calling out for love and struggling to get home.

And that DOES MEAN "bringing" the love and power of HEAVEN to this world, because it NEEDS IT. This is why "miracles fall like drops of healing rain from heaven", causing the "signs of life" to spring up. It doesn't say "suck it all in and you won't look so fat".

Major course teachers have pushed this agenda of "get out of here and screw the rest". You are actually to become PART OF the atonement PLAN, which is a plan FAR BIGGER than just your individual atonement. You become part of the atonement ITSELF when you accept it. And accepting it is accepting and receiving miracles, which you are to then GIVE TO OTHERS. Your job is not DONE when you've accepted atonement. That's so selfish and ego. Jesus needs our help to BRING healing and truth and light and love and miracles TO the world and those in the world, to HELP THEM to return to God as well.

Love shines. Love radiates. Love is miraculous. Love extends OUTWARD. Love moves PAST yourself and past the world. Love looks PAST bodies. It doesn't recoil. Jesus talks about how there is what seems to be a "state" you reach where you are miracle-minded and miracle-ready.... but reaching the STATE is only important so that you can get into "MIRACLE-DOING". We're not supposed to look at this whole process in terms of just "withdrawing" everything from the world. That is of course a majorly important ASPECT, but it is ONLY HALF OF THE STORY, and I would even say it's not even half.

The focus on being at peace about the world and accepting personal atonement and "there is no world so no point doing miracles" and "holy spirit has nothing to do with the world" and all this intellectualized "escaping" from the world, has really basically CUT OFF all mention of, teaching of, support for, any of the EXPRESSION which we are supposed to be DOING THIS FOR. That's the whole point - to return to BEING LOVING, to expressing love, to demonstrating miracles, to giving LIFE TO OTHERS, and being truly helpful beyond our own nose.

As Jesus says, "members of my party are ACTIVE WORKERS". As Jesus says, he told the disciples (and if you are an ACIM student you ARE a disciple) to be physicians of the lord and go out and HEAL OTHERS. Jesus also says to "listen, learn, then DO". Not just listen and learn. DOOOOOOOO. DO miracles. DO healing. Help people. Shine your light.