Everything in the Course makes so much more sense to me now that I see there are MANY INDIVIDUALS in God's creation.

1) Recognizing that you and your BROTHER each have your own mind and your own free will

2) Recognizing that bodies were made to ISOLATE you from your brother

3) Recognizing that healing and miracles take place when you JOIN with your brother

4) Recognizing that what you thought applied only to yourself applies to BOTH of you (golden rule)

5) Recognizing that atonement is chosen be EACH brother individually and you therefore become PART OF the atonement plan to help OTHER brothers

6) Recognizing that miracles are a maximal service you can render A BROTHER, because there are others

7) Recognizing that there is not just one dreamer of the dream and therefore you can wake up while others sleep.

8) Recognizing that you have a self - a soul, which DOES exist, and you DO have a self, and your self IS NOT the ego.

9) Recognizing Holy Relationships - you have to HAVE a brother to have a relationship WITH.

10) Recognizing that YOU have a choice for which you are 100% responsible and to whom nothing happens without your choosing.

So many of the course's teachings RELY on the recognition or multiple brothers. It's got NOTHING to do with the illusion of multiplicity of egos or the separation of bodies. Every teaching becomes FAR clearer and makes much more sense when it very naturally acknowledges that OTHER PEOPLE have their own soul, mind, will, freedom, choice, path, awakening, atonement, lessons, etc.

How we ever could have taken on board the idea of us all being just one big blob with multiple personality disorder is quite bizarre really, and we did it in the name of thinking this was more spiritual.

There is a non-duality model which is frequently projected on ACIM's teachings. It suggests that in truth there is only "one", and that in the separation from God many individuals were formed. This however is very unlike what ACIM actually says when you go read it.

ACIM's teaching is that God created many individual beings - souls - who also share everything simultaneously. This comprises the sonship, which is a permanent family of living beings who each have their own self and yet share identity through the Christ mind, creating as one. Individuality was given to each soul/mind and therefore everyone has a real self. It is not a "blob" of one being sitting there all alone. It is a community.

In the separation from God, it was not an event where individuality was invented. It was an event where pre-existing individuals tried to be selfish. They didn't want to share everything with everyone, so they tried to separate themselves off. They became selfish, hoarding, possessive, owning, isolating, exclusive, special and rejecting of others.

The separation then was a breakdown in communication or a disruption of the family unit of the sonship. It's where some individuals became "the separated ones", by freely choosing individually to not share with others. It was like an attempt to rebel against the family and go off on their own as prodigal sons. But there is nothing about being a prodigal son that deletes you from existence when you return home.

What actually happened in the separation was you attempted to reject your wholeness and your self and your family. You tried to stop sharing with your permanent brothers. You wanted some special favor from God, which he would give you alone and not anyone else. It was simply an attitudinal problem, one of selfishness, and not an issue of trying to be an individual."The ego is the idea of selfishness."

Selfishness is an attitude. You can have a person who is an individual who shares, and you can have the same person who adopts a selfish attitude. Just because you're being selfish doesn't mean you suddenly invent an individuality.

In the separation, in denying our shared identity and family coherence, we actually tried to deny that we had a self. The ego is the idea of self denial, repression, hiding and withdrawal. It was an attempt to reject your self and to not be a self. In fact the ego idea even takes it so far as to try to eradicate your self entirely, which is why it is so murderous and always has the goal of the death of the sons of God in mind.

In death the ego reports that it is triumphant in erasing your self and removing your individuality. It is in death that you stop being an individual or having a self at all. Death is the attempt to destroy who and what you really are. And death is not about the production of an individual life, it's about ending it.

This also means that when you go in the opposite direction towards heaven, towards eternal life, you are moving away from the lack of individuality, towards individuality. Towards having a self. It's a movement back towards the family of God and towards the sonship and your equal brothers. It's a reintegration of self and a return to wholeness. It's a reclaiming of your identity and a recognizing that you do exist as an individual being. As a soul.

Jesus also states in the course that as you awaken, your sense of self actually expands, becoming more full and complete. This doesn't mean you are simply returning to one big blob in the sky, it means you are returning to being yourself. And the goal of the course is to "know thyself."

So in fact the traditional models of individuality are upside down. Especially in some eastern traditions which suggests that reality is no-self while illusion is self. This is completely backwards. The fact is that when you decide to try to reject your self, to deny your soul, you bring illusions of separation into your mind. Blocks and walls and grievances and attack thoughts etc enter the mind to try to cut down, isolate, narrow, limit, confine and section off who and what you are from the rest.

These walls and limits seem to form a restricted or reduced sense of self, surrounded with pictures of bodies and things that are too small to encompass what you really are, so that you'll believe that you are not the magnitude or scope of your unlimited self. And as you "identify with" these things, such as with the body, you believe that you are something small and little and cut off and separate. And this "bodily identity" in your mind forms a sense of who and what you are, which is a false sense of identity. But really it's a false IDENTIFICATION WITH something, not the invention of identity itself.

Those who are deceived, believe that this false sense of identity is their self. Such as believing you are your body. And it is this false sense of self which ends when you wake up to reality. It is this sense of being separated off and not sharing and not being whole, that ends. Which means you actually return to a greater fullness of self, more expansive and inclusive. You actually become full of self. You identity WITH your spiritual self and DIS-IDENTIFY from the false body."The soul is the idea of self fullness."

But self here does not mean selfishness, or an isolated self. It means a self that shares all of itself with other selves, in unity and oneness, as in having a real open and full relationship with all other individual beings in reality. God included.

So you have to then realize that ego is actually the attempted denial of your self and the denial of individuality. It's the attempt to suggest you do not exist and do not have any self and are dead. And just because this denial of self shows up as the seeming "presence" of an artificial identity, it does not mean that you have created an individuality. It's actually an ILLUSION OF an individual, which is ACTUALLY NOT an individual. Because remember the ego is always deceptive, being an illusion.

Your ego is really the absence of self, the absence of individuality, the suppression of personality, the denial of wholeness, and the rejection of being as God created you. The illusion of a separated off, selfish self, is undone as you awaken. This does not mean that your individuality is thrown out with the bathwater. What it means is that your individuality opens back up to sharing with the rest of your God-given family. It is actually a return to having a self. It is self acknowledgement, acceptance and awareness.

So when you have people teaching that ACIM is non-duality, or that you have no real self, or that you do not exist, or that you're supposed to deny yourself, or that your entire identity is going to just disappear someday, they are teaching absolute bullshit. They are teaching you that you do not exist, which is an ego teaching. It is an improper use of denial.

You're supposed to deny the DENIAL OF self, not deny that you have a self. You are to deny the ego, which is an illusion of a self, but which is actually the attempt to not have a self. You are to deny that you do not have a self. That is how you return to what you really are as a self in heaven. As an individual being which God created to share with others and co-create with Him.

"God who encompasses all being nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually and want to share it to increase their joy."When you project these non-duality teachings onto ACIM and you start to claim that the path to enlightenment is self repression or self denial or "you don't exist" and trying to be so neutral and passive as if you don't even have a self at all, that is actually SELF DESTRUCTION, which is completely in accord with the ego. It is the ego attempting to be spiritual, in fact. The absolute pinnacle of the spiritualized ego is to deny that you exist, in the name of being spiritual and growing in size. It is arrogant and narcissistic and a mistake.

This is why ACIM's teaching is not the same as the teachings that people keep projecting onto it. It is not a non-duality teaching and it is NOT about trying to get rid of yourself. Remember you were created by God to HAVE a self in the first place. Your self is divine and holy and perfect. You also have equal brothers who are divine and holy and perfect, created by God as well. And you share everything with everyone always. That produces a perfect harmony of souls in the sonship who have and share everything with each other, as the family of God.

That is what is written in ACIM and that is what it teaches. That you had a self before the ego came along, and you will have a self again when the ego is erased. This is not a course in self destruction or repression of the sonship or the depressing argument of trying to not exist. You should not deny your soul, or you are denying reality. This is a course in awakening to who and what you are as created by God, as one of many of his beloved children in heaven.

All anti-individuality sentiment is therefore destructive and death-worshipping and depressing and a rejection of God's will. Ego does not mean or equate to individuality. It equates only to an ATTITUDE which an individual has that runs contrary to the sharing nature of the sonship. Removing the attitude problem does not have to entail you destroying yourself. You are in fact supposed to embrace yourself and your freedom and thank God that you have been given life to share with others forever.

The ego is NOT the idea of being an individual self. It is in fact the idea of DENYING your self, attacking your self, destroying yourself, and trying to kill your self.

The ego is the very idea of imprisoning your free will, trying to make you unwilling to be free, and stripping away your freedoms as an individual.

The ego is also the ILLUSION of having independence, which is made from pictures of isolation, imprisonment, limitation and restriction, all limits placed on your actual self.

When you wake up, you do NOT wake up to the end of individuality. You wake up TO your individuality. If being in the ego means you are NOT BEING YOURSELF, then waking up means you return to being yourself.

You have free will in God and you are an individual BEING. Here is what ACIM actually explicitly says:

"God, who encompasses all being, nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually and want to share it to increase their joy."

That's what it ACTUALLY says. So that means that we actually ARE individual beings who have everything, which automatically implies that we must have free will.

Therefore, waking up means that you RETURN TO the freedom of your will, you lift away the imprisonment you've placed on yourself, you REGAIN your freedom to be individually free, you accept atonement for YOURSELF (not for others), you become part of the atonement plan and then you help others to heal and wake up.

This entire doctrine of thinking of the ego as "an individual" is actually FAILING to overlook THE ILLUSION that the ego is presenting. The ego has been quite clever to make it look as though its "separateness" IS independence. It is not. It is imprisonment. It's the exact opposite of what it looks like.

And since people think that the ego is "a self", they then conclude that undoing that self means kind of the disappearing of that self, or like the very core of your being is ripped out and doesn't exist any more. This is absolutely the OPPOSITE of what happens.

As you wake up, you become MORE OF YOURSELF, you INCREASE your freedom, you gain access to YOUR INDEPENDENCE, you return to being a CO-CREATOR (many many quotes that prove this), and you become a SELF again. An individual in heaven. You are a co-creator with God, with your own free will and individuality.

The entire FALSE INTERPRETATION of the course has led many people to think that you do not exist and have no soul and are not individual and have no free will. THIS IS NOT WHAT THE COURSE SAYS AT ALL. If you go and read it yourself and especially in the earlier versions, you will find out that this interpretation IS A LIE, and has been spread around like wildfire by well-meaning but MISTAKEN teachers.

Being individual does not make you an ego. Having free will does not make you an ego. Being a co-creator does not cause separation or isolation. You are not "just" the one son, you are one of many sons. This IS the teaching of A Course in Miracles, not the fabricated FICTION that has been spread over the top of it to cover up your individuality.

You have a permanent self which God created, it is free, it has its own mind, it can choose, and it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY.

Cutting your Self off from God is separation.

Cutting yourself off from God means that now your Self is ISOLATED or disconnected from God.

It does not mean that you have no self or that you do not exist.

Nor does it mean that you having a Self is ego or a sin.

It merely means your Self has become surrounded with fictional illusions of SEPARATION which are not really there, which blocks your awareness of being as God created you.

God created you to HAVE A SELF. You are one of many sons of God.

Just because your Self is constrained and limited by walls of ego delusion, does not fundamentally mean that your "self" itself is false.

All it means is that you have tried to CHANGE your Self into an artificial self, one which is separated from the whole and one which does not want to be as God created it.

Just because you are in the world being "an individual" does NOT make individuality an error. It's not your individuality that is an error. It's the ego stuff that SURROUNDS your individuality and paints a picture of you being an identity that is not true of you.

Not having an EGO identity or an ego individuality, a cut off individuality, does NOT mean that when you get rid of the ego you will get rid of you "self". It only means that the FAKE SELF, which was formed from walls surrounding your REAL SELF, will disappear, and what will be left is your REAL SELF, WHICH IS AN INDIVIDUAL SOUL.

God created individual souls with individual free will. This is normal and natural. It is normal to have a SELF. It's just that, in God's creation, this Self is ALSO UNITED with all of the rest of creation - joined to it, sharing with it. It is ONLY THE SHARING that has seemed to end.

The lack of sharing and the sense of ISOLATION from the whole is all that needs to be undone and let go of. And letting go of that isolation reconnects you to the whole and DOES NOT MEAN that your "self" stops being separate and therefore you stop HAVING a self. It does not mean, there is nowhere that you begin and God ends. You do not cause God, God causes you. You exist forever as His creation. You cannot make yourself not exist any more than you can change God's creation.

All that falls away is the LIES ABOUT YOU, not YOU.

Look at anyone who has had an awakening. They will tell you, who they thought they were fell away and disappeared. So there is no THAT self left, but that person is standing there talking to you BEING A SELF, because they still have a soul. You are permanent.

Which part of "I am as God created me" means that you do not exist?

I think we all realize we are supposed to get rid of the ego. This is agreed to by almost all ACIM students, shockingly enough. But how do we do that? And can we do it without losing ourselves entirely?

We do have a real self. "I am as God created me." There is at least one son of God which is you, and me, and everyone. So we don't want to be getting rid of what God has created.

"God who encompasses all being nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually and want to share it to increase their joy."

Gods mind functions based on the holographic principle, in which the whole (God) is in every part (Sons), and every part is whole and contains the whole. That means each son shares the same whole and is the same whole, and each son is every other son as well.

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

In the separation, we drew a little circle around our individual selves and decided to stop sharing. We wanted to separate off and go our own separate ways. We became exclusive, and selfish, and thinking of ourselves as not having what others have. It was an attempt to put a stop to the oneness, while keeping the individuality.

If we were to now say we should get rid of individuality, we are trying to destroy what God created. Individuality was never the problem. The problem was the desire not to share anything. It was the opposition to the oneness and produced the ego. The ego then is simply "selfishness", or unwillingness to share.

"Selfishness is of the ego but self-fullness is of the Soul because that is how He created it."

So in fact we are supposed to be full of self. But self is shared. Self is Christ - a shared identification as the one son. We are each the whole. When you are full of the whole, you are full of self. And that also means the entire Kingdom of God is you.

"The Kingdom CANNOT be found alone, and you who ARE the Kingdom cannot find YOURSELVES alone."

"You ARE the Kingdom of Heaven, but you have let the belief in darkness enter your minds, and so you need a new light."

"We are Creation; we the Sons of God."

So we don't want to be getting rid of anything God created. We don't want to be undoing individuality - provided it's an individuality that is also shared with others. We don't want to be destroying all identity or eradicating self - provided the self also includes other selves.

It's also worth nothing that we do not want to be getting rid of mind. There is no such thing as an ego mind or a wrong mind. There is only mind as God created it. And sometimes mind is sane and sometimes mind is insane. When it is insane it is being egotistical. The egotism needs correction so that that same mind can return to sanity. We do not destroy minds, we heal them.

What we DO want to be rid of is the sense of separation. Separation isn't what gave us individuality, nor led to many beings. Separation is what happens when you take the holographic system of heaven and you draw a little fence around the part that you regard as your self or soul, and you "separate it off" as though it is exclusive and isolated and alone.

This later leads to the physical fence around the mind that we call the body. It's kind of like a little prison. So one thing we do want to get rid of is the sense of imprisonment in a body, which we do by not identifying with it and not believing it. But more broadly we want to be getting rid of any sense of exclusiveness.

In God, everything belongs to everyone, and you DO own what you've been given, but you do not own it EXCLUSIVELY. You have to share it. It's like a communal property. Even your SELF is shared and not exclusively yours. When you develop a sense of owning something that ONLY you have, or lacking something that others have, that's ego.

This becomes a little tricky then because we have to let go of the idea of exclusively owning anything, which to the ego implies we own nothing (wrongly), while still keeping ownership of everything. We are not being asked to get rid of everything, we're being asked to stop trying to posses it like it's only ours or only for ourself, as if it has only your name on it and no-one else can have it.

You could say, well, let's get rid of anything personal. Because "personal", similar to "private", tends to be an idea of something that is exclusively yours, or a form of exclusion. But you have to be careful here because personal becomes bound to "the person" and getting rid of anything personal can imply (to wrong thinking) that you have to get rid of your self. You want to incorporate the oneness of the whole but without denying yourself.

What we do want to be free from is exclusivity, selfishness, possession, exclusive ownership, hoarding, lack and poverty, not sharing, a desire not to include others in one's sense of identity, being separated off by a wall of flesh, seeing ourselves as having anything at all that others don't have, any sense of inequality, any isolation or aloneness or sense that you exist inside a body prison, any notion that what's best for others has nothing to do with what's best for you, and any sense of pride or specialness as if you are better or worse than another.

Any kind of "wall" has to go, and as the walls go the separations go. And this does NOT mean (wrong thinking again) that this leads to a oneness in which you stop existing as a self. It does lead to oneness, but oneness means SHARING and relationship and community and being God's family. All that should happen to your self is it should EXPAND TO INCLUDE the whole and all others, while still being a self. It sounds like a paradox to the ego but it's how things are set up in creation.

None of this has anything to do with getting rid of yourself or your sense of being an individual, but it does entail weeding out the aspects of individuality that hint at "I'm different to you". The elements of "self" that have become infected with "mine alone" and "not yours" and "you not me" and the various other forms of exclusivity.

The sense of self has to be PURIFIED of the egoic elements, so that you end up with a PURE SELF, a whole self, which contains the whole, is identified with the shared Christ identity, contains all brothers and the entire Kingdom and all of creation, and is one with God as well. That means recognizing that the entirety of heaven is in you, God is in you, all brothers are in you, and you are everyone and everything, including yourself.

To ego, "having a self" seems to be what it's all about. This suggestion that ego is a "self you made" or some kind of a thing.

But this is actually completely backwards.

The ego is actually the idea of the END OF YOURSELF. It is a DENIAL OF SELF. It is an attempt to DISOWN YOURSELF.

What then "looks like" the formation of a fake self, a lying self, a self built from imaginary images, is in fact the opposite of what that illusion suggests.

It's not that the "ego exists" and you have to undo it, thus throwing out all "individuality" along with it.

The ego IS NOT INDIVIDUALITY. The ego is the END OF INDIVIDUALITY, masquerading as the illusion of "self" being created. This is because the Son of God is dreaming that He created Himself, which requires the SUPPRESSION of HIS SELF using denial.

So the ego is not a self. The ego is the ANTITHESIS of self. The ego is ISOLATION away from Self. The ego is the collapsing of identity, the undoing of what God created, and the attempted DESTRUCTION of Self.

So for anyone to say, well, if you wake up from the ego you will no longer have a self... they have not seen through the ego's lie. Waking up means you REGAIN YOURSELF, you RETURN TO YOUR REAL SELF, you RECLAIM your individuality, you RESTORE AWARENESS that you have always existed. The only thing that "ends" is the fiction that you do NOT exist as God created you.

So don't buy this EGO IDEA that waking up or returning to oneness will make "you" cease to exist. That is the EGO TALKING. *IT* will cease to exist, in the sense that, it always was the idea of not existing, and the idea of NOT EXISTING will end, to be replaced with the awareness that YOU DO EXIST.

So this fictional fuck-off idea of "you have no self", masquerading as spirituality, masquerading as nonduality or acceptance of oneness. It is UTTER BULLSHIT. It is an ego-driven lie.

You are NOT going to end when you wake up. YOU are going to WAKE UP to HAVING A SELF. A self which is driven by love, designed by love, and filled with love. A self which wants to SHARE AND EXTEND ITSELF, in order to exist. A self which is REAL and is PART of GOD.

You, who God created, as permanent, to exist forever, as one of His many sons, as part of his sonship, will ALWAYS EXIST, have always existed, and ALREADY HAVE ETERNAL LIFE.

All this other "you'll stop existing" bullshit is EGO FEAR and a device to turn you away from God and deny His creation. That is not spirituality, it is a lie. Getting rid of yourself is suicide and sacrifice!

God created you. God loves you.

As humans with egos, we are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as "separate people." This is because of the ego. We have identified "self" with an individual body, and not the bodies of others, and thus perceive that we are ISOLATED and SEPARATE.

It is from that perspective of being an isolated, cut-off, separated being, that we interpret what ACIM seems to be saying about your perception, your mind, exactly what is inside your mind and what seems not to be. This has led to a great deal of misunderstanding of Jesus's teachings about perception and correction because it's all being viewed FROM a state of EGO.

"What is the Body? The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built, to separate parts of his Self from other parts. It is within this fence he thinks he lives, to die as it decays and crumbles. For within this fence he thinks that he is safe from love. Identifying with his safety, he regards himself as what his safety is."

You have to recognize that the Sonship, which contains all souls God created, are not just a sum total of many individuals. It's not simply "7 billion humans" all lined up next to each other. There is an essential part to the nature of God's holographic creation, which is SHARING.

The minds of each Son, WHEN in His right mind, is very much shared with other minds. Or let's say, "open to" or "joined with" or "connected to". Each Son is one PART of the holographic creation of God, and each PART contains the WHOLE. So while each Son seems to be an individual, and there are many individuals in Heaven, each individual is ALSO a "container" or medium through which the WHOLE also expresses. It's like being plugged into God.

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

"The mind that taught itself to think specifically can no longer grasp abstraction in the sense that it is all-encompassing."

The ONLY parts of this that turns into the ego, is when you unplug yourself from God, unplug yourself from the collective shared mindset, disconnect yourself from the Sonship, and see yourself as ISOLATED.

See, people think that you cannot be an individual and be in Heaven or that individuality is ego. This is because, as a starting point, they think that the individual is "separate" from others, and that this separation is therefore ego. But this is starting from a false premise. In God, the natural state of things is that everyone SHARES and is JOINED WITH everyone else, is open to them and shares and extends love with them. It is the reduction of the SHARING which brings about the ego, NOT their individuality. You could say, ego makes a person "more individual", it does not establish their individuality.

So if you can picture a soul in its natural state, it is an individual BUT IT IS ALSO sharing all of itself with the WHOLE of all creation, the entire sonship, and all of God. It is a part, but totally joined to the whole. And there are many parts, joined to the whole. As though everyone is sharing a collective experience, which is what we call oneness. But this oneness or sharing does not obliterate the wholeness of each individual soul.

It is ONLY when a soul unplugs itself from the whole, stops sharing God's mind, stops being one with the sonship, and "withdraws itself" from the collective, that it becomes ISOLATED. It seems isolated now because it seems cut off and separated off and DISCONNECTED from the whole. This state of isolation requires "walls" to be erected around the individual. Or to put it another way, we stop sharing with others and recoil into a defensive position of suspicion and conflict instead of lovingly embracing others. These are not walls which define the individuality ITSELF. They are walls which BLOCK SHARING. As if putting a blindfold on someone, or preventing them from ever touching anyone else.

These artificial "blocks to awareness" ARE the ego. They are what keep you CUT OFF from others, versus being JOINED WITH others. These walls are NOT what make you an individual. Your individuality is a state of being individual AND JOINED. What makes you an ego is ceasing to be joined, so that ONLY your individuality remains, as though you are now orphaned or blocked from sharing anything with the collective. It is an attempt to leave the Sonship and go off on your own.

The result of this isolation is that you end up seeming to STILL be an individual, but without a sense of being connected to the whole. Since it is normal and natural to be joined with the whole, when you are NOT joined with the whole there must be some kind of BLOCK in the way which is "separating you off", rather than allowing you to join. Joining DOES NOT UNDO YOUR INDIVIDUALITY. It SHARES IT. This makes total sense in a holographic model of heaven but not the ego's thinking.

Now, you as a "human" in "a body", this is an idea of you being separated off. As though in prison, or not allowed to share with anyone. Isolated, alone, separate, unable to join. That is what makes for an EGO. The ego is the idea of being separated from unity, but the ego is NOT the idea of having an individuality. Individuality actually is an OPENNESS TO LOVE, like a loving individual, whereas ego is an unloving individual. You can still be individual and love your family, or you can be an individual and hate your family. The hate is the ego, not the self, but the hate forms a FICTIONAL IDENTITY which you overlay on top of yourself. That fake self is a SUBSTITUTE for your real individuality, not the antithesis of existing as a self.

So you then think, ok, I am one of many separated humans in one human body. What's inside my body seems to be me. I've become separated from all others BY my body, and whatever is outside my body is not me. So that leads you to perceive, that you have a "personal mind", which is your own separate mind. You actually DO have an individual mind which God created, but it is not supposed to be isolated. It is kept in a box when it is kept inside the walls of the body. The body is a device for LIMITATION.

So you get used to this. And then you think to yourself, ok, here is A Course in Miracles, it's talking about "my perception", so it must be talking about what is INSIDE MY BOX, within my limited mind. And therefore, I need to change my limited isolated mind, my personal perception, in order to change my personal hell, and accept a personal atonement just for myself. No. That's not what the Course is telling you.

The Course completely acknowledges in fact that you SHARE illusions with other people just as much as that you have a personal set of illusions trapped in your own little box. It teaches that the content of this "world", physical objects, wars, bodies, death, sickness, lack, conflict, murder, etc, IS PART OF the illusions which are taking place in a JOINT ENDEAVOR of wrongful thinking, on the part of many many individual souls who COLLECTIVELY are DREAMING this entire universe.

So what appears to be just your personal mind, or your personal thoughts, or your personal ego illusions, which you are working on, and which the course DOES tell you to correct and heal.... that is only PART OF YOUR PERCEPTION. That is only part of your MIND. Because your mind, in its natural state, is not just that which is "isolated" within yourself like a separate cut off mind. You are not supposed to be applying the course ONLY to the part of mind which you've sectioned off and called your own.

The purpose of the course is to remove the LIMITS you placed on your mind, to undo the BLOCKS TO AWARENESS OF LOVE (awareness of the whole) which you placed on your mind, and to lift away the artificial barriers which made you think your mind was "separated off" in the first place. That means, that your mind is actually not JUST your personal private hell within your "little self". Your mind is ALSO OUT THERE, very large, very powerful, very spacious, SHARED WITH and joined with all other minds.

This is because you as part of the Sonship which God created, are not just a separate individual in a box. You RADIATE LIGHT AND LOVE outside of yourself, you extend love, and you SHARE LOVE AND MIND with all other minds. So that means, that "your perceptions" are not just limited to your boxed-in perceptions. Your perceptions ALSO INCLUDE perceptions being had by the parts of your mind which are more WHOLE, and the parts of your mind which are SHARING with other minds.

That then means, you have to look at what it is that the COLLECTIVE SONSHIP is dreaming, what the WHOLE is imagining, and recognize that this entire physical universe is actually an IDEA OF SEPARATION, within the SHARED MIND of the Sonship. And your mind IS PART OF THAT. So that means your mind also encompasses this entire universe, your mind is part of that which is dreaming this entire universe, all of the physical objects in this universe are IMAGES IN YOUR MIND, this entire world IS PART OF YOUR PERCEPTION, and the forms which are showing up are actually THOUGHTS AND IDEAS that you are having. Not just you, but many souls, collectively contributing to this mass visualization of hell.

So as you remember, ok, you are not a boxed-in separated mind, you are a JOINED connected mind, which is SHARING mind and will with the whole sonship, you are FAR LARGER than this universe and everything taking place in it even on what SEEMS LIKE a physical level,is actually happening WITHIN YOUR MIND - within all our minds. Not all illusions are totally "cut off and isolated" inside your head. There are illusions outside your head also. And even your head is an illusion. Your body is a separation device to make it seem like your mind is not part of the mind that's dreaming the world.

So if you think, ok, all I need to do is fix my own personal mind and claim atonement for myself, you are falling short. You're forgetting that you are an aspect of something much larger. And because PART OF the process of correction IS to do with correcting "your thoughts" and "your perceptions" and "your beliefs", you can find many many parts of the Course which support doing that. But if it's considered to be entirely within a context of "my separate self", you are missing additional parts of the picture.

You are MORE THAN the separate isolated self that you have come to think of as you. You are MORE THAN the self which thinks "about" this world as though it exists without your doing. You are MORE THAN the self that perceives itself to be so isolated and separated by its body, from what is "out there", that it thinks its mind is not even out there at all and is entirely housed within a box.

You are MORE THAN a perceiver OF forms which show up out there as if by magic. Who put them there? Who made bodies appear? Who invented planet Earth? YOU DID, along with many others, in a collective shared idea. Jesus says even ideas of separation have to be SHARED otherwise they cannot be ideas at all.

Separation is not just something you did alone, and it is not something that you will just undo alone. The acceptance of the atonement is NOT JUST FOR YOU. That is the selfish ego making itself special and trying to keep your mind from sharing itself with other minds. Your responsibility is to accept the atonement for yourself BUT ALSO SO THAT you accept it for others so that you can help them join you. It is not a selfish act. It merely means you must accept atonement so that you can GIVE IT because you are PART OF THE PLAN of atonement and need to become a miracle worker so that you can HELP OTHERS. This is spelled out in several quotes, like those below:

"The sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept the Atonement for himself. This means you recognize that mind is the only creative level, and that its errors are healed by the Atonement. Once you accept this, your mind can only HEAL (others). By denying your mind any destructive potential and reinstating its purely constructive powers, you place yourself in a position to undo the level confusion of OTHERS."

"The unforgiven have no mercy to bestow upon another. That is why your sole responsibility must be to take forgiveness for yourself. The miracle that you receive [into your own mind], you give [to others]."

"This is what is really meant by the statement that the one responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept the Atonement for himself. The teacher of God is a miracle worker because he gives the gifts he has received. Yet he must first accept them."

"When you have been restored to the recognition of your original state, you naturally become part of the Atonement yourself. 6 As you share my unwillingness to accept error in yourself and others, you must join the great crusade to correct it; listen to my voice, learn to undo error and act to correct it. 7 The power to work miracles belongs to you."

"The forgiven are the means of the Atonement. 2 Being filled with spirit, they forgive in return. 3 Those who are released must join in releasing their brothers, for this is the plan of the Atonement. 4 Miracles are the way in which minds that serve the Holy Spirit unite with me for the salvation or release of all of God's creations."

So open your mind and eyes to recognize that the course is not a selfish course, it's not about your separate selfish ego doing the course for itself. It's not about maintaining isolation. It's not about you choosing something in isolation which has no effect on anyone else.

It's about you taking up your NATURAL FUNCTION as the light of the world, to share and extend the truth to others through miracles, to learn to give as you receive, to reclaim the role of being part of the WHOLE MIND which dreamed the world, to purify the perception that IS THE WORLD, and to therefore UNDO THE UNIVERSE by recognizing it is an illusion, even in its physicality, because it is nothing but a mistaken idea shared by the Sonship of which you are a PART AND WHOLE. Being "a part" does not mean "being apart".

The world is perception. Forms are ideas and thoughts. Objects are visualizations. Matter is an hallucination. Your mind is dreaming this entire universe along with other minds. The mind that needs correction is far broader than just your isolated little human self, yet it includes your separate self which needs to have its limitations lifted away to realize and recognize that YOU ARE THE WHOLE. You are the ONE SON OF GOD as much as you are ONE OF MANY sons of God.

Reclaiming your IDENTITY as the One Son of God is also part of recognizing your function in the Sonship and the part you play as one of many equal sons. To go from believing you are ONLY a part of God, to realizing you are part of God AND share the whole of God and his creation, is the identity shift that needs to take place. This is not a course in fixing up your ego identity, or making your isolated self happier or more at peace with an external world that you have no power over and no responsibility for and did not put there. This is a course is GOING BEYOND your identity to reconnect with the whole, the oneness, the sharing of love, which is far larger and more encompassing than you think.

Your mind IS responsible for the physical world showing up. It IS responsible for making wars happen. It IS responsible for producing mountains and deserts and forests. It DOES have that power. Not in isolation, but as part of its shared power with the Sonship. This course is not just about you. Nor is it about the ending of your individuality. It is about taking your separated-off individuality and plugging it back into the SHARED MINDS of the Sonship, and also into the collective unity of the One Son which is one with God's mind also.

That means your perception and your perceptual errors INCLUDE the world ITSELF, not just your isolated view OF the world, and not just the content of your individual isolated mind. Bodies were made by the ONE SON of God to separate "Himself" apart and make believe He is many separated parts. The One Son of God includes the Sonship, which ARE PARTS, but also are not separated off like the ego is. Instead they are JOINED NATURALLY and yet divided NATURALLY. Unnatural division is ego, not whether or not you are individual. In-dividual means 'cannot be divided', because it is A WHOLE. And wholeness means SHARING. So any whole must be shared with any other whole, and therefore all individuals must be part of a whole. This is the nature of God's creation.

While it may seem like the ego is the idea of an individual self, some kind of artificial self, this isn't really an accurate way to frame it. The ego is actually the idea of NOT having a self.

In heaven God created your soul which is your real self. It is a fully created being. It is an individual being, at least in the sense that it has its own mind and free will, but it ALSO SHARES with everyone else, and so is also one.

"God created every mind by communicating His Mind to it, thus establishing it forever as a channel for the reception of His Mind and Will."

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. ALL His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other because they, were created neither partially nor in part."

In the separation, the willingness to share was denied, producing a state of selfishness. "The ego is the idea of selfishness. The soul is the idea of self-fullness." Selfishness is an attempt to withdraw from sharing, to not want to be be one with the rest.

In what we might describe as "making an ego", the truth is that we didn't really make an ego. We HID the soul. And we did this by denying the soul. This repression of self was an act of TRYING NOT TO EXIST. It was an attempt not to will anything at all.

In attempting not to exist, which is really an attempt to murder God's son, you tried to have en existence in which you didn't really exist. It was one thing to have the idea of existing "apart from God", but the real truth is that you were attempting NOT to exist at all. To be the total opposite of eternal life, which is death.

The ego then isn't really a self, or an individual. It is the idea of NOT SELF. It is really an ILLUSION of a self, seeming to be like a self, but this illusion is actually a deception. It isn't really the presence of something, it is actually the ABSENCE of self. It is a lack of self.

It lacks wholeness, it lacks real identity, it lacks truth and sanity, it lacks will power, and it lacks life. What it SEEMS to be, it is not. It appears to be a thing, but it is really a no-thing. It is an anti-self, and Jesus sometimes refers to it as the anti-christ. The lack of christ. A LACK OF "everything that exists" is obviously not the PRESENCE of anything at all.

So the ego is this upside-down idea of "a separate self" that you made. But secretly, when recognized, this illusion of a self existing is really actually an attempt to make something that DOES NOT exist. And it's not really there at all. That's the illusion of it. There is not really an ego.

When you identify with "the ego" and try to believe that it exists or that it is a self, or it is your own self, you are really identifying with nothingness. You are trying to reject your true existence as a soul and are trying to seemingly "take on" a new self.

As if you can line up the soul and the ego side-by-side and pick between them. But the ego isn't alongside the soul in this way, because it doesn't have any existence. So you're really identifying with a fictional nothingness that isn't really there, while believing it is really something.

If we correctly identify that the ego is a LACK OF SELF, and is an attempt NOT to exist, which is an effort to die or to cause the death of God's son, then we need to also recognize that the ego is NOT really an individual. Nor is it really the idea of individuality. It is the idea of separation from sharing an identity in christ. It's the idea of NOT KNOWING WHO YOU ARE. As if you don't even exist at all.

"The self you made is not the Son of God. Therefore this self does not exist at all."

"At no SINGLE instant does the body exist at all."

"The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in the minds of man that some people have gone so far as to doubt whether they were ever created at all."

When the ego is undone, so to speak, we're not REALLY talking about undoing something that exists. We're talking about recognizing that is never was anything at all. That there IS no ego. That it is NOT your self. And it was never really a self. We're talking about shifting from identifying as "I don't exist" to "I do exist." From identifying with nothingness while pretending it's everything, to identifying with everything and recognizing that the ego is nothing. Your soul IS everything.

