When you look back upon your life and remember all the bad shit that happened, the things that made you suffer, the stressing out and the fearful horror, the intense drama, the pain and misery, all the times that you felt threatened, and the whole litany of confrontations you had with other people, they all had one thing in common.

You may not have realized what this one thing is, but in every single encounter there was one thread running through it that made them all the same: YOU BELIEVED IT WAS REAL.

It was in fact ONLY because you believed it was real, that you ever had any upset, any suffering, any stress, any misery, any horror or fear, and anger or conflict. If the world were recognized as NOT REAL, you would remember to laugh at absolutely everything. You, as real, cannot be hurt or upset or oppressed or influenced in any way by an unreal world. The world is just a dream, not a reality, and it cannot hurt you unless YOU GIVE IT REALITY.

So all those times, all those lessons, all those difficult situations, all that turmoil and worry and loss of peace and grief and every sorrow, it was all the result of the same one problem. You thought separation was real. You thought a separated world was real. You thought you were really separated from others, from God, and from yourself. Believing separation was real was the ONLY PROBLEM. It was the cause of EVERY form of suffering you've ever experienced.

Which means, if you take reality away from the world, withdraw the power you gave it, and stop believing it is even really happening, you are finally rising above the battlefield, into a transcendental space where you can never again be hurt or upset or unhappy. The key to the undoing of suffering is simply the recognition that it has no properties of God. It is not real or true or existing or causing or powerful or permanent or unchangeable or a fact.

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness."

"For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes."

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

Here's something that may be very difficult to own up to. If you are upset by anything in the world, it is because you have attacked the world. And usually when you are upset, it is because you perceive someone else did the attacking. And then you recoil and despise the attack, and it affects you, and you become upset. And this all covers up the fact that you are attacking. Sin seems outside of you, not in your mind.

You see, you cannot see attack unless you attack. If someone seems to murder someone in front of your face, most people would be horrified. But that's the ego being horrified, about what the ego has done. The reaction has to be fake, because if you knew the truth you'd know nothing has really happened, would laugh at it, and raise the dead. Nothing real can be threatened. There is no death. You're just seeing a dream.

What's very hard to confess to or even be aware of, is that the only reason you are upset by a murder is because there is part of your mind that believes in murder, and is murderous. It reminds you of that, and triggers that in you. You are horrified by your OWN belief about YOURSELF. It reflects what you think is going to happen to you, and what you are doing to yourself. Otherwise you would dismiss it in an instant.

You might say, well, I'm a really loving person and I absolutely would never want to hurt anyone. I advocate for love and can only love. BUT, when someone gets murdered in front of my face, I may freak out. Why? How is that possible? It's only possible because I make it real, I believe it's true, and I value it. I see what I value, and value what I believe in. So I believe in the murder, and its horrors just reflect what I believe I deserve, because of my belief in sin being real, which I am perceiving outside of me.

There HAS TO BE something in my mind that is made of sin, in order for me to react to the "sinful behavior" of others. Otherwise I would be absolutely unmoved by this illusion. So on the one hand I'm claiming to be love/loving, but these events prove my love is conditional, and that means I MUST be in denial. Invulnerability is a characteristic of innocence and holiness, not reacting with ego emotional trauma. A peace that passes all understanding. The immovable rock of sanity.

So we have to be really, REALLY honest with ourselves. Are we REALLY loving, if we are so easily shaken by sin? Are we really awake, if we are still affected by the world we see? Something is incomplete if there is even a slight trace of upset. If we have any reaction other than love, we are in the ego. To the Holy Spirit, all things call for love, not fear.

Yet sometimes we split the world into two things. There are perceived behaviors which are "okay and loving" and other behaviors "which are evil". This is the result of a split mind looking at the world. And when the loving things happen we think, ok, that's love, I'm doing that, so I'm loving. Then when the unholy things happen we think, that's NOT love. But instead of recognizing it as a meaningless illusion we recoil in horror and pass blame and point a finger and make the person wrong. Because we're not really whole in our love. It's not unconditional.

