There are some parts of the course which suggest that if you will just change HOW you look at the world, or what meaning you GIVE it, suddenly seemingly horrifying scenes are interpreted as healed and lovely.

Obviously this loveliness MUST transcend the FORM of what is happening, because a broken leg is still a broken leg, and an explosion is still an explosion. But somehow, Jesus is saying that just by changing your perception, a world which used to look like hell, can look "like heaven".

"What loveliness we look upon today! What holiness we see surrounding us! And it is given us to recognize it is a holiness in which we share"

"There is no place for hell within a world whose loveliness can yet be so intense and so inclusive it is but a step from there to Heaven."

This seems ridiculous at first. You ask yourself how this is remotely possible, and how it is not just a totally insane idea to suggest that THIS world's horrors can be "smiled upon" or interpreted as "lovely". But this is what true perception and forgiveness is offering.

Somehow, a changed perception projects God's love onto the world, God is seen as a reflection IN the world, and Earth now reflects heaven instead of hell. It still has its same forms, and the same things may be happening physically, but what they MEAN changes. And there becomes a light that you see in and around everything.

Jesus says the Holy Spirit can liberate even the darkest bullshit we made, and make it appear lovely and a blessing. That even a dead body could appear to use like it is sparkling and healed. And this doesn't necessarily mean it is in a form or condition that is physically healed, like a cancerous tumor disappearing, but it is still interpreted as healed.

This SEEMS to suggest that the cancer could remain, physically, while perceiving from an advanced perspective of love and light. It would be seen as "lovely". This however doesn't necessarily imply that the cancer SHOULD remain, because the mind is capable of performing miracles to change matter. And sane minds heal bodies so that even symbolically, even in form, they symbolize eternal life and healing.

"Think of the loveliness that you will see, who walk with Him! And think how beautiful will each of you look to the other!"

"The special ones are all asleep, surrounded by a world of loveliness they do not see."

It is hard to get ones head around how it is possible to see this shitty-ass world as beautiful, light-filled, lovable. But ACIM says that even God loves the world. And that we can see God in everything, when God is in our mind, due to projecting God's meaning ONTO the world. That you can see God IN it, because you mix it WITH His love.

I used to get a sense of this, when I would read the course even years ago, where it sounded like he was saying that just by having a different state of mind, the world would be seen as entirely healed. I wasn't sure this was a correct interpretation, because I wanted to also include miracles. But it does seem to hold without undermining miracles of healing.

The world seen through the eyes of Christ, is a "healed world". It's redeemed. It's "translated into heaven", ACIM says. And then this REFLECTION of heaven, paves the way to knowledge and to the return home to the real thing.

"Miracles are merely the translation of denial into truth."

"The ability to perceive made the body possible, because you must perceive SOMETHING, and WITH something. This is why perception involves an exchange, or a translation, which knowledge does NOT need. The interpretive function of perception, (actually, a distorted form of creation), then permitted man to interpret the body as HIMSELF, which, although depressing, was a way out of the conflict he induced."

"Through Him, YOU stand before God's altar, where He gently translated hell into Heaven. For it is only in Heaven that God would have you be."

"Be not unwilling now, you are too near, and you WILL cross the bridge in perfect safety, translated quietly from war to peace."

"For, once you have accepted it as the ONLY PERCEPTION THAT YOU WANT, it is translated into knowledge, by the part that God Himself plays in the Atonement, for it is the ONLY step in it He understands."

"This is a very simple course. Perhaps you do not feel you need a course which, in the end, teaches that only reality is true. But do you believe it? When you perceive the real world, you will recognize that you did not believe it. Yet the swiftness with which your new and only real perception will be translated into knowledge will leave you but an instant to realize that this alone is true. And then everything you made will be forgotten; the good and the bad, the false and the true. For as Heaven and earth become one, even the real world will vanish from your sight. The end of the world is not its destruction, but its translation into Heaven. 9 The reinterpretation of the world is the transfer of all perception to knowledge."

"Each spot HIS reason touches, grows alive with beauty. And what SEEMED ugly, in the darkness of your LACK of reason, is suddenly released to loveliness. Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release.

All this beauty will rise to bless your sight, as you look upon the world with forgiving eyes. For forgiveness literally TRANSFORMS vision, and lets you see the real world, reaching quietly and gently across chaos, and removing ALL illusions that had twisted your perception, and fixed it on the past. The smallest leaf becomes a thing of wonder, and a blade of grass a sign of God's perfection. From the forgiven world, the Son of God is lifted easily to his home. And there he knows that he has ALWAYS rested there, in peace."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the course Jesus describes how, sometimes miracles can potentially induce fear. Also that even though someone seems to be asking for healing, they might in fact become afraid if they were to suddenly be healed.

He goes on to add also that if you were to take away something which someone is using as a defense, for the perceived purpose of protection, they may then become afraid due to having no defenses. And in turn, if you take away something which someone values or seems to need, even if it is working against them, they can become depressed.

"Yet what if the patient uses sickness as a way of life, believing healing is the way to death? When this is so, a sudden healing may precipitate intense depression, and a sense of loss so deep that the patient may even try to destroy himself. Having nothing to live for, he may ask for death. Healing must wait, for his protection."

The reason this happens is fairly straightforward. In the separation from God, we have reversed what is true and what is false, what is real and unreal. We have tried to give all the attributes of God to the ego illusions, and vice versa. So in our confusion, we think that heaven is hell, death is life, attack is salvation, and truth is a lie.

Anyone with an ego has this distortion to some degree, and usually extensively. It's the upside-down nature of the thought system. We actually think God is evil and help is harm and that we need to be protected from health.

If someone then comes along and attempts to "remove" that which we're valuing, depending on, seeming to need or want, without us having a change of mind and heart, we may interpret it as an attack and a threat. If someone were to shine a lot of light onto you, you might think you are being dragged kicking and creaming into the light, interpreting light as darkness.

This is the nature of insanity. We are confused about what things are. We lack recognition. We are out of touch with what is true. So in our confusion we are lost and deceived. We need to be aware that even if we ourselves are willing to go to the light and be the light of the world, others who need help are not there. They still defend against God and to some degree do not want your love. They fear it.

Similarly with fear, fear is the state of the rejection of love, and being afraid is bad for your health. But those who are afraid believe that the fear is protecting them from the threat of God. You can also be afraid of awakening, because to your ego awakening is like death or dissolution of the false sense of identity.

"All forms of sickness even unto death are physical manifestations of the fear of awakening."

Having identified with the ego or body, sudden miraculous changes to the body could be interpreted as frightening. If you think that you are a body and suddenly your broken leg is healed, or you literally see physical changes happening before your eyes, it could be interpreted as an intrusion or strange external power. It could upset your sense of protection and make you feel vulnerable.

Indeed for many people the idea of "spirit" or "spirits" is frightening. The idea that there is some kind of person or entity which is not in a body, which you can't see, and which is there doing stuff, can be terrifying. The Holy Spirit and angels, even a discarnate Jesus, can be interpreted as being able to bypass your physical defenses and "get to you". At least that is, until you have developed trust and recognition and are not using fear as a defense.

As miracle workers, Jesus cautions us that we need to be aware of the fact that all those who need help are backwards, insane, afraid, confused, lost, uncertain, deceived, defensive, poised to attack, and that they may even see your help as alien and vicious. It is this that they need saving FROM, but the help has to be carefully provided with love and a care not to "trigger" the person into greater retreat.

"Before it is safe to let miracle workers loose in this world, it is essential that they understand fully the fear of release. Otherwise, they may unwittingly foster the misbelief that release is imprisonment, which is very prevalent."

So the situation is, that you are working with patients who have various forms of insanity and fear, they need help to have their minds healed, but it has to be done in such a way that doesn't make the situation worse. They are booby-trapped with all kinds of mental reasons why they would misperceive what you are trying to do, and a significant supernatural miracle could be interpreted falsely as terrifying.

This in no way means that you should not perform miracles, nor spectacular ones. But you can also be sure that many people who are not READY or WILLING to receive them, may reject and run from them. In essence, people who need help generally do not want help, which is precisely why they need it. If the help is seen an encroaching on their territory, or attacking their valued beliefs, they will put up defenses. Even if the help is valid.

Unless they are willing to come forth with some sense of trust and willingness, they may not be too "closed" to reach through powerful means. They might require a lot more time and patience and a gentler approach, to use language or symbols they understand, and to not expose a "raw undiluted miracle" to them knowing what their reaction will be.

"Sometimes the illness has sufficiently great a hold over an individual's mind to render him inaccessible to Atonement. In this case, one may be wise to utilize a compromise approach to mind and body, in which something from the OUTSIDE is temporarily given healing belief. This is because the last thing that can help the non-Right-Minded (or the sick) is an increase in fear. They are already in a fear-weakened state. If they are inappropriately exposed to a straight and undiluted miracle, they may be precipitated into panic. This is particularly likely to occur when upside down perception has induced the belief that miracles are frightening."

Since everyone has free will, and chooses everything, even those who are seemingly far from God and being "evil" are rejecting love. They do not want your help. But unconditional love nevertheless shines upon them gently, slowly melting their resistance. Tolerance for pain is not without limits etc... eventually everyone seeks for a better way and thus invites the holy spirit with a little willingness.

In effect, those you are helping need to have a little willingness, otherwise to help them is to violate their freedom. You can't corece or force them to be well. "God does not coerce." Which poses the sad but necessary scenario that sometimes you have to let people remain in suffering, not because you are cruel and don't want to help but because they aren't willing enough to receive it without making their own situation worse. And sometimes being too helpful is actually a form of imprisonment and disempowerment.

"The use of miracles as a spectacle to INDUCE belief is wrong. They are really used for and by believers."

What this means is that miracles are generally more openly given and received for those who are willing to be open to it. They need to "believe" to some extent, ie to trust the help without being frightened by it, in order to be helpable. This is why miracles are not used to FORCE someone to heal or improve. Trying to INDUCE someone to align with truth is inappropriate and a form of ego manipulation, disguised as help.

Those who are open to it, bring it on. Those who are willing to get help, go ahead and offer it. Those who are willing to put aside fear, and to trust, and be open to a powerful supernatural event, all the better. You'll notice that God doesn't just snap his fingers and force everyone to wake up in a flash of light. Because people are free and they don't want it. Otherwise his mere presence would anchor them in reality and the world would vanish.

"If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves. Therefore, they are asking for the love that would heal them, but which they are DENYING TO THEMSELVES. If they knew the truth about themselves, they could not be sick. The task of the miracle-worker thus becomes to DENY THE DENIAL OF TRUTH. The sick must heal THEMSELVES, for the truth is IN them. But, having OBSCURED it, the light in ANOTHER mind must shine into theirs, because that light IS theirs."

Your role as miracle worker then is to discern clearly where people atre"at", psychologically, and to seek advice from Jesus/Holy Spirit, so that you don't perform indiscriminate miracles, or waste your efforts, or burn yourself out trying, or cause the patient to become worse off due to your "heavy-handed healing". But certainly, for those who are ready and willing to receive help, the help is there to be given.

Treat gently on the bruises. Tip-toe around the defense systems. Gently invite the person into the light. And provide plenty of reassurances. The limiting of fear and reactions is vital. Triggers must be carefully navigated. And you especially don't want to go for the ego's jugular right off the bat. Perhaps the motto should be, "gently does it."

Here is another way of interpreting this well-known quote:

"Seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world. What you see reflects your thinking. And your thinking but reflects your choice of what you want to see."

Instead of this meaning, that the world exists objectively and you must change your perception of it, so that you see it clearly....

What if it means...

What you see reflects your thinking. Change your mind and what you see will change, because YOU are MAKING the world. You are the cause of what's out there. YOU are the dreamer of the dream. Change your mind and the world must follow. Not just a change or a shift in your own perception, or a position of seeing it from a different vantage point. Instead, it's a position of recognizing and admitting that you have power OVER it and by changing your mind the world will change!

This means the exact opposite to what is it is commonly interpreted to mean. It is the sheer difference between merely changing how you perceive and attempting to accept and keep what is out there, verses realizing that you PUT the world there and by changing your mind you can be miraculous in changing it with the Power of God.

You don't think you have this power over the world because you believe heavily that it decides everything for you. That's being a victim of the world.

You are not supposed to just change your perception or INTERPRETATION of the world. You are supposed to realize that you have the power to create physical matter, to change objects, to heal sickness and undo death. That this world LITERALLY is coming from your mind and you have power over it.

Focusing on this simple formula some more...

"If he senses even the faintest hint of irritation in himself as he responds to anyone, let him instantly realize that he has made an interpretation which is not true. Then let him turn within to his Eternal Guide, and let Him Judge what the response should be."

1) Jesus seems to be saying that we should watch ourselves for any signs of upset, irritation, annoyance, anger, grief, unhappiness, etc any of the ego emotions or reactions, any kind of un-peace or lack of happiness and love.

2) This means having a very high standard for what we should normally strive for - totally peaceful, happy, joyful, loving, strong, certain, all the time. Free from suffering, free from sickness, free from death. That if we are not totally immortal and powerful and whole right now, we notice something must have gone wrong.

3) Jesus is then suggesting that this entirely boils down to an INTERPRETATION. What he's really talking about here is perception and meaning. Perception is an INTERPRETATION of what's there. A translation. We give everything all the meaning it has by INTERPRETING it. We interpret it one way ie with ego, we move into hell and false perceptions and insanity/sin. We interpret it another way with Holy Spirit and we move into the real world and true perception ie forgiveness.

4) He then goes on to say that instead of trying to sort of fix this yourself, once you recognize that you "must have made a wrong decision because you're not at peace", you now turn to the Holy Spirit and "he will undo all the consequences of my wrong decision if I let him. I choose to let him....". So now we're asking okay Holy Spirit, please SHOW ME how YOU see this and help me to see this through your eyes/eyes of Christ.

5) So now you open to receive his healing and to join with him, to merge with his mind, to be open to his awareness and his light, allowing him to correct and heal you. This means being willing to receive correction ie to be given healing, to be shown a different approach or interpretation of the world and the body and everything. To adopt HIS approach to it, as your own, as part of you resuming the will of God.

Essentially this means that while we have perception and a body, we are spending ALL our time INTERPRETING, and thus translating, and thus GIVING everything whatever meaning we want it to have. And that means we need to change HOW we have interpreted something, if we're finding that the intepretation is producing some kind of dis-ease or suffering in any way.

We MUST have interpreted it negatively with the ego if it led to a negative reaction, so now we become willing to reinterpret it a different way with the Holy Spirit, so that we can see it from a more forgiving and HAPPY vantage point. And we just keep doing this over and over and over until all our interpretations are THE SAME ONE INTERPRETATION of the Holy Spirit, which does not fluctuate or waver or change with conditions. An interpretation which reflects unconditional constant love and peace.

"You but mistake interpretation for the truth. And you are wrong. But a mistake is not a sin, nor has reality been taken from its throne by your mistakes. God reigns forever, and His laws alone prevail upon you and upon the world. His Love remains the only thing there is. Fear is illusion, for you are like Him."

"Would God have left the meaning of the world to YOUR interpretation? If He had, it HAS no meaning. For it cannot be that meaning changes constantly, and yet is true."

"A common purpose is the ONLY means whereby perception can be stabilized, and ONE interpretation given to the world and all experiences here. In this shared purpose is one meaning shared by everyone and everything you see. You do not have to judge, for you have learned one meaning has been GIVEN everything, and you are GLAD to see it everywhere."

"It is but your INTERPRETATIONS which are lacking in stability. And they are NOT in line with what you really are."

"Correction of a lasting nature, - and only this is true correction, - cannot be made until the teacher of God has ceased to confuse interpretation with fact, or illusion with truth."

"Your interpretations of your brother's need is your interpretation of YOURS."

"By applying the Holy Spirit's interpretation of the reactions of others more and more consistently, you will gain an increasing awareness that HIS criteria are equally applicable to YOU."

"Perhaps it will be helpful to remember that no-one can be angry at a fact. It is always an interpretation that gives rise to negative emotions, regardless of their seeming justification by what appear as facts."

"If anger comes from an interpretation and not a fact, it is never justified. Once this is even dimly grasped, the Way is open. Now it is possible to take the next step. The interpretation can be changed at last."

"Now is escape impossible until you see you have responded to your own interpretation, which you have projected on an outside world. Let this grim sword be taken from you now. There is no death."

"Yet you cannot BE aware without interpretation, and what you perceive IS your interpretation."

"The body, then, is not the source of its own health. Its condition lies solely in your interpretation of its function."

"Do not allow the body to be a mirror of a split mind. Do not let it be an image of your own perception of littleness. Do not let it reflect your will to attack. Health is the natural state of anything whose interpretation is left to the Holy Spirit, who perceives no attack on anything."

"What you do not understand is that the two voices speak for different interpretations of the same thing simultaneously, or almost simultaneously, for the ego always speaks first."

"Every interpretation you would lay upon a brother is senseless. Let the Holy Spirit SHOW HIM TO YOU, and teach you both his love and NEED for love."

"Joining with Him in seeing, is the way in which you learn to share with Him the interpretation of perception that leads to knowledge."

"The Holy Spirit's interpretation of fear DOES dispel it, for the AWARENESS of truth cannot BE denied."

"Knowing is not open to interpretation, because its meaning is its own. It is possible to interpret meaning, but this is always open to error because it involves the perception of meaning."

As a child of God, God has placed himself in you, as an extension of his mind, will and power. You don't really "have" anything "of your own", or exclusive to you, because everything God gives is given to everyone equally. But you do nevertheless have everything that God has given to you, just as everyone does. Which mean that you have inherited from him his mind, will and power.

"To say, "Of myself I can do nothing" is to gain all power. And yet it is but a seeming paradox. As God created you, you have all power."

When this power is interpreted as belonging ONLY to you, then you are trying to have it for your own, excluding others, which cuts you off from God, and disables the power. When it is interpreted as belonging to everyone, and being FROM God, FOR you, and FOR everyone, it is regained and you become all powerful.

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

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

What this means is that in the "arrangement" of how you are "set up" in terms of relationship to God, function, and what you must give, God has placed himself in you, and now you have everything that is OF or from God, as yours, but only so long as you share it. And in order to have it you have to give it, and to share it it must be extended. And so now the love that is given to you from God, is given through you, by YOU participating in its extension, by expressing the love that is yours - which is also his.

So it's kind of like a "pay it forward" kind of thing, where God gives love and power and will and miracles to you, then you in turn pass on and give and share the love and power and miracles to others.

"Miracles are a universal blessing (for all) from God, through me (christ, sonship) to all my brothers."

God loves you. You love your brothers and your creations. Similarly...

"Through prayer love is received. Through miracles love is expressed."

This means fairly simply that you need to "express God" ie to express love. Which is why "Miracles are expressions of love." Or as Jesus often says to me, "shine". Shine the light that is in you, give it, share it, express it, pass it on, so that you acknowlege that you have it. And thus by expressing it, it flows into you.

If you think you don't have love to express, because you don't love enough, or feel lacking or deprived, there is a simple fix. Start loving anyway, try to push the love out, feel it coming out of you, send it to someone, even if it's just a little bit.

You'll find that this "unclogs the pipes" and gets the juices flowing. As you do this, you actually start to RECEIVE more love, heaven comes to help you, and you start to get healed as well. As you give healing you are healed.

"I will heal as I let him teach me to heal."

So in a sense, we are sort of "channels" for God. But being a channel for God doesn't entail strange trance states or going unconscious or having your body be possessed. You can remain fully aware and participatory, shining a light, joined with God, in which both of you shine together. This is part of the arrangement of you being a co-creator with God. You create in parallel, you love in parallel, you heal in parallel.

What is your function? Your function on earth is healing, and in heaven it's creating, and both are very similar. The healing function lines up and mirrors the creative function. You extend God's love and shine your light, a the light of the world, and your mind extends out and unites with other minds to bring about miracles. You share this function with the Holy Spirit while you're on earth, and you hare it with God when you're in heaven.

"As your function in Heaven is creation, so your function on earth is healing. God shares His function with you in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit shares HIS with you on earth."

"The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you CAN see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them. Perceiving His RESULTS, you will understand where He MUST be, and finally KNOW what He is."

"Yet here is also a great channel of hope and healing in the Holy Spirit's service."

"Whenever a teacher of God has tried to be a channel for healing he has succeeded."

"About His yearning for His only Son, created as His channel for creation"

"Let us today open God's channels to Him, and let His Will extend through us to Him."

"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. Since only beings of a like order can truly communicate, His Creations naturally communicate WITH Him and communicate LIKE Him."

"The constant GOING OUT of His love is blocked when His Channels are closed, and He IS lonely when the minds He created do not communicate fully with Him."

"And so He has kept this Channel open to receive His communication to you, AND YOURS TO HIM."

"Your minds are not separate, and God has only one channel for healing, because He has but one Son. His remaining communication link with all His Children joins them together, and them to Him. To be aware of this is to heal them, because it is the awareness that no one is separate, and so no one is sick."

"I repeat that I do not choose God's channels wrongly. The Holy One shares my trust and always approves my Atonement decisions, because my will is never out of accord with His."

"I have told you several times that I am in charge of the whole Atonement. This is ONLY because I completed my part in it as a man, and can now complete it through other men. My chosen receiving and sending channels cannot fail, because I will lend them MY strength as long as theirs is wanting."

"Only God's own holy children are worthy to be channels of his beautiful joy, because only they are beautiful enough to hold it by sharing it. It is impossible for a Child of God to love his neighbor EXCEPT as himself. That is why the healer's prayer is, "let me know this brother as I know myself.""

"What God DOES know is that His communication channels are not open to Him, so that He cannot impart His joy and know that His Children are wholly joyous."

"While he is IN the body, however, man can choose between loveless and miraculous channels of creativity. He can create an empty shell (see previous reference), but he DOES NOT create nothing at all. He can wait, delay, paralyze himself, reduce his creativity almost to nothing, and even introduce a real developmental arrest or regression. But he CANNOT abolish his creativity. He CAN destroy his medium of communication, but NOT his potential."

This I think is a profoundly clear and definitive statement about the Course's core metpahysics. "What is the world?":

"The world is FALSE PERCEPTION. It is BORN OF ERROR, and it has NOT LEFT ITS SOURCE (error/sin). It will REMAIN NO LONGER (must disappear) than the THOUGHT WHICH GAVE IT BIRTH (sin/error) is cherished.

When THE THOUGHT OF SEPARATION has been changed to one of true forgiveness, will the world be SEEN in quite another light (re-interpreted, translated, looked at WITH a different value system, BUT STILL RECOGNIZED AS AN ERROR); and one which leads to truth, where ALL THE WORLD MUST DISAPPEAR and all its errors vanish. Now its source (sin) has gone, and ITS EFFECTS (the world) ARE GONE AS WELL."

Note that it does not say false perception is ABOUT the world. THE WORLD ****IS**** false perception. Falseness is built into it. The world IS a misperception. It is a mistake. The SIN it is made of, was a condemnation and attack on God and His Son. The ATTACK, has to be forgiven, which means the WORLD, has to be LET GO.

Note that it says, the world is BORN OF ERROR. "All forms are forms of error". Which means it was made BY MISTAKE. It is AN ERROR. "The body's eye look upon forms of error and do not see past them."

Note, that it says the world is SEEN **IN** ANOTHER LIGHT, which does not necessarily mean at all that the world STOPS being a form of error, OR a mistake. It merely means you LOOK AT IT IN A DIFFERENT WAY, with a different vantage point, which overlooks the SIN, and recognizes you were JUST MISTAKEN to make this world of sin, and it HASN'T HAPPENED and is forgiven. THE WORLD HASN'T HAPPENED, that is forgiveness. "There is no world", that is ATONEMENT. Only God's creation has ever really happened.

Note that it says, ALL THE WORLD **MUST** DISAPPEAR. This is not talking about your perception or your ego's view of the world. THE WORLD. Itself. Must disappear. Earth, planets, stars, bodies. All must disappear. They are MISTAKES. You can forgive mistakes. You can be loving towards He who was mistaken. You can shine light towards the mistake. But the mistaken HAS TO BE CORRECTED, which means UNDONE.

The line about miracles not being spectacles comes from miracle principle #10 or #11 depending on where you look.

The full context is this:

"10. The use of miracles as spectacles to INDUCE belief is wrong; or, better, is a misunderstanding of their purpose. They are really used FOR and BY believers."

or

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

(A miracle is misunderstood when it is regarded as a spectacle.)

11. The use of miracles as a spectacle to induce belief is wrong. They are really used for and by believers."

So really Jesus is talking about the fact that receipt of a miracle requires belief to be present in the person who is receiving the miracle. Jesus is teaching about how the recipient has to want and be ready to accept a miracle without fear, otherwise they cannot be healed. "The fearful are not healed and cannot heal".

So if we are using a miracle to try to "cause" someone to believe, this isn't really going to work and the miracle isn't going to work, because the person has to believe in some way in the first place, already. Without a willingness to receive and accept it, the giver can't give it.

This is really the only way in which Jesus cautioned against spectacles. The focus isn't even on the miracles being spectacular. Whole topic of the miracle principle is talking about how both giver and receiver have to have belief, and so trying to make the miracle "produce" belief by like "putting on a show", misunderstands what miracles ARE and how they work. Which means that IT IS NOT POSSIBLE to use miracles as spectacles. They DO NOT WORK when the person doesn't believe already ie has a willingness to claim the miracle for themselves.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with telling you not to perform miracles, or for your miracles to not be spectacular, or for them to be hemmed in by size or scale or intensity or effects, or to be limited in any way, or for one to be more difficult or to fit into the hierarchy of illusions in a different way.

He is merely telling us that the way miracles WORK entails cooperation, not coercion. And that is all.

He also comments "A miracle is misunderstood when it is regarded as a spectacle." - in other words, it is only when a miracle is REGARDED AS a spectacle, that it is being MISUNDERSTOOD. Which means, referring to miracles AS SPECTACLES IS A MISUNDERSTANDING. It does not mean miracles aren't spectacular or big or literally moving mountains, it means they are being INTERPRETED incorrectly. This interpretation is once-removed from the miracle itself, and it is the interpretation of "spectacle" that is BLIND to the fact that both parties must have been consenting.

Go tell Moses to stop parting the red sea. He wasn't doing it to show off.

Some people say the course is about changing your mind, as though changing the body is a separate thing or not what you are supposed to do.

This is the belief that mind and body are separate.

So if you then have to choose one version of MIRACLES vs another, you'll either decide miracles are supernatural and physically transformative, or that they are only changes in mind.

The important thing is, this idea that mind and body are separate, is a mistake.

Body is not separate from mind. Body is an illusion that the mind is dreaming, WITHIN ITSELF, and is made of mind-stuff. It is idea and thought. That's all. Just an image in the imagination.

So this is where the two camps JOIN, because now if the body is an aspect of what the mind is thinking, perceiving, doing, then as the mind changes that means the body MUST change.

The two camps of "separate mind" and "separate body" are now joined by this one piece of information - that the body and mind are NOT two things. There is ONLY mind, and it encompasses the body and the world and the universe.

That now means that not only is it true that the Course is about changing your mind/perception, it ALSO means that the Course is about changing the world through supernatural means. ie, mind over matter, or the power of the mind, to demonstrate and reflect the mind's state.

So we are not living in a physical world as such, we're living inside a giant MIND. And all the objects you see are IMAGES in the mind - just ideas, imagination. And nothing else. There is no such thing as physical matter or a "separate body".

And so as the mind changes, so too do the images in the mind change, thus the world changes. This is why the supernatural aspect of miracles is actually perfectly in harmony with the Course's ideas of changes in perception.

As you look at someone's body you are looking at content within their MIND.

"The world IS perception"

This also leads us to realize that when the course talks about "the world you see" in relation to perception, we most likely have grossly misunderstood its meaning, given that we interpreted it to mean the perceptual content of our inner mind, rather than recognizing that it was describing the world AS part of our perception. This has led to all manner of misunderstandings about what the course means by correction of perception.

One time, I was exploring my relationship to the holy spirit and it occurred to me that perhaps I was misunderstanding by presuming he was "separate from me", since I always heard him as a separate voice. And this idea came to me that maybe he was not separate and that this separation between us wasn't there. This seemed harmless enough but this opened me up to the idea that I was now "exposed" to the holy spirit without any defenses or blocks or separations or walls, and my ego did not like that one bit.

The ego in me, which was playing with this idea but not really dropping the deeper walls, interpreted this to mean that the holy spirit had "access" to me (to my ego-identified self) and that this meant he could do anything to me and I would have no defense or way to stop it. I wasn't ready to accept this level of openness without the trust that's needed. I felt that if there was nothing to stop him, the fact he proves there is no ego would dissolve me and was therefore *perceived as* an attack or threat. Of course the holy spirit wasn't doing anything of the sort but that's how I interpreted it.

Instantly, within a split second, and without thinking of it at all, my mind attempted to push him away, or rather, to recoil. To distance myself from him by trying to increase the "gap" between us, trying to hide deeper in the body, and to try to go into denial/resistance/blockage to shut him out. The only defense really was the attempt to block my AWARENESS of him. This happened really quickly and I could really feel this recoil in fear. It's not something I "figured out" it's just something I did automatically. I saw the need for a defense to keep me (my ego self) "safe" from this threat of unity. I actually felt scared of what the holy spirit was going to do to me.

Within an hour, my head became congested, my ears started ringing, they became quite blocked, I was starting to get sinus drainage etc. This came on really quickly. Of course, I did not recognize that I had induced this myself, or chosen it. I was doing what is described here in "sickness is a defense against the truth":

"Sickness is not an accident. Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception. And like all the rest, its purpose is to hide reality, attack it, change it, render it inept, distort it, twist it, or reduce it to a little pile of unassembled parts. The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole. The parts are seen as if each one were whole within itself.

Defenses are not unintentional, nor are they made without awareness. They are secret magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them. In that second, even less, in which the choice is made, you recognize exactly what you would attempt to do, and then proceed to think that it is done."

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

So by the time the hour was up, my BODY was sick. I was not aware I'd caused it or the cause-effect relationship of the event with holy spirit versus what the body was doing. I just thought I was getting sick out of the blue. I started looking ELSEWHERE for causes, wondering if it was something I ate, something I contracted, some emotions coming up, whatever. I then proceeded to suffer with blocked ears, trouble hearing, ringing in the ears, headaches, sinus congestion, for the next couple of days. And you can bet not one single idea of what caused it was related to that event. In effect, the defense is put in place to shut OUT awareness and this blockage causes you to not be AWARE that you CHOSE the defense for this exact purpose to try to make the threat go away.

After a couple days of suffering - and my hearing issues were basically a symbolic representation of "I don't want to hear this truth", I started trying to figure out when it started. I realized that it started right around when I was having that interaction with the holy spirit. And then fortunately I remembered that it had frightened me. And so then I was able to put two and two together and realized that, or at least was open to the possibility, that maybe I had chosen this as a reaction to him. I also was not on "speaking terms" with the holy spirit at this point because I was feeling afraid and did not feel safe or trusting of him, so he hadn't been saying anything.

I started to tentatively realize that I needed to get past this fear. I needed somehow to find a way to re-approach the holy spirit again, without being afraid, having some kind of TRUST, and to find a way to relate to him in terms of that openness to him without it MEANING that I was threatened or under attack. I needed a different way of looking at it so that I wouldn't misperceive our "unity" as a dangerous thing. So I became willing, and I started to try to deliberately trust and to take baby steps towards communicating with him again. And as I did, I was willing to put aside the fear that had been induced.

When I did this, I saw clearly that I had created this defense as a way to try to protect myself and out of fear. And since I could now be willing to more carefully trust the holy spirit and not fear him, it became obvious that I had NO MORE NEED for this protection. Like, it was okay to let down my guard.

Within an hour, all the symptoms vanished completely.

"Healing will flash across your open mind as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings. "

"There will be no dim figures from your dreams, nor their obscure and meaningless pursuits with double purposes insanely sought, remaining in your mind. It will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey."

"Now is the body healed because the source of sickness has been opened to relief. "

"No-one can heal unless he understands what purpose sickness seems to serve. For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning. Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. When this is seen, healing is automatic. It dispels this meaningless illusion by the same approach that carries all of them to truth, and merely leaves them there to disappear."

I find that a lot of ACIM students read the book too fast and sloppily and then approximate what they think they read and think it's saying something it's not.

For example I hear quite often cropping up people saying that the idea of "miracles are spectacles" is a bad thing and therefore, miracles cannot be things like walking on water or raising the dead because that would be a spectacle.

That's a GROSS misunderstanding of what it ACTUALLY says in the book, and it's even grosser when people USE it as a way to AVOID any reason to perform a spectacular miracle:

"A miracle is a reversal of the physical order because it brings more love to the giver AND the receiver. (A miracle is misunderstood when it is regarded as a spectacle.)"

Here it is clearly stating that if you think that a miracle is MERELY a spectacle, BECAUSE it is spectacular, then you have MISUNDERSTOOD IT. Largely because you're probably focusing on the changes in FORM and physicality and are taking it to be spectacular and impressive and such.

It literally actually says that if you think miracles are spectacles, or that a spectacular miracle has to be AVOIDED, you have MISUNDERSTOOD. This does NOT mean that miracles cannot BE spectacular.

Secondly...

"The use of miracles as a spectacle to INDUCE belief is wrong. They are really used for and by believers."

Here it clearly specifically says that if you USE a miracle to try to INDUCE BELIEF. .... then you are making a mistake. It goes on to clarify that miracles are supposed to be used BY believers, FOR believers. In other words, the issue here isn't that miracles are wrong for being spectacular, it's that if you USE them as party tricks without the proper purpose of healing/teaching and they are just some empty "spectacle" for show, you're probably trying to INDUCE BELIEF in someone ie persuade and impress them to COERCE them into believing something, which is really against their will.

So all it's doing in both counts is warning you about a couple of MISINTERPRETATIONS of miracles and their use. It NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER SAYS that miracles must not be spectacular, or that all miracles that seem spectacular are wrong, or that you should never perform a spectacular miracle.

All it says is 1) if you are dwelling on how spectacular IT IS, you are missing the point. And 2) You shouldn't ABUSE miracles by trying to use them to manipulate people. Jesus is giving these warnings because he knows that miracles CAN DO SPECTACULAR THINGS, which COULD be a) misinterpreted by some people and b) abused by others. He knows that precisely because miracles CAN BE SPECTACULAR, he needs to make sure you are performing spectacular miracles for the RIGHT REASONS.

Never does it say in ANY WAY WHATSOEVER that you should not perform spectacular miracles.

This is another example of how people do not read carefully, skim over the words, get an impression and then ignore what it actually said and meant. So now you hear people pulling up this quote as a defense against miracles because they THINK that it said something like "spectacular miracles are wrong" and "miracles should not be spectacles so they shouldn't be spectacular."

It's a gross distortion of what it says, the purpose of Jesus saying it, the meaning of what he said, and what point he is making. We need to pay much more careful close attention to what ACIM ACTUALLY SAYS instead of listening to loosely interpreted second-hand impressions. Especially from people who are anti-miraculous and who want to keep pushing an agenda of never performing a miracle for anyone for any reason.

Resurrecetion and salvation is all about finding freedom from GUILT. Which means reclaiming your INNOCENCE. Guilt is the subtrate of the ego, of all sickness, all forms of suffering, the world, and even death. Without guilt there is no separation, no misery, no spacetime and no ego. Guilt is death just as innocence is life. The attraction of guilt is the opposite to the attraction of God. Guilt is hell, innocence is heaven. We must purge ALL GUILT from our minds and reclaim the innocence that was hidden!

"****Release from guilt is the ego's whole undoing.****" "And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time."

"Teachers of innocence, each in his own way, have joined together, taking their part in the unified curriculum of the Atonement. There is no unity of learning goals apart from this. There is no conflict in this curriculum, which has ONE aim, however it is taught. Each effort made on its behalf is offered to the single purpose of RELEASE from guilt, to the eternal glory of God and His creation."

"His real escape from guilt can lie only in the recognition that the guilt has gone. And how can this be recognized as long as he hides it in another, and does not see it as his own?"

"From everyone whom you accord release from guilt, you will INEVITABLY learn YOUR innocence. The circle of Atonement HAS no end."

"Only the Resurrection became my part in it. THAT is the symbol of the RELEASE from guilt, by guiltlessness." "With everyone whom you release from guilt, great is the joy in Heaven, where the witnesses to your fatherhood rejoice." "The Atonement has always been interpreted as the release from guilt, and this is correct, if it is understood."

"The real world is the state of mind in which the ONLY purpose of the world is seen to be forgiveness. Fear is NOT its goal, and the ESCAPE from guilt becomes its aim."

"The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did. Nor does he do anything to the world, because he was mistaken about what it was. Herein is the release from guilt and sickness both, for they are one. Yet to accept this release, the insignificance of the body must be an acceptable idea."

"Through your transfiguration is the world redeemed and joyfully released from guilt."

"In the crystal cleanness of the release you GIVE, is YOUR INSTANTANEOUS escape from guilt. You MUST be holy, if you OFFER holiness."

"The ego teaches you to attack yourself BECAUSE you are guilty, and this MUST INCREASE the guilt, for guilt is the RESULT of attack. In the ego's teaching, then, there IS no escape from guilt. For attack MAKES GUILT REAL, and if it is real there IS no way to overcome it. The Holy Spirit dispels it simply through the calm recognition that it has never been."

"Nothing can keep FROM you what Christ would have you see. His will is like His Father's, and He offers mercy to every Child of God, as He would have YOU do. RELEASE from guilt, as you would BE released"

"How just are miracles! For they bestow an equal gift of full deliverance from guilt upon your brother AND yourself. YOUR healing saves HIM pain, as well as you. And YOU are healed BECAUSE you wished him well."

"God's Son could never be content with LESS than full salvation, and ESCAPE from guilt."

"The Holy Spirit KNOWS that ALL Salvation is escape from guilt. You have no other "enemy," and against this strange distortion of the purity of the Son of God, the Holy Spirit is your ONLY friend."

Jesus says in the course several times that we have a "sole responsibility". This responsibility is to accept the atonement. And this is usually attached to "for ourselves."

I think this has become one of the most selfishly misinterpreted teachings.

When Jesus mentions this, he ALSO mentions afterwards that once you have accepted atonement, you will now GIVE IT TO OTHERS. Which is not a selfish act. Nor is it exclusive. Nor does it mean you sitting there in isolation having accepted atonement CUT OFF from others, or unable to share it, or unwilling to heal others.

I also think that when he speaks of it being our sole responsibility, he is saying that because we have FREE WILL. Therefore, as the owner of the free will, I have to personally WILL to accept the atonement, and no-one can do this for me. So the responsibility lies SOLELY with me. I have to be willing. That's why it is the ONLY responsibility that lands squarely and solely on MY shoulders and not others. Because I have to exercise my free will. As Jesus says, "no one comes to the atonement except willingly."

Similarly, we have to realize that you cannot RECEIVE atonement WITHOUT giving it, because "atonement is a lesson in sharing." It means that you are aligning yourself with the golden rule and are now identify with your brothers and sharing with them. That in turn means that their interests are now shared with yours and it is your DUTY to fulfill the great crusade to HELP THEM AND HEAL THEM.

"The attraction of light must draw you willingly, and willingness is signified by GIVING."

I think Jesus is pretty clear that he never intended these statements about "sole responsibility" to be interpreted in such a selfish manner, where people THINK it means "I just accept it for myself in isolation and to hell with everyone else." The reason we accept it is SO THAT we become PART OF the atonement (plan) and now have a PROFESSION of atonement, which we do all the time, which involves GIVING TO OTHERS. Solely accept the atonement for yourself SO THAT you can share it!

Jesus's intention was NEVER to suggest that people are to accept atonement for themselves and then HOARD IT and NOT SHARE IT and NOT HELP ANYONE ELSE. In fact, we can interpret it to mean.... I accept atonement for myself because it is my sole responsibility to put myself into a position WHERE I can help others through a service of miracles!

"The sole responsibility of God's teacher is to accept the Atonement for himself. Atonement means correction, or the undoing of errors. When this has been accomplished, the teacher of God becomes a miracle worker by definition."

"The unforgiven HAVE no mercy to bestow upon another. That is why your sole responsibility MUST be to take forgiveness for yourself."

"If the sole responsibility of the miracle-worker is to accept the ATONEMENT, and I assure you that it is, then the responsibility for what is atoned FOR CANNOT be yours."

"The sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept Atonement himself. This means that he knows that mind is the only creative level, and that its errors ARE healed by the Atonement. Once he accepts this, HIS mind can only heal. By denying his mind any destructive potential, and reinstating its purely constructive powers, he has placed himself in a position where he can undo the level confusion of others. The message which he then gives to others is the truth that THEIR MINDS are really similarly constructive, and that their own miscreations cannot hurt them."

It is not possible to PERCEIVE **within** reality, because there is no perception WITHIN reality. Perception is an interpretative process based on judgement. You can evaluate reality and PERCEIVE it, but this isn't the SAME as knowing it or DIRECTLY experiencing it.

"Only your vision can convey to you what YOU can see. It reaches you directly, without a need to be interpreted to you."

Perception ends before you enter the Kingdom, this does not mean that you cannot SEE in some manner WITHIN the Kingdom.

"Only the mind CAN SEE."

In fact, after an extensive search, I found a great deal of evidence in ACIM that mind in fact DOES have a permanent ability to see. And that even God can see. This seeing does not use PERCEPTION, however. It uses cognition, recognition, and knowledge.

It is possible to KNOW reality, and to RE-COGNIZE God and your brothers. This knowing is a DIRECT experience of what IS THERE. You KNOW it, in awareness. This may well not entail BODIES, but you are SPIRIT, and spirit can be known and SEEN. The son of God can also be seen. YOU are a perfect shaft of light, which can be seen. The great rays can also be seen and they stretch to infinity.

Perception is a way of seeing based on JUDGING or EVALUATING what is there. It is interpretative. Beyond perception, WITHOUT judgement or interpretation, you can directly KNOW what is there. This knowing isn't just some fact or piece of information of non-visual experience. You can SEE GOD and His Creation - the universe of love. Knowing is UNDERNEATH perception and provides direct awareness of reality.

I will present below only a small segment of all the quotes I found. These ones speak more directly to seeing in God, seeing God, seeing His Son, God's ability to see, beyond perception, and beyond vision.

"Perception can reach everywhere under His guidance."

"Perception changes, made to take the place of changeless knowledge. Yet is truth unchanged. It cannot be perceived, but only known." (does not mean it cannot be SEEN!)

"To perceive the truth is not the same as knowing it."

"The innocence of God is the true state of ***the mind of His Son.*** ***In this state, man's mind DOES see God***, and because ***he sees Him as he Is***"

"God knows His Children with perfect certainty. He Created them by knowing them. ***He recognizes them*** perfectly."

"Blessed are the pure in heart for ***they shall see God***" is another way of saying the same thing. Only ***the innocent CAN see God.***"

"The soul never leaves ***the sight of God***"

"ONLY what God creates, or what man creates with the same will, ***has any real existence***. ***This, then, is all that the innocent can see.***"

"The wish to see calls down the grace of God upon your eyes, and brings the gift of light that makes sight possible. ***Will you behold your brother? God is glad to have you look on him.***"

"***See His creations as His Son***, for yours were created in honor of Him. The universe of love does not stop because you do not see it, nor have your closed eyes lost the ability to see. ***Look upon the glory of His creation***, and you will learn what God has kept for you."

"***You will see that God Himself*** is where his body is. Before this light the body disappears"

"***God is in everything I see*** because God is in my mind."

"***God is the light in which I see.***"

"***You cannot see apart from God*** because you cannot be apart from God."

"When you ***look upon knowledge***, all judgment is automatically suspended, and this is the process that enables ***recognition to REPLACE perception.***"

"Judgment is the process on which perception but not ***cognition*** rests." ... "It is ***perfectly possible to look on reality without judgment***, and merely ***KNOW it is there*** By knowing this, you are not doubting its reality at all."

"The innocent see safety, and ***the pure see God within His Son***, and look unto the Son to lead them to the Father."

For some time I've been confused about freedom.

A term I am often told by spirit is "you're free."

This always felt uncomfortable. It seems to allow me to do absolutely whatever I wanted to do.

It always seemed like spirit was giving me permission to do things, even things that seemed unhealthy. And this is because freedom really is unconditional, regardless of what you use it for.

Often when I would ask about what to do, whether to do something or not, they'd say "you're free". It didn't seem like a helpful response.

But I see now that it seemed to prefer to give me the freedom of choice, and to not impose any sense of one thing being more guilty than another.

Even so, I would often feel a need to then push further to ask for guidance or advice as to what to do - from someone who knows better. Because this freedom would also highlight that maybe what I was considering choosing wasn't in the spirit of freedom, ie was unloving in some way.

I still couldn't quite come to terms with "being free" though. I would ask my wife (in spirit) something for example, something perhaps relating to our relationship or earth life, and she would say "you're free". If it was ever a request about whether some kind of ego-need was 'okay', she's say I'm free.

In some way it almost seemed like a sort of "i'd prefer you don't do that, but do it if you want to" sort of begrudging. But I am sure it's my own mind that couldn't help but project that onto it.

I also struggled with the idea of being free in general, especially as it relates to my wife's passing and trying to move on and get over grief and loss.

She has been reminding me often "you're free". This hasn't always sat well, because it often was interpreted to mean "we're separate". I have since come to see that this is a sense of physical freedom - or a breaking of relationship, as though to say we have no relationship anymore, but that's not what it means.

It's finally sort of sinking in, especially from the huge download I received last night, that all this talk of freedom doesn't really mean what I thought it did.

I suddenly see now that freedom is really something that was given by God in my creation. It's a wholesale unlimited unrevokable freedom. And it has no strings attached, nor is there any suggestion of guilt for choosing one thing or another.

In this freedom is responsibility for choosing, the power to choose, the power to cause and create, and the inability to BE guilty. If we are free, and God has said "have at it", there is no coercion or requirement or pressure or punishment or judgement of any kind.

This has revealed the truth that, by being free I literally am free to come and go, free to choose, free to do one thing or another, with no strings attached anywhere. Strings are not of heaven or of God or spirit. Strings are conditions, part of conditional love. There are no chains or ties, no limits, no imprisonment.

We are all each one of us individually completely 100% free to dream or awaken, stay in hell or move toward heaven, remain suffering or regain our power, act like an effect or a cause, do evil things or good things, whatever. God does not forceable stop anything, but he does will and encourage us through his plan and help to choose a better way - a more loving happier way.

This is why I keep being told "you're free". It's a God-given right. I don't have to do anything I don't want to do. Whatever I want to do comes to pass. I a responsible for everything I experience. I consent to whatever I cause to happen. There is no victimhood, no specialness, no ties and no conditions.

It doesn't matter what I do, coming or going, advancing or retreating. God still loves me and so does all of heaven. I am guided gently forward and gently upward, and so long as I trust and have willingness I will return to God. Not because I have to, but because I want to.

"Forget not that the choice of truth or sin, power or helplessness, IS the choice of whether to attack or HEAL. For healing comes of POWER, and ATTACK of helplessness. Whom you attack, you CANNOT want to heal. And whom you would have healed, MUST be the one you chose to be PROTECTED from attack. And what IS this decision, but the choice whether to see him through the body's eyes, or let him be REVEALED to you through vision? HOW this decision leads to its effects is NOT your problem. But what you WANT to see, MUST be your choice. This is a course in CAUSE, and NOT effect." UrT21H8

You are never responsible for the freedom of others. If you make yourself responsible, you will believe they are part of your ego. Extending what you are responsible for, is like saying they are inside of the scope of yourself.

And now anything they choose, anything they do, anything that happens to them, is interpreted as being something you are responsible for. And you then are set up on a rocky boat in choppy waters, certain to be tossed around by forces you cannot control, and certain to be guilty for whatever happens.

When they suffer, you suffer along with them. When they are hurt, it hurts you. And when they die, you lose part of yourself. You will then actually grieve for what seems like part of your own self that has died along with them.

This can only possibly result from a sense of mis-identification, losing sight of who you are, and confusing yourself for another person. When you try to control the life of another person, you are effectively saying that you are them. Not in a spiritual way of oneness, but in a violating "shared suffering" kind of way.

You'll have constant concern, worry, fear, guilt and desperation, resulting from believing that this person is part of you, in an egoic way. They are part of you at the level of spirit, but not at the level of separate egos having special relationships.

Special relationships always entails a strange kind of manufactured "bond" or connection between two people. A two-way horizontal cause-effect relationship. It's like a way of trying to fuse two separate people together. To say, you are my ego and I am your ego. Or that you are the cause of me and I am the cause of you. This can only lead to mutual suffering.

In specialness, anything that happens to the "other", who you have tried to "possess", you feel as happening to your self. This can only mean that you literally believe they are you. Which also means you don't even really acknowledge them as a distinct whole person, and instead are really relating to a projected form of your own ego, which is overstepping its bounds."Yet the special relationship which the EGO seeks, does NOT include even ONE whole individual. For the ego WANTS but part of him, and sees ONLY this part, and nothing else."

Egos everywhere love the idea of violating other people's freedom. They are tyrannical rulers, selfish, hoarding, possessing and controlling. They overstep boundaries and invade other people. They are like psychic vampires. They feed off other people. They leave no room and have no humility for allowing others to be themselves. They want to devour and infest and take over other people. Egos overflow and try to spread, to inflate themselves and make themselves consume the space of those around them. And the worst of them even attempt to destroy others to remove the competition.

If a relationship entails any of this encroachment, and of this arrogance, this over-inflation of self, the invasion of other's boundaries and free willed choices, in any way tries to control or manipulate or coerce, or moves into areas of submission or dominance, then the relationship is ego driven and is unholy.

"The dominance-submission problem is related to the perception of helping others VERSUS helping the self. This is a misperception resulting from the failure to recognize the equal worth of both individuals in the interaction."

"No one CAN be "taken over" unless he wills to be. However, if he places his mind under tyranny, rather than authority, he intrudes the submission/dominance onto free will himself."

What we need to do is get our grubby little opinionated hands off other people's merchandise. Or as Jesus puts eloquently, "be passerby". We need to step back and let go of people. We need to withdraw control and stop coercing. And to do that we have to surrender not only the desire to be more than we are, but also let go of believing we are lacking in the first place.

It's really a sense of inadequacy, lack, inferiority, weakness, unworthiness or guilt that often drives us to overstep our bounds with others. We try to take from them through possession. We try to complete ourselves by assimilating someone else's soul. We try to unite in separation, through sacrifice and dominance. And this will always lead to a loss of peace.

The unwillingness to accept love for yourself is the key driving force behind all of this, producing compulsions of seeking outside of oneself. And that can only turn into an attempt expand the ego. Egos that see themselves as having nothing, attempt to possess everyone and everything.

In ACIM, we're told that we made a world, which is really spacetime, and a part of this spacetime is planet Earth. This didn't exist before the separation from God, and DEPENDS on the continuation of separation in order to take on "form".

The world itself was the idea of the opposite to everything-ness, which is the idea of nothingness. Thus the world was made as an empty shell symbolizing nothingness or a "lack of God", onto which we project meaning.

"That was the first projection of error outward. The world arose to hide it, and became the screen on which it was projected, and drawn between you and truth." (the world Earth comes between you and the truth as "emptiness" and "nothingness", and we then project ONTO the Earth)

The Earth itself is meaningless, and is nothing. Being devoid of any inherent properties of its own, like a dark shadow, it acts like a mirror, reflecting meaning given to it. You have to give it meaning because it has none. And even when you give it meaning, it still has no INHERENT meaning of its own.

"The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning."

Because Earth is meaningless, you can project good or bad thought onto it. Thus it can REFLECT an IMAGE projected onto it. It can reflect ideas of heaven or hell, and you can see these IN it, as though a reflection once removed from the thing projected. This doesn't mean the Earth IS heaven or hell, it is neutral, but it can be INTERPRETED as REFLECTING either.

"Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego."

"If a mind creates without love, it can create an empty shell (spacetime/Earth). This CAN be possessed by evil."

Having projected an "empty screen" AS EARTH, our egos rushed in and attempted to project ego meaning onto the Earth. It tried to focus on form and separations and differences to emphasize the separation, projecting this onto the Earth so that Earth "reflects hell."

"It represents a situation in which God and the ego "challenge" each other as to whose meaning is to be written in the empty space which meaninglessness provides. The ego rushes in frantically to establish its own "ideas" there, fearful that the void may otherwise be used to demonstrate its own unreality."

Earth, and spacetime, are a "void" of nothingness, onto which we project God or the ego. Our task then becomes to recognize that we are projecting ego/hell onto a neutral/nothing/meaningless world, and that we can instead project God/heaven onto it. This seems to project meaning and reality onto it, as well as love and peace and holiness. It then becomes possible to see IN the world, a REFLECTION of heaven.

As in "God is in everything I see". This doesn't mean the thing reflect IS LITERALLY the world or AS it, but is reflected IN it. Just as an image of your body is seen IN a mirror. This reflection is an image, and is also referred to as forgiveness. It is SYMBOLIC. It represents something once removed from itself. Just as a reflected IMAGE in a mirror is once removed from the actual object. The reflection of heaven on earth is NOT heaven ITSELF, but it appears to be LIKE heaven. And it is what you PUT THERE that is "the only reality it has."

"The only thing of value in it is whatever part of it YOU look upon with love. This GIVES it the only reality it will ever have. ITS value is NOT in itself" (it has no inherent love/value/reality) A mind which is healed translates the neutral nothingness of Earth into something that resembles heaven, interpreted with ideas of wholeness and healing, with love and peace, with light and happiness etc. This "converts" in a sense, through an inner translation, the form of the world into something that seems to mean heavenly things. Thus Earth appears to the mind to become heaven-LIKE. A REFLECTION of heaven, a symbolic DREAM of heaven. A "real world."

However, we need to be clear that this reflection of heaven on Earth IS NOT the same thing as heaven ITSELF. Heaven Itself, which is reflected ONTO the Earth through projection, is still a distinct dimensional reality created by God. Earth, as a veil of illusions, as an illusory world, as an empty screen, as a void, as a nothingness, must disappear. Part of seeing heaven in it ALSO entails seeing that the world has no attributes of its own, otherwise the reflection cannot be seen. And having no attributes, Earth is recognized as NOT REALLY THERE.

As the veil thins, the mirror dissipates, the reflection in perception (forgiven world) gives way, and parts. And now it disappears and is forgotten. Everything that entailed "the Earth" fades into the nothingness from which it came. The reflection of heaven, the real world, is gone.

"The real world still is but a dream." "Even the real world will vanish from your sight."

With the disappearing of Earth and space and time and the sun and stars, shone away BY light, because they are darkness, REPLACED by heaven, all that then remains is heaven ITSELF. An actual real created "world", not Earth in any way, not space or time, or any other such form, but the living world of light, the creations of light, the true Kingdom of God, which the nothing Earth was all this time made to CONCEAL and hide.

