Ego is always about believing you are SEPARATE FROM the things you attack. That cause and effect are separate. That you can escape the consequences, and get away with murder.

If you project guilt through anger, you believe that the other person is guilty and not yourself. You might not be quite so aware that when you JUDGE in any way, you are doing the same thing.

You judge something that you believe is NOT YOU, in order to believe you've escaped the consequences of judging.

However, because the Golden Rule always applies, when you do to others you do to yourself. Because you are one with them, and a part of them. The part of you in them is attacked by your attack, and judged by your judgment.

You cannot help but feel judged, victimised, embarrassed, ashamed and guilty, when you judge something. And this is because all judgements you make are with the ego. They are attempt to separate off and evaluate independent parts, which splits your mind, and causes you to hurt yourself.

It's not merely that you should not judge because "its mean to someone else." Or that you'd be guilty if you did that to someone not yourself. But more that you should not judge because you CANNOT get away with it, and WILL experience effects upon yourself.

You think you sit within your body and observe and are passive and can hand out judgements on things outside of you with no effect whatsoever. This is not true. Judgement will disturb your peace and remove your happiness, because you cannot condemn and love at the same time.

"Judge not, because you make yourself a PART of evil dreams, where idols are your "true" identity, and your salvation from the judgment laid, in terror and in guilt, upon yourself." UrT29J2

"Judge not, for you but judge yourself and thus delay this final judgment" UrM16A2

"When the Bible says "Judge not that ye be not judged" it merely means that if you judge the reality of others at all, you will be unable to avoid judging your own." UrT3H1

If judgement and forgiveness are opposites ("he who would not forgive must judge, to justify his failure to forgive"), then judgement is the condition of being unforgiving.

Being unforgiving really means that you are looking at the appearance of illusions and are believing what you see. This means that we don't recognize that we're being faced with an illusion, and instead think that it is somehow the truth. We've fallen for the trickery, for how it 'appears', but are not overlooking appearances to see the truth.

This is the same thing as not seeing Christ in others, because you can only see Christ in others when you are overlooking the illusion. i.e. you have to see past appearances, and that means also seeing past the body, seeing past how things seem, and being very clear about the fact that people are actually Christ.

If they are Christ, they are immortal, powerful, have freedom of choice, cannot be victims, and cannot die. They are also the ones dreaming their dream. If we lose sight of that we fall for the illusion they're creating and take it to be real. Doing so is 'judgement'. We are 'judging' what we see, evaluating it, engaging with it, instead of overlooking it.

It doesn't just mean we are judging harshly, labelling people, pointing out flaws or condemning. Even if we believe for a moment that someone dying of cancer is 'real' and that the person isn't choosing it, that is judgement.

So what is a failure to forgive? How does judgement justify that failure? What is forgiveness? Forgiveness is a state of mind in which you are so forgiving that you see only innocence, truth, Christ, and do not for a second fall for any illusions. You know the truth, you know who is behind all this, and you can no longer believe the trickery - appearances.

When you fail to do that, you are attempting to explain to yourself why you stopped being forgiving. So you have to point out that it was 'because of' things that you are not responsible for. It was because of other people. I mean look at them?! And so we become tangled in appearances, forgetting to overlook appearances, because we are trying to make out that we were right to not forgive, and that the person actually 'is' or 'deserves' what you're seeing in them.

What we need to realize is that this entire world is an illusion, which means, someone somewhere is deliberately creating something for the sole purpose of pretending to be something else, for portraying that author as 'not the author', to try to convince him/herself that it's actually true, and to make-believe that this story is really occurring. It's nothing more than like when a child plays make-believe and pretends that stuff is happening.

This story is what is being shown to us all around us all the time, including our body. And it's our challenge to see through the make-believe, not take it seriously, know that it is not true or real, and be aware of who it is that is making all this seem to happen. It's only because we do not recognize the author of it (and therefore do not recognize ourselves) that we think it is real. And not recognizing Christ as Christ (as the dreamer of all this) means to fail to overlook the illusion and instead fall for it, which means we are judging it to be the truth - that it is truly awful, truly deadly, truly upsetting.

It's not true. The dream is just a dream. We need to wake up to realize who is dreaming all this.

It's not possible to judge others.

It's not possible to forgive others.

It's not possible to correct others.

It's not possible to communicate with others.

It's not possible to attack others.

It's not possible to be hurt by others.

It nevertheless SEEMS possible to do all of the above. This "seeming possibility", and the belief in this possibility, is the DELUSION of the ego mind. It is insane to believe in this possibility because it is impossible.

As soon as there is an "other", there is a separation between you and them. This separation PREVENTS a transfer or a sharing of anything. This "gap" which appears between you immediately disconnects you from the other, making both of you separate, and keeps you from experiencing anything together that's real.

What you are is the whole of everything. All inclusive. Oneness. There are no real others. Love has no opposite.

When you start to believe that you are actually capable of doing any of the above, or have done so, you MUST be mistaken. You are perceiving incorrectly. You're doing something VERY WEIRD with your mind which is filled with delusion and pretense and denial. You're trying to create a perceptual state where it SEEMS like it's true, that you can in fact judge or forgive or change other people, or experience these things coming from them. It is NEVER REALITY. It is always an illusion.

Your job is not to forgive other people. It is not possible to forgive other people. They are not the cause of your perceptual malfunction. They, or your perception of them as a separate cause, is the RESULT of YOUR perceptual malfunction. You are the one hallucinating, projecting, blaming, and trying to make out that this sudden "enemy" which has shown up "out there" as "not you" is somehow attacking you. It is your own mind attacking itself, disassociating from itself, and believing that some part of itself is not itself. It is insanity.

Your only capability is in terms of what you are doing to yourself. This is the secret to salvation. This can't be said enough times. The ONLY way to find salvation from all suffering is through SELF FORGIVENESS. It is only you who has ever condemned or judged or attacked yourself, and it is only you who are mistaken, and you are the only cause of it, and you are the one who needs to be willing to change your mind about yourself. It never has anything whatsoever to do with "other people".

Literally everything outside of your own body is not there. Literally even your body itself is outside of you and is not there. Nothing outside of your "self" causes anything inside of your self. There is no outside. There are no others. There is no separation.

It is only possible for you, as the Son of God, to seem to experience (hallucinate, dream, imagine) that an entire physical universe is taking place INSIDE YOURSELF. It is only possible also that the illusion of sin take place WITHIN YOURSELF, as a state of self-attack, or inner conflict, where you have split off parts of yourself and pitted them against other parts, to wage a fictional war, which has then shown up as an entire universe of madness.

All of the separation from God and every single part of the "consequences" of it is taking place inside the mind of the Son of God. It is not anywhere else. And there is no one else to cause it. Everything that happens inside it is happening BY that mind TO that mind WITHIN that mind. One mind attacking itself and trying to get rid of itself, to try to deny what it is, to deny the truth of its identity. There is no-one else to attack it. The fictional characters it is dreaming of attacking other fictional characters are all a part of that same one mind's dream of self-attack. It is pulling all the strings.

Nothing can happen to you without you making it happen to you. You cannot get anything you do not ask for. You can only get what you ask for, and you will get exactly what you ask for. There are no victims or victimizers. There is no attack outside of the scope of you attacking yourself. There is no grounds for blame because there are no other Onenesses to blame it on.

Other people are not attacking you. Other people are not causing you. Other people are not upsetting you. Other people are not making you be or do anything against your will. Your body is not against you. There is no alien will outside of you. You are not a victim of the world you see. The world you see DOES NOT EVEN EXIST.

It's not possible to judge others. You have judged yourself.

It's not possible to forgive others. You must forgive yourself.

It's not possible to correct others. You need correction.

It's not possible to communicate with others. Communication is union with God in Oneness.

It's not possible to attack others. Only you can attack yourself.

It's not possible to be hurt by others. You cannot be hurt, you are immortal spirit.

People talk about forgiveness a lot, but might not recognize that judgement is its opposite. In order to forgive we have to give up being judgemental.

To be more accurate, the Holy Spirit does judge, but his judgement is completely accurate and impartial, simply seeing the truth of things. When we move away from his judgement we judge with the ego, and the ego is always biased and unfair and harsh.

Until recently I didn't see how important the idea of not judging is. The Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, "judging is the way that you perceive wrongly." That lead to a realisation that I was somehow in a mode of judging all the time. Judging everything I see, labelling, categorising, evaluating, selecting, analysing, figuring out, that's all judgement.

Judgement is something we made up to replace knowledge. In knowledge we have a direct knowing of what something is, a cognition of it, with no interpretation needed. We are one with it and be it, so we know it intimately like ourselves. But in the separation we threw knowledge away, meaning we could no longer just "know" what something is. We denied knowing and claimed not to know, which is a state of questioning and fear. We then needed a way to "find out" what stuff is, so in the split mind of consciousness and perception we invented judgement - to judge or assess reality.

Having invented judgement, perception is then totally based on it. Judging is what you do to try to figure out what something else, on the basis that you do not know what it is. And because you don't know it, you can't possibly correctly discern it, at least not unless judgement is completely lined up with knowledge in the state of true perception - as the Holy Spirit sees it.

To judge with ego is the attempt to decide what you think something is, what you make of it, what you read into it, and what you project onto it. And in fact it's then not an attempt to find out what the thing is, it's actually an attempt to push it away and not know it. Sensing is about not knowing, and is also part of this, via the body's senses.

So then we judge as an attack, in an effort to play God as if we can tell things what they are. As if we can put onto them our definition of them. A label to be attached. You're this, you're that. A finger to point and a sentence to hand down, a verdict of guilty. The ego always judges there to be something wrong with everything, while the Holy Spirit judges there to be nothing wrong but a mistake.

When I was thinking about not judging at all, I started noticing many quotes in the course confirming this. And then I thought, maybe God doesn't judge at all either. If God has knowledge he has no need for judgement. Which means he's not sitting there pointing a finger, blaming, resenting, assessing if we did well enough, deciding if we're worthy, looking down his nose at us, condemning and accusing us, hating and resenting and rejecting us, or any other kind of snooty dis-satisfaction.

In fact I'd been noticing this in a lot of near death experience accounts, where people discover that there is absolutely no judgement in heaven. And that means none of the above, none of that sort of sitting there in front of some panel of judges, or waiting to find out your fate, or being frowned upon for doing things wrong, or even condemned for crimes or sins or whatever. There is absolutely no judgement at all in heaven.

I found this quite inspiring, because I think we spend most of lives living inside of a state of judging and being judged. And the course says that if you judge others, you will judge yourself, due to the golden rule - other people are you, so if you judge them you are judging yourself. So then we're in a constant state of feeling judged and condemned, and trying to project that onto others. So we might then think that God does the same and judges the things we decide are sins. But he doesn't, at all.

I found this really interesting, to consider God as non-judgemental entirely. Not even batting an eyelid if we do the most heinous things, make horrendous mistakes, or even seem to deliberately hurt others or attack or whatever we would judge as evil. Not a single bit of judgement from God. It's a very loving and forgiving state when you think about that. That no-one up there is looking down their nose at you or holding anything against you whatsoever.

As I pondered this I was then wondering, well, what is it like to see things without judgement then... and then the Holy Spirit showed me one of his visions. In this vision I was aware of a person who was being seen with such innocence, such lack of judgementalism, that they seemed to be doing absolutely nothing wrong at all.

I could see that there was an awareness that the person was a bit lost, confused, perhaps making mistakes, but they just seemed to be seen as absolutely utterly innocent in that. Sort of like a child that just hadn't learned yet, didn't know any better, and was just finding their way. There was a total and utter lack of judgement against them, no sense of wrongfulness, no guilt, no condemnation, no sense that they are breaking rules, nothing but a deeply innocent and compassionate view that they are simply loved where they're at. Even their mistaken state didn't seem like a state of sin, it was just "how they were at the moment" framed in total innocence and harmlessness. As if all that remained was for them to gently find a way out of a maze or something.

No judgement, no condemnation, no failing to measure up, no sense of unworthiness, no anger or blame for doing something wrong, not even a sense that the way the person was mistaken was even "not supposed to be that way". There was no pressure, no hurrying them up toward a goal, no chastisement or punishment, and nothing but a loving sense of just gently guiding them to be less confused. Like all they had was a temporary slight confusion about things, and just needed to be shown the truth, and that is all.

I see now that forgiveness is completely non-judgemental in this way, and this is how the Holy Spirit sees everyone. It's also how heaven and God sees everyone. That we're not going through some kind of obstacle course, doing things hellishly wrong, committing sins all over the place, or causing any real problem. From heaven's viewpoint we're completely and totally innocent at all times, and just a little bit lost. With no sense of sin whatsoever, we are then just in need of being guided back home, like just a lovely little lost sheep that needs as little bit of help.

No sense of shame or guilt, no sense of punishment or sinfulness, no sense of demand or coming down like a ton of bricks, no sense of force or pushing or chastising or assessing whether someone is measuring up or not, no disappointment or annoyance or finger pointing, none of that. Just simple innocent love being nothing but innocent and gently offering a loving correction, with a smile behind it.

If to forgive is to suspend ego judgement, then we have to find a way to stop judging everything on our own. We have to let the Holy Spirit judge for us, and his judgement is a pure judgement based on innocence, in which there is no guilt or punishment of any kind. He only ever finds us to be innocent because he recognizes exactly what is true of us. And recognition is enlightenment, and is rooted in knowledge.

"Judgment and love are opposites. From one Come all the sorrows of the world. But from the Other comes the peace of God Himself."

"In the mind of the THINKER, then, He (Holy Spirit) IS judgmental, but only in order to unify it so IT CAN perceive WITHOUT judgment. This enables the mind to TEACH without judgment and therefore learn to BE without judgment."

"How can His Son AWAKEN from the dream? It is a dream of judgment. So must he judge NOT, and he WILL waken."

"Judge not, for you but judge yourself and thus delay this final judgment."

"Judge not that ye be not judged" it merely means that if you judge the reality of others at all, you will be unable to avoid judging your own. The choice to judge rather than know has been the cause of the loss of peace. Judgment is the process on which perception but not cognition rests."

"Judge not because you cannot, NOT because you are a miserable sinner too. How can the special REALLY understand that justice is the same for everyone?"

"The text explains that the Holy Spirit is the Answer to all problems you have made. These problems are not true, but that is meaningless to those who believe in them. And everyone believes in what he made, for it was made by his believing it. Into this strange and paradoxical situation, - one without meaning and devoid of sense, yet out of which no way seems possible, - God has sent His Judgment to answer yours. Gently His Judgment substitutes for yours. And through this substitution is the ununderstandable made understandable. How is peace possible in this world? In your judgment it is not possible, and can never be possible. But in the Judgment of God what is reflected here is only peace."

"On the contrary, he puts himself in a position where judgment through him rather than by him can occur. And this Judgment is neither "good" nor "bad." It is the only Judgment there is, and it is only one: "God's Son is guiltless, and sin does not exist."

"The world will end when all things in it have been rightly judged by His judgment."

"And in His judgment will a world unfold in perfect innocence before your eyes. Now will you see it with the eyes of Christ. Now is its transformation clear to you."

"Herein does he receive Atonement, for he withdraws his judgment from the Son of God, accepting him as God created him."

"You cannot judge. You merely can believe the ego's judgments, all of which are false. It guides your senses carefully, to prove how weak you are; how helpless and afraid, how apprehensive of just punishment, how black with sin, how wretched in your guilt."

"The aim of our curriculum, unlike the goal of the world's learning, is the recognition that judgment in the usual sense is impossible. This is not an opinion but a fact. In order to judge anything rightly, one would have to be fully aware of an inconceivably wide range of things; past, present and to come. One would have to recognize in advance all the effects of his judgments on everyone and everything involved in them in any way. And one would have to be certain there is no distortion in his perception, so that his judgment would be wholly fair to everyone on whom it rests now and in the future. Who is in a position to do this? Who except in grandiose fantasies would claim this for himself?"

There is a reason why you should not judge, and it has absolutely nothing to do with other people or whether it hurts them.

There is also a reason why you need to forgive, and it has absolutely nothing to do with whether other people are the ones being forgiven.

The reason is that these judgements that you THINK are being done by you to other people, are actually being done by you to YOURSELF.

And the unwillingness to forgive, which you THINK is to do with your unwillingness to forgive another person, or the need to forgive another person, because of what they seem to be doing, has absolutely nothing to do with that person. You are meant to forgive in such a manner as to realize that YOU are the one who needs forgiveness, because you've attacked yourself.

Judgements are nothing to do with other people, and trying to maintain a goal of 'must not judge anyone' is missing the point. You must not judge YOU.

And forgiveness has nothing to do with other people, so trying to maintain a goal of 'forgive everyone' is also missing the point. You must forgive YOURSELF.

The reason is, that ideas leave not their source, and your judgements do not leave your mind and go into someone else. Your attacks do not leave your mind and go into someone else. They are done TO YOU, BY YOU. Internally. It all takes place inside your own mind and never goes beyond that.

So the real benefit of you stopping judging someone else, isn't really to do with being kind to people or nicer to them or whatever.... what you don't realize is that as you judge, you are internally creating a separation in your own mind, are manifesting a split mind, are pitting one part of your mind against the other under the guise of 'projection', your own mind is now at war with itself, and this experience of conflict is what you need to heal. If you THINK you judge someone else, you automatically are judging yourself. They are not even really involved.

I saw this yesterday when I was tempted to judge someone and started to do so, and Jesus prompted me to stop, and I realized that it wasn't that he thought it was an issue of me judging that person, it was that by me judging 'them' I was actually creating conditions in my mind of conflict and upset and was CAUSING MYSELF to become angry. I needed to stop judging FOR MY OWN BENEFIT.

Similarly, forgiveness processes have nothing to do with other people. It begins SEEMING like it's to do with other people, because our mind is already in a split state and we think that the 'other' part of our own mind that we've split off and diassociated from is "not me" and therefore is "in them". You use them as like a mannequin to pin your dirty laundry on while you attack it, but the attacking and the receiving of the attack is going on entirely inside your mind, even if your mind seems to have inflated to 'include' that other person's body. So forgiveness is not to do with forgiving that person for what they do, it's to do with you coming to admit and realize that they've got NOTHING to do with your upset and that you are actually the one who has done something to yourself, and YOU need the forgiveness.

To judge, is to evaluate, or to decide upon the meaning. We assess, we deduce, and we theorize as to what something is. It's kind of like an attempt to study something, to learn something about it, to understand it, and then to label it with a conclusion.

But Jesus is saying this entire process isn't something we are really in a position to do. To really truly be accurate in assessing anything, we need to know all the facts. We need access to absolutely everything in order to do that. We need to know all of the past and present and future, all causes and effects, all potentials, all influences, all variables and pretty much a crystal ball.

We're told that we don't have that because we've narrowed our minds so much that we are out of touch with "everything" and therefore cannot KNOW what everything is. Which leaves us really in a position of not knowing what ANYTHING is.

But we're also told that the Holy Spirit remains in a position of having access to everything, he knows everything past present and future, all causes effects variables and potentials. And so He IS in a position to "judge accurately." This is why we're asked to hand over the role of "judging" to him, so that we don't keep making mistakes.

When we judge wrongly by mistake we end up suffering the consequences of the beliefs that we form. To judge really is similar to accusation. We accuse things of being something, or of something being true of them. We hold it against stuff. That's like a condemnation of sin. We kind of attack the world with these judgements. To label or name anything anything is an attempt to confine and limit and understand it.

And we're even told that the Holy Spirit does NOT understand the world at all, because it cannot BE understood. Essentially that real understanding is knowledge and "dissection" or analysis just blinds you.

As you narrow things down and put them in boxes you isolate and exclude and shut out, you increase the separation and enhance differences, and now as you are becoming more "accurate" in your understanding or "describing" of the world you actually become more out of touch with the more abstract big picture. You might think that understanding something "perfectly" is knowledge, and now passes for knowing. But it is totally opposite. The more you think you know, the less you actually know.

So there are two factors in why you cannot, or are incapable of judging accurately. 1) You do not currently have access to every fact in the universe, and 2) Attempting to judge based on limited facts limits your awareness and shuts the truth out. So you just end up believing you are "finding answers" in the dirt, very specific answers, when in fact all you're doing is becoming blinded by separations and forms. And really, all judgements made based on limited awareness are in fact the judgements OF THE EGO.

To judge is to "put meaning onto" something. In a way it is tied also into projection. You are always projecting. When you project some kind of "definition" onto reality you're trying to turn it into that definition. You hold the projection against the thing, see the image you have made, and think it is the thing you made it about.

The problem also is that by being in a role of being the one who has to figure everything out on your own, which you are not at all equipped to achieve, you also make for yourself an entire collection of meanings and purposes for the world. And all of these meanings, having been made by mistake, due to not being able to judge effectively, lead to false conclusions, which in turn produce various forms of suffering and destructiveness.

This is how you make your own hell. All your faulty judgements keep limiting and isolating and boxing you in and labelling you. Everything you think is true of what you see becomes true of yourself. You think you are right and accurate but you are highly mistaken because you don't have all the facts. And so whatever you think is happening is wrong, and results in faulty perceptions, which result in unfortunate effects of pain and misery.

So Jesus is then saying you can be alleviated from all the self-inflicted suffering you keep making by recognizing that you CANNOT judge. You are not, at present, in a position to judge accurately. You are too limited and small to know what anything is. Not that you're inept or anything but, until you are totally awake you really are out of touch with reality and are very uncertain about what is true. So you are better off asking the Holy Spirit to judge it all for you.

That means giving up the role of being the one who evaluates, judges, decides, figures out, determines, assesses, analyzes, understands, or has to in any way "know" what anything is, what it is for, how to use it, what it means, etc.

That's a pretty huge burden lifted off your shoulders if you can be willing to step out of the role of "gatekeeper of reality". Just being honest enough to admit that you really are too limited to be able to tell what anything REALLY is and that you need the Holy Spirit's vision to see FOR you. "Take this from me and look upon it, judging it for me.

Let me not see it as a sign of sin and death, nor use it for destruction. Teach me how NOT to make of it an OBSTACLE to peace, but let You use it FOR me, to FACILITATE its coming."

"We do not know him, and we cannot judge. And so we let Your Love decide what he whom You created as Your Son must be."

"We cannot judge ourselves, nor need we do so."

"You cannot judge. You merely can believe the ego's judgments, all of which are false."

"It cannot judge because it does not know. And RECOGNIZING this, it merely asks, "What is the meaning of what I behold?" Then is the Answer given, and the door held open for the Face of Christ to shine upon the one who asks in innocence to see BEYOND the veil of old ideas and ancient concepts held so long and dear AGAINST the vision of the Christ in you."

"Let me (Jesus) see for you, and judge for you what you would look upon. When you have seen with me but once, you would no longer value any fearful thing at cost of glory and the peace of God."

"You share His function only by judging AS HE DOES, reserving no judgment at all unto yourselves. For you will judge AGAINST yourselves, but He will judge FOR you."

"Remember how many times you thought you knew all the "facts" you needed for judgment, and how wrong you were! Is there anyone who has not had this experience? Would you know how many times you merely thought you were right, without ever realizing you were wrong? Why would you choose such an arbitrary basis for decision-making? Wisdom is not judgment; it is the relinquishment of judgment. Make then but one more judgment. It is this; there is Someone with you Whose judgment is perfect. He does know all the facts, past, present and to come. He does know all the effects of His judgment on everyone and everything involved in any way. And He is wholly fair to everyone, for there is no distortion in His perception."

Judgment is a fairly large topic in ACIM. The course teaches us to basically "not judge". But that's not the whole story. Judgement can relate to evaluating the meaning of something, but also can in its lower forms mean condemnation. It can devolve into hate and attack and sin, or it can elevate to true justice and forgiveness.

Judgment is tied into perception, which "selects and evaluates" the meaning of things. And because it's based on perception, it is uncertain and unstable. That is, until it is stabilized by the Holy Spirit.

He has correct judgement because he, in part, has perception, but he also has knowledge. You have to know EVERYTHING in order to correctly discern what anything is. It thus requires vision, based on knowledge. He is the only one who can judge correctly, until you can learn to share his judgement in place of the ego's judgment. The ego always judges harshly, producing what we call "condemnation" or "being judgmental."

This is because the ego does not know anything, and is always wrong. Its judgements are always harsh and attacking, accusing everything of sin and guilt. It cannot recognize the "true" judgements of the Holy Spirit, and so its judgements produce false perceptions.

If you let the Holy Spirit judge for you, and then you match, accept or align with his judgement, your own judgement will line up with his and be accurate. If you try to judge on your own, and given you lack knowledge, most of the time you will judge with the ego and make false judgements. These judgements will be attacks and they will hurt yourself.

As you learn to let your judgement rest upon the Holy Spirit's judgement, your own judgement aligns with the truth, causing your perception to become "true". You judge with the ego less and trust the Holy Spirit to judge for you. Eventually your own judgement becomes "as true" and equal to his, shared with him.

Only when your judgement is perfected, and your perception aligned with knowledge, are you in a position to judge correctly without ego. This is an advanced state.

Jesus doesn't entirely write off all judgement. He does want us to stop using our ego to judge, and to instead depend on the Holy Spirit to judge for us until we are better able to judge with him correctly and share his judgement. His judgements are not condemning, they are healing and forgiving.

Thus to him, true judgement or "the final judgement" is a way of evaluating everything as forgiven and innocent, in which judgement becomes "non-judgmental." In this way, the attacking judgementalism of the ego becomes repurposed and is used to cancel itself out. By using judgment to not attack, the need for judging at all is undone, and so the need for perception ends.

Ultimately, by using the Holy Spirit's nonjudgmental judgement, we escape from the world. The world was made BY judging, ie as an attack on God, as a condemnation of his son. The ego aligned with the world's nature (both based on separation) and judged the world harshly.

The Holy Spirit judges the world fairly and without condemning it. You thus escape from the world by not playing the world's game of condemnation and attack (which is also sin). By not attacking what is rooted in attack, by not judging those who condemn, by seeing sinners as innocent, judgement is repurposed as a way to evaluate that the judgmental attack-world is forgiven. Thus is our investment in its nature undone, and the world is gone with it.

When judgement is perfected, ie shared with and in agreement with the Holy Spirit, ego and the body and the world disappear. Perception ends and we return to a state of knowledge, waking up in the reality of the Kingdom. In the Kingdom there is no condemnation and no sin and no ego, and no need to judge or evaluate the meaning of anything. Everything there is inherently meaningful and means everything, which thus gives way to cognition and knowledge.

This all boils down to:

1) Do not condemn (hate, attack, sin, make guilty, attack-thoughts, grievances etc).

2) Do not evaluate anything on your own, recognizing you cannot (let Holy Spirit judge through you - extend his judgement).

"The intrusion of the ability to perceive, which is inherently judgmental, was introduced only after the Separation. No one has been sure of anything since then."

"Can this be judgment? You have often been urged to refrain from judging, not because it is a right to be withheld from you. You cannot judge. You merely can believe the ego's judgments, all of which are false. It guides your senses carefully, to prove how weak you are; how helpless and afraid, how apprehensive of just punishment, how black with sin, how wretched in your guilt."

"No-one who loves can judge, and what he sees is FREE of condemnation."

"How can His Son AWAKEN from the dream? It is a dream of judgment. So must he judge NOT, and he WILL waken. For the dream will seem to last while he is PART of it. Judge not, for he who judges WILL have need of idols, which will hold the judgment off from resting on himself. Nor CAN he know the Self he has condemned. Judge not, because you make yourself a PART of evil dreams, where idols are your "true" identity, and your salvation from the judgment laid, in terror and in guilt, upon yourself."

"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."

"When the Bible says "Judge not that ye be not judged" it merely means that if you judge the reality of others at all, you will be unable to avoid judging your own. The choice to judge rather than know has been the cause of the loss of peace. Judgment is the process on which perception but not cognition rests."

"Yet will his perfect sinlessness RELEASE you both, for holiness is quite impartial, with one judgment made for all it looks upon. And that is made, not of itself, but through the Voice that speaks for God in everything that lives, and shares His Being."

"We will receive but what is given us from Judgment made beyond the world."

"Judge not, for you but judge yourself and thus delay this final judgment. What is your judgment on the world, teacher of God? Have you yet learned to stand aside and hear the Voice of Judgment in yourself? Or do you still attempt to take His role from Him? Learn to be quiet, for His Voice is heard in stillness. And His Judgment comes to all who stand aside in quiet listening, and wait for Him."

"How CAN specialness be just? Judge not because you cannot, NOT because you are a miserable sinner too."

"We cannot judge ourselves, nor need we do so. These are but attempts to hold decision off, and to delay commitment to our function. It is not our part to judge our worth, nor can we know what role is best for us; what we can do within a larger plan we cannot see in its entirety."

"Love cannot judge. As it is one itself, it looks on all as one."

"The Savior's vision is as innocent of what your brother is as it is free of any judgment made upon yourself. It sees no past in anyone at all. And thus it serves a wholly open mind, unclouded by old concepts and prepared to look on ONLY what the present holds. It cannot judge because it does not know. And RECOGNIZING this, it merely asks, "What is the meaning of what I behold?" Then is the Answer given, and the door held open for the Face of Christ to shine upon the one who asks in innocence to see BEYOND the veil of old ideas and ancient concepts held so long and dear AGAINST the vision of the Christ in you."

"Father, we wait with open mind today, to hear Your Judgment of the Son You love. We do not know him, and we cannot judge. And so we let Your Love decide what he whom You created as Your Son must be."

"Take this from me and look upon it, judging it for me. Let me not see it as a sign of sin and death, nor use it for destruction. Teach me how NOT to make of it an OBSTACLE to peace, but let You use it FOR me, to FACILITATE its coming."

"Good judgment" in these terms, does not mean anything. No more does "bad." It is necessary for the teacher of God to realize not that he should not judge, but that he cannot. In giving up judgment he merely gives up what he did not have. He gives up an illusion; or better, he has an illusion of giving up. He has actually merely become more honest. Recognizing that judgment was always impossible for him, he no longer attempts it. This is no sacrifice. On the contrary, he puts himself in a position where judgment through him rather than by him can occur. And this Judgment is neither "good" nor "bad." It is the only Judgment there is, and it is only one: "God's Son is guiltless, and sin does not exist."

"Remember how many times you thought you knew all the "facts" you needed for judgment, and how wrong you were! Is there anyone who has not had this experience? Would you know how many times you merely thought you were right, without ever realizing you were wrong? Why would you choose such an arbitrary basis for decision-making? Wisdom is not judgment; it is the relinquishment of judgment. Make then but one more judgment. It is this; there is Someone with you Whose judgment is perfect. He does know all the facts, past, present and to come. He does know all the effects of His judgment on everyone and everything involved in any way. And He is wholly fair to everyone, for there is no distortion in His perception."

"No-one can escape God's final judgment. Who could flee forever from the truth? But the final judgment will not come until it is no longer associated with fear."

"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."

"The aim of the Final Judgment is to RESTORE Right-Mindedness TO man. The Final Judgment might be called a process of Right-evaluation. It simply means that finally all men must come to understand what is worthy and what is not."

"Nothing the Son of God believes can be destroyed. 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."

You can either be in a state of total forgiveness, or you are in a state of judgementalism.

In forgiveness, judgement is given to the Holy Spirit who has full access to all knowledge and can judge correctly. His only judgement is that there is no sin anywhere and everyone is innocent. Or to put it another way, he repurposes judgement to judge that nothing is judged.

If you fail to be in a forgiving state, you will enter into ego, into its thought system, and into limitation. You will then attempt to judge separately from the Holy Spirit, and will do so on the basis that separation is true.

This will lead to incorrect judgements, limited judgements, condemnation and accusation of sin, projection of guilt, labelling and categorising, and a general judgey attacky harsh attitude.

This judgment always concludes falsely because it's not based on wholeness so cannot see the whole truth. It is a mistaken form of judgement, in which we think we know - or have an opinion about - everything we see. We then turn into critics who are never satisfied and nothing is acceptable to us.

We then actually use judgement as an attack and a defence. It becomes a wall of interpretation in between you and everything you see, and a way to keep things away from you.

It's then used as a way to not join, and to keep your distance from things. It has a feeling of a withdrawing and avoiding and rejecting and not wanting.

As it becomes stronger you can notice that it is in fact hate and is not loving. So you form a rift, a barrier of hate, around yourself, to keep the world and reality and other people at a distance.

Judgmentalism twists everything it sees in an effort to frame it how you would prefer it be, or how you judge it to be. You form images in your mind overlaid on top of what you see, based on these judgements, and relate to the images instead of the thing itself.

This means that you're not really welcoming reality or truth as it is, and you are not really seeing, or engaging, or joining, or really looking and registering what is there. Instead you are pulling away in disgust and hate and unwillingness, and relating to your judgements as if they are real and true.

We are doing this all the time, if we're not being forgiving, and it actually removes us from direct immediate reality. It takes us out of the present, and puts us in the past psychologically. The ego's judgements are designed to keep God away from you.

The ego in us is very critical and accusatory, bitter and angry, unloving and unkind, labelling things as wrong, judging as guilty, condemning and finding things wrong, tearing things down and separating things out, disagreeing and disapproving and offering an opinion about everything. This is judgementalism.

If you will suspend judgement and decide you are not going to judge in any way, you may notice your awareness opening up, and you look more directly at things without any sense of attacking them or having something to say about them.

As you stop judging, you become more present, and it feels like you have more direct awareness and are paying fuller attention. You see things more for how they are and not for what you were making of them, and they in fact become more interesting and beautiful.

To see without judgement is to see with the eyes of Christ, which looks upon everything while remaining still and not having all this mental activity of evaluation and analysis and labelling and so on.

This forgiving state of mind just looks without hurling something at what it's looking at. The problem we really have is that we do not recognize how much and when we are judging, and it's pretty much all the time.

We also may not recognize that there is an alternative, a way of seeing that isn't riddled with judgements, defensiveness, accusation or attack. Try just looking at something without having anything to say about it at all in your mind. Just see it quietly.

"An unforgiving thought is one which makes a judgment that it will not raise to doubt, although it is untrue. The mind is closed, and will not be released. The thought protects projection, tightening its chains, so that distortions are more veiled and more obscure; less easily accessible to doubt, and further kept from reason. What can come between a fixed projection and the aim that it has chosen as its needed goal?"

"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."

"The Holy Spirit does not teach your mind to be critical of other minds, because He does not want you to teach your errors and LEARN THEM YOURSELVES. He would hardly be consistent if He allowed you to STRENGTHEN what you must learn to avoid. In the mind of the THINKER, then, He IS judgmental, but only in order to unify it so IT CAN perceive WITHOUT judgment. This enables the mind to TEACH without judgment and therefore learn to BE without judgment."

"How can His Son AWAKEN from the dream? It is a dream of judgment. So must he judge NOT, and he WILL waken. For the dream will seem to last while he is PART of it. Judge not, for he who judges WILL have need of idols, which will hold the judgment off from resting on himself. Nor CAN he know the Self he has condemned. Judge not, because you make yourself a PART of evil dreams, where idols are your "true" identity, and your salvation from the judgment laid, in terror and in guilt, upon yourself. All figures in the dream are idols, made to save you FROM the dream. Yet they are PART of what they have been made to save you FROM."

"He who would not forgive must judge, to justify his failure to forgive."

A Course in Miracles tells us that as soon as we cease to be forgiving, we enter into an unforgiving state where judgement is automatic. Judgement is attack. It is condemnation. It is required and necessary in order to implement separation, to come between You and God.

Typically we think of judgement as something you believe about others. But this is always an illusion. Judgement is always from you, towards yourself, happening within your own mind.

Judgement also does not judge something which is separate from you and outside of you, but it seems to make a part of yourself separate from the rest of you and outside of what remains of you. It establishes part of yourself as "other" and "not me", and attacks it.

Judgement is sin. It is an attempt to attack the Truth and split the mind. It also possesses two parts, one being the vantage point of "the judger" and the other being the vantage point of "the judged". It is not possible for a mind to be only a judger and not the judged. It must be both, because that same mind must believe that being judged is possible and real to it.

The mind entering into judgement is entering into separation. The mind becomes separated within itself. It forms a victimizer and a victim simultaneously. It engenders an attitude of superiority and inferiority simultaneously. It is not possible to therefore hold an "inferiority complex" without also possessing a "superiority complex".

To believe you are inferior can only come about by part of the mind skewing itself away from what appears to be superiority or worthiness or innocence, which is required in order for the other part of the mind to skew towards judgement.

Thus the mind splits into two simultaneous attitudes, victimization and victimhood, or judgementalism and being judged. You cannot judge without being judged, and all judgement is a judgement of yourself, not another. The mind thus simultaneously manufactures an experience of being judged, and an experience of judging, and then pretends not to be doing so.

It becomes easy for a judging mind to enter into denial that it is playing both roles, because it will either side with the position of judger or judged and deny that the other role exists within the same mind, in order TO judge or be judged. A sense of separation is needed between these two "false identities" to establish that one is what it is and the other is different.

The conscious part of the mind will likely see itself either as judged or as judging. When it sees itself as judged, it will see its judger as separate from itself and likely projected outward. It will be afraid of judgement coming from "other" than itself, which is thought to be other people. It will literally use other people to judge itself, even if they are not actively judging, trying to explain how "not myself" is the cause of this.

Alternatively, the mind can focus conscious awareness on the active role of judger, in which the role of being judged is more unconscious. It sees itself as judging only, and that which is judged is separate from itself and "other". It therefore sees judgement as being against others outside of itself, such as other people, even if other people are innocent. It believes it is not judging a part of itself, having split off the target of its judgements from awareness, through disassociation.

Both of these roles coexist within the same mind, as a split personality with two identities. There is an identity of a judger, superior and righteous and condemning. This is more clearly aligned with the act of sin, whereby to judge is to affirm that sin is real, that judgement is justified because of sin, and that it is someone else who has sinned.

Yet this condemnation is itself sin occurring in the mind, because sin is an attack just as is judgment. The attacking, judging part of the mind believes it is free from the effects of its own attack, having projected them onto another part of the mind.

Then there is the second identity of the judged, the victim who has been attacked from without, and the part of mind that sees itself as powerless, unjustified, weak, vulnerable and open to attack.

It sees itself being attacked against its will and having no power to judge at all. Seeing itself as unworthy, it disclaims having its own opinion or any sense of passing judgement upon others, and acts like a helpless victim. It is the receiver of judgement, open to feeling hurt and embarrassed and ashamed by the accusations which seem to come from beyond itself, typically projected onto other people as the cause because it doesn't recognize that the cause is within the same mind it exists within.

Both of these identities are happening within your own mind, and the interplay between them is happening entirely within you. The judging "you" and the judged "you" are both fictional, illusory identities. Neither of them are true of who you really are - a whole mind with no separation. Neither of them are your real identity, given that who you really are is wholeness and innocence and is completely free from attack, given or received.

You which are the HOST MIND to these two artificial portions of ego mind must gain enough awareness to recognize that you are judging yourself AND being judged by yourself, you are the one who stands in condemnation over yourself, it is you who is the source of your victimization, and "others" have absolutely nothing to do with this.

The only reason you believe that others i.e. other people are judging you, or are the target of your judgement, is because both the judger and the judged parts of your ego mind are unaware that they exist within a larger mind which hosts both of them. Both believe they are all of your "self" and that there is nothing more to your identity than the limits or confines of each false idea of identity.

Being incapable of seeing beyond themselves, both the judger and the judged thus see the "other" which is playing a part in causing or receiving judgement, as being "not myself" and therefore must seem to be "other people". It's easy to conclude this given that other people showing up separate bodies are readily available to "project" this onto, or to see them as sharing the same location as the "otherness" which is believed to be the problem. But this all has nothing to do with other people at all.

Whether it be others in the form of distinctly separate external people, or others in the form of the other part of your own mind, it is only the separation between these identities and the fictional story about how they see each other which is maintaining the split and projecting of the cause.

Your whole mind needs to recognize that it is bigger than and containing these two false selves, that neither self is the whole truth because its story is limited and partial, that YOU as the whole mind are choosing and playing these two identities against each other, and own up to the fact that since they are both WITHIN you, they must both BE a part of your one identity.

In order to return to a single identity, their separateness and distinctness must be dissolved and seen as an illusion. For both of these illusory selves to be a part of you, neither of them can be the whole truth. And in this light, the distinctiveness between them is overlooked and dissolved. Thus do they disappear and judgement and suffering ends. You must admit that you have been playing both roles, and therefore YOU are the one identity behind the ILLUSION of two selves.

Similarly, you must realize that all of your victimization, all of the ways that you believe others are doing things to you, all of the ways that you seem so suffer because of causes separate from you etc.. these must all be recognized as being because of another part of YOU, which is perhaps hidden behind denial and unconsciousness, attacking this second part of you. You've come to identify with this one split-off part of your mind, and are in denial of the rest of you.

It is you who has judged yourself, because it is you who have believed in sin and used sin to split your mind into multiple personalities. You are both the judger and the judged, and yet you are neither because they are both ego illusions.

It is no more true that you actually are being victimized by anyone else, than it is true that you are a victimizer of someone not yourself. You must realize that BOTH of these roles are not your true self, your real identity, or the whole of who you are. They are but an illusion of a separated, split ego mind, pretending to be an identities which you made up.

You are the one who has attacked you. You are the one who is attacking you. You are attacker and attacked, victim and victimizer. And yet you are neither of these, ultimately, because they are both fictional. The ego is always attacking itself and nothing else. The ego IS your self-attack, the scene in which a victimizer and a victim both play roles and cooperate to build a fictional story of interaction.

This is all taking place within you and has nothing to do with other people. It's only because of the split in your mind and your sense of there being a self that is "other" than your self, that you then become confused and accidentally project that sense of otherness onto other separate bodies. Really the otherness your are relating to as your enemy is just a part of your own mind, and your judgement of "them" is directly an attack on yourself, appearing to be indirect, or not at all.

To judge is to attack yourself. To believe you judge another not yourself is the very denial which makes judgement seem possible. You will judge yourself if you judge, and you will never judge another person. And if you are judged, rest assured you are not judged by another, nor should you fear the judgement of other than yourself. It is really your OWN "other self" which you are afraid of judging you, because YOU are the one who is judging you from within.

Surrender both of these positions, therefore, and return to wholeness, which is a mind of forgiveness. In wholeness you will not see an other to judge or to be judged by. Forgiveness cancels judgementalism and the belief in victims and victimizers. You have but done this all to yourself and have experienced all sides of your self conflict. Self conflict always contains two selves, who believe they each are all of your self and yet is limited in its self concept.

You cannot judge without being judged. You cannot be judged without judging. Both make up the state of sin, which is a belief that you should be condemned, or are being condemned. All of it is your own doing.

Judgment of another is a position of causality, in which you are squarely within the identity of the one who is doing something to another. Being judged then is a state of being at the effect of the judgement of another. Yet by entering into the drama of judgement, you become both the cause and the effect of it. And yet, you are not really the cause because none of it has been real. There are no real consequences from separation.

Following from the judging causality of sin, there is the result of guilt, which sees itself as the effect of sin. Yet from the perspective of guilt, as the victim of sin, the mind sees itself as separate from the sinner, and therefore sin is made unconscious and the guilty mind now sees itself as causal. It then proceeds to stand in the role of cause, continuing judgement against the self, determining that because it is guilty, it must be punished, and punishment is just another step on the road of judgement.

Judgement leads all the way to death in this manner, since condemnation calls for death to atone for what you claim you did. You will both suffer and want to suffer, will die and want to die, and will be victimized and want to be victimized. This is what comes from judgement - the entire ego thought system of sin, guilt, fear, punishment and death.

Learning not to judge is only important in terms of learning not to believe in real sin, and to place your mind back into a state of forgiveness. Of yourself. Wholeness, which is the end of judgement, cancels its illusory effects and they are undone.

It is not helpful to simply stop projecting judgements onto other people, if you are not recognizing that it was you that you were judging all along. That would only mean you continue to judge yourself but now are constipated with a censorship of the judgement that continues internally, trying not to shift it onto others but still believing you deserve it. Ceasing to project onto others is only the first step.

You must realize that you've been attacking yourself, judging yourself, being judged by yourself, and that you need to stop doing this. That you are willing to stop doing this. Generally speaking, an awareness that you have been doing this at all may be enough to shine enough light into your mind to make sense of what you have been experiencing, and to dismantle the ego's construct of self attack completely.

You need but a little awareness that it is you who has been both attacker and attacked, and that if you are both of these, then you must have a single identity, and therefore the illusion of separateness between them must be false and unreal. And thus, as an illusion recognized as an illusion of separateness, it will disappear. The mind is thus healed and restored to wholeness, awareness of wholeness returned, and along with it your FULL identity is restored to awareness.

One of the biggest ego traps is when you see that someone else is very wrong, and, as all evidence would have it, they actually ARE wrong.

And probably most people would agree they're wrong.

And the situation itself even 'proves' they are wrong.

Because when this happens, it is now very difficult for you to NOT find the person wrong. It's now very difficult for you to not judge them for it, not condemn them for it, and not use their wrongness against them.

Even though they ARE seemingly wrong, if you don't have the discernment to see that EVEN THIS IS NOT TRUE, you will just fall into the trap and see them as guilty. And then you are stuck.

So now it's a matter of, EVEN IF YOU ARE COMPLETELY RIGHT, even if you have all the evidence to prove it, even if there is no way on the planet that the other person can be right on this matter, EVEN THEN.... you must learn to let go of the need to USE that to accuse them, or to believe it is true of them, or to 'make them wrong' for being wrong.

Yes they may be wrong, but it's just a mistake. And if you believe their mistake is true - ie "its true that they are wrong" - then you are failing to overlook the ILLUSION of this obstacle to peace.

You need to let them be wrong and step back and not judge them for it. It's a very subtle trap. You can't be at peace if you buy all the evidence and take a position of judge and jury.

Choose again. Drop the need to be right when you are right.

Everyone has free will. If someone uses their free will to choose to be mistaken, that's up to them. If they use their free will to try to be a sinful evil-like person, that's up to them. If they use their free will to be angry and violent and abusive, that's up to them. If they use their free will to wage war and murder, that's up to them.

It's actually not a 'right' of ours to judge that the choices people have made are sinful. The choices they have made might be very mistaken, very ineffective, very backward or confused, but it's still their free will to make that choice. We don't actually have a right to hold their mistakes against them or to decide that they are sinful because of what they've chosen.

This means that we have to allow people the freedom to be very wrong, the freedom to attack, the freedom to hurt and damage, etc. That is their free will right. This is not to say that they are sane in those choices, or that it's 'morally right' or justified or loving behaviour etc. But it is still their freedom. If they want to suffer, if they want to produce suffering, that's their freedom.

We therefore have to find a way not to judge such choices as sins. We have to be more like, okay, if that's what you want, then you're totally allowed. Whether or not there are actions or counter-measures or defences or protections or whatever after that point, is another matter. Whether there are consequences of legal actions or imprisonment or whatever, that's another matter. But the person does have the free-will right to do what they want.

What this means is that regardless of how someone is different, regardless of the form it takes, what choices they make, what they seem to want, we have to have an attitude that these differences don't define them as guilty sinners. We can't be judging them for it.

If we start going into modes of like... you did this thing, it's a bad thing, therefore you are sinful, therefore I'm justified in blaming you and shaming you and punishing you .... now we're on shaky ground.

What it means is that we actually want people to have poor choices so that we have an opportunity to see them sin. If they sin, then we can find them guilty. Then we can project our own guilt onto them while making out that they're the guilty one, and it'll all seem nice and tidy and covert. We ourselves as "with sin", and we are trying to cast stones at people we want to be sinful.

As Jesus says in the bible "He who is without sin should cast the first stone." In other words if we're busy judging people and hurling stones at them to punish them for 'sin', we should be a bit more honest and look at the ways we ourselves are being sinful before finding other people to be sinful. We don't really have a leg to stand on. And only those who are forgiving and sinless would be in a position to judge, and would refrain from doing so.

In effect, if we are judging people for making poor choices, seeming to suggest that we think that shouldn't be acting that way, we actually DO want them to act that way, because we get a great opportunity to scapegoat. And that means we can shove some of our guilt onto them and justify it on the basis that they are the one who deserves it, and our anger is justified. Thank God they chose to sin so that we could have a chance to be innocent.

To be more honest we have to stop judging people as being sinners for what they've chosen. But this also does mean that even in the face of people seeming to do what we might classify as horrible things, abusive things, evil things, we have to STILL find them not guilty. We have to still not judge them as evil or wrong or bad people. They are just mistaken.

Criminals, murderers, rapists, child abusers, terrorists, war-mongers, thieves, bullies, you name it... yes they are making quite poor choices but they are not sinful for it. Nor are we supposed to be pointing a finger of blame and saying they are the guilty ones. Or holding it against them, or shaming them, or wanting to counter-attack them, or punish them for it.

If we're doing that, trying to use the things in the world that seem less than holy as justification for revenge and hate and accusation, then we're in our ego. Because the ego loves to judge harshly and find guilty and make wrong. That means we are being "judgey". As "judges" we act like "judge and jury", some kind of God or authority that has the 'right' to determine who is innocent and who is guilty, and to sentence the sinners to death.

We're judgemental and unforgiving. Instead of being forgiving toward them for their mistakes, we step out of forgiveness and go into judgement. We reason that we're not being forgiving BECAUSE the person is judged to be wrong. The judgement tries to justify NOT forgiving, by pointing out how the person is obviously sinful and MUST be judged. So then we're justifying unforgiving attitudes on the basis that people are doing wrong all over the place, which is itself the perceived result of not forgiving them in the first place.

Bottom line is, we are not supposed to be judging anyone or anything. Judging is just another form of attack and projection. At times it can seem to not be angry, maybe just a subtle annoyance, but it's still a way to project guilt. All the things we judge against, we have to find a way to stop doing that. All the ways we say people are wrong, and hold their acts and choices against them, we're being unforgiving.

So ultimately it means that in order to be forgiving, we have to forgive everyone and everything. There mustn't be anything that we single out for punishment, no-one that we call names, no one that we hate or are offended by, no-one that we see as deliberately evil, and no-one that justifies our anger or revenge.

People in their differences need to be allowed to be different. It doesn't mean differences are true or real, but if people are choosing to be different that's up to them. If in any way we categorise their choices as wrong, we're being judgemental. No matter how weird their choices, how strange, how unnatural, how fake, how immature, how selfish, whatever.... we have to still let them have the freedom to make those choices and not accuse them of being stupid, sinful, evil, bad, wrong, guilty, or any other negativity because of it.

We don't have to agree with the differences, we don't have to choose the same things, we don't have to condone it or support it, we don't have to go along with it or let ourselves or others be in the line of fire. We don't have to go into inaction or being carpeting or a martyr or letting people walk all over us etc, but at the same time we must not be having such unforgiving attitudes towards them.

It requires infinite patience. And it requires a willingness not to be at war. In judgement we are unforgiving and cold and heartless and unloving. Only in forgiveness - an earthly form of love - can we be kind and supportive and truly helpful.

"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." UrW220W14

How about we think of it this way. You suck. So you need help. Or more to the point, you don't know where you are, what you are, how you got here, what to do, what anything is, what anything means, what to decide, how to judge, how to see, how to save yourself, or really anything at all. Your'e a bit of a mess.

"There is no statement that the world is more afraid to hear than this: I do not know the thing I am, and THEREFORE do not know what I am doing, where I am, or how to look upon the world and on myself."

So, the Holy Spirit has come along as your mentor and guide. He's there to show you how to do it right. He has better thoughts to give you in exchange for your crappy thoughts. He has better ways of seeing which you can share. He is able to decide things for you, judge things for you, and tell you what they mean.

So you can treat him like a teacher, let him teach you, listen to his reminders of reality and learn from him. You can hand over everything to him and let him do it for you, and let him guide you how to do it better. Let him be a model and template for how to function properly, how to think properly, how to relate properly. Refer everything to him and let him lead you out of the mess you made.

Hand over your effort at destroying yourself terrible, and ask him to do purify your effort and give it back to you anew. Let him decide for God for you. Let him show you what is true and think for you, choose for you, heal for you. Receive his help. This is his function. His function is to show and tell you how to live correctly, and your function is to learn from him. You think YOU know how to do this course, perform forgiveness, or find salvation? You don't! He does.

"Peace abides in every mind that quietly accepts the plan that GOD has set for his Atonement, RELINQUISHING HIS OWN. You know NOT of Salvation, for you do NOT understand it. 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."

"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."

"If it is the judgment of the Holy Spirit, it will be right, for judgment IS His function. You share His function only by judging AS HE DOES, reserving no judgment at all unto yourselves. For you will judge AGAINST yourselves, but He will judge FOR you."

"The Holy Spirit forgives everything, BECAUSE GOD CREATED EVERYTHING. Do not undertake HIS function, or you will forget YOURS."

"And all aspects are under the Holy Spirit's particular care and guidance. Ask and He will answer. The responsibility is His, and He alone is fit to assume it. To do so is His function. To refer the questions to Him is yours. Would you want to be responsible for decisions about which you understand so little? Be glad you have a Teacher Who cannot make a mistake. His answers are always right. Would you say that of yours?"

"Follow His teaching in forgiveness, then, because forgiveness IS His function, and HE knows how to fulfill it perfectly."

"This holy instant would I give to You. Be You in charge. For I would follow You, Certain that Your direction gives me peace."

To judge or be judgemental, in course terms, is to section off part of the world and put it into a category, likely based on its form or appearance or behaviour. Sometimes it is judged as good sometimes as evil. Sometimes it is regarded as a sin, sometimes a blessing.

But in all cases it is based on separating off and pitting it against other things, producing more conflict. Even seemingly positive judgements are ways of saying "this is better than that", as a subtle put-down of something else. Nothing can be elevated above unless something else is worse.

We use judgement like a way of selecting what something is "in isolation", and then determining its merit. Is it righteous or cursed? Is it acceptable or rejected? But in truth all judgement rejects because it has to push something else away in order to focus on and accept something.

Essentially judgementalism is simply a way of applying an un-whole and unholy viewpoint, to only a portion of the world, rather than to the whole of it. And that requires emphasising differences and comparing them and finding something lacking. No matter how positive the judgement seems to be it must have a flipside, of the dark things it judges against indirectly in order to put something on a pedestal. Just as special relationships hate the rest of the community.

Therefore judgement leads to idol worship, where something is either put on a pedestal or buried in the ground based on what you "believe" its value is. But the thing about judgement is that it isn't objective, it isn't passive, and isn't unbiased. It is always a condemnation and used as a weapon to separate and subdivide and increase space-time. It's a way of accusing something of being something, projecting some of your lovely guilt onto it, or onto its competition.

While we are in ego we are being partial, and all our judgements are wrong. That's a big statement but it means every single way that we judge on our own without the wholeness of the Holy Spirit, is a form of grievance, unforgiveness, attack, making sin real, and projecting guilt. It's a way of separating things off, splitting the mind, and focusing on differences.

This is why we have to be willing to give up making ANY judgements without the Holy Spirit's judgement, because every single time we judge or evaluate anything we're making a mistake. EVERY time. And then our judgement is an attack thought, and projects guilt, and labels and categorises, and fragments everything into a worse state. Plus you are included in the mind-splitting effects of judging.

We might not think we judge, but we're doing it all the time. We might think we're not even angry, making a passing commentary about something, having an opinion, giving a wise and educated verdict, using our experience, but it's all flawed. Unless it addresses the whole coming from wholeness and concludes only universal innocence, it is judgementalism and is ego.

"Judgment was made to be a weapon used against the truth. It separates what it is being used against, and sets it off as if it were a thing apart. And then it makes of it what you would have it be. It judges what it cannot understand, because it cannot see totality and therefore judges falsely." UrW311L1

1) God created heaven which is perfect. You are in heaven as an immortal being, along with your brothers.

2) You believe you're not in heaven, and made a second world with the idea of opposing everything.

3) The second world is the physical world. Everything about it is false and opposite to God's nature. Not one single thing in it is true or real.

4) As part of the physical world, you also made a body. It's a separation device made to deceive you. It separates you off from God and your brothers and makes suffering seem possible.

5) The body agrees with the physical world's nature entirely, making it seem real. The body cannot see anything else and it cannot see reality at all. Everything it sees is an illusion.

6) Your mind seems to be in a body. Your mind seems to use the body's senses to sense the world you made. The body reports that it is real and happening. Everything in the world presents proof of sin and death and the body says it's really there.

7) If your mind believes what the body is telling it, it will be deceived. The body lies to it, because the world is a lie. So mind has to learn that everything in the world is unreal and untrue, being not of God. This can seem VERY difficult.

Sanity and awakening is merely a matter of extreme honesty.

Honestly is a willingness to admit to what is true, to accept the truth, to not hide anything. It is visibility and exposure to God.

Honesty flies in the face of things like denial, deception, lies, guilt, shame, fear, confusion, false beliefs, anger, defences, egoic justifications etc.

All the egoic stuff, the false perception stuff, is some form of avoidance of reality, an avoidance of the truth. An unwillingness to admit to something.

In order to push through to reality we have to become ever more honest in admitting to what things are. What we are doing to ourselves.

We use at first a little willingness which then grows into a big willingness. This is a willingness to admit the truth. "Admitting" means to allow access, which opens up the mind to let the truth in. Accepting that truth is honesty - ie, reality as it really is.

The end result is a direct, immediate and accurate perception, which admits only to reality and what is true, and is completely unwilling to go into the various egoic forms of avoidance and distortion.

Honesty is openness, willingness, sanity, recognition, purity, wholeness, awareness. It's a sharp look at what is actually true in preference over all the various forms of dreaming and wishing and denial.

Bit by bit we're stripping away all the ways that we are avoiding the reality of God, avoiding the truth and trying to hide and distort what's there. Honesty reveals to us the "real" world instead of our unreal dishonest world.

It is the proper tool for weeding out all ego motives, all distortions of reality, all denial of God, all unwillingness to accept atonement, all reasons for unforgiveness, all basis for judgment.

Honesty can take you all the way home, as you emerge from the fog of lies and deceit that is the separation from God. End the bullshit, it's time to get real.

"Only within the Holy Instant can an honest question honestly be asked." UrT27E6

"I will be honest with myself today. I will not think that I already know what must remain beyond my present grasp. I will not think I understand the whole from bits of my perception, which are all that I can see. Today I recognize that this is so. And so I am relieved of judgment which I cannot make. Thus do I free myself and what I look upon, to be in peace as God created us." UrW243L1

"Be sure you are honest with yourself in making this distinction. You may be tempted to obscure it." UrW9L3

"Only the trusting can afford honesty, for only they can see its value. Honesty does not apply only to what you say. The term actually means consistency. There is nothing you say that contradicts what you think or do; no thought opposes any other thought; no act belies your word; and no word lacks agreement with another. Such are the truly honest. At no level are they in conflict with themselves. Therefore it is impossible for them to be in conflict with anyone or anything." URM5C1

"The peace of mind which the advanced teachers of God experience is largely due to their perfect honesty. It is only the wish to deceive that makes for war." UrM5C2

"God's teachers do not judge. To judge is to be dishonest, for to judge is to assume a position you do not have." UrM5D1

"True faithfulness, however, does not deviate. Being consistent it is wholly honest." UrM5J2

"For honest thoughts, untainted by the dream of worldly things outside yourself, become the holy messengers of God Himself." UrW188L6

"It is necessary for the teacher of God to realize not that he should not judge, but that he cannot. In giving up judgment he merely gives up what he did not have. He gives up an illusion; or better, he has an illusion of giving up. He has actually merely become more honest." UrM11A2

"You have been as selective in your questioning as in your perception. An open mind is more honest than this." UrT12D3

"Against the littleness you see in him you stand as tall and stately, clean and honest, pure and unsullied by comparison with what you see." UrT24C1

"Leave all illusions of yourself OUTSIDE this place, to which you come in hope and honesty. Here is your Savior FROM your specialness." URT24C10v "Be very honest with yourselves about this, for we must hide nothing from each other." URT4D19

"The search for truth is but the honest searching out of everything that INTERFERES with truth. TRUTH IS. And can be neither lost, nor sought, nor found. It is there, wherever YOU are, being WITHIN you." URT14D2

I've recently come to appreciate what these two terms mean. When I am taking over control, doing everything myself, identifying what things are and what they mean, assigning labels and projecting judgements, I am actually "narrowing down".

I narrow because I am actually tying to narrow what things are. To put them in boxes. Interestingly I can't just freely use my mind to narrow things down without making my mind narrow down as well. Any attempt to label the specific forces my mind to exclude.

When doing this a lot, I couldn't help but notice that my intellectual pursuits felt like they were keeping me stuck in a box. I kept feeling small and childish and afraid. The more I seemed to become close to finding out what the truth was about something specific, the narrower my outlook became and the more I felt hemmed in.

When I confine something to being something specific, focusing on its form and so on, I become blinded by that perception of form. I might think I'm being objective or open but it's not possible to focus on the specific without making your mind become specific.

You might have thought for a long time that you can just use your mind and your thinking however you please, as if the way you think about stuff has no effect on you. But it totally does.

When you're in the business of trying to give meaning to everything and to interpret and judge everything "alone", that aloneness is isolating and actually inhibits your awareness. It closes you down.

Also interestingly the more you "home in on" what you think something is or means, isolating it into a nice tidy definition, you'll think you are "opening up" to the truth, when in fact you are closing yourself off from the truth.

You'll also find that the more you obsess over trying to find the perfect explanation or cause for something highly specific, the more it will slip through your fingers. And you'll be driven mad with the exasperating endless search for answers that can never be satisfies - as you seek and do not find.

Things in the world become true in your mind only when you start splitting the world into separate pieces and putting labels on them. Trying to categorize them into various boxes. This obsession with dividing things up to try to make sense of them or to get a better understanding of them, masquerades as becoming open to what they are. But it's doing exactly the opposite.

If to "narrow down" or pin down what something is, or means, causes your mind to actually close, then doing the opposite opens your mind. To become open-minded doesn't just mean you're not very attached to some things and willing to entertain alternatives, it means you are not in the business of being closed.

To be open minded is to stop narrowing everything down on your own. To be open minded is to be willing to receive the Holy Spirit and allow him to see and decide and judge for you. You're open to his judgement because you're refusing to confine yourself within narrow separating judgements.

The very walls you put around the things you see become blocks to awareness in your perception. As you label and section things off your mind goes into those boxes along with the things you put in them. As you imprison, as you isolate things to form and physicality, your mind shuts down and becomes small, just like those objects.

To become open minded we have to be actually willing to let go of judging and let go of labeling and let go of giving meaning to things. What the Holy Spirit wants for us is to share his perception of wholeness. "The perceptual contents of miracles is wholeness."

This also requires transcending separations between objects by not focusing so much on their differences and exclusive qualities. This is what the ACIM workbook has you doing, overlooking and being non-specific in your selection of objects to consider around you, so that you move towards a more abstract or generalized viewpoint.

That means seeing from a whole perspective, looking with wholeness (holiness), seeing wholeness, and giving a single meaning to everything. It is far more abstract and open rather than being narrow and specific. You have to be "open to everything" (to the single whole) in order to be open minded.

The Holy Spirit doesn't attempt to "understand" the world, in terms of breaking it up into specific things in an attempt to analyze and judge its parts. To figure out the inner workings or relationships between separate objects. He knows that such an analysis leads to separating, partial, blind perspectives, which cannot grasp the whole.

The more you narrow things down in the search for explaining what is true of it, the more out of touch you become with the big picture. The big picture, the real truth, is not narrow at all. It is expansive and abstract and unlimited.

You have to be in an unlimited state in order to really see from a perspective of wholeness, to be able to discern what anything really is. Unless you can see everything at once, you cannot really be in a position to judge correctly.

Open mindedness is a willingness to surrender the position of trying to be God, or trying to fulfill the Holy Spirit's function. It's a willingness to recognize you cannot judge or accurately discern the meaning of anything on your own, and your own exclusive learning has mislead you down dark paths that have only made you suffer.

To be closed-minded has in fact shut you off from happiness and from health. It has caused you to draw conclusions which are narrow and limiting and which take sides. Partitioning off aspects of your awareness and labeling and judging them as right or wrong, and pitting them against each other. Dividing up your "world" into a fragmented experience, erecting walls and inducing darkness.

Openness is really the absence of walls, and it is this absence of obstructions or "obstacles to peace" that allows light to shine and extend. To be enlightened is to be open minded, in which the mind becomes aware of the whole of reality at once. It can't do that if it's constantly focusing on trying to split everything apart and give it a name.

To "not know" what things are, or more to the point to not understand what the world is, is to recognize that on the whole it is fundamentally insane and does not make sense. Trying to make sense of an illusion is like trying to keep its illusory nature and study it. Or to study the ego. It is better to let it be what it is and move into a space of awareness, of not needing to know because the Holy Spirit can know for you.

The Holy Spirit is more than just a guide in this sense. We could say that he is the gate of heaven. That which connects your mind to both worlds, while two seem to persist, until you can accept oneness and singularity again. From his perspective, the entire world has a single meaning. "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."

"Learning is useless in the Presence of your Creator, Whose ACKNOWLEDGMENT of you, AND YOURS OF HIM, so FAR transcends ALL learning, that EVERYTHING you learned is meaningless, replaced forever by the knowledge of love and its One meaning."

"There is NO confusion in the Kingdom, because there IS only one meaning."

"This is the light which shows no opposites, and vision, being healed, has power to heal. This is the light which brings your peace of mind to other minds, to share it and be glad that they are one with you and with themselves. This is the light which heals because it brings single perception, based upon one frame of reference from which one meaning comes."

"You cannot see alone. Sharing perception with Him Whom God has given you, teaches you how to RECOGNIZE what you see. It is the recognition that NOTHING you see means ANYTHING alone. Seeing WITH Him will SHOW you that all meaning, INCLUDING YOURS, comes not from double vision, but from the gentle fusing of everything into one meaning, one emotion and one purpose."

Recognizing your own immorality is important and key. But recognizing the immortality of your brothers is also vital.

If your brother is an immortal being, nothing can happen to him. He can't be attacked, he can't be destroyed, he can't have anything wrong with him.

Just like you, your brother's immortal soul is incorruptible, it cannot change or be changed, it is eternal and will live forever. It is not at the effect of anything, not even your brother can change his own self, nor even God. His nature is fixed forever.

What this then tells you is that, by being aware of this, there is no grounds for projecting guilt onto him, attacking him, believing there is something wrong with him, seeing him as a sinner, or trying to destroy him.

All the ego's murderousness arises from the belief in death, the belief that you are something that can die, and that your brother is something that can die. Why would you even attempt to attack him if you saw his perfect invincibility?

What basis would there be for insinuating that he is guilty of anything at all, if his innocence is eternal? If he is so free from attack and there is no attack in or upon him, because he is absolutely invulnerable and pure, then it would be impossible to find him guilty of anything.

Just as the forgiveness of yourself hinges upon the recognition of your own immortality, in which you cannot possibly have the slightest trace of death or malfunction or sin or attack in you, so too your brother exhibits the same safety and protection.

You cannot change your brother's reality. You cannot attack your brother's reality. You cannot hurt your brother, destroy your brother, make your brother unhappy, cause your brother to have a shorter existence, or change your brother in ANY way.

And since you cannot do that, you have not done that. And therefore the recognition of this is YOUR salvation, because you must be innocent if you have been utterly incapable of changing him. His perfect truth, his purity, his innocence and his immortality teach you that you also must be this way, just as yours reminds him of his own.

If you think your brother is in some way sick, or damaged, or guilty, or wrong, or defective, or malfunctioning, or temporary, or limited, or exclusive, or in any way something less than immortal, you are NOT SEEING HIM.

If you could see him and feast your eyes upon him you would see only a perfectly pure innocent being with not the slightest hint of mortality or curruption in him. And then it would be impossible to judge him as anything but perfect. It is because you choose to look upon illusions about him and NOT see him, that you judge him as sinful - or rather, judge your interpretation of him as sinful, because you do not recognize him.

The forgiveness of your brother is rooted deeply in simply recognizing his real nature. In seeing his truth, forgiveness is complete. Only in failing to recognize his nature do you enter into beliefs in death, in which a basis for judgement and a justification for attack arises. Without death to tarnish his immortality or yours, there is no attack and only love - no death and only life. "Your Brother's Sinlessness" UrT22C

"My brother's sinlessness shows me that I would look upon my own. And I will see it, having chosen to behold my brother in its holy light." UrW335L1

"Before your brother's holiness the world is still, and peace descends on it in gentleness and blessing so complete, that not one trace of conflict still remains to haunt you in the darkness of the night." UrT24G1

"Your brother's holiness shows you that God is One with him AND you; that what he has is yours BECAUSE you are not separate from him OR from his Father." UrT24G2

"When you accept a brother's guiltlessness, you will SEE Atonement in him." UrT13I1

"Remove your focus on your brother's sins, and you experience the peace that comes from faith in sinlessness." UrW181L2

"If you share not your brother's evil dreams, this IS the picture that the miracle will place within the little gap, left clean of all the seeds of sickness and of sin." UrT28E7

"Who sees a brother's body has laid a JUDGMENT on him, and sees him not. He does not REALLY see him as sinful; he does not see him at all. In the darkness of sin, he is INVISIBLE." UrT28H6

"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." UrT20I3

"Do not accept your brother's variable perception of himself, for his split mind is yours, and you will not accept YOUR healing without his." UrT10H14

Quite a lot of quotes here about LETTING the Holy Spirit do stuff for you and through you…

“I will step back and let Him lead the way.”

“Then let him turn within to his Eternal Guide, and let Him Judge what the response should be. So is he healed, and in his healing is his pupil healed with him.”

“Your part is only to offer Him a LITTLE willingness to LET Him remove all fear and hatred, and to BE forgiven.”

“Let Him fulfill the function that He GAVE to your relationship by ACCEPTING it FOR you.”

“When you feel the holiness of your relationship is threatened by ANYTHING, stop instantly and offer the Holy Spirit your willingness, IN SPITE of fear, to let Him exchange this instant for the holy one which YOU would rather have. He will NEVER fail in this.”

“I rest in God today, and let Him work

In me and through me, while I rest in Him

In quiet and in perfect certainty.”

“Trust all things to Him. Let Him reveal all things to you, and be you undismayed because you are His Son.”

“The unredeemed cannot redeem. Yet they HAVE a Redeemer. Attempt to teach Him not. YOU are the learner; HE the Teacher. Do not confuse your role with His, for this will NEVER bring peace to anyone. Offer your empathy to Him, for it is HIS perception and His STRENGTH that you would share. And let Him offer you HIS strength and HIS perception, to be shared THROUGH you.”

“He gives the miracles my dreams would hide from my awareness. Let Him judge today. I do not know my will, but He is sure it is Your own. And He will speak for me, and call Your miracle to come to me."

“The Holy Spirit will teach me this, if I will let Him. And I will understand it is impossible that I could have a problem which has not been solved already.”

“Let Him be Judge of what you are, for He has certainty in which there is no doubt because it rests on Certainty so great that doubt is meaningless before Its Face.”

“Let Him be Judge as well of everything that seems to happen to you in this world. His lessons will enable you to bridge the gap between illusions and the truth.”

“Let Him evaluate each thought that comes to mind, remove the elements of dreams, and give them back to you as clean ideas which do not contradict the Will of God.”

“Follow His light and see the world as He beholds it. Hear His Voice alone in all that speaks to you. And let Him give you peace and certainty, which you have thrown away, but Heaven has preserved for you in Him.”

“The CAPACITY to empathize is VERY useful to the Holy Spirit, provided you let Him use it in His way. His way is very different. He does NOT understand suffering, and would have you teach IT IS NOT UNDERSTANDABLE. When He relates through you, He does NOT relate through the ego to another ego. He does NOT join in pain, knowing that HEALING pain is NOT accomplished by delusional attempts to ENTER INTO IT, and lighten it by SHARING the delusion.”

“The Holy Spirit asks only this little help of you. Whenever your thoughts wander to a special relationship which still ATTRACTS you, enter with Him into a holy instant, and there, LET HIM RELEASE YOU. He needs only your willingness to SHARE His perspective, to give it to you completely.”

“Call upon Him, for Heaven is at His call. And LET Him call on Heaven FOR you.”

“God's Voice alone can tell you how to heal. Listen, and you will never fail to bring His kindly remedy to those He sends to you, to let Him heal them, and to bless all those who serve with Him in healing's name. The body's healing will occur because its cause has gone. And now without a cause, it cannot come again in different form. Nor will death any more be feared because it has been understood. There is no fear in one who has been truly healed, for love has entered now where idols used to stand, and fear has given way at last to God.”

“The teacher of God must, however, learn to use words in a new way. Gradually, he learns how to let his words be chosen for him by ceasing to decide for himself what he will say. This process is merely a special case of the Workbook lesson "I will step back and let Him lead the way." The teacher of God accepts the words which are offered him and gives as he receives. He does not control the direction of his speaking. He listens and hears and speaks.”

“And now I place you in His hands, to be His faithful followers, with Him as Guide through every difficulty and all pain that you may think is real. Nor will He give you pleasures that will pass away, for He gives only the eternal and the good. Let Him prepare you further. He has earned your trust by speaking daily to you of your Father and your brother and your Self. He will continue; now you walk with Him as certain as is He of where you go; as sure as He of how you should proceed, as confident as He is of the goal, and of your safe arrival in the end.”

“I place you in His charge, and let Him teach you what to do and say and think each time you turn to Him. He will not fail to be available to you each time you call to Him to help you.”

“They will not hear another voice but yours, because you gave your voice to God and now you rest in Him, and let Him speak through you.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Then turn to Him who shares your function with you, and let Him teach you what you need to learn to lay all fear aside, and know your Self as Love Which has no opposite in you.”

“He is the strong protector of your innocence, which sets you free. And it is HIS decision to undo EVERYTHING that would obscure your innocence from your unclouded mind. Let Him, therefore, be the only guide that you would follow to Salvation. He knows the way, and leads you gladly on it. WITH Him, you will not fail to learn what God wills FOR you IS your will. ”

“The Holy Spirit points quietly to the contrast, knowing that you will finally let Him judge the difference FOR you, allowing Him to demonstrate which MUST be true.”

“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.”

“But the Holy Spirit, too, has use for sleep, and can use dreams on BEHALF of waking, if you will let Him.”

“Your creations are protected FOR you because the Holy Spirit, Who is in your minds, knows of them, and can bring them INTO your awareness whenever you will let Him.”

“The Holy Spirit knows NO-ONE IS SPECIAL. But He also perceives that you have MADE special relationships, which He would purify, and NOT let YOU destroy. 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.”

“For here is both his pain AND his healing, for the Holy Spirit's vision is merciful, and His remedy is quick. Do not HIDE suffering from His sight, but bring it gladly TO Him. Lay before His eternal sanity ALL your hurt, and LET Him heal you. Do not leave any spot of pain hidden from His Light, and search your minds carefully for any thoughts which you may fear to uncover. For He will heal every little thought that you have kept to hurt you, and cleanse it of its littleness, restoring it to the magnitude of God.”

“Leave, then, what seems to you to be impossible, to Him Who knows it MUST be possible, because it is the Will of God. And let Him, Whose teaching is ONLY of God, teach you the ONLY meaning of relationships. For God Himself created the only relationship that HAS meaning, and that is His relationship with YOU.”

“Thank God that He is there, and works through you. And all His works are yours. He offers YOU a miracle, with every one you LET Him do through you.”

“But the Holy Spirit has saved its meaning FOR you, and if you will LET Him interpret it FOR you, He will restore what you have thrown away.”

Forgiveness is a constant state of knowing there is nothing to forgive. God is "forgiving" but only in the sense that He knows there is nothing to forgive. Forgiveness is more of a sustaining of the truth, an extension of love and a clarity about what is true.

If you have a forgiving attitude it means you overlook errors because you do not make them and recognize they do not exist. You are forgiving because by looking with forgiveness you shine a kind and gentle light on all that you see, acknowledging its innocence and yours.

It's when you fail to be forgiving that you enter into making illusions, perceiving guilt, and are calling for punishment.

God's attitude is that you are always innocent. Holy Spirit's attitude is the same. Holy Spirit is always forgiving. If there is anything you think you've done wrong, it is forgivable. Forgiveness extends from unconditional love and recognizes you have not really done anything at all. That is why forgiveness is a key part of the atonement principle - there is nothing to forgive because nothing has happened.

When we do fail to be forgiving, we enter into a state of judgement in an attempt to explain why we are not forgiving. If I can judge another and condemn them, this is my attempt to explain that I did not forgive because clearly the other person is in error and this calls for me to righteously judge them.

"He who would not forgive must judge to justify his failure to forgive." - ACIM

What I need to then do is stop and recognize that I am not being forgiving, and that I need to get back to a forgiving, overlooking attitude, which recognizes innocence and acknowledges the atonement. This doesn't necessarily refer to the `process` that we seem to go through to get TO a forgiving state of mind. When we're in the forgiving state of mind - Holy Spirit - all is forgiven already. But if I'm in a state of condemnation, I need help to get my mind to stop this and to resume forgiveness.

We call it forgiveness when we undo these illusions and when we work on correction of thought and adjustment of perception. But such corrections are only there for the sake of getting mind back to a state of constant pure permanent forgiveness. Forgiveness isn't therefore something you 'do' its a way of being in love. The curriculum of returning to a forgiving attitude is just that, an illusory path of corrections of the mistakes that we're making in our forgiveness.

Some call it practice - to practice forgiveness, in order to learn what forgiveness really is. Or moreso, to unlearn what forgiveness is not. But it isn't practice that produces forgiveness - the light of truth is already established by God and it is His unconditional love that is constantly forgiving through us. We share in that. Our so called 'application' of ACIM principles is more to do with undoing the ways in which we have failed at forgiveness, removing blocks to the awareness that all is forgiven already, so that we can be restored to a constant state of pure forgiving.

Once we reach that complete awareness of forgiveness, and join with Holy Spirit fully, we will cease to make errors such as judgements and will recognize there is nothing left 'to forgive' because forgiveness is complete. And this forgiveness is a protection because it pro-actively fore-gives in order not to enter into error of judgement. So long as you stick with Holy Spirit and see as He sees, you're good to go.

All is forgiven because nothing has happened to assail the Kingdom of God and nothing ever will. This is good news.

A good question to ask is, it is any of my god-dam business?

In various ACIM groups, a majority of statements made are attempts to evaluate what someone else is doing and to judge whether or not they are supposed to be doing it.

It's kind of like the behavior police, making it one's own business to require that other people be a certain way in order to be acceptable.

What I think it really stems from is this issue of irresponsibility for our own choices. Or rather, trying to make someone else responsible for your happiness, and thereby being justified in anger at them when they're not being the way we need them to be, in order to choose what we want on our behalf.

There is this "forgiveness to destroy" all over these groups.

If I am responsible for my own choice and what I experience and I am not responsible for anyone else's mistaken decisions, then what anyone else is or is not doing should really be of no concern to me.

If I can access anything I need and any experience I desire through responsibility for my own choice, then I should have no need for anyone else to be a certain way, say certain things, have certain behaviors, or comply to some kind of guilt-laden course ideal. If I'm finger-pointing as to how others are falling short, it must prove that I am falling short and I'm the one who needs to own it.

What I came away with from spending time in the groups is, getting back to this self-study practice, for myself. No-one else can choose the atonement for me, or deny it for me. It's not anyone else's choice to make on my behalf. So I ask myself now whether there is really any significant merit in participating in these "discussion groups" where 90% of what's written is about the ways that other people are wrong.

Why are so many people talking about the way that OTHER people are doing the course and judging them for it?

I don't think we're supposed to be even getting into other people's business. Like, if someone is doing the course a certain way for them, that's their choice. It may not be the way I do it or what I believe the course says. But as soon as my ego starts to compare and judge the person now I'm getting involved in their business, interfering with their choices, trying to control them, and then rejecting them when they fail to comply.

We need to mind of own fucking business a bit more. Or as Jesus puts it more eloquently.... be passer by. Observe.

Forgiveness looks and is still and quiet and judges not. Where is the entanglement of opinions and getting into whether other people are right or wrong, in that?

All the debate and trying to coerce others to be like oneself, is an indirect ego attempt to avoid making one's own choice for atonement. It's a failure to forgive, actually, resulting in justified judgement. "He who would not forgive must judge, to justify his failure to forgive." We aren't going to get to heaven by having someone else choose to go there for us.

So what does it matter what anyone else is doing? What does it matter whether other people are getting it or not? What does it matter who said what to whom and who was an asshole and who is passive aggressive and who is spewing lies about the truth 24/7?

I'm just thinking... I need to do the course myself, for me, and let go of trying to change other people when they're not ready or willing. Those who are to meet will meet. When students are ready, teachers appear. There are no accidents in salvation. God has a plan.

For a long time I have focused on "the secret of salvation". This is to do with realizing that you are the cause of everything you are experiencing. And therefore that you are responsible for all your own suffering. On the one hand it's humbling and on the other hand it's empowering, because if you can realize you're the one doing it you have the freedom to stop.

But l notice now that the secret of "how to be saved" applies in the case where you are not yet saved. It's helpful when you are in the suffering and need to get out of it. That's kind of the context of it, it's a tool you can use to recognize who is doing what to whom, so that you can stop doing it.

I have noticed also that with the secret of salvation, we are focusing a lot on taking responsibility. Which initially is seen as inciting guilt, and then moves into trying to be fully responsible for everything. But the further secret is, that if we try to take full responsibility ALONE, where "separate me" is fully responsible for everything, then we are still generating fearful outlooks, because depending on ourselves alone is a state of rejecting God.

So I've been locked into a stage for a while of trying to be fully responsible, but trying to take that responsibility in isolation, rather than GIVE that responsibility to the Holy Spirit. I feel that I personally am somewhat moving beyond this stage now and into more of the "I am saved" stage. By which I mean, I have recognized that it is my attempts to do anything "alone" that is the source of all suffering, because that's how I "be separate". And "I" can't be fully responsible without sharing that responsibility with God.

Whenever I try to be separate, I essentially am attacking myself, which makes errors, produces more ego fear, and induces suffering. This all comes about after I have judged and given meaning to things, using my own faculties for judging. Which means really, using my own past learning. This always leads to errors because it's lacking a lot of facts. And I keep being shown now just how wrong I can be when I don't know all the details.

So I'm now finding that if I admit to not knowing what anything means, and am willing to stop trying to judge anything I see, and instead seek out the Holy Spirit to join in his vision or interpretation, then this circumvents the whole process of going into error. Or rather, I guess I'm saying that if I seek the state of forgiveness sooner, then I don't go into judgement, and thus don't hurt myself. Which reminds me of this...

"Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus KEEPING it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your minds AT ALL, or you will also believe that you must UNDO what you have made, in order to BE forgiven. "

This is what I am atuning to now. Trying to become closer to the Holy Spirit and more identified with my real self, so that I do not go INTO judgement or MAKE errors. Because as soon as you make errors, you'll start believing you've got a whole mess on your hands that you need to fix, problems to solve, fears to address and self-inflicted suffering to be undone. ALL of that can be avoided if you don't make the errors in the first place!

It's far more effective at preventing a movement INTO fear, when I try to remain OUT of the battlefield. Being willing to not be the one to judge, or decide, or plan, or figure out, or deduce meaning, I stay well out of the entire "fight" that we have with the world. If I don't do this and I go into solo-mode, ego pilot mode, then I start to "make a world" that's riddled with separations and conflicts and unresolved problems and threats and dangers.

I have been finding of late therefore that I actually feel... and this is a word Jesus just threw in my mind.... INSULATED.... against dangers. That is to say, I feel like there was an entire version of "the world" which I thought was out there, which has been scraped off the surface of my mind and isn't there anymore. An entire layer of experience and suffering and a sense of threat and engagement and littleness and fear. It's just gone. It's like I have stepped out of an entire world and it has disappeared. At least to a degree, and now I look upon what's left through much calmer and less aggravated perspectives.

I see now therefore what Jesus means about how false perception makes you see a world that looks like hell, and how as you move into more abstract states of mind you lift off of the world entire layers of vulnerability, fear, struggle and suffering. Its like a whole veil has been lifted to some degree, so much that I have been feeling like I'm in a different world. Like I literally just stepped out of one planet and am on another one where a lot of the strife doesn't exist.

And I am thankful for that, because there is a noticeable contrast between how much safer and calmer and happier I feel now without the tremendous burden of being some kind of "soldier on the battlefield" fending off the hounds of hell. I am simply not making as many errors, generating as much fear, producing as much control, making up as many problems, or developing as many meanings for things. And in fact as I look at objects now they appear to be new and fresh and interesting.

It's weird but Jesus basically says that we are to adopt a perspective in which everything is given ONE meaning, from a whole viewpoint where "wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles", where we look upon a forgiven world without trying to understand it, having given up all our past learning and become willing to be empty, to just surrender and let go of trying to know or do or control everything. I'm taking my hands off the steering wheel and the car is finding a a smoother path.

"The holy instant is the Holy Spirit's most useful learning device for teaching you love's meaning. For its purpose is to SUSPEND JUDGMENT ENTIRELY. Judgment ALWAYS rests on the past, for PAST experience is the basis on which you judge. Judgment becomes impossible without the past, for WITHOUT it you do NOT understand anything. You would make no ATTEMPT to judge, because it would be quite apparent to you that you do not know WHAT ANYTHING MEANS. You are afraid of this, because you believe that, WITHOUT THE EGO, all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that, without the ego, ALL WOULD BE LOVE."

The Holy Spirit proves the ANSWER. Your function is to listen and accept his answer.

The Holy Spirit provides the HEALING. Your function is to RECEIVE AND EXTEND it. To let yourself be an instrument of healing which he can use to heal others.

The Holy Spirit provides the DECISIONS. Your function is to let him decide for you. He decides on God’s behalf, on your behalf.

The Holy Spirit provides the GUIDANCE and instruction. Your function is to listen, learn and carry out the instructions.

The Holy Spirit provides the THERAPY. Your function is to let yourself be comforted and transformed and corrected.

The Holy Spirit provides the SOLUTION to all your problems. Your function is to offer up your problems to him and allow him to correct the problems for you. He can undo all the consequences of your wrong decisions if you will let him, including physical symptoms.

The Holy Spirit provides the JUDGEMENT. He knows what everything is and how to judge it correctly and without condemnation. Your function is to judge LIKE him and accept HIS judgement as your own.

The Holy Spirit provides the EDUCATION. Your function is to listen and learn and be taught. That means being willing to admit to be mistaken and to change your beliefs.

The Holy Spirit provides TOTAL KNOWLEDGE. Your function is to trust that he knows everything and have faith in his word. You do not need to know.

The Holy Spirit provides the HELP from God. Your function is to ask for help and let yourself BE helped. You do not need to understand how you will be helped.

The Holy Spirit provides the COMFORT AND SAFETY. Your function is to allow yourself to be comforted and to open to trusting him so that he can help you to feel safe. He will smooth your way and clear obstacles from your path.

The Holy Spirit provides a HAPPY DREAM. Your function is to open to this dream and share it with him and others. This includes the perfect functioning of the body.

The Holy Spirit provides a HEALED BODY. Your function is to let him use your body for healing so that it can depict healing. He can undo all forms of suffering, sickness and death.

The Holy Spirit provides the POWER OF GOD. Your function is to allow him to express God’s power through you, for you and for others. There is nothing his power cannot do.

The Holy Spirit provides the MIRACLES. Your function is to share his function and trust him to perform those miracles through you and for you. You do not need to understand what miracles are or how they work.

The Holy Spirit exercises the WILL OF GOD. Your function is to have a little willingness to carry out God’s will and allow God’s will to be done through you by the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit brings the LIGHT of God. Your function is to receive and give the light of God which has been given to you through sharing. You do not need to have your own light, you just extend it.

The Holy Spirit FORGIVES YOU. Your function is to let yourself be forgiven and share in his forgiveness, forgiving LIKE him. He knows how to forgive, you do not.

The Holy Spirit is like the perfect teacher. Your function here is to be the perfect student. He is here to help, to fill your needs, to guide you, teach you, heal you, and bring you home.

Your function is to FOLLOW his lead and DO as you are told, and willingly. He will direct you, he will organize people for you to meet, he will speak through you, he will heal through you. You will be told very specifically what to do so that HE can fulfill his function. And he will never leave you.

When you are innocent, you can ONLY see innocence. When you are guilty, you can ONLY see guilt.

IF you think that you therefore can objectively, unbiased, clearly discern, "whether or not" your brother is innocent or guilty, you are severely mistaken.

You cannot put your own guilt on a shelf in order to see your brother's innocence, nor can you see his guilt when you are innocent.

You literally see the content of your own mind projected outward. If you are have guilt in your mind you WILL find your brother guilty and MUST judge him to be so. Yet when your mind is healed, suddenly you no longer see the guilt in your brother, it is not there, and never really was there. It was yours.

"You but accuse your brother of your own sins." This is also why when you are having an angry crappy day you think everyone else is unhappy also, only to find that when you cheer up, it suddenly seems like everyone else wasn't even unhappy.

So the ego has given us this kind of fictional claim that we actually can be "neutral" or an objective observer who can discern right from wrong, good from bad, and make valid educated judgement calls, based on what something is or is not or appears to be. But the truth is, such an "ability" is 100% impossible. You simply are incapable of this kind of "discernment" or judgement or selectivity.

You simply cannot sit on a fence and observe passively and say, yes, I see that this person is guilty and their guilt has nothing to do with me. That's a lie. If you see guilt, you are guilty.

It is the ego that says you can "get away with" one thing applying to your brother that does NOT apply to you. That is nothing less than getting away with murder. If you can cause something and escape the consequences, while your brother suffers the consequences for you, that is murderous. Everything about the ego is murderous. And it is also in denial because it's literally impossible to "really murder", just as much as it is literally impossible to "judge correctly".

Since it is IMPOSSIBLE for you to truly tell whether you brother is guilty or not, and you can ONLY see what you believe is TRUE OF BOTH OF YOU (this is the Golden rule), you really have to find a way to stop judging that "them and not me" are wrong. It makes you think that you are not included in the guilt or have escaped the guilt, but this is DENIAL and projection. You actually are still seeing yourself as guilty, but now indirectly through others.

That's what the whole ego is based on. "Me or them" "Them or me" but not both. In the thought system of Holiness, whatever applies to you applies to your brother equally because you are equals at all times. If they are guilty, so you are you. If they are innocent, so are you.

You are effectively BLIND to "whether or not" your brother is one thing or another. ALL that you can find to be TRUE of him is that he MUST be innocent, because the only way for you to BE IN THE TRUTH, is for YOU to be innocent (whole, loving), and this will make it IMPOSSIBLE for you to see guilt in your brother.

You and your brother are innocent. This is the only true judgement. And this is why the Holy Spirit ALWAYS finds both of you to be innocent forever.

You can create an illusion of being responsible, by positioning yourself as being angry and upset about what other people are doing. You can make yourself seem like you are responsible by standing up for people's rights or agreeing with the ways that certain people are very wrong.

This paints a picture of you as a hero and savior and as someone who does not believe in mis-treatment and so on, but is also hipocritical and irresponsible given it gives you opportunity to accuse and condemn and judge.

You can seem like a very responsible, caring person who is deeply upset by the hurtful things people do, that your fellow man is mis-treated by society or that certain politicians are trying to destroy the world. But this is all a fake responsibility.

You are not responsible unless you are being responsible for yourself and for what you are doing to yourself, for the ways that you are using others by scapegoating them, the ways that you judge and condemn and project your own hidden guilt, and are owning up to being Christ. Owning up to what you have been doing to yourself and passing off as what other people are doing. That's real responsibility.