If I derive my sense of happiness from what happens "to me" or what happens "in the world", then I am easily robbed of happiness when anything goes wrong. And there are plenty of things that will go wrong. Invulnerability and love can only come about by becoming CAUSE, not effect. By recognizing that you are NOT at the effect of the world, in ANY of its forms, any events, or when anything happens. If I want to be actively loving in this world, it can't be that I ditch love at a moment's notice when something alarming seems to occur. That's special love, and too much fear. Fear does not enter where it is not welcome, and fear is its denial.

And so it's possible to have special love for the world, which means that you value bodies and the planet and want to keep it and want to have "loving behavior" and so on, but without overlooking these illusions and without being consistent. Some actions are then considered acceptable, others are considered evil and are despised. That is not love. That's judgementalism. That's fake spirituality. That's the ego trying to spiritualize an illusion and make it real. It takes many forms, sometimes things such as "not eating meat", or "hating murderers", or trying to focus solely on "the positive", or wearing "spiritual clothes".

That is denial. It is the two-facedness of the ego. The ego is especially good at taking sides and making out that one "way" is right and one way is wrong. Still continuing to be affected by the world is a certain sign of unforgiveness. Forgiveness overlooks the world which is why it causes you not to take anything seriously in it, recognizing it is not real. This can be difficult to learn because many things in the world SEEM evil or unloving. But you can't have a life where you are "loving sometimes" and call it loving. You have to learn to realize that the unloving, hateful, vengeful things are NOT THAT, and see through them to the truth.

This is a course in Cause, not effect. The world is not a cause. Believing it causes anything produces effects in you and makes you sick. To suffer with upset or horror when bad things happen is sickness. To blame the bad things for causing it is sickness. To not realize what you did to yourself to make yourself experience upset, is sickness. A Course in Miracles isn't about putting on a nice facade of persona all the time and "looking loving", and then taking off the love and going into fear or judgement when the situation changes.

Beware of illusions of love. Real, genuine, deep love is unconditional in its application, sees ALL things in this world as unreal, recognizing NOTHING can change what it is, and has NO effects from worldly events. To love is not to take sides or to judge or to hate sinners. To love is to recognize the Christ in each is the only truth and all the rest is bullshit. "For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew YOU were dreaming."

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF. No matter what the form of the attack, this STILL is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, STILL is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is STILL true. For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes."

Jesus revealead to me last night a whole new perspective on the whole idea of sin/guilt/fear/death.

I was doing a forgiveness process and Jesus had revealed that I was afraid because I believed I'd sinned. But when I inquired, tentatively, what this sin was.... Jesus revealed the real truth:

"There is no sin". ("what if you looked within and saw there is no sin?")

I thought, what, how is this possible? I thought about how we hark on about 'the separation', and how we've sinned, and now we're guilty, and then we're afraid, and all this.... we've sort of bought into this. And what Jesus showed me is, all of that is just a STORY.

It is not true that there is actually a sin in us. It's not true that we're actually guilty. It's not true that we actually need to be afraid. And it's not true that there is real death. It's all just a story, spun by the ego. This is all the ego's myth about what's happened - what it imagined and wanted to believe.

We BELIEVE we've sinned and separated, but we haven't. We THINK we're terrible sinners, but there is NO REAL SIN in us at all.

I've held in my mind a long time this 'creation myth' of how we separated and sinned and gained this huge unconscious guilt and fear etc... sort of accepting that this is 'true', but it's really not.

The ego has spun this story that we are really sinful, but it's just a made-up story. There is no sin at all! And it's pun this story that we're really guilty. But we're not guilty in the slightest! And it's spun this story that we need to be afraid. But there is absolutely no grounds for fear. And it's spun this story that we should suffer and die. But there's absolutely no foundation for that being true whatsoever.

I could see somewhat past the 'intense dark horror' of this story, perhaps for the first time, and looked instead to how this all began. Am I really separate from God? Hmmmmm.... what if the separation was also just a story that we made up? (Holy Spirit says "true"). What if we're not really separate from God at all, we just think we are.

We're all still innocent :-) And lo and behold, that made me laugh with relief, that I am still with God and quite literally, none of this story has *actually happened* at all. There is no actual sin, guilt, fear, punishment or death. It's just a great big fairytale. Kinda funny really.