Heaven is first reflected in the world, seen "in the world" here, as Earth is "translated" into heaven. But then Earth ends. A translation IS once removed from the original form of something, and although our minds can see the translation the thing BEING translated is still a void of nothingness and illusions. Earth cannot remain as part of the Kingdom, it is not ACTUAL holiness, the body cannot BE holy, and all other divine attributes cannot be fused into the planet.

"As nothing, which it IS, the body cannot meaningfully be invested with attributes of Christ OR of the ego. EITHER must be an error, for both would place the attributes where they cannot BE. And BOTH must be undone, for purposes of truth."

As the world, Earth, spacetime, disappears, heaven itself, a condition of ACTUAL holiness and BEING holy, is all that remains. This is A Course in Miracles.

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

"YOU DO NOT WANT THE WORLD. The only thing of value in it is whatever part of it YOU look upon with love. This GIVES it the only reality it will ever have. ITS value is NOT in itself" (notice how you GIVE it reality/love, it does not HAVE it itself)

"The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real." (wishes can be unholy or holy, but they're still GIVEN and not inherent)

"This interpretation of the body will change your mind entirely about its value. Of itself it has NONE."

"But what is truth to him must be brought to the last comparison that he will ever make; the last evaluation that will be possible, the final judgment upon this world. It is the judgment of the truth upon illusion, of knowledge on perception; IT HAS NO MEANING AND DOES NOT EXIST." (the Earth mirror does not exist, spacetime has no meaning of its own)

"Creation cannot even be conceived of in the world. It has no meaning here. Forgiveness is the closest it can come to earth." (forgiveness is an earthly symbolic form of heaven's love)

"The body no more dies than it can feel. IT DOES NOTHING. Of itself, it is neither corruptible nor incorruptible. IT IS NOTHING." (this is literal, the physical body is nothing at all, it has no reality).

"It is still true that the body has no function of itself."

"The test of EVERYTHING on earth is simply this: "What is it FOR?" The answer makes it what it IS for you. It has NO meaning of itself, yet you can GIVE reality to it, according to the purpose which YOU serve." (it has NO MEANING of itself, Earth has NO MEANING of itself. You have to GIVE it TEMPORARY meaning)

"Darkness is lack of light. It does not have unique properties of its own." (Earth is like a shadow, a lack of light, the absence of God - world made as an attack on God/light etc)

"All these attributes are given it by you. The world is meaningless in itself." (Earth has no inherent attributes)

"In the world you, can become a spotless mirror, in which the holiness of your Creator shines forth from you, to all around you. You can REFLECT HEAVEN here. But no reflections of the images of other gods must dim the mirror that would hold God's reflection in it. Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego." (Just the fact Earth can reflect VARIABLE things means NEITHER is permanent)

"Those who have learned to offer ONLY healing, because of the reflection of holiness in them, are ready at last for Heaven. There, holiness is not a reflection, but rather the ACTUAL CONDITION of what was but reflected TO them here. God is no image, and His creations, as part of Him, hold Him in them in truth. They do not merely REFLECT the truth, for THEY ARE truth." (notice how reflecting holiness on earth makes you READY to go to heaven, cus you're not there yet. IN heaven, holiness is a condition not a reflected image)

"Yet forgiveness is the means by which I will recognize my innocence. It is the reflection of God's Love on earth. It will bring me near enough to Heaven that the Love of God can reach down to me and raise me to my home." (again, bringing heaven to earth to REFLECT here, gets you ready to LEAVE)

"As I begin to see, I recognize His reflection on earth."

"Forgiveness, truth's reflection, tells me how to offer miracles, and thus escape the prison house in which I think I live."

"All the world shines in reflection of its holy light, and I perceive a world forgiven at last."

"Reflect the peace of Heaven HERE, and bring this world to Heaven. For the REFLECTION of truth draws everyone TO truth. And as they enter INTO it, they leave ALL reflections behind. In Heaven, reality is SHARED, and not reflected" (again a distinction between reality being shared (communion) in heaven, vs reality being REFLECTED on earth (communication))

"What they have felt in them they look upon, and see Its sure reflection everywhere."

"A sleeping mind must waken as it sees its own perfection mirroring the Lord of Life so perfectly it fades into what is reflected there. And now it is no more a mere reflection. It becomes the thing reflected, and the light which makes reflection possible. No vision now is needed. For the wakened mind is one that knows its Source, its Self, its Holiness." (again moving out of the reflected heaven on earth, INTO heaven proper, leaving the world behind)

"We do not see the ego's shadow on the world today. We see the light, and in it we see Heaven's reflection lie across the world." (heaven's REFLECTION, not heaven itself)

"the world he made. In error it began. But it will end in the reflection of his holiness." (the world ENDS when heaven is reflected in it, it doesn't go any further or enter INTO heaven)

"Where this Child shall go is holy ground. It is His holiness that lights up Heaven, and that brings to earth the pure reflection of the light above, wherein are earth and Heaven joined as one." (one means similar, not singular. also heaven is above the earth and they are not the same thing)

"God's laws do not obtain directly to a world perception rules, for such a world could not have been created by the Mind to which perception has no meaning. Yet are His laws reflected everywhere. ******NOT that the world where this reflection is, is real at all.*******" (The place where heaven is reflected on earth IS NOT REAL AT ALL - Earth is not real at all!! The reflection appears to be a real-like IMAGE, but is not heaven itself. Earth is never heaven but can appear heaven-like through translation.)

In the two opposing views of ACIM - one that God created this world, and one that he didn't, there are some parallels.

Both views recognize that the ego is a problem and seeks to undo it. Both views recognize that the Holy Spirit provides a higher vision which is more truth-oriented.

Both views also seek to see THIS world in a more loving and forgiving way.

But where they diverge, is in terms of the overall goal of the relationship with this world.

In the view that God created the Earth, forgiveness is seen as a way to love what God created, as though you were attacking a real creation through your projections of guilt, and have to learn how to forgive it and reunite with it.

In the view that God did NOT create the Earth, forgiveness is seen as a way to love what WE created, in order to see the REFLECTION of God in it, as though you were attacking a FALSE world through your projections of guilt, and have to learn how to OVERLOOK it and unite with what is BEYOND it.

Both views have us changing our relationship with the world to a more loving one. To being more forgiving towards whatever it is and whatever is in it.

The view that God created this world uses forgiveness to form a better relationship with what is thought to be God's kingdom, to not merely reflect heaven in it but to see it AS heaven literally. This view rejects the idea that heaven is another kingdom distinct from the world.

The view that God did NOT create this world essentially uses forgiveness to UNDO the world we made, where atonement is seen as bringing about the END of the world. Not ended in attack, but ended after the "benediction of holiness upon it". First forgiven, then disappeared. The ending of the world then gives way to REVEAL the underlying Kingdom of God that it was hiding.

Since A Course in Miracles has plenty of material pertaining to forgiving "a world", to being loving towards "the outside world", to no longer projecting sin and guilt onto "the world" and so on, in both models, it is easy to see that the idea of God creating the world SEEMS to have a lot of material to back it up.

But where that model falls short is revealed in the difference in its final goal. It seeks to keep the world and not have it disappear. It seeks to make the world REAL, instead of recognizing its unreality. It seeks to combine heaven with earth such that Earth is fully literally heaven. And it seeks to write-off anything suggesting that Earth is not of God, by binding it to the ego's faulty perceptions.

There is an entire step BEYOND the forgiving of this world, a step where God takes us out of this world, where the world disappears, where the stars disappear in light, where the world "merely ceases to seem to be", where it "spins into the nothingness from which it came", where space and time and all their contents disappear, and where the world indeed does come to an end. We leave bodies, we leave the world, and we go to our true home in the Kingdom of God - not of this world.

So you can see that both models have a lot of parallels, both have features that have a similar approach. A person believing that God created the Earth can still adopt a loving attitude toward the world, some FORM of forgiveness toward it, and can even approach the reflection of God - albeit interpreted as literally God itself. The reflection of heaven is "read into" as being merely a way of looking AT heaven, rather than its reflection. And so a person studying under this umbrella could still potentially reach an advanced state of some FORM of love and forgiveness. But it does not take it all the way.

Only when we can recognize that God did not create the Earth can we truly have a) a place to assign statements about Earth being not of God, b) a proper recognition of what a reflection is, c) a correct understanding of what forgiveness means and implies, d) an openness to realizing there is no Earth/world, and e) a willingness to recognize God's Kingdom as beyond this world and our true home in God.

So both approaches can take you quite far, but the belief that God created the Earth will cause you to reach an impasse. You won't be able to go INTO heaven proper, because Earth will act as a doorstop. If you think you reached your destination before you actually did, you're obviously missing out on the final goal. The road doesn't end at planet Earth, it ends in another world entirely. And so the two paths DIVERGE greatly the closer you get to the real world. One aims to settle into life on Earth forever, while the other has its sights set on a world beyond the stars.

If ACIM is to be believed, and interpreted correctly, it is literally saying that this world is the OPPOSITE of what's real. And therefore it is completely unlike the nature of God's Kingdom. Indeed, unlike your real self.

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

"earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

"This is the world of time, where all things end."

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

This presents a major challenge, because if the world is completely opposite to reality, truth, nature and eternal life, then every single thing in it is going to be doing things which are completely against who and what you are, against God's nature and will.

The Holy Spirit is now a spokesperson for the true nature of God's reality, and our own, and is here with us to help us to become heaven-like instead of earth-like. All of his motivation points towards eternal life rather than towards the world of mortality.

"The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily, and as well, as does the ego, except that HIS conclusions are NOT insane. They take a direction EXACTLY opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death" "Nothing the world believes is true."

But if you'll think on this it's pretty crazy the contrast. Here we are in a world which seems very tangible and immense, and yet Jesus is saying that every single thing in it is opposite, upside-down, and backwards, from what is true. And that the body was made to deceive us into believing it is real. "The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

"The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen."

It would be much seemingly easier to just live a life in this world acting the way bodies act, interacting with objects, not questioning anything. Just taking everything to be verbatim as-it-is and not deceptive at all. Believing everything you see and hear.

Jesus's message is far more radical though, because if what he says is true, then fundamentally the entirety of space and time and all their contents, including all planets and galaxies, are completely false, unreal and untrue. "The only effort you need make, to give this world away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

So now on a daily basis, you have this task of literally questioning everything in the world, trying to recognize the world is an illusion, trying not to be deceived by everything the body shows you, trying not to identify with the body as your self, and basically denying and rejecting everything in spacetime.

That can seem very unnatural perhaps, to suggest you have to deny that the world is of God, and then deny everything about it, but Jesus does appear to be telling us to do this. That the only way out of suffering, sickness, misery and death, is to cancel out the entire seeming universe and believe none of it. That's a pretty tall order.

"This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."

Nevertheless, it's clear that this is what Jesus is instructing us to do. To exchange the belief that this world is founded on reality, for a recognition that it is nothing but a dream. A fiction of a world which is hallucinated and not really there at all. Nor does it comprise anything real or permanent or of God.

"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you REALLY understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who SEEM to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are WHOLLY unreal?"

The world is nothing. Not something, but nothing at all. It's not there. It's a pretend world, hiding the Kingdom of God. And there is nothing in the world worth keeping as a substitute for the real thing.

"Yet its nothingness IS your salvation"

"The world can ADD nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons, but it CAN blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it. You cannot behold the world and know God. Only one is true."

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

Do I even know what the heck the world even is and how to look at it and forgive it?

"The world is horribly cruel."

What kind of a statement is this? What's happening in the mind? Is the world inherently cruel, or is this some kind of judgement?

Certainly a sentiment of accusation, blame, finger-pointing, hating, anger, etc towards the world for "being the way it is", is a combination of the world plus a projected attack thought.

"I can escape from the world (the horrible interpretation of the world) by giving up attack thoughts."

If we take away the attack thought, ie the judgement, what remains of the world? Is it still cruel? If bodies are still dying and people are still screaming, is it still cruel? Is it cruel if your interpretation of the meaning of the scene is different?

We are asked not to be DECEIVED BY the world, which means the world is potentially deceptive. We must recognize it as false or as a neutral mirror. "The only effort you need make, to give this world away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

But at the same time we're being asked to love it and forgive it. If the world is cruel somehow, that would suggest it is unforgivable. How can you overlook a murder scene or a slaughterhouse?

But are such things cruel because they are, or because we say they are? Have we given it a meaning of "that's cruel"? Is it fundamental to what's there? Are we to look upon a slaughterhouse with laughter and happiness as we regard how shiny and beautiful and new the dismembered bodies seem to be? Or, would we perhaps indeed not even SEE these images?

"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you REALLY understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who SEEM to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are WHOLLY unreal? Could you have FAITH in what you see, if you ACCEPTED this? AND WOULD YOU SEE IT? Hallucinations disappear when they are RECOGNIZED for what they are."

Is not the real world an attempt to look upon the same world which you regarded as cruel, but without the judgement that it is cruel? To still see the slaughtering but "with love and happiness"?

Can you remain in happiness and peace in the face of such a scene? Maybe. ACIM clearly wants us to look at how awful and hopeless "the world" is. But it also clearly wants us to forgive. Does this forgiveness enable us to still see the same stuff but in a happier way? Can heaven gloss over the world's chaos and make it seem somehow a reflection of perfection? How can "Earth can reflect heaven or hell" work? How can earth, a false world, a cruel slaughterhouse, be seen to reflect heaven?

To love it IN SPITE of itself? To detach the "how do I see it" from the "what is there to look at"? To love regardless of the miserable scene? "They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. "

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

So, we take away some kind of guilt "layer" that we were projecting onto the physical world, the false world, and thus lift "hell" away from it. But it remains sort of hell-like given its continued slaughtering. But somehow the lack of guilt "for doing so" renders it lovely and lovable?

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

What is the world of death? Earth in its falseness of form, or the layer of projected guilt upon it? And in essence isn't he saying then that the real-world state of mind is so filled with reinterpretation and translation of the slaughterhouse, that every single aspect of it seems SOMEHOW just wonderful and lovable? Which prevents you even seeing any sign of "that's a death" interpretation, replaced with "that's a beautiful image of a body in a certain state" interpretation?

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

Ok so now there's a world that was "made" (seemingly long-term, like an objective earth), which symbolizes death... indeed earth's cruel-seeming system symbolizes punishment and suffering and destruction. So the real world "replaces" this somehow. Yet the real world looks UPON what we made to replace it, or translates it, into this vision of the real world.

"The end of the world is not its destruction, but its TRANSLATION into Heaven. The RE-INTERPRETATION of the world is the transfer of ALL perception to knowledge."

So.... take the cruel-seeming death-symbolizing world of earth, the physical, and remove the projected guilt from it, by undoing the guilt in your own mind, and now you'll see that same world anew in another light. "You HAVE been wrong about the world, because you have misjudged YOURSELF. From such a twisted reference point, what COULD you see?"

So you made a world (earth) AND mis-judged it, which made it seem to reflect hell. And now you are to re-judge it with the holy spirit to see that it reflects heaven somehow?

"Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego. You need but leave the mirror clean, and clear of all the images of hidden darkness you have drawn upon it. God will shine upon it of Himself. Only the clear reflection OF Himself can BE perceived upon it."

So if you stop projecting guilt crap onto earth, it somehow becomes "clean" in some way such that it CAN reflect, and now you see God's reflection/image in it.

"Yet in the present love is obvious, and its effects apparent. All the world shines in reflection of its holy light, and I perceive a world forgiven at last."

And being in the present is required.

"Yet forgiveness is the means by which I will recognize my innocence. It is the reflection of God's Love on earth."

"The world I see is hardly the representation of loving thoughts. It is a picture of attack on everything and by everything. It is anything but a reflection of the Love of God and the love of His Son. It is my own attack thoughts which give rise to this picture. My loving thoughts will save me from this perception of the world, and give me the peace God intended me to have."

"Then let the Son of God awaken from his sleep, and opening his holy eyes return again to bless the world he made. In error it began. But it will end in the reflection of his holiness. And we will sleep no more and dream of death."

So the vibe here seems to be 1) you made the world earth, and 2) you hated it initially which made it seem like hell and 3) you forgive it and see it with light and in the present and suddenly it seems to reflect heaven, regardless of its strange twisted ways and forms, which this higher vision immediately glosses over and does not dwell upon?

"It is His holiness that lights up Heaven, and that brings to earth the pure reflection of the light above, wherein are earth and Heaven joined as one." "In His perception of the world, nothing is seen but justifies forgiveness and the sight of perfect sinlessness. Nothing arises but is met with instant and complete forgiveness. Nothing remains an instant, to obscure the sinlessness that shines unchanged, beyond the pitiful attempts of specialness to put it out of mind, where it MUST be, and light the BODY up INSTEAD of it."

"Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not. And what you then will overlook will not be understandable to you, just as its presence once had been your certainty." So... this "seeing it not"... perhaps is like you so very lightly see the body that you barely notice it and you don't focus on it and you see through it to the light. This is "overlooking" which is forgiveness, which really means "not to see what isn't really there".

"It sees no separation. And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees."

This vision "looks upon" everyone/circumstances/happenings/events meaning, those which are occurring in the physical world still, but they are so lightly seen that the vision still remains transfixed upon the light beyond them?

"The world you see cannot be the world God loves, and yet His Word assures us that He loves the world. God's Word has promised us that peace is possible here, and what He promises can hardly be impossible. But it is true that the world must be looked at differently, if His promises are to be accepted. What the world is, is but a fact. You cannot choose what this should be. But you can choose how you would see it. Indeed, you must choose this."

So by him saying the world is a fact he's talking about the physical world.... and then is saying that we have to find a way to look at differently - a better way of looking at it, a more forgiving loving way, which causes it to be seen SOOOOO extremely differently that it doesn't seem like an evil world at all. Or shall we say, false, but forgiven? Unreal, but harmless?

So forgiveness/vision/true perception/salvation/the real world/the world God loves/the forgiven world is a different way of seeing the world we made, from a loving vantage point unlike the world, which changes how the world "strikes us", including categorizing its forms as FALSE, without accusation, while also overlooking them and seeing only a reflection of truth in them. God loves the re-interpreted version of the world, but not the version we see in false perception. This same world that we HATE, can somehow be seen with LOVE. And its hatefulness and harmfulness can be lifted from it.

"Does one whose vision has already glimpsed the Face of Christ look back with longing on a slaughter house? No-one who has escaped the world and all its ills looks back on it with condemnation. Yet he must rejoice that he is free of all the sacrifice which its values would demand of him."

The slaughter-house was only seen AS a slaughter house when we were slightly lacking in our loving vision? When we've risen fully above the battlefield without condemning the falseness of the world, we thus "forgive" it and see the reflection of christ in it. We don't dip down into the fragmented conflicting experience of the world, we remain floating just above its surface appearances.

"The world in infancy is newly born. And we will watch it grow in strength and health to shed its blessing upon all who come to learn to cast aside the world they thought was made in hate to be love's enemy. Now are they all made free along with us. Now are they all our brothers in God's Love."

"For He Who LOVES the world is seeing it FOR you, without one spot of sin upon it, and in the innocence which makes the sight of it as beautiful as Heaven."

"In kind forgiveness will the world sparkle and shine, and everything you once thought sinful now will be re-interpreted as part of Heaven. How beautiful it is to walk, clean and redeemed and happy, through a world in bitter need of the redemption that your innocence bestows upon it!"

So ultimately what it all seems to say is that 1) We made a world in hate which produced the physical world with its forms 2) We judged it with ego to experience it as hell and label it as cruel and other made-up meanings 3) we must find a way to love that same world we made and forgive it and not condemn it, so that we can experience it through a more loving vision and regard it as in fact harmless and beautiful and a seeming reflection of heaven. So that you can even EXPERIENCE EARTH AS HEAVEN-LIKE even while you're in this world.

"And what SEEMED ugly, in the darkness of your LACK of reason, is suddenly released to loveliness. Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release."

"The real world holds a counterpart for each unhappy thought reflected in your world; a sure correction for the sights of fear and sounds of battle which your world contains. The real world shows a world seen differently, through quiet eyes and with a mind at peace. Nothing but rest is here. There are no cries of pain and sorrow heard, for nothing here remains outside forgiveness. And the sights are gentle. Only happy sights and sounds can reach the mind that has forgiven itself."

You mean to say, after all this time, I have to actually love the goddam world that I thought was cruel and hell?!!!!!! WTF. Hah.

If you didn’t believe that God is innocent, you wouldn’t feel guilty as a result of believing that you’ve attacked him. You feel guilty precisely because deep down somewhere inside you know that God is innocent. If you didn’t believe God is innocent, you wouldn’t feel anything at all when you try to attack him. If you believed he truly is guilty and deserves to die, you would interpret it as justice, and would have no remorse or guilt at all.

Similarly in all states of suffering and pain and misery, you feel bad and unhappy precisely because there is fundamentally some part of you that knows it belongs with God, a part of you that is absolutely anchored and centred in being with God, and knows that it cannot be happy if it is away from God.

This is why trying to be separate feels horrible, trying to deny life turns into sickness and suffering, and why trying to deny God completely produces death and destruction.

These are effectively natural reactions to what you’re trying to do based on the fact that in your core you know these things are wrong, you know the God is love, you know that you want to be with him, and you know that when you’re not one with God, you can only be unhappy and miserable about it.

Being away from God makes you suffer, and this suffering implies and validates the fact that deep down you do not want to be away from God. Otherwise you wouldn’t feel anything about it at all. Guilt when correctly interpreted implies innocence, just as denial of something implies that it still exists.

But anyone who tries to live without God induces suffering and cannot be happy. All forms of suffering and sickness and death, all unhappy feelings, directly imply that you know you belong in God’s love, and these things feel awful because of that, in a knowing of what is right for your soul.

This is why eventually we come to recognise that being away from God is painful, we can’t stand it anymore, It’s not working for us, and we want to seek a better way. Then we begin to give up our attempt to be away from God, because we start to recognise that it hurts really badly, and no longer willing to tolerate being in pain.

This represents a massive crisis, a spiritual emergency, and a vital turning point in awakening, and questioning the unreality of the world, and returning to spirit. It requires beginning to realise that your strategy isn’t working, that what you’re getting into actually is not good for you, the pain actually is painful and not tolerable, and that you no longer want to be evil.

Until this point you did not recognise what you were doing and you thought you were doing the exact opposite. You thought the death was life and punishment was salvation and hell was heaven. You thought death was attractive and hell was justified and there was no reason to change anything. Except that it nearly killed you.

There has to be a massive change of heart, a total reversal of the thought system, an awakening to a completely opposite truth than what you believed in, willingness to be completely mistaken. Death must be questioned and no longer confused for life. And real reality must be approached with an open mind and a willingness to be saved from hell. This invites the Holy Spirit to help you, guide you, comfort you, and heal you. A little wellness is all it takes to open up to another world.

Heaven is vertically opposite to the Earth. Heaven is love, yet love has no opposite. The earth is the opposite to love and does not exist, hence "there is no world."

"Never was love in the world."

"The truth is simple; it is one without an opposite."

"There is no death because an opposite to God does not exist."

"Perfect love casts out fear. If fear exists, Then there is not perfect love. But: Only perfect love exists. If there is fear, It produces a state that does not exist."

The Earth is made of fear, guilt, and sin. It is an illusion. It is the idea of the opposite to love, and opposite to God. Yet, an opposite to love does not exist.

If you take heaven an earth and put them alongside each other, seemingly with a separation between them, you are suggesting that you can evaluate them as though comparable equals. This is dualistic, horizontal logic. Heaven’s relationship to the earth is NOT horizontal.

Heaven, love, God, creation, do not HAVE an opposite. They are ABOVE, on a higher level. Earth is BELOW, on a lower level. Their relationship is not horizontal, it is vertical.

Heaven is infinite. Earth is finite. Heaven is reality. Earth is illusion. Heaven is truth. Earth is a lie. Heaven is everywhere. Earth is nowhere. Heaven is all that exists in God. Earth is nothing that exists anywhere but in a fiction.

You cannot compare them like apples to apples. You also cannot suggest that if you remove the separation between them, then they will BECOME ONE. That would only happen in a horizontal logical comparison, which is how the EGO THINKS about oneness.

Compare them vertically, and what happens?

Vertically, because love has no opposite, it means:

1) There is no world. It does not exist ANYWHERE.

2) When the "real world" disappears, and the supposed "separation between heaven and earth" is dissolved, this does NOT mean that they blend together into ONE state that includes them both. IT DOES NOT. It means, that which was EVERYTHING REAL - heaven - is all that will be left. That which was NOTHING REAL - earth - will be recognized as ceasing to exist.

3) Earth is not a part of heaven. It never will be. There is no world. Not even the "real world" exists but as a dream. Dreams end and what was dreamed ceases to exist anywhere.

4) Earth does not "Translate into heaven" as a way for it to BECOME heaven, to be included in heaven, to turn into heaven, or to blend with heaven. What was thought to be there, as a world which DOES NOT EXIST, disappears entirely, being recognized. Jesus teaches "Illusions recognized must disappear", not "illusions recognized are kept and transformed into part of heaven."

5) The removal of the separation between heaven and earth does NOT MEAN that heaven ceases to exist afterwards. Opposition is the idea that exists only in the illusory earth. Heaven does not oppose. Heaven does not participate in the separation or in becoming one half of a duality. Heaven recognizes there is ONLY heaven. "There is no life outside of heaven." When the idea of separation disappears, the CONTENT OF THAT IDEA will disappear, which was entirely ONE SIDED! The ego’s opposition to Heaven was NOT part of Heaven’t opposition to the ego. Heaven does not attack or separate. Heaven is not a PART OF the separation idea. When the separation is undone, vertically, ONLY THE WORLD DISAPPEARS, NOT HEAVEN. What remains is ONLY HEAVEN.

6) This is the meaning of "nothing unreal exists" - the earth DOES NOT EXIST. Trying to find a way to make it continue to exist "in God" or "fused with Heaven" is DENIAL, based in fear. Heaven/God/reality is all that exists. Ego/separation/earth/illusions is UNREALITY and does not exist. Never do the two become one. Only one of them is TRUE. The world is FALSE. Never will "what is false" be converted into or kept or become a part of heaven or ANY state of oneness no matter what you call it or how you try to read into it.

7) There is no world. This is the central thought the course would attempt to teach. It is an extremely radical idea. It threatens the ENTIRE ego thought system. Resistance against it is the sum total of ALL of the resistance of the entire ego thought system. No-one with an ego wants to admit it is true. It means nothing in the world, no forms, no bodies, no pretty animals and rainbows, no lakes and mountains and oceans, no special relationships, no bodily relationships, NONE OF IT EXISTS.

That’s why this threatens so many people. Believing YOU are made of or are a part of the ego world (earth) makes you certain that IF it does not exist, NOR DO YOU. And that is interpreted like a threat of DEATH by the ego. And then the person will put up *defenses* against the truth, moving into sickness in an attempt to explain why the world is real and part of God’s creation. It is nothing less than the fear of death.

It takes WILLINGNESS to accept that this is true and that Jesus is literally telling us there is no world here at all. This is also why Jesus repeatedly says that "nothing you see means anything" and "the world you see does not exist". Literally, planet earth does not exist. NEVER will it be a part of heaven in any way under any circumstances or interpretations whatsoever. Love has no opposite. What is not love does not exist NOW, even if it’s showing up as a fake planet. And it will not begin to exist LATER, after the universe disappears.

Only love is real.

(Comments on "the mechanism of miracles.")

"Miracles are merely the translation of denial into truth."

... Here I initially thought Jesus is talking about a typical form of denial, like, not wanting to admit something. But Jesus seems to be referring to the fact that you can deny LIFE and health and thereby implement all forms of sickness and even death. Miracles then can reverse the "denial of life", ie death. Miracles resurrect.

"If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves."

...Loving yourself can heal your sickness. All sickness is a lack of love.

"Therefore, they are asking for the love that would heal them, but which they are DENYING TO THEMSELVES."

...This seems like a quandry, people want to not be sick, but behind the denial they do, so they continue to deny what would make them well - the admission of love.

"If they knew the truth about themselves, they could not be sick."

...Recognizing you are love heals all sickness.

"The task of the miracle-worker thus becomes to DENY THE DENIAL OF TRUTH."

...To help someone heal, you must not believe what THEY are believing about themselves. They are in denial of their love, you must acknowledge their love and overlook their denial/belief in being unloveable.

"The sick must heal THEMSELVES, for the truth is IN them."

...At first this suggests you cannot heal anyone else.

"But, having OBSCURED it, the light in ANOTHER mind must shine into theirs, because that light IS theirs."

...So since someone has "disabled" themselves, blocking the source of their own healing, and while requesting help are also rejecting it, someone ELSE needs to help them. The light in YOU as a miracle worker IS the "same" as the light in the other. Therefore you can cause THEIR light to BYPASS their own denial.

"The light in them (the miracle worker) shines as brightly, REGARDLESS of the density of the fog that obscures it. If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God. YOU CAN REMEMBER THIS FOR ALL THE SONSHIP."

...Even as your brother sees themselves as imprisoned, you have to see them as NOT imprisoned. Not buy into the illusion of the denial or sickness. You must not "give power to" the sickness and must not believe it HAS any power, otherwise you are making it real and giving it strength, which reinforces it. You must deny the belief that THEIR denial (showing up as sickness) has any power, including the belief that the sickness is too difficult to heal.

"Do not allow your brother not to remember, for his forgetfulness is YOURS. But YOUR remembering is HIS, for God cannot be remembered alone. THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN."

...Recognizing your brother as "not really sick" and remembering his true self/love for him, recognizes it in both of you. You remember FOR both of you. Ie you put the ove back into both of your minds.

"To perceive the healing of your brother as the healing of yourself, is thus the way to remember God. For you forgot your brothers WITH Him, and God's answer to your forgetting is but the way to remember."

...Some have interpreted this to mean that your brother "is" you which is almost true. You are identical and you share with him. When you can see that what is true of him is true of you, YOU are remembering God. For both of you.

"Perceive in sickness but another call for love, and offer your brother what he believes he cannot offer himself."

...Love is the basis of miracles. Expressing love can heal sickness. But notice it also says OFFER... which doesn’t mean it is forceful, and it potentially can still be rejected. There is a line in ACIM which says "miracles are not always effective because of what love is" or something like that.. because they respect freedom.

"Whatever the sickness, there is but one remedy. You will be made whole as you MAKE whole, for to perceive in sickness the appeal for health, is to recognize in hatred the call for love."

...This is quite advanced. To perceive WHOLENESS requires no fear and complete love. Perception has to be very "correct" in order to *recognize* that the sickness is a call for love, and to not be deceived by it. The person has implemented sickness through denial of love, via hate. You have to not believe the hate.

"And to give a brother what he REALLY wants, is to offer it unto yourself. For your Father wills you to know your brother AS yourself. Answer HIS call for love, and YOURS is answered. Healing is the love of Christ for His Father, and for HIMSELF."

...You must give love to both of you. This is why "you can only give the miracles you have received". In order to share love which will heal your brother, you must be IN the love yourself. If you are not willing to love yourself, you cannot heal others. But if you do love yourself and are healed, you CAN heal others.

Your brother really wants love, but has denied it to himself. To give it to him, you must love him "as you love yourself". Loving your brother shares it with both of you and restores unity and wholeness to both of you. Worth repeating:

"Healing is the love of Christ (sonship) for His Father (father of all souls) and for Himself (all brothers and yourself).

Love yourself so that you can love others. Love works miracles.

In the section below, Jesus writes about how God did not create a meaningless world, God only creates things which are meaningful, and the world we see (earth etc) is not meaningful, and therefore does not exist, because God did not create it. For example he even gives examples of things in this world which God did not create and are therefore not real:

"God did not create that war, and so it is not real.

God did not create that airplane crash, and so it is not real.

God did not create that disaster [specify], and so it is not real."

This means not only are your personal perceptions and interpretations of the world not real, it also means the stuff IN the world, the wars and airplanes and disasters and so on ARE NOT REAL, so they DO NOT EXIST AT ALL, regardless of how you are looking "at" them. Looking at a plane crash in a "happy way" is denial of the fact that there IS NO plane crash, and that isn't to do with your personal private perception, nor is it really to do with your interpretation of way of looking at the plane crash. It's on a much bigger scale, of the fact that there is no plane or crash whatsoever because it doesn't exist, and the plane and the crash are PART OF YOUR MISPERCEPTION.

He goes even further to tell us that the illusions we "see", some of them can be part of our "personal hell", while other illusions are "shared".

I think this is an important point because "perception" is not just about your own personal hell within your own mind. And accepting atonement is not just about you becoming happy with a horrifying world of death and destruction, sitting on a fence smiling at passers by who go about their torture. Some aspects of perception are also taking place on a shared level, outside your body, and in "forms" which are actually parts of your perception as a much larger being/mind, shared with other minds as part of the sonship who is dreaming this whole world.

Many people think the Course is only about fixing your "personal hell" ie the illusions or perception that are "inside your own mind". This is only PART of the truth. A big part of the illusions which need correcting are OUTSIDE your personal mind, in the larger mind which we collectively are contributing to, and which encompasses this whole universe. This is why Jesus says "this world IS perception".

Whenever Jesus talks about "the world you see" many people have interpreted it to mean he's referring to your personal private interpretation of the world, as though an imaginary world that you overlaid on top of the world. This correlates to many passages in the course about false perception and seems to give it credence. But it also misses the point that Jesus is quite plainly referring to THE PHYSICAL WORLD not just your personal interpretation of it. The world you see, this universe, does not exist. The world you see, this universe, which is not "inside" your little mind, but is part of a collective shared mind, needs to be "corrected" because IT is perception.

Objects and clouds and rocks and people and mountains and rivers and trees and dogs and cats are all part of this illusion, and all part of perception, and all part of your mind. Not just the stuff that seemed to be inside your personal space.

"God did not create a meaningless world.

The idea for today is, of course, the reason why a meaningless world is impossible. What God did not create does not exist. And everything that does exist exists as He created it. The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist. "

"This is your personal repertory of horrors at which you are looking. These things are part of the world you see. SOME OF THEM ARE SHARED ILLUSIONS, AND OTHERS ARE PART OF YOUR PERSONAL HELL. It does not matter. What God did not create can only be in your own mind apart from His. Therefore, it has no meaning. In recognition of this fact, conclude the practice periods by repeating today's idea:

God did not create a meaningless world."

As you take steps toward being 100% responsible for everything in your life, you're taking steps toward being AT CAUSE instead of at the effect.

This will likely make you have two reactions:

1) The ego will not understand what this really means and will interpret it from a viewpoint of 'I' and 'me' ... if *I* did this then.... if *I* caused this then.... and always its conclusion is going to be .... then I must be guilty. It uses guilt to try to prove that if you are responsible or at-cause, ALL BLAME is pinned on you for everything that 'has happened' and 'is real'. So whatever thing you take responsibility for, any measure of believing it is real or has really happened will be interpreted as "your fault", and it FEELS LIKE SHIT. This is what I am struggling with at the moment.

2) The other reaction you will gradually have is, that you'll begin to become aware that you have a CHOICE. Its a choice that you probably never even realized existed before. It was buried under all of the illusions of 'having no say' and 'having not chosen this'. It's not just that we believe we're at the effect of the world, but that we believe that we have NOT CHOSEN to be at the effect of the world - that we had NOTHING to do with this. It just 'happened to us' as victims. A state of powerlessness. As you begin taking back responsibility for being the CAUSE - and getting past the ego's roadblock of being 'the cause of real effects' - you start to reawaken the fact that you DO have a choice, you DO have input, you DO cause things. And you start to realize not only that "you did this to yourself" (the key to salvation) but that you can actually choose NOT to do something to yourself, and that this actually UNDOES and heals - removing unwanted effects from your life through CHOICE.... including the choice for death!

So on the one hand, it's very liberating because you start to see yourself as a chooser, and that everything is optional - not set in stone or unchangeable. On the other hand you feel guilty not only for all the bad choices you made before (ego remorse) but also for the idea that you had anything to do with such things or the effects that were produced (ego guilt). You have to learn to move past that ego identification, the ego wanting to still be a part of this responsibility, and recognize your INNOCENCE.

It's not that you did a bunch of stuff on purpose and it had real effects and that means you're guilty. It's like.... you are becoming responsible for BEING INNOCENT, and are overlooking/forgiving what you THOUGHT you did which you did not really do. It's not about owning up to crucifying God's son.. although it can feel like that at first, which is horrible. It's not about claiming blame or saying a) that thing is real and b) I'm the one who really did it. That's the EGO taking responsibility which leads to guilt. We need to see that what we think happened did NOT happen and we're not responsible for it HAPPENING, we're responsible for believing it happened and being under the illusion that it was producing real results.

We are responsible for being who we really are. If we can really recognize who we really are, we must recognize we are innocent and that we have NOT done anything wrong or caused anything bad to happen. It takes time to come to that I guess, and more ego deceptions to be undone as we own up to being Christ.

I'll end on an up note .... that I am excited to be discovering that I have choices where I previously saw no choices, and I have freedom where I saw only imprisonment, and I don't just `have to` go along with death and destruction - it ONLY happens if I choose it and I don't have to choose it. I can choose life and be under no other laws but Gods.

Have you done this? I know I have done it many times: "Who but yourself evaluates a threat, decides escape is necessary, and sets up a series of defenses to reduce the threat that has been judged as real?"

Something happens, typically something related to a body - something physical which the body reports as happening. Then I observe it and judge - THIS IS REAL - something's happening, something's going wrong.

Then there is a whole cascade of reactions, starting with immediate fear. There are defenses, attempts to escape, attempts to find cures, attempts to explain the causes. All attempts are me trying to defend against the "reality" of the problem, which, because it IS real to me, cannot BE escaped.

And always no matter what I do, what I think, how I approach it, there is still the fear response to something that seems unchangeable, fixed, stuck, irreversible, and deadly.

This is always because at the "core", I've given REALITY to something that the body showed me. I've decided this is real, and have interpreted it as totally real. By making it real, I locked it in place, turned it into an inescapable sin, gave it permanence, and set it up as the truth.

Now it cannot be questioned, undone, changed, healed, or corrected. Knowing this produces inevitable unresolvable fear. If it is real, there is nothing I can do about it. And this always leads to a feeling of powerlessness, hopelessness, weakness, incapability, inadequacy and shame. As if the thing is just dangling there in front of my face taunting me and haunting me with its threats of inevitable suffering.

"NOT because it has the power to hurt, but just because YOU have denied it is but an illusion, AND MADE IT REAL."

"Its plan is to have you SEE ERROR CLEARLY FIRST, and THEN overlook it. But how CAN you overlook what you have made real? By seeing it clearly, you HAVE made it real, and CANNOT overlook it."

All of this begins the moment that I look at something and decide for myself, "this is real". This one act of reading reality into it, taking it seriously, forgetting to laugh, focusing on it like it's literally right there in front of my face as proof that it exists, is enough to cement it into my mind. As soon as it is locked in, nothing whatsoever can dislodge it and it looms over me like a constant threat.

The ego has counseled that I need to look clearly and closely at what is an error - an illusion of something going wrong - as if it is real, and examine it, and figure out what it is, and analyze it, and describe it, and find the cause of it. And that only by looking intensely at it as a real problem can I possibly find a solution to it. But this does not work because all it does it holds the problem in place.

The ONLY thing which can truly uproot and solve the problem, is the recognition that I am the one who decided it was real in the first place. I bought into the illusion. I fell for the temptation. I forgot to laugh at it. I thought it was serious. I gave it meaning. I decided what it was and why it meant. And only by this decision, based on inputs from the body senses, did I convince myself "this is really happening, holy shit, there is no escaping it."

I must then reverse this belief, this core key moment, realizing that since I gave it this reality, I can withdraw this power from it also. And I must do this is if I want to experience atonement and freedom.

"If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God."

It means I have given my power away to an illusory world, have set it up to have power over me, and now I see it as causing me. And now I am starting to experience the consequences and effects that it implies. And only by taking its power away can I free myself from my self-made imprisonment.

This problem has no power, it is not real, it is not happening, it is not true, it does not exist, it is not there, it is already gone, it never happened, it is an illusion and is nothing.

And then I can laugh and be free from the clutches of this tiny anchoring black-hole of despair and deception. It is truly nothing and I has no power over me.

When something is logical, you start with a premise, and then as the nature of this premise "extends", it produces logical conclusions. The conclusions that will come from this premise are really established in the premise itself. The limitations or scope of the premise determines what can come from it, and what comes from it is completely in accord with its starting point.

"Every system of thought must have a starting point. It begins with either a making or a creating, a difference we have already discussed. Their resemblance lies in their power as foundations. Their difference lies in what rests upon them. Both are cornerstones for systems of belief by which one lives."

When you use logic, and you arrive at a logical conclusion, what you're looking for is consistency, or the lack of contradiction within the logical system. If what you end up with seems to correlate to what you started with, and there was no obvious "nonsense" creeping in, then you can conclude that your logical conclusions are valid. You won't see any sign of contradiction so you'll consider the conclusion to be "correct". It will seem that the logic "makes sense".

What's happening is you're finding an internal consistency within the system, set up by the premise you started with. And each step you took in your reasoning did not violate the rules of the logic system. So whatever conclusions you ended up with seemed to make sense, based on what you started with. And this gives you a notion of things making sense, being valid, even being correct.

The problem is that the premise itself has absolutely everything to do with what you end up with. The conclusions that come from it, if you follow the logical steps carefully and impeccably, are really "automatic". If you start at a given starting point, you WILL end up at an ending point which is in harmony with the starting point. And you won't be able to come to a "false conclusion" if you reason it through carefully.

But if you start off on the wrong foot, if you begin with an assumption, of your premise is entirely wrong to begin with, what will happen? You'll still make logical steps, you'll still seek out internal consistency, you'll still look for that sense of "it all seems to fit together", and you'll still draw conclusions which seem to be in accord with the premise you started with. And you'll conclude "it makes sense" even. But the conclusions you come to, if you start off on the wrong foot, will be actually false. Even though they'll seem correct.

So you can be logical, and be wrong. If you start out wrong, you will only get something wrong at the other end. If you begin with a lie, you will end up with a lie, but it will be a logical lie which makes sense within the context of the whole system.

Thought systems work the same way, whatever the system is based on determines what can come from it, and only that can come from it and nothing else, unless you want to be contradictory. Yet if you start out with a system based on a lie, you will end up with lies. The lies will seem to make sense and even will seem "true" in that they seem to "add up" without contradicting the starting point, but they will still be false in the big picture. But if you believe them, you will be trapped and stuck, while believing you are free. And that is false perception.

This is the problem with the ego thought system. In the really big picture, the ego's system is a "small picture", and it is out of context, and it does not start with the whole truth. It is not beginning with something that is actually really true. It is starting out on the wrong foot, such as the belief that separation is true, or sin is real, or the impossible is possible, or death is life, or something real can be threatened etc.

When you start out with something ultimately false like that, you will produce an ENTIRE logical "system", where your reasoning will progress completely "logically" from the start to the end. And you will end up with conclusions which seem consistent. The conclusions will even seem to make total sense, IF the premise is true. But in the big picture, if it is recognized that the premise was false to begin with, then even though the conclusions are logically consistent, they are still false conclusions.

So the ego starts off on the wrong foot, on an assumption which is wrong. It starts with the belief that separation is possible, or sin is real, and then begins a progression of seemingly natural logical conclusions. If separation is real, then it must be true (consistent) that bodies are real. Then if bodes are real, it must be true that anything bodies experience is real. And if their experiences are real, then death is real. etc. That's a natural logical progress and completely impeccable logic. But the conclusion is insane because the whole "system of thought", the system of logic, began with a false premise.

When you start with a true premise, such as that God is infinite and permanent and immortal, there are once again logical progressions which come from this. If you follow the steps and start to draw conclusions based on that, and if you are careful to be consistent and not contradictory, you will end up with natural conclusions. And these conclusions will make sense, and seem valid, and they ALSO WILL BE TRUE. If you start with truth, you will end up with truth. And so whether or not the result is true or false, depends on whether the premise is true or false. And what you get out of the system as a natural logical conclusion or outcome, is set up in its starting point.

When the starting point is God, the natural logical outcome of God is the creation of the Kingdom. It's not that God randomly decides to create immortal beings, it's that the whole system just functions that way, truth goes in at the start, progressions of logical consistency occur, and you automatically get creation out the other end. And because you started with immortality, you end up with immortality. "God is but love, and therefore so am I." Such conclusions therefore are not only making sense, they are also TRUE.

"The Kingdom is the result of premises, just as this world is. You may have carried the ego's reasoning to its logical conclusion, which is total confusion about everything."

"The ego's logic is as impeccable as that of the Holy Spirit, because your mind has the means at its disposal to side with Heaven or earth, as it elects."

"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."

When you begin a thought process/system on a lie or illusion, you will end up with illusory lies which seem to make sense but are false. This means the total absence of REASON, which is the absence of sanity, because the whole system of thinking started out insane. When you start out the thought process/system with sanity and truth, you end up with a SANE conclusion. This is what ACIM refers to as REASON. The reasoning is LOGICAL, just as the ego's reasoning is logical, but it starts with sanity so ends with sane conclusions.

Just because something seems extremely logical, does not mean it is true. And this is a BIG problem for a lot of people studying ACIM. If for example you start out with a premise that e.g. God created the world, and you do not challenge this premise, the ENTIRE course will now be interpreted to try to "fit" it into that premise. And every conclusions drawn will not challenge that premise.

In order to uphold the premise that God created this world, a LOT of adjustments have to be made to the course's meanings, in order to produce consistency and a lack of contradiction. And this can lead to what seems like a consistent picture, but it is also completely wrong. Because it started out with a belief that is completely mistaken and unfounded, in light of God's nature.

A massive collection of CONSISTENT logical conclusions will be made based on it. And all of these conclusion together will form the appearance of what seems like a completely consistent internal coherence. It will STILL all seems to "fit together". A clear "picture" will form. There won't appear to be any contradictions. And any steps necessary to keep the premise valid will be made, regardless of the extent to which that means changing the meaning of the course.

Everything it says will be interpreted through that lens and filter. And the person will end up with a very elaborate, consistent, highly polished, internally supportive, self un-contradictory, and seemingly highly sensible set of conclusions. And it will all seem TRUE because it seems to make sense. And they will marvel at the seeming beauty of its logical harmony. BUT, the entire thing will be bullshit, because it all starts out with a false premise. And so the entire system of thought is completely mistaken. Yet it is regarded as truth because of its consistency.

You have to therefore be careful that your reasoning begins with something which is absolutely true. You need to understand God's nature first. And when you reason based on the truth, you will end up with truthful and valid and consistent answers, which are correct. You can't start with the world and try to reason backwards to find the truth. You have to start at the beginning of the system.

You have to have an awareness or grasp of what the absolute truth IS FIRST, before you can even proceed to think about anything. If you set off on the wrong foot, every conclusion you come to will be potentially false. But most of us will start out with false conclusions and assumptions and not question them, resulting in more false conclusions. Because we're starting out exploring all this with our egos, which has taken a whole bunch of assumptions as true, and this has not yet been questioned.

We have to find out first what the premise of our entire thinking is, whether we have started out on the wrong foot or not. And for that you have to ask yourself, what is the ultimate truth really like? What is God like? What is his nature? What IS the ultimate absolute premise? Where DID everything actually start, and what is the logical nature of that premise? Because from God, everything real proceeds as a logical system of thought, and it proceeds only according to His nature, and nothing can come from it which is unlike its starting point. So you have to be REALLY clear about God's nature before you can reason anything correctly.

When you can understand what God is like, you can start to draw truthful conclusions. And if you are careful, you can be GUARANTEED that these conclusions will be true. But if you do not understand God's premise, or you have difficulty being impeccable with your logic, then you will come to false conclusions because you'll be starting out with something false. And yet these conclusions will see true to you and make sense, even though they are mistakes or errors in reasoning. And you can end up with a whole lot of "it makes sense" even if you start out with lies.

This is happening A LOT in ACIM circles because many students are not yet in a position to grasp the nature of God's system, the premise of reality and the one truth. And so most of us are struggling to come to terms with what the conclusions are, yet alone being able to grasp where it all started or what it's all based on. And a lot of time is spent trying to uncover or learn about the premise.

If you return to the highest possible starting point, the pre-separation system, and you look at how God functions, and then you begin to reason out what CAME from that premise, and if you do so impeccably logically, you WILL come to true conclusions. But if you are mistaken about God, you will be mistaken in everything you conclude.

Those true conclusions will not only show you the things God COULD do, it will also show you what he COULD NOT do. What CAN come from Him, and what cannot. What He would will, and what he would not. And thus what you are, what your nature is, and what you are capable of in reality. When you do that, you'll see why the ego's system is entirely a FALSE premise, and EVERYTHING that comes from it will be false. And that includes the attempt to oppose God's premise, to overthrow the Kingdom, to make another world (including Earth), and why Earth CANNOT have come from God due to its nature being a complete contradiction of God's nature.

God does not make contradictions because He is logically consistent. For Him, heaven is the natural outcome of His premise. And Heaven is the ONLY outcome of His premise. Nothing else CAN come from it because it is rooted in truth. And because of His nature, Heaven HAD to be created. It's in God's nature to extend His logical premise to produce The Kingdom. Which is why it has always existed.

Earth, which is OPPOSITE to heaven in *EVERY* way, CANNOT COME FROM GOD. Its nature is opposite to His premise. It does not function like Him. It does not begin with the premise He begins with. And it cannot be a natural outcome of His thought system. If He were to create it, in addition to creating Heaven, that would mean two entirely different and opposing outcomes can result from a single premise. This is logically IMPOSSIBLE regardless of what the premise is. Each premise produces ONE conclusion in accord with it, not two different ones.

God could only create one or the other, and which one is set up in his beginning nature. Since Earth is opposite to Heaven, God could NOT have created it, otherwise He would have to have STARTED OUT with a split mind and be opposing himself. He would have to be fundamentally contradictory, as a premise, in order to PRODUCE two contradictory outputs. He could only Create ONE or the other, not both, and they cannot both exist or "be one" because of their contradictory natures. If Earth is real, heaven does not exist at all.

God is NOT contradictory, so He can ONLY produce ONE outcome. That outcome is HEAVEN, and Earth is therefore NOT OF GOD, and is not based on truth or reality. And since God is real, Earth therefore, logically, cannot be real. And since only what God creates CAN exist, Earth does not exist at all. And if God is permanent, Earth cannot be permanent. And if God exists, having Created ONLY heaven, Earth cannot exist at all. This is why "there is no world" and God did not create it.

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates MUST be eternal AS HIMSELF" is a logical statement. Since Earth is NOT eternal, it must have come from a NON-ETERNAL premise, and since God is eternal, it cannot have come from HIS premise. And because HIS premise is true, it must have come from a FALSE premise. And therefore Earth is an illusion, and never will it be His one outcome.

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

God is everywhere. This is the common idea of omnipresence. But it goes further than this. To just say he's everywhere tends to be interpreted in terms of spacetime. Like, God is in the house and the tree and the car. It makes sense.

But there's a key component we need to consider. God can't be partly anywhere, because he is absolutely one within himself. Nor can only a part of him be somewhere, because all of him has to be there in completion.

So then think of it this way. The entirety of the whole of God is in the house, while simultaneously the entirety of the whole of God is in the car, while simultaneously the entirety of the whole of God is in the tree.

If you can visualize this at all in your mind, it is mind blowing. It defies and breaks all the laws of physics. We would claim, well, if all of God is in the car, how can he also be entirely and fully and completely in the house at the same time? Normal laws of spacetime would not permit this.

We'd normally say, well, if all of something is somewhere, none of it can be anywhere else. But this is spacetime reasoning. This is not how God thinks or how he functions and exists.

God transcends all the laws of separation. Therefore, God CAN be entirely in one place, and in another place, and in another place, all at the same time. And he is not only partly there, but totally there. His entire attention, if you will, all of his being, is fundamentally in EVERY location at the same time.

This is not the same thing as saying that he is just a very big object which has some parts of it spanning across space, where some of the outermost parts are in one location and some of the other parts are in another. It is not the same thing as saying God is a universe whereby it is very big and God's left hand is over here and God's right leg is over there. God is not space or time.

In fact God utterly transcends space and time, being omnipresent and eternal. The laws and limits of space have no effect or bearing whatsoever on his nature. All of God CAN BE ENTIRELY in one place, while also being ENTIRELY in another simultaneously.

This is somewhat akin to a "blur". If you take some object and you totally blur it, spreading it out, the object seems to be everywhere at once. You can't easily put a finger on it and see the original shape, it has lost all form in the blurring. But all of it is everywhere. It's sort of like being out of focus.

The thing is though, that it is the laws of spacetime that cause the object to not be identifiable in its clear form, at the same time as being distributed. And this does not apply to God.

God is not out of focus. He isn't sort of ... distracted and distributed and diffused and unlocalized. ALL of him, his entire attention, is in one place, AND all of his attention is in another place. He breaks all the laws and requirements of spatial separation. This means he is simultaneously abstract ie out of focus, AND entirely focused.

Ultimately not only is God everywhere, but ALL of God is everywhere. This in turn means that God is impersonal, AND fully personal, at the same time. He is impersonal in that there is no difference between who or what he is in any particular location or part of himself, treating everything in the same way. And he is ENTIRELY personal in that his entire being is in every part of himself and is fully present for every part.

Since God DID create a very large number of personal beings who each are a whole and fully created being, God has a COMPLETELY personal relationship with all of them individually and specifically. But at the same time, their relationship is open and shared with all others, and is equal to all others, making it entirely IMPERSONAL.

God loves YOU fully, and loves your brother's the same way.He therefore has an entirely personal AND impersonal relationship with all his creations.

"Revelation is intensely personal." - "They represent the original form of communication between God and His Souls" (personal communication between father and sons).

"God is everything and everywhere."

"Your brothers are everywhere."

"God Himself goes everywhere with us."

"God is still everywhere and in everything forever."

Denial itself is a defense, but it can be used positively or negatively. In its negative use it is used to deny God, reality, truth. In its positive use, it is used to deny the denial of truth, to deny ego, to deny illusions and unreality.

The entire separation from God is simple a misuse of denial. Blocks to awareness are denials of what is true in God. The ego is nothing but denial of reality. All sickness and death are denials. The world is the denial of heaven. Bodies are the denial of the soul. The opposite of denial is acceptance - ie the acceptance of the truth and reality of God - the atonement.

Here are some interesting quotes about how we use denial in the wrong way, in support of ego and in denying God, reality, and truth....

"Denial of Life perceives its opposite, as ALL forms of denial replace what IS, with what is NOT. No-one can really DO this, but that you can THINK you can, and BELIEVE YOU HAVE, is beyond dispute."

"It is the DENIAL of the spark that brings depression, and whenever you see your brothers WITHOUT it, you ARE denying God."

"Allegiance to the denial of God is the ego's religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival."

"Arrogance is the denial of love, because love shares and arrogance withholds."

"What makes this world seem real except your own denial of the truth which lies beyond?"