You don't win any points for finding other people guilty or being outraged or angry or placing the blame somewhere. That's selective judgement. Selective blame. Some set of people get to be very very wrong while other people get to be very very right. It's a huge trap and it's hugely dishonest.

This always happens when you believe the world is real and you want to find a way to be more spiritual or innocent or pure or good or to uphold some high standard or ideal or higher ground. But there is no higher ground in an illusory world, it is all insane. The higher ground is beyond this world and recognizes that this world is not spiritual and it cannot be spiritualized by your ego.

What you may not realize is that your ego is split and by making some aspects of this world good and worthy and acceptable and other parts wrong and bad and unacceptable, you've fallen for the ego's primary trap of believing that SEPARATION is real. Separation between good people and bad people, between the righteous and the unworthy.

It doesn't matter which side you are on. It doesn't matter if you identify mostly with being goodie two-shoes, or some kind of dark evil monster. Both of them are false because they are both states of un-wholeness and exclusivity. They are both a lie from your ego. And those being all "good" and nice and so on are just as "evil" as the evil ones. They believe in separation and segragation, often even more than the rest of the crowd, and yet will constantly spout off about how segragation and conditional love are unfair or unwelcome.

You can't be right by judging judgers, or hating haters, or attacking attackers, or being angry at angry people, or hurting the hurtful. That's the ego's motto of an eye for an eye. There is absolutely no holiness there whatsoever. It's a fake holiness, a holier-than-thou attitude, a pretense that you are innocent when in fact you are just as guilty because you BELIEVE in guilt.

You can believe in guilt and accuse people of being guilty and believe that you're being pure and innocent by finding them guilty, but all this means is you believe strongly in guilt. You try to not appear to be THE ONE who is guilty, but you cannot HAVE a belief in guilt in your mind at the same time as a belief in holiness. And whatever you believe you will BE.

Rules cannot apply to other people separately from how they apply to you. Judgements cannot be given to others without judging yourself. You can't find someone else guilty without you believing that you are guilty. The righteous will go down in their own flames.

"Would you rather be right or happy?" - ACIM

Being happy can only come by not finding ANYONE guilty. Because other people ARE YOU. What applies to them applies to you. This is fundamentally different than seeing yourself as a SEPARATE person. Separation is attack, not holiness. So are you really escaping your own attack?

GOD's ONLY LAW: THE GOLDEN RULE - ACIM IN A NUTSHELL

In A Course in Miracles the "Golden Rule" is a fundamental LAW of God. It is true in Heaven AND on Earth.

The rule is a law of creation, a law of mind. IT APPLIES TO YOU ALWAYS! Since you share an equality of perfection with all parts of creation, with every brother, and with God, it follows that if anything applies to others, it applies to you equally. There are no special laws that apply only to some and not others. No-one including you is excluded from anything. Heaven is all-inclusive and so God's law is all-inclusive. God's INCLUSIVITY ensures that EVERY SON in the sonship SHARES EVERYTHING, what applies to one applies to all, and NOTHING IS EXCLUSIVE. This is the basis of the Golden Rule.

This is woven throughout the course and present in many many statements. The fundamental idea is that in heaven you recognize your brother as identical to and perfectly equal to yourself, sharing everything with you equally. What applies to you applies to everyone, or to no-one at all. If you deserve love, so does everyone. If you judge another as wrong, you are also wrong. This produces a law which doesn't simply say "IF you treat others a certain way, hopefully you MIGHT be treated in a similar way." Instead, it is perfectly absolute, ie:

You do to YOURSELF what you DO to others, because you share perfect equality with them at all times. So that means, literally, you CANNOT ESCAPE CONSEQUENCES of whatever it is you think applies only to others. You cannot do ANYTHING to anyone without doing it simultaneously and directly to YOURSELF.

You do not get to `opt in` or `opt out` of this law. It is ALWAYS APPLYING, even while you are dreaming, and even while you are in the ego. The ego suggests that this law *does not exist*, and so it thinks it can get away with murder. But it cannot. If you attack another you ARE attacking yourself. You cannot be hurtful toward someone without being hurt by your own hurtfulness.

This means that the Golden Rule is a permanent, inescapable law of REALITY, fundamental to existence itself, and applies to everything everywhere at all times. If you attempt to deny it or pretend it does not apply, you WILL HURT YOURSELF in your attempts to hurt others. You can think of it like direct self-inflicted karma. And this is why the secret to salvation is that "you have done this to yourself". You are free to choose, but you are not free from the consequences of choosing attack.

This applies at the level of the BODY also. Whatever you use the body for it becomes to you. It is a communication device. If you use it for attack to transmit attack, YOU will become attacked, because you are BEING attack, and your body WILL show signs of attack also. What you THOUGHT was applying only to the sinner you projected onto, APPLIES TO YOU, and so your projected sin ATTACKS YOU! The body thus will become weak and sick and die. But if you recognize at all times the Golden Rule, and learn that you *MUST* love everyone equally AT ALL TIMES, otherwise you are NOT loving yourself, then you are bringing God's Word to others and this *guarantees* your body will be perfectly healthy. ALL sickness and even death arises from DENIAL OF THE GOLDEN RULE.

So really ACIM is quite simple. It is simply saying that this Golden Rule exists, it is absolute unavoidable LAW, it doesn't matter if you're awake or sleeping it still is applying, and so you CANNOT escape the result of trying to make something to apply to others that you don't want to apply to yourself. You therefore simply have to honor the law and work WITH it rather than against it, learn to love EVERYONE EQUALLY and FULLY SO THAT you yourself are included in that and are loved fully, and therefore express love to others in the same way you would express it to yourself, because giving love INCREASES the love in YOU. If you comply with the law, you will be SET FREE from the ego!

The Golden Rule is also the basis of all miracles. Miracles are founded on the principle that there is union and equality with all brothers, rather that separation. That we are all equally innocent. That we all deserve unconditional love. And that when you recognize this in your brother you WILL recognize it in yourself simultaneously, because what applies to one applies to all. What applies to one son, applies to the whole sonship. So when you express from this all-INCLUSIVE love, towards your brother, emphasizing the love IN THEM that is YOUR LOVE, you heal them and miraculously help them.

At times, when we are in ego and we think the law does not apply, and are in denial, we also are unconscious of what we are DOING TO OURSELVES. And so we do not think a) that we did this to ourselves, and b) do not even SEE ourselves doing it to ourselves. Thus we think not only a) other people do stuff to us that they don't do to themselves, b) stuff applies to others than doesn't apply to us. These are ego lies. Underneath them the Golden Rule STILL applies. We are still DOING TO OURSELVES what we are ALSO DOING TO OTHERS. At all times.

And so this is where "shared interests" come into play. You cannot have someone be guilty while you are innocent, nor can you find someone unworthy while you think you are worthy, or be justified in anger that someone is is wrong and not you. Any time something is seeming to apply to someone else that does not apply to you equally, you are in DENIAL, and WHAT you are denying is the Golden Rule - the truth about all creation. You have to UNLEARN the ego's paradigm of it being POSSIBLE to have something apply to someone else SEPARATELY from what applies to you, and LEARN that what applies to you MUST APPLY TO OTHERS AS WELL. That means either BOTH of you are guilty, or BOTH of you are innocent, and there are NO EXCEPTIONS to this. So if you want to be happy and innocent, you MUST find your brother to be innocent also. To be loved, you MUST love. To be free of ego, you MUST overlook ego everywhere. To overcome sin, you MUST forgive your brother's sin.

"Forgiveness recognizes your brother has not sinned and in this view are ALL YOUR SINS FORGIVEN." This is the GOLDEN RULE!!! Comply PERFECTLY with the Golden Rule and you will be in the Atonement!

Here are just a handful of quotes relating to this...

"Consider the Golden Rule again. You are asked to behave towards others as you would have them behave toward you. This means that the perception of both must be accurate, since the Golden Rule is the Order for appropriate behavior. You can't behave appropriately unless you perceive accurately, because appropriate behavior DEPENDS on lack of level confusion. The presence of level confusion ALWAYS results in variable reality testing, and hence variability in behavioral appropriateness."

"Projection still has this "hurling" connotation, because it involves hurling something you DO NOT want, and regard as dangerous and frightening, to someone else. This is the opposite of the Golden Rule, and having placed this rule upside down, the reverse of miracles, or projection, follows automatically."

"Denial should be directed only to error, and projection should be limited to truth. You should truly give as you have truly received. The Golden Rule can work effectively only on this basis."

"As you release, so will you BE released. FORGET THIS NOT, or love will be unable to find you, and comfort you."

"And, as he loves them, so he looks upon HIMSELF with love and gentleness. He would no more condemn himself for HIS mistakes than damn another."

"When the Bible says "Judge not that ye be not judged" it merely means that if you judge the reality of others at all, you will be unable to avoid judging your own."

"If your brothers are part of YOU, and you blame THEM for your deprivation, you ARE blaming yourself."

"Quickly and gladly is His vision given to anyone who is but willing to see his brother sinless."

"You choose between your brother and yourself, and you will gain as much as he will lose, and what you lose is what is given him."

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

"Forgive your brother, and you CANNOT separate yourself from him, nor from his Father."

"In separation from your brother was the first attack upon yourself begun. And it is THIS the world bears witness to."

"My brother is my Savior. Let me not attack the Savior You have given me."

"Would you cut a brother off from the Light that is yours? "

"As you see him you will see yourself. Whether this be through the use of psychological tests, or by making judgment in some other way, the effect is still the same. Whenever you have judged anyone, it is impossible for you not to make this judgment on yourself."

"When you have seen your brothers as yourself, you will be RELEASED to knowledge, having learned to FREE yourself, of Him Who knows of freedom."

"If you see your own hatred AS your brother, you are not seeing HIM."

"Do not forget, however, that to deny God will inevitably result in projection, and you will believe that others, AND NOT YOURSELF, have done this TO you. You WILL receive the message you give, because it is the message you WANT. You may believe that you judge your brothers by the messages they give YOU, but you HAVE judged them by the message you give THEM. Do not attribute your denial of joy to them, or you cannot see the spark in them, that could bring joy to YOU. It is the DENIAL of the spark that brings depression, and whenever you see your brothers WITHOUT it, you ARE denying God."

"This demonstration EXONERATES those who misperceive, by establishing beyond doubt that they have NOT hurt anyone."

"Is healing frightening? To many, yes. For accusation is a bar to love, and damaged bodies ARE accusers. They stand firmly in the way of trust and peace, proclaiming that the frail can HAVE no trust, and that the damaged HAVE no grounds for peace. Who has been injured BY his brother, and could love and trust him still? He HAS attacked, and will attack again. Protect him not, because your damaged body shows that you must be protected FROM him. To forgive may be an act of charity, but NOT his due. He may be PITIED for his guilt, but NOT exonerated. And if you forgive him his transgressions, you but ADD to all the guilt that he has really earned. "

"The ONLY way to heal is to be healed."

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in this view are all your sins forgiven."

"He who would not forgive must judge, for he must justify his failure to forgive."

Being forgiving isn't a state of "doing something", it's more like an attitude. You just have a forgiving attitude, ie you aren't condemning people, you don't judge, you don't attack. You welcome people regardless of what they seem to do.

When you stop being forgiving, you become "unforgiving", relentless, attacking, judgemental. When this has occurred, you've made an error and are attempting to find reasons why you cannot be forgiving, to justify the attack. This now requires some kind of "correction" so that you can ultimately return to the state of being forgiving all the time.

The correction for unforgiveness is of course forgiveness but being a state, it's the end result of whatever corrective, healing measures are needed to return there.

You need to find a way to restore your perception to truth in which you can see and recognize, there is no sin at all, sin isn't real, and there is nothing TO forgive. Then you're done with the correction, and have returned to BEING permanently forgiving.

"Forgiveness looks and waits and judges not" because it simply is a state of true perception, in which the truth is known to be true and nothing false is believed. Sin is not believed at all. In fact as Jesus says forgiveness and salvation and atonement are all words for the SAME THING. Forgiveness IS the atonement state.

What you do when you try to correct unforgiveness, is you're attempting to return to the atonement. To overlook the things you thought were true and real, and realize they are not. That effort "towards" awakening, is an effort to become more forgiving. You don't stop being forgiving, in attitude, just because there is nothing to forgive.

To forgive means to fore-give, to give ahead of time, so that through giving love you do not MAKE errors of judgement that have to then be cleaned up. If you make errors as a result of becoming unforgiving then now you have the task of having to "do forgiveness" or at least to do something, in order to try to get OUT of the unforgiving state into a forgiving state.

God IS forgiving, because otherwise we have to say he is unforgiving. But in this forgiveness, he KNOWS there is literally nothing TO forgive. Just as we're told that the Holy Spirit looks past error from the beginning so that errors are not made in the first place. The Holy Spirit is permanently forgiving as well. But being forgiving and "having something that has to be undone", are two different situations.

True forgiveness IS the atonement, it is the recognition that there is no sin, nothing has happened, and therefore "I need do nothing" because nothing has gone wrong. "Practicing" or "applying" forgiveness is more to do with the process of purification, in which you're attempting to become clearer about what is true and what is false, so that you can come to remember how to be forgiving and wake up to your permanently forgiving (non-attacking, non-judging) nature.

A few quotes about working miracles for others...

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

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

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

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

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

When you perceive that something is 'wrong' with someone else, and that this wrongness does not apply to you, you are SEVERELY MENTALLY ILL.

When you perceive that what applies to another person, due to their apparent separate free will and the idea that they are supposed to be responsible for what they do, in isolation, you are SEVERELY MENTALLY ILL.

When you think that its possible for you to do something to someone else, or to have an attitude or judgement toward them, which does not apply to you in any way, you are SEVERELY MENTALLY ILL.

When you believe that someone else clearly is the guilty party and that you did not do anything whatsoever to ask for mistreatment, and that you have been victimized, and that you are completely innocent and they are completely guilty, you are SEVERELY MENTALLY ILL.

When you hate someone or judge them or are disgusted by them or offended by them or they seem to be totally crazy or they are your worst enemy, in which you are none of these things, you are SEVERELY MENTALLY ILL.

In all the ways of perceiving reality, when you perceive that there is a SEPARATION between what applies to you, and what applies to another, that is MENTAL ILLNESS. And this is the foundation of ALL mental illness. A belief in separation, in all its forms and flavors, is mental illness.

When you perceive that something is happening to you which you did not ask for, when you are receiving something you did not choose, or that you are not receiving you what you did attempt to ask for, that is also mental illness.

When you believe that death is inevitable and that it is going to happen to you against your will and that you will be a passive victim of it, that is also mental illness.

You will notice that the above describes THE MAJORITY OF HUMAN KIND. That is because the majority of human kind IS MENTALLY ILL.

To understand WHY this is mental illness, you need to understand how the mind is supposed to function and what is NATURAL for the mind, as opposed to unnatural. All of the attitudes listed above are unnatural and are NOT normal. They are very commonplace, but they are not normal.

The mind, in every person, is not ever in any way supposed to operate in the realm of separation. Your mind is meant to be whole, which means not only that it is whole within itself, but also that it is part of a greater whole in which all minds are joined as ONE MIND.

This means that everyone shares the same mind. This One Mind is the mind of God. When your mind is One with the Mind of God, you are SANE. God is permanently whole and permanently sane and there is no separation of fragmentation in God's mind. You can share God's mind, and that is your NATURAL CONDITION. And it is in sharing God's mind fully that you MUST experience PERFECT HEALTH - perfect divine immortal health.

When your mind is separated off from the whole, and therefore sees itself as separate and limited, it will also see itself as containing limitations and separations. This is what gives birth to EGO. The ego is INSANITY. When there is ego in your mind, i.e. a lack of wholeness, a lack of oneness, a lack of unity with God, you WILL experience insanity - mental illness.

So then as you go around the world perceiving that a given person is "not you", and another person is also "not you", and that there is not something IN them that is exactly the same as what is in YOU, you are in mental illness. You have entered into a private hallucinatory world of separation and division and SELF ATTACK. As soon as you believe in separation in any way, your whole mind must attack itself in an attempt to set one part of itself against the other part. This self attack produces ALL SICKNESS, and all sickness is a form of MENTAL ILLNESS.

Once you are in mental illness, you will perceive that other people are separate from you, that there are separate rules that apply to them which don't apply to you, that what they will is different from what you will, that something can apply to them that does not apply to you, you are in mental illness. Once you start to treat them in a different way than you treat other people, or react to them differently based on their behavior, or have a different attitude of specialness based on who they are or what they exclusively do for you, you've moved away from the UNCONDITIONAL LOVE which is the condition of the WHOLE mind, and have entered into conditionality. Conditionality is insanity.

So then when you are hating the political candidate for the opposition, or when you are against that other sports team, or when you hate that person who seemed to do something to someone against their will, or when you judge someone for the form that they appear to take, or when you can only love a special person and nobody else, or when you believe that you are right and someone is wrong, or that you are good and someone else is bad, THAT IS MENTAL ILLNESS.

It is not natural. It is not normal. It is extremely common and almost everyone on this planet IS mentally ill. This IS a crazy world, but it doesn't have to be.

So when we talk about mental illness, let's be clear about what sanity really means (One shared mind of wholeness and peace and unconditional love), and that anything other than this is mental illness in one form or another. Everyday people rising up 'against' some other group of people, is mental illness. Everyday people attacking some other group righteously because of how that other group is 'less spiritual' or 'less honest' or 'less good' or whatever, that is mental illness. And its YOUR mental illness, not theirs.

All forms of separation are mental illness. All perceptions of separation are mental illness. And all other commonly recognized types of "mental illness", which people would normally call mental illness, such as paranoia or schizophrenia or psychosis or whatever, those are just the more noticeable EXTREMES of mental illness. That doesn't mean that all the other people are SANE. Almost every psychiatrist on the planet is insane. Almost every doctor or nurse on the planet is insane. Almost every pastor of churches or preacher in religions is insane.

The only sanity is in God, with God, joined with God, one with God, as God's Holy Son who is permanently sane and whole and complete, devoid of separation and lies. Only in TRUTH is there sanity. So before we judge other people for being insane or 'not right', let's remember that WE are just as insane and we need to work on our own mental health instead.

In the Holy Mind (whole mind, one mind), what applies to you applies to others, because they are one with you. There is nothing you can do to them that you don’t *directly* do to yourself. Because you are AWARE that you are "in" other people, in harmony with them, it is in your best interests to ONLY LOVE them, in order for you to love yourself.

It is impossible in the shared mind to attack another without attacking yourself. You can’t have something apply to someone that does not apply to you.

Enter then into the ego’s game of death, it’s vast illusion of separation. The game has one rule. If you play within the game, you will die. It’s a very simple rule. However, it is possible to be in DENIAL of the rule, and to start believing there is SOME WAY that you can have something apply to someone else that does not apply to you.

As you lose awareness, you will forget that you have SHARED INTERESTS with everyone because of your Oneness with them. You will start to think they are not one with you, something applies to them differently than applies to you, and therefore there are victims. This also means, you believe you can get away with murder - that you can CAUSE something without experiencing the EFFECTS.

Even if you are under this illusion, believing that this is true and that you’re SUCCEEDING at getting away with murder, rest assured that the RULE of the game does not change. Even if you are in DENIAL of the rule, it applies to you. The law is fixed because it is part of the metaphysics of the one mind. What applies to you ALWAYS applies to others, immediately, directly, and without exception, EVEN if you are in a dream pretending that this is not true.

When you play the ego’s game and take sides, hold a grievance, maintain an enemy, hate someone, attack someone, judge someone, be against or opposed to something, or in any other way USE SEPARATION, it means you are using the EGO. This immediately enacts the one rule of the game - that you will DIE. It also means, that you will have DONE IT TO YOURSELF.

Since the mind of oneness is a mind where what you do to others you do to yourself, you cannot escape the EFFECTS that you attempt to cause. You cannot get away with murder. When you try to, you will KILL YOURSELF.

There is no way to play the game in any special, skilled, clever, educated kind of way. To do so is an attempt to CHANGE THE RULES, which you will NEVER be able to do. Belief in and use of separation is a belief in death, and it will "cause" you to die. This is why all death is suicide, because when you attempt to attack your brother, it destroys YOU, one way or another, sooner or later.

The secret to salvation is the *recognition* that you are doing this all to yourself. You cannot SUCCEED at the game, win over someone else, win a war, or be the victor. Every time you attempt to win, YOU WILL LOSE, beacuse you used separation, and that is self-attack. You cannot WIN the ego’s game of death. Its one rule always applies. If you play it at all, you will die, because that is what you will be choosing.

It doesn’t matter how much you think you can change the rules, find loopholes, figure it out, compete better, one-up someone, make someone else the scapegoat, judge another, or inventively get rid of your sin. If you are playing the ego’s game, YOU WILL DIE, and you will have done it to yourself.

This is why you MUST at some point FORGIVE absolutely everyone. If you don’t, you will hold a grievance against YOURSELF while pretending it is about someone else. You cannot get to heaven with an ego. You cannot win the ego’s game. It is not escaped or won by death or by playing it better. Success at the ego’s game is FAILURE. The only way out, is truth. You MUST surrender the ego, or you will keep weaving illusions of self destruction.

It is perhaps sad news that you have to forgive EVERYONE. It is not welcomed by the ego to recognize the rule of the game clearly. Recognizing the game helps you to NOT PLAY. Only by not playing it can you have awareness of eternal life. This is all metaphysical fact. There is no exception.

"Forgive or die." It is in your best interests to forgive absolutely everything for what it has not done, in order to RECOGNIZE your own innocence. You can only be innocent if the same is true of everyone. It’s all or nothing. The entire sonship is holy, or none of it.

You cannot play the game of death and live. Truth is the ONLY exit.

If we describe the Holy Spirit as having the power of God, of knowing everything, of having a healing solution for every problem, of being able to guide us specifically and tell us what to do, to make all decisions for us, and be an authority, then this should clearly position us in a receptive frame of mind to listen, learn, and do.

If we are unclear as to the absolute and total strength of the Holy Spirit, we will think that there are some things he cannot do, is not equipped to do, and cannot be trusted to do. And then we will doubt him, and we will start to trust our own egos. And then we will usurp his functions and take over control, unwilling to listen to or follow instructions. This means we basically are not giving him enough credit or acknowledging fully what his function is.

Part of the problem is that our egos are inflated and we want to be gatekeepers, in control of everything, making all decisions, knowing what everything is, being special and important, and all the rest of it. All of this clouds our dependence on the Holy Spirit and makes us be in competition with him. We do not want his help and we won't seek it out, listen to it, accept it or welcome it. We think we know better and don't need him.

We need to very fully and clearly spell out precisely what the Holy Spirit's function is and what he is capable of, so that we are in no way mistaken about what his duties and functions are. Only if we can be clear about exactly what he's supposed to be doing, can we be clear about what we are supposed to be doing. What is his role, and what is our role. Otherwise we will have a blurred boundary and the ego will step in.

If I acknowledge that the Holy Spirit has all of the power of God, this power is unlimited, it can heal every sickness, it can solve every problem, he knows absolutely everything that is going on with everyone all the time, he knows exactly what every problem is and how to solve it, has access to all information and facts and variables in the past present and future, and is squarely in a position to KNOW, then this tells me clearly that I can depend on him knowing. He knows how, he is fully equipped, he cannot fail, and he can be depended upon. That means I do not NEED to know everything because I can LET HIM do his part.

This then tells me that I can depend upon him and work with him as a team member, utilizing him for his function and turning to him TO help in all the ways that he is equipped and assigned to do so. Then I will not look to MYSELF to try to fulfill those functions, recognizing that I am not in a POSITION to do so. This tells me that it isn't my function here to know everything, to decide everything, to heal anything, to correct anything, or to pretend that I have all the information. I should be turning to him for that and letting him advise and help.

This also opens up the door for easier trust, because if you are now clear about what He is supposed to be doing and are acknowledging that he CAN do it, you will have more FAITH in him. Part of this entails recognizing that he has the power of God, he is absolutely unlimited in his power, and there is nothing he cannot do. To admit and acknowledge that might, to your ego, strike you as frightening. So you're going to have to work on that and get past it. If you can acknowledge and be comfortable with the Holy Spirit being immensely powerful, and on your side, then you can go forth with greater confidence knowing He is backing you up.

Since he shares God's power, he more or less can be thought of as an extension of God. And that means you should be having faith and trust in him to the same extent and in the same way that you would with God. The Holy Spirit has been appointed by God to help us, on purpose, AS the answer to the separation, TO guarantee our return home to heaven. He knows how we got into this mess, he knows how to get us out of it. We have to learn to let him do that. He also knows how to solve all problems, heal all sickness, and reverse death. We have to learn to let him do that.

Now that you know just how helpful and powerful the Holy Spirit is, you can make room for him and work alongside him as a partner rather than work against him vying for attention. You can let him help you, heal you, resurrect you, and enlighten you. He can solve all your problems and undo all your suffering.

"I will step back and let Him lead the way."

"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."

"You know not where you go, but One Who knows goes with you. Let Him lead you with the rest."

"I will step back and let Him lead the way,

For I would walk along the road to Him."

"Then let him turn within to his Eternal Guide, and let Him Judge what the response should be."

"Never attempt to OVERLOOK your guilt BEFORE you ask the Holy Spirit's help. That is HIS function. Your part is only to offer Him a LITTLE willingness to LET Him remove all fear and hatred, and to BE forgiven."

"I rest in God today, and let Him work

In me and through me, while I rest in Him

In quiet and in perfect certainty."

"And so I give all judgment to the One You gave to me to judge for me. He sees what I behold, and yet He knows the truth. He looks on pain, and yet He understands it is not real, and in His understanding it is healed. He gives the miracles my dreams would hide from my awareness. Let Him judge today."

"That is because I do not yet realize that God has placed the answer together with the problem, so that they cannot be separated by time. The Holy Spirit will teach me this, if I will let Him. And I will understand it is impossible that I could have a problem which has not been solved already."

"Let Him be Judge of what you are, for He has certainty in which there is no doubt because it rests on Certainty so great that doubt is meaningless before Its Face"

"Let Him be Judge as well of everything that seems to happen to you in this world."

"Let Him evaluate each thought that comes to mind, remove the elements of dreams, and give them back to you as clean ideas which do not contradict the Will of God."

"Follow His light and see the world as He beholds it. Hear His Voice alone in all that speaks to you. And let Him give you peace and certainty, which you have thrown away, but Heaven has preserved for you in Him."

"The CAPACITY to empathize is VERY useful to the Holy Spirit, provided you let Him use it in His way."

"The Holy Spirit asks only this little help of you. Whenever your thoughts wander to a special relationship which still ATTRACTS you, enter with Him into a holy instant, and there, LET HIM RELEASE YOU."

"God's Voice alone can tell you how to heal. Listen, and you will never fail to bring His kindly remedy to those He sends to you, to let Him heal them, and to bless all those who serve with Him in healing's name."

"And now I place you in His hands, to be His faithful followers, with Him as Guide through every difficulty and all pain that you may think is real. Nor will He give you pleasures that will pass away, for He gives only the eternal and the good. Let Him prepare you further. He has earned your trust by speaking daily to you of your Father and your brother and your Self. He will continue; now you walk with Him as certain as is He of where you go; as sure as He of how you should proceed, as confident as He is of the goal, and of your safe arrival in the end."

"I place you in His charge, and let Him teach you what to do and say and think each time you turn to Him. He will not fail to be available to you each time you call to Him to help you."

"Let Him uncover the hidden spark of beauty in your relationships, and SHOW it to you."

"Then turn to Him who shares your function with you, and let Him teach you what you need to learn to lay all fear aside, and know your Self as Love Which has no opposite in you."

"He is the strong protector of your innocence, which sets you free. And it is HIS decision to undo EVERYTHING that would obscure your innocence from your unclouded mind. Let Him, therefore, be the only guide that you would follow to Salvation. He knows the way, and leads you gladly on it. WITH Him, you will not fail to learn what God wills FOR you IS your will."

"Then let Him teach you quietly how to perceive your guiltlessness, which is ALREADY there."

"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."

"The Holy Spirit knows NO-ONE IS SPECIAL. But He also perceives that you have MADE special relationships, which He would purify, and NOT let YOU destroy. 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."

"And yet he is NOT crucified. For here is both his pain AND his healing, for the Holy Spirit's vision is merciful, and His remedy is quick. Do not HIDE suffering from His sight, but bring it gladly TO Him. Lay before His eternal sanity ALL your hurt, and LET Him heal you. Do not leave any spot of pain hidden from His Light, and search your minds carefully for any thoughts which you may fear to uncover. For He will heal every little thought that you have kept to hurt you, and cleanse it of its littleness, restoring it to the magnitude of God."

"Thank God that He is there, and works through you. And all His works are yours. He offers YOU a miracle, with every one you LET Him do through you."

"Do not make the mistake of believing that YOU understand what YOU perceive, for its meaning IS lost to you. But the Holy Spirit has saved its meaning FOR you, and if you will LET Him interpret it FOR you, He will restore what you have thrown away. As long as you THINK YOU KNOW its meaning, you will see no need to ask it OF Him. You do not know the meaning of ANYTHING you perceive. NOT ONE THOUGHT YOU HOLD IS WHOLLY TRUE."

You can't believe that other people are guilty or bad or wrong or sinful without believing that it applies to you somehow.

You can't be someone who is separate from the effects of your own attack.

You can't judge someone, believing that your judgement of them is not a judgement of yourself.

To believe that someone else is very wrong and this does not include you, is insanity.

Try hating someone while at the same time experiencing full and complete love for yourself. Try it. You will fail.

Try being outraged and angry at someone while fully experiencing the joy and peace of your true self. Impossible.

Try blaming someone for being wrong or guilty or sinful or a criminal and simultaneously experience a sense of serenity and happiness and love within yourself. You will not be able to.

The fact is, your attack on them attacks YOU. You cannot believe in sin without being sinful. You cannot believe in guilt without being guilty. You cannot believe in fear without being afraid. You cannot believe in punishment without being punished. And you cannot believe in death without being dead.

To deny this is insane. What applies to you applies everywhere. It is the ego which claims something can apply to you which doesn't apply to someone else, or vice versa. You can't have two sets of rules that come into effect whenever it pleases you or makes you out to be better off. That's dishonest to say the least.

"I did assume a human form with human attributes afterwards, to speak to those who were to prove the body’s worthlessness to the world. This has been much misunderstood. I came to tell them that death is illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand."

You as Immortal Spirit do not need a body to exist. Period.

The body was "added" to you as a projection of the idea of sin.

You think you need it, want it, desire it, rely on it, depend on it.

This is artificial.

You are sustained by the love of God at all times. You are pure spirit. You can exist without a body.

Given that your Spirit is capable of anything, has no needs, is immortal, cannot die, and is forever happy, what purpose does the body have?

It is pointless. It is meaningless. It is worthless. It is nothing.

We do however need to be careful not to let the ego come in here and use this information as an attack on the body, to judge it or hate it or condemn it with labels.

The body is not there. It is not real. It must disappear because it never really existed to begin with.

You don't need it. It cannot enter Heaven, and it was always a substitute for pretending you had needs that your Spirit could not supply.

When you have no more use for it, or belief that it has a usefulness at all, you will lay it down, disappear it, and go home to God.

"He who would not forgive MUST judge to justify his failure to forgive." - ACIM

Meaning, forgiveness is a fixation on the truth that Christ is real and nothing of the ego is real. It fore-gives by having a purely forgiving attitude so that there are no errors introduced into your own perception, so that you do not see sin as real. This means you are overlooking the ego and not believing in it. You are not supposed to believe the ego even really exists!

If you fail to do this, if you are not truly purely forgiving, which occurs in the Atonement and the acceptance that nothing "real" has happened, therefore innocence prevails, then you will enter into a psychological condition which Jesus has named "judgement".

Judgement becomes your attempt to evaluate or justify WHY you did not forgive, by explaining using various other reasons what the cause is of what you're now seeing. Since you're making a perceptual error and are hallucinating errors, you will see sin as real and will attempt to explain why it is real by judging, ie evaluating, fake reasons.

Also judgement means that you are attacking, are condemning, are attempting to give reality to illusions, and are seeing someone as less than holy. This then takes on and accounts for all forms of what you think of as judgement, which is a judgemental attitude, but really encompasses the ENTIRE ego thought system. Every part of egoic perception is judgemental because it's a split-mind thought system of self-attack and condemnation. It points a finger of blame to scapegoat and enter denial, and finds someone guilty.

The belief that sin is real is judgementalism and is the opposite of forgiveness.

A major mistake all egoic minds make is believing that one part of the ego mind is holier than another, and then pits that one part against the other. One part is called holy and the other part is called evil. And then there is judgement against those that are considered sinful, even though the entirety of that attitude is judgemental. You see people in Christianity doing this where they become very polarized and anti-sin, waging a "spiritual war" against the devil, because they believe it is REAL. But it's not just Christians that do this, everyone with an ego does this.

You WILL be judgemental if you are not forgiving, and the only sign of true sanity is One who has absolutely no belief in "real sin" whatsoever. That mind, Holy Spirit's thought system of real truth, demonstrates and proves that there is no real ego at all. Nothing has happened. The atonement.

People will then say, if you want to do the Course correctly, you need to not be judgemental. So then people repress their ego and hide their judgements. If they believe sin is real they will continue to judge on some level even if they don't express it. And it will be an unconscious self attack. You can't just "stop judging" in expectation that this will solve everything, because the only reason you're judging is because you believe the world/body/ego/sin is reality or truth. You could take that path IF it would lead you to the insight that NONE of that is real, but I don't generally think that's happening for most people.

Instead, focus on forgiveness which is the true undoing of judgement, which must lead all the way to the Atonement if it is to completely uproot the core belief about the separation really happening. Only then will judgement cease, because judgement is really an EFFECT of non-forgiveness, not a cause in its own right.

P.S. I don't mean this post to be a "judgement" about judgemental Christians. Not all Christians are judgemental by any means. But they do often present a good example of this happening due to their belief in real sin and can't help but be "against" sinners. Some of the most intensely judgemental people I've met claim to believe in Jesus with the most gusto and passion, yet were horrible to be around and so incredibly righteous. Their personas were huge and they were in such denial. This doesn't mean Christians can't be truly forgiving and not believe in sin, just that many don't get that far. This is the lower level of expressing Christ's truth and is an attempt to express it within the context of the ego being real, so is really a major "level confusion". Christians can become Christ if they can let go of a belief in real sin and the entire package of evil/hell/sickness/death/vengeful God that accompanies it.

It is not possible to hold a thought of accusation in your own mind, which seems to be about someone else, without YOU also receiving side-effects from that thought. That thought is toxic.

A thought of attack, even if it's a justified attack, is still an attack. And attack thoughts have attacking properties. It's like a nasty, dark, spiky, painful energy in your mind. Do you think you get away with not being affected by that?

So here's the conundrum. You cannot have a negative thought about anyone else without it affecting you. You have to put the negative thought into your own interior mind-garden, and it's going to grow a bunch of weeds there. It's going to attack YOU as much as it attacks someone else.

It's all or nothing. Either the thought applies to you AND them, or it doesn't apply to either of you.

When you're in the business of having the kind of thoughts that apply 'separately' to separate people, those are INSANE thoughts.

If you would realize that your attack thoughts (about other people) are attacking your invulnerability, you would not have them.

If you would realize that you cannot hate someone without hating yourself, you would not hate.

If you would realize that you can't judge and condemn someone without you also feeling condemned, you would not do it.

There is no 'separate justice'. There is no person A being guilty and person B being innocent. Either all are innocent or all are guilty. The accused and the accuser are both guilty.

The ego's laws, the law of the land, are all based on this idea. Someone is to blame, and someone is not. This is not a law based in sanity.

God's law says that whatever is true of one, is true of all. Whatever applies to one, applies to all. One law that applies equally to everyone and finds everyone equally innocent. That is the only sane law.

“Before you will to do anything, ask Me if your will is in accord with Mine. If you are sure that it IS, there will BE no fear.”

Part of the ego belief is that we have a WILL which is opposed to God’s will. That we do not want to will WITH God, and therefore do not want to will LIKE God. That we will there be something else. It is also a will that you do not have the will that God gave you. This actually results in NOT having a will, or of denying will. But it shows up as what we might call “willing against God.” Or the ego’s seeming drives to choose and select and judge.

At some point though, we’ll have to learn to will in ACCORD with God’s will again. That doesn’t mean your freedom is taken away. It also doesn’t mean that God overpowers you. Nor does it mean that you end up having to do something you don’t really want to do.

What it does mean is that you will have to surrender your attempt to will anything ON YOUR OWN, or depend solely on your own judgement and will apart from his. You ultimately and naturally should want to will what God wills, or like him. To want what he wants.

To learn to want to ”do God’s will” is partly about surrendering your ego desire to decide “what you will”, or will not, do. It requires a willingness, to put aside your “separate will“, your conflicted will or your opposing will, and be willing to ACCEPT a function of will that is in line with God’s “intentions”.

Fortunately, what God wills FOR you, is the very best for you. It’s in your best interests, it brings you peace and happiness, it provides health and healing. Doing HIS will is, in a sense, like being a servant, or a follower, or student. It entails LISTENING and following guidance. Trusting and being truly helpful. Representing he who sent you.

This is why we’re asked to allow the Holy Spirit to make ALL decisions for us, to judge for us, to see for us, to forgive for us, to heal for us, and to operate through us. We are to get out of his way (thus our own) and be channels or conduits for his expression, to do his work in the world and in the minds of man.

Are we willing to be led, and to follow, to be disciples, and to serve God?

“My mind can only serve. Today I give its service to the Holy Spirit, to employ as He sees fit. I thus direct my mind, which I alone can rule. And thus I set it free, to do the Will of God.”

“A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another.”

“But be you, rather, grateful that YOU can be the means to serve His end. This is the ONLY service which leads to freedom.”

“The gentle service that you give the Holy Spirit IS service to yourself. You who are now HIS means must love all that He loves.”

“"Psychic" abilities have been used to call upon the devil, which merely means to strengthen the ego. Yet here is also a great channel of hope and healing in the Holy Spirit's service. Those who have developed "psychic" powers have merely let some of the limitations they laid upon their minds be lifted. It can be but greater limitations they lay upon themselves if they utilize their increased freedom for further imprisonment. The Holy Spirit needs these gifts, and those who offer them to Him and Him alone go with Christ's gratitude upon their hearts, and His holy sight not far behind.”

“His Voice does not see the body as YOU do, because He knows the ONLY reality that ANYTHING can have is the service it can render God on behalf of the function HE has given.”

“The spiritual eye, which looks within, recognizes immediately that the altar has been defiled, and needs to be repaired and protected. Perfectly aware of the RIGHT defense, it passes over all others, looking past error to truth. Because of the real strength of ITS vision, it pulls the will into its own service, and forces the mind to concur. This reestablishes the true power of the will, and makes it increasingly unable to tolerate delay.”

“The mind returns itself to its proper function only when it WILLS TO KNOW. This places it in the Soul's service, where perception is meaningless.”

“The miracle joins in the Atonement of Christ by placing the mind in the service of the Spirit. This establishes the proper function of mind, and abolishes its errors.”

“To "change your mind" means to place it at the disposal of True authority. The miracle is thus a sign that the mind has elected to be guided by Christ in HIS service. The abundance of Christ is the natural result of choosing to follow him.”

“God's Will is perfect happiness for me.

And I can suffer but from the belief

There is another will apart from His.”

“We have no will apart from His, and all of us are one because His Will is shared by all of us.”

“Learning is an ability you made, and gave yourselves. It was NOT made to do the Will of God, but to uphold a wish that It COULD be opposed, and that a will APART from It was yet more real than It.”

“If sin were real it would forever be beyond the hope of healing. For there would be a power BEYOND God's, capable of making another will, which could attack His Will, and OVERCOME it. And give His Son a will APART from His, and STRONGER. And each part of His fragmented creation would have a DIFFERENT will OPPOSED to His, and in eternal opposition to Him AND TO EACH OTHER.”

“A magic thought, by its mere presence, acknowledges a separation from God. It states, in the clearest form possible, that the mind which thinks it believes it has a separate will that can oppose the Will of God and succeed. That this can hardly be a fact is obvious.” “Miracles are IN ACCORD with the Will of God, whose will you do NOT know because you are confused about what YOU will.”

“The kindness of his sight rests on himself with all the tenderness it offers others. For he would ONLY heal and ONLY bless. And, being IN ACCORD with what God wills, he HAS the power to heal and bless all those he looks on with the grace of God upon his sight.”

Anyone believing in death or thinks death is inevitable or irreversible needs to read this.

Here is a *FANTASTIC* section of the Course which explicitly details why death is not normal, natural, inevitable, or irreversible. And in fact, that the body can become completely incorruptible when it is free of YOUR attempt to kill it.

It hardly paints a picture of a body which suffers and dies against your will. In fact, it tells us the body can be IMMORTAL AND INVULNERABLE and remain so while it is useful.

I love the opening paragraph about funerals especially!

"The Incorruptible Body

One thing is sure; God, Who created neither sin nor death, wills not that you be bound by them. He knows of neither sin NOR its result. The shrouded figures in the funeral procession march not in honor of their Creator, Whose Will it is they LIVE. They are not FOLLOWING it; they are OPPOSING it. And what is the black-draped body they would bury? A body THEY dedicated to death, a symbol of corruption, a sacrifice to sin, OFFERED to sin to feed upon, and keep ITSELF alive. A thing condemned, damned by its maker, and lamented by every mourner who looks upon it as himself.

You who believe you can condemn the Son of God to this ARE arrogant. But you who would RELEASE him are but honoring the Will of his Creator. The arrogance of sin, the pride of guilt, the sepulchre of separation, all are part of your unrecognized dedication to death. The glitter of guilt you laid upon the body would KILL it. For what the ego loves, it kills for its obedience. But what obeys it not, it CANNOT kill. You have ANOTHER dedication which would keep the body incorruptible and perfect as long as it is useful for your holy purpose.

The body no more dies than it can feel. IT DOES NOTHING. Of itself, it is neither corruptible nor incorruptible. IT IS NOTHING. It is the result of a tiny, mad IDEA of corruption, WHICH CAN BE CORRECTED. For God has ANSWERED this insane idea with His Own, an Answer that left Him not, and therefore brings the Creator to the awareness of every mind which heard His Answer, and ACCEPTED it. You who are dedicated to the incorruptible, have been given, through YOUR acceptance, the power to RELEASE from corruption. What better way to teach the first and fundamental principle in a course on miracles than by showing you the one that SEEMS to be the hardest can be accomplished FIRST?

The body can but serve your purpose. As you look upon it, so will it seem to be. Death, were it true, would be the final and complete disruption of communication, which IS the ego’s goal. Those who fear death see not how often and how loudly they CALL to it, and bid it come to SAVE them from communication. For death is seen as SAFETY, the great dark savior from the light of truth, the answer to the Answer, the silencer of the Voice that speaks for God. Yet the retreat to death is NOT the end of conflict. Only God’s Answer is its end.

The obstacle of your seeming love for death, which peace must flow across, SEEMS to be very great. For in it lies hidden all the ego’s secrets, all its strange devices for deception, all its sick ideas and weird imaginings. Here is the final end of union, the triumph of the ego’s making over creation, the victory of lifelessness on life Itself. Under the dusty edge of its distorted world, the ego would lay the Son of God, slain by its orders, proof in his decay that God Himself is powerless before the ego’s might, unable to protect the life that He created, against the ego’s savage wish to kill.

My brothers, children of our Father, this is a DREAM of death. There is no funeral, no dark altars, no grim commandments, nor twisted rituals of condemnation, to which the BODY leads you. Ask not release of IT. But FREE it from the merciless and unrelenting orders you laid upon it, and forgive it what you ordered it to do. In its exaltation, you COMMANDED it to die, for only death COULD conquer life. And what but insanity could look upon the defeat of God, and think it REAL?

The fear of death will go as its appeal is yielded to love’s REAL attraction. The end of sin, which nestles quietly in the safety of your relationship, protected by your union, ready to grow into a mighty force for God, is very near. The infancy of salvation is carefully guarded by love, preserved from every thought that would attack it, and quietly made ready to fulfill the mighty task for which it was GIVEN you. Your new-born purpose is nursed by angels, cherished by the Holy Spirit, and protected by God Himself. It NEEDS not your protection; it is YOURS. For it is deathless, and within it lies the END of death. What danger can assail the wholly innocent? What can attack the guiltless?

What fear can enter and disturb the peace of sinlessness? What has been given you, even in its infancy, is in full communication with God AND you. In its tiny hands, it holds, in perfect safety, every miracle you will perform, held out to YOU. The miracle of life is ageless, born in time, but nourished in eternity. Behold this infant, to whom you gave a resting-place by your forgiveness of EACH OTHER, and see in it the Will of God. Here is the babe of Bethlehem reborn. And everyone who gives him shelter will follow him, NOT to the cross, but to the Resurrection and the Life.

When anything seems to you to be a source of fear, when any situation strikes you with terror and makes your body tremble and the cold sweat of fear comes over it, remember it is ALWAYS for one reason; the ego has perceived it as a symbol of fear, a sign of sin and death. Remember, then, that neither sign nor symbol should be CONFUSED with source, for they must STAND FOR something OTHER than themselves. Their meaning CANNOT lie in them, but must be sought in what they REPRESENT. And they may thus mean everything or nothing, according to the truth or falsity of the IDEA which they reflect.

Confronted with such seeming uncertainty of meaning, judge it not. Remember the holy Presence of the One GIVEN you to be the Source of judgment. Give it to Him to judge FOR you, and say:

"Take this from me and look upon it, judging it for me.

Let me not see it as a sign of sin and death, nor use it for destruction.

Teach me how NOT to make of it an OBSTACLE to peace,

but let You use it FOR me, to FACILITATE its coming."

"

I used to think that "false empathy" meant when you are basically empathizing with someone, sympathizing, or sort of getting into their emotional drama etc....

Now I see it is more than that. It means really `joining` with someone in, and agreeing about, ANY kind of ego scenario, relating to ANY appearance or ANY illusion that covers up the immortal, God-created Real Self.

If a person comes along and is in any way demonstrating belief in being anything less than God created them, perfectly whole and holy and innocent and invulnerable, then that's an ego drama. If I go along with it, buy into it, join with them in it, participate in it, take it seriously, listen to it, judge it, engage with it or any of that, that's me entering into false empathy.

It's kind of like a false Oneness... a false joining, that says, I will join with you in a subjective illusion and pretend it is objectively real, and the two of us will then be 'infected' with this ego attitude and at least we'll agree with each other that this it the truth.

Real empathy then would entail absolutely not joining in ANY ego whatsoever, overlooking all ego, persona, and appearances, not believing in or taking seriously ANY presentation that runs against that (including anyone seeming to be sick, diseased, afraid, upset, etc)... holding the light, holding the truth, being a beacon, a leader, and strength that invites the other person to remember who they really are.

THE BODY'S EYES ***CANNOT SEE REALITY*** EVER!

THIS IS A VITAL A COURSE IN MIRACLES TEACHING!!!

THE BODY CANNOT AND NEVER WILL BE ABLE TO LOOK AT REALITY. YOU HAVE TO DEVELOP AN ENTIRELY NEW WAY OF SEEING - VISION - WHICH DOES NOT LOOK AT BODIES OR THE WORLD **AT ALL**.

THIS ALSO WHY THERE ARE NO BODIES IN HEAVEN! THEY ARE ***USELESS***. "To sense is NOT to know."

Many people are trying to "see" Heaven in the world and to look at this world WITH the body, keeping the body, and supposedly SEE reality. YOU CANNOT. The body's eyes are permanently fixated on hell. You have to use an entirely different kind of vision to SEE reality BEYOND the world.

Too many are getting lost in believing this world - Earth - is to be "looked at" in a loving way. It is supposed to be LOOKED PAST. If you look AT IT and SEE IT you are blinded by sight of form. The world WILL NEVER be Heaven. The body will never show you God's Kingdom. Spiritual vision requires mind-to-mind awareness which completely bypasses ALL forms, bodies and planets.

Check out these vital statements from Jesus about how the body is completely limited and CANNOT SEE. You cannot USE IT to see Heaven or reality. You cannot see your brother if you see a body. "To see a sinless body is impossible."

You must choose your method of sight, and what you will look upon. If you choose the body, you will see ONLY hell (Earth). If you choose the spiritual eyes/Christ Vision, you will see ONLY Heaven. You cannot see two worlds. Sight of one denies the other.

The entire PURPOSE of the Workbook is to train you to develop A NEW WAY OF SEEING that doesn't rely on the body!!!! IT says so in the workbook introduction! "The workbook is divided into two main sections, the first dealing with the undoing of the way you see now, and the second with the acquisition of true perception" "The very nature of true perception is that it has no limits. 6 It is the opposite of the way you see now." True perception is not just an alternative perception, it's based on the holy spirit's thought system which is spirit-based and it transcends the laws of the world!

"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."

"You look still with the body's eyes. And they CAN see but thorns. But you have asked for AND RECEIVED another sight. Those who accept the Holy Spirit's purpose as their own, share also His vision."

"Your chosen home is on the other side, beyond the veil. It has been carefully prepared for you, and it is ready to receive you now. You will not see it with the body's eyes."

"Here is a world established that is sick, and this the world the body's eyes perceive. Here are the sounds it hears; the voices which its ears were made to hear. Yet sights and sounds the body can perceive are meaningless. It cannot see nor hear. It does not know what seeing IS; what listening is FOR. It is as little able to perceive as it can judge, or understand, or know. Its eyes are blind, its ears are deaf. It can NOT think, and so it cannot HAVE effects. "

"Let not the body's ears and eyes perceive these countless fragments seen within the gap that YOU imagined, and let THEM persuade their maker his imaginings were real."

"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."

"The body cannot see this, for the body AROSE from this for its protection, which must ALWAYS depend on keeping it NOT seen. The body's eyes will NEVER look on it."

"What witness to the wholeness of God's Son is seen within a world of separate bodies, however much he witnesses to truth? He is INVISIBLE in such a world. Nor can his song of union and of joy be heard at all. Yet is it given him to make the world recede before his song, and sight of him REPLACE the body's eyes. "

"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. "

"It is your world salvation will undo, and LET you see another world your eyes could never find."

"Is it not evident that what the body's eyes perceive FILLS YOU WITH FEAR? Perhaps you think you find a hope of satisfaction there. Perhaps you fancy to attain some peace and satisfaction in the world as YOU perceive it. Yet it MUST be evident the outcome DOES NOT CHANGE. Despite your hopes and fancies, ALWAYS does despair result. And there is NO exception, nor will there ever be."

"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?"

"And you can want to see a sinless world, and let an "enemy" tempt you to use the body's eyes, and change what you desire. "

"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."

"Faith sees him only NOW, because it looks not to the past to judge him, but would see in him ONLY what it would see in YOU. It sees NOT through the body's eyes, nor looks to bodies for its justification. It is the messenger of the NEW perception, sent forth to gather witnesses unto its coming, and to return their messages to YOU. "

"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. "

"But what is there to see by searching for your Savior, seeing Him through sightless eyes? "

"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."

"Let not the dream take hold to close your eyes. It is not strange that dreams can make a world that is unreal. The WISH to make it IS incredible."

"That is because your idea of what seeing means is tied up with the body, and its eyes and brain."

"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. "

"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."

"The strength in you will offer you the light and guide your seeing, so you do not dwell on idle shadows that the body's eyes provide for self-deception."

"Leave, then, the dark a little while today, and we will practice seeing in the light, closing the body's eyes and asking truth to show us how to find the meeting place of self and Self, where light and strength are one."

"You do not seem to doubt the world you see. You do not really question what is shown you through the body's eyes."

"How can you judge? Your judgement rests upon the witness that your senses offer you. Yet witness never falser was than this. But how else do you judge the world you see? You place pathetic faith in what your eyes and ears report. You think your fingers touch reality and close upon the truth. This is awareness which you understand, and think more real than what is witnessed to by the eternal Voice of God Himself."

"He will not tell you that your brother should be judged by what your eyes behold in him, nor what his body's mouth says to your ears, nor what your fingers touch reports of him. He passes by such idle witnesses, which merely bear false witness to God's Son."

"Properly speaking, this is the release from hell. Perceived through the ego's eyes, it is loss of identity and a descent into hell."

"Let me not look to my own eyes to see today. Let me be willing to exchange my pitiful illusion of seeing for the vision that is given by God. Christ's vision is His gift, and He has given it to me. Let me call upon this gift today, so that this day may help me to understand eternity."

"Beyond His Will lie only illusions. It is these I choose when I think I can see apart from Him. It is these I choose when I try to see through the body's eyes. Yet the vision of Christ has been given me to replace them. It is through this vision that I choose to see."

"You closed your eyes to shut him out."

"How can you become increasingly aware of the Holy Spirit in you, EXCEPT by His EFFECTS? You cannot see Him with your eyes, nor hear Him with your ears."

"You dream of isolation, BECAUSE your eyes are closed. You do not SEE your brothers, and, in the darkness, you cannot look upon the light you GAVE to them. "

"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."

"And you look up and on toward Heaven, with the body's eyes but serving for an instant longer now. "

"You do not doubt that the body's eyes can see. You do not doubt the images they show you are reality. Your faith lies in the darkness, not the light."

"Miracles are seen in light. The bodys eyes do not perceive the light. But I am not a body. What am I?"

"The dream of crucifixion still lies heavy on your eyes, but what you see in dreams is not reality. "

"Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold? What need have they of sights or sounds or touch? What would they hear or reach to grasp? What would they sense at all? To sense is not to know. And truth can be but filled with knowledge, and with nothing else.The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

"It is because the thoughts you think you think appear as images that you do not recognize them as nothing. You think you think them, and so you think you see them. This is how your "seeing"was made. This is the function you have given your body's eyes. It is not seeing. It is image-making. It takes the place of seeing, replacing vision with illusions."

"Real vision is not only unlimited by space and distance, but it does not depend on the body's eyes at all. The mind is its only source."

"What you see of His Son through the eyes of the ego is a demonstration that His Son does not exist, yet where the Son is, the Father MUST be. "

"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. "

"But eyes deceive, and ears hear falsely."

"Here are the sounds it hears; the voices which its ears were made to hear. Yet sights and sounds the body can perceive are meaningless. It cannot see nor hear."

"This is because you actually cannot see anything, and it is easier to recognize that no matter how vividly you may picture a thought, you are not seeing anything."

"It is indeed a senseless point of view to hold responsible for sight a thing that cannot see, and blame it for the sounds you do not like, although it cannot hear."

"His vision cannot SEE the body, because it cannot look on sin."

"You cannot see the invisible. But if you see its effects, you KNOW it must be there."

"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. "

"We said before that the spiritual eye cannot see error, and is capable only of looking beyond it to the defense of Atonement."

"Sin is a block, set like a heavy gate, locked and without a key, across the road to peace. 3 No one who looks on it without the help of reason would try to pass it. 4 The body's eyes behold it as solid granite, so thick it would be madness to attempt to pass it. 5 Yet reason sees through it easily, because it is an error. 6 The form it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from reason's eyes."

"Everything 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."

"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? 9 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. 2 For the idea they represent left not its maker, and it is their maker that sees through them. 3 What was its maker's goal but not to see? 4 For this the body's eyes are perfect means, but not for seeing. 5 See how the body's eyes rest on externals and cannot go beyond. 6 Watch how they stop at nothingness, unable to go beyond the form to meaning. 7 Nothing so blinding as perception of form. 8 For sight of form means understanding has been obscured."

"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. 3 Let your awareness of your brother not be blocked by your perception of his sins and of his body. 4 What is there in him that you would attack except what you associate with his body, which you believe can sin? 5 Beyond his errors is his holiness and your salvation."

In ACIM there is a theme which says ... we need to surrender control of our lives and hand it over to the Holy Spirit in trust.

We've put ourselves in a position of being greatly disadvantaged, blinded, confused, lost, alone. We can't see the whole picture, we don't have all the facts, we are lacking greatly.

And yet at the same time, we've adopted a position of trying to be an "authority". As though we have rejected the authority of God. We don't want God telling us what to do, what is true, how to live, or anything. We value our own judgement, we value our intellect, we value our experience and education, and think that we know it all - that we don't need or want any help.

In that position, we have to depend on our own strength - which is really a lack of strength, which makes us afraid. We have to make all decisions on our own, which leads to huge amounts of guilt and fear. We have to try to control everything, which leads to everything becoming uncontrollable. And we stubbornly refuse to admit to being mistaken.

What if God came along and said, hey, I will just plan your whole future for you, I will orchestrate everything that is going to happen, I will choose everything for you, I will make all decisions, I will smooth the way, I will cause the right people to show up at the right time, I will put you in the right situations, I will guide the right people to come to you for help from me, and we'll do this all together.

What would you say to handing over control and management of your whole life to the Holy Spirit? Would you accept an off-the-shelf inheritance, rather than one you made up yourself? Would you be willing to admit that you are not in a POSITION to be ABLE to correctly do anything on your own?

The course has several teachings that focus on this in different ways.

1) You cannot decide anything on your own

2) You're not in a position to judge anything correctly

3) You're supposed to put your whole future into God's hands

4) You're supposed to let the Holy Spirit make all decisions

5) You're supposed to go where you're directed

6) You'll be told specifically what to do

7) If you depend on yourself you become afraid

8 ) You are trying to take on the Holy Spirit's function

9) You're being asked to resign as your own teacher

10) There is an atonement plan in place

11) You're asked not to interfere with God's plan for salvation

12) The Holy Spirit leads you to eternal life by his planned events

13) You are nothing without God

14) The right people are being sent to you at the right time

15) You don't know anything because you lost knowledge

16) You have a big problem with God having authority

17) The ego in you has ruined your life and you trust it

18) You don't trust God to look after you

19) You think you are separate and autonomous

20) You keep trying to control and manage reality

The list goes on and on. The central core of all of this is you RECOGNIZING that you are NOT in a position of knowledge or capability. You have put yourself at a disadvantage, with limited abilities, a massive lack of awareness, a great inability to make wise decisions, you're making a mess of your own life. We've even given ourselves learning disabilities.

Rather than carrying on like a bunch of headless chickens, it would be better for us to have humility and humbleness and admit that we are ILL EQUIPPED to run our lives. That we do in fact NEED HELP. This takes surrender and willingness to look at the fact that we are essentially very disabled in our ability to be aware of the whole picture, or to know anything for sure.

In the course Jesus asks us to admit that we cannot judge on our own, and any time that we judge anything without total whole awareness we are making a mistake. That it's not just that we make bad judgements all the time, but factually we cannot actually make any judgement at all. Because we are so out of touch with reality and knowledge.

Instead of us being so arrogant, so dependent on ourselves, so alone and isolated, so putting our egos on pedestals, idols worshipping ourselves, thinking we're better than others and proud of all our useless education and worldly learning, perhaps we should be admitting that we generally suck. We have very limited resources, very limited perception, very limited truth and very limited ability.

So that being the case, we are far better off admitting that without God we are nothing. That since we're not aware of everything right now, we cannot do anything correctly. We are lost in the woods. We need help from outside of the scope of this world. And that means admitting that you are flawed and limited.

Egos everywhere will not like the idea whatsoever of admitting to being limited or incapable. Ego will take it as an affront, suggesting you are inadequate, uneducated, don't know enough, not successful enough, not enough social standing, not intelligent enough, stupid, flawed, lacking in some way. Ego does not like to admit that it is woefully inadequate at fulfilling the ROLE of God. Yet we are all in our egos trying to play at being God - being an authority, because we have a big problem with his authority.

How would it be, if you let the Holy Spirit run everything? Like, put your entire future in his hands, let him decide everything, let him tell you what to do, where to go, what to say. In which you TRUST that whatever he decides, whatever is in HIS plan, is right for all concerned. That you don't NEED to know the details. You don't NEED to be informed of the reasons and why and explanations of what it's based on - which all undermines trust. What if you just trusted that everything he's orchestrating and telling you to do is absolutely correct, and just went with it?

What if you don't need to know everything, don't need to figure everything out, don't need to explain the reasons for everything, don't need to "be sure", don't need to control and manage anything, don't need to find the correct judgement, don't even need to make any decisions? What if you just had faith and trusted? What if you just asked for His Help and listened and followed his guidance, saving you massive amounts of time and effort and thinking and worrying?

Adopting this position of humility and downplaying the ego's importance is not only VITAL to salvation and awakening, it is REQUIRED.

"What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything which happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life." UrW136L19

"Resign NOW as your own teachers. THIS resignation will NOT lead to depression. It is merely the result of an honest appraisal of what you have taught yourselves, and of the learning outcomes which have resulted." UrT11F11

"If you are trusting your own strength, you have every reason to be apprehensive, anxious, and fearful. What can you predict or control? What is there in you that can be counted on? What would give you the ability to be aware of all the facets of any problem, and to resolve them in such a way that only good can come of it? What is there in you that gives you the recognition of the right solution, and the guarantee that it will be accomplished?" UrW47L1

"There is another advantage,- and a very important one, - in referring decisions to the Holy Spirit with increasing frequency. Perhaps you have not thought of this aspect, but its centrality is obvious. To follow the Holy Spirit's guidance is to let yourself be absolved of guilt. It is the essence of the Atonement. It is the core of the curriculum." UrM30A3

"Miracles are merely the sign of your willingness to follow HIS plan of Salvation, in recognition of the FACT that you do NOT know what it is. His work is NOT your function, and unless you accept this, you CANNOT learn what your function IS." UrT9C6

"You would make no ATTEMPT to judge, because it would be quite apparent to you that you do not know WHAT ANYTHING MEANS." UrT15F1

"The giving up of judgment, the obvious prerequisite for hearing God's Voice, is usually a fairly slow process, not because it is difficult, but because it is apt to be perceived as personally insulting. The world's training is directed toward achieving a goal in direct opposition to that of our curriculum. The world trains for reliance on one's judgment as the criterion for maturity and strength. Our curriculum trains for the relinquishment of judgment as the necessary condition of salvation." UrM10A2

"You are still convinced YOUR understanding is a powerful contribution to the truth, and MAKES IT WHAT IT IS. Yet we have emphasized that you need understand nothing." UrT18E8

"The Thought of God protects you, cares for you, makes soft your resting place and smooth your way, lighting your mind with happiness and love." UrW165L2

"EVERYTHING you have taught yourselves has made your power more and more obscure to you. You know not WHAT it is, nor WHERE. You have made a SEMBLANCE of power, and a SHOW of strength, so pitiful that it MUST fail you. For power is not seeming strength, and truth is beyond a semblance of any kind." UrT14G1

"You taught YOURSELVES the most unnatural habit of NOT communicating with your Creator." UrT13H16

"You do not know how to OVERLOOK errors, or you would not make them. It would merely be further error to think either that you do NOT make them, or that you can CORRECT them without a GUIDE TO CORRECTION." UrT9C2

"The Bible tells you to become as little children. Little children recognize that they do not understand what they perceive, and so they ASK WHAT IT MEANS. Do not make the mistake of believing that YOU understand what YOU perceive, for its meaning IS lost to you. But the Holy Spirit has saved its meaning FOR you, and if you will LET Him interpret it FOR you, He will restore what you have thrown away. As long as you THINK YOU KNOW its meaning, you will see no need to ask it OF Him. You do not know the meaning of ANYTHING you perceive. NOT ONE THOUGHT YOU HOLD IS WHOLLY TRUE." UrT10H6

"There is no statement that the world is more afraid to hear than this:

"I do not know the thing I am, and THEREFORE do not know what I am doing, where I am, or how to look upon the world and on myself." Yet in this learning is salvation born. And what you are will TELL you of Itself. UrT31E16

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.

I asked myself yesterday, when was the list time I actually "did a forgiveness" ... perhaps because I know that forgiveness is very important - its the core of ACIM practice - but was I actually DOING it?

What came to mind wasn't the typical answer, you know, thinking back to how many times I 'did something'.

Instead, what I recognized is, forgiveness or 'being forgiving' is a constant state that Holy Spirit represents, in which all is seen as already forgiven and that there is nothing 'to' forgive - because forgiveness fore-gives in order NOT to judge.

So this led to recognizing and acknowledging, that perhaps in some way I am 'being forgiving' all the time, to some degree, as a constant thing rather than as one-off events of sudden correction.

See, there's a difference between being forgiving and applying a correction. Correction is there to undo faulty perceptions so that you can RETURN to a forgiving attitude. Yet in the past I used to think forgiveness is the part where you correct the attitude - the process.

So I stopped to get a sense of... am I, in general, having a more forgiving attitude than I used to have.... am I carrying around with me a constantly more forgiving way of perceiving, regardless of whether it's punctuated with "Oh I gotta do something" procedures and techniques. And in general, I don't really know.. but I think I'd have to say yes, I'm generally more forgiving.

In other words, each time a correction is made, I become more forgiving in general and my 'level' of forgiving attitude raises. It's a constant, not a one-off. I'm less judgemental. I'm not as attached. I'm less reactive. I'm generally "stronger in the truth" (Jesus's words to me). That seems like a step in the right direction.

So no need to beat ourselves up for how many linear times we've 'done a forgiveness'... all the benefits of prior efforts stay with us. Each choice for Holy Spirit is a permanent step toward Heaven. And you definitely aren't 'guilty' for not taking enough of them.

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."

Believing that you sinned, is an attack against YOU, not an attack on whom or whatever you think you sinned against. The sin is against yourself, directed inward. It has no power over God.

Believing you are guilty for that sin is an attack on YOU, not a guilt imposed by whoever you thought you sinned against or how they would judge you, but by your own self against yourself. God does not find you guilty.

Believing in fear because of your guilt is also an attack on YOU, by yourself, not a fear induced by who you sinned against, or because they will retaliate, but a fear that you will deserve your own punishment because of the guilt that you believe you deserve. God is not making you afraid.

Believing in punishment because of your fear is once again an attack on YOU, by yourself, and not an attack coming at you from anyone else for any reason. It is your way to pretend to use others as ways to punish yourself, all the while pretending that you are not the one doing any of it. You are afraid of YOU and your self punishment. God has no desire to punish you and you're doing such a good job of doing it to yourself that He doesn't need to.

You sin against you. You make yourself guilty. You are afraid of yourself. You punish yourself. That's how it goes.

Nowhere in this equation is anyone else involved in any direct causal way without your consent whatsoever. Nobody. Because there is only you, doing this to yourself.

Why are you doing this to yourself?

Hmm?

Are you done with self attack yet, or the fake story that it's everyone else who is against you? The only one against you is you, as your own enemy.

What if you were to stop attacking yourself? What if you decided you are forgiven? What if you realized and recognized that you DID NOT SIN? That your sin did nothing to anyone but yourself? That nobody else separate from you was sinned against, caused guilt, induced fear, or dealt out punishment. What if there is only you and your war with yourself?

The war with yourself cannot be 'won', because then you lose.

Is it time for peace?

The secret to salvation is this... that you are but doing this to yourself!

The body does not really do a whole lot. It is an instrument. It cannot really live without you as a host. It doesn't really have a mind of its own, or a will, or power, or causality. It cannot really create anything or make anything happen. It's a medium, a tool, a device, which is to be used. You can pick it up and put it down. Without you it would do nothing.

"A body cannot stay without illusions"

"The body cannot heal, because it cannot MAKE ITSELF SICK."

"the body CANNOT be used for purposes of union"

"The body cannot KNOW. And while you limit your awareness to its tiny senses, you will not see the grandeur that surrounds you."

"Yet a body CANNOT be guilty, for it can do nothing of itself. You who think you hate your bodies, deceive yourselves."

"The body cannot create, and the belief that it CAN, a fundamental error responsible for most of the fallacies already referred to, produces all physical symptoms." "the body cannot be healed by itself."

The eyes are neutral. As you look around the room the body just reports what's there. It is like you have a video feed coming into you through your face. The eyes just pick up the light signals and pass them on. The eyes themselves are not aware of what they are looking at. They don't judge or decide anything about what they detect, and they don't even "see" what they are picking up because they have no awareness - making them blind. They just faithfully report on what's outside. They are sensors, like a detector, or a scanner.

As you look at different things, or rather, use the body's sensors to detect what is supposedly out there, there is no judgement, there is no meaning, there is no partitioning, there is no accusation, there is only a completely neutral feed of images being transferred. Your eyes are like a camera. They just bring in the data, they don't have any opinion about it at all. It isn't until the mind looks at the data that we start to enter into deciding what something means, our attitude about it and our relationship to it.

It's the mind that "looks at" what the body "looks at". There are therefore two steps in seeing the world. The body sees it first and passes on what it sees. Then the mind looks at the "printout" of what the body has seen. The mind isn't actually looking directly at the world out there. It's looking at the recorded images which have come in through the video stream, through the pipeline of the optic nerves, and which have travelled to the place in the brain where the mind is "attached". And as though on a kind of internal screen, the mind is now looking at the screen on which these images are reconstructed.

This all happens quite effortlessly so it is very easy to be deceived. The body is so non-interfering with sight, unless perhaps the eyeballs or vision apparatus is damaged, that you easily forget that the eyes are even there. This sets up a kind of deception, in which it's very easy to just think that you are looking directly and personally at the physical world. But you in fact are not. You are looking at images which are sent in to you via external sensors on the body's surface, and you are sitting there in the mind, beyond the brain, reading the transmitted images. But you think hey, I am looking at the actual world. No, you're looking at images once removed.

The same happens with sound. The ears do not discriminate as to what they hear. They just hear everything they can. They are like microphones. They pick up and sense the sound vibrations and translate it into a signal, which is sent to the brain, and then it is reconstructed into "sound". And then, the mind listens to the reconstruction, and thinks that it now hears the world. It's almost like the body is a long distance telephone, and it's picking up audio from a world far away, sending the sound along a wire, and now you're at the other end listening in. You're not really out there, in the environment where the sound is picked up, you are removed from it.

All the other body senses have the same properties. They just detect changes and differences and report them to you. You then get to interpret or give meaning to them. Upon receiving the signals your mind could have decided that all the things experienced are absolutely real. That they really exist. As though, because your body sees a car, that there really is a car there. Or because your hands touch the car, that there really is a car there. Or that because you hear the car, the car really must exist. But it's not the body that decides this, nor the brain. It's your mind, on the receiving end of transmissions. It is the mind that decided what it is FOR, or how it USES it.

It is optional, whether you believe in what the body is telling you. It is just a sensory device. In fact, Jesus says in ACIM that the body is not really there to know anything, it is only there to sense. "To sense is not to know." Which means that sensing the world or using physical perception to look at it, is not an act of knowing. It doesn't mean that you know the thing is really out there. It means that your sensors are detecting something and telling you something. And they might be lying.

The problem is, is that the body can lie. Because here you have a physical instrument for detecting things, which can report back that something exists, within the same realm that the body itself inhabits. Which means that the body can also sense itself, can look at and hear and smell and touch itself, and can report back that the body "is really there". But this cannot in any way be reliable. The body is now justifying its own existence and trying to prove itself.

The body can easily lie to you. To rely on an instrument to tell you what really exists, given that the very same instrument is reporting upon its own existence, completely invalidates everything it tells you. It is no longer impartial or neutral, if it is telling you that its own existence has been detected by its own sensors. It is completely biased, then, because it is ALWAYS telling you that physicality is true and real, even if it is not. It is ALWAYS reporting that things exist even if they don't. And if it is going to tell you to trust it when it tells you that its own existence is real, based on its own senses, this is heavily tainted information.

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

"Yet a body cannot evaluate. By seeking after such things the mind associates itself with the body, obscuring its identity and losing sight of what it really is."

What it comes down to is that your mind is sensing a world using an instrument, whereby the signals you receive and are aware of are once removed from the thing you are sensing. But if you buy into them and forget you are using an instrument, you will act as if it is YOU who is doing the sensing, and thus confuse yourself with the body. This is body identification. It's the failure to recognize that the body is a device for sensing, and is not your self. Since the senses themselves seem "transparent" and have no opinion, and since they report what's there all the time, it's easy to forget that you are even using sensory equipment, and instead believe that you ARE the senses. That the body is YOU who is picking up on the world, and YOU who sees it and hears it. It seems so effortless that you forget you even are using senses, which is extremely deceptive.

The mind is not required to believe anything that the body tells it. When it receives neutral images of a world, it can decide what to do with that image. It can dissect it, it can give meaning to it, it can believe in it, it can choose to react to it, it can remain detached from it, it can judge and condemn and attack it, it can love it, it can ignore it, whatever. But we have to realize that since the senses themselves are effectively neutral, it is US who is giving everything we sense all the meaning that it has. It is US who decides whether you believe what we see, whether it is real, and what truth it holds.

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

"This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world. And of these two but one is real. Just as reality is wholly real, apart from size and shape and time and place, for differences cannot exist within it, so too are illusions without distinctions."

So the mind is receiving signals from the outside world, through the body sensors, and gets to decide what to make of them. What meaning they have. All such images are illusions because the world itself is an illusion, and all sensory inputs are actually false, because the world they are reporting on isn't real. The eyes are in fact unable to really see actual reality. They are strapped into a virtual reality headset and are blinded to see only the inside of a tiny box. The body is in fact an interpreter, a translator, and it is fixated on an illusory world which isn't reality in order NOT to see reality. And so everything that it faithfully and neutrally reports, is a lie. What it sees is not really there to see, what it hears makes no real sound. And the sensations it sends to your mind for evaluation are all false.

"These eyes made not to see will never see."

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

It is up to your mind to decide what to make of the signals it is receiving through the body. It is up to your mind to recognize the body cannot really see or hear reality. It is up to your mind to discern that everything the body tells you is happening, is not really happening. It is up to your mind to withdraw all of its dark and twisted and confused meanings, which it projects onto the body's signals, and to instead categorize all body signals as FALSE. It is up to your mind to overlook and not see what the body is telling you is there. And it is up to your mind to recognize the world is nothing but an unreal dream, something to overlook through forgiveness and NOT see, and that BEYOND it is heaven.

"The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear. And what is fear except love's absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him. Here was perception born, for knowledge could not cause such insane thoughts. But eyes deceive, and ears hear falsely. Now mistakes become quite possible, for certainty has gone."

"Let not your eyes behold a dream; your ears bear witness to illusion. They were made to look upon a world that is not there; to hear the voices that can make no sounds. Yet are there other sounds and other sights which can be seen and heard and UNDERSTOOD. For eyes and ears are senses without sense, and what they see and hear they but report. It is not THEY that hear and see, but YOU, who PUT TOGETHER every jagged piece, each senseless scrap and shred of evidence, and MAKE a witness to the world you want."

"Let not our sight be blasphemous today, nor let our ears attend to lying tongues."

"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 are thought to hear. Its little space and tiny breath become the measure of reality. And truth becomes diminutive and meaningless."

"Rejoice you HAVE no eyes with which to see; no ears to listen, and no hands to hold nor feet to guide. Be glad that ONLY Christ can lend you His, while you have need of them."

"How can you judge? Your judgment rests upon the witness that your senses offer you. Yet witness never falser was than this. But how else do you judge the world you see? You place pathetic faith in what your eyes and ears report. You think your fingers touch reality and close upon the truth."

"The body cannot see this, for the body AROSE from this for its protection, which must ALWAYS depend on keeping it NOT seen. 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."

"He will not tell you that your brother should be judged by what your eyes behold in him, nor what his body's mouth says to your ears, nor what your fingers' touch reports of him. He passes by such idle witnesses, which merely bear false witness to God's Son."

"You do not seem to doubt the world you see. You do not really question what is shown you through the body's eyes. Nor do you ask why you believe it, even though you learned a long while since your senses do deceive. That you believe them to the last detail which they report is even stranger when you pause to recollect how frequently they have been faulty witnesses indeed! Why would you trust them so implicitly? Why but because of underlying doubt which you would hide with show of certainty?"

"These testimonies which the senses bring have but one purpose; to justify attack and thus keep unforgiveness unrecognized for what it is."

"Everything these messages relay to you is quite external. There are NO messages that speak of what lies underneath, for it is NOT the body that could speak of this. Its eyes perceive it not, its senses remain quite UNAWARE of it, its tongue can not relay ITS messages."

"You strain your ears to hear ITS soundless voice, and yet the Call of God Himself is soundless to you."

"This body, purposeless within itself, holds all your memories and all your hopes. You use its eyes to see, its ears to hear, and let it TELL you what it is it feels. IT DOES NOT KNOW. It tells you but the NAMES you gave it to use, when YOU call forth the witnesses to its reality."

"You who would make a sacrifice of life, and make your eyes and ears bear witness to the death of God and of His holy Son, think not that you have power to make of them what God willed not they be."

"Here is an image that you WANT to be yourself. It is the means to make your wish come true. It GIVES the eyes with which you look on it, the hands that feel it, and the ears with which you listened to the sounds it makes. IT PROVES ITS OWN REALITY TO YOU. Thus is the body made a THEORY of yourself, with NO provisions made for evidence BEYOND itself, and NO escape within its sight. Its course is sure, when seen through its own eyes. It grows and withers, flourishes and dies. And you cannot conceive of you APART from it."

"The mind without the body cannot make mistakes. It cannot think that it will die, nor be the prey of merciless attack. Anger becomes impossible, and where is terror then? What fears could still assail those who have lost the source of all attack; the core of anguish and the seat of fear? Only forgiveness can relieve the mind of thinking that the body is its home. Only forgiveness can restore the peace that God intended for His holy Son. Only forgiveness can persuade the Son to look again upon his holiness."

"A mind and body cannot both exist. Make no attempt to reconcile the two, for one denies the other can be real. If you are physical your mind is gone from your self-concept, for it has no place in which it could be really part of you. If you are Spirit, then the body must be meaningless to your reality."

The only reason you blame or judge or project or scapegoat or see yourself as a victim or experience effects from others, is because you do not see how you did this to yourself.

If you could see how you ONLY do things to yourself, it would be so obvious you are the cause that you would have absolutely no NEED to even begin to go looking for its source. You wouldn't even need to find out who else is responsible for this. And so you wouldn't even start to step onto the slippery slope of blaming other people for it.

It's solely because you do not SEE, that you did this to yourself, or you chose it, and therefore your vision is obscured, and so you quite literally are now INCAPABLE of seeing who really is responsible.

But you will try TRY to find out who is responsible, you'll search around the room angrily trying to point fingers of accusation and judgement. "Was it you? or You?!"... And beyond even asking if it was someone, which you strongly believe it MUST be because you didn't see yourself do it, you pretty much have found others guilty automatically.

Then you think that if you FIND or have found someone guilty, and can blame them, that you're simply being justified. You're simply pointing out what the cause is. You're just honestly and innocently identifying who is responsible. You think you're just doing the normal honest sane rational thing of finding out who caused you to be upset, and that you're just pointing it out. You don't realize you're totally barking up the wrong tree because the cause isn't out there.

So projection, blame, anger, judgement, scapegoating, it's all simply an effort to continue to recognize who is responsible, but at the same time as being irresponsible yourself. By not being responsible for who you are, you entered into darkness, could not see what you were doing, and now are attempting to find another person to pin it on. And you will be wrong.

You will ALWAYS be mistaken if you EVER decide that it's someone else's fault. Because it is ALWAYS YOU that is doing it to yourself. You don't need to find someone to pin it on. You need to wake the fuck up and SEE CLEARLY, so you can recognize that you only do stuff to yourself.

To truly be a student, you have to be willing to recognize and admit that you DO NOT KNOW.

If you do not know, then you are in a position of NEEDING TO LEARN.

Because you do not know, YOU CANNOT teach yourself what you do not know, so MUST resign as your own teacher.

Therefore you need a teacher who DOES KNOW, other than yourself, and you must turn to them, listen to and trust them.

If you can accept that you do not know, then you will be willing to turn to the Holy Spirit and ask for his Help. He is there to help and to guide, to comfort and to heal. He is there to provide therapy and to teach you what you do NOT know.

But here is the problem. Everyone who does not know, does not recognize that they do not know, and believes that they do know.

Similarly everyone who does not know, believes that they DO know, and thinks that they are CAPABLE of telling themselves what they need to know.

So now you have a person who is blind to knowledge, who does NOT know what anything really is, who is turning to themselves and whispering IN THEIR OWN EAR, TELLING THEMSELVES what things are.

How can a person tell themselves what anything is, if they do not know what anything is? But this is what we are all doing all of the time.

It's like saying, I have no clue what anything really is, so I'm going to tell myself what it is anyway. This is obviously insane and a mistake. But we keep doing it over and over, telling ourselves what everything is.

We judge on our own, we decide on our own, we depend on our own strength and experience, we tell ourselves what we think is true, we make it all up as we go along, and we convince ourselves that we're experts.

We then develop a kind of pride in believing that we are in a position of authority, that we are educated and knowledgeable, with all the facts and trivia and information that we need, along with greatly developed "judgement", allegedly autonomous and capable of discerning anything and everything.

But we're totally clueless. We're lost in the dark, we're completely out of touch with real knowledge - which is an aspect of heaven only, we have no real clue what anything is or means, we're making up all these meanings as we go along, and we're trying to constantly talk ourselves into things.

It's obvious therefore that we all "start out" doing this course in a position of believing that we are the ones who are going to get ourselves to the goal. It is even a widespread teaching that we OURSELVES need to "do a forgiveness". That WE ourselves are going to figure out what's wrong with us, how we are insane, and what we need to do to fix it.

But ACIM is quite clear that we are in fact supposed to surrender and admit that we do not know, recognize that we are in a position of NEEDING HELP, and then TURN TO the Holy Spirit to join with him FIRST, BEFORE we even attempt to overlook sins.

We are not going to do that if we are not being true students. We are so busy being teachers. So in fact we start off believing we know, with fake authority and made-up knowledge, and ponce around as if authoritative teachers. And it isn't usually until much LATER in our progress that we start to relinquish the role of "fake teacher" and adopt a greater role of being a true STUDENT.

To be a true student, or happy learner, we have to have enough humility and humbleness to drop the ROLE of trying to do everything on our own. We have to be willing to admit that we cannot judge anything correctly, we are rather stupid, we have no knowledge or true certainty about anything, have no clue what anything really means, and have failed at teaching ourselves.

This then gives way for opening up to LISTEN and to hear the Voice for God, to direct us, to decide everything for us, to tell us what everything means, to direct us what to do, where to go, what to say. To even step aside enough to allow him to use our body, to speak through it, to manipulate our hands, to heal through us. Such that we become more like a medium for God and Christ.

All of this takes the removal of the egotism, the arrogance, the pretentiousness, the righteousness, the self importance, the pride, the holier-than-thou, and all of the sense of self-reliance and not needing God for anything. We are here to do God's will, not our own separate will. We are here to serve, not to dictate from our own sources.

We are not our own source. Anything and everything we have is part of God and has been LOANED to us through sharing and inheritance. Our strength is the strength of God in us. Our power is the power of God is us. Our light and love are God's light and love. We are symbiotic and dependent on God. We should not be taking a position of standalone agents, thinking we have something exclusively of our own, something special, that others lack.

To be a student is to drop the role of being an exclusive teacher. Then only as a student can you truly become a teacher of God. A teacher of God is a student of the Holy Spirit and not their own ego.

"Resign NOW as your own teachers. THIS resignation will NOT lead to depression. It is merely the result of an honest appraisal of what you have taught yourselves, and of the learning outcomes which have resulted. Under the proper learning conditions, which you can neither provide nor understand, you will become excellent learners AND teachers." UrT11F11

"EVERYTHING you have taught yourselves has made your power more and more obscure to you." UrT14G1

"The lessons you have taught yourselves have been so overlearned and fixed they rise like heavy curtains, to obscure the simple and the obvious." UrT31A3

"You taught YOURSELVES the most unnatural habit of NOT communicating with your Creator. Yet you remain in close communication with Him, and with everything that is within Him, as it is within YOURSELF. UNlearn isolation through His loving guidance, and learn of all the happy communication that you have thrown away, but could NOT lose." UrT13H16

"Do not attempt to teach YOURSELVES what you do not understand, and do not try to set up curriculum goals, where yours have clearly failed. For YOUR learning goal has been NOT TO LEARN, and this CANNOT lead to successful learning." UrT11F6

"The aim of our curriculum, unlike the goal of the world's learning, is the recognition that judgment in the usual sense is impossible. This is not an opinion but a fact. In order to judge anything rightly, one would have to be fully aware of an inconceivably wide range of things; past, present and to come. One would have to recognize in advance all the effects of his judgments on everyone and everything involved in them in any way. And one would have to be certain there is no distortion in his perception, so that his judgment would be wholly fair to everyone on whom it rests now and in the future. Who is in a position to do this? Who except in grandiose fantasies would claim this for himself?" UrM11A3

"When your peace is threatened, or disturbed in ANY way, say to yourself, "I do not know what anything, INCLUDING THIS, means. And so I do NOT know HOW TO RESPOND TO IT. And I will not use my own past learning as the light to guide me now." By this refusal to attempt to teach yourself what you do not know, the Guide Whom God has given you, will speak to you. HE will take His rightful place in your awareness, the instant YOU abandon it, and offer it to Him." UrT14G7

"Never approach the holy instant AFTER you have tried to remove all fear and hatred from your mind. That is ITS function. Never attempt to OVERLOOK your guilt BEFORE you ask the Holy Spirit's help. That is HIS function. Your part is only to offer Him a LITTLE willingness to LET Him remove all fear and hatred, and to BE forgiven. On your little faith, joined with HIS understanding, HE will build your part in the Atonement, and MAKE SURE that you fulfill it easily. And WITH Him, YOU will build a ladder planted in the solid rock of faith, and rising even to Heaven. Nor will you use it to ascend to Heaven alone." UrT18F2

The separation from God was a pretty big event, placing many sons of God into states of insanity and producing an entire world of separation.

What was the answer to this? God himself gave the most profound miraculous answer, in the form of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was created TO GUARANTEE the resolution of this problem for everyone everywhere forever.

The Holy Spirit was given us as God's HELP. He is described as our friend, therapist, comforter, our only teacher, healer, and way out of hell.

It sounds to me that we should therefore be trusting him and using him and asking for his help and healing. He has a function in awakening that God has given him, and we have a particular function as well.

Very often people talk about doing ACIM as though it's something they do all on their own. They might say that all you have to do is forgive, all you have to do is see things correctly, all you have to do is think right.

But there is no room for the Holy Spirit in any of this. What does he DO exactly? How is he helping? What is his role and function? Because apparently GOD decided that the Holy Spirit was the answer and guarantee and power that will correct the ENTIRE separation issue. So are we LETTING him do that?

If we are not working with, using, trusting, depending on, making room for, being healed by, the Holy Spirit, then we are essentially denying Gods help. And that to me seems somewhat arrogant. Some people see the path to awakening as something they can do all on their own without the Holy Spirit ever doing anything, and this cannot be right.

We're told the Holy Spirit will respond to your slightest invitation. We're told that we are having just a little willingness and he will help us. Were told to refer ALL DECISIONS to him with increasing frequency. We're told that he will heal us and teach us how to heal as we attempt to heal others with his help. We're told that when we heal by the Holy Spirit he never fails. We're told that he has the power of God at his disposal and what he enables you to do is unlimited and not of this world.

If we're not incorporating the Holy Spirit into our PRACTICE AND APPLICATION of this course, then we're missing something major and crucial. It's not really enough to just say that we should merely see from a forgiving perspective, or that all we have to do is identity with Christ or all we have to do is get rid of our grievances. Were told to not even attempt to forgive without FIRST joining with the Holy Spirit.

You might ask yourself what function the Holy Spirit HAS, what he is capable of, and what he can DO FOR you. Or even to you. There is essentially nothing that he cannot do, and it's really us who is placing limits on him through mistrust and fear. WE should be building a solid relationship with him and working with him as the centrepiece of our entire journey back to God. Especially since it is HIM that orchestrates events and happenings to lead us to eternal life.

I think we ALL need to let the Holy Spirit be our teacher, healer, comforter and helper in ALL matters, and that we should trust him and turn to him for support in ALL things. Certainly as a priority above and beyond turning to any other ego-driven teacher who might be falling short of the whole truth.

"The imagined usurping of functions not your own is the basis of fear. The whole world you see reflects the illusion you have done so, making fear inevitable. To return the function to the One To Whom it belongs is thus the escape from fear. And it is this that lets the memory of love return to you. Do not, then, think that following the Holy Spirit's guidance is necessary merely because of your own inadequacies. It is the way out of hell for you."

"If it is the judgment of the Holy Spirit, it will be right, for judgment IS His function. You share His function only by judging AS HE DOES, reserving no judgment at all unto yourselves. For you will judge AGAINST yourselves, but He will judge FOR you."

"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."

"Never attempt to OVERLOOK your guilt BEFORE you ask the Holy Spirit's help. That is HIS function. Your part is only to offer Him a LITTLE willingness to LET Him remove all fear and hatred, and to BE forgiven."

"The Holy Spirit never refuses an invitation to enter and abide with you. He will give you endless opportunities to open the door to your salvation, for such is His function. He will also tell you exactly what your function is in every circumstance and at all times. Whoever He sends you will reach you, holding out his hand to his Friend."

"The curriculum is highly individualized. And all aspects are under the Holy Spirit's particular care and guidance. Ask and He will answer. The responsibility is His, and He alone is fit to assume it. To do so is His function. To refer the questions to Him is yours. Would you want to be responsible for decisions about which you understand so little? Be glad you have a Teacher Who cannot make a mistake. His answers are always right. Would you say that of yours?"

"In His function as Interpreter of what you have made, the Holy Spirit USES special relationships, which YOU have chosen to support the ego, as a learning experience which points to truth. Under His teaching, EVERY relationship becomes a lesson in love."

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

"What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything which happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life."

"They will not hear another voice but yours, because you gave your voice to God and now you rest in Him, and let Him speak through you."

"It is not needful that I make it ready for Him, but only that I DO NOT INTERFERE with His plan to RESTORE to me my own AWARENESS of my readiness, which is eternal."

"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."

"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."

Lately when I read ACIM talking about time, I have a different impression of it. There's because there's "physical" time and "psychological" time, like two layers.

In some parts we're told basically that as soon as the current moment is done, it is gone. That whatever is "here and now" in the physical sense, is all that there remains. Prior configurations, previous states, stuff that seemed to happen before, it's all over the instant it happens. This "physical time", part of spacetime, is a constantly evolving changing world of form.

Then in other parts Jesus talks more about a kind of psychological time. This psychological time is an interpretation of what's happening, in which you can either be very present with whatever is physically here now, or you can be somewhat distanced from it by focusing on beliefs and memories about stuff from "the past".

In our minds we have sort of invented an idea of the past, in which we keep holding onto stuff which is already gone. So the physical "time" of spacetime seems to march onward, in which the states of material objects are gone forever and have been replaced, and in which only the current stuff you are faced with now is all that's left. And then there's an overlay of psychological perception and use of the world, which can be deeply invested in things that have gone by, or present here now.

When the mind is much more present with what it is faced with here and now, it is closer to what seems to be called a "holy instant", or in effect, moments of the current configuration of the world which are squarely focused on the present here and now, seen without looking toward the past or future.

An instant of spacetime, a moment of happenings, present events and arrangements of objects etc, as though keeping pace with it and always focusing on what is current. Jesus seems to call this immediacy of and use of "time", ie being in the present or "now", a string of holy instants. As Jesus says "now is the only time." But of course, in spacetime, the forms constantly change still. But as soon a their state changes, the old state is gone forever.

But if your mind is heavily preoccupied with the past and future, this takes you away from the present. In particular if you believe that someone attacked you at some point in time, and you have not forgiven this, and are holding onto it, you have a grievance which anchors your mind in the past and focuses you on what is not happening anymore.