While persona ego self, within our body, is firm in the belief that our shadow self, projected outside of our body, is 'not me', there is a sense of separation between the two and there is war and conflict.

In this condition, the in-here self will not want to claim ownership of the projected shadow content (guilt etc) because it *appears* unwanted. The persona does not like to accept things that it does not want, it focuses on rejection in order to include selectively.

So while we're in this state, with stuff projected, it will APPEAR to us that what we projected is terrible, bad, unwanted, hated, unforgiveable, evil etc. And because it appears that way, nobody in their 'right mind' would want to claim ownership of it.

However, it ONLY looks that way BECAUSE the persona is trying to reject it, condemn it, judge it, and get rid of it. If the persona in our mind, in our body, was not perceiving our 'self' as being intensely opposed to the projected 'out there' self that is our shadow content (guilt etc), then this IMPRESSION that the shadow is an evil external enemy would not be perceived. But this would also mean the inner persona self would not be able to see itself as a separate limited identity of 'goodness and innocence'. And it doesn't want to give up that facade.

So it's really only because the persona and shadow are kept SEPARATE and (as in a split mind) are war with each other, that it seems they appear to each other as enemies. If they were NOT kept apart, but instead came together as a unified, ONE SELF, the separation would dissolve, the impression of evil enemies would disappear, and we would not see that projected self as evil or attacking us.

In other words, the secret here is.... your enemy only seems to be an enemy while you choose to PERCEIVE them as an enemy, and if you weren't doing that, and you weren't putting walls up between you, and you weren't attacking 'them', you would simultaneously realize that they are no longer seeming to attack you. And this is how the two become one, and the persona and shadow then dissolve into each other and are undone (which means the whole ego is undone, because the ego is a split mind), and what is LEFT is the personality which is your real self.

What seems like a scary monster behind the door only seems that way while the light is off. Turn on the light, the light of truth, the light of awareness that you are BOTH the persona and shadow and that really you cannot be against yourself, and the fear and horror and conflict must melt away. Instead you find peace.

I hope I am clearly conveying what the ego's TRICK is here.... it is only an illusion that your enemy is your enemy.... it's really the separation BETWEEN the two of you that is the problem, and it's making them seem like an enemy. 'They' are really the other half of yourself. The two need to come together and stop being separate and against each other, which means the persona has to stop rejecting and attacking and being conditional, and the shadow has to stop doing the same. Then you are of one mind, a whole mind, which is at peace, realizing it was the war that made everyone look like enemies, and really both sides were innocent all along.

When I have guilt in me, I am unaware. Guilt blocks my awareness. I can't even tell that I'm guilty. It's not like, I have full complete awareness and there is also guilt present. If I had full complete awareness there would be no guilt. When guilt is present, my awareness is diminished and I don't know what I'm doing or what I've done.

This is really why our sense of separation from God is riddled with guilt, there is an aspect to it of shock and horror and not realizing what we've done. We then seem to have some awareness of the results of what we've done and it seems like we must've made a terrible mistake, and therefore we are now horrified by ourselves and are afraid.

What's needed to escape this isn't so much to admit to guilt. Guilt can't be admitted to. There can't be a total admittance of truth at the same time as guilt existing. You can admit to being innocent, but you can only deny being guilty. And the only solution to being guilty is to reclaim innocence. Owning up to guilt, if you were to do it, would just hold the guilt against you and make you suffer. This is why we don't want to do it. Deep down we know we just made a mistake and that we didn't mean to.

"Forgive them father, for they know not what they do."

It's hard for me at times to admit to 'what I did' even if what I did was an accident, because that means owning the guilt. If it were possible to admit to something without being guilty, that would be easier. But nobody wants to own guilt. It is counter-productive. We should want to get back to innocence, as a true atonement, rather than say "I'm really guilty". Owning guilt doesn't atone for anything. To the ego it atones because the ego wants to find someone to blame and to keep the guilt, but to the Holy Spirit we are always innocent.

Is regret healthy? Is a guilty conscience helpful? Should we suffer in remorse? How long is enough time to be ashamed? How much suffering is enough to atone for a sin?