"For the separation is only the DENIAL of union, and, correctly interpreted, attests to your eternal knowledge that union is true."

"Miracles are merely the translation of denial into truth. If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves. Therefore, they are asking for the love that would heal them, but which they are DENYING TO THEMSELVES. If they knew the truth about themselves, they could not be sick. The task of the miracle-worker thus becomes to DENY THE DENIAL OF TRUTH."

"Projection arises out of FALSE DENIAL."

"But in every hurtful thought you hold, wherever you perceive it, lies the denial of God's Fatherhood and your Sonship."

"Your denial made no change in what you are. But you have split your mind into what knows and does not know the truth."

"Accepting His Son as guilty is denial of the Father so complete, that knowledge is swept away from recognition, in the very mind where God Himself has placed it."

"YOUR denial of reality precludes ACCEPTANCE of God's gift, BECAUSE YOU HAVE ACCEPTED SOMETHING ELSE IN ITS PLACE."

"Guilt hides Christ from your sight, for it is the denial of the blamelessness of God's Son."

"Denial of light leads to failure to perceive it. Failure to perceive light is to perceive darkness."

"That is why the ego IS the denial of free will."

"Denial is NOT mere negation. It is a positive miscreation. While the miscreation is NECESSARILY believed in by its own creator, it does not exist at all at the level of true Creation."

"The mind can make the belief in Separation VERY real and VERY fearful. And this belief IS the devil. It is powerful, active, destructive, and clearly in opposition to God, because it literally denies His Fatherhood. Never underestimate the power of this denial. Look at your lives and see what the devil has made."

"Yet this is what denial DOES, for BY it you ACCEPT insanity, believing you can make a private world, AND RULE YOUR OWN PERCEPTION. But FOR this, light MUST be excluded."

"Being made out of the denial of the Father, the ego has no allegiance to its own Maker."

"In the darkness you have obscured the glory God gave you, and the power that He bestowed upon His guiltless Son. All that, lies hidden in every darkened place shrouded in guilt, and in the dark denial of innocence."

"For eternity is NOT regained by still one more denial of the Christ in him."

"And therefore those who look on sin ARE seeing the DENIAL of the real world."

"This is not difficult to realize in some forms which these self-deceptions take, for the denial of reality is very obvious."

"Can the ego teach truly, when it overlooks truth? Can it perceive what it has DENIED? Its witnesses DO attest to its DENIAL, but hardly to WHAT it has denied. The ego looks straight at the Father and does not see Him, for it has denied His Son."

"This is a very primitive solution, and has led to a denial of the spiritual eye, which always depends on light."

"DENIAL of the error results in projection."

"The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and completely limitless idea. It draws a circle, infinitely small, around a very little segment of Heaven, splintered from the whole, proclaiming that, within it, is YOUR Kingdom, where God can enter not."

"Beyond the body, beyond the sun and stars, past EVERYTHING you see and yet somehow familiar, is an arc of golden light that stretches, as you look, into a great and shining circle. And all the circle fills with light before your eyes."

Let's draw a large circle and call it heaven.

Then inside of that circle, let's draw a smaller circle and call it earth.

You could say that the small circle overlaps with the big circle. In a sense, when you are in the small circle, you are in BOTH circles. As such, being in the smaller circle, or on Earth, it is possible to be aware of the fact that in truth you are ALSO inside the big circle. That you are always in heaven with God, even if you are dreaming of exile inside the small circle.

It's also possible while you are in the smaller circle, of focusing so much on the small circle to the exclusion of the big circle, that it can seem like ONLY the small circle exists. This is what being "blinded by perception of form" means, focusing on a limitation of smallness and not seeing the bigger picture. Focusing on the small circle and not seeing the big circle. Focusing on believing earth (small circle) is real, and not seeing the reality of the big circle at all.

But it is also possible for the small circle to be overlooked (forgiven) to such an extent that its boundaries become transparent and you become able to see the bigger circle behind it. As such, as you look toward the things in the small circle you will see the light of the big circle shining through underneath it. As though you are in two places at once. One foot on earth, and one in heaven.

Your perception takes on a temporarily parallel functioning, part physically focused on the small circle, and part spiritual-eye focused on the vision of the big circle. When seeing the big circle more clearly, the smaller circle is framed differently, and the things in the small circle become less important, less solid, less believable.

This smaller circle, when seen through, and when seen beyond, is regarded as the forgiven world, or real world. This includes the earth which is a small circle within the small circle. As mind becomes aware of its thinness and transparency, it simultaneously becomes increasingly aware of God, which is a very large circle beyond all small circles.

God is the big circle. This means the small circle is an illusion, because there can only be one circle. A separation is needed in order to imply that there is a second circle. Temporarily there seems to be two circles. But you cannot have two circles without opposition and conflict. With separation, the small circle is a dream of death, and without separation, there is no death because there is no small circle (no world).

At best, the small circle can be interpreted AS IF it is LIKE the big circle, as though reflecting heaven, and while the small circle persists you can seem to be in the small circle and mostly aware of the big circle at the same time. This makes the small circle seem less like an actual thing, and more like a faint illusion of a thing. It becomes less valued, and more overlooked. It seems more lovely, framed in the holy wholeness of the big circle, but is still a limited circle.

If you really want to go ALL the way to awareness of the big circle, you will have to transcend the small circle completely. You will have to go OUTSIDE the small circle, beyond its small reach, and beyond its limits. This isn't possible while remaining in any way inside the small circle, because the small circle doesn't cover all of the area that big circle covers. Also the small circle requires a belief in being separate in order to have a second circle. Without separation there is no small circle at all.

When you are ready to transcend the small circle and completely open up to the big circle, which is totally accepting atonement and ascending to heaven, you will transcend the small circle world and wake up in the big circle. At this point you will be completely aware of the fullness of the big circle, and there will be no small circles anywhere. In truth, only the big circle exists, and there is no small circle at all.

Here's an example of how I gave myself a sickness.

I was thinking about Holy Spirit one day and about the fact that I thought of Him as separate from me. In my mind I had this sudden idea, what if He is not separate from me? And in that idea I saw there being no wall separating us, nothing coming between us, which immediately suggested I was "exposed" to Him and that He had direct access to me.

This is when my EGO reacted. My ego still believed in being a separate individual, which is a delusion, and so quickly saw in this Oneness an "attack". Holy Spirit definitely was not attacking, but to the ego, the idea of having no separation to block the truth was seen as a major threat to its existence. If I am One with Holy Spirit, there can be no ego!

Seeing this therefore quite shocked me, and I was a bit horrified. Almost immediately, in order to "defend myself" against what I saw as a threat, I attempted to shut out the Holy Spirit. I did this almost automatically like I already knew how to and just created a kind of "blocking force" within myself, emphasizing separation from Him, like trying to get away from Him or push Him away.

I did this using my mind by putting up a strong resistance, literally trying to push Him away, and to simultaneously withdraw into the body. I felt like I was cowering and shrinking. And I felt afraid because of the idea of no separation. I was making myself "little" to create a sensation of distance between us.

Within hours, I started to lose my hearing.

My ears very rapidly started to block up, they started to ring with a high-pitched ringing, my head became congested and they ached.

Basically, I did not want to LISTEN to the idea of there being no separation. I wanted to shut it out. And that meant shutting down my mind, shutting down awareness, which manifests itself in/as the body in the "form" of a reduction in sensory perception.

At first I didn't know where this sudden sickness came from or why it was happening, and started to react to it and to even seem to seek out remedies/magic. I acted as if I hadn't chosen it and didn't want it, as if it was happening to me against my will and I didn't like it. But I HAD chosen it. I had put it in place myself. And I had done so very quickly and quite automatically.

It took a day or two of "suffering" for me to become willing to look at why this had happened. At first I didn't want to admit that I'd created it. I couldn't see that. But I did start to realize that I was at least AFRAID. And as I looked into that, I became honest and admitted this fear to Holy Spirit, which took courage. I had to admit and realize I'd become afraid of the "truth" that I'd seen a couple of days before.... not so much afraid of it because of what it means, but because of how my ego mis-interpreted its meaning.

My ego thought that if Holy Spirit and I were One, that would have to mean that I - ego separate self - must not exist. In other words, that Holy Spirit had come to destroy me and that I was under threat of death. I therefore believed in death, and so manifested sickness - which is a step toward death.

As I began to "admit the truth", which is, to start to trust and allow this truth to sink in, and started to do some "forgiveness process" about it, the symptoms started to lift. In fact within about 24 hours the whole thing had almost completely cleared up. All symptoms disappeared without a trace.

By looking and admitting to how I'd defended myself against the truth, and that this was the PURPOSE of the sickness, and owning up to the decision I made to do this, and seeing that I'd done it to myself, set me free. Holy Spirit also helped to remove some of the "consequences of my wrong decision", as I became willing to let Him and to move past the self-made fear delusion.

Sometimes the truth frightens us because we mis-perceive it and don't understand what it really means. Our identification with the ego seems to threaten our "self" when the ego mis-perceives truth as a threat. Dis-identifying with the ego/body and recognizing what we've done to ourselves is the key to salvation.

It turns out this episode was actually a lesson in which I learned a good example of how sickness is created, and its undoing. All sickness is psychosomatic, chosen, and on purpose.

"Sickness is a defense against the truth". - ACIM

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

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

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

The children's PHYSICAL bodies grow and suffer.

Their minds are trapped in the PHYSICAL brain.

Their PHYSICAL bodies become hurt.

Their PHYSICAL bodies wither and die.

These are not perceptions. These are physical states.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus describes the process of becoming sick...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Correction is needed, and that is all.

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

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

When I write or read ACIM stuff, after a while I'll start to feel upset. I may feel overwhelmed, or agitated, even hurt, and might feel like I want to cry. It's almost like someone just said a whole string of lies about me.

I look at what part of me feels this way and I acknowledge what it is likely feeling. It feels offended by everything the truth says. It feels threatened by it. It does not want anything to do with the stupid-ass course and does not want to wake up at all. It wants it all to go away. It wants the truth to shut the hell up. It sees it as constantly attacking it, and it won't leave it alone. It feels victimized and threatened and hurt. It is offended by everything the truth said, as if it were all a personal insult and attack. It is frightened about the notion of the truth being true, and hates the Holy Spirit.

This "part of me" does not want anything to do with ACIM, or any spiritual path, or any kind of waking up, or anything to do with God. It just wants to be the way it is. It is reluctant to have anything to do with God or making truthful statements or reading what is true and or studying. It just reacts to it all from an ego perspective.

This is something maybe not spoken about by many people but it happens with me all the time and I think it probably does with most people too.

This stuff happens because the ego's vantage point is actually totally opposite to the truth, opposite to God, opposite to reality. It interprets everything to do with God as false, wrong, bad, evil, vengeful, an attack, offensive, abusive, hurtful, to be avoided, etc. Every possible attribute of "evil" is assigned to God by the ego. Every possible way to want nothing to do with it is given him. This is simply because the ego believes that what is true is false, and what is false is true, and in this it is actually insane and confused.

Then, there is my mind, which is "doing this ego", or is identified with the concept of it. So part of MY mind or self is latched onto this perspective, caught up in it, identified with it as if it is true of my own self, as if it IS me. So part of my mind is turning my back on God and is peering back at God through highly negating opposing ego glasses, and everything it sees is backwards and upside down and inside out. But it doesn't realize this. And so as I look "through" the ego, everything true is false, and everything real is an illusion, and God is death and death is life.

We have this stuff going on in us so long as we are identified with the ego/body. A bodily identification, an ego-thought-system identification, a sense of limitedness or exclusion or specialness. That collections of vantage points seems to form "the ego self" or false self, an "area" of our mind that is temporarily flipped inside out. And so long as we're still bound to it in that way, exposure to the light will be experienced as attack by darkness. And moving closer to truth is experienced as reality falling apart. And trying to open up to love and sharing and union is interpreted as a threat to my very life.

It's tough to go through this because on the one hand the majority of me is wanting to awaken and be loving and spiritual while this ego portion wants the exact opposite. And so doing the course, reading the words, doing the lessons, writing about the topics, whatever related to it, sooner or later pushes these buttons and out comes the tears and the tantrums and the emotional breakdowns and the resistance and the procrastination and all the rest of the dysfunction.

We perhaps have to be gentle with ourselves, with the part of our self that is still confused, still bound and identified with a way of perceiving that is backwards. And some times that part of ourselves needs a break, it needs a rest from course shit, it needs to stop reading and writing and thinking about it 24/7, and it needs to just live and do some basic earthly ego things for a while, to cool off, to feel less threatened and pressured. Because that self, typically filled with childhood traumas and twisted early beliefs, is completely confused about God and truth and everything real.

It wants nothing to do with it. And actually it can become seemingly "happier" when you ease up on threatening it. Gotta throw it some bones sometimes. Relax, take a study break, go shopping, eat some fun food, whatever. Be "normal" for a while. This can actually bring you a feeling of peace, at the ego level, temporarily. Then when you are rested and ready to press forward, go exposure yourself to what the ego interprets as "its demise" all over again.

"NO evidence will convince you of the truth of what you do NOT want."

""Give up what you do not want, and keep what you do." How simple is the obvious! "

"When you think you are projecting what you do NOT want, it is still because you DO want it. "

"You must have noticed that the emphasis has been on bringing what is undesirable TO the desirable, what you do NOT want to what you DO. "

WHAT IS SIN?

Every aspect of an insane egoic mind is JUST A MISTAKE, which calls for correction. The mind "accidentally" considers something to be possible which isn't, and so is making an error. Like an error on a math test - a false conclusion, a miscalculation, a mis-thought. The mind believes impossible things, and because they are impossible it is not doing them.

"Sin" is what we call it when you become mistaken ABOUT a mistake, and fail to recognize its impossibility. Being mistaken about mistakes, not recognizing them as mistakes, converts them into TRUTHS, which are now sins. You don't realize they can't be true, and you think they are possible. As if you are actually doing them, giving them reality.

"Sin" is thus a "mistake about a mistake". A failure to recognize a mistake, leading to taking it seriously and taking it to be true and real. As if it is actually happening with real irreversible consequences.

Insane people are regarded as sinful when their insanity is not recognised as insanity, and is instead thought to BE SANITY, and thus assuming the person is SINNING ON PURPOSE from their right mindedness, which would indeed be deliberate attack. If this were true it calls for guilt and punishment.

Mistaking someone's delusional state for truth and reality, you think they are "actually attacking on purpose from a sane mind that should know better", which justifies anger and revenge for such a violation of the rules of sanity.

Guilt therefore arises from being mistaken about mistakes, regarding mistakes as deliberate acts of defiance against God and reality. If you COULD attack God it WOULD be a sin and you WOULD be guilty.

Sin is therefore a fiction about a fiction. The insane mind is in a deluded state believing illusions, which is just a set of mistakes, and then on top of this the delusion is taken to be NOT a delusion.

Sin is twice removed from God, mistakes are once removed. Guilt arises from taking mistakes to be truths. Or believing that illusions are real. Such as believing that the physical world is happening. If anything seeming to happen physically IS TRUE, it is a sin. If it is recognised that the world is JUST A MISTAKE, it is open to forgiveness.

Sin sees everything as unforgivable because it locks in the mistakes and regards them as concrete truths. Forgiveness recognizes what the mistakes ARE, and so sees an error has been made, which calls only for correction to appropriately treat the error. To fix the problem correctly.

Sin does not fix errors correctly, it compounds them by trying to use punishment as a fix. It says that the "mistake" is that you really did something impossible, as though it were possible, and now it has had real effects.

There is now "proof of sin", tangible sin, physical sin, evidence. Or in other words, an illusion (such as form) is mistaken for a real true possible thing and held up to be the "evidence" as to what you did wrong. Such as that the body did some wrong act causing the plates to be smashed, proven by the pieces of broken plate on the floor. Instead of being recognised as more illusions, it's taken to "prove" that you broke the plates in reality.

That presence of "an illusion being interpreted as proof that it's true" means "you did it" in space and time, and therefore are guilty. If you did sin, you deserve absolute punishment and death. Sin sees death as the way to CORRECT sins - death as atonement.

"Sin calls for punishment, as error for correction. And the belief that punishment IS correction, is clearly insane." UrT19C1

"They do not realize that, to deny God, is to deny their own identity, and in this sense, the wages of sin IS death." UrT19C3

"Yet, for all the wild insanity inherent in the whole IDEA of sin, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE. For the wages of sin IS death, and how can the immortal die?" UrT19C3

You not recognizing that this world is an illusion, converts the world into a place of sin and guilt, demeaning punishment for every act. You recognizing this world is just a MISTAKE and IS IMPOSSIBLE, forgives and overlooks the error and calls for the true atonement of the UNDOING of the error. The erasing of the world and space and time. The correction of the error - the illusion of a world - through its cancellation and disappearance, in which the mind returns to sanity and to God's kingdom.

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there is a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not. And what you then will overlook will not be understandable to you, just as its presence once had been your certainty." UrU5A5

You can either accept what is real and true, or you can deny it. Denying it doesn't mean you change it, or make it go away. It just means you are unwilling to accept that it's still true. It means you're hiding from it and don't want to admit that it's true.

We're all living in a state of denial. A denial of reality, of God, of ourselves, of identity, of truth, of love etc. This denial of reality puts us out of touch with reality, which means we are insane. In this insanity, which is 'sin', we life a fantasy life pretending to be something we're not, such as a body.

Atonement is offered as "accepting the truth". That means accepting reality as it is, accepting who you and others really are, and no longer being at war with God. This puts you in "contact" with reality, because you've been out of touch with it.

"Miracles are examples of right thinking. Reality contact at all levels becomes strong and accurate, thus permitting correct delineation of intra- and interpersonal boundaries. As a result, the doer sees the truth as God created it. This is what is meant by the point on "perspective adjustment."

Our goal is to perceive the truth as God created it. Not to adjust it, or change it, or want something else to be true. To withdraw all artificial values and beliefs and powers and laws, accepting only those given by God. To recognize and accept and live only the reality and life given by God, in its original and raw unchanged form.

To do that we have to come out of denial. We may not even realize we are in denial, because being in denial is not exactly a state of admitting to anything. It's a state of lies and deceptions and an unwillingness to admit the truth. But we need to become aware of the ways that we are in denial, and overcome this denial.

To overcome denial we need to move into acceptance. Acceptance means agreement, and no longer be at war with reality. It means no more resistance, no more fear, no more hiding, no more pretending, just direct raw reality contact and deep honesty. This deep honestly permits full wholeness of awareness. Everything is seen in light and nothing is concealed. And in that state is innocence and peace.

We're basically pouting little ego children who don't want to admit that God loves us. We've thrown away our inheritance from God including his power and love. We think we know better and are in a bad mood off in some corner in the dark plotting revenge.

To get over this denial takes a lot of work to find a way to accept the facts. Acceptance is not easy because you believe that your resistance will get you what you want, will let you keep what you've lost, and will allow you to control reality. By remaining in denial, you can pretend that things are still how you want them. You can even pretend to not admit that someone died, for example, by not accepting that it's happened, as if this keeps them around.

In various ways we are sort of reacting to what we think of as the death of God, the separation, the absence of love. A rift and a relationship breakdown, as if we lost our home and our family and everything we loved and valued. And now everyone is in a state of loss trying to figure out how to get back what they lost, while believing they haven't lost it. When will we accept what is true, that nothing real can ever be lost?

"Everyone is looking for himself and the power and glory he thinks he has lost."

"denial of Life perceives its opposite, as ALL forms of denial replace what IS, with what is NOT. No-one can really DO this, but that you can THINK you can, and BELIEVE YOU HAVE, is beyond dispute."

"This is not difficult to realize in some forms which these self-deceptions take, for the denial of reality is very obvious."

"YOUR denial of reality precludes ACCEPTANCE of God's gift, BECAUSE YOU HAVE ACCEPTED SOMETHING ELSE IN ITS PLACE. If you understand that the misuse of defenses always constitutes an attack on truth, and truth is God, you will realize why this is ALWAYS fearful."

"It is the DENIAL of the spark that brings depression, and whenever you see your brothers WITHOUT it, you ARE denying God."

"Allegiance to the denial of God is the ego's religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival."

"What makes this world seem real except your own denial of the truth which lies beyond?"

"For the separation is only the DENIAL of union, and, correctly interpreted, attests to your eternal knowledge that union is true."

"The task of the miracle-worker thus becomes to DENY THE DENIAL OF TRUTH."

"The ACCEPTANCE of peace is the denial of illusion, and sickness IS an illusion."

"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life."

"ONLY YOU CAN DEPRIVE YOURSELF OF ANYTHING. Do not oppose this realization, for it is truly the beginning of the dawn of light. Remember also that the denial of this simple fact takes many forms, and these you must learn to recognize, and oppose steadfastly and WITHOUT EXCEPTION."

"That is why the ego IS the denial of free will."

"And therefore those who look on sin ARE seeing the DENIAL of the real world."

"All fear comes ultimately, and sometimes by way of very devious routes, from the denial of Authorship."

"Guilt hides Christ from your sight, for it is the denial of the blamelessness of God's Son."

"Being made out of the denial of the Father, the ego has no allegiance to its own Maker."

"THE BODY'S EYES SEE ONLY FORM. 4 THEY CANNOT SEE BEYOND WHAT THEY WERE MADE TO SEE. 5 And they were MADE TO LOOK ON ERROR AND NOT SEE PAST IT. 6 Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they CAN SEE ONLY ILLUSIONS, UNABLE TO LOOK beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside form of NOTHING."

Ok so.... the body's eyes, the physical eyes, your eyeballs, are like little machines or sensing devices. All they do is detect sensory input. They do not see. Even in basic scientific interpretations all the eyes do is "send signals to the brain." The body's eyes do not interpret anything. They don't think, they don't "see", they don't have a mind, they don't do anything other than transmit messages beyond themselves. A physical object will still "look like" the same physical object no matter how your perception interprets things.

The body's eyes were made to fulfill a very specific function, just like a machine. They are "locked into" that function. They cannot clean the dishes, they cannot build a house, all they can do is "perceive falsely" and look at illusions. All they can do, is see illusions, errors, sins, surfaces of forms, as if they are real. This is all they were designed to do.

They will not EVER be able to do anything else. You cannot and will not ever be able to make the body's eyes look AT or SEE anything other than a world of forms, bodies, objects, physicality, sin, error, and illusions. No matter how enlightened you are, no matter what kind of interpretation you have, no matter what state your "perception" is in, your body's eyes can ONLY fixate on forms and appearances of physical objects.

The body's eyes are FIXED in a state of permanently seeing HELL, as if it's real. They have FALSE perception. They send signals to your mind, pictures of hell seeming to be real, pictures of forms which block awareness, pictures of bodies moving around in various states of sickness. This will ALWAYS be what the body's eyes do. No matter how advanced you are.

And this is a problem. Because now you've got to find a way of seeing the world in a different way, to interpret these IMAGES and messages in such a way, that you don't keep fixating on form, illusion, sin, error or illusions.

That means your mind has to learn to SEE PAST these images. You have to learn to OVERLOOK what they seem to show. You have to forgive them. You have to NOT BELIEVE what they are showing you. You have to learn to see BEYOND the surface of physical objects, to the Christ, which the objects were made to obscure.

That means learning to recognize that the ILLUSIONS that the body's eyes are ONLY capable of seeing, are NOT TRUE. You have to learn that everything they see is NOT REAL. They ONLY look at illusions as if they're reality. You have to learn that these pictures of illusion seeming real are FALSE, and stop buying into them!

You have to transition away from the physical eyes, which are permanently fixated on illusions, to using the spiritual eye (Holy Spirit's vision) which overlooks everything the body's eyes claim is real, and sees reality BEYOND them. You need a new way of SEEING.

This is how your mind learns to perceive love and light "in" the world BEYOND the world, in spite of the world, overlooking the world, seeing past bodies, disregarding appearances, looking beyond differences, and basically looking THROUGH and PAST all physical forms, as if they do not exist. Because they don't.

Do not believe your eyes!

Your eyes will not EVER show you heaven. But the images they show you of HELL, can be interpreted in a TRUTHFUL way, a correct way, which is the recognition that these images are FALSE ILLUSIONS, and that reality is something ELSE beyond them. God is IN everything you see because God is IN your mind.... God is BEYOND everything you see. You see God IN SPITE OF and BESIDES seeing forms. This does not make forms reality. It proves that forms are ILLUSIONS. And all the physical world has ever been doing is pulling the wool over your eyes and blinding you to reality.

You will never see these images AS HEAVEN. You will never see them as TRUTH. They will ALWAYS be photographs of hell. But what needs to happen is your awareness must expand beyond the physical, beyond forms, beyond the images, to see some other content that the body's eyes CANNOT SEE. To see the presence of God, love and light. You see that additional material IN SPITE OF the limitations that are shown by the body's sight. You don't suddenly turn those images into images of heaven.

You see heaven PAST those images and recognize that those images are not interfering with your vision. You have to learn that your body was made NOT for seeing, and to see using a whole new apparatus of vision which is NON PHYSICAL and does not look at the physical AT ALL.

To understand the separation from God, consider the relationship between light and darkness.

At first, light is everywhere in heaven. Then in the separation, the presence of light is resisted by trying not to will that there be light. This "puts the brakes" on creation, as an unwillingness to extend love, and a selfish attempt to retain everything for yourself. This is kind of like a light bulb that does not want to let its light shine because it wants to keep the light for itself.

When the light is shining, all is well. When there is a blockage or a denial of the light, the light SEEMS to dim. And now a seeming shadow or darkness forms. The shadow appears darker, as though there is less light there. As if light has gone away.

If you look carefully, you may notice that the shadow totally DEPENDS on the light being blocked. When the light is not blocked, there is no shadow. When the block appears, the shadow appears. And the shadow has no say in this.

On the one hand, a discerning mind should recognize that the shadow itself doesn't really have ability to assert its own existence. It can't decide to stay on its own. It can't resist the light. Nor can it cause light to go away.

Really, the darkness isn't ACTUALLY darkness. It's the absence of light. These are not the same thing. Light being absent, and darkness being "present" are different. If darkness is truly present, then darkness actually removes light as light's equal and causes light to go away, or can resist it.

In the separation, all that we really did was block the light. We blocked it with blocks to awareness, which are forms of denial, unwillingness and resistance. By being unwilling to will with God, we were unwilling to extend light. These are attempts to stop light from shining, to hold back the extension of love, and to INDUCE darkness.

Having done this, it seems like we go into a darkened state of mind. What we're going into is the appearance of a "lack of light" or "absence of light". We don't actually go into an "actual" darkness. There is in fact no such thing as an actual darkness. Similarly to how there isn't really evil or hell.

"Just because "nature abhors a vacuum," which is true enough, it does NOT follow that "a vacuum is filled with hellfire."

"Those who have not yet "changed their minds" have entered the "hellfire" concept into it."

The sane recognition that darkness is only the seeming absence of light, produced by a blockage, cast as a shadow, is what it means to recognize that this blockage is just a MISTAKE or error. There is no real darkness there at all, ONLY an illusion that makes it appear light is absent.

When you fail to recognize that the blockage is just an illusion, you start to believe that the darkness is, itself, a "positive creation", something which can cause light to go away, some kind of "actual real evil".

This is also the difference between mistakes/errors and sins. A mistake is recognized as simply a "lack of light", whereas when the appearance of light lacking is given artificial attributes of reality, it is considered to be "real darkness."

We lend it the darkness reality, truth, power, causation, will, a mind of its own, etc... and now what is really only the ILLUSION of light being absent, is now interpreted as the PRESENCE of active living darkness. And now we believe that this darkness has the power TO HIDE something, to actually blot it out.

This is the insane egoic belief that darkness has power over the light, and can cause light to go away. That darkness shines away light. It is the belief in evil and in sin and of having POWER OVER GOD. It is the authority problem and is level confusion. It is the belief that separation is real, and that guilt is true. And it is also fear. And believing that darkness can hide stuff induces fear that something evil IS hiding in the dark, which you cannot see.

"Miracles are associated with fear only because of the fallacy that darkness can hide."

"It is only in darkness and in ignorance that you perceive the frightening, and you shrink away from it to further darkness. And yet, it is only the hidden that CAN terrify, NOT for what it IS, but FOR its hiddenness."

By believing that what actually is only an ILLUSION OF light's absence, is actually the PRESENCE OF a "real darkness", is the entire ego thought system. It is the belief that sin is real and death is happening and impossible suffering can occur and that hell is evil and real. That the boogie man is hiding in the dark shadows. It's the stuff of nightmares.

When we denied the light of heaven, we pushed our mind into a darkened state. A state of the appearance of the lack of love and light and life. This was only really a state of the ILLUSION that light CAN be absent.

It's an illusion because light is actually permanent and can never be destroyed, and so DENIAL is the belief that it's not there, even though it is. Believing that light is not present, when it is, must mean that you believe something is true which is not. This is an ILLUSION. There is deception and temptation because something impossible seems possible.

This means also that so long as there is a state where light seems absent at all, there IS illusion. The state of light's absence is ITSELF an illusion, because it's not true that light can really be absent anywhere. So when it APPEARS that light is not present, in any way, this can't be TRUE, but it SEEMS true to insane minds.

The really big thing is this. WE MADE A WORLD OUT OF THIS DARKNESS - WITHIN the illusion of the lack of light. It is in fact THE lack of light. Another term for a lack or light or love, in ACIM, is error. The seeming lack of light appears to be an erroneous world.

"For it was made out of what you do NOT want, projected FROM your mind, because you were AFRAID of it."

Then, if this erroneous world is believed to be REAL, it is converted from the ILLUSION of light's absence, to the belief that it is REAL DARKNESS. That this world is in fact, the PRESENCE of a world. That there really is a world there, alive and willfull and with mind and power and causation. A world which has OVERTHROWN the Kingdom. This belief is a misperception of the illusion of the lack of light, and nothing more.

What this means is, the world we made, which includes the planet Earth, originally was simply the illusion of light seeming to be lacking. It WAS the 'absence'. It was a mis-creation, or a sort of failed creation. A limited expression, infused with unwillingness and denial. It was made in the thought of the denial of God, and as an attack on God. An attack on light, if interpreted as "actual darkness".

Then as we moved further into believing in it, we invested this illusion of light's absence with the qualities of God, such as reality and truth and power and life and will and causation. And now what merely was **IN TRUTH** an ILLUSORY WORLD, in the shape of the ABSENCE of light, was converted by our belief in it as "REAL DARKNESS" to a WORLD OF SIN.

"The body is the idea of sin made flesh"

What this means is, a world which is in fact ONLY an illusion of light's absence, and exists ONLY so long as the light REMAINS blocked, NOT made of light, was invested with greater belief in order to ASSERT that it is in fact a REAL DARK PLACE - a real living hell.

The physical world is this world, a world made of shadows cast from blockages in the mind, invested with belief and given reality, to try to convince ourselves that hell exists instead of heaven. This is the world of bodies and of forms and planets and other objects. And this world exists ONLY WITHIN our false perception. ONLY IN THE LACK OF LIGHT.

"The world is false perception."

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

"From the world of bodies, MADE by insanity, insane messages seem to be returned to the mind which made it. And these messages bear witness to this world, pronouncing it as true."

Note that another word for sin is insanity. "Sin is insanity." Which means that investing darkness with the belief that it is reality, is insane. This is because darkness is NOT the presence of evil, or of ANYTHING. Nor is it s REAL darkness. Just as planet Earth is not really hell. But believing that the earth is real, IS a belief in sin, and DOES cause you to experience the Earth as though it is a REAL hell.

What we're now describing here is false perception, which really is the false BELIEF that an illusory world made of darkness is reality. It is the kind of perception which takes the physical world to be real and true and valid. It is a deceptive perception, in which something which IS an illusion is MIS-PERCEIVED AS a reality. Just as darkness ie lack of light is mis-perceived as the real presence of evil.

The Earth, in its original construction, was born of error, and projected outward, and believed in by insane twisted minds, which both produced it through their denial of light, and reinforced it through their belief in evil. This is why ACIM refers to it as "the hell you made."

"That was the first projection of error outward. The world arose to hide it, and became the screen on which it was projected, and drawn between you and truth."

"Guilt ASKS FOR punishment, and its request is granted. NOT in truth, but in the world of shadows and illusions BUILT on sin."

"The learning of the world is built upon a concept of the self adjusted to the world's reality. It fits it well. For this an image is that suits a world of shadows and illusions."

The body was also made as part of the illusion of light's absence, masquerading as the PRESENCE of a "real something". But the body is really nothing at all, just as Earth is nothing at all. This is why there is no world and the body is not an actual positive creation. The body and the world DO NOT REALLY EXIST.

The body is given senses designed to reinforce the world of apparent SIN, ie Earth believed to be "real darkness", to give it reality, to make it seem real, and to give it all the meaning it has. This is in order to reinforce the idea that real darkness exists. This was its original evil purpose. This is why we "made it" by NOT creating reality.

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

"Temptation has ONE lesson it would teach, in ALL its forms, WHEREVER it occurs. It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what must die, unable to escape its frailty, and bound by what it orders him to feel."

To the ego, creation means taking something that does not exist and trying to give it life, in terms of taking the ILLUSION that light can be absent and reinforcing it to the point where it seems darkness has CAUSED light to disappear.

As such, Earth was made by us to seem to REPLACE the world of light that is Heaven, to blot it out and hide it and destroy it. Indeed to destroy the light of God and his children. "The world was made as an attack on God. A place where God (light) could enter not" etc. It was born from an evil thought - a mad idea.

What then needs to happen, is the UNDOING of all this distortion and lies. This confusion and hallucination and the belief that Earth (darkness) really exists. What we need is forgiveness. We have to re-trace the steps. This means that first of all, we need to recognize (as described) how we got into this mess, and what the mess IS.

The mess is, that we have denied God's light, which has produced the UNTRUE ILLUSION that light is indeed absent, which has taken the shape of A WORLD OF BODIES, and which has then been invested with reality and fear and evil thought to try to GIVE IT immortality and reality. To make it permanently replace heaven. However, this is not possible.

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that"

"Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."

What we then need to do is recognize the facts. If we have belief in the world as "real", or existing, or causing, or happening, or being valuable, or having power over the light, or able to kill immortal beings, or capable in any way of enforcing darkness and suffering, then we DO believe that darkness can make light go away. And as such Earth is interpreted as REAL hell.

This is the belief that the world of bodies ***IS NOT an illusion***. Believing it IS NOT an illusion, IS A DENIAL of the FACT that it is. It's an inability to see and recognize that the world is made of light's absence, and CAN ONLY last so long as the light remains absent. It's even more heavily the belief that the world is actually real and has REPLACED the reality of Heaven.

If we believe this in any way, we need to look at this and undo this belief. We need to stop believing that the world IS real. That belief IS FALSE PERCEPTION and is a belief in evil. What we've put ONTO the world, given it is ONLY an illusion of light's absence, is the heaviness of sin and guilt and value and meaning. We've tried to turn an ILLUSION of a world into a reality, to convert "lights absence" into "darkness's presence."

All this projected meaning, the "perceptions about the world", the sin and hate and guilt we throw onto it, the condemnation of it, the false beliefs about it, is all part of our attempt to reinforce the idea that the world IS real and DOES have power over God and his Son. If you believe it REALLY IS sinful, then you are using it to stay in the illusion that darkness really exists. Which also means that to NOT do that, you have to STOP believing the world is real.

So then we set about withdrawing these projections of "real sin", and of reality, and of rebellion, and of attack and harm, and of guilt and fear, which we have put ONTO AN ILLUSION OF A WORLD. We have in fact laid illusions ON TOP OF ILLUSION, in an attempt to DENY that the world IS an illusion, so that we can MAKE IT REAL to us. This is a DOUBLE DENIAL.

"But what you have forgot can be remembered, given willingness to reconsider the decision which is doubly shielded by oblivion."

"It adds illusions to illusions, thus making correction doubly difficult."

When, through forgiveness, we lift away from the world our belief in sin and guilt, we in fact lifting away REALITY from it. We are withdrawing BELIEF in it. We are stripping it of value, and meaning, and all the heavy dark USES of the world to victimize and to attack. We are taking back our FUTILE attempt to PROVE that darkness can destroy the light, that death trumphs over life, and that the Son of God can be killed in the flesh.

Once we stop doing this, the world that we have been "attacking", in an effort to LEND IT reality, in order to keep it, begins to be RECOGNIZED FOR WHAT IT REALLY IS. Since a false perception of the world makes it seem REAL - because false perception is a CONFUSED perception, a true perception of it does THE OPPOSITE. It takes AWAY its reality. It strips it of its causal power. It diminishes it in your sight. And it reduces its value to you. It removes what it is NOT, and reveals what it IS.

At the end of this process, the world which lives in and is made OF the illusion of light's absence, is seen NOT as a world capable of destroying life, or of sinning, or of inducing guilt, or of making life into suffering, but instead it is RECOGNIZED as ONLY AN ILLUSION OF LIGHT'S ABSENCE. In effect, its TRUE nature, is not that it is real, but that it IS NOT REAL.

"Enlightenment is but a recognition and not a change at all."

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

Recognizing the world for what it IS - a FALSE appearance of the absence of God, does not mean recognizing that it IS real or true. Recognizing the truth ABOUT the world, does not necessarily imply that the world IS true. Only that we are looking at it WITH truth and seeing it "truly", to find out ***IF*** it is true. Seeing what IS ACTUALLY there. But it is entirely possible that what is ACTUALLY there, IS AN ILLUSION, and NOT a reality.

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

The world in fact ONLY exists as an illusory world. It is like a veil of shadows and darkness. It PRETENDS to be a world - a something. It is really, in truth, THE ABSENCE OF A WORLD. It is the seeming form that shadows take when light is blocked. It is ONLY the interior seeming contents and shifting patterns of the SHADOW cast by light's blockage. And as a result, the dark world is really ONLY an illusion. Believing it is real sin is a SECOND error designed to convert illusions into reality. This is like 3 levels.

1) Heaven/reality (no illusory world, only the world of light).

2) Illusory world regarded as unreal (true perception).

3) Illusory world regarded as real (false perception).

More to the point, the world is in fact, in its "true form", seen clearly and accurately, NOT a world made of "real sin", NOT a world that can cause anything to be threatened, but ONLY a world that IS FICTION. It is smoke and mirrors. It is the illusion that there is no light. It is MADE OF denial. It is the denial of existence, and so it denies ITS OWN existence.

"What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

When the "lack of light", which can at most be an ILLUSION OF a lack of light, since light cannot be really lacking, is recognized for what it IS, it is NOT regarded as a "real" anything. It is not a real world, or a real darkness, or a real sin. Its TRUE nature is that it is an ABSENCE of anything real, and an illusion of LACK.

Like a shadow, the world then CANNOT LAST, IF the blocks to the awareness of light are removed. The world DEPENDS ON this "separation" in order to maintain its seeming existence. If you lift away the dark blockages and the denial, and the light comes in, the darkness IS GONE. This is because darkness can ONLY SEEM to exist PROVIDED light seems to be absent. It is a lack, and not a presence. Forgiving it brings light in, and makes the world GO AWAY.

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

The darkness does not TURN INTO light either. Light shines it AWAY, because darkness is just a sort of fictional label we give to "the part that seems lacking". A name for the lack ITSELF. But lack is not a positive creation, it is more like a "hole" in creation. A seeming place where light was not allowed to enter. A place where God was not allowed to dwell. Where life was denied.

When the light comes, that which is the absence of light and not the presence of darkness, SIMPLY DISAPPEARS. It at first appears to become lighter, because light is beginning to REPLACE it. It seems to be a mixture of darkness and light. It brightens and sparkles and seems fresh and new. Sin is lifted from it, guilt is removed from it, and REALITY IS WITHDRAWN from it.

"If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God."

BUT, at the same time, the presence of the darkness is decreasing, BECAUSE the light is increasing. The LACK of light is going away. "Miracles supply a lack." As such, anything "made of darkness", or which was really merely the ILLUSION that darkness was present, is now shown to have been really NOT the presence of ANYTHING. Like it was just some dream that passed by. And so the shadow world now simply FADES OUT and vanishes and disappears and is gone forever, leaving NO TRACE. In truth, it WAS NEVER REALLY ANYTHING.

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

"An unremembered world will leave no trace behind its going, when God's gifts have been accepted as the only thing you want."

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

This is why ACIM teaches that "there is no world." The world, Earth, this planet, this physicality, is NOTHING pretending to be something. It is nothing other than a ILLUSION of a world, made of the LACK OF A WORLD, due to the REJECTION of heaven, masquerading as existence. It is what you end up with, limited and withering and half dead, when you try to BLOCK LIFE. It is a world of DEATH. It is made OF death and HAS no life.

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

"There IS no life outside of Heaven."

"Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is NOT in Heaven is not ANYWHERE. Outside of Heaven (in the "darkness"), only the conflict of illusions stands (illusion of light being absent); senseless, ***impossible***, and beyond ALL reason, and yet perceived as an eternal BARRIER to Heaven (interpreting the illusion of the lack of a world AS a SOLID world). Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."

"In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is NOT in Heaven is not ANYWHERE."

"it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere.

There is no world, ie there is no Earth, because at MOST it is comprised of and DEPENDS ON maintaining heaven's ABSENCE. It REJECTS reality. It is not compatible with life. And it has NO REAL PROPERTIES of its own. It is utterly slave to the shadow projection, dependent on the maintenance of blockages, and dwells SOLELY in denial. It cannot exist WHERE there is light.

"Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. "

As the awareness of the light increases, the LACK of light decreases. The illusion that light is not HERE lifts, like a veil. The veil of a "solid world" becomes transparent. Heavy sin and causation and evil are lifted FROM the illusory world, SO THAT it is not believed to be real. And the more light infuses where it seems to be, the LESS it can be seen. The world fade OUT, and heaven fades IN.

Eventually, upon opening up to the FULL experience of the light, the face of Christ appears, "Gone are bodies in the blazing light on the altar to the son of God.", the Earth is literally SHONE AWAY by the light and REPLACED AND UNDONE FOREVER, it literally DISAPPEARS, and its NOTHINGNESS is truly apparent. There then IS no world. There is ONLY light, and "Heaven is all that remains."

"Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does so."

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

Earth is the ABSENCE of reality and the ABSENCE of heaven. It remains only so long as heaven is blocked. And once heaven shines, the world is shone away forever. When believing in real sin, earth reflects hell. When NOT believing in real sin, earth is recognized as a meaningless MIRROR in which heaven's LIGHT is temporarily reflected. And then the world VANISHES just as eternity is finally permitted its full expression, and where there was darkness now there is only light, and the world cannot be found.

This is why we are to be THE LIGHT of the world. This is why we are to see the REFLECTION of heaven's light ACROSS the CHAOS of the illusion of light's absence. And this is why ultimately the light itself will shine the world away completely.

"What SEEMS eternal all will have an end. The stars will disappear, and night and day will be no more. All things that come and go, the tides, the seasons, and the lives of man; all things that change with time and bloom and fade, will not return."

"The stars will disappear in light, and the sun, which opened up the world to beauty, will vanish. Perception will be meaningless, when it has been perfected. For everything that has been used for learning, will have no function. Nothing will ever change; no shifts nor shadings, no differences, no variations that made perception possible, will occur. The perception of the real world will be so short, that you will barely have time to thank God for it. For God will take the last step swiftly, when you have reached the real world, and have been made ready for Him."

In ACIM, mistakenness is not the same thing as how the world generally thinks of it. If you go into the women's toilet instead of the men's, it could be a mistake. A mistaken action. If you pick up the wrong set of keys, it could be a mistake. If you leave your lunch box at the workplace, it could be a mistake. Something you intended that sort of went wrong somehow.

You could then try to turn these mistakes into sins and say that the person is guilty for going into the wrong bathroom, or a bad person for forgetting the proper keys, or stupid for leaving their lunch at work. But a "forgiving" reframing of this that says like "oh well they just made a mistake because they were supposed to go into the other toilet", isn't forgiveness. It just recognizes a horizontal worldly error within this system.

Forgiveness is higher than this. True mistakenness is a recognition on a vertical axis. It's a view from above, from a mindset of sanity and truth and light. It looks down and sees something impossible, something which cannot be true, and recognizes it as not true or real. Something false. Like a lie. And because it recognizes it as untrue, it is not attracted to it, and it doesn't turn it into something to be punished for. Instead it recognizes that the error just needs to be corrected. It was just a mistaken view, a mistaken belief, which can't be true, and the mind needs to be restored to the truth.

So if in the world, say, we take something that someone is believing or doing, based on a mistake. Let's say that they're having a sickness and coughing all over everyone. You could take this mistake and turn it into a sin. Sin does the opposite of see correctable errors, and sin doesn't recognize a mistake AS a mistake. Instead it thinks of it as a TRUTH, as something real and valid, and actual. The person really is coughing all over the other real people, how horrible. What a sinner.

To move to forgiveness then, we need to shift away from "it's a sin" to "it's a mistake". But not in worldly terms. Not in social preferences or rules about how to act around people or other made up stuff. True mistakenness would recognize that a) the person is not a body even if they think they are b) they are not really sick because they are immortal c) no-one is really suffering d) contagion is a lie e) nothing real can be threatened etc... that sort of thing. In effect that ... this whole show, this body person, this coughing, this spewing, is all FALSE. It isn't true, it isn't happening, it isn't POSSIBLE in God.

If we can see that this event isn't possible, is false, isn't true of the person, they are not really doing it, its having no effect, etc, then we can recognize that the person is in a sate of insanity and is just simply mistaken about how and what they are. They're showing a lie. They're trying to convince you sin is taking place. It isn't. We recognize there are just a bit insane, a bit mistaken, calling for love, in need of healing and correction. None of what they are doing is possible, none of it is true, none of it is happening but in a dream.

That's the kind of mistakenness that the Holy Spirt recognizes. He sees errors and does not mistaken them for sins. The ego on the other hand tries to take mistakenness and hold it against people, narrows down to focus on it, judges it, makes it out to be TRUE, believe it is HAPPENING, believes it is POSSIBLE, and is HAVING EFFECTS ... and that's all basically a definition of "sin". The idea of an attack which can have real consequences against real things.

"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects." UrT27I6

It's kind of all about recognition. If you recognize what is possible and true in God, then you recognize when someone is MISTAKEN. Their mistakenness calls for correction not punishment. You recognize what they are presenting is NOT POSSIBLE, and can't be true, so is not actual or real. So you can't hold it against them.

If you FAIL to recognize that the person is just mistaken or "being false", you make another mistake, by mistaking a mistake for NOT a mistake..... you turn the mistake or falseness into a TRUTH, and now because it is true it seems REAL to you. Or like a fact. The person really is coughing all over everyone. The person really did go into the wrong bathroom. The person really did leave their lunch at work for the 5th time.

"The Holy Spirit CANNOT punish sin. Mistakes He recognizes, and would correct them all, as God entrusted Him to do. But SIN He knows not, nor can He RECOGNIZE mistakes that cannot be corrected. For a mistake that cannot be corrected is MEANINGLESS to Him. Mistakes are FOR correction. They call for NOTHING ELSE." UrT19D4

Largely such mistakes are easy to mistake for sins, rooted in physical stuff. All the things we do with the body, all the things in the world, are all IMPOSSIBLE. ... and they present temptations, and illusions that you can do things which CANNOT BE TRUE in God, such as being sick. If you take those illusions AS TRUTH, you believe they are real, and now the physical act is interpreted as a sin. You lock it in place as though it can't be reversed or forgiven. And now in unforgiveness you "accuse" the person of "really doing this", and justifying punishment. Who moved my cheese?!

So basically we have a mind full of illusions and insanity which is just a state of making a lot of mistakes and believing untrue stuff. That only calls for correction. But if you take that stuff and do not recognize it and do not realize it is untrue, you will MISTAKE IT for truth and now it becomes SIN. As though you're really doing it. That's the little shift the ego insanity makes. That little shift from "it's just an illusion" to "taking that illusion seriously because you're actually really doing it." Ego grabs ahold of mistakes and corrupts them into punishable acts of evil. As if you intended it on purpose.

We are just mistaken. And we are mistaken about being mistaken. And when we lift away the mistakenness about being mistaken, we'll recognize we are mistaken, and then stop being mistaken. And that is forgiving.

Let's say that the entire contents of spacetime is sin. It is an idea of sin. Sin is a lack of love. The world was made as an attack on God, as a sin against him. Let's say that sin is the absence of truth, and so is a false world. Let's say that sin is also insanity, in which the true and the false are swapped and nothing means anything.

And let's say that all of spacetime is therefore a realm of sin, a realm in which everything is always attacked. Because sin is attack. And bodies were made to make attack seem possible. Bodies are the idea of sin, and this includes human and animal and vegetable and mineral and planetary bodies.

It is all sin, and it is sinning all the time. Every time it suggests something impossible has happened, which cannot happen in heaven, it is attempting to provide the proof of sin. Physical matter is "the granite block of sin" which the body's eyes look upon and cannot see past. Sin appears to be irreversible and unsealable, like a permanent crime, stepping ever closer to inevitable death. And death is the wages in sin, in a world where all roads lead to death.

Let's then simply say that the physical world is the idea of sin and of evil, of destruction and death. It is a dream of death and a fantasy of sin being possible. The world is false perception. Flesh and bones were made to sin with. Every atom can attack every other atom and sin against it. Destruction of any kind is sin. And if the mind takes all of this world to be true or real, it has believed in sin instead of innocence.

The function of forgiveness is to forgive the ENTIRE world of spacetime, including all of planet earth and every other planet. It has to be forgiven because it constantly sinning. Every part of it is constantly trying to murder. The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son.

Every part of it sins against the rest and holds sins up before your eyes to testify that sin is real. It is a world of sin. It must be forgiven because it has sinned, and it can be forgiven only because it has sinned. It has offended you and your function now is to recognize it as merely a mistake, an error in judgement, and to release it from your belief that sin is the truth.

The world can be seen in another light, which reframes the sin and regards it as a mistake. Which does not hold the world against itself, despite its continued efforts to induce death. You don't merely need to forgive a murderer, you need to forgive an entire planet of death. An entire solar system and galaxy of death. The world is an attempt to tempt you to believe that sin is reality. Your job is to forgive its sinful nature and let it go.

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

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

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

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

"Forgiveness is this world's equivalent of Heaven's justice. It translates the world of sin into a simple world"

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

"Except for God's teachers there would be no hope of salvation, for the world of sin would be forever real."

"Sin is belief attack can be projected OUTSIDE the mind where the belief arose. Here is the firm conviction that ideas CAN leave their source made real and meaningful. And FROM this error does the world of sin and sacrifice arise."

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

"ITS effects are changelessly eternal, BEYOND fear, and PAST the world of sin entirely."

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

"Sin would maintain you MUST be separate. But REASON tells you that this must be WRONG."

"My body, Father, cannot be Your Son. And what is not created cannot be sinful or sinless; neither good nor bad."

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for, it will become to you. Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak it suffers and it dies."

"All that is real proclaims his sinlessness. All that is false proclaims his sins as real."

"In kind forgiveness will the world sparkle and shine, and everything you once thought sinful now will be re-interpreted as part of Heaven."

"What is seen outside must lie beyond forgiveness, for it seems to be forever sinful. Where is hope while sin is seen as outside?" "Who could see the world as dark and sinful when God's Son has come again at last to set it free?"

"Who but the sinful need to be forgiven?"

If you are feeling like someone else is wrong, someone else is guilty, someone else is at fault, someone else is sick, someone else is doing something they shouldn't be, someone else is afraid, someone else is not awake, someone else is pissing you off, someone else is the cause of any upset etc.... YOU ARE MISTAKEN.

The problem we have though is that once we get into the way of perceiving, the mindset, where we actually are quite adamant about how it is someone else who is wrong, it may not even occur to us that we need to forgive or that there is any other way to look at this. We can get so absorbed with anger and reactions and frustrations, that compound and increase the sense that the other person is wrong. It's all their fault. And we may not even REALIZE that we are actually experiencing being a victim right now.

Often when we are victims we are actually in a state of anger or frustrations and projection and that means that we're really really convinced that all of the 'problem' is outside of ourselves. Like, literally, it seems like it's got nothing to do with us. And we don't even recognize that we feel victimized by whatever it is we think the other person is doing wrong. Anger and frustration for example are quite strong energies which seem justified and which aren't usually interpreted as victimhood.

Victimhood is often equated with the experience and perhaps the acknowledgement that something is happening against your will - at least the awareness that you are suffering. When you are upset and pissed off at how wrong the other person is, you may not even have that awareness, because you feel like you WANT to feel angry and SHOULD feel angry, rather than that that you are actually suffering in a state of victim consciousness.

So an early step is, to recognize, if you are angry and upset, you most likely - pretty much definitely - are experiencing the situation as a VICTIM, and that means you are actively SEEING yourself as a victim, and playing the ROLE of a victim, and are actually CHOOSING that role. And you don't have to.

Just because you currently are really passionate about how the other is 'wrong', that doesn't mean you are in your right mind. You don't have peace, so something is amiss. Do you want peace, or do you want to keep being angry and outraged and justified in doing so, as a victim? Do you want to keep suffering? And, is the solution to your suffering that the other person changes and stops doing what they're doing, OR is it that YOU actually need to change yourself, so that you stop experiencing the situation as a victim? That's not so easy to admit to, or to have a willingness to pursue. It's much easier to skapegoat the other person and to expect them to be the one who is meant to change. That's the ego's form of forgiveness.

And there's a trap you can easily fall into. In the situation, just based on an evaluation of what's happening and how most people would view it, sometimes the other person IS seeming to be wrong, or IS severely mistaken. Maybe they are lying, maybe they are deluded, maybe they are attacking you, etc... so there is now 'evidence' that they are wrong. And this is a severe trap because now there is a risk that you will be so convinced they are wrong based on the situation, that this JUSTIFIES even more you condemning them for being wrong. And this becomes even more of an unconscious reaction. It wouldn't be so hard to get out of this if they were more obviously right.

But when even the situation itself clearly shows that the other is wrong/mistaken, it's very much harder to stop yourself from using that to judge them. So they're wrong, okay, that's fine, but does that mean you have to be right about it? Do you have to make them wrong for being wrong? What about recognizing they are wrong, but seeing that this wrongness is a mistake that calls for FORGIVENESS, rather than you conveniently using is to ATTACK them for it? Once you enter into attacking someone for them being 'actually wrong', you are falling into the ego's trap and likely will become even more upset.

So stop. Step back. And have this little willingness..... maybe it's ME that is mistaken. Maybe I am projecting. Maybe the other person is not as wrong as I'm making out. Maybe the other person IS wrong but I don't have to react to that wrongness with more mistakes. Maybe what I see in them IS my stuff. Maybe it's not actually their own wrongness. Maybe all the guilt I see in them, even their sickness, even their fear, even their delusions, even their lies, even their attacks, what if that is actually MINE? And what if I need to take that back and seek true forgiveness for it from Holy Spirit?