You can only have grievances based on things that happened in the past. Someone "doing something to you" immediately becomes past-tense, and now you recall it like a wound that keeps reminding you of something that is already over and gone. You won't let it go, so you keep pulling it back up from what seems like a psychological past, to relive it, regurgitating it and trying to keep it going, not letting go of what has already gone.

Without a psychological past it is impossible to retain grievances of any kind because you can only be upset about what someone "did", which is always past tense the instant that is has happened. Without a past you cannot have any unforgiveness.

And as Jesus leads off in the workbook, with "I see only the past", he's talking about how we are so heavily attached to things that happened "before" that we haven't accepted as "gone", that we are living in a kind of haze of hypnotic memory and recall, dwelling on things which are not here anymore.

And because of this, we filter the "present" configuration of the world through a lens of history, of unforgiven grievances, of resistance to God's presence, which causes us to not see anything "as it is now".

There can only be grief over things which once were seemingly here, which have gone, such as physical bodies, and the unwillingness to truly accept that they are not here now. To let go of the past is to let go of lost treasures and special relationships which are over already. We just struggle with the fact of their extinction, because the very instant that they are gone, they are gone.

As we move toward God, who is always present and lives only in the eternal "here and now" or "always and forever", we must move our psyche out of the past and into the present. Not that we're trying to make the world out to be real or anything, because its forms will still change and shift as they always do in illusions. But we are at least trying to get a look at the world through present-tense eyes which are clean and new and forgiving and which are not projecting past sins or ancient hatreds onto it.

Thus "in time", or at least, in the progression of change of form, our view of that form can come from a more centred and present frame of reference, which is a holier state and closer to God. The present "now" of time is symbolic of eternity and it is where we can most fully connect with God. Being "in the past", mentally, is an attempt to create "more spacetime" ie more distance and more delay between us and God, and between us and reality.

So there's a kind of physical spacetime, and there is also a kind of psychological spacetime. When the psychological spacetime completely lets go of the past and future, and becomes fully present, it looks upon the physical spacetime with fresh loving eyes, which do not not use past happenings as condemnations, and does not look to the the past for truth.

Then once the forgiven world is seen and looked past with this present light, we are close enough to "what really is" that we can transcend and overlook the world, and move on to our home in God. God is always here and now, and has always been here and now, and will always be here and now. It is only your mind that has wandered off into a movement away from what remains.

"Release the future. For the past is gone, and what is present, freed from its bequest of grief and misery, of pain and loss, becomes the instant in which time escapes the bondage of illusions where it runs its pitiless, inevitable course. Then is each instant, which was slave to time, transformed into a holy instant when the light that was kept hidden in God's Son is freed to bless the world. Now is he free, and all his glory shines upon a world made free with him, to share his holiness."

"Judgment ALWAYS rests on the past, for PAST experience is the basis on which you judge. Judgment becomes impossible without the past, for WITHOUT it you do NOT understand anything. You would make no ATTEMPT to judge, because it would be quite apparent to you that you do not know WHAT ANYTHING MEANS. You are afraid of this, because you believe that, WITHOUT THE EGO, all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that, without the ego, ALL WOULD BE LOVE."

"The holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love."

"When your peace is threatened, or disturbed in ANY way, say to yourself, "I do not know what anything, INCLUDING THIS, means. And so I do NOT know HOW TO RESPOND TO IT. And I will not use my own past learning as the light to guide me now." By this refusal to attempt to teach yourself what you do not know, the Guide Whom God has given you, will speak to you. HE will take His rightful place in your awareness, the instant YOU abandon it, and offer it to Him."

Another malady of ACIM students is becoming paralyzed by trying to comply with ACIM principles 24/7, before you are really ready or able to do so.

This entails calling for sacrifices in your own life or that of others. It's an attempt to fit into the model of truth, or to act or behave as though you are doing it right.

It can also manifest as trying not to judge, by holding your tongue, and secretly judging in your mind. In other words, being in denial or using denial that you are judging.

Generally this is the ego trying to "act like" it is doing the Course. The spiritualized ego. It wants to people-please Jesus and never put a foot wrong.

It also results in victimhood and powerlessness whereby you hold off saying anything to upset anyone, you don't want to act, you stop standing up for yourself, you start tolerating crap and are unwilling to "act like an ego" because "its not course". This can get you really stuck in a rut and suffering.

You don't have to try all the time to be perfect at it. You don't have to be walking around biting your tongue and trying to be all nice to everyone. You don't have to be turning the actions of ASSHOLES into some kind of "its okay" attitude, where you don't do anything about it or stand up for yourself because "that wouldn't be forgiving". Then you end up trying to use the course to solve general real-life problems instead of using normal real-life methods.

Many level confusions arise when you have this issue. You try to meet up to an extraordinarily high standard, you compare yourself to advanced teachers, you feel like crap for not getting it yet, and you generally over-reach and over-demand yourself to succeed at it right now. The ego loves to get in there and push you to "be more spiritual" ... secretly because it believes "you're not spiritual enough".

This is a slight technicality which the ego forgot to mention.

If you knew and could see that any attempt you make to influence or hurt or affect another, immediately has direct repercussions upon yourself, and that it is absolutely impossible to escape ANY of the effects, then you would have no choice but to always love.

It is ONLY because you do not see, ie are not aware, that this is true, and applies in every situation, that you think it's possible to get away with one set of rules applying to someone else that does not apply to you. Or that you can cause something without experiencing the effects.

The ego is entirely based on this idea that you are not equal to your brother in some way, that they can be the one who is a sinner and not you.

This creates the tremendous illusion, commonly believed-in by most of the planet, that you literally can attack or judge or harm or condemn without having any side effects whatseover.

This is false. It is not true at all.

You could call it karma. It's not pay-back. It's not compensation. It's the simply fact that WHATEVER you do, you WILL do it to yourself and everyone.

"Whatever you do unto the least of my brothers you do unto me" ... or something like that. Every way you treat everyone else, you are treating Jesus and God the same way.

Not necessarily that they will receive the treatment you are dishing out, but you will believe they are.

What applies to others applies to you. At all times.

There are no loopholes. There is no exit clause. There are no workarounds. There is no hope of being especially skilled or capable or clever or imaginative in how you figure out how to cheat the system. The system is not cheatable. God's laws are pemanent.

This is what "shared interests" are all about. You, being literally one with your brother, SHARE everything with them, and therefore receive everything you give.

This is also why giving and receiving are one. What you give you will receive.

"****Projection will ALWAYS hurt you. It reinforces your belief in your own split mind, and its ONLY purpose is to KEEP THE SEPARATION GOING****."

"It is solely a device of the ego to make you feel DIFFERENT from your brothers and separated FROM them. The ego justifies this on the wholly spurious grounds that it makes you seem better than they are, thus obscuring equality WITH them still further."

When you accuse someone of something you are splitting your mind. Splitting your mind isn't exactly a healthy thing to do. It means dissociation and denial and mental illness. Not to mention a profound loss of identity.

The fundamental fact is that you and other people ARE ONE. You are a PART OF other people. We are all joined together. We are all connected and SHARE everything. Part of you IS other people. You are in them. They are part of you. We are a collective in unison. "One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."

To appropriately relate to others, knowing that they ARE YOU as well as themselves, is to acknowledge that they are part of yourself. How you treat what appears to be "them", is the SAME as how you are treating yourself directly, because part of you is in them.

When you begin to SEPARATE OFF the other person, putting a fence around them and believing they are NOT PART OF YOU, that they are not yourself, not in your mind, not one with you, you are excluding A PART OF YOURSELF from yourself.

Part of you lives in other people. If you like, think of it as though part of you is in all the other bodies besides your own. When you single someone out and attack "them", in order to turn "them as you" into "only them without you", you are SPLITTING yourself.

Your mind splits because it has to dissociate or not-associate with the SELF that is IN your brother/neighbor. It is sectioning off a part of itself and calling it "not me", while labelling the other part of it as "me". That's one mind, split into two minds, at war with itself, attacking itself from the inside.

This is what happens when you accuse, attack, condemn, judge, find guilty, make sinful, or in any way reject anyone for any reason. You cannot do anything to other people WITHOUT doing it to yourself.

Anything that is done to them, IS done to you. And by your own hand. This means if you attack anyone for any reason, you are literally attacking yourself. You hurt yourself when you hurt others. You cannot escape from these consequences. This is the golden rule. It is the law of God.

If you identify anyone as "not me", sectioning them off as not SHARED with you, as not one with you, you are literally doing something unnatural to your mind. Your mind in its NATURAL condition is not isolated to your own body, nor is it exclusive to you. Mind HAS TO BE SHARED. All real mind is shared by everyone. You inherit and share the mind of God. Everyone shares the christ mind.

To identify that someone is not part of you, is to say they are not part of christ, and are not sharing existence with you. It's like you exclude them. And then you think in this separation that it is only THEM that you are targeting. This is where the ego is coming in and giving you an illusion. It will seem as though, if the other person is NOT YOU, then you CAN attack them WITHOUT experiencing consequences.

Another way to put that is trying to get away with murder. To cause without being part of the effects. To give without receiving. To attack while remaining safe. To judge as guilty while remaining innocent. As soon as there is this split in the mind, the mind starts believing this "ego message" that what applies to others DOES NOT apply to you. And now there is a rift, with the two of you on seemingly different levels, experiencing different things.

The world would say, in physical terms, that this is PRECICELY what is natural and normal. That you can, for example, on a physical level, damage the body of another person WITHOUT damaging your own. This is because bodies are separation devices and are designed to facilitate this illusion. They play along with it and make it seem POSSIBLE that you can attack without being attacked. Everything in spacetime does this because the whole system is a lie.

If you think you can cause without being affected, you have bought into the illusion of physical form. Bodies now testify that you can get away with murder, that you can in fact sin, because you can now attack another against their will without receiving any consequences. And if this were the truth of absolute reality, separation would be real.

It is because the physical world is rooted HEAVILY in separation that all physical objects testify to murder. This is their nature, to portray the son of God as attacked and split apart, to portray the sonship as broken and fragmented, to make it seem like one brother is NOT all brothers, that each is isolated and confined to their bodily prisons, and nothing ever applies equally to anyone. This is a PHYSICAL rejection of the Golden Rule, an attempt to break the law of God.

The fact is, however, that God's laws CANNOT BE broken. You can accept them, or you can deny them, but you cannot stop them from functioning. The golden rule ALWAYS applies at ALL levels at ALL times. This means even when you THINK you are doing something without receiving consequences, you are deceiving yourself. You cannot attack WITHOUT being attacked. You cannot judge WITHOUT being judged. And you cannot destroy without destroying yourself.

Your body might SEEM to get away with it, but YOUR MIND DOES NOT! And if your mind splits in this way, thinking it has isolated the effects to ANOTHER person, not yourself, your mind IS STILL in a state of self-attack, and IT WILL take this out on your own body, making you suffer and sick! You do NOT escape the consequences!

You are ALWAYS ONE with others. They are ALWAYS part of your self. We all share identity in christ. We are all part of God's collective family. When you single anyone out and label them and isolate them and exclude them, when you point a finger and say "this applies ONLY to you", you are in denial. You're denying that you are literally HURTING YOURSELF by splitting yourself off from the PART OF YOU which IS your brother. Other people are LITERALLY YOU.

This is the truth and the nature of reality. This is God's law. No one ever escapes this fact. Mind can only function naturally when it is being SHARED by everyone. It is only healthy when it is embracing WHOLENESS. It is only alive when it is being GIVEN AND RECEIVED equally.

When you disturb this by trying to force part of it to exclude another part, which you do through the ego's use of projection - blaming "others" who are "not you" for whatever reason, you are not only in denial, you are driving a huge divide between the you that is "here" and the you that is "there". This is like cutting yourself in half.

Seeing yourself as "only" one half of the mind, which is split off from the other half, correlates also to identifying with your body. The body now seems to symbolize the split mind, whereby one half of your split self is "in your body" and the other part which is "not you" is "in another person's body". Your body seems to be you, and their body seems to be them, and the two have NO relationship. Attacking anyone for any reason on any level therefore CONFINES YOU to the body prison and SEPARATES YOU OFF from relationship. "Inasmuch as you do it unto the least of these, my children" really ends with "you do it unto yourself and ME."

No one is exempt from this consequence. Attack anyone and you are attacked. Try to hurt anyone and you are trying to hurt the entire sonship. Try to attack another but not yourself, and you will STILL hurt your mind. Pretend that just because your body got away with murder without experiencing the consequences, does not mean your MIND got away with it. Illusions can always seem to defy God's laws, but YOU are under no laws but God's.

Stop hurting yourself. Stop hurting everyone. Be us. That means that YOUR INTERESTS are the SAME as your brother's, thus your interests are shared, because you recognize that your brother IS part of your self. Therefore, how you treat them, you are also treating yourself. So you have a vested INTEREST in treating them well, otherwise you will treat yourself poorly. So now YOUR needs and your brother's needs are ONE. Acknowledging this is what it means to be a teacher of God. You MUST love your brother otherwise you will fail to love yourself.

"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously."

"Since you and your neighbor are equal members of the same family, as you perceive both, so will you behave toward both. The way to perceive for Golden Rule behavior is to look out from the perception of your own holiness and perceive the holiness of others."

"The Holy Spirit is in BOTH your minds, and He IS One, because there is no gap that separates His Oneness from Itself."

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

"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. Once he has done that his road is established and his direction is sure. A light has entered the darkness. It may be a single light, but that is enough. He has entered an agreement with God, even if he does not yet believe in Him. He has become a bringer of salvation. He has become a teacher of God."

"Miracles are thought-creations. Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities. This is the basic distinction between intellectualization and thinking. One creates the physical, and the other the spiritual, and we believe in what we create."

Intellect here is being basically equate with the ego thought system. Intellect is a device that separates and analyzes. It looks at things and separates them off and compares them. It judges them and evaluates them. This splitting apart is an emphasis on separation and increases the send of fragmentation of things. Things can become extremely complicated in the intellect.

As such, since the physical world is made from the idea of separation and the intellect similarly fosters perceptions of separation, the intellect can be said to be responsible for making the world. ie the ego mind of separation reinforces ideas of differences and contrasts and directly leads to physical matter showing up.

Jesus congrats this against real thinking, ie the thoughts you think with God, thoughts of love and creation, which are extensions of God's mind. Those create wholeness and spirit and eternal life because they are not based on separation. It's a way of thinking that doesn't dissect or analyse or judge or evaluate. It's a thought process that looks out from a loving whole state of mind and creates more of the same - the good, the beautiful and the holy. This extends the Kingdom of God (heaven).

"Child of God, you were created to create the good, the beautiful, and the holy. Do not lose sight of this."

You might notice also that when you move away from love and the present moment, the mind creates a sense of separateness from "what is" and moves into a kind of more fictional, theoretical, conceptualizing state. This produce a sort of "shift upwards" in the mind, or what we might call moving thought up into the intellect. In the intellect everything becomes theoretical and non-practical, or is a lack of application because it's a lack of real engagement and sharing. It could be thought of as a way of shutting down and separating off by trying to hide from immediate reality, going into fantasies and sidetracks.

"Intellect may be a "displacement upward"

The intellect can be somewhat useful perhaps for assessing things in this world and sorting out what to do and so on, but only as a temporary tool. It's easy to become lost in it and to be so involved in intellectualizing that your whole experiences becomes one big theory and not a whole lot of relationship. Then you can be sort of living in a cloud of "course thought" masquerading as "doing the course" but only really being good at talking bout it, around it, and indirectly referring to it. The truth has to be lived, and that means eventually the intellect will be transcended and used no more.

Introductory text prior to lesson 221 in the ACIM workbook - one of the Course's masterpieces on Forgiveness:

"What is Forgiveness?

Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in that view are all your sins forgiven. What is sin, except a false idea about God's Son? Forgiveness merely sees its falsity, and therefore lets it go. What then is free to take its place is now the Will of God.

An unforgiving thought is one which makes a judgment that it will not raise to doubt, although it is not true. The mind is closed, and will not be released. The thought protects projection, tightening its chains, so that distortions are more veiled and more obscure; less easily accessible to doubt, and further kept from reason. What can come between a fixed projection and the aim that it has chosen as its wanted goal?

An unforgiving thought does many things. In frantic action it pursues its goal, twisting and overturning what it sees as interfering with its chosen path. Distortion is its purpose, and the means by which it would accomplish it as well. It sets about its furious attempts to smash reality, without concern for anything that would appear to pose a contradiction to its point of view.

Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing. It offends no aspect of reality, nor seeks to twist it to appearances 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.

Do nothing, then, and let forgiveness show you what to do, through Him Who is your Guide, your Savior and Protector, strong in hope, and certain of your ultimate success. He has forgiven you already, for such is His function, given Him by God. Now must you share His function, and forgive whom He has saved, whose sinlessness He sees, and whom He honors as the Son of God."

Would you trust life or death decisions to the Holy Spirit? And if not, why not?

We are ego-identified idiots here. We don't know what we're doing, what's right, what's in anyone's best interests, or how to judge anything. And we're not as expert as we think we are.

We have in this world people who become highly educated, experts in their field, professionals, authorities, experienced individuals. But even these people usually trust their own world-based learning, their own egos, their own judgement.

I have personally experienced many many times over how such exalted persons can be incredibly blind, totally unaware of God or anything spiritual, completely indoctrinated into institutions, and yet proud of their prowess and achievements in highly advanced fields. And they can be VERY mistaken and lost. This includes highly advanced doctors, specialists, scientists, gurus of all kinds.

For me I've had to go through some seriously difficult situations, life-or-death decisions, medical body-health decisions. I've had a partner who was in intensive care twice, in hospitals for over 6 months, and multiple serious health concerns. It was stressful and difficult and filled with very important and serious life choices. Decisions to be made, does she live or die?

Who do you turn to? You might ask family and friends and those you trust. People will give their opinions. But ultimately for me I knew that I could not really "handle" the severity of situations, and had to surrender and get humble. I had to make room for the Holy Spirit and God.

Sometimes when life gets really shit it really pushes you towards God because you can reach some really dark hellish places filled with fear where you just start reaching out and asking God for help. And you then find that the Help he has provided through the Holy Spirit, Jesus, etc, is not only effective and correct it is highly trustworthy.

Their guidance and support and healing has a power and accuracy and rightness far above and beyond all humans and all institutions and all educated fields and professions. Their expertise and knowledge and insight is absolutely unparalleled. Their access to all information, all outcomes, all scenarios all futures etc is absolutely beyond the reach of anyone on the planet.

So when you get into situations like that, and you need help and you reach out for spiritual help, and it comes, and you trust it, and you learn that it works and is right, you trust it more and more. And so you listen and you turn to it, it's like a compass in your back pocked. You whip it out whenever there's something important to deal with. Or even for little things.

Would I trust life or death decisions to the Holy Spirit? Absolutely! If they told me to do or not do something, I would very likely go with that even if it flew in the face of whatever everyone else said or suggested. I would place his truth and rightness above everyone, because he has proven to me over and over again how trustworthy he is, how helpful and healing he is, and how his wisdom is always right.

I cannot pretend to know everything, or to judge anything correctly, or to be educated enough, or professional enough, or experienced enough, or to have accumulated enough facts and information, or done enough research, or any other such way that our little egos go wild with trying to play God. I don't want to play God.

I want God to be God, and me to do his will. That is all it's about. Knowing your place as second to God, dismantling the authority problem, not trusting artificial external authorities, and turning to God for EVERYTHING.

Many people would think that doing this is totally irresponsible, that trusting "spiritual guidance" would be insane and not good enough and not accurate and who knows where it's coming from. They would say you have to listen to the experts and believe the science and follow the rules and laws and all that shit. It's all made up bullshit. You have to trust someone that TRULY KNOWS which is the Holy Spirit. His credentials are massively above and beyond anything any person on this planet can offer you.

It is in fact irresponsible and arrogant to put ourselves into a position where we think we know enough to be able to decide ANYTHING important on our own. ACIM tells us to trust the Holy Spirit in ALL THINGS. For all decisions. Even the risky ones. Even the ones to do with the body and health. Even things to do with serious life scenarios and problems and stuff that no-one can see to solve. Even things which defy all possibilities and seem hopeless. He is there to HELP, so that you are NOT ALONE EVER.

It does take time and willingness to develop this TRUST. And it can be a long process especially if there is fear, trusting in your own strength and the abilities of yourself and others. If you trust in egos and external saviours. If you trust in magic and traditions and regimented groups of people who think they know everything and decide everything for you. It can take time to wean off all that and be spirit-driven. But it is absolutely the best thing you could ever do, guaranteed!

And the good thing is that when you TRUST spirit and RECEIVE the help and can SEE that it is right, you absolve yourself of guilt because you're allowing God to decide FOR you. You don't have to do this all on your own, alone, trusting in your petty arrogant weakness, or that of others who masquerade as unquestionable authorities. Put your life into the hands of God and your way will be made straight. Follow his word and his advice and his path and your life will become much more manageable. Who wants to carry the whole weight of the world on their shoulders? Not me.

"What worry can beset the one who gives his future to the loving hands of God? What can he suffer? What can cause him pain, or bring experience of loss to him? What can he fear? And what can he regard except with love? For he who has escaped all fear of future pain has found his way to present peace, and certainty of care the world can never threaten." UrW194L7

"Place, then, your future in the hands of God." UrW194L8

"NOTHING can prevail against a Son of God who commends his Spirit into the hands of His Father." UrT3C13

"The Thought of God protects you, cares for you, makes soft your resting place and smooth your way, lighting your mind with happiness and love." UrW165L2

"Who dwells with shadows is alone indeed, and loneliness is NOT the Will of God. Would you allow one shadow to usurp the throne that God appointed for your Friend, if you but realized ITS emptiness has left YOURS empty and unoccupied? Make NO illusion friend, for if you do, it CAN but take the place of him whom God has called your Friend. And it is he who is your ONLY Friend in truth. He brings you gifts that are not of this world, and only he, to whom they have been given, CAN make sure that you receive them. He will place them on YOUR throne, when you make room for him on his." UrT26G3

"That is why we suggested before that there was help in reminding yourselves to allow the Holy Spirit to decide for God for YOU." UrT6G9 "Forget HIM not, and He will make EVERY decision for you, for YOUR Salvation and the peace of God in you." UrT13H13

"Leave ALL decisions to the One Who speaks for God, and for your function as He KNOWS it." UrT13I6

I've come to realize, through painful lessons and helpful support, that I've for a long time now been using my learning about 'truth' as a way to justify being 'right' about that truth.

It's a trap. It's not just that in some situations I am 'actually right' based on the facts of the matter, and that therefore I get lost in being 'right' about being right. It's not just about that form of blindness to and use of the ego situation to make myself look even 'righter'.

It goes way beyond that. Because the fact is, the ego has taken all of what could be considered 'truth', A Course in Miracles truth, even very high lofty metaphysical truth, and this ego in me has used it repeatedly to make myself ultra-right whenever anyone ELSE is not complying with this 'truth'.

When someone else is not matching up to this lofty truth, I start to spout off this truth to them. I start to correct them. I even judge them as 'doing it wrong' or 'failing to be truthful' or whatever. The more 'insanely wrong' they seem to be the more I react with 'noooo, that's not the truth'. Doesn't help.

I've been pushing and enforcing 'truth' onto people for a long time. Correcting people. Analyzing situations to prove why someone is not being truthful. Using what seems to be 'honesty' and 'clarity' as tools to point out where other people are being less than honest, so that my ego mind has an opportunity to jump all over them.

Yes we're talking 'holier than thou' with a capital H.

This is the ultimate ego trap, using the highest-possible 'truth' to make others wrong, by pointing out how they are 'incorrect' or using their mistakes to point out how they aren't 'doing it right'. And all along, it's me not 'doing it right', because I'm stuck in the ego.

Being stuck in my ego mind and relying on its accumulated concepts, causes me to attack others with this vantage point, seeing them as stuck in a place of listening to the ego too much, when in fact its me listening to the ego.

Hmmmmm.

And all of this is a substitute for trusting God.

"Fear is trusting in your own strength"

"What COULD you choose between, but life or death, waking or sleeping, war or peace, your dream or your reality?"

There is only one choice in the world. Not a million choices. Not a million scenarios. Not a million conditions to judge and evaluate and decide upon. There is only one choice. You are always choosing either life or death.

Life here means eternal life, immortality, invulnerability, perfect health, wholeness, happiness, love, peace, joy, etc. The attributes of God and His Kingdom of creation.

Death here means the cessation of eternity, an attack on God, a rejection of health and wholeness, a desire for destruction and death, and an attempt to make God non-existent.

The physical world itself is set up such that everything in it tends to lead towards death. It is not in support of God because it was made as an attack on him. This is why everything in it seems to make death inevitable.

But just because the world says all things must die, it doesn't mean you don't have a choice. It doesn't mean you have to go along with it and just give up and drop dead. Nor does it mean you have to find a way to try to accept death and cozy up to it.

What many in the world do not know is that there IS an alternative to death and dying and destruction and degradation. To embrace it requires a recognition of two things.

1) The world is ONLY offering death and there is no hope of life. 2) There is ANOTHER world which is offering only life and no hope of death.

Only if you can recognize that there IS AN ALTERNATIVE to the world's ways, do you even have a real choice. If there is no better world, no God, no eternal life, no miracles, no healing, no resurrection, then you really DON'T have a choice. You are set on a rollercoaster ride to hell and death and will not get off it until you're worm food.

We might think there are choices be made along the way, electing for different states of dying, different kinds of sicknesses, different unhappinesses, trying to trade-off one thing for another to come out on top. But the world has news for you - it is not ever going to let you come out on top in the long run.

So you have no real choice at all, because death is looming and you have no way to stop it. Or do you? Only IF there is another option do you actually have any real choice in life at all. Otherwise you're destined to die. And you cannot be at peace with such a fate because it is utterly insane.

Only if there is another world, another way, another option, and only if you have some kind of power of decision to choose it and make it be your experience, is there any REAL HOPE at all. There is REAL HOPE if you can in fact CHOOSE not to suffer, be sick, or die. And there is REAL HOPE if you have in your mind the POWER to actually make that choice, to choose away from death, and actually CAUSE life and REVERSE death.

Only if you can surmount death and overcome the world, can you be free from the descent into hell. Only if you can resurrect and raise the dead and reverse sickness and perform miracles, can you head in the direction of God who is life. Only if you can demonstrate harmlessness and invulnerability can you prove your commitment to immortality.

The world does not think immortality is possible. It is seen as a silly idea thought by crazy people. It is seen as having had almost zero examples and certainly does not appear to be commonplace. It seems like no-one gets out of here alive. And everyone has just decided to try and accept this fate and "live with it". To then adjust to it and try to "make the most" of the little lot of life we have, begging death for scraps of time and asking for little gifts of nothingness before we're extinguished.

Unless you are open to God and open to immortality and open to resurrection and miracles and healing, you are NOT open to life. You are committed to dying. And that is the only reason it will happen. You are CHOOSING it by not choosing away from it. And you are free to make this choice. If you do not choose God, you are choosing destruction. If you do not choose resurrection and healing, you are choosing to die.

This is your responsibility because you actually have a power in you to decide what you want. You do not HAVE to die or go through sickness or suffering. You CAN in fact elect not to have any of these things happen, and make it so. This is not a fantasy. Your mind is just as capable of causing life as it is of causing death. But to choose eternal life IS going to require you to fly in the face of the entire world, all its supporters, all its believers, and all of its pathways.

Only with help from beyond the world can you be liberated from the world. Only with the Holy Spirit can you find a solution, an answer, a way, which breaks all the laws of physics and violates all the seeming laws of reality. Only with his power can you recover and heal and resurrect even in the face of what the world would say is an impossible irreversible situation.

You have to choose towards God and towards life, away from death and way from destruction, if you want to live. If you want to escape from death and from sickness and hell, you have to choose life. This is really a no-brainer. If you are choosing life you will have life, if you are choosing death you will have death. You are free to choose.

"You who fear salvation are WILLING death. Life and death, light and darkness, knowledge and perception are irreconcilable."

"Either you give each other life or death; either you are each other's Savior or his judge, offering him sanctuary or condemnation."

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt. The ancient Calling of the Father to His Son, and of the Son unto his own, will yet be the last trumpet that the world will ever hear. Brother, there is no death. And this you learn when you but wish to show your brother that you had no hurt of him. He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned. But it is given you to SHOW him, by your healing, that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream."

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die."

"Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible."

"The emphasis this course has placed on that idea is due to its centrality in our attempts to change your mind about yourself. It is the reason you can heal. It is the cause of healing. It is why you cannot die. Its truth established you as one with God."

"Now do we live, for now we cannot die. The wish for death is answered, and the sight that looked upon it now has been replaced by vision which perceives that you are not what you pretend to be."

"Even in time you cannot live apart from Him, for sleep is not death. What He created can sleep, but it CANNOT die. Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF. Yet God's Son cannot will death for himself, because His Father is Life, and HIS SON IS LIKE HIM."

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do."

"And BEING loving, they are like the Father, and therefore cannot die."

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures came to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality."

How do you know that you have a body?

Do you see it with your body's eyes?

Do you hear it with your body's ears?

Do you taste it with the body's tongue, touch it with the body's flesh, and smell it with the body's nose?

Is this not a completely circular logic within a closed system?

You are using the very device that you are trying to detect, to detect that same device.

It cannot see outside of its own self. It cannot objectively report whether its own form exists or not.

Its own eyes show you a picture of a body, but the picture is seen with the body that the body is looking at. And so using the thing itself to detect itself, is completely invalid.

You would need proof outside of your own body, that your body exists. And you have none. A scientist could come along and tell you that, per their study, your body does in fact exist. But this would also be a lie. Because they used bodies to look at bodies. They uses eyes to look at eyes. It's entirely invalid within a closed loop.

The body therefore cannot be relied upon to tell you of its own existence. And therefore, there is no proof whatsoever that the body really exists.

You think you see your body in a mirror. But your body is using itself to look at itself. It is completely biased. It cannot tell you if it exists or not, it is designed ONLY to report a false positive that it "has been sensed". It's not capable of telling you of its own non-existence, and is totally one-sided.

The body does not really exist. All it can do is sense what it was designed to sense and NOT see reality.

"To sense is not to know." - ACIM

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

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

"At no time does the body really exist." - ACIM

"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." - ACIM

"Here is a world established that is sick, and this the world the body's eyes perceive. Here are the sounds it hears; the voices which its ears were made to hear. Yet sights and sounds the body can perceive are meaningless. It cannot see nor hear. It does not know what seeing IS; what listening is FOR. It is as little able to perceive as it can judge, or understand, or know. Its eyes are blind, its ears are deaf. It can NOT think, and so it cannot HAVE effects." - ACIM

"The body is clearly a device for separation and therefore does not exist." - ACIM

"The ultimate purpose of the body is to render itself unnecessary. Learning to do this is the only real reason for its creation." - ACIM

"Minds need not bodies to communicate." - ACIM

"To be without a body is to be in your natural state." - ACIM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything about most religions is fairly accurate in that it describes what's happening INSIDE THE DREAM. They describe what APPEARS to be true here.

It SEEMS that sin is real, it SEEMS that therefore God will judge and condemn us, it SEEMS that death can be justified, and it SEEMS that we can never be with God again.

The key point is, there is a chunk of metaphysical truth regarding what happened BEFORE the separation, before the dream, which frames the entire dream in a different light. And this chunk of truth, missing from religions, is extremely key in putting everything into its proper perspective.

Recognizing that Heaven is real, God is unconditional love, separation is impossible, and the innocent cannot sin, would have to tell you that the entire content of the dream and everything that goes along with it is not REAL. It is impossible.

But without that key fact, if you only look at what seems true within the dream, after the illusion of separation, it starts to seem quite sensible to conclude the exact opposite. You'll then say that sin is real, death is real, God has vengeance, you need to repent of real sins, etc.

The religion then becomes all about this fiction of having "actually sinned", and what you need to do to atone for it. And ultimately within that same idea, there MUST be also the idea that only death can atone for sin. And so the religion, while seeming to uphold moral values and lead towards love, also inadvertently supports death.

Descriptions of what seems real in a dream can only ever be opposite to the truth.

This is the one key area in which A Course in Miracles is different, because it explains what happened BEFORE separation or what conditions were like, such that the entire content of the dream is clearly RECOGNIZED as being false, unreal, untrue and impossible. It gives us the clarity to see that everything within the dream is an ILLUSION, not a reality.

This puts an entirely different spin on everything we perceive here. It totally reverses the illusion of the meaning of what seems to happen, or all the conclusions that have been drawn from appearances. The proper framing of everything that goes on in the dream world puts everything into its correct place and perspective, recognizing the real truth for what it is, and recognizing the illusion as an illusion. Failure to do this, or the deliberate "omission" of this key foundation at the core of truth, makes the entire content of the dream suddenly twist to a completely opposite and confused explanation of events.

Only a truth based on completely pure non-duality can explain and properly frame why and how everything within the dualistic world is false and unreal. Otherwise if you stop just short of awakening from the dream, or you stop just beneath the peak of the dream's heights, it will make the dream seem to be real and you will not wake up from it. This is why those religions ultimately keep people asleep. They are religions of the ego, based in the ego's thought system, worshipping the ego's God of death.

Death can't be true and separation can't be true and sin can't be true because God only creates eternal innocent life. If the absolute truth remains hidden, all true meaning is lost and insanity begins to seem sane.

If you make sin real to you, you enter into a state of NOT forgiving. While you maintain that the sin is real, you are not being forgiving. In order to be forgiving, you have to shift into the position of recognizing the sin is not real.

It seems that if you make the sin real first, you cannot overlook it. But the fact is, you probably have ALREADY made the sins real to you. This is part of your unconsciousness. You already MADE the world real to you by believing in it. You are already IN a state of believing it is real. If it were not possible to forgive, considering that you are already IN this state, forgiveness would be impossible. Forgiveness is NOT possible SO LONG AS you maintain that the sin is real.

Even IF you make sins real, which causes you to not BE overlooking them, this doesn't mean you CAN'T choose again. It doesn't mean you are stuck in not being able to forgive. It just means you are not forgiving it right now. So long as you maintain the belief that it is real, you are in an unforgiving attitude, in judgement.

But this doesn't mean you cannot adopt a forgiving attitude and TAKE BACK your belief that it is real. If this were not true, you would be stuck forever in the belief that sin is real. You HAVE made many sins real to you, many illusions that you think are reality, and now you are in a position where you DO need to change your mind about them.

You ARE in a state of "false perception". You're already starting from the bottom up to try to return to true perception. It HAS to be possible to transition from making sins real, to not making them real. Forgiveness isn't impossible, it's just that you have to let go of the "making real" in order to RETURN to a forgiving state.

You cannot forgive "real sins" WHILE believing or maintaining that they are real to you. But forgiveness would show you they are NOT real. And you CAN change your mind and believe they are not real. You can take back your beliefs. You can change your perceptions. You can shift into a more truthful way of perceiving, in which the sin is RECOGNIZED as being just an illusion of a sin, not a REAL sin, and in fact it is nothing at all. "Illusions recognized must disappear."

Ideally, you would not have entered into the belief that sin is real in the first place. If you were squarely in the Holy Spirit all the time you would not do this. True forgiveness is "fore-giving". It entails giving love AHEAD of time, in order NOT TO MAKE ERRORS (sins), so that there IS nothing to fix. It is only when you enter into judgement that you become UNFORGIVING, this unforgiveness MAKES errors, and then makes it seem that illusions are real to you.

"He would not forgive MUST judge, to justify his failure to forgive."

THEN you will believe "there is really something I have to DO TO this to make it go away." It's a perspective where you believe the problem really does exist and is happening, is threatening, and now you need a way to handle it, fix it, correct it. It means now you think you have MADE an error. And having believed that you have made an error you will now believe you MUST UNDO or "do something about" this "real" error BEFORE you can be forgiven.

But then you will seek to fight with, tackle, adjust, condemn, attack the error, that you think is real, trying to make it go away. Which means you are still judging, because it is YOUR UNFORGIVENESS that is KEEPING the error happening. And it won't go away because you are still assuming IT IS REAL to begin with. You see the error as if its outside of you, but it's YOUR UNFORGIVENESS looking back at you. This is a failure to overlook it. It means you see a "real threat" that is "doing something against my will" (sinning). Why? Because YOU are attacking.

And this real sin will remain IN PLACE, so long as you believe it REALLY IS there. It's seeming presence as "real sin" also implies, you are sinful, suggesting you are not forgiven. To even see it at all is an accusation against you. ("Sick bodies are accusers.") To try to asuage your guilt you will try to "heal it", but it won't go away so long as you believe it is even really there to begin with.

Having MADE sin real, you now need a remedy. The remedy is therefore obviously to STOP making it real. And you can do this. It requires that you withdraw all belief in its reality, because what you believe in is real to you. By cancelling all belief in its reality, in your mind, you are unlearning the lie you taught yourself, and returning to the state of forgiveness.

Once you no longer believe in the sin, which really was an attempt to "make it happen", your mind can remain in that primary state of FORE-giving, in which you do not MAKE errors. You overlook what is not there, because you have not PUT IT THERE. You do not see errors or ego or think them real, because you are not MAKING these errors (failures to forgive).

To be forgiving is to recognize, THERE IS NO SIN. What seems to be there, is not there. It is nothing. It is ALREADY GONE. And all that remains is innocence. To be forgiving therefore means to NOT SEE sin, to not MAKE errors real, to not BELIEVE IN sickness, and to not JUDGE. Recognition that there is no sin, and accepting of this universal fact, is acceptance of the Atonement, and the Atonement and Forgiveness are the same thing.

"Forgiveness recognizes what you think your bother DID, .... HAS NOT OCCURRED."

"The ego’s plan is to have you see error clearly first and then overlook it. Yet how can you overlook what you have made real? By seeing it clearly, you have made it real and cannot overlook it."

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in this view are all your sins forgiven. "

"Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning and thus keeping it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your minds at all, or you will also believe that you must undo what you have made in order to be forgiven."

When someone says or does something that you judge and perceive as wrong, you become upset.

In your upset, you claim that you are upset because they said or did something that was wrong - i.e. something incorrect, something that is a mistake, or something untrue.

But, even though YOU are claiming to believe that this thing is untrue and wrong, you are still upset.

Why are you upset, if what the person said is not true? Why do you become upset when someone says something untrue about you, something that seems to attack you, to slander you, to accuse you, to portray you as unfairly guilty, or to label you with something derogatory? Why are you upset if its not true?

The truth is, even though you are to some degree aware that it is not true, you're upset because some part of YOU does believe it is true.

If you didn't believe it, you'd just laugh. You wouldn't take it seriously. You'd KNOW with so much certainty that it's just ridiculous and completely false, that it wouldn't even seem to touch you or engage with you at all.... like it's got nothing to do with you.

But you DO think it's got something to do with you. On some level, deeper down, there is some part of you that actually thinks there is truth to what someone has said about you, even if you are simultaneously horrified and upset and are claiming that it's completely false in a very intense way.

You could be experience a very intense sense of it being unfair, of the slander being vicious, of the person being totally nuts in their accusations, and all of this other framing of the situation that makes it looks like they are wrong and you are not... and yet, you're still upset, despite your claims about how mistaken they are.

You don't really, really, really believe that they are mistaken, you actually believe that they are REAL, and what is real is true. So if you are 'really' being attacked, then you are being attacked with truth, and you believe in this truth so you will be upset. What you receive as real will strike you as the truth and you will accept it. i.e., you took it seriously and didn't overlook/forgive it.

And so this boils down to this simple fact: you are upset because YOU believe these things about YOURSELF.

So then it's really not so much anything to do with what anyone else has said or done. It's not really that they have accused you of something so incredibly - potentially - hurtful. It's not that there is even some kind of inherent attack-power embedded into their slander, or some kind of force in their words that can actually come into you and MAKE true whatever they are judging you for.

Instead, it all boils down to your own beliefs about yourself - your own sense of identity. Has this *attempted* attack got anything to do with what I AM? If it hasn't, because I'm clear about what I am, and I am immortal spirit, and I am eternally innocent, then in that clear identity I have absolutely no grounds for even thinking that it's got something to do with me.

But if I do not believe in my own innocence, if I myself am actually in some way AGAINST MYSELF, or have undermined myself, or think of myself as unworthy or not good enough, or think that I don't deserve love, or I don't like something about myself, you can bet that when someone comes along to appear to provoke you, you WILL think that it has something to do with who and what you are - you will think that they're talking about YOU and you will 'take it' as an attack on that identity.

So you can see this in people who are very against themselves, who have a lot of self-hate or self-loathing or low worth etc. When someone seems to attack them or judge them, they become very upset very quickly. This is because they themselves very strongly believe in and AGREE WITH what the other person is claiming is true of them.

The person is so upset by the stimuli because they themselves are very upset about their own self, they are upset about how they see themselves, they are already walking around with a huge baggage of pain and suffering within themselves that they feel very badly about, and this is now tapped into by the other person.

The pimple then seems to pop and the cover of denial laid over the top of this mountain of self-attack is taken off, and out pours the gush of a "reaction"... which typically is then blamed on and projected on and targeted at the other person, as though they created all of it.

But all the other person is doing.... is nothing. Absolutely nothing. They're just showing up and mirroring back to you a reflection of what YOU think of yourself. People will come into your life "as if by magic", attracted to the vibrational frequency or mental focus of content in your mind, that reflect to you what you currently think of yourself. And you will hate them for doing this, because you hate yourself. And each time they come along and seemingly do TO you what YOU are already doing to YOURSELF, you don't like it. And the only reason you don't like it is because they are doing to you exactly what you're already doing to you.

And so even if you are upset, deep down you in some way must agree with that person, even if they seem to be a horrible enemy, otherwise, why would you be upset? Why would you be having a reaction, if their judgements were completely false and you knew it? Why would you lose your peace and blow up in a rage or whatever if you're calmly certain that that person is very mistaken about who you are, and you are very clear about who you are? And I don't mean, clear about your ego self, but clear about your REAL self as God created you - innocent immortal spirit. Your real identity.

So every time you get upset, and it seems like someone caused it, it just means that YOU HIRED SOMEONE to come along (attracted them mentally) to come and point out, within you, what it is that you believe is true, about yourself and God, so that you will become aware of what is in you, and get an opportunity to question it. Is it really true? Do I really want to hold onto this belief? And if all you're doing at that point is falling for the appearance that someone else is causing everything you're feeling, then you've totally missed the point. And you're being dishonest.

It's more honest to step back and look at why you are upset. You are upset because you believe that your worst enemy's attack is actually true of you and deserved by you. You actually want it. You chose it. You asked for it. Yes you did. And that means that they're not actually doing it 'to' you, as much as YOU have done it to you. And since you're the one who actually believes this bullshit about yourself, YOU are the one who needs some correction. The other person is only there to "trigger" you, to draw your attention to areas of yourself where you thought you were pure but are not, or areas where you believe bullshit that needs to be purified. They're helping you. They're actually on your side, in the bigger scheme of things. And you hired them to do so. All those enemies of yours? They're your servants.

So at some point you have to get past this fireworks of blame and denial and projection, and take some responsibility. It's you that believes you suck and are not worth shit. When someone does something to highlight this, you should be thanking them. AND then you should work on undoing YOUR belief that this is true. If you are upset, you DO believe it is true, and you DO agree with them, no matter what you are experiencing and no matter how much you think this is not the case. If you are upset, you are believing something untrue about yourself, and the only way to be not upset is to undo that.

So yes, it's not anyone else's fault that you're upset. Look at yourself. What have you decided about yourself? What is it you believe about yourself?

Because if what the other person has 'done to you' is not the truth, then why are you still upset? It MUST be because you actually don't FULLY believe that it's not true. Some part of you agrees and some part of you has attacked your own self.

And what this will lead to is the simple insight, that ALL of your upset is really the result of your own belief about yourself, and NONE of it is really because of other people. And therefore, if you can change your own attitude about yourself, and learn to love yourself, you will be learning your LESSONS and will wake up to the truth about who you are. And then you will have peace, and you will stop putting 'helpers' in your life to provoke you "painfully". Instead your way will be made straight and Holy Spirit will go before you to smooth the way, such that nothing is about your little ego self anymore and you are fully convinced of your own innocence.

Not until you are fully convinced of your own innocence will you cease to be upset when other people accuse you of guilt. But when you get there, you will experience invulnerability, confidence, empowerment, peace and immortality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Believing that evil is real, is a mistaken perception. It's actually a failure to recognize what the so-called evil is. Only in a total lack of recognition, does it appear to be "real evil" at all. Without forgiveness, it seems to take on a kind of authenticity, as if it's actually a viable opposite to God, or some kind of real threat to what is good. But if you see evil this way, it is because you yourself are unforgiving, which means you are the evil one.

It's interesting to realize that evil is nothing but a way of describing someone who is not in their right mind. No-one in their right mind would ever attack or be harmful or anything other than loving. Evil really is just a term for someone who has lost their right mindedness and is now "not in their right mind", ie is insane. This insanity is simply a state of being confused and mistaken about what is real and true. It's a state of false belief, false perception, false values, and made-up fantasies about reality.

So someone who is in that state isn't really evil. It's not like their minds are in a state of wholeness and health and balance but just happen to believe something negative. To hold the beliefs that they do, their minds cannot be whole, they have lost sight of reason, they are in the darkness, are experiencing self conflicting ideas, must be living in fear, and do not know what is real any more.

Such an "evil" person may indeed seem to "do evil deeds", ie to sin in the world, and indeed they may well be vicious and attacking and harmful to themselves and others. But this isn't because they are "really evil". It's only because they are mistaken, confused, lost, in denial, are blocking the love they are, are unaware God loves them, and are trying to hide in the darkness. They are not really evil at all, they are just opposed to God's reality, experiencing what must be temporary insanity.

No one in their right mind would ever choose to do what an evil person would think is reasonable, justified, valid, worthwhile, functional, truthful, and a form of salvation. Such insane people simply have lost sight of what is true and real and now believe that all kinds of illusory made-up things are more true and real. They are therefore simply making an error, and are in a state of being very mistaken.

We can't then really say that such people are evil. When viewed through the same evil distorted perception they will appear to be truly evil, but this is also an unforgiving perspective, not an enlightened one. When you look at the big picture and what obviously must be true of such people, it becomes clearer that they are not really sinners, and there is no real sin. This isn't too much of a stretch because it's simply a fact.

In truth, sin is not real and evil does not exist. So whatever these people are being or doing isn't real sin and they are not really evil. If we can't recognize that, WE must have some kind of illness of our own that is producing false perceptions and making sin and evil real to us. And now we are scapegoating the "evil ones" to try to get rid of our own sinful beliefs about ourselves. Now we're essentially just as nuts as they are, and have become hypocritical in our claim that they are the evil ones and not us.

Anyone who blames the evil ones is just as insane, and looking to take advantage of what they see as a "really evil person", to justify why it's okay to find fault in them. It seems to be "true" that the evil ones are the evil ones, and not me. And now I've gotten away with murder by pinning the blame for my own sinful outlook onto someone else, just because they appear to me to be the evil one. This reveals a lack of sanity on my own part. I'm hardly justified in pointing a finger when there's a log in my own eye. And why am I casting stones when my own mind supports sin being real?

What we have to learn is that there are no sinners and there are no evil persons. Not in God's reality. His Kingdom is purely good and whole and innocent and there is no evil anywhere. And here in the world, these people are not evil sinners either. They are ONLY mistaken people, in error, whose minds are temporarily insane, and who do not know what they are doing. This is why they are forgivable. You can hardly hold anything against them if truly they are so confused that they do not really know what they are actually doing. And being not in their right minds they certainly are out of touch with reality.

So these evil persons are simply insane persons who have lost their way, and who truly must be afraid and calling for love, and who need healing and forgiveness, not more condemnation. They do not need us to make their sins real. They do not need us to compound and imprison them by holding their own mistaken-ness against them. If we do that, we're just as nuts and unforgiving as they are. We are in false perception the instant that we condemn people for what they are not really doing.

"Forgiveness recognizes that what you think your brother did has not occurred."

Forgiveness does not pardon sins or make them real. It does not mistake what we call evil people for "real evil". It does not look at a "sinner" and blame them for actually sinning. It recognizes what they are doing is not sin or evil. What they are doing is merely hurting themselves through mistaken choices and confusion.

Those who seem evil merely have lost touch with what is really true and think that other things are true which are not. And so they choose the darkness by mistake, believing it is the light. Their navigation system is reporting false positives and steering them towards hell and death and sin under the belief that they are moving towards truth and life and heaven. They are deceived and are deceiving. They are in denial. They believe in something that is not what it is, and so worship false Gods and lies. This doesn't make them evil, it just makes them mistaken.

It is our job to recognize that every so-called evil person is not evil. And that every so-called sinner is not a sinner. Because that is actually the TRUTH. And if no-one is ACTUALLY evil, and no-one has ever REALLY sinned, and if these people are just in need of some correction and healing, then we can open up to being more compassionate towards them.

Just as Jesus would, we now can recognize that even the most "evil" people deserve love and forgiveness. He would ask us to love our "enemies". He would stand up for the well-being and innocence of all people even if the world would judge them as sinners. He would defend even a murderer against those who would accuse the murderer of being disgusting and despicable. Simply because he knows this is not the truth of the person, and they have not really done what they seem to be doing. Would you beat down someone who is mentally ill and who does not know any better?

Only blind people who cannot see would accuse blind people of making accurate choices based on vision. And if every case of so-called "evil" falls within the umbrella of "those who are insane", then there is no-one on the planet who is truly evil. And we must then learn that to accuse anyone of evil is really part of our own evil. In our harmlessness we would not condemn or point a finger or scapegoat or project blame or judge or try to justify attack or enact revenge. Those are all signs of someone who is, themselves, full of shit and in need of correction.

God loves all His children. Everyone is innocent. No-one is evil. There are no sinners. But there are a great many insane people who need psychological healing and help because of their confusion. And every one of them deserves to be loved.

If you can no longer describe people as "really evil", this not only lifts away all sense of threat and danger from such people, it also makes you harmless and sane and puts you back into your right mind. No-one in their right mind would believe that anyone is an evil sinner, because sin and evil and death do not really exist. To accuse is to be accused, and accusation is never truth.

Recognizing no one is really evil is all part of remembering the truth, that we are all completely innocent, there are no enemies, there is no "real evil" plotting to destroy you, evil is just a call for love, and it is your function to forgive them for what they are not really doing. Those who seem evil are innocent children of God. And every single one of them is welcomed Home by God with open arms and unconditional love. Love is justified because they are just experiencing a bad dream. And nothing in dreams is true.

Jesus loves "the devil".

There is a reason why the Holy Spirit is invisible to the body's eyes. There is a reason why Heaven is invisible to the body's eyes. There is a reason why Christ is invisible to the body's eyes. The body's eyes CANNOT SEE REALITY and they never will. That which is invisible "to the Earth" is real. What has "become" visible - this planet, is FAKE VISIBILITY. It is a block to sight, crammed in front of your face so that you will be distracted by illusions and NOT SEE. The time will come when all things VISIBLE will end. That includes this planet. Christ Vision is how you see the invisible, which MUST ENTAIL no longer seeing that which you THOUGHT was visible, which is in fact non-existent.

"When you made what is NOT true visible, what is true became invisible. But it cannot be invisible in ITSELF, for the Holy Spirit sees it with perfect clarity."

"What witness to the wholeness of God's Son is seen within a world of separate bodies, however much he witnesses to truth? He is INVISIBLE in such a world. Nor can his song of union and of joy be heard at all. Yet is it given him to make the world recede before his song, and sight of him REPLACE the body's eyes."

"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. But still and white and lovely will it shine through all eternity. There was no time it was not there; no instant when its light grew dimmer or less perfect ever was. Who knows the Father knows this light, for He is the eternal sky which holds it safe, forever lifted up and anchored sure. Its perfect purity does not depend on whether it is seen on earth or not. 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. "

"How can man "come close" to others through the parts of him which are really invisible? The word "invisible" means "cannot be seen or perceived."

"By making him invisible, the world of retribution rose in the black cloud of guilt which you accepted, and you hold it dear."

"Judge not what is invisible to you, or you will NEVER see it. But wait in patience for its coming. "

"What love would look upon is meaningless to fear, and quite invisible."

"For, in the NEW perception, the mind CORRECTS it when it SEEMS to be seen, and it becomes invisible."

"These might be called the Teachers of teachers because, although they are no longer visible, their image can yet be called upon."

"For the little spark that holds the Great Rays within it, is ALSO visible, and this spark cannot be limited long to littleness."

"But the time will come when all things visible will have an end. The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen"

"Here is what is really here made visible, while all the shadows which appeared to hide it sink to obscurity."

"Nor will what you saw before be even faintly visible to you. Today we are trying to use the new kind of projection."

Can you accept the atonement?

For the ego, atonement means that you really did something wrong, and now you have to pay for it. This is the idea that you must make up for the losses you caused, because of your guilt. It calls for you to make a sacrifice, to have some portion of yourself or what you value taken from you, to make up for what you stole when you sinned. It suggests that if you "do your time" and suffer enough, MAYBE... just maybe, there might be a forgiveness or a pardon.

MAYBE those with authority and justification and righteousness to judge you guilty might decide to pardon you and let you off the hook. Except that, these judgemental accusers are never really satisfied, and there is no amount of atoning you can do to make up for your sin. Once a criminal, always a criminal. And all crimes are considered punishable by death. Even little ones.

If you believe that this is the truth of what atonement means, you will not want to accept the atonement, or understand it.

Similarly, it is believed by many that when Jesus allegedly died on the cross, he was suffering and in pain. And that this tremendous suffering, having to undergo death, somehow "carried the weight" or "paid for" or "took on the sacrifice for" or "suffered for" everyone else's sins, so that everyone else could be considered forgiven thereafter. It's even said that God, in all his loving ways, condemned His beloved son to death, in order for this atoning to occur, so that everyone else could be let off the hook.

Nevertheless, it's quite obvious that in spite of this alleged atoning and suffering, pretty much everyone is still riddled with sin and guilt and fear and murder and death. So it didn't exact "work", according to the evidence. And the fact that this explanation is evidently false is covered up with further theological justifications which are all unfounded band-aids trying to patch up a broken fundamental misunderstanding of what atonement is.

Jesus's atonement was misunderstood. He did not suffer on the cross. He was a profound miracle worker, had no guilt in his mind (the guiltless mind cannot suffer), did not believe in death at all, had already raised the dead, had power and authority over all illusions, and was an embodiment of the power of Christ. Nothing could happen to him against his will. He was not a body at all, and anything seeming to happen to his body did not happen to him. He was truly beyond it, beyond all suffering and death and sin.

He was not a victim in any way at all. It is claimed that Jesus was "sacrificed" for us. How can sacrifice be in any way associated with Jesus, who does not believe in the sacrificial thought system of the ego, and its belief in egoic atonement through loss? Jesus was not asked to sacrifice and he was NOT a sacrifice. He was a demonstration that sacrifice was an illusion and was not POSSIBLE, because sin was not real, and He had not done anything wrong. And he knew that we hadn't either, so sacrifice was never even called for.

His act of being on the cross showed that in spite of the fact that he was supposed to die, he could not die, and could not feel pain, to DEMONSTRATE the miraculous truth that you are not a body and you are invulnerable. And upon returning in a brand new manifested body later, He further demonstrated and proved that bodies are not who you are, that you cannot die, and that you are immortal spirit.

Jesus knew this because He knew what the atonement really was. He knew that it meant that, in truth, nothing real can be threatened because the entire world, bodies, and death, are all illusions. He did not believe in them. AND he did not believe in SIN. Not one bit. He had no sin in him because He did not believe in it. In that view, HE knew that everyone else's "alleged" sinfulness was forgiven, because nobody had really sinned at all. And all of the ways that people believed they were sinful, HE knew that those were not "real sins" in the eyes of God, and that all sin WAS undone because it had not really occurred. That's the true meaning of the atonement and most people did not get the memo.

That also demonstrates why, in spite of the fact that Jesus knew and perceived and experienced the atonement principle, that nobody was sinful or guilty at all, claiming it for himself and thus for everyone, this didn't prevent everyone else from STILL BELIEVING IN SIN. In fact, most onlookers believed in sin so much that they thought that his death was real and did not "get" the teaching of his demonstration that the body is not real at all. And it was precisely the people who DID believe in sin and death and bodies, who MADE UP the interpretation of Jesus being "really sacrificed" and "really suffering for us", which has been an ongoing ego myth for 2000+ years. The ego rejoices that so many people believe that Christ could suffer and be sacrificed. It's satanic!

And so people have carried on believing in real sin and in BEING in sin, because they still believe that sin is real. That's why Jesus's atonement did not instantaneously lift the belief in sin from everyone's mind, which it should have done if what is claimed about the crucifixion were true, ie that Jesus took the hit for us. If he did that, why are we still believing in sin and death? Jesus's awakening should've removed all sin from everyone. In HIS eyes, this was done, but in OUR eyes, it was not done, because WE still freely chose to continue believing in real sin and real death. And plenty of people have demonstrated this by DYING ever since.

Jesus IS the atonement in that Jesus has united with the Holy Spirit in a mind of pure innocence, in which God recognizes the truth that we HAVE NOT SINNED, and that sin is not reality. Jesus knows this is true of us, but WE have not woke up to this reality yet. And so we DO continue to still do "real sins" because we still believe in real sin. That keeps us bound to sin and death. We CAN be liberated from this if WE will accept the atonement, but WE do have to willingly do that ourselves. Jesus can't force it on us. He knows we have not sinned but we don't believe him. Not really.

So all these false definitions of atonement have to be thrown out. The atonement means that literally nothing "real" has actually happened, and that all the things that you thought were "real" were just imagined, just a dream, a vast illusion, masquerading as a real world with real bodies doing real bad stuff. Its UNREALITY is the proof of innocence. You cannot have become less than innocent if you did not achieve a REAL sin. Make-believe sins do not count! You cannot REALLY sin and you have not really sinned. But while you believe that you HAVE, that's a problem. That's keeping you from the truth and keeping you from ACCEPTING Jesus's demonstration of the atonement.

The world is not reality. It is an illusion. And you have not really done anything wrong here, because everything you've ever supposedly "done" has ONLY ever been a portion of a made-up dream that isn't really real. It sure as heck can seem real, but ONLY because you believe that dreams are reality. Look around you at all the people who have set up camp in this dream, believing it's the real world, believing it is real life, prepared to hang out here and just die and not wake up to the truth. There is more than this.

Undo all of your beliefs that the physical world is reality. It is not. Jesus proved it, IF you will believe it from His vantage point. He knew that there was no real sin, and saw that everyone's sins ALREADY were forgiven before He even came to that awareness. God does not condemn. God does not judge. God knows your innocence is still pure and holy. And God knows that you cannot POSSIBLY "actually" separate from Him other than in a dream-like illusion of separation. Your innocence is guaranteed. It is ALREADY the truth, even while you believe that you have really sinned.

The truth of the atonement ALREADY WAS TRUE before Jesus became the first to claim it for Himself and for all. It was ALREADY TRUE that God had not condemned us and had not believed that we really sinned. It was ALREADY TRUE that God's unconditional love had not wavered for a second, and that He KNEW that it was IMPOSSIBLE to actually separate from him. Real Sin is impossible. Jesus came to ACCEPT that the atonement is true, He did not CREATE the atonement. The truth of the atonement is God's truth, and has always been true and always will be.

It's a done deal. Nothing happened. Wake up.

"You HAVE been wrong about the world, because you have misjudged YOURSELF. From such a twisted reference point, what COULD you see? All vision starts WITH THE PERCEIVER, who judges what is true and what is false. And what he judges false, HE DOES NOT SEE. You who would JUDGE reality CANNOT see it, for whenever judgment enters, reality has slipped away. 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. He lives within you in the quiet present, and waits for you to leave the past behind, and enter into the world He holds out to you in love."

Here, Jesus appears to simply say that whatever you believe is true, you will see. The kind of world you will see depends entirely on your mind's decision as to what to accept. Whatever you accept into your mind becomes your reality. Therefore inversely, whatever you reject as false does not enter your mind, and therefore you do not see it.

This means that if you believe the world of bodies is true and real, you will see it, and as a result of seeing it, you will make the real world invisible to you. Because the real world is blotted out by this choice to perceive an illusory world and not a real world.

Similarly, if you desire to see only love, you will see only the real world. As a result, that which is now recognized as false, will not be seen. This is reflected in the teaching "you cannot see both worlds." And "The world you see must be denied, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."

Jesus also confirmed this basic law here: "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."

So very simply, whatever you want to see, you will see. In all cases. Whether it be "I want to see a sinful world" or "I want to see reality" or "I want to see love" or "I want to see death as though it's really happening." Whatever you value, desire and believe in, you want to see, and so you see it.

"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."

The spectrum of choice here is in terms of whether you want to see death, darkness, evil nightmares, sin and guilt and murder etc, or whether you want to see harmlessness, peace, joy, love, safety etc. Consider this a vertical spectrum, ranging from darkness to light.

At the bottom in the greatest darkness, there is the most belief that illusions are real. Here there is significant denial, blockage, unwillingness, condemnation, belief in sin, horizontal causality, suffering and death. As resurrection towards the light is made, all of this diminishes and is replaced with calm, happiness, peace, love, gentleness, loveliness, forgiveness etc.

The darkened state of perception, Jesus is calling false perception. The lightened state of perception, Jesus is calling true perception. ie, in false perception, that which is FALSE is SEEN because you WANT TO. In true perception the TRUTH is seen, because you want to. This is a spectrum between illusions and reality, between death and life, between fear and love, between chaos and peace.

So this depends on what is happening in your mind and what you believe is true. Your mind decides this FIRST, and THEN sees what it has believed in. Projection of the belief makes perception. "Perception is a result, not a cause". Jesus also likens this process to HALLUCINATION, in which you basically make up IMAGES based on what you want to see, regardless of whether it's really there.

Someone in great darkness is hallucinating strongly (insanity). They SEE a world that strikes them as horrifying and upsetting. As the focus shifts to love, the hallucinations diminish and "what is really there" is revealed. ie the real world, or rather, the illusory world "as it is" with nothing added to judge it. The world is now "forgiven" and appears neutral and lovely. You wanted to see love in it, so you do. "Love looks upon itself."

Jesus also appears to be quite clear, that by choosing to "shift perception" towards Christ Vision, which enables you to become aware of and see "the real world", doing so causes you NOT TO SEE the dark icky world. In fact, he even goes so far as to say that in the purest true perception, the world of bodies is completely forgotten, you don't even see bodies AT ALL. And the real world HAS no bodies.

"And if you see the body, you have chosen judgment, and not vision."

"You have the vision that enables you to see the body not."

"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."

He is clear that you cannot see both worlds. You cannot see BOTH the false perception world and the true perception world as the same time. At least, not seeing either of them fully. To fully have vision is to NOT see the world of bodies. "Forgiveness does not look upon bodies." And this is simply because the Spiritual Eye does not USE the body's eyesight to see. And ALL it sees is the face of Christ. It does not see a world based on photons of light because it does not use the body's light sensors (eyes).

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

This is key because it means, either you will look at the false world, or the true world. Either the illusory world, or the real world. Either the world that has no buildings or streets or stores or the sun, OR the world that has buildings and streets and stores and the sun.

"For vision, like relationships, has no order. You either SEE, or not."

This means, either you are using the body's physical sight, OR you are using the Spiritual eye. The Holy Spirit correlates to the spiritual eye and He only looks upon Christ.

I have come to think of these as like two "devices." Both of them are also illusions, and therefore technically ego. But the illusion of forgiveness can point towards the truth. You can either use the body's physical sight sensors to pick up images of a physical world, or you can use the Spiritual Eye, which CAN ONLY SEE SPIRIT. The spiritual eye CANNOT BE USED to look upon the world of form! It can only look at REALITY. And the world of form is an ILLUSION.

For you, as mind, you can decide how much of the Spiritual Eye you will behold. ie how much you believe it's messages are true. But here is the catch. To the extent that you ATUNE to the spiritual eye, you inversely TUNE OUT of the physical eye. Which means, you're going to either emphasize or deemphasize what the body's eyes are showing you, based on how much you have forgiven.

"Corrective learning always begins with awakening the spiritual eye, and turning away from belief in physical sight."

"This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight."

The body's sight is one source of "input" to your mind's awareness. The spiritual eye is the second source of input to your mind's awareness. Dialing the knob tunes between the two. Your mind thus ALIGNS WITH, ie agrees with as real, either the physical world or the spiritual world. And agreement means, you believe it is true and real. By tuning into one, you tune OUT of the other. You cannot see BOTH!

In order to SEE the physical world, therefore, your mind has to CLOSE the spiritual eye. Guilt is required in order to tune into it. A belief in sin is required. A belief in death is required. The physical is also tuned into through body identification.

By believing in narrowness, blockage, sin, guilt, fear, death, attack, isolation, separation, selfishness, upset, unhappiness, sickness etc... your mind confines itself to the body. The more it binds itself to the body the LESS it sees with the spiritual eye. The more it believes these things are TRUE, the more it will SEE them in the world it sees.

The body is like a fixed frequency of hell. The spiritual eye is like a fixed frequency of heaven. The more you tune into one the more real it becomes to you. And this then determines what of the TWO worlds you will see.

The world you made, is the illusory world, which includes all dreams and includes the real world and the physical. Within this, christ vision shows you this world as having NO FORMS, while the BODY shows you this world as having solid forms.

There are no objects or bodies in the real world. If you see bodies your mind is in judgement and is starting to sin, causing you to see bodies made of sin. "Only if there were a body is sin possible." "It is impossible to see a sinless body." Christ Vision does not see the body AT ALL, because innocence ERASES the separation idea and bodies are incompatible with innocence.

Essentially, the belief in ego causes your spiritual eye to close, your mind to shut down, your perception to ATUNE to the body's frequency of permanent FALSE perception, which shows ONLY a false world, and then you will have visions of hell. And the world will now seem upsetting and threatening and dark and dangerous, and not deserving of forgiveness.

THe whole purpose of the body was to accomplish this, such that if the mind were to believe that it is ONLY a body, a perception of hell would ensue. "Only the body makes the world seem real" tells you that if you tune INTO the body level of sight, physical sight, and believe it, the world WILL seem to be the ONLY reality. It will take on greater solidity, firmness, tangibility and intensity.

"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."

"Sin is a block" ... "The body's eyes behold it as solid granite"

"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."

"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."

If you tune into body identification, a belief in sin, fear, or any kind of denial of reality, any form of judgement or egoic attempt to defend against God, you will narrow your focus and isolate to a body, causing you to see more exclusively through its eyes, and project onto its images heavy judgements of sin and guilt, which will turn the body's images into visions of hell and real suffering.

If you tune out of the body, into spirit, and into the spiritual eye, you tune out of body perceptions. Out of false perception. Physical sight becomes de-emphasized, and it is given less credit. Thus what was seen as the physical material world through the body's eyes begins to be seen as a transparent, thin veil, rather than a heavy solid surface of matter.

"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."

"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."

"For there is light where darkness was before, and now the veil is lifted from his sight."

"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."

As you tune into the radio station of the real world, you tune out of the radio station of the physical world of forms. Christ enters your awareness and the world of bodies leaves. "The world of bodies is the world of sin". As your belief in sin leaves, so does the world of sin.

In the transition, temporarily there is a parallel of utilizing the body's sight in part, and the spiritual eye in part. These are occurring simultaneously. This causes the physical world to still be seen, up to a point (before christ's face is unveiled) but all the judgement and fear and guilt are lifted away from this image of a fake world. It becomes but a thin veil, a forgiven world, an image of loveliness and a reflection of heaven. But simultaneously it is becoming thin, light, transparent, and is fading from sight, because you DON'T WANT IT. Upon reaching the face of Christ, the physical world is forgotten ENTIRELY and completely VANISHES from view. It literally becomes INVISIBLE to you. "Illusions recognized (as false) must disappear."

Becoming able to see the real world is the final step just prior to going to heaven. But the fact is that to be ABLE to see it, you have to NOT USE the body's eyes AT ALL. And in fact the Spiritual eye does not depend on OR use the body's eyes, and can even function without a body. The Spiritual eye is direct mind-to-mind seeing, and BYPASSES anything physical entirely, overlooking it. When the shift to true perception is complete, Christ is ALL that is seen, AND NOT THE WORLD OF BODIES. It is NOT POSSIBLE TO SEE BOTH! "You cannot see both worlds."

Here, then, as the world is GONE from view, you are ready to return to heaven, and in this state, the physical world has literally faded out of view. It is no longer there TO see, and you do not believe in it, or want it. You do not see it because you do not WANT to see it, and you do not see it because you have CHOSEN to ONLY see reality - vigilance only for the Kingdom. Here, only the truth is true.

By focusing on truth, you DO NOT SEE WHAT IS FALSE. What is false does not exist. And there literally IS NO WORLD to perceive. The world is GONE. It never was, and sights of it were hallucinations. Only reality is real. And now perception has finished its function and you are ready to ascend from the real world into Heaven.

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

"You cannot behold the world and know God."

"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."

"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."

Moving out of victimhood towards empowerment requires a radical shift in perspective. The victim mindset always involves a sense of separation from others. In this mode, your mind assigns certain things to them, and not to you. They're the one that's guilty, they're the attacker, they're the one doing something wrong. But in order to get out of this, we have to realise that everything "about" this situation is YOU doing it TO YOU.

That means that even when you think of someone like "that person is being evil", that is not actually a separate thought about a separate person. That is your mind attacking itself. Your mind splits off and invents a character to represent the other role, projects that character onto the other person, imagines that character being sinful and attacking, and then believes that the guilt belongs to them and not you. But this is YOUR mind forming a split personality, identifying with one part and not another, being at war with itself, and attacking itself from the outside in a kind of indirect way.

It is NOT TRUE that you can use your mind to just think casually about anyone and anything, with no effect on you. Even if you think you are describing what someone "is like", even if it seems based on their physical appearance, their behavior, or anything else that you think belongs to them, it requires you to still judge and attack in order to assign these labels to them. And when you do that, it's really your mind attacking itself. You cannot just sit there on a kind of fence having objective observations of condemnation and pretend that you're not hurting yourself by doing so.

It's kind of like a misuse of the equipment, like you don't know how to use your mind. You think that your mind is capable of operating in a mode where you can remain separate from others and cast judgements at them, label them, describe them, evaluate them. As if these perceptions have no effect. But what you don't realise is this is a totally incorrect way to use the mind. Mind cannot have these thoughts, labels, judgements, even if they map accurately to someone in form, without them being a form of attack. If I say "you did something wrong", I am literally telling myself that I'm wrong, I am split minded, have a case of dissociation, and am pretending to be a victim.

The major shift of believing that the problem is separate from you "out there", to recognizing that "you are doing it to yourself", requires a complete ownership of your thoughts, your judgements, your attitude. It's a total responsibility. It's a recognition that anything you perceive you have projected, because projection makes perception. Any labels you give to things are not neutral, they are a way that your mind is setting up an enemy within and as itself, to attack itself. It's your mind using the world vicariously to imagine that the world is doing something to you, when in fact this visualising is your mind doing something to itself.

So basically we have to go from believing that the stuff out there is not inside us, to realising that "ideas leave not their source". That any idea you have "about" anyone is about yourself. That you are included in everything. That you never escape any consequences, you are never separate from any judgement you make, what you do to others you are doing to yourself, and you are still bound by God's law of the golden rule. It's a shift away from a mind which is in two halves with two wills and two characters, to a mind which is single and whole and undivided against itself.

"When you CORRECT a brother, you are telling him that he is WRONG. He may be making no sense at the time, and it is certain that if he is speaking from the ego, he WILL be making no sense, but your task is still to tell him HE IS RIGHT. You do not tell him this verbally if he is SPEAKING foolishly, because he needs correction AT ANOTHER LEVEL, since his error IS at another level. HE is still right, because he is a Son of God. His ego is ALWAYS wrong, no matter WHAT it says or does."

When you see a person acting egoically, you will think this is all they are. Whatever they say and do, you point your finger at "that" and consider it the whole person. This is why its incredibly easy to judge and condemn people for their egoic behaviors. As if what you see them doing is what thy are in truth.

But what this really means is you are blinded by perception of form and lack vision, so you are not seeing THROUGH and BEYOND their ego. The fact is that the person simultaneously is a perfect soul, and yet they also have egoic beliefs in their mind. Kind of like having two selves.

If you only see the ego in them and do no look past it ("to forgive is to overlook"), you become blinded by it and do not see their real self. You then hold their ego against them as if that is all they are. In effect, there is more to people than meets the eye.

Jesus is saying we should try not to be deceived by people's mistakes, and recognize it as a call for love. To look past appearances to the holy child of God that everyone is in truth. If you could see past their ego to their holiness, you would recognize their ego as just mistaken, instead of sinful.

Remember everyone here has two selves so when you take everything people say at face value you're not being forgiving. You have to look deeper past the surface. Give your brother due credit and love or still being a perfect soul. Recognize his mistakes as only that, and hold nothing not of God against him. To fixate on a person's ego is to be believe the forms of error.

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK. Look, then, BEYOND error, and do not let your perception rest UPON it, for you will believe what your perception HOLDS. Accept as true only what your brother IS, if you would know yourself. Perceive what he is NOT, and you CANNOT know what you are, BECAUSE you see HIM falsely. Remember always that your identity is shared, and that its sharing IS its reality."

"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."

"Before a holy relationship, there IS no sin. The FORM of error is no longer seen. And reason, joined with love, looks quietly on ALL confusion, observing merely, "this was a mistake." And then the same Atonement YOU accepted in YOUR relationship, CORRECTS the error, and lays a part of Heaven in its place. How blessed are you, who let this gift be given! Each part of Heaven that you bring, is given YOU. And every empty place in Heaven that you fill again with the Eternal Light YOU bring, shines now on YOU. The means of sinlessness can know no fear, because they carry ONLY love with them."

"T-22.III.5. 3 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? 9 It is held back by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but form will be perceived." - ACIM

**** This is a very important part of the Course. ****

Jesus is telling is clearly here that the physical world of FORM, all objects, all matter, the physical universe, the world, are NOTHING, it is the way that we experience a 'wall of sin' which stands between us and God, and we are quite literally incapable of seeing God while we use the body's eyes to see.

It is also telling us that the physical universe is not reality. Perception of 'form', which means, physical materials, objects, people's bodies, the planet, etc... if you are seeing that, you are seeing an illusion.

This is very hard for many people to accept even intellectually yet alone to experience this truth. "There is no world" fits right in here.

So it's one thing to wake up to the point of still seeing the physical world and yet somehow 'seeing God in it' because God is in your mind. Okay, that's a step closer. BUT... that's not going all the way.

Jesus is telling us from a CHRIST perspective, that we have to become able to recognize that ALL FORMS ARE ILLUSIONS and that there is a REALITY that is beyond form, formless, in which you not only live your real life with God but you also are completely infinite and unlimited.

It's not enough just to find a different way of perceiving form. It's not enough to learn to not judge form. It's not enough to overlook your personal judgements or mental distortions or guilty attitudes about the world or yourself. That is not the end of the story.

We are asked to really go ALL THE WAY.... to go beyond form entirely. To go all the way to IMMORTAL SPIRIT. To transcend all forms and all physical matter and all of space and time. To go all the way to the complete and total and permanent awareness of the ONE REALITY. That reality is completely abstract and has NO FORMS IN IT. None. No objects. No bodies. No physical universe. No planets.

So that means, it's important to learn at some stage how even the body's senses are misleading you, how you are deceived by the appearance of differences and objects, how the physical world is actually set up to BLOCK you from God, and how the world PHYSICALLY STOPS YOU from being with God by completely deceiving your awareness.

You need a vision which transcends form. A vision which sees Christ. And that doesn't just mean seeing Christ in your brother or seeing Christ in the body-self of your brother. It means seeing past ALL FORM to the Christ and ONLY SEEING THAT.

Not just to see and be aware of God, but to see and be aware of NOTHING ELSE as well.

As Jesus says, "There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you." - ACIM

Pure heaven.

You have free will. "All loving creation is freely given." God has given you freedom. You can choose. There was nothing to really choose "between" in reality, until you dreamed of an alternative.

God did not stop you from dreaming. He didn’t frown at you. He didn’t judge you. He didn’t tell you you were wrong, sinful, and shouldn’t be doing it. He allowed you to.

You are free. You can stay in illusions as long as you like. Or you can wake up. "God does not coerce". ACIM speaks of the fallen angels... "they are free to establish their kingdom where they see fit." God isn’t even stopping them or judging them for wanting to not be with him.

In fact, God doesn’t even have an ounce of "shoulding" you. You are completely free. If you don’t want something, you don’t have to have it. If you want it, its yours. God isn’t pressuring you to wake up.

Your will is free. You have to WILLINGLY WANT to awaken in order to do so. No one comes to the atonement except willingly. "Heaven is a choice I must make."

God is merely asking, do you want to come home now? If you say no, then so be it. God isn’t mad. He has INFINITE patience because he KNOWS, that at some point, you WILL willingly return. It is inevitable because no one can tolerate hell forever. Everyone at some point seeks for a better way.

God’s door is open. You are welcome, to come and go. God knows its in your best interests, for your happiness and peace, to return to Him. But if you say, I don’t want happiness and peace, I want to suffer, that is allowed.

If you are for example between lives, and you approach God, and take an honest look at what you learned in your life and what you now believe, it may be revealed that you *actually* want to still be in a body. And so be it. If it is actually true that you want to stay with God, then so be it. Nothing is keeping you in a body any more than anything is keeping you from being with God. It’s up to you.

You are where you are because you want to be. You could keep going through 1000 lifetimes still not really wanting to awaken. God asks, are you ready now? You answer, no... and off you go on another adventure trying to find yourself.

There is no guilt involved. God is not judging you. He respects the TOTAL freedom that He has given you. He will not condemn you for not wanting Him. He Loves you. This is why you need to have a little willingness, and eventually total willingness. You need to be sure that Heaven is what you want, above all else.

God, Holy Spirit and Jesus all have infinite patience for your process. Whatever you want to do, you are free to do it. But you must also accept the consequences of your choice. Whatever you want, you receive. Nothing happens against your will. This is the key both to causing your own suffering, and finding salvation. Accepting this freedom and using it to choose Heaven, takes you home.

"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. This must I accept. For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my Will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them, and Him Who has created me."

Forgiveness is the only way out of the dream. It is the only way to undo error. It is the only salvation. It literally IS the way that you learn illusions are illusions and not the truth. It is your only option, your only hope, your only salvation.

"Forgiveness is for God and toward God but not of Him. It is impossible to think of anything He created that could need forgiveness. Forgiveness, then, is an illusion, but because of its purpose, which is the Holy Spirit's, it has one difference. Unlike all other illusions it lead away from error and not towards it. "

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in that view are all your sins forgiven. What is sin, except a false idea about God's Son? Forgiveness merely sees its falsity, and therefore lets it go. What then is free to take its place is now the Will of God."

"Fear binds the world. Forgiveness sets it free."

"Forgiveness gives the miracle its strength to overlook illusions."

"Let forgiveness be the substitute for fear. This is the only rule for happy dreams. "

"Forgiveness can truly be called salvation. It is the means by which illusions disappear. "

"Illusion makes illusion. Except one. Forgiveness is illusion that is answer to the rest. "

"Forgiveness offers everything I want. What could you want forgiveness cannot give? Do you want peace? Forgiveness offers it. Do you want happiness, a quiet mind, a certainty of purpose, and a sense of worth and beauty that transcends the world? Do you want care and safety, and the warmth of sure protection always? Do you want a quietness that cannot be disturbed, a gentleness that never can be hurt, a deep abiding comfort, and a rest so perfect it can never be upset? All this forgiveness offers you, and more."

"Those who forgive are releasing themselves from illusions, while those who withhold forgiveness are binding themselves to them. As you condemn only yourself, so do you forgive only yourself. "

"The one correction possible for false perception must be true perception. It will not endure. But for the time it lasts it comes to heal. For true perception is a remedy with many names. Forgiveness, salvation, Atonement, true perception, all are one."

"Forgiveness is still, and quietly does nothing. It offends no aspect of reality, nor seeks to twist it to appearances 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."

"This is not a course in philosophical speculation, nor is it concerned with precise terminology. It is concerned only with Atonement, or the correction of perception. The means of the Atonement is forgiveness."

Sometimes (ok, often), I think I know what is good or bad. For myself, for other people etc. But I have to question this. Do I really know anything?

What if my efforts to help are hurtful? What if I'm distracting someone from a spiritual lesson? What if I'm taking away someone's lesson, even if it's painful, that they need in order to wake up? What if my fixing is actually undoing an opportunity that someone has to find their own strength? What if my attempt to take over something is disempowering for them, even if it was with the intention of helping?

Ultimately then it comes down to just... allowing oneself to open up to the idea that I do not know ANYTHING as to whether something is right, or wrong, for myself or anyone.

The Course asks us to be open to 'not knowing', as a doorway to knowing. What I see it as now, is that when we're constantly in this tug of war of seeing something as right or wrong, we automatically then leap off that springboard into ego reactions and coping tools and ways of 'doing something about it', all of which is based on us thinking that we KNOW... believing that we KNOW what is going on or why it's happening, when we actually don't.

What the Course is warning us against is FALSE knowing, which is ego knowing - and the ego actually cannot know anything. False knowing is where you believe you know, you have some opinion, you judge it, you label it, you decide something is right and okay, or something is bad and not meant to be this way, and then you proceed to pile extra reactions on top of this. You even make decisions about what to 'do about it' based on this. But this basic perception of ... its wrong. .. or ... it shouldn't be like this. .... that's something WE are making up.

I don't know what's right or wrong for people. I don't know even what's right or wrong for myself. I don't know what's helpful or hurtful. I don't know whether my attempts to fix and save and heal and cure are actually interfering with someone's spiritual growth. I could be doing more harm than 'good' in spite of my belief that I'm helping. Or vice versa, I may be holding back on helping in certain ways that would be truly helpful because of a belief that I shouldn't, or don't want to, or can't love a person enough etc.

So it's like, here is this neutral situation, and then the ego will waver off to one side or another, taking sides, either for or against this thing, and basically go off on a tangent of believing that it knows that this diversion away from 'what is' is based in truth.

It takes a tremendous amount of humility, therefore, to admit truly, honestly, that if we really get down to it, I do NOT KNOW what anything means, I do NOT know what anything is for, I do NOT know whether something that's happening is good or bad, I do NOT know if it's meant to be happening and is helpful or whether it should not be happening and is harmful. And maybe helpful/harmful is entirely an ego-made up idea? How about that? What if there was absolutely no good or bad of any kind? What is everything that's happening, no matter whether I love it or hate it, has absolutely nothing to do with my ego's judgements about it? What if I have NO CLUE about it, other than that IT SIMPLY IS WHAT IT IS?

And what is it that I ultimately REACT to? It's my own perception that I've invented that something is wrong with the picture. I am the one deciding that, thinking I know, when I don't know. And then I react to my own conclusion. I don't really know anything, or at least, my ego doesn't really know anything.

But God knows everything. Holy Spirit knows everything. I guess I should trust Him and let Him decide for me?

The ego does not exist. It cannot be loved or embraced. It cannot be turned into a friend. It cannot wake up or heal or convert into something spiritual. It is nothing but an artificial idea of impossibility, and as such is impossible. It does not exist, cannot exist, and has no reality. To have a relationship with it is it attempting to have a relationship with itself.

Light dispels darkness. Ego is darkness. Love is light. If you shine your love in the direction of the ego darkness, it simply will disappear, because it does not exist as anything other than the illusion of the absence of love, which is impossible. It's not there. Shadows are not truth, light is truth. And darkness cannot hide the light. You cannot "love your ego" without your love disappearing it.

While it may be a stepping stone to learn not to fight with the ego, since that is the ego fighting itself, and to not resist it, and to not attack the body, and to undo all basis for ego thinking and reactions "to" the ego, this is only so that the ego itself is undone. The ego is already undone, we just are hallucinating that it exists at all. It never existed to begin with.

Eventually we have to look within and be willing to see that not only is there no sin, there is no ego either. There IS no central core of isolation. As the clouds which promised to conceal an underlying artificial identity clear, you discover that there is nothing there. It was not what you expected. There is no ego to go up against or even to really undo. Enlightenment is a recognition and not a change at all.

Holy Spirit knows that the ego does not exist and this does this forgiveness teach:

"T-9.IV.5. Forgiveness that is learned of me does not use fear to undo fear."

(do not use fearfulness or making illusions real in an attempt to relate to or deal with or undo or address the ego at all)

"2 Nor does it make real the unreal and then destroy it."

(do not make the ego a real thing and then attempt to have a relationship with it or deal with it or change it or do anything really about it directly)

"3 Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus keeping it unreal for you."

(True forgiveness is fore-giveness, it gives ahead of time. That means, it looks WITH a forgiving attitude, IN ORDER TO ENSURE that it is not mistaken, so that it does not MAKE error or ego, so that there IS no ego or error to have to undo. Only when forgiveness fails do we enter judgement - he who would not forgive must judge - which makes the ego, and so if we simply remain fore-giving the ego does not come into manifestation at all.)

"4 Do not let any belief in its realness enter your mind, or you will also believe that you must undo what you have made in order to be forgiven."

(Pretty straightforward isn't it? If you make the ego real in any way then you will start to fight with it and believe that you have work to do or stuff to fix or whatever, and doing so you will be stuck.)

"5 What has no effect does not exist, and to the Holy Spirit the effects of error are nonexistent."

(Error does not exist because true forgiveness fore-gives, failing to make errors or perceive erroneously, and therefore RECOGNIZES that there IS no error, therefore there is no ego.)

"6 By steadily and consistently cancelling out all its effects, everywhere and in all respects, He teaches that the ego does not exist and proves it."

(There is no ego, period. Believing there is an ego, is an attempt to make an ego real, which is impossible. Ego is fiction. It's just a useful concept for teaching that it does not exist, and nothing else.)

I often fall for the trap of trying to be right. After of a period of time of trying to be right over and over again, I noticed that this rightness was basically a position of defensiveness, trying to defend (and therefore attack) against some kind of perceived 'wrongness' outside of me.

The trouble is that the wrongness is not really outside of me, it's a part of my mind, but the rest of my mindbelieves it is separate from it - disassociated from it. So really when I'm being right, I'm going into my persona and am rejecting my shadow, projecting it onto someone else and trying to position my persona-identified self as more correct, more truthful, more real.

This is a position of war, because always these situations of being right involve conflict - seemingly with someone else, but really with some part of myself. So long as someone else seems to be the opposite of my position, it becomes very easy to see my wrong-focused shadow projected onto them. It's a convenient way to get rid of my own wrongness and guilt.

So even if I seem very annoyed about someone being wrong, and I'm going to lengths to correct them or prove myself right, I secretly want them to be wrong so that I can put all of this sense of wrongfulness onto them, finding myself seemingly more innocent as a result. I get to look like the innocent victim who is just defending the truth, and they get to look like the evil monster who is hell-bent on destroying it.

This is all happening inside our own mind when we start to dig in our heels and be right. And the thing is, in this world there are many many situations in which, according to normal rules and laws and seeming "facts" (really illusions of truth), we can fall for this and believe that someone is "really wrong". We think there is a truth to the illusion that they are wrong, and react to it with righteousness in trying to separate ourselves from this perceived untruth. But separation itself is untruth.

We have to learn then to allow others to seem to be wrong, if they seem to be, recognizing it's not that they really are wrong, but only an illusion that they are, and that if we just react to that with ego we will just move into the persona and project our shadow guilt onto them. We need to let them be wrong, if they seem to be, and choose not to rise up in this mode of holier-than-thou, or the one who is good and righteous and correct. One person being wrong and one person being right is just an inner war, in which there is no peace.

Learning not to go into this mode of projection and wrong-making when, given the situation, it seems that you *actually* are correct, is a very subtle trap. It's easy to recognize you are being right when the other person is actually right and you're actually mistaken, on whatever ego grounds. But when the other person *seem* to be wrong, given the facts and so on, this makes it much harder to drop the 'role' of being the 'right one', or falling for the temptation of believing that something "really wrong" is happening outside of you.

Even when we are technically right, correct, or know a greater truth, we have to learn to surrender and not use it as a way to judge or to make others wrong for not seeing it. It's quite a subtle trap, and I fall for it all the time, lol. What ends up happening is I am defending the ego in me, thinking that I am defending some kind of truth, and only make myself be in conflict.

I can choose peace instead of this. I'd rather be happy than right.

"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."

A belief that sickness is real must be a belief that God is sick.

Sickness is an attempt to redefine God as less than whole; suffering, and preparing to die.

What we give reality to, or see truth in, becomes our perceived reality. If we believe that sickness is real, we will in some way experience sickness, because we put it there.

If sickness is real, it cannot be healed. Having given reality to it, it has been established with a sense of permanence and held in suspension.

To attempt to heal that which is real, is nonsense. Reality needs no healing. To attempt to heal a real sickness is nonsense. While the belief in sickness remains active, it is actively producing more sickness.

Those who are sick would like to enjoy health. But they do not have this option. They are fixed in sickness, because they believe the world is real. If the world is real, and they have ambition to go from "real sickness" to "real health", it will not work. A healthy body and a sick body are both illusions, and the experience of sickness as real maintains it.

The only way that sickness can be cured is by recognizing sickness is not reality. Giving it no truth, and giving it TO the truth.

One the one hand we may be saying, I want to not be sick, or I want that person to not be sick. But at the same time, we are saying this because we are experiencing "real sickness" and do not like it. Who would enjoy being "really sick"? If sickness were real, we would seem to "really suffer".

Divine health focuses entirely on God's truth and life. It has no room for even a thought of sickness or separation.

Forgiveness overlooks sickness and error from the start.

"The ego's plan is to have you see error clearly first, and then overlook it. Yet how can you overlook what you have made real?" - ACIM

"Your brother's errors are not of him, any more than yours are of you. Accept his errors as real, and you have attacked yourself." - ACIM

"You have been told not to make error real, and the way to do this is very simple. If you want to believe in error, you would have to make it real because it is not true. But truth is real in its own right, and to believe in truth you do not have to do anything." - ACIM

"Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus keeping it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your mind." - ACIM

Here Jesus has told us that forgiveness overlooks error from the very beginning, because forgiveness is FORE-giveness. It gives truth ahead of time so that it does not PRODUCE errors. Error (judgement) enters in as a FAILURE to be fore-giving - an error in forgiveness ("he who would not forgive must judge").

A form of error is SICKNESS. To overlook sickness we must learn not to make sickness real, which is making the error real.

Therefore to heal sickness, we must withdraw all sense that the error/sickness is REAL, to begin with, otherwise we will be fighting against our own decision to believe in the sickness, and will be in conflict with ourselves. Likely we will wage war against the sickness like it is an enemy, which will only mean that we're waging war against our own desire to keep sickness a reality.

We need to be single minded. One minded. Whole minded. One focus on perfect health and truth, with no room for producing error, and therefore no room for believing that sickness (error) can be in any way real.

When you see or experience sickness, you are in error. You believe the sickness is really happening. You believe you are experiencing it. You are choosing it, and adding to it. You must unbelieve it.

There IS no real sickness!

There IS no real death!

There IS no real sin!

God's truth is the only truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"When you forgive the world YOUR guilt, YOU will be free of it. Its innocence does NOT demand your guilt, nor does your guiltlessness rest on ITS sins. This is the obvious, a secret kept from no-one but yourself. And it is this that has maintained you SEPARATE from the world, and kept your brother SEPARATE from you. Now need you but to learn that BOTH of you are innocent OR guilty. The one thing that is impossible is that you be UNLIKE each other; that they BOTH be true. This is the only secret yet to learn. And it will be NO secret you are healed."