The ego wants us to own up to 'really doing stuff' because this makes the error real and doesn't forgive it. Holy Spirit asks us to be forgiving, to overlook error, and to demonstrate that it has had no effects. To demonstrate that we and the other person are innocent because nothing has really happened. The ego doesn't want this, because then it can't find anyone guilty. It takes practice.

Do you have the right to claim innocence and to choose to relieve yourself of all guilt and return to innocence with Holy Spirit? And what if someone else doesn't believe you deserve it yet?

We need to all remember that if we find someone else guilty it doesn't prove that they are guilty, it proves that WE are guilty. We can't find someone else guilty without us being involved, no matter how convinced we are. If the other person is truly the separate guilty party, then we should remain in perfect innocence. And if we remain in perfect innocence, we will see perfect innocence in the other person, so we won't be able to find them guilty. It's not possible to find someone guilty without including ourselves. That kind of puts a damper on the ego's parade. We MUST forgive otherwise we ourselves cannot be forgiven.

One of Jesus's big teachings is. ... love your enemies. But I'm finding that a lot of people (largely less spiritual people) have a MAJOR issue with this.

Particularly around issues of abuse, victimhood, trauma, rape, child abuse, torture, those sorts of things. Things where it seems like the victim has been unfairly treated, where there has been violence and trauma and great difficulty. In amongst these unhealed wounds it is very hard to look upon the 'sinner' as sinless.

Jesus' teaching IS clear, that regardless, EVERYONE IS SUPPOSED TO LOVE EVERYONE.

That means loving your enemies, loving criminals, loving hateful people, loving bullies, loving rapists and murderers, loving hitler, loving terrorists, loving serial killers, all of it. Jesus loves all of them and is asking us to do the same. How many people are going to CRINGE at the thought of that?

Just because someone acts out from ego and does something stupid or crazy like hurting another, does not mean they are sinful. It does not mean they aren't calling for love and help. VERY likely the person is themselves a "victim" of some form of "un-love" from themselves and others, which has led to their current state, with which they need help and healing.

MANY people in this world would not say that they are willing to love someone who has done something horrendous. This is a DIFFICULT area for even seasoned forgivers. It's easier to forgiven friends and family and coworkers, much harder to forgive those figures who seem to represent tyranny and murder and horror.

The thing is, if we don't love these people, we are just as bad. What is our alternative, to hate them? But this is what many of us do. We hate the people that we think deserve it because of their crimes and behaviours. We don't want to love them, we think they don't deserve it. We want to see them dead. Well, what does that say about us, murderous hateful vengeful people? Do we want to be that?

It will take a lot to step up and be willing to forgive what appear to be sins and crimes and terrible acts. It will take a lot to forgive them because "they know not what they do", and to RECOGNIZE in them a call for love. To be able to discern, there is far more to the person than just this particular area of behaviour or egotism.

There is some good in everyone. No-one is purely evil. Everyone is welcomed by God. I'm often reminded that God loves ALL the people that I don't love, which is humbling. If God is loving them, why aren't I? I have to be willing to love everyone unconditionally and without reservation otherwise I am NOT BEING LOVING, which places me entirely into a category of a nasty hateful person. I don't want to be that and hopefully you don't either.

Jesus essentially teaches in the cours the difficult truth - that what is not love is murder. If you do not LOVE the murderers, you are murderous yourself. That's a tough pill to swallow because now it renders victims and sufferers as just as much murderous if they don't love their victimisers. A difficult lesson for sure. But we HAVE TO TRY to find a way to love everyone if WE want to experience love.

If you don't love them, you don't love yourself, because they are part of you.

"What is NOT love IS murder. What is not loving MUST be an attack." UrT23E2

"The prayer for enemies thus becomes a prayer for your own freedom." UrS1C5

"And happily your brother will perceive the many friends he thought were enemies." UrT27F6

"Do I DESIRE a world in which I have NO enemies, and CANNOT sin?" UrT21H6

There are a set of steps by which your own sin comes to find itself inside of your brother.

1) Believe you are sinful (oops, are you sure?)