This is the beginning of taking responsibility. No matter how the situation seems, whatever you are seeing IN it, whatever you see IN the person, whatever you think is THEIRS and not yours, IT IS YOURS. Take it back. Own it. Then take it to Holy Spirit for correction. The other person is INNOCENT. They were just holding onto your guilt FOR you, so that you could disown it. Get honest as fast as you can.

God is always light.

When we resist God, we try to block the light.

This blockage produces an illusion of the absence of light, ie a "lack of light."

This lack of light may seem like darkness. But this darkness is entirely dependent on the block remaining to obscure the light. When the block is removed, the light will be present and there will be no darkness.

God's law is that light always dispels darkness, and that the illusion of darkness only shows up when the light seems to be blocked/denied. This works the same as clouds - when the cloud blocks the sun the cloud seems dark, but the darkness is an illusion. When the sun shines upon the cloud from below it is illuminated.

"Light dispels darkness automatically, by definition." UrT1B22A

If there is a lack of light, also called a lack of love, this is merely a seeming absence. It's like there isn't enough of something, or it's being held back. It is not the presence of something.

A darkness is merely the dimming of light, producing an illusion that there is less light. But this isn't the same thing as a "presence of darkness." Your world doesn't become "filled with darkness" at night, it just has a lack of light.

Darkness is not causing the light to go away. The blockage to light is what obscures the light and makes it seem like it has gone away. The blockage directly causes a shadow or darkness to appear, but the darkness is entirely dependent on the blockage because the blockage is keeping the light from shining.

If the blockage were to be removed, there would be no lack of light, and no illusion of darkness, and the light would shine so much that there would be no darkness. Light always dispels darkness this way.

Someone who is blocking the light/love of God is merely mistaken. They are putting up a block trying to deny what is still true. This is seeming to shut out the light and love of God, but only in an illusory way, because God's light and love cannot be affected.

So blockages to light are really just forms of denial, in which we try not to admit that the light is still there, and hide it from awareness, covering our eyes to try to be blind to it. And we may go so far as to hide in the illusion of the darkness to pretend there is no light.

Doing this isn't a sin, it's just a mistake. It's an attempt to not extend God's light and love, or to put the brakes on creation, so that God is prevented from shining/extending outward. Trying "not to shine" holds the light in and doesn't let it out, producing an illusion of an absence of light - a darkness.

"God's extending outward, though not His completeness, was blocked when the Sonship does not communicate with Him as one." UrT6F2

If the denial of light, or the block to awareness of light, is recognised for what it is, without getting into ego, then it calls for an obvious remedy. It is seen as merely a lack of love, and the obvious response is that love needs to be supplied. So you give love/light to supply the lack. This is what miracles are for.

"Miracles are a form of healing. They supply a lack, and are performed by those who have more for those who have less." UrT1B8

There is no "sin" involved in this, only mistakenness ie denial of the truth. An unwillingness to admit that the light is still there.

"Sin" is a faulty interpretation of this whole scenario. It ignores that the block to love is the "cause" of the darkness, or that if the block were removed the darkness would be dispelled. To suggest this is to suggest that you could heal the darkness and replace it with light by removing the blockage.

The ego does not want this to happen. Ego is the idea that the blockage is not the cause of the darkness, and that the darkness exists in its own right. Such that whatever has put the darkness in place is irreversible, because it seems to have no cause other than itself.

Ego doesn't just see a shadow projected from the blockage. It takes the darkness and considers it as standalone thing, and fails to recognize that there is a lack of light/love. Instead it interprets that the darkness is the PRESENCE OF something else. Something which has its own existence, its own power, its own will, its own causality. Something which can make the light go away. Or as the course describes, this is the belief that darkness can hide.

"Miracles are associated with fear only because of the fallacy that darkness can hide. Man believes that what he cannot see does not exist, and his physical eyes cannot see in the dark." UrT1B22B

When a "lack of light" is interpreted to be the "presence of darkness", this is the idea that evil exists. That there is a power capable of causing light to go away. And then there becomes a vested interest in staying in the darkness in order to "exist". This is why the ego dwells in shadows and cannot exist in the light, and why it wants to keep the illusion of darkness going.

So we turn a lack of love into a "real sin" with "real consequences". We hold the lack against the person, and instead of saying that they are merely mistaken and we need to give them more love, we say that they have failed to love and do not deserve forgiveness. Therefore their blocks to love are irreversible and their darkness its produced is permanent and they are now wretched and darkened beings.

In effect, what should just be a simple error easily corrected by love, is misinterpreted as something real in its own right with its own meaning, proof that evil is real and exists, and holds that against the person as their truth. We take what should be easily forgivable and turn it into a crime, as though to say that they aren't just making a mistake, they are positively making an act of assault.

"The ego does not perceive sin as a lack of love. It perceives it as a POSITIVE ACT OF ASSAULT. This is an interpretation which is necessary to its survival, because as soon as YOU regard it as a LACK, you will automatically attempt to remedy the situation. And you will also succeed. The ego regards this as doom, but YOU must learn to regard it as freedom." UrT5G8

So essentially the idea of the belief in sin, or interpreting things as sins, is rooted in taking something which is actually an absence, and interpreting it as the presence of something. It's not just an error, it's a crime. It's not just a mistake or something to be learned by a child, it's a deliberate attempt to harm and offend. It's not just an innocent lack of wisdom, it's a positive desire to do horrendous things on purpose out of malice and spite.

So really when we interpret someone as sinning, we're sort of saying "you're a dark evil person for being this way", rather than that "you are just lacking some light and need more light." Any sense of accusation, scapegoating, making guilty, turning what someone does into a crime, holding the mistake against them like it proves that they're unworthy of love etc, is all the ways that we convert a mere "lack of" love into a "presence of" evil.

True perception accurately and correctly views all illusory things - all blocks and the results of those blocks - as nothing more than temporary errors, which can be perfectly corrected without any punishment or need for chastisement or blame or hurt. And no death sentences or justified revenge. It merely sees an innocence and a mistakenness within the confused/lost person, rather than converting that mistakenness into "you're doing this on purpose to hurt people because you're evil and deserve attack."

There are only mistaken innocent souls who lack wisdom and are lost and confused and choose incorrectly, who need simple gentle correction by a loving hand such as the Holy Spirit. A simple classroom of children learning how to stop hurting themselves. When we turn this into a bloodbath or a warzone or a battlefield or a place filled with enemies and opponents and competition, we're moving into the belief in sin.

The belief in sin is the belief that darkness is real and contains real evil and can really produce real powerful consequences in its own right. This completely ignores the truth that there is only love and a lack of love, and never a sin. Nothing is a sin, because sin is nothingness misinterpreted as something. Your brother's sins are not sins, they are just mistakes calling for love.

"Dream softly of your sinless brother, who unites with you in holy innocence. And, from THIS dream, the Lord of Heaven will Himself awaken His beloved Son." UrT27H14

False perception means you are looking at something in such a way that you do not recognize what it is.

If the thing you're looking at is false, your mind will think it's true.

If the thing you're looking at is true, your mind will think it's false.

Although it's called false perception, this can be misleading because it makes it sound like it only focuses on falseness. But being a "false" perception, it's really a state of mind that INVERTS EVERYTHING.

What is true is swapped with what is false. What is false is swapped with what is true. That's all part of "perceiving falsely." Perhaps it would be better to call it inaccurate perception or mistaken perception.

If the world itself were a reality, an inaccurate perception would make it seem unreal. An inaccurate perception would distort whatever the world is, and show it to you as it is not.

If the world itself were NOT reality, an inaccurate perception would make it seem real. An inaccurate perception would distort whatever the world is, and show it to you as it is not.

So being in false mistaken perception doesn't inherently tell you whether the world itself is real or not. It only tells you whether you are in a state of mis-perceiving or not. Whether your mind is distorting or not, inaccurate or not, or deceived or not.

However, Jesus does refer to false perception in contrast to true perception. Perception is "true", or correct and accurate, when it is lining up more closely with facts and isn't introducing mistakes. A truer perception becomes somewhat transparent and stops interfering with what's being perceived. It kind of gets out of the way and reveals something "as it is", rather than interpreted incorrectly.

Nevertheless, even a true perception does not tell you whether the thing you're looking at is true or false, real or unreal. In and of itself perception does not determine this. All a true perception does is it stops distorting vision and takes a direct undistorting look. Whatever is there, no matter whether it is real or unreal, will be seen more for "what it actually is."

But what something "actually is" does NOT inherently tells us whether the thing actually is true, or actually is false, in its own right. Seeing a world truly does not mean that you automatically are looking at a true world. You can see a false world truly as well. You can see a word of fiction truly, just as you can see a work of non-fiction truly. You can see a fake world just as accurately as you can see a real world.

So at no time does perception actually tell us in any way, WHETHER or not the world is INHERENTLY real. It does not tell us if the world is genuine. It doesn't tell us if it is God's creation. And it doesn't tell us whether the thing perceived is really there.

Part of this comes from the fact that "projection makes perception". This means that you in fact have to PROJECT something out first, in order to perceive it. And you can only perceive WHAT you project. And you perceive it because you believe in it, and WANT it to be there. You look within at what is inside of you, and you project it out, and perceive its projection, which REFLECTS back to you like a feedback loop and you perceive it. This is why Jesus says:

"Perception is a RESULT, not a cause."

Perception does not cause anything, it does not define whether what you perceive is real, it does not give us any facts, and it does not prove whether the world is real or unreal. All it shows us is WHAT WE ARE GIVING, and what we therefore are CHOOSING TO SEE. And we see whatever we WANT or wish to see, projected out, because WE PUT IT THERE to see.

The question then becomes, do you actually ever perceive "an objective world", in its own right, in its own nature, or do you ONLY perceive what you project ONTO it? And how is it that you can project something onto it in the first place?

If the world were, let's say, completely real and God created, it should not be possible to project ANYTHING onto it at all. It should not be possible to modify it, define it, shape it, interpret it, or in any way have anything to do with "what is there." God by his will has put a world there and it would then be our job to accept it as it is and know it and be one with it. It would not be possible to "project perception".

That it IS possible to project perception onto "this world", the world we recognize as Earth etc, tells you that this world cannot have any INHERENT MEANING of its own. It has to be able to reflect what you project, and it can only reflect it because it is neutral. It is neutral only because it is nothing, and being nothing it has no inherent truth of its own. How could you project false things onto it, OR true things onto it, if it had ITS OWN truth? Its own truth would fight with and block anything you tried to give it.

Perception therefore really hints at us to realize that "there is no world apart from what you wish." There is no world apart from what you give to the world. There is no objective world out there. What we're projecting onto is an emptiness and an illusion, not a reality. What we're perceiving things IN is a mirror. We only see what we put there, otherwise there would be nothing TO see.

Note that perception is feedback, and it is a feedback from what was projected out.. True perception is less distorting that false perception, and could potentially become more transparent, to where it could "see past" what is projected to the underlying inherent nature of the world. To see it for what is actually there. But if there isn't something real actually there, true perception should also reveal that the world is unreal.

We need to realize that true perception does not mean that you see "the truth" as if it is the objective truth. It means that you are seeing in a "true way", such that WHATEVER you see won't be distorted. You are projecting an idea of love which makes the least amount of distortion or misinterpretation.

Seeing truly is only accurate vision, which DOES NOT IN ANY WAY indicate whether WHAT you look upon with it is, in and of itself, actually true or false. True perception can just as easily look upon a FALSE WORLD, and recognize "the truth that" it is a false world. True perception is not "blindness" to what is false, and we must not confuse WHAT is seen with HOW it is seen. You can look truthfully upon and lie and recognize it is a lie, just as much as you can look truthfully upon something that is inherently true in and of itself. True perception DOES NOT tell us whether the world is really there or not!

You can see that perception really has absolutely nothing to do with establishing whether or not this world exists, whether God created it, whether what you see is true and real, or what the inherent nature of the world is. Even if you see love in it, even if you see reality in it, even if you see God reflected in it, it STILL does not prove that the world is objectively real. Beyond what you GIVE to the world, or what you MAKE OF it, you have literally NO IDEA whether the world is really there or not.

True perception can potentially show you "what is there", but it doesn't of itself tell you what "it is." True perception is just as capable of showing you that THE WORLD IS FALSE.

"Projection makes perception; the world you see is what you GAVE it, nothing more than that."

"The world can give you ONLY what you gave it, for being nothing but your own projection, it HAS no meaning apart from what you found in it, and placed your faith in."

"The power of decision is your one remaining freedom as a prisoner of this world. YOU CAN DECIDE TO SEE IT RIGHT. What you MADE of it is NOT its reality, for its reality is only what you GAVE it."

God has created a Home for you. He is sharing with you everything He is. All of his property is yours. He is offering you eternal life, endless joy, infinite happiness, and perfect peace. He is willing to protect you forever. He is on your side. God wants to help you to know you are safe and loved.

God has established a Truth, which defends you and protects you and can cause you to be permanently happy. It is the most wonderful gift available. God has created the Truth.

You might presently believe that you have another truth. You may believe there is something else that you want. You maybe believe something else is more valuable or important or true. You also want to hold onto your own seeming ability to make your own truth.

Having gone off on your own, lonely for God, you have pretended that you can give yourself everything God was offering. You’ve tried to make your own home. You have tried to keep yourself safe. You have tried to determine what the truth is. And you have tried to defend your life. But you’ve struggled, and suffered, and have been unhappy.

Something is missing. What’s missing is love. What’s missing is God. What’s missing is your inheritance. What’s missing is God’s gift to you, which you seemed to throw away.

God has fortunately kept for you the very gift he has given, because it is permanent. God has kept your home spotless and perfect. He has protected everything about you that He created, ensuring it can never be harmed or changed. He is simply waiting for you to claim your inheritance.

To receive your inheritance, it’s going to have to mean that you surrender your own separate efforts to do everything for yourself that God wants to do FOR you. You don’t need to establish what the truth is - God has already done that for you.

You don’t need to create a safe place to live. God has already done that for you. You don’t need to protect your life or defend yourself to try to survive. God is offering perfect protection and everlasting life. You don’t need to sustain yourself through food and water, God can sustain you and nourish you at all times. You need nothing that God cannot provide FOR you, and he WANTS to provide ALL of what you need FOR you, if you will let him.

The only thing that needs to happen here is that you be WILLING TO ACCEPT what God has given, rather than what you have tried to give to yourself. You’ve tried to do EVERYTHING that God has done FOR you, on your own, without Him. You have tried to be God.

The world you made is nothing compared to the world God has created for you. And His gift to you is ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING, given with no strings attached and given fully. Unconditionally. And without you having to earn it or prove you deserve it. You are ELEGIBLE for God! You are WORTHY of God!

The truth you invented, and your desire to be the one who invents it, is nothing compared to the truth God has already established. You are trying to do everything on your own without Him, in place of Him, and this is not working very well. Living without God is unhappiness.

All we need to do here is become willing to LET GOD. To allow God. To accept God’s gifts. This means letting God be the one who defines the truth, putting aside your ego’s special abilities to figure truth out on its own, and simply ACCEPTING the truth that GOD created FOR you.

This is nothing short of putting aside your "wish" to have a SEPARATE WILL, and to instead accept God’s Will for you. To the ego this is interpreted as what you do not want, because it seems imprisoning to your separate will, as though taking away your freedom. But accepting God’s Will in place of your own, is FREEING you to be who you really are.

It is our job to give up our little protest against God, our little corner of imaginary existence, and our wishful thinking. It is our job to give up our separate authority. It is our job to stop relying on ourselves for everything and to MAKE ROOM for God in our lives. To make a space where God is managing some area of life FOR us, where we accept HIS decision, and carry out HIS will. And He assures us, His will for us is REALLY GREAT, and we will LOVE carrying out God’s will.

We need to learn to TRUST, that God’s will, God’s truth, is acceptable, WITHOUT our ego first figuring out if its true or needing to be the one who decides whether to comply or not. This stand-off we’re having with God needs to end. We need to learn that God can be TRUSTED to CHOOSE FOR US in every area of life, to speak for us, to think for us, to show us the straight way to heaven. Putting the Kingdom of God first makes everything easy.

Letting God be in charge, is not what the ego wants. Listening to guidance from Spirit, is not what the ego wants. Trusting God in major life decisions in spite of what circumstances suggest is not what the ego wants. Allowing God to HEAL YOU FOR YOU is not what the ego wants. Did you know that God wants to heal you of every sickness and problem, to melt away all suffering, to end all fear and to restore you to perfect happiness forever?

The Holy Spirit is here to carry out God’s will on Earth as in Heaven, while Earth seems to persist. It is his function to heal. It is your function to heal here also because you share his function. But this healing, this miracle working, does require that you be willing to trust Him, to LET HIM do the healing, to be open to RECEIVE God’s truth rather than being the one to create it, and to trust that God KNOWS what is best for you and everyone.

Letting go of our ego is literally an act of ALLOWING a power larger than yourself to work through you, to decide everything for you, to heal you for you, to heal others through you, to accept the truth as it is with no protest or desire to change it, and to TRUST that God knows what he’s doing. It takes time to develop this trust, but miracles arise from allowing God to be God through you, extending miracles of love and healing to all. This is God’s Will.

God loves you. Will you let him love you, heal you, bring you back to life?

"I want to decide otherwise, because I want to be at peace.

I do not feel guilty, because the Holy Spirit will undo all the consequences

of my wrong decision if I will let Him.

I choose to let Him, by allowing Him to decide for God for me."

"I do not have to worry about what to say or what to do, because He Who sent me will direct me.

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

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

I'm somewhat tired of hearing people say that, given this world is an illusion and doesn't exist, all you need to do is recognize this and disappear off to heaven. This "seems" to make some logical sense, to the ego.

This is not only level confusion, it is also selfish. It is the EGO trying to interpret what atonement means, because it wants to "get" the atonement without any of the responsibility of sharing it or giving it to help others.

Jesus has a PLAN OF ATONEMENT, which He also refers to as "the great crusade". This plan includes you accepting atonement, but also entails you become PART OF the atonement plan, so that you can HELP to fulfill the rest of the plan.

Accepting Atonement entails a willingness to receive miracles, a willingness to admit you are worthy of love, and thus a willingness to accept that others are worthy of love. This automatically opens the door to you loving others and helping them. And you will help them by sharing the miracles you have received.

"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. 8 I will provide the opportunities to do them, but you must be ready and willing."

Here is how Jesus describes the fact that He did not accept atonement solely for "himself", but in fact had to SHARE it in order to HAVE it.

"I heard one Voice because I understood that I could not atone for myself alone. 2 Listening to one Voice implies the decision to share It in order to hear It yourself. 3 The Mind that was in me is still irresistibly drawn to every mind created by God, because God's Wholeness is the Wholeness of His Son. "

Essentially, by accepting atonement, you receive miracle-working abilities, and are more or less given a "mission" to help others through miracles, teaching, loving, sharing. There is nothing selfish about it.

The other main part of the problem many people have, is the way the ego comes to logical FALSE conclusions. It SEEMS logical to say, well, this world is an illusion and does not exist, therefore I only need to "do nothing" in the world and sort of ignore it and go off to heaven. That's ego bullshit.

The result of that "reasoning" is that the truth of the higher level or "goal" of "there is no world" is used as JUSTIFICATION for behavior WHILE STILL IN THE WORLD. That is pure level confusion. That means, people will then "do nothing" in the world, while still in the world, will not help anyone, will sit on a fence smiling at the illusion, will not perform any miracles, will not heal anyone, and will basically BYPASS MIRACLES.

This is used as a broad brush stroke to GLOSS OVER the REQUIREMENT that you perform miracles as part of Jesus's plan of atonement, IN THIS WORLD. If you jump from "I'm in the world" to "there is no world" while you're still in the world, you will put up a BLINDNESS OF DENIAL against anything you could possibly ever do while in the world.

This has been used, en-masse, to justify NOT performing any miracles, NOT changing the world, NOT helping others, and basically disappearing up your own butt while everyone else "who is an illusion" continues to be in suffering and loss. EVEN IF that suffering and loss is an illusion, that does not mean you should not help anyone who is having a "false experience". How cold and callous can we be, to put up a middle finger to the world just because it's a dream and let everyone who believes in it continue to be in despair?

We have a FUNCTION of being the LIGHT OF THE WORLD, to heal the world, to correct it, to demonstrate truth through miracles, to prove this world is NOT REAL by showing that its forms can be changed by the mind, and to help others to overcome the suffering they have themselves implemented.

It is because people do not want to do this, the ego does not want to do this, that we disappear up our own selfish butt holes imagining how we will "gain" atonement for ourselves and be done with this whole world. "There is no-one to save"? That is level confusion. "No-one is sick so there's nothing to heal"? That is level confusion. "Death isn't real so there's no point reversing it"? That is level confusion.

You can't use a truth that only applies on a much higher level, to explain why you should or should not do something on this lower level. While we are in this world, we are to heal, help, perform miracles, enlighten, share, love, teach, and HELP OUR BROTHERS. Even if this whole world is fiction. Even if no-one is really sick. Even if death isn't real. Even if none of this happened. OTHER BROTHERS do not wake up just because you wake up. Other brothers do not get healed just because you accept healing for yourself.

The function of a miracle worker is to SUPPLY A LACK, to give to those who temporarily have less, from those who temporarily have more. That means when you accept atonement and "have more", you GIVE IT to those who have less. This is your RESPONSIBILITY.

All the belief systems that have interpreted the course in terms of "there is no world so just get out of here and go home", are ALSO the belief systems which POO POO miracles. They are also the belief systems which justify "doing nothing". They are also the belief systems of people who believe ACIM is non-duality. And they are also the belief systems of even some of the best teachers who are IN DENIAL of Jesus's atonement plan, or the fact that giving and receiving are one and that you must GIVE the miracles you have received in order to receive or have them.

And what is behind all of this level confusion? What is the driving force of fear behind all of this BYPASSING of performing miracles? What is the foundation of this "reasoning" which SEEMS to make sense, to the ego, that we need do nothing here other than forgive and go home? What kind of selfish motivation is behind all this?

IT IS THE EGO.

This is the ego's interpretation of the atonement. And it is INHERENTLY FALSE. When something makes sense to the ego, the ego has MADE NONSENSE. It is NOT your only responsibility to accept atonement for yourself. You must accept it SO THAT you can extend it to others through supernatural miracles and healing and being truly helpful. Being, essentially, "a disciple" of Jesus, proving that you ACTUALLY believe God's laws by demonstrating them IN the world, where help is still needed.

Let's just be VERY, VERY clear for a moment. Heaven and Earth are definitely TWO VERY DISTINCT STATES/PLACES in A Course in Miracles. If they were the same place there'd be no point Jesus referring to them as opposites or as two things. Or as "in heaven" or as "on earth". THEY ARE TWO PLACES. You cannot be in, or see, both of them, at once. THEY ARE OPPOSITES, diametrically opposed in every way.

This is important to realize, because Jesus frequently states how Heaven is DISTINCT from Earth and being IN Heaven is very different to being ON Earth. And yes folks, EARTH DOES MEAN THE PLANET EARTH, not some strange twisted metaphoric interpreted labelling of your inner ego interference "about" a world. The only way the Earth is "about" anything is in that it is an attack on Heaven.

Heaven and Earth. TWO PLACES. Earth has "place" because it is inside spacetime. Heaven is "not a place" only in that it has no FINITE LOCATIONS, because IT IS EVERYWHERE, and so transcends spacetime. It is STILL A PLACE WHERE YOU CAN EXIST AND LIVE!!!

If you EVER think that Earth is Heaven, you are stuck and have totally missed the obvious. Anyone reading theses statements SHOULD, using NORMAL LANGUAGE, get the impression and message that Jesus literally means TWO WORLDS, and that they can never be one because they are OPPOSITES. And only Heaven really exists. If someone reads these and doesn't get that? Read it again and take it literally.

"He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

"Only this is the real world, and perceiving ONLY this will lead you to the real Heaven, because IT WILL MAKE YOU CAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING IT."

"For you share the real world as you share Heaven, and his healing IS yours."

"Because my feet are on the ground and my hands are in heaven, I can bring down the glories of Heaven to my brothers on earth."

"You can REFLECT HEAVEN here. But no reflections of the images of other gods must dim the mirror that would hold God's reflection in it. Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego."

"Both Heaven and Earth are in YOU, because the call of both are in your wills, and therefore in your minds."

"It was only my DECISION that gave me all power in Heaven and earth."

"The Holy Spirit is the way in which God's will can be done on earth as it is in Heaven."

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

"All power in Heaven and earth is therefore given him and he will share it with you when you have completed yours. "

"Just under Heaven does he stand, but close enough not to return to earth."

"As your function in Heaven is creation, so your function on earth is healing. God shares His function with you in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit shares His with you on earth."

"You have been told that your function in this world is healing, and your function in Heaven is creating. The ego teaches that your function on earth is destruction, and that you have no function AT ALL in Heaven."

"The miracle, without a function in Heaven, IS needful here."

"The golden ASPECTS of reality which spring to light under His loving gaze, are partial glimpses of the Heaven that lies beyond them."

"As miracles in this world join you to your brothers, so do your creations establish your fatherhood in Heaven."

"Deny a brother here, and you deny the witnesses to your fatherhood in Heaven."

"The miracles you do on earth are lifted up to Heaven, and to Him."

"This is the ONLY justice Heaven knows, and all the Holy Spirit brings to earth. "

"Reason will tell you that there is no middle ground where you can pause uncertainly, waiting to choose between the joy of Heaven and the misery of hell. Until you choose Heaven, you ARE in hell and misery."

"The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky. So high in Heaven is it set that those outside of Heaven know not it is there."

"The sky embraces it, and softly holds it in its perfect place, which is as far from earth as earth from Heaven. It is not the distance nor the time which keeps this star invisible to earth. But those who seek for idols cannot know this star is there."

"For that is changeless, and has no effects which anything in Heaven or on earth could ever alter. But appearances are shown to be unreal BECAUSE they change."

"No one on earth can grasp what Heaven is, or what its one Creator really means. Yet we have witnesses."

"There is no place for hell within a world whose loveliness can yet be so intense and so inclusive it is but a step from there to Heaven."

"I give You thanks for what my brothers are, and as each one elects to join with me, the song of thanks from earth to Heaven grows from tiny, scattered threads of melody to one inclusive chorus"

"There IS no change in immortality, and Heaven knows it not. Yet here on earth, it has a double purpose, for it can be made to teach opposing things."

"The ego's logic is as impeccable as that of the Holy Spirit, because your mind has all the means at its disposal to side with Heaven or earth, as it elects. But let us again remember that both are in you."

"It but acknowledges the Will of God is done on earth as well as Heaven. It unites all wills on earth in Heaven's plan to save the world, restoring it to Heaven's peace."

"Forgiveness is an earthly form of love which as it is in Heaven has no form."

"His will is done because all power is given him in Heaven and on earth."

"And you will have conviction then of Him Who knows the function that you have on earth as well as Heaven. "

"Just as your light increases every light that shines in Heaven, so your joy on earth calls to all minds to let their sorrows go, and take their place beside you in God's plan."

"There is no sorrow still upon the earth. The joy of Heaven has come upon it."

"It is the bond by which the giver and receiver are united in extension here on earth as they are one in Heaven."

"It is the reflection of God's Love on earth. It will bring me near enough to Heaven that the Love of God can reach down to me and raise me to my home."

"No-one outside of Heaven knows how this can be. For understanding this is Heaven itself. Even the real world has a purpose still beneath creation and eternity."

"God limits not. And what is limited can NOT be Heaven. So it MUST be hell."

"Now a quiet time has come in which we put away the toys of guilt, and lock our quaint and childish thoughts of sin forever from the pure and holy minds of Heaven's children and the Son of God. We pause but for a moment more, to play our final happy game upon this earth. And then we go to take our rightful place where truth abides and games are meaningless."

"Father, in Heaven it is different, for there, there are no needs. But here on earth the miracle is closer to Your gifts than any other gift which I can give. "

"His Words contain all hope, all blessing and all joy that ever can be found upon this earth. His Words are born in God, and come to you with Heaven's love upon them."

A Course in Miracles itself contains some structures. There are for example two basic "levels" or states that are contrasted. There's reality vs illusions, God vs ego, life vs death, awakening vs dreaming, light vs darkness, health vs sickness, heaven vs hell, the Kingdom of God vs Earth.

So let's say that upon reading about these things, we start to form a structure in our mind, sort of a framework. We've got this one box over here in which we put all the reality stuff, and another box next to it but opposite, in which we put all the illusory ego stuff.

Now, here's where a big mistake happens. It's possible to INTERPRET what each of these boxes MAPS to. Or what they refer to in your environment. Whenever the Course says "reality", WHAT in YOUR world view is that REFERRING to? Which PART of your view of all of existence, is it speaking ABOUT? Which means some portion of "existence" in your world view has to be where you put the "reality" box, and another portion has to be where you put the "illusion" box.

If you discern this correctly, you'll map the reality box onto the Kingdom of God which is NOT OF THIS WORLD, and you'll map the illusion box onto THIS WORLD, Earth. This then means that Earth is an illusion. "The world you see is an illusion of a world" "The world was made as an attack on God etc." In this view, "there is no world" is referring to the illusory world which is in turn referring to Earth and all the galaxies etc.

But there is another way to MAP the course. This alternative approach SHIFTS the framework down a level. It considers that all the "reality" box stuff is actually TALKING ABOUT or referring to, THIS WORLD. e.g. the universe, Earth, bodies etc. Everything the course says about real stuff a person will think is referring to THESE THINGS. And here's the rub.

In order for the course ITSELF to seem to make sense, its STRUCTURE has to remain intact - the contrast between the real stuff and the illusory stuff. So that means you now need somewhere to PUT the "box of illusions". SOMETHING in your "environment" has to be ASSIGNED to the box of illusions, otherwise you can't make sense of it at all.

So if Earth and bodies are considered "in the reality box", you now have to find another thing to assign "illusions" to. And what might that be? Well, since if bodies are real we don't want to ever challenge that idea, so it can't be anything PHYSICAL. So this then leans towards something psychological, something perhaps to do with the MIND or the realm of perception. You have to connect the references to illusions SOMEWHERE in your experience.

And so what people do is, they take a necessary "step back" from "the world" which they think is REALITY, Earth, bodies being real, and HAVE TO displace the illusions into some kind of INTERNAL box, a hidden box, a more nebulous perceptual box. And so now the meaning of illusions is RELEGATED entirely to the inside contents of the mind. It all now becomes a model in which illusion means "my FALSE VIEW OF the world", and awakening now must mean "seeing the world as reality".

Of course if the world IS reality, correct perception would SEEM to line up with the idea that all you're supposed to do is learn to LOOK AT the world correctly, "as God intended", and then you're more or less done. ie true perception is now passed off as "seeing the world as God's most beautiful handywork." And therefore that if I don't LIKE the world for some reason, I must be HAVING ILLUSIONS, in my mind, in my perception, which is causing me to NOT APPRECIATE the world that God supposedly created "outside myself."

There is a great deal in the course which COULD by some seem to be suggesting this is correct, especially given that people seem to find themselves ISOLATED to a single body. "The minds are trapped in their brains." And from that perspective, where you think your mind is CONFINED to your brain, or your self is confined to your body, it SEEMS to make sense that the rest of the world and the body are God's creations. It doesn't seem to challenge it. But this is only because the perception of self and mind as LIMITED TO ONE LOCATION goes unchallenged. It's completely ASSUMED that it is normal to find yourself "inside a single body." And in this view, it seems to make sense that "everything else" is God's doing.

But there are some significant distortions that have to be introduced into what ACIM says in order to make this FIT. For example, the course is very clear in stating that "the body does not exist." "The body is a dream". That doesn't fly well if you believe God created the world. So in order to COMPENSATE for that, to ADJUST the course's meaning so that this basic core belief goes unchallenged, a person will REDEFINE THE MEANING of various terms.

"The body" may now be thought of as being some kind of internal "ego attitude" or "mental self". The "world you made" may be considered some kind of projective, perceptual, interpretation OF the world. "Earth" even has to redefined in light of ACIM stating that Earth is heaven's opposite, so now you have to conceive of references to Earth meaning some kind of "inner planet?". Statements about the sun disappearing have to also be reinterpreted to mean some kind of "inner attitude ABOUT the sun". These modifications are absolutely NECESSARY AND UNAVOIDABLE if a person is to try to maintain a sense of CONSISTENCY in their thought system.

But here's the problem. Just because a person is grasping the internal STRUCTURAL relationships in various parts of the course, the relationship between reality and illusions for example, and just because they are maintaining a clear delineation between the two in THEIR view of the world, it doesn't mean their view is VALID. Consistency is not necessarily validity.

It is possible for example, for a person to take *everything* the course says, and essentially RE-MAP it to MAP IT ONTO, this prior-belief that God created THIS world. It takes a huge number of modifications to the meaning of statements to do this, but if a person does this with BELIEF it doesn't matter to them. They just believe it's correct. It SEEMS TO MAKE SENSE to them, because it is CONSISTENT.

But the problem is you can really go DEEP into this and expose yourself over and over and over again to the same interpretation of the course, become very deeply rooted in it, believe you are "getting it", but all the while are interpreting that it is REFERRING TO stuff that it isn't actually referring to. In fact, a person can become extremely comprehensive in their awareness of what the quotes say, studying the text umpteen times, doing the workbook endlessly, and STILL believe that God created the world.

They will think "when it says body, IT MEANS...." and then will attach that to whatever TARGET they think the course is talking ABOUT when it says "body". There is this TRANSLATION happening all the time, which now requires a person to be an expert translator in order to "understand" anything it says. And it's now possible to think you are understanding it because it seems CONSISTENT, while being TOTALLY INVALID. Because if when Jesus says "the body" you think he means "my internal attitude and NOT my physical body", that's now leading to a TOTALLY DIFFERENT interpretation. It now makes the person have to REINTERPRET EVERYTHING, rather than just taking it simply and literally.

What does this DO? It basically establishes in a person's mind a very DETAILED, reinforced, faith-given, heavily-believed-in "model" of what is real and what is not, WHICH IS FALSE. And a person can study the course for DECADES believing that THIS is the correct interpretation of what the course MEANS when it says stuff. What it is REFERRING to. Don't be fooled - someone can have been doing ACIM for 40+ years and be totally mistaken about everything.

So by failing to see what the course is REFERRING TO with each of its statements, an entire layer of interpretation and displacement is occurring which results in the person becoming STUCK AND TRAPPED. They are stuck because they THINK that they are relating to reality, when they are relating to an illusion. They THINK they are accepting what the course is saying, when in fact the stuff they are accepting is REJECTING what the course is saying. And so they think they are doing something they are not doing. WHICH IS INSANITY.

One of the really serious things that happens is this. If it is believed that God created the world, but if this is NOT TRUE, the person believing it now looks upon this world as if it is REALITY. If it is NOT TRUE that this world is reality, but the person believes it is, that person now technically has FALSE PERCEPTION. False perception means you are viewing illusions and mistaking them for reality. Just because a person BELIEVES that this world is reality, doesn't make it true. And believing it is true, is being MISTAKEN, while believing you are NOT mistaken. And so the person becomes BLIND to the fact they are mistaken - they are insane, while believing they are sane.

If the world IS an illusion and you believe it is reality, you are deceived and are believing falsely. But to the person doing this, who believes "the world is real", THEY believe that regarding this world AS REAL is TRUE TO ITS NATURE. That seeing this world "truly" or as God intended, is TRUE perception. So if this world is NOT real, that person now has false perception but believes they have true perception. That is a state of profound confusion.

There are things which the course states plainly enough which are hard to deny. For example it actually states that THE SUN WILL VANISH. It also states that the stars will disappear. Which means, ALL GALAXIES. Believing God MADE THEM this is totally contradictory. What is a person to do? They would have to relegate these references to "they must mean something else". And then they'd seek for something else to pin it on. And good luck with finding "a sun" and a whole bunch of massive galaxies that exists only in your "inner perceptions about the world that's real."

And how about "Both heaven and earth are in your mind"? Surely this isn't saying that your mind is SO VAST that it actually contains a physical planet and an entire kingdom, whereby all of the animals, mountains, oceans, forests are all INSIDE YOUR MIND, meaning your mind must be HUGE and powerful? Well, that's what the Course IS saying. But those who don't believe this, relegate it to a nice comfortable safe "this must just be referring to some perceptions I'm having inside my little body." And that's an extremely TINY (non-threatening) interpretation of what ACIM is meaning.

These are basically the two major views of ACIM. Either God created the world or he did not. If he did, rather large chunks of ACIM **do not mean what they say**. In order to "make it make sense" the whole thing has to be interpreted as poetry, metaphor, and re-interpreted at every turn. Even the meaning of common words HAVE to be completely redefined, like "Earth", "Sun", "Body". Nothing is then taken LITERALLY. The course is no longer believed to be simply plain and obvious or honest and straightforward, but rather some kind of obscure and subtlety poetic array of metaphors that have hidden subtle meanings hardly anyone can understand. And Jesus is quite clear he has taken every effort to make this course as obvious and unambiguous as possible.

The simple view that God did not create this world is FAR MORE ACCURATE, requires massively less "reinterpretation", is EASIER to understand, is much more literally connected to what Jesus actually SAYS using terms that we are familiar with, AND makes a whole lot more sense. The HONEST view of ACIM is that it is telling the truth when it says the sun will vanish, the earth is not heaven, that this world is cruel, and that bodies are illusions. This true view of the course removes an entire LAYER of interpretation and "mapping", taking out the FILTER which some people interpose between themselves and EVERYTHING it says, incapable of taking Jesus at His word EVER.

This view of the course is also far more radical. Therefore potentially more threatening to the ego. It is therefore less popular, and more challenging to accept. If it's true bodies don't exist and the world is fiction and you made it all up and your mind is bigger than the universe ("your mind has the power to make worlds"), that's a much bigger mind bending conclusion with extraordinary implications. It challenges your every belief, all your values, everything you have a special relationship with, the notion of bodies being life forms, and even brings into question whether anything you see is real at all. But this view of the course does have one thing going for it. It doesn't require you to MANGLE THE HELL out of everything it says in order to make it make sense.

"There is no world" is simply literal. "You made sickness and death and can therefore abolish both" is now literal. Miracles can now literally heal the sick and raise the dead IN THE WORLD, not just in your mind. Miracles are no longer mere shifts in perception but capable of transforming matter and BREAKING ALL THE LAWS OF THIS WORLD including the laws of physics, which supports Jesus walking on water LITERALLY. And it also now means that it is possible to overcome PHYSICAL death. And in this view, the world is recognized as AN ILLUSION, NOT the Kingdom of God.

This view of the course is VASTLY DIFFERENT to the conclusions drawn from the other view. The contrast is practically night and day. The THOUGHT SYSTEM that arises is totally different. And the kind of BELIEFS you have to have to invest in them to make them true are TOTALLY opposite. It's literally the difference between believing that God made the Earth and believing God did NOT make the Earth. The difference between THIS IS REALITY, and THIS IS NOT REALITY! It's a hugely different view. And it hugely affects how you perceive and relate to this "world."

You CAN only believe one or the other, if you are consistent about it. Which ever one you side with will completely gravitate ALL your views towards it. In order to keep it consistent, you will HAVE TO adopt every single view that is based on that belief. And that means you will have to view everything "the other camp" believes as TOTALLY FALSE. And not one thing the other camp says will be accepted as true because it would undermine the CORE belief that God made the world, or not. And this is why there is a huge divide in the ACIM community between those who think the world is reality, vs those who do not. It's extremely pivotal and fundamental. And they can't both be true.

So you have taken a side. The question is, whether you are on the side of actual truth, or the side of fiction.

Nightmares and happy dreams have one thing in common, they are both dreams. It cannot be the fact that it is a dream that determines whether it is happy or not. It also can't really be a matter of what the dream depicts as happening.

A dream of a beach with a nice sunset and lapping waves might be regarded as a happy dream, while a plane crash with broken bodies strewn upon the ground might be considered an unhappy dream. But this is not really what makes a dream happy or not. If you think the form of what happens determines whether you are happy, you are being a victim of the world and are blind.

There can be an illusion of happiness, whereby a dream takes on a form of happy things, or things we think of as positive or uplifting. And there can be an illusion of unhappiness, whereby a dream takes on forms we do not like such as things going wrong. And likely we will decide only to be happy along with happy things, and to be upset around the bad stuff.

But what really determines whether we are in a nightmare or a happy dream has a lot more to do with one factor alone: HOW REAL IS IT. It's not a matter of what the dream is about or what it depicts, which is a trap easily fallen into. Dreams going in your favor are a trap just as much as evil doings.

Dreams are always essentially always dreams of death. They are dreams of death because reality, which is the opposite of dreams, is always eternal life. Every dream has underpinnings of separation and conflict.

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem."

So in effect, every dream you have has its basis in the separation from God, in opposition to God's nature, and in the idea of an opposite to eternal life. The themes of dreams, even the ones with the seashores and sunsets, are still rooted in some degree of separation.

What makes a dream a dream is that it opposes reality. It is a protest against reality. It's an attempt to turn reality into something unreal, something impossible, and something unnatural. Even if a dream is not real or is recognized as not real, it will always feature things happening which cannot happen in God's reality.

It isn't so much the fact that strange and unnatural things happen in dreams, because if you were to recognize it's just a dream you would laugh it off. It's more to do with the fact that you take it seriously.

A dream which is believed to be real, is given far more weight than a dream that is recognized as nothing. A real dream becomes a nightmare. If it is real, then everything that happens in it is true. If it is true, then all the experiences are real threats, real dangers, real awful situations, and real horrors.

The mind then experiences them as if reality is now a horrifying, twisted, unnatural but nevertheless real thing. As if it's true that someone has died a horrible death, or its true that everyone died in the plane crash, or its true that there was a revolting murder. Only IF IT IS TRUE does the dream upset you.

What ACIM is telling us then, is that since we're appearing to live in a dream world, a seemingly waking dream of Earth, if we believe it is real and true it will seem like a nightmare. Sometimes it will seem tolerable if the events taking place are regarded as safer, but it won't be long before it comes up with some new problems or disasters.

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

You can be sure then that the world is setup to be highly problematic, with temporarily illusions of reprieve and peace, in between vast hordes of horrors and stresses. But what determines whether it UPSETS you is whether your mind believes it is REAL or not. What makes it a living hell, is not so much what happens, but WHETHER it really happens. Whether it is true or not.

A happy dream then isn't so much a dream where nice stuff happens and you have a gap in between the world going to shit, because the world is permanently shit. It's more a matter of a mindset or way of looking at the world, in which it is not GIVEN reality or truth or power, and so it is recognized as not having any.

It cannot upset you because you don't choose to use it to do so. It does not hurt you because you know you can only hurt yourself by believing the world is capable of real harm. It cannot make you sick or die unless you use the world as a prop to pretend that you, as an immortal being, can suffer and die.

So what once would've been interpreted as a nightmare, comes to be reinterpreted as harmless, because you have lifted away from it the one thing that ever made it dangerous - the idea that it is REALLY HAPPENING. If the world is nothing BUT a dream, and is regarded correctly as NOT REAL AT ALL, then nothing in it can threaten you, hurt you, make you sick, or destroy you.

A happy dream is a dream thus in which your mind is free from the world because it does not GIVE it any reality, power or truth. It has power OVER the world because of this. You are now recognizing yourself as the dreamer of A DREAM, and not of a reality. And no nightmare can remain a nightmare when its heavy darkness is lifted away by the light of truth.

"There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are."

"The happy dream about him takes the form of the appearance of his perfect health; his perfect freedom from all forms of lack; and safety from disaster of all kinds."

"Salvation is a paradox indeed! What could it be EXCEPT a happy dream? For you are asked but to forgive all things that no-one ever did; to overlook what is not there; and not to look upon the unreal as reality."

"That is why forgiveness of another is an illusion. Yet it is the only happy dream in all the world; the only one that does not lead to death." "In your relationship, the Holy Spirit has gently laid the real world; the world of happy dreams, from which awaking is so easy and so natural."

"ANY mistake can be corrected, if TRUTH be left to judge it. But, if the mistake is given the STATUS of truth, to what CAN it be brought? The "holiness" of sin is kept in place by just this strange device."

What is a mistake? It's just a conclusion you come to when you don't have all the facts. It's what you experience when you deny what is really true, and hide from it. Hiding from the facts makes you unaware of them.

You will base your conclusions on all the information you have. But if your information is lacking due to being hidden, you are very likely going to make a mistake. Based on what you DO know, your conclusions will seem to make total sense. But the problem is you have left out some facts, and that could change everything.

For example, the "tiny mad idea" that you can be separate from God, is an idea of something impossible. You cannot be separate from God because God is everywhere. The idea is ridiculous and makes no sense. However, if you go in denial and hide from the truth, you will lose sight of the facts. And now you can potentially convince yourself that separation is possible.

Believing separation is possible, IS a mistake. Because the fact remains that it is not possible at all. But we don't RECOGNIZE that it is a mistake, because we think that in our state of denial we still have full access to all the information. And in this we are also mistaken, because being in denial shuts information out of your awareness.

So as we go into the so-called "separation from God", as we "buy into" what seem to actually be very logical conclusions, making sense of reality based on what we think we know, we can become very mistaken and NOT RECOGNIZE that we are. We can believe separation is possible, even though it isn't. And this sets us on a slippery staircase where we're likely to make one mistake after another.

"Brothers, take not one step in the descent to hell. For, HAVING taken one, you will NOT RECOGNIZE the rest for what they are. And they WILL follow. Attack in ANY form has placed your foot upon the twisted stairway that leads FROM Heaven. Yet, any instant, it is possible to have this all undone. How can you know whether you chose the stairs to Heaven or the way to hell?"

Being in a mistaken state of mind, ie lacking awareness of the whole truth of God, you WILL come to false conclusions. You will assume that you are correct in believing that separation is possible. In order TO believe it, however, you have to assign the attributes of God TO the mad idea.

God means truth and reality and meaning and permanence. If you are mistaken, you are confused about what reality IS, and will lose track of WHAT is real. You will now start to assign God's attributes to the mistakes you're making. You will claim that your mistakes are NOT mistakes, and you will instead GIVE them reality and truth. You'll interpret them as ACTUAL FACTS.

Believing that a mistaken idea is actually a fact, GIVES the mistake a sense of truth, validity, power, causation, reality, permanence and life. It is by this mechanism that you convert mistakes into SINS. Sin is now the idea that, even though you are ONLY mistaken, you're not ACTUALLY mistaken, but are in fact correct, and therefore your mistakes are REAL.

If what you do in mistakes is real, then every time you make a mistake you are REALLY doing it. And you will find that once you start off on the wrong foot, believing in separation, you will progress ever more deeply into mistake upon mistake, until the descent into hell becomes so twisted and unrecognizable that you can't even tell what anything is anymore.

"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."

A sin, then, is really just a mistaken state of mind, which has mistakenly believed that some property of God belongs to the mistake. It ASSOCIATES reality and truth with something that isn't true or real. It mistakes something false FOR something true. And it therefore produces confusion and insanity.

What this really means is that what we call "the ego" or the "split mind", is NOT a sinful state. There IS no real sin, on any level at any time. The ego is not really a sinful approach to reality. It is a MISTAKEN approach. It is nothing more than mistaken. The whole notion that "you are really separate" is a mistake. Separation is not possible, so you can't be separated off. To believe that you are, is to be mistaken, but not sinful.

You cannot be guilty unless you are sinful. You can only be sinful, or believe that you are, if you combine reality with illusions. If you mix the attributes of God with the attributes of something UNREAL, you get sin. A mistake is interpreted as permanent, as having real effects, as causing with a power of its own, and of attacking the vulnerability of something as though it were true and possible. IF that were true, your mistakes WOULD be sins. But it isn't.

The ENTIRE ego thought system is nothing more than a mistaken state of mind. A mind that does not RECOGNIZE what is true and false. It arises in a mind that has lost sight of the truth, due to being in denial of God. This denial has hidden the truth and concealed it, making it hard to recognize or see. And in that lack of light, things which are NOT true are CONFUSED with things that are. This means you are lost, but it does not mean you are sinful.

If the ego assertion is that "separation is possible" or "you are separate", it will base all of its sense of identity and truth on this premise. This includes its seemingly "selfish" attitude of self-preservation and self-interest and general selfishness. But these are not really sins. They are just a mind being mistaken. And the mind is actually trying to be very very logical in drawing its conclusions, based on what it believes is true.

If separation IS true, then you ARE separated off, and you SHOULD be selfish, because there is no-one else you're connected to that you can share anything with. It all becomes about "me alone" because you literally are believing you exist on a desert island in isolation. It makes perfect sense to such a mind that it CAN only look out for its own interests, because there has been a breakdown in communication and relationship with everyone else due to the separation.

This doesn't make the ego a sinner, it just makes it confused. It is just mistaken. The belief in separation is a mistaken belief because separation is impossible. WHEN the mind finally recognizes that its conclusions of "I am separate" were simply based on a false premise, that this entire way of thinking in terms of "me alone" was based on a LIE, that same mind will have a eureka moment and wake up to the truth.

There is no call for guilt, because real sin does not exist. When you believe that sin HAS reality, then guilt IS entirely justified AND inescapable. You WILL be forced to feel guilty and to seek to destroy yourself to atone for what you really did, IF what you did is believed to be taking place in reality. If it is not recognized that this world IS A DREAM, then you will, by mistake, condemn yourself to death for your "real" mistakes. Real mistakes are unforgivable.

To forgive then, or to apply forgiveness, we simply need to learn to recognize that we are mistaken. We are mistaken because we are in denial. The denial is making us unaware of the whole truth. We do not have all the facts. We don't really know what anything is, or what it is for. We can't judge anything correctly because we can't see the whole picture and are highly liable to come to a false conclusion. We can't draw ANY conclusions because we don't RECOGNIZE the problem or situation.

Therefore we need the help of the Holy Spirit who stands outside of this mistakenness and sees it for what it is. HE recognizes that we are ONLY mistaken. All of heaven knows this. All the angels know this. They come to our aid knowing that all we're doing is being asleep and having a bad dream, which seems real, but which isn't, in which all kinds of upsetting things seem to happen. And not one single thing we dream of is real or true, nor does it have any consequences whatsoever.

They come to our aid to simply tell us, we are mistaken and are incorrect. We need gentle corrections. We don't have all the facts and need to open up to a bigger truth than the one we believe currently. We need to have a little willingness to entertain the idea that we ARE in a mistaken state, and become open to the possibility of having drawn a false conclusion. The truth might even be totally opposite to what we believe, making it seem like something we do not want.

You are not guilty because you have not really sinned. Reality and truth can only appropriately be assigned to God. You should never assign reality or truth to a dream or anything in it. The world is not real and doesn't exist, because you are still at home with God in heaven, dreaming of exile. Nothing that you seem to do in your dream happens to anything real. Nothing real is ever affected. Only by giving it reality or truth can you deceive yourself that you HAVE done what you think is possible, but what remains impossible in truth.

Undoing the ego then is nothing more than recognizing that you are merely mistaken, and not sinful. This is forgiveness. The recognition that you HAVE NOT DONE what you think you did. You cannot have done it because it is IMPOSSIBLE in God's reality. Therefore it cannot be real or true. You DID NOT do what you think you did, in reality, you just dreamed of it. And you only dreamed of it because you were mistaken. Your mistake can be corrected and undone without ANY punishment or guilt or suffering whatsoever. "Forgiveness recognizes that what you think your brother did has not OCCURRED."

"I must have decided wrongly because I am NOT at peace.

I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise.

I WILL tod ecide otherwise, because I WANT to be at peace.

I do NOT feel guilty, because the Holy Spirit will undo ALL the consequences of my wrong decision IF I WILL LET HIM.

I WILL to let Him by allowing Him to decide for God for me."

The thing it realize about perception is this. The physical body itself has a form of sight. It can only see differences. Its sight is based on the reflection of photons of light, which seem to illuminate the surface of objects. This light enters the biological eyeballs and passes ”images” or sensory impressions on to the mind.

The physical body is actually permanently locked into FALSE perception. ”The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen.” It CANNOT SEE reality. Which in turn means EVERYTHING IT CAN SEE IS NOT REAL! What it is looking at is therefore NOT reality. Physical objects, photonic images, differences of form, shapes and sizes, colors and brightnesses, is not reality. These is ALL a part of false perception. “The world is false perception.”

It is not really seeing. It is in fact blindness. “Nothing so blinding as perception of form.” Since the body cannot see through or beyond physical surfaces, its seeing is in fact BLOCKED by objects. Objects blind it from seeing what is beyond. And therefore physical sight pretends to be seeing, but is in fact a lack of seeing.

These messages which the body seems to receive from the outside world, transmit into the mind, and the mind is sitting there EVALUATING THE MEANING of the messages. The mind is flexible in its beliefs, and can choose. It can decide what is true, and therefore what something MEANS.

The mind takes the ”physical images” provided by the body senses, and decides what they MEAN. It has perceptions ”about” the images, or projected ONTO the images. In a sense you could say the mind projects stuff ONTO the world or has perceptions ABOUT the world. But it’s really about the sensory signals being interpreted internally, once the body has received them.

The mind can decide whether these images represent the truth, or whether they are false. It can decide whether to believe in them or deny them. It can choose whether to regard them as real or as illusions. It can project sin and guilt ONTO these images and USE these images to mean attack, just as it can also project innocence and love ONTO these images which re-frames them as harmless. “I have given everything all the meaning it has for me.”

In and of themselves, the images actually have NO MEANING. They come from a world which itself HAS NO MEANING. This is why the course describes it as “a meaningless world”, and one which God DID NOT CREATE. The physical world is not merely meaningless ONLY when viewed in false perception, as if meaningful when perceived truly. It is in fact NEVER inherently meaningful. Meaning can be PROJECTED ONTO it, but in and of itself it is literally nothing. “The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it.”

So what actually happens is, the physical body provides a FIXED state of FALSE perception. And everything it sees is what we typically refer to as “the world” or planet Earth. Bodies, trees, houses, buildings, streets, the sky etc. Differences, changes, transitions, growth, decay, etc. This is all false perception and CAN ONLY been seen IN and WITH false perception.

Then at the same time, the MIND is sitting there INTERPRETING the physical signals. So the mind can ALIGN or IDENTIFY with the body, with physicality, and make the world seem real to it. When it does this, the MIND is now having false perception OF a false world - a false interpretation of a false image, at the same time as the physical body having false perception. They are in seeming agreement.

So what the falsely perceiving mind sees as coming from the body, it regards as TOTALLY REAL, because it is tempted anad DECEIVED BY the illusion. It totally agrees with and accepts it as true. That is what false perception means - not recognizing that an illusion is unreal. Just as true perception recognizes the world IS an illusion and not reality.

The mind can also move into a totally opposite state of TRUE perception, which is accurate perception. In this state, the BODY is actually STILL insisting on sending signals of physical unreality to the mind for interpretation. But the mind is not DECEIVED BY their falseness or their forms and appearances. Instead, the mind puts ALL of these physical signals into ONE category - THEY ARE ALL UNREAL. This is because it RECOGNIZES WHAT THEY ACTUALLY ARE, and is not deceived into thinking the physical world is reality. It recognizes these images ARE ILLUSIONS.