If you are innocent, you recognize that everyone is innocent, because your innocence overlooks their guilt and looks to the truth about them. Truth is eternal and unchanging, so their innocence is permanent, as is yours.

If you are guilty, you will see everyone as guilty. Having lost sight of the truth you will not recognize it, and will mistake everyone's innocence for guilt. Seeing the guilt in them results from seeing it in yourself. Seeing them as guilty you will assume this means you are not guilty, which disguises this fact.

It works kind of like wearing either clean or dirty glasses on your eyes. When your own glasses are clean you will see a clean world free of guilt. When your own glasses are dirty you will see a dirty guilty world. And how you see them you see yourself reflected in the mirror.

It is not possible to accurately determine whether someone is innocent or guilty, from the perspective of ego. You are not sitting on a fence being neutral. You have no neutral thoughts. Either you are making everyone appear innocent or you are making everyone appear guilty. You are contributing to what you see.

If you think you can determine that someone is guilty, but you are innocent, you are mistaken. If you think you can call someone innocent while you believe in your own guilt, you are mistaken. You cannot see past what's in you own mind.

The ego counsels that you can find someone guilty and yet you can escape this guilt. This is impossible. Either BOTH you and your brother are guilty, or BOTH you and your brother are innocent.

You actually therefore are blind to whether or not your brother is innocent or guilty, independently. You cannot tell this independently because your brother IS NOT independent of you in a separate, compartmentalized way. You cannot section off his worth from your own.

The Golden Rule, the law of God, is always in effect no matter where you are or what you believe. What you believe is true of you is always believed to be true of others, even if consciously you think there is a difference between the two. You cannot find someone guilty without making yourself guilty first. And you cannot see your brothers innocence if you are not willing to accept your own.

This is how your brother is your savior. He does not actually save you in the sense of doing something for you that you have not done for yourself. He merely is recognized as reflecting back to you either your own innocence or guilt, depending on what you believe is true. If you regard yourself as innocent, you will regard him as innocent also. If you find him guilty, you have condemned yourself.

You do not have the faculty to be able to say, ok, my brother is the guilty one, and I am a passive observer, and I can tell he's guilty because I'm neutral and objective. There is no such thing as objective judgement. All judgementalism is inherently biased and pulls the judger INTO the judgement. Think not you can judge lest ye be judged.

Unfortunately, its not possible to find someone guilty, if you want to find your own innocence. It will drag you down. Maintaining enemies and scapegoats and pointing fingers at people keeps YOU in hell. You HAVE to find everyone to be innocent if you want to find yourself to be innocent. And so long as you find even one person to be guilty, you have relegated yourself to death.

The truth (about you and your brother) is always true, and nothing else is true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ego has built some very terrible things which we regard as extremely real. These include pain, disease/sickness, fear, death, emergency, intensity, attack, and separation. When these things seems to be happening, the ego is sending out a very strong message to us.

The message says, "you should stay the hell away from this it's really bad". (Beware, this advice may be misleading ;-)

Pain quite literally tells you in an experiential way that it is something you do not want. And nobody wholeheartedly wants to be sick or dying. And attack can be particularly upsetting. The ego keeps reinforcing the idea:

"This is really really terrible and it's really happening and you should want it to stop" (Beware again, this ego advice may not work ;-)

And so typically that is the reaction that we have. If I've got pain, I want it to go away. If someone is attacking someone, I want them to stop doing it. If I am sick or diseased, I want to get rid of it.

The trouble is, these attitudes... These reactions... These ways of experiencing these 'temptation', is precisely the OPPOSITE of what will actually HELP the situation. The ego's counsel is ALWAYS completely opposite of the truth and leading you down exactly the wrong path that results in things becoming far worse. What it claims will save you, and what it claims will heal you, and what it claims will fix the situation, DOES NOT, and so you seek for but you do not find peace.

So let's look at the opposite, which the ego warns you against.

If you are in pain, love the living FUCK out of it. Welcome it. Don't resist it. Drop all desire to get rid of it. Don't make it wrong. Don't judge it as bad or a mistake or something that shouldn't be there. And in particular, stop being a victim and OWN the CHOICE to put it there.

Instead of being a passive victim of it, instead be proactive in choosing how you wish to perceive it. It is also useful to extremely exaggerate how much you WELCOME the problem. For example:

"I am choosing this pain (or whatever the thing is)."

"I really wanted to have this and this is what I've received."

"This pain is absolutely beautiful and lovely and I love it with all my heart."

"I am the one who chose this pain and I've done a really excellent job of choosing it."

"This pain is absolutely amazing I totally love it and welcome it and want it."

"I allow this pain to stay for as long as it wants to, it is completely free to do so and I don't even want to get rid of it or make it go away."

"I feel really happy about this pain being there, and I am truly grateful that it has shown up just like I planned."

"I love this pain. This is the best pain I've ever created. This pain makes me completely happy because it is exactly how I wanted it to be and it has met all my conditions."

"I accept this pain and allow it to remain."

"I let go of resisting this pain or trying to make it go away."

"I let go of labelling this pain as negative or a fault or something I did wrong, there is no guilt in it at all. I am completely innocent."

"I surrender all attack on this pain and give it to you Holy Spirit."

"I am open to being completely still with this pain and simply observing it without any desire to change it or judge it."

"I surreneder this pain to you God, please heal it in my mind and I gently let it go to you now."

Notice that we're having an ATTITUDE which is completely the opposite of what the ego says your attitude SHOULD be. When something goes wrong, the ego puts it into the hierarchy of illusions and tells you exactly what kind of severity of reaction this calls for. If you let it, you'll react according to this hierarchy and be a victim. So the ego says this pain is not something you can possible want - that YOU are not something you can possibly want - so go ahead and WANT IT, to defy the ego and reverse its assertions.

The keys here are you need to include:

1. Complete ownership for having created this

2. Complete ownership for actively still creating it and wanting to

3. Gratitude for having created exactly what you wanted

4. Openness and welcome that is heartfelt

5. Allowing and accepting whatever it, letting it BE without you changing it

6. Surrender of all of the reactions you were having about it and all the ways you were making it out to be something wrong

7. Willingness to let it be free so that you can be free

8. Offering it up to Holy Spirit now that you have LET GO OF IT and have stopped trying to attack it or make it wrong or get rid of it yourself

9. Willingness to ASK Holy Spirit/Jesus/God to now heal it and take it from you

10. Actually DOING SO and letting go of it in peaceful surrender.

To the ego this is total madness. It will tell you if you try to accept or allow something that's clearly bad or awful, that you have regarded as real and upsetting, you will just condone it and keep it. This is not true. It will tell you that you should stop even trying to 'live with it' because if you do, you literally will be stuck keeping it and have to live with it. This is also not true.

The reason the ego's attitude is false is because there are a whole shitload of attitudes that you are having which are REINFORCING the pain and making it worse. In fact, you are the one who put it there. But while you keep REACTING to its appearance, which typically is "I want to get rid of it because it shouldn't be there", that just makes it worse and keeps it. When you lift away all of those reactions and layers of condemnation, judgement, guilt and wrongfulness, you are stripping away layers of 'making it real' and holding it in your mind, which actually FREES YOUR MIND from the illusions surrounding this. So you're actually undoing your reactions, seeing innocence and harmlessness in the thing, and thus getting yourself to the point where you can LET GO of it. You can't be free while you won't let IT be free.

The reason for this is that whenever there is pain or suffering or sickness, it is because there's some part of you that you do not LOVE. Some part of you where you see guilt or wrongness or non-acceptance or sinfulness. So that part of you that you refuse to accept HURTS and turns into sickness. This may or may not produce physical sickness but often it does. So you're not really dealing with your body being sick, you're dealing with your mind being sick - some part of YOU (not the body) needs love. So as you look at the body sickness and you keep launching counter-attacks and defenses against it, all you're doing is hurting the part of you that hurts, even more. That only compounds it and keeps it. Plus it makes you very unhappy because the ego's default reaction to pain and sickness is unhappiness. And yet the fact is, it is a choice to BE unhappy by not loving a part of yourself that MAKES the sickness appear in the first place.

Do you really HAVE to be unhappy and afraid and guilty and lost and hopeless 'because of' a pain or sickness? Do you not have any choice in the matter? At the very least, even if changing your attitude about it does not have any effect on making the sickness BETTER at all, physically, at least you will FEEL GOOD instead of feeling like shit. It IS far better for you to choose to be happy because of sickness than to add a layer of feeling shit on top of the physical sensations or symptoms. Having a headache is one thing, but also having a headache and feeling depressed and unhappy is a whole extra layer of despair. You don't HAVE to have that experience. And what you might find is, if you CHOOSE to have a happier experience about what is happening - a more welcoming, loving, open, allowing experience, then maybe, just maybe, your body will fall into line and actually HEAL to match your change in attitude. Since the physical sickness is just a symptom/projection of your unhealed attitude about yourself, internally, changing your attitude MUST change the projection.

The more support for sickness you can strip away the better, and all of your default negativity and victimhood about being sick DOES compound and support and reinforce it. What happens when you withdraw that support? How can a sickness have a strength, when you weaken it by withdrawing all of your mind's support for it? Make no mistaken, seeing yourself as victimized BY sickness or BY attack or BY someone dying or whatever, that very much strengthens the EFFECTS of that thing happening. Choosing to be happy and loving toward it, instead, which is completely against the ego and does take some WILL (affirmations help too), CANCELS OUT your belief in the effects. When you deny that something has affected you, the cause is undone and you are HEALED.

Jesus DOES ask us in ACIM to cancel out all of the effects of things in order to undo them and to DEMONSTRATE that you are invulnerable. You can't do that if you insist that there's no way you can love or be happy about whatever seems to have gone wrong. You've got to start somewhere. Worth a try?

How much of your life have you spend in the default reactionary space of feeling shitty about bad things that are happening? Has it worked? How much effort have you spent fighting against things that have gone wrong and failed and that are malfunctioning? Has that really helped at all? It has not worked. Try something radical. Try the exact opposite way of dealing with it and see what happens. Holy Spirit can amplify the effects of your willingness to SEE YOURSELF AS WHOLE AND HEALED, because it is in line with the truth.

The only thing you need to be wary of is the ego turning this into a reason to become SARCASTIC, which means that you're saying one thing and believing another. You need to find some amount of belief and meaning in what you're affirming. And because you're trying to UNDO the beliefs you already put in place in your negative reactions, it may take some effort of will and persistence to change your beliefs and to actually FEEL that what you're saying is true. After a while of saying it and MEANING it, you should feel a growing sense of peace and acceptance about the issue, and it should seem easier to be less upset about, and to surrender all of your counter-attacks upon it. Then you will have a GENUINE WILLINGNESS to hand it over to Holy Spirit.

Go for it.

You know sometimes when you're doing something on a computer and there's a progress bar, and sometimes there are actually two progress bars - overall progress and the progress of one of many smaller tasks? Well I think it's kind of like that with forgiveness too.

There is an overall progress which slowly evolves along similar steps to how each individual forgiveness progresses, but it goes a lot slower. This means that in general, you will start out really strongly believing that forgiveness has something to do with other people, that it's their fault, that you have to forgive them in some way.

Then gradually you will pull away from that and start to realize that it's not really about other people, it's about you. Each time something happens, over time you are a little less convinced that you're starting out with someone else being the problem. So you sort of start a little further along the process.

Each time you do a small forgiveness, each time you tackle some individual issue, and you take it all the way to it being forgiven, you are sort of practicing. You wear away at the rock of sin. And then you do another one, and another one.

What I've seen is that as a result of all these practices, all these forgiveness of individual events and people and situations, in the big long-term picture my mind seems to be gradually moving its 'starting position' away from others and more toward myself.

Instead of falling for some of the more obvious ego traps that convince and tempt me to believe that it's all someone else's fault, there's been a progression where I at least don't fall for those basic starting illusions as easily. I start my forgivenesses a bit further along the process.

Lately I've been encroaching more closely on the idea that forgiveness has nothing at all to do with other people. Instead I'm seeing that there is stuff going on in my own mind, a conflict between two parts of my own split mind, and that I play both the role of victim and victimizer. Whatever way I am using my mind to judge or attack others, I see that this is just my own mind content playing out, there's activity in my own mind about myself, and I'm doing this to myself. I am sort of learning that I can completely ignore any suggestion that this upset has anything to do with other people.

So I think gradually we erode this overall attitude of unforgiveness, we gradually chop down trees and the forest starts to clear. We keep winning little battles and gradually we're winning the war, so to speak. I am much quicker now to recognize that my issues have nothing to do with other people, and can quickly jump over the whole emotional drama tangle of "they are doing this to me", "I'm a victim of them", "I don't want this etc". I've had to take that illusion, that perceptual fault, so many times that I guess I've learned, overall, or have become able to generalize that learning, so that I just kind of 'know it' now.

I think this is really how things progress. I can well imagine that as time continues to unfold I will just keep having fewer reactions, less belief in victimhood, less fear, that I will fall for illusions less, that I will inevitably gradually be sustaining a certain level of 'awareness' and 'wakefulness' which acts as the starting point for any further corrections that are needed.

We wake up gradually. We make progress. And once we've done enough of the undoing of the grosser, more ego-extreme aspects of our mistaken perceptions, we will learn and won't be so easily fooled by them. Then it will come down to the subtler aspects of what's happening, what I'm doing to myself, how my mind is functioning, as we gradually 'home in' on revealing to our awareness what the simple truth really is about us.

And someday we'll realize, there is nothing left to forgive, and forgiveness isn't even needed, because now we are in a permanently forgiving attitude with Holy Spirit that shows us a forgiven world all the time. Ultimately there is nothing to forgive when you get to that point because you're seeing clearly, and really you were only ever forgiving your mistaken belief that there was something wrong that needed to be undone. Nothing has really happened. We're all doing fine. Congratulations on your progress.

One of the major problems we have is that while in ego, we're in a state of confusion. And that means we've lost sight of what is true and real. This then leads to confusing things which are false with things that are true, and not really knowing what is what. In such a state, it is hard to recognize anything for what it really is.

The problem is that not recognizing stuff makes it harder to identify if you are doing something wrong or need to take action to correct it. In denial, it's hard to even realize for example that you are upset, afraid, guilty, angry, harboring grievances, judging someone else. We might be doing all these things but simply not recognize them as these things. It's like we have swapped around all the labels. This can even make you choose suffering and death by mistake, thinking they are salvation.

Years ago I was harboring a lot of anger and yet at the same time was so in denial of this that, even sitting on top of a volcano about to burst, I would have told you I was not angry at all. Similarly I was in states of tremendous fear and anxiety and yet was so "used to it", to blinded by it, that I did not think I was afraid. I simply could not recognize it for what it was, and thought it was just normal or something else. And when you get used to living with something you think can never be undone you just assume it's a permanent truth.

When I judge, I do not always recognize that it is judgement. I do stuff that I think does not seem like judgement, but it is. I may be having a grievance about something but may not actually think to myself, this is a grievance, and it doesn't seem to be what you might categorize as a grievance. Fear can take on many forms and turn into anger, and you might not even realize you are afraid because you feel angry, yet behind the anger there is fear.

It's hard to correct things when you don't even really discern what it is you are doing. You might not even think you have a problem at all. You might be convinced that someone else is the one who is wrong. I mean, regardless of the fact that you may be projecting blame, you might literally not even realize that you are doing something. You can be unconscious of the fact that you are attacking yourself and totally believe that other people are out to get you.

So it all really boils down to a simple lack of recognition, of clear discernment. Being able to tell, this thing is this, and that thing is that. That God's truth is actually true, and that ego's truth is actually false. Trying to "sort out" which is which is almost our entire effort in waking up. If we could simply "learn" to be clear about what stuff is, what we are doing, what effects it is producing, and making awakened decisions about what we want, we would not produce "un-asked for" consequences, undesired suffering, or buy into make-believe problems.

We may be asked to see Christ in our brothers, but how can we do that when we have absolutely no clue what Christ is, how to be it, or how to perceive like Him? We might be asked to forgive, but then we barely can even grasp what forgiveness is or how it's supposed to work. We are digging around in the dark trying to find our way to the light, when all the while the light is what we need to find our way.

Really we're just a bit confused. We're having some trouble remembering what is true and real about ourselves, others and the world around us. We're mistaken. And we do not even recognize that we are mistaken. Which can result in just staying asleep in a confused state believing you're totally normal. But once we do recognize we're mistaken we can learn to accept what now becomes an obvious fact. We have an aha moment, a eureka. What seems confusing becomes clear to you. And once you recognize the truth, you are enlightened.

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

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

It doesn't matter what you did or how bad it was, it is forgivable. People make mistakes. Sometimes mistakes seem very serious. Sometimes that seems to justify why should feel guilty. Presumably you hurt someone or did something 'wrong'. Well, did anyone come along and tell you, you know what, even though you did this and you maybe even meant it, you're still unconditionally lovable? Did anyone remind you, so that even you yourself would believe it, that you're lovable in spite of what you did, and that you are permitted to forgive yourself, even if other people don't forgive you?

This society we live in, coupled with the 'ego' in each person, has a very skewed and ridiculous idea of how you should feel when you make a mistake. Especially if people in your past punished you for making mistakes instead of educating you or teaching you of your unconditional lovability.

For example when someone does something wrong, most people would find that person guilty and judge them. And even the person themselves - you in this case - would even agree with them that you did something wrong and therefore 'should' be guilty, like you are supposed to suffer. But why?

The whole purpose of this guilty suffering is to try to atone, to make up for, what you think you did. So supposedly, your 'offering' of guilt, and your wallowing in guilt and shame, is supposed to be some form of compensation. It's as if, you have too suffer 600 days of guilt to make up for the 600 units of sin that you committed. And during that time, you are not allowed to be loved or forgiven. And even you agree to this. You agree that you are unworthy of forgiveness or love, and that you deserve some kind of punishment.

So then you go around being guilty, believing that you're supposed to be, that you deserve to, and that you should especially show everyone else how guilty you are, so that you'll burn off the karma or whatever BS that you think you deserve. And only after you've 'done enough time' like this, might you be allowed to let it go and be forgiven - i.e. pardoned, by the very same people who accused you of sin and who held you in condemnation.

So really guilt is actually your attempt to give a gift to other people, an offering, to make up for whatever crappy mistake you made. Like, somehow if you suffer enough other people will be pleased. You actually believe this lie. It's an egotistical lie and not at all mature. But because of this dynamic, most people actually believe that being guilty for doing something wrong is the same thing as caring about the people that you did it to, and that it is a way of showing that you are making it up to them - that you love them, by giving them what they seem to want. It seems they want guilt from you, and that giving it to them is making it up to them. It's ridiculous. And so in your mind, guilt = love. This is grossly mistaken.

Guilt is not love. Nobody in the entire history of the world has ever truly benefited from anyone being guilty for a mistake. Ever. The only thing that's happened is this.... the whole world was doing perfectly fine, you came along and did something wrong which was attack #1, and then to make up for it, you went ahead and moped around in guilt and negative self pity for 15 years which consequently actually brings everyone else down, lowers everyone's mood, removes a loving contributor from society, and is therefore attack #2 on those same people. Both doing things wrong and feeling guilty for it are attacks of unlove which require a RESTORATION of love to make up for it. And neither of these attacks improve the state of the world for anyone concerned.

If society was more mature and recognized that mistakes call for forgiveness, not punishment, they would also recognize that it is in everyone's best interests that you return to LOVE after you make a mistake, not guilt. Guilt is the opposite of love. If what you've done in your mistake is bring everyone down, then your true 'atoning' for this and making it up to everyone, is to reclaim your innocence, forgive yourself and everyone involved, for everyone involved to forgive you, and for you to be lifted up and restored to a mutually shared state of unconditional love. Then you've truly given something back to make up for the error, i.e. you've offered healing, and correction, and 'repentance' for the 'sin' rather than the completely useless offering of being guilty or ashamed. But society is generally not mature like this. Society loves to blame people and judge and condemn and criticize and find people guilty. And maybe you are part of that system.

So your challenge is, do you keep going along with this system of guilt, where you prove time and again that mistakes call for suffering, and that mistakes demand punishment, and that people should not be forgiven for making mistakes... or do you break out of this ridiculous system and become a leader, a shining example of what it means to be forgiving and loving, in spite of what anyone else says or thinks about it, to show that there is a better way for people to treat each other and that just as you deserve 100% forgiveness for what you did, so does everyone else if they were making mistakes.

So now, if you 'do yourself in', that is not helping anyone. That is just adding another insult to injury. It's cowardly actually. And it's only going to pile on an extra layer of suffering for all involved, not alleviate them from it. You think that they WANT you to suffer and that they want you to be guilty, and maybe they do... and if they do, that's their own egos, that's them being a-holes, that's their lack of maturity, and you should not stand for or accept that. Just because other people find you guilty does not mean you are guilty or that you are not forgivable. Their failure to forgive you is their own choice to choose to believe in guilt and punishment. You do not have to believe that. You can take a higher road.

You have to decide that no matter what anyone else thinks of you or whether anyone is hurt and no matter if you have done something really bad, you have to decide that you are going to choose to be innocent, that you are going to forgive yourself completely, that you are going to claim your own right to be forgiven, and that if nobody else likes it then that's their problem. You have to stand up for yourself. You can't wait for other people to forgive you, they generally are incapable. You deserve to live. You do not deserve to die. You deserve to be completely exonerated.

Know that there is absolutely nothing you can do in this world which is in any way serious enough or bad enough to cause unconditional love to stop loving you, because it loves you no matter what you do or who you are or what mistakes you make. Unconditional love loves you far more than the magnitude of any errors, even if you really really wanted to do something 'bad', it still looks upon you with absolute forgiveness and acceptance, and it passes a judgement on you ALWAYS that you are innocent.

It is not and will not help anyone to punish yourself, or to believe that you deserve it, or to enact it upon yourself on behalf of other people, which is really you doing it to yourself. And you're doing it to yourself only because you have not forgiven yourself, and that's really the main issue. You have to decide to heal and forgive your shame and guilt. You deserve love. You do not deserve to be unhappy for the rest of forever just because you did something wrong. You need to heal from what you did and allow yourself to be worthy of forgiveness.

Know this. Nobody in their truly right mind ever does anything wrong on purpose. To do something wrong you have to be temporarily mistaken and insane, which means you do not know what you're doing, and therefore it is forgivable.

Also know this. Shame is self imposed. And it will cause you to walk around the world feeling like there is a target on your back that everyone can see, that you are super-self conscious all the time and like everyone knows about your little secret sin that you committed. You'll feel like you can never hide enough or get away from it. And you'll start to withdraw from people in order for them not to find out about how evil you are. And eventually you'll become self-destructive and punish yourself because you don't believe you are worthy of love.

Who deserves to be loved and forgiven when they have committed some crime or sin? That's what the collective egotism of society says. That you don't. But the answer is, YOU DO. Your shame is telling you that you don't deserve love and that nobody wants you and nobody accepts you, and that they're justified in that, and that you even agree with them that you should be put to death. YOU agree with it, because YOU are the one who thinks you are unworthy.

You decided that. You need to forgive yourself and change your belief so that it doesn't run you into the ground. You've already suffered waaaaaaay more than you even needed to to begin with. Let yourself off the hook and reclaim your power, your entitlement to be happy, your deserving to be loved and accepted, and brush off anyone who says you have no right. Because if you believe them when the say you have no right, you will believe it yourself, and then you will make darn sure that your life goes to hell.

Ultimately you are your own worst and only enemy. This has nothing to do with anyone else. It's to do with you learning that you can be forgiven even when you make mistakes, that you can be loved even when you don't see to deserve it, and that you can come to accept yourself for doing something unacceptable. That's called learning to be UNCONDITIONAL. Otherwise you are practicing conditional love, conditional acceptance, and conditional forgiveness.

That's the kind of attitude of an egotistical maniac - that you only deserve if it you meet some special conditions or terms or social rules or regulations. You need to rise above conditional love, both for yourself and for others, and that's going to mean that if YOU want to find love for yourself in spite of what you did, then you're also going to have to learn to love other people regardless of what they do. It works both ways. You can't believe in your own innocence unless you believe in other people's innocence too. And you won't be able to accept that you deserve love instead of punishment, unless you believe that other people deserve love instead of punishment. So you need to extend TO others, do unto others as you would have them do to you... be forgiving as much as you want to be forgiven - unconditionally. Be loving as much as you want to be loved, unconditionally.

Nobody deserves to die for making a mistake. Everyone deserves to live and be happy and enjoy life and be loved forever regardless, by a love that is so full and whole and strong and unconditionally that it doesn't even blink an eye when you make a mistake, it just keeps on loving you endlessly. Can you handle that? Total endless love? That's what God has to offer.

The way I see the world, I recognize at least in theory that it was made by mistake. It was made to oppose God's nature, even as an attack on God. It is unnatural and strange and filled with contradictions and conflict. It is inherently limited, problematic, confused and made from ideas of death and sin. Ok, so that's just what it is. A botched mis-creation.

But at the same time, while keeping that squarely in mind, and without using it to judge or condemn the world, I can also recognize that some of the "hell-like bullshit" that we made is not "all that bad". I mean, I just ate some pretty tasty French toast for breakfast. ie, "it's not all bad". The toast isn't heaven and must not substitute for it, but it can be enjoyed for what it is.

I'm finding out, the long hard way, that it's okay to enjoy some of the shit we made. To live a little. Because otherwise if all we do is label the world as a picture of crucifixion and death, our outlook can become a bit bleak.

I see that yes, on the one hand we did make a quite faulty, terrorizing, awkward and very bizarre world, but at the same time, it's possible to find a way to forgive it. To look at it without holding it against itself. It's flawed yes, but if I start labelling it as flawed I'm really accusing it of sin. And then I'll start experiencing it from a vantage point of suffering "from it".

The course seems to point to an attempt to "save" the world, and when we look at what it's being saved from, it's being saved from our accusation of sin. Saved from our projections of faulty meaning that we've given to it. Allowed to just be neutral and "what it is" without attacking or condemning it for being what it is. Without judging it wrongly and only sharing the Holy Spirit's judgement of it.

Yes it's a picture of hell and murder, but if I start holding that against it and using it as a way to condemn it, then I'm going to be dragged down into it. Even the ego knows that it slightly depends on God and accepts SOME good. It doesn't reject goodness entirely, but rather mixes it with evil ideas and confuses them.

Even if we made galaxies and planets and black holes in error, we could look at them from a more loving perspective and appreciate them for what they are, not making them into something they're not. We could be careful not to turn them into idols or something to depend on or artificially value, remembering always to recognize that the world is FALSE. But even a false world can become a forgiven world. And a forgiven world can be appreciated through beautiful vision.

"The real world can ACTUALLY BE PERCEIVED. All that is necessary is a willingness to perceive nothing ELSE. For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM. The ego sees SOME good, but never ONLY good. That is WHY its perceptions are so variable. It does not reject goodness entirely, for this you could not accept, but it always ADDS something that is NOT real TO the real, thus CONFUSING ILLUSION AND REALITY. For perceptions cannot be partly true. If you believe in truth AND illusion you CANNOT TELL WHICH IS TRUE."

"Each spot HIS (Holy Spirit's) 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."

"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."

ACIM says that "I do do not know what anything including this means". It also says that if you let go of everything you ever learned, then you become open to actually learning. In effect, it boils down to that we need to let go of the accumulation of "answers" that we've taught ourselves, becoming ready and willing to be open to something that we "may not know".

Only by being willing to, in effect, be a "beginner", or a "student", are we really receptive. You'll notice that people who are beginners to ACIM are in fact quite open minded, and that in fact many who have been trying to do the course for decades can become very closed-minded and rigid.

This is because we think that we've found all the answers or learned everything there is to learn. But Jesus is really saying that your mind needs to approach an innocent and "new" kind of state, where you are trusting and open to guidance, where you can be told what to do, where you are willing to serve God's will, and where you are not filled with "plans" and "wishes" and "control" and "being right" and the whole accumulation of ego nonsense. To be as if you are only just starting out, all the time.

This takes for you to let go and purge out of yourself all of the past and all of your false beliefs and all of the trying to do everything on your own. To let go of all the sense of gaining and getting and taking and accumulating. To get past the whole intellectual pursuit of amassing more and more concepts and theories. And just get down to being primitive, in a sense, original and innocent and pure.

That's why it's all about purification. Throw that shit out. We're actually in a process of retracing our steps and going BACK to where we came from. That's why atonement is about UNDOING. It's radical, the teaching, that to gain heaven, you need to let go of everything you think you know and give up everything you ever learned. Only be returning to a fresh clean slate can you be ready to accept what is already true. "In gratitude and thankfulness we come, with empty hands and open hearts and minds, asking but what You give."

"Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false or good or bad; of every thought it judges worthy and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God."

"Heaven Itself is reached by empty hands and open minds, which come with nothing to find everything and claim it as their own."

"You would make no ATTEMPT to judge, because it would be quite apparent to you that you do not know WHAT ANYTHING MEANS. You are afraid of this, because you believe that, WITHOUT THE EGO, all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that, without the ego, ALL WOULD BE LOVE."

"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."

"Do not be concerned how you can learn a lesson so COMPLETELY different from everything you have taught yourselves. How would you know? Your part is very simple. You need only recognize that everything YOU learned you DO NOT WANT. Ask to BE taught, and do NOT use your experiences to confirm what YOU have learned. When your peace is threatened, or disturbed in ANY way, say to yourself, "I do not know what anything, INCLUDING THIS, means. And so I do NOT know HOW TO RESPOND TO IT. And I will not use my own past learning as the light to guide me now." By this refusal to attempt to teach yourself what you do not know, the Guide Whom God has given you, will speak to you. HE will take His rightful place in your awareness, the instant YOU abandon it, and offer it to Him."

"3 Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus keeping it unreal for you."

Forgiveness does not react to problems you think are real and then try to fix them. Forgiveness ensures THERE ARE NO PROBLEMS TO FIX.

Simple isn't it? What forgiveness means, is that you simply are "being forgiving". That you have a forgiving attitude. An attitude in which you see correctly, you do not make illusions, you do not separate, you do not attack, you do not judge, you do not make sin real, and you simply observe clearly that nothing has happened.

This awareness of truth simply shows you the proof that there is no ego, there is nothing to really undo, there is not even really anything to forgive.

Forgiveness should NOT be an attempt to "fix" or "undo" stuff which seems to really exist. The things which seem to exist, as ego stuff, are illusions of things existing. These perceptions have ONLY come about as a result of FAILING to be forgiving.

"He who would not forgive must judge, to justify his failure to forgive."

Forgiveness is fore-giveness. It is a willingness to give love fully, at all times. That is what makes for a forgiving attitude, versus being "unforgiving" ie attacking. By constantly emitting truth and love and light, a forgiving mind simply does not MAKE errors. That means it does not MAKE ego.

It is only when we slip into being unforgiving that we MAKE the ego at all, and then it seems to show up as something that seems real, but still isn't. Through being unforgiving, we weave dreams, fiction and illusions.

It is not really then that you need to DO anything about any of the errors that you make, any of the mistakenness, or anything to do with the ego at all. The ego is not the problem. The problem is that you stopped being forgiving. Or simply, that you tried to be separate from God. That's the only problem. So returning to being with God, to being forgiving, is the solution.

Forgiveness then is not a process as such. It is a permanent attribute of the Son of God. Even after the world disappears and you're back in full awareness of God, you will still be forgiving. God is permanently forgiving. This has absolutely nothing to do with whether there is anything TO forgive as such. God does not "forgiven you because you did stuff". It's not a pardon. He forgives you forever knowing that you cannot sin. And it is the "privilege of the forgiven to forgive" meaning those who are in a state of forgiveness having accepted atonement are PERMANENTLY forgiving.

Forgiveness is not a matter of... well.. something has gone wrong, or someone sinned, and now I have to DO something to clean up the mess. That is not forgiveness. That is "forgiveness to destroy." That has made the problem real and now is fighting with the problem to try to make it go away. And who hasn't attempted to use the Course to make bad stuff go away? Or to "forgive other people for what they did"? It doesn't work because that isn't the real problem.

It's not about tackling the error itself directly. The error is an indirect side-effect of moving away from a forgiving attitude. The problem is not the error. The problem is the sense of separation from love/forgivingness. Returning TO a state of pure forgivingness ie love is the ANSWER which automatically will undo and disappear any of the errors which were manifest. And that is miraculous.

We really need to learn not to fight with illusions, but instead to drop the belief that you NEED to fight with them at all, to recognize that they are not the problem, that they are not even real and do not exist, and thereby return TO a mindset of a forgiving attitude.

A fore-giving mind gives ahead of time to ENSURE that there is no error made, that perception remains true, and therefore that ego simply is not MADE at all. There being no ego and no error, there is nothing TO forgive. But rather, forgiveness MAINTAINS a state of "having nothing to forgive".

Therefore when forgiveness is "complete", it means that all things which seemed to need to be forgiven are now forgiven, and it is really only that you are being forgiving NOW (and peramenently) that those errors appear to not be showing up any more. They are not showing up because you are not MAKING them, rather than that you really tackled "real substance" of ego stuff and manipulated it through some process to transform it.

The ego does not need to be undone, because it does not really exist in the first place. Rather, we need to simply come to RECOGNIZE that it does not exist, by stepping out of judgement (unforgivingness) and back into a forgiving attitude. A forgiving attitude looks and sees that there IS no sin, there is no ego, there is no separation, there is no reality to sickness or death, and literally nothing has happened.

Forgiveness and atonement and salvation are all words for the same thing.

So how do you "DO" forgiveness? You really don't. If you are DOING "forgiveness" (as a process) it is because you believe there is something to forgive, which means you are actually being unforgiving, and therefore your doing of forgiveness is really an attack - an attempt to make a "real problem" change. But what you DO need to, or seem to need to "do", is to become clear that there IS NOT ANYTHING TO FORGIVE, by correctly perceiving, and thus correcting perceptual errors so that you do not see stuff AS real sin.

To get to that place does appear to require a process or a transition, in which you question what it is you think needs to be forgiven, and LEARN WHY IT DOES NOT. ie, to learn to see it correctly and not in a distorted way, so that you can RECOGNIZE it for what it is, realize it was not a real attack, there has not BEEN any real effects, the causes you thought were causes are not causes, and withdraw from it all sense of belief that it even exists or has happened at all, and therefore completely circumvent the ego's insistence that there is a "real problem" to deal with.

The Holy Spirit does not fight the ego because He knows there is no ego. The Holy Spirit reminds us that what we THINK we need to forgive, does not exist, and therefore it IS forgiven.

We do not need to forgive other people, because they have NOT done what we thought they did and they are NOT being the source of OUR unforgiveness. They do not need to change at all. And we ourselves are also not in need of any real change, only recognition. We have not done what we thought we had done. It's an illusion.

We must learn to recognize it is NOT REAL and therefore what we THOUGHT we had to "deal with" or to "forgive" or "overcome" or "prevent" really isn't even there in the first place. We're not seeing correctly because we are in error, and we are in error ONLY because we are not being forgiving. We've bought into some lies. Lies are not solved by attacking the lies, they are solved by TRUTH.

You are already forgiven and you are already purely forgiving. God created you to be permanently forgiving, SO THAT there would never arise any kind of error or thing TO forgive, given that everything was already seen correctly as perfectly innocent. Everything else is "unforgiveness", judgement, attack, and so-called "ego", which does not really exist at all.

You think your life is your own life. It is not. Your life is belongs to God.

It is God's life, living through you. You are His extension, created by His Will, for His Purpose. Not that you are some kind of slave or unwilling servant - you are free, and you SHARE in life, but it's not really 'your life'.

The life that you are, comes from God, and is shared with God. It's His as much as yours.

That which flows through you or extends love through you, that's God's love, which you can share in, but you cannot possess it. It's not your love. It's not exclusive to you. You don't get to control it.

You could spend your whole 'life' in control and believing that you own this life, that you own yourself, that you own all rights to decide and to live as you please. That you 'have' rights. It's not your life to own. God owns you.

God shares His love with you, He provides you with everything you need in total abundance, He extends everything He has to you, as you, and you do not need anything else. You are completely sustained by the love of God. You are not sustained by yourself or the things in your life.

Without God you would not exist, not just in the sense that He gave birth and therefore you owe Him, but in the sense that you exist because He is permanently creating you. You are as God created you and nothing else. You cannot add to yourself or remove from yourself against His will, but in a fairytale.

The ego is the device which you have made to seem to take over ownership of life, to possess it, to control it, to direct it, to decide about it, to make it how you think it should be, to manipulate it, to build it and rearrange it, to judge it, to reject it, and to do with and to it whatever you seem to want. But it's not your life. Your ego has stolen it from God.

You belong to God. Your life belongs to God. You can share it fully, abundantly and freely, but you cannot make it your private property.

Where is there room in your life for God? Where are you allowing God to live in you? Where are you sharing in God's love? Where are you extending God's love and doing your Father's business? Where are you allowing and accepting the Authority that God has as your Creator? Where are you standing in the way of God trying to be a separate authority that stands against His and opposes His will?

If you are against God you are against love. And since God created you, being against God is being against yourself. So while you try to be a separate self with a separate will in a separate world having a separate life, you are actually against your life. And you then think your life is yours, but it isn't... this farce of a life you own actually means you have disowned your real life. You've disowned your life with God. You've passed off ownership as a substitute for being owned by God. You think you'd rather be the one who owns God, but you can't. Not even if you try. But you try.

God loves you, always has, always will. You are His to love forever.

It can be very therapeutic to just listen and be still and judge not while someone expresses themeslves. This is the essence of being forgiving.

"Forgiveness … is still, and quietly does nothing. … It merely looks, and waits, and judges not" - ACIM

When we all have egos, we're all so busy not listening. We're too busy broadcasting and transmitting illusions and stories to make ourselves special.

Even if you're in a conversation with someone and you're supposedly listening, you're probably still not FULLY listening because you're not in a state of forgiveness.

Instead you're starting to mentally engage with what was said, are starting to process it, are chewing on it, judging it, judging the person, thinking about what to say, having memories of your own personal story, resisting the person and hoping they will shut up soon, etc. All of these activities mean you are not being forgiving, but it also means you are not fully listening. You're not paying full attention. You are not being fully present because you're lost in your own ego.

So then when the person speaks, they sense this. They know in the mind/energetic level that they are not being heard. They know that there are limits and boundaries in place, which you put there, which are your attempts to make them stop and shut up. Especially if you start to offer advice or talk over them or try to stop their expression. Maybe their expression is very ego and it triggers you and you just want it to stop because you can't just be still.

The result of this is that the person does not feel permitted to fully express themselves. They don't feel that you are listening, that you recognize them deep down, that you really care unconditionally, or that you even want them to continue. They will take these cues, consciously or not, and it will stop them fully expressing.

We are all so used to walking around in a world where everyone is always broadcasting that we feel terribly constipated with ego energies, feelings and expressions, which are not being ALLOWED to fully express. Nobody is listening! And that's because everyone has egos and are not in a state of forgiveness. Forgiveness is a state of mind of stillness and listening and allowing and presence and non-judgement. That's the state that we're sorely lacking in this world.

This state is a state of "holding space". It means that you are so still and clear and non-judging and present that you simply allow and listen and permit everything. You do not resist, you do not get caught up in your own thoughts, you don't get lost in your own reactions, and you don't try to stop the person. If you do this for someone and you let them just express, you will notice something really interesting happens.

Not only will they express themselves and all their ego stories, feelings and thoughts, but they will seem to really go overboard, over the top with major ego expression. Given permission that it's okay to express fully, as proven by your forgiving willingness to listen and be present, it all just comes flooding out. The person doesn't even quite know why they are doing this. They can seem to become "very ego" while they do this. YOU MUST NOT try to stop that. It's good. They are venting. Maybe for the first time someone is finally fully listening to their heart's pain and they can therefore finally let it out and let it go all the way.

People are natural expressers. Even if it's ego shit coming out and totally bullshit, they still need to express it, and not being in a situation where it's safe and okay - unconditionally okay - to be as ego as they like, it just stays stuck inside.

Also when you are in a state of holding space and being fully present with the person, where you are actually giving your FULL ATTENTION while simultaneously backing totally off from expressing anything of your own, this creates a kind of "space". That is, your intense attention connects to the person where they are, and the fact that you are totally withholding your own expression creates "space" in between the two of you. It's a space that you're not flooding with your own expressions, because you are RECEIVING.

This space is held by the mind and can actually be an energetic presence. You form it with your EMPATHY. In True Empathy you are listening intently and sharing awareness and unconditional acceptance, WITHOUT ENTERING INTO the person's problem. This is TRUE empathy. Empathising without engaging or joining in or making real the illusions that flow out in any way. And that doesn't just mean be quiet on the outside, you must be totally present and attentive INSIDE your mind as well, otherwise you are distracted with ego and are not listening.

And because there is a kind of law that nature fills a vacuum, their ego is SUCKED OUT. It pours out to fill the space. Or to put it another way, your willingness to FULLY RECEIVE allows them to FULLY EXPRESS. The person may not even realize they are really digging deep and sharing all their deep dark secrets and even stating embarassing egoic "secrets" that they never told anyone. Onlookers might judge them and label them as evil! But you have to let it just flow out into the space. Just listen, fully. Give your full attention in silence.

After the person has "finished" expressing, having been heard deeply perhaps for the first time ever, and having aired tons of dirty laundry and guilt and everything in between, they will tell you... if you succeeded in this .... they'll tell you, they feel TREMENDOUSLY PEACEFUL. They got it out! They finally could let it all out and let it go instead of having it shoved halfway down their throat by everyone else who is too self-absorbed to ever give them permission to fully express.

I have done this before, by accident. I didn't know what I was doing, but I was doing it. I recall a person at an old job who started to brag. He was a natural bragger. But as he did, instead of wanting to shut him up as such, I just paid attention and let him get on with it. I held space, sort of accidentally. And he just kept going, and going, and going. He really really vented, and started even telling me about all these secret exploits and perversions that he'd been doing, just a great big giant ego brag. He didn't even know why he was expressing so much, he just kept going! An onlooker judged him, not understanding what was happening, telling him that he should stop talking because he was making a fool of himself. But it was a HEALING.

And then,..... he wound down, and he said, he couldn't believe how peaceful he felt. He was shocked at how calm he was. It was simple. Pay full attention and be fully present without your own mental noise.

Also, if a person is quite shy or sensitive, introverted or has difficulty or fear expressing themselves, this is like GOLD. If you are like this, you know that you are very much put off by the loud intensity of everyone else's expressions, and usually you will only express yourself to one individual in a secret corner when no-one else is looking. Only if there is near silence do you feel permitted to make sound, to speak, or to express yourself. You are really sensitive and everyone's just "regular" level of expression is experienced as like LOUD. Like, they're shouting all the time and don't really want to hear you at all. And especially if the person is domineering or controlling or takes over expressing for everyone, you can bet you will just shrivel up into a hole of loneliness.

That's why sensitive people become so quiet and shy. In their spectrum of expression, they are drowned out. Loud intense or even just regular people can "shut down" sensitive people and make them even shyer, because they're never really given an opportunity to BE HEARD. People won't shut the fuck up for long enough to let them express their soft gentle expressions!

If you say to a shy sensitive person, that you're going to be totally quiet and just listen and that they can go ahead and just talk and tell you anything... anything at all, just go ahead and I'll listen quietly.... that's like GOLD. If you will trust that as a sensitive person, you will then start to express yourself, and you'll keep going, and going, and you'll explore and uncover all kinds of things that you could never tell anyone. It's SO healing and cathartic. To be heard in this overly broadcasting ultra-loud ego-screaming world, it's absolutely treasure. It touches a person. It heals them. Sometimes as a sensitive person I wish the whole world would SHUT THE FUCK UP for long enough for me to express myself.

(I WILL BE HEARD! Thanks for letting me express that, lol)

This is also partly why my expressive energies have diverted themselves into the silent, unhurried expression through typing and writing.. ... people don't shut you up when you put it down on paper.Mostly. Until they start reading it, hah. Then it's "that's too long to read, shut up". .. ie, I can't read all that text... when will *I* be able to talk about myself! lolol

Anyway. Hold space for people. It is thoroughly deeply healing. We should have healing circles where we do nothing but let people express silently. This is partly how it's set up in Alcoholics Anonymous and AlAnon and other programs with a "no cross-talk" rule... although it should be extended to a "no mental chatter either" rule. No ego.

Be quiet. Be present. Listen. Let people be fully acknowledged. This is an expression of true forgiveness.

Remember, this is part of being truly forgiving. And having the opportunity to PRACTICE this is an opportunity to be forgiving. As Jesus said:

"Forgiveness … is still, and quietly does nothing. … It merely looks, and waits, and judges not" - ACIM

Whether it be truth, or love, or the Holy Spirit, or Christ, the Holy instant, or your soul/one self, something that has come from God has to be the thing that corrects your mind. Your ego mind cannot correct itself. Light must enter from outside of it. You can't solve a problem from inside the problem.

Something of God has to help you. This is because LOVE is the active agent that CAUSES fear to disappear and GIVES life in order to UNDO death. Something that HAS life in it must give that life to that which lacks life. The lack cannot be supplied by that which is lacking. Those who have MORE, give to those who have less. Those who have and ARE love, give to those who lack love.

Your task is to RECEIVE an "off-the-shelf solution" from God, a solution that is GIVEN to you and done FOR you, such that all you need to is accept it and receive it, and then extend it to others. Love and life does not come from you, it comes through you. Correction does not come from you, it comes through you. Healing does not come from you, it comes through you.

"Truth will correct all errors in my mind. I am mistaken when I think I can Be hurt in any way. I am God's Son, Whose Self rests safely in the Mind of God."

"Never approach the holy instant AFTER you have tried to remove all fear and hatred from your mind. That is ITS function. Never attempt to OVERLOOK your guilt BEFORE you ask the Holy Spirit's help. That is HIS function."

"referring decisions to the Holy Spirit with increasing frequency."

"Your part is only to offer Him a LITTLE willingness to LET Him remove all fear and hatred, and to BE forgiven."

"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."

"He has forgiven you already, for such is His function, given Him by God. Now must you share His function, and forgive whom He has saved, whose sinlessness He sees, and whom He honors as the Son of God."

"No needs will long be left unmet, if you leave them ALL to Him Whose FUNCTION is to meet them. This is His function, and NOT YOURS."

"Do His work, for you SHARE in His function. As your function in Heaven is creation, so your function on earth is healing."

"I who am host to God AM worthy of Him. He Who ESTABLISHED His dwelling-place in me created it as He would have it be. It is not needful that I make it ready for Him, but only that I DO NOT INTERFERE with His plan to RESTORE to me my own AWARENESS of my readiness, which is eternal. I need ADD nothing to His plan, But to RECEIVE it, I must be willing NOT to substitute my own IN PLACE of it."

"We thank you, Father, for Your guarantee of only happy outcomes in the end. Help us not interfere, and so delay the happy endings You have promised us for every problem that we can perceive; for every trial we think we still must meet."

"The Holy Spirit will not delay at all in answering your EVERY question what to do. He KNOWS. And He will TELL you, and then do it FOR you."

"Salvation comes from my One Self."

"The love of Christ will light YOUR faces, and shine from them into a darkened world that NEEDS the light"

"Today I let Christ's vision look upon all things for me and judge them not, but give each one a miracle of love instead."

"And God Himself shall wipe away all tears."

"The answer is GIVEN. Seek not to ANSWER it, but merely RECEIVE the answer AS it is given. In preparing for the holy instant, do NOT attempt to make yourself holy to be READY to receive it. That is but to confuse YOUR role with His. Atonement CANNOT come to those who think that THEY must FIRST atone, but only to those who offer it NOTHING MORE than simple willingness to make way for it."

"All this is GIVEN you, who would but SEE your brother sinless. All this is GIVEN, waiting on your desire but to RECEIVE it. 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."

"I cannot seen in darkness but in light."

Instead of thinking of the ego, think of two thought systems or two minds. Jesus refers in ACIM to us having a higher mind and a lower mind. A portion of mind became 'lower' in the separation from God, and focuses on being separate.

"The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought"

"I AM working with your higher mind whether you are asleep or awake, (just as your ego does with your lower mind.."

"Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities. This is the basic distinction between intellectualization and thinking. One creates the physical, and the other the spiritual, and we believe in what we create."

When you are in the higher mind, you are in the light and you can see. You recognize what everything is, nothing is hidden, and you are not deceived.

When you are in the lower mind, you cannot see, you cannot recognize, and you are deceived. It's like being unconscious. You cannot tell that you are in the lower mind because it is a place of darkness.

When you are in the lower mind you lose perspective and lose sight of where you are, lost in the woods. You may not even realize you are in the lower mind at all, and think everything is normal, and may forget completely that there even is a higher way to see.

This is because the lower mind is the realm of egotism, separation, darkness and confusion, narrowness and closed-ness and limitation. It's a mind level that perceives falsely, makes illusions real and believes in the physical world. It is where you are deceived and distracted and reacting as a victim.

So really when you are in the "ego-mind" (thought system) you have a kind of loss of awareness that makes it much much harder to recognize that you are in the ego. The whole thought system of that mindset is like being in a dark prison cell, lost and alone, and not even remembering that there even is a light outside.

When you get back out into the higher mind, into the light, you can see again, you can recognize things, and you can tell where you are. You also, when in the higher mind, suddenly have the perspective that recognises where and what the lower mind is, and that there even is a lower mind within you.

This allows you to realize that you WERE in the lower mind, because you know that it was a state of ego. From the perspective of being in the higher mind, you have a sense that you have a kind of "lower self" within you that is very primal and basic and victim-oriented and fearful.

This is the "self you made", the ego-oriented thought system. Like a child that throws temper tantrums and screams at the universe. It's a whole system of thinking and perceiving.

If you slip out of the higher mind you lose sight of even HAVING a "lower self" within you, that you need to be vigilant against, and you fall back into it. Then you lose sight of the big picture and it seems like the lower self is all that exists and all that you are. Then it's a scramble trying to get yourself back out of it into the light.

It's like, you need the light of the higher mind in order to be able to tell that you're in the lower mind, but when you're in the lower mind you don't have that light so you get lost and stuck in it easily. Trying to get yourself out of the darkness into the light is the best thing you can do to give you perspective and help you to recognize where you are and what you're doing.

The aim is to be in the higher mind as much as possible so that the lower mind is ultimately dissolved. Or rather, that that portion of mind is freed from its egoic focus and its belief in separation so that that mind can be reintegrated as part of the higher mind.

Also note that the lower mind includes the intellect, which is a seemingly 'higher' function within the lower mind that uses separation to split things up and analyse and judge. Jesus says in ACIM that this intellectual lower mind actually produces the physical world of space and time. The higher mind rises above the battlefield and transcends it.

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

When you hold a grievance, where you demand that someone else has to change because they are unacceptable to you, you are using the ego's version of forgiveness.

If you claim they are wrong or bad or evil or sinful or guilty in any way, you are saying you need them to change. They should not be the way they are. They are wrong and bad and evil to be the way they are. They should not be this way.

This means really that you want THEM to change so that YOU do not have to change. And it also means that you in fact want to be AFFECTED by them, as a victim, but you want them to affect you in a way that matches your desires.

So if you were to get a person to change and be the way "you want them to be", then supposedly they'd now treat you the way you want them to, and give you what you want. Maybe they'd now "make you happy". But this is still a form of victimhood.

Being caused to be happy by something outside yourself is just as ego as being cauesd to be unhappy by something outside yourself. They are both forms of being at the effect of the world. And when you depend on the world being nice to you, giving you what you want, meeting your standards, or forcing you into preferable states, you're forgiving to destroy.

By demanding that someone change, or be not like they are, which is your projected judgement of them in the first place, you are destroying them with your judgement of them. You evaluate first that they are evil and then ask THEM to be the one to stop being evil. This is not only self destructive, it's an attempt to destroy the world.

It's like accusing someone of being a bad person, even when they're not, and trying to put that onto them, and then demanding that THEY change to get out of the prison that you've put them in, to make you happy. It's like asking someone to do your own dirty work.

So first you try to destroy them, then you demand they stop being the destroyed person, to appease you and for your own gain. Like hurting someone then requiring that they get up and thank you for it. This is how the destroys in order to try to bring about a "forgiven" state where the sin seems to have been removed. In a sense you demand that they "resurrect" from being evil, for your benefit.

If someone undoes the sin you accuse them of, by changing, and complying with your wishes, then the ego now says well, you have indeed forgiven, and now that I see you are not being the evil I accused you of, my perception of you is not seeing evil in you. And that implies that I've done a forgiveness. If you stop being the evil sinner that I hate, then apparently I have forgiven you. But nothing has really changed in my mind, so there has been no real forgiveness at all.

It's like when someone does something you disapprove of, and then you say you are not going to forgive them until they change their ways. They have to repent. And when they change their ways and meet your conditions, you will say yes, very good, you did what I wanted and now I approve of you, and now you are my loyal servant. Then you are temporarily bestowed with an ego blessing of seeming mercy, while still enforcing that if you return to your wicked ways, you'll be punished just as much as before.

This in effect is therefore like some dictating tyrant who wants everything to be their way and wants everyone else to comply. To have power over everyone and control everything. To force the world to stop being the way it is, or the way you judge it to be. If those other motherfuckers would just stop being assholes everything would be great for you and life would be smooth. And so the ego seems for an illusion of peace in the midst of its warring ways.

"The ego's plan for salvation centers around holding grievances. It maintains that if someone else spoke or acted differently, if some external circumstance or event were changed, you would be saved. Thus the source of salvation is constantly perceived as outside yourself. Each grievance you hold is a declaration, and an assertion in which you believe, that says, "If this were different, I would be saved." The change of mind that is necessary for salvation is thus demanded of everyone and everything except yourself."

"...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."

In order for you to fully allow Holy Spirit to decide for you, whether you are truly innocent or guilty, you need to be fully willing to accept His verdict.

That means, unconditional acceptance.

If I go to Holy Spirit holding onto some kind of hope that He will decide one way or another, or some kind of belief in the reasons why I will keep my guilt, then I'm not really allowing HIM to decide for me. It means I'm still using my own decision-making processes to evaluate my own guilt and am judging myself and having an authority problem.

So let's put it this way.

Think of Holy Spirit like a courtroom judge who is going to listen to your case. In this courtroom session, you do not have any say in what the law is. The law will be perfectly enacted. You will not be able to squirm your way out of or into anything. So really, you do not have any say in what the verdict is going to be. Holy Spirit knows about all of the evidence and nothing is hidden. So you really are not in a position to be able to control anything. It is impossible for you to sway the verdict or get off lightly or persuade the jury or anyway. All you're going to be able to do is receive a verdict. Whatever that verdict says, is going to be the law, and you are going to have to accept it. There is no point in fighting it or resisting it.

So in order to get yourself ready for Holy Spirit's verdict, you are going to need to SURRENDER. And that means, unconditionally, that you give up trying to evaluate for yourself whether you are guilty or innocent. It's no use trying to believe EITHER that you are innocent when you feel guilty, or that you are guilty when you're really innocent. You do not know. You do not have the faculties to know. That's why you've come to court, to allow He Who Knows to make a completely informed decision.

So your position now is that you will ACCEPT whatever Holy Spirit's verdict is. If Holy Spirit says that you are 100% guilty, then you are going to WILLINGLY ACCEPT THIS, even if it sucks. If Holy Spirit says you are 100% innocent, you are going to WILLINGLY ACCEPT THIS also, even if you think you're meant to be guilty. See, regardless of what YOU think, you have to put ALL of that aside and be willing to really hand over the decision-making to Him. It's not up to you whether you're innocent or guilty. That's for God to decide. You have to admit to yourself you are not in a position to 'invent' innocence or guilt. You are willing to surrender and accept whatever God says is true. And that means unconditionally, no matter what He says. You're just going to have to live with it.

I don't mean that to sound dire like some kind of terrible fate, but you do need to have that unconditional willingness to ACCEPT and allow Him to decide. So then you ask Him. Ok Holy Spirit, here's all the shit that I believe, all my guilt, etc... what do YOU think of this? Am I really guilty? You decide. If he says you're guilty, you're guilty. If he says you're innocent, you're innocent. So you listen. And he says.... drumroll please....

His unconditional response is ALWAYS, YOU ARE INNOCENT.

And as He tells you this, any fear relating to what His verdict will be, will lift. And you will be relieved that you are NOT GUILTY. None of what you thought about yourself or others was true. And because you were willing to fully accept, unconditionally, His verdict, you are now in a position to actually ACCEPT IT. So you allow it. And this allows His HEALING to come into you, and literally to undo and correct all of the consequences of your wrong decision, which actually does mean undoing all negative feelings and energies in your mind/body, removing all guilt, and leaving you PURIFIED. It may take a bit of practice for you to allow Him to do this, but He can indeed 'supernaturally' heal you of all consequences that came from your guilt, especially now that you have accepted that you are innocent.

Party time!

In this passage from "creation and communication", Jesus talks about how God created us as individual beings and minds. There are more than *35* references to multiple sons/minds/creations/individuals in this section alone. These mentions are not metaphors or concepts. Heaven actually DOES contain multiple minds, and each mind is responsible for choosing freely to do God’s will. This is why heave and "non-duality" or "oneness" concepts are a poor fit for the Reality of Creation.

"This communication IS the will of God. Creation and communication are synonymous. 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. This communication is perfectly abstract, in that its quality is universal in application, and not subject to ANY judgment, ANY exception, or ANY alteration. God made YOU BY this and FOR this. The mind (of a soul) can distort its functions, but it cannot endow itself with those it was not given. That is why the mind cannot totally lose the ability to communicate, even though it may refuse to utilize it on behalf of being. Existence as well as being rests on communication."

"Existence is SPECIFIC in how, what, and with whom communication is worth undertaking. Being is completely without these distinctions. It is a state in which the mind IS in communication with everything that is real, including its OWN SOUL. To whatever extent YOU permit this state to be curtailed, YOU are limiting YOUR sense of your OWN reality, which becomes total only by recognizing ALL reality in the glorious context of its real relationship to YOU. This IS YOUR reality. Do no desecrate it or recoil from it. It is YOUR real home, YOUR real temple, and YOUR REAL SELF."

"God, who encompasses ALL Being, NEVERTHELESS CREATED SEPARATE BEINGS WHO HAVE EVERYTHING INDIVIDUALLY, but who want to share it to increase THEIR joy. Nothing that is real can be increased EXCEPT by sharing it. That is why God Himself created YOU. Divine Abstraction takes joy in application, and that is what creation MEANS. How, what, and to whom are irrelevant, because real creation gives everything since it can only create like itself. Remember that in being, there is no difference between having and being, as there is in existence. In the state of being, the mind gives everything always."

"The Bible repeatedly states that you should praise God. This hardly means that you should tell Him how wonderful He is. He has no ego with which to accept thanks, and no perceptions with which to judge your offerings. But unless you take your part in the creation, His joy is not complete because YOURS is incomplete. And THIS He does know. He knows it in his own Being and ITS EXPERIENCE OF HS SON’S EXPERIENCE. 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."

"God HAS kept your kingdom for you, but He cannot share His joy with you until you know it with your whole mind. Even revelation is not enough, because it is communication FROM God. But it is not enough until it is shared. God does not need revelation returned to Him, which would clearly be impossible, but He DOES want revelation brought to OTHERS. This cannot be done with the actual revelation, because its content cannot be expressed, and it is INTENSELY PERSONAL TO THE MIND WHICH RECEIVES IT. But it can still be returned BY THAT MIND through its attitudes TO OTHER MINDS which the knowledge from the revelation brings.

God is praised whenever ANY MIND learns to be wholly helpful. This is impossible without being wholly harmless, because the two beliefs cannot coexist. The truly helpful (many) are invulnerable, because THEY are NOT protecting THEIR EGOS (individual egos), so that nothing CAN hurt THEM. Their helpfulness IS their praise of God, and He will return their praise of Him, because they are like Him and can rejoice TOGETHER. God goes out to THEM and through THEM, and there is great joy throughout the Kingdom. EVERY MIND THAT IS CHANGED adds to this joy with ITS OWN INDIVIDUAL WILLINGNESS to share in it.

The truly helpful are God’s MIRACLE WORKERS (many), whom I direct until we are ALL UNITED in the joy of the kingdom. I will direct YOU to wherever YOU can be truly helpful, and to WHOEVER can follow my guidance through YOU.

ACIM's simple teaching: "This is a very simple course. Perhaps you do not feel that a course which, in the end, teaches nothing more than that only reality is true is necessary. BUT DO YOU BELIEVE IT?"

Do you believe this fully and deeply, that only God's truth is true? Maybe in theory, to an extent. But that's not what matters. What matters is if you REALLY believe it deep down.

We're simply being asked to ONLY believe God's truth, the truth of heaven and reality, and to disregard all lies and falsehoods. That's all. But we have to be CONVINCED and deeply fully believing that God' truth is true, AND that we want it.

The entire "process" of waking up entails just sorting out the true from the false. Reason being that we've mixed them together and are confused and lost. We have to clearly identify what the truth IS, and we have to in contrast recognize what things are false. And then we have to be willing to believe ONLY the true things.

This is likely to be met with ALL your resistance, because the fact is that EVERY single belief you have that is false has to be brought into question, and had to be recognised as NOT true, and you do NOT WANT to do that. You think the opposite is false and want nothing to do with it, unwilling to even entertain its possibility. You literally will have to give up everything you think you know and be very open to being extremely mistaken.

There really is nothing more to it than that. We identify what is REALLY true in God's terms, we contrast it against what is OPPOSITE, we recognize that they can't BOTH be true, we reject the FALSE in favour of what is TRUE, and accept the truth - which is atonement. The Holy Spirit helps us in this sorting out:

"The Spiritual eye is the mechanism of miracles, because what the Spiritual eye perceives IS truth. The Spiritual eye perceives both the Creations of God AND the creations of man. Among the creations of man, it can also separate the true from the false by its ability to perceive totally rather than selectively. It thus becomes the proper instrument for reality testing, which always involves the necessary distinction between the true and the false."

"The Holy Spirit points quietly to the contrast, knowing that you will finally let Him judge the difference FOR you, allowing Him to demonstrate which MUST be true."

"You have need of contrast only here. Contrast and differences are necessary teaching aids, for by them you learn what to avoid, and what to seek."

"The contrast between what is true, and what is not, is PERFECTLY apparent, yet you do NOT see it. The simple and the obvious are NOT apparent to those who would make palaces and royal robes of nothing, believing they are kings with golden crowns BECAUSE of them. All this the Holy Spirit sees, and teaches, simply, that ALL THIS IS NOT TRUE."

"The real world can ACTUALLY BE PERCEIVED. All that is necessary is a willingness to perceive nothing ELSE. For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM. The ego sees SOME good, but never ONLY good. That is WHY its perceptions are so variable. It does not reject goodness entirely, for this you could not accept, but it always ADDS something that is NOT real TO the real, thus CONFUSING ILLUSION AND REALITY. For perceptions cannot be partly true. If you believe in truth AND illusion you CANNOT TELL WHICH IS TRUE."

"Truth must be all-inclusive if it be the truth at all. Accept no opposite and no exceptions, for to do so is to contradict the truth entirely. Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true and nothing else is true. This you have heard before, but may not yet accept both parts of it. Without the first the second has no meaning, but without the second is the first no longer true. Truth cannot have an opposite. This can not be too often said and thought about. For if what is not true is true as well as what is true, then part of truth is false, and truth has lost its meaning. Nothing but the truth is true, and what is false is false."

"Let all these errors go by recognizing them for what they are. They are attempts to keep you unaware you are One Self, united with your Creator, at one with every aspect of creation, and limitless in power and in peace. This is the truth, and nothing else is true."

When I am upset, feeling unhappy, having a cry, feeling guilty or afraid, or whatever, Holy Spirit is gentle and compassionate. He often says, "I know". Sometimes I feel a hand on my shoulder from Him or Jesus.

They are compassionate in that they know that *I* believe I am experiencing something upsetting, that *I* feel sad or whatever. They are there for me, and they don't judge it. They don't even use the opportunity to push me towards some kind of forgiveness or greater awareness. They just hold me and hug me.

However, the fact is that all upset feelings come from a mis-perception that I chose. And I chose that mis-perception so that I could further my separation from God.

So for example, I might feel upset because I saw myself victimized by someone. I might feel sad about how someone rejected me or whatever. And those feelings seem genuine, it seems like I really feel this way and that it's very sad and unfortunate. But, once I'm done with feeling, at some point I need to find the willingness to move beyond this.

I've witnessed how, in particular, when old hurts come up from the past, to be healed, they always feel like how it felt at the time. They're always based on how I was perceiving when I was younger and less aware. Even though at the time I did not understand what was going on, or what it meant, how it made me feel at the time based on that perception is now the feeling that I need to work through and release. But I've also seen how obvious it is, that these feelings were just how I felt 'within' the framework of a certain way of looking at life, and there is usually some kind of mistake in that.

I saw myself as hurt because I didn't perceive correctly. I saw myself as unloved because I didn't recognize my infinite lovability. I saw myself as unworthy because I devalued myself sort of 'by accident' because I didn't know what i was doing. And so I created feelings of unworthy and unlove and so on, which I must 'heal' and release, but even though these feelings seem like they reflected some kind of 'truth', they're not really the ultimate truth.

I need to become willing to admit that, once I've allowed myself to feel and release the 'energy' produced by a false perception, that the perception ITSELF was faulty. And it was the fault perception that LED to faulty feelings. Unhappy feelings come from unhappy perceptions. So I need to now be willing to see differently, to look for a greater truth, to own up to the part that I played in choosing to suffer, to take back my power, to claim responsibility for doing this to myself, and to realize that nobody involved was doing it without my will.

So there is a 'forgiveness' process that needs to occur, above and beyond unhappy feelings, to correct the perception that led to them. And even though Holy Spirit knows this, he seldom prompts or forces me to 'go there' especially not right when I'm feeling how the feelings felt. I let myself fully feel because this releases the energy, even though it's a FALSE energy, to clear it out. To cathart it. THEN my mind is clearer and can have a cognitive shift, as well as being more willing and able to now apply a 'forgiveness' to change my perception.

It's important to let yourself feel and let out the trapped negative emotions, but recognize also that they are only there because of a mistaken way of looking at life, and that mistake needs to be corrected at some point. When you are ready. And not before. And nobody is pushing you or forcing you to have to do that, especially not when you're in the middle of a deep release. Trying to rush someone out of feeling into truth isn't compassionate.

So it's possible to have compassion for someone who is feeling upset even if you know that their upset is false, and there really isn't a need to be upset. Holy Spirit knows that nothing has gone wrong and there is ONLY reason to celebrate, but to tell me that in the middle of me believing heavily that I've been wronged, isn't entirely helpful because I can't hear it until I'm ready and willing. We really believe we've done something terrible to God and deserve to be punished for it, and as we work through those feelings, Holy Spirit is very patient to give you time to 'process' the consequences of a mistaken decision. And then at some point, when you're ready, you will undo the belief that caused it.

False perception is exclusive vision. It sees only a small part of what there is to see, excluding the rest. It is blinded by form and appearance and cannot see past the surface of an illusory world. It has covered the world in labels and categories and fragmented boxes.

True perception is an inclusive vision. It can see the small parts of the illusory world but only as a thin transparency overlaid upon a unifying light. It sees through and beyond the physical realm. The compartmentalizing of the world is removed and all things are placed in a single box.

As such, by being inclusive, vision sees wholly and sees the whole. It has one singular response of love to everything. It is unmoved by form and unchanged by conditions. It doesn't adjust or waver or fluctuate based on circumstances or upon what it seen. It is constant.

It brings a steady light to everything that is seen, such that everything is seen in the same way and with the same judgement of innocence. The steady innocence anchored within is projected outward, seen reflected in everything regardless of its form.

We are therefore transitioning from an exclusive, separating, partial way of seeing, to an inclusive whole-oriented way of seeing. To see everything in the same way. To judge everything as a single whole. To have no favoritism or special interests. To not pick out some parts as ugly and some parts as beautiful. But to bring a higher beauty, detached from form, which is seen in all parts at once.

A forgiven world is then a world of form, which might to unforgiving eyes appear to be separated out by that form. But seen anew with unifying eyes, which ignores the form, forgiving eyes regard everything in the same light and with a singular meaning.

Nothing is rejected or attacked or split off or segregated. Everything, all forms and appearances, are recognized as equally unreal. Simultaneously, the properties of unity, which includes innocence and holiness and love, are seen across all such forms, because these are what are being used for seeing. Thus Earth comes to reflect heaven and is forgiven of its attempt to be a symbol of separation.

Now that the mind is open to seeing wholly, it is open to the whole, and therefore now sees the whole beyond the partial world. It recognizes the world is not even a whole world, and sees the unity beyond the dream. Now is it ready for heaven, to enter into that which is truly one.

"The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness."

"They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeing and yet surely theirs."

The Spiritual eye is the mechanism of miracles, because what the Spiritual eye perceives IS truth. The Spiritual eye perceives both the Creations of God AND the creations of man. Among the creations of man, it can also separate the true from the false by its ability to perceive totally rather than selectively. It thus becomes the proper instrument for reality testing, which always involves the necessary distinction between the true and the false.

Until you learn that what you do to others you do to yourself, and you can be at least a little convinced about this, you will continue to see no point in forgiving. It will have no value to you and you won't want to do it, because you see it only as a way to pardon someone else. If that is what forgiveness means to you - bestowing pardon - it reveals that you don't recognize how forgiveness benefits YOU, or how you are involved in and a recipient of your judgement of others.

You have to keep being reminded that either both of you are innocent or both of you are guilty, a lot, because you have been severely programmed to perceive contrary to this. You think what you do to others has no effect on you, and what they do to you has no effect on them. In this there is injustice and unfairness and mistreatment and victimhood. This way of perceiving has to be gradually eroded and corrected so that you can come to believe and recognize that it simply isn't worth condemning someone because, you know only too well, that your own peace has been lost along with it.

And so this really means that you need to also learn to value peace and love within yourself, toward yourself. Without believing that you are worth loving, you aren't going to see the vested interest in loving others as yourself. You'd maybe rather maintain hate or justified anger for a while because you think the feeling of hating and being angry is actually good for you. You like the rage and the attack and the sense of helplessness, provided someone else is suffering at the same time, so you can convince yourself you're at least not as guilty as they are. But its a losing battle. You have to forgive yourself so that you can learn your worth and value and lovability, otherwise you're not going to want to protect it at all costs.

Once you do establish, to some degree, that you deserve the love of God, and you want it and value it, and your valuing of the truth has been corrected enough, you will start to experience a kind of automatic yet different response to others. Instead of maintaining condemnation at all costs, you'll start to feel that you know better, and that you know that you don't really want to feel like this. You want to feel the peace and love and forgiveness that your own heart deserves. And so even if you get mad at others, the more you forgive and learn your own innocence, the sooner you will feel a kind of growing urge to forgive them sooner. You will lose your taste for the fight and will gradually develop a greater willingness to want to put down your attacks and admit to responsibility and move into truth, simply because it is more valuable to you.

Eventually you will cease to judge, condemn, criticize, attack or project blame or anger onto anyone, solely because you've become very clear that YOU do not deserve any of that. And you also realize that truth is shared and wholeness is equal and you can't access love without sharing it with everyone. There is a oneness to it. The rules that apply to them must apply to you. As you do unto others, you DO do unto yourself. So now you have shared interests. And in your shared interest, it's in your best interest to treat both yourself and others with love and innocence and acceptance and peace. And you'll just decide you no longer want to enter into conflict or separation. And then you'll just remain at peace.

I say some of this because I understand it theoretically makes sense. I am not by any means loving all the time or at peace. But I have begun to notice a growing unwillingness to maintain angst for a long period of time. There is an increasing ... something, in my mind, which nags at me a bit more loudly, a kind of knowing, a surrender, a willingness, that reminds me of a mutual truth. And as I work on surrendering to truth and love and healing this certainty increases and speaks up more loudly. I find myself wanting to forgive sooner, just because I don't want to keep being unhappy. It takes practice. The mind needs to undo all of its ego conditioning of separation and blame and that takes a while. But slowly I see the results of a continually clarifying alignment with Holy Spirit. One forgiveness at a time.

You are the cause of everything you experience. You cannot be victmized against your will. This is the secret of salvation. "You are doing it to yourself." You are responsible for choice because you have free will.

When you DISOWN this responsibility, forming a block to awareness - which is a DENIAL that you are the cause, your mind splits and dissociates.

You do not see the cause of your suffering within yourself because it is blocked from awareness behind your denial. So you reason logically, "if it is not coming from me, it MUST be coming from something that is not me."

Immediately you look outside yourself for a cause. This projects cause outside of yourself. The groundwork has been laid to BLAME anyone and anything, even randomly, for causing what you are experiencing.

So the JUSTIFICATION for anger or any kind of attack, is based on your belief that YOU aren't the one causing it.

IF it were true that someone else is CAUSING what you are experiencing, agaist your will, you WOULD be justified in seeing yourself unfairly treated, and right to be angry.

But since other people are NOT the cause of you, your anger cannot EVER be justified. That justification is based on a MISTAKEN BELIEF that YOU are not the one doing this to yourself.

Your inability to see that you are the cause of your experience, is an act of irresponsibility. So you disown responsibility and give it to someone else. They are now seen as the responsible party. And now anything that happens is THEIR doing.

If you were to remove the blocks to awareness and the denial, and heal the split in your own mind, you would become aware that you are the CAUSE of EVERYTHING you experience. And in that awareness, you would see it is OBVIOUS that no-one else can EVER be involved in causing you against your will.

The notion of blaming anyone for anything then becomes complete nonsense. The only way to blame someone is to start out with the FALSE PREMISE that YOU aren't the one doing it.

This is true no matter what the situation seems to be like, who seems to be doing what to whom, what you think of it, how you judge it, whether its moral or not, whether it's kind or not. No matter who seems to victimize who, if you are angry, you are DISOWNING your power.

Anger is therefore NOT an expression of POWER, it is an expression of POWERLESSNESS. It is an ILLUSION of power, which is actually the OPPOSITE to what it appears.

Those who are powerless are angry. Those who are powerful cannot BE angry. Those who have true power can be assertive, WITHOUT being angry. They also can be most effective. Those who are powerless can only attack and force because they lack any true strength to accomplish anything.

Being angry is NOT being assertive. It is being DESTRUCTIVE, in which there is an attempt to assert at the same time as an attempt to TAKE AWAY the power of another.

True power does not take away the power of others, it EMPOWERS them, recognizing they are one with you. You cannot accept your own empowerment if you are busy believing that others should have no power. You must actually give power TO others, in a healthy way, in order to BE powerful.

If it seems someone has power over you, it is because you have disowned your power and GIVEN IT AWAY through sacrifice and not through sharing. You have lost it because you are at war with yourself. What appears to be their power is really your disowned and projected power, which you must reclaim and reintegrate.

When no-one is seen as having power OVER you, all are seen as having power WITH you as equals. And then there is no competition and no-one "overpowering" others. When there is equal power there is mutual self-responsibility and no grounds for aggression.

People get angry because they are confused about what is causing something. And who woudn't be angry if they thought they had no power to change something, or that they were being caused against their own ability to cause. Owning up to BEING THE CAUSE erases the entire basis for projected responsibility, and makes anger IMPOSSIBLE.

Those who are at peace, are fully empowered, and never angry. Because they see that only forgiveness is justified and nothing can disturb their peace.

In your whole mind, there is a split mind. It's kind of an artificial mind. It's made of illusions. It's a mental construct which blocks awareness by fooling you into thinking it is not all the same identity.

This split mind comprises two parts. One of the parts you are conscious of and you think is your entire self. You've identified with it.

The other part you are mostly unconscious of, having shut it out and pushed it out of awareness. You think that part is not yourself. You do not recognize it as you. And you project it onto/as 'others' to disown it.

The illusion is maintained so long as you are convinced that these two parts are separate, different, unrelated, and not one self. That means you fall for the illusion, the appearance, and the stories each has, that seems to suggest they're not `one`.

The best way to create that illusion is to set them against each other in a war of conflict, which makes them seem like enemies, or opposed to each other, as though they have absolutely nothing in common. This is a deception.

When you do not realize the two selves are part of one self, you are inside the illusion. You've bought into it. And you've identified with one part as your 'self'.

Awakening happens when you look more closely at the illusions which make it seem like these two selves are in fact separate.

Those illusions include any idea of victimhood or victimization, any idea of denial or blame or scapegoating, any irresponsibility or disowning of responsibility, any way in which you reject or judge or abandon yourself, etc. All forms of separation and attack. All of these attack ideas must be questioned.

What then happens is you realize that the 'other' that you thought was not you, IS a part of you. Anything you are experiencing IS chosen by you. And therefore, since you are the 'other' as well as the 'self', you have been doing all of these attacks to yourself. This is the key to salvation/awakening.

You have to get to where you can see that you are playing both sides of the experience. You are both the victim and the victimizer. You are both the attacker and the attacked. You are both the person running away and the person chasing.

And then you will see that both of these 'identities' both have a story. One of them (persona) has a sob-story about how it's just trying to be good and how the other (shadow) keeps attacking it. And the shadow has a story about how it's got nothing to do with the persona and wants to destroy its fake image. You need to look at both stories and realize, both stories are an illusion. The entire purpose of the notion that these two identities are 'separate' is to convince you that your Self - your identity - does not encompass both of them.

You are both of the parts of the split mind. Both of the false identities are within you. And this is where you have an aha moment of awakening. If both of these selves are within you, and if you are literally doing stuff to your 'self' ie you are making the shadow self do stuff to the persona self and vice versa, then you will realize that it is an ILLUSION that they are two separate identities. They are not separate selves. They are part of your ONE self.

Once your sense of self encompasses and is responsible for both of them, the illusion and story of each will be blown. You will see through it and recognize it is a deception. They're not really separate enemies after all, they're both you! And that means you see the sameness and oneness and unity of your identity. Your one self, rather than your dualistic selves. And overlooking (forgiving) these illusions of separation leads you directly to seeing your singularity, your wholeness. The oneness - singleness - of your identity. This is where you awaken.

You awake to a sense of self which encompasses all of the parts that you used to think were separate selves. And you therefore transcend all of those separate selves. You transcend the persona and the shadow. You see through the illusion that you were 'only' one small part of the contents of your mind - the illusion that you were the construct of a separate portion of mind (e.g. intellect). Seeing the oneness of the two becoming one, unifies you and reveals to you the true self.

You are whole, you are inclusive, you are unified, you are one self, you are not a split mind, you are not multiple personalities, you are not at war with your own self, you are not attacking yourself, you are singular, you are 'individual' not multiplicative, you are innocent and holy. Holiness means whole. Simply, awareness of this - experiencing it, is awakening. Letting go of separate selves and returning to one self.

In heaven, we are powerful creative beings and co-creators with God. The proper use of our creative power is constructive and cooperative and aligned with God's will. We create only perfection, beauty, happiness and eternal life.

"Child of God, you were created to create the good, the beautiful, and the holy. Do not lose sight of this."

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

God gave us freedom to create, but that freedom includes the potential ability to TRY to use freedom to imprison freedom, to create something without extending God, to will that we be unwilling, and to deny reality.

This mis-use of creative power that essentially runs against the very nature of creative power itself, produces what's called a "mis-creation". It results in nightmarish hallucinations of impossible things happening, a world without God, a place of suffering and mortality. These "creations" are the result of mis-guided, insane, contradictory, amateurish and childish uses of creative power.

"Your Father created you Wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. 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."

"The creation of the Soul itself has already been perfectly accomplished, but the creation BY Souls has not."

The stuff we mis-create (make), which includes spacetime and Earth and bodies and death, is like a lower and more primitive form of expression. It's really an attempt to create a dead-end, or a world which cannot co-create and cannot live forever.

We use our infinite power to create an uncreative world that we do not want. We're still being essentially creative, but we're creating stuff that isn't ultimately real or true or alive. The "content" that we come up with isn't aligned with God's nature. Like we've "devolved" somewhat and everything we create is lacking in some way (lack of love=sin - a world of sin).

"Miscreation is still a genuine creative act in terms of the underlying IMPULSE, but NOT in terms of the CONTENT of the creation."

"The instinct for creation is NOT obliterated in miscreation. That is why it is always invested with reality."

"You are much too tolerant of Mind-wandering, thus passively condoning its miscreation."

"While the miscreation is NECESSARILY believed in by its own creator, it does not exist at all at the level of true Creation."

"Both the Separation and the fear were MISCREATIONS of the mind, which have to be undone."

So essentially mind has one of two "modes", it can either create constructively in line with God and love, or it can mis-create which produces fearful things which seem to lack perfection and do not last.

If we completely leave out any sense of judgement about miscreation being wrong, or a sin, or something to be guilty for, or to attack the miscreation or condemn it in any way, we would see that it is simply a mistake. It is just a mis-use of the mind by someone that doesn't recognize the futility and self-deception and pointlessness and confusion that is inherent in trying to create the uncreateful.

We could look upon such miscreations, such as Earth, without any judgement. We could think of it as like the creation of a child that has not learned or perfected or mastered its abilities yet. It makes things which are broken, primitive, don't work, contradict themselves, are full of limits, are ugly, designed to malfunction and to fall short.

And then we could consider what God's attitude would be as a loving parent. God would not condemn or hate or judge harshly what had been mis-created by the child. He would recognize the shortcomings, the mistakes, the limitations of what had been made, but would see it as at least a "good first effort" by his children, with potential for improvement. And he would encourage them to continue perfecting the use of their creative power.

"It is curious that the perfect must now be perfected. In fact, it is impossible. But you must remember that when you put yourselves in an impossible situation, you believed that the impossible WAS possible."

If we think of the world therefore as "somewhat bad, not all that bad, a good try" ... recognizing it for what it is and is not, realizing the mistakes inherent in its making, we can be what we call "forgiving" toward it.

Forgiveness could be described as a loving attitude that you have towards something unloving. A less limited viewpoint towards the limited. A more inclusive mindset towards something made to exclude. A less judgemental or attacking perspective on something which was made as an attempted attack on God.

Instead of the world being seen as a horrible hellscape, or as a half-empty cup, we can see the half-full cup and at least give the son of God credit for "trying" (lol). Even if that trying involved some failing. We can let the world be the limited broken thing that it is, while being mindful to "do better in future". To master our creative power and to create greater higher works of art that are more aligned with God and more in-keeping with sanity and harmony with eternal life.

God doesn't condemn or judge our mis-created world. But he would rather that we return to co-creatorship in heaven with him to create only the eternal and the loving.

"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? For one of you is wrong. It must be so."

It sounds like maybe we have a guilty conscience for what we think we've made, doesn't it? A guilt over an attack on God, a guilt about having mis-created, a hatred of what we mis-created, a sense of shame and fear that the hideous thing we made is lurching at us and trying to kill us, even though we are its maker. It's like we made a terrible mistake (a supposed sin) by mis-creating, and it induced guilt, and now we're living with the fallout of believing God would hate us for it.

Jesus also warns us that if we somehow regard the world as a sin, something to be hated, even destroyed, then we're actually denying the fact that we have very powerful minds that can create entire worlds. We need to acknowledge what we HAVE "created", even if it was in a spirit of fear and murder (unmiraculous creation), as being a not-entirely-evil "first attempt" that at least demonstrates the sheer power we DO have to create, even if WHAT we created falls short in so many ways.

"...it is not necessary to protect the mind by denying the un-mindful (physical). There is little doubt that the mind can miscreate. If one denies this unfortunate aspect of its power, one is also denying the power itself.)"

Earth and its surroundings, spacetime, is simply something we've mis-created in a mis-use of our divine power, in a form which is unlike what God would create, and of a nature which tends to attack itself. It is seemingly partly creative and partly destructive, partly good and partly evil, partly light and partly dark. It's an expression of the belief that an opposite to God is possible, even if such a belief is mistaken.

What we created (made, dreamed, hallucinated) is not real and cannot last. But for what it is, it at least shows that we do have infinite power and we did come up with something. And we keep mis-creating horrible nightmares as we go along. It's just that we need to create higher, better, and more loving creations. We need a higher prayer, a higher song, a better way, a more beautiful content.

Meanwhile, in our forgiveness of what we did mis-create, we must find a way to acknowledge and respect its maker. Even if we did "a shit job of it", it at least reveals some of our qualities, here and there. There are aspects to the world which are symbolic of light things, as well as dark things.

There are some forms of beauty, forgiveness is an earthly form of love, bodies can be repurposed to serve the mind, and perhaps the decrepit shit-heap that we came up with isn't entirely devoid of traces of the son of God's perfection. Even in subtle ways perhaps there is a trace of beauty, of order, of health, of cooperation, of peace, and of love, intermingled with the mis-created forms.

"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."

We made a chaotic universe, complete with every imaginable form of limitation and difficulty and problem and struggle. A world whose nature and laws are not the perfect unity and harmony of heaven, and which indeed attempts to be as opposite and lacking as possible.

But we still must look on the brighter side and find the proper higher interpretation of it. The way God would look upon the rudimentary and somewhat laughable deformities made by an inexperienced child. The world is what it is, complete with all its faults and partial symbols of heaven. And it will end, because it mis-created as an idea of limiting existence and life.

In heaven perfection is even greater, even more broad, even more natural and ever-present. It is the absolutely perfectly divine expression of a perfect creator. And it is your true home in which you co-create absolute perfection and beauty with God.

"Forgiveness is an earthly form of love which as it is in Heaven has no form. Yet what is needed here is given here as it is needed. In this form you can fulfill your function even here, although what love will mean to you when formlessness has been restored to you is greater still."

"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."

God and his Kingdom are unlimited. They are EVERYTHING. In the separation from God, we tried to be opposite to God. We made-up a world opposite to everything. The opposite of everything is NOTHING At the same time, we confused the true with the false, and so believed that the nothing was actually SOMETHING. This is the entire problem to be corrected. It is a lack of recognition that the world is absolutely NOTHING. It is because you believe it is SOMETHING, that you think it has something to offer, or something to do to you.

What is nothing has no real effects because it is not really a cause. The world isn't right or wrong or good or bad. The world isn't anything at all. It is meaningless because of this nothingness.

God's Kingdom is all meaningful and means everything to you. The world you made means NOTHING AT ALL. But you tried to GIVE IT meaning that it does not have. Because it is NOTHING it can reflect the meaning you project onto it. But of itself it has none. Of itself it has nothing of anything. The world is not a something, it is an ABSENCE.

Our task then is simply to see through the lies and appearances produced by the wishful thinking, ie the denial, that the world IS something, when it isn't. To stop believing it can BE something it is not. Or indeed that it can be anything at all. There is nothing there. It's not really a world. It's an illusion of a world. A smokescreen. A hallucination of a world. It is unreal and does not exist. There is no world at all.

To recognize it AS nothing requires seeing through illusions. It requires correctly discerning that the world is NOT what you thought it was. It also requires the recognition of what it IS, which is nothing. You are not really afraid of nothing because, being afraid of nothing means you have no fear at all. You are afraid of nothingNESS because you think it's something you can experience - as if it is somethingNESS. Yet it cannot be both something and nothing at the same time.

Jesus asks us merely to come to our senses and realize that the world is nothing whatsoever. The body is nothing. Events are nothing. Nothing is happening. Or indeed, the nothingness is not happening. It's only because we think there really is a world there that we suffer. It's only because we give the body roles and duties and laws and purposes that it seems to become sick. We keep trying to twist a world of nothing into a dedicated something, which it cannot be. And so this denial attacks it.

Let the world be nothing. Only by it being nothing can you truly let it go. Its meaninglessness, emptiness, nothingness and absence must be recognized. What is absent CANNOT BE THERE. what is nothing cannot be the truth of everything. What is nothingness CANNOT HAPPEN. There is no world.

The world is not a guilty world or a sinful world. Nor is it an innocent world or a holy world. It is not a forgiven world or an accused world. The world isn't anything at all. To forgive it is to overlook it and to not see it. And so the world must disappear because it is not there to be seen or believed. Only the Kingdom of God remains.

"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."

"Symbols which but represent ideas that cannot BE, must stand for empty space and nothingness. Yet nothingness and empty space can NOT be interference. What CAN interfere with the awareness of reality is the belief that there is SOMETHING THERE."

"The body that is asked to be a god WILL be attacked, because its nothingness has not been recognized. And so it seems to be a thing with power IN ITSELF. As something, it CAN be perceived, and thought to feel and act, and hold you in its grasp as prisoner to itself." ... "Yet its nothingness IS your salvation, from which you would flee."

"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. In your demand that it be MORE than this lies the idea of sickness."

"What can the causeless BE but nothingness. The picture of your brother that you see is wholly absent, and has never been. Let, then, the empty space it occupies be RECOGNIZED as vacant, and the time devoted to its seeing be perceived as idly spent, a time unoccupied."

"For here is nothingness, where neither birth nor death is real, nor any form in the misshapen mind that spawned it has any meaning in the Mind of God."

"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."

"Now the hosts of Heaven come with us, to sweep away all vestiges of dreams and every thought that rests on nothingness."

"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." ... "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."

"To overlook nothingness is merely to judge it correctly, and because of your ability to evaluate it truly, to LET IT GO."

"To recognize this is to recognize nothingness when you think you see it. As such, it is the prerequisite for vision."

"The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. 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."

"The "changes" the ego seeks to make are not really changes. They are but deeper shadows, or perhaps different cloud patterns. Yet what is made of nothingness cannot be called new or different. Illusions are illusions; truth is truth."

"God's Will is all there is. We can but go from nothingness to everything; from hell to Heaven."

"Such is the choice. 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!"

"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 SENSE in seeking to be safe in what was MADE for danger and for fear? 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?"

"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."

"Now are they without effects. They cannot be concealed because their nothingness is recognized."

"And the alternative you think you chose seems fearful and too dangerous to be the nothingness it actually is."

"How can a battle be perceived as nothingness, when you ENGAGE in it? How can the truth of miracles be RECOGNIZED, if murder is your choice?"

"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. The dream has gone, and all its dreams of gifts have disappeared as well. The first dream has been seen and understood for merely an illusion of the fear on which the world was based."

"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."

"Pursuit of the imagined leads to death because it is the search for nothingness, and while you seek for life you ask for death"

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives."

"The more complicated the results become, the harder it may be to recognize their nothingness, but it is not necessary to examine ALL possible outcomes to which premises give rise to judge the PREMISES truly."

"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. It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt."

"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."

"Only the ANTICIPATION will frighten you, for the reality of nothingness cannot be frightening."

"Very simply, then, you may BELIEVE you are afraid of nothingNESS, but you are REALLY afraid of NOTHING. And in THAT awareness you ARE healed."

"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."

It seems like a tall order to not believe this world is real. I've been immersed in believing it's real for so long.

A result of believing it's real, and trying to become more spiritual, is that I sometimes judge the world or label it. For example I'll say this world is bullshit. Well, technically it's true. But if I look carefully, I have actually made the world real first while believing that I'm taking a higher ground, and am then "separating myself" off from it by judging or labeling it as wrong.

I have to be careful now to notice whether my responses are to a belief that this world is real, like, "its really insane", versus, recognizing that it is not real. I see that many of my "spiritual" perspectives are actually based in pushing this world away.

I've felt a strong sense of inspiration towards the things of Heaven, wanting to be with God, etc.. .but at times the ego comes into this and uses it to try to create separation between me and the world. The world may not be real, but there is a difference between me understanding it intellectually, and whether I am actually recognizing and perceiving and experiencing it as unreal. And if it is unreal, then I have no real basis for having these "spiritual reactions".