So really it's all upside down. And a lot of people have believed this idea that the ego IS a self, and IS a real individual. And that therefore, we have to get rid of this self, and therefore get rid of individuality in order to be spiritual. But this then leads to the false conclusion that you HAVE NO SELF. Or that individuality is a bad thing. Thus has individuality received a bad wrap, and people keep thinking that there are no individuals in heaven. The truth is there are no real individuals on earth, and heaven is full of them!

The separation from God therefore was never really an issue about individuality. It was never really about BECOMING an individual. You had an individual self BEFORE the separation even happened, it's just that your individual self was so SHARED with others that it was also one with them. "We are the Kingdom, WE, the Sons of God." "You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did." Remember that "God who encompasses all being

nevertheless CREATED SEPARATE BEINGS who HAVE EVERYTHING INDIVIDUALLY and want to share it to increase their joy." That is normal, that is natural. It's OKAY to have an individual self, provided it shares and is not selfish. The ego is all about specialness and selfishness. Getting rid of the specialness and selfishness doesn't have to get rid of YOU. Especially when the specialness and selfishness was an attempt to get rid of you in the first place.

As you awaken, as you come to know yourself, as you return to being as God created you to be forever, as you acknowledge your brothers ACTUALLY PERMANENTLY EXIST along with you in reality, and therefore that you DO HAVE real relationships, and that everything belongs to everyone, the sense of "I am a real ego" is replaced with "I don't have an ego". But not having an ego doesn't mean YOU don't exist.

The end of an illusion of a self, an illusion of who you are not, of what you are not, of NOT existing, and NOT having a self, is the re-dawning on your awareness of your REAL SELF which has always existed and always will exist. A recognition of your individuality AND your shared nature. A reclaiming of your real identity in christ. And awakening to remembering that you are the soul God created to live forever.

"The Name of Jesus is the Name of one who was a man but saw the face of Christ in all his brothers and remembered God."

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

What is real can only be increased by sharing. This is because what is real cannot changed. Nothing can be added to it or taken away because it is already complete.

Therefore in order to 'increase', the only option available to God is to "share" ie CREATE. God has to therefore create something which is whole and complete within itself, yet individual, yet one with Him. "Connected", holy spirit says.

He thereby creates untold numbers of INDIVIDUALS, each of whom has everything individually. This is why every soul has free will and the freedom to create and choose individually.

Individuality does not mean ego. Individuality means wholeness and sharing with other wholes (souls). Ego means putting up walls to try to stop sharing.

Course quote:

"5 God, Who encompasses all being, created beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy. Nothing real can be increased except by sharing. That is why God created you. Divine Abstraction takes joy in sharing. That is what creation means. "How," "what" and "to whom" are irrelevant, because real creation gives everything, since it can create only like itself. Remember that in the Kingdom there is no difference between having and being, as there is in existence. In the state of being the mind gives everything always."

Before the ego existed, you had a self, created by God. Just as everyone did. In the separation, you denied your self. The denial of self, was an attempt to destroy your self. But you had to have something to identify with. So you shifted your sense of "what am I" away from your soul, towards an ego that you invented.

The ego is really the idea of the denial of life, of God, and of your soul. It is the attempt to eradicate you, which is why all its efforts lead to death. While the ego seems to be a self, it really is a lack of self. It is the absence of you and the rejection of mind. It masquerades as a self, when in fact it is the opposite of having a self.

Having identified with it, when people talk about oneness and non-duality you might feel frightened, as if it means that YOU are going to end. So long as you are identified with your ego, which is a false and second self, you will interpret any movement towards God as threatening.

The ego does not understand union or oneness and interprets it as death. This is also why you have ego rebounds and feel afraid and offended when you try to move into the truth. It's not really that YOU are under threat, it's that the ego is. But having identified WITH it and believing it to be what you are, you interpret ITS fear as your own.

So then the idea of returning to oneness, seems threatening to your ego, because your ego indeed cannot exist in oneness. And if you think that your ego is your self, YOU WILL not want to wake up. It will seem to threaten you. Especially the idea that the ego does not exist at all, is taken by the ego as an attack, and YOU will experience this as an attack upon your very existence. But only IF you believe the ego is your self.

The truth is that when the ego is undone, this happens as a result of YOU dis-identifying with it. Or to put it another way, you reintegrate yourself, identifying with your soul/spirit, reclaiming your mind, and dis-associating from the ego. This means you stop believing that the ego is your self, or that you even have an ego. Once you can recognize that your self, and your ego, are two different things, you are no longer threatened by the idea of undoing it.

A return to heaven is not really a return to no self. In fact, the ego is the state of no self. It is the state of self denial. It is a denial of life and a denial of existence and of identity in Christ. Returning to heaven is a REUNION with your real self, a re-identifying as a soul or Son of God in the Sonship, and a reclaiming of your true nature. You actually are returning to HAVING a self. That's why this is all about RESURRECTION.

The self God created you to be is permanent and will always exist in reality. Your Holy Self is God-given and cannot ever be destroyed. It's only your identification or sense of "who am I" that has become confused. Shifting your "who am I" from the non-existent ego to the permanent soul, can be nothing but reassuring and authentic.

Some people interpret the course to mean there is either a oneness or a duality, either God alone or many egos. And that undoing egos results in God being alone again. But this is not sufficient or accurate. God created you as a real living being, and it is you IDENTIFYING WITH ego that produces the ego and the separation, NOT the creation of an individual identity. You were an individual (who also shared everything) before this all happened.

Returning to God is not the annihilation of your individuality, it is the reclaiming of your individuality. The ego is NOT individuality, it is the rejection of having any real identity at all.

"God who encompasses all being nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually and want to share it to increase their joy."

The ego only comes about when there is an emphasis of DIFFERENCES between any two things.

If two holy beings are relating to each other, recognizing their equality, there is no egotism involved. Their equality makes it impossible for them to be different or to have different interests or for different rules to apply to each.

Without differences there cannot be a difference of opinion, therefore there cannot be conflict. Without conflict there is no ego. The ego is made of illusory differences or the idea of inequality. When there is equality there is no ego.

Therefore, recognize that "having an ego" does NOT necessarily equate with "having a self", nor does it equate with "being an individual".

The only way in which a self could turn into an ego is if that self is DIFFERENT to other selves in some way - a different appearance, a different opinion, a different form, a different nature, a different interest etc.

The only way that individuality turns into ego is when a person attempts to DIFFERENTIATE their individuality from others by trying to make their self SPECIAL. Jesus says that the separation (creation of ego) occurred only when we sought "special favor". We already had our own self and individuality BEFORE we tried to be "better than" or "different to" others. Before that, we were equals with all of God’s Children - our "brothers" in Heaven.

Ego is NOT the idea of "being separate", as in, there being many individuals. The only way that individuals become separate in an egotistical way, is when they aim to be SPECIAL and thus in COMPETITION with others. That is egocentric, because the individual is then seeking special exclusive treatment that they would deny to others.

This also ties into "what is not love is murder", in which when one thing applies to one person that does not apply to another, cause and effect are separate and it seems you can escape the consequences of trying to attack a brother - thus getting away with murder. What is the opposite? The opposite is not to have NO brothers, it is to treat your brother as an EQUAL. LOVE, therefore, recognizes EQUALITY. Love does not have to mean "one self", when those selves are cooperating lovingly.

The same is true of free will, which each Child of God is granted. You would think that if everyone had free will there would be ego chaos. Not necessarily. If everyone wills IN THE SAME WAY or with the same GOAL, there is no disagreement and therefore no ego. When all wills are "united" or "in accord" with God’s Will, there is HARMONY.

Harmonious, ego-free relationships arise from mutual recognition of holiness and equality. Therefore every child can have their own free will and be co-creators, provided they are always desiring to share joy and love. When their interests are not different, there is no war, and thus no ego.

We need to be careful to recognize then that EGOTISM means SELFISHNESS, and being selfish isn’t inherent to you having a SELF - it’s just a bad attitude. Selfishness means self-interest or in some way believing that something applies to you which others should not be a part of. It is a lack of SHARING or willingness to be equal and share everything with others. When there IS a willingness to share everything equally, there can STILL be selves, but now these selves are holy and innocent.

The idea therefore that ego means "any kind of separation" is not true! It’s okay for MANY BEINGS to be LOVING. For brothers to be loving, equal, identical and to share everything. The fact that brothers are getting along in a NOT-SELFISH way, lacking ego, does not mean they have to stop being separate beings. You getting along with your neighbor doesn’t entail you having to destroy them.

Jesus says that the ego entails selfishness, while the SOUL entails SELF-FULLNESS. If you think about it, when you are being selfish you actually WITHDRAW part of yourself from sharing with your brothers. Therefore you are no longer being the fullness of yourself. To be ego is to be NOT YOURSELF. It is a withdrawal of yourself from your brother and an attempt ISOLATE so that you stop SHARING. Egotism is simply lack of sharing, not being a "separate being". When you isolate yourself you become UNNATURALLY SEPARATE, but your inherent "self" which is "separate" from other selves is NOT unnatural.

Although it looks like being self-oriented, ego is actually the ABSENCE OF SELF, because self is naturally open and sharing. Ego is confinement, imprisonment, limitation, lack and a loss of identity. This is why being in the ego ends in death of the self. Self denial, self attack, self abuse and self sabotage are attempts to UNDO the Holy Self that God created you as. Death is a denial that you are a free-willed individual who lives forever.

Becoming "more ego" does not make you MORE SELF, it makes you less self. And the more you TRY to emphasize your "self" the more you LOSE IT. This is also why waking up means returning TO BEING YOURSELF, and is NOT a loss of self but a GAINING of self. It is only the LACK of yourself that disappears!

Being FULL of self is the opposite of being "full of yourself". Being full of yourself really means PRETENDING to be someone you are not. It is a lack of authenticity. Being your authentic SELF means being the Child of God that God created. "I am still as God created ME" means you are still the holy child which God created as ONE of his holy children.

Egotism or having an ego does not mean having a self or being an individual. It means HIDING YOUR SELF behind a facade of lies. You DO exist. You have a Holy Self with your own Holy Mind. There is nothing WRONG with that. It is not ego to say that God created many children. Ego does not equate with all forms of separation! It’s OKAY for God to have created "separate beings", provided those beings are loving, equal, and have no egotism or specialness. It’s only when they COMPETE that there is a separation problem.

"God, who encompasses all being, nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually and want to share tit to increase their joy."

That is a recipe for harmony, happiness, joy and peace. There is no ego in that. God creating a Kingdom with many things in it, doesn’t mean there is any EGO in it. It’s okay for WHAT IS REAL to be a living world filled with light beings who love each other equally. Being one of many children of God does not man that you are fundamentally in competition with or attacking other children of God. Love brings order to God’s divine creaion.

Do you think you know what the ego is?

Do you think you know what separation means?

How many of you believe the idea that "ego" means "separation", and that therefore any kind of separation is ego? Or that all forms of separation must be removed in order to have oneness?

This is NOT TRUE. And it's not what Jesus says in ACIM:

Jesus: "Selfishness is of the ego but self-fullness is of the Soul because that is how He created it."

Jesus: "You who prefer specialness to sanity could not obtain it in your right minds. You were at peace until you asked for special favor. And God did not give it."

BEFORE THE SEPARATION, there were many of us in God's Creation. Many Sons of God, directly created by Him. There wasn't just one Son. There being many sons IS NOT SEPARATION. IT IS NOT EGO. Here's why.

God's children are all created in the likeness of Himself. They are identical reflections of Him. They are all IDENTICAL. He loves them all EQUALLY and therefore they are all created in PERFECT EQUALITY. There isn't a single Son of God who is different to or unique from the others. They are like "clones". Perfect beings of a like order. A good analogy is spherical orbs of light which all look the same. These are souls.

There is nothing wrong with this. There is no ego there. There is no ego because there are no DIFFERENCES. There is no inequality. Every son is fully equal to all the rest. Every son has access to share everything with everyone. Every son is perfect and whole and complete within themselves and needs nothing. Every son has everything that all the other sons have. Every son is perfectly IDENTICAL to all the others in every way. In this there is NO ROOM FOR EGO.

The Sons of God in the Sonship are in perfect permanent harmony. It is perfectly normal and natural for there to be many FREE WILLED beings who all correlate and agree and are in accord with the Will of God. They each have their own minds which God created, and their own free will, and yet there is not even the slightest trace of disagreement. Every son is perfectly UNITED in the willingness to will like God. To create in His likeness and in their own. Even though all children of God are CO-CREATORS with God, there is no discord, no competition, no comparison, no differences, no exclusivity. NO ONE IS SPECIAL IN ANY WAY. And this leads to the perfect harmony of Heaven's peace.

Now. What is the ego really? The ego is NOT the idea of separation. The Sons of God are "separate beings" and this is NOT EGO. So to say that any kind of separation is ego is wrong. It is also wrong to say that having separation means you can't have oneness. That's bullshit. Oneness means OF LIKE KIND, being identical and in the likeness of God. It means they are ONE KIND. Jesus even says you can even be "one with yourself" - meaning you are of one single kind of state within yourself. That's what oneness really means, not "only one thing with nothing more than a count of 1."

WHAT EGO REALLY MEANS, in Jesus's terms as well, is any form of SPECIALNESS, which attempts to ISOLATE OFF some Son of God from the rest, describing him as DIFFERENT IN SOME WAY, unique, special, unlike the others, no longer equal to anyone else. THAT is the oppositie of the identicality of God's perfect creation.

Jesus: "You who prefer specialness to sanity could not obtain it in your right minds. You were at peace until you asked for special favor. And God did not give it."

WE (many) had our own right minds BEFORE EGO. Then we tried to believe in "special favor" from God, that we would be thought of as NOT IDENTICAL TO others, and therefore gaining in some way and losing in others in order to have exclusivity.

It is PERFECTLY OKAY for there to be individuality in Heaven provided the individuals are PERFECTLY IDENTICAL. There is nothing wrong with there being a million Christs. Having individuality IS NOT AN EGO THING. It only becomes an ego thing when it turns into a SPECIAL INDIVIDUALITY or an individual identity that is NOT LIKE THE OTHERS.

"EGO", in ACIM terms, really means... being exclusive, isolated, imprisoned, limited, lacking something that others have, having something that others lack, not being equal to anyone, being unique, spiritualizing something, demonizing something, condemning others for what they have which you lack, being in competition, being selfish, wanting to own and hoard and posses something in denial of others, denial of your brothers, denial of God, rejection and abandonment, failing to share anything with anyone, not-shared interests, privacy, private thoughts, your own subjective perception, withdrawal from Life, isolation into a specific point in spacetime (in a body), being cut off from abundance or sharing, a breakdown in communication, contrast, opposition, war and conflict, murder and suffering and sickness and death.

That is basically ALL THE SAME THING. It's just different ASPECTS of the same wish to be exclusive, to be different, or to be un-alike your identical brothers. That's what leads you to withdraw from sharing from the entirety of Creation and to narrow yourself down, withdraw and isolate into a little corner, and to then hide yourself in a body. Specialness produces body-identification and reincarnation and sickness and death.

So egotism, or selfishness, or specialness, forms a barrier around yourself which tries to keep something exclusively within, while also rejecting stuff as outside of you. The body is a symbol of that. It means you want to be seen as DIFFERENT and not identical. And that's why all bodies are unique and unalike. They were made as devices for proving separation. This special exclusivity and isolation is the same thing as sin. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards."

So in this more-accurate view of what ego is and is not, which is perfectly in line with what ACIM says about it, it's not your individuality or self or soul or free will that's a problem. The ONLY problem is your sense of SELFISHNESS which has attempted to set you APART from others in terms of BEING DIFFERENT TO THEM, rather than identical. To be un-equal is to be in disagreement and conflict. It is an act of war. And it produces a split mind. Your mind cannot stop being split and become "right minded" until all inequalities are ironed out and made equal again. Then, when there are NO inequalities, your mind can return to ONE MINDEDNESS, which is a mind experiencing a SINGLE STATE, ie "oneness" as in - ONE KIND.

You do not need to forego your free-willed individual soul or self. It has never been a problem. The ONLY thing that needs to be let go is the sense of being SPECIAL, exclusive or isolated. Any form of inequality is ego. Any form of equality is God's Will.

"You cannot enter into relationship with any of God's Sons unless you are willing to love them all equally".

Loving MANY BROTHERS EQUALLY is not an ego state.

"Healing is an act of thought by which two minds perceive their oneness, and become glad."

When TWO MINDS REMAIN TWO MINDS, BUT see each other as IDENTICAL, they become glad. Oneness means identicality and perfect equality and LIKENESS, it does not mean "there is only one Son" nor does it mean "many sons is an ego thing" nor does it mean "many sons is separation."

SEPARATION, as in separation from God, doesn't mean "being separate from one thing" it means being EXCLUSIVE an ISOLATED FROM THE REST. What constitutes "the rest" isn't necessarily "only God". Isolation isolates you from your brothers as well. It is the sense of isolation and inequality from your brothers that must be undone and undoing that DOES NOT ERASE YOUR BROTHERS. Attempting to do that or to claim that doing that means oneness is MURDEROUS. It's another way the ego interferes with the truth.

So what I've come to do is that whenever I think of ego or separation, think more in terms of exclusivity, isolation and inequality. It's FAR more accurate and lines up with absolutely everything Jesus says. We are to overcome our self-imposed imprisonment and open up to SHARING, to RECLAIM OUR IDENTITY AS *A* SON OF GOD, and return to sharing in all of Creation of which we are a PART.

Jesus continues his passage:

"For the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this of a Father who truly loved His Son. Therefore, you made of Him an UNloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father COULD give. And the peace of God's Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his REAL father, having attacked his glorious equality WITH Him.

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

To SINGLE OUT is to MAKE ALONE, and thus MAKE LONELY. God did not do this to you. Could He SET YOU APART, KNOWING that your peace lies in His oneness? He denied you only your request for pain, for suffering is not of His creation. Having GIVEN you creation, He could not take it FROM you. He could but answer your insane request with a sane answer, which would abide with you in your insanity. AND THIS HE DID. No-one who hears His answer but will give up insanity. For His answer is the reference point BEYOND delusions, from which you can look back on them, and see them as insane. But seek this place and you WILL find it, for love is in you, and will lead you there."

In ACIM Jesus describes that revelation is direct communication between God and one of his creations.

It also describes revelation as intensely personal.

It also describes revelation as being knowledge which cannot be directly shared, but that God wants us to bring or express the truth of the knowledge to OTHERS.

Now, we can do some pretty simple logical reasoning here.

1) God can only communicate directly with beings that He directly created, with no go-between.

2) He must communicate immediately and directly to whatever He created.

3) Whatever He created must be in Heaven and must be real.

4) Revelation is not given to the ego, it's given to God's creation. The ego is not part of His Creation and He does not communicate with it.

5) Since revelation is "intensely personal" and it's given to a real creation in heaven, and yet cannot be directly shared with others, there MUST be "personal selves" in heaven.

6) Since God wants the knowledge of the revelation to be shared with OTHERS, there must BE others in heaven.

7) Therefore God must have multiple sons who He DIRECTLY CREATED IN HEAVEN, which are real and permanent. Which also means, the idea of a "one son" who somehow encompasses the sonship or is the ONLY Son, is incorrect. The One Son is the SHARED EXPERIENCE of all DIRECTLY CREATED Sons, not a go-between or umbrella.

8) Given that God can communicate directly and fully to ONE of His creations, in an experience of transmission which goes ONLY to that one creation and not to other creations, and cannot be shared BY other creations at the same time, this MUST mean that there is some kind of "separation" or division IN heaven distinguishing one self from another, preventing the revelation from being shared.

9) Therefore Heaven cannot be a state of "no separations" or "no individuality" or "no free will".

10) Therefore ideas of non-duality and "oneness" meaning "only one thing" with "no separate parts" is a very poor fit for the truth of A Course in Miracles.

"God, who encompasses all being, nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually, and are willing to share it to increase their joy." - ACIM

At some point, in order to progress further in awakening, we have to realize that we're going to have to willingly do the will of God, rather than our separate will.

We can only go so far holding onto individuality and separateness. We can only progress so far when we want to be in charge of our life and do our own thing and not allow God to express through us.

God has a perfect 'ideal' of how we should be and what we should express, and His Will be done.

It's basically like saying, that you can function on the top floor of a building of consciousness, but you will not be able to go up onto the roof and open to the heavens unless you're willing to accept, allow and participate in God's will.

Whatever it is that God wants.. the heavenly divine expression of perfection and creation.. that is going to have to become your will if you want to be closer to God. You can't go to God and abide under God's laws without relinquishing the ego's laws and being willing to accept God's laws.

Another way to say it is, to get into Heaven, you do need to be willing to meet the conditions of Heaven, which isn't so much that you need to not be a sinner that goes to hell, but that you need to be willing to accept the 'role' and 'function' that God has created for you, given you are HIS idea.

So are you willing to let go of the independent ego mind, the ego thought system, doing everything on your own, relying on your own faculties and controlling life as thought it is 'your own life'? Are you willing to let your life be 'used' by God and shared WITH God? Is there room in your life FOR God and for doing God's will?

OK.

This is going to have to be pretty long because this is a very difficult subject to explain, so bear with me. Some of you may be willing to accept what I'm going to say, some will not.

Oneness. What does it seem to mean? God is whole. God is complete. God is "all there is". God is everywhere, omnipresent, lacking nothing. God is the same everywhere. So... if this is true in terms of ego logic, it means the following:

God has no son. God is dreaming this world. God is a murderer. God created death. God makes people suffer. The separation happened inside God. God is mistaken. God is afraid. God is all people. God is experiencing "himself" through and as all people in the world. There is nothing other than God. We are God. Separation is real. God created this world. etc.

Absolutely none of that is true. That is the purest most logically accurate definition of what non-duality means to the ego. It is the most precise conclusion you can draw from how the EGO understands oneness or what it means to be "one". If oneness truly means "there is only one", the God is responsible for hell. And it is grossly mistaken.

If God is one, then God cannot even create anything because there is nowhere for the creation to occur and nothing to add which wasn't already there and so, literally, "there is only God". This is the conclusion many many Course folk have come to. It seems to in some ways make sense TO EGO THINKERS and those who use linear logic who think that such linear logic is capable of encompassing and understanding the nature of God.

God is not like this. And oneness does not mean "there is only God". And non-duality, as the opposite of duality, does not properly describe the holographic creative nature of God or reality. Non-duality is CLOSE to being correct, and is more correct than duality, but it is still a concept and it falls way short, as you will see. If there is non-duality there should be just "one thing". In that, there can be no Son of God at all, no creation, no love, no extension, no sharing, no sonship, and no holy relationship.

In fact, what's happened widespread in ACIM folk is various false conclusions which have established themselves as if written in stone "what the course says". And yet the consequences of these errors are quite horrific. To believe God is all there is is to equate God with ego and death. To claim that God is all there is also denies and murders every Son of God.

OK.

Now, let's talk about how God actually exists and thinks and creates and the nature of His creation. If the strictest definition of oneness or non duality is true, then God cannot even create anything. And in a sense, PARTS of the Course speak to this. E.g. "God is". And also, "nothing real can be increased except by sharing". So anything real, like God, is permanent, fixed, unchanging, does not increase or decrease, and therefore there can be no creation whatsoever. Which means no son. UNLESS, this thing called "sharing" happens.

Recognize that God is love, and because of what love is, it automatically goes out and shares and extends. It shares because it has no reason to hold anything back. It is fundamentally a state of sharing, including, giving, and this radiation of love is another way of describing the act of creation.

God in and of Himself is whole, complete, lacking nothing, needing nothing, and is already permanent. Like a solid rock. Unchanging. That does not really sound like something that can create, does it? It seems very fixed. Like absolutely nothing is happening or possible. That's strictly what most definitions of "oneness" imply also. That nothing else is possible besides God existing. That's false.

God loves, and in that love, God radiates, extends, shares, creates, miraculously. Ego logic will NEVER account for "the miraculous", and God's creative ability is truly miraculous, which is why YOU ARE A MIRACLE. To the ego, God CANNOT create, and the act of His creating defies ALL EGO LOGIC and demonstrates that God is a miracle worker. Something happens in God which defies explanation and seems impossible yet happens. God SHARES AND CREATES something "other" than Himself, out of nowhere.

If you think of God like a light bulb, God is the fixed light bulb which does not move or change really, but the bulb radiates and SHINES light. The light goes outward and illuminates. That "shining", that light radiating, that is creation. The light radiating is not necessarily the same thing as God Himself. God is complete and whole already, but God SHARES Himself by shining light and radiating and extending, and that which extends outward is creation.

It is in this way that God created the world of Heaven. Here is how the Course describes it is a NATURAL division:

"The world was made as "a natural grand division," or a projecting outward of God. That is why everything that He created is like Him. Projection, as undertaken by God, is very similar to the kind of inner radiance which the Children of the Father inherit from Him. It is important to note that the term "project outward" necessarily implies that the real source of projection is internal. This is as true of the Son as of the Father."

So God in and of Himself is complete and whole, but He "projects outward" (extends) and that which is projected forms a "world" (heaven). This world is, in a sense, "divided from" God in a natural way, in that it comes FROM God and is God SHARING, but God as its SOURCE still remains in a sense, beyond it.

This is because God is the "first cause" and what God radiates is the "effect" of God. His Thought/Shining is the effect of Him as the "thinker". The effect of God is not capable of turning around and "causing God" in reverse, or of making God its effect. The creation (the Son/sonship) is being constantly sustained by, projected by God, forever, is coming FROM God, and therefore the Son is ONLY "as God created Him" and cannot change what He is. The Son has no real say in what He is at all, He merely gives thanks for having been created perfect.

God is cause, not effect. God cannot be affected. This causal extension or "creating of effect" in a way puts up a kind of "wall" or division you could say, just on a causality level, which in a sense, separates the creation from God's own Self, but only in the sense that the created Son cannot cause God back. But the Son CAN share love with Him.

This is not the same thing as the "separation" that we are accustomed to thinking of as what the ego does or relating to the "separation from God" which was a different matter. The "separation from God" happened when the Son, who is only effect and not capable of causing God, attempted to cause God. That means the Son tried to will against God's will or to undo what God has created, trying to replace it with something else. That was an act of impossible denial, which brought about the separation and the "fall of man".

That's an entirely different thing to the "natural division" between God and His Son. The division between God and Son is NATURAL in that this is How God intended it, that the Son is imbued with the SAME WILL TO CREATE, the same love, the same completeness, the same wholeness, AND SHARING the WHOLE OF GOD within itself, as well as sharing THE WHOLE OF CREATION within itself. All of God is in the Son, shared with the Son, and yet the Son is in some way also "divided" from God as a creation of God or thought of God.

In nonduality and oneness concepts there is no accounting for God thinking anything at all, yet alone creating a son. It completely glosses over the fact that God is LOVE, and love radiates and extends and creates. When people tell you what the definition of oneness is they become very clinical and ego-specific in describing God as a kind of "single blob". There is no love in that concept, nor does it appreciate the NATURE of Oneness, which is to share, extend everywhere, create, increase, and to experience JOY. Do you equate oneness with joy, or power, or love, or creativity, or miracles? As a logical device, no. But God is joyful and creative and all powerful and miraculous.

Now, it is possible for God to create AT LEAST One Son, and the Course references the "one son of God" in various places. And due to misunderstandings, many people have come to believe God only has one Son. So now there are two camps - a set of people believing that God is one therefore has no son or "I am God", and a camp of people accepting there is One Son (somehow) but not more. It relates to how much of the nature of God is grasped.

OK. So holograms. Did you know God thinks holographically? Do you know what a hologram is or why this is totally different to how the ego thinks? If you are thinking about God's creation or oneness without thinking about holograms, then you WILL come to false conclusions, such as that there are no divisions in heaven or God has only one Son or no son, because non-holographic logic CAN ONLY arrive at these conclusions. Ego logic is FAULTY and limited.

The essential idea of a hologram is that the whole is able to express in many "parts" and yet each part contains ALL of the whole. This makes NO SENSE to the ego, because it thinks in terms of separated space, where it is impossible for all of God to be in one part AND all of God to be in another part simultaneously. The ego will wager, "there is not enough God for God to be elsewhere, if God is fully here". And that's why the ego is BLIND to the nature of heaven. It does not account for SHARING.

Here's what the Course says about the holographic nature of God and the Sonship - note how ILLOGICAL and CONTRADICTORY these all sound, at first:

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

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

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

"Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite."

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought, and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. All His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other."

So Jesus is saying two things, which seem to clash. 1) God created One Son. 2) God created many sons. The conclusion here, to THE EGO, is either, a) God only created one Son, or b) The "many" or "multitude" nature of the sonship tells us that it is OF THE EGO and is therefore not real. Are either of these conclusions true? NO! They are both mistakes, and reveal the limitations of the ego's thought system when it tires to understand the EGO DEFYING nature of God.

In a hologram, the whole is present in EVERY part. Now, if you think in terms you are familiar with in this world, like physical objects and space, you think ok, if I take 1 gallon of water and I pour it into a 1 gallon container, there is no water left to fill another container. Yes? This is ego thinking. And ego thinking gave rise to this ENTIRE universe, including all physical forms, and all laws of physics, to paint a picture that attempts to PROVE that God's NATURE is NOT the way things are. And we have used physical form as a way to understand the nature of existence. This is a major error. We are BLINDED by sight of form, because forms express the EGO IDEA of separation, limitation, "measuring" how much of something there is in a finite way, and then concluding that there is lack and limitation.

When ALL of God is poured into one creation, how much God is there left to pour into another? ALL OF HIM! He does not run out. He INCREASES BY SHARING. The ego cannot believe this. The multiplying of fish and bread to feed 5000 people is a good example of this principle. Giving ALL to something does not diminish it AT ALL, it merely increases by being given away.

God puts ALL of the whole of his nature into His creation, in EACH thought. And what He creates is FULL, complete, and whole, AND shares ALL of itself with God, and includes all of God, and all of any other creation God creates. So then God has another thought, creates another WHOLE, and then another WHOLE, and another. You should get the idea then, spatially, even in ego terms, that adding more wholes INCREASES the sum total - and this is How the Kingdom expands.

To the ego, it is impossible that God be fully in one location and yet fully in another. This is completely impossible in terms of a physical object. However, bi-location is a miracle because it demonstrates that we are not bound by space or by instances or amounts. The Course says that God has many thoughts, INFINITE IN NUMBER. That amounts to an INFINITE number of Sons of God. And each Son of God is WHOLE and complete and perfect in itself, has free will just like God, extends and creates just like God (you have your own creations in Heaven), and radiates love just like God. This means each son is not just some "partial person" or limited or unlike the rest, it means EVEY son is FULL, whole, complete, absolutely unlimited, and shares EVERYTHING with God in perfection. And so do all the rest.

That God does not diminish when sharing himself fully to create a WHOLE SON, means automatically that God can create MANY sons without any diminishing of Himself at all. And all of God is in every Son. AND every Son is within every Son. And the ENTIRE SONSHIP is within every Son. This is entirely NATURAL AND NORMAL in Heaven. Heaven therefore contains INFINITE "naturally divided" (causally divided) INDIVIDUAL WHOLES - which are souls or Sons of God - each one holy and perfect.

Ok.

So now we need to talk about why some people are confused in constantly saying that God has One Son or there is "only oneness" or the Sonship is an part of separation etc. It's because people are getting PART of the picture and not the whole picture, because EGO LOGIC is telling them to EXCLUDE some parts of the holographic nature of God. They can "see" that God's oneness makes sense, but this seems to imply there is no son or at least not more than one. They can't see HOW God can have created many sons OR how a "division" is natural. And so they just can't get their heads around the nature of God or how it's possible for there to be a sonship at all.

And if you will go looking, ACIM contains specific quotes which SEEM to support the ego's interpretations by focusing on only one PART of the holographic picture, using that as justification for why "the course said this". For example, "God has but one Son", or countless references to "God's Son". Well, this leads God people to conclude that the Course is saying God doesn't have more sons. It's a mistake. With no grasp of God's NATURE - which is holographic, it makes sense people will be in error. And then they will say well, since God has only one Son, the sonship is a lie, or I do not exist, or I am God, or I do not have a self, or there is no-one here, or whatever else.

These are NON-DUALITY concepts which FAIL to appreciate God's nature. And you can see how, if it is true that God has many sons, these kind of "beliefs" are HARMFUL. They basically DESTROY the sonship, DENY the Self, and render God impotent.

When I finally understood how God thinks holographically and realized that non-duality is bullshit and a limited EGO concept of God, I felt great RELIEF about the simple recognition that "GOD CREATED ME". Me, as an INDIVIDUAL. Not me as an EGO, that's different, but that I have a HOLY SELF, which is sharing with other holy selves, and all of us are PERMANENT and INTENDED by God to have free will. When I saw this, I cried tears of joy, and also release of sadness, which had built up from the non-duality teachers, who have MISLED countless students and spread LIES ABOUT HEAVEN, resulting in the belief that "I do not exist", which can only lead to despair and depression because it DENIES GOD'S CREATION.

A course in miracles is NOT non-duality at all. The principle of Oneness is NOT that there is "only one and nothing else". Oneness truly means, sharing, creation, unlimited extension, INFINITE wholes, and a heaven filled with SOULS that live forever in a state of perfection and wholeness, sharing everything they are with ALL OTHERS including God. Why do you think Jesus refers to you as a brother? It's not just a temporary thing. You will ALWAYS be equal to and a brother of Jesus, AND at the same time, one with Him, and literally sharing everything WITH Him, AND still having your own soul, and still having your own free will which happens to be the same in focus as God's.

So now we have a very different picture of Heaven, and it has NOTHING to do with Earth or this universe. "Heaven and Earth are opposite in EVERY way." Heaven is a PLACE in the sense that it EXISTS as God's creation and you can experience it and BE there in it/with it. There are many references in the course where Jesus says "in Heaven" and also referring to Heaven as a "world" and as something God created. And given that THIS world - earth, physical universe, DOES NOT EXIST BECAUSE THERE IS NO WORLD - where IS there to BE or live or exist other than Heaven? In that sense, it IS a place, far more a REAL place than planet earth. Earth is not a place at all.

Heaven is within the mind of God. "The kingdom of God is you" is another reference to you being The Son of God and one of may sons of God. You are part of and all of heaven. Something you can be INSIDE OF and BE, and where there are infinite souls and angels, plus the Holy Spirit, plus an entire sonship of equal souls, all equal with Jesus, all individually a Son of God, AND also every one of those souls is THE Son of God as well. And each soul continues to CREATE MORE. There is nothing unnatural about this at all. All PARTS of heaven are of ONE ORDER.

Per Jesus: "The world, in the original connotation of the term, included both the proper creation of man by God and the proper creation by man in his right mind. The latter required the endowment of man by God with free will because all loving creation is freely given. Nothing in these statements implies any sort of level involvement or in fact anything except one continuous line of creation in which all aspects are of the same order." (Here "man" is the same thing as soul or son of God, not humans.)

One final word then. Each Son of God, being a hologram of God, is whole and complete in and of itself, lacking nothing. And AT THE SAME TIME, is so OPEN and so SHARING, that it is wired into the ENTIRE CREATION of God. Picture it as your mind is so expanded that you are "one with" ie sharing in, the entire sonship. God therefore experiences ALL of his many thoughts, as ONE, while simultaneously allowing them to be many.