It regards them as UN real because it does not AGREE with or align or identify with the physical. It has identified with spirit, which is NON-physical and OPPOSITE to the physical world. Being fulled on the side of reality, everything unreal is now clearly and obviously unreal. And that means everything FALSE is ”truly seen” as false. As it is. And since the body can ONLY see falsely, and everything it sees IS FALSE, the sane mind now recognizes that the physical world is NOT REAL. Or even really there at all.

The body is trying to tell the mind that there is a world of differences and forms and attack and death ”out there”, BUT the mind is not BUYING INTO it at all. It does not fall for THE ILLUSION. It is not tempted. It RECOGNIZES what the physical really IS, which is that it is NOT TRUE. “The one you made is false.” It’s a false world which ONLY exists WITHIN false perception.

So now you’ve got FALSE signals of FALSE perception coming in from the body, and you’ve got a mind looking AT and USING these signals for a certain purpose. And its goal is the TOTAL OPPOSITE of the physical. So it does not believe in, accept, have faith in, nor is it deceived BY, anything the body is seeing. It’s a strange state, almost a paradox, where something UNREAL is recognized as an illusory physical world, while at the same time the mind is in a state of truth. “The world you see must be denied.”

True perception, christ vision, the spiritual eye, does not depend on, use, or rely upon, the physical sight mechanism. It is actually direct mind seeing. But this mind seeing does not SEE the physical world, because it regards it as FALSE, and what is false is shut out from awareness. This is why “It is impossible to see both worlds.” Either you see the false physical world AS IF it is real and true, or you see beyond it to reality. The mind’s eye also does not utilize physical photons for seeing, which is why in effect it cannot see the physical world. “Forgiveness sees it not.” It‘s sight is not based in space or time or distance or measure.

Truly, “To forgive is to OVERLOOK” and overlooking means ”forgetting to see”, or not seeing. You cannot look AT what you forgive. Looking AT it is unforgiveness. You look PAST it and fail to see it. That is what overlooking means. This is why “A world forgiven cannot last.” You cannot forgive the physical and still see the physical. When the mind is sane and healed, it categorizes ALL physical materials, worlds, energies, SPACE TIME, as entirely UNREAL. And this is the recognition of illusions which causes them to DISAPPEAR. And why “there is no world.”

The physical body is an illusion and sees ONLY illusions, in an agreein-with-illusions manner, which makes them seem real. “Only the body makes the world seem real.” All things physical are illusory and unreal. They are blindness. The blind body can only look upon the blind world, which was made to HIDE REALITY from your sight. “The world is drawn like a vail across the face of christ, but it can last no longer than an instant.” Only by recognizing that ALL body signals are FALSE AND UNREAL, can your spiritual eye rest upon the face of Christ, making you ready to return to God, ending perception forever.

Consider the idea of a script for your life which you fully planned, consented to, and passionately wanted, before you came into this lifetime. Imagine that you organized and orchestrated every single interaction. You created agreements with every single person you would ever meet and you asked them to do to you every single thing they were to do, with which they would comply. Imagine also that only what you planned would happen and nothing else would happen - except you would also forget that you planned it.

ACIM does speak to this, in that it says that nothing happens to you that you have not asked for, and that you get *everything* you ask for, and that you get *nothing* that you did not ask for. It also speaks to this when it says that nobody dies without his own consent. NOBODY DIES WITHOUT THEIR OWN CONSENT.

At some point, somewhere, whether it's in this life or before this life, but somewhere, for ACIM to be TRUE on this matter, you ****MUST**** have consented to every single thing that has ever happened in your life. ABSOLUTELY ALL OF IT. Not only consented to it but created it, asked for it, wanted it, designed it and even set it in motion YOURSELF. Not by any outside force or coercion or ANY amount of victimhood whatsoever. (this is somewhat described in the "song of prayer" pamphlet as well)

Remember the Course also says the key to salvation is this - that you are but doing this to yourself.

IF the Course is telling the truth (and it is), then everything that has ever happened in 'your life' has been exactly designed by and asked for by you. All of it. So this takes quite a lot of 'fessing up', which also means your life must become totally void of victimhood.

If you look now, and you look back at some things that you recognize as having 'happened' in your life, particularly events which involved people where they seemed to influence you in ANY way, and in particular in what *looked like* any kind of negative way, then you need to now reinterpret that. If you can allow yourself to ACCEPT that you planned and asked for every single detail of what occurred, then a few insights must arise:

1) You have to realize there was a REASON WHY you planned what you did, and that reason was FOR YOUR GOOD. Every single thing that you designed must have been for an intended purpose of, ultimately, leading you to a spiritual awakening. Every single 'lesson' or scenario that you put together, MUST have been intended to HELP YOU in some way.

2) With the information that all events are helpful, this must then shed a new light on all of these tragic past experiences, to show you that SOMEHOW, whatever happened, and no matter how it looked at the time, somehow that event and that person were ONLY doing what was in your script and they performed it perfectly. Therefore they weren't REALLY a victimizer. And you weren't REALLY a victim. At the time, yes, you believed you were, but here's the thing. You only believe you are a victim when you are UNAWARE that you are a script-writer.

3) This now gives rise to the insight that every way you've experienced being a victim in the past, was a result of a lack of awareness on your part, in which you experienced something designed to HELP YOU but interpreted it initially as HURTING YOU. This symbolically is the same thing as being loved by God but believing that you're actually being attacked by God. Ie it seemed against you rather than for you. So all of the ways that you STILL hold onto past events with a grievance, thinking of them as 'wrong' or 'unwanted' or 'bad' or 'unpleasant' or whatever, blaming the other person, all of that INTERPRETATION of events came about ONLY because you did not remember that you wrote the script. It looked like you didn't ask for what happened, which, IF it were true, WOULD justify your anger and hurt and offense. And that means, you need to to be more truly forgiving, ultimately accepting the atonement.

4) This now helps you to see that, ultimately, everyone involved is INNOCENT, because nobody has done anything outside of the contract and nobody ELSE is responsible for having done anything TO YOU against your will. Your will is embedded in your script which YOU WROTE, so even if you now find yourself unaware of this and experiencing victimhood, YOU DID STILL WRITE IT. So you can hardly blame the other person. So now you need to go look at all the unhealed grievances that you still haven't let go of, and which you still interpret in a victim consciousness that says "I didn't want this to happen", "this wasn't fair", "they did it to me against my will" etc.... you HAVE to reinterpret that.

5) This now leads us to TAKING RESPONSIBILITY. This might seem like a step which places a shitload of guilt on your shoulders, blaming yourself for what happened, bla bla bla. That's ego. What it really means is actually a doorway to FREEDOM and RELIEF. You see, if you scripted all this, and you asked xyz person to do what they did, and you can admit that and own that fact, then you can let them off the hook. You can realize they did not victimize you. YOU victimized you. You hired them to carry out your wishes. If you are responsible for writing your script (and maybe you had help on the other side to do this gently/realistically etc), then you can no longer blame anyone else for what happens, in the past or in the future. It also means you can no longer view experiences as unwanted, bad, against you, unhelpful, hurtful, something to resist, as an attack, or any other form of victimization. That means, yes, whatever they did, whatever happened, you wanted it and got what you wanted, FOR A REASON, to HELP YOU to wake up.

6) Having now admitted to this responsibility, and started to access the sense of RELIEF and freedom that this gives you... because dropping the whole victim drama is a RELIEF from suffering, you can now enter into GRATITUDE. You cannot be grateful to an attacker while you think you didn't ask them to attack you. But you can be grateful to them when you realize you DID ask them to AND you can turn your mind to look at the situation as helpful/for you. It's like looking for the silver linings. What's happening is NOT a terrible tragedy or a horrible event gone wrong. That's illusion. What's happening is trying to help you to be steered in the right direction or to keep you safe or to help you learn who you are or to guide you to remembering whats true or to learn to love and care etc.. whatever the purposes are in your plan for spiritual "growth."

7) Finally then you have to learn to change the 'direction' or angle from which you look at events. If you're responsible and everything is for your good, then you need to learn to 'take it' that way. Look for the helpfulness. Look for how it is 'positive'. Look for the silver lining, the learning, the opportunity its giving you. Look at how it is making you grow or what you're learning from it. Ultimately then there is only one LESSON, in the form of all lessons. And it's this. You need to overcome the NEED for the lesson by recognizing the truth, owning up to the responsibility of who you really are (owning your innocence), entering into the mindset of the Holy Spirit which shows you that you are never a victim, and reclaiming your FREEDOM from the dramas of the ego. Ultimately this translates to you OVERLOOKING (forgiveness) all of the ways that you get LOST in the 'game' that you set up, so that you literally are no longer CAPABLE of playing the game. Once the truth is revealed, you can never forget it. And so you no longer need to create these dramas ever again.

Remember, nothing happens to you against your will. There are no accidents. Nothing happens that wasn't planned at some point in time BY YOU. Nothing is being forced upon you against your will.

You might find yourself 'inside a lesson' in this lifetime and feeling stuck in it, victmized by it, limited by it. But you might not also remember the benefits of this situation. Maybe it has indirect effects on the spiritual growth of other people. Maybe by suffering a sickness you HELP other people to learn compassion. Maybe by being afraid you give others an opportunity to learn to nurture. We're all this big soup of roleplay and side-effects and responses.

Also let's just finish by saying you're not stuck with a lesson. Holy Spirit WANTS you to learn the lesson. The answer to it is not being hidden from you. Often Holy Spirit tells me, in the midst of some frustration and confusion, "its a lesson". So them I'm like.. hmm... what is this lesson, what am I meant to learn? And it's not like Holy Spirit is withholding the answer, but I need to experientially becoming willing to accept some measure of truth in order to complete the need for the situation. The lesson may not be obvious.

In fact a recent lesson for me was to learn to DROP the idea of miraculously healing a problem with my eye, so that i would let go of false ideas about control and spiritualization of my ego, even though this outcome seemed at the time to be totally the opposite of what I thought I needed to do. Holy Spirit eventually revealed, when I was at the readiness to admit to it, that the whole point was to help me to 'see' the truth - that I was trying to do/be something beyond what is asked of me.

Also I can't begin to tell you how much I have learned compassion and a heart-opening as a result of various challenges that a person close to me has been through. For which I'm grateful, even though it sounds 'sick' to say you're grateful for sickness.

Holy Spirit said to me, "there is a plan". I'm learning to trust that more. And thus learning to take responsibility for my part in that plan, and thus relinquishing all of the support for victim mentality and blame. Even now as I start to look back at past events in 'this new light' I can see that I need to become grateful to people that I thought were against me or who I thought did the wrong thing. They were only helping and they only DID help. I just didn't recognize it.

Ultimately you want to get to where you have no more need for writing scripts, having learned everything they offer. Then you are free from the cycle of reincarnation forever.

I think one of the main reasons people seem to be homophobic, is just because we expect men to be men and women to be women. And if we ourselves are "straight" which largely means squarely or "purely" male or female and not a mix of the two, we project that onto everyone.

I think we become conditioned to think that there are only 100% males and 100% females. Then we project that onto people and expect them to comform to that.

When someone is more of a mix of gender traits, partly male, partly female, in whatever ways, it starts to fall outside of the standard "heteronormative" society model.

This is where a person starts to become offended, because whenever something seems to go outside of our beliefs, it registers to us as false. Whatever we believe or think is the acceptable standard is always regarded as true. When something seems opposite or doesn't fit with our truth, we judge it as false, and that also gets lumped in with negativity, evil, darkness, sin, guilt, perversion, rejection, etc. It's quite a basic mechanism.

So then if some man is partly female, but the model in the viewers mind is that they are supposed to be purely male, the person will seem to be violating the model. That will register as that they're not conforming to the norm, and are doing something they're not supposed to be doing. That registers as sin and violation and offence.

It's interesting that if a man is feminine and doing some things that a straight man would judge as wrong, but if you then ramped up the femininity of that man to the point where he turns into a complete woman, then the straight man suddenly would find no problem with them, because now they are conforming again to the model of strictly separate genders. So it's only the middle-ground where someone isn't entirely fitting into the strict model, that registers as an offence against the model.

This then leads to the viewer becoming offended, feeling violated, attacked, threatened, upset by the hideous creature they they see, which seems to be doing things and acting in ways that are not "normal" to them, or rather, not conforming to their model of what a man or woman is.

The problem really is that there is an expectation and a projection of the idea of what a man or women must be, and the ego especially likes to keep these extremely separated out. That you can be either one or the other, not both. "Not both" is the ego's standard function of "not God", because God's whole system of truth is based on both/and. The opposite of both/and is either/or, which the ego loves to uphold.

And indeed its sense of identity requires a strong contrast between exclusive opposites, in which the males try to keep the females outside of themselves so that they "know who they are" and have a firmer and clearer sense of identification with their gender. Or rather, so that their ego can stand out as being more separate and different, in order to have an identity, because the ego depends on opposition. And if you are not being "man enough" then you somehow are becoming too feminine and are stepping over the line.

If someone seems to fall outside of the projected model, it registers as false, evil, wrong, offensive, upsetting, an attack, violent against their very sense of identity. This does two things - it threatens the clarity of distinguishing who they are, in which they need to keep male and female separate in order to "exist", and secondly it seems to threaten the model of what a man or woman is.

This perceived violation is then interpreted as that the stranger is actually breaking rules, attacking their truth, going outside the bounds of what is acceptable into territory of "perversion", is seen as unnatural, vile and disgusting, can't be tolerated, and is seen as actually a direct attack upon the viewer and everything they stand for and are. Indeed if the person IS really purely a man AND then proceeds to act like a women, that would be register as an actual perversion.

Having perceived that the not-quite-straight person is threatening them and offending their ways, this then produces the perception of justified anger, because they feel actually literally under attack by the non-conforming person, as if that person will infect them, change them, influence them, invade their integrity, remind them of the fragility of their masculine identity, invade their boundaries, and do things to them which persons of a given gender are not supposed to be doing.

This can take on ridiculous forms such as fearing that the queer person will turn the kids gay just by living nearby, or radiate gay rainbow vibes into their minds, or have ultra evil sexual powers of lust after their treasured ones such that they'll be taken into a cult and subjected to satanic abuses, or that the queer person is simply am abomination against their God and breaking all the laws of heaven in a state of sin and madness.

So then they project hate and rejection onto the queer person, which they see as completely justified, because they've perceived that the queer person has attacked them first just by existing, and now this evil spectre must be destroyed in order to protect oneself. Which means the homophobia is seen as a justified and needed act of self-preservation based on fear. This is where the "phobia" part comes in, because the anger and abuse literally stems from a perceived fear, that something outside of what is acceptable is threatening to undermine their truth. Not just their truth, but their whole sense of identity and reality.

Because if a man can be partly not a man, and a woman can be partly not a woman, then that brings into question what is a man or woman, how are they defined, and how to distinguish a sense of self in the midsts of the seemingly "vague and muddy" mixture of gender and identity.

The ego would like things to be clear-cut, but the queer person is presenting a picture of something not so clear-cut, something which appears to be crossing over boundaries, "gender bending", breaking the ego rules of either-this-or-that, and corrupting the whole model of "man and woman produce male or female kids only." And now queerness is a boundary-violating attack upon families and marriage and religious institutions. And all this is is a concern for what happens when something transcends the rigid boxes that everyone wants to live in.

Really all of these reactions, which are just ego projections of a rigid model of identity, are only happening because the viewer lacks discernment and sees things in a very black-and-white exclusive and special way. They are not recognizing something, which is always the failing of the ego mindset. By not recognizing that the person is not JUST male or JUST female, and that people actually can be "not entirely one thing", there is no account made for people who seem to blend across the boundaries. And then "non-binary" is seen as the ultimate sin and rejection of all that is good and proper in the human race.

If they would open their minds from the closed-off either/or mindset of male/female strictness, which is closed-mindedness and a lack of spirituality, they would consider that some people (in body terms) are not purely male or purely famale, and that such people are completely acceptable and part of "nature".

If the viewer would then stop trying to force the person to be eieither man or woman, they wouldn't actually produce all the distorted reactions - which they do to themselves - that arise from trying to fit something into a box that it doesn't belong in. It's only because of the projecting of the "I know what a man is!" that a person requires someone else to conform to that.

There has to be an opening up to a greater repertoir of how many different types of human bodies there are, just as we have to open up to accept people from other countries and enthicities without judgement. And to then drop the expectation and conditioning that says you have to be one of only two things, and you must never be a mixture in any way. It's only those strict rules that give rise to a sense of the rules being violated, which then leads to the fear of invasion and the discomfort of being "pursued by a gay rapist", which then leads to the angry projections of guilt, which becomes homophobic abuse - all an attempt to maintain the ego.

If we could better recognize what people ARE, rather than what we think they SHOULD BE, we'll be better able to accomodate everyone and stop trying to force people to conform to a rigid tight little structure. The problem is really that egos are JUDEGMENTAL, and this judgement is always flawed and narrow and wrong.

Homophobia is actually just an expression of the regular ego doing its regular ego thing, just in the same way as any other conditioned belief which results in a sense of being offended by anyone or anything that outside of that belief - be it someone of another religion, another race, another gender, another color, size, hairstyle, whatever.

The fact is that the world is not black and white, it is not purely either/or, it quite often happens - though to less of a percentage usually - that there are exceptions to rules. Flowers that sometimes grow double heads, creatures which sometimes are half female and half male, humans that sometimes have a mix of sex-oriented organs, people with darker skin who become albino, people that are sometimes born as siamese conjined twins instead of separate bodies, etc.... nature isn't completely strict in its forms.

People only have prejudice against various aspects of the physical world when they think it's supposed to be a very very basic black-and-white model, where you have to be 100% this or 100% that. And as the mind believes strongly in separation the egotism emphasizes this contrast and exepcts everything to conform to it. And anything that deosn't is labeled as a sin. That's standard ego functioning, nothing special. It's unforgiveness. It's based on the belief that the world is absolutely real, and therefore separation is truth.

To be more forgiving we have to be willing to really look at what things are, not what we wish they would be, or what category they're supposed to fall into, or to judge them based on appearances while trying to fit them into neat little boxes. Some people are such a mix of things that you'd have a hard time even describing them accurately. In the past society was much more recognizing of the fact that everyone is to some degree bisexual, which is still true, even if people try to deny it.

Long story short, society needs to become more forgiving and learn that the human race isn't composed of pure men and pure women, but rather than absolutely everyone is at least to some degree partly both. All human embrios start out as female and even the males still have some trace of that in them. This is a world of relativity, in which nothing is absolute and nothing is extremely pure and nothing is completely separate. There is no real man or real woman. We are ALL hybrids, and everyone is queer. That's not wishful thinking etiher, that's the nature of spacetime.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made" .... "earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way".

We made this world, the physical world, complete with stars and galaxies and planets and bodies, in an attempt to be COMPLETELY OPPOSITE to God's reality. It therefore HAS to have the properties that are OPPOSITE to God.

Heaven is everything, and so the world you made LACKED EVERYTHING and IS therefore nothing. Heaven is entirely meaningful, and so the world you made LACKS ALL MEANING and is utterly meaningless. Heaven is reality, and so the world you made IS COMPLETELY UNREAL. Heaven exists, and so the world you made DOES NOT EXIST. Heaven is the truth, and so the world you made IS COMPLETELY FALSE. Heaven is all possibility, and so the world you made is IMPOSSIBLE.

So what you have ended up with is an imagined, hallucinated world, within your mind, which presents an illusion of a world. An image of a world which seems to be there, but isn't. Which seems to do things which are impossible in truth. And which seems to exist in some way, but still doesn't. It is a fiction, a dream, a make-believe wishful-thinking desire to have something be possible that isn't. As a result, "the world" in and of itself IS NOTHING AT ALL. It has NO meaning, NO truth, NO life, NO reality, NO power, NO will, NO mind, NOTHING AT ALL. And we're talking here about what the world IS, not about your interpretations and perceptions of it.

"That was the first projection of error outward. The world arose to hide it, and became the screen on which it was projected, and drawn between you and truth."

"We also have observed that man can create an empty shell, but cannot create nothing at all. This emptiness provides the screen for the misuse of projection."

In the separation we made "an empty shell", which has no inherent meaning or reality of its own, which becomes a seemingly "neutral screen", ONTO which we project meaning. This is because the world in and of itself has NO meaning and IS NOTHING. It can only act like a mirror to reflect back whatever meaning you GIVE to it.

"It is essential, therefore, that you learn to recognize the meaningless, and accept it without fear. If you are fearful, it is certain that you will endow the world with attributes which it does not possess, and crowd it with images that do not exist. To the ego illusions are safety devices, as they must also be to you who equate yourself with the ego." "That is all the world of the ego is. NOTHING. It has no meaning. It does not exist."

So what happened was, we made this NOTHING world, a meaningless empty mirror devoid of ANY meaning, good or bad. And then what we call "the ego", really the ATTEMPTED BELIEF that an opposite to God HAS the attributes of God, began to project ITS meanings onto the meaningless world. It wanted the world to be real, to have truth, to mean something, to be alive, to have power and mind and will, and to replace heaven as a real existence.

All of that was meaning PROJECTED ONTO the meaningless world by the ego in the mind. The belief in, or the desire to WANT the world to BE something it can never be, has pushed our minds into egoic states of insanity where we believe this world is reality.

We have fallen for illusions, given value to stuff that doesn't exist, have interpreted NOTHING as SOMETHING, have GIVEN the world meanings so that the forms of objects mean different things, we have decided that the world has power over us, and have tried to force it to act as if it is alive.

All in an attempt to turn what is really essentially NOTHING into something that seems like it really exists. We've tried to MAKE it be real, even though it can NEVER BE. By doing this, we've now failed to recognize that the world simply is still a "neutral mirror", or basically a NOTHINGNESS, which is empty in every way and lacks any kind of meaning. It is not positive, or negative. It is not light or dark. It is not evil or holy. It is not ANYTHING. It's not even really there at all. But we've tried to invest it with attributes of SOMETHING, whether it be that we've tried to give it ego attributes or holy attributes. And BOTH are incorrect, because it in and of itself IS NOT THERE.

"Earth can reflect (because it has no truth of its own) Heaven or hell; God or the ego."

"To see a SINLESS body is impossible. For holiness is POSITIVE, and the body is merely neutral. It is NOT sinful, but neither is it sinless. ***As nothing, which it IS, the body cannot meaningfully be invested with attributes of Christ OR of the ego.*** EITHER must be an error, for both would place the attributes where they cannot BE. And BOTH must be undone, for purposes of truth."

"What is meaningless is neither good nor bad. Why, then, should a meaningless world upset you? If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy. But because it is meaningless, you are impelled to write upon it what you would have it be. It is this you see in it. It is this that is meaningless in truth."

"All these attributes are given it by you. The world is meaningless in itself."

"I am looking at a meaningless world."

So Jesus is really trying to get us to realize that "the world" is in fact absolutely utterly NOTHING. It is not this or that, or up or down, or good or bad, or anything. That ANY kind of judgement about it is wrong. That even trying to assign it positive meanings is invalid. It can't BE holy, because it doesn't exist. It can't BE given life, because it cannot be eternal. It isn't an evil hell, nor is it a heaven. It is an empty lifeless nothing mirror in which you see, at best, a REFLECTION of what YOU PUT THERE TO SEE. It can REFLECT heaven, but it cannot ever BE heaven.

This is where perception comes in. Or rather, projection makes perception. Your mind is always projecting something. If it projects from ego then it GIVES the meaningless world EGO meanings, and this somewhat transforms the NOTHING world into a "hell on earth" kind of experience. It makes the world a nightmare for you because your mind is now ASSIGNING all kinds of unnatural, inappropriate, incorrect meanings to everything you see.

This in turn makes the world SEEM dark and foreboding and frightening and dangerous. It sets up a hierarchy of illusions in which different forms seem to have different meanings or importance or severity. And now your whole experience of a NOTHING WORLD transforms into a NEGATIVE experience of hellish nightmares, victimhood, victory, and everything in between.

The whole of ACIM is geared towards lifting AWAY these projected false meanings that you've "given to everything you see", so that you stop trying to turn NOTHING into SOMETHING. Which really is the definition of making mountains out of molehills - creating drama from nothing at all.

Jesus is then saying that if you lift away from the world all of the ego meaning, sin, attack, giult, fear etc, that you PUT ONTO IT unnaturally, then a light will shine in your mind from the Holy Spirit which will "light up" the meaningless world, and you will GIVE IT A HAPPY MEANING.

This happier meaning, aligned with God, is in turn STILL an illusion and a projection of meaning. The world is GIVEN a sense of innocence, purity, love, etc. Not because it HAS that, and not because it is inherent to it. In fact the world is STILL NOTHING. But your mind is able to "bless it" with the giving of love, so that what you "see in it" is a REFLECTION of the love you gave.

You then look upon "what you made" with forgiving eyes, and see the forgiven world. Not a world that's REAL or TRUE, but a REFLECTION in a MEANINGLESS world that is shining back at you the light that you are PUTTING there to see in it. This is how "God is in everything I see because God is in my mind", NOT because God is in the world or as the world.

And eventually this will give way to the complete DISAPPEARING OF THE MIRROR as "the world" disappears in light and is no more. It never was really anything to begin with. It has always been nothing and never really became anything. And so "the world was over long ago."

What this means for us is that in ACIM there is a very powerful and deep thread which basically says, the central lesson is, "there is no world." Not that the world is inherently anything, it is not hell or heaven, it can at best REFLECT them but cannot BE them. It's just an empty shell, a meaningless nothingness which, IF you invest it with belief, seems to become a "something" with real existence and life, but when seen truly, is RECOGNIZED as NOTHING AT ALL.

"The eyes of Christ look on a world forgiven. In His sight are all its sins forgiven, for He sees no sin in anything He looks upon."

"And as we look upon a world forgiven, it is He Who calls to us and comes to take us home, reminding us of our Identity Which our forgiveness has restored to us."

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals."

The central core message then is simply this. The world is nothing at all. The body is nothing at all. There is no war. There is no death. There is no sickness. There is no attack. There is no sin. There is no guilt. There are no victims. There is no suffering. There is no unhappiness. There is no history of the human race. There is no space or time or galaxies. There are no civilizations of bodies. There are no cities or streets. There is no devouring nature. There is no decay or loss or deprivation or sacrifice. There is NOTHING HERE AT ALL.

It is only when we mistake this nothingness for SOMETHING, that we become upset. Now we have made it real and given it belief. Now we have confused it for having a life and mind and will of its own. Now we think the world we made as nothing, has become something, and has risen up out of nowhere to do something by a will of its own, against our will. And now we are victims and are afraid and suffering and dying at its hand. And now we accuse others who seem to populate the world of being the cause of sin against us. And all of this is confused, insane and mistaken, because the entire world IS NOT DOING ANYTHING AT ALL.

"******The world is nothing in itself.***** Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real. Perhaps you think you did not make the world, but came unwillingly to what was made already (as if it objectively exists), hardly waiting for your thoughts to give it meaning. Yet in truth you found exactly what you looked for when you came. There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly."

"*****There is no world!***** This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again. But healing is the gift of those who are prepared to learn there is no world, and can accept the lesson now. Their readiness will bring the lesson to them in some form which they can understand and recognize."

"*****There is no world***** because it is a thought apart from God, and made to separate the Father and the Son, and break away a part of God Himself and thus destroy His wholeness."

"Without the idea of death *****there is no world*****. All dreams will end with this one. This is salvation's final goal; the end of all illusions."

"He does NOT realize that HE MAKES THIS WORLD, for *****there IS no world outside him.*****"

In the separation, you confused the true and the false. You assigned God's properties to the false world, BUT YOU ALSO assigned false properties to God. This turned God into an evil enemy to you in your perception of him. This was necessary in order to believe that the world you made was something you would want instead.

This means you actually framed God as opposite to his nature. As if God is evil, destructive, attacking, sinful, deadly, sick, suffering, weak, powerless, unreal, illusory, vengeful and special. While many people focus on how they are going to forgive the false world, which entails lifting truth from it, you ALSO have to forgive God and lift the FALSE from him.

You may not realize that you have assigned false properties to God. But you have in fact framed God as a special false God. You have tried to make out that God is evil and an enemy. The ego believes this. It wants nothing to do with God because IT believes and perceives God as "everything evil", while seeing itself as holy.

"No-one who hates but is afraid of love, and therefore MUST he be afraid of God."

"You are more afraid of God than of the ego, and love cannot enter where it is not welcome."

"And being deceived in yourself you ARE deceived in your Father, in Whom no deceit is possible."

This means you do in fact have within you various reasons to avoid God, to fear God, to not want God, and to hate God. Part of you wants God to be dead. You have to therefore actually forgive God of the projections and misperceptions that you have laid upon him, and recognize that he is not those things.

It is your attempt to AVOID looking at your "attack on God" blasphemy that compels you to focus on forgiving the WORLD instead. You do not want to look at this because you actually believe that your attack on God has made you GUILTY. And you do not want to revisit the idea of approaching God because you believe it means admitting to having sinned against him, and you think he's going to kill you for it.

"You do NOT see that EVERY sin and EVERY condemnation which you perceive and justify IS an attack upon your Father."

"Your brothers and your Father have become VERY fearful to you, and you would bargain with them for a few special relationships, in which you think you see some scraps of safety."

"For through guilt, you EXCLUDE your Father and your brothers FROM yourself."

"It is your Father Whom you would defend against."

If you think that God is evil you will not want to go home. If you think the world is NOT evil you will not want to go home. You've turned God into an enemy and do not trust him. That's why there is a whole process of "the development of trust". You have misplaced your trust in the ego world. You have to learn to trust God again.

"You CHOSE to forget your Father, but you did NOT will to do so."

To trust God you have to be willing to accept the possibility that God is not the scary monster that you think he is. That he is not going to hurt or attack or reject you. That he still loves you because he is still love. You have to take away from God the false accusations you've made that he is evil and vicious and not to be trusted. You have hurled abuse at God and have accused him of sin. This has to be undone.

You will only approach God, tentatively, if you can have a little willingness to be mistaken about him. And this requires that you trust and have faith that he isn't out to destroy you. You have to be wrong about God, because you have become mistaken about him and his nature. You cannot conceive of him without a body, or think of him as anything but selfish like your ego. This has to be reversed.

"And either the ego, which you made, IS your father, or its whole thought system will not stand."

"Your gods are nothing, because your Father did not create them." "You who have been unmerciful unto yourselves, do not remember your Father's love."

This aspect of forgiveness doesn't seem to be talked about very much in ACIM circles. A lot of time is spent talking about forgiving the world and its contents and the people that piss you off, but very little about looking at the fact that you rejected God, hate God, do not want God, and are trying to destroy him and his son. This picturing of God as an enemy has to be undone in order for you to feel safe to be intimate with God again.

You have to unlearn your rejection of God and learn to love him again. Perhaps the real reason that many people do NOT focus on forgiving God, or looking at how they have framed God as evil, is because it would suggest tremendous guilt and fear, to admit that you have tried to attack and kill off God himself. Fortunately God has not held any of this against you and dispels it entirely, and is his hands are held open in welcome to receive you as his most loved creation once again.

To want to go towards your brothers in Christ, to want to forgive anything, you have to be willing to forgive God. You have accused him and must correct this. The world was made as an attack on God. You can forgive the world but you also have to forgive the idea that you've attacked God. You have made God into a false God and have redefined what you think God is like. This has to be corrected. You have to learn to love God again, and you can start by admitting that you don't.

"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. 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."

"Allegiance to the denial of God is the ego's religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival."

"The "attack on God" made His Son think he was fatherless, and out of his depression he made the god of depression."

"Do not look to the god of sickness for healing, but only to the God of love, for healing is the acknowledgment of Him."

"The god of the crucifixion demands that he crucify, and his worshippers obey."

"You MADE the god of sickness, and BY making him, you made yourself ABLE to hear him. But you did NOT create him, because he is NOT the Will of the Father. He is therefore not eternal, and will be UNmade for you, the instant you signify your willingness to accept ONLY the eternal."

"You were willing to accept even death to deny your Father."

"You have interpreted the separation as a means which you have made for BREAKING your communication with your Father."

"You can give up the god of sickness for your brothers; in fact, you would HAVE to do so, if you give him up for yourself. For if you see him anywhere, YOU are accepting him."

"GOD is not at war with the god of sickness which you made, but YOU are. He is the symbol of willing AGAINST God, and you are afraid of him BECAUSE he cannot be reconciled with God's will. If you ATTACK him, you will make him real to you. But if you refuse to worship him, in whatever form he may appear to you, and wherever you think you see him, he will disappear into the nothingness out of which he was made."

"Embodiment of fear, the host of sin, god of the guilty and the lord of all illusions and deceptions, does the thought of death seem mighty. For it seems to hold all living things within its withered hand; all hopes and wishes in its blighting grasp; all goals perceived but in its sightless eyes. The frail, the helpless and the sick bow down before its image, thinking it alone is real, inevitable, worthy of their trust. For it alone will surely come."

"There is either a god of fear or One of Love."

"Or will you make another idol to replace it? For the god of cruelty takes many forms."

"The ego is not a traitor to God to Whom treachery is impossible. But it IS a traitor TO YOU who believe you have been treacherous to your Father." "You who have played that you are lost to hope, abandoned by your Father, left alone in terror in a fearful world made mad by sin and guilt, be happy now. That game is over."

Jesus speaks in ACIM about translating hell into heaven, converting somehow the Earth into heaven's reflection. ie that the Earth is neutral/devoid of meaning and we project meaning onto it. Or to put it another way, we decided that certain states or forms or situations "must mean" something in partcular.

We associate meanings like they are outcomes or inherent definitions of what is happening. As if, when such and such happens it always means "this". As if the meaning is inherent in the form. Jesus speaks of this as form appearing to shut out all meaning to the extend that the form itself seems to describe what the forms means. And that this is a total illusion.

"See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning."

The truth is that we give everything all the meaning it has, and the world has NO inherent meaning of its own. It is indeed a meaningless world, which is why it acts like a mirror reflecting back whatever you project onto it. We actually decide that it means whatever we think it means, and then pretend it meant this without our contribution.

But when you think about it, he's talking about a process of interpretation or translation. There's plenty of interesting quotes about both those terms. We basically interpret the world. Interpretation means, a process of judging or evaluating, what WE BELIEVE something is, which in some way TRANSLATES it into some other preferred form in our minds that we find acceptable. We decide to interpret it to mean whatever we WANT it to mean, hence "there is no world apart from what you wish."

Similarly, the idea of a translation does not simply mean that the thing itself changes. The world doesn't actually "turn into" the meaning that you give it. You can take the example of translating a language.

If the world is writen in English, and you translate the world into Spanish, and you can only speak Spanish, then you can "read" or interpret a VERSION of the world, an image of it, written in the Spanish language, that seems to represent the world. But the translation you are reading isn't the ORIGINAL form. The world is essentially still in English, but your interpretation of it is transforming its meaning.

Translation is also a kind of math term, translating means to move something from one location to another. And it's part of a broader group of operations such as rotation and scaling, which are all types of "transforms". In effect the thing goes through a transformation of some kind and ends up different to how it began.

So in ACIM terms, our minds are giving the world meaning by interpreting it, putting that meaning onto it. Sometimes we give it meaning from our egos and sometimes from the Holy Spirit. When the ego gives it meaning, we believe the world is inherently hell or reflects a hell-like nature. When the Holy Spirit gives it his meaning, the world now reflects the love of God.

But we should note here that the TRANSLATED VERSION of the world is in fact once removed from the world, just as a Spanish translation is once removed from the original English. When you have interpreted the world to mean that it reflects heaven's meaning, we're saying that we now look AT the translated version, a sort of copy of the world, which is a different way of looking at it.

So when ACIM talks of earth translating into heaven etc it's not really saying that a meaningless world, having the meaning of God projected ONTO it, reflected back, now is actually a meaningful world. But that the REFLECTION is meaningful, and the TRANSLATED alternative dream which INTERPRETS the world is heaven-like. You are then seeing what you put there to see, rather than necessarily what is there. Because really the world is not there at all.

Our task then is simply to recognize that we do not want the translations that are converting the world into a hell-like language, and we instead want to "read into" the world a heaven-like language. We want the Holy Spirit's translation of the world, his purpose for it, his use of it, instead of what the ego is trying to "make of" it or use it for. And that applies to the body too.

"Miracles are merely the translation of denial into truth."

"The ability to perceive made the body possible, because you must perceive SOMETHING, and WITH something. This is why perception involves an exchange, or a translation, which knowledge does NOT need. The interpretive function of perception, (actually, a distorted form of creation), then permitted man to interpret the body as HIMSELF, which, although depressing, was a way out of the conflict he induced."

"Thus are the Holy Spirit's lesson plans arranged in easy steps, that, though there be some lack of ease at times, and some distress, there is no shattering of what was learned, but just a re-translation of what seems to be the evidence on its behalf."

"For as Heaven and earth become one, even the real world will vanish from your sight. The end of the world is not its destruction, but its TRANSLATION into Heaven. The RE-INTERPRETATION of the world is the transfer of ALL perception to knowledge."

""Father, Christ's vision is Your gift to me, and it has power to translate all that the body's eyes behold into the sight of a forgiven world. How glorious and gracious is this world! Yet how much more will I perceive in it than sight can give."

"For the instant of peace is eternal, BECAUSE it is wholly WITHOUT fear. It WILL come, being the lesson God gives you, through the Teacher HE has appointed, to translate time to eternity."

"Blessed is God's Teacher, Whose joy it is to teach God's holy Son his holiness. His joy is not contained in time. His teaching is for you, BECAUSE His joy is yours. Through Him, YOU stand before God's altar, where He gently translated hell into Heaven."

"Creation cannot even be conceived of in the world. It has no meaning here. Forgiveness is the closest it can come to earth. For being Heaven-borne, it has no form at all. Yet God created One Who has the power to translate into form the wholly formless."

"Forgiveness is the ONLY function meaningful in time. It is the means the Holy Spirit uses to TRANSLATE specialness from sin into salvation. "

"For to RECOGNIZE fear is not enough to escape FROM it, although the recognition IS necessary to demonstrate the NEED for escape. The Holy Spirit must still TRANSLATE it into truth. If you were LEFT with the fear, having RECOGNIZED it, you would have taken a step AWAY from reality, not TOWARD it."

"Never forget that the Holy Spirit does not depend on your words. He understands the requests of your heart and answers them. Does this mean that, while attack remains attractive to you He will respond with evil? Hardly! For God has given Him the power to translate your prayers of the heart into His language. He understands that an attack is a call for help. And He responds with help accordingly."

"Miracles are natural to God, and to the One Who speaks for Him. For His task is to TRANSLATE the miracle into the knowledge which it REPRESENTS, and which IS lost to you."

"However UNholy the reason why you made them may be, He can TRANSLATE them into holiness, by removing AS MUCH FEAR AS YOU WILL LET HIM. You can place ANY relationship under His care, and be sure that it will NOT result in pain, if you offer Him your willingness TO HAVE IT SERVE NO NEED BUT HIS." "Every attack is a call for His patience, because ONLY His patience can translate attack into blessing."

"Thus does the Holy Spirit replace fear with love, and translate error into truth. And thus will YOU learn of Him how to replace your dream of separation with the fact of unity."

"When a child is helped to translate his "ghost" into a curtain, his "monster" into a shadow and his "dragon" into a dream, he is no longer afraid, and laughs happily at his own fear."

"The Holy Spirit, as always, takes what you have made and translates it into a learning device FOR you. Again, as always, it re-interprets what the ego uses as an argument FOR separation into an argument AGAINST it."

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

"The miracle-worker begins by PERCEIVING light, and translates HIS perception into sureness by continually extending it, and ACCEPTING ITS ACKNOWLEDGMENT."

"Vision is the means by which the Holy Spirit translates your nightmares into happy dreams; your wild hallucinations, that show you all fearful outcomes of imagined sin, into the calm and reassuring sights with which He would replace them. These gentle sights and sounds are looked on happily, and heard with joy. They are HIS substitutes for all the terrifying sights and screaming sounds the ego's purpose brought to your horrified awareness. They step AWAY from sin, reminding you that it is NOT reality that frightens you, and that the errors which you made CAN be corrected."

"By RE-INTERPRETING the ability to ATTACK, which you DID make, into the ability to SHARE, He TRANSLATES what you have made, into what God created."

In A Course in Miracles, Jesus says that this world - Earth - is upside down, back to front, and inside out. Perhaps we should look at how this is the case, to realize just how OPPOSITE Earth is to heaven in its nature.

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

In this world, there is saying that "change is life, stagnation is death". You can find plenty of examples of this in what we call "nature".

For example when water stops moving and becomes still, it stagnates. Oxygen stops exchanging at the surface and the water becomes toxic. It can then become host to numerous bacterias and other nasty things. It begins to smell awful and would be dangerous to drink.

It seems then that movement of the water is life, because when it moves the oxygen can exchange and the water becomes infused with it. The oxygen in the water can then seem to support life, such as fish and aquatic plants. So long as the water keeps flowing, impurities are flushed away and the water remains relatively healthy. So it seems that in this world, the idea of "stillness" is equated physically with DEATH, and "movement" is equated with LIFE.

However, in heaven's reality, this is TOTALLY OPPOSITE. In truth, stillness is in fact life, because it means that there is no change, and therefore there is no end to the life, and life becomes immortal. Real life is eternal life. Life which never depletes or runs out or becomes toxic. Its stillness is its peace, and its peace is guarantee of its health. In fact life and health are now equated with what the world would call "stagnation".

From that view, what we would think of as "change" is in fact evidence of DEATH. Time is death, because it attempts to bring an END to everything. Anything that changes can suffer and die, and cannot be immortal. And so anything which seems to be born, to grow, to age and to die, is really NOT eternal life, and is NOT peace, and is NOT reality. This is the truthful perspective on this world, which recognizes that only CHANGELESSNESS is life, and therefore stillness is life, and change is destruction.

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

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

So if you look at it, the physical world is set up to be completely backwards in its functioning. The laws of physics are totally upside down and the REVERSE of God's laws. The laws of "nature", or what we think of as "natural" in the world, is ACTUALLY completely unnatural. And it could not be MORE unnatural.

"This IS the "natural" condition of the separation. And those who learn that it is NOT natural at all, seem to be the UNnatural ones. For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true."

If you think about it, in the physical world, when you move towards stillness, it seems that you will move towards death. If you stop breathing, your body may die. Indeed, it seems to prove out that if you exercise more and are more physically active, moving and changing, this seems to be "good for your health". So now health is equated with CHANGE, instead of with stillness. And if you were to become sedentary and not move much, it is proven to indicate that your health will be worse. And indeed we seem to refer to "dead bodies" or "lifelessness" as a complete lack of motion.

But a complete lack of motion is GOD. Total stillness is the nature of reality. NOT change. NOT movement. NOT constant activities. So if the world has kind of "sign posts" pointing in a direction that the ego thinks you should be going, its signposts POINT AWAY from stillness. It suggests to you even biologically that you should move towards activity and away from motionlessness. And that if you were to move towards PHYSICAL PEACE, you are in fact moving towards DEATH. This is why some people think that dead bodies are "resting peacefully", which is utterly nonsense.

"Rest in peace" is a blessing for the living, not the dead, because rest comes from waking, not from sleeping. Sleep is withdrawing; waking is JOINING."

So here for example Jesus clarifies that REAL rest, real peacefulness, actually results from spiritual awakening in which you are awake and alert, NOT from sleeping or being unconscious. But the physical world would suggest that you "get some rest" when you are physically inactive, when you are LOSING consciousness, and when you are NOT awake. This is completely backwards from God's truth.

The more you look at this the more examples you will find, indicating that the PHYSICAL NATURE of planet earth, not even considering any kind of perception or interpretation of it - just its physical functioning and behaviors and ways, is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to the truth of reality and to the nature of the Kingdom of God. This is because Earth is in fact TOTALLY OPPOSITE in its NATURE to God's creation. And because it is totally opposite, it cannot BE God's creation.

"What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

This statement literally states that Earth is opposite to heaven in EVERY way. And I could really go on at considerable length describing the WAYS that earth is nothing like heaven. This is not to reject the part of ACIM that says earth can potentially REFLECT heaven, in some kind of neutral way, but its fundamental functioning, the way the system is set up, the kinds of things which happen when you are active or inactive, etc, all point to the "laws of nature" of the physical planet being BACKWARDS.

There are similar things you can notice about guilt. You see the ego suggests that you should not look within because it says that if you do, you will approach the very thing you do not want. That if you look within you will find guilt and sin. And so as you begin to look within, guilt and sin seem to come into your awareness and the ego uses this to steer you AWAY from that direction. It instead points all its arrows outward away from yourself, away from God, and away from ever connecting with the Holy Spirit in your mind. All of its DIRECTIONS run CONTRARY to what is actually true.

"Do not be afraid to look within. The ego tells you all is black with guilt within you, and bids you NOT TO LOOK. Instead, it bids you look upon your brothers, AND SEE THE GUILT IN THEM."

It's similar in PHYSICAL terms in that as you approach things in the world which might symbolize becoming closer to reality, to peace, to freedom and so on, the more the physical world itself screams at you "go the other way". Or even, to suggest that if you keep going in this direction, you are going in completely the WRONG direction, and WILL NOT FIND what you're looking for. This is a DECOY. It is how spacetime is set up to give you constant messages that say "you're going the wrong way" when you are in fact going the right way, and vice versa. So that you are always moving AWAY from the truth.

"Some of your greatest advances YOU have judged as failures, and some of your deepest retreats YOU have evaluated as success." BACKWARDNESS IS BUILT INTO THE LAWS OF PHYSICS! THE WORLD'S NATURE IS INSIDE OUT!

The physical world therefore is in fact, so to speak, "inside out". It is a nothing pretending to be something. It is an unreality pretending to be real. It has a nature that could not be MORE unlike heaven. It makes it look like peace is associated with DYING and not with living. It steers you AWAY from stillness. And at every turn it deceives you and points you towards the very opposite of what you're looking for. It's all part of "seek and do not find."

Another example is outer space for example. In heaven, everything is light. Light is everywhere. In spacetime, however, the light has been reduced down, limited, withdrawn, condensed, SO MUCH, that all that's left are tiny little pin-pricks of light in the night sky. As though to suggest that MOST of the universe IS COMPLETELY EMPTY. That "space" itself is a LACK OF light and a lack of substance. And that all that remains of the presence of anything are tiny little specks we call atoms, in tiny little clusters, separated by billions of light years.

And then we look to the little bits of material that remain and we call it the presence of a very big planet, when in fact it is practically nothing in the big picture. It's the REMAINS of what is LEFT OVER when ALMOST EVERYTHING Has been removed. And now the presence of something is no longer recognized as the LACK OF something. The world is the ABSENCE OF a world. It is a LACK OF everywhereness. It is the opposite to heaven.

We can of course repurpose the world and the body and the weird backwards laws of physics, to use them to point in the OPPOSITE DIRECTION from which they naturally point. This is what is required in order TO use them for a higher purpose. Something which was made to KILL has to be used to support life. Something which points AWAY from God has to be used to point towards him.

"As sight was made to lead away from truth, it can be redirected." "Though it was made to fence him into hell without escape, yet has the goal of Heaven been exchanged for the pursuit of hell. The Son of God extends his hand to reach his brother, and to help him walk along the road with him. Now is the body holy. Now it serves to heal the mind that it was made to kill."

"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."

"Let not the world deceive you. It was made to be deception."

It is only possible for the Holy Spirit to repurpose everything in the world, PRECISELY BECAUSE everything in the world moving in the WRONG DIRECTION. And so it HAS to be used in an alternative and totally OPPOSITE way to what it was originally intended. For example the body was made to KILL the son of God. It is a device for SEPARATION, to reinforce impriosnment and keep minds from joining. But the Holy Spirit puts its to use by using it for a purpose TOTALLY OPPOSITE TO ITS NATURE.

When we do this, it does not CHANGE the nature of the things we made. It does not stop the world spinning, or does not make the clouds go away, it does not change the fact that dead bodies are motionless and living bodies are moving. It does not change the fact that water stagnates when it doesn't flow. But it looks at it from a different vantage point which INTERPRETS these things as not MEANING what they originally were meant to mean. Or to USE them in an OPPOSITE WAY to their own inherent nature.

Using something for an alternative purpose than it was DESIGNED TO FUNCTION, does not CHANGE its function. It just works within its limits and uses it as best as possible towards a different GOAL. Such as if you were to grow flowers in a machine gun. Or use what the ego made as an attack on God's children (bodies) to help them to LEAVE bodies permanently. That's the whole point. Everything we made as an attack on God is now being used for a higher purpose, which runs AGAINST its inherent nature, and uses it to undo itself. This is only possible BECAUSE the world IS back to front.

As heaven becomes reflected in the world, it does not change the fact that the world is still running IN REVERSE. And even the illusion of time is actually secretly an attempt to move INTO THE PAST, not the future. The world can reflect heaven when looked at in a heavenly way but NOT in terms of ITS FUNCTIONING. It will still always operate in the same way, with the same physics. Decomposed decayed rotten bodies will still appear to symbolize peace and stillness while objects in motion will seem to have energy, vitality and life. And all of this is STILL going to be backwards if you look upon it with love.

It needs to be more clear and more widely understood the sheer EXTENT of the ways in which this world - space and time - planet earth - all galaxies - all physicality - is COMPLETELY OPPOSITE to heaven's nature. They are not AT ALL alike. And only by recognizing this can you realize that the world was made to BE opposite to God. And that is why it is NOT GOD'S CREATION, AND WILL END. We can forgive the world BECAUSE it is a picture of crucifixion, but this will not stop it BEING a system of death. Hell becomes interpreted in a heavenly way, IN ORDER TO end it.

God willed that you be innocent forever, and God's will is done. Nothing can ever change this. This innocence isn't merely some kind of judgement of your condition. It's your actual permanent state of being. In your being, in your mind, there is still a place that is wholly completely innocent and pure and will never be guilty.

"We seem to be discrete and unaware of our eternal unity with Him. Yet back of all our doubts, past all our fears, there still is certainty. For Love remains with all Its Thought, Its sureness being Theirs. God's memory is in our holy minds, which know their oneness and their unity with their Creator."

In the separation, we merely went into a state of denial. We pretended that the truth was not true. We also pretended we were no longer ourselves, no longer innocent and no longer a part of God. This denial isn't a fact, because denial doesn't actually make anything go away.

All denial does is hide the awareness of the presence of that which is STILL THERE, pretending it is gone. In fact, Jesus speaks to this property of denial and the fact that even the denial confirms the existence of that which it denies.

"For the separation is only the DENIAL of union, and, correctly interpreted, attests to your eternal knowledge that union is true." So a part of your mind does in fact still believe, right now, and always, that you are perfectly innocent forever. Then your mind became split, and now a second portion of your mind believes it is guilty. You therefore have two conflicting opinions about yourself in your mind at the same time.

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

The problem we typically have, is that once we go into denial, the denial DOES SEEM to block the AWARENESS OF the presence of love. It seems to block the awareness that, in truth, you actually still are holy and innocent. You still are an immortal being in God. And you will never change, nor have you been changed by the denial.

So some portion of you is literally still innocent right now. And some other portion of you believes the opposite. That second portion is what we call ego.

"The ego is a part of your belief about yourself."

However, in order TO DENY the part of you that is still innocent, your mind does block awareness. This produces a shift in premise, which makes it potentially possible to become convinced that what you've denied HAS GONE AWAY. Ie, out of sight out of mind. If you are not aware of it, surely it's not there.

Entering into denial tends to make you believe that you have actually CHANGED, from an innocent holy being, into an evil anti-christ false-self. The denial suggests your real self has been destroyed, and no longer exists. That you have literally transformed from one state to another, and now you are SOLELY in a state of guilt. The unawareness of the continued presence of your innocent self tempts you toward believing these illusions.

All of the world, all bodies, space and time, all sickness and death and suffering, is entirely designed to try to HIDE FROM THE TRUTH. It's an attempt to shut out the FACT of what you STILL ARE. That you actually literally still are as God created you right now. Just as the world was made as an attack on God, it was an attempt to ASSERT a one-sided ego war upon the truth about you. To depict you as if you have been destroyed and turned into something dead.

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

All suffering, all death, all states of sickness, all resistance to reality, all defenses against the truth, all blocks to awareness, all lies and deceptions, all body identification, its entire purpose was to resist God. To try to stop God's will. To try to overthrow and usurp his completed permanent works and replace it with something else, in order to PRETEND that his kingdom had been destroyed. That the son of God could be killed.

The strange scenario, however, is that while you are busy being guilty and worthless and deserving of horrible punishments, SIMULTANEOUSLY, there is another self, another PART OF YOU, that is right this instant STILL HOLY AND INNOCENT. It has not in truth changed.

What this then reveals is that the world, the mindset of the ego thought system, all of space and time, and every separation ego idea, is all a COVER UP. It is literally a veil placed OVER the truth of the permanence of the Kingdom of God. It is put there to come BETWEEN you and the truth to HIDE the truth. To hide from the attraction of God. To smother reality with illusions. To keep you from realizing that NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

"To this distorted form of vision, the OUTSIDE of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true." "The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear"

Therefore, we can say that "underneath" your guilt, there is ALSO a place any our mind where you are STILL innocent. That innocent place was NOT converted into guilt, it was NOT transformed into an anti-christ, and it remains exactly as God created it. Right now. Even in PARALLEL with the guilty false sense of self that you maintain is your whole identity.

THERE IS STILL INNOCENCE IN YOU AND THERE ALWAYS WILL BE.

"The changelessness of Heaven is in you, so deep within that nothing in this world but passes by, unnoticed and unseen. The still infinity of endless peace surrounds you gently in its soft embrace, so strong and quiet, tranquil in the might of its Creator, nothing can intrude upon the sacred Son of God within."

"But most of all, try to sink down and inward, away from the world and all the foolish thoughts of the world. You are trying to reach past all these things. You are trying to leave appearances and approach reality."

"Go past all the raucous shrieks and sick imaginings that cover your real thoughts and obscure your eternal link with God."

"and then try to reach past all your images and preconceptions about yourself to the truth in you. If Love created you like Itself this Self must be in you. And somewhere in your mind It is there for you to find."

So Jesus is actually telling us that below the murky surface "clouds of guilt" which seem to smother and obscure, block and distract, deflect and deceive, BELOW and BEYOND the world and the body and the ego guilt, there is STILL a quiet place within you where you are perfectly innocent still. Where you are still as God created you.

This means that you actually have two parts to you right now. A holy self and a false self. Because your mind is split. The guilt is in one part, and the innocence is in another. And the guilt merely seems to HIDE the innocence, so you think there is no innocence in you, or that you can ONLY be guilty OR innocent at one time. This is not true.

Your mind is in fact divided between TWO goals, and wants two conflicting things at once. One part of you still accepts your innocence while another part is attacking it. The only reason you tolerate this is because you've identified WITH the guilt and have believed the illusions of the denial, such that you don't think the innocent part is EVEN THERE any more. And you maintain the guilt IN ORDER TO keep the innocence hidden.