2) Grab ahold of that sin

3) Hand it over to your brother and shove it down his throat (project)

4) Disassociate yourself from it and wash your hands of it

5) Put on your 'happy face' and pretend you are innocent

6) Point a finger at the sin, which is now in your brother

7) Accuse your brother's sin of being evil, and attack it

You then see sin in your brother and seemingly 'not' in yourself, because your mask of pretend innocence HIDES the fact that the sin is still in you and never left. The face of innocence covers up your guilt and makes everyone believe you didn't do it.

The one left holding the baby is then your brother in whom you see your projected sin, and you attack him for it, to make sure it stays well away from you.

At the same time, you are then terried that your own sin, which you got rid of, might come back to haunt you. You start to suspect it's going to attack you, find you, hunt you down and enact itself upon you again.

As this is playing out, it seems to transpire that 'the sin' does indeed come back to attack you, manifested in forms of punishment and victimhood, seemingly done 'by' the person in whom you shoved your sin, and now you get to claim:

"I am an innocent victim, I did not ask for this, they are attacking me without my will, the sin is in them, look look I can see the sin in them, it's all their fault".

Well, pretty convenient, to keep up this charade, given that it conceals the sin in you, within your own mind, and puts on a show that you are not sinful at all. You're trying to convince yourself and everyone around you that you do not believe you are the sinner, all the while keeping your sin hidden in the shadows of your mind underneath your blanket of fake innocence.

Now, to reverse this is going to mean, you have to take off the fake mask of innocence, you are going to have to stop being a victim, AND - horror of all horrors - you are going to have to TAKE BACK the sin that you shoved into your brother. It's yours, anyway. You have to separate your brother from your sin, i.e. from the guilt. You have to find a way to see them as innocent and as not `owning` the sin. It's not theirs. They are not sinful.

But you don't really want to do this because if you take back your sin, lo and behold, your mask of innocence (which was a total farce) has to be taken off of yourself, and you have to come face to face again with the sin being IN YOU. You do not like the sin being in you, that's why you tried to get rid of it in the first place.

So why would anyone 'seemingly' in their right mind want to take off their lovely sheen of innocence and own up to being a sinner? It's not exactly an attractive offer.

However, until you do this you have no chance to really heal it. And there is a healing option. If you take it quickly to Holy Spirit and let Him decide whether it's true or not, he will guarantee to find you ALWAYS innocent. It's pretty easy, but you have to be open minded about ACCEPTING that it's true that you're innocent.

There is a way out of hell.

I used to be of the mindset, like most humans, that certain physical things were bad things, and others were good. I would use whatever form the thing took, to tell me what it meant.

Someone falling over and breaking a leg might be considered a bad thing, and someone laughing perhaps a good thing. Tigers are dangerous, butterflies are harmless. You can eat the good bread but don't eat the mouldy bread.

The sense of whether it's right or wrong was always based on what did the thing look like physically, what shape, what color, what behaviours, what forms. As though some physical things are evil, and other physical things are good.

And of course this elevated some physical things to being somehow more spiritual, acceptable, less guilt-laden than others. And other things to being more evil and bad, forms of sin and deserving of guilt. Crimes versus blessings.

But the truth is that looking at and dividing up the world this way, is based on an egoic false perception. The world is in fact not comprised of positives and negatives. It's a neutral world. It's chaotic yes, sometimes cruel, sometimes merciless, sometimes seems to take on an appearance of loveliness etc. But overall it's basically all the same.

Internally, in our minds, our degree of ego - mental illness - determines what we make of the world. Whether we judge some things are hellish, or some things as heavenly. Whether we think that certain acts are crimes while others are not. How much guilt we think something deserves versus how much special attention.

There is a whole internal landscape of meanings and interpretations, judgements and labels, categorisations and evaluations, which become projected onto the world. But they really have nothing to do with the world.

For example we could say that when bodies seem to die, that's very bad, especially if we are projecting the belief that people are entirely physical bodies. The bodies go and then there is loss and horror and crying and misery. But this is because the ego mind is deciding that such events mean this, based on the form that it takes. As though physical deaths are worse than mild headaches or a slight tiredness.

We're got all this meaning that we've put onto everything, binding it to it, and then believing that it is part of it. But the world doesn't inherently have any of this meaning. Physical deaths are not really that important, or any more significant, than someone going to the toilet or eating some cake. It's just another form of the same illusion.