Sometimes for example I've been labeling the world as wrong or insane or bullshit or an illusion or that sickness isn't real or there is no death etc, only to then turn around and "react" to a perception of the world by trying to move into a space of "being more spiritual". This is really a form of denial. If the world really isn't real, then it should not create these compulsions to "escape" from it.

Saying the world isn't real is one thing. Actually getting to the place where I believe it solidly and don't react to its appearances is another.

There is a series of workbook lessons which I feel encapsulate the whole transition from 'world is real' to 'world is not real' and the various stages.

128: "The world I see holds nothing that I want."

129: "Beyond this world there is a world I want."

130: "It is impossible to see two worlds."

131: "No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth."

In 128, Jesus highlights how we are not seeing 'this world' correctly, and instead are projecting 'hell' onto it. That means we are making separation real.

In 129, Jesus talks about another world - a perceptual world of true perception, in which this world is seen "as is", revealing the "real world" aka forgiven world. Coming to see this world as harmless and forgiven is the challenge I talked about above.

In 130, Jesus talks of how you can't see the world as sinful and innocent at the same time, or as real and not real at the same time, highlighting that we need to be careful to discern if we're making it real still.

In 131, Jesus talks about Heaven, a world beyond this world, which we can reach if we seek to do so, and cannot fail to do so. But coming to see 'this world' as innocent is required first as a stepping stone, a gentle dream of awakening, which prepares the way.

I do see at least that if I can discern that there is a world I'm making real that I react to, and that if I don't do that, then I will gradually learn that this world is NOT real, and the truth will emerge in my awareness that only heaven is real. And that seems to me to be a straight path which leads right to God.

It also means I have to stop believing the world is an enemy. It is nothing because there is no world.

If you're carrying around some guilt about something you did wrong, you need to let that shit go.

How long are you supposed to suffer before it's enough suffering to make up for your sin? Do you want a bit more suffering? How much do you deserve?

10 years? 50 years? The rest of your life? Are you so worthless that you don't ever deserve forgiveness? When is it enough suffering that you're done? And what is going to happen when you decide its enough?

Your offering of 'being guilty' is supposedly your GIFT to the world, in an attempt to ATONE or "make up for" the mistake you made. You think that if you walk around feeling guilty about it, that you're appropriately ashamed, and you actually agree that you're supposed to be shameful.

You think this gift of guilt is actually a helpful offering, something that is called for or wanted by everyone else. You think if you remain guilty and carry around your sob story about how awful you are, that you're making up for what you did. And if you be guilty long enough, you "pay back" the suffering that you think you caused someone else.

This is bullshit. Offering guilt to the world to make up for something you did wrong is a DOUBLE OFFENSE. You not only did something wrong, but then you followed it up with this righteous self-punishment agenda where you punish yourself, on behalf of everyone else, to try to make up for it. Like, as if you can atone through suffering. And you think this is your gift to the world but all you've done is a) committed some sin, and then b) followed it up with a prolonged period of moping around acting like a guilty asshole, as if this is helping the situation. So now the world is not only hurt by you, but it's also got to put up with your guilty portrayal of yourself which, while seeming to be self-correcting, is actually just pulling everyone down even more.

How do you compare being guilty to being loving? How is being guilty for doing some wrong BETTER for other people than REPENTING FROM THIS SIN, receiving CORRECTION WITHOUT PUNISHMENT, and then being restored to being LOVING? When you are restored to being loving - which includes loving yourself - you now are in a far better position to actually 'atone', if you will, to make up for what you did. You can now offer a true gift of love and support. You can be more present. You can be more truly helpful and more attentive and available. You can't do that if you're carrying around a big heavy weight of guilt strapped to your ankle.

IT IS BETTER FOR EVERYONE if you forgive yourself and let yourself off the fucking hook, and give yourself a frickin' break, and say hey, I made this mistake, ok... it was a mistake, but it calls only for loving, unconditionally loving compassion and correction, so that I can correct my position to one of LOVE rather than one of being heavy weight of guilt around everyone else's ankles. I need to DROP the guilt and be freed from the burden of sin and shame, otherwise what USE am I to anyone else? How can I actually give anyone anything of TRUE value - true hope, true blessing, true understanding, true love, if I'm totally captivated by my own guilt?

We have to stop believing that guilt IS love. We have to stop offering guilt to everyone as if we're blessing them with it, and especially not taking guilty actions to try to 'make up for' doing something wrong. Guilt-driven actions are further attacks! We have to stop having this stupid ego-driven "guilty conscience" which we seem to think is our judge and jury and which governs and justifies us being punished for making mistakes. Each time we listen to it, it will always say, yup, you did something wrong, you guilty fucker, you deserve to die. That's it. That's how it works. It never says well, you made this mistake, because you were wrong about yourself, because you attacked yourself, and ended up projecting it onto other people as well, but really you deserve LOVE and love is all you need. So throw the guilty conscience away. It paralyzes your entire life and it's purely an ego device!

If you're feeling guilty, you need correction and love, not punishment and hate and shame. When are you going to drop your guilt? When have you suffered enough, needlessly (ALL suffering is needless except to use it to learn that you need not suffer because you're innocence)? When will you stop listening to everyone else's bullshit ego that says, yup, you gotta suffer a really long time you guilty asshole? When will you stop your own agenda of self destruction, for which you ARRANGED events to turn sour, so that you'd have an excuse to chastise yourself? And then it's like, oh, poor me, I guess I do deserve to suffer because I did something wrong, you're right, go ahead and destroy me. Its bullshit.

You need to stop making yourself guilty for every little fucking thing you do whether it's a mistake or not. And you need to drop all of the guilt that you have accumulated which enforces your STORY about WHY you are justified in not being loved by God (which is the secret purpose of your guilt-hood to begin with), and CHOOSE AGAIN to RECLAIM YOUR INNOCENCE. It's the best thing you can do for yourself, for everyone else, even for anyone that you might've harmed in a moment of confusion. The BEST thing you can do for everyone concerned is to RETURN TO LOVE. And this is the best thing you can do even for people you might've hurt because even if THEY can't forgive you continue to project THEIR guilt and hate onto you, you MUST choose innocence for yourself otherwise you're just making the whole situation worse.

And if we're sane about this, we have to say, that we should be ENCOURAGING all of our enemies and attackers and abusers and everyone else to BECOME LOVE, to be forgiven, to be recognized as innocent and to become OUR SAVIOR. This is the only way that our brother becomes our savior and Jesus speaks on this at great length in ACIM. You brother isn't going to be your savior if you can't WANT for them to be restored to a state of perfect innocence. And you can't BE a brother to someone if you're not willing to FORGIVE YOURSELF and ALLOW YOURSELF to be innocent. It's in everyone's best interests for anyone making a mistake to be healed and loved so that they can return to equality and unconditionality, otherwise they will ONLY drag down the entire brotherhood. It is counter productive to keep enemies as enemies because it only ensures that YOU are more likely to be attacked again. You can't remove attackers by punishing them, only be healing them. Rehab!

You're useless to the world when you're guilty. Stop it. Stop playing the "poor me, I'm guilty and unworthy, you better not love me" card. The secret purpose of this card is to have an EXCUSE for why God should not love you. Your failure to forgive yourself requires you to justify it with explanations for why you SHOULD suffer. "He who would not forgive must judge, to justify his failure to forgive" - ACIM. Stop justifying why you need to be guilty, for anything. YOU DESERVE COMPLETE FORGIVENESS.

You are God's creation. You are God's child. You are INNOCENT FOREVER. Stop putting yourself down and stop using other people to put you down, and stop using your stories about your mistakes to enforce why you should be stepped all over or why God can't possibly love you. You implicitly DESERVE ALL OF THE LOVE IN THE WORLD. Period. Unconditionally. Right now. Your guilt facade isn't helping anyone, least of all you.

Nobody really cares if you're guilty or ashamed or not. If they really want you to be guilty, THEY have a problem with making themselves guilty. That's their game which they are projecting onto you. Fuck em. You need to take back your power and stop being a deliberate victim about the mistakes you made. They are just mistakes. There is not a single mistake in all of the history of the world that calls for punishment. All mistakes are a CALL FOR LOVE. God is not holding a single thing against you. You cannot sin. You haven't sinned. You will never sin. You're just having a case of mental illness and thinking that you're sane when you're confused, and making mistakes in error because you've lost touch with the truth. That's all. Nobody is to blame for this. All you need is HEALING. That's all. Mistakes call for healing and restoration and for your RETURN TO UNION AND ACCEPTANCE with everyone else.

Take your life back. Everyone else can fuck off with their judgements and shaming. You deserve to be forgiven.

Fail not in your function of loving in a loveless place, made out of darkness and deceit, for thus are darkness and deception UNdone.

This is something I think we've all struggled with. It seems the world is cruel, vicious, hateful, dangerous, murderous, and at times evil. It is filled with horros and torment and suffering and death. How can you love such a place?

It seems that when the world is being evil, you can't love it. More likely you will despise it, hate it, fear it, judge it as wrong, or consider it broken. How can you feel love in the face of atrocities and attack, or when you are witnessing war and destruction?

It then seems even insane to suggest that while the world is being evil, you can love it. Because this implies that somehow you love evil. If the evil is really happening, and it seems real to you, you logically HAVE to despise it. To love evil is itself unthinkable, and seems insane.

What occurred to me today, is that approaching the "how to love it" from this angle, is really looking at a special relationship. We're talking in terms of what the world is causing in us, how we are reacting to it, and how we are affected by it. What IT is doing to us and others, and whether or not IT is CAUSING US to love it. ie we JUDGE it to be lovable.

In specialness, we believe that something outside of us affects us. It can affect us positively or negatively. We believe it causes us and has power over us. We then seem to PREFER that it treat us well, and if it does, we will love it. And if it turns on us, we will hate it.

It's within that framework that we are stuck, when asking how we can love a cruel world. And it seems we can never love the world, because it is always messing up. If the world remains cruel, it is not going to inspire love. More likely it will inspire revoltion and bitterness.

If I allow my relationship with the world to be based on what the world "does to me", and if I'm waiting for the world to be RESPONSIBLE for causing me to love it, then chances are that how I feel about the world will waver by the minute.

Sometimes the world might seem loving, perhaps a lovely sunset or a pleasant smell. We then say that we love it, and become enamored with it. Then we see a car crash and are horrified, just as the smell of death wafts into our noses.

When we are worshipping idols, we are looking for those aspects of the world which "we like" or approve of, or prefer. We may even become obsessed with them, collectors or them, trying to gather them up to surround and immerse ourselves in them. The foods we like, our favorite color, the music we like, our favorite shows, toys and games we like to play with, etc. So long as we avoid the rest and pretend it's not there.

In this mindset we can only sporadically, conditionally, love the world. We love it when it seems to CAUSE us to love it. When it does something TO us that we prefer, we clap our hands. When it seems to meet our rules and does FOR us what we have assigned it responsibility to do.

Responsibility, however, also ties into the cause of sin. If we assign responsibility to the world, and it does not do what we want it to do, we consider it in violation of its duties. And now it has failed to act responsibly, or do what we wanted it to do, and it has now acted against our will, sinning against us.

We can't love the world like this. We can't love it on a basis of what it does to us or for us. In fact we can't love it on a basis of it doing anything at all. It can't be what the world IS that makes us love it. Nor can it be because of what it DOES, whether things we like or not. It can't be some effects we prefer, while despising others. Our love can't be based on the world being RESPONSIBLE for whether we love it or not.

What I'm learning is that a feeling of love or happiness is not supposed to be a REACTION to the world, or something the world causes in me. I shouldn't be feeling love for the world on the basis of what I GET from it or what IT is like. Love based on the world's CONDITIONS is conditional love - special love.

Love actually is supposed to be an outward expression FROM WITHIN, extended from the unconditionality and permanence of God. It is something I GIVE TO what is out there. And this giving should not happen as a reaction, or on the basis of adjusting to external conditions. Nor should I be doing it ONLY when the world lines up with my wishes. Expectation is not love.

The world should be loved, ONLY because YOU are loving, and not because OF the world. We're not loving it for its lovely scenery. We're not loving it's cute animals. And we're not loving it for the things it does for us. These are all special relationships.

We don't want to be getting lost in a state of idol worship or external dependency or only being happy based on worldly conditions. If we jump up and down when the world is in a certain configuration, or cower in fear and hate when it is in another, we are merely on a rollercoaster ride of fake happiness and despair.

The world, itself, is going to keep on being intermittently cruel and vicious and hateful and warring and decaying and deadly. It is going to continue operating within the laws which established it as a weapon against God.

It will try to delight you some of the time, and try to take away your peace at others. It will inspire guilt and fear and continue to attack itself in all its ways. You can't place your happiness or love on such unsure footing, or give the world the POWER to take it away from you when it wishes.

An inner love arises as you forgive yourself and love yourself, applying love at all times. This inner love has permanent qualities. It is unconditional. It is not a REACTION of love. It is not a love you only feel IF or WHEN certain conditions are met. It's a love you just feel, hopefully all the time, for "no seeming reason". "Happiness is a constant state."

It comes FROM WITHIN, and expresses outward. It shines ONTO the world. It is something you GIVE to the world. You PROJECT love onto it. And you then SEE the love you put there, mixed in with the world's cruelty. You enjoy it ONLY because you EN-JOY it, which means to GIVE IT JOY. Love is its own reward.

"Peace is impossible to those who look on war. Peace is inevitable to those who ***offer peace***. How easily, then, is your judgment of the world escaped. It is not the world which makes peace seem impossible. It is the world you see that is impossible."

The world IS a world of impossibilities. It cannot represent love or freedom. It cannot be real. It cannot be true. It is its nature to attack and destroy. That was what it was made to do. But to see only this is to judge it and hold it against itself. Only by GIVING peace and love TO it can you FEEL peace and love in relationship with it.

"Yet has God's Judgment on this distorted world redeemed it and made it fit to welcome peace. And peace descends on it in joyous answer. Peace now belongs here, because a Thought of God has entered. What else but a Thought of God turns hell to Heaven merely by being what it is?"

This projected love changes the framing of the world, and what it means. It shows you that the world's cruelty is not true or real. That it is just an illusion of sickness and suffering. That its images of death are not really death, because they are fake, and powerless to change you.

And at the same time, you look upon love IN SPITE OF the world, thus PUTTING LOVE THERE to see. This is the projection of the "real world", with which you OVERRIDE hell with heaven. And what you project you will perceive.

You OVERRIDE the world with your extension of happiness. You remain happy NO MATTER WHAT is happening, not because of some kind of "acceptance of it" but because of your REFUSAL to allow the world to come INTO you from the outside. You have power OVER it and dominate it with what you radiate. You are master of it. And you experience love because you chose to.

You really cannot love the world from the perspective of expecting the world to BE LOVABLE. The world is NOT lovable. No-one can make murder and death real and love it. That would be insane, to be in love with evil.

The only way to love is to recognize the evil is NOT REAL. It is not compatible with love. The world makes love IMPOSSIBLE. The only way TO love is to love it in spite of itself. And as such, you can love unconditionally precisely because you love IN SPITE OF the world being cruel. This also grants you the miraculous power to override its cruelty.

I find myself now, more often, smiling upon the world - upon subtle things, small objects, textures, colors. Feeling an inner sense of projected beauty. A sort of gentle happiness that bestows love, which shines upon, the world. And this is not because of what the world IS or what it DOES. It is because of what I am GIVING to it. Because I am staying IN MY LIGHT and shining it ONTO what I see, even if faced with a twisted hell.

It is more like an inner choice. A choice to love, regardless of what something is. To love something, even if it is a picture of brokenness or damage or malfunction. Not because IT is lovable, in its form or nature, but because I can CHOOSE to love, and will not ALLOW the thing to interfere with whether I am loving or not.

This means a love which is not DEPENDENT upon the world, triggered BY the world, or an EFFECT OF the world. It is not a love I GET FROM the world, and reciprocate, in some kind of bargain.

It is a love which is given outward TO the world, regardless of whether it seems to deserve it. Because *I* deserve it. Because if I stop being love, then I stop experiencing love. If I let my love switch on and off depending on externals, then I am a victim of the world, allowing it to affect me both positively and negatively.

Real love, or let's say, a holy relationship with the world, can only take place by IGNORING what the world suggests, and REPLACING IT with love. Giving it love even when IT hates, recognizing IT as calling for love.

We're told in ACIM that the cruel world is NOT the world God could love. And this makes perfect sense. But it also tells us that God loves the REAL world. God DOES love HIS PROJECTION OF LOVE. He gives peace, and sees peace. He feels love, and so is loving "toward" the world REGARDLESS of what the world is like. He doesn't love it BECAUSE OF what it is. He loves it IN SPITE of what it is. In spite of its evil ways.

If you think about this, it ties in properly with forgiveness. Unconditional love overlooks and ignores what something claims about itself, and sees past its illusion, and sees love instead. And only because it GIVES love and innocence.

Not because the thing is "being innocent". The world cannot be sinless or guiltless. "To see a sinless body is impossible." But we can choose to not believe in sin and guilt, and to thus project forgiveness and light UPON a sinful world. And we then see the reflection of our light, or of God, IN it. Because we PUT it there.

No one can love the world we made, on the basis of it being lovable, or on the basis of it acting lovingly. It is not that, and it cannot be that. It will always be a world of separation and death for as long as it appears to exist.

But we can love ... while the world seems to be there... in spite of what IT says or does, even WHILE it is being cruel, because the choice to love does not DEPEND on the world, or come from it. We can love in the FACE OF cruelty, in spite of the cruelty, which will render the cruelty seen with loving eyes. But this will not JUSTIFY the cruelty, because the love is not BASED ON the cruelty.

This is the only way to "love hell". No one can love hell, on the basis of what hell does to or offers them. The world in fact holds NOTHING that you want, and has NOTHING to give you. It effectively has NO redeeming qualities. Because it is nothing.

"The world can ADD nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons"

But you can "love hell" - which does not mean BEING IN SPECIAL LOVE WITH hell, on the basis of what you OFFER TO IT. You be loving, even when surrounded with evil people. You can love unconditionally regardless of whether the world was made from love. It wasn't made of love, and never will be. But this must not stop us from loving. Otherwise we cannot feel happy.

Our challenge is to stay strong IN OUR LIGHT, even when confronted with evil. To remain IN THE TRUTH, even when faced with lies and deception. To remain IN POWER, even when the world pretends to take power away. And to NOT ADJUST to the world in any way, or allow it to cause us to waver or change our decision to love. This is the only way God is able to love the world. To love it, because he can do nothing BUT love, REGARDLESS of whether the world "is lovable" or not.

"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."

When we separated from God, believing we had sinned, we projected the idea of this sin onto God, blaming Him for abandoning us and forcing us to be separate.

When we then entered into guilt, we projected this guilt onto God, accusing Him of being the one who made us sin.

When we then became afraid, we projected the cause of this fear onto God, claiming we are afraid of Him, because of Him.

Then we feared punishment, and we projected the source of this punishment onto God, believing he is the one who is going to punish us.

When we experienced punishment and felt close to death, we projected the cause of this onto God and believed that God wanted us to be dead.

And then we died. And it was God's wrath.

These are the stages that we have gone through in order to INVENT A FALSE GOD. Every ego projection of our own stuff, onto God, paints an image 'out there' of a source, a God, who has caused all this to happen. This is the ego's idea of God, a God invented to replace the Real God.

So now we have projected the cause and reason for all stages of separation onto God. God is the one who rejected us, God is the one who made separation happen, God is guilty, God is fearful and the cause of fear, God is going to judge and punish us, God is punishing us for good reason, it's God's will that we die, and by dying we're doing what God wants.

This is how we have defined and generated this false ego-created God in our minds. This is what we believe God is like. We have a death wish, trying to die, not just to escape God's wrath but because we think this God wants us to die, that it is His will, and that we are carrying out His will by dying.

At every stage, it is our ego denial of ownership of what we're doing, that brought about a projection and disassociation of that condition, onto God. We've tried to pull God into the problem. We've tried to blame Him for all of it.

This is also why we have an existential terror that God wants us dead. This is why we feel guilty just for existing when God apparently doesn't want it. This is why we feel unworthy of love. This is why we believe we can't go back Home to God because we don't think He will ever want us back or forgive us, wanting instead for us to be dead. We actually have this belief in us, and we also believe that God is the one who decided that we're terribly guilty.

It was never Him. God has had nothing to do with any of this. All of this disownership of the causes of this unfolding of sin-guilt-fear-punishment-death, has all been our own choosing and our own doing, to ourselves, within ourselves. None of it has taken place outside of ourselves. None of it has involved anyone else, no other, no person, no God. We have done this to ourselves. But along the way we've progressively disowned every part of it and projected it.

All of this projection has built an outward, separated picture of what God is like. This is the ego's false God. The ego also believes that it stopped having a parent/Father/Mother when it separated from God, and therefore has had to invent this alternative God, an artificial false God, which it not only worships and obeys (by carrying out its apparent death wish) but also fears to such an extend that it would try to escape into the grave to avoid God's wrath. This is how we've built this fiction of a God that is unloving, unkind, unforgiving, hurtful, vengeful, judgmental, condemning, conditional. This is not what God is like at all.

All of this has happened because of our disowning of ourselves. Our progressive disowning of ourselves at every stage of the development of the idea of being completely separate and unlike God. It's all to do with us disowning our power and projecting all of our self-attack onto God, believing He is the external cause of it all. So now it's all God's fault and we're just victims, lambs to the slaughter. This is the ego's creation story.

The ego attitude that we have, is an attempt to say that all of this terrible stuff happened because of anyone other than ourselves. And therefore we can't do anything about it. But the truth is, this entire process of 'creation', making, has taken place entirely within our own self. In our own mind. It never really projected. It was never God's fault and doesn't involve God whatsoever.

God is pure love. God is holy. God is innocent. God is freedom and light. God is happy with you. God is beautiful. God is harmless and ageless and deathless. God is peace. God isn't against you. God doesn't think these hideous things of you. God loves you unconditionally and for all time and beyond. And always will.

Perhaps what we're trying to do here, is to meet the world "as it is", rather than what we keep making of it. True perception is referred to also as "accurate perception". Which means that our perception otherwise is "inaccurate".

If we are busy filtering everything, judging, categorizing, labelling, condemning etc... we're not really seeing it "as it is now", we're projecting the past onto it and denying it etc. Various forms of attack and judgment keep "the truth" away from us. Not saying the world is the truth but "reality" is to do with mind accessing what "is" rather than what it's making up "about" what's there.

This is perhaps why the course says slightly cryptically to "make the world real unto yourself". It doesn't mean to give it reality as such, but to see it "as it is" unfiltered and raw from a perception of wholeness and non-judgment. The course also calls this "reality contact". We're coming out of a state of reality distortion, confusion, misperception and denial, into a state of truth and recognition and acceptance.

The course is basically saying, you are in an illusory world that you made, but you also are very out of touch with it and not seeing it as it is. The world you made "as it is" seen with love and forgiveness is the "real world" or "actual world" that's there, albeit not of God. But you're not even seeing what you made "accurately" because of all the distortions and judgements and hate and stuff in your mind.

So you're out of touch with its "reality", or the truth of it. Upon seeing the reality of it you'll also recognize its UNREALITY in the big picture. But until you do, you'll mistake it FOR reality and think it real. False perception interprets an illusory world as real. True perception interprets the illusory world as unreal - by seeing its "real nature" accurately.

"The term "right-mindedness" is properly used as the correction for wrong-mindedness, and applies to the state of mind which induces accurate perception. It is miraculous because it heals misperception, and healing is indeed a miracle, in view of how man perceives himself. Only the sick NEED healing. The Soul does not need healing, but the mind DOES."

"It is necessary ONLY because Misperception is a BLOCK to knowledge, while ACCURATE perception is a stepping-stone TOWARD 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."

"Make the world real unto YOURSELF, for the real world is the gift of the Holy Spirit, and so it BELONGS to you. Correction is for all who cannot see. To open the eyes of the blind is the Holy Spirit's mission, for He knows that they have not LOST their vision, but merely sleep. He would awaken them from the sleep of forgetting, to the remembering of God. Christ's eyes are open, and He will look upon whatever you see with love - if you accept His vision as yours."

"You ATTACK the real world every day and every hour and every minute, and yet you are surprised that you cannot SEE it."

"Simply do this: Be still and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself."

"You HAVE been wrong about the world, because you have misjudged YOURSELF. From such a twisted reference point, what COULD you see? All vision starts WITH THE PERCEIVER, who judges what is true and what is false. And what he judges false, HE DOES NOT SEE. You who would judge reality CANNOT see it, for whenever judgment enters, reality has slipped away. 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. He lives within you in the quiet present, and waits for you to leave the past behind, and enter into the world He holds out to you in love."

"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."

One of the things about letting go, is to do with willingness. I realised it's about what you "want". If there is a wanting, a desire, it drives you to an attachment.

If you then want something, but can't have it, you'll experience emotional upset, grief and loss. If the thing you want has seemingly gone away, but you still want it, you'll suffer.

For me, for example, my wife has gone from the physical, but there are parts of me that still want her to be here in a body. The part that doesn't want to "let go" or can't figure out what to let go of, is the part that is already committed to pursuing what it wants, and is so into making what it wants "be there" that it is blind to its own ambition.

The part of me that wants the person to be present, wants the relationship, wants the specialness etc, is the part that isn't letting go. After all, you really only hold onto stuff that you want. And it's not easy to let go of "wanting" a person.

So now I find there is a contradiction between what I want and what I "can have". I still want something that isn't available. And that produces a sense of loss and emotional upset.

So what we have to let go of isn't so much the thing itself, but the wanting of the thing. The wanting is a form of control and attachment. What that leads to is having to realise that the wanting is a choice. I have chosen to want something. And as I continue to choose it, coupled with its unavailability, it is making me suffer.

And what that leads to is realising that at some point I have to choose to want something else. Or to stop wanting entirely, if that's possible. And that means choosing away from what I was choosing.

That's not easy to want to choose away from something you are attached to with special love and bodily value, when the rest of oneself is saying that it wants to keep it going. It's like having to deliberately decide to leave a relationship that you see no reason to leave, which isn't easy.

But as usual, what it amounts to is that, if I am suffering, I am doing to it to myself. "I must have chosen wrongly because I'm not at peace."

My wife, in her wisdom, and in our brief discussions mind-to-mind now, has been quite brutally honest and blunt about things. She is far ahead of me on this. She's told me that "we had our time" and, with regards to our marriage, "all those chains are broken now." I attempted to wear her wedding ring around my neck and she told me quite firmly to "take it off". She knows that these are forms of trying to stay attached to specialness.

It's a bit hard to accept that, and not take it as a rejection to the ego, almost seeming as if she doesn't "want me" anymore. But the higher soul perspective is much more detached, much more unconditional in its love, and much more shared. We're all supposed to love everyone, and exclusivity is of the ego.

Thing is, what could we be in "want" of, except something we lack. And who can lack when they are immortal. And what could be wanted except things that aren't real to begin with, and were never real. it gets pretty deep.

No-one wants to let go of what they believe is real, because whatever you value you allow into your mind and it becomes real to you. To let go of illusory things they have to be recognised as having not been real to begin with. An unreal relationship with an unreal body in an unreal world.

"And while you see more VALUE in sleeping than in waking, you will NOT let go of it."

"You do NOT recognize that love has come, because you have not yet let go of ALL the barriers you hold against EACH OTHER."

"I must let it go by realizing that it has no meaning, so that vision may take its place."

"For what you think is real YOU WANT, and will NOT let it go."

"To overlook nothingness is merely to judge it correctly, and because of your ability to evaluate it truly, to LET IT GO."

"You groped but feebly in the dust and found each other's hand, uncertain whether to let it go, or to take hold on life so long forgotten."

"Forgive the past and let it go, for it IS gone."

"No-one would choose to let go what he believes has value."

"Light cannot enter darkness, when a mind BELIEVES in darkness, and will not let it go."

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.

Each thought system starts with a logical premise, which determines everything that comes from it, which are perfectly logical conclusions. This is true of both God’s creation and the EGO’s world, which are logical outcomes.

The separation from God followed NEAT, LOGICAL steps. The thought system of the ego is run by impeccable logic, just as God’s thought system is. The outcome of each system depends entirely on its logical premise. At the CORE of A Course in Miracle’s metaphysics is PURE LOGIC.

If you can understand the logical premise of each system, and if you can follow the progression of logical conclusions based on that premise - which is IMPECCABLE LOGICAL REASONING, you will correctly understand ALL of the metaphysics of the course. Where everything fits. The TRUTH about the entire separation from God, states of awareness, what is true and false, what is real or unreal, who created what, how the systems MUST function etc.

It is all TOTALLY LOGICAL. If you struggle with logical reasoning you may have difficulty SEEING the logic or following it.

This literally means, that states of mind, states of separation, the making of the body and the world, all of the mechanics of special relationships, sin and death, the nature of the physical universe and its laws, ALL OF IT, is a LOGICAL CONCLUSION. Correctly discerning what the logic IS, HOW it progressed, and WHY that makes SENSE, is the key to accessing the core metaphysics in the course. Once you do this, you can refer to this metaphysics as a cheat-sheet, a reference to TELL YOU, what ANY statement in the course MUST MEAN, where it fits, and what JESUS MEANS. GUARANTEED.

"T-23.II.21. From the belief in sin, the faith in chaos must follow. 2 It is because it follows that it seems to be a LOGICAL CONCLUSION; a valid STEP IN ORDERED THOUGHT. 3 The steps to chaos DO FOLLOW NEATLY from their starting point. 4 Each is a different form in the PROGRESSION of truth's reversal, leading still deeper into terror and away from truth. 5 Think not one STEP is smaller than another, nor that return from one is easier. 6 The WHOLE DESCENT FROM HEAVEN LIES IN EACH ONE. 7 And WHERE YOUR THINKING STARTS, THERE MUST IT END."

"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."

"The Holy Spirit USES LOGIC as easily and as well AS DOES THE EGO, except that His CONCLUSIONS are not insane. 5 They take a direction EXACTLY OPPOSITE, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death. 6 WE HAVE FOLLOWED MUCH OF THE EGO’S LOGIC, and have SEEN ITS LOGICAL CONCLUSIONS. 7 And having seen them, we have realized that they cannot be seen except in illusions, for there alone their seeming CLEARNESS seems to be clearly seen. 8 Let us now turn away from them, and follow the SIMPLE LOGIC BY WHICH THE HOLY SPIRIT TEACHES the SIMPLE CONCLUSIONS that speak for truth, and only truth."

"The Kingdom is the RESULT OF PREMISES, JUST AS THIS WORLD IS. 2 You may have carried THE EGO’S REASONING TO ITS LOGICAL CONCLUSION, which is total confusion about everything. 3 If you really saw this RESULT you could not want it. 4 The only reason you could possibly want any part of it is because you do not see the whole of it. 5 You are willing to look at the ego's PREMISES, but not at THEIR LOGICAL OUTCOME. 6 Is it not possible that you have done the same thing with the premises of God? 7 YOUR CREATIONS ARE THE LOGICAL OUTCOME OF HIS PREMISES. 8 His THINKING has established them for you. 9 They are exactly where they belong. 10 They belong in your mind as part of your identification with His, but your state of mind and your recognition of what is in it depend on what you believe about your mind. 11 Whatever these beliefs may be, they are the PREMISES that will determine what you accept into your mind."

"Look calmly at the LOGICAL CONCLUSION of the ego's thought system and judge whether its offering is really what you want, for this is what it offers you. 2 To obtain this you are willing to attack the Divinity of your brothers, and thus lose sight of yours. 3 And you are willing to keep it hidden, to protect an idol you think will save you from the dangers for which it stands, but which do not exist."

"In one sense the ego's fear of God IS AT LEAST LOGICAL, since the idea of Him does dispel the ego."

There is a common trend towards trying to accept everything in the world. To allow it. To give it permission. To let it be whatever way it is.

There is one part of this which is beneficial. If you resist things, you make them real. If you control things, you make them real. If you judge and attack things, you make them real. It would imply that if you accept them "as they are", you can find some kind of peace, where you're not really attached to outcomes or conditions or situations or people. As if the world will just fluidly flow over your experience without triggering anything or upsetting you. Because you accept it. But this also can be a trap, and a massive justification for keeping suffering and death.

Because the fact is that this world is not real. It's an illusion, and everything in it is a lie. It's not supposed to be happening. It's not natural. Whatever you accept into your mind you make real to you. If you accept the world into your mind, you make it real. If you are in a position of "allowing" it, you are handing over causality and permission and power to it. If you are trying to simply be at peace with whatever happens, you are not owning the fact that you are making everything happen. If you focus on trying to transcend whatever's going on, which can bring a sense of peace, it does not necessarily bring into question whether things are happening or not.

The task at hand is more to do with learning to recognize that this world is NOT happening. There is not anything to really ACCEPT about it because it isn't really doing anything. You don't have to ADJUST TO conditions, or try to persuade yourself to be okay with suffering, sickness, unhappiness and death. You're not supposed to be having any of these things.

The only true acceptance, the only thing you should ever accept, and thus believe in fully, is THE ATONEMENT. God's truth. Reality. This world is not reality. In accepting the atonement you are accepting something that should be accepted. Something which will bring a cure. Something which will instill miracle mindedness and the ability to be invulnerable. Something which puts you in touch with the power of God, to have dominion over this fake world.

There is merit in not being in such a 'fight' with the world, not resisting it or taking sides against it or having this whole ego un-peaceful counter-attack scenario in your mind. Yes, so it's good to accept things on that basis, because it at least includes less conflict mentally. BUT, this also should not be on a basis that "the world is real" and "things are really happening" and "bodies are really sick" and so on. You should not be accepting that these things are true. You should not be "allowing" them as such. Otherwise you become a passive, miracle-less fence sitter with no power to do anything.

Detaching from the world is great. But it must include the *recognition* that the world is not real, it is entirely illusory, you should be not "agreeing with" it, you should not be justifying it, and you should not be confusing acceptance with authorizing death. It may seem paradoxical but accepting the TRUTH should entail the DENIAL OF the world, the rejection of death, and a demonstration of symbolic immortality in the body.

You are not supposed to just find a way to "let the world happen", you're supposed to become aware you are DREAMING IT and MAKING IT happen, and thus regain power OVER it to change it at will. That's a massively different position than merely trying to get comfortable with "real suffering" or "whatever happens that I did not cause." There is no causality in that kind of acceptance, it's a total passivity. Yes you can try to accept that you feel unhappy but you shouldn't be feeling unhappy. You can try to accept your body is sick but it is not supposed to be sick. Are you going to accept your death?

You might think well, if I am so at peace and accepting of what's SEEMING to happen in this illusory world, why would I bother changing it? Because if the body is sick, the mind is STILL sick. The body can't get healthy unless the mind is healthy. And the mind cannot get healthy while the body is being constantly bombarded with mind attack. "A broken body IS PROOF the MIND HAS NOT BEEN HEALED." So the body DOES have to get healed as well, which means the reversal of sickness and death. Death has to get UNDONE, not accepted. Otherwise there is no true resurrection of mind OR body.

ACIM does not teach to "accept everything that happens in a dream world". It teaches there IS no dream world and YOU are the dreamer who makes it be whatever you decide it is. And if you change your mind, THE WHOLE WORLD MUST CHANGE. This is a course in CAUSE, not being passive. "Members of my party are ACTIVE workers." Will you lay down and let death happen against your will, and try to "accept it"? You cannot be at peace with death. Death can only "happen" if you CONSENT to it, which means you CAUSE it, because you have an attacking unhealed mind that's not at peace.

If you want people, you must learn to undo the world and stop dreaming of nightmares. Not because otherwise you'd be at the effect of external causes of un-peace but because being at peace goes hand in hand with HAVING POWER AND BEING THE CAUSE.

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."

When your mind is whole, you are in your right mind, and not in two minds. Being in two minds is what happens when your mind is split in half. What happens in the state of split mindedness is quite interesting.

It's not merely that you split off a part of your mind. As you introduce a split, ie a belief in separation, you lose sight of wholeness completely. What then happens is you actually form TWO artificial identities, and neither one of them is the whole of you. It's almost like having two egos or personalities, and both are fake.

One of these identities, let's call it the persona, is retained in awareness as more of a conscious self. This self is the part of your mind that is steering away from darkness and sin and tries to be "good". It uses denial of "the rest of you" in order to hide its sense of sin and guilt in the darkness. It blocks it out of awareness through this denial, which is attack, which buries it and projects it.

The part of your mind which has also split - the other 50% of you - becomes a dumping ground for sin and guilt, hidden behind denial and repressed. You project this dark shit outward through disassociation, to try to disown it. It's part of further trying to disown part of your mind that your persona-self thinks is evil. Recognize the persona appears good but ultimately is judgmental and wants to destroy the sinful self.

So the "goody two shoes" part of your mind which is always trying to focus on a fake sense of idealism, positivity, looking good, saving face, being popular, seeming to be perfect etc, actually has a murderous attitude towards the other part of your mind. It basically sections off this other part of your mind, hates it, judges it, and shoves everything it does not "approve of" onto it. That includes sin and guilt, so now this "shadow self" is formed and relegated to death.

So in your mind, if your mind is split, you have this conscious persona self and this much less conscious shadow self. The shadow self is kept in the dark because, as Jesus says in the course, if you were to bring these two selves in close contact with each other they could not long remain separate.

The persona self fears the shadow self and tries to constantly judge and attack in on order to keep its distance, to maintain its own sense of autonomy. The persona sees itself as what the course calls "the face of innocence", aka the victim. And it views ithe shadow portion as a victimizer, or an enemy, which it wants nothing to do with and pushes away. This pushing away produces separation, disowning and projection onto others and the world, to try to "attach" the sin to something other than your own mind or sense of self. As the course says, separation means disassociation, or coming "between".

But we have to realize here that being split minded does not mean you are being the whole of your real self while you're in your persona self, or that your real self is under attack by the shadow self or its projections. Instead, recognize that the persona self is only a partial ego self, and it not whole, and it is not real, and it is not you. It's an artificial sense of identity formed from illusions of preference and avoidance, illusions of innocence and pretending to be perfect.

So as you consider how to forgive and take back projections and so on, you have to also realize that the "you" that is trying not to judge or project, is actually part of the judgement. It's part of the split mindedness. That persona self, wants as best it can to be completely free from the repressed shadow crap. So beware that as IT tries to take back projections, it is really not that interested in UNDOING the sense of sin, to begin with, because it needs it in order to maintain the split. And note that this persona self is "trying to wake up and be more spiritual" - the spiritual ego, and it can't - you have to wake up FROM it.

Without the split in the mind, without maintaining a sense of separation, both the shadow self and the persona self cannot exist. They rely on keeping the war going. The inner conflict has to be perpetuated, denial and blocks to awareness have to be maintained, otherwise it blows up the whole dynamic of you having a split minded relationship with another part of yourself.

For example in terms of victims and victimizers, usually the shadow crap is projected and seen as an external victimizer, while the innocent victim role is assigned to your persona self ie conscious self. But in order to "heal" this situation, it's not enough to just "take back the victimizing". It's not enough to simply own that you are the one attacking yourself from the outside in, or that you are vicariously using others to do this. The victimizer is only one HALF of the problem.

The victim role is also part of the split, and being a victim has to go as well. You can't maintain this ideal of "getting rid of attackers" while keeping the "innocent victim" intact. So what that's going to have to mean is, if you want to wake up, is that you're going to have to not only dis-identify from the victimizer, but also from being a victim. You have to recognize that your mind - the larger container of this drama - is actually playing both sides. Your mind is being both a victim and a victimizer of itself. And NEITHER of those roles is your real identity.

When you can bring both of these parts of your mind into awareness and see them together, AND then recognize that you are the ONE MIND who is pulling all the strings and making the victimizer victimize "you", plus making the victim "be a victim", you can no longer maintain the ILUSION that they are separate identities. When you own that you are both of them, you will own that you cannot be EITHER of them. It's been a lie, all along, that either of these two identities were you.

You were pretending they were DIFFERENT to each other, by means of splitting off some attributes to assign to one and some to another, to maek them seem to be opposites. But the opposition is entirely a deception and in truth, the two identities are not really opposite at all. They are both being run by one "larger" mind - your real self - who temporarily is the actor behind the scenes who has lost sight of itself while pretending to be having a multiple-personality disorder.

Because we so heavily identify with the conscious persona and not with unconscious hidden projected stuff, largely because we are not aware of it, you "as the conscious self" might think that you merely need to deal with the harmful attackers outside of you who are making your life miserable. But it's not just them. It's also you, in denial, with rose-tinted glasses, pretending to be special and perfect, who are also part of the murderous dynamic of sectioning off parts of yourself and relegating them to hell. So that sense of identity also has to be brought into question.

You are not a victim, or a victimizer. You are not the persona or the shadow. You being the persona is not you being the whole of yourself, even though this split off part of a sunbeam thinks it's the whole sun. You are bigger than both. Which means your sense of identity has to let go of these illusory selves and expand to a larger reality. As Jesus says in the course, as you awaken your sense of self expands. Because what you are really waking up from is being stuck inside little boxes and compartments, walled off from each other as if you have multiple selves that live in isolation.

Your enemy is yourself. The perpetrator is you. The victim is you. The fake innocence is just a "face" you put on to hide the pain and maintain the shadows. To take back your projection means only to reel in the projection of the shadow content, the sin and guilt, to try to bring it closer to its source. But it must also meet with your persona and cause the two of them to cancel each other out. You are larger than both aspects of the split mind, because you are the whole of mind. And only whole-mindedness, without the split condition, is a state of sanity.

The ego is always about taking sides, emphasizing differences, being special, having enemies, being offended, being at war with something. But what is this "opponent", except MORE EGO? It takes both sides of every conflict, it does not care who wins or loses. It does not care who is the victim and who is the victimizer. It is both, in a state of self attack. It doesn't even care if you live or die because it knows that someone will die, when you play its games.

So you have to realize that your "conscious ego self" is really only PART OF the problem and your sense of having a spiritualized ego is just as much part of the problem as the projected sin. Being holier than thou goes hand in hand with becoming highly judgmental and condemning other parts of yourself as unworthy and defective. If you feel unworthy it's because your conscious self believes it is superior. Inferiority and superiority go hand in hand.

The conscious ego self cannot wake up. Much of its efforts are to make its life better by continuing to repressed, reject, accuse, condemn, project, disown and kill off anything resembling "unacceptable and unlovable". And yet all the while, judging you are unlovable from the outside so that it is never satisfied with trying to make you more perfect through self mutilation. The ego is in two minds. It is not in its right mind. And it is not your mind. There is more to you than any of these roles or fantasies or illusions of being one thing and not another. You are everything.

Your mind is always obeying the laws which Oneness established for all minds, regardless of whether you are in the ego or not. These laws are permanent and unavoidable.

These laws are fully obvious and correctly obeyed when you have True Perception. These apply to God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. They also apply to the ego even though it will deny it.

The ego will attempt to PRETEND that these laws do not apply or are not operating. (more on that later)

The laws:

1) Whatever applies to you applies to the entire Sonship and all of existence equally, and vice versa. It is not possible for something to apply to you which does not apply to others the same. It is not possible for something to apply to them which does not apply to you. If something applies to you, it applies everywhere instantly. If something applies to another, it applies to you immediately. In other words, THERE ARE NO PRIVATE LAWS.

2) Ideas leave not their source, therefore you can only experience what is INSIDE your mind. You cannot experience attack from outside the mind or outside of your Self. Attack has to be manifest WITHIN your mind, put there by yourself. You can only be aware of the content of your mind, not what is separate from it.

3) Cause and effect are NEVER separated. Where there is a cause, there must be an effect. A mind cannot contain a cause without containing an effect, and vice versa. It is not possible for cause outside the mind to put effects inside the mind - the mind has to contain both cause and effect inside itself. You cannot perceive an attacker without inventing an attacker within yourself.

4) You cannot attack without being attacked. All attack is self attack. It is impossible to do something to a separate part of the Sonship without you experiencing absolutely all of the effects. They are you. You are one with them. You cannot judge, attack, hate, condemn, or find sinful, without it applying to you. It's either BOTH of you are sinful, or neither, but never one or the other. This is the meaning of SHARED INTERESTS.

5) You cannot perceive, access, be aware of, or affected by, anything outside of your mind. There IS no outside. You cannot perceive outside of yourself. Anything you perceive or are aware of must be happening WITHIN your own mind. Believing there is a separate will outside your mind will frighten you because of what it can do outside of the scope of your mind's reach, or in other words, it has power over you which you can do nothing to prevent. Such a belief will result in death.

6) Your mind cannot remain neutral and perceive something which is not neutral. There are no neutral thoughts. Your mind does not have the ability to perceive objectively that someone is being sinful, separate from your own sin. If they are seen as sinning, you are seen as sinning. You DO NOT have an ability to perceive neutrally or objectively while seeing sin. Therefore you cannot tell if your brother is sinful or not, because to see sin in them it MUST be in you, and you cannot see past your own sin, so are blind.

There may be some more ways we can talk about the way a mind of oneness operates, but this is enough for now.

Now, the mind is ALWAYS bound by these laws, no matter what, no matter if the ego is getting involved (false perception) or whether you are enlightened The presence of ego (an attempt to defy the law) DOES NOT stop the laws operating.

However, what the ego TRIES to do, is to DENY the law, and PRETEND that these laws are NOT permanently operating. It pretends it's possible to IGNORE these laws, and to operate in a different way, and not receive the consequences of the law. The ego sees itself as rewriting the laws and having power over the laws (law = God's Will).

The thing is, when the ego tries to pretend the laws don't apply, all kinds of shit happens. It will try to convince you there is a separation between cause and effect. It will try to convince you you can get away with murder, can see objectively that someone is sinful and not you, that what applies to you does not apply to others, that you have escaped consequences of sin and someone else is paying for it, and that you can use the body for attack without being attacked.

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

Within the laws of God, this means that the ego tells you that you can see the sins of others "through" your body, without your body being affected. This is denial. It is not true. If you attempt to see your brother as sinful, IT MUST APPLY TO YOU ALSO. This automatically will condemn and attack YOU, and this WILL show up in your body image as symptoms or signs of attack. Another word for that is forms of sickness.

You literally cannot judge or accuse or condemn without being condemned, by yourself. What you are actually doing then, is you're trying to use the body as a weapon. Because there is a direct correlation between your belief in and projection of sin, and sickness showing up, you will make your body SICK, in an attempt to prove that your brother is sinful. This is the ONLY WAY you can attempt to prove it. By proving you can be attacked or hurt, you demonstrate that your brother is the sinner and not you. Or at least that's the ego's interpretation of it. In God's law, you are hurt BY YOUR OWN ATTACK.

People literally are walking around projecting sin and hate through their body, trying to get rid of sin onto someone else to escape the consequences of the law, but are nevertheless finding that it makes their body sick. They cannot escape the law, but they're pretending to. The effects of sickness in the body also then reflect the level confusion, that those outside of yourself are causing you to be hurt.

Trying to prove this is level confusion and will implement sickness. All sickness is a form of magic. Magic is the belief that a lower level can cause and higher level (e.g. body causes mind, others cause you, being a victim etc). This turns you into an EFFECT and your body will demonstrate those effects to correlate to the perceived external cause.

When someone gets to the point where their body is so sick that it seems to die, they are actually attempting to severely prove that they can suffer and die, that it is someone or something else *separate* that has caused it, and therefore the dying body is a weapon. It accuses everyone and everything of sin, being the cause of the death - anything other than yourself.

Death of the body is a fulfillment of a belief in sin, an attempt to kill the Son of God by binding him to form, and demonstrates a lack of forgiveness. A dying body is like a kamikaze weapon, attempting to infect and destroy everything and prove that God and His son are dead. God's death (the purpose of the dream of death) cannot be proven without YOU dying. Death is also completely "contained" as an effect upon YOURSELF, because ideas leave not their source and therefore, God is not affected by it.

This is of course an ego cover-up job, because NO-ONE CAN DIE WITHOUT THEIR OWN CONSENT. Meaning, your body cannot die unless you are believing that everyone else must be dead at some level. Death is symptomatic of huge level confusion, where the lower level (world of effects) has produced a "cause" upon the higher level (mind). The person believing this MUST show death in the body image to represent God's law that what applies to others applies to you. All sickness and death is an ACCUSATION that your brother has sinned against you.

This also therefore means that, if you stop accusing your brother of sin, your body CANNOT SHOW SICKNESS. No exceptions. Sickness can ONLY come about through mis-use of the law, where you attempted to perceive your brother as corrupt, sinful, guilty, wrong in some way. YOU will receive the effects of this belief. Your body will show it.

And this also means that if you stop believing in sin, your body MUST show and demonstrate a complete lack of symptoms of sickness. If there was sickness showing up previously due to prior judgement, IT MUST DISAPPEAR. No exceptions. What has no cause cannot remain. If you understand the Course's section on "sickness is a defense against the truth" you will see that we implement sickness only as a form of defense and denial of the truth, and as a form of level confusion. Once this denial and defenses is not needed, it will be dropped, and the sickness MUST DISAPPEAR as a result of having recognized the illusions you were implementing.

You need to also realize that attack can only happen INSIDE your mind. It's not possible to perceive or experience external attack. This means, if there is an "external person" who seems to attack, or is tempting you to believe in sin, the only way you can SEE that attack is if it is INSIDE the scope of your mind. That means, for you to SEE attack, your own mind has to be sectioned off and part of it has to become an attacker. This attacker is part of yourself, and is in ADDITION to the external attacker, projected onto them. Simultaneously, the part that is not seen as the attacker will be sectioned off and seen as a victim of attack. Your mind will now be attacking ITSELF.

Therefore realize, your mind implements both the belief in a CAUSE of sin, AND the effects of sin, simultaneously. This all happens inside yourself, even if it seems like the person attacking it outside of you. You cannot see them as the source of attack. You have to make YOURSELF the attacker. That means, as in the secret to salvation, that you are literally doing this to yourself. Your mind manifests/produces/visualizes and turns into FORM, both the attacker and the attacked, the cause and the effects. You will put effects of sickness into your body and hold it hostage with the part of you that is hallucinating an attacker.

Now here's the trick of healing. You have to recognize you are doing this to yourself. Other people or external causes have NOTHING to do with it. You are the one who invented the cause and the effects of your sickness. You believe in both of them, and your split mind has two identities. You must recognize that illusions of causes are not real causes, you are the one who, within your mind, is attacking yourself and pretending it has something to with others, and YOU put in place ALL of the symptoms/effects of that causality.

As Jesus tells us, "you made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both". Sickness has NO CAUSE other than your mind's decision to make it. Sickness has no reason to remain, other than your NEED to keep it (as a defense against truth).

When you do not need or choose to keep it, and recognize the illusion you made (that cause is unloving and sinful - which is really the belief that God in evil and has attacked you), the symptoms of sickness MUST DISAPPEAR. You DID make your sickness, and you DID make death, and you CAN abolish them. Not only that, because you are bound by the laws of God, you cannot FAIL to abolish them if you stop using your body for attack. Sickness simply must vanish to comply with the law.

There are no loopholes in the law. There are no exceptions. There are no other causes of sickness beyond yourself. Sickness has no mind, will or power of its own. No-one maintains it besides you. It can and must disappear when you return to True Perception. Illusions recognized must disappear. A guiltless mind cannot suffer, because a guiltless mind CANNOT MAINTAIN SICKNESS. Sickness has to disappear.

This is so black and white a law, that Jesus tells us, "a sick body is proof that the mind has not been healed." You literally CANNOT be sick if your mind is healed. If sickness is showing up, or remains, your mind IS NOT healed. You can be in denial of this, as most people are. You can believe that it's possible to be at peace and keep sickness. But you can't. The law confirms that sickness WILL NOT and CANNOT show up at all if the mind is sane and free. Similarly you cannot be at peace with death or dying, because to die is the ULTIMATE expression of a belief in sin.

The dead can be raised and all sickness can be healed, BECAUSE of the law. If this were not true, resurrection would be impossible. You cannot believe in death and make the body die and believe in resurrection. Using the body lovelessly will make it suffer and die. Believing only in eternal life will bring the body to health, since it is not being attacked and twisted and deformed by the mind's attitude. The body is just an image being projected, it can EASILY be changed by the healed mind.

Jesus tells us not to use sickness to attempt to demonstrate that our brother is a sinner. If our body is sick in any way, we ARE using it to prove he is a sinner. He asks us to demonstrate that WE CANNOT BE HURT, which proves that our brother is not sinful and cannot cause death. HIS innocence is proven when YOUR innocence is proven. This DOES play out on the visual, perceptible, illusory dream level of the world, because the world is a symbol in the mind. The body can become a symbol of holiness and innocence, used as a teaching device to prove to your brother that he has not sinned. HE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO ATTACK IT, because YOU will not put symptoms of sickness into it, and HE is not an evil cause of effects!

You must understand the law. The law applies to you. You cannot escape it. But you can be in denial and pretend it does not apply. And then you will suffer and die. Choose the equal innocence of the entire Sonship and Live.

Miracle working entails the use of PRAYER. "Prayer is the medium of miracles." "Through prayer love is received. Through miracles love is expressed."

Miracles are NOT a shift in perception. The only way perception is involved is that perception must be loving (as close to true perception as possible), and fear must be suspended. "Wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles." Wholeness of perception is not a shift. It is miracle mindedness, resting on forgiveness, which sees with MAXIMAL love.

Miracles, in a course in miracles, are expressive acts of power which can heal others. And they are performed through PRAYER. However, this doesn’t mean you have to pray using words. God does not understand words. Prayers are requests made in your HEART, in awareness of LOVE. Love is essential for miracle working. Your heart requests and receives and experiences, in certainty and decisiveness.

Some parts of ACIM speak specifically to "how to perform miracles." Here is one of them:

21. What Is the Role of Words in Healing?

M-21.1. Strictly speaking, words play no part at all in healing. 2 The motivating factor is prayer, or asking. 3 What you ask for you receive. 4 But this refers to the prayer of the heart, not to the words you use in praying. 5 Sometimes the words and the prayer are contradictory; sometimes they agree. 6 It does not matter. 7 God does not understand words, for they were made by separated minds to keep them in the illusion of separation. 8 Words can be helpful, particularly for the beginner, in helping concentration and facilitating the exclusion, or at least the control, of extraneous thoughts. 9 Let us not forget, however, that words are but symbols of symbols. 10 They are thus twice removed from reality.

M-21.2. As symbols, words have quite specific references. 2 Even when they seem most abstract, the picture that comes to mind is apt to be very concrete. 3 Unless a specific referent does occur to the mind in conjunction with the word, the word has little or no practical meaning, and thus cannot help the healing process. 4 The prayer of the heart does not really ask for concrete things. 5 It always requests some kind of experience, the specific things asked for being the bringers of the desired experience in the opinion of the asker. 6 The words, then, are symbols for the things asked for, but the things themselves but stand for the experiences that are hoped for.

M-21.3. The prayer for things of this world will bring experiences of this world. 2 If the prayer of the heart asks for this, this will be given because this will be received. 3 It is impossible that the prayer of the heart remain unanswered in the perception of the one who asks. 4 If he asks for the impossible, if he wants what does not exist or seeks for illusions in his heart, all this becomes his own. 5 The power of his decision offers it to him as he requests. 6 Herein lie hell and Heaven. 7 The sleeping Son of God has but this power left to him. 8 It is enough. 9 His words do not matter. 10 Only the Word of God has any meaning, because it symbolizes that which has no human symbols at all. 11 The Holy Spirit alone understands what this Word stands for. 12 And this, too, is enough.

M-21.4. Is the teacher of God, then, to avoid the use of words in his teaching? 2 No, indeed! 3 There are many who must be reached through words, being as yet unable to hear in silence. 4 The teacher of God must, however, learn to use words in a new way. 5 Gradually, he learns how to let his words be chosen for him by ceasing to decide for himself what he will say. 6 This process is merely a special case of the lesson in the workbook that says, "I will step back and let Him lead the way." 7 The teacher of God accepts the words which are offered him, and gives as he receives. 8 He does not control the direction of his speaking. 9 He listens and hears and speaks.

M-21.5. A major hindrance in this aspect of his learning is the teacher of God's fear about the validity of what he hears. 2 And what he hears may indeed be quite startling. 3 It may also seem to be quite irrelevant to the presented problem as he perceives it, and may, in fact, confront the teacher with a situation that appears to be very embarrassing to him. 4 All these are judgments that have no value. 5 They are his own, coming from a shabby self-perception which he would leave behind. 6 Judge not the words that come to you, but offer them in confidence. 7 They are far wiser than your own. 8 God's teachers have God's Word behind their symbols. 9 And He Himself gives to the words they use the power of His Spirit, raising them from meaningless symbols to the Call of Heaven itself.

Imagine that you live in a reality where you are always included in everything. Anything that happens, happens to others, and it happens to you. Anything that you give, you give to others, but you also receive. Anything that transpires happens to all at once.

Anything that is expressed by you is received by everyone, and received by yourself. Like, you literally ARE the whole of everything. The whole is your self. The entire realm of reality, the kingdom of God, is your self. So anything that takes place, you know about it, you feel it, you experience it along with everyone.

Everyone co-creates together. You are never excluded in any way. That's the fundamental fact of how reality actually IS. This is the law of God. This is the golden rule. What you do to another you do to yourself. You are one with everyone. You are the whole environment, not just a figure in the environment. You are heaven. The kingdom is your self. The sonship is your soul. All your brothers are part of you. No-one escapes anything ever. Everyone is always included, shares everything, has everything.

This is how reality really is. This is what produces shared interests. How would you act, think, feel, behave, if you knew that this was the fundamental law of existence? That anything you do even slightly you will do to yourself as well? This provides the incentive that you should only love, otherwise you will deprive yourself of love. You should only heal, otherwise you will make yourself sick. You should only include, otherwise you will become alone.

This is what ACIM is teaching you to remember and to attune to. Knowing your neighbor and brother as yourself. Realizing that if you do something you do it to yourself. The secret of salvation. Whatever you give you receive. Anything you see as being in your own interest is to be seen as being in the interests of everyone. Miracles are given to you in order that the be given through you to others and thus shared by everyone. Miracles are a universal blessing from God to the entire sonship all at once.

We need to re-learn this because we have forgotten how to live as shared entities, with shared identities. We think we are separated off by bodies, exclusive, omitted, rejected, lost, alone, not qualifying, left out. As though others can do something that doesn't include themselves, and you can do things in return that don't include yourself. As if you can get away with murder. As if you can attack without being attacked, or project guilt and escape from it without it still belonging to you. This is all the ego's realm of lies and deceit, denial and projection, dissociation and separation.

You have to learn to remember again that you are not just some separate figure in the world, separated off from others, separate from effects. You are the entire environment. You are the whole. You are the sonship. You are the kingdom of God. You are included in everything at all times. Every thought affects everyone. Every act impacts the entire universe. You are the one, shared with all. Everything belongs to you and to everyone else simultaneously. Everyone has full access to everything at all times. There are no limits anywhere.

"The secret of salvation is that you are doing this to yourself."

"I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thinking."

"When I heal I am not healed alone."

"Nothing is for you alone."

"Atonement is a lesson in sharing."

"I will not judge lest I be judged."

"Giving and receiving are one."

"Miracles are a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers."

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds. Such is the truth."

"You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did."

"The sonship is your soul."

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

"The Kingdom of heaven includes all his children and their creations."

"I and my father are one."

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK"

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in this view are all your sins forgiven."

"Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus KEEPING it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your minds AT ALL, or you will also believe that you must UNDO what you have made, in order to BE forgiven"

"A forgiven world cannot last."

"He who would not forgive must judge, to justify his failure to forgive."

The function of forgiveness, is to look beyond error from the start, as pro-active "fore-giving", a giving of love which recognizes innocence and does not allow the mind to MAKE an error. Forgiveness is the perception in which errors are not seen at all, because the mind is not making or projecting errors itself, and so this "pro-active" attitude sustains a state where there is no error, ie there is no sin, and so long as you stay focused on this you will not produce any.

If you slip up and fail to forgive, you will make an error. You will go into the belief in "sin is real". And by going into it, you will use judgement to try to explain (justify) why you couldn't be forgiving. e.g. that someone "really did this or that", calling for you to "have to" be justified in judging due to what you think happened. But what you think "happened" is an error in judgement, an error in your own perception. An error that your own mind made-up, as a result of leaving the state of forgiveness.

The Holy Spirit therefore does not MAKE errors, or produce perception of sin, and so perceives only that there is no sin. He looks past errors to the truth, using reason. This form of sight literally "overlooks", as in, DOES NOT SEE, errors anywhere, as if the errors (if they were to exist) have become totally transparent and have disappeared. He looks only to the face of Christ and innocence and recognizes that there literally IS no ego, because there IS no error or sin, and the "forms of error" which the body's eyes look at and can't see past (physical objects) are overlooked entirely.

The world, as referred to in "the forgiven world", that being simply Earth and the rest of this universe, IS AN ILLUSION, and it is the form of error. To look at it is to be blinded by perception of form. To look past it is to overlook it and see beyond it. In this way, forgiveness literally overlooks the world entirely, forgets the world, ignores physical objects, and looks past it to the face of Christ. This is "forgiving the world" doesn't entail keeping it and looking AT it in a forgiving way, it entails OVERLOOKING it, recognizing it is NOT THERE, and realizing that it - being made of the idea of sin - DOES NOT EXIST AND HAS NOT HAPPENED. In this way forgiveness overlooks the world itself, not just misperceptions of it, and looks beyond this world to another - Heaven.

As such, "a forgiven world cannot last" because if it IS forgiven, it WAS an illusion, and IS NOT real, and therefore CAN be overlooked, not seen, regarded as nothing, and forgotten entirely. A "forgiven world" is an OVERLOOKED world, a world NOT SEEN, and NOT THERE. A world that never existed in the first place. And so forgiveness recognizes the world is an illusion, not a reality. A forgiven world is an undone world, and it disappears. This is why it cannot last. If you forgive it, you will make it disappear, because there is no sin and the world is the idea of sin. "Without the idea of death there is no world." "The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came."

It is very important in the development of trust, that we learn to make room for SPIRIT in our lives and hand over the responsibility for decision making to the Holy Spirit. This means ASKING the Holy Spirit WHAT TO DO. And this includes even in small matters which seem very specific. Just because the matters are small does not mean that you are not advanced.

We are asked to hand over all decision with increasing frequency, allowing him "to decide for God for me." Which means we have to talk to him and we have to listen to his response. We have to open up to trusting and being willing to RECEIVE GUIDANCE. And we have to learn to TRUST this guidance, seeing that it works, seeing that it is always for the best, seeing that it is never harmful, and seeing that it CAN BE trusted. Thus we develop trust.

By giving him all decision making it also absolves us of guilt, because then we are simply following his WISER advice. Part of this is because our attempts to judge anything correctly are heavily flawed and ego-driven because we can't see the big picture and we don't have access to all the variables. We are meant to relinquish judgement, which means we then can't know what anything means, or what to do, or where to go, or how to act. And thus we have to ASK FOR HELP. And our egos really do not want to give up control.

This is an absolute vital and required practice as part of doing this course. We must learn to trust the Holy Spirit in ALL THINGS, and turn to his advice ESPECIALLY in serious and difficult decisions, decisions about health, about life and death even, as well as what's for dinner and which way to go on a walk or which item to buy at the store. ALL THINGS, ALL decisions. Deep trust and handing over of ego autonomy and trusting in your own strength.

It is not only perfectly acceptable AND curriculum-aligned to seek for spiritual guidance, it is in fact what Jesus WANTS us to do. And that includes getting guidance from Jesus and the Holy Spirit, using it, AND sharing it with others to help them. It is a sign of spiritual maturity to do this because it means you're having true humility and are willing to serve God's will.

My wife was in the ICU for the second time, having been oxygen deprived, and was being declared more or less brain dead by the doctor, who told me to my face that she would never recover. She wasn't breathing well and he said we might as well let her die. I however did not trust this advice. The man seemed like the devil incarnate to me, certainly skilled in his profession but still an ego.

I instead sought the Holy Spirit and Jesus to decide for me and tell me what to do, knowing that I myself COULD NOT. I trusted their advice MORE than anyone. Their advice was to "resurrect her". And because of that, I made the decision that she would NOT be terminated and that we would wait.

In the next few days I did my praying and affirming and attempts to heal and so on, whether it helped or not I do not know. But a few days later, she began to wake up. The doctor at first accused me of lying when I told him she'd been trying to communicate. He was rather arrogant that he knew better and that it was impossible. He was completely convinced she would never recover.

But when they tried leaving off the sedation she suddenly came around and was talking. And a couple weeks later she was back at home to continue living. Had I listened to the advanced educated human ego advice of the chief doctor, she would've been put to death. Because Jesus told me what to do, and because I trusted it, she lived.

"ALL miracles mean Life, and God is the giver of Life. He will direct you VERY specifically."

"Remembering this, let us devote the remainder of the extended practice period to asking God to reveal His plan to us. Ask Him very specifically:

"What would you have me do?" Where would You have me go? What would You have me say, and to whom?"

"There is another advantage,- and a very important one, - in referring decisions to the Holy Spirit with increasing frequency. Perhaps you have not thought of this aspect, but its centrality is obvious. To follow the Holy Spirit's guidance is to let yourself be absolved of guilt. It is the essence of the Atonement. It is the core of the curriculum. "

"Leave ALL decisions to the One Who speaks for God, and for your function as He KNOWS it. So will He teach you to remove the awful burden you have laid upon yourself, by loving not the Son of God, and trying to teach him guilt INSTEAD of love."

"When you have learned how to decide WITH God, ALL decisions become as easy and as right as breathing. There is no effort, and you will be led as gently, as if you were being carried along a quiet path in summer. "

"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. "

Nothing has gone wrong.

There is nothing wrong with you.

You have not sinned.

You are immortal.

You cannot be hurt or suffer or be sick or die.

God created you eternal and holy forever.

You are sustained by the love of God at all times.

You have never sinned.

There is no real sin or guilt in you.

Any consequences of sin are utterly make-believe.

You are perfectly pure and forever innocent.

There is nothing you have ever done or can ever do which can make God decide to turn you away or judge or condemn you.

Your innocence is incapable of being defiled.

You are immortal and all forms of suffering and sickness and death are fiction.

No-one has ever died and no-one has ever really suffered.

You cannot die and you already have eternal life.

You are already in Heaven with God right now, right here, and always have been.

You are not lacking anything and there is no loss in you.

You have no needs whatsoever, and you are already complete and whole.

There is nothing that you want beyond what God has given and your only desire is to extend and share joyfully in the creation of more love.

You cannot be in error and you cannot be lost.

It is impossible for you to be separate from God in any way or to make Him unaware of you.

There is nowhere to hide and you have no secrets.

God is aware of everything about you.

God knows everything about you and always has.

He knows you are eternally guiltless and sinless and could not sin if you tried.

God did not create beings capable of sin or separation.

You have not malfunctioned or gone off the rails or hurt anyone or hurt yourself.

You are not too far gone, you have not gone anywhere.

There is nothing you can do in reality or truth besides extend love and create happiness.

You are always happy.

You are always perfect.

There is nothing being held against you and there is nothing you could ever do to turn God's love away.

God has not changed His mind about you at all and still regards you as perfect because He still creates you as perfect forever.

You have never caused anyone to suffer and no-one has ever caused you to suffer.

You are incapable of being damaged or threatened in any way.

You are real and exist forever in Heaven with God right now.

There is light everywhere within you because you are made of light and shine forever with a radiance of love.

You have not rejected God and God has not rejected you.

Your spirit is immortal and nothing can happen to it.

Who you are, your identity, has not changed and cannot change.

You are permanently real and permanently as God intended.

You have not wavered and nothing has altered the divine perfection that you are.

Nothing can be added to you and nothing has been taken away.

You share the absolute infinite abundance of all creation and could not possibly lack or need anything beyond what has been supplied fully.

You have no sickness and have never been sick and can never be sick.

It is impossible for you to be evil or sinful or dead.

You are an immortal soul, supremely perfected by the Perfect Creator and you are everlastingly immaculate.

Not one single note has been lost in Heaven's song and not one single note has been lost in Heaven's Son.

All is well and there is nothing to fear.

There is only love and only love is real.

There is no real reason to worry about anything.

Everything is absolutely perfect and always has been.

There is no fictional world and only Heaven is real.

Heaven holds everything your heart could ever desire and you want nothing else, nor have you ever traded it for anything else.

Heaven is your natural inheritance and you are worthy of it now.

You know deep inside that God loves you unconditionally at all times and there is absolutely no reduction in His measure of love for you, nor will there ever be.

You are eternally worthy of unconditional love at all times and it is impossible for you to offend God or to make Him angry at you.

He is incapable of hurt or attack or anger or fear or revenge, as are you.

You are like God in every way and always will be.

You are immortal and invulnerable and invincible and immune and innocent and fully identified with the whole of yourself.

You have never become something you are not, nor are you capable of being someone you are not.

You have never dreamed a real dream and you have never entered into a real separation.

God's love is the only love you ever will need and you have it fully.

You are absolutely complete and already completely yourself, needing no spiritual path and no seeking and nothing has been denied you.

You are incapable of real denial and it is impossible for you to reject God.

You are 100% the same as you have always been in every way, and need do absolutely nothing because there is only cause for celebration and gratitude.

You have been created perfect, and there is nothing you can do to change this.

You are worthy of all of the love of God, endlessly and forever, and you are receiving this love right now.

God loves you, and the truth of Heaven is your permanent Home.

The aspects of the Earth that you don't like, the things you are not fond of, the stuff you say is bad and wrong, the people you think of as guilty and sinful, are these really a part of the world?

Actually this is a combination of two things. The earth with its contents, plus your attack thoughts and judgements. "You're wrong" is an attack. "They're guilty" is an attack. "That's cruel" is a judgement.

It requires even an upheaval of all your values because now we're saying that even the things most people would think of as [insert your label for evil here], is in fact not that. Not unless you make it be that with your labeling.

So now we're saying that you can take the basic "raw material" of the world and give it a totally different meaning. What if you were an alien who just came down to earth and had never seen it before, know nothing of the culture, had never met a human, and had no clue what anything meant?

Things which are considered wrong, bad, evil, heresy, in some cultures, is actively embraced in others. Generally speaking in the UK, people who exercise are often labelled as vain and self absorbed. In the USA exercise is embraced much more openly as acceptable and a part of being youthful. But this is all made up.

When I moved from the UK to the USA I had to go through a huge transformation and reconfiguration of what I thought was good or bad or right or wrong or valuable or valueless. There was a whole different focus on what was 'normal' and acceptable.

It's the same with the whole world in general. We've made up our social rules and our cultures and our belief systems and our evaluations of what everything is. We've made up all our values and our protests at things we don't think are right.

Love has to find a way to look upon even hell and torture and murder and war and sacrifice and abuse and sickness and death without for a moment accusing it of sin or guilt or making it wrong. That's not a popular thing to do amongst the insane, and it appears to BE insane to suggest you could think of horrors as not horrors.

The course is indeed asking us to recognize that pain is pain and suffering is suffering and so on, but at the same time to forgive them and love them away. To translate them into something higher.

I think we don't want to even consider this because the notion of all the bad stuff not being bad, seems insane. And all the stuff people consider normal or natural, is in fact unnatural. And all the standards are bullshit. And all the social rules are invented. And there's not even really a valid moral system. It all has to be thrown out.

Only the Holy Spirit's true judgement of the world can see it correctly and judge it accordingly.

"To learn this course requires willingness to question EVERY value that you hold. Not one can be kept hidden and obscure, but it will jeopardize your learning."

"It cannot be too strongly emphasized that this course aims at a complete reversal of thought."

"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely. Life is now recognized as salvation, and pain and misery of any kind perceived as hell. Love is no longer feared but gladly welcomed. Idols have disappeared, and the remembrance of God shines unimpeded across the world."

"The illusion of orders of difficulty is an obstacle the teacher of God must learn to pass by and leave behind. One sin perfectly forgiven by one teacher of God can make salvation complete. Can you understand this? No; it is meaningless to anyone here. Yet it is the final lesson in which Unity is restored. It goes against all the thinking of the world, but so does Heaven."

"Today's idea, completely alien to the ego and the thinking of the world, is crucial to the thought reversal which this course will bring about." "To give up all problems to one Answer is to reverse the thinking of the world entirely."

"The world will end when all things in it have been rightly judged by His judgment. The world will end with the benediction of holiness upon it. When not one thought of sin remains, the world is over. It will not be destroyed nor attacked nor even touched. It will merely cease to seem to be."

Recognize this. The body was made to have permanently false perception. To be permanently unforgiving. It is absolutely incapable of ever forgiving anything. All it can do is sense what it detects seemingly in the world, and report it back as REAL. It cannot question it. It cannot rise above the battlefield. It will NEVER see reality. It cannot get even the slightest glimpse of real light or real truth It is permanently fixated on the physical form of objects, utterly blinded by them and incapable of seeing past them. It takes the form of objects as utter reality and meaning. It is completely convinced by the hierarchy of illusions, orders of difficulty, levels of problems and all manner of suffering. And to the body, every difference or change is real.

Every sickness appears utterly real to its senses. Every death is seen as undeniable proof of termination. It is tempted by literally everything it looks up or senses. It has never made even the slightest progress towards forgiveness, and it never will. It cannot step out of hell, it cannot wake up, it cannot even begin to suspect there is another reality, and it will not ever look upon God. What was made in vegas stays in vegas, and the body is MADE OF unreality.

This is just what the body is. It is a limited piece of biological machinery designed to deceive. It has one specific function of turning illusions into reality. It is an embodiment of the belief that separation is possible, and implements that belief. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh".

It is a reality inverter. It absolutely shuts out all trace of reality and light and truth and God, and only allows illusions and unreality and falsehoods to pass through its filters. And as false things pass through its filters, it regards them as the whole truth. What is false is seen as true, what is unreal is seen as real, and what is evil is seen as holy. This is because it was in an attempt to swap all the properties of what is true with what is false.

The body is a polarizer. It takes what is not true and makes it seem true. It takes what is true and makes it seem false. It denies God's Kingdom of heaven and opens itself up to hell. It makes itself "invulnerable" to eternal life and makes itself vulnerable to death. It is the very idea of exposure to death and to hell, to murder and sin, to suffering and fear. It is the inside-out expression of the desire to be unnatural and uncreated.

The body is always going to be like this. You can change the purpose that you use it FOR, but you cannot change its nature. You cannot make the body see reality, or wake up, or know what's true, or discern facts from fiction. The body is limited. It was made TO limit and to remain limited forever. It is the "lens" through which hell is looked upon and regarded as real, and not for a single second will any body EVER gain access to the light of reality.

The body ALWAYS sees with UNFORGIVENESS. It is absolutely locked into false perception. It constantly makes all unreal things real to itself. It cannot forgive, overlook, see past, recognize, correctly judge, discern, or recognize anything. It is blind to reality, and sees only unrealities.

And because the body itself is made of that same unreality, an unreality seeing an unreality registers as "truth". The body thinks an unreal world is true because unreality is the body's truth. Two negatives seem to make a positive. It does not see the world as opposite to its own nature, and so regards it with agreement. Even though both the body and the world are false. And this makes it utterly biased toward always regarding unreality as real.

The body will not ever show you God. The body will not allow you to be with God. The body will not bridge the gap to God. The body cannot open your mind. The body will never ever see the light of truth, or the real world, or heaven. The body cannot have visions of God or Christ. The body will never see Christ in your brothers. It is NOT CAPABLE. And it will always be incapable. And it cannot love.

The body is only what it is. It was made to confine and to limit and to imprison. You cannot use a prison to experience freedom from prisons. You cannot use handcuffs to know what it's like to be unlimited. You will not EVER turn the body into an awakened being, or get it to look upon reality, or make it able to forgive anything whatsoever. It cannot even BEGIN to forgive because it is absolutely PERMANENTLY HARDWIRED into hell.

There must be a better way, yes? There must be ANOTHER WAY TO SEE. There must be some way that your MIND can choose away from the body and experience without it. A way to escape from hell. There has to be freedom FROM the body. "Do you want freedom of the body, or of the mind? For both you cannot have." If you want your mind to be free, it has to be free FROM the body. The body itself cannot be free because the body IS imprisonment. And there's no point polishing a turd.

We have to then learn to recognize the body for what it is and what it is not. The body is a JUDGER and a condemner. It is an accuser. It cannot stop judging sin to be real. It cannot stop testifying to the proof of sin. The body is utterly selfish. The body is so locked into unreality that the ego actually sees the body as its ally, something it is in "agreement with", because both the body and the ego identify hell as reality. That's why the body became the ego's "chosen home."

As Jesus says, we have to leave the desert. The body has to be transcended and the mind has to open up to ANOTHER WORLD, another vista, through another sight, which does not depend on the body at all. It has to get out of the box and step out of limitation. And if you are going to forgive at all, it CANNOT be that the body forgives. Your mind has to overlook what the body shows it and recognize it as false. Only if all of hell is false can heaven be true.

"Real vision is not only unlimited by space and distance, but it does not depend on the body's eyes at all. The mind is its only source."

Attempting to take your self closer to the truth in any way, will be met with ego resistance.

The ego itself is nothing, just a "way of looking" which is the opposite to seeing the truth. It distorts everything and makes everything seem the opposite to what it is. It inverts reality. It changes God into death/evil/murderous. It sees Holy Spirit as an enemy. It sees the truth as a threat. And it does not want anything to do with this idea of "waking up and not having an ego."

The ego by itself doesn’t do anything. The problem is that YOU have taken it on AS IF it is your own Self. You regard IT as the same thing as your identity.

What that does is it causes you to perceive WITH it, through it’s eyes. You then will see things the way the ego sees them.

So if you are "tied to" an ego identity which wants absolutely nothing to do with truth, cannot exist in the truth, and sees the truth as proof that it does not exist, then "YOU" will become very threatened by approaching the truth.

If for example the truth says, there is no sin, and the ego believe that sin is real and true, and therefore sin is your *identity*, to your sense of self this will SEEM to say "I do not exist."

Regardless of the fact that you may have sided with an insane ego, you do not RECOGNIZE it is insane. You think it makes perfect sense. It seems logical, sensible, rational. You will also want to defend it as though to do so is defending "your" life, because you think it is you. Therefore it makes sense to you to AVOID the truth at all costs.

The ego sees the truth as attack, vengeance, evil, warring, deadly, hateful, loss, non-existence, etc. If you identify with the ego, you will also see the truth as meaning this.

So then, you will attempt to reach out to the truth, to become closer to God, to go into the light, but because part of you is STILL holding onto the ego and is using it to perceive, that part of you seeing with the ego will think you’re trying to kill yourself.

No-one in their "right mind" would go against what seems sensible and true, and expose themselves to what must be the END of themselves. The truth is the end of the ego, and if you believe it, it means it’s the end of your self. Approaching the truth WITH the ego, pulling it along with you, is nothing short of you SCARING THE CRAP out of yourself by exposing yourself to your worst enemy, complete with no defenses.

This is the sole cause of all ego rebounds and resistance - the mis-perception that welcoming the truth is welcoming your own death. No-one wants to do this. IT seems sensible to protect yourself and defend yourself against this. In spite of your best efforts to "become more spiritual" by opening up to the light of truth, or to love, the rest of you - still perceiving the opposite to the truth, will fear out when you try to do it.

What can even happen is your ego self will create DEFENSES AGAINST THE TRUTH, which it thinks are *needed* in order to protect your "self". Or to put it another way, you who are identified with the ego, interpret the truth as your mortal enemy, and do not want it, are threatened by it and want to "naturally" defend yourself. In the name of preserving your own life, you will erect DEFENSES psychologically.

The only ego defense is *separation*, attempting to create a gap or sense of "distance" between yourself and the threat. Implementing this is an attempt to shut out the truth, by implementing a BLOCK. The purpose of this block is to block your awareness of the threat, because if you are not aware of it, to you this is practically the same experience as though it does not exist. You use DENIAL to hide the perceived danger from yourself, so you can enter an *illusion of safety*. This illusion of safety, this block, made of guilt, shows up as SICKNESS. Sickness is a defense against the truth.

The purpose of sickness then is to defend you against what you think is going to hurt you. But to implement it, you actually HURT YOURSELF. It should be obvious why this is insane. Perceiving your best interests through the filter of the ego is insane, because it shows you the *opposite* of what will actually help you. What would really help you, and what is the UNDOING of sickness, is to correctly perceive WITHOUT the ego, that the truth is NOT a threat or hurtful, is FOR you not against you, is welcome, you want it, and it does NOT mean you will not exist.

When you can perceive correctly that you are not being threatened by the truth, you will UNDO the NEED for the defense, and this will make the sickness *disappear*. Literally. All symptoms will be dropped, because you have no further need for them. Sickness is always serving the PURPOSE of being a defense to keep you safe, even though it does the opposite. Without its purpose, it will not exist because you will withdraw your belief from it.

Essentially, approaching the truth is going to make your ego-identified self threatened. It will want to defend itself and it will be horrified, offended, upset and scared of the truth. This can lead people to BECOME SICK by doing the course. It can also cause peoples lives to turn upside down, as reactions to the misinterpretation of the truth.

Gradually the way to undo this is the development of trust and coming to perceive correctly WITHOUT the ego’s interpretation. This will naturally lead to a WILLINGNESS to accept the atonement, and accept God’s truth as true. And then you will have no resistance whatsoever. It is only your beliefs to the contrary that try to defend you against the truth.

So each time you have an ego rebound, don’t belittle yourself or judge yourself as failing to do the course right. I used to think I was making big mistakes when I had rebounds, like I was guilty for having them. But I had to learn to be gentle and acknowledge what they were saying, recognizing it was a part of my SELF that was afraid and offended by the truth I was opening up to. It’s perfectly okay to take a BREAK from pushing yourself towards the truth, to let your ego settle down a bit, and integrate what you’ve learned so that you can move forward with more willingness and less fear.

"Forgiveness is the only gift I give because it is the only gift I want, and everything I give I give myself. This is salvation s simple formula."

"Only the self-accused condemn."

"It can be but myself I crucify."

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF."

"You but accuse your brother of your own sins."

As I learn that any upset I feel is entirely self created and internal and nothing to do with anything else, I begin to experience a strangely unexpected disconnection between what seems to happen and how I react.

I can see that things happen externally, and perhaps they trigger internal reactions initially, but if I work on those reactions or realize they are just some old unhealed junk surfacing in my awareness, and I heal it, I am then restored to a more peaceful happy state even in spite of the fact that the external situation may still be the same.

And so this shows me that there are kind of two things running simultaneously. There's the external story, the world, showing pictures of things happening. And then there's this internal story or dialog, this inner reactive ego response, which runs alongside it. The ways that I am attacking myself, and then USING the world as a scapegoat.

As I practice ownership of my inner experience and see myself responsible for choosing and causing it, rather than making a false ego causal connection between "what I feel" and "what is happening outside", the two previously merged stories are peeling away from each other. Whereas before I thought that my upset goes hand in hand with a given situation, it is suddenly evidence that the two are not connected.

They no longer completely coincide and I now see myself sometimes moving outward to join with the external story but then flowing back inward again to pull away from it. If I identify with the "what's happening out there" story, I lose myself and react to it. But if I recall that I'm doing this all to myself internally, and ideas leave not their source, and any reaction in me I have chosen to reinvent myself, the whole sense of being "caused by" the world diminishes.

Where there used to be simply a total confusion and distraction and immersion and absorption into the hierarchy of illusions, all of the effects the ego dream would suggest I have, and its entire script for what I "should" be experiencing as a result, there is now an intermittent but increasingly wide divide between "what the dream is doing" and "what I am doing to myself."

If I am being triggered a lot by some situation that is ongoing, but then I recognize the triggered reaction is a re-emergence of a prior condition of self attack in my mind, my own accusation of myself as sinful, and I work on that and undo it, and it goes away, and the external situation just continues in its normal form but without triggering me, I see that there is a definite difference between me and "it".

It's as if, we don't just become body identified, we become world identified. We believe that *everything* external to the mind, which includes the body, has become the storage place and cause of all the stuff we are experiencing. We bind with it, just as we bind with the body in pain. We fail to separate out what is the dream and who is doing the dreaming. It's like an attempt to be one with the dream, to merge with it, and to fail to recognize it is not dreaming you.

If I think the world is dreaming me and causing me, I'm going to go out of my mind and connect my sense of who and what I am to whatever the world suggests I should be, based on that causality. If I let the dream dictate everything I experience, I am now in a constant victim role. As I continue to believe that I'm at the effect of the world, I cannot separate out what is happening within me versus what is really causing it. Because the world is not really the cause at all, and I'm doing this all to myself from within, to within.

I have to learn to recognize that whatever is going on inside me, whatever feelings or upsets or experiences or beliefs I'm having, not one single one of them is the result of the external dream world. There is not a single cause in the world with the power to do anything to me, as an invulnerable, immortal being. And that means learning to stop having this symbiotic merging of identity with the world, where I plug myself into the external illusion and allow it to trample all over me under the belief that it CAN and IS doing so.

I have to learn that nothing I experience is caused by anything but my innermost self. And if I am upset, I must address what I am doing to myself. And if someone *seems* to trigger me, I have to not accuse them of causing what comes up because they did not put it there, I did. And I would then thank them for bringing it to my attention. And so I must then recognize, if it weren't for me hurting myself, accusing myself, upsetting myself, I would NEVER be hurt, accused, or upset. An in fact as Jesus says, "you cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

It actually isn't really so much a matter of what the world has been doing TO ME. It's more in fact a matter of what I have been doing TO THE WORLD. I have been putting MY self-accused sins ONTO the world and have been attacking it and using it as a scapegoat to blame for causing the very things *I* have been doing to myself! The world has not been guilty at all, it's been innocent the whole time. And it's my own inner conflict that has been playing out projected and disassociated externally, to make it SEEM as if it's not part of me or in my mind or anything to do with me. I then get away with blaming the world for everything I do not like about myself.

MY task now is to step back, out of the drama I am causing, out of the rollercoaster of reactions and suffering that I'm producing based on what I've done to myself and tried to accuse others of, and constantly correct the "spilling over" of my inner wounds onto the world. Indeed I am to take off of the world all of the shite that I have been dumping onto it through my egoic projections of self attack.

All the guilt, sin, fear, unworthiness, shame, whatever.... if I address it as an internal scenario that I am doing to myself, NOT caused by anything or anyone else, and it is addressed honestly and correctly within my mind, then gradually I'm lifting off of the world all of this inner baggage that I was associating or attaching to it. And that means the world itself, the dream, is going to be recognized more as not really the cause of anything.

In this way, gradually the world becomes forgiven, in the sense that it is seen WITHOUT my inner content projections. As I stop seeing inner junk "out there", what was behind the junk - the illusory world onto which I projected more illusions - the illusory world is "revealed" more for simply what it is and not what I was making of it. Without my sins being projected, and without having any sins, I cannot see sin IN it.

The guilty meanings I was projecting onto it, the causality I was accusing it of, the sense of vulnerability and stress and suffering that I thought IT was responsible for causing but which I was doing to myself backwards, are no longer seen as "coming from" the world or from anyone else, but myself. It's all an inside job. And it's really me that needs the forgiveness, having accused myself of things that are untrue of my perfect divine holiness.

If I am wounded, by my self attack, I will project my wounds all over the place, bleeding out onto the world a blackness of self hatred. This will cloud my perception of the world and render it dark. As I heal the inner wounds, within, where the problem really is, in my mind, I can no longer have anything TO leak out onto the world. The world simply becomes automatically "forgiven", not because it did anything, but through simply being able to SEE what is there as the world, through self-forgiven eyes, rather than seeing THROUGH the old lens of sin and guilt.

As such, the world becomes uncovered, released, "saved" from me, from my projected self attack. And without a log in my own eye, I no longer HAVE sin in my mind TO attempt to displace onto external figures. And without this sin blocking my vision, I become more able to simply see the world for what it is, without all of the sin guilt and fear dumped onto it or filtering it. And without this angry dark content, perhaps the world is filled with light.

We're told that as we progress with this, the "real world" will become more visible to us. That is, the world we made, but without judgement, projection, disassociation, displacement, or all the other forms of disowned self attack masking it. Without this content, its forms seem less inherently meaningful. Without putting these dark meanings onto the world, the world IS meaningless. It is also neutral, and in a way pure, because it is nothing.

The world, in its "reality", or rather, seen "as is", is just a picture, without sin or guilt or fear or death projected onto it. It just stands like a thin veil before the face of Christ. It has no meaning of its own, because God only creates meaningful worlds and He did not create this. It is not dark. Or alive. Or dead. Or holy. Or sinful. In fact it can become more seemingly beautiful, as the inner beauty begins to look upon itself and shine outwards, illuminating the picture rather than attacking it. And as such the "real world", the forgiven world, begins to show up in awareness as a reflection of your OWN holiness projected onto a NEUTRAL canvas.

While the world in its physicality and form is "false perception", in which the forms are only focused on as part of seeing falsely and dwelling on separations, guilt and death, as perception rises toward the light within, looking first within and then looking outward, the forms are overlooked. They don't define anything quite so strongly as before. They don't separate off with harsh boundaries and walls. They become less solid, less heavy, less dark. They loom with less weight and seem to have less substance or meaning. As if they are not there, because they aren't, being just illusions.

The world becomes lighter, within, and seen without, as the dream seems to turn to a happier dream, where the unhappiness that was in you is no longer added to it. Where happiness returns to the mind and the world is seen as not containing any real sin or guilt - because the mind has none to project onto it. You can only look upon yourself. If you are love you see love in everything because the world is not real or evil. If you are guilty, you see guilt in everything and the world seems like hell. By forgiving yourself and restoring heaven to your mind, the world can be but a reflection of heaven to you.

The world without your guilt is the forgiven world, shining and sparkly and new. Still an illusion, yes. Still neutral and meaningless, yes. It is still nothing at all. But now the meaningfulness of love - God's will - is projected and seen within it, rather than darkness. This makes the world seem "lovable". Not because it is love or made of love, but because you can see only the love BEYOND it and can do nothing else. And God does love the world we made. This love, seen in it, is its only reality, and in the intensity of this love, all of the forms melt and disappear. Because the love is deeper than the forms and lives between the lines.

When eternity finally shines away the world, all its forms have vanished, everything has fused into oneness, love has erased death and the nothingness of the world of bodies ceases to exist. Without separation there are no forms. In light, there is no darkness. And in love there is no fear. All that remains beyond this disappearing world is heaven. Love looks upon itself. Christ looks upon Himself. And then God is known in completion.

"When you think you are projecting what you do NOT want, it is still because you DO want it. This leads directly to dissociation"

"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. You cannot really give anything but love to anyone or anything, nor can you really receive anything else from them. If you think you have received anything else, it is because you have looked within, and thought you saw the power to give something else WITHIN YOURSELF. It was only this decision that determined what you found, for it was the decision of what you SOUGHT."

"You are afraid of me because you looked within, and are afraid of what you saw. But you could not have seen reality, for the reality of your mind is the loveliest of God's Creations. Coming only from God, its power and grandeur could only bring you peace, IF YOU REALLY LOOKED UPON IT. If you are afraid, it is because you saw something THAT IS NOT THERE. Yet in this same place you could have looked upon me and all your brothers, in the perfect safety of the Mind that created us. For we are there in the peace of the Father, Who wills to project His peace through YOU."