Because if you were to actually become aware of the sinlessness within you, it would then become obviously clear that you cannot be both innocent AND guilty at the same time. And yet this is what your mind has actually been believing. Covered up, below, beyond, and underneath your guilt, there is a dwelling place of innocence and being as God created you still. And how can that be compatible with being guilty?

If you go within and look for that innocence and realize it MUST still be there, then it also becomes apparent that you cannot ACCEPT being both innocent and guilty, in conscious awareness. Only one of them can be true. One of them must go! And since the innocence has the property of permanence and unchangeability, the guilt MUST be fake. The guilt must be false and a mistake and NOT TRUE. And this also means the world must be false as well.

Jesus actually refers to "the real world" as this borderland of thought or place within your mind, where you come to fully realize that the innocence is true and the guilt is false. Allowing yourself to recognize that ONLY THE TRUTH CAN BE TRUE, ie only the permanent innocence in you can be really there, the guilt is correctly framed as IMPOSSIBLE, and is finally let go.

"Here is the meeting place where thoughts are brought TOGETHER; where conflicting values MEET, and ALL illusions are laid down beside the truth, where they are judged to be untrue. This borderland is just beyond the gate of Heaven."

"It HAS BEEN recognized that, if they were BROUGHT TOGETHER, their joint acceptance WOULD become impossible. But, if one is kept in darkness FROM THE OTHER, their SEPARATION seems to keep them both alive, and equal in their reality. Their JOINING thus becomes the source of fear, for, if they meet, acceptance MUST be withdrawn from one of them."

"They are brought together, and only ONE continues past the gate where Oneness is. Salvation IS a borderland, where place and time and choice have meaning still, and yet it can be seen that they are temporary, OUT of place, and EVERY choice has been ALREADY made."

"WHAT DO YOU WANT? Light or darkness, knowledge or ignorance are yours, but not both. Opposites must be brought together, and not kept apart. For their separation is only in your mind, and they are reconciled by union, as YOU are. In union, everything that is not real MUST disappear, for truth IS union. As darkness disappears in light, so ignorance fades away when knowledge dawns."

It may be easier to understand the differences in perception, when you consider inanimate objects. Objects which appear to just sit there and do nothing at all.

A good example is a rock. It just sits there. It has no will or mind and isn't particularly alive. At the subatomic level maybe it wiggles around but over time it generally does nothing but vegetate. It cannot move itself, it cannot articulate an attack, it cannot think, it cannot cause of its own will. It has no power and is just a lump of stuff, inert and unmoving.

If you a walking by and you stub your toe on the rock, you might yell at the rock for seeming to attack you. In pain your anger projects and you find the rock to be an enemy. This is your perception of the rock. In your mind, you are giving meaning to the rock. You now believe the rock is a sinful enemy, a guilty attacker. And as you look at it with hate you see it as real and threatening.

But the rock is just sitting there. And if you come to your senses you have to admit that really the rock didn't do anything at all. It was all you. Your own movement caused you to stub your toe. The rock just sat uninvolved and uncausing. So is it really the rock's fault? No. It's something you did to yourself.

So then you admit ok, I am only thinking the rock is an evil sinner because I am choosing to project guilt and sin onto it. I'm framing it as sinful and believing it is an attacker. That's happening in my own mind. I'm projecting stuff onto it and it's making me perceive it as hated and unwanted.

Then you have to realize that since the rock isn't really the cause of the upset, that you are the one who actually attacked the rock with your toe, it's really your own doing. And now you take back your accusation. The rock isn't a person, so there's no point yelling at it and calling it names. It can't hear your swear-words.

You shift "your perception" from false to true. You decide to believe that the rock is innocent and harmless, not an attacker or an evil sinner. You recognize the rock as incapable of hurting you against your will. You realize it has no will or mind or power to do anything on its own. So it cannot have wanted to hurt you. It must be innocent. So now you're willing to believe the rock is not sinful, or guilty, or an attacker. The inverse of which is a belief that it is innocent, loveable, beautiful even.

Your mind is able to decide what it sees in the rock, ie what meaning it projects onto it. When the mind is deciding to project from love, it sees the rock in a loving way, which makes it appear as though the rock is lovable rather than hatable. And so now you love the rock, because you are projecting love, in spite of the rock's own nature.

But the rock isn't changing. The rock isnt inherently sinful, nor is it sinless. It doesn't really have its own meaning. In a way it's kind of like a neutral mirror. You actually see yourself in it. Whatever you think is true you visualize in it. You see refleted back to you what you put there to see. So the rock is doing its own thing, and you are having varying types of beliefs about it, seemingly independent of it.

It's possible to project a mental state of hell onto the world of rocks, just as it is possible to project a mental state of heaven's reflection onto the rocks. True perception can be very close to heaven's nature. You reach within and find love and peace and joy and light and shine it outward and light up the world with it. What appeared to be a harmful rock is now a healing rock. What used to be an attacking rock is an innocent rock.

This is the translation, in your mind, of earth into heaven's reflection. A translation is an interpretative process which evaluates the meaning of something. It gives meaning to it, based on what you believe or WANT it to mean. This is in spite of any seemingly inherent properties that the thing has. Because it has none.

Earth, the world, the galaxies, space time, rocks and plants and animals, human bodies, cities and forests etc, is all essentially a neutral mirror. It's a veil of images which the mind is making and inventing. It holds pictures of forms and illusions of life and death. And yet it is a meaningless world. And so it only has the meaning that you GIVE to it. "The world is what you gave it, nothing more." "There is no world apart from what you wish." "Projection makes perception and makes the world you see."

So on the one hand, we made a world in an attack on God, which was made to be completely opposite to heaven, and which is therefore hell. Or at least, we came up with it in a state of false perception, ie misperception. In that state it appears to be hell because we see it in a hellish way. So we project hell and fragmentation and separation and attack and guilt onto it. And so it appears to be a hellish world. But this view of it (this projected world) only exists while you are having false perception (false projection).

What the course is saying is that you can change your vantage point. But the change in vantage point is huge. It's a 180-degree total opposition to false perception. It's a way of seeing totally alien to the world and to how the body functions. It flies in the face of every seeming law of physics and reality, and completely denies the apparently separated world. It's a lofty, heaven-based perception, which does not buy into anything the world appears to be.

It is in fact difficult for minds to comprehend how it's possible to see the world through loving eyes. The mind has trouble breaking through its own defenses against love. It can't sense or feel or experience what it is like to see from the vantage point of the Holy Spirit, without a whole lot of purificaiton and correction. And so most of the time, it seems impossible to love the world. Or indeed it seems as if the world is inherently sinful and wrong and bad.

The hell seen in false perception motivates a person to not want to love the world. Indeed the course says that such a world "cannot be the world God loves". Yet also that "God does love the world". He does not love the world seen in false perception, where rocks are separated and death seems real and attack seems commonplace. He does not love that world. No one can love such a thing and still behold it. No one can love death. "You cannot behold the world and know God."

But God does love the "real" world. The real world is a world seen in true perception, in which reality's love is projected onto it. And it does not show you separations of forms, or illusions of meaning. It is an accurate view of what the world IS, and the world is nothing but a flat image. It is a neutral inert meaningless lifeless powerless willless uncausal incapable valueluess veil of illusions. It has nothing of its own because it is nothing, and so at best it is symbolic. It can symbolize heaven or hell, but it cannot ever really be either.

If you look upon war you see war and you hate it. But if you see war as war, it is because you are giving war. If you give love and peace and extend and express these higher vantage points, then what you see comes from what you GIVE, not from what is THERE. You project the real world and see it as forgiven and holy because that's what you're projecting, and so it's all that you can see because you can ONLY see what you project.

You give love to the image of a world and the image reflects the love you are giving, and now you see the reflection of love in it. But this reflection also completely ignores anything the image itself possesses as its own properties. It overlooks forms, ignores shapes and sizes and distance or delay, and sees no orders of hierarchy anywhere. It doesn't distinguish individual bodies or places or times. And it sees no orders of difficulty.

If you extend love toward the world, it makes you blind to the world seen in false perception. It causes the dark twisted world to not be seen, and for this layer of interpretation to be lifted from what the world is. In a sense, the world of false perception is a world of specifics, and the world of true perception is abstract and transcendental. This doesn't necessarily mean the world stops having the form of attack. In fact it cannot ever have anything BUT forms. And it is this the body's eyes always and only see.

Even as the mind is healed and views love from love, the forms of the world remain much unchanged. The dogs still bark, the trees still lose their leaves, murderers still kill, and the graveyards are still populated. But they are translated, re-interpreted, overlooked, ignored, and do not stand out as different. All the differences are ignored, all properties of appearances are ignored, all ways that the objects could compete with one another for attention are ignored. The world becomes flattened and regarded as a singular unreal image. A veil of illusions, in which none of it is true.

As the veil is seen with love, in which its own nature is recognized as false, and yet which simultaneously acts like a mirror for your own meaning to be clearly projected, the veil is also losing its solidity. It becomes transparent before the light. And ultimately the reflection of God is seen. But to see God's reflection you cannot see bodies and spacetime, vying for attention. When "God is in everything I see because God is in my mind", God becomes ALL that you see, and you see nothing else. "A world forgiven cannot last." "Forgiveness sees it not."

And so the veil of a world lifts from sight, as all differences become ignored. And the face of Christ is revealed as heaven's reflection reaching across what still remains as a world of chaos. And all forms and differences are no longer seen. And to such an extent is the mind in the holy instant, fully present, that things of past and future such as bodies cannot be seen at all. The world is forgotten, and disappears. It is as though it has become so deflated and equalized and transcended that it does not exist at all. And all that remains is the face of Christ, which once seen leads to the immediate return to heaven. And "heaven is all that remains."

In the separation, we tried to invent a world which was completely opposite to God's Kingdom. This resulted in false perception, and also the reversal of cause and effect.

The son, who is an effect of God, who is our cause, tried to be the cause of God, to create effects in Him. This was a kind of role reversal, and is the idea of original sin or the authority problem.

In this effort to oppose God, we dreamed of a world opposite to God. Given that God is truth, this world had to be false. And in opposing knowledge we invented perception. So simultaneously in the making of the world we entered directly into false perception. This world was made to also be completely opposite to God's world.

"The world is false perception."

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

So all this was happening at once in the separation:

* The complete opposition to the truth producing a false world* The opposition to knowledge producing false perception* Cause and effect are reversed, making the effect (dream) seem causal

We entered a state of unconsciousness, in which we dreamed of a false world, which was opposite to Heaven, AND in which cause and effect were reversed.This reversal of causality or "backwards perception", is what made you necessarily believe that the false world you made is NOT an effect of you dreaming, but instead is a CAUSE. ie that the world seem so have a LIFE of its own, or an alien will. And it also made you believe that you are NOT the dreamer or cause of the world, but rather the EFFECT of it. So you instantly went into a victim role, which is played out in physical matter and the "laws of physics."

Forgiveness, salvation, atonement, true perception etc, is what you arrive at when you REVERSE all this. It requires that you recognize the world is false, not true. It requires that you recognize the dream is coming FROM you not TO you. It requires the re-reversal of cause and effect (which is also level confusion), so that you recognize you are the NOT AFFECTED by the world in ANY WAY. You see yourself as cause, not effect ("This is a course in cause, not effect"). And you thus position your vantage point as a reflection of heaven.

If you look at how life typically is on the level of form, you can see all the ways that we made ourselves AT THE EFFECT of the very dream that we dreamed. This includes all victimhood roles, all reactions, all ego emotions, all of the senses of the body, and every way that the world seems capable of doing something to you.

It means vulnerability, the need for defenses, perceiving oneself as unfairly treated, fear of threats and dangers, grief and loss relating to parts of the dream which you value and lose, and all manner of suffering. It also includes any and all kinds of sickness and death, because death is nothing more than the firm belief that the WORLD is entirely the CAUSE of you and you are COMPLETELY AFFECTED by it with no will or power to do anything to stop it.

Every ego emotion, is a reaction, an EFFECT, produced by your mind, in response to your mind's parallel belief that THE WORLD is the cause of you. By believing the world is real and true, you give it power over you. And then you experience effects. So some person get's killed, you feel anger and sad and lost. Someone attacks you and you feel threatened. Some war breaks out and you fear for your life. Some plague spreads around the world and you worry about your continuation. Someone seems able to hurt you and you become angry at them.

The list of victim roles and the seeming reactions that it produces is endless. All of them are ways by which you believe you are CAUSED BY the world. That the world oppresses you, hurts you, changes you, defines you, dreams you, makes you what you are, decides your fate, ends your life against your will, destroys you, does things that "you like", gives you things "you want", and generally acts as the CAUSE OF everything you are. All of that is false perception and backwards causality.

So that means that all ego emotions are fake. Some people would say its "natural" or "healthy psychology" that you would feel loss or grief when someone dies. Or that it's normal to feel sad when something doesn't work out. Or that it's sane and rational to be angry because of what someone did to you. Or that you should feel happy because of the gifts someone gave you. Or that anyone would feel depressed if they had to go through what you went through. But ALL of that is complete bullshit. It is all part of believing that you are AT THE EFFECT of a dream which, in and of itself, has NO POWER to do anything.

This carries over to the body senses. "To sense is not to know". The body's senses are ways of BEING SUSCEPTIBLE or "sensitive to" the dream. They can only operate by BEING AFFECTED by the environment. You touch something and it relays a message to you, changing you, affecting you. You smell a bad smell and recoil. You see ugly sights and are driven to anger. You hear the sounds of hell and it frightens you. The physical senses were all designed to make the world seem real, to PROVE that you are AFFECTED BY the world, to sense what is there, and to lock in false perceptions. Even pleasure, which is interpreted as "being affected positively", is a form of victimhood and powerlessness.

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

Every physical sense is a form of vulnerability, susceptibility, effects, victimhood, the ability to be caused by something outside of you, and a way for you to "get" from the world. And the body was designed this way so that it would permanently be locked into a victim role and a false way of perceiving.

"These eyes made not to see will never see.""The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen.""Everything the body sees is a form of conflict.""The body sees only the forms of error.""Nothing so blinding as perception of form."

The body essentially was built on the idea of sin ("the body is the idea of sin made flesh") and on the reversal of causality. It was meant to be at the EFFECT OF the dream. It testifies to the ways in which the dream CAUSES you. And so the body is a lie.

Your function of forgiveness operates in an opposite direction to the seeming nature of the body, its senses, and to ALL beliefs and perceptions that the world can ever do anything to you.

In truth, you are immortal and you cannot die. You cannot be affected. You cannot be hurt or changed or made to suffer. Nothing can happen against your will. The dream has no power to oppress you or make you ill or sad or weak or frail. Nothing in the world can force you to be sick, or make you dead. Nothing can happen without you choosing it to. You cannot die without electing to. You cannot facilitate sickness without backwards perceptions. And literally you are beyond the reach of every illusion.

To recognize this is to completely reverse cause and effect in the dream, which means completely opposing and breaking all the laws of spacetime. All the laws of physics are completely backwards because they are designed to make the dream function AS IF the world is the CAUSE OF events. As if the world is first-hand reality. But the world is an EFFECT.

"Perception is a RESULT, not a cause." "The world IS perception."It is by COMPLETELY recognizing that the world CAUSES NOTHING and cannot do ANYTHING to you, that you return to a state of invulnerability, producing in the interim the INCORRUPTIBILITY OF THE BODY, in which the body becomes a symbol of eternal life and is devoid of all signs and symptoms of "being affected by the world." This includes the healing and prevention of any attack by anyone or anything. A demonstration of immortality and power over death.

Resurrection, which is the "surmounting of death", is the state of being THE CAUSE, and not the effect of the world. It is awareness of dreaming. And as the Course says, "For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming." This is the secret of salvation. The fact that the world IS NEVER the cause of ANYTHING. And the fact that YOU are the cause of everything, because YOU are the one dreaming it. And if someone seems to play a role in your dream of victimizing, or of being a victim, the truth is that NOTHING can affect you unless you make it do so.

Once you recognize that you are CAUSING the dream, and that the world CANNOT produce effects in you, ALL the ego emotional reactions must cease forever. You can no longer have reason to justify anger, to be sad or upset, to be unhappy, to have loss or grief, or even to be happy as a "result of" what the world "does to you". Not even through special relationships or idols you worship or valued objects or career success or any kind of INPUT coming from the world to CAUSE you to feel a certain way.

The only TRUE feelings are those which come OUT of you CAUSALLY, and extend through you. This includes love and joy and peace and happiness. You GIVE these through causation and sharing. They come out of you and extend. They are not the RESULT or EFFECT of anything in the world. The world cannot give you happiness OR unhappiness. They are not there because of what someone does for you or what you GET from the world. Positive or negative. Victim or reward.

"It takes great learning to both recognize and accept that the world has nothing to give.""This world holds nothing that I want""Teachers of God are willing to give up all the pleasures of the world."

This is why we have to learn that we are ONLY extenders of God's spirit, we are only GIVERS of life and love and happiness and joy, and we are CAUSAL. We are co-creators with God. We are not to need, require, depend on, want, desire, be attached to, or react to, ANYTHING in the world. ANYTHING AT ALL! Why would you need to when a) you are immortal and have everything and b) have inherited everything you need from God and c) can only be happy and at peace when you GIVE what you want to receive?

You cannot GET happiness from the world. You cannot GET freedom from the world. The world cannot give you life or immortality or invulnerability or protection or safety or love or peace or joy. It has no ABILITY to give, because the world has absolutely ZERO causality. It is NOT a cause. The world is ONLY an effect. It is your dream, that you are putting there."It is not a cause, but an EFFECT."

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No-one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are."

This is the essence of A Course in Miracles. BE THE CAUSE. BE THE POWER. Do not give power to a dream which is nothing but an effect of you. Do not believe in being affected BY anything or anyone in the world. God is the only cause of you and your brothers. Your brothers are NEVER the cause of each other, and you have never caused or been caused by them. Nothing real can be changed or threatened or made different by the world and its contents.

You are to reach a point of resurrection in which you CANNOT BE AFFECTED by the world. Where even the body CANNOT be sick OR die. Where your mind is so certain of its strength and power that there is NOTHING your holiness cannot DO (cause). Where you are so fully EXPRESSING love that you are miraculous all the time. Where you extend and inherit the power and love of God every second of every day. Where so much light and joy is flooding OUT of you through giving and thus receiving, that nothing from the OUTSIDE is able to come IN to you. Making you completely safe and invulnerable.

You are to cease believing that anything or anyone in the ENTIRE world, in the whole universe of spacetime, EVER has a power or causation over you, making you change, making you suffer, making you die, making you happy OR unhappy. You are to be BEYOND this dream and beyond this world. You are PRIOR to the dream. You are beyond sickness and death. You are immortal spirit and NOTHING can change that. All it requires is your total acceptance of this truth, the reclaiming of your immortal rights, and your willingness to express and know your true self. It is nothing short of reclaiming eternal life.

When ACIM talks about the secret of salvation, it goes on to talk about how there is a singular lesson the Holy Spirit teaches, transcendent of all forms of suffering:

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

So what he's saying here is, YOU CAUSE all of your own suffering and pain and sickness and death. YOU are the SINGLE CAUSE of all suffering.

So if we are then to approach healing something that you are seeming to suffer from, even a physical sickness, we need to be at least acknowledging this fact that you have to ADMIT... that you DID THIS, and you now become willing to UNDO it.

"miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo." "

This means there has to be a willingness to admit and accept that if there is any suffering of any kind, it is because YOU CHOSE IT. This has nothing at all to do with inducing guilt either.

"I must have made a wrong decision because I am not at peace" "I made the decision myself..."

This tells you the same thing. You can't get anywhere so long as you are tangled up in beliefs about someone OTHER THAN yourself, or some EXTERNAL CAUSE, being responsible for putting this suffering in place.

You have to be willing to look at the fact that you PUT IT IN PLACE, through a decision you made, a deliberate choice, FOR a reason to fulfill a PURPOSE, to achieve a GOAL, based on a perceived NEED to do so.

"No-one can heal unless he understands what ***purpose*** sickness seems to serve. For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning. Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. ***When this is seen, healing is automatic.*** It dispels this meaningless illusion by the same approach that carries all of them to truth, and merely leaves them there to disappear."

Jesus again confirms that without a PURPOSE, or a NEED FOR the suffering, due to some belief that you WANT IT in order to accomplish something, there would be no way for the sickness to remain.

"Special agents seem to be ministering to him, yet they but give form to his own choice. He chooses them in order to bring tangible form to his desires. And it is this they do, and nothing else. They are not actually needed at all. The patient could merely rise up without their aid and say, ***"I have no use for this."*** There is no form of sickness that would not be cured at once."

You can see that Jesus is being very clear about the RESPONSIBILITY and the POWER that you have, the FREE WILL which you are at all times exercising, which results in either supportive or destructive effects. If anything is happening, it is ONLY because you have chosen it. And therefore you have every power NOT TO. To reverse and undo whatever it is that YOU put into place.

""My Self is ruler of the universe." "***It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself***. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen."

So nothing AT ALL, no sickness, suffering, experiences, effects, reactions, perceptions, NOTHING can come to you unbidden (un-chosen) by yourself. YOU CHOOSE whether or not you suffer. Which exactly ties into "no one dies without their own consent."

We are free willed beings, which means that absolutely NOTHING happens against your will. You yourself have to ELECT to experience whatever it is you experience. EVERYTHING you experience is chosen freely and willingly. NOTHING happens without YOU willing it to happen. This is responsibility.

This also means there are NO VICTIMS. There is no-one else to blame. No-one else is responsible for changing you or fixing you. No-one is the CAUSE of anything you experience. You are NEVER trapped and stuck in any situation regardless of the symptoms or severity. EVERYTHING can be reversed if you TRULY, genuinely, honestly choose it.

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. ***Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way.*** There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. ***No-one but yourself affects you.*** There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail."

Read it again. "No-one but yourself affects you."

NOTHING in the world has any power to make you ill or sad or weak or frail. NOTHING in the world causes you to be sick. NOTHING in the world can make you die.

If you are suffering, and without adding any guilt or BLAME, which is an ego interpretation of responsibility, YOU HAVE THE POWER to choose again and be free from it. Because you have GIVEN IT to yourself, and you can take it away.

"I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

So at the very least, as we're looking at the "consequences of our wrong decision", which "The holy spirit will undo" ... "if I will LET Him". .... we need to at least be willing to accept the BASIC rule, that whatever it is... WE MUST HAVE CHOSEN IT.

So you admit to yourself, I chose this. I wanted this. I put this in place. I made this happen. I put it there. I did this on purpose. I did it intentionally. I was trying to ACHIEVE something. I had a PURPOSE for it. I NEEDED to do it.

As you think along these lines, you might be surprised that the RATIONALE for WHY you did this, what you were TRYING TO DO, is much more likely to come to mind. I did this with a physical problem for example and quickly what shows up in my mind was a feeling of hate and anger and a desire to attack, and this hate was clearly directed towards myself. And it was coupled with a desire to position myself as suffering so that I could try to blame someone for something. That's why I induced sickness. And sickness is ALWAYS CHOSEN CONSCIOUSLY.

"***Sickness is not an accident.*** Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception."

"Defenses are not unintentional, ***nor are they made without awareness.*** They are secret magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them. In that second, even less, in which ***the choice is made***, you recognize exactly what you would attempt to do, and then proceed to think that it is done."

There is also a whole "piece" to the course's metaphysics to do with projection and accusation. That is, when you use the body for attack, which attacks the body, such as when you are trying to project your sin and guilt onto your brother, you DELIBERATELY make your body sick in order to PORTRAY "your self" as suffering, SO THAT you can create EFFECTS in the body, which act as PROOF. And these physical effects, which form as part of PROJECTION OF SIN, act as ACCUSATIONS.

"Sick bodies remain accusers"

And once the body is showing as sick, tied into the projection of RESPONSIBILITY and CAUSE onto another person, in which you see yourself as NOT RESPONSIBLE and NOT THE CAUSE and NOT THE CHOOSER, you are accusing your brother of being these things. And your effects seem to correlate to HIS causing you. And now he stands accused, by your suffering, of being the REASON FOR your suffering. And you will now happily have the body suffer and die if it means you can be exonerated from sin by finding your brother to be the RESPONSIBLE party. And now "brother by your hand I die."

So what's happening here is we try to DISOWN the fact that we ALWAYS CHOOSE THE SUFFERING, and that WE PUT IT IN PLACE, and we try to FRAME someone else as the cause of it, by externalizing the choice and try to pin it on someone else. And we use this as a DEVICE, to try to escape RESPONSIBILITY. Because in our mind in which are know we ARE responsible for everything we experience, we also experience GUILT for sins we believe in, and to the ego that makes us feel like we are responsible for being guilty sinners. And we can't stand that so we try to DISSOCIATE from it.

To do that, we have to reverse perception and project causation and make it seem like someone else or something external is the cause of it, we materialize the effects in the body through SELF ATTACK, and then blame our brother for it. So now sickness has a PURPOSE of trying to disown your responsibility and GET RID OF the guilt out of your mind (and of course ideas do not leave their source). And the NEED for the sickness is to escape from RESPONSIBILITY for the guilt. So we try to throw the responsibility out with the guilt.

So while you have a NEED to escape from sin and guilt in your own mind, which YOU CHOSE TO BELIEVE WERE TRUE OF YOU, you have all kinds of reasons why you can BENEFIT from sickness and from portraying yourself as suffering. So that you can DEFEND against the truth. So that you can INDUCE illness. And so that you can try to render yourself SAFER and more INNOCENT. By finding someone else to blame for the beliefs YOU are responsible for, you create a false sense of security. Which at the same time undermines your security.

This is still stuff that we are RESPONSIBLE for doing. But the ego has a really tough time accepting any kind of responsibility because it believes sin and guilt are real. So whenever we're asked to be responsible for choice, for power, for SELF INDUCED SUFFERING, the ego recoils at it, interpreting it as meaning WE REALLY ARE GUILTY if we "own up to having sinned." To admit to "being the sinner" in an effort to be more HONEST, is interpreted through ego as confessing to a crime, and you avoid this at all costs because it induces guilt.

This is why RESPONSIBILITY has to be separated out from ego, sin and guilt, and recognized as SALVATION, rather than as a guarantee of condemnation. Being fully responsible for CHOOSING everything is not in any way an indication of being guilty, or to compound it, or make you feel bad about yourself. It's not a way of pointing a finger of blame or shifting blame to yourself. You are supposed to ADMIT that you did this to yourself, SO THAT you can tap back into the POWER you have to DO THIS, so that you can UNDO IT.

"When you are willing to accept ***sole responsibility*** for the ego's existence YOURSELF, you will have laid aside all anger and all attack""Anger ALWAYS involves PROJECTION OF SEPARATION, which must ultimately be accepted as entirely one's own responsibility."

In general, you will make far more progress towards healing if you are willing to look at your suffering from a vantage point of being its SOURCE. Consider yourself as PRE-SUFFERING, and in a position of being PRIOR to having CHOSEN it. And now recognize from this perspective that you MUST HAVE CHOSEN IT, wanted it, put it there, USED it, desired it, had a purpose for it, needed it, for a reason. And ADMITTING this, will prevent your mind from making up projections and disowning the causation of it. And this will very quickly bring to mind WHAT you did to yourself, and WHY.

You can't become aware of the PURPOSE of your suffering if you are not willing to be responsible for causing or needing it. And only when to recognize what it was FOR, can you see what USE or need you had for it, and may still have for it. But once you can see WHY you did this to yourself, you are then in a far better position to CHANGE YOUR MIND, and therefore UNDO what you have done.

When sickness is correctly recognized as NO LONGER NEEDED, BY YOU, for any reason, and you clearly now have no use for it, having addressed the source underlying reasons why you put it there in the first place, you will LET IT GO. And it will simply disappear automatically because your MIND no longer supports it. And then there is healing.

You can set yourself free. You can find salvation. The secret of salvation is that you are doing it to yourself.

"If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

You may be wondering how "the separation" was possible, and how we came to seem to be in the situation we're in. There IS an explanation, which Jesus has given in many forms.

The essence of it, is that God gave you TOTAL unlimited freedom when you were created.

"The latter required the endowment of man (Souls) by God with free will, because all loving creation is freely given."

"Free will is the attribute of the mind, NOT the Soul."

This means God gave us all absolutely free will. Our will has TOTAL freedom. Now, here's the interesting part.

Because the will is totally free, it actually has the freedom, or potential, to try to use its own free will against even itself. It can actually try to "will not to will." It actually is free to even use its freedom to try to prevent its own freedom, if it so chooses. Doing so is self-defeating, but you CAN do this.

This is an inherent function of the mind and actually completely natural, because it's part of being totally free. God HAD to give you the freedom to potentially "mis-use" your will, otherwise you could not be free. He couldn't just lock you in to some kind of mandated use of it, you had to be free to use it as you saw fit.

The freedom God has given you INCLUDES the freedom even to deny God if you want to. It includes the freedom to resist him, to deny reality, to try to use free will to stop willing, the ability to try to create nothing, to use the will destructively, and to at least ATTEMPT to separate itself from its source.

Your mind can in fact go into a state of denial. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, in terms of it being "not allowed by God." God had to GIVE YOU this ability in order to give you total freedom. He doesn't necessarily will for you that you USE the will in this way, ie non-constructively, but you CAN if you so choose.

When you do choose to use it in a self-defeating way, you are "mis-creating", in an attempt to use the will against itself. This is really an attempt not to create, or to cause nothing, or to be inept and inert, or to not extend. It's like a kind of resistance, which is also fear. An attempt to be UN-WILLING, or to NOT will what God wills. Indeed, to attempt to will AGAINST him, which is "the authority problem."

"Remember, we have already stated that denial is not a purely negative device; it results in positive miscreation."

There is a fundamental truth that you cannot will against God's will. But, that does not mean you aren't free to TRY to. You are free to attempt it. When you do attempt it, you FAIL to change his will at all, and instead go into denial.

In the denial you BELIEVE that you have succeeded, but you haven't. Also when you are in this denial state, you are denying yourself, denying God, and denying reality. It's very important to realize however that denial does not CHANGE reality. It has no effect on the truth. Denial merely means to believe that something is not true, even though it still is true. It's a kind of rejection or refusal - an unwillingness - to accept what is true.

Your mind, as given by God, DOES HAVE the freedom and ability and power to go into a state of denial. This is BUILT IN to its fundamental freedom. It HAS to be able to potentially use its own freedom even against itself, otherwise it is not free. It is because of this "clause" if you will, that we could potentially elect to "go into the separation", ie to believe that we have become separate, even though we haven't. ie to go into denial.

"The sense is very literal; -- denial of Life perceives its opposite, as ALL forms of denial replace what IS, with what is NOT. No-one can really DO this, but that you can THINK you can, and BELIEVE YOU HAVE, is beyond dispute."

"For the separation is only the DENIAL of union, and, correctly interpreted, attests to your eternal knowledge that union is true."

Mind then is perfectly natural in its ability to try to deny its own creator if it so chooses. God has given it the freedom to use itself against itself. The fact is that it HAS DONE THIS, which is what we call "the separation" or the fall of man. Our minds HAVE elected to deny their own freedom, placing themselves into a state of imprisonment.

When mind uses its own free will to will AGAINST freedom, it induces a state of imprisonment. The will becomes imprisoned and the mind seems to go to sleep, or seems to become unable to will anything.

"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."

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

This has actually happened, without in any way leaving God or leaving God's laws or operating outside of your inherent nature. There is fundamentally nothing "wrong" with this as such, but it IS out of accord with God's will. It is an attempt to reject his will. All this can produce is a state of denial, because God's will itself cannot be opposed, but you can thus "believe" that you are opposing it. Even if it's just a belief, it DOES alter your mind when you believe it.

"Remember a very early lesson, -- "never underestimate the power of denial." It has no power in ITSELF, but YOU can give it the power of YOUR mind, whose power is without limit of ANY kind."

"God did not ALLOW this to happen. But you DEMANDED that it happen, and therefore believed that it was so."

"God did not blot it out, because to eradicate it would be to attack it."

"It is NEVER God Who coerces you, because He SHARES His Will WITH you."

The main truth is that there is no real benefit to using freedom against freedom. The circular logic becomes obvious. For example, we're saying that it's possible to "will not to will". The more that you will not to will, the more you are using will, and obviously contradicting what you're claiming to accomplish. You therefore cannot will NOTHING, and have to will something. So instead you will a sense of EMPTINESS or a sort of "lack of creation."

"If a mind creates without love, it can create an empty shell. This CAN be possessed by evil."

"We also have observed that man can create an empty shell, but cannot create nothing at all. This emptiness provides the screen for the misuse of projection."

"He can create an empty shell (see previous reference), but he DOES NOT create nothing at all."

So in fact what happened is we used our free will and our freedom of choice to elect to use the mind, mis-creatively, to try to "create nothing", and this produced a sort of empty creation, or a lack of creation - a lack of love's extension. In the mind this produced the hallucinated state of the lack of God, which is space-time and all its contents. Jesus refers to it as an empty screen onto which we then project meanings.

So long as the mind is unwilling and is resisting freedom and therefore is in denial, it is maintaining its belief in something opposite to God. That maintains 'the ego' and the illusion of a meaningless world. The world is meaningless because it is an "empty shell" which has no real content of its own, onto which we project images and meanings either thought false or true perception.

While it is true that mind cannot create a real separation, and you cannot leave God, and you cannot violate his reality or his laws, it is also true that the ability to deny IS within his laws and his reality. It is part of your rights as a created free-willed being.

God actually does not COERCE or shame you or guilt you or punish you for WANTING to use your freedom against itself. You ARE FREE to do so if you so choose. It's just that when you do so, you do bring suffering upon yourself and He does not will that you suffer.

"If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it."

So God gently INVITES you to return back to willing constructively with him rather than destructively. You have to FREELY CHOOSE IT, and accept atonement because you want to, not because you are forced to. This is because your mind still has the power to exercise freedom - a power that you have never lost.

So being in the denial of God, is actually a possibility of reality. It is not PREFERRED, but it is possible. It is not what God wills for you, but he HAS given you your own will, so even though he does not make it possible for you to actually separate, he DOES allow you to BELIEVE that you have. And this has taken place. This is why Jesus says "the separation has occurred." We HAVE tried to deny God and we HAVE believed that we've become separate.

The problem then isn't REALLY denial. Denial is NOT a negative functionality. It is not inherently a bad thing. You actually can use denial positively and for protection. The proper use of denial actually denies illusions and supports the truth of reality. It is only the improper use of it which has led us to deny God and accept lies, instead of accepting God and denying lies.

"Because of your Father's love, you can NEVER forget Him. For no one can forget what God Himself placed in his memory. You can DENY it, but you CANNOT LOSE IT."

"You can DENY His knowledge, but you CANNOT change it."

"But denial is a defense, and so it is as capable of being used positively as it is of being used destructively."

We have actually moved into a denial state, in the mind that God gave us, as part of the freedom he gave us, and this has TEMPORARILY produced the 'tiny mad idea' and the 'unholy instant'. It has led to the hallucination of spacetime - a belief in possibilities which aren't actually possible in truth. This has happened. But none of the things which seem to happen WITHIN this denial, have really happened.

"What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was."

This ability for the mind try to elect to be what it is not, to assume an alien power it doesn't really have, or to enter a state that it can't really enter, IS the power of denial that all minds are naturally capable of, in reality or otherwise. If you use the mind against itself it attacks itself and produces insanity. And since denial is a rejection of or avoidance/hiding from reality, it is a form of unconsciousness or an attempt "not to know", which induces a sort of sleep, in which we dream of imaginary worlds.

You CAN deny God, that's not against his law. But when you do, you induce a nightmare of suffering.

"What God did not create can only be in your own mind apart from His."

"What God did not create does not exist. And everything that does exist exists as He created it. The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist."

The world you "made up" does not really exist. It's a dream. The ability TO dream, is not made up. It is part of your natural freedom. God is not stopping you from choosing to go into denial, but he IS inviting you to come out of that denial when you are freely willing to do so, and therefore return to a happier state in alignment with his will. Denial is not an illusion, it PRODUCES illusions when misused.

So basically, "the separation", otherwise called "the attempt to deny the truth" has happened, the mind HAS exercised its free will to repress its own freedom, and this HAS induced a kind of sleep state in which the mind dreams of separation. The dream isn't valid at all. The DREAMING is a mind function and not to be discarded. It is simply something that you can choose or not choose. When you DON'T choose to dream, you instead choose to accept ultimate reality, and use the mind ONLY for constructive creative purposes.

"By denying his mind any destructive potential, and reinstating its purely constructive powers, he has placed himself in a position where he can undo the level confusion of others."

Long story short, mind DOES have the potential and freedom to go into denial, and this is entirely within the laws of God. It's just that when we do this, we are not happy, and it induces fantasies of things that aren't really possible. God does not will that we suffer so he instead calls us to return to him, knowing that it's best to use our free will creatively rather than self-destructively.

"It is for this denial that you need Atonement. Your denial made no change in what you are. But you have split your mind into what knows and does not know the truth."

"Both the power and the strength of man's creative will must be understood, before the real meaning of denial can be appreciated and abolished. Denial is NOT mere negation. It is a positive miscreation."

"Extension cannot be blocked, and it has no voids. It continues forever, however much it is denied. Your DENIAL of its reality arrests it in time, but not in Eternity."

"The Separation HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial." "For fear IS a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied."

"The out of mind is out of sight, because what is denied is THERE, but is not recognized. Christ is still there, although you know Him not. His Being does NOT depend upon your recognition."

"Fear and love are the only emotions of which you are capable. One is false, for it was made out of denial, and denial DEPENDS on the real belief in what is denied for its OWN existence."

Mind is free to deny itself, at any time. It has denied itself. That's why we're dreaming of exile. Its ability to do this is God-given. Its election TO do this is its own free choice. It HAS chosen to do this, and so it IS in a denial state. That is why there arose a NEED for atonement and God had to create the Holy Spirit to maintain a link to his children, guaranteeing that they can return to him when they are willing to do so.

We are not to be in the business of trying to "deny" that the mind can or has done this. It absolutely has done this. But it can choose again. It can choose to stop mis-creating and to instead create only the extension of God. It can choose to stop denying its own freedom and reclaim its inheritance. It can move out of its temporary state of resistance, into acceptance, out of fear into love. And at no point is God sitting there saying "denying me is against the law." He doesn't condone it, but he also doesn't force you not to choose it.

The world of separation, of space time, including planet Earth and all bodies, all forms and objects, is NOTHING AT ALL.

This is the simple teaching of A Course in Miracles. There is no body, there is no world. It is NOTHING. It is not a thing, it has no attributes, it has no inherent nature, it isn't good or bad, or holy or evil, it is absolutely nothing. It is an illusion of nothing pretending to be something, but is in fact nothing when recognized. This is why when you recognize illusions for what they are, they disappear, because they are really nothing.

The world is nothing. This is all we have to learn about the world. It has nothing to give, and cannot take anything away. It cannot live or die. It cannot do anything. It cannot bring oppression or make you sick or dead. It cannot hurt you. It has no value, and has no meaning. We did not create something in the making of this world, we opposed everything, which resulted in nothing.

God has guaranteed that opposing his will, wills nothing. And that trying to create without creating, has no effect. And that nothing real or serious can come of tiny mad ideas. That nothing has really happened, and all events are nowhere. The body is not something, it is nothing. The planet is not something, it is nothing. It is when we try to give it egoic meanings that it does not have, that we induce sickness and suffering. We give it power over us because it has none.

When we replace the egos projected meanings with God's projected meanings, the world is seen in another light, in which its nothingness IS RECOGNIZED, at the same time as seeing it with love. The love we give to it is the only reality that we seem to experience from it, because the love BLINDS us to the world's nothingness. The nothing is temporarily interpreted by the mind as a REFLECTION of heaven on earth, and then the earth disappears entirely. It was never really there to begin with, it was never really created, and it has never really lived. There is no world.

"There is no world."

"The world is nothing in itself."

"At no SINGLE instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered or anticipated, but NEVER experienced just now. Only its past and future make it seem real."

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

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

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

"But what is truth to him must be brought to the last comparison that he will ever make; the last evaluation that will be possible, the final judgment upon this world. It is the judgment of the truth upon illusion, of knowledge on perception; IT HAS NO MEANING AND DOES NOT EXIST. This is NOT your decision. It is but a simple statement of a simple fact."

"The world you see does not exist BECAUSE the place where you perceive it is not real. The gap is carefully concealed in fog, and misty pictures rise to cover it with vague, uncertain forms and changing shapes, forever unsubstantial and unsure. Yet in the gap is NOTHING."

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

"There is no world because it is a thought apart from God, and made to separate the Father and the Son, and break away a part of God Himself and thus destroy His wholeness. Can a world which comes from this idea be real? Can it be anywhere?"

""And the last to be overcome will be death." Of course! Without the idea of death there is no world. All dreams will end with this one. This is salvation's final goal; the end of all illusions. And in death are all illusions born. What can be born of death and still have life? But what is born of God and still can die?"

"The ego rushes in frantically to establish its own "ideas" there, fearful that the void may otherwise be used to demonstrate its own unreality."

"It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere."

"The world arose to hide it, and became the screen on which it was projected, and drawn between you and truth"

"This emptiness provides the screen for the misuse of projection." "Pragmatically, what has no real effect, has no real existence. Its REAL effect, then, is emptiness. Being without substantial content, it lends itself to projection."

"Sin is a block, set like a heavy gate, locked and WITHOUT a key, across the road to peace. No-one who looks on it without the help of reason, would TRY to pass it. The body's eyes behold it as solid granite, so thick it would be madness to ATTEMPT to pass it. Yet reason sees through it easily BECAUSE it is an error. The FORM it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from REASON's eyes."

"To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear."

"His body's nothingness releases yours from sickness and from death."

"Sickness is a demand the body be a thing that it is not. Its NOTHINGNESS is guarantee that it can NOT be sick."

"The body that is asked to be a god WILL be attacked, because its nothingness has not been recognized."

"For here is nothingness, where neither birth nor death is real"

"Dreams are dreams, and every one is equally untrue. This is the only lesson to be learned. Yet will fear linger until every one is recognized as nothingness, and seen exactly as it is and nothing more."

"The final judgment on the world contains no condemnation. For it sees the world as totally forgiven, without sin, and wholly purposeless. Without a cause, and now without a function in Christ's sight, it merely slips away to nothingness. There it was born, and there it ends as well. And all the figures in the dream in which the world began go with it. Bodies now are useless, and will therefore fade away, because the Son of God is limitless."

"Your faith is placed in the most trivial and insane symbols; pills, money, "protective" clothing, "influence," "prestige," being liked, knowing the "right" people, and an endless list of forms of nothingness which you endow with magical powers."

"Yet how can sight which stops at nothingness, as if it WERE a solid wall, see truly? It is HELD BACK by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else BUT form will be perceived. These eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see."

"Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning."

"We can but go from nothingness to everything; from hell to Heaven."

"A firm commitment to darkness or nothingness is impossible. Nobody has ever lived who has not experienced some light and some of everything."

"What loss can be for you in choosing not to value nothingness? This world holds nothing that you really want, but what you choose instead you want indeed!"

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

"But hold out your JOINED hands and touch this heavy-seeming block, and you will learn how easily your fingers slip through its nothingness. It is no solid wall. And only an illusion stands between you and the holy Self you share."

"What is the ego? Nothingness, but in a form that seems like something. In a world of form the ego cannot be denied for it alone seems real. How could God's Son as He created him abide in form or in a world of form?"

"Why burden it with further locks and chains and heavy anchors, when its weakness lies, NOT in itself, but in the frailty of the little gap of nothingness whereon it stands? What CAN be safe which rests upon a shadow?"

"The bleak little world will vanish into nothingness, and your heart will be so filled with joy that it will leap into Heaven and into the presence of God."

"God wills salvation be received today, and that the intricacies of your dreams no longer hide their nothingness from you."

"Nothingness will become invisible, for you will at last have seen truly."

"Like all things in the world its meaning is temporary, and will ultimately fade into the nothingness from which it came when there is no more use for it."

"There is a silence covering the world that was an ancient dream so long ago no one remembers now. Its time is done, and in the little space it seemed to have is nothingness."

"To mean these words acknowledges illusions are in vain, requesting the eternal in the place of shifting dreams which seem to change in what they offer, but are one in nothingness."

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death."

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

"EVERY illusion carries pain and suffering in the dark folds of the heavy garments with which it hides its nothingness."

"And so is ALL time past, and everything EXACTLY as it was before the way to nothingness was made."

"Specialness is the idea of sin MADE REAL. Sin is impossible even to imagine, without this base. For sin rose from it, out of nothingness, an evil flower with no roots at all."

"In the Divine psyche, the Father and the Holy Spirit are not incomplete at all. The Sonship has the unique faculty of believing in error, or incompleteness, if he so elects. However, it is quite apparent that so to elect IS to believe in the existence of nothingness. The correction of this error is the Atonement."

"Go on to meet them gladly, and learn how much awaits you, for the simple willingness to give up nothing, BECAUSE it is nothing. The new perspective you will gain, from crossing over, will be the understanding of WHERE HEAVEN IS. From HERE, it seems to be outside, and ACROSS the bridge. But, as you cross to JOIN it, IT will JOIN WITH YOU, and BECOME ONE with you. And you will think, in glad astonishment, that for all this, YOU GAVE UP NOTHING!"

Your whole life, since you found yourself in a body, you've believed that your self is SEPARATE from other people. That you are isolated and alone INSIDE your body, and no-one else is in there with you.

You have believed that everyone else is excluded from you, is not a part of you, and exists outside of you, stuck in their OWN bodies. And that therefore they are NOT you. But this is completely untrue and unnatural.

In heaven, the whole Kingdom of God, which is the Sonship, comprises many beings. But all of these beings are SHARED. They share all of themselves with each other. So much so that a part of each being is IN and AS other beings. They are all one. One brother is all brothers, every mind contains all minds. So the sense of "self" really means, "I am myself AND I am everyone."

In the separation from God, bodies were invented as separation devices to IMPRISON each self, to cut it off from others and to NOT SHARE with them. This produced a sense of a self which is only you, and not anyone else. A self which is alone, isolated, separate, exclusive, and DOES NOT SHARE with others. This self appears to be trapped inside a separate body, kept apart from others by a gap of space, and confined.

So now you grew up believing that anything that refers to you, refers to the "only me" that is inside your body. The sense of self that EXCLUDES everyone else. Me, and NOT you. Only me. Only MY self, and NOT your self. That's what your sense of yourself has turned into. A self which shares nothing, a self which is special and exclusive, a self which is alone, and a self which is DISCONNECTED from others.

But what you may not have realized is that, in applying the imprisonment of bodies to your unified self, you actually split the mind and separate off PART of you into your body, and LEFT OUT the part of you that is IN OTHERS. The part of you that is them, became seemingly disconnected from you. You were "separated out" from the shared group collective mind. And it's still true that PART OF YOURSELF IS OUTSIDE OF YOU.

So whereas before, your whole experiencing of how to receive something was to bring it INTO you from the outside in, to "get" from the world, to possess something ONLY for yourself, what needs to happen in truth is that you realize that the parts of you IN OTHERS have to also receive in order for YOU to receive. Because, literally, you ARE in them and if you exclude the part of you that's in them from receiving then you are literally deprived.

So now your whole sense of "who and what am I" has to EXPAND and become MORE INCLUSIVE. It has to go from "only me by myself" to "me including everyone else". That you ARE everyone. You are the whole sonship.

"The sonship is your soul." "We are the Kingdom, WE, the Sons of God." "One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds."

So now the dynamic of giving and receiving has to change. To your separated self, giving has been interpreted as LOSS, because to give away to someone NOT yourself is to LOSE what you had. And this is how the ego - the "me alone" sense of identity, sees it. And receiving was only ever seen as you GETTING for yourself and depriving others of what you have, so that they are the one sacrificing.

In truth, if you ARE everyone, and part of your very own self is IN them, then when you give to THEM, you are STILL INCLUDED, because the part of you in them receives it. And therefore to receive anything, you have to give it to YOURSELF AND OTHERS simultaneously. And the word for that is SHARING, or joining. Or even oneness.

It will seem odd at first, and counter-intuitive. It will seem ridiculous to suggest that you have to GIVE to someone "else", in order to receive. That whatever you want for yourself, you have to give it to someone else. That if you want to be healed, you have to give healing. That if you want to feel loved, you have to GIVE love. It will seem like you're being fooled, that someone ELSE is going to get all the benefit, and you will be left hanging. You'll be wondering to yourself how YOU are going to benefit at all if someone ELSE is getting all the stuff given to them.

But as you practice this and SHIFT your sense of self away from "I am only me" to "I am us", which is true sharing and natural oneness, you will realize that it does in fact work. When you do give love to another, you DO become elevated. This is why "miracles benefit both the giver and the receiver". Giving love makes YOU feel loved. Giving healing brings healing TO YOU. Making someone happy makes YOU happy.

This is actually the only way that miracles can be given to others. Because "miracles unite you with your brother" and "healing is when two minds recognize their oneness and become glad." This is also where shared interests come into it.

If your SELF really encompassses and means, "You plus them", and you really start to develop a sense that YOU ARE IN THEM, then whenever you are thinking of your "own" interests you actually think of what is in the best interests of BOTH of you. You think of how you can BOTH BENEFIT and BOTH RECEIVE equally. You start to be your brother's keeper, because it is on your own best interest to do so.

The course also says that when you do this, when you start to see yourself as IN others, shared with them, which results in you looking out for your MUTUAL interests, you can now call yourself a Teacher of God. Because you are now TEACHING something BEYOND separation, beyond isolation and exclusion. You are teaching inclusiveness and sharing, which is aligned with God's nature.

"A teacher of God is anyone who chooses to be one. His qualifications consist solely in this; somehow, somewhere he has made a deliberate choice in which he did not see his interests as apart from someone else's."

It can feel strange at first, but as you start to practive this, you realize that you need to "target" the you that is in someone ELSE, in order for YOU to really receive anything. And that when you try to target the you that is ONLY in your body, you end up being deprived. After a while you start to actually expand your sense of identity and self to INCLUDE other people. You start to feel like, references to "ME" are references to "US". That you start to ENCOMPASS others like a kind of umbrella.

Whatever is truly given is therefore given FOR you and TO you but also FOR others. This is why the light of God is given to you in order to move through you TO others. This is how miracles are working. Because we're really talking here about the basis of a holy relationship, a relationship in which "my selfish self" is being put aside and my sense of identity is transcending "just me" and is opening up to INCLUDE others.

That means you are becoming more WHOLE, or having more "self-fullness", because the whole of you really is the whole sonship. You ARE the Kingdom of God. You INCLUDE everyone in yourself. You are christ just as everyone is. So to be whole, you have to be everyone. Otherwise you exclude huge portions of yourself by excluding your brother.

You can't be seeing other people as "NOT ME" if you are to be spiritually awakened. Atonement is the TRANSCENDENCE of separation.

"Specialness is a lack of trust in anyone except yourself. Faith is invested in yourself alone. Everything else becomes your enemy, feared and attacked, deadly and dangerous, hated and worthy only of destruction."

"But NEVER you alone. This world is but the dream that you can BE alone, and think without affecting those apart from you. To be alone MUST mean you are apart, and if you are, you cannot BUT be sick."

"Specialness is the function that you gave yourself. It stands for you alone, as self-created, self-maintained, in need of nothing, and unjoined with anything beyond the body."

"It is not true that you can make decisions BY yourself, or FOR yourself alone. No thought of God's Son CAN be separate, or isolated in its effects. Every decision is made for the WHOLE SONSHIP, directed in and out, and influencing a constellation larger than anything you ever dreamed of."

"You communicate with no-one, and you are as isolated from reality, as if you were ALONE in all the universe. In your madness, you OVERLOOK REALITY COMPLETELY, and you see ONLY YOUR SPLIT MIND everywhere you look. God calls you and you do not hear, for you are preoccupied with your own voice. And the vision of Christ is not in your sight, for you look upon yourself ALONE."

"You BELIEVE that it is possible to harbor thoughts you would NOT share, and that Salvation lies in keeping your thoughts TO YOURSELF ALONE. For, in private thoughts, KNOWN ONLY TO YOURSELF, you think you find a way to keep what you would HAVE alone, and share what YOU would share. And then you wonder why it is that you are not in full communication with those around you, and with God, Who surrounds ALL of you together."

"Salvation needs your help as well as mine. Do not forget you do not answer for yourself alone."

"You cannot hear the Voice for God in yourself alone, because you are NOT alone. And His answer is only for what you ARE."

"Remember that you learn not for yourself alone, no more than I did. It is BECAUSE I learned for YOU, that you can learn of ME."

"You can no more pray for yourselves alone than you can find joy for yourself alone. Prayer is a re-statement of INCLUSION, directed by the Holy Spirit under the laws of God."

"The idea for today is obviously the reason why your seeing does not affect you alone." (I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts.) "WITHOUT His guidance, you will think you know alone, and will decide AGAINST your peace, as surely as you made the wrong decision in ever thinking that Salvation lay in you alone. Salvation is of Him to Whom God GAVE it FOR you."

"The ego teaches that your strength is in you ALONE. The Holy Spirit teaches that ALL strength is in God and THEREFORE in you."

"And how could your request be limited to you alone? No gift of God can be unshared."

"The gifts you have are not for you alone. What He has come to offer you, you now must learn to give. This is the lesson that His giving holds, for He has saved you from the solitude you sought to make, in which to hide from God."

"It will NOT be for you alone, for therein lay its misery. As its UNholiness kept it as a thing apart, its HOLINESS will become an offering to everyone."

"Atonement is for all, because it is the way to UNDO the belief that ANYTHING is for you ALONE."

"This you COULD spare him AND YOURSELF. For reason would not make way for correction in you alone. Correction cannot BE accepted OR REFUSED by you, without your brother."

"Salvation IS His Will BECAUSE you share it. NOT for you alone, but for the Self which IS the Son of God."

"The contrast is far greater than you think, for you will love this concept of yourself, BECAUSE IT WAS NOT MADE FOR YOU ALONE. Born as a gift for someone NOT perceived to be yourself, it has been given YOU. For your forgiveness, offered unto him, has been accepted now for BOTH of you."

"Neither of you alone can serve at all. Only in your JOINT will does healing lie. For here YOUR healing is, and here will YOU accept Atonement. And in your healing IS the Sonship healed, BECAUSE your wills are joined."

I’ve been studying passages about perception lately. There’s a lot of them. The body’s eyes are only capable of fixating on forms and appearances of physicality. They were made NOT to see. They only register "physical signals" of light coming from the outer surface of objects. They eye’s "perception" is equivalent to false perception, because they are blinded by form. The eyes do not see at all.