Eventually we end up with an entire hierarchy of illusions in our minds, with things ranked and evaluated as being better and worse in varying degrees, more or less serious, more or less important, more or less harmful, more or less evil etc. But this is entirely all made up.

For sure, our internal egoic experience of the world is an entire layer of suffering induced by ourselves, which really has no actual connection to what goes on physically. We could be watching the very same scene, and either practically kill ourselves over the seeming horror of the form it takes, or laugh at it as another example of nothingness.

It's in this way that the course says "Earth can reflect heaven or hell." Earth itself is neutral, meaningless, and nothing. Just a dream of a world, a pretend world, a world of forms and changes. It has what seem to be some changes we might classify as positive in some way, and others that are not so great. And overall it's a pretty harsh and occasionally pleasant-seeming place.

But whether or not we choose to experience it in a hell-like manner, or a heaven-like manner, is entirely an internal thing. Whether we are coming from ego and mental illness, or coming from Holy Spirit and sanity, makes the entire contribution to whether or not we "read into" the world meaning one thing or another.

All physical forms are illusions, and the differences they take on is itself the illusion that ... being different makes something inherently not the same as something else. A different shape, color, size, style, movement, whatever, all seeming to suggest this is not part of that, there is a separation. Dogs are not cats and houses are not cars and boats are not airplanes and birds are not fish. That's the illusion, that there are many separate things, when in truth it's all one illusion morphing and changing in irrelevant ways.

A dead body, a living body, a broken body, a sick body, a healthy body, it's all still the same illusion. None of those states are better or worse than the others. Symbolically maybe, we'd prefer to see symbols of life and heath and harmlessness. And we'd prefer to not see symbols of death and destruction and murder. But ultimately it's all just spacetime dream-stuff moulded into different shapes.

So really there's no sort of inherent physical sin, or physical evil, or physical good. It's neutral and meaningless in and of itself. It's just stuff. Stuff designed to obscure the wholeness and shared nature of God, to make it seem like God is not fully anywhere and doesn't exist. What you make to it, use it for, see in it, or project onto it, is an entirely mental exercise.

Use it for ego and the ego will happily tell you you're suffering in hell and life is shit and everyone hates you and you might as well be dead. Use it for Holy Spirit and he'll happily tell you you're not of this world, you're safe in God, nothing in the world can affect you, and none of it really matters.

So is a dead body worse than a living one? Does it actually matter is there are crimes or well behaved individuals? Is it worse to murder than to support? Technically no. That doesn't mean it's justified or the kind of behaviour that would emerge from a loving mind. But in the grand scheme of things, life and death, seeming positives and negatives, truths and untruths, it's all the same stuff just in a different shape. And none of it is real.

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal. This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world. And of these two but one is real. Just as reality is wholly real, apart from size and shape and time and place, for differences cannot exist within it, so too are illusions without distinctions. The one answer to sickness of any kind is healing. The one answer to all illusions is truth." UrM9A6

"The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams, once they are recognized for what they are? Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeing and yet surely theirs." UrM13A6

Hell is a state of total denial. It is the end result of "seek and do not find".

It happens metaphysically, based entirely on previous logical steps, and having gone through all the "laws of chaos" which are stages in the ego thought system.

1) You believe you lack love/God.

2) You believe love must be somewhere else, outside of you.

3) You believe others are responsible for providing it.

4) You try to manipulate others into providing it.

5) If they provide it, you temporarily think you are in heaven, since you are getting specialness, which tries to substitute for a lack of love (and fails)

6) If they do not provide it, you are FUCKED.

What happens then, if others do not fulfill your "need" or lack, is that you have absolutely nowhere to turn. You can't get it from God because you believe He stopped loving you. You can't get it from yourself because you denied it's in you. You can't get it from others because they are refusing to give it.

So now you are left in this state of lack, neediness, emptiness, lovelessness, with no "way" or tool or mechanism through which you can correct the emptiness. And the seeming absence of love DOES seem like a nightmarish hell of judgement, attack, hate, suffering, guilt, fear, sickness, torment and death, with no peace anywhere. Hell is psychological.