This is why there are many references to God having only one son. When it's speaking of this, it refers to how God experiences all Sons as though they are all the same and one, experienced simultaneously and so sharing that they do not seem "separate". Yet they are still divided. And then when the course speaks 250+ times about the many sons of God, this is not contradictory because God DOES have many sons AND one son.

God thinks holographically. All of God is in every son and all of every son is in every son. The whole sonship is in every son and every son in the sonship. You are the ONE SON of God, AND you are one of many. This is heavenly logic, not ego logic. When every individual PART of the sonship has returned to its true nature, all of the sonship as a whole communicates with God again.

The only other point to make I think is the difference between division and ego separation. In heaven you are divided from others and from God. But only in the sense that you are a loving family who shares everything together. Loving families are still individuals yet joined. The individuality does not go away. When walls are erected between family members, ie artificial separations are introduced, there is denial of the sharing, denial of the oneness, and denial of wholeness. This UNNATURAL DIVISION is the ego. This is what the course refers to as separation.

You have to get your head around the idea that you can be individual AND joined and that this is normal, natural and real. It is not your individual soul nature that makes you an ego. It is not that you are PART of a huge family of souls (sonship) that makes you an ego. What makes you an ego is that you withdraw your connection from God, withdraw your connection from the sonship, and become ISOLATED behind artificial imaginary walls of denial. It's got nothing to do with whether you are an individual or not.

Perhaps the most misunderstood thing about ACIM is the belief that ego means separate self, and therefore means individuality, and therefore having an individuality is ego. THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!!!! Individuality is not the problem. Cutting your individuality off from sharing with the whole is the problem. Trying to be a "part" of the hologram that does NOT contain the whole. Trying to not be an effect of God. Trying to cause God and change Him and affect Him. Cutting yourself off from the sonship. Believing you are not equal to all brothers. Being special. THAT is the problem and that is what the ego is made of, not your individuality.

Individuality does not mean you are separate from God, it means you are one of God's Son's. YOU DO EXIST. Just not as an illusion of an isolated self who has no connection to others. What is death but the end of all connection and the bringing about of total separation from Life? Joining with Life does not make you disappear! It's not about "you're not really out there". It's more like, "you are MORE than you APPEAR to be." You are God's Son and one of many sons. You are one with God and with all others and you SHARE with them all, one in sharing, not in number.

ACIM is not non-duality. And ACIM is not about the ego's idea of what oneness means. ACIM is not teaching that God only has a single son "separate from" the many sons. Heaven is a cascade of creation and miracles and light and souls and beauty and sharing and union and freedom. This is why YOU are responsible for everything YOU CHOOSE. Choose again.

Jesus talks further about the power of your FREE WILL.

"All things BECOME possible through our joint will. But my will alone will not help you. Your will is as free as mine, and God Himself would not go against it."

WOWZA, stop the action, what is this saying? It's saying that you have free will which EVEN GOD does not oppose. That automatically means your will is not "determined" by God. You have been GIVEN FREEDOM, and that makes you a "separate being" with your own mind, will and soul. Where is there any provision for free will in "non-duality"? And where is the personal responsibility of "choosing the atonement for yourself"?

"I cannot will what God does not will. I CAN offer you my will to make yours invincible by this sharing, but I CANNOT oppose yours without competing with it and thereby violating God’s Will for you."

OK stop the action again.... what is he saying?! ... He's saying that not even JESUS can oppose your will. Your will is shaping up to be pretty powerful here! It meas Jesus honors and respects YOUR freedom and YOUR free will to be able to choose what YOU want or what YOU DECIDE. He can agree with you and share with you, but He CANNOT OPPOSE you or force you. Nor can God.

"Nothing God created can oppose your will, as nothing God created can oppose His."

This makes sense. God gave you free will by WILLING that you BE FREE. It is, in effect, God's WILL that you are FREE FROM being willing against. And actually this makes even more sense when you realize, that it is "opposing wills" that produces separation. And so the freedom to will is a NATURAL PART of Heaven ie Creation, otherwise if God were to force something upon you or your will HAD to have its decisions "chosen for it" by God, unwillingly, that WOULD be an opposition of will and a tyranny and God is not like that.

"God GAVE your will its power, which I can only acknowledge in honor of HIS."

See? You have free will in heaven. Every brother does. This is all part of our INDIVIDUALITY IN HEAVEN.

Oneness does not mean "one thing."

In reality, all thinking follows along the lines that whatever applies to one creation, applies to all creations. What is true of one son, is true of another. What is true of you, is true of the entire sonship. Whatever applies to you, applies to everything. It either applies to BOTH of you, or NEITHER of you.

This is a LOGIC system, a way of THINKING, based on the simple idea of "BOTH-AND". What applies as true, is true of BOTH you and others. It is true of me AND you. It is a system based on INCLUSION and EQUALITY. The entirety of God's mind and all of creation runs on this form of reasoning, this kind of THINKING. It's how God thinks and how all of creation functions in harmony. And it's how you should think of ALL your brothers, as being equal to you in every way.

In the dream, the ego's thinking was devised as a way to OPPOSE God's way of thinking. To develop another thought SYSTEM and WAY of thinking that breaks away from God's system and DENIES IT. What better way to disrupt equality and everything applying equally to everyone, than to introduce the law of chaos that the truth is DIFFERENT for everyone.

In the ego's thought system and its way of thinking about anything, it does not think in terms of both/and. It thinks in terms of EXCLUSION, because the whole system is based on separation/exclusion/isolation/specialness. So to the ego, what is true of you is NOT true of your brother. What applies to you does NOT apply to them. This ISOLATES you from them and sets up a special rule that seems only to apply to some PART of the sonship, not everyone. And "me not you" is murderous.

The entire ego MIND runs on "EITHER-OR" logic. The ego never wants to confirm that anything is EQUALLY TRUE of more than one thing, because this would erase separation and differences. It emphasizes how, one thing is NOT another thing. How you are NOT the same as your brother. How what is over here, is NOT over there. How what you have, your brother does NOT have. This belief alone, this kind of mindset, gave rise to SPACETIME, in which what is true in one location is not true in another.

Now, spacetime IS THE THOUGHT SYSTEM OF THE EGO. And because everything IN spacetime is "laid out" logically on a basis of exclusion and isolation, where one object appears to be over here and not over there, and one object appears to be different to thus not equal to other objects, this maps exactly onto the way the ego THINKS. And so then it seems to be natural to THINK in terms of either/or, about everything in the world, because it happens to map exactly or "naturally" onto the physical world.

You can for example easily talk about how your car is parked in the first parking space and not the second one. How you were in Australia for a week and not the USA. How your body is not the same as your neighbor's body. How you own a particular car while your neighbor does not. How your hair is brown while your neighbor's hair is blonde. All of these ways that you pick apart the world, is inherently a direct reflection of the entire ego thought system (which is the world), and so makes it seem easy to talk ABOUT the world using either/or logical reasoning.

However, because this "way of thinking" is COMPLETELY OPPOSED to God's SYSTEM, his thought system,which is HEAVEN and how heaven functions, whenever you use this kind of either/or reasoning to think about ANYTHING to do with heaven, creation, sonship, sons, god etc, MAJOR DISTORTIONS HAPPEN, hugely FALSE conclusions are arrived at, and all kinds of confusion erupts. The ego's system was made to DENY AND DESTROY heaven's system, so if you USE the ego's system to try to understand heaven's system YOU WILL FAIL. Guaranteed.

Here's what happens. In ego thinking, you think in terms of boxes. Either something is in box A, or its in box B. Those are the only accepted possibilities. All of spacetime's "reality" seems to support the idea that this is the only possibility ie something cannot be in two boxes. However, Heaven is outside of spacetime and transcends its nature and its laws. Things having to be separated out by space, things not being equal, things not SHARING a location, things having to be in one place at a time and not everywhere at once, etc... are all DEFIED by heaven's thought system. The ego's laws are BROKEN by Heaven's laws.

The truth is, in heaven's reality, in God's system of both/and thinking, it is possible for very "strange" things to happen. For example it's possible for one thing to be in multiple locations at once, simultaneously. Not only is the thing in multiple locations, it is FULLY in EACH of those locations. This is because everything in heaven has OMNIPRESENCE. God is omnipresent and so are all his creations. Meaning LITERALLY, that a being in reality is capable of showing up in multiple locations simultaneously.

God is not only everywhere, he is FULLY PRESENT in EVERY location. Without compromise. Without only one "part" of him being over here and another "part" of him being over there. He is not partial. ALL of God is simultaneously in multiple locations at the same time. To the ego, that is regarded as ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE. But it is nevertheless possible, because God does abide by the ego's limited laws. The ego would say, anything that is in this location, must be TOTALLY ABSENT from another location. And if it thinks that is true of God, it is not TOTALLY FUCKED In its comprehension of the truth and has come to a completely INCORRECT conclusion. Ego thinking is BROKEN!

Now, that's a problem for ego reasoning, because the EGO wants to put things into nice discreet boxes. It wants to say, well, either a son of God is in this one box, or he is in another box, but he can't be in both at once. But in reality that is actually a LIMITATION which is being placed on what is possible. In reality, A son of God CAN be in both boxes at once! He transcends boxes even when there are boxes. So the ego looks at reality and sees a son of God and says, this Son of God is either:

a) totally separate from all other sons of God because he MUST be ONLY in one completely discreet box by himself, thus "multiple sons" MUST mean SEPARATE sons and this is therefore an "idea of separation", thus the sonship is an ego thing, or

b) the division between the boxes must be erased completely so that there is only ONE box, resulting in there being in truth only ONE son, which by erasing the boxes, has now destroyed the individual sons of God because the ego can't comprehend how many sons can SHARE existence or OVERLAP boxes.

Similarly, if we talk about the notion that a single son of God can be in two places at once, or that there can be multiple sons of God, the ego has no way to comprehend that correctly. It WILL come to false conclusions. All it can conclude is either:

a) if there are multiple sons of God there must be multiple SEPARATE boxes whereby the sons do not SHARE boxes at all and thus are separate - which renders the idea of multiple sons an EGO idea of separation to be discarded as untrue, or

b) there aren't really multiple sons because there can only be "one son per box" so if you take away all the "separations" by taking away all the boxes, there can only be one box left containing only one son, thus completely ignoring the fact that God created many permanent sons IN reality.

This is the kind of ego reasoning that almost everyone in this WORLD uses because it seems to match up to the LAYOUT of spacetime and thus goes unchallenged. To think about or try to understand reality, heaven, creation, and the sonship THROUGH this ego lens, is an AUTOMATIC DISTORTION of the truth. The result is FALSE CONCLUSIONS that SEEM to make SENSE, but are TOTALLY NONSENSE.

It is FALSE to say that God only has one son, by reasoning that there can only in truth be one box in order to have no separation. Separate boxes in reality does NOT mean separation, because the contents of the boxes TRANSCEND the boxes. "One brother is all brothers. One mind is all minds" does in fact mean there ARE many boxes!

It is FALSE to say that multiple sons implies multiple separations and is therefore a separation idea. If you think of "any kind of separation" as being an ego thing, not realizing that it's OKAY and NATURAL for there to be NATURAL DIVISIONS in reality WITHOUT it implying EXCLUSION, ignoring that the boxes are SHARING with each other, then you are making a mistake.

SONS OF GOD SPAN BOXES. THEY TRANSCEND THE LIMITS OF EGO REASONING. THEY CANNOT BE CONTAINED BY OR ACCURATELY MAP ONTO A SYSTEM OF THOUGHT BASED ON EXCLUSION! YOUR WAY OF THINKING IS FAULTY!

So in order to actually comprehend how and why there ARE MANY sons in reality, and why AT THE SAME TIME they are "all one", YET MANY STILL, and why this is NOT an ego idea of separation or duality, you have to go BEYOND "box based thinking." And another way of saying that is "thinking outside the box". If you don't think outside the EGO box you WILL come to ALL of the ego's logical conclusions such as "god has only one son" (because it SEEMS to make sense) and "multiple sons is a separation idea" (which SEEMS to make sense) because that's all the ego CAN conclude. It's automatic as a result of either/or thinking.

To think like God, means to stop thinking in terms of either/or. For example, in this world, you have to learn to stop thinking about how your brother is DIFFERENT from you. You have to stop thinking that some truth can apply to him and NOT you. You have to move past this ego model of "its true of you, but not me" or "you're sinful, I'm innocent". You actually have to learn, in thinking like God, that what is true of you is true of THE WHOLE SONSHIP. What is true of you is true of your brother. And you and your brothers are totally EQUAL in every way. And that also means you are transcending the LAWS OF SPACETIME, and you are transcending the entire WAY that the ego thinks, which opens you up to POSSIBILITIES that the ego considers totally impossible.

It's quite a big transition to go from constantly thinking in terms of "true of me, not true of you" or vice versa, to thinking in terms of "whatever is true of me is true of everyone". Or to go from "having individuality is an ego separation idea" to "having individuality that we share but still retaining my SELF is TOTALLY NATURAL." God's system is a matter of either:

a) its true of BOTH of us, or

b) its true of NEITHER of us.

That's totally different to the ego's system of "its true of either A or B but but not both."

It's a TOTALLY different SYSTEM of thought. A totally diffeent MIND. It's a totally different WAY of thinking. It's a totally different way of REASONING and performing logical conclusions. God's system simply is not LIKE the ego's system. And so to understand heaven's dynamics you HAVE to move past either/or thought. If you don't, if you just keep thinking of ANYTHING to do with God's Kingdom USING the ego to THINK WITH, you will conclude falsely!

You have to realize WHY either/or thought is LIMITED, why it was made to produce CHAOS, why it leads to CONFUSION, and why it is totally NONSENSE. In fact, when ego thinking looks at anything to do with reality, anything true registers as nonsense, and anything false registers as making sense! That's because the ego is NUTS and totally OPPOSED to truth. IT CANNOT SEE REALITY CLEARLY. But that doesn't mean YOU can't comprehend heaven's nature, you just have to ditch the WAY you have always been thinking.

So let's say the ego looks at heaven and it sees ok, over here there seems to be a son of God, but over there there also seems to be a son of God. There seems to be two things, two brothers. What will the ego conclude? It will conclude that if there are two things, there are two separate boxes, and the two things are EITHER in one box OR another, but they do not share boxes at all. And thus that this means there are two SEPARATE beings, thus there is *separation* happening, thus its an EGO situation so the two brothers MUST BE ILLUSIONS. And thus it turns the sonship, which comprises MANY INDIVIDUALS, into an ego concept.

That's a PROBLEM, because the fact is that one brother is IN the other brother, and both brothers are SHARING their INDIVIDUAL boxes. There ARE two boxes, but the CONTENTS of the boxes SPAN the boxes. The ego can't handle that! So it sees joined unified SHARED experiences/minds, multiple INDIVIDUALS who SHARE EVERYTHING, as being "separated off" isolated units, and thus concludes that the idea of multiple children of God must be an ego idea of separation that IT has put INTO an ego framework. TOTAL FAIL!

It is PERFECTLY POSSIBLE, in reality, in heaven, for there to be MANY INDIVIDUAL THINGS, which SIMULTANEOUSLY are one. One AND many. Truth that applies to one thing AND to another. Truth that is true of BOTH OF THEM. Something in box A which is ALSO in box B, supporting oneness AND individuality. THAT is heaven's nature! It's a realm, a mind, a thought system, where there ARE many things, in number, many INDIVIDUALS, but AT THE SAME TIME, those individuals are SHARING everything of themselves with each other and God and therefore are "one". The one doesn't cancel the many!

"God who encompasses all being, NEVERTHELESS (defiant of ego logic) created *SEPARATE BEINGS*, who have EVERYTHING INDIVIDUALLY and want to share it to increase their joy."

There is nothing false in this statement and "separate beings" does NOT mean EXCLUSIVE ISOLATED BEINGS. It means MANY beings, who SHARE everything. Who have boxes, and SPAN boxes. They TRANSCEND LIMITATIONS.

Beware. Just because they are ONE, does not mean they are NOT TWO. THAT would be an ego conclusion. And just because they are TWO, does not mean they are NOT ONE! That too is an ego conclusion. Are you following? It's mind bending. The truth about God's creation TRANSCENDS EGO LAWS. Transcends ego logic. Transcends limitations. And transcends the "layout" of spacetime. Omnipresence is the total opposite of spatial relationships, just as eternity is the opposite of time. Spacetime and its structure (thought system) was made as an ATTACK on God.

Heaven is NOT LIKE THIS WORLD, because it is a SYSTEM OF THOUGHT (God's creation) totally opposite to the SYSTEM that runs spacetime. Heaven does not THINK like how the ego thinks! It's laws and rules are BEYOND the ego's laws and rules. Your entire WAY of THINKING has to be transcended and recognized for its limitation in order to go BEYOND it to SEE clearly and correctly the metaphysics and dynamics of heaven. It is not of this world. And in fact you have to unlearn "thinking with the ego" and LEARN TO THINK LIKE GOD. This is in the course! Your mind has to get out of the either/or paradigm!

Ego says, "how can something be two things and yet one thing at the same time? that makes no sense". OF COURSE! It makes no sense to the EGO's way of thinking, so it registers as nonsense, even though IT IS TOTALLY SENSIBLE. One thing CAN be two things! God HAS CHILDREN!!!!!! God has a FAMILY! The Holy Trinity is real and DOES HAVE 3 PARTS TO IT. The Holy Spirit *IS* a permanent distinct ETERNAL CREATION. The sonship DOES have its own children! God DID create legions of angels!

"We are creation, we, the sons of God."

"The Kingdom of God includes ALL HIS CHILDREN, and their creations."

"God's angels".

Until you can recognize and move beyond the limitations of either/or-based ego thinking you will not be able to SEE or ACCEPT why God has created many sons or why it makes TOTAL SENSE to say so. You have to think way outside the box and use an entirely different KIND of thinking. If you look up "paralogical reasoning" you will get an idea of how this works.

This is also why heaven is NOT DUALITY.

This is also why heaven is ****NOT NON DUALITY.***

***BOTH of those concepts are EGO CONCLUSIONS!!!!***

THEY ARE BOTH FALSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The ego can't help but think that way. "Either its one thing, or its two things". That's ALL the ego thought system can conclude, ever! And so it thinks "one thing" is "more spiritual" than two things, so let's go with that. BUT IT's WRONG! IT"S NO BETTER! "Either its duality, or its non-duality, there's no other possibility". THAT'S EGO!! THERE IS another possibility beyond the limits of that assumed way of reasoning. THERE IS A BETTER WAY!

Reality is not duality OR non-duality. It is "paraduality" or "transduality", to coin a phrase. It TRANSCENDS BOTH OF THEM. Stupid ego rules DO NOT APPLY. God is one AND MANY. Creations are one AND many. One brother is ALL brothers. One mind is ALL minds. There are MANY!!! And it's not duality!

Omipresence! Transcendence of the limits of space and time. Transcendence of finite boxes or being one box or many boxes. SHARED experiences. Transcendent experiences. Unity which does not obliterate individuality. Oneness which does not undo or cancel the multitude of God's creations who are, according to ACIM, "in number infinite"!! Equality which acknowledges REAL BROTHERHOOD. A sonship which DOES CONTAIN MANY INDIVIDUALS who are all "the one son of God" AND WHO ARE THE MANY SONS OF GOD. At the same time! Doesn't make sense? TO THE EGO!

Some of you reading this will get it. Most probably will not, and most have not, mainly because we don't realize just HOW steeped we are in ego reasoning. Thinking like God is VERY DIFFERENT to what you're used to. Any time you go towards "one box", or you go towards "many separate boxes", you are IN THE EGO and failing to comprehend the nature of reality.

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT." (notice how the ego's reasoning comes to false conclusions because it can't comprehend how multiple souls could have everything AT THE SAME TIME and not exclude each other).

"It goes against all the thinking of the world, but so does Heaven. The world will end when its thought system has been completely reversed." (Heaven's thought system of both/and GOES AGAINST the ego's thought system of this WORLD)

"...but it is perhaps more alien to the thinking of the world..." (the true nature of heaven is ALIEN to the ego's idea of it)

"Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely. Life is now recognized as salvation, and pain and misery of any kind perceived as hell." (Recognition of reality REQUIRES that you ditch either/or based thought and adopt both/and based thought, which is INCLUSIVE REASONING)

"You will need no rule but this to let your practicing today lift you above the thinking of the world, and free your vision from the body's eyes." (to reach true perception you have to transcend the body's perception, ie transcend EGO THINKING and the EGO WORLD/SYSTEM, so that you can SEE SENSE and SEE REASON and return to reality, only possibly through an acceptance of how everything applies equally to everyone everywhere always.)

"I and my father are one"

Oneness does not mean "one box"! THAT IS EGO!!!!

Oneness means SHARED UNITY AND BEING JOINED AS TWO THINGS IN HARMONY WHO ARE NOT SEPARATE YET ARE STILL TWO THINGS!

This false non-duality idea of "you don't have a self" is not part of ACIM itself and is only something that people have projected onto it in attempting to mis-understand it.

You DO have a self, a PERMANENT soul, which God created. There is a you in Heaven. God loves YOU and always will.

Being in ego, it really means an attempt to DENY yourself, to NOT BE yourself. The ego and the body are images of what you THINK you are, which are attempts to cover up what you REALLY are. What you really are is a permanent spirit being, a soul, a Son of God, which God created with eternal life.

We are permanently brothers in creation. In reality, God created many children and we are all equal. Every one of us has an individuality.

"God who encompasses all being NEVERTHELESS created separate beings who have everything INDIVIDUALLY and want to share it to increase their joy."

Believing that "you will end" in the atonement is really the ego's fear. The EGO will end, and the ego is not you. In fact the ego is NOT the idea of a self. It is an ILLUSION of a self, APPEARING to be a self, but is EXACTLY OPPOSITE TO THAT. It is the idea of the END OF YOU. It is the anti-christ. Which is why it leads to death.

It's the idea that YOUR SELF, which God gave you, has "become separated from" other selves. That you've been ostracized from the family. Rejected. Abandoned. Alone. It is this "separation from" the rest of God's Kingdom that is being healed in the atonement, so that you can RETURN TO being in UNITY WITH all other created beings. To return home to reunite with your brothers and with God.

The ego fears its end because the Holy Spirit proves IT does not exist. Atonement is the end of the ego. But YOU are not the ego. It's ONLY because you - your real self - has tried to IDENTIFY WITH the ego self, the "not me" fake self, that you think YOU will go down with it. You will not. In fact your sense of self is going to expand to it FULLNESS.

"The ego is the idea of selfishness. The Soul is the idea of self-fullness."

When you are FULLY YOUR SELF, you will be as God created you. When you are not being fully yourself, it's because you are rejecting some parts of existence by trying to be selfish, and simply put selfishness is what the ego is. An attempt to isolate and exclude. It is ONLY the isolation and exclusivity which ends, NOT your self. You BECAME a "separated one", but you do not have to remain a separated one. You can become rejoined with the family. "God's family".

Your real self is permanent and real. "I am not an illusion but a reality." You are a son of God, and so am I, and we will live forever in God's being as brothers."

"Separation" is an ACIM buzzword and yet often misunderstood. Most people associate separation with something unnatural, something to remove, and a sign of the ego. Separation is bad, oneness is good. Anything that even hints at a sign of separation is considered to be wrong, some kind of "duality" which is opposite to the truth. But this is actually incorrect in ACIM terms.

If you look deeply at the course you may eventually realize that heaven's reality is not the same as the world of space and time. Heaven entails the sharing of everything. Spacetime entails NOT sharing anything. As you look deeper, you discover that God in fact isn't "arranged" like objects in spacetime. His whole mind and system and creation are in fact more like a holgoram.

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is PERFECTLY natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you." The holographic principle is that there is a whole, and there are also parts. But each part isn't merely "a part of" the whole, lacking in some way. Each part in fact contains ALL of the whole. Every part is whole in and of itself, and is host to the whole. ACIM refers to this for example as "I am forever host to God." And "You had everything when you were created just as everyone did."

Each of the parts of a hologram experiences immense SHARING with the whole. And the whole includes all of God, and all other parts. This means that every part IS every other part, and is also host to God. This sharing, however, is not like sharing in spacetime. It does not mean that there are two separate things and something is transferred between them. Each part "houses" the whole, and therefore IS the same whole as the other parts. One part IS another part.

ACIM again expresses this in statements such as: "One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth." This is not easy to understand in linear terms or by drawing analogies to spacetime objects, because in spacetime each object is "apart" from others, is NOT a whole, does NOT share anything, and is "separated off". This is not what it's like in a hologram. In the hologram, that which is in one part is located in all the other parts as well. It TRANSCENDS space and time, beyond spatial separations.

This also parallels very closely the idea of omnipresence, which is an attribute of God and everything he created. This doesn't just mean God is everywhere, it also means that THE WHOLE of God is in EVERY location. Not just one part of him over here, and another part of him over there. But ALL of him is simultaneously in multiple places. This again transcends the limits of space and time.

Now, in ACIM terms, the main whole is referred to as God, and the "whole parts" are referred to as souls, or God's children. There are a great many creations, which are many thoughts of God. Each thought of God IS whole, because God can only think wholly and in terms of wholeness. What he thinks of "creates another whole", which SHARES everything with the original whole and with all other wholes. Each whole is FUSED to all the others and effectively IS them.

This is the real meaning of oneness - a shared experience in which EACH wholly existing distinct "part" is united with and sharing everything with all the others. "The soul has not only been created perfect, it has been fully created." This is part of the miraculous nature of God, that a part of God is the whole of God, a creation of God contains all of God, and therefore every part "is one", and yet there are parts. These parts are not PARTIAL parts, or lacking what other parts have. Every part is A WHOLE.

Then we come to the idea of "the separation from God". This is where paople start to demonize the idea of separation or of "many things". When people don't recognize that heaven's natural state is one of TOTAL SHARING AND UNION, they may think of it more in terms of space-time objects. Such as the son of God is one "object". And then the only way to conceive of separation is to "split the object" so that there are now two or more objects. But this is NOT what happened in the separation, because heaven is not object-oriented or spatially separated.

In the separation, or "the fall of man", basically some of the WHOLE PARTS which were aspects of the hologram of God's thought, chose to STOP SHARING EVERYTHING. They wanted to become selfish. Their innate nature is to share everything with everyone. Everyone in heaven has everything. Everything belongs to everyone. Everyone IS everyone. "We are the Kingdom, WE, the sons of God." But "the ego" is actually the idea of trying NOT to share. And "the separation from God" was actually moreso an act of OPPOSING God's holographic family unit.

"The ego is the idea of selfishness. The soul is the idea of self-fullness."

The separation from God was a movement AWAY from sharing, towards selfishness. Selfishness goes by many names, all of which are efforts to "separate off", to withdraw, to hoard, and to move into a small isolated part which is NOT SHARED with the rest. This results in SPECIALNESS, which is the desire to have an exclusive special "something" true for you, which is not true for others.

Another way to view the separation is to say, individual whole parts of the hologram, rejected their union and shared totality with the whole, and tried to become "parts which do not share". They tried to orphan themselves. They did not want to be "part of" the collective sonship. They did not want to have the total holy relationship of sharing everything with everyone. They wanted to go of by themselves and have something special and exclusive just for them. "You were at peace until you asked for special favor, and God did not give it."

It's important to note then, that in fact in the creation of God, in the hologram of the Kingdom, there were in fact MANY INDIVIDUAL BEINGS prior to "the separation." God had created the sonship which comprised many souls, who are permanently brothers, and who were joined and sharing everything happily. These were INDIVIDUALS, but at the same time each individual was ONE WITH all the other individuals. Each one, is one and many, because the truth of a holographic system is that the one is many and the many are one.

The existence of many individual beings DID NOT MEAN that there were many "separate people" standing around like disconencted objects sharing nothing. That is not what multitudes are like in heaven. In heaven, many beings are individually present, AND YET at the same time, they are so intimately joined to and ONE WITH all other beings, that they ALL ARE one thing at the same time.

The separation from God did not actually INVENT "many selves". Many selves existed before that, and is completely natural. Nor did the separation produce individuality. But it DID produce a SECOND SELF, which was the idea of being not yourself and unlike how God created you - the ego. The denial of your joined identity (in christ - every soul is christ), formed a false self image.

"God who encompasses all being, nevertheless created separate beings (who SHARE, not who are isolated), who have everything individually and want **to share** it to increase their joy." "Nothing real can be increased except by sharing."

God had already created "many beings", not separate OBJECTS, or isolated cut-off individuals, but individuals who were ALSO joined together. They wanted to SHARE everything with each other, even their own souls. One soul IS another soul. There are many souls and each of them is an individual being, but also IS the other beings. The possibility of this is the "miraculousness" of the soul. You can see Jesus contrasting the WRONG way of thinking about the soul, here:

"Each Soul knows God completely (is the whole). This IS the miraculous power of the Soul (that it can be both a self and the whole at the same time). The fact that ***each Soul has this power*** completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

Indeed when we think in terms of spatially separated objects, we would conclude that if I have everything or am the whole, there is nothing ELSE for another soul to have. But in heaven, EACH individual being IS THE WHOLE. YOU are the whole sonship. "The Kingdom of Heaven IS you." I am the whole sonship. So are you. And WE are both there as brothers. Each PART of the sonship is the whole sonship. All the many children of God, which will always be many children of God and equal brothers, are the whole of heaven.

So in "the separation" event, some of the whole parts of the hologram rejected their SHARED nature, and wanted to ISOLATE. They didn't want to be included, they wanted to exclude. Thus they used denial and unwillingness and attack to reject the hologram. They were ALREADY individual beings, that have a total relationship of sharing with all others. But they tried to CUT OFF COMMUNICATION to end their shared relationships.

This turned them INTO "the separated ones." They BECAME separated, precicely because they existed in a NOT separated state before that. But this does NOT mean they didn't have an individual self before this. The only thing that changed was the loss of sharing (aka communication).

"Everything the ego perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships that imply BEING. The ego is thus AGAINST communication, except in so far as it is utilized to ESTABLISH separateness, rather than to abolish it."

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

Some of the beings, who existed as whole beings, who had everything, who shared and WERE everything, "cut themselves off" from sharing anything, and isolated themselves. They wanted to have something SPECIAL for themselves. They tried to end their RELATIONSHIP with God. They wanted God to treat them with special favor. They wanted to be different and have something of their own. They wanted to be SELFISH.

Selfishenss is the opposite of sharing. Separation means a desire to be exclusive and selfish and to NOT SHARE. Which is why JOINING is its correction. And joining does not mean undoing your SELF!

To "be separate" therefore really means to NOT JOIN, or to not share. Spacetime is very obviously a state of not sharing. Each object is separated off. One car does not share with another car. One thing does not exist in two places at onces. Two things are not one thing. You cannot be located in one place and another at the same time. No two objects can overlap, otherwise they'd destroy each other. Spacetime was an attack on the SHARING of the sonship, resulting in a realm in which everything is separated off and excluded.

The body arose from the idea that you wanted to be isolated from the collective. You wanted to have something exclusive to you which others did not have - your own body. You wanted to be different than everyone else and not like them - your own appearance. You wanted to have some small portion of heaven that you thought of as exclusively yours, locked up inside a fence, surrounded by a wall, to keep others out and to keep you in. And you wanted to inhabit this small area of existence as exclusively yours, so that ONLY YOU exist within it and everything else is outside. This is what the BODY is based on. It is a separation device. And within it you are lonely and isolated, unless you are willing to extend or join PAST it.

"The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built to separate parts of his Self (holographic shared self) from other parts (your brothers who ARE also you). It is within this fence he thinks he lives, to die as it decays and crumbles. For within this fence he thinks that he is safe from love (wholeness/sharing)."

The UNDOING of separation, the atonement, healing, does NOT therefore necessarily mean ... ."let's get rid of anything that hints at separation". God had already created "separate beings" in heaven before the ego came along. They were separate in the sense that they were MANY, but they were ALSO JOINED. That which is BOTH many and one, is heaven's natural holographic condition. This is NATURAL. There is nothing wrong with it. It's perfectly legitimate that God has a family of souls. This has nothing to do with the ego.

"Ultimately, every member of the family of God must return."

Heaven means separate beings who are not separate. Whole parts which are parts but also the whole. There is an aspect of separation to that, because there ARE many beings. But they are not ISOLATED because they share everything. So the "attack on separateness" is NOT correct. The attempt to remove all sense of "separation" in all cases is NOT correct. We are not supposed to be removing the holographic aspects of reality. We are not supposed to be undoing the sonship. And we are NOT supposed to be getting rid of individuality!! You and your brothers all have permanent souls, created by God, which can never be destroyed.

What we ARE supposed to be doing, is realizing that we threw away what CONNECTS us. We threw away joining and sharing and RELATIONSHIP. We threw away holographic wholeness. We want to undo isolation, specialness, selfishness, possessiveness, ownership, exclusivity, localization, littleness, unwillingness to share etc. These are what being "separated off" really means. But we are not supposed to take it to the point of erasing ALL hints of "many things". God having many children is NOT a dualistic idea, because all of those many things ARE ONE as well.

Duality really means that there are many things which DO NOT SHARE. This is a false experience and is the basis for spacetime.

Nonduality is the idea that there are NOT many things. This is an attack upon heaven's creation and an attempt to claim that God is NOT holographic. It is ignorant and false and an ego conclusion.

Reality is in fact a kind of "trans-duality", a hologram, a paralogical and omnipresent system, in which many parts DO exist but they are NOT "separated off" parts like in spacetime. It is NOT duality to say that God has many sons, because while there are a count of many, they ALSO are fused together as one. They are WHOLE beings, who are each ALL the whole. And therefore each child of God is ALL children. This is why the sonship itself is united via the ONE MIND of christ, yet EACH INDIVIDUALLY is christ.

So we have to be careful when dealing with "undoing the separation" that we're not mistaken in trying to also undo the holographic aspects of creation. We can't just remove ALL trace of separation, because this undoes God's Kingdom. We can't just use a blanket statement to wipe out all notion of separateness because this kills off all the souls that God created. Separateness is therefore not really the PROBLEM. The problem is that the separate individuals are being selfish and don't want to SHARE THEMSELVES. It is a breakdown in communication and relationship that needs fixing, NOT individuality.

"Heaven includes all God's children and their creations." We can't just say "separation is a bad thing". It depends on whether or not the separate things are including or excluding each other. INCLUSIVE SEPARATION is perfectly normal. EXCLUSIVE SEPARATION is ego. The undoing of the ego is NOT the undoing of separation. It is the reversal of EXCLUDING OTHERS. This does not result in the erasing of individuality, nor of the undoing of multiple individuals. It results in a REUNION OF BROTHERHOOD in the sonship of God, in which all God's children are one big happy family who share everything with each other forever.

Ego's world is run by the egoic thought system, based on an EITHER-OR mindset of separation.

God's world is run by God's thought system, based on a BOTH-AND mindset of sharing.

EITHER-OR is based on the idea of separation - there is a separation between who has and who has not, who does and who does not, what is and what is not, etc. An object is this, but not that. It's either red or blue. It's either here or there.

BOTH-AND is based on sharing, something is equally true of both me and you, we both have everything, me and you are loved the same by God, etc. There is no separation in that. What exists is in all locations simultaneously, space and time do not place limits on anything.

Because the world of physical matter is entirely an expression of the egoic thought system, space and time and everything within them (bodies, planets, etc) are governed by this idea of EITHER OR. Living in such a world, the seemingly "natural" way to think about anything is to align our thought processes to the "natural world" and think in accord with it.