"When you have accepted your mission to PROJECT peace, you will FIND it. For by MAKING IT MANIFEST you will SEE it. Its holy witnesses will surround you, because you CALLED upon them, and they will come to you. I have heard your call, and I have answered it, but you will not look upon me, nor hear the answer which you sought. But that is only because you do not yet want ONLY that. Yet as I become more real to you, you will learn that you DO want only that. And you will see me as you look within, and we will look upon the world as God created it together. Through the eyes of Christ, ONLY the real world exists, and can BE seen."

"As you decide, so will you see. And all that you see but witnesses to your decision. When you look within and see me, it will be because you have decided to manifest truth. And as you manifest it, you will see it both without AND within, for you will see it without BECAUSE you saw it first within. Everything you behold without is a judgment of what you beheld within. If it is YOUR judgment, it will be wrong, for judgment is not your function. If it is the judgment of the Holy Spirit, it will be right, for judgment IS His function. You share His function only by judging as HE does, reserving no judgment at all unto yourselves. For you will judge AGAINST yourselves, but He will judge FOR you."

Remember, then, that whenever you look without and react unfavorably to what you see, you have judged yourself unworthy, and have condemned yourself to death. The death penalty is the ego's ultimate goal, for it fully believes that you are a criminal, as deserving of death as God knows you are deserving of life. The death penalty never leaves the ego's mind, for that is what it always reserves for you in the end. Wanting to kill you, as the final expression of its feeling for you, it lets you live but to await death. It will torment you while you live, but its hatred is not satisfied until you die. For your destruction is the one end toward which it works, and the only one with which it will be satisfied."

"You're doing this undo yourself."? No way!!!

The ego objects to the secret of salvation. "I CAN'T be doing this to myself! There's no way I'm causing or choosing this! I don't want this, I didn't ask for this, I didn't do anything to make this happen."

Of course the ego thinks this because this IS the defense that is covering up the awareness that you are all powerful. That you chose and caused.

See, ego equates responsibility with guilt and it has absolutely no notion that you can be responsible WITHOUT being guilty. It sees responsibility as "where the blame lies", who is guilty, who sinned, who did it.

It doesn't WANT to be open to the idea that you could take responsibility and be INNOCENT. And so it has a lot of defences and denials and resistance to this idea.

When you start taking responsibility the ego is going to come in and say that you are guilty because of this. So you're going to have to learn to separate out the responsibility from the accusation.

It can really challenge you to be willing to consider that you might actually be choosing what you are experiencing. It means you're going to have to let everyone off the hook and not hate them. It means you can't be a victim, you can't be unfairly treated, you can't be being misrepresented or not heard or accused.

The ego sees taking responsibility as on par with admitting to a crime that's going to send you to prison. It does not want to do it. It sees confession of truth as totally against your best interests. It's like admitting to being a guilty sinner, tapping into your deepest hidden hurts and sense of regret and guilt and shame.

Who wants to admit to being the cause of something awful, or some suffering, or something unpleasant even? But this is what we're going to have to do. The ego has been judge and jury and has decided that the only way you can have the power to do anything is by having the power to be a guilty suffering attacker.

This is why it's a bit challenging, admitting to the truth. You suspect that you sinned, you suspect you're guilty, you don't even want to look at it in case it's true. Or it seemed true when you last looked at it, so you hid from it and vowed to keep it hidden.

But the truth is that you cannot suffer unless you choose to do so. And that's easy to say but a lot harder to totally own. It means you're going to have to look at and question how you might have actually done this. How you chose. The power of your decision. How you decided and the purpose you were trying to serve in your deciding. Why you wanted to suffer. Why you wanted sickness. Why you wanted pain and misery.

Probably you'll feel that the reason for this self-attack was some kind of horrible sin that you committed long ago, maybe an ancient sin, you know, like trying to kill God? Which you believe is true. So you're going to have to confront that at some point to find a path through so that you can get to where you are responsible without the guilt. Where responsibility can mean a verdict of freedom.

We are quite averse to admitting to what we think we've done because we don't want to. And we've become used to projecting it rather than owning it, because owning it feels like shit. But we are not being asked to own up to something terrible that we did, we're being asked to own up to having NOT DONE ANYTHING.

But the road to freedom requires the total acceptance of total responsibility. Without ANY sin or guilt entering into it. When responsibility is polished clean of all guilt, it simply means you are still as God created you, pure and clean, innocent and sinless. And cause for celebration.

"Loudly the ego tells you NOT to look inward, for if you do, your eyes will light on sin, and God will strike you blind. This you believe, and so you do NOT look. Yet this is NOT the ego's hidden fear, nor YOURS who serve it. Loudly indeed the ego claims it IS. TOO loudly and TOO often. For underneath this constant shout and frantic proclamation, the ego is NOT certain it is so. Beneath your fear to look within because of sin is yet ANOTHER fear, and one which makes the ego tremble. What if you looked within, and saw NO sin? This "fearful" question is one the ego NEVER asks. And you who ask it now ARE "threatening" the ego's whole defensive system too seriously for it to bother to PRETEND it is your friend."

I haven't been focusing on miracles for a while, but kind of accidentally lately I've been finding myself exposed to some statements about miracles. I seem to be seeing them in a different light. Which is funny because "seeing in the light" is a big part of it.

There is one thing ACIM says fairly clearly and it's that miracles are ONLY seen in light. It also says miracles and vision are completely connected to each other. At times it also suggests miracles are so high in terms of states of consciousness, as to be right up at the christ level. Such as that the eyes of christ deliver them to all they look upon.

It also tells us that miracles, seen in light, are all over the place. A miracle stands next to what seemed to be a false perception, and these miracles are even there when we don't see them. We can block awareness of the miracles but that doesn't mean they're not there. And that suggests they are "ways of seeing."

I also found in experience recently that in one instance where I was driving behind a car and was about to scapegoat and then chose not to, kind of "holding back" the projection of guilt, Jesus called it a miracle. So then that got me thinking, what is a miracle really? We're also told that miracles and grievances are opposites. Also that ego-projection and miracles are opposites. So that tells us a bit about the state of mind or the activities of mind.

We're also told that miracles don't "do" anything, although we're also told they UNDO the interference that the ego was DOING. They "correct" the mind and sort of straighten out perceptions. They're also described as the translation of denial into truth. Also that miracles merely remind the mind of who the dreamer is, ie putting your awareness back in touch with you being causal and not seeing yourself as a victim or as in a position to scapegoat.

Miracles appear to be tied into true perceptions, as though they are glimpses of an accurate perception of something. But we're also told that they are thought creations, that they can energize others, that they can supply a lack. And that they are expressions of love. In prayer love is received, and in miracles love is expressed.

The impression I'm getting is that the love is coming down from a higher level ie heaven, and we are the open door who has to extend them. This is a sort of cause-effect chain, where God gives us the miracles and then we transfer them to others. As in "Miracles are a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers."

If we are in a state of christ mind where we're fully open to the truth, then we are fully able to extend and pass on these miracles, these parcels of love. It's almost like they reflect the idea of creations, in which we are co-creating with God, extending God and paying forward what we've received. This is why you can only give the miracles you've received.

On the one hand it seems that a miracle is like a gift of love, a form of healing, which corrects the mind and lifts it up out of false perceptions into true perception. As stated in terms of miracles "entailing" a sudden shift into vertical perception. At the same time this gift of love has power and healing in it, as all love does, and so while it corrects your sight and you "see with the miracle" or through the miracle-sight, you also extend that love and power and it can cause things to happen.

Jesus also refers to them as examples of right thinking. Right thinking is sanity and true perception. Accuracy of thought and mind. These moments of clarity and non-attack and non-judgement and non-projection, recognize sinlessness ie as in forgiveness, and broadcast that wholeness of mind to the whole sonship. They are thus also expressions of holy relationship ie total unconditional relationship.

Since Jesus refers to them as thought-creations, and that thoughts can create higher or lower realities, these miracles are clearly a function of mind and thought, which includes power and love, as kind of acts of "higher dreaming". These miracles lift up the mind and heal it, as in "interceding for your holiness". And as a result you see correctly, and your correct seeing has corrective properties which can shine light into other minds and correct them.

Thinking of someone like Jesus in a state of christ-mind, or near to it, he was so sided with heaven's laws that he could constantly radiate and pass on that miraculousness at will. He could use the mind, in combination of thought and belief, and with the power of God behind it, to cause things to happen. And each of these were love-based expressions. Including raising the dead and healing the sick and moving mountains. The mind is just naturally miraculous and powerful when it's in its healed state.

So miracles are definitely tied to mind, and to seeing, and to light, and to forgiveness, and to giving and receiving, and to extension of God and love. They are acts, performances, expressions, doings, which emit out of the mind and are given and shared, as part of the natural outgoing of love and its unlimitedness. Someone miraculous has the light of God in their eyes and just sees everything with sparkling light and can effortlessly bestow blessings of supernatural transformation everywhere they go.

"The miracle is the act of a Son of God who has laid aside all false gods, and who calls on his brothers to do likewise."

If a miracle can be as simple as a right-minded non-attacking non-scapegoating non-projecting opposite to a grievance, where you "look and wait and judge not", in which you are being closer in alignment to how the Holy Spirit sees, then we're asked to basically get our mind-seeing into the light where it can bestow miracles all the time. Seeing forgiveness given to everything. Meeting all things with heavenly blessing.

Or something like that.

"A sense of separation from God is the only lack you really need correct. This sense of separation would never have arisen if you had not distorted your perception of truth, and had thus perceived yourself as lacking."

Before the separation there were no problems. There was no sickness. No death. No war. No lack or suffering. No pain or fear. No guilt. No sin. Nothing. There was only joy and love and creation and peace and light and truth and celebration.

Recognize this then. ABSOLUTELY EVERY problem or difficulty in this world is symptomatic of what happens when you leave God. EVERYTHING.

Everything in this world is MADE OF "God’s absence". MADE OF IT. ***It IS the separation***. It is not something that was "tacked on" after separation, it is the separation ITSELF. The direct and unavoidable RESULT of trying to exist without love.

All sickness and all death are nothing more than an aspect of you being separate from God. These things did not happen for any other reason. There was NO CAUSE whatsoever other than the causality in Heaven, prior to the separation.

Problems, sickness, death, suffering, it is all a manifestation of "being without God". All needs that have arisen are there ONLY because we are LACKING GOD. Every form of sickness is the absence of God. All forms of death are the absence of Life, and God is life. Every war and every conflict is arising because of the absence of God.

To in any way suggest that your return to God/truth will entail the retention of ANY PROBLEM, any form of sickness, suffering, lack or death, or even this world itself, is absolute bullshit. ALL of this "stuff" IS THE SEPARATION. When there is no separation, there IS NONE OF THIS.

There is NO PROBLEM other than the separation from God. There IS nothing happening in this world that isn’t symptomatic of trying to be away from Him. EVERYTHING here is the RESULT, of pushing God away.

You do not have a problem paying bills. You do not have unfair sicknesses caused by improper diet. You do not have struggles with coworkers which is their fault. You do not have issues with people on facebook groups. The separation from God IS THE ONLY LACK YOU NEED CORRECT. You have a problem with GOD, not with this world. This world is the FORM of your problem with God. And there is **no problem** love cannot solve.

"Let me recognize my problems have been solved. If you are willing to recognize your problems, you will recognize that you have no problems. Your one central problem has been answered, and you have no other."

Every question that you have, every fear, every doubt, every problem, when you are EXPOSED to God, if you try to commune with God, none of those questions become answered. What happens instead, is all your questions DISAPPEAR. They simply vanish. Every question was a form of fear arising from the ABSENCE of God. When He shows up, the entire foundation for those questions no longer exists.

When you go to God, you are SOLVING every problem you have. When you join with God, His MERE PRESENCE is the SOLUTION to every issue in your life. Because every single issue in your life, no matter how it APPEARS, or how specific it seems to be, or how confined it seems to be, or how much it seems to be about specific people and not others, IT IS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANY OF THAT.

Pushing God away introduces lack. Pushing God away introduces fear. Pushing God away makes you feel guilty and want to die. Pushing God away is the source of ALL ILLNESS. Pushing God away is the source of every war and every single death that has even taken place in this dream.

Every aspect of every nightmare is the result of the "darkness" that seems to come about when light is absent.

All financial problems are a lack of God. Every argument arises from a lack of God. All injuries are a lack of God. Every disease is a lack of God. All problems in your job are the lack of God. Everything you attack or judge is the result of the lack of God. There is not a single problem in this world that is anything other than a symptom of God being absent. Upon his "return" to your life, it simply all will disappear because it was all made of his absence. This is a metaphysical fact.

Loving with God = eternal life. Trying to exist without God = suffering and death.

You do not have any other problem other than not being with God. All you have done is you have pushed away the provision of every need you could possible have. You have rejected life. You’ve separated yourself from effortlessness and from being natural. You’ve tried to deny eternal life and immortality. You’ve attempted to suppress all power and creative potential. You ONLY have a shit life because you’ve shut God out.

There is no other problem to solve. And this problem ONLY HAS ONE SOLUTION. The ONLY solution to EVERY problem in the world, is love. God Himself. The restoration of your willingness and awareness of the presence of God in your life, in your mind, in your heart, in your being. LOVE SOLVES EVERYTHING. Not only does it solve everything, it is THE ONLY WAY to solve ANYTHING. There is NO OTHER ANSWER.

You cannot be happy without God. You cannot live without God. And in truth, you cannot be separate from God either. So all of these problems you have, cannot be real problems. They must be illusions of "being separate from God". A dream of "what might it be like without love". This dream fortunately is NOT THE SAME THING as "separation really happening". It’s just a great big IDEA. Wake up. God still loves you and that’s forever. And that’s all you need.

A collection of quotes from A Course in Miracles.

"Right-Mindedness neither exalts nor depreciates the mind of the miracle worker nor of the ****miracle receiver****. However, as a creative act, the miracle ****need not await the Right-Mindedness of the receiver. In fact, its purpose is to restore him TO his Right Mind.**** But it is essential that the miracle worker be in his Right Mind, or he will be unable to reestablish Right-Mindedness ****in someone else.****"

"All forms of not-Right-Mindedness are the result of refusal to accept the Atonement FOR YOURSELF. If the miracle worker DOES accept it, he places himself in the position to recognize that ****those who need to be healed are simply those who have NOT done so.****"

"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. By affirming this, the miracle worker releases the mind from overevaluating its own learning device (the body), and restores the mind to its true position as the learner."

"Having offered love, only love can be received. It is in this that the teacher of God must trust. This is what is really meant by the statement that the one responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept the Atonement for himself. The teacher of God is a miracle worker because ****he gives the gifts he has received****. Yet he must first accept them. He need do no more, nor is there more that he could do. By accepting healing ****he can give it.**** If he doubts this, let him remember Who gave the gift and Who received it. Thus is his doubt corrected."

"Yet love without trust is impossible, and doubt and trust cannot coexist. And hate must be the opposite of love, regardless of the form it takes. Doubt not the gift and it is impossible to doubt its result. This is the certainty that gives God's teachers the power to be miracle workers, for they have put their trust in Him."

"Prayer is the medium of miracles, not because God created perceptions, but because God created YOU. At the beginning of this course, we said that YOU are a miracle. Therefore, the miracle worker is a miracle NOT of his own creation."

"They meet IN ORDER to abolish the difference. At the beginning, since we are still in time, they come together on the basis of inequality of ability and experience. The aim of the teacher is to ****give them more of what is temporarily his.**** This process has all of the miracle conditions we referred to at the beginning. The teacher (or miracle worker) ****gives more to those who have less, bringing them closer to equality with him****, at the same time gaining for himself."

"Then let him turn within to his Eternal Guide, and let Him judge what the response should be. So is he healed, and ****in his healing is his pupil healed with him****. 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. His sins have been forgiven him, and he no longer condemns himself. How can he then condemn anyone? And ****who is there whom his forgiveness can fail to heal****?"

"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. 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."

"The miracle worker is one who accepts my kind of denial and projection, unites his own inherent abilities to deny ****and project with mine, and imposes them back on himself and others****. This establishes the total lack of threat anywhere. ****Together we can then work**** for the real time of peace, which is Eternal."

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

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

****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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's why having a thought of attack or judgement about someone else automatically includes you and attacks you.

Mind in its natural state is free of all judgements and attacks. It is "empty". It sees reality for what it is with no interpretation.

In order for mind have a 'judgement' about someone, the only way mind can do this is to generate some kind of situation within itself that looks like a judgement. An attack thought.

So within the mind itself, made from mind, mind has to invent images, forms, thoughts, impressions, sensations, which put a judgement into the mind's experience. Otherwise the mind wouldn't be able to PERCEIVE that there is a judgement taking place. Mind can only experience what is within itself and is absolutely blind to anything external (because there is nothing external, really).

So now the mind is having a judgement about "someone", but it couldn't create this judgement outside of itself. It's setting off nuclear bombs about this so-called other person, but the fallout from that explosion is affecting the mind because it's all taking place inside the mind.

Even though the mind is having a judgement ABOUT something that it thinks is outside of itself - beyond the body identity - the actual experience of the judgement and the conditions that this judgement creates, are happening inside the confines of the body-mind.

So that means it's happening to you. Not only is it happening to you just as much as it's happening to someone else, it's actually ONLY happening to you, and not happening to someone else at all!

So to perceptually attack someone else, you have to put attack into your mind. Your mind has to believe in attack, and it goes both ways. The mind doesn't conceive of 'attack on xyz person' hoping to escape how that attack feels, it conceives of 'attack' in general. And that means, the same rules it applies to someone else, applies to itself.

The mind cannot perceive or experience anything outside of itself. It's like, the ocean cannot know what life is like in a desert - it can't go there, it doesn't exist there, it can only be aware of what's in the ocean.

So you THINK that you can use your mind to make up stuff 'about someone not myself'. You THINK you have this ability to objectively sit on the sidelines and judge and attack and have absolutely no effects from this at all. That's absolutely mistaken and a totally ego-based self-deception. Nobody has this ability. It's a myth. If you want bombs to go off against other people, you have to set them off within you, and pretend that they're having an affect on someone else. Good luck with that.

So you have this vested interest in not attacking 'others' because in fact it doesn't even attack others, it attacks you.

Try hating someone or being really angry at them, at the same time as loving yourself. Any luck with that? It's not possible. You can't maintain a state of mind for love to exist while simultaneously having a state of mind where hate/fear/guilt/judgement/attack exists. YOUR mental condition has to degrade in order to generate hatred. Hatred destroys you. Your mental condition has to become unconscious and blocked in order for you not to see love in someone. And by not seeing it in someone, those blocks will block your own awareness of your own love. You put up walls to keep others out, and to keep you in a prison.

So you see you can't do anything to others and think that you're getting away with it, or that you are not going to be affected in some way. You are deeply affected, and ONLY you are affected, when you really get down to it. So it's utterly futile.

You have this interest in not attacking others not because you even can attack others, but because every single time you do this you do not realize that you are ONLY attacking yourself, YOUR mind suffers, YOUR mind changes into a hate machine, YOU are experiencing the hate, and other people aren't even experiencing it.

You think you can generate 'stuff' in you that somehow leaks out and overflows and travels over to other people and does stuff to them. You think you have these weapons of warfare, the power to affect someone else. You don't. It's a total myth. If someone doesn't choose to experience effects they will not. If you're in a judging hateful mood and you're going around believing you're capable of attacking people, and the people are all laughing and not taking it seriously, obviously you don't have the power to affect them. You're deluded.

You are the only one who is upset.

It is based on two simple ideas:

1) God knows everything about you and sees everything you do (there is nowhere to hide so you might as well admit it)

2) God is always unconditionally loving you in spite of what you have done in secret/darkness (thank God)

The exercise is simple.

Step 1: Admit to God everything that you've been keeping a secret, everything you've been doing 'in the dark', realizing he already knows about EVERYTHING anyway. Confess! (And here I mean Holy Spirit knows)

Step 2: Surrender to His unconditional love and receive acceptance and healing.

...

So, simply admit to the first step and acknowledge that God is aware of EVERYTHING going on in your life, whether it is things you do in public or around people or in private or ways in which you hide things or keep secrets. He knows all of your skeletons, all of your dark secrets, all of your thoughts, all of your sins, all of the things you feel guilty and ashamed about, and every single motivation and manipulation that you have ever engaged in. And yes it includes you pooping and having sex. ie. You cannot hide from God.

So what you do, is you just review various things in your life that you think God is not aware of (because you TRIED to do them in isolation/guilt/fear/shame/darkness/ego), and you admit that God knows about it. This can be somewhat humbling, and perhaps even a little scary. God does know what you get up to in bed at night ;-) God does know the foods that you sneak when nobody's looking. God does know how you really feel about various people even when you don't tell them straight. Go over all the things you do in life that you keep secret and conceal and hide and pretend and cover up, and recognize that GOD SEES IT. Expose it to Him.

If you really allow the first idea (God knows about everything I do) to be a kind of 'tuning fork' that you keep focusing on, you may find yourself suddenly becoming aware of various things you feel GUILTY about, things you do in what you think are the most secret of ways, of which you perhaps feel ashamed. It's okay, acknowledge God knows about these things as well, and remember that He loves you anyway.

Then after you've done this for a while you'll start to get a feeling that it is pointless to hide anything. IF God knows everything about everyone you do, even all the things you've hidden, then what's the point in trying to hide them? What's the point in trying to kid yourself that God doesn't know about it? And why are you bothering to hide it at all when it doesn't work? Then you start to come to this conclusion.... I might as well NOT EVEN BOTHER trying to hide any of this from God. I might as well just ADMIT TO IT ALL. And that might feel a little bit scary too because you wonder if admitting it will condemn or judge you, but it won't.

Because now you remember the second part... God loves you unconditionally IN SPITE OF any of the things that you have just CONFESSED to, and forgives you of all of them, none of them are more important than that he loves you, and you are absolutely unconditionally loved ANYWAY even if you KEEP doing all these things.

So this is where you start to admit to love what is IN you, and expose all aspects of your inner life TO love, and then ACCEPT that love still loves you anyway. You can ask God then to heal your guilt and shame and fear and hate and other dark secrets. You can ask God to heal the need to hide these things, or even to do these things if you like. You can offer up these 'sins' to Him in an amnesty that has no repercussions, and finally SURRENDER your life to Him. Allow Him to come in and heal you of all this guilt and shame that has made you turn away from Him. ALLOW HIM TO LOVE YOU. RECEIVE THE LOVE!!

This is simply you exposing yourself to God, to the light, allowing light to shine on everything that keeps you separate from this exposure, and then allowing yourself to be LOVED more than you ever thought possible.

Confession is not the focus here, you are not admitting to actually BEING sinful/guilty/shameful, you are exposing these things to the light so that you can realize you are FORGIVEN and that nothing is being held against you, because you are NOT sinful.

Give it a try. :-) You'll feel happy and free afterwards.

The tiny mad idea, a thought of separation, produced a "dream".

The dream is comprised of illusions. Thoughts of separation must always be illusory because reality is not separate. A thought of separation is also a thought of death (opposite to life).

Thoughts of separation must always produce "form". Form is a limited illusion. It just means, the "form" that the illusion takes - its appearance, which differentiates it from other illusions. All illusions are limited. All illusions are forms. Forms can be subtle, mental, energetic, emotional, or physical. They are all dreams, but of varying degrees of deception or "solidity". As Jesus says, waking dreams and nighttime dreams differ only in their form - both are illusions.

A thought of separation HAD to produce what we call a physical universe in order to fulfill, in the extreme, the death-wish which was put in place when we "sinned". Sin was believing that separation was possible, which began the dream in the first place. As soon as it began, death was written into it and this HAD to lead logically and consistently to what appears to be a "universe", containing a "world", in which there are "bodies", which can seem to die.

People within that world, inhabiting bodies, have in their minds *identified with* illusions and are now experiencing a layer of illusions ON TOP OF the illusion of the physical universe itself. They mis-interpret it and project stuff onto it. This is a *secondary layer* of illusions. The first layer of illusions was dreamed by the whole of the Son of God, and the second layer is added by individual ego-identified people.

When this layer of illusions (delusion) is seeming to happen, people mis-percieve "the world", or the physical universe in general, and do not recognize it. They distort it, attack it, judge it, and see their own sin in it. This is a false perception of a false perception. The universe was false perception in the mind of the Son of God in the first place, and now we are further mis-perceiving it even more.

"Individuals" have their own mis-perceptions of the illusory world, but also the illusory world itself is a mis-perception in the larger shared mind.

When we apply forgiveness, we are correcting mis-perceptions, which are beliefs in sin being real, and are taking back our projected hate from the illusory world. This causes us to BELIEVE LESS that the illusion of the world is actually reality. We were deluded so long as we thought the world was real. What we thought ABOUT the world was a mis-perception OF the world.

Believing the world is real, is believing an illusion is real. The world is not real. I it an illusion. It is a dream of a world. And being part of the physical universe, the same applies to the whole universe.

When the mind is purified of these mis-perceptions OF the world, we come to a CLEAR perception OF the world, which is "True Perception". This true perception looks "with truth" upon what the world "is". It *recognizes* that the world is an illusion, NOT a reality. "Making real" the physical world enforces upset and victimhood. Making it unreal, recognizing its urneality, frees us from suffering.

Being able to clearly perceive that the world is actually an illusion, is sight of the "real world". It is the real, as in actual, world that's there. Or to put it another way, we're seeing the "true state" of the world, which is that it is not real.

Jesus referred to it as the real world ONLY to contrast it against a perceived "unreal world" which is what you perceive when you are attacking yourself and projecting it onto the illusion of a world. Self-attack distorts your perception and shows you a world of hate. A forgiven self shows you an illusory world which is forgiven - the forgiven world, the "real" version of the illusory world - recognizing that it is NOTHING MORE THAN AN ILLUSION.

At that point, you have true perception and are seeing correctly, recognizing the world was never real and the physical universe that seems to contain it is not real whatsoever. This is where you then have a tiny step to take to cross over to the "REALLY REAL" "world", which is God's Creation, God's universe, which is beyond all physicality. In the light this produces, the physical world, which was an illusion, eventually disappears from the mind of the collective Son of God, BECAUSE it was not real. All the stars disappear in light, etc.... and the "truth of" the "real world", the true-perception of the lie, easily allows you to translate that to mean that only God's reality is true. The world is forgotten, and God is remembered.

In heaven we are one with God, with each other and with our shared self in Christ. We are everything.

In the separation, our egotism is an attempt to become one with something not God, and less than everything.

Things that are not God, are generally not whole, and tend to be very limited, such as physical forms, objects, places, other people's bodies, the planet, etc.

It can also be ego thoughts which are thought-forms, limited thoughts, attack thoughts etc.

The attempt to become one with these things is the attempt to give them the properties of God. Such as to think of these things are what you want, valuable, meaningful, life, reality, truth.

We even want "self" or identity to become one with these things to try to turn them INTO an identity. To make our self BE one of these things.

Mind is unlimited, expansive, infinite, and whole. It is everywhere. Your real self is the same. When you try to identify with things which are not unlimited, you narrow your mind, and make it sick. It's like putting it into a prison and stopping it from functioning fully.

We literally try to "attach to" things which are not God, by trying to merge with them, to be one with them, to literally make them a part of ourselves.

Attachment, identification, oneness, it is all the same thing. You can become identified with your car, if you value it and give it reality. Your attempt to merge with it, love it, want it, value it, see it as truth, judge its importance etc, is you trying to become it.

So that whatever its qualities are, they reflect upon you and define you and become part of you. Then you can say that you are better and more important and more valuable because of the car you have that is part of you.

The same can apply to food, to places, to your house, your money, your job, your role as mother or father, your role as victim or victimiser, your egoic thoughts, your fantasies, your body, the whole planet even. You can literally try to be one with the planet which is an attempt to make it a part of yourself.

The ego takes a lot of credit for being something that it is not, or for you having something that you did not create. Such as to steal away a part of heaven and call it your own, or to say that the qualities you have which are God-given did not come from God.

Similarly it takes on credit for and vain reflection for things which are not yourself, such as that you are a better person if you have a flashy house, or your hair is improved, or you have the nicer clothes, or whatever. It thinks of these things as defining itself and as part of itself, one with it, its identity.

This is why it's important to unravel all the fake selves that you're making, all the attempts you make to be one with things which are not one, all the false identifies that you fabricate by trying to "wear" parts of the world like clothing, and then thinking that your clothing changes your self image.

And it's important to then realize that you need to re-identify with your real soul self, in heaven, as Christ. The son of God. Which means, simply, being one with it, merging with it, seeing it as true and valuable and real and meaningful and wanting it. Taking it on as the definition of what you are, and regarding it as you. Just as the ego does with illusions.

It should be clear that the ego is insane in what it does, because essentially it is trying to find oneness or wholeness... with things which are not one or whole. This is a contradiction. You can't be whole and complete by being something limited and small, like a body or an object.

The ego really wants to narrow down oneness and wholeness while pretending to want oneness and wholeness wholeheartedly, because it is two-faced and a lie. It wants the impossible. You can't really be one with anything other than God, and you can't really be anything other than what God created you to be.

"The world you see (with the physical eyes, earth, bodies physicality, spacetime) is based on SACRIFICE of oneness. It is a picture of a COMPLETE disunity and total LACK of joining. Around each entity is built a wall so seeming solid that it looks as if what is inside can never reach without, and what is out can never reach and join with what is locked away within the wall. Each part must SACRIFICE the other part to keep itself complete. For if they joined, each one would LOSE its own identity, and BY their separation are their selves maintained. The little that the body fences off BECOMES the self, preserved through sacrifice of all the rest. And all the rest must LOSE this little part, remaining incomplete to keep its own identity intact." UrT26B1

"Let me remember I am one with God." UrW124

"Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus KEEPING it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your minds AT ALL, or you will also believe that you must UNDO what you have made, in order to BE forgiven."

Here Jesus again outlines the simplicity of "forgiveness". He says that if you will overlook error - which means the entire illusory unreal dream world - then you will KEEP IT UNREAL. If you keep it unreal, you do not even enter INTO a state where you become confused about what it is, nor do you give reality to its content. If you do not MAKE it real, you won't have to "atone" to fix this error.

You must not turn the world's forms into realities, you must not give strength to its attacks, you must not give power to its lies, and you must not give truth to its sufferings. You overlook it and effectively ignore it and look beyond it to the face of Christ. To the light of truth where it really is.

If you KEEP THE WORLD UNREAL, then you do not go INTO false judgements or evaluations of what the world is. You simply recognize it as an illusion. An illusion, totally DEVOID of any sense of reality, seriousness, weight, validity, or truth, is no more powerful or threatening or causal than a thin veil of nothingness. But if you fail to stay IN THE STATE of forgiveness, you enter into judgement.

"He who would not forgive must judge, to justify his failure to forgive."

If you FAIL to stay forgiving, you go INTO the state of GIVING REALITY to the unreal world. You go into attack, into confusion, you confuse reality with unreality, you GIVE reality to the illusory world, and now the world SEEMS real.

All the things which happen in it which are utterly strange and unnatural, now APPEAR to be VERY REAL to you. And this makes them threatening and upsetting, dangerous and powerful, able to hurt you and destroy your peace. But it is only the sense of REALITY that gives it this apparent power.

Having MADE the world real, you will now believe that there ARE actually real problems, real attacks, real dangers, real impossible situations, real threats, real murders, real deaths and real sickness. And now you will be in suffering and hell having a nightmare because now a dream of death will have become REAL to you, threatening you at every turn and promising to destroy you. You cannot ESCAPE from this while you believe it is real.

So if you make the world real you will believe you now have to DO SOMETHING in order to fix the problem. But having bound reality to illusions, you will now think the source of the problem is the "real things" you see, and so to solve the problem you have to do something about those things. But this won't really work.

The only way to move back OUT of unforgiveness into forgiveness, is to TAKE BACK THE REALITY that you yourself gave TO the illusory world, SEPARATE THE WORLD FROM REALITY, give reality back to God, and recognize the false world is unreal again. Get your mind back into the "world is not real at all" mode, which overlooks it and doesn't GIVE it any power.

"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."

To "take back" the projections of REALITY that you gave to the unreal world, is to take back the POWER that you mis-placed and gave away to EMpower illusions against you. Dis-empowering illusions gives back power to God, and to your shared self. When the world has no power of its own, which it doesn't, the ego and the world and the body have NO POWER OVER YOU. This is a return to the STATE of forgiveness.

Ideally we should aim for a state in which we do not LEAVE forgiveness, or step OUT OF a state of power, so that we do not MAKE ERRORS. If we do not make errors, ie do not give reality to errors, then we will not have to do a purification or correction process to undo what we have done. But if we DO slip and fall into judgement, then a miracle is needed to RESTORE us to the state of forgiveness.

"Do not let any belief in its realness enter your minds AT ALL, or you will also believe that you must UNDO what you have made."

"And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

Forgiveness then is simply the recognition that only God's reality is real, only his truth is true, nothing in the world you made has any truth or reality, and therefore your entire attention is fixed upon The Kingdom.

TEMPTATION

"What is temptation but a wish to make illusions real? "

Illusions are not inherently real. However, there is a potential in illusions to be "tempted" to believe they are real. If someone is sane, they will recognize the illusion is just a trick and will not believe it. But the illusion contains this property of "trying to convince" you that there is a hidden, delusional truth, which you will "see" when and if you believe in it.

The world, is an illusion. It "tempts you" to believe that you are physical, a body, in a physical world, which seems real. But this illusion is only "potentially" taken as real, depending on your belief system and perception.

You are tempted by form to believe that sin and error are reality. You are tempted by the body to believe that you are limited and isolated. All the time, this world and everything in it is potentially a temptation. It tries to persuade you to believe its lies.

But it is then up to you, whether you buy into it and fall for the temptation, or whether you come to your senses and rise above it into sanity and truth, recognizing the world and body as lies, and not listening to these messages of temptation.

"Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated."

""Let me not wander into temptation.""

"Even the most advanced of God's teachers will give way to temptation in this world."

"Temptation has one lesson it would teach, in all its forms, wherever it occurs. 2 It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what must die"

"When the temptation to attack rises to make your mind darkened and murderous, remember you can see the battle from above."

"The temptation to regard problems as many is the temptation to keep the problem of separation unsolved."

"Let him not wander into the temptation of crucifixion, and delay him there. 4 Help him to go in peace beyond it, with the light of his own innocence lighting his way"

"Yet there will be temptations along the way the teacher of God has yet to travel, and he has need of reminding himself throughout the day of his protection."

"The purpose is to protect yourself from temptation throughout the day"

"Let nothing that relates to body thoughts delay your progress to salvation, nor permit temptation to believe the world holds anything you want to hold you back."

"And if we hear temptation call to us to stay and linger in a dream, we turn aside and ask ourselves if we, the Sons of God, could be content with dreams"

"I am constantly tempted to make up other laws and give them power over me. 5 I suffer only because of my belief in them."

"Let this not tempt me to look away from me for my salvation."

"No temptation but becomes a nameless and unwanted thing before God's Name."

"The temptation of the ego becomes extremely intense with this shift in goals."

"As you look upon yourself and judge what you do honestly, you may be tempted to wonder how you can be guiltless."

"And he will reinterpret all temptation as just another chance to bring him joy."

""Lead us not into temptation" means "Recognize your errors and choose to abandon them by following my guidance.""

"If you are tempted to believe them true, remember that appearances can not withstand the truth these mighty words contain: 3 Salvation is my only function"

"When you feel that you are tempted to accuse someone of sin in any form, do not allow your mind to dwell on what you think he did, for that is self-deception."

"Should you be tempted to become angry with someone, tell him silently: 3 Light and joy and peace abide in you. 4 Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God."

"If you are tempted to be dispirited by thinking how long it would take to change your mind so completely, ask yourself, "How long is an instant?""

"Perhaps you would be tempted to agree with the ego that it is far better to be sinful than mistaken."

"This releases the mind from the temptation to see the body in many lights, and gives it over entirely to the One Light in which it can be really understood."

"When you are tempted to deny Him remember that there are no other gods to place before Him, and accept His Will for you in peace."

"And you can want to see a sinless world, and let an "enemy" tempt you to use the body's eyes and change what you desire."

"When you are tempted to yield to the desire for death, remember that I did not die . 2 You will realize that this is true when you look within and see me."

"When you are tempted by the wrong voice, call on me to remind you how to heal by sharing my decision and making it stronger."

"The PURPOSE OF THE WORLD you see IS TO OBSCURE your function of forgiveness, and provide you with a justification for forgetting it. 3 It is the TEMPTATION TO ABANDON GOD and His Son BY TAKING ON A PHYSICAL APPEARANCE. 4 It is THIS THE BODY'S EYES LOOK UPON."

"NOTHING THE BODY'S EYES SEE CAN BE ANYTHING BUT A FORM OF TEMPTATION, since this was THE PURPOSE OF THE BODY itself."

"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. 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."

If someone appears to do something wrong, perhaps they're angry and they're attacking, you focusing on this "surface appearance" is what it means to "make sin real." You judge based on the appearance of form and the form of what they do dictates what it seems to mean. You hold their physical behaviors etc against them and accuse them of what they are doing, as if to say that what you see in this judgement is all that there is to see. In this state there is no compassion or deeper insight into why they're behaving this way or any sense of a call for love. Or better yet, a call for help.

When someone is hurting and afraid and so on they tend to lash out and project and blame and attack. But in order to be forgiving, the surface appearance of what they're doing has to be looked past. Essentially this means you have to realize that their outward appearance is an EFFECT, not a cause. And therefore there is a deeper cause behind it. When you focus solely on the appearance of what they're doing, you are believing that the appearance is a CAUSE, and in particular that YOU are at the effect of it.

This means that cause and effect have kind of "shifted". The cause is in them, and their behavior is an effect of it. But now you're believing that their effects are the cause, and the effect has shifted out of them completely and into you. This is a belief that physical form is the only reality, that what the body is seeing is the truth. When the body's senses are trusted, and given the body can only see form and surfaces, this produces a suggestion that the world is primary reality. That it is the starting point of everything, and therefore causal and not an effect. It is necessary to displace the effect onto yourself or others then because this "causal form" cannot be both cause and effect.

This is the unforgiving attitude. That the dream world is real and is the cause of suffering. That surface appearances are true. That sin is real. That death is real. That sickness and suffering are happening and making more things happen in turn. In order to forgive, causation has to be pushed back into the mind or source within the person. Their behavior has to be seen as a facade and as only an effect, something to be pushed past and seen beyond. There has to be something going on with them that's deeper than just the outward expression of their pain.

When you are unforgiving you will accuse them of sin and put up a wall and use the surface appearance as a barricade to separate you off from them. The body will be emphasized and its activities will become the proof of sin. The person will be relegated to being a body only and only what you can see and sense will be given reality. This shuts you off from the person and treats them like an object. It's is a cold-hearted and vicious state of perception.

As you peer beyond this surface veil, beyond what they appear to be doing, and look deeper into the person, you're opening your heart. This is because you necessarily are opening up to a deeper truth, a higher truth. The higher truth is that beyond the layers of suffering, the obstacles to peace, the protest against reality, and their seeming attacks, there is a seemingly wounded frightened person inside longing for help. To see that they are only acting this way "because of" something else is a step in the right direction.

There is always something deeper behind the surface, just as there is another world beyond the surface of this one. To see that someone is in need of help is to shift your vantage point. You begin to see from their perspective, what they are going through and where they are coming from. You see behind the wall of sin, which also means seeing beyond the body, and acknowledge that they need help. This is a much more loving point of view. It's a compassionate point of view. It causes you to side with the person, which is part of becoming one with them. The part of you that is in them, or is them, now is included in who and what you are, and your love for them is now a shared love for yourself.

Not taking anything personally, not using what people appear to do against them, not holding events and happenings against the world, and seeing behind it to the deeper causes, is what forgiveness entails. And beyond all the deeper causes is the light of Christ which is the true nature of each person. No-one is evil and no one in their right mind would ever do anything unloving. People are just confused and mistaken. This is the movement away from making sin real, towards the forgiveness that confirms that people are simply mistaken and lost and in need of help.

Someone isn't sinful for attacking. People attack when they're hurt. Someone isn't evil just because they're being vicious and cruel. They obviously have experienced some major hurt or rejection or abuse or something that has led to this expression. We need to recognize that whenever we think the world, or bodies, or people, or events, are what they are based on the surface appearance, we're forgetting that the world is an effect and not a cause. By making it into a cause you shield the cause and hide it, and now the effect becomes the cause, with a seeming power to put the effects into you.

All of these violent expressions, all attacks and murders, all conflict and arguments, all destruction and viciousness, it all has to be seen as symptoms or side effects of something beyond it. Something in people that is in need of help. A call for love. A state of being lost and alone and frightened and guilty, that needs healing. People act out only as projections of what they have inside of them. What they are lacking is love and what they need is love and compassion. To see this need you must find a way to look deeper than the surface and see where the person is coming from, what's behind this expression, where it started, and get to the root of it. Because at the root of it is the reality of their real worth and innocence.

"That is the ultimate value TO YOU in learning to perceive attack as a call for love."

"For fear IS a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied."

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

"The only judgment involved at all is in the Holy Spirit's one division into two categories; one of love, and the other, the call for love."

"What calls for punishment, must call for NOTHING. Yet every mistake MUST be a call for love. What, then, is sin? What COULD it be but a mistake you would keep hidden; a call for help that you would keep UNHEARD, and thus UNANSWERED?"

"Although you have attacked yourself, and very brutally"

In the separation from God, each of us has condemned ourselves. We've accused ourselves of sin, and condemned ourselves to suffer. We want ourselves to be punished, murdered, and destroyed. Ultimately this is a death wish, in which we have become suicidal because we don't believe we deserve to live or to be loved by God. You might be thinking, suicidal? I'm not suicidal. Well think again.

At the same time as trying to destroy yourself to prove you don't exist in God, your true self is utterly sinless, guiltless, innocent, holy and pure. You have never sinned or hurt or commit a crime or broke a law. You have never done anything to anyone, and no-one has ever attacked you. You are immortal and eternal and endless and permanent. And no harm can come to you because God himself protects you.

"The Thought of God protects you, cares for you"

The problem is, there is a seeming "gap" between what is really true of you, and what you currently BELIEVE. And if you are not in touch with your utter immaculate sinlessness, then some part of you DOES believe you are condemned to hell. God isn't doing this condemnation, nor are your brothers.

It's all an inside job of your own self attack. It is your self destruction. And this is suicidal. Even though death isn't real, this needs to be undone because the belief in your non-existence keeps you from being happy.

Looking at what you are doing to yourself is not pretty. If you are not accepting your sinlessness, it means you are believing you are sinful. It means you don't love yourself. It means you actively attack yourself and are trying to destroy yourself. Such as in "my attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability." It means you don't really like yourself, yet alone love yourself with the love of God.

So now if you think about it in terms of the "relationship" that you have "with yourself", as if you could relate to yourself like a third party, how do you really feel about yourself? What is your honest current attitude towards yourself? If it's not one of total unconditional perfect love, then it isn't a very healthy relationship.

If there is a belief in being sinful, or evil, or a monster, or unworthy, or not good enough, or you resent yourself, or are angry at yourself, or keep judging yourself, or see yourself as weak, or hurt yourself emotionally or physically, or keep being abusive towards yourself, there are all signs of a breakdown in relationship.

And what that ultimately means is that you have not forgiven yourself. You're in this relationship with someone that you don't want to be with. And that is going to split your mind and hurt your mind. If you don't love yourself and embrace yourself with acceptance then how can you possibly relate to yourself at all?

Think of yourself as in the shoes of a person that you don't like in a similar way. If you don't like that person you don't want to be near them. You don't want to give them things. You don't want to share with them or spend time with them. You don't want them to exist. You don't care if they get hurt or suffer. You want them to suffer. And you may even feel so bitter towards them that you wish they were dead. Is that the relationship you are having with YOURSELF?

You have to look deep within yourself with much honesty to find this out. And it's probably going to be somewhat painful or even scary. You may not actually even realize or recognize that you have it in for yourself, or want yourself to suffer, because you may be so used to a general level of background destructiveness that you think it's totally normal. You might not have even seen how much you hate yourself.

"You who think you hate your bodies, deceive yourselves. YOU HATE YOUR MINDS, for guilt has entered into them, and they would remain separate, which they CANNOT DO."

"You HATE the prison that you made, and would destroy it."

"You are afraid of Him, and do not see you hate and fear your Self as enemy."

"And why do you attack them anywhere except you hate yourself?"

"But if you hate part of your own Soul, ALL your understanding is lost, because you are looking on what God creates AS YOURSELF without love."

"You do not realize how much you hate each other. You will not get rid of this until you DO realize it, for UNTIL then, you will think you want to get rid of EACH OTHER and KEEP THE HATRED. "

So you have to look at this stuff. And typically you need a strong contrast in order to recognize it. Get in touch with what it means to be sinless. That your sinlessness is guaranteed by God. Get a feel for total pure innocence and the complete absence of all attack, even slight annoyances. And then in that light, look at how you feel about yourself.

Do you still feel like attacking? Do you still feel a need or requirement to judge and blame? Do you condemn others to hide your self condemnation? Are you constantly fighting with people? Do you feel unhappy most of the time? If you have any of the "symptoms" of the ego, which is anything not of God, then certainly there is room for improvement in your relationship with yourself.

First you need to recognize that you even DO hate yourself, before you can be willing to take steps to heal that relationship. And you can't see that unless you have some kind of higher truth about you to compare it to. Your utter pure sinlessness in God, your immortal innocence, the guarantee of eternal life, can act as a contrast and at reality-tester to find out just how you really do feel about yourself. And once you find that out, you have healing work to be done upon yourself. You need correction and forgiveness. You need to FORGIVE YOURSELF, in order to recognize you are sinless and free.

"You have condemned yourself, but condemnation is not of God."

"You who believe you have condemned the Son of God"

"But in the dream of judgment, you attack and ARE condemned."

"And unless He had given you a way to remember, you would have condemned yourselves to oblivion."

"Now has the mind condemned itself to seek without finding; to be forever dissatisfied and discontented; to know not what it really wants to find."

"If the Son of God is guilty, then is he condemned, and he DESERVES no mercy from the God of justice."

"Guilt is ALWAYS in your OWN mind, WHICH HAS CONDEMNED ITSELF. Project it not, for while you do, it cannot BE undone."

"The delusional can be very destructive, for they do not recognize they have condemned THEMSELVES."

"It is not God Who has condemned His Son. But ONLY you, to save his specialness, and kill his Self."

"Remember, then, that whenever you look without and react unfavorably to what you see, you have judged yourself unworthy, and have condemned yourself to death."

"You have handled this wish TO KILL YOURSELF by NOT KNOWING WHO YOU ARE, and identifying with something ELSE. You have projected guilt blindly and indiscriminately, but you have NOT uncovered its source. For the ego DOES want to kill you, and if you identify WITH it, you MUST believe ITS GOAL IS YOURS."

You don't need to die. You need to forgive yourself.

Our main problem in separating from God is simply not recognizing what is true. "Enlightenment is but a recognition".

If we were to recognize accurately what is true, and what is false, without any distortion, we would attain enlightenment. This recognition is the pure sanity of our right mindedness.

A mind which is so correct in its recognition of truth, practically KNOWS it, which is how true perception paves the way for knowledge. Our problem then is that we DON'T recognize what is true, or how it is opposite to what is false. In the separation we simply swapped the true and the false. We gave all manner of true properties to that which is false, and all manner of false properties to that which is true. This produced immense confusion.

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

In a state of confusion, you do NOT recognize reality or truth. You believe that things which are true are not true, and things which are false are true. You give reality to illusions, believe in lies, and mistake hell for heaven.

This reversal is so great that it leads to the belief that death is life, hell is heaven, suffering is healing, punishment is atonement, and God is evil.

Everyone naturally gravitates towards whatever they believe is true, and tries to avoid what they believe is false. In fact Jesus in the course says that you cannot SEE what you believe is false, and you can only see what you believe in a true.

"All vision starts WITH THE PERCEIVER, who judges what is true and what is false. And what he judges false, HE DOES NOT SEE. You who would judge reality CANNOT see it, for whenever judgment enters, reality has slipped away. The out of mind is out of sight, because what is denied is THERE, but is not recognized."

This presents a problem, because it means you end up choosing something which is NOT what it appear to be. You think it will save you, but it hurts you. This manifests particularly in using sickness as a defense against the truth.

We first fail to recognize that God's truth is true. We believe it is false and evil and wrong. We don't want it. Then we believe that its opposite will save and protect us. That we want whatever IS true, even though the things we think are true are false.

Then we choose false things, to move away from true things, but believing they're helping us. Sickness is an attempt to defend your life and perpetuate your truth, to save you from the attack of "what is false" - God - but what is false has been mis-identified.

So you end up choosing suffering, under the belief that it is helping you. You choose sickness in an attempt to save your life.

This happens only because you do not RECOGNIZE what is really true and what is false. You are confused, and so you make a poor decision. You then end up hurting yourself because you are confused.

"I must have decided wrongly because I am not at peace. I made the decision myself"

What the course then tells us is we have to sort out and correctly identify things which are true, and things which are false. To identify what is OF GOD, and what is not. What is real, and what is unreal. This includes sorting out what is really life, and what is death, and what is health and what is suffering.

"If you obscure the Kingdom, you are perceiving WHAT IS NOT OF GOD."

"Whatever is revealed to Him that is not of God, is gone."

"It denies the ability of anything which is not of God to effect you in any way."

"True denial is a very powerful protective device. You can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you. This kind of denial is NOT a concealment device, but a correction device. The "Right Mind" of the mentally healthy DEPENDS on it."

We actually don't recognize that suffering IS suffering. We don't realize we are feeling guilty and afraid. We can even be angry without actually recognizing it as anger. In denial, we'll even believe that our sickness is saving us, and so we want to keep it.

Our task is to become clear about what IS true and what IS false. To properly "categorize" stuff. To put the things of God into the "true and real" category, and the stuff of this world of ego and death into the "untrue and not real" category. The illusions of Earth belong in the not-real category.

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

In true perception then, which is close to enlightenent, we are doing two things. We are correctly recognizing that illusions ARE illusions and death is NOT real and there is no real sin and Earth doesn't really exist. AND, we are recognizing heaven and the face of christ and the real world and reality, shining beyond the illusory world.

Once we actually can distinguish that suffering IS suffering, and attack IS attack, and death IS death, rather than confusing them for something else, we will recognize not to choose them. Anything we associate with what is false, we will choose away from. Whatever we associate with truth, we will gravitate towards.

In order to choose heaven and not hell, we have to first learn that hell IS hell, and not heaven. We have to stop confusing Earth for heaven, or mistaking an unreal world for a real one. We have to deprogram ourselves and become clear about what really is true and what isn't.

"the necessary distinction between the true and the false."

"But HIS function is to distinguish ONLY between the false and the true, REPLACING the false WITH the true."

"His Voice WILL teach you how to distinguish between pain and joy, and lead you out of the confusion YOU have made."

"Therefore, if you learn the tests by which you can distinguish everything from nothing, you will make the better choice."

"Only by learning what fear IS, can you finally learn to distinguish the possible from the impossible, and the false from the true."

"This is because of the miracle's inherent avoidance of within-error distinctions. Its SOLE concern is to distinguish between truth, on the one hand, and ALL kinds of error, on the other."

"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."

Miracles, then, are states of mind in which the real truth is recognized as the ONLY truth, and nothing ELSE is believed to be true. All errors are correctly identified as false, untrue, unreal, and nothing. All reality is acknowledged and welcomes as ACTUALLY real and true and meaningful.

When all truth is "separated out" from what is false, you will cease to make confused mistaken choice, will stop choosing death and sickness and suffering, and will be ready to choose heaven.

The false world (Earth) is false and does not exist. The true world (Heaven) is true and is all that exists. Truth is everything, the false is nothing. Correctly recognizing God allows you to recognize who you are. In remembering your true nature, you are ready to identify with your soul, and as Christ.

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you HAS NOT OCCURRED. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in that view are all your sins forgiven. What is sin, except a false idea about God's Son? Forgiveness merely sees its falsity, and therefore lets it go. What then is free to take its place is now the Will of God.

An unforgiving thought is one which makes a judgment that it will not raise to doubt, although it is not true. The mind is closed, and will not be released. .......

Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing. It offends no aspect of reality, nor seeks to twist it to appearances 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.

Do nothing, then, and let forgiveness show you what to do, through Him Who is your Guide, your Savior and Protector, strong in hope, and certain of your ultimate success. He has forgiven you already, for such is His function, given Him by God. Now must you share His function, and forgive whom He has saved, whose sinlessness He sees, and whom He honors as the Son of God."

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Notice that forgiveness is a state of mind in which there is nothing to forgive. It isn't so much a "doing". It is still and looks and judges not. It doesn't say, "well, I see a bunch of unforgiven or unforgiveable stuff over there, I have to do a forgiveness."

Forgiveness is only forgiveness when it is complete. It is the same thing as the state of atonement in which nothing real has happened. It's the state of mind of the Holy Spirit with perfect correct perception and a clear vision of and acceptance of God's truth.

This truth exists kind of on an entirely other "level" of mind, which you need to find your way to become aware of. When you are IN that mind, you are forgiving, as in, have a forgiving attitude, and see no wrong. The steps you take to get TO that mind, are NOT forgiveness itself. They are steps of undoing false perceptions and beginning to take back the errors that you made. Judgements. Your unforgiving attitude.

Transitioning from an unforgiving, judging, condemning attitude, to one of forgiveness, seems like a process, with a practical application of principles and various corrections that are needed. But that process isn't itself forgiveness, because forgiveness is the FINAL state you get to when the process of complete. It's the restored state of mind which has a forgiving attitude and sees that there is nothing TO forgive, because real sin has not happened. The steps you take to get there, are a process of purification.

I never really understood this until recently. I always believed that if I was taking some steps to forgive people, or later to forgive myself, ie taking back projection and so on, that I was "doing forgiveness". To a degree I was taking steps TOWARD forgiveness. But I also noticed that I did not always take it all the way to the atonement. And since forgiveness IS the atonement, as a state of mind, I clearly was not reaching all the way to that state of mind. And so, effectively, I was only really doing the first PARTS of the undoing of judgement, and not taking it all the way to complete forgiveness.

Still, it was practice, and it was part of the process of learning what forgiveness is, and how to reach it. Forgiveness truly sees, experientially, that there IS nothing to forgive. So if I'm in the mode of "I need to forgive this", that isn't actually forgiveness. I need to get OUT of the mode of believing that there is something unforgiven, because that is contrary to what forgiveness sees. That's still judgement. A partial forgiveness, as a mix of judgement and attempted correction, which ALSO is the spiritual ego which attempts to keep some part of judgement real while trying to undo it.

Until we can take our process of purification all the way to the atonement and to the mind of forgiveness, where we can accept the truth that there is no real sin and nothing has happened, we have not really completed a full forgiveness. And if we stop short of that each time, if we don't completely undo all of the perceptual errors that fall short of the atonement, then we're still in a state of judgement. We haven't fully uprooted the problem, and so it will "grow back" over time. A belief that sin is real will keep producing more guilt, which will produce more fear and punishment and death. It has to be COMPLETELY uprooted by accepting the truth of the atonement.

Over time I think we gradually chisel away at it and perhaps become more willing to take the process further. And especially early on we might simply not be able to go deeper with this because maybe all we can do is grasp at sometimes taking back projections of guilt and taking on some ownership. And our mind might be so cluttered with ego that it takes quite a long time to keep chipping away at that mindset to be able to more quickly and consistently see that that's what we're doing.

Then it takes yet more time to chisel away at the belief that we ourselves are guilty or sinful, before getting close to what forgiveness really is. Simply because or thought system is so filled with ego that a lot of confusion and delusion has to be undone before you can even catch your first glimpse of the atonement. Not that we're doing anything wrong. It's just a learning process. But we do need to make sure that we're at some point going to fully embrace what the atonement says, in order to truly achieve forgiveness.

When you can get your awareness to where you understand, see, accept, believe, and are experiencing, a state of mind in which you know there IS nothing to forgive because there has not been any real sin and nothing can have really happened, only then are you accepting the atonement and being truly forgiving. Seeing that you HAVE NOT sinned at all, that your innocence has NOT been corrupted, that God's love has always been present for you, and that you ARE still worthy of it because you and others have not separated from God at all, that's the "peak" of the forgiveness "process".

The recognition that forgiveness is already DONE, accomplished, and complete, BECAUSE nothing ever happened in reality and truth that requires forgiving.

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you HAS NOT OCCURRED" - ACIM --- it has not occurred because the world is not REAL, and everything you ever thought had gone wrong was JUST an illusion and nothing more. Nothing has really happened, there is no real sin, you are STILL innocent in God's eyes, and are worthy of His love.

On the level of the physical world, all objects and forms can never be perfect. This is sobering to recognize. It's actually because of the nature of spacetime.

In order to have space, or locations, it's necessary that something is in one location and NOT another. It's also therefore necessary that any given object LACKS what any other given object has. There is no real sharing, whereby two objects are literally one object. Everything is separated out, exclusive, unique, different and unequal.

This applies throughout this universe. It sets up a scenario where, in terms of a physical object, which includes planets and human bodies and toys and cars and houses and food, it is literally impossible to find perfection.

"It is the world you see that is impossible."

"The world was made that problems could not be solved."

"All its roads lead to death"

So now, as we enter this physical world, seen through false perception of the body's eyes, blinded by sight of form, we now seek to try to find "the perfect thing".

The ego presents objects as options, choices, and then asks you to choose between them. It does not ask whether you believe in the objects existing at all, it simply assumes they do exist and leaves you with the only remaining "choice" of choosing A OR B. This "either or" scenario is built into the whole ego thought system of spacetime. "Do you want to die this way, or that way?"

But the problem is, you are now left with two inferior, partial, temporary, incomplete, unwhole options. Neither of them ca be perfect because they both are lacking something. They both entail compromise. None of them truly mirror any kind of divine nature. They are all flawed.

So now the best you can do is choose between two flawed possibilities, where you know that to choose one you will lack the other. And committing to any of them is not fully possible with full satisfaction or certainty because to choose one is to reject something else, leaving you empty handed.

If you choose object A, you lack what object B has to offer. It drives you nuts trying to settle on what you want. You try to look more closely for signs that one thing is "better" than the other, to judge and evaluate its worth or value, as if its even possible for one of them to BE perfect.

Then after a lot of frustration and fear and uncertainty and lack of commitment and inability to trust, you "settle" for what you think is the lesser of two evils. It seems to be the best choice only because you're willing to accept its limitations and what it cannot offer you, which seems less of a sacrifice than the other choice. And so you "commit", reluctantly and in fear, crossing your fingers that it will be the right one.

The ego is playing this game all the time. It is literally impossible to be 100% satisfied with ANY choice the ego offers, because they are limited and lacking. And it would simply have you choose between two forms of death. And you think that by choosing the better of the two, you will defer death a little longer.

As you look at this, you'll find yourself trying to seek for this "perfection in the world". The perfect choice. The perfect option. The perfect car, perfect house, perfect body, perfect diet, perfect tv show, perfect city, perfect president, perfect whatever. Trying to find that one something that is completely whole and lacking nothing and utterly fulfilling and flawless. And there is NO SUCH THING in this world.

Anywhere.

I stumbled on this many times, particularly in terms of artistic projects and trying to come up with something that was perfect. My mistake was not recognizing the ways in which limitation are inherent to this world. I thought in terms of ideas, that some kind of perfection was POSSIBLE among the physical objects or physical choices or things I could create physically.

This would lead to tremendous frustration and blown-out expectations and procrastination and low self worth and being afraid of the judgement of others when they would find out how flawed and imperfect my creations were, implying my own imperfection. And this would just snowball into a huge amount of avoidance and shame and dysfunction trying to deal with this whole mess of "how will I achieve perfection". And this search for physicalized perfection is the spiritual ego, with its mantra, "seek and do not find."

It is much better to recognize when I am seeming to seek perfection at a FORM level, and to recognize the truth that ALL form is INCAPABLE of perfection. So for example if I am trying to create a piece of art, or some project, I have to realize there are built in limits as to what is possible. It cannot BE perfect, ever.

Limits have to be realistically set, there is only so much time and energy, there are only so many features, there are only so many design decisions, the object cannot ever be some kind of "miracle" that pleases everyone infinitely.

For example maybe I'm writing a book and getting hung up on how this book will "cover everything", how it will "talk to everyone", how it will be everything to all people. And then this becomes paralyzing, because as soon as you try to appease the myriad "forms" the ego presents, such as billions of disagreeing egos, it is now literally impossible to please them.

In any creative endeavor, any form of shopping, any kind of selection process, any decision making about your life or your time or where you will go or what you will do, if it entails the physical level at all it is far more productive and sane to "accept" that there are these limitations on this level. And to then simply work within those limitations, removing the sense of expectation or "wishful thinking" that form CAN BE anything other than it can be.

This means accepting that the world of limits IS fundamentally limited and limiting. And by that I don't mean to just settle for imprisonment, because of course we are meant to rise above these limits, break all the laws of physics, go beyond all boundaries and demonstrate "the impossible is possible." But in terms of the form level, it JUST IS a world of limitation and pretending it isn't really gets us in trouble.

There is one passage in ACIM where it touches on this with regards to why Jesus was not able to "perfectly" save or teach the whole world during his lifetime. The nature of the beast is simply that operating IN TIME AND SPACE, there were limits, and he had to be selective, and there was a plan and a goal and various things to be done and not others.

A physical life cannot truly embody unlimited infinity, nor can divinity be fully expressed at the level of the world. This is a world of partiality and lack and temporary differences, inequalities and flaws. It can never be immortal or perfect or holy or innocent or have eternal life or be whole. It lacks, because it is a picture of lack. We can work with it, or we can break its rules with miracles. But even miracles can't keep death while expressing life.

The world can only do what it can do. It's in its nature. It's a world of limits. It won't ever give you heaven or salvation or the attributes of God's perfection. Through true perception it can be seen as a reflection of God's perfection, but it cannot be it.

"Is he the Christ? O yes, along with you. His little life on earth was not enough to teach the mighty lesson that he learned for all of you. He will remain with you to lead you from the hell you made to God. And when you join your will with his, your sight will be his vision, for the eyes of Christ are shared. Walking with him is just as natural as walking with a brother whom you knew since you were born, for such indeed he is. Some bitter idols have been made of him who would be only brother to the world. Forgive him your illusions, and behold how dear a brother he would be to you. For he will set your mind at rest at last and carry it with you unto your God."

This is possibly the most threatening and mind-blowing teaching in A Course in Miracles. There is in fact NOT a world here! It's not even a matter of who made the world, it's the even higher truth that it DOES NOT EXIST. Earth is in fact NOTHING.

"There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it"

"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?"

Everything that happened in the separation from God, involves a belief in something existing which does not exist, something being true which is false, something being real which is unreal.

For example, we made a separate self which seems to have free will to do as it pleases. However, this self is in fact the DENIAL of self, which is why it results in death. But it APPEARS to be the presence of a self. This is why it's an illusion - it seems to be showing you something which is not there, as if it is. It's supposed freedom of will is in fact an imprisoned will, which is not free, but SEEMS free.

Take a look at the body. "The body is the symbol of WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist." The body SEEMS to picture "you", presenting an appearance and form, it seems to positively exist and move and do stuff. But, the body is NOT you, it is a replacement for you, and is only an image of what you THINK you are. What it SEEMS to be, is the opposite of what it actually is. The body is the ABSENCE OF YOU. And you do not look like your body. "What you are cannot be seen nor pictured."

It is the same thing with regards the difference between light and darkness. Darkness is not possible. Where there seems to be an absence of light, there must be an ILLUSION of darkness. If you believe the darkness is real, you are giving it false reality and are claiming it "is a something." But a shadow on a wall is not the PRESENCE of darkness, it is the absence of light. It appears to be a something, but is really the lack of a something.

It is also the same with regards to sin and error. Error or mistakes are just illusions of impossibilities, recognized as false. In their "true form" it is clear they cannot be true. But if you invest belief in them, are deceived and tempted by them, and buy into them, they turn into sin. And now it seems that they assert that something has REALLY happened, and something is REALLY possible, that isn't. So sin is really a lie, depicting stuff happening that CANNOT happen, as though it is really happening. It is deceptive.

The same applies to this world. This world is in fact NOTHING. But by believing in it and investing it with reality, it turns from an illusion of a something to an ACTUAL something. It seems to exist. It seems to host events and happenings. Things in it seem possible. But the world is impossible, and the things which happen are impossible, and sin is not real. The world was made to try to prove that sin and guilt are real.

"Their aim is to fulfill the purpose which the world was made to witness and make real. They see in its illusions but a solid base where truth exists, upheld apart from lies."

"The world of bodies is the world of sin."

So basically, we have a world that SEEMS to be here, which is made of sin, which testifies and proves that impossible things are possible, which hosts the idea of the death and murder of reality, and SEEMS to have real consequences. But it has none. And it does nothing. And it causes nothing. And it has no power. And it isn't really there at all.

"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 does nothing to him."

"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."

The really deep thing to realize is this. The world is in fact, the ABSENCE OF EXISTENCE. It is the antithesis of heaven. It is the LACK OF HEAVEN. It is a HOLE, which we call the spacetime bubble, in which are housed impossibilities and unrealities. It is an hallucinated world, because it seems to be there to see, but isn't. You are projecting it and making it up as you go along.

The idea that there is no world isn't simply that the world "exists" and it has to be "undone". It's really the RECOGNITION that the world you thought was here, does not exist. And this doesn't mean there's a better view of it. It means the WHOLE THING IS GONE. It has no reality at all. No presence. No life.

"There is no life outside of heaven."

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

"He does NOT realize that HE MAKES THIS WORLD, for there IS no world outside him."

Through unwillingness, we resisted God. We failed to create. We wanted not to shine. We tried to end eternal life. We wanted to stop reality. We opposed the Kingdom. We attacked will. We tried to deny our own existence. We blocked awareness. We tried to destroy. And ultimately this is all a matter of TRYING NOT TO EXIST.

In so doing, we seemed to make a world which SEEMS to exist, which is really actually the LACK OF A WORLD. It's like you took a part of heaven and DRAINED IT of all life. Held it back and prevented its extension. As though you could attack heaven and remove its presence. This world, which includes the Earth, is the ANTI-world. It is a mis-creation. It is empty and it is nothing.

We have GIVEN the world, the fake world, all manner of belief in trying to MAKE IT BE SIN, so that it is GIVEN reality, so that we can try to make it exist. It's our attempt to give it life and immortality. But we can't. We tried to make the world be a cause. We tried to make it have power. We gave our power to it to try to animate it. We tried to make it appear to be alive with "life forms", which are illusions of life. We tried to imagine it has a mind and alien will of its own. We tried to make ourselves subject to it and affected by it, to confirm its reality. We made bodies to sense it and to tell us that it is there.

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

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

Quite simply, this world, this planet, this galaxy, all the stars, all bodies, all animals and "life forms", are NOTHING. They are life's ABSENCE. They are the LACK OF LIFE. They are something that is really NOT there, appearing to be there. Like an hallucination. A lack of light, appearing to be the presence of a real darkness. And to believe in it is to believe that evil is real, asserting that the world has power OVER heaven. That the world CAN CAUSE immortal beings to die. Believing this world is real is level confusion.

Our task in forgiveness, then, is not to find a way to give EXTRA reality to the world, but to recognize ITS UNREALITY, and see finally that it SO NOTHING, that it disappears and fades into nothingness. All it is is a veil of illusions, a block, hanging in front of the face of christ, pretending to exist. Our guilt makes it seem solid. Our fear gives it reality. Our belief in sin anchors it in our minds. But it is not there at all. It is an empty shell.

"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."

"What can the causeless BE but nothingness. The picture of your brother that you see is wholly absent, and has never been."

"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. "

"Yet its nothingness IS your salvation, from which you would flee."

"His body's nothingness releases yours from sickness and from death."

"For here is nothingness, where neither birth nor death is real"

"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.****"

"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."

"To recognize this is to recognize nothingness when you think you see it. As such, it is the prerequisite for vision."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"To overlook nothingness is merely to judge it correctly, and because of your ability to evaluate it truly, to LET IT GO."

"The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. 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."

"The "changes" the ego seeks to make are not really changes. They are but deeper shadows, or perhaps different cloud patterns. Yet what is made of nothingness cannot be called new or different."

"We can but go from nothingness to everything; from hell to Heaven." "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."

"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?"

"What can correct illusions but the truth? And what are errors but illusions which remain unrecognized for what they are? Where truth has entered errors disappear. They merely vanish, leaving not a trace by which to be remembered. They are gone because without belief they have no life, and so they disappear to nothingness, returning whence they came. From dust to dust they come and go, for only truth remains."

"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."

"All that is veiled in shadows must be raised to understanding to be judged again, this time with Heaven's help, and all mistakes in judgment which the mind had made before are open to correction as the truth dismisses them as causeless. Now are they without effects. They cannot be concealed because their nothingness is recognized."

"How can a battle be perceived as nothingness, when you ENGAGE in 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. The dream has gone, and all its dreams of gifts have disappeared as well."

"Pursuit of the imagined leads to death because it is the search for nothingness, and while you seek for life you ask for death.

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death."

"The more complicated the results become, the harder it may be to recognize their nothingness, but it is not necessary to examine ALL possible outcomes to which premises give rise to judge the PREMISES truly."

"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. It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt. It looks on them with quiet eyes, and merely says to them, "My brother, what you think is not the truth.""

"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. The tiny tick of time, in which the first mistake was made, and ALL of them within that ONE mistake, held also the Correction for that one, and ALL of them that came within the first. And in that tiny instant time was gone, for that was all it ever was. What God gave Answer to IS answered, and IS gone."

"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."

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.

Jesus is asking us to be fully responsible for everything we experience.

It means you cannot ever again be a victim in any way.

It means nothing happens to us against our will.

It means if we decide something, it happens. If we don't, it doesn't.

It means the body and its condition are exactly what we asked for and were given.

It means that everything that happens around us is what we explicitly asked for and are given. That all prayers are answered.

It means everything you feel, everything your body is doing, is coming from you. Directly.

It means there is no cause in the world able to do anything to you whatsoever against your will.

It means absolutely everything that you do and experience is 100% deliberate, intentional, on purpose, and there are no flaws, no accidents, no mistakes, and everything is exactly the way you want it.

It means you have freedom of choice, because choosing one thing gives you that one thing, and choosing something else gives that to you also.

It also means that whatever you decide to perceive, you will perceive. Whatever you want to see with your perception, you will project so that you can see it. Literally, projecting objects out of thin air.

It means nothing can attack you and nothing can affect you and you cannot be sick nor can you die and the body can be used to demonstrate this, proving that the Son of God cannot have anything happen to him against his will.

It means you do not ask questions, you express. You create. You create (or make) whatever it is you want to create (with or without God's will). You paint pictures. You do not ask pictures to change, in that they might decide not to. You put there what you want to see. You create what you will experience.

It means projection makes perception because you first project and then you perceive what you have projected. You project whatever you want to see. If you want to see an entire planet you will project an entire planet, "making it" in your dream. But when you are done projecting and perceiving, you will stop doing that, and it will disappear.

It means when you make a decision, the consequences are immediate and permanent, and there is no ifs or buts, no fears or doubts, no uncertainty. God's will BE DONE. What God wills CANNOT BE DENIED.

It means that because you have free will, whatever you ask for you will be given. You will never fail to be given what you ask for. Only what you ask for will be all that is given to you. And nothing that you receive will ever be something you did not ask for.

It also means that the world is not causing you, God is not attacking you, other people are not doing anything to you, no-one can hurt you, you MUST be invulnerable, and you cannot die.

It therefore also means that YOU MADE sickness and death and can therefore ABOLISH both, in yourself and in another IF they are willing to ask for help. This means you do not have to go through death if you do not choose to do so, and you would only choose to do so to attempt to prove you can be hurt against your will, which is a bullshit lie.

It also means other people with free will are 100% responsible for EVERYTHING they experience, there is nothing you can do to them, you cannot hurt them, you cannot attack them, you cannot judge them, you cannot forgive them, and they are absolutely immune to anything you express, other than your sharing of love.

It also means, therefore, that anyone's victimhood or sob story or justifications for revenge or reasons to be right or wrong or ego reactions or upset emotions or pain or suffering or sickness, which are all acts of IRRESPONSIBILITY, are attempts to get rid of ourselves and to disown who we are, denying the ABSOLUTE POWER that we share with God.

It also means, that nothing real can be threatened! Reality could only possibly attempt to threaten itself, and if it does so, it will make only illusions of threat - pretend threat - because reality cannot be threatened, and nothing can happen to it against its will.

Can you sense the absolute explicit deliberateness of this? This is the thought system of a miracle worker. This is the kind of belief about ourselves that we need to have, or rather, to get rid of the belief that things happen for reasons OTHER THAN yourself. This is RIGHT MINDED THINKING.

The secret to salvation is that you are doing this all to yourself. That's because of all of the above. NOTHING can happen to you against your will. No-one can die without choosing to do so. No-one can suffer or be sick without choosing to do so. No-one is a victim of anyone else. No-one can be hurt against their will. No-one can show "effects" caused by anyone or anything else, unless they themselves PUT the effects into their own body to pretend that someone else put them there.

You are not at the effect of the world you see. You are not a victim of the world. No-one can suffer without his own consent. The secret to salvation is that you are doing all of this to yourself, including making your body sick and die, to try to prove you are not doing it to yourself. No-one needs to die. The dream of separation is NOT left by death, only by THIS TRUTH.

Total absolute responsibility for everything makes you IMMORTAL, INNOCENT, INVULNERABLE, and incapable of death.

A glossary of christianity terms reinterpreted and clarified by Jesus in A Course in Miracles.

Here are some elements of ACIM which may sound christianity-oriented, but of course Jesus redefines and clarifies their meaning.

1. Heaven - is the kingdom of God which God created one with Him and which is immortal and eternal. You are part of it, as is everyone. It is reality. It is a living creation in which all things are alive forever. It is not Earth.

2. Hell - the attempt to oppose heaven, reality, God, yourself and others, by believing in a state which really does not exist, as if it does. A state opposite to the nature of God, which lacks everything and is therefore devoid of meaning. Onto this empty shell you can project ideas of hell or or heaven, which are seen as a reflection. A belief that hell is real turns the nothingness into hallucinations of something evil. Earth is part of the empty shell, the veil of illusions.

3. Being cast out of heaven - if you are not in heaven, you are dreaming of being exiled. God didn't cast you out, you left. Or at least, you believe you are no longer where God is. This produces an illusion of a world outside of heaven, which includes the Earth. God didn't abandon or reject you, you wanted to not have him be your father and to receive nothing from him. You became the prodigal son who thought he could be better off on his own.

4. The devil - anyone who denies God is against God. They are also against Christ, making them the anti-christ. Being against God you are attempting to turn yourself into a devil. The devil is your belief in an impossible opposite to God. It is your ego. Every separated individual is the anti-christ. But these states are not real. They are make-believe fiction and fantasy in which someone who is confused believes they are something they can never be. Thus there is no real devil or anti-christ, only people with mental illness.

5. Sin - the idea that separation is possible and real and has real consequences. That you can cause reality, therefore you can cause God. Therefore you have committed the "original sin" of trying to attack God. Except nothing real (immortal) can be attacked, so sin is really just a mistaken belief that sin is possible. When correctly recognized as a mistaken belief, it is regarded as error, and errors can be corrected without punishment. If sin were real, punishment by death is inevitable. But if sin is a false idea, then there is no death.

6. Salvation - to the ego-oriented person, salvation is anything opposite to God which takes you further away from God. In this light death is seen as salvation from life. In truth salvation is the return to God through willingness and acceptance that only his truth is true. To be saved is to be free from sin, ie error. Which means simply to be sane and to recognize correctly what is really true. Salvation is the same thing as atonement, true perception and true forgiveness.

7. Atonement - to the ego-oriented person, this is punishment for sin, demanding death. To pay for what you did. Ego says you attacked life so your life will now be attacked. Real atonement is the recognition that attack is impossible, there is no sin, and only what God created really exists. Atonement is the final miracle in which you recognize reality for what it is and reject anything not of God. Where you realize that only God's Kingdom exists and there is no world. That you are still as God created you, causing you to wake up from your dream and return to reality.

8. Evil - the notion that some power other than God exists and can cause changes in the immortal. Evil is nothing but mental illness, insanity, confusion, and just a belief in an opposite to God. It's an attempt to overthrow the kingdom and rebel against reality, making a person seem insane. Believing truth is false and false is true, all properties of nothingness and evil are assigned to God, while all properties of God are assigned to nothing. This produces hallucinations of enemies and attack and hell. There is no evil because it is nothing but a false belief in something impossible.

9. Repentance - you must repent of sins, or choose to stop being a sinner. In truth you cannot really be a sinner because sin is not possible. You can believe you are a sinner, however. And it is this belief that must be undone. To "choose again" is to repent by aligning yourself closer to God and rejecting the ego/devil.

10. Confession - really means to admit the truth, but only to admit the truth of God is true. To admit to having seemingly done something that is impossible in reality, may seem like honesty, but it's really admitting to something unreal. A true confession admits that you are christ and are purely innocent forever.

11. Word of God - the true nature of God expressed and manifested in creation. God's authenticity and honesty and trustworthiness. The expression of God's love, his voice, and his creations. It is the whole kingdom and its truth. 12. Faith - similar to trust, in terms of who or what you are placing your faith and allegiance in. Faith in the ego/devil means trusting a lie and moving towards death. Faith in God means trusting the turth and moving towards life. It's also tied into what you give "credit" to, and therefore what you value or want. If you value God you want God and credit him with being true. Therefore you trust him and side with him, and therefore have faith (know) that his laws are the only laws.

13. Resurrection - A return to life, meaning a return to immortality and eternity. This is possible only in the context that currently those who reject God are to some degree "playing dead" and are trying not to live. Resurrection is the assertion of pure life and is the opposite of choosing to die. It surmounts death and abolishes it and has power over it. It might be expressed or demonstrated as in Jesus's resurrection in which he showed through physical form that death has no power over him. It also includes the power to abolish sickness and death in all its forms, including physically in self and others.

14. Savior - Jesus is an example of a savior in that he united his will with God's, therefore uniting the will of the whole sonship with God's for us. Part of us therefore became united with God again in Jesus's resurrection. In this sense he has now in a position of being able to save ie help us - to become saviors.

15. Prayer - Ultimately communion with God in which everything is given and received. Love is received and love is expressed. It is a request for and an acceptance of everything. In its lower forms it devolves into specifics and requests which include a wish for some kind of attack or control or special favor.

16. Revelation - a true revelation is a state in which fear is totally abolished. It is a one-way communication from God to a child of God, and is like being imprinted with God. In the experience it is deeply personal and there's only you and God there. It does not include others. But its content can later be shared with others. It is not a mere insight or download or slight upgrade, it's a powerful world-blotting-out intense expression directly from God.

17. Soul - God created many souls which are individual beings who comprise the sonship and are the Kingdom. They are simultaneously all one as the Christ, also known as the one son of God. They are not children of Christ, they are children of God. They share everything with each other and therefore are each other. Souls are permanently perfect co-creators with God and create their own kingdoms of living beings together. You have a soul which is your real self/identity in christ, and you have your own kingdom of creations in heaven, which are your children.

18. Christ - Christ is also referred to as the one son, a part of the holy trinity, but christ is also EVERY son of God. Each soul is christ and you are christ just as Jesus is. Which means you are also part of Jesus and vice versa. We are all joined together in christ. Christ is the perfect holy state of being of all souls and the christ-mind is shared by all minds.

19. Trinity - Before the separation from God there was a duality, ie God and his Sonship. But in the separation God also added the Holy Spirit, producing a trinity. The Holy Spirit is the call to awaken, God's Voice speaking to His Son, which guarantees his healing and his return to reality. All three aspects of the trinity are now permanent and only the trinity is real.

20. Holy Spirit - God's creation which was added in the separation to keep a link between God and his children so that they could never be lost. It is God's guarantee of their union with him and the permanent potential for their return home to share everything with him. He bridges the gap between parts of mind that seem united in christ and parts which seem separate. He is the appointed friend and help and corrector and therapist and comforter and healer God has designated to lead us out of hell.

21. Forgiveness - really the recognition that there is nothing to forgive. In this recognition is the clear sane recognition of what is true and what is false. And only God's truth is regarded as true. In that truth sin is utterly impossible and nothing real can be changed. Therefore it's the acknowledgement that everyone is as God created them and nothing has ever happened to change God's will. It disregards all notions of an opposite to immortality and shines a beacon of light in the darkness for all those who think they are unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflection of your immortal nature, and therefore entails invulnerability in which no-one can ever be accused of doing anything to you.

22. Angel - beings created by God as part of the Kingdom. They are created below the sons of God (or from?) and act in roles of protection and guidance and healing. You can communicate and work with them even while on earth.

23. The fall of man - the separation from God, which was an attempted belief that separation is possible, a tiny mad idea, took place in the minds of souls. But also some angels became involved and believed in the separation. This produced what is termed "the fall" in which we exiled/projected ourselves from heaven, into a fictional realm of exile outside of heaven, which is not really anywhere. Lucifer, an actual angel, was included in the fall. He symbolizes the devil perhaps but all separated souls are just as much the anti-christ. This was an actual rebellion in heaven against God and a desire to be God, producing the authority problem and the rejection of God's fatherhood/authorship. A desire for their own kingdom they could rule without him. This produced spacetime, the world, and earth, which was the idea of hell as heaven's opposite.

24. Blasphemy - technically real blasphemy is impossible because God cannot be opposed or offended. But you can believe things which are seemingly against God's nature. Any form of fear, suffering, sickness, death, an annoyance, even a slight lack of joy, unhappiness, lack of peace, are all blasphemous in that they claim something that is not true in God's reality. Therefore they are trying to work against God's truth and oppose his laws. This is of course all a fantasy and there is no sin.

25. The last judgement - God's evaluation of you is the same as it was when he created you perfect, which is that you remain exactly as you were intended to be and nothing can change you. Therefore you are worthy of God and are perfectly innocent forever. Nothing has ever been done to affect your entitlement to his love and you have never sinned or attacked anything real. You merely dreamed of it in a nightmare of your own making, where you deceived yourself. The last judgement upon the world we made (earth etc) is that it is nothing and does not exist.

26. Church - perhaps a term best used as a synonym for the sonship or the kingdom, which are the same thing. The body of God, if you will, is the outer expression of God - his creation. All members of the sonship are part of the church of christ, and this membership is permanent.

27. Communion - while "holy communion" may be a symbolic act, real communion takes place in heaven as the perfect symbiotic union of God and his children. It is the total immersion and openness to God, receiving from Him and expressing in return. To commune is to know, to be, to share. On Earth this devolves into "communication" which can have varying degrees. The separation from God was really a communication breakdown, ie an unwillingness to receive or to see eye-to-eye. Miracles raise the level of communication until communion becomes possible again.

28. Creation - a term only applicable to what takes place in heaven and not on earth. It requires the perfect total whole extension or giving of what the creator has, to what the creation is. The creation inherits everything of its creator and has nothing else. It shares everything with him, having not left him, and therefore can only exist to share it. All creations are co-creators therefore because they inherit the ability to create. Creations are living beings of light, and can only create living beings of light. They cannot create physical objects or forms of matter or energy or other elements of spacetime. Earth is not a creation because it cannot create more earths. Everything in spacetime is a "dead end".

29. Crucifixion - while Jesus's activity on the cross is mostly referred to as "the crucifixion", crucifixion itself really means the attempt to crucify christ, which is everyone, through allegiance to the ego and to death. It's the attempt to prove that God's immortal son can be killed. Every form of fear and suffering and unhappiness and death is a form of crucifixion. This includes the making of an entire seeming universe of spacetime which is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son ie kingdom. It depicts all possible forms of death and is run by laws of death. Being hell, everything in it is crucified and crucifying. Ressurrection marks the ascension back to heaven.

30. Disciple - someone who freely wills to follow someone who may be more advanced, above, or wiser than themselves. Jesus does state in ACIM that if you were not to follow someone of greater wisdom you would be unwise. This indirectly suggests you should follow Jesus as his discipline and learn from him, but is not a mandate. We're also told that Jesus told the disciples to be physicians of the lord, that is to go out and heal the sick and raise the dead, and to heal themselves, with the power of the holy spirit. It is again implied that we are asked to do the same.

31. Garden of Eden - originally really the state of heaven, in which there was no need or lack of anything. Everyone had everything. It wasn't literally a garden with apple trees in it. Adam and Eve were just a couple of God's children. The tree of knowledge of life and death is symbolically the ego thought system, which if believed in (partaken of, eaten, consumed, believed) seems to "poison" the mind, make a person self-conscious of their shameful existence, and attempt to hide in the bushes of the darkness of the mind, to hide from God. They seem then to be expelled from heaven but really have believed in their own expulsion because they want to be exiled, having bought into temptation by believing the tiny mad idea of "the serpent" (ego).

32. God - of course, the prime first creator, the absolute reality, the only true law, the infinite immortal being who shares everything of himself in order to express and apply himself through creation. The father of all eternally living beings and the source of all existence. The all in all. The guarantee of eternal peace and perfection. God relates to every child fully and personally while relating to all children the same way, making him both personal and impersonal. Everyone knows God.

33. Holiness - related to wholeness and purity, innocence and the lack of belief in sin. A state of alignment with God's reality and with truth. Sanity, harmlessness, gentleness, light, healing, power, certainty and openness. Just one of many synonyms for the state of being in heaven.

34. Miracle - in the big picture everything real is permanently miraculous. Miraculousness is the nature of reality in which one thing is all things and all thing are one. This breaks all rules relating to limitation and separate boxes and isolation and exclusion. All expressions of love (God) are miraculous. God creates miracles. You are a miracle of God. God extends through you, God works miracles. You are a miracle capable of creating miracles. Miracles are expressions of life. Even in the world of dreams, on earth, miracles mirror creation in heaven, and are thought-creations which give life, provide love, fill a lack, resurrect, and correct the mind from its mistaken beliefs, producing healing. Since their nature is extension, they are received from God and given to your brothers. There are without number or limit and there is nothing they cannot do. They are truly supernatural - above the nature of the world, based solely on the laws of another world (heaven).

35. Temptation - really just the way that illusions of nothingness seem to symbolically assert and represent things which are opposite to God, as if to try to persuade you to buy into and believe in them. Illusions present themselves as things happening which cannot happen in reality, sins occurring, attacks having effects, real suffering, to "tempt you" to believe further that such things are possible. If you give them your belief, you buy into it and are deceived. If you see through the illusion and frame it in the truth, you deny it and reject its lies and do not believe in it. You can be tempted but not coerced against your will. Being tempted to believe sons of God are bodies is a major hurdle to be overcome because it is not true, but difficulty to recognize as false. The ego/devil is said to tempt souls deeper into hell, which is our own mind/beliefs making faulty decisions.

36. Commandment - not talked about much in ACIM except to say that God's will cannot be opposed, his laws are unbreakable, his nature has permanently established reality, and you cannot do anything to interfere with it. What God has created, no man can put asunder. This does not include the rather social-religious commandments or "guidelines for behavior" on earth. God does not coerce. Thou shalt be free. Thou shalt love your brother as yourself. Thou shalt live forever. Thou shalt come to no harm. Thou shalt be always happy. Thou shalt give and receive as one. Thou shalt share everything with everyone.

37. Worship - Appreciation and awe of God is appropriate, as is loving God and thanking Him, but he does not have an ego with which to receive any kind of praise. You cannot tell him how great he is as if to give him something he does not have. He cannot receive offerings of sacrifice or exalting words. He has no need of anything. But you can celebrate what has been given and rejoice and be glad that only his truth is true. You can thank him for what you are and for what you have been given, and for what your brothers have as well. But you're not supposed to idolize him or your brothers or jesus or turn anyone into a figure "above" you. Only God is above you and that's why you have awe of him.

38. Healing - in ACIM this usually refers to the transformative process of change whereby something begins in a less healed state and moves towards a more healed state. Miracles can induce healing but a "miracle of healing" is a level confusion. Miracles are a remedy, like a drop of detergent upon dirt, which causes the dirt to be removed. Healing is the result, but the miracle itself is not the healing. This is also why miracles can cause shifts in perception but are not the shifts, because the shifts are part of the healing effect, not the miracle that caused them. To heal you give healing and learn to receive healing as you give it. All those who become healed become instruments of healing. Your function on earth is the healing of the sonship as a miracle-worker.

39. Christian - apparently someone who follows christ, but you should recognize that you are christ as well. You are supposed to return to the state of owning up to being christ, recognizing that everyone is christ. Acting as christ and being christ-like is to be christian.

40. Second coming - really has nothing to do with a singular person coming down from heaven for a second time for a second go-around. It's really what happens when all those on earth are choosing to return to heaven and, of themselves, become the christ. The first coming was Jesus showing the way to return to heaven, and the second coming is us actually implementing and following that and doing the same.

41. Eternal life - really granted by God the instant he created you and everyone. It means permanence and the impossibility of anything ever happening that could interrupt, damage or change that permanence. This means it is a state of total immortality and invulnerability. Everything real lives forever.

42. Eternity - a state of heaven and reality in which everything real always exists, is always the same, never changes, and exists here and now and forever. There is no "time" involved, only presence.

43. Golden rule - Not an optional rule, but really the unbreakable law of God that you are everyone. Therefore how you treat them you are immediately and directly and personally treating youreslf. The part of you that is in them is the receiver of what you give, because giving and receiving are one. This produces an incentive for only shared interests and for giving only love, otherwise you will hurt yourself by trying to hurt another. What you do unto others you do unto yourself. By treating them how you would want to be treated, you directly do treat yourself that way and directly receive that treatment, regardless of whether other opt to reciprocate or not.

Some ACIM quotes...

"I told you that I could reach up and bring the Holy Spirit down to you. But I can bring Him to you only at your own invitation. The Holy Spirit is nothing more than your own right mind. He was also mine. The Bible says, "May the mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus," and uses this as a BLESSING. It is the blessing of miracle-mindedness. It asks that you may think as I thought, joining with me in Christ-thinking."

"The Holy Spirit is the only part of the Holy Trinity which is symbolic. He is referred to in the Bible as the Healer, the Comforter, and the Guide. He is also described as something separate, apart from the Father and from the Son. I myself said, "and if I go I will send you ANOTHER comforter, and he will abide with you."

"The Bible enjoins you to be perfect, to heal ALL errors, to take no thought of the body AS SEPARATE, and to accomplish all things IN MY NAME."

"The Bible instructs you to "KNOW thyself," or BE CERTAIN. Certainty is always of God. When you love someone, you have PERCEIVED him as he is, and this makes it possible for you to KNOW him."

"The Garden of Eden, which is described as a literal garden in the Bible, was not originally an actual garden at all. It was merely a mental state of complete need-lack. Even in the literal account, it is noteworthy that the pre-Separation state was essentially one in which man needed nothing. The Tree of Knowledge, again an overly-literal concept, (as is clearly shown by the subsequent reference to "eating of the fruit of the tree") is a symbolic reference to some of the misuses of knowledge referred to in the section immediately preceding this one."

"The Bible repeatedly states that you should praise God. This hardly means that you should tell Him how wonderful He is. He has no ego with which to accept thanks, and no perceptions with which to judge your offerings. But unless you take your part in the creation, His joy is not complete because YOURS is incomplete. And THIS He does know. He knows it in his own Being and its experience of His Sons' experience. 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."

"That is why the Bible says "There is no death," and that is why I demonstrated that death does not exist."