It's like having something wrong with you with absolutely no way to correct it. The ego has no further options or solutions available to you, and has led you away from all solutions to an oblivion of desperation and horror. There is no-one who can seemingly offer salvation to you because they are all refusing it, and so there is no way to "satisfy" the craving for love. It then seems you are in a state of CONSTANT LACK of love - the idea of absolute permanent unlove - the ego's opposite to heaven and eternal happiness.

This produces the state of HELL - the idea that love (you/God) does not exist.

This is also what surfaces when someone is needy and others fail to meet the needs and reject them. Or someone who is supposed to love you turns into an enemy. All of a sudden there is no special love to cover up your self hate - the same self hate which denied the love that was in you to begin with which created the need for a substitute - and so now the lid comes off the self hate and out it comes in a rage of hellish proportions.

It then seems like a nightmare that no-one loves you, you are alone, you have this huge problem which you cannot solve, you see no way out, no way to heal it or resolve it, there seems to be no-one who wants to save you, and so you are totally fucked and have nowhere to go.

Except there is one way out of hell. And that's through forgiveness.

Because what really needs to happen is the recognition that love is not lacking, therefore you have no need to find it, therefore you do not need a savior, therefore it doesn't matter if other people are filling the need or not, and therefore you are already supplied with love, and therefore you are with God, and therefore YOU ARE IN HEAVEN.

"Forgiveness is the way out of hell for you."

There is a significant ego trap at play, when people are significantly upset about the world. Maybe upset about cruelty to animals, upset about violence or torture, upset about the economy, upset about how people treat each other, upset about who got elected, or whatever. And especially if you are more sensitive or more easily affected or more reactive, you will join the rollercoaster ride of hell and despair.

When we are 'upset', we are making this bold statement of how we're justified in being upset because the world is not right. Which means, we are locked into being upset, because if the world doesn't change and we maintain this attitude, we are permanently going to be upset. And that means we have absolutely no way to be happy because the world sucks.

So as people get upset, they get locked into reactions, because they can't change what's happening out there to trigger them, and the truth is, they do not want to change their attitude or perspective. They don't realize that their perception is coming from ego, or that there is another way to look at this, or that there is any way in which 'this horrible thing' could be acceptable.

The ego loves to be upset about the world. The ego loves to be unhappy about how things are happening. The ego loves to be upset about all the little damaged animals and all the broken homes and all the warring countries. It loves that. It gets to be victimized by it, at the same time as saying it doesn't want it. It gets to complain about it. It gets to scapegoat. It gets to project blame all over the place. It gets to condemn and judge, in the name of upholding some kind of ideal of perfection and right living.

The ego is always two-faced like this. It says one thing while doing another. It is always contradictory. As it seems to take great offense at something, it's simultaneously taking the opportunity to counter-attack. There is just no end of suffering to be found when all you can do is react with upset to a world of hell and death. So then if you 'care' too much about the world, about the sorry sob-story of the little victims and so on, then you won't be able to detach and you won't be able to find peace.

Some of the things happening in this world are seriously disturbing, to the ego, because it wants to be really really upset, because it loves that. Some of these things happen and you just can't get them out of your mind because they're so upsetting. And the ego loves that. It can be very controversial and very unpopular and very radical to suggest... that you should look at this thing differently, such that you become at peace with it and you 'allow' it. How dare you look as though you are actually allowing horror to take place, says the ego, who wants to find you guilty. It doesn't want you to be detached because that means, detaching from IT.

So it's one thing to be all upset and pissed off and unpeaceful and JUSTIFIED in being this way... but anger is never justified. You cannot and will not ever be happy if all you do is react in a state of unconsciousness and unawareness to every 'bad thing' that appears to be bad out there.

How about this. How about it is all a trap? How about there is a word for all these bad things? How about.... temptation? How about the ego made this stuff on purpose, to deliberately try to upset you, so that you would believe it is real, so that you would take it seriously and buy into it, so that you would..... drumroll please...... stay the hell away from God? Are you so sure that all those innocent victims are really so innocently victims, now that they are actually a part of the ego's plan to destroy you? Are you going to keep listening to that? There HAS to be a better way.