So now we "learn" to think in an EITHER-OR way. Either I will turn left or right. Either I will eat at 5 or at 6. Either I'm male or female. Either I am asleep or awake. Either I choose option A or option B.

We adopt this as an entire way of thinking about the world, of reasoning about anything, of what to do, where to go, what to choose, always a selective judgement based on either this or that. It seems to "fit" well with the way the physical world is structured and how it behaves. But it is completely unnatural and completely opposite to God's world.

In God's world, seemingly miraculous things are possible. Everywhere. All the time. Everything in God's world breaks all the ego's laws of separation, and therefore the entire basis of EITHER-OR thinking. God does not think, hey, either one son or another will get my attention. He thinks, BOTH of them get my FULL attention. Nor does he think, I will give 50% attention to one and 50% to another. He thinks, I will give 100% love to both at the same time. And this is done WITHOUT loss, without sacrifice or lack, and without compromise.

The true meaning of divine sharing is that everything applies to BOTH me and you equally, simultaneously, and always. If there were such a thing as a divine pizza, I could eat the whole pizza and you could eat the whole pizza. We both get everything. This is not possible in the physical world, but it is possible in spirit.

One of the tricky things about understanding ACIM is that we come at it with the ego thought system. We come at it with EITHER-OR thinking. And that's a serious problem. Because whenever ACIM speaks of ANYTHING to do with God, Heaven, Creation, Sonship, Holy Spirit, Laws of God, beyond spacetime, etc.... any of those topics, the laws of GOD are applying, not the laws of ego.

So then a statement like "I and my father are One", is completely misunderstood. It's a truth WITHIN the scope of God's BOTH AND system of thought. There, I can be one with God while still being an individual. I am both, myself and part of God. The course also states that God has only one son, BUT that the one son is also many sons. It literally states that BOTH statements are true, that there is one, and many. The Sonship comprises many children, who are ALSO one.

But to the ego this seems nonsense, it cannot fathom how there can be ONE AND MANY at the same time. It insists that it is EITHER one, OR many. And then it decides that many sounds like an ego thing, and one sounds "more spiritual", so it hacks out the many from the one and ends up with its version of what Heaven must be like. And it's totally bullshit.

To grasp anything of the divine nature of the Kingdom, on ANY topic "that side" of the separation boundary, anything real and true, anything to do with Sonship or Creation or God, you have to totally put aside the EITHER OR exclusive separatist way of reasoning logically, think WAY out side the box, and adopt a BOTH AND way of reasoning. THEN the things that Jesus says that sound totally contradictory finally make perfect sense, WITHOUT having to change anything or turn stuff into ridiculous metaphors.

"One brother is all brothers." "One mind is all minds."

Does not mean there is EITHER one brother OR many brothers. Nor does it mean there is either ONE mind OR many minds. Literally, the entire statement is true. There are many brothers, and they are all one. There many minds, and they are all one. And as soon as your thought process tries to "axe" the "many" part of those statements in favor of keeping only the seemingly unifying "one" part of the statement, you're off on an ego tangent of error.

We are one, but we are still brothers. We are the one son of God, but we are also PART of a sonship of many sons. I am a child of God, and so are you. I have individuality, and so do you, and yet simultaneously we share everything. I have everything that God is, which should to the ego mean there is nothing left for you, but you also have everything that God is, simultaneously, because we share it all. Sharing does not mean a collapse of individuality either.

The BOTH AND system of thought, which "runs heaven", is a completely miraculous thought system. It defies all ego laws. It breaks space and time. It ignores silly limitations and false conclusions. It allows to be possible that which the world of EITHER OR would find absolutely impossible. It ignores spatial limitations of all kinds. This is why God is omnipresent, meaning existing in all locations simultaneously. It ignores the idea that we must be kept apart in order to be individuals. And it defies every attempt to split it up and compartmentalize it into nice little prison cells.

The entire Kingdom of God and everything in it is miraculous because of this fundamental logical premise of the whole system. "Nothing real can be increased (God cannot create) except by sharing". As God SHARES, this is an AND scenario. God AND his creation. God AND his son. BOTH God and His son exist. His son is in his likeness because they BOTH are of the same Kingdom and nature.

When I give to you, BOTH of us have it, and I do not lose it. This is why sharing INCREASES the supply in heaven, while sharing causes scarcity in the ego world. When God creates you, God gives ALL of himself to you and yet loses nothing and HAS everything still - BOTH you and God now share everything and there has been an INCREASE. This is miraculous, it dissolves the idea of separation and exclusivity, transcending all ego concepts. The entirety of reality depends on it.

The system of God's mind, his thought system, how the Kingdom is run, is entirely based on this idea of simultaneous sharing, union at the same time as creation, multiplicity at the same time as oneness, having everything while also sharing it with others without anyone being excluded in any way. Heaven is not like this world. It's laws are totally different to the separated-out world the ego made to depict isolation and selfishness. There is no selfishness in the Kingdom, only self-fullness.

"The ego is the idea of selfishness. The soul is the idea of self-fullness."

You have everything, and we all share it as God's family.

"The ego is the idea of selfishness. The soul is the idea of self-fullness."

Within me there is an ego aspect which is very selfish. This aspect rears its head if I see myself as having to do something I don't want to do, being caused to do something because of someone else, or that my condition or situation is a result of something outside my control.

My mind goes into a victim mode where I see myself as being at the effect of external powers. I start to become justified in anger. I start to complain and make noise about how I'm having to do all this stuff "because of" something or someone else. How it's all their fault.

And as I listen to myself in those states I see a tremendous selfishness. Everything I say is laden with "you're doing this to me" and "if it wasn't because of you" and "its your fault" and "you're not meeting my needs" and "my needs aren't met" and so on.. all revolving around this self absorption.

It even can take on a guise of trying to be helpful or "care" in such a manner as to see myself as doing stuff for someone else for "their benefit" and me not getting any benefit from it, and then accusing them of inflicting this upon me, and that I'm suffering because of my efforts to be helpful. It's a strange twisted ego response.

This was flaring up for me recently and i was quite shocked as just how victimy and selfish I sounded as I ranted on about things I was having to do that seemed outside my control or which could not be avoided. Everything that came out of my mouth was all about me me me and my needs and my wants and my effects which seemed to have been caused by something that's not me. lol

This is what the ego is. It's this idea of selfishness. Many people think that ego means individuality, it doesn't. It means an individual WHO IS SELFISH. And that selfishness is just one mental condition of that individual, which can be healed and restored to an individual who is NOT selfish. Selfishness means attempting not to SHARE anything or give anything. Sharing is the natural condition of the sons of God who cooperate with each other perfectly fine when they're not being selfish.

The end of selfishness is not the end of your self. It's merely the end of seeing your self as a victim. It's the end of hoarding, ownership, possession, isolation, imprisonment, exclusivity and specialness. When those things go, the "selfish person" goes, but the person that you are, underneath, does not go anywhere. It becomes uncovered for the loving being that it is.

In ACIM Jesus sometimes says things which SOUND contradictory, but they are not. He will claim one thing, then claim another, sometimes in the same sentence. And it will sound like the two things are totally opposite. So then you'll tend to conclude only one of the two statements can be true. But this is a mistake.

Here are some examples of logically cryptic-sounding self-contradictory statements:

"It should be noted that God HAS begotten only ONE Son. If you believe that all of the Souls that God created ARE His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul MUST be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship."

"I and my Father are one."

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

"Within its holy circle, is everyone whom God created as His Son."

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

"God has but one Son, knowing them all as one."

The reason they sound contradictory is because they simultaneously take two logically opposing positions. For example he tells us God has one son, but in the next breath tells us God created many sons. Or he tells us there's "I" and "my father" and then says they are "one". Then he's talking about brothers, suggesting more than one, but is talking about how they are seemingly one thing. Or how God created "everyone" within heaven, but then refers to them as a seemingly singular "one son". Even to suggest that God has one son, but that he knows "them all" as one.

So then you find yourself asking, how can it be possible that God is having one son AND that God is knowing "them all" as one? And USUALLY what almost everyone does, who thinks the way most people think, is to SIDE WITH one or the other of the statements, and DISMISS the other. Because that "seems to make sense". Because if you can turn a blind eye to the contradiction, you seem to "solve" the problem. But this is a TOTAL FAIL. Here's why.

The ego thought system is based on separation. The separation always suggests that something is true of one thing which is NOT true of another. It is the opposite of an equality-based system. It reasons that the truth is DIFFERENT for everyone. That something is either true of this OR that, but not both. The whole ego approach is to differentiate and make un-equal everything it refers to. This results in ME VS YOU, ie war.

Examples of this are e.g. "I am innocent, you are guilty". "I parked in the first parking space, not the second". "I bought the red one, not the blue one". "Its either male or female". "You can go north or south". "I took the left door, not the right door." "I am Paul, not Jim" etc.

The whole PHYSICAL world, and all of space and time, was MADE based on this thought process or "way of reasoning". In fact you can say the physical world IS the ego thought SYSTEM. And so when you THINK this way, in terms of "EITHER THIS OR THAT, BUT NOT BOTH", it maps very very well to the physical world. It doesn't seem to produce contradictions either.

I'm either in America or in England but not in two places at once. I can go north or south, but not both. I am old or young, but not both. I can have the salad for supper or the beef steak but not both. I can buy the house or the condo but not both. etc. I can go left or right but not both. etc

The trouble is, God's Kingdom is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to this way of thinking, being opposite to THIS WORLD.

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

The whole system is completely unlike it. And what's POSSIBLE in God's system is IMPOSSIBLE in the ego's system. And what makes SENSE in God's system appears to be utter NONSENSE in the ego's reasoning.

And the thing is, pretty much everyone in this world, whether you're into ACIM or not, and even if you are, USES the ego's reasoning system to draw conclusions.

That's fine, if you're talking about the physical world. But the instant you start talking about God's Kingdom, his laws, his nature, his creations, you are now in TOTALLY inappropriate territory for that way of thinking. That way of thinking is NOT how God thinks, so it WILL NOT map correctly to God's Kingdom or draw correct conclusions about it. And HIS world is not broken up into pieces of "either this or that."

The key difference is that God's Kingdom and system of thought, logic and reason, are based on INCLUSION AND SHARING. Whereas the ego's system is based on EXCLUSION and SEPARATION. This can be simplified to two simple equations or formulations:

God: BOTH THIS AND THAT ARE EQUALLY TRUE.

Ego: EITHER THIS IS TRUE OR THAT IS TRUE, BUT NOT BOTH.

You can also see that since God's Kingdom is reality, and the ego is the idea of the OPPOSITE of God, the ego is a logical "operation" of NOT GOD, or the negation of God. And if eternity is "always", the ego's opposite is NEVER. ie "always never."

Which is why its whole system is based on this notion of "This is true, but that is not". ie EITHER this is true, OR it's false, but not both. Or this applies to ME OR YOU, but not both at once. There is no simultaneous, at-once, sharing, or inclusiveness, in the ego world. And that limits its thought process.

In God's thought system, God shares all of himself with his creations. This SHARING, fundamental to his nature, means that his creations HAVE everything God has. Without limit. Without compromise. Without one person having something and having to wait until the other is done with it. They SHARE it, like simultaneous access. And they OVERLAP each other, which is impossible in the physical world without causing an atomic explosion.

Similarly, the Golden Rule which describes God's thought system, applies here just the same. What is true of one brother, is true of another brother. What is true of one of God's creations, is true of ALL creations. Every thing God creates is EQUAL in its nature and its wholeness and its perfection and its LIKENESS to God.

So now you can say something which sounds bizarre like, if what is true of ME is true of YOU, then it is true of BOTH of us. It is true of ME *AND* YOU. Which means if it is true that I am me, it must also be true that YOU ARE ME ALSO. And now there are two things, me and you, which are ALSO simultaneously BOTH one thing, while still being two things.

THAT is the "oneness" that is taking place in reality. And it's this oneness of sharing that many do not understand because it DEFIES exclusive thinking. I am INCLUDED in my brother, I am INCLUDED In God, and my creations are INCLUDED in me.

In God's system, a whole bunch of seemingly bizarre things are possible and true. For example Jesus talks about how when you GIVE in reality, you SHARE it, and now YOU have it AND the other has it. Because now both of you share the same thing. And instead of having to LOSE the thing, you now allow another to GAIN it while you RETAIN it. Which means it has INCREASED. This defies the ego's reasoning.

"Ideas are increased by sharing."

It would be silly to suggest that when God creates, he sacrifices himself and there is nothing of himself left, given that he GAVE ALL of himself to his creation. But that's what the ego would conclude. The ego would also conclude that if YOU have everything, NO ONE else can have ANYTHING, because there is nothing left to have that is not already yours.

Ego produces a FINITE system because it does not want to share anything and so sees everything as LIMITED in its amount. This also leads to conditional love, like love is a scarce commodity to be traded. The ego would say if you have all of God, no-one else can have any of God, because the ego is based on SELFISHNESS, which arises naturally as part of a system of exclusion. As Jesus confirms:

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

In the ego system, when you give something, you lose it, the other gains it, you sacrifice, and there is no increase. If I have a pizza and I want to "share" it with you, I have to SACRIFICE AND LOSE half the pizza. This is compromise, not sharing. We both have less than wholeness. But in heaven, its the total opposite. I can have the whole pizza, you can have the whole pizza, because we share it. We OVERLAP. We merge together and are one in our having of the pizza. And now we BOTH have THE WHOLE.

Similarly when you think about sons of God, the EGO's way of thinking would say you have to put things in concrete boxes and keep them SEPARATE. Which leads you to conclude, EITHER I am in my body, OR I am in your body, but not both. But God's law would say, I am in my brother and in myself at the same time. What is true of me is true of him. Therefore there are TWO brothers who ARE ONE. Their oneness or union DOES NOT IN ANY WAY overthrow or erase or undo or cancel, the fact that there are STILL TWO. And this applies clearly in cases like "one brother is all brothers", and "I and my father are one." Jesus confirms:

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

"Every mind is in all minds."

Notice here that he clarifies that there are STILL TWO PARTS in the statement. There is still ME and GOD. Two entities. Yet, they are ONE. Which means logically, 1=1 and 2=1. This makes no sense to the ego. But it is true. And accurate. And correct. This is how things are in reality. God has created a son, SHARED everything with him, so now THEY BOTH have everything, and thus they BOTH AS TWO ... are one. Their oneness does not undo their twoness, and their twoness does not undo their oneness. None of this has to do with the ego or "the separation".

The ego on the other hand, or those who THINK WITH the ego, tend to think about God's kingdom in EITHER OR terms. This is a complete logical failure. It results in false conclusions all over the place. If AIR, let's say, is in one box AND in another box, the ego would have to say, the air can only be IN one box OR the other box, not both. But the air is in both boxes. Similarly, a son of God is in his own box, BUT he is ALSO in the boxes of all the other sons. And in God's box/being.

If you use ego reasoning to draw conclusions about the inner contents of the Kingdom, YOU WILL come to a false conclusions, guaranteed. God's Kingdom is not made up of SEPARATE (un-shared) BOXES. It's made of SHARING boxes. So you can't say "either this or that", or "either one son or many", or "either God or God and a son", or "either oneness or separation" or "either one or many". That's all ego thought. It's a mistake. You have to THINK LIKE God to "get" what God's system is really like. And that way of think is to think WAAAY outside the box.

Once you recognize that God's system is based on a totally different kind of logic, basically "BOTH AND" rather than "EITHER OR", *EVERYTHING* Jesus says no longer is a contradiction. It is no longer contradictory to say "God has but one son knowing them all as one". It does not mean He only has a count of one son, because that ignores the fact he has many. And is does not mean that by having many they are "separate" in the ego sense, because they DO SHARE EVERYTHING and therefore transcend their boxes and thus ARE one. Their oneness and manyness coexists.

If all you do with these kind of statements is to TAKE SIDES with one PART of the statement and relegate the other to "the ego", that's a total fail. Because now you will relegate perfectly legitimate multitudes of creations of God to the realm of EGO, or multiple minds are now considered fragments of one mind, or multiple sons is considered an illusion. WHICH IS WRONG. It is completely a total failure of logical reasoning because the wrong kind of logic is being used

You can't just say "well it says I and my father are one, therefore I don't exist.". That's BS. That's what the EGO concludes. That's not God's conclusion, nor is it true. It is still true that YES, essentially, in truth, you and God ARE ONE THING. But, this oneness DOES NOT in the traditional sense mean or imply that there aren't ALSO two things. God IS a father and DID create a son.

I want to just make it clear that this is also NOT the same thing as"duality". Some people will argue that God having many of anything is duality. It is not the same at all.

Duality is the ego's idea of separateness. That is, that something is EITHER this OR that. This denies sharing. When you change the "OR" into an "AND", to correctly map to God's nature, the statement becomes THIS AND THAT. Which now suggests that there is sharing between TWO or more things. This is no longer duality, but it is also NOT THE END of individuality or many-ness. In any "contradictory" statement Jesus makes like that, THIS (part A) AND THAT (part B) are BOTH true. Without cancelling each other, and without opposing each other.

God's Kingdom is not duality. Duality means separate boxes WITHOUT sharing. As Jesus confirms:

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

Those RELATIONSHIPS, are the SHARING nature of the Kingdom. You need more than one of something to have relationship. It's what joins you with God and the Christ mind. But these relationships also do NOT undo your individuality. Nor does it imply that you having a self is unholy.

God who is whole, creates additional wholes beings. He cannot create partial beings. "The soul has not only been created perfect, it has been FULLY created, there is no lack in it." So now if God has a son, which he does, because he's a creator, and a father, His son MUST BE A WHOLE, yet to ego logic you can't have two wholes.

If God is all encompassing, there is NO ROOM FOR ANY SON AT ALL. To the ego, anyway. Because "two wholes" is nonsense to the ego. Yet many proponents of oneness and non-duality like the idea of there being at least a son still, which is COMPLETELY illogical in any thought system.

Ego thinkers who struggle with logic will conclude this. But the truth is God does have a son, and there ARE TWO WHOLES. The reason this is POSSIBLE is because of sharing. The two wholes SHARE everything, and therefore ARE ALSO ONE WHOLE. EACH SON therefore is a WHOLE SON, has everything, and shares it with the WHOLE of the rest. As Jesus confirms:

"God who encompasses all being, NEVERTHELESS created "separate" beings, who have EVERYTHING individually, and want to share it to increase their joy."

This is a statement of divine logic. God is whole, and yet, he SHARED himself to create MANY "separate" beings, INDIVIDUAL WHOLES - souls, sons, who HAVE EVERYTHING because they share all of God, and they WANT to SHARE it. This statement was taken out of later editions btw, probably due to ego thought processes that deemed it "nonsense" or "suggesting separation", appearing to be a contradiction when it IS NOT. God created separate beings who are share as one.

Technically God should not have a son, or be a father, or a creator, if God is everything. Because what is all encompassing cannot have an opposite, thus cannot create a division or separation. BUT God DOES that, not by SPLITTING, but by SHARING. He allows within his own being the presence of additional beings provided they SHARE ALL of what is, thus NOT invalidating their individuality OR the wholeness of the system

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

Even to the ego the idea of God having even ONE son makes no sense. It implies separation and two-ness. And that is against the EGO'S spiritualized concept of "oneness" meaning "a count of one". Ego reasons, if you remove all separations, you must end up with ONE BLOB. One perfect blob, which we'll call oneness or God. And thus IT concludes THIS is what God is like. But this is the logical outcome of EGO thought processes. And it is COMPLETELY WRONG.

Or perhaps we can say it is partly right, because God IS one and his whole creation IS one, BUT.... it is also many. And it is this "one AND many" which the ego CANNOT comprehend. It can reason there is one, OR many, but not both. And BOTH is true. Because God IS a creator of many sons, and has a FAMILY. And his nature is to share, and be inclusive, which means BOTH me AND God exist.

"the whole family of God, or the Sonship"

"Ultimately, every member of the family of God must return"

AND, you have your own creations, which further adds to the sonship. AND God created the holy spirit. AND the angels. The Holy Trinity DOES have three entities. And "The Kingdom of God includes all his children and their creations." AND "Heaven is the sum of all God's thoughts, in number infinite." Infinite creations is a LOT MORE than "one". But the ego would balk at this as if it's some kind of "duality", or separation, or ego. EGO concludes that God is ego-like!

So if you really want to grasp HOW and WHY Jesus is NOT contradicting himself, and WHY his seemingly opposite statements are NOT against each other, and why ALL parts of his statements are true simultaneously, and why God did create multiple children who are BROTHERS, and why separate individual beings does not mean ego or duality, you have to adopt a whole different way of reasoning. A thought system LIKE how God thinks.

"Either this or that" is ego and DOES NOT work when used to think about ANYTHING in heaven. And this one "default" way of reasoning is what almost EVERY acim student uses, because we don't recognize that we're basing all our thought on a false permise and assumption. It's an assumption to believe that two things cannot be one thing, or it's "natural" for two things to be separate and not share anything, or that you can never have two things being one thing. You have to question this.

Such thinking has led to countless horrendous manglings of the course material and its meaning. Relegating Jesus's TRUE statements to PARTIAL truths and partial falsehoods. Which has produced interpretations of the course which fall way short. People then either conclude WRONG things about heaven, or they give up and exclaim its not possible to undestand it because they can't see HOW to think outside the box. BOTH are ego reactions to ITS failed logic.

"No-one who looks upon this "reasoning" EXACTLY as it is could fail to see it does NOT follow, and it makes NO sense. Yet it SEEMS sensible"

To the ego, the truth is UTTER NONSENSE. But what is nonsense to the ego, makes perfect sense to God. To him it is completely natural to create an infinite number of creations which all are whole and coexisting in total harmony, sharing everything without selfishness or egotism. And God's creations DO NOT think in terms of "me or you", but in terms of US. You have real holy brothers and always will.

"We are creation, WE, the sons of God."

Most people have an idea of what duality means. Usually a world of many separate things. Separate objects, separate bodies. A count beyond one.

This however isn't a full enough definition. Duality is also a matter of NOT SHARING. It's a state of mind in which you do not want to be joined with, share with, or have relationship with, anything or anyone. It's also a state of selfishness, therefore, because it opposes sharing. It produces isolation and disconnection. The ego thought system - the world of duality - is all about selfishness.

"Selfishness is of the ego" T-7.IX.1:4

If duality really means selfishness, what is the opposite of selfishness? It is sharing. But this requires that there be someone or something to share WITH. It cannot mean that there is only you there, or only God. It also requires that in absolute reality, in God, there must be something other than JUST God, such as your brothers, to share with. For example:

"You dwell in the Mind of God with your brother, for God Himself did not will to be alone." T-11.I.1:6

"Because He did not will to be alone, He created a Son like Himself." T-11.I.5:7

God wanted to share himself. In fact we're also told that SHARING is the natural inherent property of reality.

"Nothing real can be increased except by sharing. ³That is why God created you. ⁴Divine Abstraction takes joy in sharing. ⁵That is what creation means." T-4.VII.5:2-5

We're told in ACIM itself, putting aside all interpretations by other well-meaning teachers and students, in Jesus's words, that God did NOT will to be the "only thing that exists". He did not will to be alone. He willed that there be ANOTHER, and CREATED at the very least one son.

He even goes on to say that God not ONLY willed to create at least one son, this son ALSO has the ability to create its own sons.

"God would not have us be alone because _He_ does not will to be alone. ⁷That is why He created His Son, and gave him the power to create with Him. ⁸Our creations are as holy as we are, and we are the Sons of God Himself, as holy as He is." T-8.VI.8:6-8

Note also that it clearly states that God has SONS, not just one.

"The creations of every Son of God are yours, since every creation belongs to everyone, being created for the Sonship as a whole." T-7.IX.5:3

"The Kingdom of God includes all His Sons and their children, who are as like the Sons as they are like the Father. ¹¹Know, then, the Sons of God, and you will know all creation." T-7.XI.7:10-11

It's quite simply stating that God not only created many children, but that even those children in turn go on to create more children. The Sons of God form the sonship, which shares the One Mind of Christ. And collectively as the One Son, we all co-create with God to produce our own creations.

This is in fact why Jesus refers to us as having BROTHERS. The term brother means an equal sibling of the same parent. Because God did not will to be alone, and did not will us to be alone, he created MANY OF US, so that we would have permanent brothers IN heaven forever.

"Return with me to Heaven, walking together with your brother out of this world and through another, to the loveliness and joy the other holds within it." T-18.I.12:4)

"Here stands your brother with the key to Heaven in his hand, held out to you. T-24.II.7:6"

There is also a holy trinity in reality. God the father, the Sonship as the One Son comprising many sons and their creations, and the Holy Spirit. These are not conceptual or ego inventions, they are permanent.

"The Son of God is part of the Holy Trinity" T-3.II.5:4 "Your creations are your gift to the Holy Trinity, created in gratitude for your creation." T-8.VI.5:3)

The Holy Spirit is also a permanent eternal creation who will continue to exist along with the many sons even AFTER the atonement.

"When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed there will be no Call to return. ⁶But what God creates is eternal. ⁷The Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless their creations and keep them in the light of joy." T-5.I.5:5-7

So what we have now is in fact a more fleshed out picture. Heaven, God's reality, comprises God, the Holy Spirit, the Sonshsip, which form the trinity. And the Sonship includes many sons, and many creations of many sons, who are also brothers. By the way there are angels as well, created by God.

Now, such a picture does not sound remotely like "non-duality." Someone came up with non-duality as an antithesis to duality, purely as a conceptual idea. It's an attempt to try to explain what the course is saying. Except that, it doesn't quite fit.

It fits in the sense that it may describe God himself, IF God were alone and willed to be alone. As a LOGICAL DEVICE, opposite to "many" means "one", a count of one. This is what non-duality logically means. There are many flaky and wishywashy definitions out there which have tried to glue toegether pieces of the course to make it fit with this, but the PUREST form of non-duality is that "there is literally only God."

This obviously does not FIT with what ACIM says, because it's told us that God is a creator, that he has created at least one child if not many, and that his child has has its own children. Not to mention also the holy spirit being created, and the trinity existing. All of this is not properly encompassed by the concept of non-duality.

Some people like non-duality ideas because they seem to suggest the antithesis to "separateness". As if it is the opposite of ego, the opposite of separation, and the way to undo all trace of the separation from God. But this is VERY BASIC logic and highly inaccurate in its representation of what JESUS ACTUALLY says.

The purest non-duality does not support God being a creator, or God sharing, or God having relationships, or God having even ONE son, or of God creating the Holy Spirit, or of YOU existing, or of you having any creations. It doesn't even allow for heaven to exist. All it does is reduce God to a singular blob, a very lonely isolated blob, which sits there all by itself doing nothing. That is NOT what God is like according to ACIM itself.

The problem is that many people have latched onto this non-duality "concept" and have tried to FORCE the course to fit into it, because they don't have a better OR more accurate model. And in many cases also because they don't recognize the shortcomings of this concept.

It's easy for anyone to say, well, if I get rid of all the separations which implied "many things", then I will get down to "one thing", and this is oneness, and it must be what reality is like. Except that, it isn't. Not by a long shot.

Not according to what Jesus has said about God ADDING to himself, and SHARING himself, and having REAL relationship with his Son, and HAVING a son, and CO-CREATING with him. Jesus's definition of ONENESS is not what you think it is. It is not the everyday definition. It's more to do with a SHARED WHOLENESS between two beings.

"This may appear to contradict the statement “I and my Father are one,” but there are two parts to the statement in recognition that the Father is greater. T-1.II.4:7

The urtext had a much fuller statement about this:

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

In fact we are told countless times that God is GREATER than us. We are supposed to have AWE of him, as his son. That God is the FIRST cause, and we are CO-creators as secondary causes. That "I am forever an effect of God". The whole notion of equating yourself with God is nonsense because this is what the whole authority problem is about. You are NOT at the same level or role as he is.

Urtext: "Revelation is NOT reciprocal. It is always FROM God TO man. This is because God and man are NOT equal."

"God’s accomplishments are not yours, but yours are like His. ⁶He created the Sonship and you increase it. ⁷You have the power to add to the Kingdom, though not to add to the Creator of the Kingdom." T-7.I.2:5-7

There are so many aspects of ACIM that fly in the face of pure nonduality, and are contrary to the traditional idea of "oneness". It is NOT CORRECT to claim that ACIM is a non-dualistic teaching. And it is NOT correct to project an idea of "oneness" onto its statements. To be "one with" does not ERASE the fact that there are two things sharing that oneness. Heaven is all about sharing between many things, which is the opposite of many things which don't share.

In fact even individuality is an inherent part of reality. You HAD an individual existence as a soul BEFORE the separation from God ever came along. Individuality isn't even the problem. It's the unwillingness to SHARE that is the problem - selfishness is the problem. Not whether you HAVE a self.

"God, Who encompasses all being, created beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy.T-4.VII.5:1

Here ACIM has explicitly stated that God created a PLURAL OF BEINGS, in reality, who EACH had everything INDIVIDUALLY - as individuals, and who WANT TO SHARE so that THEIR collective joy increases. That is not in any stretch of the imagination a state of non-duality, or of "its all one thing", or "its all God".

What's needed is a much more accurate concept that maps to what ACIM actually says, and which supports and INCLUDES all of what it says, without trying to screen out stuff on the basis of making teh concept MORE right than the text. ACIM is a kind of "trans-duality", in which God has created many things which ARE still one. That the one and the many are coexisting through sharing. And that this is NOT duality, nor ANYTHING to do with the ego.

Heaven is in fact a holographic system. It is how God thinks. His whole creation and thought proceeds along holographic principles - where every part (son/creation) contains and IS the whole. This is NOT the same as duality. You have to open up to the idea that the many AND the one can COEXIST. That

the one IS many, and the many ARE one. This is stated here: "The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part is perfectly natural, for it is the way God thinks, and what is natural to Him is natural to you. T-16.II.3:3

"God has but one Son, knowing them all as One. T-9.VI.3:5 "Every child of God is one in Christ, for his being is in Christ as Christ’s is in God." T-12.VI.6:1

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought, and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. ²All His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other. T-6.II.8:1-2"

Perhaps we can be willing to stop talking about ACIM as if it's some kind of non-duality teaching when it is utterly riddled with statements to the contrary. God is a creator and has a FAMILY in reality. And you are part of that family. And God LOVES YOU personally and EQUALLY.

"You cannot enter into real relationships with any of God’s Sons unless you love them all and equally. ²Love is not special. ³If you single out part of the Sonship for your love, you are imposing guilt on all your relationships and making them unreal." T-13.X.11:1-3

"Ultimately, every member of the family of God must return." T-1.V.4:1)

Btw these are ALL quotes from FIP 3rd edition. Put aside what other well-meaning people have told you and listen to what JESUS is telling you.

(And why the idea of only one son, one dreamer, one perceiver, no individuals, non-duality, etc are bullshit)

"Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what you want to take at a given time."

(This means God's will is not forced upon YOUR will, you CAN choose when to take the curriculum, or to delay it as long as you like, it's YOUR CHOICE. People have used this statement to justify a sense of "having no choice" and no freedom, as if the curriculum is handed down like a commandment from God. It should be obvious that your "freedom to elect" IS a use of FREE WILL. Even "the script is written" does not prove you don't have free will, because you have to CONSENT to it and are FREE to ignore it.)

"However, if he places his mind under tyranny, rather than Authority, he intrudes the submission/dominance onto free will himself. This produces the obvious contradiction inherent in any formulation that associates free will with imprisonment."

(Having free will does not mean you are an ego, but when you attempt to imprison your will, that's when you produce ego. In other words, by trying to have a will which wills differently to your natural will, you create the illusion of there being an alternative "real choice" but simultaneously puts your will into a prison of UNWILLINGNESS. Yet, you are FREE to be un-willing - that is a USE of will).

"It is not your will to be imprisoned, because your will is free. That is why the ego IS the denial of free will. It is never God Who coerces you, because He shares His Will WITH you."

(See, the ego is the attempt to repress your personal freedom, not to establish personal freedom, but it makes an illusion of personal freedom to cover it over. Also notice, VERY IMPORTANT, "It is never God who coerces you." - meaning that YOUR WILL is not enforced by God, because you are free and independent!)

"Free will MUST lead to freedom."

(This also means freedom from a tyrannical ruler. God is not a tyrannical ruler, he loves you, and has given you a gift of freedom to choose for yourself to willingly want to will like Him, in unison, co-creatively).

"Awaking unto Christ is following the laws of love OF YOUR FREE WILL, and out of quiet recognition of the truth in them. The attraction of light must draw you willingly, and willingness is signified by GIVING."

(Willingness is required in order to want to be with God. It is the EGO that lacks willingness and lacks freedom and lacks true independence. Ego means imprisonment and loss of self, not gaining of self. It is an illusion of gaining self while simultaneously losing it. It is also an illusion of willing independently while isolating your will. You can only be with God WILLINGLY, which means freely, which means no coercion and not being forced by God. Love does not enter where it is not welcome) .

"In reality, this is his ONLY choice, because his free will was made for his own joy in creating the perfect."

(YOUR free will was given you by God for YOUR own joy in creating the perfect.)

"You will never know that you are co-creator with God, until you learn that your brother is a co-creator with YOU."

(Ok so now not only do you have the position of co-creating with God, which means you COLLABORATE WILLINGLY AND FREELY AND INDEPENDENTLY, but also you co-create with your brother. Guess what happened when you co-created with your brother in an egoic way? You CO-DREAMED the dream!)

"It is this Thought by which the Father gave creation to the Son, establishing the Son as co-creator with Himself."

(God Himself has established you and others as co-creators with Him. That means it's not just God creating everything on His own, or that the son is just an effect of Him, or that the son is forced to do God's will like some kind of robot. We participate joyfully in sharing God's will, sharing the same interest, sharing the same desire to create.)

"And it is the AGREEMENT of their Thought that makes the Son a co-creator with the Mind Whose Thought created him."

(See, what makes you a co-creator and what makes you "do God's will" isn't that His will forces you, it's that you AGREE WITH HIS WILL FREELY. Doing God's will is VOLUNTARY.)

"A co-creator with the Father must have a Son. Yet must this Son have been created like Himself. A perfect Being, all-encompassing and all-encompassed, nothing to add and nothing taken FROM; not born of size nor weight nor time, nor held to limits or uncertainties of ANY kind."

(I think this is talking about YOUR creations. Note that it also says that the creation you create is a PERFECT BEING, and since it is LIKE YOU, you also are a perfect being.)

"Think not He wills to bind you, Who has made you co-creator of the universe along with Him. He would but keep your will forever and forever limitless."

(This is clear. God's will DOES NOT BIND YOU. He created you as a WILLING, FREE-WILLED INDIVIDUAL, who is capable of desiring to and agreeing freely to will WITH God and in alignment with what God wants to create. He will keep YOUR WILL forever limitless, meaning that even Himself and His own will does not impose limits on your will.)

"Your will is as free as mine, and God Himself would not go against it."

(See. Now, if God will not go against YOUR will AT ALL, ever, not even a tiny bit, this MUST MEAN, that you are effectively a SEPARATE INDIVIDUAL in heaven! It MUST also mean that your own will is FREE to choose WHETHER to will the same thing as God wills or not. Because it's only possible that you MIGHT do something God would oppose, by virtue of you being ABLE to will something ELSE. You can will to "try" to make something UNLIKE God's will would create, which is what produced the separation. And God does not OPPOSE your will to do that, although He offers help and guidance for you to return to Him and will like Him, freely. If God does not go against your will, YOU MUST HAVE INDIVIDUALITY. Note Jesus also says YOUR WILL is as free as HIS... meaning that THERE IS NOT JUST ONE SON, and you cannot oppose His will anymore than He can oppose yours, because you RESPECT each other's individual freedom!)