They pass signals to the mind. The mind is the only thing that sees. The mind then interprets the signals based on the belief system and values. Whatever you value, you believe in, and want. This turns into what you "want to see". Similarly fear is used to shut out perception of things you do not want to see. When you have ego values, you see what you want to see as special, and what you don’t want to see is regarded as unreal or evil. This is a dualistic view.

Your perceptual mechanism is a layer on top of the mind which filters the body signals and interprets their meaning. This is where the "world you see", in your mind, is based on the meaning you give it. The body’s eyes are never capable of showing you reality. They can only send pictures to the mind which are illusions. The world they depict is fundamentally an illusion regardless of HOW the picture is interpreted. It is not possible to use the body’s eyes to see Heaven.

When you move towards true perception, which is still interpretative, you start to put all things into one category in your belief system and value system, rather than categorizing the world in dualistic terms of special love/special hate. All of the pictures being sent by the body are categorized as UNREAL. They are recognized as being fundamentally illusions, which, when viewed WITHOUT distortion (accurate perception) are easily discerned to be NOT reality. A mind "without illusions" in its perception does NOT "see reality", it interprets body signals as the LIES they were made to be.

To see with true perception lines up perception with the laws of God and allows the mind to see "through" the perceptual filter without distortion or bias. "The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness." The mind then uses perception to see the "physical signals" "as-is", with no additional meaning being given them, nothing denied, nothing hidden. When seen "as is", they are simply registered as FALSE. They are OVERLOOKED with forgiveness.

Perception of form becomes very "thin", like a thin transparent veil. The body’s eyes here are still registering signals of a physical world, where bodies are in various states of sickness, people are still at war, and so on, but the mind interprets it all as unreal. The mind is in touch with the fact that it is the one DREAMING, and that it is the one who has sent the world out there to report back what’s out there. "Miracles remind you of who the dreamer is."

So then the mind knows that ITS DREAM is what is brewing shown to it by the body signals, the dream is fundamentally FALSE, and does not really exist. It is a very small step from there, "illusions recognized must disappear", for God to now take action to END YOUR DREAMING, remove perception from your mind entirely, and thus collapse the entire dream including the body and the physical world which were nothing BUT an illusion. In false perception you ADDED illusions ON TOP OF the illusion. There are TWO LAYERS of illusion. In true perception you came to look at the illusion WITHOUT illusion being added, and recognizing it only for what it is. Then when the world illusion has been recognized, it disappears.

I’ve been hearing people use the term illusion in an incorrect way. As if it means, "illusions about" something. You guys need to brush up on your grasp of what an illusion IS. People have too easily equate an illusion with "a false perception of something", and then equated the "disappearance of the illusion" with true perception. As if true perception does not SEE illusions, but sees reality. Let’s be a bit more precice in defining what is an illusion and what is reality.

I was driving one day and saw what I thought was a two headed bird. It was a large bird like a crane. I stopped the car and had a good look. Sure enough it dam well looked like a two headed bird. It seemed REAL. I drove forwards a little and took another look. Driving forwards introduced additional information which was HIDDEN from my perception before. Suddenly I was able to see additional legs, and then it became clear that there were in fact two birds, standing right next to each other. The illusion that there was a two-headed bird in reality, was blown. I was now SEEING the TRUTH (true perception) "about" what was ACTUALLY THERE. Seeing the truth, however, merely revealed the information that was hidden, and the parts of "whats there" that I could not see. My perception became more full and whole and inclusive. I was now looking at what was there "as is", instead of with a deluded interpretation.

This is also how it works in the course. You perceive with the body falsely. If you believe that what the body shows you is truth, you are deluded and in false perception. You believe the ILLUSION or the parts which function together to make it seem like soemthing, is real. You don’t see all the information. They are key facts hidden by denial. You are unconscious. When you open your awareness by removing "blocks to awareness", you gain access to information and facts which you did not know existed. You start to see more FULLY, all of what is there, as it is, a complete picture, without distortions or hidden information. This merely shows you the "apparatus" that was being used to make something look like somethig else. It’s like being privy to a "behind the scenes" look at the making of a movie. You see the cameramen and the fake stage and all the actors "out of character" and it blows the whole illusion.

True perception shows you these hidden details. But the fact is that SEEING CORRECTLY (corrected perception) only shows you the TRUTH ABOUT what is out there. It only reveals it "as it is "without your interpretations and strange meanings and lack of context. It only shows you an undistorted view of what is there. This undistorted view is, you could say, "free of illusions", but more accurately, it is free of BELIEVING that what is out there is REAL. It does not buy into the illusion any more. It’s like when you solve a puzzle and now you can never be deceived by it. Or you hear the punchline to a joke and it’s never as funny after that because you recognize that the setup is a lie. True perception shows you, without distortion, accurately, correctly, that the physical world the body looks at makes no sense, is deceptive, does not match up with God’s nature, is fundamentally flawed, IS ITSELF AN ILLUSION, and IS NOT REAL. Jesus is very clear on this in stating that true perception recognizes that what you see in this state is categorically UNREAL.

Bodies, forms, objects, animals, weather, forests, oceans, the planet, galaxies, all of it is a movie set. And when you are aware of ALL of the parts of it, see it clearly, and stop buying into its appearance, you will no longer be willing or desiring to believe that it is anything other than FALSE. A big lie. A trick. Just a great big scam. That’s why you WAKE UP after seeing that "forgiven world", because you see that what is here - this world - is NOTHING REAL, it has NO VALUE, it’s nothing but smoke and mirrors that you USED to think was true, and now you RECOGNIZE it as FALSE. Then it disappears.

You then find yourself in Heaven, where there is no world, no bodies, no spacetime, no planet, no critters, no forests and oceans, and "nothing there but shines and shines forever." Now you are in KNOWING of what is REAL. And it sure as fuck was not planet Earth. You’ve now left the MOVIE SET behind, have given up your little toys and fake play things, have become COMPLETELY DISILLUSIONED with the world, and have now decided to GO HOME TO HEAVEN, leaving this world behind. "The world will spin into the NOTHINGNESS from which it came." "The body is a dream." "The body is the central figure in dreaming and without the dream it does not exist." (paraphrase)

So all you folks saying "illusions about", are not RECOGNIZING that the world ITSELF is a mechanism of illusion. FORM is an illusion, no matter HOW you look at it. If you look at it and think it IS REALITY, now you are blind and decdived. ONLY by looking at it with true perception can you be NOT DECEIVED by it, not blinded by it and realize it is 100% fundamentally a device for deception and untruth, which can ONLY deceive you if you don’t realize what it is doing. In this truth, you SEE form - body signals - as something that you USED TO think was real, and now you realize it was just a TRICK. If you don’t recognize how this world is LYING TO YOU ("nothing so blinding as sight of form"), and if you think illusions are ONLY your "interpretations" of what’s out there, you’re going to be staying sleeping for a long time to come.

I think the big gross error that some people are making, is that they have decided:

1) When I’m in ego, I’m not seeing correctly, so I’m making a shit hole out of something that isn’t shitty.

2) When I’m in true perception, I will see the beautiful lovely world with the credit it deserves.

That’s totally fucked. I’m sorry. It’s 100% backwards.

1) When you are having false perception you are BUYING INTO the illusion and not recognizing it. You think it’s reality, even though you’re having a nightmare. It’s a state of hallucination and distorted interpretation.

2) When you are having true perception you STOP BUYING INTO the illusion, you recognize it is NOT TRUE. You realize it’s NOT REALITY. You are no longer having a nightmare, but you ALSO ARE SEEING THAT THIS WORLD IS NOT REAL. You stop hallucinating ABOUT IT, but that doesn’t suddenly mean "its reality." You are now seeing the TRUTH ABOUT it. The truth about an illusion is that IT IS AN ILLUSION!!!

This ties in exactly perfectly with what forgiveness is. Forgiveness OVERLOOKS FORMS and does not make them real. The idea of "looking at" the physical world "with love" and "seeing it correctly" and it being fundamentally "a lovely thing" is bullshit to the 10th degree. That’s a total failur to understand what an illusion is. You are supposed to stop believing it’s real, not believe it’s MORE REAL than before.

This is the *incorrect* view of the metaphysics:

1) False perception shows you a false world or false view OF the world

2) True perception shows you are true world, or a true view OF a true world - as if what’s out there is true and real

THAT IS WRONG!

This is the CORRECT view of the metaphysics:

1. False perception shows you a *FALSE WORLD*, AS IF IT IS TRUE, making it SEEM REAL. It is backwards perception. It renders reality an illusion, and illusions reality. You do not realize what you’re seeing "as real" IS NOT REAL. False perception sees this world AS REALITY.

2. True perception shows you a FALSE WORLD, which is NOT REAL, and recognizing that IT IS NOT TRUE. That the "truth about" it is that IT IS NOT TRUE. It renders reality as reality and illusion as illusion. Truth = true, false = false. Here you RECOGNIZE that what you’re seeing IS NOT REAL. True perception sees this world AS ILLUSION. **A LIE**

In true perception you will then be so certain that you aree merely PERCEIVING A DREAM, not a reality, that you will be ready to WAKE UP FROM DREAMING.

When you wake up from dreaming, the UNREAL WORLD - Earth - does not suddenly become real! IT DISAPPEARS beacuse it was never real to begin with!

What REMAINS is Heaven, which has nothing to do with this unreal illusory world whatsoever.

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made." You MADE this world with illusions. Making makes illusions. It is not creation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Love was never in the world of dreams."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Illusions recognized must disappear."

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

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

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

"Heaven is all that remains."

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been noticing in myself lately that I keep being judgemental. My thoughts feel like judgements. Even just basic thoughts of "what something is" feels like a judgement. I wondered to myself why I seem to be judging all the time. I hadn't realized just how judgmental I seem to be all the time.

This could be in the form of just having some opinion about everything. It didn't even necessarily need to be in terms of anger or projecting blame, just a kind of incessant "believing I know". Just constantly and consistently labelling everything in terms of what I believe it means.

I would just keep labeling everything in course terms. "That's an illusion", "They're level confused", "This is unreal", etc. I seemed to be just using the whole course to add a layer of naming and shaming to everything I was aware of.

I noticed also that I couldn't seemingly just look at something without "coursifying it". I couldn't just enjoy something or do normal activities without having to have an ACIM commentary running alongside it. Just constantly trying to "counteract" the world and everything I see with statements, trying to deny it, trying to change it, trying to push it away.

This also seems to be tied into a general sense of unhappiness about everything. My ego would sometimes really flare up with attack thoughts which clearly were attempts to increase separation. It increased a sense of being alone, and further justified a sort of seeming "bitterness" about the world. It kind of felt like kind of slipping down further into hell rather than rising out of it.

I also have been growing weary of ACIM, quite honestly. I've chewed on its words and metaphysics and have written about it to such an extent that I was becoming tired of it. Tired of thinking about it. Like I'd done it all and seen it all and there was nothing left to figure out. As if figuring it out, or understanding it, was the whole point.

I wanted some kind of more direct, simplified experience. Something more practical that works. Something more direct, that didn't have a layer of interpretation or second-hand thinking alongside it. I didn't want more affirmations or course statements flying around in my mind. I didn't want just another commentary or people just parroting the course's words as if knowing what it means. I and I didn't want to keep doing forgiveness on the basis of some bunch of statements, trying to use words to fend off ego attacks.

I had to step away from all this for a bit to just settle down and get a sense of something more basic and simple and fundamental. And this is when I started opening up to wanting the Holy Spirit to inform me of a better way. I wanted to see things how he sees things and to join with him more, to just very simply take some small little step that would be enough to fix my mind without all the psychobabble. Some kind of simple something I could just "do" that would produce a happier experience without all the course crap alongside it.

I saw that having conversations about the course just wasn't really working. Everyone's just talking about it. We use its statements as if they are magic wands. But I wasn't seeing a satisfying effect from this. Just figuring out what it means and repeating its words didn't do much. I didn't want to be just another parrot regurgitating the same stuff while staying entirely confined in this same "way" of trying to apply it. I wanted something much closer to my being, that I didn't have to think about. Something much more basic and intimate that I could "live" without mental gymnastics.

This is when I started to discover that I was in general laying an entire interpretation of everything on top of it. This interpretation was based on my thinking that I knew what things were. An attempt to understand it. I saw that I was giving everything meaning through this interpretation. I was deciding that things sucked or were negative and was then reacting to my own decision as to what I thought it was. My interpretation of everything was being mistaken for the thing itself.

So then I considered the fact that every single time that I was less than happy in any way, it was a part of this "way" that I was interpreting. I was filtering or translating or changing, twisting, whatever was "out there", into some kind of decided-upon "version" that I was then experiencing as my "perception of it". Because if you remember, "perception is a result not a cause" and "projection makes perception".

It's really what I project that produces perceptual issues. If I perceived a result or conclusion of "unhappy", I must have projected and wanted that. If I was interpreting that something happening "meant" that I should be afraid, I must've decided that it meant this. I gave it this meaning. And this meaning changed my perception and produces "experiences" or effects which were generally unpleasant.

In the truest sense, I was doing this to myself, as in the secret of salvation, because it was this whole "layer" of interpretation, coming in between me and the world so to speak, that was responsible for causing my "experience" of the world to be faulty. I was willing to consider that any time I was not happy I MUST have mis-interpreted and had come up with some kind of MISTAKEN opiniion about what it MEANS.

I had to be willing to recognize that it was my chosen interpretation that was entirely responsible for the "effects" of that interpretation upon myself, the seeming ego reactions or fears or upset emotions or any kind of annoyance or disturbance. All of my suffering was really rooted in that layer of interpreting, NOT in what lied "beyond it" as the world. And that meant that I was making a lot of mistaken interpretations, resulting in a lot of unhappiness.

Light a light-switch, I then found that simply by recognizing I had made an interpretation, and just being willing to admit that it was the entire reason why I was not happy, my mind would become open to just "letting that interpretation go." I didn't seem to have to do anything else for this to happen. As they say, "illusions recognized must disappear." My interpretation IS the illusion. It was a way of turning "reality" into something it's not. Just recognizing it as an illusory, self-made, made-up, filtered "view", was enough to make it disappear.

As soon as it would just disappear, immediately my mind would light up with light and happiness. It would seem as though a higher me, rooted in the "back" of my mind, would suddenly shine outward. It was as if secretly behind all my ego upset sense of self, there was this higher me that was just always happy and filled with light and wasn't taking anything seriously. It seemed to already be there. I didn't invent it myself. Perhaps this was the real me.

This has started a revolution in my mind and in my outlook and in my way of experiencing the world. It isn't a forgiveness based on some kind of long-winded, elaborate story that I have to tell myself, trying to deprogram myself, trying to counteract perceived problems with a long litany of affirmative statements, or trying to remember course principles, or trying to grasp at straws to make it go away.

It was very very simple. It was much more a sort of change in how I EXPERIENCE what's going on. And that was far more immediate. More like just a kind of attitude change. Not something "thought about", or arrived at through understanding, or made out of complicated metaphysics, or logically deduced. It was a kind of forgiveness that was just a much more intimate matter of psychological engagement.

Either I was interpreting or I wasn't. Either I had chosen to invent some kind of "meaning" for something, or I had let it go. Either I was filtering and believing I knew what something was, or I was just willing to stop doing it. It wasn't a matter of replacing it with something or justifying it or explaining it or writing a book about it. It was kind of like just stepping back. Getting out of my analysis. Stopping my self-made attempt to determine what something is.

The bizarre thing is just how effortless it is and how immediately a whole world of low-level ego experience, suffering, upset and darkness, is immediately overruled by a much much higher bright light of happiness and lightness.

It almost seems wrong, in that the light-heartedness of it doesn't even seem to care to "address"the many doubts and fears and concerns that the ego had. It just sort of leaps above it and pays no attention to it. Like, who would have thought THAT would be a solution? Not to change the ego but to just get OUT of it? To just leave the desert without even dealing with all the many loose ends and questioning fears.

I think for a ton of years now I've generally been locked into the ego mind. Regardless of how lofty my thoughts have been, and regardless of efforts to forgive. It's always still been accompanied by ego feelings, upsets, emotions, fears, reactions, ego rebounds.

I was just kind of getting fed up with the fact that every time I tried to do anything with the course, it ALWAYS had a stupid ego rebound afterwards. Catharsis, release, upset emotions, fear reactions etc. It was just so annoying. I was kind of getting tired of the course in this sense because I couldn't seem to do any of it without having this sense of ... I just don't want to do this. My ego self or whatever just is wired against God and does not want to wake up, and can't. "I", mixed up in that sense of lower-suffering-self, couldn't stop being the way it was.

So there's been this tug of war between the part of mind that just basically couldn't care less about the course and just wants to live a normal life in a body, versus this constant barrage of attempts to awaken to some kind of higher life and perspective that's totally incompatible. The contrast between the two was becoming very acute and I couldn't find a way to satisfy both. I had to even take a break from ACIM for a while and just be in "my ego" to just be normal and stop hitting it over the head with a hammer of spirituality.

But I think what's come out of that now is this very very unexpected movement in which I let the ego stuff remain ego and just seem to step outside of it. It's quite odd. Because I now see that within myself there's this sort of self-contained internal bubble of my suffering self, complete with all the ego emotions and upsets, which is generally most of the time unhappy, riddled with fears and grief and uncertainty and so on. And it seems like this is all within my body. And then somehow there's this higher me that is totally outside of all that, shining a light from a vantage point of not even trying to understand or interpret anything.

It has raised questions of, who even am I. What aspects of myself or of my experience actually is "the ego" and should be something to "get rid of", versus what aspects of this is actually a permanent part of my true nature? Are my emotional reactions just an ego thing? Is this sense of "me suffering" the ego? In particular, where do I draw the line?

But I'm finding that maybe I don't actually have to answer that in terms of a description of it. Because what I seem to be realizing is that ALL of that internal seeming "struggling self" is entirely sort of the "byproduct" of this whole "thinking I know" thing. This whole interpretation of everything. Having a judgement about what everything is. Labelling everything in course terms. Trying to describe everything in explicit detail.

That whole approach of trying to "understand" the world and everything in my experience, is precicely what CAUSES all of the suffering. It's as if, when I try to interpret "reality", it produces generally negative forms of consequence, in a cause-effect kind of way. And the outcome of that is what we might call "the ego" in me. It's this collection of reactions, emotions, upsets, perceived threats, fears, guilts, etc... which all seem to revolve around victimhood and being at the effect of something. That all seems to actually be the END RESULT OF, my minds attempts to INTERPRET reality.

So I put out some kind of negative faulty mistaken interpretation or effort to understand what something is, this results in a false perception, which in turn results in a bunch of suffering, which in turn assembles as a collection of unhappy elements that bundle together as an "ego experience". And that ego experience seems like it's somewhat outside of me. And when my mind is going there, it seems that I am the one having this experience, that my identity IS the suffering, that I AM the upset and the unhappiness. And that anchors and confines and limits my whole awareness INSIDE OF that whole viewpoint.

So if my view is so narrow and limited and false, producing heavy false dark perceptions, then my whole sense of self seems to become imprisoned and confined, alone and afraid, small and weak and vulnerable. It seems like my entire life has been spent accumulating sufferings in this little internal storehouse, surrounding and forming this confused and separated-off sense of self or of "my experience" of life. All gathered up in a ball, even which seems to be housed within my body and especially within the "emotional center" in the stomache area.

If this ENTIRE experience of life is the end RESULT, ie perceptual consequence of, the various mistaken MEANINGS that I keep putting onto things, then it stands to reason (lol) that if I fundamentally CHANGE my entire approach and alter the process of "giving meaning", then it's going to totally override that ENTIRE realm of expeirence.

It's going to basically switch off the ego experience, it's going to totally override all the upsets and reactions, all the unhappy emotions etc. Because it was as though, all along, all this time, ALL of my sufferings have been the RESULT of the meaning that I'VE been giving to everything.

I've become very good at describing things, explainig things, analyzing the world, picking apart illusions, labelling stuff, counter-attacking attacks, and generally just reacting to MY OWN decisions. And suddenly I seem to be embarking on an entirely different ballgame. I guess it can be described as moving above the battlefield in a way. It's like a HUGE stepping back and just stopping trying to fucking figure everything out. Not just because it can't be figured out but because the act of trying to do so is BLOCKING me. It shuts down my light and decreases my awareness and turns me into a judger.

So now for me, this whole course thing, it's turning into something very very simplified. It's just some basic sort of flip of the switch thing, between whether I want to carry on with my faulty judgements/interpretations/translations of what's going on, or whether I want to just let those go.

As I let them go, it's like a huge cloud of psychological blockage is lifted away. A bright HAPPY light switches on out of nowhere, as if I'm getting back in touch with the REAL me that is in the back of all this, and has been there all along covered up by all the mental distortions. It immediately feels remarkably happy and light, regardless of how heavy and dark the ego experience was "before" I stepped out of it.

What the ego is, I think it really is just the "effects" that are produced when we try to "narrow" (Jesus interjected) reality down to being this or that, to describe it, to judge it, to assess or evaluate what stuff "is". The labels and meanings we keep trying to give things. And then mistakedly confusing that effort for reality, believing that reality now inherently IS the meaning that WE decided it has. That produces all the ego reactions, all suffering, all unhappiness and dissatisfaction.

When we stop producing these illusions of interpreation, trying to think we know what things are, trying to understand the ego and the world, trying to filter what's happening, trying to insist that something is what we think it is, trying to be right about our labels and projections, all that just immediately switches off the "ego effect" and puts our mind back in touch with cause.

We settle back into reality, we return to our baseline, we get back in touch with who we are BEHIND all these layers of interpretation, and the clouds part and the light comes shining forth. And it feels SO much happier than the deluge of suffering that ALL interpretations produce.

So it's not a matter of trying to get "that ego" to change and grow and wake up and become spiritual, the ego is just the result of "shutting down". If we are to "open up" we have to be willing to actually be open all the time. Because any time we judge or label or describe or analyze or think we know about or seem certain of what stuff is or means, we are actually narrowing and closing down, casting anchors into the wind. And that just diminishes our light and makes us feel dark and alone and afraid.

We step out of the ego by stepping into the light of "not knowing", of forgetting what you taught yourself, or letting go of thinking you know, and of learning NOT to try interpreting anything. When you stop projecting your made-up meanings onto everything, you leave an open space for the Holy Spirit and God to project THEIR meaning instead, in the emptiness that you've left there. In the space you've provided for light to shine through you. Really it's more like, getting out of your own way.

I am finding this is what forgiveness means to me now. It's the simple movement away from having made the mistake of deciding what something must mean, which is pretty much always in error and leads to suffering, and just being willing to not do that. My own meanings are what blocks my sight. My own judgements of reality are what keeps reality from me. This is how we undo perception itself, by undoing the basis for judgement. And it takes no more than a slight willingness to recognize my self-inflicted suffering is coming from my self-imposed meanings, to let them disappear to reveal the light within.

Yesterday I saw for the first time, myself just pivoting differently, in a situation where someone had clearly "done something wrong", breaking some rules. I could've "held it against" the person, and yet somehow I remembered that this entire experience of it being "wrong" or sinful was a meaning I was giving it, and as I stepped back from that I found myself expressing that the person was still lovable regardless of this mistake, and it was only a mistake. It was as kind of "experiential forgiveness", so basic and simple, a psychological act of just "withholding judgement" in a way, that I felt it produced some kind of miraculous effects afterwards. And it felt good.

Ultimately it all boils down to the simple idea that we have en experiential realitionship with truth and reality, and we are either going to be fully open it and let it be what it is without trying to define it, or we're going to narrow our perception and lay judgements and labels on it, trying to dissect it. And as soon as we do that we will shut down our light and go into darkness (ego). If we want light and happiness, we have to learn to just accept reality in the fullness of "what is" (not the world as such), by not "having an opinion about it". Not laying a meaning on it. So that the light can fully shine and illuminate our happiness.

"Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing. It offends no aspect of reality, ****nor seeks to twist it to appearance that it likes.**** It merely looks and waits and judges not. ****He who would not forgive must judge****, for he must justify his failure to forgive. But he who would forgive himself must ****learn to welcome truth exactly as it is.****"

"If you could accept the world as meaningless and ***let the truth be written upon it for you****, it would make you indescribably happy." "In the world you, can become a spotless mirror, in which the holiness of your Creator shines forth from you, to all around you. You can REFLECT HEAVEN here. But no reflections of the images of other gods must dim the mirror that would hold God's reflection in it. Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego. You need but leave the mirror clean, and clear of all the images of hidden darkness you have drawn upon it. God will shine upon it of Himself. Only the clear reflection OF Himself can BE perceived upon it. Reflections are seen in light. In darkness, they are obscure, and their meaning seems to lie only in shifting interpretations, rather than in themselves."

"The reflection of God NEEDS no interpretation. IT IS CLEAR. Clear but the mirror, and the message which shines forth from what the mirror holds out for everyone to see, NO-ONE will fail to understand. It is the message that the Holy Spirit is holding to the mirror that is in HIM. He recognizes it, because he has been taught his NEED for it, but knows not where to look to FIND it. Let him, then, see it in YOU, and share it WITH you. Could you but realize, for a single instant, the power of healing that the reflection of God, shining in YOU, can bring to all the world, you COULD not wait to make the mirror of your mind clean, to receive the image of the Holiness that heals the world."

In A Course in Miracles, there is a significant theme of allowing the Holy Spirit to fulfill his function, without you interrupting it, and without you attempting to take over his role as healer and therapist. But it may not be obvious how far this goes and what this implies. So let's look at what your role in this world is supposed to be.

As an ego, you stand in the way, you direct everything, you control everything, you make all decisions on your own, you tackle all challenges alone, and you believe you have the power and capabilities to succeed independently and with no reliance on spirit. It's kind of a state of "I don't need you God, leave me alone."

In this mode, we are trying to be God. We have an authority problem. We hold life by a tight grip of attempted control and brace ourselves against difficulties believing we do not want any help.

We're unwilling to acknowledge that we might not be capable, that we are too weak, that we cannot succeed, or that we need anyone. It's an attempt to be "independent" in a separated way, attempting not to depend on God at all. It is actually a form of isolation, imprisonment, desperation and failure.

As we attempt then to become more spiritual, there will at first be a transitionary phase in which we try to keep our selfish egotism while trying to turn it into something more spiritual. This is the ego's "seeking" and not finding, which results in a spiritualized ego. The spiritualized ego is quite capable of regarding itself as a hero, a savior, a fixer, a healer, a rescuer, a saint, and exalts itself to a very high level of what it thinks of as holiness.

"All unhealed healers follow the ego's plan for forgiveness, in one form or another.

In this phase, the person will attempt to be the one who heals others, to be the one who has power, to be the one who can perform miracles, to be the one who still relies on themselves but with a higher demand of achievement and perfectionism. The ego self can still adopt a mode of trying to be like Jesus, but it is the trying part where it all falls down.

You might take on various healing modalities or start to tap into forms of guidance, but these will likely be limited because there is still much ego interfering. The ego still wants to be the center of attention, the doer, the one who causes the results. And in fact the ego will even use aggression, anger, forcefulness, intensity, loudness, as "tools" that it believes will cause miracles to occur. And it's fairly guaranteed that these will not work.

But it's important to try to do this, and to fail. Because in the failing you may become more willing to give up on the effort to go it alone. You will recognize what does not work. You will give up on this false hope of being a superhero, and begin to seek a deeper surrender to something larger than yourself.

As you go beyond this phase, you begin to surrender to the holy spirit, ask for help, seek guidance, and reach out beyond yourself for love, support, comfort, healing and guidance. This means a willingness to put aside your self-driven ego efforts, your "going it alone", your "being the one who does it". It means getting out of the way, not merely sitting on the sidelines but removing the ego self that would need to sit on the sidelines. It means opening up to the spirit, to the spiritual eye.

This overall entails a deepening of trust, of allowing there to be something not of you, that is there to help you. It means putting aside the idea that you will be powerful in and of yourself, and no longer being the central figure. Instead of being self-reliant, you must become willing to rely on HIM to HELP you, knowing you cannot go it alone. In a way, it's like you turn more into a medium or channel through which something "not of you", something prior to you, operates. And you want it to, and trust it to, because you know you cannot do this alone.

So what does this really mean? What is our proper role in this world? Everything points to a state in which we ourselves become an open window, a portal, a doorway, through which THE HOLY SPIRIT functions. And in this role, WE do not get to be heroes. And as this doorway, "we need do nothing" is very literal in that it applies to our own self. We no longer need to source or cause things, to be the one who does things, we merely need not interfere with WHAT HE does through us. And he WILL act through us if we will let him, which includes allowing Him to heal minds and bodies.

We're told that he will direct us everywhere we go. We're told that we will be told very specifically what to do. We're told that he will heal through us as we allow him to heal us. We're told not to place limits on what Jesus/HS can do through us. We're told that what HE allows "us" to do, ie what he does through us, is not of this world - meaning it is capable of doing things WE have no clue how to do.

We're told that WE do not understand anything, and HE knows how to heal because that is his function. We're told HE is the only therapist, not us. We're told that OF ourselves we have no power, but there is a power in us that works THROUGH us FOR us.

We're told the Holy Spirit will undo ALL the consequences of our wrong decision (all effects, symptoms, errors, manifestations, sicknesses, problems) if we will LET HIM (allow him to ACTUALLY DO IT).

We're told not to assume his function. We're told that when he heals he never fails because he knows how to succeed and cannot fail. We're told to not interfere, to not get in the way. We're told to let him literally SPEAK through our mouths to let HIM to talk others, which means literally channeling him. We're told to let HIM use our bodies, to allow our body to be a device for HIS communication and healing.

We're told to adopt His Christ Vision and to see WITH him how HE sees, so that His vision becomes shared with us - that we tune into it, but do not originate it. We're told this vision is GIVEN to us, we did not create it, so we need to accept it. Were told the atonement is GIVEN to us, and needs only our acceptance and allowance, which means we do not MAKE IT or define it.

We're told that we had everything before the separation and we must now re-receive INHERITANCE FROM GOD. What God wills that we have and be, not what we make of ourselves. We're told that we're still as God created us and that because He created us, we do not MAKE ourselves or redefine ourselves, so must stop trying to be the gatekeeper who decides what is true and false but to instead accept HIS definition of us. We're asked to make NO decisions on our own, relying heavily on guidance. The list goes on.

This all requires a laying down and surrendering of our entire ego effort for control and definition of who and what we are, what the truth is, what we have, and what God would have us do. A willingness to ACCEPT as our own, that which GOD HAS DECIDED we should have and be and share in. And to do so willingly and joyfully, knowing and trusting it is for our highest good to take on board HIS provision, decision, mind, will, power and safety. We are to EXTEND creation, we are not to invent things which are not in alignment with what God has already created.

All of this points to a clear picture that in our natural God-given state, we are not in the business of being something "of ourselves". We're not inventing or reinventing. We're not trying to make something as substitute for what God already created. We're not trying to give ourselves a function that God did not give us, some kind of heroic role that makes us look good or that we think is better than the "chore" of doing God's will "against our will".

Our only function in heaven is creation, our only function on earth is healing. We're more or less asked to completely surrender all control and resistance and unwillingness. We're asked to do GOD'S will, rather than our own separate interests. And to settle into returning to being ONLY what God has decided is true of us.

So our proper function, our natural way of being in harmony with Creation, is basically to be what God defines you to be, to act in accord with HIS will, to create WITH him, to extend FROM him, to communicate and share what HE would have us know, to perform the miracles HE directs, and to have complete total trust and dependency on him for EVERYTHING. To be in a kind of symbiotic relationship of happy dependency. "God and his miracles (you) are inseparable."

Learning to adopt this position allows you to become "a miracle worker". But not because you are a powerful independent superhero, but because you have let go and let God, you have surrendered deeply all efforts to BE God, you have given up "trying" in favor of trusting Holy Spirit's supernatural power which never fails, and you have become a conduit through which HIS POWER can move to cure all ills, solve all problems, and correct all suffering. And that means you are now allowing God to operate THROUGH you in the world.

It is humbling. We do not get to be the center of attention. We do not get to be the false savior. Our inflated spiritualized ego needs to be dissolved and replaced with SHARING. And we simply settle into being OF SERVICE to God, trusting Him in all things, doing what He bids willingly, listening to and following his instructions, and being a representative of His Will. Nor does this mean you are some kind of slave, unwilling worker, coerced victim or person who is being forced to do what they do not want to do. You must be WILLING to recognize and trust that His will is for your good.

So the question is, do you want to be on team ego, or do you want to be on the Holy Spirit's team? Are you willing to adopt HIS function, shared with him in trust, or do you want to keep being the hero of the dream? And are you willing to allow a supernatural power to move THROUGH you, in this world, to perofrm miracles which are not OF you, and which are not of this world?

Are you willing to be a FOLLOWER? A disciple? A willing participant in the great crusade and a professor of Christ?

"The therapist does not heal; he LETS HEALING BE. HE can point to darkness, but he CANNOT bring light OF HIMSELF, for light is NOT of him. But being FOR him, it MUST be for his patient."

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

"ANY attempt you make to correct a brother (which includes attempting to heal him), means that you believe correction by YOU is possible, and this can ONLY be the arrogance of the ego. Correction is of God, Who does not know of arrogance. The Holy Spirit forgives everything, BECAUSE GOD CREATED EVERYTHING. Do not undertake HIS function, or you will forget YOURS."

"Accept ONLY the function of healing in time, because that is what time is FOR."

"As you awaken other minds TO Him through HIM, and not yourself, you will understand that you are not obeying the laws of this world, but that the laws you ARE obeying WORK. "The good is what works" is a sound though insufficient statement. ONLY the good CAN work. Nothing else works at all. This course is a guide to behavior. Being a very direct and very simple learning situation, it provides the guide who tells you what to do. If you do it, you will SEE that it works. Its RESULTS are more convincing than its words. THEY will convince you that the words are true."

"the Holy Spirit will undo ALL the consequences of my wrong decision IF I WILL LET HIM.

I WILL to let Him by allowing Him to decide for God for me."

"All miracles mean Life, and God is the giver of Life. He will direct you VERY specifically."

"Make no decisions about what it is, or where it lies, but ask of the Holy Spirit EVERYTHING, and leave ALL decisions to His gentle counsel. The One Who knows the plan of God, which God would have you follow, can teach you what it IS. Only His wisdom is capable of guiding you to follow it. Every decision you undertake alone, but signifies that you would define what Salvation is, and what you would be saved FROM. The Holy Spirit KNOWS that ALL Salvation is escape from guilt. You have no other "enemy" and against this strange distortion of the purity of the Son of God, the Holy Spirit is your ONLY friend."

"Today I will make NO decisions by myself."

""Take up thy cross and follow me" should be interpreted to read "Recognize your errors and choose to abandon them by following My guidance.""

"I have repeatedly asked MY pupils to follow me. This means that, to be effective teachers, they MUST interpret teaching as I do."

"Only then will your MIND will to follow me. Without your will, you cannot be rehabilitated. MOTIVATION TO BE HEALED is the crucial factor in rehabilitation."

"You once said that souls cannot rest until everyone has found salvation. This happens to be true. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive. The Disciples were officially and specifically told to heal others, as Physicians of the Lord. They were also told to heal themselves, and were promised that I would never leave them or forsake them. Atonement is the natural profession of the Children of God, because they have professed Me."

"I must found His church on you, because you, who accept me as a model, are literally my disciples. Disciples are followers, but if the model they follow has chosen to save them pain in all respects, they are probably unwise NOT to follow him."

"RELEASE yourselves to Him Whose function IS release. Do NOT assume His function FOR Him. Give Him but what He asks, that you may learn how LITTLE is your part, and how great IS HIS."

"Healing is the one ability that everyone CAN develop, and MUST develop, if he is to BE healed. Healing IS the Holy Spirit's form of communication, and the ONLY one He knows."

"Yet what makes 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 that are not of this world, and the mind will understand because of their Source.From this understanding will come the recognition, in this new teacher of God, of what the body's purpose really is; the only use there really is for it."

"The Holy Spirit does NOT work by chance, and healing that is of Him ALWAYS works. And unless the healer ALWAYS heals BY Him, the results WILL vary. But healing itself IS consistence, because ONLY consistence is conflict-free, and only the conflict-free ARE whole. By accepting exceptions, and acknowledging that he can SOMETIMES heal and SOMETIMES NOT, the healer is OBVIOUSLY accepting INconsistency. He is therefore IN conflict and TEACHING conflict.

Can ANYTHING of God NOT be for all and always? Love is incapable of ANY exceptions."

"You cannot see the Holy Spirit, but you can see His manifestations. And unless you do, you will not realize He is there. Miracles are His witnesses, and speak for his Presence. What you cannot see becomes real to you only through the witnesses who speak for it. For you can be AWARE of what you cannot see, and it can become compellingly real to you, as its presence becomes manifest THROUGH you. Do His work, for you SHARE in His function. As your function in Heaven is creation, so your function on earth is healing. God shares His function with you in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit shares His with you on earth."

Sorry this is a bit longish... it's hard to explain.

The physical world is a holographic dream. But the way that it is holographic isn't very obvious. And most people do not believe it is a dream!

Firstly, a hologram is not a projected 3D image. It is not the hollywoodized concept of an artificial three-dimensional object projected in space that you can view from any angle. That very loosely is tied to the idea of a hologram and they just ran with it and turned it into a marketing exercise.

Holograms have some interesting properties which describe the way that this world is put together, and the reason why it is a dream.

You will see a hologram on most credit cards. It's the little shiny symbol in the corner which, if you look at it from different angles, appears to let you see a virtual object suspended in space. You actually seem to be able to look at it from different angles, even though it's a flat image. They use this on cards because they are hard to manufacture, requiring precise laser technology, so this offers a certain level of protection against fraudulent cards.

The idea of a hologram is that information about the whole of something is present in all of the parts. On your credit card, information about the image of an object as viewed from countless different angles, is embedded into each tiny particle of the image. It's as though there were thousands of cameras recording images of the object from different angles, and then all of these images were overlaid on top of each other. Therefore each part of the image contains a ton of information, much more than just one particle of image.

One way to produce a hologram like this is to create tiny 3-dimensional bumps which you project different images onto from a specific direction. When your viewing angle changes, you see a different side of the bumps thus forming a different image. That's a very loose approximation of how a hologram works.

One of the properties of a hologram, therefore, is that if you remove a physical portion of the holographic image, it does not lose a specific portion of the information stored in it. That's because the same information is present in all of the other parts of the image. It's like storing the same piece of data a thousand times scattered across the surface. Chopping off a part of the object does not lose information stored in that part, it only reduces the overall sum total of occurrences of the information.

In the book, The Holographic Universe, it was described for example that a person had a portion of their brain removed. It was believed by science that certain memories were stored in that part of the brain, and that removing it would definitely produce a memory loss. However, afterwards, the person still could recall the memory, it was just a little fuzzy. That's because the memory was actually stored throughout the brain in a holographic manner, meaning that "all" of the memory was stored in "every part" of the brain. Removing one part of the brain did not remove a specific portion of the memory. The memory could still be recalled and reassembled because all of it was stored in all parts. Just with a little less clarity. The brain is holographic.

So in a hologram, each specific part of an object isn't JUST that part of the object, it is also connected to and shares information with all of the other parts. This is also similar to the scientific theory that matter is energy which exists as a kind of field of potentiality, which, when you look at it with consciousness, it condenses the field into a tight point and shows up as a particle. The particle then seems to be the only part visible so you think that that's all there is to it, but the particle actually is still intimately connected to and extends into the field. Thus there is an extension beyond the form of matter.

Another word that describes this extension beyond the form, and the idea that the part contains the whole, is a "symbol". Symbols are representations of something greater beyond themselves. They are not the thing, but they're sort of a condensed representation of the core qualities of the thing. They allude to something beyond themselves, and they point in the direction of the whole of the thing they represent. They don't show up as the thing in its entirety, only as a small image which "symbolizes" the thing. And what is it that we know of that are built from symbols? Dreams.

Now, the reason that we can't usually tell this physical universe is a holographic dream, is because as much evidence as possible that each part (particle) is connected to the "all" has been squeezed out. The matter that shows up, as form and objects and bodies and worlds, are symbols representing energies that are far bigger than the objects themselves, and which connect the objects together. In other words, there is a lot of SHARING going on behind the scenes, but by the time the energy field coalesces into tight concentrations - as matter - you only see the concentrations ie forms, and you don't realize that these forms are symbolic of something more beyond them. You fixate on the form of what is visible and think that this is all there is, as though the symbol is not really a symbol but is actually the whole 'thing' in completeness.

So at the most extremely spread out end of the hologram, which is the physical universe, it APPEARS that there is no sharing. Particles do not seem to share the same space. They do not seem to be connected. Everything seems to be separated out. Objects do not really touch each other, but are held at a distance by forces. And so this makes us believe that each object does not share anything with other objects, particularly if you fixate on the object's form and appearance. This is an ILLUSION. It's an illusion composed of SYMBOLS, which you have interpreted incorrectly to be NOT symbolic, and instead see only the condensed form of the hologram, which makes you think that physical matter is entirely fixed and is showing you all of what exists.

This illusion, then, that matter is all separate and that there is no sharing going on, deceives you to believe this world is not a hologram, because you don't SEE the ways that the particles are joined together, or joined to the whole. You also don't see the ways that the whole is present in every part. You don't recognize, and your body can't show you, that this so-called reality is actually just a SYMBOLIC collection of temporary images, not a final end-state in its own right but a place that points beyond itself.

Just as your dreams at night are highly symbolic, so too the physical world is completely symbolic. There are established massive symbols in this world which represent all kinds of aspects of the separation idea. For example, outer space, empty and black and cold, symbolizes the unconscious mind, whereby instead of there being light everywhere, light is denied and reduced to tiny concentrations - which you call stars, which are symbols of the ego and the conscious mind as separated selves. If you go into it, there area many many symbols in this world representing the structure of the ego and its interpretation of the truth. The body is a symbol of the idea of separation from the whole environment, for example. It is not just a form and a finite thing in its own right, it REPRESENTS the idea in the mind that you are separate from the whole. It is a symbol with a hidden background.

Most people do not think they are inside a dream. They think that there are no symbols anywhere. Yet they might loosely say from time to that that something seems symbolic. When you have synchronicities and things seem to correlate and be "connected", that's you starting to realize and tap into the hologram, into the field of energy, which is diffused beyond just physical appearances. You're sensing and noticing that, uncannily, two seemingly separate symbols are actually related. ie you start to realize that there is something CONNECTING things together in a semi-meaningful way (synchronicity is "meaningful coincidence"), and coincidence means co-incidence, ie two things correlating, because they share a holographic background.

Dreams at night occur at what you could call a higher level of the hologram. As such, in a night dream, the seemingly concrete, fixed quality of matter is not as "dense" as in the physical universe. Therefore the reality of the dreams are much more highly and obviously symbolic, not just that the objects and events in them symbolize things you experienced in the daytime or whatever, but that they actually represent things. Dream interpretation isn't just an attempt to derive meaning from something that has no meaning, it is actually based on the fact that dreams are entirely composed of SYMBOLS, and those symbols are the structure of "dream reality" because dream reality is holographic, objects and events are representations and not things in their own right, and everything is joined together beyond just the appearance of its form.

Sometimes you will notice that you have dreams which are far more symbolic than others. Sometimes you'll have a dream where it seems effortless for objects to transform bizarrely into other objects. I remember having a dream where I walked out the front door and there was like a dog barking and something changed in my mind and the dog turned into a small child and started to talk to me and then something else happened and the child turned into an adult. This is possible because in these dreams, the "form" or the fixed condensed material quality of the reality experience, the holographic reality, is not as dense and not as concrete. Abstract weird stuff happens.

It's much easier at that level, where matter has not concentrated so tightly, for forms to SHIFT and change quite naturally and normally. Forms that shift and change, by the way, is the foundation of all "life forms" that GROW and change over time, demonstrating that their reality is not actually fully fixed. And symbols can more easily transition into other symbols at the deeper level of the abstract hologram. The very form of objects can convert into other objects, as symbols shift around.

I also had a dream once which explicitly explained to me the holographic nature of dreams. In this dream I stood on a small bridge. There was nothing else in the scene. Then around me in all directions were apparently images, but each of these images was a symbol. It wasn't that I took the appearance of the image at face value, but instead, I recognized that the images were symbolic and therefore they "led" to something that they REPRESENTED. I could literally FEEL and sense that these symbolic images were not only connected to "other realities", but that the way the image was showing up wasn't "the whole" of what existed. It was just one finite expression of what it represented.

So it was possible to actually sort of "go into" the image, into the symbol, which caused it to expand as I moved closer to the environment that the symbol represented. I was able to travel through holograms this way. And it was then possible to take some other part of the environment, and go into it in similar fashion, upon which it would also expand out or elaborate into an entire scene based on that chosen focus. This showed me that the dream reality is highly holographic and fluid and symbolic and that everything is connected together behind the appearance of the symbols.

The physical world is less obviously symbolic and holographic because it is more DENSE, and that means the shared energy field - the all - has been very strongly broken out, to create the ILLUSION that each part barely has any trace of a connection to any other part. The extreme of separation is so strong between parts that you would be forgiven for being convinced not only that each object is not a symbol at all, but that there is nothing "beyond" the form of each object, nothing is shared, nothing is connected, and there is no reality beyond appearances. This is the lowest "level" of the hologram, where the unfied field, the shared symbolic nature of this dream, has become so cemented and "physicalized" that it barely seems possible to you that it is a dream at all. So extreme is the degree of concentration and contraction o the energy here, that it's almost undetectable to sense or tell that everything is joined.

That is, perhaps, unless you are an "empath", which is someone whose mind is able to sense where the symbols lead, and can expand upon what lies beyond them as though tuning into the hologram's symbolism and travelling in Spirit to its source. This is also why empaths are able to actually tune into "real people" that show up on television recordings or in movies, because even though the recording was done in the past, there is STILL a symbolic holographic connection between that IMAGE and the actually thing it represents. The mind can go into that image and sense and explore things about what the image shows, navigating through the symbolic hologram.

This highly obscuring, difficult to discern, God-blocking, reality covering, immense illusory dream, which seems to have solidified into a consistent solid world, is precisely what you wanted! This is why you used a holographic dream to create a world of separation, an illusion, where the illusion IS that the world is NOT symbolic, it is NOT a dream, and it APPEARS to be solid and real with everything separate.

We've pushed the hologram to the limits of physical density, causing particles to remain very fixed-seeming in their arrangements, which has created the ILLUSION of a place of form where consistency is very very sustained over long period of time. Objects don't apparently change into other objects, and you as a limited mind do not SEEM to have hardly a trace of power to change objects into other objects, because they're being held in a physicalized state very strongly, unlike the conditions in a nighttime dream which is much more maleable. Unless you're Jesus ;-) Events mostly do not seem to be symbolic. Bodies seem to function based on non-holographic laws. And nothing seems to be connected to a greater whole.

Then you are left only with the appearance of the physical matter, you make up laws about it based on its behavior, and then you justify that your science is correct based on its illusion of consistency, and have moved into the "linear" perspective. But the truth is lateral, vertical, because if you move out of the physicalized EFFECT and back towards the abstract CAUSE, you become able to modify the physicalization of matter to take on a different form. And this would be considered miraculous.

This therefore shuts out the idea of GOD, which is a reality where everything is shared. This is because the world was made as a defense against God and as a way to OBSCURE the truth that God is omnipresent, that ALL of Him is fully present in all parts. In physical matter, this could not be more obscured as an illusion that the all is NOT in ANY part, and therefore that the all does not exist. That was the PURPOSE of the physical world. To hide God from awareness.

So just because you think this world is an objective, verbatim kind of reality, it's not. It's a holographic dream. And sometimes this holographic dream actually does shift and change in symbolic ways that defy all logic and scientific explanation. Quite literally, sometimes, people report cases where an entire building which did not exist the day before, suddenly materializes in a known location that simply was not there. Somehow, it simply shows up in the dream hologram because of some kind of shift in the energy focus.

Also quantum physics is starting to reveal how objects at a distance can share the same reality - that a particle of light can be in two places at once, and that changes to the particle in one location AUTOMATICALLY changes the particle in the other location with NO TIME DELAY. This is "physically" impossible, in terms of a fixed dense world of form and matter, but in terms of holographic dreams, it is TOTALLY NORMAL! In fact, that this isn't happening more often is very abnormal, and shows you the extent to which we have designed this "world" (which is nothing more than an illusory dream) to APPEAR to be very fixed and separated.

In higher, more symbolic night dreams, it's possible to do things to bend reality, modify objects, transcend physical laws, transform one thing into another etc... all quite naturally, because that's what's possible when you know that everything is ONE, and everything is joined together. Form, matter, objects and appearances, including bodies and worlds, are nothing more than SYMBOLS, and those symbols can easily shift and change "form".

Having mastery over this dream illusion gives you the ability and mastery to defy all of the so-called "physical" laws, which are merely laws based on visible concentrations of the one field, and to do things like walking on water, changing objects into other objects, disappearing sickness, reversing death, etc. The miracles Jesus demonstrated merely shows us that this dream is a holographic illusion which is completely malleable, its form is nothing more than a temporary expression of an idea, and everything can be modified.

This world isn't real. It is a dream. It's an illusion of a world. It's a temporary concentration of an idea of separation, an idea that "the all" does not exist, and the idea that nothing is shared. It takes the form of a hologram which goes from a state where everything is one, to a state where nothing is one, and every level in between. The all IS in every part, because every part is not the WHOLE, it's just a portion of the whole. You are not seeing the whole picture! And if you believe solely based on "appearances" that physical matter is all that there is, you are completely falling for the holographic illusion that nothing is connected.

Everything is connected. All is One. At at the very peak of the hologram, everything is shared everywhere. God is omnipresent. All of God is in all parts fully, and this completely defies all physical laws. The physical laws do not apply to MIRACLES because miracles are expressions of the abstract source of the hologram, from the field of mind and energy which transcends particles and concentrations of matter, and which all of the symbols POINT TO.

So yes, you're dreaming. You're inside a symbolic dream right now, right where you are, as you read this, with your holographic dream body. All is not what it seems. There is reality beyond this apparent world, and appearances are not reality. Thus there is no real world here. At most, this world is a SYMBOL, and not a finite concrete objective wholeness. And yet even as a symbol it is just a symbol in a dream, and this dream is not real, because DREAMS ARE NOT REAL. That is why there is no real world here, no real death, and no real sickness or suffering.

We are meant to wake up from the entire holographic projection and return to the abstract source of truth where ALL IS ONE.

"The world was made as an attack on God." "The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible." "The world you see is an illusion of a world, God did not create it" "The world is the picture of the crucifixion of God's Son". "The world was made as a place where God could enter not." "Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way." "The hell you made".

Okay so, apparently, we MADE some kind of a world, which was designed to attack God, is made of illusions, tries to shut God out, depicts the death of God's Son, and is totally opposite to heaven as a form of hell, where bodies sin and try to prove death can happen.

So now we're in a position where we can ask a really interesting question. What do we do about this? How is this resolved? What's the Holy Spirit's solution? How should we be regarding or viewing this hellish realm of sin and attack and death that we made? What is the way to return to Heaven? How does God deal with this situation?

There are many significant parts of the Course which talk about the fact of what this world IS. It's nature. As described above, an illusory hellish dream of sin and death. In some of the perspectives Jesus gives, he reminds us of how meaningless, pointless, non-existent, purposeless, substanceless this world is.

This seems to be a very important aspect of how we overcome it. A recognition of what it is and what it is not. No rose tinted glasses, no fluffy romantic language, no trying to make it out to BE Heaven or to BE God's creation. Just a simple recognition of its illusory nature, a picture of impossibilities and nonsenser. Just a straight forward honest appraisal of what we made and why it is not real. For example:

"(mind) ... it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substance-less, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was."

"There is no world" "The world sill spin into the nothingness from which it came." "Eternity will shine away the world." "A world forgiven cannot last."

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

"There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body’s eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the healed mind will put them all in one category; they are unreal."

"God's teachers choose to look on dreams a while." ... "The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are?" ... "Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers." ... "Yet they are not deceived by what they see." ... Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."

So in this perspective, Jesus teaches us that this world we made, is an illusion of a world, which we mistakenly think is REAL. And we're supposed to recognize it's an illusion/dream and not believe in it, we're supposed to recognize it holds nothing that we want, that it is unreal, that we are not of it, the body is not who we are, and really that none of it is happening. "All events are nowhere." It has no consequences, nothing that happens causes anything real, there is no real sin. "All changes wrought are substance-less." And this proceeds all the way to the world disappearing. "The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came."

There is no particular love-loss for the world in this view. It's just simple honest recognition of the fact that it is a world made from the denial of the Kingdom, dreamed in an attempt to attack God and His Son, it is illusory and has no real effects, no part of it is valuable or permanent, and it doesn't really exist.

There is, however, also an additional component to coming to recognize "awareness of dreaming of hell". To realize the world is not the real world. And this has to do with the Holy Spirit's reinterpretation of what we made.

The world we made, was made in total "false perception". The body was made to be fixed in a state of false perception, where it does not overlook/forgive ANYTHING. It is blinded by perception of forms. Its vision stops at the outside surface of nothing. It "sees" only what BLOCKS vision. "These eyes made not to see will never see."

The body's eyes can only report that "the world seems real" "it seems to exist" "it seems to be happening." They only see "sin is real" "bodies are sinful". We jumped all the way from perfect Heaven to total hell. We designed the world to be a total opposite to reality. "Earth, heaven's opposite in every way." But what does the Holy Spirit do with this hell that we made?

What he represents and makes possible, is an alternative way of looking at the hell we made. A re-interpretation of it. This doesn't really CHANGE IT, because it can't BE anything other than an illusion. You can't make it BE Heaven - God already accomplished Heaven's creation. But you can learn not to be deceived by it, so that when you see it, you don't BUY INTO IT. You don't MAKE it real to you.

"the Holy Spirit, the RE-INTERPRETER of what the ego made".

"This world is full of miracles. They stand in shining silence next to every dream of pain and suffering, of sin and guilt. They are the dream's ALTERNATIVE, the choice to be the dreamer, rather than deny the active role in making up the dream. They are the glad effects of taking BACK the consequence of sickness to its cause. The body is released, because the mind acknowledges "this is not DONE TO me, but I am doing this." And thus the mind is free to make another choice instead. Beginning here, salvation will proceed to change the course of every step in the descent to separation, until all the steps have been retraced, the ladder gone, and ALL the dreaming of the world undone."

His goal is to UNDO the dreaming of the world. To take back the cause of it. To stop the making of it. To cancel it, reverse it, dissolve it, erase it, disappear it. To STOP DREAMING. This is His aim and guarantee. But before this happens, something happens to how you experience the world you made. We're introduced to this idea that the WAY YOU SEE, perception, can be modified and repurposed, so that you gradually invest in the dream less, believe it's illusions less, are convinced it is a picture of real sin and death less, and so learn to overlook/forgive/forget it.