""No man cometh to the Father but by me" is among the most misunderstood statements in the Bible. It DOES NOT mean that I am in any way separate (or different) from you, EXCEPT IN TIME. Now, we know that time does not exist. Actually, the statement is much more meaningful if it is considered on a vertical rather than a horizontal axis. Regarded along the vertical, man stands below me, and I stand below God. In the process of "rising up", I AM higher. This is because without me the distance between God and man is too great for man to encompass. I bridge the distance as an Elder Brother to man, on the one hand, and a Son of God on the other. My devotion to my brothers has placed me in charge of the Sonship, which I can render complete only to the extent I can SHARE it."

"When the Bible says "Judge not that ye be not judged" it merely means that if you judge the reality of others at all, you will be unable to avoid judging your own."

"I have been correctly referred to in the Bible as "The Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world."

The sight used by the physical body, based on seeing photons, is not a forgiving sight. The body is completely 100% biased because it only ever says that things like itself exist. If the body can see itself, this registers as "bodies exist."

So now you have a sensory device which you might think is able to be objective, trying to use it to tell you whether something exists or not, but the dial on it is switched entirely to one side so that it only EVER reports that physical things exist.

In turn, it is 100% completely blind to anything real, anything of God, and any part of actual reality. It can only EVER say that the physical things it senses must be there to sense, and so they exist and are real and true. ie if you can see it, it's real.

The body is completely biased because it uses its own senses to sense whether it itself exists. And it only ever reports "yes", that it exists, because it senses itself. This is obviously completely tainted information, 100% closed off, biased, and blind.

So basically anything that the body can sense, does not exist. But the body is only capable of saying that it does. It is 100% on the side of the physical, and validates the physical, and is squarely focused only on the physical. It is incapable of finding that the physical world is unreal, and it is not able to sense reality AT ALL.

"Only the body makes the world seem real." UrU5A5

"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." UrU5A2

"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." UrT22D5

Literally, the physical body was made to NEVER see reality, to ONLY look upon error, and to COMPLETELY "believe" that everything it senses really exists. It is the perfect device for deception, for making sure you are completely stuck in unconsciousness, for making forgiveness impossible, and for proving that everything impossible is possible.

In effect, we made the body in an attempt to deceive ourselves COMPLETELY. And this makes the body 100% unforgiving. It cannot be objective, it cannot question whether the physical world is real, and it has absolutely no way to see actual reality. It is a "device for separation", NOT a device for oneness.

It is unforgiving in that, anything it sees is an illusion, and that illusion registers as 100% real. It sees illusions as reality and reality as an illusion. That is false perception. That is total insanity. That is total confusion. Sin is insanity, which is why the world of bodies is made of the idea of sin.

Anything that occurs in the physical world, which is "the world of sin", is regarded as a REAL SIN. Something happens, it registers as having happened, the body witnesses the physical proof that it happened, and regards this as irreversible truth. I can see it, I can touch it, I can smell it, taste it, hear it, it is RIGHT THERE, screams the body.

Physical sight, if it were believed without question, would result in the mind being completely convinced by death and destruction and sickness and suffering. Anything that occurs would be regarded as real and true. All physical causes and effects would prove separation is real. Every physical attack would be seen as real and undeniable, justifying revenge. There is no forgiveness there. It is the "battlefield."

Now, a lot of how you experience this illusory world depends entirely on the mind and its USE of the body, the mind's belief system or thought system, and whether it BUYS INTO the deception of the physical world. What MEANING it gives to the signals coming in from the body, whether it believes they are true or not.

If the mind thoroughly deceives itself by aligning its identity with the body, narrowing itself to the body, imprisoning itself in it, seeing itself as "separated off" by it, believing the body IS itself, and as such shutting out the mind, then the mind is going to become UNFORGIVING. In the extreme, this "nihilism" of believing that "the physical world is all there is" would produce a state of total insanity.

This is because physicality IS deception and believing in it means you are deceiving yourself, and deception is evil. Which essentially means that the physical world and the body are evil. Or at least were made in an attempt to be evil, to oppose the "good" of God. But whether it is experienced as hell-like or heaven-like depends on the mind's USE of it.

So basically the body itself presents a POTENTIAL which, in and of itself, is 100% wired for unforgiveness. But the mind can OVERRIDE this, by changing what it makes of the signals it receives from the body. The mind is responsible for whether it BELIEVES in what the body is showing it. And the mind HAS to be willing to categorize EVERYTHING the body senses as FALSE, if it is to be sane and forgiving.

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

As the mind moves towards God, therefore, it moves away from physical sight. It recognizes that everything the body senses is NOT TRUE. This means forgiveness is an assertion that the physical world IS NOT TRUE, which dismisses all deceptions and blame.

But mind can "use" the physical for a higher purpose, e,g, to help others who are in the physical world. But in the mind, it is not buying into, believing, or being deceived by, anything in the world.

What this ultimately means for FORGIVENESS, is that to be truly forgiving you have to NOT believe anything the body tells you, NOTHING that the physical world presents, and recognize it for the illusion it is. As we "practice" forgivenesses we are trying to get our minds to move into that higher "true perception", where we properly recognize the physical as FALSE. In its entirety.

It's then like the body is a sensor dipped into a completely false illusory unreal world, picking up signals about what's going on there, and reporting back, but the mind that looks AT these signals is not deceived by them, does not believe they are ultimately true, and recognizes their falsety. It can still USE the body's signals temporarily, e.g. such as when Jesus walks the Earth and can use the body to SEE the sick bodies, to offer help, but the healed mind does not BELIEVE anything it's witnessing here.

And that's because everything physical is unreal. And forgiving the physical causes it to cease to seem to exist, overriding the body's insistence that it does.

"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." UrM13A6

"Yet sights and sounds the body can perceive are meaningless. It cannot see nor hear. It does not know what seeing IS; what listening is FOR. It is as little able to perceive as it can judge, or understand, or know. Its eyes are blind, its ears are deaf. It can NOT think, and so it cannot HAVE effects." UrT28F4

"Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold? What need have they of sights or sounds or touch? What would they hear or reach to grasp? What would they sense at all? To sense is not to know." UrW250W41

Innocence is goodness. If guilt is equated with evil, then innocence is equated with good. In order to forgive someone or something requires looking for the good in them - looking for their innocence. Seeing their harmlessness, their gentleness, their holiness and their perfection.

"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."

"The good" is also combined with love, and light, and power, and strength. It is the realm of miracles. In effect, evil is a breakdown, malfunction, failure, weakness and a loss. So its opposite, good, is all that can actually work, solves all problems, repairs all sickness and resurrects.

"The good is what works" is a sound though insufficient statement. ONLY the good CAN work. Nothing else works at all."

The Holy Spirit also represents the state of forgiveness and the miracle, as the power of God which performs miracles, as the healer as the resurrector. Therefore seeing the good in your brother for example also equates with seeing the Holy Spirit in him.

"And now I place you in His hands, to be His faithful followers, with Him as Guide through every difficulty and all pain that you may think is real. Nor will He give you pleasures that will pass away, for He gives only the eternal and the good. Let Him prepare you further."

Jesus encourages us to find the good in things. To "look on the bright side". To make of the world a forgiven world where all is seen as innocent and harmless and guiltless and sinless.

"Have you been similarly grateful to each other? Have you consistently appreciated the GOOD efforts, and OVERLOOKED mistakes?" Indeed forgiveness puts you in touch with your true nature, brings you closer to God, aligns you with your soul, and reawakens the power of God in you. It is your natural divine function to create the good and to do only good.

Ultimately "the good" is God, and anything of God is good. The world, as an illusion, is not good, and can at best only reflect God's goodness. Moving away from evil takes you toward the good of God. And in God, everyone and everything is good.

"Child of God, you were created to create the good, the beautiful, and the holy. Do not lose sight of this."

""I am blessed as a Son of God."

Herein lies my claim to all good and only good. I am blessed as a Son of God. All good things are mine because God intended them for me. I cannot suffer any loss or deprivation or pain because of who I am. My Father supports me, protects me, and directs me in all things. His care for me is infinite, and is with me forever. I am eternally blessed as His Son."

"You have been told that everything brings good that comes from God."

"And as you gave your trust to what is "good" in him, you gave it to the "good" in you. In terms of concepts, it is thus you see him MORE than just a body, for the "good" is NEVER what the body seems to be."

"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.""

"And look upon the "good" in him, that you may not be fearful of your "evil" thoughts, because they do not cloud your view of him." "ALL things work together for good. There are NO exceptions except in the ego's judgment."

"Man will ultimately look upon his own creations, and will to preserve only what is good, just as God Himself once looked upon what he had created, and knew that it WAS good."

"For what God gives can only be for good. And I accept but what He gives as what belongs to me."

"God is said to have looked on all He created and pronounced it good. No, He declared it perfect, and so it was."

"Something good must come from every meeting of patient and therapist. And that good is saved for both, against the day when they can recognize that only that was real in their relationship."

"And so there is a place for all relationships in this world, and they will bring as much good as each can accept and use."

"We look on everyone as brothers, and perceive all things as kindly and as good."

"The real world can ACTUALLY BE PERCEIVED. All that is necessary is a willingness to perceive nothing ELSE. For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM. The ego sees SOME good, but never ONLY good. That is WHY its perceptions are so variable. It does not reject goodness entirely, for this you could not accept, but it always ADDS something that is NOT real TO the real, thus CONFUSING ILLUSION AND REALITY. For perceptions cannot be partly true. If you believe in truth AND illusion you CANNOT TELL WHICH IS TRUE."

"The perception of goodness is not knowledge, but the denial of the OPPOSITE of goodness enables you to perceive a condition in which opposites do not exist."

"What would give you the ability to be aware of all the facets of any problem, and to resolve them in such a way that only good can come of it?"

"But "good" and "deprivation" are opposites, and CANNOT meaningfully join in ANY way."

"Any ability that anyone develops has the potentiality for good." "Nothing good is lost, because it comes from the Holy Spirit, the voice for Creation. Nothing that is not good was ever created, and therefore CANNOT be protected."

"There is always some good in any thought which strengthens the idea that life and the body are not the same."

"The Resurrection demonstrated that NOTHING can destroy truth. Good can withstand ANY form of evil, because light abolishes ALL forms of darkness."

"It is secure in certainty that obstacles can not impede its progress to accomplishment of any goal which serves the greater plan established for the good of everyone."

"What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything which happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life."

"Now close your eyes and see him in your mind, and look at him a while. Try to perceive some light in him somewhere; a little gleam which you had never noticed. Try to find some little spark of brightness shining through the ugly picture which you hold of him. Look at this picture until you see a light somewhere within it, and then try to let this light extend until it covers him, and makes the picture beautiful and good."

"The laws of God work only for your good, and there ARE no other laws beside His."

"The Biblical quotation should read "In this world you need NOT have tribulation BECAUSE I have overcome the world." THAT is why you should "be of good cheer.""

"He will remove all faith that you have placed in pain, disaster, suffering and loss. He gives you vision which can look beyond these grim appearances, and can behold the gentle Face of Christ in all of them. You will no longer doubt that only good can come to you who are beloved of God, for He will judge all happenings and teach the single lesson which they all contain."

"The Holy Spirit USES time, but does NOT believe in it. Coming from God, He uses EVERYTHING for good, but does not BELIEVE in what is not true."

"Out of Love he was created, and in Love he abides. Goodness and mercy have always followed him, for he has always extended the Love of his Father."

"You can do ANYTHING I ask. I have asked you to perform miracles, and have made it VERY clear that these are NATURAL, CORRECTIVE, HEALING, and UNIVERSAL. There is nothing good they cannot do."

Quite often while reading the ACIM text I am blown away by Jesus's crystal-clear clarity on various topics. It's like, there couldn't possibly be any way to explain MORE clearly. Last night as I read about forgiveness it was no exception. Immediately I knew I had been misunderstanding parts of it all this time.

The ego's version of forgiveness has you taking a good, clear look at an 'error' and then attempting to overlook it, but you can't overlook it because you've made it real. Looking AT the error is not looking PAST the error. It is not overlooking, it's just looking. Once the error is firmly in our sights, we are holding onto it and maintaining it, so cannot simultaneously transcend it.

What the Course then says is that once we've made errors real - which is the situation we find ourselves in almost all the time and usually this is the state that compels us to want to forgive - we will be tempted to believe that we have to "UNDO what we have MADE in order to be forgiven". We made the illusion, we invented it, we believed in it, we have faith in it, and if it is real then we have to undo what we made in order to forgive. So then we start to set about trying to UNDO the thing that seems to be upsetting us. But we can't undo it that way because our belief in it holds it firmly in place.

The Course goes onto to describe Holy Spirit's forgiveness. It says simply and clearly, that Holy Spirit is ALWAYS overlooking all errors, and DOES NOT SEE ERRORS, in a pro-active manner - fore-giving, SO THAT errors will not ARISE, and so that they therefore do not need to be later 'undone'. The Holy Spirit does not make errors real in the first place. He does not `make` illusions. And so to Him, there IS no error. This is where it becomes paradoxical. The Holy Spirit forgives constantly in order that there is nothing to forgive. He fore-gives, ahead of the need to address an error, so that no errors arise whatsoever. He therefore has a 'forgiving attitude' which is incapable of registering error whatsoever. This is why HIS forgiveness is "quiet, still, looks and does not judge, and does nothing".

So the Course is describing these two types of forgiveness. Ego forgiveness which tries to undo things it's made real and cannot, vs Holy Spirit's forgiveness which HAS NOT made things real and so is permanently overlooking all errors in the knowledge that NOTHING HAS HAPPENED. The Course also says that the ego attempts to take over control of all activities, and this is why the ego thinks IT is the one who has to do forgiveness. But the Course also says, Forgiveness is the HOLY SPIRIT's function. Holy Spirit constantly is forgiving in order not to have anything to forgive. OUR function is different.

The error I have made is in thinking that I am the one that forgives - as the ego - who has made errors real and now attempts to do something to/about them in order to make them go away. Holy Spirit is the light which actually shines so brightly that there is nothing to forgive.

So, then I found myself asking, how then does one transition from being in the ego and `needing to forgive` or `needing to undo` due to seeing something that seems real, to aligning with Holy Spirit's viewpoint which is that ALL IS FORGIVEN already in a pro-active, preventative way. How do I go from maintenance and cleanup after observing a mess, to proactive preventative measures. How do I go from 'attack it with the course' to 'nothing happened'.

Somehow I have to get my mind to ALIGN with Holy Spirit's way of looking at things, so that I can see that all is forgiven. But while I'm believing that something has gone wrong and I need to do something, THOSE beliefs are actually preventing forgiveness. The truth is that nothing has really happened and nothing has gone wrong, and its my believing in the reality of the error that IS the error. Its an error in my forgiveness. I have to get my mind to change its viewpoint away from 'I need to forgive this because it's happened', to, 'I am forgiven because this HAS NOT HAPPENED'.

This is kind of along the same lines as "I recognize we are both forgiven for what we HAVE NOT done", which is the viewpoint of Holy Spirit. The ego's version of forgiveness is very misleading and distracting. I see them now as two wavelengths, the lower wavelength of ego mired in illusions of illusions, and the higher wavelength of Holy Spirit floating above everything knowing there are no real illusions.

The process of 'transitioning' from an ego viewpoint to the Holy Spirit's viewpoint seems to what we call 'applying forgiveness'. We try to 'not do' (undo) the WAY OF SEEING that was producing a view of error, recognizing we must be mistaken if we believe there even IS a real error. Holy Spirit said to me we need to "withdraw" our conviction and belief that the error is real in every way, so that we can move towards the atonement viewpoint, which says nothing happened. Holy Spirit sees WITH the atonement.

One thing I always was mistaken about is when I heard that Holy Spirit perceives, I always thought it meant he perceives illusions, therefore he can see all of our errors etc. But the Course has clarified that Holy Spirit only sees clearly by OVERLOOKING all errors and NOT seeing them. He perceives, but he perceives with total right-mindedness, proactively forgiving and looking pass all errors to The Face of Christ. Sort of, `in` the world but not of it. This was my mistake because I thought he saw the errors as well. The EGO is the one that sees errors, and the ego is IN the world. This separation of roles and perspectives has really clarified things for me as to WHO is doing the forgiving and WHO is holding the appropriate perspective.

The only area now where I have some questions, and I'm sure continued reading of the Text will reveal more... is in.... through what seeming 'process' or 'steps' do we transition our mind away from the ego's version of forgiveness to the Holy Spirit's. When I'm in the ego I do not understand forgiveness and I apply 'something' but it isn't Holy Spirit's version. When illusions are particularly strong I believe heavily that the problem is separate and that IT needs to be changed by throwing Course at it. That's totally ego. But that's the starting point. That's not HOW I need to forgive, it's the KIND of forgiveness that I need to learn NOT to do. If I see a house on fire, my forgiveness should be - there is no house on fire, 'how can I forgive this burning house'.

I'd always thought that the process of 'undoing' and of 'correcting' and of trying to shift toward Holy Spirit WAS forgiveness... even the goodie-two-shoes student approach of APPLYING the Course ... but that apparent 'process' is not forgiveness itself. Forgiveness is the Holy Spirit's view which is always the same. Whether I JOIN Holy Spirit in His view is the question/decision. And if it takes time TO join with Him, it seems like that 'journey' toward Holy Spirit is a forgiveness process, but it's more of a ... 'realization that nothing needs to be forgiven' process. A process of correction. Holy Spirit IS the source of correction because He sees CORRECTLY. My (ego) attempt to `do` the forgiving and to become forgiven and to get to where I see that it IS forgiven, is really my struggle between allegiance to ego and allegiance to truth. That's where the 'work' seems to be needed and surrender needs to happen, SO THAT I can get to where I can SEE clearly that 'all is forgiven' already - ie that all is looked upon WITH forgiving eyes and sees only Christ.

(I'm not sure if I'm explaining clearly what exactly has become clearer for me 'overnight'. .. more to follow)

There is no world - one of the hardest things to accept. There is no error, there is no problem, there is no ego.

Thank you Jesus for your unceasingly clarity and for sharing it with us!

This is an important point. When you are being forgiving, you do not continue to LOOK AT the thing that you were forgiving. Sight of it was the result of NOT forgiving.

Forgiveness is NOT ABOUT looking "at" bodies and at the world and regarding them as sinless and holy. This is not how forgiveness functions. Forgiveness does not make something real and then try to look past it, nor does it make something real and then attempt to endow it with qualities of love and perfection.

To forgive the world does NOT MEAN to keep looking AT the world in a loving way. To forgive the world does NOT MEAN to love the world and believe it is God's creation. To forgive does not mean that your SIGHT stops at the outside surface of material objects and still regards them as reality. I'm sorry but that is NOT forgiveness.

To forgive means to OVERLOOK. It means to SEE PAST. It means to NOT FIXATE ON. It means to NOT BE DECEIVED BY. It means to GIVE NO REALITY TO. It means to CANCEL illusions. It means to DIMINISH illusions in your sight so that you can see THROUGH THEM and PAST THEM to the truth (Christ) that was being hidden BY them.

The world stands like a block of sin before the face of Christ. So does all bodies. You have to OVERLOOK THEM if you want to see Christ in your brother. The Christ in him is BEYOND HIS BODY.

"It must reach out beyond itself, as you reached out beyond the body to LET yourselves be joined."

"Beyond the bodies that you interposed between you, and shining in the golden light"

"And place no value on your brother's body, which held him to illusions of what he is."

You have to OVERLOOK PHYSICAL OBJECTS. Your sight, your spiritual sight, has to take the place of your body's vision (which lies to you and only looks at bodies). To be forgiving, to forgive your brother, and to forgive the world, does not mean you're still SEEING THE WORLD or seeing bodies. Nor does it mean you still see exactly the same stuff you saw before but with a sense of innocence and loveliness. You are NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SEEING THIS WORLD.

Those of you who believe that God created this planet, are particularly apt to be mistaken about this. It is an error to say that your aim is to "love the world". Your love would dispel the world. "Eternity shines away the world." You cannot love what isn't really there. You can only love the reality and truth which is BEYOND the world. To want to keep the world and the bodies and keep SEEING them, and keep being BLINDED by sight of form, while trying to simultaneously reach a state of love and forgiveness, is IMPOSSIBLE. You have to let the world go. You are NOT being forgiving if you keep fixating on it.

All things in this world are the form of sin and error. You must learn to OVERLOOK these errors and see PAST them with reason. Only this way can you "see God in everything you see". It's not because you keep seeing the world AS God. You see God IN PLACE OF the world. Behind the world. He was hidden BY the world. That was why you made it, to shut him out. To forgive is to recognize that this illusory world IS NOT THERE, HAS NOT HAPPENED, AND DOES NOT REALLY EXIST. Only by looking PAST forms to the Christ BEYOND can you recognize God's Son.

When your mind stops at the outer surface of objects, you are blinded and the extension of your mind has been arrested. If you arrest the extension of the mind you foster separation and induce illness. It is unnatural to see this world and bad for your health. You need to see PAST its illusion in order for your mind to JOIN with the Christ that is hidden BEYOND the world and beyond bodies. It is the only way you can communicate and it is the only way you can love. Love shines PAST illusions and renders them unreal and irrelevant. The world is irrelevant. The body is irrelevant.

It's like in the Matrix movies... you have to learn to see the 'matrix code' instead of being deceived by illusions of a world that doesn't exist. Then you can get out of hell and get back to being in Heaven.

Only love is real and "love was never in the world". Love wants the world to end.

"Just as forgiveness overlooks all sins..."

"...brought to its forgiveness is gently overlooked, and disappears"

"He overlooks the mind and body, seeing only the face of Christ"

"Strength overlooks these things by seeing past appearances."

"By its ability to overlook what is not there, it opens up the way to truth"

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK."

"You can overlook your brother's dreams. So perfectly can you forgive him his illusions"

"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."

"For it is your unwillingness to overlook what seems to stand between you that makes it look impenetrable"

"(body)... Its eyes ADJUST to sin, unable to overlook it in any form, and seeing it everywhere, in everything."

"Let love draw near them and overlook the body, as it will surely do"

"Thus are his sins forgiven him, for Christ has vision which has power to overlook them all. In His forgiveness they are gone. Unseen by One, they merely disappear because a vision of the holiness which lies beyond them comes to take their place."

"When you have looked upon each other with complete forgiveness, from which no error is excluded and nothing kept hidden, what mistake can there be anywhere you can not overlook? What form of suffering could block your sight, preventing you from seeing past it?"

"In your madness, you OVERLOOK REALITY COMPLETELY, and you see ONLY YOUR SPLIT MIND everywhere you look."

"To overlook nothingness is merely to judge it correctly, and because of your ability to evaluate it truly, to LET IT GO."

"See him as guiltless as I look on you, and OVERLOOK the sins he THINKS he sees within himself. "

"Condemn your Savior not because he thinks he is a body. Far beyond his dreams is his reality"

"But what is that to those who have been given one true relationship, BEYOND the body?"

"He holds not the proof of sin before his brother's eyes."

"This separating off is symbolized, in your perception, by a body which is clearly separate and a thing apart. "

"To see a brother in ANOTHER body, SEPARATE from yours, is the expression of a wish to see a little PART of him, and sacrifice the rest."

"And while you see your brother as a body, APART from you and separate in his cell, you are demanding sacrifice of him AND you. "

"What witness to the wholeness of God's Son is seen within a world of separate bodies, however much he witnesses to truth? He is INVISIBLE in such a world."

"In Heaven God's Son is NOT imprisoned in a body, nor is sacrificed in solitude to sin."

"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?"

Beware the ego. You bring it with you into the Course, and it will do everything it can to delude you, confuse you, distract you, blind you, and make you use the Course as a weapon.

One of the main ways that it does this is by engaging the intellect. Whatever you are experiencing right now, that is your most real-seeming experience and represents your current truth/beliefs. In order to really change that experience you have to undo some ego, which will shift you to experiencing something else.

The ego doesn't like that. The ego wants to keep the ego and increase itself. A major way it does this is through shifting into concepts. In essence, attempting to take on board "truth" which is too far outside the envelope of what you actually are experiencing, it shifts awareness into the intellect. You can "conceive" of the thing being talked about, but you cannot experience it.

The intellect is the ego's attempt to bridge the gap between where you are most authentically at, and where it pretends it wants to be. It is a tool for dissection and analysis and trying to find answers in illusions. It's a mechanism for judging, it experiences reactions, and tries to make realities. It's part of the dreaming mind.

What happens unfortunately is that the intellect becomes strongly engaged by studying the Course. There are so many concepts, theories and ideas in the Course. There are so many quotes which say or thing or another. A student will amass an internal library of all these things, and then the ego will use them as weapons and justifications.

What happens is, because the intellect takes you away from the present experience and into fantasy, the intellect becomes a way for the ego to avoid the present. The intellect loves to be a quotation machine, it loves to get hung up on the form of words, it loves to fixate on what is specifically in or not in the course, and it loves to be the ultimate judge or the authority or thing which figures out and decides what is true or not.

What I've seen is, some Course students become so lost in the form of the Course's words, the theology, the quotes, the concepts, that their intellect goes into overdrive. When you try to hold a normal conversation with these people, there is practically nothing you can say which won't be picked apart. You can't speak to these people with normal words because if there is any overlap with course words or if the course seems to have a redefinition of a term, they will see the use of the word as an error.

What then happens is they will have a reaction to a perceived error, will use the course to back up "why" its an error, and then the conversation will shift away from presence and into the course concepts where they'll assert all the reasons/quotes as to why what you said was wrong. You don't even really know what it was you said, being normal, that was so erroneous, and then you end up being bombarded with all this "correction" that you didn't even need.

Another favorite ego tool is to jump around in the levels. This is a classic move. Basically you're talking about something within a given context. Maybe you're discussing the ego or the world or something. You say something. Their ego intellect kicks in and sees a opportunity to be right, or basically pulls up a quote or course concept which they believe has truth to it, and they then use it as a weapon. They'll jump out of the `level` or context you're discussing on, and jump into some super-high conceptual level of the course. This "trumps" whatever you said, and seems to render you in error, or less true, and therefore you're wrong.

For example, you could be talking about forgiveness or how to apply it to something, and you say something, they get triggered, and then they suddenly come out with something like "that doesn't exist" or "nothing happened" or something... something at a higher level, which basically ultimately is true, BUT, it's being used as a way to discredit and overly dismiss whatever you said that wasn't even a point of contention. The person positions themselves with weapons of truth, concepts, in order to have the best most high trump-cards possible, so that no matter what you try to discuss with them, they will constantly undermine you. There is no way to hold a normal conversation with such people.

I think we all do this to some extent. But Course students especially are prone to this. It is so easy to get hung up on what the Course said on some matter and to then use it as a way to be subtly right, to use it against other people, to make people wrong etc.

I recently was in a group of people discussing ACIM stuff. I was shocked. I couldn't believe how much of this intellectual prostrating was going on. It seemed practically impossible to say anything without some person jumping all over it and pulling it apart, with a sort of "I've got a better truth" attitude. Even saying things which were absolutely nothing to do with the course whatsoever, which suddenly were turned around and explained to be false or in error because of something it contained. It turns into an addiction to correcting people.

The intellect can be used by the ego to really firmly latch onto the concepts as though they are the truth. They are held onto like precious jewels. And then they are used as weapons. The concepts are not the truth itself. Truth is an experience. Getting lost in debating the Course is very easy to do. It's possible to amass a considerable body of conviction about what the Course is saying or meaning and to then be so rigid and fixed in that that you can no longer talk to people normally or allow them their mistakes.

One person I was talking to was so distracted by intellectual positions that it was almost like talking to no-one. I would say one thing, they would do an instant bypass, find some other quotation or concept to go against it, and throw it back at me. I also wrote a few posts which were clear and obviously correct. But what happens is, people will then read it, sort of quietly refuse it, find one word you said which was slightly "not pure course-correct lingo", and then go in a diatribe about how you were wrong, completely glossing over and ignoring what you actually said or whether it was true.

This is what the ego does. It creates diversions. Distractions. Cover-ups. It makes noise about something, anything, other than what is immediately present. It pulls you away from the here and now. It takes you out of conversations and into wars. It uses its prowess to launch counter-attacks to perceived attacks, which it itself put out there with its mis-perceptions and judgements, and then reacted to.

You have to beware of the ego doing this. It will try to use the Course to point out the ways that people are wrong and then react to this perception by trying to correct them, when in fact it is your own mind which is at fault. It's just another way the ego projects responsibility and blame.

Sometimes I find it difficult to relate when people suggest that you "just" do this or that, in order to be awakened or spiritual.

Even if it's coming from a masterful person and even if it makes total sense and even if its deeply simple and pure and lovely, I can't relate to it or use it.

Expressions coming from a certain 'level 'of consciousness can only really be related to by people who are also AT that level of consciousness. Those broadcasts are NOT helpful for people at a lower level, except as perhaps an inspiration. There's a big difference between an expression of "this is what it is like here" versus "this is how you come up to this level".

The reason is because the 'level' that I'm currently at, I need ways to remove the blocks to awareness in order to become aware of a truth/love/experience that "already is".

I don't need to work on learning how to 'do' what is already done. I don't need to practice 'being'. I don't need to TRY to be still or quiet or meditative or whatever.

The Course tells us that we need to focus on simply removing the blocks to love. This is akin to severing the anchors which keep us attached to the bottom of the ocean, dragging us down. Once let go, we naturally float back to the surface.

This to me can be a problem with teachings coming from a higher level. They can be impractical and not really helpful. They sound fantastic. They're beautiful. And they're truthful expressions from a greater perspective. But they're not always relatable for people who are stuck down in the quagmire of illusions and delusions.

We don't need to construct reality, or make things heavenly, or spend heaps of time trying to produce some kind of skill or ability to be what we naturally already are underneath our disguises. We just need to learn to take our disguises off. And that process is a practical one in the application of forgiveness or other methods to undo delusions.

I could say, well, just be still, be at peace, stop thinking. But that's not going to last. You're not going to be able to do it. And then it will just be annoying and you'll feel like you're inferior for not being able to just flip spirituality on like a switch.

This can be why the spiritual quotathon can produce not only a sense of confusion and impossible expectation, but also attempts to give to students things they are not ready for and which don't really help them to get out of their confusion. If things are too abstract, the only way you can really relate to that abstraction is to be experiencing it. There needs to be more of a middle ground.

This is why often you get teachers who are perhaps awakened on like "level 3" or whatever but they don't have a practical "level 2" teaching platform that helps people to go from where they are actually at to their next steps. To move them forward. And then the things they say which are so beautiful and lofty sort of make them into a mysterious yet inaccessible idol that becomes worshipped and followed in a state of confusion and misunderstanding.

If I go visit God and I come back and I say, well, hey, all you have to do is be with God. Easy right? Can you do it? Then you'll try to do it and you'll fail, then get frustrated and disappointed and believe separation is real and you'll beat yourself up and compare yourself and judge yourself as insufficient, unworthy or inferior, which is the perfect foundation for turning me into a spiritual idol that you worship. You don't need that.

You need guidance that you can relate to that works for you at the level you're at, in the language you currently are speaking, that nudges you forward just a little bit past your current reality, and leads you on to the next steps. That's how you gradually wake up. Not by hitting yourself over the head with a giant space mallet trying to digest things which your mind really cannot comprehend yet.

Trying to get ahead of yourself doesn't work. The ego likes to suggest you should do that, but then you end up just emphasizing how "far behind" you are from the special chosen ones. Not that the masters are in any way wrong or bad or whatever, just that if truly they're a helpful teacher they need to be recognizing where YOU are at and what YOU can currently understand and speak your language, not just sit on a throne and radiate abstract experiences as though this is "all you need to do". Yes its true, yes they're correct, but.... that advice is next to useless when your mind is fucked.

Gotta walk before you can run. Gotta learn to flap wings before you can fly. Gotta take steps to get to the temple before you can go in. You need help walking, not jumping off cliffs.

Holy Spirit is an expert teacher in this regard, He recognizes our illusions (as illusions) and doesn't believe them, but knows that we do, and is able to not only speak our language but support us at whatever level we're at with whatever guidance we're willing to accept and are ready for. One step at a time. Non-threatening, non-pressuring, just loving gentle awakening.

I will share a forgiveness I just applied, to a milkshake.

This evening I was somewhat argumentative with my wife, and feeling guilty. We went to buy take-out dinner and went through the drive through of Culvers custard, where I tried to purchase a strawberry milkshake. We waited for our order, and I received what looked like said milkshake - it was at least pink, although I sensed it tasted a little unusual. At the time I let it slide and we drove home. Once I got home I found, for sure, it was not strawberry, but rather a 'strawberry-mango' combination. It tasted like a mix of strawberries and orange juice. I know right. So I was bummed. And I found Culvers guilty, and I blamed them, and I felt victimized.

So. Let's remember the contract I made. I had guilt in me about my wife. I chose to enter a contract with Culvers to be victimized, in exchange for being permitted to project my guilt onto them - guilt about a completely different subject. I was victimized by their nasty mango-infused flavor adjustment and given something "I did not ask for", I was an "innocent victim", unfairly treated, and righteously angry. In exchange, because this is part of the contract, they got to victimize me, attack me with a mistake, take away what I wanted, and generally upset me. It was a fair exchange.

So then, later in bed, I decided with Holy Spirit I would use this idea of a contract to end the contract and choose forgiveness instead.

I looked at the fact that I put my guilt onto Culvers and chose to participate in an arrangement where I found them guilty in exchange for being a victim ie permitted to project it onto them so that I could be relieved of my guilt (fake innocence), and they could victimize me in return. Even though I did not seem to want the victimization, I had to admit, I did agree to it. I agreed to the terms of the contract. I wanted to be victimized, therefore. I saw how I put my guilt onto them and blamed them, so now I had to take it back.

To get out of the contract you have to take back the projected guilt, BUT, this means that you can no longer appear to have 'fake innocence'. It means YOU have to be found guilty again, which is not very appealing. However, there is a chance that if you do this, you will be in the running for being able to access REAL innocence later. So I affirmed, Culvers is not guilty, it is not THEIR guilt I am seeing, it is MY guilt that I projected onto them. They we're just attacking me because I asked for it in exchange for guilt. I take back MY guilt that I put onto them, and I see them as innocent. They are innocent and have done nothing wrong, done nothing to me, and their mistake is forgiveable.

Thank you Culvers for participating amicably in the contract and serving me faithfully on the terms, and giving me the victimization I agreed to. I set you free. Thank you.

So now, I'm left holding the guilt. Its my guilt. Ok. Not fun. I feel it. I am guilty. I recognize this is the guilt about my wife that I wanted to get rid of. But now I am in a position to exercise the exit clause which says, if I am willing to go to the 'judge' (Holy Spirit) and take my case of guilt to Him and present it to Him, AND be willing to ACCEPT whatever His verdict is, there is a chance that I might be found innocent.

So this means I approach Holy Spirit. So I go up to Holy Spirit in my mind and I start to show Him all the 'evidence' of why I am guilty, all that I think I did, even the 'sin' that lies underneath it, and I offer it up. This requires that I be OPEN. I have to be OPEN to SHARE it with Him and show it to Him and let Him see it. It's kind of like being the prosecutor against yourself, showing all the evidence of what you did and admitting to it - but at least in an atmosphere that you are not at this point found guilty - the verdict is still undecided.

So I do that. I tell Him, Holy Spirit, I am guilty because I did all this stuff and said all this stuff and felt bad about it and it proves I'm not innocent. What do YOU think of this? How do YOU see this? What is YOUR verdict of me?

He said, in my mind, "not guilty". I then realized that I needed to ACCEPT His opinion, and that means I have to be pretty open minded because I have to actually be willing to SUSPEND my own belief in my own guilt IF He says that's what I am to do. I have to be open to go along with what He says. So I become willing to surrender the guilt, I ACCEPT THE ATONEMENT - ie I accept that I really AM innocent, and then...

My head starts to shake, my arms wiggle, my hands tremble. I mean, for real. This is the Holy Spirit working to remove the guilt. I offered it up. He healed it. Seemingly without doing anything. Then, I found myself noticing.... Myself starting to have this new FEELING.... "Am I really innocent"... Like.... Starting to sense a feeling of not being guilty, a feeling of it actually being possible that I am innocent. So I'm asking this only as a kind of exclamation of surprise, really. Holy Spirit says, "you are free".

Smiles all round. Contract abolished. True innocence reclaimed.

It seemed quite easy, actually!

"What you would hide is hidden from you."

"Fantasies are the veil behind which truth is hidden."

"The hidden can terrify not for what it is, but for its hiddenness."

"Love has no darkened temples where mysteries are kept obscure and hidden from the sun."

"Every thought you would keep hidden shuts off communication."

"The children of God are holy and the miracle honors their holiness, which can be hidden but never lost."

"To learn this course requires willingness to question every value that you hold. Not one can be kept hidden and obscure but it will jeopardize your learning. No belief is neutral. Every one has the power to dictate each decision you make."

-------------------------

God is fully aware of you right now. The Holy Spirit especially is able to perceive everything about you in this illusory world. He literally knows everything, having access to true knowledge and a completely full perception with nothing hidden or omitted from His sight.

Therefore, if you think there are some things you are successfully hiding from Him, think again. "He sees you when you're sleeping, He knows when you're awake" ;-) ... just like Santa.

He even is aware of everything you get up to "in private". Every time you are taking a shit, He is right there. Even when you're... you know... doing the deed.... He is right there. He literally is unlimited in His awareness of you.

Even the things which you think you are hiding from Him, you are only hiding them from yourself. He is perfectly aware of them. He is aware of everything in you, everything you think, all of your memories, every experience you've ever had, and everything that is going to happen.

If you can admit to yourself that He "sees you"... that He already knows everything about you and has not forgotten or ignored you whatsoever, this CAN be used as a justification for surrendering your hidden hates and secret sins. It can be used as a rationale for why there is no point in trying to keep these things hidden from Him.

This is where the true power of "confession" comes in. I'm not talking about being Catholic either. I'm talking about, the willingness to admit that there is no point hiding because it does not work. The willingness to expose your darkest secrets to the light. The willingness to purge from yourself every little dark corner which you keep hidden and secret believing that He would hate you for it.

God is not about to judge you or hate you or attack you or punish you for anything you think you've done. It's perfectly safe to TRUST Him with your deepest shames and your most horrifying sins. Just get them out in the open.

Hey, fact is, HE ALREADY KNOWS WHAT YOU THINK YOU DID. Who are you kidding? You think you can Hide from He who is Omnipresent? You think there is a place where He does not exist or has no awareness? God knows everything. Holy Spirit perceives the whole picture.

So why try to keep stuff hidden as if doing so is keeping you safer? Keeping stuff hidden just keeps YOU in the dark and keeps you afraid and protects the sin and uses this "fear of what God will think" as a justification for not exposing it to Him.

And the fact is, you WANT To keep your stuff in the dark because you know that if you were to expose it to the light it would disappear. And you don't want that, because you want to keep your sin and keep on suffering, believing it is a valuable treasure that He would take away from you, something that you have long kept within you as "truth" and as your own verdict of what you're worth.

Expose yourself to God. Let it all out. Trust Him to be nothing but understanding and forgiving as you "confess" everything you think you ever did wrong or whatever is sinful about you. He will disregard it. He knows it's not true of you. He just wants to help you, for you to be willing to put all your shitty lies into His hands so that He can dissolve them and give you a big hug of love.

If you can tune into this idea that God already knows your every secret, and see the futility of keeping anything from Him, then you will become quite willing to admit the truth. Which means, allowing the truth to access you and heal you. It doesn't mean you "really did do" what you think you did. It means, you really didn't, but you don't realize that until you let it out in the open, into the light, to let Him remove it for you.

One practice I find useful sometimes is to imagine an "altar" or some kind of thing, where you can put your dark shit onto it and it will simply disappear. It's taken from you by the Holy Spirit. I say like "I give this shame to you Holy Spirit" and I visualize myself literally reaching into myself, pulling out this "stuff", and handing it over to Him or putting it on the altar. I may even visualize his hands taking it. And often the stuff I pull out takes on a "form" like spiked objects or heavy balls or a basket full of weapons or a bucket of blackness or whatever... I hand it over and let it go. It disappears. After several rounds of that, you can feel the relief, and you feel happier.

You might as well confess, because at this point, it's not a matter of whether "The Law" (God) knows what you think you did or not, it's only a matter of you being willing to offer it up in a surrendering act of handing it over and admitting to your belief in it, and NOT getting punished for it, and then having it be absolved and undone. Just surrender it all to God and acknowledge God's awareness of you.

God's verdict of you is ALWAYS that you are innocent no matter what you think you did. So just get that shit out. Hand it over! Give it to God and let it go already.

The course appears to say that christ vision (true perception) isn't simply a state in which you "do not see the world". It's a state in which you see the forgiven world - the physical world - the world of bodies still, but through christ's eyes. And at the same time, that this vision is so open and inclusive that it sees ALSO beyond the physical, it sees the real world.

I used to think the course was saying we had to simply "look past bodies" ie not see them at all in order to see christ in people. But here it is saying clearly that we are to use christ vision to still look upon the physical world, while also seeing past it.

Christ vision CAN still see bodies, events, happenings, and the whole world as the forgiven world. It is forgiven because it is overlooked or "looked past", to the light beyond, which christ vision does see, but it also still sees the world below. We see the world as a thin veil which we see mostly THROUGH to a light beyond, but still see the veil - until the final instant in which the veil lifts completely.

I think this tells us that essentially your goal isn't to try "not to see" bodies. As per the quote about how it's almost impossible to deny the body, and trying to do so is an unworthy form of denial. Instead, we are trying to find a way to see that is more inclusive and open that can see the light that is beyond the bodies while ALSO translating the bodies into the forgiven world.

I see this as a vision which goes out and acts sort of like an x-ray vision, which is causing the view of this world to become somewhat "transparent" like an x-ray of a body, where you can see through and beyond it to the light shining behind the x-ray, but this also allows you to see the x-ray image properly. Christ vision is fixated on the light beyond but INDIRECTLY still can see and INCLUDE the physical things in its sight, in a forgiven way.

Only at the very very end of the road might we perhaps completely overlook bodies and physicality to such an extent where the veil LIFTS entirely, we see the face of christ ONLY, and then return to heaven. At this final moment the world is forgotten entirely and not seen. We pierce the veil and go beyond. But this NOT going to happen until the very end of the road.

Before we get there, we definitely are meant to be using christ vision to see THIS world in a forgiven way. What this means is that christ vision INCLUDES EVERYTHING in sight, while strictly false-perception body-like perceptions see EXCLUSIVELY and ONLY see the physical, believing it to be real and all there is. Spiritual sight open up awareness to detect and see the subtler light "between the lines" and "beyond the forms", which physical-only sight cannot see.

"Christ's vision ...has power to translate all that the body's eyes behold into the sight of a forgiven world."

For a long time I think I bought into the idea of an either/or exclusive approach to this, in which as some people say - if we see the body at all we're not being forgiving. But we're not supposed to not see the body at all until the very end. We are MEANT to see the body, and MEANT to see the forgiven world, THROUGH the eyes of Christ, BEFORE the world disappears from sight. Otherwise we're skipping ahead.

This means that seeing the christ in someone DOES NOT MEAN that we do not still see the body, only that the body is translated in its meaning as a part of the reflection of heaven WHILE also being past it to a light which is growing ever brighter. Seeing with Christ is an expanded more inclusive full-spectrum vision, while seeing through "eyes of fear" ie ego exclusive narrow vision shuts out some of the signal.

This alleviates the rather awkward and seemingly insurmountable "issue" of trying NOT to see bodies at all, or to see only beyond them while excluding them. I don't think Jesus is asking us to NOT see the physical world - until the final moment of ascension. he's asking us to see something ADDITIONAL permeating it and transcending it, in which the physical becomes like a thin veil - still seen but given much less emphasis and belief.

We don't need to be rushing to try to DENY the physical world from our sight. We need to be focusing on seeing it in a different way so that we can arrive at the FORGIVEN WORLD first, which is a more inclusive and whole way of perceiving, prior to the world disappearing from sight entirely.

Trying to "not see the body at all" is an unworthy and unnecessary form of denial, spiritually bypassing the required step of seeing the world forgiven "in another light" first. To just try to "not see bodies" isn't very effective. We need to learn that bodies aren't all there is to see, first, and the strengthen our seeing of the light beyond, AS bodies begin to fade out.

All the bodies ... that the body's eyes see .... are translated into a forgiven world ..... by christ vision ..... seeing the body in a different way.

"Christ's vision ... has power to translate all that the body's eyes behold into the sight of a forgiven world."

And yet christ vision also overlooks and sees beyond the body, to a light beyond it, at the same time.

"Christ's vision has one law. It does not look upon a body and mistake it for the Son whom God created (yet it just got done saying christ's vision sees bodies differently). It beholds a light beyond the body (as well); 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 (does not dwell on making out that each separate object is truly separated). And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events (all physical bodily things!), without the slightest fading of the light it sees (beyond those things)."

"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."

"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."

"Today I let Christ's vision look upon all things for me and judge them not, but give each one a miracle of love instead."

"Christ's vision looks on everything with love (including this world). Yet even Christ's vision is not His reality. The golden ASPECTS of reality, which spring to light under His loving gaze, are partial glimpses of the Heaven that lies beyond them."

"For light must come into the darkened world, to make Christ's vision possible even here. (even in the physical)"

"Christ's vision is a miracle. It comes from far beyond itself, for it reflects Eternal Love and the rebirth of love which never dies, but has been kept obscure. Christ's vision pictures Heaven, for it sees a world so like to Heaven (the physical world forgiven) that what God created perfect can be mirrored there."

"Christ's vision is the bridge between the worlds (false and true perceptions), and in its power can you safely trust to carry you from this world (physical seen exclusively) into one made holy by forgiveness (forgiven world)."

"For forgiveness is the only means whereby Christ's vision comes to me."

"Christ's vision looks through me today. His sight shows me all things forgiven and at peace, and offers this same vision to the world."

"Ours are the eyes through which Christ's vision sees a world redeemed from every thought of sin (the forgiven world)."

"RIGHT-MINDEDNESS listens to the Holy Spirit, forgives the world, and through Christ's vision sees the real world in its place."

"Christ's vision does not use your eyes, but you can look through His and learn to see like Him."

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it (still sees it) as nothing more than just a fragile veil (transparent), so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant (at the end). It is seen at last for only what it is (a veil of illusions). And now it cannot fail to disappear (AT the end when the physical is faded OUT and christ is faded IN), 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 (the veil lifts, you see ONLY christ, the physical world disappears), with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

If you meet a person who complains a lot, they frame themselves as a victim and then tell you all the many many ways that someone or some group of people are wrong. They go on and on and on and on and on endlessly. And meanwhile you feel like you are being held hostage and can't get away and you can't shut them up. And then as you try to leave, they follow you and keep on going with their diatribe.

What's happening is the person is full of guilt and shame and secretly condemns themselves a lot. They see themselves as victimised by all the many things in the world that they seem to not like. But they are not being spiritually responsible, for their experiences and feelings, so constantly accuse the world of causing it. They feel justified in pointing a finger of blame and listing off all the many sins they see outside themselves, but really because they themselves believe they are sinful. They hate themselves, so they like to hate others. Their shit don't stink, and they portray themselves as always idyllic and harmless and justified in being righteous.

The payoff for them is that if they can project their sins onto other people and find everyone to be guilty, it makes them have a certain sense of psychological relief from the heavy burden of their own hidden guilts. They get to come off as innocent and not like those who sin, separated off from them, and therefore not the guilty one. It produces an illusion that they believe they are not guilty, which is a form of denial.

Meanwhile, the more that they do this, the more they are basically imprisoning others. They are projecting their own imprisonment, and in effect really see themselves as imprisoned by their own guilt. They are locked in and stuck in their own confinement, so are expressing confinement to you. And that makes you feel like you are being locked in confinement. Whether or not they actually target you or complain about something you are believing or doing, it doesn't matter, because they want your indirect acknowledgement that they're right and that you are bearing witness to their innocence.

So long as you agree with them, don't stop them, allow them to spew, and go along with it as though condoning it and not challenging it, they will keep going and never end. They find validation by your passive receipt of it. Meanwhile their condemning blaming imprisoning vibe can make you feel like you're being held hostage and that the other person is using you, like you're chained to them and have to hear the long list of sins, so that they'll feel better about themselves. They don't want to let you go or be free because they won't be able to scapegoat and get rid of their guilt. It's really a guilt dump onto you so that they feel better, in illusion.

There is another way that this plays out. I've noticed if someone sees themselves as a victim and isn't being spiritually responsible, they'll believe that things you personally do make them feel unpleasant, guilty, shameful etc. They will then accuse you of being the cause of their suffering, even though they did it to themselves by taking something personally. They will twist what you said and use it against you as though you caused them to have a reaction. And now they'll start to get angry at you and scapegoat you and demand an apology.

This becomes a form of intimidation, where responsibility has been shifted, and now you supposedly are responsible for making them feel better. They hold what they did to themselves against you, and now you feel like it's your fault, you feel guilty, and now you feel like you have to atone or make it up to them. You have to now grovel and lower yourself and make an apology, after which they grin with delight that they forced it out of you and made themselves feel superior.

It becomes a kind of tyrannical relationship of control and blame, where you are accused of causing them what they're supposed to be responsible for. You feel imprisoned by this accusation, and supposedly guilty for causing them. They get this angry strong opinion about how you're wrong. They totally depend externally on someone apologising or meeting their needs or sucking up to them, in order for them to feel better, because they are not being responsible for how they feel. They depend externally on this positive feedback and getting positivity from others, to make up for their lack of responsibility for feeling shit. And meanwhile they judge the living shit out of everyone and everything.

So then you start to feel obligated and held hostage and like you can't tell them they're wrong. Since they depend so heavily on external validation, you also sense that if you were to say anything against them or that they might take as an attack or that they might think of as not validating their bullshit, they will become even more angry and negative and scapegoating, and then they'll become a big monster and do something even more threatening and aggressive and controlling. So then you become afraid that they'll have power over you, control you, manipulate you, and that you're not good enough.

This kind of person is so victimy and so dependent on externals and so believing the physical world and generally likely atheistic and non-spiritual, such that they act like a gatekeeper and superior person whose opinion has to be requested on all matters. Like they are really important and special. And if you agree with them they shower you with ultra positivity and loveliness, and if they don't agree with you they go into an angry pout mode and become aggressive.

The special love flips to special hate. So now it's very hard to question their motives or to point out their flaws or to push back on their strong opinion because you know they'll just go into attack mode and make you an enemy. So instead they get to stay in a kind of 'everything's wonderful' state of illusion and fake special love relationship and dishonesty and irresponsibility, acting like they have the face of innocence all pleasant and nice to everyone, only to become an enraged monster when anyone points out their bullshit.

Either way you can end up feeling held hostage by someone's ego, with demands that you act a certain way, or indirectly demands that others act a certain way, in order for them to be happy. It can be difficult to stand up to and to draw a boundary with these people, to stop them from their spewing or to raise doubts about their motives. In both cases the person is a scapegoater, a judger and a hater of the things in the world that they consider wrong.

They segment the world into positives and negative, side heavily with what they like and side heavily against what they don't like. This is a spilritualizaiton of the world, an attempt by their egos to make out that some parts of the illusion are better than others, and leads to believing that they themselves are better than others. In their siding with the face of innocence they become overpowering and seeing themselves as holier than thou. In effect, those who portray themselves as the innocent victims tend to be the most vicious accusers.

"The partly innocent are apt to be quite stupid at times." UrT3D3

"This is particularly unfortunate, because frightened people are apt to be vicious" UrT3C15

"The first presents the face of innocence, the aspect acted ON. It is this face that smiles and charms and even seems to love. It searches for companions, and it looks at times with pity on the suffering, and sometimes offers solace. It believes that it is good, within an evil world. This aspect can grow angry, for the world is wicked, and unable to provide the love and shelter innocence deserves. And so this face is often wet with tears, at the injustices the world accords to those who would be generous and good." UrT31E2

"Beneath the face of innocence there is a lesson that the concept of the self was made to teach. It is a lesson in a terrible displacement, and a fear so devastating that the face which smiles above it must forever look away, lest it perceive the treachery it hides. The lesson teaches this; "I am the thing you made of me, and as you look on me you stand condemned, because of what I am." UrT31E4

When you are afraid, it is because you do not trust. Or more specifically, you trust the ego and yourself alone, rather than trusting God. You always trust something, whether it be reality or illusions.

When you trust in your own strength you become afraid because this cuts you off from God's strength. And the fact is that your real strength IS the power of God in you. And without God's strength you cannot be all powerful. In fact, alone, your only option is to be weak and insufficient.

When you are in weakness you will be automatically afraid because you know that you lack the power needed to deal with existence. Without the power of God, you are up against insurmountable obstacles and irreversible problems and all manner of threats and dangers. And you are NOT equipped to handle it without Him.

While you are depending solely on yourself, you are closed off and confined and limited, small and weak and frail, and you are in a state of fear. You cannot get out of this state of fear while you maintain dependence on yourself to be strong, and you cannot muster enough strength alone to get out of it.

What the fear then says is, you are unwilling to move forwards, proceed, invest, commit, take action, try anything, get involved, put energy into something, express yourself, enjoy life, be free, or even do anything at all, because you are afraid and weak and alone and you are already failing and anything you do is doomed to produce suffering.

So then you do not even try, you do not even attempt to live, you do not even endeavor to share your heart, because you feel like you are hemmed in by fear and mistrust. You feel like it is not SAFE to trust. That if you were to go ahead with things you will be threatened, perhaps punished, you will fail and be abused for it, and everyone will judge you, and it will end in a catastrophic failure.

But as usual, the ego is always lying about the reasons why you are afraid. It uses deflection away from the center of fear to try to tell you, you're afraid because of external things, or what will happen in future, or what other people will do, or how they'll attack you etc. But these are not the reason for the fear.

The reason for fear is always to hide the fact that there is nothing to be afraid of. Fear ITSELF is a lie. It's a deception designed to KEEP YOU afraid, for as long as possible, so that you will not go investigate for yourself and FIND OUT that there is no reason to be afraid. It's a story that's being told, a myth, designed to keep you away from God, away from freedom and away from happiness.

The thing the ego does not want you to do, is to withdraw your trust in it, ie depending solely on your own strength, and to put your trust in God. Because if you were to do this it would in fact grant you EXTRA STRENGTH, sharing God's power, and this strength IS safety, and it would eradicate the basis for any fear and obliterate the ego.

The ego does not want you trusting God instead of it. It wants to keep you in a fearful state, hiding, withering, avoiding, procrastinating, deflecting, denying, not embracing, trying to keep your distance from the state of freedom of mind and expression. Because it knows that its lie of fear is totally bullshit and the moment you stop believing it the ego has no hold over you.

What this means is, if you are afraid to act, it is because you are NOT trusting correctly. You believe that the situation is not safe, there will be punishment or attack or danger, and you do not want to approach it. You don't want to go through with things because they might cause unprecedented reactions from others. You become afraid of judgement and not being good enough for them and you hold yourself back.

But the fact is that when you TRUST, it is an act of willingness that empowers you. When you TRUST, fear disappears. In fact we can say that fear is the absence of trust. And like all illusions, the fear disappears when its absence becomes a presence. When trust is present, you cannot be afraid. Trust makes you safe. Trust gives you strength. Trust empowers you to move forward and expressed yourself. Trust gives you freedom.

And so AS you trust, you will find yourself able to do all the things you kept avoiding in fear, because you stand in the strength of God and are fearless. And you stop defending against, blocking, resisting, avoiding, the things you want to do. And life becomes more of an effortless flow.

But you have to thus find out why you are not trusting. Why you are not letting go of your idea of past failures. Why you are holding failure against yourself and threatening yourself with a repeat. And instead of living in fear, you have to become brave and courageous and willing enough to trust that if you will take a step forward, it will be supported and will not fall through.

You will find that a lack of trust is built with ego, and is an attempt to side with ego. And trusting means moving closer to God and trusting Him. And that means you have to be willing to approach God and let go of the fear of God. And indeed you have to let go of any past stories and emotional baggage relating to the undermining of trust. Thing which seemed to happen to you to threaten you and make you feel "not safe". Because a lack of trust is a lack of safety. And without safety you will live in fear.

God is with you to empower you and strengthen you and light your way and make your way smooth and effortless and safe and danger-free. If you will trust it.

""God is the Strength in which I trust." If you are trusting your own strength, you have every reason to be apprehensive, anxious, and fearful. What can you predict or control? What is there in you that can be counted on? What would give you the ability to be aware of all the facets of any problem, and to resolve them in such a way that only good can come of it? What is there in you that gives you the recognition of the right solution, and the guarantee that it will be accomplished?"

"Of yourself you can do none of these things. To believe that you can is to put your trust where trust is unwarranted, and to justify fear, anxiety, depression, anger, and sorrow. Who can put his faith in weakness and feel safe? Yet who can put his faith in strength and feel weak?"

"God is your safety in every circumstance. His Voice speaks for Him in all situations and in every aspect of all situations, telling you exactly what to do to call upon His strength and His protection. There are no exceptions because God has no exceptions. And the Voice Which speaks for Him thinks as He does."

"Today we will try to reach past your own weakness to the Source of real strength."

"Now try to slip past all concerns related to your own sense of inadequacy. It is obvious that any situation that causes you concern is associated with feelings of inadequacy, since otherwise you would believe that you could deal with the situation successfully. It is not by trusting yourself that you will gain confidence. But the strength of God in you is successful in all things."

"The recognition of your own frailty is a necessary step in the correction of your errors. But it is hardly a sufficient one in giving confidence which you need and to which you are entitled."

"You must also gain an awareness that your confidence in your real strength is fully justified in every respect and in all circumstances. In the latter phase of the practice period, try to reach down into your mind to a place of real safety. You will recognize that you have reached it if you feel a deep peace, however briefly. Let go all the trivial things that churn and bubble on the surface of your mind, and reach down and below them to the Kingdom of Heaven. There is a place in you where there is perfect peace. There is a place in you where nothing is impossible. There is a place in you where the strength of God abides."

"Remember that peace is your right because you are giving your trust to the strength of God."

"What difference does the content of a dream make in reality? One either sleeps or wakens. There is nothing in between."

I thought it was interesting in lesson 140 - only salvation can be said to cure - talking about a cure vs the world's remedies etc. It says that we need to awaken FROM the dream world. In this awakening, it does not matter what the dream contains. Nor does it matter to especially change the dream to some other form, in such a way that doesn't awaken you FROM the dream.

It says you can cause bodily healing on the form level but without awakening the mind FROM the dream, and therefore not really enacting a real change. You can thus DREAM OF healing, in which there may be bodily changes, but WITHOUT the mind changing. True healing, and the true and only cure, is to cure the mind in God, such that the mind is waking up from the entire world. Getting your head out of the sand.

It says to me that our forgiveness really is a very GLOBAL function that applies to everything all at once. Like when we say that "nothing in this room means anything." We have to realize that the ENTIRE CONTENTS of the world means nothing, or is not true, or is false or unreal. Not just some parts of it. Not just certain people. We need to realize we are HAVING a dream, and EVERYTHING the body sees is part of that dream world. The WHOLE THING is false and we should to believe ANY part of it.

We need to awaken from the whole world, from all of space and time, and from the whole universe. That kind of global perspective is a universal perspective, just as the course says that "miracles are a universal blessing from God." We need a more "blanket statement" kind of approach to forgiveness which renders everything in the world as EQUALLY UNREAL. The people's bodies, the events, the speeches, the behaviors, the happenings, all of it must be put into a single category of unreal.

We thus need to assert that not one single bit of this world is true. As in "nothing the world believes in true." That not one single body is real. That there is no one single shred of REAL sickness or death anywhere. That all appearances, all forms, all events and happenings are NOTHING and nowhere. Nothing in this room is really happening right now. Nothing that you see really exists right now. Nothing that bodies are claiming is true right now. None of this world is reality. Mind needs to wake up OUT OF this dream realm.

Awakening is truly a movement AWAY from the ENTIRE world. A movement into "awareness of dreaming". A movement in the direction of God away from spacetime, away from Earth, and away from bodies. The WHOLE THING has to go.

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

"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."

"My body, Father, cannot be Your Son. And what is not created cannot be sinful or sinless; neither good nor bad. Let me, then, use this dream to help Your plan that we awaken from all dreams we made."

"Do you believe that truth can be but SOME illusions? They are dreams BECAUSE they are not true. Their EQUAL lack of truth becomes the basis for the miracle, which MEANS that you have understood that dreams are dreams, and that escape depends, NOT on the dream, but ONLY on awaking. COULD it be some dreams are KEPT, and others WAKENED FROM? The choice is NOT between which dreams to keep, but ONLY if you want to live in dreams, or to awaken from them. Thus it is the miracle does not select SOME dreams to leave untouched by its beneficence. You cannot dream some dreams and wake from some. For you are either sleeping OR awake. And dreaming goes with only ONE of these."

"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."

"Forgiveness is the key to happiness.

I will awaken from the dream that I

Am mortal, fallible, and full of sin,

And know I am the perfect Son of God."

"How can His Son AWAKEN from the dream? It is a dream of judgment. So must he judge NOT, and he WILL waken. For the dream will seem to last while he is PART of it."

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

Sometimes, although we don't want anyone to suffer, and God does not will anyone suffer, ... .sometimes someone going through a "thing", a hardship, a suffering, is actually consentual and beneficial to the person.

There can be a great compulsion to stop it, solve it, take it away, make it better, avoid it, etc.... we are VERY avoidant of any threat to us. But in the big picture, these "trials" as they say are actually "lessons", which we've sort of agreed to go through in order to grow spiritually.

If we are in the business of just taking away everyone's troubles all the time, we might actually be denying them a tremendous opportunity for advancement.

How do we know that, perhaps a person becoming an alcoholic and hitting rock bottom could actually lead to them becoming a powerful advocate for healthy living and helping others to escape from it?

Or that, someone going through a horrible nightmarish experience of sickness might actually lead to new perspectives and opportunities and maybe even a new future career that ends up helping a lot of people? We have to be careful not to think always in such short-term aims, and look instead to what the purpose is in the LONG TERM plan of atonement.

Very often the things you go through give you a lot of wisdom and insight and personal experience, which "equips you" in a sense with perspectives and abilities and compassion for others who might go through something similar. And then you might find yourself using that to be helpful to them down the line.

You might for example have elected to be a really great therapist or something and, in order to do so, wanted to first-hand go through some horrible abuse situation which you had to experience and work through and heal, in order to find a way out, in order to become able to help others to find a way out. And without that, you might not have been able to be useful in that way, for the higher purposes of the atonement plan.

On an earthly level we often interpret any bad thing as bad and wrong and to make it stop. We insulate ourselves from problems and sufferings. We label all unpleasant things as unwanted. We try to make an idyllic life, comfortable and controlled, to shut out the chaos.

But in the big picture of the soul we come here to learn lessons, to grow, to advance towards God. The importance of returning to God in the long term, across even lifetimes, may be so significant that we would be willing to even go through hell and back if it meant we would find a way to rise above it when pushed to our limits.

A person might actually on a higher level be willing to go through tremendously difficult lessons because, in the big picture, they know what it is leading to. The potential for major spiritual growth. An opportunity to see the other side of a situation. The purpose of finding a different way to relate to others etc.

It's not like, God is there saying, you must suffer and I want you to go have a horrible disfigurement just so that you can learn, or some kind of cruel karmic punishment scenario. But because we have chosen to go away from God and into ego, we "need" lessons to help us to return to him. And that means we have beliefs that need undoing, and attitudes that need correction.

So we then find that the atonement plan is set up to use our "faults" and our unwillingness and our biases and blind spots and so on, as "lessons", which may appear at first like horrible trials and difficult challenges, in order to try to find a "better way". To find a way to make a better choice in that scenario so that in future we don't need to go through something like that. Or rather, that we stop making those kinds of forms of suffering because we've learned that they are ultimately not in our best interests.

So in general we can't be quick to judge whether something is a good thing or not. The most horrible looking through could well be very much consensual and very much asked for. If the soul knows that there is the POTENTIAL for massive growth and learning, it may in fact be WILLING on a deep level to suffer the most horrendous difficult challenges, because it knows that the payoff may be really really worth it.

So hats off to all you people who are and have gone through horrible states of hell and nightmares and abuses and victimhood and all manner of pain and misery. Because it may well indicate not that it was just some thing that "was not meant to happen" but rather, something that you consented to and were WILLING to experience because it would potentially have tremendous spiritual benefits.

No sane person in their right mind would want to choose any such trial or difficulty, but it's because we're NOT in our right minds that we DO choose these things, and the holy spirit REPURPOSES these things, in an effort to use them productively and constructively, to help us to make the best of it, so that it isn't all for nothing and a waste of time.

This is a more FORGIVING view of suffering, because it reframes it as potentially beneficial when used for a higher purpose. Instead of focusing on the thing itself through false perception, labelling it a dark and wrong and unwanted. We can USE anything for the purpose of becoming closer to God, and that's what all these "trials" are all about.

"What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything which happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life." UrW139L19

"Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one, and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you." UrT31H2

"The misuse of will engenders a situation which, in the extreme, becomes altogether intolerable. 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." UrT2B69

"In every difficulty, all distress, and each perplexity you face Christ calls to you, and gently says, "My brother, choose again." He would not leave one source of pain unhealed, nor any image left to veil the truth. He would remove all misery from you whom God created altars unto joy. He would not leave you comfortless, alone in dreams of hell, but would release your minds from everything that hides His Face from you. His holiness is yours because He is the ONLY power that is real in you. His strength is yours because He is the Self that God created as His ONLY Son. The images you make can not prevail against what God Himself would have you be." UrT31H3

"Some of your greatest advances YOU have judged as failures, and some of your deepest retreats YOU have evaluated as success." UrT18F1

"There IS no choice where every end is sure. Perhaps you would prefer to try them all, before you REALLY learn they are but one. The roads this world can offer seem to be quite large in number, but the time must come when everyone begins to see how like they are to one another. Men have died on seeing this, because they saw no way EXCEPT the pathways offered by the world. And, learning THEY led nowhere, lost their hope. And yet this was the time they COULD have learned their greatest lesson. All must reach this point, and go BEYOND it. It is true indeed there is no choice at all within the world. But this is NOT the lesson in itself. The lesson has a PURPOSE, and in THIS you come to understand what it is FOR." UrT31D3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is critical to recognize this fundamental truth about the world. It is true of the world, it is true of every part of the world, of every world, every planet, every galaxy, and every part of space and time itself.

Time is change, and change is death.

Space is separation, and separation is death.

Space and time are systems of death.

There is no escaping this. There are no exceptions.

If something can change, it can stop being the way it is. Fundamentally it doesn't matter how perfect something seems to be, how new it is, how long-lasting, how impervious, how hard or solid, how much vitality it has, how much time was put into it, what it's made of, who made it, what brand name is slapped on it, how ancient it is, or how slowly it seems to change.

All things in space and time are constantly in a state of dying. We call "cell division" life. It is SEPARATION. It is death.

ALL THINGS HERE DIE.

"There IS no life outside of Heaven."

That which is immortal lives forever. It remains constantly the same. In order to be immortal it cannot change or be changed. It has to be invulnerable and impervious. It has to last forever. It cannot have any quality of modification, change, alteration or effect. It cannot be influenced, moved, transformed, attacked, made different, or questioned. It has to be always rock solid, the same, permanent, true, real, everlasting, and endless. Reality is ABSOLUTE.

That is true of all things in heaven's reality, in God. It is not true of ANYTHING in this world.

EVERYTHING in this world changes. Time forces it to change. TIME IS CHANGE. Time is a seeming force that takes whatever exists, and does not allow it to be permanent. It takes whatever is there now, and converts it into something else. It does not allow anything to stay the same. It does not permit permanence of any kind. Time is destructive. It is fundamentally a process of making sure NOTHING can last. NOTHING.

Time is death, and it is only a matter of time.

This means all things in space and time will end.

"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 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."

Think not that there is just some small PARTS of the world that do this. Think not that there are some places you can go, people you can meet, body types, vocations, objects or anything at all anywhere in this whole system which escapes this law. It is the law of death. It is the law of NO freedom. It is the law of punishment. It is the law of sin and payment. Everything has a cost. Nothing is without sacrifice. And there is loss everywhere. Welcome to hell.

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

"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." God is insane, and fear alone is real."

Time DEVOURS.

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."

You cannot WANT this. But if you are not willing to look at its nature, you WILL want it, because you will be in denial. You will think the world is not like this. That there is hope. There is NO HOPE in the world. It has NO HOPE of ever succeeding at escaping death. It has NO HOPE of ever ceasing to disappoint.

It always falls short because something always changes. Everything always comes to an end. Every physical form transforms and decays and is no longer like itself. And nothing has any sense of any permanent identity at all, so there is no knowledge or anything trustworthy. You cannot rely on it. You cannot depend on it. It lies to you constantly. It is not your friend. It gives only to take away, and it never really gave in the first place.

You can only want the world if you are not willing to look at this. You can only want it if you think this is not true of the world. If you have the rose-tinted glasses of selective perception, in which you fake a sense of positivity and try to dress the world up as great and valuable. You invest time into it. You assemble its objects into pleasing configurations. You try to make it look new and shiny. You clean it and polish it. You make it appear never before seen as if it has given birth to something utterly fresh and interesting. And every single time it is a decoy to tempt you to stay in hell.

You cannot want the world because it was not MADE with love. It was not made through an act of wanting. It was made of rejection. You made it by rejecting the shit in your mind that you did not want and hated, by projecting it out. And thus your unwanted garbage turned into a dumpster pit filled with lies about external salvation and valuable treasures. You do NOT really want the world, and that is the underlying truth.

You cannot want a world which fails. You would be insane to do so. You cannot want a world which offers nothing of real value. You cannot want a world that does nothing for you and everything against you. You cannot want a world whose offerings are always death wrapped in a picture frame of sparkling jewels and special love. You cannot want a world that fundamentally can only die and can never sustain anything.

"You who feel threatened by this changing world, its twists of fortune and its bitter jests, its brief relationships and all the "gifts" it merely lends to take away again, attend this lesson well. The world provides no safety. It is rooted in attack, and all its "gifts" of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. It attacks and then attacks again. No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus."

You cannot want a world that denies its own existence, hates itself, destroys itself, is completely disinterested in you, and attacks you at every turn. You cannot want a word that does not want you, and instead rejects you and abandons you. You cannot want a world that wants you to be destroyed and ignore who and what you are. How can you love something that is so utterly unloveable? To love it would have to be to completely overlook it.

That's what forgiveness means. "To forgive is to overlook." It means to NOT SEE the world. To look past the bodies and not see them. To look past physical matter and beyond the veil. To NOT SEE the world. That is forgiveness. Because your focus on the truth and the light of God BLINDS you to hell and makes the world of form turn transparent. You cannot look upon hell with love and expect the darkness to remain. Shine upon it and it will be dispelled from your sight.

"Strength overlooks these things by seeing past appearances. It keeps its steady gaze upon the light that lies beyond them."

"Just as forgiveness overlooks all sins that never were accomplished, healing but removes illusions that have not occurred." "What fear would feed upon, love overlooks."

"For, at its center, Christ has been reborn, to light His home with vision that overlooks the world."

"Forgiveness RECOGNIZED as merited will heal. It gives the miracle its strength to OVERLOOK illusions."

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK. Look, then, BEYOND error, and do not let your perception rest UPON it, for you will believe what your perception HOLDS."

"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."

"It is impossible to overlook what you would see, and fail to see what you have chosen to behold. How surely, therefore, must the real world come to greet the holy sight of anyone who takes the Holy Spirit's purpose as his goal for seeing."

"To overlook nothingness is merely to judge it correctly, and because of your ability to evaluate it truly, to LET IT GO."

"YOU DO NOT WANT THE WORLD."

"Is he (Jesus) the Christ? Oh yes, along with you. His little life on earth was not enough to teach the mighty lesson that he learned for all of us. He will remain with you to lead you from the hell you made to God."

When we are introduced to this world, it is through false perception. That means we SEEM to "see it with" the body's eyes, and we believe the body's way of seeing. And the body shows us the world of form, which is cruel and dark and a place of death.

We do not even realize our mind is in any way making, or interpreting, how the world is. We observe. We see its suffering and carnage. And we decide the world is an inherently bad place.

Jesus then tells us:

"The world is false perception".

"The world IS perception."

"There is no world apart from what you wish"

"Projection makes perception."

What this suggests is, when your mind is in a dark attitude, it projects a world which it simultaneously perceives as a dark place. And when the mind is in a light attitude, it projects a world which is simultaneously perceived as a light place.

What it also suggests is, there IS no world, beyond your mind's dreaming and projecting of one. Ie the world is in your mind. And Jesus agrees to that.

"You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts."

"Projection makes perception; the world you see is what you GAVE it, nothing more than that. But, though it is no more than that, it is not less. Therefore, to you, it is important. It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition. As a man thinketh, so does he perceive."

What this tells us is there is not really an objective world. The world doesn't exist without someone dreaming of it, in their mind.

It may appear, conceptually, that there is a neutral, meaningless world, like a mirror, waiting for you to project whatever kind of images you want onto. And it might suggest this neutral world is a receiver of either your dark projections or your light projections. And that you see this darkness or light "in" "it" accordingly.

But He is also telling us that at no time does the body or world exist. That it is an hallucination.

"Perception is a result, not a cause."

"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?"

"Hallucinations serve to meet the goal of madness. They are the means by which the outside world, projected from within, adjusts to sin, and seems to witness to its reality. ***It still is true that nothing is without.*** Yet, upon nothing, are ALL projections made. For it is the PROJECTION which gives the "nothing" all the meaning that it holds. ***What has no meaning, cannot BE perceived.*** And meaning always looks within, to find itself. And THEN looks out. ***All meaning that you give the world outside, must thus reflect the sight you saw within.*** Or better, if you saw at all, or merely judged against."

You look within your mind first, and then you project. And what you see, is only what you have projected, because projection MAKES what you perceive, and perceiving is the RESULT of what you projected.

Therefore you see only "a world" "out there" because you are projecting it inside your mind. It is not really out there at all. It is nothing. There is nothing to project onto. Only what you project AS.

This tells you essentially that the world you see in false perception, when your mind is dark, when you look within and see darkness, and then project it outward for perceiving, is seen ONLY in the dark of mind.

And this tells you that, essentially, there is ANOTHER WORLD, another "version" of a world, unlike what you saw in false perception, which is seen in light. It is seen only by looking within, seeing the light of Christ, and then projecting outward as Christ Vision. That "real world" has no resemblance to the world of false perception.

In fact, because there is no objective world, and you maintain it entirely in your mind, and because your mental attitude "tunes you out" of one world and "into" another, the Holy Spirit's happy dream, seeing one makes you unable to see the other.

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

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

It's kind of like saying, when you are in a bad mood, you project a hellish version of a planet Earth. When you are in a good mood, you project the real world, which contains no forms, no suffering, no sickness, no death. They are like tuning into different TV stations. Investment in the spiritual eye weakens investment in the physical sight.

"Everything looked upon with vision is healed and holy. Nothing perceived without it means anything. And where there is no meaning, there is chaos."

The world, which we call Earth, seems to exist only so long as we dream of it. A forgiven world, is how Earth appears to be when seen through forgiving eyes. It is not the real world, because in the real world there are no forms. But it may appear close.

Earth is a veil, hanging in front of the real world, and must be seen through to the light. This is what Christ Vision does, overlooking the world. And eventually this veil lifts entirely to reveal the real world/face of Christ in its fullness. And in this Vision, the world - Earth, is completely forgotten, and disappears from sight entirely.

"This world of idols is a veil across the face of Christ, because its purpose is to separate your brother from yourself."

"Forgiveness lets the veil be lifted up that hides the face of Christ from those who look with unforgiving eyes upon the world."

"the veil of sin that hangs between you and the face of Christ."

"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."

The Earth, hell, the forgiven world, the real world even, are all dreams in your mind. The real world offers you an entirely different outlook, vision, and something to look at, beyond the world of bodies and sin.

"This is the shift that true perception brings: What was projected out is seen within, and there forgiveness lets it disappear. "

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all."

"No-one in this distracted world but has not seen some glimpses of the other world about him. But while he still lays value on his own, he will DENY the vision of the other world, maintaining that he loves WHAT HE LOVES NOT, and following not the road that love points out."

"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. "

"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?"

"Damnation is your judgment on YOURSELF. And this you WILL project upon the world. See it as damned, and all you see is what you did to hurt the Son of God. If you behold disaster and catastrophe, you tried to crucify him. If you see holiness and hope, you joined the Will of God to set him free. There is no choice that lies between these two decisions. And you will see the witness to the choice you made, and learn from this to RECOGNIZE the one you made. The world you see but shows you how much joy YOU have allowed yourself to see in you, and to accept as YOURS. And, if this IS its meaning, then the power to GIVE it joy MUST lie WITHIN you."

"You HAVE been wrong about the world, because you have misjudged YOURSELF. From such a twisted reference point, what COULD you see? All vision starts WITH THE PERCEIVER, who judges what is true and what is false. And what he judges false, HE DOES NOT SEE. You who would JUDGE reality CANNOT see it, for whenever judgment enters, reality has slipped away. 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. He lives within you in the quiet present, and waits for you to leave the past behind, and enter into the world He holds out to you in love."

"18. A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously."

This touches on the essence of A Course in Miracles and the Golden Rule. Jesus is literally telling us that YOU ARE ONE WITH OTHERS. This means you are literally IN THEM. And therefore the way that you treat them is the SAME as the way you treat yourself.

There is no exception to this. You treat BOTH yourself and others the same way at the same time. To recoil for another is to recoil from yourself. To not love another is to not love yourself. To hate another is to hate yourself. There is no escaping this because fundamentally, by the Law of God, you ARE them.

"One brother is all brothers. One mind is all minds. Such is the truth."

So per the Golden Rule, that means that every person you encounter, you should love them, IF you want to be loved and if you love yourself. You should SEE YOUR SELF in them. Because both you AND them are Christ. And your love of them IS your love of yourself, directly. What you give to them you receive. What you transmit to them, you transmit to the part of you that is in them.

The "part of you" that is "in them" is the target of everything you give to them, so you have a VESTED INTEREST - a shared interest, in treating them well in order for YOU to be treated well. This is not a play on words or an option. This is how minds share and relate. This is how they were created. This is the dynamics of the laws of God which are always applying.

It is always the ego that suggests, the way you treat another is NOT the way you are treating yourself. Or that you can attack without being attacked. Or you can be murderous without experiencing the consequences. Or you can judge without being judged. Or you can hate without being hated. Or you can be right and they can be wrong and there is no equality between you.

These are all LIES because they fly in the face of the inescapable LAW. It can SEEM as if you can treat someone differently to how you treat yourself, but all of that MUST be an illusion. Because the only truth is that ALL of God's children are perfect EQUALS. Making them perfect brothers in the sonship. And this is permanent fact.

Any kind of inequality is an illusion. And that not only means that you and your brother are SEPARATELY EQUAL as individuals, like two identical twins standing next to each other. It in fact means that you SHARE EVERYTHING, which means you OVERLAP with each other, are ONE with each other, JOINED with each other, IN each other. You literally are in your brother's mind with him. Even if that means part of you seems to be "over there" in another person, from a separated point of view.

This is really the only thing to be learned. How to love yourself AND others equally. How to recognize that you are ONE with all people. To realize that, you cannot GET AWAY WITH anything. You cannot hurt without being hurt. You cannot attack without being attacked. Scapegoating and blame are delusional and denial. When you attack anyone you are hurting yourself, and you have to ask yourself, do you want to keep hurting yourself?

Anger and attack towards "others" drives a RIFT into your mind between the part of your mind which seems to be isolated to "inside your body" and the part of you which seems to be "inside other people's bodies". The more you attack what you THINK is a "separate them", the more you are SPLITTING OFF part of you which is in "you" (as a body identified self) and the part of you which is ONE WITH THEM. Which means you are directly attacking yourself and splitting your mind.

The split mind is divided by bodily boundaries, and as you focus on the ways in which you are NOT ONE, by emphasizing the solidity and reality and restriction of bodily obstacles, it simply SPLITS your mind and causes you to disassociate from yourself. And now you think you are literally two selves, with one part of you trapped in your body and the other part of you trapped in another person's body. You've now made an ego for both of you. And now you want to attack another to steal back from them the part of your SELF that you believe they have kept from you. As discussed in "the laws of chaos", everyone is looking for the self they think they lost.

So this seems to be a catch. The catch is, that if you choose to attack someone, you WILL be attacked, and you will suffer consequences, directly inflicted BY YOURSELF upon yourself. This is the secret of salvation, that you are doing it to yourself. And the only way to alleviate this suffering is to LOVE the other person. If you love them you will be loved. If you hate them you will be hated. By yourself. You cannot escape this "clause". It is the law of God. It is the Golden Rule. It is both a curse if ignored, and a clue to how to be happy if embraced.

The Golden Rule doesn't just mean that if you might treat someone as you would have them treat you, they MIGHT elect to treat you in a similar fashion. If there is any possibility that cause and effect breaks down and they MIGHT NOT treat you how you are treating them, then the law is breakable, and it is not a law, and it has devolved to the level of physical behaviors. The true nature of the Golden Rule is the oneness you always have with everyone in the mind, whereby you LITERALLY are DIRECTLY treating yourself the way you are treating them, because you are IN THEM.

"Do unto others because you ARE doing unto yourself." is what it should say.

If there is a person you hate, you will drive a separation between you. In this separation you will believe that person is completely separate from you, and you want to have as much distance and dis-association between you as possible. You do not want to be associated with them. You want to destroy them and have them not exist. And in this intensity of hatred and rage and attack and anger, you believe THEY ARE NOT YOU. And as such you can hurl as much blame and condemnation upon them as you can muster, and it seems to be 100% about their faults, and 0% about yours. This is a state of insanity.

This is a great way to split your mind, leading to states of personal suffering, unlove, a total lack of peace, and literal self destruction. Those who murder are trying to kill themselves. And those who attack are undermining their own integrity. And those who hate do not love themselves. Just as those who are sick have made themselves sick in an attempt to accuse OTHERS of sin as well as themselves.

"You but accuse your brothers of your own sin."

"Damaged bodies remain accusers."

The only solution, and the only option, and the only law which you HAVE to abide by, and cannot escape, is the law of God, that how you DO treat others IS how you are treating yourself, because YOU ARE ONE WITH THEM. And being literally part of that person, anything you hurl at them you are hurling at yourself. And you WILL experience the consequences. So really, your hands are tied and you do not have any loopholes or ways to get out of it.

Either you love BOTH you and your brother, or you hate both you and your brother. Either you love both you and your brother, or you attack both you and your brother. Either you attempt to make both you and your brother sick, or you HEAL both you and your brother. When you suffer you suffer along with him. The truth that applies to you applies to them equally and to the same degree. And not simply because they are your equal, but because THEY ARE YOU.

"Healing is when two minds recognize their oneness and become glad."When this is recognized as true, when cause and effect are reunited so that anything you cause you also experience the effects of instantly, and when there is no way to attack without attacking yourself, you now have shared interests and the only option is to love. The only sane choice is to love. If you don't love you will hurt yourself and others. If you do love you will uplift and heal yourself and others. And "when I heal I am not healed alone."

It is by recognizing that you have a vested interest in loving others, because it allows you to be loved, that you will automatically steer clear of attack upon yourself. You will realize that you CANNOT attack another person WITHOUT suffering the consequences. And there is no way to hurt them without being hurt. So your only sane choice is to love unconditionally, so that you will be loved. Otherwise a failure to recognize your oneness leads to it seeming plausible, justifiable and warranted, that you can attack without consequence. And then you are on the slippery slope to hell.

Over time with ACIM you may come to realize that you're making everything up as you go along. What things mean when stuff happens isn't actually a part of what happens. There is a judgement happening which comes in between you and the events.

You could also call it a projection or a decision, an intention or an attitude. An expression or a wish. There is this entire layer or filtering and choosing and deciding what to MAKE OF things which happens in between you and all external happenings.

In the past you might have thought that all these interpretations and experiences and the meaning of things was locked into what happens. As if the form of the situation dictates what you feel, the people involved decide your experience, and the consequences dictate what is true.

But there actually isn't any inherent meaning in the world, or the body, or in anything that happens here. Everyone has totally and utterly made up the entire thing as they've gone along. At some point in time someone has decided to give certain things certain meanings and labels. Totally arbitrary and out of the blue.

We've all inherited a lot of these labels from society etc. But what you have to realize is you're actually deciding what to MAKE OF things all the time. You have to ask yourself, is this thing really what you think it is, or are YOU determining that it is that? Are you the one GIVING it this meaning? Does it only seem to be "this bad thing" because YOU have said that it is? And what if it isn't?

As you start to explore the fact that you give everything all the meaning it has for you, that you project your decisions about what you want to see, that you decide often wrongly what to make of situations, and you are the one who judges that you should be in fear, you may realize that you're doing all this to yourself. Your "attacking thoughts" make the world seem attacking, but it isn't.

"I have given everything I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place) all the meaning that it has for me."

"I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts."

Now the secret of salvation says you're doing it to yourself which makes you think of an inward direction, as if you are attacking yourself from the outside in. But what you actually do is you, from the inside out, reach inside and decide what you want, what you believe, what you want to see and experience, what meanings you think are true, and THEN you project them out onto or as the world. And then you perceive it. And as you perceive it you take it as total fact.

What that means is that it is your judging, labeling, deciding, projecting, expressing, intending, your attitude, your viewpoint, your desires, your completely arbitrary choice of what you want to MAKE OF the world, that you then put ONTO it and decide is real. As such you do everything "to" the world, so to speak, and the side-effect is that you then experience exactly what you decided it was going to cause you to experience. You experience what you make of it. So then indirectly you are doing it to yourself.

As you realize that all your engagement with the world has been forced through a filter which is in you, in which you direct what to make of the world before you see things in it, you might also then realize that you can choose something else. You could conceivably choose to believe or make of the world something other than what you had been making of it. And why not? Why not just arbitrarily decide to see good in it?

Certainly if you are not at peace, you have made a wrong decision. But what this means is that you have chosen to PROJECT a decision ie a judgement about the world ONTO the world, choosing WHAT you want to make of it, and this has resulted in a loss of peace through the feedback loop of perception. Therefore, you are not at peace because you made a wrong decision ... about what you wanted to see in it.

You may not have realized yet that you actually have the freedom and control and power TO decide what you want to see in the world, and you don't HAVE to just adopt the automatic unconscious inherited interpretations of things that everyone buys into. You need to realize that the world really is totally meaningless and has no inherent meaning. Nothing that happens really means what people have decided it means. Even death is not really death.

"Life and death seem to be opposites because you have decided death ends life."

We've taken certain physical states and have given them labels. We've decided that a body laying motionless is death and bodies moving around are life. This is NOT the truth. They are both just different forms of the same images with NO meaning. The whole world is mistaken in even thinking that a motionless body MEANS death. It is no more alive OR dead because bodies are equally illusions in all states. So YOU in your mind decide that one of the states is bad and awful and tragic and the other is not.

We might think there's a whole host of meanings and definitions for things in the world as if they are just accepted by everyone, but ALL of these have to be questioned. They have in fact all been GIVEN TO the world by you.

"Projection makes perception; the world you see is what you GAVE it, nothing more than that."

So now as you refine and heal your mind, and practice forgiveness and responsibility, it becomes more clear that you're making up all the meanings that things seem to have, and you are reacting to the very meanings you give to them. You MAKE OF situations what you would have them be. You COULD potentially make of a situation something far more light, than the dooming tragedy that you're making it out TO be. In other words, there IS another way of looking at this.

"In dreams, YOU arrange everything. People BECOME what you would have them be, and what they do YOU order."

"Since the purpose of the world is not the one I ascribed to it, there must be another way of looking at it."

So this is where we have to recognize that we have the power of decision to choose, we always choose what meaning we give to everything, we're not in a position to choose or judge accurately because we don't have all the facts, we should open up to the Holy Spirit's judgement or interpretation and stop hurting ourselves with faulty evaluations.

We can potentially just as easily DECIDE, that someone is going to do well, as we can decide that they are going to do poorly. We might think ok if the situation looks like it's bad, then I will decide to agree that it's bad, and will suffer. But does it have to be seen as bad or wrong or going south? You COULD just as easily decide to believe that it's going to go well. You COULD adopt a brighter outlook. There is nothing stopping you.

It may seem at first that this is like playing with insanity or just throwing out all morality or values or sense of what things are, like some kind of LIE that you're telling yourself, some kind of thing that you're "making up". As if you're being totally fictional or in "in denial" about what's "really happening", pretending things are not bad. And indeed forgiveness IS "a happy fiction". You are MAKING a different interpretation of the world, one where you decide to see it right instead of wrong and not use it for attack.

This reveals that probably you have been floating around in a completely untethered free-roaming state, washed around by the crashing waves, believing that the world has decided for you what situations mean while all along just flitting back and forth between made-up meanings. You have been undecided and fickle and unstable and changing your mind and just all over the place with inconsistency.

Most likely you have adopted a general "attitude" or "mood" about life, maybe it's filled with bitterness, maybe it's very judgmental, maybe you attack a lot, maybe you have become pessimistic, maybe you hate people, maybe you just have "learned" that everything sucks. Or maybe you have TAUGHT YOURSELF that it does. Maybe you haven't realized that you decided every single thing you perceived in it, and COULD have changed your mind to seek a better way.

"Judgment was made to be a weapon used against the truth. It separates what it is being used against, and sets it off as if it were a thing apart. And then it makes of it what you would have it be."

"I must have decided wrongly because I am NOT at peace.

I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise.

I WILL to decide otherwise, because I WANT to be at peace."

Jesus simply is saying that the world doesn't mean anything at all, we are constantly making up meanings and PRETENDING that they are inherent to the situation or the forms you see, and we can EASILY just elect to believe something else. There are brighter happier outlooks that are possible, there are miraculous loving viewpoints that you could just as easily adopt. There is a higher happier healthier outlook you could have.

And again this goes back to your thoughts, because everything you think is praying for, asking for, and producing, the very thing you want to experience. It's GIVING the meanings that you have decided things have. The key is realizing YOU are in the driver's seat making all these decisions, usually deciding on your own, and it's you that's made up all the dire meanings that you see in things. You can instead adopt the holy spirit's meanings and see with his vision instead. By letting him decide FOR ME what everything is and means, from a very lofty perspective, I can experience the world in a much happier way.

I am never upset for the reason I think.

"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."

Each to their own. But for me, I cannot reconcile how God can be purely benevolent, peaceful, loving, gentle, kind, happy, soft, life-affirming, life-giving, joyful, etc. ... and in ANY WAY, even CONCEIVE OF .... a thought, idea, creation or otherwise, which could take on the form of things like weapons, pain receptors, teeth, explosions, problems, colliding objects, damage, sickness, death, incompatibilities, conflict and war etc. ALL OF WHICH MUST BE HIS WILL if he created it.

If God is truly truly so incredibly unconditionally loving at all times, incapable of anything BUT love.. .. HOW "on earth" is it ever possible that a world, an environment, a perfect home created just for you, could emerge from his mind and heart, created from that same love and tenderness, and produce horrifically un-traversible landscapes, widespread droughts and lifeless frozen tundras, scorching deserts of starvation and thirst, war zones and stinking trash heaps, the "fetid scent of death", rotten corpses, and all manner of murder.