"Would God let this be real, if He did not will to be alone Himself?"

(God did not will to be alone! So He CREATED YOU! This is because nothing real can be real unless it is given, because it has to be given in order to have HAD it to give, so God automatically creates YOU!)

"They remind you that you are the co-creator of all things that live."

(Remembering that "there is no life outside of heaven", you have co-created WITH God, freely, all things that LIVE, because everything in heaven is alive, including your soul.)

"God, who encompasses ALL Being, nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy. Nothing that is real can be increased EXCEPT by sharing it. That is why God Himself created you. Divine Abstraction takes joy in application, and that is what creation MEANS."

(There you have it plainly and simply, God created "separate" distinct beings who have everything "individually", have their own free will, and WANT to share what they have in order to increase THEIR joy. Note is also says that nothing real can increase except through sharing - sharing means extension or creation, and also making sort of "room for" something ADDITIONAL, which is why God ADDED you to creation, increasing it, and He did this because it brings him joy to apply what He is - to create.)

"God does not need revelation returned to Him, which would clearly be impossible, but He DOES want revelation brought to others. This cannot be done with the actual revelation, because its content cannot be expressed, and it is intensely personal to the mind which receives it. But it can still be returned BY that mind through its attitudes to other minds which the knowledge from the revelation brings."

(Information about revelations helps us to see that God communicates directly to individual PERSONAL selves, he does not and cannot communicate directly with an EGO, so it must be to the SOUL, and yet is personal, because there are OTHERS. Many sons, many brothers, many souls, many minds. "God is praised whenever any mind learns to be wholly helpful.")

"The truly helpful are God’s miracle-workers, whom I direct until we are all united in the joy of the kingdom."

(God has MANY miracle workers!)

Clearly there is SIGNIFICANT PROOF here that God created many individuals who are independent and HAVE THEIR OWN FREE WILL.

This leads to having to re-evaluate many other beliefs and conclusions that people have FALSELY come to, such as that there is only one dreamer of the dream, that other people are literally you, that you are responsible for other people's choices, that your perception's correction makes it impossible to see other people's poor choices, that your acceptance of atonement undoes the entire dream for everyone, etc... these are ALL false conclusions based on the DENIAL OF FREE WILL and the DENIAL OF INDIVIDUALITY IN HEAVEN.

Independence can seem like a good thing. It seems to in some way be better than dependency on others, or codependency. It seems to represent being responsible for ones own life, and having the freedom to choose anything.

The ego has an idea about independence. To the ego mind, independence from God is highly sought after. If you can exist and be autonomous without Him, that's your goal. And you can be relatively successful at this, albeit that usually the success will be punctuated with failures and is short lived.

You can, if you want, have your life all to yourself and do whatever you want to do. But at some point it will become obvious that something is missing. There is an emptiness, and your heart yearns for meaning. And that's because your independence is an attempt to be separate from meaning.

Separation from God, in which God's love is heartfelt and meaningful, must lead to a meaningless life in which the ego has taken over control of your life and is running the show on its own. This autonomy is artificial and pretends to be freedom. But it leads to death.

Without God, alone and incapacitated, there is only so much you can do. You cannot move the planets or heal the sick. You cannot raise the dead or bring miracles to those in need. And you cannot experience true peace.

Your independence from God is at a price. You may not realize it at first, but the cost is great. To be separate is to have nothing. And yet independence from God is an attempt to have everything for yourself. This grasping and holding-on to everything cannot accomplish what it aspires to do. Instead, everything is lost and you have nothing of value.

Your very existence, your being, cannot last while it is disconnected from the Source of Life. Cut off from supply, you will become sick and die. Disconnecting from your Real Self and from God is a lonely path of weakness, vulnerability, suffering and death.

If you want to eat real food at the table of God, then it comes with requirements. The Kingdom has some conditions you must meet. It is not that the Kingdom is conditional, but it does not include the ego. The idea of independence from God must be recognized as an ego attempt to be separate from God, to have a will of your own, to overthrow the Authority of God and to play at being God of your own world.

This you must be willing to let go if you are to reconnect and reunite with the only source of True Strength. This you must surrender if you want the benefit of Eternal Life. You must give up your desire for separate control over your life, and allow yourself to receive God again. Together you can share everything, but alone you have nothing but scraps.

The world is a dry and dusty desert where starved and thirsty creatures come to die. Without God, it has no life, and there is no hope of forever. Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven, come to rejuvenate, resurrect and bring life back to the living. Only when you allow God to nourish you in this way might you enjoy the fruits of Heaven.

You can have it your way, exercising all the rights and freedoms to the full extent that individuality and separation allows, yielding every possible result that can come from an single separate self. But you will grow tired and be thirsty for more. And true meaning will not be found in a separate life.

God is your home. The Father shares everything worth having. True Peace can be yours again if you will open your heart and mind and let Him help you with living. Plug yourself back into His Power Source and return to Life. You have been dead without Him. Now is your time of resurrection. It's time for the prodigal son to come home.

ACIM is not really non-duality, or duality. It's sort of both. ACIM makes this clear statement about the nature of God and reality:

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is PERFECTLY natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you" UrT16C3

This is the holographic principle. There is a whole (God) which has parts (sons of God), and each part contains the whole (oneness with God). The one whole is shared by the whole and the parts (brothers, inheritance etc).

Most people think of reality as sort of "one thing". Like one large area or an expanse or some kind of bigness. But that's more or less the same as the idea of spacetime or the universe. God is not actually like that. God is holographic.

In a holographic system there is a singular wholeness, which we call God. But there is also a characteristic of this wholeness - the entire wholeness is in every part. Every part of God contains the whole of God. ALL of God pays FULL attention to EVERY part simultaneously - because God is infinitely transcendental and can do this even if it sounds impossible.

God is also a creator and is capable of fully absolutely creating secondary beings who are like himself. But he cannot add-on anything outside of himself, so instead he adds on INSIDE of himself.

He does this by SHARING himself entirely with that which he creates, and that means that his creation has to also SHARE all of itself with everything. This is a kind of "internal expansion" of the Kingdom. It does not involve creating OUTSIDE the kingdom or beyond be pre-existing totality of God.

This sharing produces fully-created beings who inherit everything from God and share everything with God. They have a oneness with God. But they ARE fully created individual beings. They are completely full in every sense of the word. They contain everything like God does. Which means they absolutely exist, and yet at the same time are one with the absolute.

This results in a holographic system in which God is the main whole who creates "additional wholes" that share everything with him and with each other. Each part of God has the whole of God in it. Each son of God contains the whole of God and everyone else. We are all unified and merged and fused together.

This doesn't mean we lose our duality. It doesn't mean we lose individuality, or that we can't tell where we end and God begins. We DO have a discrete independent existence as absolute beings. But we ALSO have total oneness with the whole.

This seems like a paradox to most people. But it is actually miraculous.

Because a holographic system has wholeness to it, we identify that wholeness as "oneness" and might call it "non-duality". However, a holographic system ALSO has parts to it - whole parts, which share the whole and yet are whole in their own right. These "parts" might be called "duality".

This means that IN REALITY, the nature of God as a holographic system comprises BOTH ... non-duality AND duality, fused together as one. Everything is God, but God has parts which are living beings in their own right.

This is what A Course in Miracles teaches. And it means that there is material which in a certain CONTEXT is focusing on the non-dual aspects of the hologram, such as the oneness and the "God is" and "there is no opposite" and all that. But in other contexts it also speaks of God's infinite creations, the many sons of God, your own creations, your own kingdom, permanent brothers and so on.

ALL of these aspects of the course are simultaneously true. Even if they sound contradictory. If God's reality was NOT holographic they would indeed be contradictory and you'd have to resolve that by separating off some parts as "ego" or "separation" or "illusions". That's what many people do, in error. Because they don't realize reality actually is a holographic system not a "blob".

Ultimately then ACIM is not non-duality, or duality. But it is PARTLY non-duality and PARTLY duality. The two are fused together in a kind of "trans-duality". Transcendent of both exclusive-oneness and exclusive-separateness. God is not EXCLUSIVE anything - God is INCLUSIVE. Which is why the "non-duality" INCLUDES "the duality".

By duality here I do not mean spacetime. Spacetime is duality WITHOUT the non-duality, ie exclusively dual. That's not the same as the trans-duality of God in which every part is the whole. In space time, every part is PARTIAL and incomplete. The opposite of duality is not-nonduality, it's transcendental of the whole "either this or that" mindset.

"The whole does define the part, but the part does NOT define the whole. This is as true of knowledge as it is of perception." UrT8H2

"There IS no difference between the whole and the part where change is impossible." UrT8H2

"Because the Sonship MUST create as one, you remember creation whenever you recognize part of creation. Each part you remember adds to YOUR wholeness, because each part IS whole." UrT9E5

"Creation is the holy Son of God, for in Creation is His Will complete in every aspect, making every part container of the whole." UrW320W113

"The whole power of God is in every part of Him, and nothing contradictory to His Will is either great or small." UrT10G10

"It shines in every part of Him, as in the Whole." UrT17E16

"Every loving thought held in ANY part (of the Sonship) belongs to every part. It is shared BECAUSE it is loving. Sharing is God's way of creating, and also YOURS." URT5F9

"The creations of every Son of God are yours, because every creation belongs to everyone, being created for the Sonship as a whole." UrT7J6

"But the Resurrection IS the symbol of sharing, because the re-awakening of every Son of God is necessary to enable the Sonship to know its wholeness." UrT6B13

"Because He did not will to be alone, He created a Son like Himself." It was not His Will to be alone. And neither is it yours."

There are two thought systems, one is God’s system, the other is of the ego’s system. God’s thought system produces Creation/Heaven, the ego’s thought system produces hell/earth. Both systems run on impeccable logic based on a logical premise, and are systems of thought. They both start with a premise and follow through to a logical and natural conclusion. The conclusion of Heaven’s thought system is eternal life, the conclusion of the ego’s thought system is death. Both are arrived at through perfectly logical reasoning. As Jesus describes:

"The ego's logic is as impeccable as that of the Holy Spirit"

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

The two systems THINK differently. The ego’s system is entirely founded on separation and exclusion. Everything in the system obeys the premise of exclusivity. God’s system is totally opposite, and is founded on INCLUSION and sharing. Jesus tasks us to learn to "think like God", which does not merely mean to use EGO thinking to think about God, or to use exclusive logic at all when considering the nature of Heaven.

One of the biggest fundamental errors in ACIM circles is USING the ego’s thought system to THINK ABOUT the thought system of God. God’s system is SO unlike the ego’s, that doing so automatically produces two effects: a) what seems to make sense is nonsense, b) what seems like nonsense is actually true sense.

The ego always thinks in terms of separations and exclusions. And this maps directly onto objects in SPACE. You can say for example, if bananas are yellow, and this fruit is purple, it is not a banana. Or if my car is parked in the first space, it is not parked in the last space. Or if I have the whole pizza, you do not have any. Everything is put into a contained, confined box (body) and what is inside the box is considered separate from what is outside. What is outside is *excluded*, and there is no SHARING between the two regions.

This kind of thinking is based entirely in separation thought, a way of thinking that excludes, isolates, separates off, and "reasons" based on whether something is fully in or out of a box. You think about objcts in the world this way because the world ITSELF is the ego thought system, based on the same reasoning, the same logic, the same functioning and the same relationships of separation.

This WAY of thinking, exclusive logical reasoning, is EXTREMEY POOR at evaluating the nature of God’s thought system. When it looks at God’s system (everything in Heaven), it tries to put everything into nice tidy boxes. It separates things out. IT excludes. It has no regard for ANY form of sharing, oneness, Union, or anything that transcends boundaries.

It cannot SEE or comprehend how it makes SENSE, that something can be in more than one box at once, that the inside and outside of the box are joined, that something can be in more than one place at the same time, that two entities can have full access to share the same thing at the same time without compromise, or that two seemingly opposite statements can be NOT contradictory.

For example, when ACIM says something like "God has one son", the ego is delighted, because it gets to put God’s system into a nice confined box. When ACIM then says something like "We are creation, we, the sons of God", it now concludes either a) they can’t both be true, b) the statement about the one son is true and the statement about multiple sons is false, or c) God has many sons and not one son. These are the ONLY ways that can seem to "make sense" to ego thinking. NONE OF THEM ARE CORRECT.

The correct truth about God’s system,is that God has one Son AND many sons. The truth is also that each son has full unlimited access to share ALL of God, WITHOUT excluding anyone else from doing the same at the same time. The truth is also that as you give, you do not lose anything, and you keep what you had, and now BOTH of you have it. This sounds like absolute nonsense to the ego thinker. It does not conform to boxes. If there were pizza in heaven, you and I both would be able to eat the entire pizza. That sounds ABSURD to the ego. It is the way God’s system works!

His thought system is entirely run by INCLUSIVE logic. This is based entirely on sharing. Logically it means, we BOTH share things. Everything applies to me AND you. This is what the Golden Rule is based on. Equality. Whatever is true of me, is true of you. So if I have the whole of something, and I share it with you, we BOTH have the WHOLE of it. We share space. We overlap. We commune. We share . We are united. We are one. All things real COMPLETELY DEFY exclusive boxes. If you are thinking about Heaven, God, sonship, sons, creation etc WITH exclusivity in your logical reasoning, you HAVE TO come to a false conclusion.

For example, "I and my father are one". What does the EGO make of it? It thinks ok, it said me and my father , that’s two things, two boxes. So now we have two boxes. It then says "are one". So now..... there are two seemingly contradictory things happening (to the ego). Is it two boxes, or one box? And usually this is where an ego thinker wil THROW OUT the first half of the statement or forget it entirely, and home in on the second part., in an attempt to RESOLVE the contradiction. This is BULLSHIT. Total failure. Trying to MAKE it make sense, by butchering it.

The ONLY correct way to grasp what is said, is to literally think outside the box. You have to THINK differently. Use inclusivity. Inclusivity says, two things can SHARE. It says two things can JOIN. It says two things can be mutual in their likeness and nature. And it even says that two things can be TWO THINGS, while simultaneously SHARING EVERYTHING. And so here, being one with God does NOT end the TWO-ness. Two distinct things are SHARING with each other.

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

And so oneness, being one-with, are-one, DOES NOT mean "one box". In fact Jesus even says you can "be one with your self". It means BOX DEFYING sharing and singularity of NATURE, in which the two ARE STILL TWO, while ALSO being as if one. They are two AND one. Oneness to THE EGO means "one thing". Oneness to God means OF LIKE KIND. And here also SHARING does not mean "only has one" like a single identity, it means TWO THINGS are joined in their NATURE while still retaining their two-ness and INDIVIDUALITY! AND THIS IS NOT DUALITY. NOR IS IT NONDUALITY!

Similarly when Jesus says something hyper cryptic like "one brother is all brothers, one mind is all minds" or "healing is when two minds recognize their oneness and become glad", IT DOES NOT mean that "the one box" is true, NOR does it mean the "two boxes" is true. It is not oneness (as in a count of one) OR duality. THEY ARE BOTH TRUE. There is simultaneously INDIVIDUALITY AND ONENESS. This is why you have a self AND are one. This is why you are one of many sons of God AND part of THE son of God. And this is also why the idea of many sons is NOT a separation idea. It is NOT an idea of "many boxes". It is more like the idea of many boxes which share the same space and overlap each other and share their contents.

The Kingdom of God, the sonship, creation, the relationship of souls, the nature of reality, the way God thinks, Heaven’s functioning, the Holy Spirit, extension, giving and receiving being one, the golden rule, sharing, communication, multiple minds, etc are all GROSSLY misunderstood, because anyone USING ego logic to think ABOUT them is blind, making no sense, using faulty tools, and coming to automatically false conclusions, putting stuff in boxes that is not in a box, and just creates confusion upon confusion.

You have to THINK LIKE GOD if you want to understand these things correctly. And the Holy Spirit’s thought system is based on this inclusive logic. And you are supposed to be learning HOW to think this way, as part of true perception. You have to let go of thought processes that follow the LAWS OF SEPARATION AND EXCLUSION. Otherwise you will think in terms of boxes and shutting everything out. You cannot INCLUDE your brother with that kind of thought process. And you cannot grasp oneness by locking it in a prison cell and falsely concluding "there is only one thing" or "its all one thing" or "there is only god" or "only one son". All of that is ego bullshit.

Creation is one and many. The "one" sonship has many perrmanent parts. You have brothers who are one with you. God has many children who are a united family. Not one or two. Many AND one. And that is natural.

"The whole power of God's Son lies in all of us, but not in any of us alone. God would not have us be alone because He does not will to be alone. That is why He created His Son and gave him the power to create with Him. Our creations are as holy as we are, and we are the Sons of God Himself, and therefore as holy as He is. Through our creations we extend our Love, and thus increase the joy of the Holy Trinity."

There is a huge rift in the ACIM community.

It mainly hinges around a single assumption. Some people make this assumption and some do not.

Those who make it are very consistent in the consequences of that assumption, because it leads to massive level confusion. There is an entirely different interpretation of the meaning of almost everything the Course means, which arises based on that one assumption.

The assumption is this:

Everything about the course applies to "my identity" as I see it right now. It ALL applies to ME.

This is a MISTAKE!

And this happens because .... every course student has a EGO, which is a false sense of identity or self, which perceives that everything is about IT. It is an ego-centric interpretation of the course.

Here is a fact which you can deny or accept:

Sometimes the Course is speaking to and about an "individual son" as part of the "sonship." "A son", "A brother", "my brothers", "God’s children", etc of which there are many. And sometimes, the course is speaking about The One Son of God - "The son", "God’s son" etc.

These are two very different LEVELS OF IDENTITY. The scope of these levels is vastly different. What applies to one individual may not apply to another individual. What applies to the one son, does not apply to an individual son in isolation. The mind of the One Son is HUGE, it is the mind of Christ. The mind of an INDIVIDUAL SON, has its own individual free will choice and its own ability to independently deny God.

Confusing or combining these two levels, which is a confusion of identity, will lead to massive level confusion and false conclusions.

When YOU, as an "individual son", think that everything the course says about the One Son applies to YOU, you are making a massive level confused mistake! It does NOT apply to you! When you, as an individual son, believe that every teaching in the course is ABOUT YOU, as you see yourself as an individual right now, you WILL come to false conclusions. And these conclusions are radically warped in comparison to what they would be if you saw all the levels in their appropriate placement.

Some parts of ACIM are talking about an individual son, and some parts are talking about the One Son, which is a vast difference. Knowing WHEN Jesus is talking about WHICH LEVEL, is very important, otherwise you will just lump them all together and .... come to some very distorted conclusions.

To understand and accept this DOES REQUIRE that you believe that there ARE multiple sons. Some people refer to multiple souls as mentionedin earlier versions. Or the sonship, which even in edited versions talks about multiple sons. The sonship IS supposed to be a term that refers to MULTIPLE INDIVIDUALS. The sonship is NOT the One Son of God. The sonship IS NOT CHRIST.

If you confuse certain intentions of "which level of identity" Jesus is talking to or about, it will produce huge differences in what you think he means. If he says something which only applies to the One Son, and you think it applies to YOU as an individual, you will become mistaken.

This is what is happening throughout the course community. A kind of rift or difference of opinion, between those who take the course as "all one level talking about me as the only son" versus "multiple levels talking sometimes about me as an individual and sometimes as a shared single identity."

Those who believe the course always is talking at one level, who fail to see the levels or discern when Jesus refers to which identity, WILL come to the following FALSE CONCLUSIONS:

1) "I dreamed everything in the world, it’s all in my mind, therefore if I heal my mind, it will heal everyone else, because they are all part of me." —�- NO. This is only true of the One Son! It is not true of individuals. You as an individual are NOT responsible for what other individuals are experiencing!

2) "I dreamed the world myself"—�- NO. The One Son dreamed the world and you are INSIDE HIS DREAM. You are having an ADDITIONAL LAYER OF DREAMING within his dream.

3) "When the course talks about perception, he is talking about my pecteption." —� NO not always. E.g. When he says "the world IS perception", he literally means, planet earth is part of the perception of the ONE SON. It showing up is the One Son’s dreaming. You, as an individual, have your own INDIVIDUAL PERCEPTION *OF* the Son of God’s perception of a world. There are two levels here.

4) "I need only change my mind about the world to be at peace". —� NO. When you heal your individual perception OF the One Son’s perception, you will wake up IN the dream, but not FROM it. Many gurus have done this. Doing this will still result in death.

5) "If I change my perception, I will be able to transcend sickness." —� NO. If you change your perception of something which you think has been put there by someone else, in order to deal with it, IT will still stick around, proving that the One Son’s mind has not been healed.

6) "God created the world" —� NO. A person WILL come to this conclusion if they do not believe that there is a sonship of many individuals. This is because, somehow, they have to account for what the world IS or how it got there beyond their personal perception. Since they don’t believe there is a separate LEVEL of identity of the One Son, and they think they ARE the one Son at this level of individuality, they MUST conclude that the only identity LEFT who might be responsible for making the world is God! They do not see, that the One Son made the world, NOT their individual self.

7) "If you heal your perception you cannot perceive sickness in another." —� NO. This level confusion comes from believing that you, as an individual, are the one son. This means that everything you see in the world is "part of you". That then means that if sickness is showing up, like a person has cancer or some disease, it must be "part of your mind". And this leads to the conclusion - if I change my mind about this sin I’m seeing, that person will get healed. NO—�- it does not work. That other person is NOT part of your mind. You are an individual, they are an individual, and you both have free will. Believing that you are the one son of God at this level makes you delusional that a) you are responsible for other people’s sickness, b) they are sick because of you, c) if you withdraw your projection they won’t be sick. NOT TRUE. You are having an INDIVIDUAL FALSE PERCEPTION. And so are they. You are not the one son of God at this level. Other people are NOT part of your individual mind. They are part of the One Son’s mind, and that’s NOT your identity right now, not even if you reach true perception.

8) "What I project onto others affects them or is in them, so I need to take back those projections so they will be healed" —� NO. Your projections within the scope of your own individual mind, DO NOT LEAVE YOUR MIND. It only seems that these things are outside of you in another person. You have a belief in sin - an independent belief. Not the one son’s belief. This independent belief splits your independent mind. Your mind then has one area which seems innocent and one area which seems sinful. You will shift your identity to associate with the innocent part, and disassociate from the sinful part. This is internal denial. Your mind is at war with ITSELF. Your identification with the innocent part makes it seem like the sinful part is OUTSIDE of IT, but it is still within YOUR individual mind. You will hallucinate that because it seems "outside me", it is IN or belongs to or is doing something to other people. IT IS NOT. All attack is SELF attack. You NEVER attack others. Your projection DOES NOT leave your mind and go onto them. They HAVE NOT been affected by your projection! And when you take your projection back, it will NOT CHANGE ANYTING in terms of what the other person is experiencing. This is because both of you are individuals. Interpreting this whole part of the course based on the assumption it’s referring to "you" as "the one son" is a huge error.

9) "If I stop identifying with the body I will be free"�— NO. This is part of the belief that the body is there on its own, which is part of the belief that either God or the Son of God made it, and that if you just detach from it you will be free. The body is showing up because YOU AS AN INDIVIDUAL are projecting it. What YOU, as an individual, use the body for, it will become to you, individually. Use it for attack it becomes sick, use it for love it is healed. This is about you as an individual son, not as the one son. You can’t disidentify from something that YOU are responsible for putting there. This includes all sickness in your body. YOU, as an individual son, made sickness and death, and therefore can abolish both.

10) "If I stop projecting sickness I will not see my brother as sick" —� NO. This is the erroneous assumption that everything "out there" is "in you". Therefore that you are the one son, not an individual son. This makes you believe if you correct your false perception of sickness, you will never again be able to SEE that someone is sick. You will think of people as just parts of your own mind, that their sickness is your own, and that therefore YOU need healing. THIS IS FALSE. You can get your individual self to a healed state and be whole as an individual, free of sickness, while other individuals continue to be sick. You will not be blind to their choice to be sick. Because at this LEVEL, they are OUTSIDE OF YOU. They are inside the One Son, yes. But you are NOT the one son at this point. Healing your perception heals YOUR perception, not anyone else’s. Accepting the atonement accepts it for you, it doesn’t force anyone else to accept it. Other people WILL NOT suddenly become cured when you see correctly. True Perception is INDIVIDUAL. You will still see the illusion of sickness other people are projecting, you just won’t believe it is real. People can stay sick in spite of you!

11) "I can be at peace with death" —� NO. You cannot. This suggests death happens regardless of you choosing the truth. Which suggests God is doing it to you. This is not true at ANY LEVEL of identity. If you are going to die, as an individual, it is because you, as an individual, have a belief in death. And it will not affect anyone else.

�—�—�—�

There are other examples but I’m out of oomph right now. We need to be careful to read the course, maybe even re-read it, knowing that there are TWO levels of identity. And we need to discern, when is the course talking about me as an individual, and when is it talking about the entire One Son. At times it talks about perception and seeing in terms of The One Son’s perception, not yours! And we have to recognize, while we’re in bodies, if we’ve awoken to the maximum limits of our individual mind, our individual identity in its most natural whole state, that mind is STILL MUCH SMALLER than the mind of the one son.

The mind of the one son can experience THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE at once. Recognizes that absolutely all individuals are part of itself. Knows that IT dreamed the entire universe. Knows that it has the power to create planets. That One Son’s mind is huge. To awake to THAT mind requires a TRANSCENDENCE OF INDIVIDUALITY where a single son in the sonship unites with God. Just like Jesus did. That happens AFTER you wake up individually in the dream! Becoming the Christ, is another whole level of awakening FROM the dream, that takes place after you as an individual wake up IN the dream. Becoming healed as an individual IS NOT the same thing as becoming Christ! You have to transcend the entire sonship to do that!

For me, the Course makes so much more sense, is much easier to understand, is clearer, more consistent, less confusing, and gives you much more relief of responsibility and guilt if you can recognize that there is MORE THAN ONE LEVEL in what Jesus is presenting. We need to learn the individual level first, then the second level later. That there are two levels in the awakening is clear, evidenced by some individuals who have woken up IN the dream, believe they are done, only to find they are NOT done. They still die. And they still do not perform miracles. Because they did not transcend the sonship yet to return the mind to Christ.

It’s a simple concept that there are two levels of identity. But failing to recognize which identity you have right now, and which identity Jesus is speaking about or when, WILL lead to huge level confusion. And many many false conclusions have come from this.

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

God's miracles are as total as His Thought, because they ARE His thoughts. God shines in them all with perfect light."

In heaven, in God's mind, all of God is in all parts of God. Not just that his left hand is on one side and his right hand is on another, so to speak, but all parts of him are simultaneously in all places.... if we can speak of it in terms of space. This is God's omnipresence. Not just that He is everywhere, but ALL of Him is in EVERY location at once. In this sense, God is kind of a "blur".

Similarly, when God has a thought, this thought is alive. It is a living being. His thoughts produce souls. The thing is, since God is whole, absolute, and omnipresent, when He creates or has a thought, it produces something which is also WHOLE, complete, omnipresent. This leads to the interesting and mind-boggling situation, that there are now TWO WHOLE THINGS. God and His child.

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. ALL His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other because they, were created neither partially nor in part."

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

His children are not partial children. They are not finite children. They are infinite, absolute, complete, whole, eternal, endless, unlimited beings. They are completely whole in and of themselves. Which means God, who is whole, and who is whole in every part of Himself, creates a part (a thought) which itself JUST AS WHOLE as God is. And now there are two wholes.

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is perfectly natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you." (this is holographic - the whole in every part!)

Now, logically speaking, to the ego, this is impossible. It makes no sense whatsoever. How can there be two wholes? But heaven's nature has an attribute unlike spacetime which makes it completely possible. That attribute is the fact that everything OVERLAPS AND IS SHARED.

An analogy in spacetime would be that you literally occupy the same space as another person's body. That your atoms occupy the same space. They literally are right on top of each other, overlaid like two layers in one. This isn't possible in spacetime because it would cause atoms to explode, ie death would occur. But in heaven it's opposite - and life occurs.

God and his children are one, in that they are each a whole in and of themselves, and yet are so united that they SHARE and OVERLAP everything. One soul has all of God, full access, total unlimited complete "ownership" of everything God has. AND so does another soul. And another. And another. Each soul has everything.

In this world it's not possible to share anything because everything is finite. If I give you some pizza I can only give you half otherwise I'll have none for myself. But in heaven this doesn't happen. Both can have the whole pizza simultaneously. This is possible because they truly SHARE everything. They both simultaneously have full total access to everything. We both get the same full pizza. This unlimited sharing is oneness.

This same dynamic is actually what Jesus is referring to as "miraculous". This is the miraculous nature of the soul. It's able to have everything, while also sharing everything with others. And therefore there IS EVERYTHING LEFT for another soul to have everything.

Similarly when God creates you he does not "run out of" himself. Since God gives you everything, ego would say there is no God left over at the end. This is nonsense. God gives everything AND retains everything. He does not diminish by creating, he increases creation. This defies ego logic but is completely true and miraculous.

Actually it's not even possible TO create anything real, generally speaking, because if reality is already whole and infinite you cannot ADD to it. BUT, God HAS added to it, miraculously, not by "tacking on" extra being, but by SHARING HIMSELF. Making room, so to speak, within his own being, that he SHARES WITH His creations, so that no "extra room" is needed.

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

This is only possible in a system where all the creations are sharing fully with each other, therefore overlapping fully, one with each other and cooperative. It doesn't require the cessation of individuality, only the cessation of conflict. Or more to the point, the absence of selfishness, which is the opposite of sharing.

All things that are real, are permanently miraculous. They are miraculous because they defy the strict boundaries, exclusions, boxes, limits and selfishness of the ego's thought system. In heaven it is not a problem for multiple individuals to have everything for themselves at the same time. This is impossible in this world. It was the selfishness and exclusion and attempt to NOT SHARE, that produced the entire ego thought system and all of space and time.

What that means is, in God's holographic thought system, every part of God, every individual being, is just as totally whole as God is, at the same time, without there being any issues of "no room" or "private ownership" or "hoarding" or selfishness. It's all totally shared. Shared so much that you are literally one with all your brothers. You are literally THEM, in a sense, because you SHARE everything with them. Yet you are still two, and are still brothers. There are many children of God who are all one.

What some people are calling a paradox, is actually MIRACULOUS. It's paradoxical to say many individual beings can co-exist and have everything at once. But miraculously they can. God is a miracle worker. "You are a miracle." "God's miracles." "Miracle are a universal blessing from God". God is ENTIRELY MIRACULOUS AT ALL TIMES. And being miraculous - having this nature - of shared minds, equality, oneness with others, is completely natural. It's how we're supposed to be all the time. It's why being a miracle worker is permanent.

This is also why miracles are not mere shifts in perception because the fact is that you are uncovering your PERMANENTLY MIRACULOUS nature. Your soul is always miraculous. You are meant to be miraculous all the time, every day. This is why "miracles are natural, when they are not happening something has gone wrong" and "every day should be devoted to miracles." This is also why Jesus is STILL miraculous even after accepting atonement.

Miracles are not the healing EFFECTS that occur, or the shifts. They are a REMEDY, a cause of healing - a spark of life which resurrects. Healing or shifting is the effect. When you are done shifting, you are STILL miraculous. If shifts were miracles you would stop being miraculous when you reached the atonement. You don't. You are in the process of RETURNING TO being miraculous FOREVER, uncovering your miraculous nature, and resuming the nature of your soul. All beings of light are eternally miracles and eternally miraculous.

"The world was made as "a natural grand division," or a projecting outward of God."

First of all, the use of "OR" here means there are two ways of saying this. A natural grand division is the same thing as a "projecting outward". Which is the same thing also as extension and creation. When God projected outward from Himself he Created "the world". This is the world of heaven, having nothing to do with the physical universe.

"That is why everything that He created is like Him."

So we know that everything God creates is LIKE Him. Like a copy. "Heaven and Earth are opposites in every way" - so we know God did not create Earth.

"Projection, as undertaken by God, is very similar to the kind of inner radiance which the Children of the Father inherit from Him. It is important to note that the term "project outward" necessarily implies that the real source of projection is internal. This is as true of the Son as of the Father."

The clarification here is that what God is, internally, is "distinct" in a NATURAL way, from the "projecting out" (creating) that God performs. His CREATION, is "naturally divided" from Him. This reflects in the idea that God is the FATHER, and His Creation is HIS SON. He is Cause, His creation is Effect.

This is considered a NATURAL division. Because it is natural, it is not alien, it is not an attack, it is not ego, it is not separation, it is not a dream, it is not artificial, it is NATURAL and normal and healthy.

All of God's children (plural - many) inherit this same ability to create which is the ability to radiate outward from their being, to create things which are NATURALLY DIVIDED from themselves, in terms of the relationship of cause to effect. All children are CAUSE of their Creations, which are their effects.

The natural division between Father and Son tells us Father creates the Son, but the Son does not create the father. If there was no "division", the Son would indeed create the father. The Son is INCAPABLE of doing that, because He is the EFFECT of the Father, so He is "divided off" from being able to BE the "Cause of God'. But he Himself inherits Fatherhood abilities, meaning He can "father" (create) His own creations.

To create His own creations he MUST be given free will. God is freedom and God only creates that which is free. If the Father has even ONE Son, that son MUST have FREEDOM. A free will. Bestowing complete freedom upon the Son is basically a MIRACLE, because in a way it means the Son is DISTINCT in His own ability/independence/individuality to Will either WITH the father or to try to will against Him. FREEDOM gives Him that "right" or ability.

"The world, in the original connotation of the term, included both the proper creation of man by God and the proper creation by man in his right mind. The latter required the endowment of man by God with free will because all loving creation is freely given. Nothing in these statements implies any sort of level involvement or in fact anything except one continuous line of creation in which all aspects are of the same order."

There is nothing UNNATURAL about these divisions. Effect is not cause. However God creates so fully and so freely and gives so unconditionally that He gives ALL of His abilities to His Son, endowing Him with both FREEDOM and the ability to CREATE FREELY. As the quote says, this is all in one continuous LINE OF CREATION, in that, the SonS (plural) and THEIR creations (and the creations of their creations etc) are all one simultaneous timeless eternal creation. It has all always been.

That there are NATURAL DIVISIONS, particularly between cause and effect or Father and Son, doesn't necessarily mean that there is anything blocking the Son from being completely equal to and "one with" the Father. There is no "difference" that comes between them. But they are still distinct. They are as close to each other as close can be, to the point where they practically disappear into each other. But they are still divided! Like, they can HUG!

An UNNATURAL division, is what the course refers to as SEPARATION. An unnatural division is unhealthy and incorrect and is an error. It's an artificial division that isn't supposed to be inherent to the nature of Creation. It is a wall, a block, a barricade which attempts to cut off some portion of Creation and keep it in the dark. This is the ego's separations. Divisions in heaven do not keep anyone from SHARING with each other. Ego separations BLOCK SHARING. Every ILLUSION of multiplicity, every ego form of attack, every wall or block or unnatural separation, these are UNNATURAL. This is not the same thing as a NATURAL division.

Heaven has NATURAL divisions. There is a kind of hierarchy of cause and effect: God > Many Sons > Son's Creations > Creations of Son's Creations etc.

Even the idea of God having ONE Son suggests a hierarchy: God > Son. Yet the ego would say, noooooo... can't have heirarchies or any concept of separations or multitudes in Heaven. YES YOU CAN. And they are NATURAL, meaning they are not WRONG to be there, and they are not attacks, and they are not ego.