This means that initially, it seems as if the world is really hell. Unforgiven, it is a "real nightmare". The body is designed to fixate on the nightmare and make it seem real. But we have the ability to change our mind, which changes our beliefs, which change our perceptions. We can choose again and NOT believe in what the world is showing us, and to regard the body as DECEIVING us. It's still a picture of hell. It's still "the strange world you made." It still seems to run by ego laws of death and everything in it still is limited and flawed, per the laws of illusions/death. But if you don't BELIEVE IN IT, you don't take these appearances at face value. You are not deceived. You are not tempted.

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

"Be never fearful of temptation, then, but see it as it is; another chance to choose again, and let Christ's strength prevail in every circumstance and every place you raised an image of yourself before. For what appears to hide the Face of Christ is powerless before His Majesty, and disappears before His holy sight."

"Lead us not into Temptation" means "Do not let us deceive ourselves into believing that we can relate in peace to God or our brothers with ANYTHING external."

"And he will reinterpret ALL temptation as just another chance to bring him joy."

"I am the light of the world" "It is the perfect answer to all illusions, and therefore to all temptation. It brings all the images you have made about yourself to the truth, and helps you depart in peace, unburdened and certain of your purpose."

We're also told that God loves the world. Even though the world is an imaginary illusion of death, a picture of hell, somehow God still loves it so that He does NOT believe in it or mistake it for Reality. But let's be clear, that loving the world does not MAKE the world BE love. It doesn't MAKE it holy. It merely looks upon it WITH love and holiness, forgiving what is there, not believing in what it depicts. The picture of crucifixion turns into an empty MIRROR, in which you see YOUR reflection. In this, the world is meaningless in and of itself, so by taking away its meanings you reflect only Gods' meaning INTO it. This makes the world SEEM holy or heaven-like.

"The world you see cannot be the world God loves, and yet His Word assures us that He loves the world."

"What the world is, is but a fact. (it is a picture of hell) You cannot choose what this should be. But you can choose **how** you would see it."

"God offers the world salvation; your judgment would condemn it. God says there is no death; your judgment sees but death as the inevitable end of life. God's Word assures you that He loves the world; your judgment says it is unlovable. Who is right?"

What he's clearly saying here is that you have dreamed of hell, in an attempt to destroy God and His son. And Earth is still Heaven's opposite. But this hell only seems to have any reality while you believe it is real, while you are judging and deceiving. God does not believe in hell being real. He knows there is no real sin or death. So he looks UPON hell and does not make it real, does not see any proof of real sin in it, sees no evidence of real death happening, and so has no grounds for being anything other than loving. Laughing at it. Shining it away.

So now in the Holy Spirit's true perception, everything about the world is OVERLOOKED, ie not taken at face value. The world is regarded as a thin veil of nothingness hanging over the face of Christ. Substanceless, causeless, not doing anything, imaginary. An image of crucifixion still, but depicting nothing but a fantasy. An image of death and sin still, but depicting only an idle wish that sin and death can happen. It's not taken seriously. And so he does not see REAL sin in it. In this way, the picture of crucifixion is forgiven.

Here before your eyes is a vision of hell, a veil of death, which the body wants to report as real, but which the Spiritual Eye recognizes is entirely fictional and absurd. Not even worth paying attention to. But because the Holy Spirit does not see "real sin" in it, he does not project sin onto it, or judge it, or condemn it, or mistake it for reality. It is now a picture of death, interpreted as nothing, depicting fake sins, containing no real sin, and so it is forgiven. It is not seen as "full of sin". Nor is it sinless. It is a forgiven illusion, seen through and disregarded,.

And so instead it seems to symbolize innocence and holiness. If no attack or hate or judgement is laid UPON it, it's merely seen as a thin veil of illusions. It has lost its heaviness and darkness. It is now a very light picture of darkness. A thin picture of solidity. A loved picture of illusions of hatred. Because the world you made is always an illusion, always artificial, always not real, always false, always a depiction of impossibilities, and always nothing. Not taken seriously, it ends in laughter.

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone ***what more remains to keep a separated world in place?*** For place has gone as well, along with time. (end of spacetime.) Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate **it could not remain where separation is impossible.** Forgiveness proves it is impossible ***because it sees it not.*** And what you then will overlook will not be understandable to you, just as its presence once had been your certainty."

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

The illusion of forgiveness covers the evil world by not BELIEVING that it is real. By recognizing SIN does not exist. So this picture of sin is false. The perspective of the big picture reveals the world's illusion, and correctly perceives it as a deception. It REPLACES the world's meaninglessness. It SHINES AWAY the world because illusions recognized must disappear. A forgiven world is a world recognized as FALSE. A FALSE world, perceived WITH love, which overlooks and shines away the world. God erases the world with love. You cannot love it and keep it. A world forgiven cannot last.

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

"Until forgiveness is complete, the world does have a purpose. It becomes the home in which forgiveness is born, and where it grows and becomes stronger and more all-embracing. Here is it nourished, for here it is needed. A gentle Savior, born where sin was made and guilt seemed real."

"When not one thought of sin remains" appears to be a long-range goal indeed. But time stands still, and waits on the goal of God's teachers. Not one thought of sin will remain the instant any one of them accepts Atonement for himself."

"***The world will end*** when its thought system has been completely reversed. Until then, bits and pieces of its thinking will still seem sensible.The final lesson, which brings ***the ending of the world***, cannot be grasped by those not yet prepared *****to leave the world and go beyond its tiny reach.*****"

"The world will **end** in joy, because it is a place of sorrow. When joy has come, the purpose of the world has gone. The world will **end** in peace, because it is a place of war. When peace has come, what is the purpose of the world? The world will **end** in laughter, because it is a place of tears. Where there is laughter, who can longer weep? And only complete forgiveness brings all this to bless the world. **In blessing it departs**, for it will not end as it began. To turn hell into Heaven (symbolically) is the function of God's teachers, for what they teach are lessons in which Heaven is ***reflected*** (symbolic)."

To turn hell into heaven simply means, to learn to recognize that the world is not REALLY hell, it is not REALLY anything. It's claims are ignored. It's proof is thrown out. It's picture of death are laughed at. It's sins are not taken seriously. It's illusions do not deceive. The picture of crucifixion is SEEN WITH love, and a **reflection** of love and holiness is seen "in it". As if looking upon a picture of devastation and war in an extremely happy mood. What it claims to be is not what it is. You override it. And then the world disappears completely.

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

"Eternity will **shine away** the world."

"And now God's knowledge, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its kingdom. Gone is perception, false and true alike. Gone is forgiveness, for its task is done. And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God. God knows it is His Own, as it is his. And here They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant, and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause. For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, **no walls, no bodies**, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

"The world (Earth) stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as ***nothing more than just a fragile veil***, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last **for only what it is.** (an illusion of a sin/attack/death world.) And now ***it cannot fail to disappear***, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant ***is the world forgot***, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

I want to make an important point which I think many people overlook with what the Course is teaching.

There is something that you may not have realized about this world. It is not what you think it is.

Physical matter ITSELF, is an ILLUSION, of such profoundly convincing proportions, that you do not even suspect that there is something unnatural about it.

Its form and appearance are so deceiving, and so successful at convincing you it is "natural", that you don't even consider that there is something untrue about it. It is SO BLINDING that it is assumed to be "just the way it is", as if any universe would have objects like this.

This blindness about form has led many ACIM students to not even question physical form, as if it's just there and is real. Like it's a given, so vast and seemingly consistent that it seems to be outside of our minds and impossible to influence directly. And this then leads to a severely mistaken interpretation of the Course.

If physical form is natural, and it's not even up for question, then the only thing that seems changeable is "inside your mind", which will be interpreted to mean "inside your personal non-form self", separate from the world.

You will then start to interpret the course as meaning you should only change your mind "about" the world, because it seems to be the only part of "you" that CAN be modified easily.

It's as if, the world is a separate "thing", so big and so unchangeable by you, that you don't even begin to question its nature. The Course then becomes entirely about you accepting atonement "for yourself", you changing "your mind" ABOUT the world, you not changing the world at all, and you not having any miraculous power to do so.

What also results from this is a false sense of context, that your "perception" is kind of a personal thing, inside your mind, inside your body. Everything physically external to your body is considered to be something else.

Indeed there is barely any consideration for this entire universe being "inside your mind" in any way - that seems like FAR too big of a responsibility or a magnitude of identity FAR too big to be able to accept or relate to. We have become SO USED TO LITTLENESS, that we do not think big at all.

I want to make it clear just how BLINDING form is, and WHY it is so deceiving, lying, unnatural, false and unreal.

I also want to reframe this entire world as being inside the collective mind of the Sonship. This leads to a very important point, which is, that the appearance, manifestation, physicality and nature of "physical matter" is actually nothing more than a STATE OF MIND. Or to put it another way, it is PERCEPTION.

The Course literally says "This world IS perception." This does not mean perception OF the world, which is once removed. It means literally, the mind of the Son of God which is dreaming this universe, is having a false perception, which is showing up as a tree, a car, and a young child. These seeming forms are not really physical matter, they are IDEAS IN THE MIND. And all of these ideas are just thoughts. And thoughts are nothing more than PERCEPTIONS. So this seemingly physical universe is in fact the Son of God mis-perceiving, and the hallucinations He's having in his false perception are showing up as IMAGES which we think are physical objects.

There is a huge camp of people in the ACIM community who generally do not see or believe this. As described above, they think that this world is somehow real and natural and that we are only supposed to change our "little" minds about it, to see IT differently. Not realizing whatsoever that IT ITSELF is perception, INSIDE A MIND, a mind so vast and powerful that we don't even conceive of it as being who we really are or what we are capable of.

Now. How is it that form is blinding, or an illusion, and exactly HOW does form deceive you? How is it lying to you? What is it trying to DO? And what is its PURPOSE? Remember the Course tells us to ask, "what is it FOR"? What is form FOR?

Physical form is a device for massively obscuring the nature of God, by presenting a "picture of the crucifixion of God's Son" (ACIM terms), so that you see something completely UNNATURAL presenting itself as if it is "the nature" of existence, so that God's presence will be HIDDEN.

This entire world, this planet Earth, this universe and everything with it, IS A LIE. It is FALSE. It is unreal. And it does not exist. This is reflected in "there is no world". IT IS LITERALLY TRUE. So exactly how is physical matter lying or covering up God's nature?

In terms of how the ego thinks and how this world SUGGESTS things are true, it seems to us that physical objects cannot occupy the same space. It is also suggested that whatever is contained within one area of space, cannot be contained elsewhere. It seems there is only so much material (matter) to go around, and that in order to make something presence elsewhere it has to be *removed* from where it was, thus indicating a lack or limitation to "how much" there is of anything.

This is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to the nature of God. God is omnipresent. He is everywhere, fully, at all times. If you were to think of God as occupying "space" - as an analogy for the sake of explaining this - then ALL of God is in one location, AND, God is also fully in another location, at the same time, without any lack, any diminishing, or any limitation. All of God is in America, all of God is in Africa, all of God is in Europe, etc. This does not mean God has sectioned off 1/3rd of himself to be in the USA so that there is "some left" for the other places. He is fully 100% present in ALL of these locations simultaneously.

To the ego, this is absolutely impossible and absolute nonsense. In terms of physical matter it is impossible for some amount of substance to be fully located in more than one place. So physical matter inherently has this "belief system" built into it, of finite limitation, lack, difference, competition, murder, attacking (causing) without being affected, the opposite of abundance, absolutely no sharing, no unity, no stability, no sameness or equality, no constancy, nothing permanent, everything changing. Physical matter is the EMBODIMENT of the ego's thought system. THIS WHOLE UNIVERSE IS THE EGO THOUGHT SYSTEM!

Given that God's nature is to be everywhere fully, simultaneously, at all times, without lack, and completely defying all ego laws, when we are presented with an image of FORM, we are being presented with a picture of the OPPOSITE to God's nature. It is a massive lie. It is DELIBERATELY DESIGNED to obscure God's nature, to paint a picture of attack and crucifixion and death, to make it SEEM AS IF there is absolutely no sharing or abundance, that it is "natural" to lack or have limitations.

Even the way that one physical object seems to be separate from another, sharing nothing with it, unable to merge or be "one" with each other, different in their properties and which "physical laws" (ego laws) apply to them, influencing each other differently and unequally, is specifically INTENDED by the ego to LIE TO YOU, so that you will be convinced that it is normal and natural for things to be this way. It is NOT NORMAL OR NATURAL for objects to not share space, for there to be limitation and lack, or for there to be DIFFERENCES or different appearances.

So the fact is this. You are surrounded by a massive, very solid-seeming ILLUSION, which IS PART OF THE EGO, part of the ego thought system, and is inside of MIND, and is being thought by those who are separate from God, and is coming from a state of belief in sin and separation. Physical objects are SIN. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outward."

Whenever "events" seem to happen in this world, and something seems to go wrong, this is an IDEA playing out, an idea of sin made real. This is why the REVERSAL OF THE PHYSICAL STATE represents a supernatural MIRACLE. To rewind time, to undo the symptoms, to cancel the chain of illusory cause-effect, to modify the outcome of sinful events, is an expression of miracles. Physical form is the idea of sin made flesh, and to reverse that IDEA will make that flesh DISAPPEAR. It must disappear because it is an idea in the MIND. Physical forms are IN THE MIND. Change your mind and "the world" MUST CHANGE ITS FORM, or disappear entirely.

This presents an entirely radically different view of some of the Course principles, that somehow PHYSICALITY is actually INCLUDED IN changes that are made to mind. The body is not outside the mind, nor is this world. They are not solid or real. They are IDEAS OF SEPARATION. That means as mind changes, physical form must change as well. This is why the physical body can become a symbol of immortality, why all sickness must be reversed, why a broken body is PROOF that the MIND has not been healed, and why there is a VERY PHYSICALLY ORIENTED aspect to performing miracles.

Miracles, true miracles, are not restricted to the "scope" of your LITTLE MIND. Nor are they limited to the scope of what you THINK of as mind, separate from matter. Miracles apply to THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE, because it is inside the mind, and IT IS perception. Physical matter is misperception of God. Period. You can change how "you" seem to perceive it, to see God "in it" etc, but if you are still seeing physical matter according to ITS ILLUSORY LAWS, and still think of yourself as separate, then you are still not perceiving correctly.

Fact is, because physical forms are IN THE MIND and are thoughts/ideas, changing the mind HAS TO CHANGE THE FORM. So what that means is something very interesting.... there is a direct connection between "changing your perception" and changing PHYSICALLY. So if for example Jesus changes water into wine, he is not really changing water into wine, he is CHANGING HIS MIND and it's showing up as water changing into wine.

This means, we have to stop thinking of physical bodies and forms as "separate from mind". That's part of the ILLUSION that they are trying to convince us of, that they REALLY ARE SEPARATE, because forms "prove" that separation IS REAL. Believing forms are real is falling for the illusion they were intended to convince you of. Instead we need to think of physical matter as IDEAS or THOUGHTS IN THE MIND. And that means, we are not living in a physical world, we are living INSIDE A MIND, and as the Course says, "everything is an idea". That means, if you HAVE A DIFFERENT IDEA, it will materialize as an image of a form.

It also means if you change your ideas/thoughts, IT WILL show up as things changing in the world. And this testifies to the POWER OF THE MIND, which most of us are scared shitless about. We literally MUST change forms if we change our mind and form MUST ALWAYS REPRESENT our state of mind. There is no matter separate from mind. There is no matter separate from our ideas and thoughts or misperceptions. Whatever form is showing up, that testifies to what we think about God. So a change in perception is not without power - a change in perception LITERALLY MUST show up as a change in physical images, because we are LIVING INSIDE A MIND and everything is fluid and changeable. Form is not "solid and fixed" implying that mind is only that which is flexible. Form IS WITHIN the mind.

This is NOT a physical world. This "world" is a THOUGHT. It is an idea, in the mind. Inside a VAST mind. The mind of the Son of God, not just the mind of a little separate human. If we are to be miracle workers, it MUST MEAN that we demonstrate that this PHYSICAL WORLD IS A LIE, by showing HOW it is a lie, by changing it, in order to SHOW that it is a lie, so that people are educated experientially. The course literally tells us to do this, and that our demonstrations will exonerate our brothers from belief in sin.

When the Course also teaches, which it does, that we are supposed to demonstrate a PERFECTLY HEALTHY BODY, free of all sin and symptoms and signs of death, it tells us this because our physical body is an IDEA in our MIND, which we are presenting to our brother. If the body is broken, the MIND IS DREAMING OF A LIE. So that proves the mind is not healed.

So if we show sickness to a brother, to his physical eyes, we are actually presenting a THOUGHT OF DEATH AND ATTACK, which shows up in what we call "physical form", but is really an IDEA in the mind. So now our physical body HAS TO BE USED as a "medium" through which God's laws are demonstrated, and the mind is SHOWN to be healed, through the miraculous absence of all signs of mental illness.

You cannot have mental health without physical health, and you cannot have sickness without mental illness. "All sickness is mental illness." And that's simply because, the body is IN THE MIND, so whatever state of mind you have it WILL SHOW UP as the body. And when the mind is perfectly purified, the body will disappear entirely.

What this reveals is that in A Course in Miracles, which many people think is about the mind (inside the body), MUST INCLUDE the transformation of FORM, as a symbol of truth, to use form to demonstrate the truth, and to use form to show that form is a lie. And these demonstrations are what the Course refers to as MIRACLES. They DO incorporate changes of mind, because form IS IN THE MIND. The body is not separate from the mind, nor are physical objects, nor is the world.

And this is why our PROVING of God's truth and laws must take place IN THIS WORLD, using miracles which demonstrate SUPERNATURALLY (beyond the illusory nature of physical matter), that the truth is true. If one object is multiplied into two objects, with no lack or limitation, this is a miraculous demonstration of the fact that the EGO'S LIE, which is physical form, does not apply to the nature of God.

"That the body cannot heal the mind but the mind can heal the body proves that the mind must be stronger than the body. EVERY MIRACLE DEMONSTRATES THIS." Miracles can ONLY demonstrate this by showing that the mind can HEAL the body, mind is more powerful than matter, mind is free of the ego's laws of physics, and therefore the mind has SUPERNATURAL POWER over physicality. This is a central, core teaching of A Course in Miracles.

"What you use the body for it will become to you." tells us that if you use the body with love, the body should BECOME A PICTURE OF LOVE. If it is being used for attack, IT WILL become a picture of sickness, proving the mind is not healed. The body is literally A REFLECTION OF YOUR MENTAL STATE. Because it is being projected by your mind. Just as this whole universe is being projected by the mind of the Sonship. And everything which seems physical IS NOT, it is in the mind. And so if you change your mind, THE WORLD MUST CHANGE.

We are not inside a physical world. The physical world is a lie inside our mind. Nothing more than an idea or thought, or a false perception. It is a visualization of mental illness. And because it is IN the mind, within the scope of the mind's influence, it can EASILY BE CHANGED by someone who is purified in their awareness of love's power.

So ACIM is not just about hey, I'm going to heal my mind in isolation, regardless of what other people do, in private, and not have ANY EFFECT on others or on the world. There are entire sections in the course talking about how we are afraid of the FACT that thoughts produce effects. "All thought produces form at some level." Therefore, all form is a thought, therefore it must be within the mind, therefore it must be changeable if the mind changes.

Form is the "form of error". Error means the unforgiving idea of sin and death considered to be real. All physical form is ERROR. It is an IDEA of attack, separation, difference and UNNATURAL conditions.

There is a great section in the course talking about how the body's physical eyes were designed to look upon FORM (of error) and make it real, BLINDING YOU to true vision or the ability to REALLY SEE or recognize the ILLUSION that matter is.

”The body's eyes see only form. 4 They cannot see beyond what they were made to see. 5 And they were made to look on error and not see past it. 6 Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see only illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside form of nothing. 7 To this distorted form of vision the outside of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true. 8 Yet how can sight that stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, see truly?"

In this section we are told how the ego made form (matter) as errors, vs mistakes, and made the body with physical eyes, to be BLIND YOU, NOT to see. Physical sight is an ILLUSION, pretending to "see" when in fact it is like burying your head in the sand.

From the perspective of the whole of existence, in which you can see everything at once, the body was made to ISOLATE YOUR VISION, to trap you in an illusion, like going inside a closed box, in which you are only allowed to see the inside of the box. It's like being forced to look at a tv screen forever and ever, never allowed to look away or look at anything else. It gives you pre-presecribed images to look at, and to ONLY look at them in a certain way, so that you will NOT SEE ANYTHING REAL.

Physical matter, and sight of it with body eyes, was INTENDED by the ego to BLIND YOU, so that you would never question that physical forms are illusions, or can be changed, or have anything to do with mind, or that you put them there through dreaming for the sole purpose of LYING about the nature of God.

You cannot and should not believe your eyes, or any body senses. They are designed to FAIL TO SEE, to FAIL TO SENSE, and to NOT BE AWARE of what is real. Body sensory organs are LIES, pretending to be able to be "aware of" something when in fact these sensations BLIND YOU to true awareness. This is why pain and pleasure both make the body real. Sight of form, belief in form, and assumption that physicality is natural, is part of the ego thought system.

Demonstrations that it is false and limited is a miracle, revealing the TRUE NATURE OF GOD. If miracles could not demonstrate that the ego's laws, its world, physicality, matter, are NOT REAL OR TRUE, and are not governed by the laws that the ego made up, we would have NO WAY to prove that God's laws are true, there could be NO HEALING, and the ego could not be undone. As Jesus says, the mere fact that illusions CAN BE CHANGED by miracles proves their impermanence.

So open your mind. This world is not what you think it is. It is a huge lie. You are not little, isolated to a body. Nor do you have a private awakening. Your mind is not stuck in your body. You are bigger than this universe, and more powerful than anything this world can demonstrate. This world IS perception and it must be corrected. That's how it turns into a happy dream, not just a happy interpretation of hell, but the TRANSLATION of hell into Heaven, initially through the transformation of matter towards symbols of Heaven, and then its disappearance.

"Heaven and Earth are opposite in EVERY WAY." And that could not be more true - physical matter and its "nature" are SO OPPOSITE to God's nature, they have nothing in common. Matter is a lie. Objects are fiction. Bodies are illusions. Worlds and planets and stars are fake. There is no separation, no difference, no appearance and no forms. There is only God's nature governing the TRUE LAWS of existence, which we are to demonstrate through miracles HERE in this illusion so that we can teach others that this world is NOT NATURAL, and that the truth is therefore SUPER NATURAL.

The world, meaning the larger physical universe and everything in it, is fiction. It's a dream, coming from a dreaming mind. The mind is dreaming of states of being in which there is degradation, decay, change, entropy, uncertainty and death. This shows up as what we call the universe. It's an image, an illusion, picturing what God's creation (His Son) would be like if it were NOT what it is like. It's the idea of the opposite of Heaven (reality), and is hell (illusion).

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

"He will remain with you to lead you from the hell you made to God."

As a dream, it's not real. It's actually entirely nothing. Nothing whatsoever. It's merely an illusion of something. It's not there. At most, it is completely neutral, in that it causes nothing and has no effect on anything real. It is nothing but a thin "veil" of illusions, covering up reality. It has no mind, no will, no self, no soul, no power, no causality, no identity. It is not life and nothing in it lives forever. It has no real properties at all. Made of darkness, it is the illusion of the absence of light. When light comes, it disappears.

"Eternity will shine away the world."

"The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came."

"It is at best an illusion of life, at worst, death."

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

You are the dreamer of the dream. The cause of the manifestation of the illusory universe. It is in your mind and coming from you. You put into place everything that happens and everything the world contains. This is "the world you made".

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways"

"For, if you think the world you made has power to make you what it wills, you ARE confusing Son and Father; effect and Source."

"My self is ruler of the universe."

"You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts."

"Both heaven and earth are in your mind."

Now. You as a dreamer, the cause of the dream world, have within your power the ability to choose whether to believe God's true reality is the one reality, or whether to put belief into the world you made. The only way to believe that the world you made has any truth or reality to it at all, is to believe God's world is lacking in truth and reality. This requires you to confuse what is really true, with what is false.

The false world you made (which includes planet Earth), by believing it exists at all, seems to take on properties of its own, as if it exists, as if it causes, as if it is happening, as if time and space actually occur. Through a reversal of cause and effect, believing that the effect of you is the cause of you, that your dream world is dreaming you, this forces your mind to "perceive" itself as being "caused by" the universe. This level confusion takes you out from "above" (or prior to) the world and places you seemingly "within it" (below it).

This is the foundation for incarnation into or the making of a body, which pictures you as if you have been "made by" the world, at the effect of it, and anchored in space and time like a prisoner. The body depicts the idea that the world is causing you, rather than that you cause the world. And now you seem to perceive in, through, and with the body.

Without this reversal of causality, there is no body. This also means everything the body "perceives" is false, perceived in a false way, confusing a false world with truth, and therefore perceiving it as if it is really there. This is what the senses were made to report (lies). They were made to look upon illusions of forms ("the forms of error"), and NOT see past them, taking them to be real objects and things.

"It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substance-less, and all events are nowhere."

"Even in its most spiritualized form perception involves the body."

"Everything the body's eyes can see is a mistake, an error in perception"

"Perception is a witness but to this, and never to reality."

"Its eyes perceive it not; its senses remain quite unaware of it"

"The body's eyes will NEVER look on it." (reality)

"The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There IS no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream, in which it acts as if it were a person, to be seen and be believed."

The perceptual function of the body, through the body's eyes and senses, reports illusions to the mind as if to suggest these illusions are really there to perceive. The body relays images of a *false world* to the mind. These are neutral images with no real meaning. Snapshots of a fake world. Pictures of nothingness seeming to be something. It is then entirely up to the mind to determine what to make of these messages.

The body always and only perceives what is false. It can ONLY look upon false things. Everything it sees MUST be false (the world is false). It is literally incapable of perceiving reality or truth of any kind. It's vision is locked into hell, for as long as it seems to exist. It cannot see light, reality, heaven, or God. It was designed not to AND it never will, regardless of your state of mind. The body sees only sin. The world is made of the idea of sin and death. Every form, object, body, planet, galaxy, is made of the idea of separation, sin and death, being a dream of death. Physical objects are sin - illusions of separations seeming to happen.

"The world of bodies is the world of sin."

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

"These eyes made not to see, will never see."

"endless list of forms of nothingness that you endow with magical powers."

"For sin arose from it, out of nothingness"

"Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see only illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside form of nothing. To this distorted form of vision the outside of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true. Yet how can sight that stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, see truly? It is held back by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but form will be perceived."

So there's the body, showing you pictures of sin and hell, constantly. That's all it can do. Anything it "sees" is a result of vision being blocked by illusions, unable to overlook (forgive) anything. Unable to see through the block of solid physical sin (matter). Repulsed by it. Imprisoned by it.

The mind however, is the only thing that sees. "only mind can see". The mind "looks upon" the images of hell that the body relays to it through the senses. The mind is the location of the belief system. The mind is where any kind of distortion of reality is happening, and it's where you assign meaning or value or "reality" to illusions. Depending on what the mind accepts as true and real, determines how it will interpret the images of a fake world. It will either believe they are real, or will believe they are not real. But so long as the body persists, it WILL continue seeing the false world.

When the mind wants to believe (value) illusory things as real, it misinterprets what the body is showing it. It is confused. It confuses unreal things for real things. The mind, therefore, has a false perception ABOUT, the images being sent to it by the body's eyes. Since the body is showing you images of the FALSE WORLD, and the mind is believing these illusions are real, the mind is now having "false perceptions about" a FALSE world. The body only shows the mind images of "hell is real". If the mind agrees with the images and is convinced these images are indeed real hell, the mind too has false perception.

Believing the body's eyes is false perception. The body is always seeing falsely, but the mind can choose whether to be confused about what it's being shown (taking it as real), or to recognize that these images are false. Images of a false world, a fake world, an untrue world, a world that is not real, or happening, a world where the sin it is made of is recognized as not real. Not true. The mind decides what meaning to give to what the body is seeing.

"Nothing I see means anything."

"I have given what I see all the meaning it has for me"

"Therefore ... will to change your mind ABOUT the world. Perception is a RESULT, and not a cause."

Note that just because you change your mind ABOUT what the body is showing you, DOES NOT MEAN that the world is inherently real or true. It does not mean the world is REAL behind your misperceptions of it. It does not mean the world is suddenly the Kingdom of God if you would just stop projecting stuff onto it. The world is NOT REAL, IN ADDITION TO, your false perceptions "about it". You have false peceptions ABOUT a false world, which makes that false world SEEM like a real world. Therefore believing the world (which is an illusion of a world) is real, or created by God, IS FALSE PERCEPTION.

A mind that believes the world is real, is having false perception. This is a false perception about a false world. The world is false, because you invented it to oppose God's truth. It is the OPPOSITE of truth. Perceiving a false world falsely, you regard it as a true world or a real world, you take it seriously, you think you live in it, and that you are at the effect of it. A true (corrected, healed) perception of a false world, reveals to you that the world IS in fact false. This is *recognition*. It is a recognition and a correct identification that this world IS in fact illusory, false, unreal, untrue, not happening, not real sin, not causing anything, not existing.

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

"Illusions recognized must disappear."

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

"Enlightenment is but a recognition"

Just prior to total awakening from the dream, having sorted out what is really true and really false, having come to recognize illusions as illusions, not being confused about what is real, the mind is very much healed and still uses the body temporarily as a teaching device. It is used by the Holy Spirit to communicate healing and to symbolize immortality. This is the state of being "a teacher of God."

A teacher of God is still in the world, still dreaming, still causing the body as a result of slight cause-effect reversal, but almost awake ("those who perceive still need healing." The teacher of God still looks using the body's eyes, upon a fake world, where nothing is real. And it still remains in a world that continues to function according to ego laws, space and time, change and death, war and conflict, sickness and suffering. The world is still a picture of crucifixion. But the development of true perception is the development of the "spiritual eye" which overlooks these illusions and does not believe them. It looks PAST them, through them, beyond them, to the truth of reality, ignoring the illusory world and not believing in it.

"To forgive is to overlook."

"Oneness and sickness cannot coexist. God's teachers choose to look on dreams a while. It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences. The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are?"

"Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. ***They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see.*** They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is ***no more real*** than to regard it as healthy and beautiful."

In this state, the mind is becoming aware it is making the world. It is the dreamer of the dream. It is causing the world. It has power over it. Miracle mindedness allows for the breaking of all laws. There is nothing you cannot do. The mind here is still perceiving, and the body is still showing it pictures of hell (bodies sick and damaged, people unhappy, death and decay etc), but having *recognized* the truth (God's) it now sees things in their proper perspective.

It's a recognition that a false world IS false, illusions ARE illusions, sickness is NOT REAL, and everything you're seeing in the dream IS nothing but a dream. If you see sick bodies, you do not BELIEVE they are really sick, even though they still APPEAR as illusions of sickness you can perceive. The body can still show you broken legs. You just RECOGNIZE that they are not REALLY broken legs. They are false images, and you are not deceived by it.

The distinction is simple. Failing to recognize that a false illusory world is exactly that, confuses the mind and makes the world seem real. Recognizing it for what it is, overlooking it, not buying into it, or believing in it, reveals its FALSE nature, BECAUSE you know what is true. What you used to believe was true, real, valuable, causing you, now clearly appears to be interpreted as doing nothing, having no reality, causing nothing and producing no real effects. The illusory world is recognized as not *really* sinning. It's sin is fake. It's sicknesses are not true of anyone. And death can be abolished at will.

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem."

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

"Miracles reawaken the awareness that the spirit, not the body, is the altar of truth."

"You are the dreamer of the world of dreams. No other cause it has, nor ever will. Nothing more fearful than an idle dream has terrified God's Son, and made him think that he has lost his innocence, denied his Father, and made war upon himself."

In this state of mind the world becomes "the forgiven world." It is forgiven because you are seeing truly. True perception is ACCURATE perception. To accurately see the world you made reveals its "true nature" or "the reality of it". The reality of the world is that it is NOT real. "The real world" is Heaven. Seeing a false world truly, recognizes this world is nothing. False things are seen, but not believed.

Realize that this is a state of continuing to perceive the world and all its ills. It cannot help but be a dream of death. Being in true perception does not in any way change the laws of physics, unless you perform a miracle. The world still spins regardless of how you look at it. Blood falls to the ground regardless of how you look at it. How you look at it is NOT a cause, it is a RESULT. Perception does not cause anything. Perception is *feedback*. It shows you what YOU MADE. It shows you the dream that you're causing.

So you are still seeing the hell you made through the body's eyes, BUT you are no longer believing it is real or confusing it for reality. False perception is a failure to *recognize* an illusion when you see one, and the world is made of illusions. And illusions are not "only" your perceptions "about" the world. The world and the body are both illusions in their own right. You will still look upon them or with them but without the confusion that they are reality.

"The body is a dream."

"The body is clearly a device for separation and therefore does not exist."

"God did not create the body."

"The world you see is an illusion".

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do. For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt. While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt."

It's important to realize then that when your mind is almost 100% healed, you will still see a world of death. You will still see bodies being sick. You will still see (illusions of) war and suffering. The body keeps showing it to you per the ego's laws of physics. Just because you see this stuff, it DOES NOT MEAN that you are sick or believing in sickness. Just because you see someone suffering, it does not mean you are making them suffer. Just because you see your neighbor with a broken leg, it does not mean you are believing in broken legs. The key is whether you BELIEVE IT IS REAL. Whether you confuse it for truth. NOT "whether or not I see it."

Having truer perception DOES NOT MEAN "I will no longer see bad stuff." It does not mean "I will not be able to see sickness, otherwise it means I am still sick." It does not mean you cease being able to perceive death. It ONLY means you REINTERPRET what you see. You change what it MEANS to you. You change how you evaluate or judge it. You change whether you BELIEVE it is true or false, real or unreal. That has nothing to do with "whether I see it" UNTIL you attain 100% Christ Vision and the world disappears.

"The Holy Spirit is the great re-interpreter of the world."

You will continue to see this world until you ascend to Heaven. That's a fact. You being near enlightened will not change the way that the sun rises or the fact that oceans still are polluted or that death seems to happen. What changes is who you see it WITH and whether or not you *recognize* it for what it actually is. You either recognize a broken body is an illusion of a fictional broken body, pretending to be sick but being actually nothing but a fake image which you can easily change, OR you fail to recognize it and take it to be real, seeing a "real need", regarding it as "sin really happened", taking it seriously and reacting with fear. If you make the sickness real to you by believing in it, you are failing to recognize illusions and are now in need of healing yourself.

True perception, aligned with the Holy Spirit, aka Christ Vision, aka Spiritual Eye, is a clear and direct and un-distorting accurate way of seeing, which recognizes TWO things. Not just what is true, but also what is false. You must learn to recognize the false stuff AS false, and you do that by learning what is really true. In light of what is true, in the big picture, discerning, clearly recognizing, illusions are recognized as false and reality is recognized as true. BOTH occur simultaneously. You don't get to ONLY see "the truth" or "Reality" UNTIL you ascend to Heaven. Until then, you see both.

The false is seen for a while, but as false. The truth is also seen, becoming increasingly obvious as true. There are two perceptions happening at once. Body eyes and spiritual eyes. What is true (Heaven) becomes able to be seen BEYOND the thin veil of the false illusory world. The world becomes thin. Transparent. Illusions are overlooked. Bodies are not believed in. Fake causes are laughed at. Miracles demonstrate you are under no laws but God's, and break all the illusory laws of this world, including space, time, gravity, atomic forces, size, weight, distance, etc. These are all fiction.

The world seems to become forgiven, in that you no longer ADD attack to what it is. The world, when seen with forgiving eyes, isn't a REAL world, but is a NOT BELIEVED world. NOT believing that the world is real, or sinning, or attacking, or guilty, or anything at all, can make the illusory world seem lovely. It can seem lovelier than a world onto which you overlaid your projections of sinful belief. BUT, it is not lovely due to being real. It is lovely because it has no sin projected onto it. It becomes seemingly "innocent", BUT IT IS NOT REAL INNOCENCE. It becomes seemingly "holy", BUT IT IS NOT HOLINESS. It is NOTHING. It is seen merely as a thin veil, a picture of illusions of attack, which isn't really attack, and so sparkles with light as if clean and new and free from accusation. BUT IT IS STILL UNREAL. A forgive, yet STILL STRANGE world made of illusions.

"To see a sinless body is impossible. For holiness is positive, and the body is merely neutral. It is not sinful, but neither is it sinless. As nothing, which it is, the body cannot meaningfully be invested with attributes of Christ OR of the ego."

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not."

Then the veil parts. Christ is seen. The world is forgotten. The illusory world DISAPPEARS. The body vanishes. Death is snuffed out. There is no world. No perception. The mind awakens in Heaven's reality and continues Creating with God, where it left off, as if nothing ever happened. Because it was just a dream. And now it is gone. And everything made of dreams has disappeared. Now you are Home. Now you are awake in God.

"What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substance-less, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was."

"Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists."

This is a MAJOR axis in the course, transitioning from false perception to true perception. Learning to overlook the world of bodies and see beyond it to the light of the real world, so that you are ready to move on to Heaven. It is VERY CLEAR that the physical world of bodies is ONLY SEEN through the body's eyes, and learning to OVERLOOK it and not believe any of it is forgiveness.

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant."

"Sin is a block, set like a heavy gate, locked and without a key, across the road to peace. No-one who looks on it without the help of reason, would try to pass it. The body's eyes behold it as solid granite, so thick it would be madness to attempt to pass it. Yet reason sees through it easily, BECAUSE it is an error. The form it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from reason's eyes."

"ONLY the form of error attracts the ego. Meaning it does not recognize, and does not know if it is there or not. Everything that the body's eyes can see is a mistake, an error in perception, a distorted fragment of the whole, without the meaning that the whole would give. And yet mistakes, regardless of their form, can be corrected. Sin is but error in a special form the ego venerates. It would preserve all errors, and make them sins. For here is its own stability, its heavy anchor in the shifting world it made; the rock on which its church is built, and where its worshippers are bound to bodies, and believe the body's freedom is their own."

"If you but recognized how little stands between you and your awareness of your union! Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous, solid body, immovable as is a mountain. Yet, within you, there is a force which no illusions can resist. This body only seems to be immovable. This force is irresistible in truth. What, then, must happen when they come together? Can the illusion of immovability be long defended for what is quietly passed through and gone beyond?"

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

"It is not Will for Life, but wish for death, that is the motivation for this world. Its ONLY purpose is TO PROVE GUILT REAL."

"The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not. And what you then will overlook will not be understandable to you, just as its presence once had been your certainty."

"The body's eyes will NEVER look on it. Yet they will SEE what it dictates. The body will remain guilt's messenger, and will act as it directs, as long as YOU believe that guilt is real. For the REALITY of guilt is the illusion which seems to make it heavy and opaque, impenetrable, and a REAL foundation for the ego's thought system. Its thinness and transparency are not apparent, until you see the light BEHIND it. And then you see it as a fragile veil, before the light."

"This world you see (with the body's eyes) MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision (christ vision). YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS. For each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER."

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

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

"The purpose of these exercises (workbook intro) is to train the mind to a different perception of everything in the world. The workbook is divided into two sections, the first dealing with the undoing of what you see now, and the second with the restoration of sight."

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

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

"Corrective learning always begins with awakening the spiritual eye, and turning away from belief in physical sight. The reason this entails fear is because man is afraid of what his spiritual eye will see, which was why he closed it in the first place. We said before that the spiritual eye cannot see error, and is capable only of looking beyond it to the defense of Atonement. There is no doubt that the spiritual eye does produce extreme discomfort by what it sees. The thing that man forgets is that the discomfort is not the final outcome of its perception. When the spiritual eye is permitted to look upon the defilement of the altar, it also looks immediately toward Atonement. Nothing which the spiritual eye perceives can induce fear. Everything that results from accurate spiritual awareness merely is channelized toward correction. Discomfort is aroused only to bring the need to correct forcibly into awareness.

What the physical eye sees is not corrective, nor can it be corrected by any device which can be physically seen. As long as a man believes in what his physical sight tells him, all his corrective behavior will be misdirected. The reason why the real vision is obscured is because man cannot endure to see his own defiled altar. But since the altar has BEEN defiled, this fact becomes doubly dangerous unless it IS perceived. This perception is totally not-threatening because of the Atonement. The fear of healing arises in the end from an unwillingness to accept the unequivocal fact that healing is necessary. The fear arises because of the necessary willingness to look at what man has done to himself."

"Pain thresholds can be high, but they are not limitless. Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point. This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight. The alternating investment in the two types or levels of perception is usually experienced as conflict for a long time, and can become very acute."

"But the outcome is as certain as God. The spiritual eye literally CANNOT SEE error, and merely looks for Atonement. All the solutions which the physical eyes seek, dissolve in its sight. The spiritual eye, which looks within, recognizes immediately that the altar has been defiled, and needs to be repaired and protected."

"The REAL beauty of the Temple cannot be seen with the physical eye. The spiritual eye, on the other hand, cannot see the building at all, but it perceives the altar within with perfect clarity. This is because the spiritual eye has perfect vision."

"Vision adapts to wish, for sight is always secondary to desire. And if you see the body, you have chosen judgment, and not vision. For vision, like relationships, has no order. You either SEE, or not."

"By focusing upon the "good" in him, the body grows decreasingly persistent in your sight, and will at length be seen as little more than just a shadow circling round the "good".

"The concept of the self stands like a shield, a silent barricade before the truth, and hides it from your sight. All things you see are images because you look on them as through a barrier which dims your sight and warps your vision, so that you behold nothing with clarity. The light is kept from everything you see. At most, you glimpse a shadow of what lies beyond. At least you merely look on darkness, and perceive the terrified imaginings that come from guilty thoughts and concepts born of fear. And what you see is hell, for fear IS hell. All that is given you is for release; the sight, the vision and the inner Guide all lead you out of hell with those you love beside you, and the universe with them."

"And this he learns when first he looks upon ONE brother as he looks upon himself, and sees the mirror of himself in him. Thus is the concept of himself laid by, for nothing stands between his sight and what he looks upon, to judge what he beholds. And in this single vision does he see the Face of Christ, and understands he looks on everyone as he beholds this One. For there is light where darkness was before, and now the veil is lifted from his sight.

The veil across the Face of Christ, the fear of God and of salvation, and the love of guilt and death, - they all are different names for just one error; that there is a space between you and your brother, kept apart by an illusion of yourself which holds him off from you, and you away from him. The sword of judgment is the weapon which you give to the illusion of yourself, that it may fight to keep the space that holds your brother off unoccupied by love. Yet while you hold this sword, you must perceive the body as yourself, for you are bound to separation from the sight of him who holds the mirror to another view of what he is, and thus what YOU must be."

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

"If you send forth ONLY the messengers the Holy Spirit gave you, WANTING no messages but theirs, you will see fear no more. The world will be transformed before your sight, cleansed of all guilt, and softly brushed with beauty. The world contains no fear that you laid not upon it. And none you cannot ask love's messengers to REMOVE from it, and see it still. The Holy Spirit has given you HIS messengers, to send each other, and return to each with what love sees. They have been given to REPLACE the hungry dogs of fear you sent instead. And they go forth to signify the END of fear."

"My holy vision sees all things as pure" - "And while we still remain outside the gate of Heaven, let us look on all we see through holy vision and the eyes of Christ. Let all appearances seem pure to us, that we may pass them by in innocence, and walk together to our Father's house as brothers and the holy Sons of God."

"Be willing, then, to see your brother sinless, that Christ may rise before your vision and give you joy. And place no value on your brother's body, which held him to illusions of what he is."

"Vision is freely given to those who ask to see. Your brother's sinlessness is given you in shining light, to look on with the Holy Spirit's vision, and to rejoice in, along with Him."

"There is no problem, no event or situation, no perplexity, that vision will not solve. All is redeemed, when looked upon with vision. For this is not YOUR sight, and brings with it the laws beloved of Him Whose sight it IS. Everything looked upon with vision falls gently into place, according to the laws brought to it by His calm and certain sight. The end, for everything He looks upon, is always sure. For it will meet His purpose, seen in unadjusted form, and suited perfectly to meet it. Destructiveness becomes benign, and sin is turned to blessing under His gentle gaze.

What can the body's eyes perceive, with power to CORRECT? Its eyes ADJUST to sin, unable to overlook it in any form, and seeing it everywhere, in everything. Look through its eyes, and everything will stand condemned before you. All that could save you, you will never see. Your holy relationship, the source of your salvation, will be deprived of meaning, and its most holy purpose bereft of means for its accomplishment. Judgment is but a toy, a whim, the senseless means to play the idle game of death in your imagination. But vision sets all things right, bringing them gently within the kindly sway of Heaven's laws."

"The barren sands, the darkness, and the lifelessness are seen only through the body's eyes. ITS vision IS distorted, and the messages IT transmits to you, who MADE it to limit your awareness, ARE little and limited, so fragmented that they are meaningless. From the world of bodies, MADE by insanity, insane messages seem to be returned to the mind which made it. And these messages bear witness to this world, pronouncing it as true. For YOU sent forth these messengers, to bring this BACK to you."

"Anger but screeches, "Guilt is real!" Reality is blotted out as this insane belief is taken as replacement for God's Word. The body's eyes now "see"; its ears alone can "hear." Its little space and tiny breath become the measure of reality. And truth becomes diminutive and meaningless."

"Reason would tell you that the world you see through eyes that are not yours, MUST make no sense to you. To whom would vision such as this send back its messages? Surely not you, whose sight is wholly independent of the eyes which look upon the world. If this is not your vision, what can it show to you? The brain can not interpret what YOUR vision sees. This you would understand. The brain interprets to the body, of which it is a part. But what it says, YOU cannot understand.

Yet you have listened to it. And long and hard you tried to understand its messages. You did not realize it is impossible to understand what fails entirely to reach you. You have received no messages at all you understood. For you have listened to what can never communicate at all. Think, then, what happened. Denying what you are, and firm in faith that you are something else, this something else, which you have made to be yourself, BECAME your sight. Yet it must be the SOMETHING ELSE which sees, and, as NOT you, explains its sight to you.

YOUR vision would, of course, render this quite unnecessary. But, if your eyes are closed, and you have called upon this thing to lead you, asking it to explain to you the world it sees, you have no reason not to listen, nor to suspect that what it tells you is not true. Reason would tell you that it can't be true, BECAUSE you do not understand it. God has no secrets. He does not lead you through a world of misery, waiting to tell you, at the journey's end, why He did this to you. What could be secret from His Will? Yet you believe that YOU have secrets. What could your secrets be except ANOTHER will, that is your own, APART from His? "

"Your sight was given you, along with everything that you can understand. You will perceive no difficulty in understanding what this vision tells you. For everyone sees only what he thinks he IS. And what your sight will show you, you will understand BECAUSE it is the truth. Only your vision can convey to you what YOU can see. It reaches you directly, without a need to be interpreted to you. What needs interpretation MUST be alien. Nor will it ever be made understandable, by an interpreter you cannot understand. Of all the messages you have received and failed to understand, this course alone is OPEN to your understanding, and CAN be understood."

"Reason will tell you that they must have seen each other through a vision not of the body, and communicated in a language the body does not speak"

"My condemnation keeps my vision dark, and through my sightless eyes I cannot see the vision of my glory."

"The love of God, for a little while, must still be expressed through one body to another. That is because the real vision is still so dim."

"Miracles are seen in light" "It is important to remember that miracles and vision necessarily go together. This needs repeating and frequent repeating. It is a central idea in your new thought system and the perception which it produces. The miracle is always there. Its presence is not caused by your vision; its absence is not the result of your failure to see. It is only your awareness of miracles that is affected. You will see it in the light; you will not see it in the dark."

"Only be quiet. 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 the extent to which you value guilt, to that extent will you perceive a world in which attack is justified. To the extent to which you recognize that guilt is meaningless, to that extent you will perceive attack cannot BE justified. This is in strict accord with vision's FUNDAMENTAL law: You see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you WANT it there. Perception HAS no other law than this."

"But on His Vision sin can NOT encroach, for sin HAS BEEN corrected by His sight."

"What is the resurrection?" "Here the curriculum ends. From here on, no directions are needed. Vision is wholly corrected and all mistakes undone."

"Now there are no distinctions. Differences have disappeared and Love looks on Itself. What further sight is needed? What remains that vision could accomplish? We have seen the face of Christ, His sinlessness, His Love behind all forms, beyond all purposes."

"These things await us all, but we are not prepared as yet to welcome them with joy. As long as any mind remains possessed of evil dreams, the thought of hell is real. God's teachers have the goal of wakening the minds of those asleep, and seeing there the vision of Christ's face to take the place of what they dream. The thought of murder is replaced with blessing."

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do. For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt. While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt."

"These are among the many magical beliefs that come from the conviction you are a body, and the body's eyes can see. You also believe the body's brain can think. If you but understood the nature of thought, you could but laugh at this insane idea." " Yet this is no more foolish than to believe the body's eyes can see; the brain can know."

"It is your weakness that sees through the body's eyes, peering about in darkness to behold the likeness of itself; the small, the weak, the sickly and the dying, those in need, the helpless and afraid, the sad, the poor, the starving and the joyless. These are seen through eyes which cannot see and cannot bless. Strength overlooks these things by seeing past appearances. It keeps its steady gaze upon the light that lies beyond them. It unites with light, of which it is a part. It sees itself. It brings the light in which your Self appears. In darkness you perceive a self that is not there."

"The body's eyes are closed, and as you think of him who grieved you, let your mind be shown the light in him beyond your grievances."

"You can SEE reason. This is not a play on words, for here is the beginning of a vision that has meaning. Vision is sense, quite literally. If it is not the body's sight, it MUST be understood. For it is PLAIN, and what is obvious is not ambiguous. It CAN be understood. And here do reason and the ego separate, to go their different ways."

"Yet how can sight which stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, see truly? It is HELD BACK by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but form will be perceived. These eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see. For the idea they represent left not its maker, and it is their maker that sees through them. What was its maker's GOAL, but not to see? For this the body's eyes are perfect means. But not for seeing. See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and cannot go beyond. Watch how they stop at nothingness, unable to go beyond the form to meaning."

"Let not the FORM of his mistakes keep you from him whose holiness is yours. Let not the vision of his holiness, the sight of which would show you your forgiveness, be kept from you by what the body's eyes can see. Let your awareness of your brother not be blocked by your perception of his sins, and of his body. What is there in him that you would attack, except what you associate with his body, which YOU believe can sin? Beyond his errors is his holiness, and YOUR salvation. You gave him not his holiness, but tried to see your sins in him, to save yourself. And yet his holiness IS your forgiveness. Can YOU be saved by making sinful the one whose holiness is your salvation?"

"There has been some controversy (in human terms) as to whether seeing is an attribute of the eyes, or an expression of the integrative powers of the brain. Correctly understood, the issue revolves around the question of whether the body or the mind can see (or understand). This is not really open to question at all." " The body is not capable of understanding. Only the mind KNOWS anything." "Only the mind sees".

"Your world is seen through eyes of fear, and brings the witnesses of terror to your mind. The real world cannot be perceived except through eyes forgiveness"

"I would bless the world by looking on it through the eyes of Christ."

"You keep an ancient memory before your eyes. And he who lives in memories alone is unaware of where he IS."

"The real world is attained simply by the COMPLETE forgiveness of the old; the world you see WITHOUT forgiveness. The Great Transformer of perception will undertake WITH you the careful searching of the mind that MADE this world, and uncover TO YOU the SEEMING reasons for your making it. In the light of the REAL reason that He brings, as you follow Him, He will SHOW you that there is NO reason here at all. Each spot HIS reason touches, grows alive with beauty. And what SEEMED ugly, in the darkness of your LACK of reason, is suddenly released to loveliness. Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release.

All this beauty will rise to bless your sight, as you look upon the world with forgiving eyes. For forgiveness literally TRANSFORMS vision, and lets you see the real world, reaching quietly and gently across chaos, and removing ALL illusions that had twisted your perception, and fixed it on the past. The smallest leaf becomes a thing of wonder, and a blade of grass a sign of God's perfection. From the forgiven world, the Son of God is lifted easily to his home. And there he knows that he has ALWAYS rested there, in peace."

"Forgiveness is the home of miracles. The eyes of Christ deliver them to all they look upon in mercy and in love. Perception stands corrected in His sight, and what was meant to curse has come to bless. Each lily of forgiveness offers all the world the silent miracle of love. And each is laid before the Word of God upon the universal altar to Creator and creation, in the Light of perfect purity and endless joy."

"Seen through understanding eyes the holiness of the world is all I see, for I can picture only the thoughts I hold about myself."

"Vision is the means by which the Holy Spirit translates your nightmares into happy dreams; your wild hallucinations, that show you all fearful outcomes of imagined sin, into the calm and reassuring sights with which He would replace them. These gentle sights and sounds are looked on happily, and heard with joy. They are His substitutes for all the terrifying sights and screaming sounds the ego's purpose brought to your horrified awareness. They step away from sin, reminding you that it is not reality that frightens you, and that the errors which you made CAN be corrected.

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

"This is your purpose now, and the vision that makes it yours is ready to be given. You have the vision that enables you to see the body not. And as you look upon each other, you will see an altar to your Father, holy as Heaven, glowing with radiant purity, and sparkling with the shining lilies you laid upon it."

And this will be your concept of YOURSELF, when you have reached the world beyond the sight your eyes alone can offer you to see. For you will not interpret what you see without the Aid that God has given you. And in His sight there IS another world. You live in that world just as much as this, for both are concepts of yourself, which can be interchanged, but never jointly held. The contrast is far greater than you think, for you will love this concept of yourself, because it was not made for you alone. Born as a gift for someone not perceived to be yourself, it has been given YOU. For your forgiveness, offered unto him, has been accepted now for BOTH of you."

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals."

"Accept the one illusion which proclaims there is no condemnation in God's Son, and Heaven is remembered instantly; the world forgotten, all its weird beliefs forgotten with it, as the Face of Christ appears unveiled at last in this one dream. This is the gift the Holy Spirit holds for you from God your Father."

"Now is there silence all around the world. Now is there stillness where before there was a frantic rush of thoughts that made no sense. Now is there tranquil light across the face of earth, made quiet in a dreamless sleep. And now the Word of God alone remains upon it. Only That can be perceived an instant longer. Then are symbols done, and everything you ever thought you made completely vanished from the mind which God forever knows to be His only Son."

"And now God's knowledge, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its kingdom. Gone is perception, false and true alike. Gone is forgiveness, for its task is done. And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God. God knows it is His Own, as it is his. And here They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant, and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause. For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

"The stars will disappear, and night and day will be no more. All things that come and go, the tides, the seasons, and the lives of men; all things that change with time and bloom and fade, will not return."

"The stars will disappear in light, and the sun, which opened up the world to beauty, will vanish. Perception will be meaningless, when it has been perfected. For everything that has been used for learning, will have no function. Nothing will ever change; no shifts nor shadings, no differences, no variations that made perception possible, will occur. The perception of the real world will be so short, that you will barely have time to thank God for it. For God will take the last step swiftly, when you have reached the real world, and have been made ready for Him."