1. DUALITY - is the idea of "real opposites". That there really is good and evil, black and white, up and down, male and female etc. The differences of objects are believed to be "real" and a first-hand reality. That when you see these things you are looking at reality. They I really am my body, that you really are your body. That there is no unity at all, no connection, no joining, everything really is separate. In the Course, this is equated with "false perception." And in fact Jesus says "the world is false perception", meaning that the physical objects/forms themselves ARE the idea of separation, without which they would not exist at all.

2. NON-DUALITY - the original form of the non-duality idea is that all of the objects present in duality "are there" still, but there is an underlying oneness/unity which joins them all together. It's as if to say, God is a limitless being who is "expressing as" various objects. As if a clock and a chair are "really" one thing, as if joined by a hidden energy field of field of mind. That "all things are one".

In this view, the world, bodies, Earth etc are actually "kept" and still show up and move around seemingly independently etc, but are thought to be all part of one overall single Mind's thinking, or its self expression. As if God is animating the world. As if God Himself is the world or is "in it", like in the background, pulling the strings. In this view, the world is retained but is reinterpreted as "one thing", wherein its various parts and shapes seem only to be separate things when the mind is unaware of the unity it springs from.

That you might in some way "experience it all at once" if an experience of oneness, a kind of transcendent unity in which "you are the airplane" "you are the car" "you are the house". Here, God seems to be in everything you see. This idea is actually not really in ACIM at all. Some people believe it is. But ACIM actually teaches that reality is BEYOND the forms, not AS them, regarding the forms themselves to be illusions regardless of how they are experienced - that even experience as "all one thing" is an illusion. This is often confused with "true perception" which is similar but not the same - in true perception see reality beyond forms, not as "their true nature".

3. PURE NON-DUALITY - as touted by several others, is a progressive form of non-duality, takes the aspect of non-duality that seems to still be "a world" with things happening, and says that all of these worldly things are literally 100% not there. Not even that they are reinterpreted or experienced as "one thing". Not even that you are "experiencing them all at once" - it separates the "oneness" from the "things" entirely and labels the things as absolutely nothing - non-experiencable. In pure non-duality, the idea is that there is "only God", and nothing else. Only the oneness. Seemingly the oneness alluded to by non-duality but dispensing entirely with the world of forms and all objects and bodies and happenings. This does tie in with the Course teaching that "there is no world". Not simply that "the world is one thing" but that it is NOTHING.

A pure state of "only God". Just an expansive eternity is sameness, no change, no movement, no creating, no increase, no individuals, no objects, no forms whatsoever, no differences, no appearances of any kind, just rock solid God on his own. In this view, logically, it should also mean that there is no Son of God and no Holy Spirit. Some people sometimes actually "go there". That we are God. That only mind exists. That even the Son doesn't really exist as anything other than God's radiance, still solely God.

Some have used this to justify that the Holy Spirit does not exist, that Jesus does not exist, etc. It's often associated with the idea of "Oneness". That there is only "one thing". Literally a count of "one". One box, one entity, one being, just God all by Himself. This view ignores creation, sonship, free will, souls etc. This view is really not in ACIM **AT ALL**, but many think it is. It's actually the result of the ego's reasoning, believing that if you remove all separations and get down "one" thing, it must be the final answer about what exists. This essentially boils down to the idea that God is alone and is dead because he is not extending, creating, sharing or loving. He just "is" ("God is"), WITHOUT anything having been created (no sonship, no souls, no creations). It logically becomes the idea that God is dead, because love has to be shared and has to create in order to exist.

4. TRANS-DUALITY - I don't know if there is really a word for this. It takes the idea of pure non-duality, in which there is NO WORLD (only Heaven exists and Earth is not it) but then acknowledges that "God did not will to be alone". That God is a creator. That God loves to ADD to His "solo" reality. That God has in fact created, not just one thing, but a great many things. That the Holy Trinity is real, there really are three parts, and the Sonship (as one of them) actually contains many souls that God created to freely create WITH him. This is much more closely aligned with Christianity.

All of these creations, together "the one son" in ACIM, aka "sonship", are extensions of His mind and being and have been fully created as essentially autonomous entities, with their own minds. However, this is not the same as in duality. In duality these individuals would be cut off from each other, ie separate. In "trans-duality", these entities share everything with each other. AND YET, do not lose their individuality. They share such extensive oneness with each other, you would think there is nothing defining their "self", and yet there is. God has fully created souls. It defies ego thinking. It is miraculous.

In this model, which is really the model of God being a creator who has created a Sonship (and the Holy Spirit) as eternal beings, "The Kingdom of God contains all his children and their creations", these beings are co-creators with God, and have their own creations, which are shared and celebrated by the whole. This is an extraordinary state where everyone shares absolutely everything with everyone else, including God. Total access. Total openness. No selfishness, no exclusion, no ego, no separation ideas, no thoughts of imprisonment or unwillingness or denial.

A family of God, sharing in love endlessly, celebrating and being thankful for having been created, joining with all brothers in a union which seems to transcend their self yet allows them to still have one. "The ego is the idea of selfishness, the soul is the idea of self fullness." It is the miraculousness of the soul that allows it to share everything without ceasing to exist. God created many children who are permanent brothers to each other.

God is a holographic thinker and creator - every part is a whole in its own right. He has created beings, "in number infinite". THIS IS THE TRUE MODEL OF A COURSE IN MIRACLES. It acknowledges God as Father and you as A SON, one of many. This is not non-duality, it is not pure non-duality, it is not duality. It is a state of "many and one" at the same time. It is God's family.

God's system is a system of inclusiveness, which is why all beings He created share everything. It's a system of AND/BOTH rather than the ego's system of EITHER/OR. All children of God are equal, per the Golden Rule, and are brothers. "One brother is all brothers. One mind is all minds." This does not in any way mean there is only one mind or only one brother. Nor does it mean they are not joined as if one. It is a fusion of oneness and many-ness, without contradiction, and with no ego involved whatsoever. It is not a separation idea, is not duality, or non-duality. It is the Creation of an omni-present being who is fully present in all things He creates without limit, making each creation a whole in itself. It is a system of "many wholes", which defies all ego thinking.

This is what A Course in Miracles is teaching. This is reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To have all, give all to all."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Exclusion and separation are synonymous."

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

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

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

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

"the whole Kingdom as literally PART OF YOU."

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

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

God is wholeness, or Holiness. He is the whole of everything, everywhere. There is no lack in Him. He is unlimited and infinite. He is omnipresent. He is the all in all.

"The mark of Wholeness is Holiness"

"God is all in all in a very literal sense. All being is in Him because He IS all Being. YOU are therefore in Him because YOUR being IS His."

Every part of God contains all of God. All of God is everywhere. All of God is shared, within Himself, with all of Himself. All of God has access to all of God. And all of God is God.

"The Will of God is without limit, and all power and glory lie within it. It is boundless in strength and in love and in peace. It has no boundaries because its extension is unlimited, and it encompasses all things because it CREATED all things."

God cannot access anywhere that He does not exist, and there is nothing outside of God. He already exists everywhere, so there is nowhere to be added, and no space to add into.

"Heaven is not a place nor a condition. It is merely an awareness of perfect Oneness, and the knowledge that there is nothing else. Nothing OUTSIDE THIS Oneness, and NOTHING ELSE within."

God cannot create an external space, nor can he add a separate thing outside of Himself. He cannot "tack on" any kind of a creation to the outside of Himself.

The internal nature of God, however, is one of sharing. God fully shares with Himself. He is fully open. He loves Himself, and therefore gives Himself to Himself.

"Nothing that is real can be increased EXCEPT by sharing it. That is why God Himself created you. Divine Abstraction takes joy in application, and that is what creation MEANS."

Within God, within His mind, within His being, there is total unlimited sharing. This sharing is a transcendence of space and time and limitation. It enables God to be a host, and to share Himself by giving Himself.

"Everything He created is given ALL His power because it is part of Him and shares His Being WITH Him."

"Being is known by sharing. Because God shared His Being with you, you can know Him."

"Oneness is simply the idea God is. And in His Being He encompasses all things. No mind holds anything but Him."

"You cannot separate your SELF from YOUR Creator, who created YOU by sharing HIS Being WITH you."

"I am forever host to God."

God wants to give Himself because it is His nature to share everything. This giving is what we call love, or life. It also leads to what we call projection, extension, or creation. Love loves itself.

"God shares His Fatherhood with you who are His Son"

"God shares His function with you in Heaven"

"Divine Abstraction takes joy in application, and that is what creation MEANS."

"projecting outward of God. That is why everything which He Created is like Him."

God is able to share Himself, within Himself, and can extend Himself as what we call Thoughts or Creations. These thought-creations can only occur provided they inherit the whole of God, and in turn share His will to share the whole of themselves.

"Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite, and everywhere without all limit. Only Love creates, and only like Itself."

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind."

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul." "ALL princes INHERIT their power from the Father"

"the Children of the Father inherit from Him"

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

Any thought-creation of God can only share what they are given, and can only give what they inherit. They also must create by sharing, and can only create by sharing, by hosting within their own being.

"By CREATING all things, it made them PART OF ITSELF. YOU are the Will of God, because this is how you were created. Because your Creator creates only like Himself, you ARE like Him."

"accept the Thought of God as its inheritance."

"Perceiving the majesty of God AS your brother is to accept your OWN inheritance."

"The inheritance of the Kingdom is the right of God's Son, given him in his creation."

Creation, therefore, really occurs as a kind of internal expansion, or a giving inward. God shares the whole of Himself, which produces creative thoughts, which must inherit the whole of God, and be wholly like God. "The Father and the Son are not identical, but you CAN say "Like Father, LIKE Son."

"GOD gave you the function to create in eternity."

"God gave Himself to BOTH of you in equal love"

"God GAVE you Heaven"

"God GAVE you all there is."

God also can only share wholly, or fully. He cannot only partially give, or partially create, or partially share. When He shares, He creates wholly, and creates only wholeness. And anything He creates must be completely whole. "Each part you remember adds to YOUR wholeness, because each part IS whole." "which recognizes the wholeness of God's creation and BY this recognition knows its Creator."

"That is the law of God, for the protection of the wholeness of His Son." "God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. ALL His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other because they, were created neither partially nor in part."

This means that any creation of God, any extension of God, MUST be a completely whole creation. It must be fully given, fully established, fully sharing, and fully created.

"This is the ONLY love that is fully given, AND FULLY RETURNED."

"We have also emphasized that man, insofar as the term relates to Soul, has not only been fully Created, but also been created perfect."

This leads to the FULL creation of living thought-beings, ideas of children, which are the living thoughts of God. Each is a miracle, and each inherits absolutely everything from God. Each HAS everything, and IS everything. "You ARE the Kingdom of Heaven"

"You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did."

"God and HIS miracles are inseparable."

Absolute wholeness is passed down and is SHARED by every creation. Therefore, two things become true. 1) Every thought-creation is a completely autonomous being who is a whole fully-created being, and 2) Each being shares AND IS the whole of creation.

"God, who encompasses ALL Being, nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy."

This results in a scenario where each Son of God literally IS God, and is PART of God, and IS EACH OTHER. There can only truly be one whole, which must be shared by EACH whole. And therefore each whole is the one whole. This is what oneness really means.

"The wholeness of God, which IS His peace, cannot be appreciated EXCEPT by a whole mind, which recognizes the wholeness of God's creation and BY this recognition knows its Creator."

"God's wholeness IS the wholeness of his Son."

This means that each Son of God IS the other Sons of God, as well as being an individual Son of God. "Individual" does mean "undivided". And thus each brother is all brothers. And every soul is part of God. And every child of God is every other child of God. And all of them share the same whole - all of themselves - with all the rest.

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

"For your Father wills you to know your brother AS yourself."

"to know your brother IS to know God."

This produces the Sonship, which is the family of God, the Kingdom of Heaven. And having inherited everything from God, as His perfect extensions, each Son of God is a fully created being and has SO much freedom and autonomy that they are established as TRUE co-creators - free-willed "separate" beings.

"the Sonship is your Soul"

"you are part of God, and the Sonship is one"

"in a relationship in which ALL the Sonship is together blessed"

"Think not HE wills to bind you, Who has made you co-creator of the universe along with Him. He would but KEEP your will forever and forever limitless." "If you believe that all of the Souls that God created ARE His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul MUST be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship."

This doesn't merely mean that they just do God's bidding, or that he dangles them like puppets, or that they are slaves to His will. They have been WHOLLY created, and therefore do in fact have free independent will. But remember that, at the same time, this will is ALSO shared with everyone. And to remain free it has to be shared, yet still retain freedom.

"The latter required the endowment of man by God with free will, because all loving creation is freely given."

Blessed with free will, in a sense "free from God", or as "separate beings", individuality has been established. They are individual because they are whole in and of themselves. Yet they are one because they share everything.

"For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my Will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them, and Him Who has created me."

"be reminded of His Son, our holy Self, the Christ in each of us"

"every member of the family of God must return"

They now proceed to naturally share everything that they have, because this is their one nature. They can only share everything because it is by the sharing of everything that they exist at all.

"You HAVE the power to ADD to the Kingdom, but NOT to add to the Creator OF the Kingdom."

"We said before that WHAT you project is up to you, but it is NOT up to you WHETHER to project, for projection is a law of mind."

"Every mind MUST project, because that is how it lives, and every mind IS life."

So in turn they create their own creations by sharing everything and hosting them within their own mind and being, just like and with God. And as such the Kingdom continues to expand internally as a continuous line of extension and creation.

"all loving creation is freely given. Nothing in either of these statements implies any sort of level involvement, or, in fact, anything except one continuous line of creation, in which all aspects are of the same order." "As God's creative Thought proceeds FROM Him TO you, so must YOUR creative thoughts proceed FROM you to YOUR creations."

"YOUR creations belong in YOU, as YOU belong in God. You are part of God, as your sons are part of His Sons. To create is to love. Love extends outward simply because it cannot be contained. Being limitless, it DOES NOT STOP. It creates forever"

"YOUR creations add to Him, as YOU do. But nothing is added that is different, because everything has always BEEN"

Wholeness, within wholeness, shared by the whole, in which each whole is the one whole, and all wholes are one. And yet at the same time, there are many wholes because God constantly shares itself. And all living beings therefore continually create and extend and think and give, and the increase of the Kingdom is endless.

"The Kingdom of God includes all His Sons and their children, who are like the Sons as they are like the Father. Know then the Sons of God, and you will know ALL Creation."

"And BEING loving, they are like the Father, and therefore cannot die."

"A co-creator with the Father must have a Son (your creations). Yet must this Son (your sons) have been created like Himself. A perfect Being, all-encompassing and all-encompassed (by you and your brothers and God), nothing to add and nothing taken FROM; not born of size nor weight nor time, nor held to limits or uncertainties of ANY kind."

"You do not know YOUR creations, because you do not know your brothers who created them WITH you."

"for in him you will find your creations, because he created them WITH you."

The simple fact that God, who is whole, gives the whole of himself, wholly, to wholly create whole beings, who share the whole of himself, alignes exactly with the holographic principle. That the whole is in every part, and every contains and IS the whole, and every part is the SAME whole. And therefore all the wholes are one.

This is why heaven is a truly holographic structure. Not holographic in the sense of 3d projected images - which have nothing to do with holograms. But in the sense that the whole of God is in every creation of God, and every creation of God IS the whole.

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

This is what heaven is like. It is not some singular blob that sits there by itself. It is not just some kind of singular oneness which doesn't create or extend. It isn't populated by God alone. It is not devoid of individuality. Nor is it devoid of relationships or free will. It is host to an entire family of unlimited thought-beings, and every part of it is part of God, and part of you, and of your own spirit-children.

"God, who encompasses ALL Being, nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually"

"Each Soul knows God completely."

"By HIS willingness to share it, He becomes as dependent on you, as you are on HIM."

"God is as dependent on you as you are on Him, because HIS autonomy ENCOMPASSES yours, and is therefore incomplete WITHOUT it."

"TOTALLY dependent on their One Creator for EVERYTHING"

"God and the Souls He created ARE symbiotically related. They are COMPLETELY dependent on each other."

"God created Souls so He could depend on them BECAUSE He created them perfectly."

This is why certain other conceptual models of reality are not a good fit. Traditional ideas of oneness don't quite cut it, because they fail to acknowledge that oneness MUST share itself, MUST extend, and MUST be given to create.

Ideas of non-duality don't cut it either, because God is a creator and HAS to create whole expressions of Himself, forming a divine family. He does not will to be alone, or that you be alone, or that you will beings that are alone. All of heaven is about creation and sharing and openness and inter-dependence.

"the whole family of God, or the Sonship"

"the Holy Family"

"If you created GOD and He created you, the KINGDOM could not increase through its OWN creative thought. Creation would therefore be limited, and you would NOT be co-creators WITH God. As God's creative Thought proceeds FROM Him TO you, so must YOUR creative thoughts proceed FROM you to YOUR creations. In this way only can ALL creative power EXTEND OUTWARD. God's accomplishments are NOT yours. But yours are LIKE His. HE created the Sonship, and YOU increase it. You HAVE the power to ADD to the Kingdom, but NOT to add to the Creator OF the Kingdom."

"The Kingdom is forever extending, because it is in the Mind of God."

"Your gifts TO the Kingdom are like His to YOU."

"God extends outward beyond limits and beyond time, and you, who are co-creators with Him, extend His Kingdom forever and beyond limit."

"And His Sons, who create LIKE Him, follow it gladly, knowing that the INCREASE of the Kingdom depends on it, just as THEIR creation did."

"The Kingdom of God includes all His Sons and their children, who are like the Sons as they are like the Father. Know then the Sons of God, and you will know ALL Creation."

"The Kingdom of Heaven IS you."

"You, too, have a Kingdom which your Soul has created."

"I have a kingdom I must rule."

"God HAS kept your kingdom for you"

"Your Kingdom is not of this world because it was given you from BEYOND this world."

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

"The Kingdom of Heaven is the dwelling place of the Son of God, who left not his Father, and dwells not apart from Him."

"His Kingdom has no limits and no end, and there is nothing in Him that is not perfect and eternal."

"For Christ DOES rise above the ego and all its works, and ascends to the Father and HIS Kingdom."

"The inheritance of the Kingdom is the right of God's Son, given him in his creation."

"My Kingdom is not of this world, because it is in YOU. And YOU are of your Father."

"Because you are all the Kingdom of God, I can lead you back to your own creations"

"What God calls one will be forever one, NOT separate. His Kingdom IS united; thus it was created, and thus will it ever be."

"The Kingdom of Heaven is the right of the Soul, whose beauty and dignity are beyond doubt, beyond perception, and stand forever as the mark of the love of God for His Creations, who are wholly worthy of Him and ONLY of Him. Nothing else is sufficiently worthy to be a gift for a creation of God Himself."

"Salvation must reverse the mad belief in separate thoughts and separate bodies which lead separate lives and go their separate ways."

"And if God created bodies, death would indeed be real."

On the one hand, it seems that people are not the same. That is, if you look at their bodies, their seemingly different personalities, they're all quite different. That's what we think makes everyone unique. But there is really no equality on this level. This is the level of differences, of disagreement, of conflict. Just the mere fact that two bodies are not alike is war.

We then look to higher morals and try to treat everyone the same, with some kind of unconditional love or equality of rights. That someone who is a certain race or sexual persuasion or gender etc might be treated in the same way as any other person. But the fact is that in order to lift up out of the realm of differences into the realm of equality, you HAVE to transcend the body.

We can't be saying that, on the one hand, we are bodies that are for sure all different, while on the other hand trying to find some kind of moral equality, or equal rights, democracy, or whatever. These higher ideals MUST transcend the very fact of the body's variation. It must in fact overlook and defy the very things that make the bodies stand out as unlike each other.

This is why for example if we are to be kind to people who have bodies that seem overweight, then we have to really be looking past the overweightness. And we can't honestly do that if we're looking at the body still, trying to make the body special or sacred or holy or more important or equally important or anything else is really a kind of denial.

You cannot find equality at the physical level. Physical things are NOT equal and never will be. So when we start talking about treating a person of a certain "type" in a fair and equal way to other bodies of other types, we're really trying to have our cake and eat it.

To keep the bodies and identify people as separate objects, while simultaneously deciding that they all deserve the same rights. But this is impossible. The separate and the same cannot be reconciled, nor can the different and the equal. But isn't variety and difference and uniqueness a wonderful celebration of individuality? No it's not.

So then we set about this confused mixture of trying to make all the special separate bodies special in their own ways, exalting them, having marches to support them, rallying to get certain kinds of bodies the same rights as other kinds, but all still entirely focused on bodies and identifying people with physically different objects. And there is simply a total inherent tug of war in that, you cannot be maintaining belief in separate things while claiming to be a proponent of equalism.

The ONLY way that makes any sense and which can produce TRUE unconditionality, is to entirely transcend ALL conditions, all differences, all forms, all shapes and sizes and colors, and every definition of a person as a physical object. You can't keep being a man or a woman and claim to be interested in equal rights. The ONLY way there is equality between the two genders is for them to NOT be two genders. For gender to not matter at all, you can't KEEP gender on the table. You have to look past it.

This means the only way to find any sense of unconditoinality towards anyone, you MUST not regard them as a physical body in any way, to any degree. You cannot make their body extra special, or put the bodies alongside each other and say they are all the same - which is a lie, and you cannot make out that certain bodies are deserving of what other bodies have. That's total insanity.

Only if we are NOT bodies is there equality. Only if we are all identical in every way, created by the same one creator, in the same design, with the same will, sharing the same mind, sharing the same everything together, united singularly under one purpose and one function, can there be equality. This is why there is only true equality in heaven, where the differences of separation and form and conflict and war do not exist.

You CAN "embody" that reality here, to an extent, which is what forgiveness is about. It's about living like you are in heaven while you're on earth, seeing with loving eyes instead of the physical eyes, and using the mind as primal cause instead of the body. And to do that you cannot put any emphasis on the body whatsoever.

You cannot be confused that people are their bodies because this fundamentally denies their soul. You cannot say that somoene is a certain shape or form because now you're separating them out which is in fact an attack. To say that anyone is a body is an attempt to bring them down, to isolate, to condemn, and to accuse of sin. You can't be doing that if you are interested in equality and unconditionality.

Bodies are utterly incompatible with love. They are utterly incompatible with treating everyone the same. The only way to treat everyone the same is to NOT treat them like they are a body, or have a body, or that their body means anything whatsoever. The body is NOTHING. It has no real value or meaning and isn't even real.

To regard a person as a body is to believe a fantasy about them and to NOT see them. Bodies are disguises, a form of camouflage, which people who want to hide from God wear to pretend they are physical objects. You won't find any true sense of trust or meaning or purpose or function or value or reality by regarding people as human bodies, or by trying to reconcile their utter incompatibilities by pretending they're all the same.

Bodies will never be the same, every single one of them is unlike the rest. And if you believe people are their bodies, you are literally denying them equality. Gay bodies, straight bodies, male bodies, female bodies, trans bodies, autistic bodies, tall bodies, skinny bodies, large bodies, short bodies, they are NOT the same, and they are NOT TRUE OF ANYONE.

"While you believe that BODIES can unite, you will find guilt attractive, and believe that sin is precious."

"He will, in fact, be unable to recognize his brother at all, for his Father did not create bodies, and so he is seeing in a brother only the unreal."

"Yet, in the dreaming, has this been reversed, and separate minds are seen as bodies, which ARE separated, and which cannot JOIN."

"Communication MUST have been restored to those that join, for this they COULD not do through bodies."

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

God created you as a holy child of God. He gave you an individual soul with a mind and a free will. God has many creative children, forming the family of God.

"The soul is the idea of self fullness." It's the idea that you are fully a self, and that the whole of your soul/self is shared with the fullness of the Kingdom of God.

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

The idea of separation is simply an idea of denial. It's an attempt to deny and block reality. In a way, it's an attempt to disown what you are. Its a refusal to accept yourself as God created you. It's an attempt to NOT will, moving into unwillingness and imprisonment.

This means, "the ego" is not really the production of an additional self, or the manufacture of a first-and-only self. It is in fact the idea of NOT HAVING A SELF. It is self denial.

The ego is also the attempt to not be yourself. Being a denial of your soul, it's a withdrawal away from the awareness of what you are. As a rejection of light, this throws you into what seems to be the illusion of darkness.

Generally speaking, your soul is infinite and unlimited. It is everywhere, like God, sharing all of existence with Him. God occupies all "space" in the Kingdom and so does your soul in an "overlapping", sharing union.

In the idea of denial of self, you become withdrawn from being everywhere. You attempt to isolate yourself, to not share, to close down, to possess some small part of yourself which you claim is yours alone and NOT shared with the rest. It's the idea of having something exclusively yours which is unique and different and not accessible to anyone else.

This really is the idea of selfishness, the desire to have something special that no-one else has.

"The ego is the idea of selfishness." An idea of selfishness is NOT the idea of A SELF, it's the idea of a self having a poor attitude and not wanting to share with others.

But we have to frame this correctly. The ego is not a self. The ego is the idea of what you are NOT. It's the idea of NOT HAVING a self. It only SEEMS to be "a something" that you made, when in fact it is NOTHING. The belief that it has existence IS a state of deception, believing illusions are true. The ego is NOT really a self at all.

The ego, or egotism, is really the idea of self destruction, which is why the entire system of thought is centered on and leads towards death - the destruction of your self.

In death you are attempting to finish off the intention of becoming completely unwilling to exist. This is a selfish act. And it is there that the so-called ego reaches its climax. In essence, by trying to be selfish, a soul/mind tries to have private ownership, and ends up losing everything instead.

So it's not so much that we really made an ego. We didn't really invent a separate self. We didn't start out with no self and come up with a new self. We HAD a self before the separation and WILL have a self afterwards. Every soul that God created has individuality and eternal life.

The problem is not a matter of whether or not you have a self or are an individual being. The problem is a matter of whether you are willing to SHARE EXISTENCE with all of the rest of creation.

To be the fullness of the soul, you have to expand infinitely and unlimited. You have to be open to allowing access to YOU by everyone else, and to have access to everyone else. To join minds, to share all that exists, you cannot be closed off, isolated, excluded or imprisoned.

So by "going into egotism", we basically "made an ego" but only in the sense that we really did NOT create anything. Th ego has not been created, and in fact it does not exist at all. Not only is the ego the idea of what you would be if you did not exist, it also does not exist. In essence, "the separate self" is total fiction and DOES NOT EXIST. The belief that you ARE IT, is a mistaken belief and needs correction.

So you really can't be the ego, but you can believe you are. You can't be not yourself, but you can pretend to be. You can't lose your soul, but you can think you gain the whole world and lose it all anyway. You can't stop being as God created you, but you can dream of being something you're not.

The ego isn't the idea of a self. It's not a separate self. It's the idea of NOT a self, of NO self. An illusion that appears o be a something, but is a nothing. Believing that the ego is a self, or that you have an ego, is an upside-down belief. It suggests that in reality there is no self, and in illusions there are selves. This is an EGO perspective, having bought into the illusion that the ego state is a state of existence, not recognizing it as NON existence.

If you think that awakening means the end of self, due to the end of ego, you are thinking upside down. Selves ONLY exist in the Kingdom of God, NOT in the world of illusions. All illusory selves DO NOT exist, all REAL selves do exist.

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

The Kingdom of ego death contains NO selves. Selves attempting to destroy themselves and ending in death.

This world of ego perspectives is merely a world of pretend selves, blocking and covering up the world of real selves. Trying to end self is just another extension of the ego's suicidal approach resulting in SELF DENIAL. Rejecting the soul results in death, not life. The ego does need to be "let go", but since it was never who you were to begin with, this is a loss of NOTHING. You give up nothing, to gain everything.

Recognizing that this no-self does not exist, and that you are the self God created, is the atonement. The ego doesn't have to "die" because it never existed in the first place. All we really need to do is stop pretending to be OTHER than the self that God created, or opposed to our self in any way.

Jesus also clarifies that our sense of self will EXPAND as we awaken. It will expand to INCLUDE all of the brothers and creations that we tried to deny. And it will expand to include the infinite immortal soul that you forgot is who you really are.

Losing the ego isn't the end of you. It's a return to your self. It's a reclamation of your immortal identity - still a God created you.

The separate self is really just the idea of being a SEPARATED self.. a self that had a self before the separation, which BECAME separated due to a lack of sharing, and will RESUME sharing and cease being separated after the atonement. This is why Jesus refers to such selves as "separated ones", NOT "separate ones". Just because you are separated does not mean you throw out your self when the "separateness" ends.

Awakening is a return to your real self. An acceptance that you are as God created you. A remembering of your soul.

"NOTHING can prevail against a Son of God who commends his Spirit into the hands of His Father. By doing this, the mind awakens from its sleep, and the Soul remembers its Creator. All sense of Separation disappears, and level confusion vanishes."

"Separation" does not mean that which allows there to be many. It means that which keeps many things from sharing anything.

"God who encompasses all being nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually and want to share it to increase their joy."

We are all permanent beings in the heart of God.

"The ego is the idea of selfishness."

At the very foundation of the entire ego thought system is the idea of selfishness. But more accurately, it is the idea of not sharing. It's an idea of being exclusive, the ownership of something which is considered "yours alone", and inaccessible to others.

"You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did."

God's Kingdom was set up so that everyone has everything. And this goes way beyond the kind of sharing that you experience on a physical level. In Heaven, every being has literally 100% of everything. Everyone has full access, simultaneously, to the totality of all that exists. Even your SELF is shared with everyone, as are all your creations.

This is oneness. And just because one person has full access to everything it does not shut out access to anyone else, there is no limitation, no compromise, no partitioning, no need to only access part of everything, and there is no private ownership. In reality is it possible for everyone to have everything always. You ARE everything always.

The entire idea of the ego is the idea of not sharing in this way. It's the idea of exclusivity. It's an attempt to own some portion of reality that you can call "yours alone", protected and fenced off by some kind of wall (such as the body), so that not only is your prized possession kept isolated inside the walls (such as within the body), but everyone else is also kept outside the walls (such as outside the body).

The desire not to share, is the entire basis of the separation. The ego is built on it. And this means that any attempt to have something for yourself that you want others NOT to have, or anything which is true of you and not true of them, or any sense of inequality of any kind, produces egotism. And this egotism is essentially SELFISHNESS.

The result of this selfishness is that you experience yourself as being fenced into a prison, ie the body. You see yourself as though everything which is "yours" is inside the prison. And everything outside the prison is not yours. In turn, you see that you are the only one allowed access to what is inside the prison walls, meaning that you experience yourself as being entirely alone within its confines.

This leads to the perception of yourself as though you are inside a body, you are the only one inside the body, the body is your private property, no other mind shares your body with you, you are alone and lonely and trapped inside of it, and the body's walls defend your hoard from the rest of the sonship.

This is how most people experience their sense of identity. That they are a single isolated "separated self", living within prison walls, everyone else is "outside" the walls, and nothing is shared across this boundary. The body acts then as a separation device, keeping them out and keeping you in, so that what is yours within is yours alone and your private possession.

"The body is clearly a device for separation"

From here, of course, upon seeing oneself as special, with a deeply rooted selfishness, a desire to be given special favor by God, and seeing oneself as excluded (separated) from sharing the Kingdom (exiled), so-called "relationships" with others take on the form of what we call special relationships. Basically this means that relating to others is always tainted with elements of selfishness, elements of exclusivity, elements of ownership or possession, and attempts to control and manipulate.

You see, a selfish self, ie a self that is "being selfish", has to believe that something is owned by others that it does not have access to. By cutting itself off from sharing it is able to believe in something privately hoarded and exclusive to it, but to do this it MUST also believe that others own something that it is excluded from. So now others are seen as hoarding privately hidden secret "stuff" that the selfish self wants and is jealous of, and so begins the attempts to wrestle it from others through what ultimately becomes attempted control and murder.

This is outlined in the "laws of chaos". Having seen yourself as an excluded, exclusive self, whose value is special and whose importance and truth is unequal to others, you believe other people also have something "special" locked up inside their bodies. And now you will seek to enter into relationship of some manner with them, to try to steal from the inside of their body the secret treasure that you believe should be yours.

So long as you lack what they have, you will feel an emptiness and a compulsion to steal it from them - a sense of "need" or neediness, in which you will make demands of them and place conditions on the relationship. This of course leads to conditional love and various forms of bargaining and betrayal. It can even become violent and lethal if it is strongly perceived that the other has what you significantly lack, is therefore guilty of stealing it from you, that you are justified in any action to retrieve it, and being denied it is a slap in the face that compels revenge.

All elements of this special way of relating stem from the foundation of the whole system of thinking. It all starts with this deeply rooted sense of selfishness, leading to isolation, leading to specialness and special relationships, and ultimately death.

The fundamental ONLY problem therefore is the unwillingness to share. The unwillingness to be equal. The consideration of one's own selfish made-up needs above and beyond the freedom and wishes of others. As you become presented with your own selfishness staring you in the face, you will learn to move past it and to start considering what other people want, on their terms, per their own choice, regardless of any "special interests" that you have. Once their interests become untainted by your selfishness, your interests become shared.

I should comment briefly that being "not selfish" does not in any way mean having no self, nor does it mean self sacrifice, or putting others first and you last, or any other form of inequality. It does not mean getting rid of your identity or individuality. All it means is changing your attitude, so that you are now SHARING EQUALLY with everyone, rather than isolating, excluding, or seeing to "get" something of special value "just for yourself".

"You cannot enter into real relationship with any of God's Sons unless you are willing to love them all AND equally."

Essentially our entire journey to undo the ego is simply to undo our selfishness. We have to look at this. We may be far more selfish than we want to admit to, or in ways that we had not realized. We may be more controlling than we'd like to admit. We may be claiming to put the interests of others first while secretly having needs or wants that depend on others fulfilling us in order for us to be satisfied.

To be not selfish might be what some (with ego thinking) would call the opposite - selflessness - but this can be misleading. We are not aiming here to have no self. We are aiming to SHARE, which some would refer to as joining in holy relationship. To truly think of others interests is to acknowledge that you have no needs that are interfering with being of service to them.

It means allowing and letting go and giving up controlling them. It means seeing them free from the tyranny of your control, dominance, interference, manipulation, selfish neediness, inferiority, superiority, judgement and specialness. The relinquishment of specialness is the relinquishment of selfishness.

This actually restores you to the fullness of your self, because by sharing everything you also share in all of yourself, and share all of yourself with others. You literally tried to steal yourself from God and keep it hidden. We have to open back up to allow God in and to let ourselves be visible and accessible to others, sharing fully with them and extending love with them. This is essentially a reunion with your own soul, in which all God's children share.

"The soul is the idea of self fulness."

The idea of non-duality is an attempt to describe reality or the nature of God. What is really real and really exists. At first we have the idea of duality or polar opposites. Then we reach the idea that the world is secretly "all one thing", as though all the objects are connected together by a singular "one" something.

Then we're presented even further with the idea that if we're being really "pure" about it, the forms and objects really don't exist at all, and the "oneness" beyond them is all that really exists, ie God. In this model of "pure non-duality", there is no world", and this is what SEEMS to correlate to SOME of what ACIM says. This usually leads to conclusions such as "oneness" as in "a count of one something", "its all God", "it's all mind" etc.

So various people took up the idea that ACIM is pure non-duality. But this has some problems. Let's put it this way - the idea is not pure enough. Because if this is a logical concept and we're trying to get down to the purest essence of "what is", usually you'll find that the pure non-duality folk will ACCEPT that "God has one son". There's a lot of material about God having a son - "The Son of God". And while this is accepted, it's not actually pure.

How can God have a son, at all, if there is only God? How can you even label some aspect of God - like his "radiance", as "a son"? God would not be able to have parts, or aspects, or anything you can ever attach a label too. Not even in the most vague of ways. Some people like to try to get around this by suggesting that the Son of God is so joined to God that there is nowhere he ends and God begins... while STILL keeping somehow in their minds this loose idea that SOMEHOW, you can still point a finger at this "part of God" and call it God's Son. THAT is still not pure. It's a bandaid attempt to explain it.

The problem is that if you get really pure about it, and we remove all sense of separations, divisions, multitudes, labels, parts and aspects etc... and we REALLY boil it down to "one thing" as in the traditional idea of "oneness" (the ego's idea of purity), we end up with .... there literally is only God. And that means God, sitting there ALONE, by Himself, WITHOUT a Son, without a sonship, without any creations or thoughts, just totally alone, no-one to share with, nothing to communicate with, just complete a total loneliness. THAT, actually, is the purest possible interpretation of "pure" non-duality. That "there is only God" all by Himself and he doesn't even have a Son at all. Not even one.

But many people will not want to "go there" because to suggest there isn't even one Son flies in the face of a lot of ACIM material. And certain popular teachers have taught for a long time that a) there is only one thing but b) a slight exception is made for there being a single son. This sort of hybrid mishmash of logical concepts has been quite widely accepted as a correct mapping to what ACIM is saying. One God + One Son, who is God, but isn't, but is. It's a bandaid and not logically pure nor does it match what the Course itself says.

The fact is, if there is truly this "oneness" in which there are not "many" of anything, in an effort to avoid "duality", there is **no son** there whatsoever. Not even as an aspect or expression or radiance or thought or part of God. And that leads also to the super watered-down conclusion of "it's all God" ie "there is nothing else". And that conclusion by itself has problems because e.g. the Course speaks of how a) God does not will to be alone and b) God is a creator and c) God has at least one Son and d) God created the Holy Spirit and e) God created angels and f) the Son has his own creations as well. Which is shaping up to be a lot of "parts", a lot of "somethings" that are sufficient enough to say there isn't "just" God there - that there HAS BEEN an act of creation. That something has been ADDED TO reality.

There is also an issue of freedom. If everything in reality is God and God is just being God in all of His ways, then there is no freedom in which any part or aspect has any free will. There is no way that you as a Son of God can dream of exile. There is no way that anything can occur without it being God doing it Himself, directly. And any idea of a Son must really be an idea of some kind of PUPPET that God is manipulating that has no mind or life or will of its own - no freedom at all. Which really runs counter to what Jesus tells us of the Son of God, free will, the ability to choose and the separation seeming to happen.

If you also blob it all together and say "its all God" then you end up with the alarming scenario that God therefore MUST be dreaming of exile, God must have invented the illusion of death, God is REALLY cruel, and God has attacked himself. This renders God insane, and that just isn't acceptable. Because if God could go off the rails, there is no way He would ever return to sanity, and all of existence would vanish.

It is vital that there be some kind of freedom between God and the Son in order for God NOT to be pulled into insanity along with His Son's dreaming. Free Will is absolutely vital in order to prevent this. But to have free will means, you guessed it, there MUST be a kind of "independence" or individuality, in which the Son CAN, if He so chooses, try to will against God. And this is based on the fact that God is the CAUSE of His Son, His Son is the EFFECT of Him, and God has given His son FREEDOM to SHARE His freedom with Him, or deny it. Either way, without freedom there is no free will and no son at all.

There is also another major problem with non-duality. God by His nature is love and love MUST be given. Unless it is given ie shared, it does not extend or shine and so becomes essentially lifeless. IT MUST go out and create. If God has no son, there is nothing TO love or to SHARE it with. And so love cannot love. And this means, ultimately, logically, that God is dead because He isn't LOVING. This again is unacceptable as a conclusion. God can't be dead or unloving. But to be alive, GOD MUST CREATE, so we must accept God has created ADDITIONAL BEINGS in a state of freedom.

And this is the key part that non-duality shits all over. Regardless of the fact that it destroys the sonship and ignores God's creations, it basically denies that God CREATES at all. It's the idea that God is just sitting there alone twiddling his thumbs. And this means He is not creating a son, not even one. It means there is no Kingdom. No Heaven. No HOME for the Son of God. No inheritance. It means the denial that God has a family. It denies that God's SON is a creator, AND it denies that God's son has created children. It's not conceptually a good FIT for ACIM's metaphysics.

So non-duality basically suppresses the MANY thought creations of God, denies many aspects of REALITY, and overthrows the Kingdom. It kills off God, puts a stop to Creation, eradicates sharing, makes it impossible for God to create many children, and interprets the Sonship as a collection of egos. Now, WHO exactly do you think comes up with such a concept of "what reality is like"? THE EGO. These are the EGO's conclusions, non-duality is an EGO CONCEPT, and like all ego concepts it actually NEGATES what is true and cancels or denies reality.

All non-duality models are the ridiculous FALSE conclusions that the ego comes to when trying to understand something TOTALLY BEYOND the ego. Something whose nature is NOTHING LIKE the ego, and so the ego is utterly clueless as to its nature. Non-duality is not really an attempt to define or describe reality, it's an attempt to destroy it.

At best, and only loosely, non-duality MIGHT describe "God Himself", if you could isolate Him and say, God is one whole being, PRIOR to creation. But beyond that, in terms of God being a CREATOR, who HAS CREATED CHILDREN, it totally falls flat on its face. There is no sonship without creation. Non-duality is Kingdom-denying. Reality IS NOT a state of "its all God" or "its all mind". It's all God AND God's creations AND their creations. Because you can ADD TO REALITY, reality cannot be non-dualistic.

"HE created the Sonship, and YOU increase it. You HAVE the power to ADD to the Kingdom, but NOT to add to the Creator OF the Kingdom."

"God created His **Sons** by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. ALL His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other because they were created neither partially nor in part."

"You should know that all God's children are fully worthy of COMPLETE courtesy."

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

"And we, God's children, rise up from the dust and look upon our perfect sinlessness."

But let's back up a moment. The Course DOES say that there is only God. It DOES say God has one Son. It DOES say there is only one mind (Christ mind). It DOES speak of oneness. "Into eternity where all is one" "I and my father are one" "God has but one son" etc. And that *seems* to support the idea that "its all God". But here's the thing. IT IS all God, it IS all "one", BUT.... THERE IS **ALSO** CREATION. And all created BEINGS are LIKE God, share with God, are one with God (of the same nature, joined to Him), yet have THEIR OWN FREEDOM.

God HAS created a family of beings. God IS a creator. God DID create at least one son. SO non-duality is out the window. Reality is not some giant expanse of singularity. It's more like a womb in which God has given birth to creations, WITHIN His own being, and has given them FREEDOM. Living, whole-minded, willfully free beings. Children of God. And if that makes you uncomfortable because it "does not compute" or "it sounds like duality", too bad. It is what it is and its your job to accept it.

It's not the same thing as duality. Duality means the localization of parts which are split off and kept separate by NOT SHARING with each other, confined and isolated and different. Duality is the nature of space and time, where nothing shares. Non-duality is the idea of the opposite of that - that the differences are illusions and everything is one thing. But that too is not accurate. Reality isn't some "state" where God is contemplating his navel. Reality isn't like duality even with its many parts because they STILL are all "one" AND YET also many. And each part SHARES with all the rest and IS EVERYWHERE. "One mind is all minds."

Love is EXPRESSIVE. "Divine abstraction takes joy in application." "God did not will to be alone." And as such God has gone BEYOND the concept of "there's only one thing there". God has CREATED children. He has ADDED to existence, and your function is to add to it further. That's not non-duality by a long shot. Nor is it duality (spacetime where things are separated and limited).

God has created a Kingdom. A home for His Sons. Who are one, but many. This is what's miraculous and ego defying. Because of SHARING ("nothing real can be increased, except by sharing"), God has "made room" for beings within Him who share with Him FULLY (oneness) but who STILL retain their own souls. The soul has been FULLY ADDED to existence.

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

After the ego is undone, after the separation has ended, after the universe has disappeared, after all divisions and artificial UNNATURAL separations are gone, when duality is no more... the children of God WILL REMAIN children of God, just as they were BEFORE the separation.

"I am as God created me".

"The Holy Spirit promotes healing by looking beyond it to what the children of God were before healing was needed, and will be when they have been healed."

"The Voice of the Holy Spirit is the Call to Atonement, or the restoration of the integrity of the mind. When the Atonement is complete ***and the whole Sonship is healed*** there will be no Call to return. But what God creates (Holy Spirit) is eternal. The Holy Spirit will remain with ***the Sons of God***, to bless ***their creations*** and keep them in the light of joy."

A Course in Miracles is NOT non-duality. It only loosely teaches that "its all ONE" or "we are all one". That's TRUE. We're woven from the same cloth. BUT, it's not the WHOLE truth. We are ONE, BUT, God as the Oneness has created many of us WITHIN His being. And this is NOT contradictory to God, only to the ego. It is miraculous. And this is because God is MIRACULOUS. He HAS done what seems impossible to the ego. He HAS created a Kingdom filled with souls, beings of light, who share everything together as one united family, WITHOUT destroying reality and without fragmenting existence.

"God, who encompasses all being, NEVERTHELESS (regardless of whether you like this or it makes sense) created **separate beings**, who have everything **individually** and want to share it to increase their joy."

In God's Kingdom, each individual being is also all of the other beings. There is a shared oneness. Everyone is everyone.

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds. Such is the truth." "The Sonship is your soul."

Each brother or Son of God actually IS the other brothers, while still being multiple brothers. It is correct to then say, you are the whole sonship. And also, that other person you know, they are also the whole sonship. And everyone in the world, is the whole sonship. And each one of them individually, is each other, as the whole sonship. This is the natural arrangement of the family of God, where every child of God is one with all other children of God.

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

In the physical world however, bodies were constructed as separation devices. Their purpose was to SPLIT OFF each child of God and prevent them from being one with each other. The body then acts like a prison cell with walls, keeping the whole rest of the sonship out, and locking you inside in isolation. This denies that you share ANYTHING with anyone, and asserts that there is NO oneness.

To enter into the bodily state, you enter into the ego thought system of sin and death. And the body is an expression of the idea of sin and death. "The body is clearly a device for separation"

"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master."

Once you're in a body, or have identified with a body, or see yourself as less than the whole sonship in any way, you confine yourself to a little tiny speck in space and time, wrapped and trapped in a body, kept apart from everyone else.

This makes you feel alone, and also as though you are the only person inhabiting your body. And everyone else's bodies are only their own bodies, and no-one shares bodies. And indeed there are vast distances between bodies, to ensure they never meet. And even when the two bodies meet, the two people are still alone and separate and do not really touch each other, inside-to-inside.

Such was the physical world made and arranged, so that bodies would act as separation devices to keep everyone apart. To exclude and isolate and make everyone seem different and unequal. The body was designed to always be different, unfamiliar, unalike, and unrecognizable. Such that they turn all brothers into seeming strangers.

Essentially bodies are expressions of the idea of having NO RELATIONSHIPS with others, no connection, no sharing, and no communication. You can't be related to something you're different from.

"Everything the ego perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships that imply BEING."

"You cannot enter into REAL relationship with ANY of God's Sons, unless you love them all, and EQUALLY."

"If you single out PART of the Sonship for your love, you are imposing guilt on ALL your relationships, and MAKING them unreal."

You see a body that you don't remember and you think you never met them before, even though all brothers are part of God's original family. And then it seems like you have to "get to know" people, as if you are starting out with no knowledge of them and have no clue who they are. You ask their name and where they are from and what they do, only because you've been estranged from them for so long you don't even know anything about them.

"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."

This is incredibly unnatural. This is the opposite of the nature of the sonship and the reality of heaven. Everyone's unity, everyone's shared nature, everyone's oneness, the fact the each son of God is all sons of God and the one son of God is hidden completely by bodies. Bodies pull the sonship apart and confine them in containment and limitation, isolate them away from each other and don't allow them to share anything.

This was the original intended purpose of the body, to produce slavery to the ego, to worship and exalt the very prison that keeps you bound, and to anchor you in spacetime so that you'll die along with it.

"What could the purpose of the body Be BUT specialness? And it is this that makes it frail and helpless in its own defense. It was CONCEIVED to make YOU frail and helpless. The goal of separation is its curse."

If you look at society in general you'll see that this is a prevalent experience. Everywhere you look there are expressions of individuality in the sense that, each person is their body, and is not another body. The law of the land looks to what one body does to another. You are held responsible for your body's actions, but not those of others. And everyone thinks in terms of "only me".

My house, my car, my food, my television shows, my toys, my bed, my kitchen, my toilet, my day, my life, my separate isolated experience, my unique loneliness, my exclusive specialness, my self-interests, my my me me my my me me. This is the selfishness of the ego thought system, physicalized as bodies. Bodies designed to prevent the sons of God from recognizing or sharing with each other.

We can, however, re-purpose the prisons that the we made in the separation, and use them to help us to transcend the prisons. We can use the body to increase communication, and that doesn't mean to increase talking it means to extend the mind beyond the body's limits and beyond limits of "a solitary identity", beyond exclusion and specialness, to a much broader inclusiveness of everyone.

We can use the body for a higher purpose, but note that the body IS STILL a prison no matter how you use it. It will always be a limit on love. It will always confine and separate and have limited senses. It cannot ever see reality through its eyes and it will not ever enter heaven. So we should be careful to think the body can turn into a physicalization of the freedom of spirit, or that it can be truly holy. But it can serve a holier purpose, within the limits of what it is capable of.

To transcend the body is the body's higher purpose. To use the body to learn that you are not a body. To use the body to render the body unnecessary. To use the very device of separation against itself, so that we move past the body's limits. In this view the body actually is recognized as having NO FUNCTION.

"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."

In effect, the body and its limits needs to get out of the way. In fact a holy relationship should be a way of actually relating BEYOND the body, transcending its limits, mind-to-mind, soul-to-soul, and physicality shouldn't even enter into and need not even be a part of the relationship. The mind needs to learn to extend through the body to join with other minds, beyond their bodies. So that we can recognize again our shared oneness. This is why "miracles unite you with your brother."

"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."

Our challenge then is to learn how to ignore the body's imposed limits, transcend its boundaries through transcendental vision, move the mind through and beyond it to join with other minds, overlook all physical objects of spacetime which were designed to keep everyone separate, and rejoin the sonship. Not just to return to being a member of the collective mind, but to learn to recognize YOU ARE EVERYONE, and NOT just this one little tiny body self.

"Nothing the body's eyes seem to see can be anything but a form of temptation, since this was the purpose of the body itself. Yet we have learned that the Holy Spirit has another use for all the illusions you have made, and therefore He sees another purpose in them. To the Holy Spirit, the world is a place where you learn to forgive yourself what you think of as your sins. In this perception, the physical appearance of temptation becomes the spiritual recognition of salvation."

"Yet what makes them God's teachers is their recognition of the proper purpose of the body. As they advance in their profession, they become more and more certain that the body's function is but to let God's Voice speak through it to human ears. And these ears will carry to the mind of the hearer messages which are not of this world, and the mind will understand because of their Source."

"Everyone can use his body best by enlarging man's perception, so he can see the real VISION. THIS VISION is invisible to the physical eye. The ultimate purpose of the body is to render itself unnecessary. Learning to do this is the only real reason for its creation (the only re-purposing of it after it was made)."

"For everyone is seeking to escape from the prison he has made"

"You ARE the Kingdom of Heaven, but you have let the belief in darkness enter your minds, and so you need a new light."

"The Kingdom of Heaven IS you."

In Heaven, God's thought system entails profound sharing. Each part of the system contains the whole of the system. It is holographic. This is how God thinks.

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

"The whole power of God's son lies in all of us, but not in any of us alone. God would not have us be alone because God does not will to be alone."

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

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

"Every part is a container of the whole."

In that system, each child God created as a whole, producing multiple wholes, SHARES the whole of creation. That means, you have total access to *everything*, to experience it fully as if it were your own, while simultaneously EVERY other child is doing the same.

The key principle of Heaven, and Creation, is sharing. And so multiple children of God SHARE one mind, and that one mind is the "one son of God". Yet there are many children. Sharing is like "overlapping", literally co-existing in the same space. Your mind is plugged into the whole like how your computer is plugged into the internet and shares the internet with everyone else.

Before the separation idea there were ALREADY multiple individuals. There were already multiple children, who were so UN-SELFISH, that they were willing to SHARE everything with everyone. No-one wanted to be special or to have exclusive access to anything. Everyone was willing to ALLOW all of the others to share everything, themselves, and all that exists. It is the total absence of ownership. It is communal.

When the separation idea occurred, these pre-existing, eternally existing beings, decided to try to seek special favor from God. The idea was that they wanted to have something EXCLUSIVE, just for them, which the others did not have. They wanted to be SPECIAL. They wanted God to give them something which ONLY they had, and which others lacked. They wanted to be better than others. They wanted to be SELFISH. They wanted to find a way to shut out everyone else, to NOT SHARE ANYTHING, and to have something to call "just my own".

This produced a state in which souls, who were many prior to this, surrounded themselves with walls and barricades to try to "shut out" and EXCLUDE, "access", which all other souls had shared with them up to that point. Because even your own soul is something to be shared, you tried to not allow yourself to be shared WITH others. You put up a fence around your mind, to serve two functions: to keep them out, and to keep you in. This way you could fence off a tiny part of yourself and regard it as "exclusively mine", and stop everyone else from SHARING it directly.

In so doing, you withdrew from the collective shared experience of the sonship, you STOPPED SHARING, you went off into a corner and pouted by yourself, you attacked God and your brothers to try to keep them from sharing with you, and you created this illusion that you occupy a little space where NO OTHERS share with you, some kind of autonomous self-owned, self-run, isolated, personal PIECE of the whole, that you wanted to call your own SPECIAL self.

"Everything the ego perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships that imply sharing."

Doing this made you "alone". By trying to not share with anyone else, you stopped the RELATIONSHIPS that come with sharing, you closed the doors on your mind, you prevented access, and you said to the rest of the sonship "stay away, this is my castle and you can't come in." So then you find yourself pulling away from infinity, narrowing down, confining, withdrawing, isolating, imprisoning yourself, into a small tiny area of littleness, and that manifests as the condensing of thought into a BODY. A human body. Which is "a device for separation."

This body will then represent the idea that because you HAVE something exclusive that your BROTHERS do not have, you are now DIFFERENT to them. And this is also why every body is NOT THE SAME, on purpose. It's the idea of being UNLIKE anyone else, not equal, and unlike God. The body keeps all of creation OUT, and traps you IN, so that you can pretend there is some part of existence that is EXCLUSIVELY YOURS.

*THIS*.... is what it means, to have a separate self. It's got NOTHING to do with you being a self or not. It's got nothing to do with the fact that God created MANY SONS prior to the separation, which will CONTINUE after the atonement. It's got nothing to do with you being an individual. It's ONLY got to do with you attempting to NOT SHARE ANYTHING, within a realm where the total sharing of eveything is completely natural for all beings.

"The ego is the idea of selfishness. The soul is the idea of self-fullness."

So by trying to be SELFISH, in the midsts of a SHARED COMMUNITY, to stop communion, to stop communication, to take up arms against your brother, to PUSH OTHERS AWAY, and to try to EJECT them from your own shared experience, so that all that seems to be LEFT is you, THAT is the ego. That is what it means to be "separate". That is the separation IDEA. That's what the course means BY separation.

"Separation", as a word or term, does NOT MEAN, "there are many". It does NOT MEAN, "The presence of multiple brothers is an ego idea." It does NOT MEAN "there can only be one son." The fact there are many WHOLES who are HOLY, is NOT a problem whatsoever in reality. It is NATURAL. It's is God's Will. That you have a self, an individuality, is NATURAL. This has NOTHING to do with the tiny mad idea or separation from God. The separation is ONLY to do with you trying to STOP SHARING, in a realm where sharing is totally natural, prevalent, and something that everyone is doing.

It is not the creation of "a separate self", as if there was NO SELF before. You already HAD a self prior to the separation. The separation from God has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the invention or creation of "a self", or multiple selves. The separation ONLY has to do with your *RELATIONSHIP* to others, your willingness NOT TO SHARE WITH THEM, and your attempt to EVICT THEM from sharing with you, so that all you end up with is YOUR SELF, in isolation, sharing with no-one. That's what the separation from God is all about.

The reversal of the separation from God will reconnect you to the sonship, restore your willingness to share everything with everyone that exists forever, join your mind back to other people's minds, make you willing to share your SELF with others and theirs with you, and to return to this state of Oneness, in which there is ONE MIND, but MULTIPLE BEINGS. Many souls, who are all alike and who share *everything* with each other without a single ounce of selfishness or possessiveness. THAT is heaven. That is natural. The end of separation and ego is NOT the annihilation of God's children, OR the end of your brothers.

So the separation from God merely means the rejection of a shared experience, and the attempt to bring an end to sharing, so that you can claim exclusive rights to some little piece of the whole that you don't want to share with others.

Having a separate self merely means your ACTUAL self is trying to pretend that it no longer SHARES anything with others, and so is "outside of" the shared communal experience AS IF it were "separate from it".

The ego, as the separate self, is nothing other than the rejection of the fact that you are PART OF everyone and are part of the WHOLE, as a SELFISH attempt to OWN part of the whole and call it your own, at the expense of others. It's your attempt to BLOCK ACCESS to your mind, from other minds, so that you SEEM not to be part of the whole anymore. When the ego ends, you simply stop being selfish and LEARN TO SHARE AGAIN. That's not the end of your SELF, ever. You in fact REGAIN more of yourself than you even have now, you expand your self, and you return to the WHOLE of yourself. "The soul is the idea of self-fullness."

So when we're talking about there being many sons in heaven, or many children, or "separate beings", we're NOT in any way talking about anything unnatural or against God's will. We're not even talking about the ego, or the separation idea, or the tiny mad idea. It's not until the MANY REAL BEINGS, the MANY PERMANENT BROTHERS, trying to compete with each other and vie for attention and be SPECIAL, that we start talking about the descent into ego, and the making of an illusory experience of "being separate". To be cut off in a body is to be ALONE, having disallowed anyone else to SHARE YOU. That's all it means to "be a separate self." A seeming outsider or stranger, cut off from the rest and having no relationships with anyone.

God's creation is perfectly natural containing multiple wholes, multiple individuals, multiple selves, multiple brothers, multiple beings, multiple minds. Because they all are willing to SHARE unconditionally and 100% with each other, coexisting in a communal state of total joining and freedom. It's only when someone starts trying to be special or selfish that we run into a problem. The end of the ego is the end of isolation, the end of exclusion, the end of selfishness, and a return to STILL EXISTING but SHARING EVERYTHING with everyone forever. The regaining of your natural inheritance, which is all of Heaven and all beings.

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

"There can be no disinherited parts of the sonship, for God is whole, and all his extensions are like him."

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

"Though every aspect IS the whole, you cannot KNOW this, until you see that every aspect is the same, perceived in the same light, and therefore one."

If you look at the various things ACIM says, it becomes clearer and makes more sense when you don't think of "mind" or "one mind" or "christ mind" as being the highest or deepest level of existence. We need to distinguish that mind IS NOT the same thing as spirit, soul, SON or being.

For example, there is a distinction between MIND and SOUL:

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

For example, the soul USES the mind to create or miscreate. The mind is at its disposal, like a tool, described here as a MEDIUM *through which* the soul/son/spirit expresses itself:

"The Creation of the Soul is already fully accomplished. The mind, if it votes to do so, becomes a medium by which the Soul can create along the line of its own creation."

For example, we're told that YOU (whatever you are) has control OVER the mind. That mind is the mechanism of decision (free will), and so the "what you are" CONTROLS the mind or has POWER OVER it, meaning it is on another "level", causality-wise:

"For you DO have control over your mind, for the mind is the mechanism of decision. "

All of this indicates that you essentially are OUTSIDE OF your mind. Your mind is something you HAVE, not something you ARE. It's something you USE, and it's not the same thing as your soul.

Soul is a synonym for spirit, and a synonym for "Son of God". So too is BEING an aspect of the soul/son/spirit NOT an aspect of the mind. The essence of what you are at the deepest or highest level, is BEYOND the mind, and CONTAINS the mind inside of it. What you ARE, is the soul/son/spirit/being.

Now look at this:

"Your will is the means by which you determine your own condition, because will is the MECHANISM OF DECISION. It is the power by which you separate or join, and experience pain or joy accordingly. My will cannot overcome yours, because YOURS IS AS POWERFUL AS MINE. If it were not so, the Sons of God would be unequal."

Here, "separation" or "joining" occur WITHIN the realm of your free will, WITHIN the realm of decision, which is WITHIN the mind. Note also that Jesus clearly states your free-will decision is AS POWERFUL AS HIS. That the two of you, EACH, have a free will. Therefore, you both have your own minds.

If you can distinguish these two "levels" within reality, whereby at the highest level there is being/soul/son/spirit, and at the lower level there is MIND, which has IDEAS such as the tiny mad idea, and where ALL ideas are contained INSIDE the mind and do not leave the mind (never affect or determine anything about the soul), then it becomes OBVIOUS that "the ego" is occurring IN THE MIND, NOT IN THE SOUL.

The ego is occurring on an entirely different LEVEL to your soul/spirit/being/son/self.

This means that WHAT you are - a spirit being - is in a larger realm than your MIND, and the ego is never happening in the realm of the spirit. Your SPIRIT does not have a separation idea, the mind does. Your SPIRIT does not develop an ego, the mind THINKS of egotism. Ego is an idea, a thought, in the mind, NOT part of the soul.

Which means... drumroll please... that whether or not there are many SONS, many SOULS, many BEINGS, or many SPIRITS, has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not there is EGO or separation. They're on two entirely different levels. How many sons there are, thus, is completely BEYOND the realm of ego, beyond all speculation as to "it means separation", and beyond all ideas of separateness in the EGO sense. The KIND of separateness that we're trying to undo, has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with souls, sons, spirits or beings. We're ONLY trying to correct the MIND, NOT THE SOUL.

The separation is a MIND problem, NOT a soul problem.

And this in turn means, that whether there are many souls/sons, or one, or not, has absolutely nothing to do with the separation or the ego. It is NOT a separation IDEA to suggest that there are many sons, because IDEAS are confined to the MIND, and souls/sons are BEYOND that.

This is why, Jesus is able to tell us in the course that WHAT we are, is permanent brothers, permanent real beings, permanent family, permanent souls, permanent multitudes of spirit beings, and that this fact has NOTHING to do with the ego THOUGHT in the mind.

The ego thought does not come BETWEEN souls, it does not DEFINE their "separateness", it does not CAUSE them to BE separate, and it says absolutely nothing as to the VALIDITY of whether it is NATURAL for there to be many souls in reality. Or therefore, many sons of God. And in fact it also means any statements about "sons of God" plural is absolutely NOT contradictory against ideas of ego separation. They're not even on the same level. Ego is inside the bubble of mind, mind is inside the bubble of being.

"Mind is the activating agent of spirit."

Does not mean mind IS spirit. It's merely a PART of what you are or HAVE.

This is why it's totally OKAY, NATURAL, NORMAL, REAL, and NOT AN EGO THING, that there are MANY SONS OF GOD. And that these son's of God are many in NUMBER *without* it having anything to do with "an ego thing".

God literally has MANY thoughts, in his mind, which is not his being. He literally creates many other BEINGS, and GIVES THEM their own mind, as a reflection of his own nature. Thus God has created many minds, many sons. This is "the family of God".

"Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite, and everywhere without all limit."

The "One Son of God" is a synonym for Creation, meaning ALL of the sonship. Christ is the MIND that is SHARED in communication between God and the Sonship. SONS are the SOULS/spirits/beings that God created as equals forever (brothers, children of God). And each child has a soul/spirit/being and a MIND with which to create.

Sons of God (meaning God's literal direct descendent IN REALITY) is mentioned 82 times, in direct relationship between God as Father and US (plural) as many BEINGS:

"All the Sons of God"

"We are creation; we the Sons of God."

"Only one equal gift CAN be offered to the equal Sons of God, and that is FULL APPRECIATION."

"Know then the Sons of God, and you will know all Creation."

"When the Atonement has been completed, all talents will be shared by all the Sons of God." (AFTER the ego is GONE, no separation left, there are STILL many sons of God sharing talents!)

"When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed…the Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless their creations and keep them in the light of joy." (AFTER the ego, with no separation left, the SONS OF GOD are STILL PLURAL!)

"Our creations are as holy as we are, and we are the Sons of God Himself and therefore as holy as He is."

God creates permanent BEINGS (plural):

"Since only beings of a like order can truly communicate, His Creations naturally communicate WITH Him and communicate LIKE Him."

"God, who encompasses ALL Being, nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy. "

God creates permanent CHILDREN (plural):

"God watches over His children and denies them nothing."

"God knows His Children with perfect certainty."

"The Children of Light cannot abide in darkness, for darkness is NOT in them." (no ego!)

"The Children of God are entitled to perfect comfort, which comes from a sense of perfect trust."

"Let us today be children of the truth, and not deny our holy heritage."

"The Kingdom of God includes all His Sons and their children, who are like the Sons as they are like the Father." (not only are there multiple sons, there are multiple CREATIONS BY sons - grandchildren of God).

"Only God's own holy children are worthy to be channels of his beautiful joy"

And similarly there is plenty of mention of SOULS (plural), over 120:

"They represent the original form of communication between God and His Souls"

"It is the final lesson that I learned, and God's Sons are as equal as learners as they are as Souls." (soul=son)

"Souls were given their own true authorship"

"The Revelation unites Souls directly with God."

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

"It should be noted that God has begotten only one Son (the combined totality of ALL the sons). If you believe that all of the ***Souls that God created are His Sons***, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then ***every Soul must be a Son of God***, or an integral part of the Sonship." (every means PLURAL! - MANY beings, who SHARE everything).

"They represent the original form of communication between God and His Souls"

"Many Souls offered their efforts on behalf of the Separated Ones" (not all souls used their minds to believe in ego!)

God additionally also created MANY MINDS, not just one:

"God's memory is in our holy minds"

"How holy are our minds!"

"If you allow yourselves to HAVE in your minds only what God put there, you are acknowledging your mind as God created it."

"And peace will be restored forever to the holy minds which God created as His Son" (good example of the ego-rule-breaking logic, that God has many sons who are, IN TOTAL, "His Son").

"Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one." (still many minds, they don't stop being many just because they are ONE. On means IDENTICAL, of like nature or KIND, NOT one in number).

"all the minds which God created one with me"

"Not being in their Right Minds, they turned their defenses from protection to assault, and acted literally insanely." (MULTIPLE right minds)

The evidence is totally overwhelming for anyone willing to be open to this. It does NOT mean "separation" in the ego sense. It does not mean, ISOLATION, or SPECIALNESS. It only means many EQUAL BEINGS WHO SHARE EVERYTHING AND YET ARE INDIVIDUALS.

There ARE many beings, spirits, souls, sons. There ARE many minds that SHARE as the Christ mind. Ego has NOTHING to do with this. It's NOT unnatural. It's not "wrong". It's not "the separation". Individuality is NOT an ego thing. Ego has ONLY anything to do with whether INDIVIDUALS choose to BELIEVE in lies or truth, WITHIN their minds. That's is all.

(and why this world is NOTHING like God’s creation)

"For what you are is what He is. There is no love but His, and what He is is everything there is. There is no limit placed upon Himself, and so are you unlimited as well."

Everything about the ego is based on the idea of not sharing anything. This results in everything being completely separate from everything else. What is in a banana, is not in an apple. What is in my house, is not in your house.

Because this ENTIRE UNIVERSE has been made by the ego thought system, every property of matter follows the same law. The ego’s entire statement is "share nothing". Bodies do not share or join. Atoms do not share or join. One mountain is not another mountain. The Earth is not Mars.

In this ego world, absolutely everything is confined to limited FORM. The form or appearance of the surface of objects, fixated on by the body’s eyes, show you a picture of "nothing being shared". Another word for a world where nothing is shared, is DEATH!! This is a world of death, a dream of death, fundamentally. That is why is it OPPOSITE TO LIFE, and OPPOSITE TO HEAVEN IN EVERY WAY. "There is no life outside of heaven" "Only the creations of light are real."

The form of your TV separates and distinguishes it from the form of your chair. Forms seem to have different properties, qualities, identities. This applies not only on the level of the PHYSICAL UNIVERSE, it also applies in all aspects of EGO THINKING.

The ego literally thinks in terms of not sharing. It fundamentally assumes that one thing is separate from another. That one thing is limited by its form and is not something else. There is no oneness. No sharing. No overlap. No unity.

To the ego, there is "only so much to go around". It evaluates the "amount" of something based on "how much form there is". Or in other words, how limited something is. It does not give ANY value to any idea of sharing. It does not count something twice. It does not measure amounts by anything present in multiple objects simultaneously.

This leads to a way of thinking which is anti-abundant, has built in SCARCITY, is fundamentally a thought system of LACK, and therefore produces competition, war and sacrifice. To the ego, there is simply NOT ENOUGH to go around. Not enough of anything. This is the ego saying, God is not enough, God is not sharing, God is nowhere, and love is limited.

It does not simply make this statement or belief on a mental level. It is DEMONSTRATED on the level of PHYSICAL OBJECTS. This entire universe is an idea of lack, deprivation, limitation, scarcity, loss, with nothing being shared, and God being nowhere.

This is because the ego is very very EXCLUSIVE in its thought processes. It *separates out*. It divides. It sees in one part what is MISSING from other parts. If I own the only 1 pound diamond in the world, you do not. If I own the best property in New York, you do not. If I bought all the apples at the store, there are none left for you. There is NO SHARING in the ego. It has absolutely NO CONCEPT of INCLUSIVITY whatsoever.

This is intentional. Because this is the TOTAL OPPOSITE of what God is like. God is not like this AT ALL. This is why "Heaven and earth are opposites IN EVERY WAY". Earth, and this "physical" universe, fundamentally demonstrate the idea of SEPARATION in ALL ITS FORMS. Every form - or object - is the form of ERROR. This world is fundamentally NOT LIKE GOD, down to the subatomic quantum particle. This is why GOD DID NOT CREATE THIS WORLD. It is NOTHING LIKE HIM!!

Here is what God IS like.

God thinks ONLY INCLUSIVELY. God thinks only in terms of SHARING. God thinks only in terms of INCREASE, abundance, availability, unity, creation, an NO form of exclusion.

God does not think, hey, all of myself is over here being shared with Paul, therefore, there’s none of myself left to share with that other person. God does not DECREASE by sharing himself. He is not a quantity. He is not limited. He is not finite. "Nothing real can be increased except by sharing".

Because of SHARING, which the ego has completely opposed, it IS POSSIBLE in God’s world (Heaven) for something to be accessed by multiple individuals simultaneously without ANY LACK. This is because there is no POSSESSION or ownership or exclusivity. Everyone SHARES everything.

This means not simply, there is a limited amount of stuff and we all compromise on how much each gets. That is ego. Rather, each time something is shared, IT INCREASES, because it is CREATED, and this ADDS TO what exists. Each time God shares himself in an act of creation, he puts all of himself into the creation, and yet STILL has all of himself left.

Remember, ideas are INCREASED by being shared or given way. Remember also that nothing real can EXIST UNLESS it is shared and extended. It must extend in order to have PRESENCE, and this makes it shine with radiance. In God’s reality, if you give something to another, you do not LACK it. You do not lose it. You are not left wanting. What you give, YOU HAVE, and you give it only because you have it, and you KEEP IT by giving it. "To have all, give all to all". Giving does not REDUCE. Giving INCREASES.

That means, unlike in the EGO WORLD, Heaven is utterly filled with abundance, everything functions based on SHARING, and sharing does not mean lack or loss. This sharing requires the ability for multiple individuals to OVERLAP, to literally SHARE the same space. Another word for this is oneness. Oneness doesn’t mean "one finite thing" - that is the ego’s version of oneness. Oneness means SHARED WITH ALL AND BY ALL. It DEFIES ego logic.

You being a creation of God, one of many, occurred because God shared the WHOLE of Himself in order to create you. And He created you AS A WHOLE. You have been FULLY created. God thus INCREASED His Kingdom by creating you. You have been ADDED to God. This means that God is IN you, fully, and yet it ALSO is fully present in all other souls. God being in you does NOT limit Him or deprive anyone else of Him. For one simple reason, the one idea and NATURE that the ego hates: SHARING.

You SHARE God with all other creations. You all have access to all of Him, at the same time, with no lack and no private hoarding. This gives new meaning to "whats mine is yours". "One mind contains all minds" "One brother is all brothers". God has One Son AND MANY SONS simultaneously - this is the Sonship. It is REAL BECAUSE it is shared. This is impossible in terms of the ego world of matter, but entirely possible in heaven. "It is the world you see that is impossible" refers to the physical universe, which is a picture of impossibility, a picture of death, a picture of NOT EXISTING because there is no sharing, and a picture of the crucifixion of God’s Son, IN MATTER.

This can be demonstrated through miracles WITHIN this impossible world. Here, it should NOT be possible to feed 5000 people with only a few loaves of bread and a few fish. This is because there is not enough FINITE AMOUNT to go around. The ego says, by its laws, you can only give 5 loaves to 5 people and you have no more to give. This is embedded into the nature of the PHYSICAL OBJECTS.

If there are only a few loaves of bread and a handful of fishes, and there are 5000 people to feed, the ego says there is not enough to go around. God says, YES THERE IS. And through SHARING, at the supernatural level, those loaves and fishes MULTIPLY. The amount INCREASES. All 5000 people get fully fed. This *demonstrates* that what appeared to be finite lack, was an ILLUSION, was not TRUE, was not God’s law, and it was PROVED to be false through a miracle of demonstration. Jesus fed all the people by demonstrating GODS LAW, God’s truth, that sharing increases abundance, there is NO LACK, giving does not diminish, and supply is unlimited.

This is what it means to perform a MIRACLE in this world. To demonstrate that the ego’s ways, the ego’s laws, the very nature of matter itself, IS FALSE, a lie, can be demonstrated to BE a lie, and that God’s power is UNLIMITED. This shows through proof, that this world is lying to you, because its laws of lack and limitation are NOT TRUE. This is why miracles are teaching devices. Jesus didn’t just feed the 5000, he TAUGHT that THERE IS NO LACK, there IS enough for everyone to have ALL of what is available without loss, and what is given to one person is GIVEN EQUALLY to all from an unlimited source.

God shares all of himself with EVERY PART of his creation. There is no competition, no war, no scarcity, no lack, no deprivation, no loss, no reduction, no inability to have everything, no isolation, no exclusion, and no posession. This is why God’s world - heaven - is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to the "physicality" or physical NATURE of this entire universe. God CANNOT have created this world of limitation. Next time you don’t have enough money, remind yourself, THE EGO DID THIS. When you run out of food, the ego did this. When you had to SACRIFICE, the ego did this. There is no sacrifice in God. EVERYONE SHARES EVERYTHING FULLY.

There is an abundance of love to go around. Being loved does not mean others are not loved. Getting God’s attention does not mean others are excluded. Receiving a LOT does not mean the supply is reducing. Having a lot does not mean others are being deprived. God has an UNLIMITED SUPPLY OF LOVE. Everytime it is given, it increases. God has FULL LOVE for you, not just scraps of attention or leftovers from what other people have ripped away as their own posession.

Ultimately your SELF is unlimited. You thought you could posess a part of God’s creation and make it your own. You thought you could STOP SHARING and place a limit on your identity. Your individuality is not a problem and is not ego. All of God’s children are permanent and real. The only problem is that you tried to reduce by seeking to be special, to have exclusive interests for yourself. To give yourself more, so that others would have less. This is the opposite of SHARED INTERESTS. Everything in heaven has shared interests.

You being a self is not ego because your self naturally SHARES. You being SELFISH and not wanting to share, is ego. You being an individual is not ego. You believing in sacrifice and lack and deprivation and possessiveness is ego. You being one of God’s Sons is not a problem. You trying to ISOLATE YOURSELF so that SHARING is prevented, and so that there is a LIMITATION on yourself, THAT is the ego. Lack of sharing is imprisonment.

Placing your mind under authority of ego places it under tyrannical rule and leads to imprisonment. It leads to the ego’s thought system of NO SHARING and lack and finite limitations. It leads to BODIES being made to represent the idea that nothin is shared AS physical, limited matter. It makes this universe. It leads to all forms of suffering, lack and sacrifice. And it leads to DEATH. What is starvation but the total lack of sharing or access to what you need? Death is DENIAL OF GOD. Death is DENIAL OF SHARING.

That is not God’s will for you. It is God’s will for you that you HAVE EVERYTHING, and that you share it with ALL OTHERS, AND that you increase it by creating MORE, which ALL SHARE IN. Abundance is your natural inheritance. You will NOT find it in the physical world, which is a world of lack, limits and sacrifice. It is a world of compromise and loss. Although you can DEMONSTRATE it here through supernatural miracles which prove just how UNLIKE God this world is, and that "you are undo no laws but God’s".

Your abundance is waiting for you in Heaven. In God’s world. By Gods laws. God wants to share ALL OF HIMSELF with you, and he already has. That is how you were created and that is what is natural for you. You ARE sharing fully with God, with His One Son, with All His Sons, and with the whole Sonship, FOREVER.

You are loved and provided for by God, UNLIMITEDLY. "There is NOTHING my holiness cannot do."

There are many subjects in ACIM which can be difficult to understand. When we try to understand anything, we try to "make sense of it". If it makes sense, we're willing to accept it as true, because we can't "see any reason why not". Everything seems to make sense without contradiction so we regard this as "it must be true."

The problem is that our way of making sense, is NOT compatible with some of the subjects in ACIM. And not many people realize this. HOW you make sense of something has a lot to do with WHAT sense comes out of it. The kinds of conclusions you come to is actually hugely influenced by HOW you reason things out.

In the physical world of spacetime, in a world of separation and separate objects, thinking in the way that we typically do "makes sense". It lines up very well with separateness. In this world we have therefore learned to think in a separating way. This versus that, one thing and not another, either this or that but not both. We think of all things as kept apart from each other. Nothing ever overlaps or shares or transcends boundaries.

It works great when you're talking about whether to park your car in the first or second spot. Or whether you'll eat dinner at your house or a friends house. Or whether you want the red or blue shirt. Or when you are doing math. Or when you are choosing which way to turn. Or whose body belongs to who etc. This is all based on a very simple logical idea of "EITHER OR". Or what you can also describe as an "exclusive or".

Something can be this, or that, but not both. Because in a separated world, everything is based on EXCLUSION. A banana is not an apple. An orange is not a pear. Either I have 100% of the money or you do. Either I am at work or at home. Either the license for the car belongs to me or you etc.

This works for just about everything in the known "universe" simply because all of the physical objects in space time are BASED ON SEPARATION. The world around you, all forms of matter, are exact representations of the IDEA of separation. Houses do not overlap. Cars are in different lanes. Trees cannot take root on the same spot. Planets cannot occupy the same orbit etc. Everything physical is separate, and therefore it "makes sense" to think about all physical things in terms of separateness.

Therefore, we have all grown up immersed in, working with, thinking about, talking about, and interacting with, a separation-based environment, in which we have learned that THINKING in a separation-based way is the best kind of language to use to describe it. Our who way of "reasoning things out" is based on separation, and we do this so automatically we don't even realize how unnatural it is.

The rule of separation is that one thing is not another thing. They are different. One thing shares nothing with another thing. The two things are seprate and are kept apart. One thing you can put in one box, another you can put in another box. The two things cannot share boxes, or transcend boxes, or be in two boxes at once. Nothing is allowed to occupy the same space or literally BE another thing. One thing is never in two places at once. Two things are never one thing, and one thing is never two things. And on this basis we perform ALL of our thinking about the world.

But this way of thinking is COMPLETELY INCOMPATIBLE with reality, with heaven, with God's creation and mind, with the Sonship, with anything to do with the PRE-SEPARATION state, anything to do with the sons of God, anything to do with real relationship, and anything to do with the REFLECTIONS of heaven on earth... which includes the atonement, miracles, forgiveness, holy relationships, and so on.

When you think in terms of "either this or that but not both", you don't make any errors, provided you are thinking ABOUT physical stuff. If you take this highly polarizing mindset and think ABOUT non-physical stuff, you IMMEDIATELY FAIL. And to understand why that is, you need to understand why the Kingdom of God operates on an entirely different kind of LOGIC and reasoning. A logic that is NOT based on separation, does NOT follow rules of separateness, and where the seemingly impossible becomes possible.

As soon as we're talking about oneness, or sharing, or transcending limits, or having a relationship in which you recognize yourself in another, or the unity of the sonship, etc we're no longer talking about states of separation. When we talk about ideas being given away and increased and the person who gives it still has it, that's not compatible with separation-based logic. When we're talking about you being one with God, you cannot use separation-logic to describe that. When we talk about how one soul has everything and so does another soul simultaneously, that is NOT compatible with separation logic.

Indeed Jesus speaks of many kinds of overlaps, blends, merges, sharings, equations, and various ways that two things are one thing and one thing is two things, and at first these things will seem to make NO sense.

For example "God has but one son knowing them all as one". Does that mean in separate terms, that God does only have ONE son, OR does it mean that he has many? Before you answer that, you might notice what KIND of thinking you are using. Are you thinking in an "either this or that" kind of way? Are you asking yourself, whether EITHER he has one OR he has many? Because if you are, you are USING SEPARATION to think about something beyond the realm of separation.

When you do that, you will come to false conclusions. You are taking something that transcends separations, and you are IMPOSING separations and limits on it by thinking about it that way. You are POLARIZING something that is not polarized. You look at it and you SEE separate boxes in it, you put "one son" into one box and "many sons" into another box, keeping them APART. But that is a destruction of the nature of what heaven contains. It corrupts the data, so to speak.

God does in fact have one son. And, simultaneously, God does in fact have many sons. BOTH of these statements are true, at the same time, and to the same degree. One is not MORE true than the other. It isn't MORE true or encompassing that God has one son, than that he has many. Nor are the many part of duality - which is another false proof people use to claim "why" God can't have separate parts. Nor does their manyness indicate separation in the physical terms we're used to. What this requires is a leap in the WAY YOU THINK, to think like God, and NOT like the ego.

There has to be a way of reasoning, of MAKING SENSE, that actually does make sense, while also supporting ideas where TWO THINGS ARE TRUE AT ONCE without it being a contradiction. Two things which seemed like two in separate terms, but which are not two things. For example, we're told that God is whole, and that God creates at least one whole son. To create a WHOLE thing, God has to GIVE THE WHOLE of himself.

Separation-based thinking would claim that if God gives 100% of what he has, he has NOTHING LEFT. And thus God disappears as soon as he gives unconditional love. But does that really seem likely?

What actually happens is that God gives the whole of himself, through a oneness act of SHARING it, and now both God AND the thing he created have the WHOLE of everything, and at the same time. That DEFIES the kind of logical reasoning you've been using your whole life. IT DEFIES the separation.

Now we're told that if you want to HAVE everything, you have to GIVE everything. "To have all, give all to all." How can that make ANY SENSE whatsoever to someone who thinks in separate terms? It makes NO sense. If I give everything, I have nothing, right? That's our experience in spacetime in a world based on separation. If I give the whole pizza to you, I get no pizza at all. But that's NOT how it works in God's reality and creation. We are literally being told that if we give 100%, we will still HAVE 100%. And that if we DON'T give 100%, we will LACK 100%. How can it be true that you LOSE when you don't give anything away? Can you see how that SEEMS like it makes no sense whatsoever, in terms of how we normally think?

To put it simply, God, his creation/Kingdom/heaven, the sonship, all our creations, the holy spirit, miraculousness, all of the qualities and properties of ultimate reality, IS NOTHING LIKE THIS WORLD. Nor does it run on the same logic. Nor do the aspects of it interact or relate in the separate ways that we think all things in the physical universe relate - not even remotely. This is part of "earth, which is heaven's opposite in every way." And because heaven is OPPOSITE to a separated world, you have to use AN OPPOSITE WAY OF THINKING if you want to grasp what the course is saying about those things.

The opposite of regular logical reasoning, is paralogical reasoning. Where BOTH AND makes sense, and EITHER OR does not. Either/Or is another way of saying "NOT BOTH". Logically speaking, "not both" or "share nothing" was the ego's assertion in the separation, which led to the separated world of spacetime. "Not both" is the OPPOSITE of "both have everything."

In reality, God can create many things and STILL be one. God can create one son, a billion sons, and STILL be one. EACH created being can be the WHOLE of creation. YOU, can be ALL your brothers, while simultaneously there being billions of brothers. YOU, can be EQUATED to the utmost degree, with another person, to the extent to even say you ARE them, WITHOUT losing your self. Because in reality it is BOTH true that I am me AND I am you. I am one with God AND I am myself.

Another popular line is that "I and my father are one." If you think about this in terms of separation, you will make two boxes - "I" - and "my father." You will then take those two boxes and say, "these two boxes are one box." And then you will say that, because you have merged the boxes, the contents of the boxes have merged. And that therefore, in conclusion, there is only "one thing left". BUT THIS IS NOT TRUE. This is a complete failure in reasoning, as Jesus points out. Just because I am one with God doesn't mean he and I form a singular big "blob" in which I have NO self and I AM HIM. You are NOT equal to God.

"This is because God and man are NOT equal." urtext T1B40AC "This appears to contradict another statement: "I and my Father are one." It doesn't. There are still separate parts in the statement, in recognition of the fact that the Father is GREATER. Actually, the original statement was "are of one KIND."" urtext T1B40AA

Here Jesus clearly states that the father is GREATER than the son. That's because God encompasses MANY sons, just as God has MANY thoughts. That is why you have AWE of God because he IS bigger than you. To say you are one with him does mean you SHARE everything with him, and are PART OF him, but you are NOT equal to him. That is what ACIM says. And to understand that you cannot think in separating terms, you have to think in terms of "both and".

Both I and God are whole. Both me and my brother are God's creations. This is what the golden rule is based on, that the truth is the same for everyone - my truth is the same as your truth, what is true of me us true of BOTH of us. It's true of me AND you. You cannot think about ANY of the topics in ACIM that are on the other side of the separation, unless you are prepared to put aside your ego-based separation-based laws of reasoning and logic, and think WAY outside the box using paralogical reasoning. You will not only not make ACCURATE sense of anything Jesus says, you will also DISTORT IT to hell.

THIS, is why, many ACIM teachers, and MOST ACIM students, have come to false conclusions about a large chunk of the course. They have used the same ego reasoning and thought processes ABOUT things which are NOT ego-like. And when you do that, you project separations onto things that are not separate, and you fail to acknowledge separations where they are natural and present. There IS a separation of sorts between father and son, and between you and your creations, but it's not the KIND OF separation we see in spacetime. SHARING, DOES require multitudes, and does NOT require isolation.

Very few people understand this, so if you've made it this far and are following along, then good for you. Thinking like God is SO ALIEN to how the world thinks that for many people it will take a lot of practice to REASON like God does. His whole mind, his whole thought process, the whole act of creation, the whole dynamics of heaven and the sonship, are NOTHING LIKE this world. And until you learn to recognize when you are thinking like an ego ie "either this or that", separating things out in your mind, versus when you are thinking like God - recognizing their UNION AND SHARING, you will continue to draw false conclusions about what ACIM is saying.

Even as you BEGIN to move away from false perception, ego projections of blame, attack thoughts etc, and move towards God's reality, you will have to start to open up to seemingly ILLOGICAL ideas that you really have a hard time making sense of. What does it even mean that "One brother is all brothers?" Or that "Healing is when two minds recognize their oneness". What does it even mean that my brother is my savior because the christ in him is in me? Any notion of having ANYTHING in common with another is NOT separation idea, and ANY degree of holy relationship TRANSCENDS seeing the two of you are "separate".

The presence of separation in spacetime means, two things share nothing. What is the opposite of this? The opposite IS NOT that "there are not two things". The opposite is that "Two things share everything." That's what a lot of people do not understand about what separation means. Duality and Trans-duality (heaven's nature) are not the same thing. God having many sons is NOT a separation idea. God having parts is NOT a separation idea. Because those separate things ARE ALSO one. The ability for something to be both one AND many simultaneously, is what ACIM refers to as "miraculousness."

Ending separation does not mean erasing all trace of separateness. This is a MAJOR false conclusion with so many people. The reason being that this is still staying within the thought system of the ego while trying to undo it. Trying to KEEP the that something MUST be "either this or that", and then getting rid of "that" to end up with "this". That is NOT what oneness is like. Oneness is about sharing with others, union among many, singularity as multitudes, God having many thoughts which are all one (which is reflected in miracles - they each contain the rest).

You'll be far more accurate and clear about what the course DOES mean when you recognize that heaven has holographic properties, the whole is in every part and every part is whole. God is in all his children. Every son of God is one. I have everything and so do you. God has many sons who ARE all one as christ. Yet they are many.

"Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite, and everywhere without all limit." urtext W320W111 "The Kingdom of God includes all His Sons and their children, who are like the Sons as they are like the Father. Know then the Sons of God, and you will know ALL Creation." urtext T7L8

"We are Creation; we the Sons of God." urtext W320W114

"God has but one Son, knowing them all as One. Only God Himself is more than they, but they are not less than He is." urtext T9E3

If in any way, at any time, you are "singling out", "isolating", "putting in boxes", "separating off", as you think about these abstract topics, you are making a major mistake and blinding yourself to the truth. Learn to think in such a way that ALLOWS miraculous possibilities. Where there is sharing and overlap. Where the two are one and the one are two. Where we can be joined and be ourselves. Where I can see myself in you, as you, and as myself. And where we can all still be a collective family in UNION without it meaning we're exclusive. Reality is INCLUSIVE, and being included means you are part of everything, it does NOT mean you can't have an individual identity.

FIP 3rd edition: "God, Who encompasses all being, created beings (PLURAL!) who have everything individually (INDIVIDUALITY!), but who want to share it to increase their (PLURAL!) joy. (https://acim.org/acim/en/s/86#5:1 | T-4.VII.5:1)"

There is a statement in A Course in Miracles which describes how God thinks. This is a very important statement because it gives us a strong idea of the workings of God's mind. And let's not forget that GOD IS REALITY, so how God functions is how reality functions...

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

Notice that it says there are PARTS in God's mind. EACH of those parts, which are therefore MANY parts, contains the WHOLE. God thinks of "whole parts". God has many thoughts in his mind, in reality, which produce many parts, each of which contains the same ONE whole.

When you ponder what kind of relationships are going on between these parts, you may realize that this is THE SAME as the holographic principle. The principle states that there is a whole, and the whole also has parts, and the whole is in every part, and every part contains or IS the whole, and therefore every part is whole.

If you read up a bit on how true holograms work, and I don't mean hollywood's "projected images" which are NOT holograms, you find the same thing happening. In a holographic image, such as those on your credit cards, EACH PART of the image actually contains THE WHOLE image. All of the information is crammed into each speck of the picture. Every part is whole.

That is very different to how things usually work in the world. Usually a part of something does NOT contain the whole. Usually parts are only PART OF the whole, are limited, finite, and lacking some of the information. For example an apple lacks the qualities of a banana. Apples don't contain bananas parts, nor do bananas contain apple parts. But it's not like that in God.

In reality, according to ACIM, God's mind is unlike spacetime. God's mind HAS parts which DO contain the whole. EACH PART IS the whole. Notice that it does not say that there "are no parts" in God. It quite explicitly says that the whole of God is in EVERY PART. And therefore there are many parts in God. Yes, that means multiplicity, and no, that does not mean the same as duality.

There is a key difference between many whole parts in God, and duality. In duality, each of the parts is NOT the whole, and each of the parts does NOT contain the whole. The parts are all different and separate. They do not SHARE anything. Parts which do not share is duality, or illusion. But this does not mean that you have to get rid of parts, in general, in order to find the opposite of duality.

The opposite of "parts which do not share anything", is actually "parts which share everything." The TRUE opposite of duality, is not non-duality, it is a holographic system in which EVERYTHING IS SHARED by the parts.

To put it into other words, God is the whole, and God also contains parts, because God has a mind which has thoughts. God has many thoughts, not just one. Each of these thoughts is a part of God's mind. Each of these thoughts is alive, and is a thought of life, and is in fact a living being. Each thought is a thought of WHOLENESS, because God is whole and can only think in whole terms, so EVERY thought contains the whole of God.

Therefore, as God thinks a thought, a WHOLE BEING comes into existence, which is a PART OF God, AND which shares the whole of God. "I am forever host to God." Sharing the whole of God is what "your inheritance" means. Each part of God inherits the whole of God. Each part of God, each thought of God, is A SON OF GOD - a soul. Or one of God's creations.

"God created His Sons (plural in reality) by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. ALL His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other because they were created neither partially nor in part."

Notice how ACIM states clearly that God has many thoughts: "the extensions (plural)" "ALL His Thoughts (pural)". This is a fact of reality. God has many thoughts. There is a multiplicity of thoughts in God and this is completely natural and real.

Notice how ACIM also states that all of his thoughts (his parts), EACH of his parts, "are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other". EACH son of God, each thought of God, is WHOLE WITHIN ITSELF, AND it shares the whole with the other sons of God. There is one whole - God - which is shared FULLY, by each and every thought of God. All of them are united (whole, one) within themselves as WHOLE BEINGS, AND are united (whole, one) across their RELATIONSHIPS with each other as a SONSHIP.

Notice how ACIM also states that each of these many thought-creations are not created "in part", or "partially". They are fully created. Which causes them to be, in effect, "fully standalone whole beings". In effect, "separate beings". I know people don't like the word separation but, it does not always mean ego. If there are separate beings (thoughts of God) which are THE WHOLE, simultaneously "many and one", their separateness is there at the same time as their unity. And THAT is what most people find hard to get their head around.

This is where most ACIM students fall flat on their faces attempting to understand how it can be possible that something can be separate AND one at the same time. It is not possible on Earth, for example, so we are not used to this idea. When two objects are separate, they are not one. When you join them together, they become one, and are no longer two. So we think that nothing can be one AND two at the same time. This has become HOW WE THINK. But it is NOT how God thinks. And thinking that God thinks (that reality functions) in this way is an error.

God does NOT think in terms of "either this or that" or "this is not that" or "it can be this or that but not both". Those are ego thoughts based in a separation thought system. They are ideas of parts which do not share anything. They are ideas of a lack of unity and oneness. They are selfish egoic unsharing ideas. And they also lead to a majorly false conclusion, that you would have to get rid of the many in order to have the one. That oneness means "not two" and "non-dual" and "not many". That is completely false.

It's false because God's mind does not function in the same way that spacetime functions. God's mind does NOT follow laws of separation of objects. God DOES have many thoughts, DOES contain many parts, AND STILL maintains oneness at the same time. That's what's so hard for many people to get their heads around, to understand it logically and to make sense of it.

It will not make sense when you think of it in normal logical terms. It will not make sense when you try to ask yourself, "is it this, or that?" It will not make sense when you demand that everything within God has to put be into one box, or another box, and that nothing can span the boxes. It will also not make sense when you demand that it's not POSSIBLE for there to be one AND many at the same time, or have an ASSUMPTION that reality HAS to be "only one thing" in order to have oneness.

This is why many parts of ACIM seem to be "contradictions", when considered using normal egoic logic. It becomes apparent that they are NOT CONTRADICTIONS when you consider them in terms of the holgoraphic principle. Because the holographic principle allows there to be MANY AND ONE at the same time, through sharing of the same whole, which DEFIES the contradiction. And btw the proper term for this relationship is MIRACULOUSNESS, which is the true nature of God.

"God has but one Son, knowing them all as One. Only God Himself is more than they, but they are not less than He is."

"Each Soul knows God completely (each part is the whole). This IS the miraculous power of the Soul (holographic relationship = miraculous). The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking (separation-based logic), in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

This statement for example contains two major claims. 1) That God has only one son, and 2) That God knows ALL of his sons - meaning there are many of them. And since they are his sons, they are his direct creations, and MUST therefore exist in reality together. It goes on to reinforce that "they are not less", meaning there is more than one.

So now YOUR mind is going to look at this, and it's going to look at it WITH SEPARATION (alienating thinking). You're going to think in terms of, "it has to be either this, or that, and it can't be both". You will PROJECT SEPARATION onto it. You don't realize you do this because you do it all the time and have not questioning how you think, and have not realized that you are NOT thinking like God, and that your insistence on separating everything is corrupting reality.

So what you'll end up doing is you're going to try to SEPARATE OUT the two parts in the statement. You will identify that "God has one son", and you'll put that in one separate box, which does not SHARE with anything else. And then you will identify the idea "God has many sons", which you will put into a second SEPARATE box. THEN you will reason WITH THE EGO, that they can't both be true. That it has to either be one or many. That the two boxes do not share anything.

The conclusion that you'll come to, which will seem to make sense to you, based on how you think, is that EITHER God has one son OR many sons. And you will probably steer towards the "one son" because you see it as larger or more encompassing. Then you will side with HALF OF THE TRUTH, and HALF of ACIM's statements of fact, and claim that God only has one Son, and will go look and find quotes abut God having only one son, which you'll think backs up this idea. It's true, but it's not the whole story.

The truth is that in a holographic system, there is many AND one, that BOTH parts are true, that God does indeed only have one son, BUT, at the same time, that one son IS MANY sons. And their manyness coexists with their oneness. Without any ego in a PRE-SEPARATION STATE. This is because they SHARE EVERYTHING and overlap. Each son HOSTS all of God. Each son HAS everything. The many sons of God ARE the one son of God. They all make up the sonship. God experiences them as individual wholes AND as one whole son.

Note that there is no "exclusion" in this. Reality runs on laws of inclusion. Being the one son does NOT stop the many sons from being many. And being many sons does NOT imply they they are not one. In a holographic system the rules are very different. It is OKAY AND NATURAL for "many parts" to exist, provided they are ALSO THE WHOLE. It is the sharing of the wholeness that is the true ACIM definition of "oneness", NOT a "count of one to the exclusion of many".

This is largely why A Course in Miracles is NOT a non-duality teaching. Or to put it more accurately, non-duality only touches on HALF the story, identifying that there is a oneness, but with complete disregard for the many. Thus it focuses on only the wholeness of the hologram and not its parts. You can just as easily pull up many quotes about God's MANY creations, children, beings, individuals, minds etc, all of which are JUST AS VALID AND EQUAL as the quotes about the one son, AND are on the same level.

One of the very unfortunate things which happens when people cannot understand that God's reality is holographic and not linear, is that they cannot accept "the many" as being part of and coexisting with "the one". So they instead see the many as a separation idea, and separation in general becomes taboo. To remove all separation becomes a goal, EVEN IF it means destroying all of God's creations in the process. Driving everything toward "oneness only" EXCLUDES creation and is blind to reality's nature.

And then the only way to logically seem to RESOLVE the conflict, to undo the contradiction in the statements, is to relegate the many to the realm of the ego, wihch people think is the only place that manyness can exist. This does "make perfect sense" when you think in EGO TERMS, using separation-based logical reasoning, but it DOES NOT make sense in holographic terms. In holographic terms, it is a total mangling of A Course in Miracles, taking the perfectly valid whole parts of God's creation, his many whole children, and shoving them into a box with the ego, to try to get rid of them. This is a horrible BANDAID, and it turns FACTS INTO METAPHORS and REALITIES INTO ILLUSIONS.

This all leads to non-sense notions, which SEEM LIKE logical sense, that 1) there is only one son of God, 2) this one son must have split apart to form many, 3) the many sons is an ego illusion and not part of reality, 4) there is no-one else to have a relationship with, 5) when you wake up everyone is awake so you should selfishly focus on your own atonement etc.. Notice any popularly held beliefs here? Commonly distributed ideas of what ACIM is saying? Non-duality based interpretations handed down from teacher to teacher all making the same logical error?

This has literally become an entire MISREPRESENTATION of A Course in Miracles, taught by very prominent teachers the world over. It is a horrible logical bandaid placed over ACIM's holographic metaphysics by people who think using the ego's rules and do not even realize they're doing it. It has led to a "version" of ACIM that does not allow for sons of God or souls, does not permit free will, does not include relationships, does not support co-creators, does not acknowledge the Holy Spirit or Jesus, does not support performing miracles to help others, and in general points solely towards the non-dualistic eradication of God's Kingdom and the death of the self. Literally, it is UPSIDE DOWN and destructive and an attempt to destroy reality and its contents.

All of this has arisen PURELY because of a faulty logical reasoning, based on a lack of comprehension of the subtle SYSTEM of God's mind and its properties. God is not just another "space". God is not like space or time. God is transcendental and holographic in his nature. All of God thinks at once, and when all of God thinks, EACH thought contains all of God, because it is a thought OF wholeness BY wholeness. And this produces WHOLE creations, which are FULLY created, which are inherently therefore "independent individuals", but WHO ALSO are STILL the whole.

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

"Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite, and everywhere without all limit."

Thus we have this perfectly legitimate and perfectly accurately worded statement in the urtext AND in FIP 3rd edition:

"God, who encompasses ALL Being, nevertheless ***created separate beings*** who have everything ***individually***, but who want to share it to increase their joy. Nothing that is real can be increased EXCEPT by sharing it. That is why God Himself created you."

Notice a few things here. It is stating that God does encompass all being - he is the whole of being, all of existence. It is stating that regardless of this fact, GOD HAS CREATED. It is stating also that God has created many things, because he has created a PLURAL of beings as his many thoughts. Note also that while it uses the term "separate beings", which is ENTIRELY VALID, because each of these beings IS a WHOLE BEING, this does NOT imply that these beings are egos or that they do not share in oneness. It also states that EACH of these whole beings "has everything individually", which again reflects the holographic principle that the whole is in every part and every part (being/self) is whole. And this of course does mean that EACH being is an INDIVIDUAL, but NOT CUT OFF.

This again goes on to confirm not only that God created individual beings, but also that individuality and having a SELF is perfectly natural. "I am still as God created me." As in the first quote I gave, "what is natural to him is natural to you". YOU have a self that lives in heaven. You also have brothers in heaven who have selves, as individuals. This is because each of God's MANY thoughts are living beings, and you have relationships of wholeness with these selves making them PART OF YOU as well. The whole of God is shared by EACH brother, making your brother contain the SAME whole as you, and therefore each brother IS you also, and is part of God - while still being a separate distinct brother.

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

This again is a seemingly highly cryptic and contradictory statement WHEN you consider it in terms of separate boxes. When you think about it with the ego, you come to false conclusions. When one brother is all brothers, it DOES NOT mean that there is a single person standing alone. Or more to the point, there IS a oneness, but there also are still MANY brothers, many in number. They ARE brothers because they share the same parent - the same whole in the hologram. EACH brother is a brother (whole part), all the brothers are equals (share the same whole as one), and they each contain EACH OTHER. But they are still many!

Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. This again is a holographic principle, not a linear principle. It means that there are in fact many minds "(all the minds God created one with me)", and EACH of those minds contains ALL the minds. The fact that EACH mind contains the WHOLE of mind, does NOT eradicate the fact that there are many minds. The manyness, and the oneness, exist SIMULTANEOUSLY in a holographic system. And God's mind IS a holgoraphic system.

Unfortunately all of this is very rarely understood by ACIM students. It is not something I properly understood until recent years after a great deal of exploration. I rarely hear ACIM people talking about this, and I even more rarely hear ACIM people understanding it. Yet it is absolutely the CORE of A Course in Miracles's metaphysics. That God is not a solitary lonely figure, but in fact has many thoughts and many children, many co-creators who even themselves have many children. That REALITY in fact comprises ONE AND MANY, and NOT JUST ONE. That oneness is ALSO manyness.

Until there is a full grasp of this, ACIM students will continue to misunderstand and misrepresent A Course in Miracles. This isn't just something that a select few teachers have done, it is very widespread among teachers and students at all levels. The lack of recognition that the WAY YOU THINK is firmly rooted in separation, is the real culprit. The fact that we are all so used to thinking in terms of "separation of objects", because the physical world is set up this way and it works very well when describing SEPARATE THINGS. But it is HORRENDOUS when it is used to describe a state of reality which is nothing like "the separation" of space.

It is solely because everyone thinks in compartmentalizing terms of "either this or that" or "not that" or "not both", which is thinking WITH AND LIKE the ego, that we've resulted in these extraordinary skewings of the ACIM teachings. Especially in terms of trying to foce reality into a non-dualistic model, which is completely inappropriate and inaccurate. Also in terms of the very basic and wrong interpretation that "oneness" means "there's only God". Yes there is only God.... PLUS the many parts of God which God shares all of himself with, which are MANY in number, AND which are fully "separate" creations. Non-duality is only HALF of the story.

Even the term "separation" has become taboo because people think "the separation" is a bad thing and getting rid of separation is a good thing. This is a fallacy because God in fact does include many separate parts. It's just that those parts are ALSO joined. They are separate, AND they are joined. The true logical system of God's mind and thus reality is not "either this or that". It"s "this is BOTH this AND that." This is what the Golden Rule is based on - what is true of me is true of you. Either/or always means ego, and both/and always is true to God. Using any kind of either/or logic to describe reality is an ABSOLUTELY FAILURE.

Major teachers of ACIM never realized this. They came to faulty conclusions about the nature of reality and taught it to many people. They used the ego to reason as to what reality is like, and came to egoic conclusions about God's system of thought. This led them AUTOMATICALLY to the ONLY conclusions that an egoic thought process COULD come to, because their LOGIC drove them there. This results in these ideas of "only one son", "one dreamer", "fragmented son", "no others", "no free will", "no relationships", "no miracles", etc. This whole "model" of ACIM is completely false and has resulted PURELY form BAD THINKING. By people who do not understand the logic of God's mind.

This highly distorted and soul-destroying self-denying anti-creation version of ACIM needs to be pushed aside and replaced with a much more accurate holographic model. One which supports, is open to, allows for, and accounts for, the presence of many beings in heaven's reality. The fact even that you have real brothers, with real relationships, and that God has a real family, and that all of this is permanently real. That reality itself is not JUST oneneses, it is also an entire Kingdom of absolute creations.

This is the true form of A Course in Miracles. Not a non-dualistic flattening of God, not a creation-ignoring blob of singularity, but in fact a sort of "hybrid" idea which joins the one with the many in a perfectly natural system. Perhaps we can call it trans-duality. But it is definitely not non-duality. Yes duality is not real, yes bodies are not real, yes separate things are not real. But in God, there are also separate things which SHARE, and that guarantees they are still one. You DO have brothers, God DOES have children, and you ARE part of a divine family.

We have to open our minds to thinking WAY outside the box, and to stop thinking WITH boxes, if we want to understand what A Course in Miracles is really saying.