ALL OF THAT would have to come FROM GOD, by his will, from the purity of his absolute love and gentleness, without a single ounce of cruelty or malice or viciousness or vindictiveness or meanness. There is simply NO WAY... NO WAY EVER, that a benevolent loving God could come up with, condone, allow, permit, cause, will, want or create, an environment in which it is even POSSIBLE... yet alone whether it happens or not, POSSIBLE.... to even have such things as weapons or destruction or things that die.

To claim that this is possible is to claim that God's OWN NATURE, entails and includes, fickle transformations, unstable changes, contradictions, self attack, insane murderous intentions, threat and danger, corruption and malice. ONLY such a nature could ever give rise to such things as machine guns and atomic bombs. ALL of which, if part of HIS world, are part of HIM.

I don't know why anyone reading A Course in Miracles, would EVER come up with a notion that God could have created planet Earth, space or time, along with all of its horrendous malfunctions, limitations, problems, difficulties, cruelties and inherent conflicts. A person would have to conceive of God not as purely absolutely unconditionally gentle and loving and kind, but as some kind of bizarre mysterious twisted strange maker of nightmares and awful landscapes of torture and twisted shapeshifting bullshit. No perfect loving harmless peaceful God, could EVER EVER EVER create this planet and its contents.

This has nothing to do with perception either. It doesn't even require the presence of a single human being standing on the planet looking at it. If we were all wiped out the world would still be horribly cruel, with no-one around to re-interpret it. Because its NATURE is cruelty and punishment and death. This will ALWAYS be its nature because it is made from the idea of an OPPOSITE to beautiful perfect harmony and effortless safety and loving joy of God.

We ARE asked to see this world differently. We ARE asked to not judge it, hate it, attack it, or regard it as real sin - instead to see it as a MISTAKE. We ARE asked to love toward it, thinking more charitably toward it, and even to repurpose it to help us to return to HEAVEN where we belong. But at no time are we asked to WANT the world, to KEEP the world, to MAKE the world be heaven, to TRANSFORM it into something God has created, or to MISTAKE it for heaven. Even a happy interpretation of a broken planet still shows a broken planet.

No amount of forgiveness is EVER going to stop airplanes from crashing, or tigers from ripping the living guts out of live animals, or people shooting each other with guns, or starvation and lack of food, or diseases, or the eventual death of the planet when the sun swallows it whole after burning it to death. You can forgive it, you can bring light to it, you can carry peace to it, you can envelop it in love and happiness, but it's still going to function the same way because that is its non-God-given nature.

God could not, would not, never has, and never will, create a world such as this. If could could or would or had, God would be a complete and total murderous asshole. And I don't think we want that.

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end? We have asked this question before, but now we need to consider it still more carefully. It is the one fixed, unchangeable belief of the world that all things in it are born only to die. This is regarded as "the way of nature," not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the "natural" law of life. The cyclical, the changing and unsure; the undependable and the unsteady, waxing and waning in a certain way upon a certain path, - all this is taken as the Will of God. And no-one asks if a benign Creator could will this." UrM28A1

"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." UrT11J2

"Death is the symbol of the fear of God. His Love is blotted out in the idea, which holds It from awareness like a shield held to obscure the sun. The grimness of the symbol is enough to show it cannot co-exist with God. It holds an image of the Son of God in which he is "laid to rest" in devastation's arms, where worms await to greet him and to last a little while by his 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." God is insane, and fear alone is real." UrM28A3

"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." UrW131L7

"This IS the "natural" condition of the separation. And those who learn that it is NOT natural at all, seem to be the UNnatural ones. For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true. In Heaven, where the meaning of love is known, love is the same as UNION. Here, where the ILLUSION of love is accepted IN ITS PLACE, love is perceived as separation and EXCLUSION." UrT16F3

Since all things physical are rooted in separation, it is impossible to do ANYTHING in this world without it being in some way connected to being separate.

Eating, breathing, talking, touching, fighting, whatever, everything physical is not God’s nature.

We tend to section off certain physical things as somehow “meaning” that they are good or bad, right or wrong, better or worse, more or less spiritual. But physicality can’t really be said to be selective in terms of what it represents.

A war, a butterfly flapping, people hitting each other, baking a cake, painting a picture, on the physical level it’s all still forms in a dream, images made of ideas of separateness and conflict. But somehow arbitrarily we’ve assigned all kinds of hierarchies and categories to physical things to say that some are better than others.

Given that you can’t DO anything in the world without it being rooted in separation, it then comes down to PURPOSE. And by purpose we have to mean that how it is being USED or toward what ultimate goal. The use of it isn’t inherent to the thing itself, because purpose is about mind and the meaning the mind gives to things.

It is mind that judges murder as bad, or as worse than kissing. It is mind that decides that a dead broken body is more evil or proof of sin that a healthy athlete running a race. It is mind that decides to say that people shooting others with guns is bad while hugging is good.

Ultimately the strange truth is that all things physical cannot be used to determine “what it means”, or whether it is a good thing or not. Our categorizations of stuff comes from judgements, and most of those judgments are rooted in ego. It is technically the ego that says that physical war is ”an ego thing.” Which is kind of a confusion of two levels - mental and physical.

Let’s remember the world is a dream. And the dream is made of symbols. And the symbols can sometimes look what we have decided is nice and other times not nice. Even the death of the body has been artificially endowed with negative meanings, while the non-dead bodies have been endowed with positive meanings. Yet:

“The body cannot be meaningfully invested with attributes of Christ OR the ego.” Because the body is actually “nothing.”

So if we stop completely trying to evaluate whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, spiritual or not, based on its FORM … we might be better off. This means all illusions are equal and there is no hierarchy. Just because something looks like “a big disaster” doesn’t mean it IS actually in truth “worse than” a seemingly small problem. These are DECEPTIONS based on being blinded by perception of form.

A headache or cancer are technically both equally unreal and untrue, and one is NOT technically worse than the other. One is not more serious than the other either. Both are supposed to be regarded as equally meaningless and their forms are meant to be regarded as illusions of deception. We are not supposed to buy into how stuff looks on the physical level, as though differences mean something.

This is a bit radical because it means putting physical war and murder alongside kisses and hugs as equals. And not just categorizing the arbitrarily as opposites. It means that terrorism and abuse are “just another form” of the same illusion as someone throwing a birthday party and giving gifts. Because the FORM something takes is not its real meaning.

As the course teaches, when we look to the form tell us “what it means”, and USE and depend on the form to “describe” its meaning, we are deceived by illusions. A healthy body is not better or worse than a sick body in this sense. But the world is very accustomed to evaluating rightness or goodness based on what form something takes. Technically a nuclear bomb is no more ‘evil’ than a feather falling to the ground lightly.

“Let me not use this as a sign of sin and death, or as an obstacle to peace, but help me to use it to facilitate its coming.” This applies to all the seemingly physical FORMS of “bad things” in this world as much as anything - you should be able to find a way to laugh at it and see it as affirming a mental purpose of peace.

In terms of judgement, meaning, purpose, evaluations of whether its good or bad, judging whether it is spiritual or not, an ego thing or not, more or less ego based, etc…. that’s all mental stuff happening on a separate level from the physical. We have to give stuff all the meaning it has because it has none of its own. It’s a meaningless world. It has many different forms and we seem to prefer some over others, but truly we are not supposed to. The form illusions takes is not supposed to sway us whatsoever.

So then it comes down to the mind’s USE of the form, the PURPOSE it gives it from a higher level. What is it for. What meaning do we give TO it. What goal will we use it to serve? Who are we looking at it with - ego or holy spirit? You could say that a physical war could be used by the holy spirit’s vantage point to welcome laughter and happiness, just as much as you could say that a happy dance with hugs and kisses could be used by the ego as a sign of treachery and betrayal and conflict.

We’re not supposed to be dividing up the world based on what FORM things take, whatever category we put those forms into, or what meanings we give to those categories. Otherwise we start to try to “spiritualize form”, by saying that certain behaviors, acts, physical movements, styles, wardrobe choices, words, whatever, are somehow “more spiritual”. And before long we’re creating an illusion of being “physically spiritual.”

Of course a mind at peace, coming from Holy Spirit, may well tend to be guided to act in a certain way, to avoid certain things, or to do other things. But the things that are done are done for a higher purpose. And the form that these things appear to take may be misunderstood as “not looking spiritual.” There could be a higher purpose at work even if on the surface something does not “look spiritual.” Who are we to judge anything?

Can physical forms of separation and attack be AVOIDED in this world? Probably not. No matter what you eat, no matter how you move, what you do, it’s all still technically unreality and an attack on truth. Forms of sin and weird strange behaviors. You can’t avoid it. The whole system is one of death. But you can change how you look at it, what meaning you give to it, and what you make of it. And that’s all you can do with it. See it differently.

The key to seeing it differently is detaching from HOW IT LOOKS, disregarding the form, not trying to make the form take on a certain shape in order to be more spiritual, and not feeling guilty about what form it does take. Even going to the toilet is technically an act of war on the physical level. Nature’s nature is to devour. Everything you eat requires something else to starve. There is no escape from problems in this world. But you can change your mind about it and how you use it.

There are some things which ACIM states are not possible in this world, and which is only possible upon leaving this world, leaving the body, and returning to Heaven with God.

1. Creation

2. Your creations

3. Totally freed will

4. Knowledge

5. Eternal Life

6. The peace of God

7. Communion with God

8. Extension of Spirit

9. Oneness with the Sonship and God

10. Being Christ

11. The condition of Holiness

12. Being permanently miraculous

13. Being in your natural environment

14. Nothing unreal exists

15. There is no world

16. No time or space

17. Immortality

18. Being unlimited

e.g.

"God cannot enter a body, nor can you join him there."

"Indeed you cannot remain in this world with this knowledge."

"To be without a body is to be in your natural state."

"For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my Will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them, and Him Who has created me."

"The body cannot create"

"You CANNOT create in this divided state, and you MUST be vigilant AGAINST this divided state because ONLY peace CAN BE extended."

"As long as perception lasts, prayer has a place. Since perception rests on lack, those who perceive have not totally accepted the Atonement and given over themselves to truth. Perception IS a separated state, and the perceiver DOES need healing.

Communion, not prayer, is the natural state of those who know. God and HIS miracles are inseparable."

"Perception of the truth is not the same as knowing it"

"In this world, it is impossible to create."

"And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God."

"Gone is perception, false and true alike."

"the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant"

"no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

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

"Communion, not prayer, is the natural state of those who know."

"The Holy Spirit's temple is not a body, but a relationship."

"You CANNOT make the body the Holy Spirit's temple, and it will NEVER be the seat of love. It is the home of the idolater, and of love's condemnation."

"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."

"The body cannot contain you who are love."

"When we are all united in Heaven, you will value NOTHING that you value here."

"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."

"Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere."

"Even the perception of the Holy Spirit, as perfect as perception CAN be, is without meaning in Heaven. "

"In Heaven God's Son is NOT imprisoned in a body, nor is sacrificed in solitude to sin. And as he is in Heaven, so MUST he be eternally and everywhere."

"Father, in Heaven it is different, for there, there are no needs."

"In Heaven, where the meaning of love is known, love is the same as UNION."

"great is the joy in Heaven"

"The holiness of your relationship is established in Heaven."

"Your Father knoweth that you have need of nothing. In Heaven this is so. For what could you need in eternity? In YOUR world you DO need things"

"In this form you can fulfill your function even here, although what love will mean to you when formlessness has been restored to you is greater still."

"Learning must lead beyond the body"

"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."

"Let your awareness of your brother not be blocked by your perception of his sins, and of his body. "

"For it is only in Heaven that God would have you be. "

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In any state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it seems like life; at worst, like death."

"In the holy instant, where the Great Rays REPLACE the body in awareness, the recognition of relationships WITHOUT limits is given you."

"Love's meaning is your own, and shared by God Himself. For what you are is what He is. There is no love but His, and what He is is everything there is. There is no limit placed upon Himself, and so are you unlimited as well."

"Grace is the natural state of every Son of God. When he is not in a state of grace he IS out of his natural environment, and does NOT function well. Everything he does becomes a strain, because he was not created for the environment which he has made. He therefore cannot adapt to it, nor can he adapt it to him. There is no point in trying. A Son of God is happy only when he knows he is WITH God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond ANYTHING that he can make.

Consider the Kingdom which you have made, and judge its worth fairly. Is it worthy to be a home for a Child of God? Does it protect his peace, and shine love upon him? Does it keep his heart untouched by fear, and allow him to give always without any sense of loss? Does it teach him that this giving is his joy, and that God Himself thanks him for his giving?

That is the only environment in which you can be happy. You cannot make it, anymore than you can make yourselves."

"The joy of Heaven, which HAS no limit, is INCREASED with each light that returns, to take its rightful place within it. Wait no longer, for the Love of God and YOU."

"Joy is unlimited"

"The mind that serves the Holy Spirit is unlimited forever, in all ways, beyond the laws of time and space, unbound by any preconceptions, and with strength and power to do whatever it is asked."

"The Will of God is without limit, and all power and glory lie within it. It is boundless in strength and in love and in peace. It has no boundaries because its extension is unlimited, and it encompasses all things because it CREATED all things. By CREATING all things, it made them PART OF ITSELF. You are the Will of God, because this is how you were created. Because your Creator creates only like Himself, you are like Him.

You are part of Him who is all power and glory, and are therefore as unlimited as He is."

"The extension of God's Being is the Soul's only function. ITS fullness cannot be contained any more than can the fullness of its Creator. Fullness IS extension."

"God extends outward beyond limits and beyond time"

"The creative power of both God AND His Creations is limitless"

At first we believe physical sight is perception. And everything the body's eyes look upon is taken as real. And thus we learn that the world appears to be an inherently bad place. Regardless of trying to be optimistic or positive, bad shit happens frequently. And people seem to die.

Assuming that everything we see is real, we might not realize that there is a flexible component to perception. Our mind gets to actually decide what to "make of" the images that the physical eyes see. It categorizes them, projects meaning onto them, and decide what they are for.

This is because only the mind really sees, and it is looking upon the images the body shows to it of the world, as pictures of reflected photons bouncing off blockages. And the mind can decide what this means and what to project onto them, choosing what to see in them, God or ego.

What this means is the world you initially see is a combination of "the physical world" and the overlaid projected junk in your mind. The dirt on your lens. The baggage and self attack and sense of sin and guilt which you see in the world as if it's outside of you.

What you have to learn, is that what the world is, and the sense of it being a negative hellish place, are two different things. It's easy to hate the world, be angry at it, mistrust it, fear it, and want to escape it.

You can easily get into a mindset that if you will get away from "that bad place" through some spiritual means, you'll be better off. You can judge and demonize the world and decide it is a hell you want nothing to do with. But this isn't escape. It really is just making it real to yourself, which keeps you trapped.

The real solution is to develop true vision, which allows you to look upon whatever the world "is", without your projections of baggage. Without your distortions of meaning. Without your judgements. Without your sin and guilt seen in it.

But to do that, you have to in a way give "the world" the benefit of the doubt, or a kind of second chance. A possibility of redemption. Because somehow you have to be able to get to where you forgive the world, where you shine a light of love towards it, and where it no longer appears to threaten or upset you.

It may have taken a long time to build up resentment towards the world, which bound what the world is to a negative, false perception of the world. And in this confusion you thought the world was inherently a bad place. But now you have to be open to the idea that the world is not inherently bad. That there is another way to see it.

This entails the recognition that if you will change the component of your mind that gives meaning to the world, you actually can redefine what it means to you. Instead of meaning hell, or indicating sin, or proving guilt, or producing fear, the world can be seen in a much different light.

What the world IS, isn't what you see in false perception. That's the unforgiven world. That's Earth with your self hate and belief in sin projected onto it. It actually makes what the world IS appear to be a hellish place.

What the world IS, is nothing more than a simple thin veil of illusions injected in-between you and yourself, or you and Christ and God. Kind of like a wall, or as Jesus calls it "the granite block of sin." It takes on various forms of error, and depicts sin and attack and guilt. But without the meaning of "sinful", "attacking", "guilty" projected onto it, what's left?

The world is really just a thin illusory world, a whisp of smoke, a faint remnant of an idea of separation, and a strange area of nothingness pretending to be something. It does not have any meaning. This is why Jesus tells you that the world you see is a meaningless world which God did not create. It is devoid of meaning, in its false-viewed form, because love is the only real meaning.

As you forgive it, as you lift away guilt from yourself, as you have no sin to project onto it, as you recognize your own innocence, the dark heavy shadow of guilt which makes the world seem SOLID, is lifted away from it. Like a heavy curtain or a thick wall, it thins out and lightens. And eventually without any judgement upon it at all, it is recognized only as a light veil of illusions swirling around.

It is not positive, or negative. It is not alive, or dead. It is not really anything. The world, the veil, being illusions, is nothing at all. It is not loving, it is not holy. It is not even really there. And eventually when Christ Vision is fully accepted it vanishes completely.

Just prior to that, however, you reach "the forgiven world." A forgiven world is always an illusory world, because forgiveness overlooks illusions, not reality. It looks beyond bodies. It looks toward the light. So as you forgive the world you are learning to look past it to the light of the real world. And this causes the world to appear thinner and lighter and less burdened with guilt and the reality of sin.

It should over time look less and less sinful, less and less serious, less and less threatening, less and less solid even. Christ Vision is practically similar to having x-ray vision. It literally bypasses matter, as the spiritual eye can see anywhere and with no regard for distance or obstacles. It is not blinded by perception of form and its sight does not stop at physical surfaces. It is not deceived or blocked by what they appear to be. It sees through them.

As the world becomes forgiven, due to you forgiving yourself, what used to be "world + negativity", becomes "world + holiness". Your holiness or the meaning of love, is projected onto it. It is seen WITH love. This does not make it love, it is still nothing. And in fact this love causes it to disappear even more. But if you do see it still, just short of going home to God, it will appear beautiful and lovely in its sparkling forgiven state.

And so what once seemed like a world of inherent hell, reflecting hell and showing signs of attack and death everywhere, your view or perspective on it changes to one of spiritual love. And from that vantage point of true perception, there is no longer a belief in real sin projected onto it. And being made of sin, it is therefore recognized as fake sin, and not sin at all. The world is simply recognized as false, not sinful. And just as it is about to be seen as a perfect reflection of heaven, it disappears, revealing Christ.

And then you go home.

Christianity makes sense. It makes logical sense. The structure of its metaphysics is consistent, albeit mistaken. But here's a secret... everyone who has an ego believes the Christian doctrine, because it's really a doctrine base on the ego's thought system and the ego made it.

For example, it depends on the idea that this world is real, that you do real things in this world, and that if you do the "wrong" real things then that's a sin.

This basis alone is enough for all of the rest of it to spring forth consistently.

For example, if this world is real and sin is real, then you will start trying to identify what is a sin and what isn't. You'll separate out "good and bad". This immediately produces the notion of good and evil. Some things are considered not sins so they are good, and other things are considered sins so they are evil.

Just the mere of act of existing in a dualistic right/wrong world where real stuff happens and some of is it not right, automatically implies that evil exists. Therefore the doctrine now becomes that you should choose only the good stuff and reject the bad stuff.

This actually isn't really just a Christian perspective. It's really the belief of the EGO, and anyone who has a persona and shadow is participating in the battle of good vs evil. If you believe that some aspects of this world are good and some are not, or that some behaviors are good and some are not, you are believing in a separation between good and evil. It means the good stuff is being spiritualized, is being made special, is given extra value, and is seen as acceptable. The bad stuff is seen as unspiritual, valueless, and unacceptable.

So it's not just Christianity that believes in this dynamic. Anyone with an ego believes in this dynamic, even members of other religions if they believe this world is real and that some of the things in it are more spiritual than others.

This goes on to imply that in order to be spiritual, you must only do the good acceptable things, you must keep your behavior in-line, and you must not "sin". If you do sinful things, you will be guilty of sin and be justified in being punished. It would then only seem "right" to punish the sin and condemn the sinner.

This leads to the idea of God, or the interpretation of God, as someone who judges whether you've been sinful or not, and how he then decides based on that whether you are worthy of heaven/love, or whether you need to be punished in hell. So automatically it creates the belief in heaven and hell as the extremes of sin vs not sin.

Anyone who believes that sins are real, Christian or otherwise, actually does believe in heaven vs hell, and good vs evil. They must, because believing in real sin automatically implies these things. Its a package deal.

So if now God is only going to approve of you if you are "good" and do not do the things which are considered sins, and if God's disapproval is going to land you in hell and punishment, it gives you a pretty good motivation to be "good". So then you focus on that, believing that the more good you become the less evil you become. Makes sense right?

This also then implies that if you DO sin, then you need some kind of special pardon if you're going to be seen as acceptable. Therefore you will need to be forgiven by God or Jesus, and if they decide not to forgive you but to condemn you, then you're on your way to hell. This produces such a huge amount of fear relating to whether you are going to be acceptable or not, whether you can be forgiven, and even the possibility of going to a "real hell" is already a nightmare.

To believe that sin is real automatically leads to believing that hell is real. If sin is evil then obviously sinning produces evil and, you know, there's a "place" where evil then seems to exist, and we call that hell. This belief in real sin produces therefore the belief in "real hell", and just believing that hell is real, alone, is enough to frighten the pants off you. It is not so much that the church itself attempts to use this idea to scare you into conformity and control, although that might've happened to some degree.

The ego doesn't need the church to accomplish this. Anyone who believes sin is real will automatically haunt themselves with this belief that a "real evil" could not only attack and threaten and tempt them, but that they themselves could therefore be vulnerable or susceptible to becoming part of that evil, and wind up in hell, suffering and being damned from love forever. Nasty business. All it takes is an ego.

Also then if God is in a position of having to judge between sinners and the innocent, that now turns God into a judger and and a conditional lover. He will only love IF you behave yourself, and if you don't, He will be the one to send you to hell. The amount of fear produced by reacting to this notion, alone, is horrifying, not to mention that it implies that God is fickle and incapable of unconditional love, and so cannot be trusted.

The idea that you might not be accepted or loved, is deeply upsetting. IF God were like this, which he would HAVE to be if sin and evil are real, you're going to be clinging to the edge of your seat until "judgement day" hoping that you've got some chance in hell of not being sent into the pit.

Again this is not just a Christian viewpoint, to be fair, it is the viewpoint that underlies EVERYONE who has an ego. Almost everyone on the planet has bought into this entire thought system as a complete package. Believe in even just one PART of it and you must automatically believe in the rest of it, because it all ties together perfectly logically and leads to all of the other implications.

If you are a A Course in Miracles student, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist or whatever, or an Atheist, if you believe the physical world is real and that it contains good and bad, YOU DO BELIEVE IN HELL, SIN, A JUDGEMENTAL GOD, SACRIFICE, THREAT OF DAMNATION, SUFFERING AND DEATH. If you think you don't, and you have an ego, you're in denial.

In order for you NOT to believe any of this thought system, or any of the parts of it, there MUST be a decision on your part not to believe at least one PART of it. For example, if you were to believe that sin is not real, this AUTOMATICALLY IMPLIES that the entire rest of the ego thought system, the entire rest of "christianity", is false.

If sin is not real, there is no good and bad or right and wrong, things appearing to happen are just illusions, God is unconditionally loving and nonjudgmental, there is no real evil, there in no hell, and you are One with God in Heaven forever. And that's all an automatic logical conclusion that is part of the package deal you get when you believe that sin is not real.

You could also say, I do not believe the world is real. That too will put a pin in the entire ego thought system based on good vs evil, and will completely undermine every part of it. If the world is not real and God did not create it then there is also no real evil and no sin or death and no hell to speak of, and nothing that seems to happen here can prove that you are sinful or guilty, therefore you are already eternally forgiven.

So it's really down to the thought system, and its logical consistency. The ego's thought system is responsible for creating Christianity, it is responsible for creating all political parties, it is responsible for creating all wars and conflicts, it is responsible for creating all belief in sin and evil and hell, it is responsible for all suffering, all sickness, and all death, regardless of what form the belief system seems to take or how it's structured or what side you're on.

What A Course in Miracles is trying to teach is that the entire ego thought system and ALL of its contents, IS NOT TRUE. And that means, since truth=reality, it is not REAL. This doesn't throw Jesus Christ out the window, in fact, because Jesus wrote ACIM and He is teaching us through it the "correction" of not only Christianity's interpretation of reality, but also the entire ego's, which includes far more. It's trying to show us the way out, the truth and the light, and the correct interpretation of what is happening here.

It's teaching us that the world is not real, sin is not real, sickness is not real, death is not real, it's all an ego illusion. God is unconditionally loving, forgiveness is universal and permanent, and only love is real.

If you perceive that you have lost something, then your logical response is despair. You are not grateful because you have not received. Something has been taken away instead, and it inspires ingratitude. You also can feel the same way if you think you are getting something you do not want - you resent it, judge it and reject it instead of being grateful for it.

You will then feel that you do not want what has happened. You will fight with it, resist it, hate it, and wish it was the way it used to be. Whatever has been lost, you want it back. And you feel justified in feeling loss so long as it remains absent.

At the same time, the ego wants what has been lost to stay lost, because it really believes in loss as death. Loss is the gap of spacetime. Loss is the absence of love. Loss is the suggestion that something of God is missing from reality. It is a rejection of life and love and happiness. It is an attempt to die.

Such a state of mind does not inspire gratitude because it feels more like a treachery, a theft, a taking away, a diminishment, in which you now don't have what you should have. And then there will be hate and anger and resentment and a sense of not wanting whatever else someone or some place is offering, because it's not the thing you're missing.

In loss, you will then reject everything, not acknowledge what you have, not appreciate or even recognise what is present, and will just wish that you had the thing that is absent. But wanting what is not there can only produce what we call grief, which is the unhappy despair and sadness and sense of horror that everything of value has gone away.

But what can this be other than a denial of God, a rejection of love, an unwillingness to live, an insistence that death is true, and a failure to recognise what has been given. There is no gratitude because there is no acknowledgement of what you are receiving.

In fact, loss can be a lesson in which you have to learn to become grateful, and to receive. It is a state in which you are are trying to do the opposite of receive, as if you gave and didn't receive in return.

It's based on the ego's breakdown of the golden rule, in which it insists that giving and receiving are not one, and therefore you have not received what you have given. This is a state of sacrifice, as if something has been sacrificed.

But such a state of mind, which is really the rejection of love and God and receiving, can only produce feelings of loss and despair. It can only incite an attachment to what is gone, a wish it be present, and yet a firm belief that it must not be. It is a way of pushing love away, pushing the valued thing away, while at the same time wishing it was here.

This can only produce a kind of "split" in the mind which produces insanity and intensifies the ego. The ego loves to be in this contradictory state of wanting and not wanting at the same time. It wants what it does not have, and it does not want what it has. This is completely backwards, of course.

The remedy requires the recognition and acknowledgement that you are NOT at a loss, and in fact the total opposite is true. It must entail realising that God has given you everything, and therefore you lack nothing at all, loss is impossible, and everything you could ever really want has been given you.

This requires you to be willing to receive. It requites a willingness to want what you have, and to no longer want what you don't have. But the ego will say, it's impossible not to want the thing that's missing because you love it so much. You want it badly. And the idea of not wanting it seems like a betrayal.

Yet badly wanting something is a state of lack and need, and the more you believe in this lack the more you will want it. So you aren't really wanting it based on love, but based on not getting what you want. The loss is therefore selfish, as part of the ego.

It is in fact by wanting what you don't have instead of what you do have, that you produce a rejection of what is here right now, and therefore a denial and unwillingness to be grateful for what has been given you in the present. It is a rejection of the acknowledgement of gain, and a dwelling on absence and death. But in fact, a willingness to want what you have, not what you don't have, is the only sane approach.

In truth, if you move into a space of being willing to receive, acknowledging that everything has been given you, and that you have everything from God, you will suddenly find that in fact that means that you have love. And the only way to really acknowledge that you have the love you thought you lost, is to acknowledge that it is still being given to you right now. In fact, God has eternally given you love, and the only problem in you seeming to "lack it" and being at a loss, is an unwillingness to receive it. You might complain by feeling it is lost, but this is really an attempt NOT to have it.

By moving into a willingness to RECEIVE, you therefore admit that God has GIVEN everything, and fully, and so completely, that in fact you have been gifted, blessed, honoured and completely recognised. In fact you have not been left out at all, you have been utterly showered with everything you could ever really want. And in that recognition that it is coming TO you, and you HAVE it, you immediately move into a natural response of gratitude. Gratitude opens your awareness to RECEIVE and to WANT what you are receiving, instead of wanting what you are not receiving.

Gratitude is therefore the antidote to loss, because it recognises gain and completely ignores the ego's insistence that death is possible. Loss is really ingratitude for what is. In fact, gratitude to God for life is the way to receive life, and is the rejection of death and the belief in death. And without a lack of God, there can be no sense of loss at all. And then suddenly you will find that everything you thought you did not want is suddenly something you can embrace and accept and want. And then you open up to a whole new life that was in front of your face all along, even while you were unwilling to acknowledge it.

And the good part is, that the love you thought you lost, is not only still with you, it is in you, as you, given to you, shared with you, and had never really left. And thank God for that. How could you actually experience that you had the love you thought was lost, if you weren't willing to gratefully receive it?! This is simply a lesson in becoming grateful to God for what he has guaranteed to be yours forever. A simple movement out of loss and despair and disaster and failure, into total happiness and gladness that everything is present and accounted for.

"Love is the way I walk in gratitude."

"And gratitude can only be sincere if it is joined to love."

"Walk, then, in gratitude the way of love."

"Today we learn to think of gratitude in place of anger, malice and revenge. We have been given everything. If we refuse to recognize it, we are now entitled therefore to our bitterness, and to a self-perception which regards us in a place of merciless pursuit, where we are badgered ceaselessly and pushed about without a thought or care for us or for our future."

"Our gratitude will pave the way to Him, and shorten our learning time by more than you could ever dream of."

"For gratitude is but an aspect of the love which is the Source of all creation."

"For love can walk no road except the way of gratitude, and thus we go who walk the way to God."

"A day devoted now to gratitude will add the benefit of some insight into the real extent of all the gains which you have made; the gifts you have received."

"Today in gratitude we lift our hearts above despair, and raise our thankful eyes, no longer looking downward to the dust. We sing the song of thankfulness today in honor of the Self Which God has willed to be our true identity in Him. Today we smile on everyone we see, and walk with lightened footsteps as we go to do what is appointed us to do."

"In gratitude and thankfulness we come, with empty hands and open hearts and minds, asking but what You give."

"My gratitude permits my love to be accepted without fear. And thus am I restored to my Reality at last."

"What IS Heaven, but a song of gratitude and love and praise, by everything created, to the Source of its creation?"

"YOU are being blessed by every beneficent thought of any of your brothers anywhere. You should want to bless them in return, out of gratitude."

"And with My gratitude will come the gift first of forgiveness, then eternal peace."

"What is your life but gratitude to Him Who loves you with an everlasting Love?"

"The unhealed healer wants gratitude FROM his brothers, but he is NOT grateful to them. This is because he thinks he is giving something TO them, and is NOT receiving something equally desirable in return. His TEACHING is limited because he is LEARNING so little. His HEALING lesson is limited by his own ingratitude, which is a lesson in sickness."

"Your gratitude to each OTHER is the only gift I want."

"Let our gratitude unto our Teacher fill our hearts as we are free to choose our joy instead of pain, our holiness in place of sin, the peace of God instead of conflict, and the light of Heaven for the darkness of the world."

"God's justice warrants gratitude, NOT fear."

"And by this LACK of thanks and gratitude, you make YOURSELVES unable to EXPRESS the holy instant, and thus you lose sight of it." "Miracles should inspire gratitude, not awe. Man should thank God for what he really is. The Children of God are very holy. The miracle honors their holiness."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If someone tries to attack you, they have a problem. They are not sane. They are attacking themselves, but they're doing it in such a way that they think they are attacking someone else. Whatever they accuse you of, they are accusing themselves of.

Anyone who attacks is not in their right mind. No one in their right mind would attack, because they'd recognize that part of themself is in the other, and to attack them is to attack themselves. This is the law of God, the Golden Rule. Also the right minded are not split minded, and do not act against themselves or other.

If someone is attacking you, or it seems like they are, they are not really attacking who you are, they are attacking an image in their mind of what they think you are. And this image is really an image of what they think they are.

They target your body because they are being unforgiving toward themselves, and in this unforgiveness they can't help but focus on the form of objects. This mean they are not really seeing you, your spirit, or your real identity. The target of their attack is themselves, driven by guilt.

It can look like the attack is upon you, because in their dissociated state they separate off the part of their mind that attacks itself and see it as "outside themselves". They attack "it", to try to maintain the split minded state. And in dissociating from it, they tend to associate it with someone other than themselves. And that may seem to be you.

Even if they call your name, even if they speak of you and what you've done to them, even if they hurl abuse at "you", it is really nothing to do with you. Not even remotely.

"You but accuse your brother of your own sins."

"It can be but myself I crucify."

"I can be attacked by nothing but my thoughts."

So in no way has this attack got anything to do with you at all. It might seem to play out that way, or it might even seem that they physically attack your body as if that really is an attack upon you, but it is still themselves they are trying to attack.

"Let them be as vicious and hateful as they may. They could have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is your dream."When you yourself are not in your right mind, you will attack yourself. You'll accuse yourself of sin and judge yourself harshly. This means you believe it's true that you are guilty.

When this is happening, and if it is happening at the same time as another insane person fighting with their own shadows, you will fail to recognize that their attack is entirely a self attack. You will fail to realize they are calling out for love, and you will think that their hallucinated "attack on you", which is really on themselves, is actually about you.

Since what they accuse you of taps into what you have accused yourself of, you won't be able to discern between the two. This will create a kind of blind-spot in your mind. A block to awareness. And because of the block, you will be deceived. And being deceived you'll "read into" what they're doing, failing to see all of what they are doing to themselves. And due to this lack of recognition, you'll think that some of what they are doing, they are doing to you, and that it's really about you.

Because of your own self attack, you see yourself as vulnerable and affect-able. And you'll see yourself as being able to be accessed by the cause-effect relationships that seem to play out physically. And you will have confused yourself with your body, and now it may seem that because it can be attacked, you can be attacked. And so you're going to take their attempted attack personally as a threat to your identity and existence.

That means you're failing to remember it's your dream, and have entered into dreaming, or a state of greater unconsciousness. And in this state you'll think that someone else "is attacking you" and is "having an effect on you". It's really you having an effect on you, but you confuse it for them being the cause. So you blame them for it.

It can seem as if, what they do triggers pain in you. And its really your own pain that you put there, being raised to awareness. Because it resonates with what they are expressing and agrees with it. And then you'll think they caused the pain in you because it arose when they attacked, but its really your own self inflicted wound that is unhealed, resurfacing in resonance with their insane behavior.

You then are in the position of having to apply forgiveness processes to sort out "what is yours" and "what is theirs". And ultimately this has to lead to the undoing of the self attack, otherwise you won't be able to recognize that the other person was not the cause of your upset. And their innocence can only be recognized if you can see how they are solely attacking themselves.

The blinds spots and blocks to awareness in your own mind have to be removed, otherwise you cannot see the full picture. And without the full picture you can't tell whether what someone is doing is really about you or not. You can't tell your sin apart from theirs. You have to find your own innocence in order to recognize the innocence of others.

Once you do, what seemed like a call for attack, or seemed like an obvious selfish attack upon you, is now recognized as a call for love. It's calling for love because the person is solely interacting with themselves, within their mind, in a private world. And they are attacking themselves, believing it is not coming from them. And they seem to falsely accuse you of it, which you must not buy into, for your sake and theirs.

In recognizing the secret of salvation that people can only attack themselves, and no one ever really attacks anyone else, you take responsibility for your own choices and give them back responsibility for theirs.

Everything they are experiencing they are doing to themselves. Everything you are experiencing you are doing to yourself. And never the two shall meet. People are asking for love, in an attacking way, because they are denying their own love. The only thing that can truly be shared or communicated between you, is love.

Love is joining in peace and recognition. It facilitates sharing and communication and transfer. Without love, the breakdown of communication and separation of mind and relationship ensures that all attack is self contained. Just as trying to will against God disables all will and is an attempt to will nothing, trying to attack places you in a prison in your mind and stops any transfer to others. Attack is always separation between others and self. This happens because God does not will that attack between beings be possible.

No-one is ever affected by anyone else. No-one else is the cause of you. You have not caused anyone else, other than your own creations. And God is the only cause of you and your equal siblings. There has never been an attack on you, by anyone but yourself. And anyone who believes otherwise is not in their right mind.

"I am not a body. I am free, for I am still as God created me. All that I do, I do unto myself. If I attack, I suffer. But if I forgive, salvation will be given me."

If you get angry or start blaming and pointing a finger at someone, you perceive as if it really is "about them". You see them doing something, you judge "them" for it, and your mind starts attacking them. But here's the truth.

When you do this, ideas do not leave their source. You might perceive that you're successfully attacking a "separate person out there", but the attack is actually taking place INSIDE your mind. It isn't leaving you. And this has two key parts to it:

1) The attack is taking place inside your mind

2) The "target" of the attack is also inside your mind

So both the attacker and the one being attacked are IN YOU.

You might have a tremendous sense of disassociation in that it seems you are just blaming xyz person for something, casually and easily, but you may not be realizing that even when you're hurling abuse at someone who obviously is "in the wrong", you're basically having a PRIVATE SELF ATTACK, inside a private bubble, in your mind.

So all that attack that you're trying to get rid of through projection and blame, although it doesn't seem like, is actually part of your mind attacking another part of YOUR mind. Which means that you literally are attacking yourself. You think "that asshole cut me off in traffic". Well, your mind there is saying to ITSELF, that it is an asshole.

"You but accuse your brother of your own sins". It's simple and easy to say, but may not always be obvious to recognize as what you're doing. In every case, every way that you seem to be "able" to attack someone else without experiencing the seeming effects and consequences, you MUST be in denial, MUST be mistaken, MUST have disassociation happening in your mind, AND you are attacking ONLY yourself.

So this is the thing. Your angry attack on another is NOT really an attack on another. The idea does not leave your mind. The thought does not leave your mind. The source of the attack (the attacker) does not leave your mind. And the thing that is attacked does not leave your mind. So while it SEEMS like you're "not targeting yourself", YOU ARE. In every case.

Underneath the illusion that it's not about you, it's always about you. Always. 100% of the time. Every time you think you can "get away with" having someone else experience the effects of what you're causing, without you participating in those effects, you are mistaken. Not only do you participate in the effects, ONLY YOU participate in the effects

If that other person chooses to be innocent and invulnerable your mental illness attack has absolutely no effect on them. If they choose to laugh in the face of your attempted attack, it has no effect on them. Whatsoever. You could be sitting there screaming at someone thinking that you're successfully attacking ONLY THEM, they could be totally happy and at peace and immune to it, and YOU are the only one suffering. And it's not simply that you are suffering because you're being angry, you're suffering because you are actually the THING that you are angry AT. You are RECEIVING the attack. What seems to aim "outward" actually goes inward.

See, your mind isn't only inside your body. Your mind is everywhere. Infinite. Bigger than the universe. And when you have a split mind of self attacking conflict, you position part of your mind seemingly "outside of your body". You disassociate from it and believe it is not inside you, is not your self, and is in fact another separate alien willed person who is doing stuff "Against" your will. Well, it's actually your will against your will. Your will is in conflict with itself and having a war. That "external" target is squarely YOU, INSIDE your mind.

This is sobering. Because simply put, it means that it is not possible to even attempt to attack anyone without attacking yourself. It's not possible to blame without hurting yourself. It's not possible to be angry at someone without accusing yourself of sin. So at some point you have to realize, it's got nothing to do with anyone else ever doing anything to you. It's ALWAYS about you doing stuff to yourself. Each time you attack and project and THINK it's not about you, it is. Each time you are annoyed about someone, it's YOU that you're annoyed about. And each time you retaliate, it's against yourself.

Which means that you've been hurting yourself, all this time. And it's never been about anyone else. And every single time in your life that you thought you were simply justified in reacting to someone else's bullshit, you NEVER WERE, you were hurting yourself. Nothing ever left your mind. Every argument was with yourself. And the question is, are you tired of hurting yourself? Do you want to keep doing it?

If you would simply be aware of this, and realize and recognize it, you'd realize the simple Golden Rule. Whatever you try to do to others you do to yourself. Whatever you think is true of others is true of you. It has nothing to do with whether they reciprocate or not. You do to yourself what you would have yourself do to you. Others never do anything. They are never the cause of you. Ever.

If you realized that you could not ever make a single effort to attack "someone else" without it being 100% an attack on yourself, you would not do it. It would be insane to do it. If you knew that it's not possible to attack another without hurting yourself, you would not do it. It hurts too much.

If you knew that you can NEVER get away with murderous behaviors without hurting yourself, you'd see the sense in never even considering attacking, knowing that to do so would hurt yourself. It's a kind of self regulating thing. All you need is the awareness that you are in fact INCLUDED in, and the ONLY one included in, receiving the effects of whatever you're trying to cause.

So the question simply is, if you are aware of this and can stay aware of it, do you really want to keep hurting yourself? It is in your best interests to only love. It is in your best interests to only ever be loving toward yourself and others. You can't have one set of rules that apply to others and another for yourself. You can't have it be that you are loved while others are hated. Its BOTH, or NEITHER. Either both you and others are loved or both you and others are attacked. There is no escape. And the ego is the thing that suggests there IS a way to get away with this without any consequences.

There is no escaping consequences. Whatever you do you do to yourself. This is the secret of salvation. All you need is awareness to SEE that any slight mis-step against "another" is REALLY a mis-step against yourself, and you do not want to do that because it hurts you. And it splits your mind. Which makes you disassociate from yourself and imagine an enemy, which makes you project, which doesn't REALLY project at all. External enemies are indirect self attack from your mind to your mind.

You've never attacked anyone but yourself. No-one has ever attacked anyone but themselves. You've never been attacked by anyone other than yourself. You have the power not to attack yourself. To not attack yourself you must also not want to attack others, because the fantasy of being ABLE to attack others will make you hurt yourself under the belief that it's having no effect on you. Secret of salvation. You're doing it all to yourself. Stop hurting yourself. Love yourself. Easy peasy.

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK"

"Everything the body sees is an illusion."

Years ago when I began the course, I thought I understood forgiveness. I thought it basically meant not blaming people, and trying to learn that everyone is innocent. It's kind of that. But over time and with deeper study my grasp of forgiveness kept expanding.

I realized at some point forgiveness is a state, a high state of mind, in concert with true perception, and that our efforts "to forgive" move us in the direction of that state. At some point we would achieve a truly forgiving state of mind as an end result or goal. And this state recognizes there is no real sin.

And so then "doing forgiveness" to me was more to do with purification, healing, release, not judging, taking responsibility, embracing the secret of salvation etc. I made effort to forgive myself and others through various means and to move out of fear into guilt, out of guilt into sin, and out of sin into innocence. But this still wasn't the whole story.

It gradually became clearer that the entire world needs to be overlooked. Particularly because the world itself is an illusion, it wasn't enough to undo my mistaken ideas and beliefs about it, somehow I had to learn to "see past" the world to a light or reality beyond it. And this is significantly challenging. The world hangs like a veil before the face of Christ, a granite block of sin, designed to tempt you to believe everything you see.

It became clearer that the entire physical universe, all forms of matter, all bodies and planets and objects, are there as temptations, appearances and deceptions. That seeing something seem to happen in the flesh was in fact untrue and unreal. That people are not bodies, but something beyond their physical form that I'm meant to see. And so my efforts shifted toward trying not to be deceived by the world in general.

This is where things seem to become quite difficult. When you consider that we've lived in a physical body for many years, assuming the world is real, reacting to everything the body senses as if it's happening as proof, there is a lot of conditioning to undo. And it starts to go into a territory where you have to literally question fundamental reality, whether events are even really happening, whether sick bodies even exist, whether all of the hierarchy of illusions really testifies to bad things happening or if it's just some awful dream. And that means questioning even what your body senses say is happening.

For me lately the challenge has been intensified because I've been presented with some very difficult "physical" scenarios with my wife that present powerful temptations. Temptations to believe that awful things are happening, that there is physical loss, that body parts are malfunctioning, that there is seriousness and heaviness and fear-inducing problems. I've been extremely pushed and impressed upon by the apparent reality of these horrors.

Just the mere act of seeing something physically "wrong" and believing it is truthful, real, happening, or a danger, is enough to incite fear and reactions. When the world is dangling "proof" that sin is happening, attack is happening, that bodies seem to be real, in front of your face, proving that sin is real, what do you do? Because this is where we really get into some major need for forgiveness.

It has become more and more apparent that everything physical is an illusion. All body states are fictional. The ego uses forms to hold the idea of death in front of our noses, asking us to believe that it's really happening. It asks us to regard people as bodies as though, when parts of the body are threatened or lost, the person is threatened or lost. And if you buy it, you will be very upset. And this is why the world is so unhappy.

Presented with a torrent of nightmarish happenings, my challenge has been to try to learn to disbelieve them. To not buy the appearance. To trust a bigger plan. To see beyond the short-term nonsense. To not believe it means something. To not go into fear as a reaction to my own belief that something is very wrong. From what I've been shown through these trials and lessons, not only that our immortal reality the only truth, but also everything bodies testify to is an illusion.

My wife had to have an amputation of her left foot. At first this was horrifying. Just the idea of it made me guilty and afraid. I feared the "loss of her" because if her foot was gone, part of her was really gone. That's what the ego teaches through form. Physical loss means something real has been destroyed, which automatically leads to loss and grief. And so I entered into loss and grief and had to struggle to get out of it. It was induced by the belief that what the body was showing was true of her. That a) she was a body, a b) she was attacked and really suffering and c) it was an irreversible sin.

This is where forgiveness really meets the road. I've had to learn to try to see past and disbelieve all physical events, happenings, states, conditions, people's expert opinions about how serious it is, the physical testimony that "it really is happening", all proof, and all suggestion by the ego world that something is terribly wrong. It is not easy. The level of temptation has been so high and so frequent that I've been thrown far off-center and struggling to get back a sense of truth.

But I do realize through all of this that the opportunity has presented me with a "test", a way to find out if I will be willing to not buy into this problem and laugh it off with love, perhaps to even become miraculous and healing through that love, or whether I will sink into fear and forgetfulness. To say that the road has been extremely bumpy is an understatement. And so the challenge to forgive is to NOT BELIEVE that any of this is even happening at all. To disregard it as illusions and as lies.

Somehow through the clearing smoke, it seems I disbelieve the physical with more certainty now. And as I see other people's sick bodies, somehow I now see them with the same attitude that I see my wife's body with. Her example has changed my perception. Whatever the education has been, it now applies to a transformation in my vision. I can't by any means claim this is total or even halfway to where it needs to be, but it's clear that forgiveness has evolved way past what I thought it was, and now onto a more living experience of not being deceived by form. Even the suggestion of physical death now seems like a ridiculous lie.

It's no small undertaking. We literally are being asked to not believe ANYTHING in this world. That all forms, appearances, bodies, objects, are mere illusory appearances designed to tempt us, causing us to have to learn NOT to be deceived by them. It's very difficult to not buy illusions when someone close to you is seriously ill with visible and "serious" physical symptoms. But this is what we have to do. The body is a denial of the truth. We have to deny the denial of the truth. We have to learn not to buy a single thing the world says is happening, and look beyond the world to the light. We are safe in God, merely dreaming of exile.

In this view, our task is to overlook the world, which transforms it into the forgiven world. And a forgiven world cannot last. "A forgiven world cannot last. It was the home of bodies but forgiveness looks past bodies." We look beyond the forgiven world, beyond the real world, to the Kingdom of God. We regard the Kingdom as the only reality. We are vigilant only for its truth and immortality. We are not deceived by lies of mortal death or suffering. Nothing that the body senses can distract us from an unwavering fixation on God's truth. We are under no laws buy God's, and only the truth is true and this world is not true.

This is what we are asked to do. This is how we forgive. We overlook the false world we made and see it not. We ask to see only the reality of the Kingdom. Nothing else is real. Nothing else has value. Nothing else attracts us. Nothing else satisfies. Only in the forgetting of the world and the complete overlooking of its transparent veil of lies can we look upon the face of Christ and finally move beyond to our True Home.

"A Son of God is happy only when he knows he is WITH God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond ANYTHING that he can make.

Consider the Kingdom which you have made (Earth), and judge its worth fairly. Is it worthy to be a home for a Child of God? Does it protect his peace, and shine love upon him? Does it keep his heart untouched by fear, and allow him to give always without any sense of loss? Does it teach him that this giving is his joy, and that God Himself thanks him for his giving?

That is the only environment in which you can be happy. You cannot make it, anymore than you can make yourselves. But it has been created for you (Heaven), as you were created for it. God watches over His children and denies them nothing."

"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."

"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. And what you then will overlook will not be understandable to you, just as its presence once had been your certainty.

This is the shift that true perception brings: What was projected out is seen within, and there forgiveness lets it disappear."

If you're seeing bodies, your vision is blinded by sight of form.

Christ's vision LOOKS PAST bodies to the truth and does not see physical forms.

"The BODY'S EYES are therefore ***NOT THE MEANS BY WHICH THE REAL WORLD CAN BE SEEN***, for the ILLUSIONS 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."

"Christ's vision has one law. 2 It DOES NOT LOOK UPON THE BODY, and mistake it for the Son whom God created. 3 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. 4 It sees no separation. 5 And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees."

"THE OPPOSITE OF SEEING THROUGH THE BODY'S EYES IS THE VISION OF CHRIST, which reflects strength rather than weakness, unity rather than separation, and love rather than fear. The OPPOSITE OF HEARING THROUGH THE BODY'S EARS is communication through the Voice for God, the Holy Spirit, which abides in each of us. His Voice seems distant and difficult to hear because the ego, which speaks for the little, separated self, seems to be much louder. This is actually reversed. The Holy Spirit speaks with unmistakable clarity and overwhelming appeal. No one who does not choose to identify with the body could possibly be deaf to His messages of release and hope, nor could he fail to accept joyously the vision of Christ in glad exchange for his MISERABLE PICTURE OF HIMSELF."

"Christ's vision is the HOLY SPIRIT'S GIFT, GOD'S ALTERNATIVE to the ILLUSION of separation and to the belief in the reality of sin, guilt and death (seeing the physical world which is made of sin and death). It is the one correction for all errors of perception; the reconciliation of the seeming opposites on which THIS WORLD IS BASED. Its kindly light shows all things from another point of view, reflecting the thought system that arises from knowledge and making return to God not only possible but inevitable."

"Learning MUST LEAD BEYOND THE BODY to the re-establishment of the power of the mind in it."

"The body cannot be looked upon EXCEPT THROUGH JUDGEMENT. 2 To SEE THE BODY is the sign that you LACK VISION, and have DENIED the means the Holy Spirit offers you to serve His purpose."

"Today the lights of Heaven bend to you, to shine upon your eyelids as you rest BEYOND THE WORLD OF DARKNESS. Here is light YOUR EYES CANNOT BEHOLD. And yet your MIND CAN SEE it plainly, and can understand."

"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 A 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."

"BEYOND THE BODY, beyond the sun and stars, PAST EVERYTHING YOU SEE and yet somehow familiar, is an arc of golden light"

"The Holy Spirit's messengers are sent FAR BEYOND THE BODY, calling the mind to join in holy communion and be at peace"

"It must reach out beyond itself, as you reached out BEYOND THE BODY, to let you and your brother be joined."

"Yet what is that to those who have been given one true relationship BEYOND THE BODY? 10 Can they be long held back from looking on the face of Christ?"

"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."

"You do not doubt that the body's eyes can see. 4 You do not doubt the images they show you are reality. 5 Your faith lies in the DARKNESS, not the light."

"Here is a WORLD established THAT IS SICK, and this THE WORLD THE BODY'S EYES PERCEIVE."

"It is impossible to see your brother as sinless and yet to look upon him AS A BODY. 2 Is this not perfectly consistent with the goal of HOLINESS? 3 For holiness is merely the result of letting THE EFFECTS OF SIN BE LIFTED (body veil disappears), so what was always true is recognized. 4 ****TO SEE A SINLESS BODY IS IMPOSSIBLE****, for HOLINESS IS POSITIVE AND THE BODY IS MERELY NEUTRAL. 5 It is not sinful, but NEITHER IS IT SINLESS. 6 AS NOTHING, WHICH IT IS, THE BODY CANNOT MEANINGFULLY BE INVESTED WITH ATTRIBUTES OF CHRIST OR OF THE EGO. 7 Either must be an error, for both would place the attributes where they cannot be. 8 And both must be undone for purposes of truth."

"WHO SEES A BROTHER'S BODY HAS LAID A JUDGEMENT ON HIM, AND SEES HIM NOT. 2 He does not really see him as sinful; HE DOES NOT SEE HIM AT ALL. 3 In the darkness of sin he is INVISIBLE. 4 He can but be imagined in the darkness, and it is here that the illusions you hold about him are not held up to his reality. 5 Here are illusions and reality kept separated. 6 Here are illusions never brought to truth, and always hidden from it. 7 And here, in darkness, is your brother's reality IMAGINED AS A BODY, in unholy relationships with other bodies, SERVING THE CAUSE OF SIN an instant before he dies."

"Your question should not be, "How can I see my brother without the body?" 2 Ask only, "Do I really wish to see him sinless?" 3 And as you ask, forget not that his sinlessness is your escape from fear. 4 Salvation is the Holy Spirit's goal. 5 THE MEANS IS VISION. 6 For what the SEEING (with christ vision) look upon (overlooking bodies to something beyond) is sinless. 7 No one who loves can judge, and what he sees is free of condemnation. 8 And WHAT HE SEES HE DID NOT MAKE (heaven), for it was GIVEN HIM TO SEE (by God), as was the vision that made his seeing possible."

"You believe that what your PHYSICAL EYES CANNOT SEE does not exist."

"Let love draw near them and OVERLOOK THE BODY, as it will surely do"

"For FAITHLESSNESS is the perception of a brother AS A BODY"

"IT DOES NOT LOOK UPON A BODY, and mistake it for the Son whom God created."

"Perception is a FUNCTION OF THE BODY, and therefore represents A LIMIT ON AWARENESS. Perception sees *THROUGH* THE BODY'S EYES and hears through the body's ears. It evokes the limited responses which the BODY makes."

"If you are SIN, YOU ARE A BODY, for the mind acts not."

"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***."

"(sin) 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. "

"EVERYTHING that the BODY'S EYES can see is a MISTAKE, an ERROR in perception"

"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."

"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 whole problem with false perception is really just one of confusion about "what is the cause." Or more to the point, who is causing it. We could rephrase that as "I don't know what God (cause) is."

In the separation there was a disassociation from the role of "causer" or chooser (creator), and the ownership and responsibility of this causing was projected onto others. We then ended up in an extremely confused state of not being able to clearly discern, "who is doing what to whom?"

In the ego thought system, cause and effect are completely reversed, things which are true seem false, things which are false seem true. There is a breakdown of the Golden Rule, in which anything that's true is true of both of us.

It's replaced with the ego's idea that what is true for me is not true for you. Which really is another way of saying, cause and effect are separate. I can cause you without being affected. And you can cause me without being affected. I can accuse you of doing something I did not do, and thereby believe I am innocent while you're guilty.

This is the ego's idea of "getting away with murder", because it believes it can cause things to happen and escape the consequences. So when we get into "its you not me", or "you did this to me", any kind of blame or finger-pointing or scapegoating or believing that "cause" is outside of you, you will instantly go into a victim role. And victims are always confused about who is attacking them.

In that confused state of ego reactions, it always seems like it's someone else doing this to us, some external event happened, some unforseen circumstance, some unwanted happening

Usually you'll feel devoid of all responsibility for causing it. ie it'll seem like you didn't choose any of it, and you don't want it. But this is because you have no clue whatsoever what is really causing anything. And so random fingers point at random targets hoping some mud will stick.

As you apply forgiveness, ie you become more honest and less in denial about your contribution, you start to sort out exactly WHO is causing stuff to happen. At first it seems like it's everyone except you, but then gradually each time you see that YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF, or was something you did in fact choose, or that it did have an effect on you, the picture starts to become clearer.

The more you can take responsibility for choosing the more you will discern clearly and recognize that you are the cause of your suffering. You will also start to notice that the ego's breaking of God's laws does not work, and in fact when you do attack or scapegoat another you do NOT escape the consequences. It makes you feel guilty, it frightens you, it upsets and stresses you out.

Eventually, there becomes a clear association between "being a victim" and "attacking yourself". A clear line of causation from what you are choosing and the effect YOU experience as a result. You'll see it's not possible to blame another without feeling blamed. It's not possible to judge without feeling judged. It's not possible to attack without feeling attacked. And it's not possible to accuse someone of being the cause of you without you feeling like a vulnerable victim.

And so then it becomes obvious, that you feel like a victim BECAUSE you positioned yourself as one, seeing yourself in that role, and wanting to do so in order to try and get a payoff of scapegoating. But you no longer can pretend that your attacks on another don't hurt yourself. You can't help but notice that the instant you try to shift guilt to someone else, you will immediately feel that familiar weakness, threat and lack of safety that accompanies a victim mentality.

It then becomes an unavoidable no-brainer. That is, you clearly recognize and distinguish, whenever I attack, I feel attacked. Whenever I want to make someone out to be guilty, I feel like a victim. Whenever I try to be unforgiving, I feel unforgiven. It has a direct correlation, because I AM the cause of everything I experience, NOT the other person.

It then becomes harder to pretend to yourself that your attempted attacks on others have no effect on you. You are affected every time. You simply cannot maintain peace and happiness at the same time as being angry with someone. You can't truly honestly justify anger in any situation because you know that it's bullshit. And it'll become increasingly noticeable that you're bullshitting yourself as you sort out exactly who is causing everything you feel.

So then it becomes quicker and easier to catch yourself. You can see, well, as soon as I went to point a finger at someone and use them as a scapegoat, I felt like a victim under attack. Funny that. I made that happen. I gave myself that experience. And so I can choose again and withdraw that self-attack, that self-positioning of "I'm the victim here!". That demand that I be weak and vulnerable and recognized as a suffering frightened liar.

Since I then see that I do this to myself and it was very obvious that I did this, the entire "appeal" of playing the victim role withers away. There's no point to it when you can more accurately discern that it very much does hurt you. There are consequences. And so the challenge then is to no longer see yourself unfairly treated or as a victim of anyone or anything, recognizing that it's only when you do that you feel that way at all. And you no longer want to feel that way.

Fortunately since it's an inside job where you're the only one causing, and other people are never the cause of you AT ALL, it really boils down to your own willingness to admit to what you're doing to yourself and to want a better way. To prefer not suffering over suffering. To recognize that hurting hurts and attack attacks, rather than believing it does something else. Because in our confusion we don't even realize what the fuck we're doing to ourselves, and we end up killing ourselves in the name of self preservation.

True perception is accurate perception. It is recognition. It is awareness and discernment. It is the ability to SEE, clearly, what the truth of this situation is. What is really going on. Who is really causing and choosing. Where things really originate and what their effects actually are. It's the willingness and ability to not be blinded or confused by the ego temptation to think its one-sidedness can work. It's simply honesty and openness to the truth.

Who would hurt themselves unless they thought they weren't hurting themselves in doing so?

Who would hurt themelves once they recognized that they cannot be hurt unless they do so?

Who would hurt themselves if they recognized that even the slightest attempt to hurt others diminishes your own happiness?

Who would hurt themselves when joy and peace and love are the price?

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

"No-one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No-one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No-one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. And no-one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

""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. This must I accept."

Ok so Jesus lets the cat out of the bag in the section titled "The real alternative." Here he speaks of how utterly disappointing and hopeless the world is. He talks of how all the world's roads lead to death, how there is no real choice among them, and how every path or answer or solution or hope you ever had in the world is secretly hell-bent on the same failure.

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death." UT31D2

"Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped." UrT31D2

He goes on to say that EVERYONE must look at this eventually. Everyone must come to the awareness that the world is utterly completely disappointing, hopeless, worthless, ridiculous, insane, and without hope of redemption or salvation. And that within its closed system there is absolutely no way out and not a single road truly leads to a real solution.

"Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end." UrT31D2

"Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. All of them will lead to death." UrT31D2

"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." UrT31D2

He describes also that if you come to linger on this, and if you do not sense that "there must be a better way", or "this can't possibly be God's will for me", and if you make the world real or think it is all that exists, you WILL become depressed. In fact, Jesus even says somethings startling here - that "men have died" when looking upon this. And I expect he literally means they dropped dead on the spot because they couldn't handle the bleak hopelessness that arises from this view that the hopeless world is "all there is."

"There IS no choice where every end is sure. Perhaps you would prefer to try them all, before you REALLY learn they are but one. The roads this world can offer seem to be quite large in number, but the time must come when everyone begins to see how like they are to one another." UrT31D3

"Men have died on seeing this, because they saw no way EXCEPT the pathways offered by the world. And, learning THEY led nowhere, lost their hope. And yet this was the time they COULD have learned their greatest lesson." UrT31D3

Then of course he urges us that we should, as well as reaching this point, be sure not to linger there and that we MUST go beyond this. We must become willing to recognize that there MUST be a better way. Yet for many it will require that our "tolerance for pain" has not hit its limit, or you have not scraped to the bottom of the barrel and hit "rock bottom" with the world's bullshit and pain enough to get you to open your mind.

"All must reach this point, and go BEYOND it. It is true indeed there is no choice at all within the world. But this is NOT the lesson in itself. The lesson has a PURPOSE" UrT31D3

However, he also speaks of there being a great potential in this "lesson", in that seeing the world in such stark clarity, such obviousness of its failure and its impossibility and its hell-bent laws of death and punishment, there is a much higher potential that you will suddenly REJECT it, as a whole.

What your mind HAS to do is it has to become open enough to NOT ACCEPTING this as "the only reality", even when faced with the world's UTTER BULLSHIT, slapping you upside the head on a daily basis. There has to be some light of true hope and sanity in you which stops BUYING into the world's empty promises.

"Why would you seek to try another road, another person or another place, when you HAVE learned the way the lesson starts, but do not yet perceive what it is for? Its purpose is the ANSWER to the search that all must undertake who still believe there is another answer to be found." UrT31D4

"Learn now, WITHOUT despair, there is no hope of answers in the world. But do not judge the lesson which is but BEGUN with this. Seek not another signpost in the world which seems to point to still another road. No longer look for hope where there is none." T31D4

You have to be willing to see that you've been seeking for salvation in all the wrong places, and every place you've looked you have come up empty handed and disappointed. That nothing in the world has lasted, nor will it ever. And everything has always disappointed and betrayed you, no matter its appearance, no matter its form, no matter how much it shone and sparkled in its frame of death.

If you can get in touch within yourself with a sense that there MUST be a better way, there must be something more than this, there must be a better reality, there must be ANOTHER WORLD, where God's will is supreme an all the Earth's stupid bullshit is utterly impossible, then your mind will open up instead of shut down. It becomes a "perceptual turning point", which in fact causes a rejection of PHYSICAL SIGHT (having lost all faith in the physical) and an opening of the spiritual eye (willingness to see the spirit world).

"For from ***this lowest point*** will learning lead to heights of happiness, in which you see the PURPOSE of the lesson shining clear, and perfectly within your learning grasp." UrT31D4

"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."

It means you are suddenly recognizing EN-MASS and in total GENERALIZATION, that the WHOLE world is utterly flawed and NOT what you want. That it HAS failed you, and CANNOT give you what you wanted it to give you. And now you turn from it, turn your back on the whole thing in disgust, or perhaps quiet recognition, and now your WHOLE AIM focused squarely on the Kingdom of God.

"Who would be willing to be turned AWAY from all the roadways of the world, UNLESS he understood their real futility? Is it not needful that he should BEGIN with this to seek another way instead? For while he sees a choice where there is none, what power of decision can he use?" UrT31D5

You're whole attention and sense of VALUE and hope is placed on the other world, where there is a REAL HOPE and where there is a real sanity and a real potential to find what you have always wanted. And as such heaven becomes "the real alternative" to you, and your faith in it becomes massively focused.

He says that everyone must come to look at this eventually. EVERYONE has to be willing to look upon the freak-show without flinching and without making it real, or at least with enough of an opening to an alternative that it doesn't just turn into a horrible depressing dark-night of the soul kind of thing. A night in which you seem SO FAR from God, and yet are SO CLOSE to turning your back on the darkness forever.

"The learning that the world can offer but ONE choice, no matter what its form may be, is the beginning of acceptance that there is a REAL alternative instead. To fight AGAINST this step is to defeat your purpose here. You did not come to learn to find a road the world does not contain." UrT31D5

Once you see just how horrendously stupid the world is, how pointless and disappointing, how hopeless and short-lived, how false in its empty promises and how it is set up only to destroy, you can also potentially see that it CAN ONLY EVER BE THIS WAY. You can see also that since you MADE IT, YOU wanted it to function like this. And you can see that since it is opposite to heaven's reality, it HAS TO FAIL this way. It has no hope because it was made to oppose hope.

"The search for DIFFERENT pathways in the world is but the search for different FORMS of truth. And this would KEEP the truth from being reached. Think not that happiness is EVER found by following a road AWAY from it. This makes NO sense, and CANNOT be the way." UrT31D6

"And EVERY road that goes the other way will NOT advance the purpose to be found." UrT31D6

And this is a great thing to recognize because it means you can forgive the world for being impossibly incapable and utterly flawed. It's only that way because an alternative to heaven CAN ONLY BE that way. And so now you can forgive it and laugh at it and find peace because it is NOT what you want, and because you see NO merit in it, and there is nothing in it that you want to use to keep your false hopes and wishful thinking alive.

"There IS a choice which you have power to make, when you have seen the real alternatives. UNTIL that point is reached you HAVE no choice, and you can but decide how you would choose the better to deceive yourself again. This course attempts to teach no more than that the power of decision cannot lie in choosing different forms of what is still the SAME illusion and the SAME mistake." UrT31D7

"No pathway in the world can lead to Him, nor any worldly goal is one with His. What road in all the world will lead within, when EVERY road was made to separate the journey and the purpose it MUST have, unless it be but futile wandering? All roads that lead AWAY from what you are will lead you to confusion and despair." UrT31D8

"There IS no road that leads away from Him (your brother/self). A journey FROM yourself does not exist. How foolish and insane it is to think that there COULD be a road with such an aim. Where could it go? And how could you be made to travel on it, walking there without your own Reality at one with you? Forgive yourself your madness, and forget all senseless journeys and all goal-less aims." UrT31D9

All we have to do is be willing to look at the UTTER SHIT HOLE with the light of the Holy Spirit and with a willingness to be honest in recognizing its nothingness, and then we will TURN AROUND and vehemently and passionately embrace heaven. And now our vigilance for the Kingdom will be super clarified and magnified and glorified. And then we will walk straight out of hell into the light.

"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." UrT12G3

"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." UrW131L7

We are addicted to the body. We talk about the body as if it is the same thing as the person. We talk about what they are wearing as if they are the body wearing it. We ask what they are looking at, as if because the body is looking so are they. We talk about what the body did, what the body ate, and how the body slept, as if it was the person doing these things, which we then celebrate the body doing. We cover the body in clothes and remark at how wonderful WE look. We think we are it, and this is a major confusion of identity.

There is a PROFOUND degree of body identification in this world. Take a look at the news. You can be pretty much guarantee that almost every single news report will feature people who are heavily in victim fear roles, heavily bodily identified, not overlooking the situation whatsoever, and quite unconscious, discussing what happened to bodies. And then you have the whole "he did this to me" "she did that to me" "they were doing this and that". Always pointing to bodies, because only bodies can sin. "Only if there were a body is sin possible." "Only the body makes the world seem real." Always mistaking bodies for people.

And then we look to a spouse or a child or a parent or a neighbor or coworker or some other stranger and we say, look, behold, there is a person. But all we point at is the body, using our own body to sense its presence, and seeing little else.

Bodies are not souls, they are not real, and God did not create them. Parts of our mind are using the body temporarily but any confusion about the mind BEING the body is level confusion, magic, sickness, authority problem, body identification, attack thinking, blindness, and evidence of blocks to awareness. But this is how the whole world is operating almost all the time.

It is SO habitual, so ingrained, and so accepted as normal, that you see it very subtly infused into every advertising, every conversation, every interaction of body folk. It's become totally habitual. Always with the "you", in reference to the body self. "They" in reference to groups of bodies. The whole word of the law is written based on what bodies do to bodies and whose body did what to whom. Copyright law doesn't even acknowledge discarnate entities as valid authors, such as in the case of Jesus and ACIM.

It is so heavily assumed that people are bodies in this world, due to massive widespread body identification, that it is literally everywhere. In all walks of life, in all forms of communication, people think they are human beings with arms and legs. This is a problem, because it is not true. And we have to actually deprogram ourselves of this belief. And as we do this, we're going to start becoming VERY aware of the fact that the whole world is going against the truth in this way. That 99%+ of the population relates at a body-to-body level and does not see beyond it.

You can see how the development of christ vision, the opening of the spiritual eye, the clarification of spirit identification, recognizing YOU ARE NOT A BODY, you are spirit, is an entirely different kind of way of relating to people. It totally steps back from the entire association between "you" and "your body". It denies the assumption that your brother is his physical form. "You're looking great today Paul". Well, no, Paul isn't flesh and bones and you are blinded by perception of form. If Paul's like, oh hell yes, I'm looking great today, then now we're into Paul being body identified and having level confusion. And if Paul decides to confuse himself with his body in order to confuse his brother with a body in order to have a body relationship, well now he has a cell mate and they're both in hell.

This is how profound the course is. We have to learn to dis-identify ourselves from the FLESH AND BONES body prison. We have to learn it is NOT OUR SELF. We are not made of bits of flesh and strange organs. It does not look like us. It is not a representation of our true nature. At best it symbolized health and wholeness but your soul absolutely does not have a penis or vagina, nor does it make shits, nor does it sip the cool-aid. "I am not a body I am free" should mean that totally literally. 100% NOT even REMOTELY the body. Not even a tiny bit the body. Such that the body is utterly UNLIKE you in every way. Just a random picture of a form. Because "The body cannot contain you who are life." and "What you are cannot be seen nor pictured."

When we show the body to our brother, identified with it, we are offering him hell and damnation, having damned ourselves to it. We give him what we have given ourselves. We can only offer him a body if we think we are a body. And this means we are offering him something valueless and meaningless. Which is a way to attack him and strip him of his divinity. Neither you nor your brother are physical. Your mind is non physical. Your soul is formless. UTTERLY FORMLESS. Abstract. Shapeless. Boundaryless. Unlimited by space or time.

When we make the body sick we use the body to accuse our brother of sin. This is an entire teaching to do with how the body symbolizes attack and communicates a message of proof of sin in order to find your brother unworthy. But it goes even further, not just including typical sickness, and even beyond sex. It goes as far as to say that EVERY way that you use the body determines the message it symbolized and if you have ANY KIND OF BODY IDENTIFICATION, this is an attack on your brother AND yourself.

If you show the body to your brother mistaken for yourself, you are communicating that he is not himself, and this is an attack. Just as body identification produces sickness, believing you are a body is denial of yourself and your brother. If you depict it to him with an attitude of "this is my self, look at me", you are trying to cause him to be confined to his body also. You cannot possibly see his true self if you cannot see yours. You cannot possibly appreciate his divine christ nature if you think you're not christ but a body. We need to rediscover our soul, our innate inner truth, God-given, if we are to RELATE in any kind of real, loving way to anyone.

If there is not a movement towards recognizing yourself as spirit, NOT a body, there is no awakening at all. That is the whole direction of the curriculum. Moving away from body identification, confused about who and what you are, towards clarity about the fact that you are not a body at all and never were. When "you" (body) look in a mirror you should not be believing that you're looking at yourself. Vanity is ego. When "you" (body) puts on the latest clothes that you fancy yourself in, you shouldn't be believing that this changes who or what you are at all, nor do these clothes define you. You could wear a sack of shit and be spirit identified knowing your true nature is absolutely golden and that the body has nothing to do with who you are.

Sex is only a small part of the body identification issue. It's a cornerstone and a reason to keep perpetuating the focus on bodies and the belief that people are physical forms. Confusing mind and body and believing the body can create, can cause, has power, can live, and is important. As Jesus says, "the body is hardly worth the least defense." "The body is clearly a device for separation and therefore does not exist." "God did not create the body."

So isn't it clear, that in order to exist, and to be created by God, you have to become very very clear that you are NOT a body in any way whatsoever, you don't need one, you don't want one, and you don't have one. Because "to be without abody is to be in your natural state.", which is a state of being solely spirit.

It is by identifying ONLY AS spirit (and not a gender or a sexual preference) that you free yourself FROM the body and become able to return home to God. You cannot be believing that ANYTHING "true" of the body is true of you. You are not male or female. You are not gay or straight or bi or anything else. You are spirit. You are immortal. You are made of light. You are divine. The body cannot possibly be anything but a fake artificial picture of a fake artificial self in a fake artificial dream pretending to be a someone. And the body cannot go to heaven with you. "Leave it behind, it cannot enter heaven."

But you, as spirit, can enter the spirit world. Your spirit is the only way through the gates of heaven, to reunite with God, the creator of your spirit, where "the only function of spirit is to extend God's being." There, your spirit has always dwelt with its maker, and has never really left. It is your spirit that is permanently recognized by God as holy and complete. "The soul never leaves the sight of God." "God's children are as equal as learners as they are as souls." Only your spirit self is the reality of you. Everything else is an illusion that you have become tangled up with, confused with, lost in, and believing is you. The body is not you. You are eternal.

"Look upon all the trinkets made to hang upon the body or cover it, or for its use. See all the useless things made for its eyes to see. Think on the many offerings made for its pleasure, and remember all these were made to make seem lovely what you hate. Would you employ this hated thing to draw your brother to you, and to attract his body's eyes? Learn you but offer him a crown of thorns, not recognizing it for what it is, and trying to justify your own interpretation of its value by his acceptance. Yet still the gift proclaims his worthlessness to you, as his acceptance and delight acknowledges the lack of value he places on himself.

Gifts are not made through bodies, if they be truly given and received. For bodies can neither offer nor accept; hold out or take. Only the mind can value, and only the mind decides on what it would receive and give. And every gift it offers depends on what it WANTS. It will adorn its chosen home most carefully, making it ready to receive the gifts it wants, by offering them to those who come unto its home, or those it would attract to it. And there they will exchange their gifts, offering and receiving what their minds judge to be worthy of them.

Each gift is an evaluation of the receiver and the GIVER. No-one but sees his chosen home an altar to himself. No-one but seeks to draw to it the worshippers of what he placed upon it, making it worthy of their devotion. And each has set a light upon his altar, that they may see what he has placed upon it, and take it for their own. Here is the value that you lay upon your brother, and on yourself. Here is your gift to BOTH; your judgment upon the Son of God for what he is. Forget not that it is your Savior to whom the gift is offered. Offer him thorns, and YOU are crucified. Offer him lilies, and it is YOURSELF you free."

When I came to A Course in Miracles, it was largely based on "non-duality" teachings from certain ACIM teachers.

The books spoke of the world as being a shitty place, a hell hole, psycho planet, a world of death and suffering, spinning its wheels and going nowhere. A world which you would not want and should want to leave behind. This seemed to provide a kind of motivation to want to escape it.

The solution that was presented then was a form of forgiveness which largely entailed maintaining the view that the world sucked, but realizing that it was not real. That it was just a dream. This formed a picture where, you're in the world, dreaming of the world, the world STILL sucks, but you recognize it's not real. There was nothing positive about this, it was a very clinical view.

More importantly, in this view there was NEVER a single mention of the "real world". There was no mention of saving the world, the great crusade, being a miracle worker, performing miracles to help others, healing others, healing bodies, or anything else which could be construed as "making the world better".

It was kind of an attitude of, the world is hell, so let's jump straight out of hell into heaven. And that the way we do this is by remembering it's a dream of hell, will always be hell, and once you can just "not believe it" you'll be saved. This basically reinforces a view that the world still is hell, it can only ever be hell, and there is no point or way to actually come to love or forgive the world. It was more like a message of, the world it shit, let's escape it.

In fact part of what made those books popular was the self-proclaimed "brutal honesty" about the world, which acted to judge it harshly and point out its flaws. This was supposedly a refreshing honesty but at the same time portrayed the world as only CAPABLE of being a negative place. And that therefore you had to do what you could, psychologically, to try not to be affected by it, by remembering it's just a dream of death.

The problem as I see it now, is that this model was largely fostered by the non-duality conceptualization of the course, which is deeply flawed. That is, this idea that there's either heaven as the only reality, or earth as the opposite ie hell. And nothing in between. Either duality, or pure non-duality. Either you're in the shit world, or you're in God's arms. But that's a major issue, because it COMPLETELY ignores a vast majority of what ACIM actually teaches.

In particular, there is absolutely no mention made of the real world. There is no presentation of the idea that the Holy Spirit has MADE an alternative dream world which is seen through the eyes of Christ, is a forgiven world, has no sin or guilt in it, and is not seen as hell. It's true also that the real world does not contain bodies, since it transcends forms. And it's also true that we're supposed to be learning to SEE the real world, by learning to LOVE the world.

If you were to try to present the idea of loving the world to the non-duality folks, they would run the other way. It's incompatible with the cold, clinical view of the course's structures, which attempt to maintain that the world is hell at all costs - kind of a form of false forgiveness really in which the world is made real and then you try to forgive it. If we BYPASS the real world, as a VITAL stepping stone on our way to awakening, we're NOT really getting the course's message.

The course isn't asking us to love hell. It's not saying hey, this world has ONE form, one nature, and you need to learn to love it. Rather, it's saying that, the world of form seems like hell because of HOW you are looking at it, and WHO you are looking at it with. Which yes btw means a HUGE emphasis on looking WITH the holy spirit, with christ vision, which was more or less obliterated from these teachings about non-duality (because certain teachers do no like the idea of the Holy Spirit having anything to do with this).

It is telling us that the reason you see bodies, forms, objects, planets, is because this is how the BODY was made to see, and it can ONLY see falsely. Everything it sees is a false INTERPRETATION of the world ladened with sin and guilt. It's not capable of seeing the world as it is. The body can never see the real world. But that does not mean you should not attempt to see the real world. In fact, this is what the ENTIRE course is aimed towards.

You are meant to awaken another form of vision - the spiritual eye, which does not use the body's eyes, and sees BEYOND what the physical sees, so that you are not really looking at or distracted by forms, bodies, appearances of sickness and death, etc. You temporarily use the body to allow you to interact with "the world", but "the world" as you have known it is actually a combination of a neutral world + false perceptions. And without the false perceptions, the neutral world becomes the FORGIVEN world - the real world. And this real world is beautiful, lovely, forgiving, shining and sparkling like new, innocent and free from all sense of sin and guilt. You are meant to be learning to SEE THAT in place of the physical separations of form. An underlying, transcendental unity BEHIND all forms.

And when you do this, instead of seeing "the world is a shit hole", which focuses on the closed box of being blinded by sight of form, you start to see a "world" beyond the physical, a canvas of love, which IS LOVABLE, and which God loves, and which the Holy Spirit sees as the face of Christ. This is a VITAL step in the course. Becoming able to see that happier dream. The happy dream is the forgiven world. A reinterpreted world, reinterpreted by the Holy Spirit, where sin and guilt and fear no longer exist and where you have forgiven yourself and everyone. ie not simply a "hell recognized as a dream" world, but a world which is practically almost the same thing as HEAVEN, because you see PAST its illusory forms and separations.

I was fooled by this omission. I bought into it totally, that yes it's true, the world of bodies is a world of sin and death and suffering and victims and war and murder. As Jesus himself even tells us in the course, THAT world IS a cruel world, a world God did not create, a world opposite in its nature to heaven, basically hell on earth. A nightmare world. That IS what you see when you have NOT forgiven. The UNFORGIVEN world. That's the hell you'll see when your mind has sin and guilt in it. That's NOT the world you'll see when your mind has forgiven itself. Because it will now look within, see love, and extend love TO the world, seeing love IN IT.

This is why we're supposed to learn to see God in the world. Not to see God equated at the same level as forms and physicality, but to see that God is "in" or rather BEHIND or UNDERLYING the illusions of forms and objects. That this "Real world" is there, a world of love, which can be seen INSTEAD of the world of bodies. This is what the whole teaching about "you cannot see both worlds" is about. "Beyond this world there is a world I want" speaks to this also - there is a "real world" that you should WANT TO LOVE (not heaven), which is hidden behind the illusion of form. And developing "vision", the entire function of the workbook, is what allows you to see it.

So if someone had told me years ago, hey, the world you see seems like hell but only because you have sin in your mind, and when you remove the sin in your mind you'll see PAST the world and see a world that you can love and forgive.... that would've painted a very different picture, and would've set things up quite differently to come to different conclusions about the world. It would've changed my attitude, and I would've have become so negative about the world's faults.

We are to learn to forgive and love the world FIRST, to approach the happy dream of the holy spirit's christ vision, which looks upon OUR wold WITH forgiveness to show us an underlying love that we didn't see before, in it... and THEN transition to heaven. We can't get there by making the world's sinfulness real to ourselves and to then attempt to forgive it. This is exactly what we do in false perception - body perception. There is another way of looking at the world, this is a VITAL piece of information. And it means you no longer have to hate the world or think of it as "inherently hell."

Change your mind about what you want to see IN the world, and it's transform into a reflection of heaven. Not physically as such, because the physicality ONLY exists in FALSE perception, but psychologically and perceptually you'll see the truth.

"Vision already holds a replacement for everything you think you see now. Loveliness can light your images, and so transform them that you will love them, even though they were made of hate. For you will not be making them alone."

"The world you see (with false perception) cannot be the world God loves, and yet His Word assures us that He loves the (real) world."

"God's Word has promised 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."

"God's Word assures you that He loves the world; your judgment says it is unlovable. Who is right? For one of you is wrong. It must be so."

"Peace is impossible to those who look on war. Peace is inevitable to those who offer peace. How easily, then, is your judgment of the world escaped!"

"It is not the world (as neutral) that makes peace seem impossible. It is the world you see (in false perception of the neutral world) that is impossible. Yet has God's Judgment on this distorted (false) world redeemed it (neutral world seen with true perception) and made it fit to welcome peace. And peace descends on it in joyous answer"

"Knowledge (flipping to a non-duality level 1 viewpoint) is not the remedy for false perception since, being another level, they can never meet. The one correction possible for false perception must be true perception (a third state which we should focus on attaining first). It will not endure. But for the time it lasts it comes to heal. For true perception is a remedy with many names. Forgiveness, salvation, Atonement, true perception, all are one. They are the one beginning, with the end to lead to oneness far beyond themselves. True perception is the means by which the world is saved from sin, for sin does not exist. And it is this that true perception sees."

In A Course in Miracles, whenever Jesus uses the term "oneness" or "one with" or "are one", he DOES NOT MEAN that they are "one thing" like a count of 1.

The classic idea of "oneness" is this ego concept of "one thing" - what you'd be left with if you removed all egoic separations and ended up with a single unified "whole", which had no other parts. This idea of oneness is actually NOT what Jesus refers to in the course!

What I've come to learn is that instead, to be "one" with something means to be "of one kind". ie, to be in the same LIKENESS, or the SAME EXACT NATURE AS. In terms of brothers for example, this means brothers being "one" are like identical twins.

Jesus also makes statements about how you are one WITHIN YOURSELF. This has the same meaning, that within yourself there is only one consistent nature, no differences, no parts that are different from other parts, all "unified" and "united" within yourself. This is what it means to be one with YOURSELF. e.g. if you are made only of LIGHT, then all of you is LIGHT and so you are consistently "one nature".

So to Him, in His use of these terms, he is not referring to OUR idea of oneness. He has redefined its meaning as "of one kind" or "identical to" or "the same quality as" or "the same nature as" or "is still distinct but not different in appearance or form or character".

So now.. have a read of these statements below which all use this terminology, and instead of reading it to mean the typical idea of "oneness" or "one thing"... read it instead as saying, are OF ONE KIND or are identical, or that they share a likeness. It gives a whole different meaning to what He is saying, and it ALSO clarifies some of the subtler points that He is making where He distinguishes that there are TWO things in another portion of His statement and this TWONESS is not contradicted when the part mentioning "one" is recognized to mean THE SAME KIND, rather than "one thing."

This is all in recognition of the FACT that God has created many "separate beings who have everything individually" and recognizes that they are in the LIKENESS of God but still have their own distinct "self" or soul. Souls are ONE WITH GOD, meaning, they are LIKE HIM. Not that they ARE Him.

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

"Helpers are given you in many forms, although upon the altar they are one." (are similar)

"Today s idea accurately describes you as God created you. You are one within yourself, and One with Him. Yours is the unity of all creation. Your perfect unity makes change in you impossible." (one with yourself = consistent throughout) (perfect unity means the same thing, a state of consistency and one KIND)

"Miracles are seen in light, and light and strength are one." (are the same)

"I trust my brothers who are one with me." (you still have brothers, they are IDENTICAL to you)

"What can this mean, EXCEPT your minds are one?" (you still have your own minds, but they are IDENTICAL in nature)

"To and to receive are one in truth." (are identical)

"This recognition is the recognition that his will and God's are one." (shared, mutual, in agreement)

"He does not judge BETWEEN them, KNOWING they are one. Being united, they are one BECAUSE THEY ARE THE SAME" (ie identical - being united doesn't mean one thing, it means teamwork)

"No miracle can ever be denied to those who know that they are one with God." (how could you do a miracle if you are "as God"? You still have a self, which is LIKE GOD)

"For we are one in purpose, and the end of hell is near." (one in purpose, meaning identical purpose)

"THEY are one." (identical)

"I and by father are one" (we are identical to God's nature, in his likeness)

"And I, who am among them, am one with them and with Him" (still Jesus has his own self, and "them" has their own selves, and God has his self, and we are all one ie alike)

"So he became identified with Christ, a man no longer, but at one with God." (Christ is still distinct from God, they are alike)

"If you were one with Him, and RECOGNIZED this oneness, you would know His power is YOURS." ("his" and "yours" still coexist as TWO THINGS, but are sharing a similarity)

"And He will speak to you, reminding you that you are Spirit, one with Him and God, your brothers and your Self." (See how Jesus says you still have brothers, being one with them does not UNDO the brotherhood)

"Now are we One with Him Who is our Source." (we still have our self, yet are one, ie of one nature)

"Let me remember I am one with God." (but you still have an *I*)

"And everything we see reflects the holiness within the mind at one with God and with itself." (see how here again he says that your mind is one WITH ITSELF and therefore still is a distinct thing in its own right, and its oneness with God is a reflection or similarity TO God, it does not mean "god is you")

"Aspects of reality can be seen IN EVERYTHING and EVERYWHERE. Yet only God can gather them together by crowning them AS ONE with the final gift of eternity." (as identical)

"Yet its frame is JOINED to its Creator, One with Him AND with His masterpiece." (alike)

"And yet, unless your will is one with His, His gifts are not received." (you still have your own WILL! ... but your will being one with God's means its a second will that is identical in intention to God's - elsewhere Jesus says "in accord with" or agreement with)

"It remains forever and forever like its Creator, being one with Him." (it still remains forever! Just because it's one with its creator doesn't mean it isn't a thing in its own right)

"No-one who shares his purpose with him can NOT be one with him." (identical to)

"Praise be unto you, who make the Father One with His Own Son." (Here again the father HAS A SON, but they are one, and this doesn't mean the son IS God, it means the son is LIKE GOD or of one kind)

"Your mind IS one with God's." (you still have a mind, it is LIKE God's mind)

"We thank our Father for one thing alone; that we are separate from no living thing, and therefore one with Him." (separation mean isolation ie no sharing. You still share with God, and being one with him means being in total harmony)

"This little aspect is NO DIFFERENT from the whole, being continuous with it, and at one with it." (there is still a little aspect, it is LIKE the whole)

"No pathway in the world can lead to Him, nor any worldly goal is one with His." (one with as in identical to)

"But, as you cross to JOIN it, IT will JOIN WITH YOU, and BECOME ONE with you." (identical with you)

"I am one with God." (You still have an *I* in this statement! It doesn't mean you are God.)

"No-one unites with enemies, nor is at one with them in purpose." (here Jesus uses "one" interestingly in the 'negative' to again refer to "at one" as meaning "not identical to".)

"For Christ takes many forms with different names until their oneness can be recognized." (oneness means identical selves/souls)

"The single vision, which the Holy Spirit offers you, will bring this Oneness to your mind" (notice that YOUR MIND is still a distinct thing. Oneness comes to it, and it still remains a distinct mind. It becomes LIKE God's mind and united within itself rather than against itself)

"Its oneness is forever guaranteed inviolate" (wholeness, unity, self-supporting, free of conflict)

"As we share this goal, we increase its power to attract the whole Sonship, and to bring it back into the Oneness in which it was created." (the sonship still exists with MANY SONS in it, its oneness is the IDENTICALITY of the nature of each son)

"If you were one with Him, and RECOGNIZED this oneness, you would know His power is YOURS." (there is still "him" and "you" in this)

"And ONLY as you look upon him as guiltless, can you understand his Oneness." (oneness is also holiness and innocence)

"My oneness with the Christ establishes me as Your Son, beyond the reach of time, and wholly free of every law but Yours." (being like all others)

"Your role in the redemption LEADS you to it, by re-establishing its oneness in your minds." (there are still multiple minds here, even after oneness is established... oneness means a healed state of unity and freedom from conflict and wholeness and single-minded intention and similarity to God's likeness)

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

Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Beyond this world there is a world I want.

I choose to see that world instead of this,

For here is nothing that I really want."

To accept the Atonement is to accept that God's truth is the truth. It also means accepting that nothing else is true.

Jesus demonstrates this when He speaks of His own state of Atonement:

"There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you."

We would be perfectly willing to accept God's truth, IF we did not believe that something else is true. We have been listening to another "voice", the voice of the ego (untruth) rather than the Voice of God (truth).

If we believe the ego has some truth to it, it means we agree with it. We will defend it, protect it, want to keep it, and will shield it from God. We'll use it as justification for "why" we believe we cannot accept God's truth as true. This literally makes us perceive that God's truth is NOT true.

This is the meaning of "He who would not forgive MUST judge to justify his failure to forgive." We are busy justifying WHY we cannot accept atonement/forgiveness, in order to keep and protect the ego that we believe is sacred and true and worthy of us.

No-one in their right mind would want to accept something they believe is not the truth. No-one would want anything to do with something they regard as "false". The ego attributes all qualities of falseness to God, including perceiving Him as evil, as a threat, as an attacker, and as willing that we be dead. That's quite a lot of false belief to "reverse" - thought reversal - if we are to become genuinely WILLING to want to be with God.

An unwillingness to accept God's truth comes solely from a willingness to accept the ego's truth. Another way the Course puts this is in terms of faith. We have "faith" in the ego, we have come to TRUST it, we think it is helping us, protecting us, defending us, acting in our best interests, and is "working" for us. We think we WANT what it is offering. This is because we do not RECOGNIZE the ways that the ego is deceptive, a lie, a form of attack, self defeating, suicidal and fixated on death.

When we believe the ego is the truth, we literally become "blind" to the truth, and incapable of discerning that God's truth is true. We see falseness IN it, because there is falseness in our perception. We see reflected in God our own "evil" content, thinking it is his.

For example, whenever we misperceive the truth through the ego, we see it as attacking us, we put up a defense, which implements blocks to life, which produces sickness and death. This production of sickness is an attempt to "save our life" by protecting us from life. This is obviously insane. The ego's efforts to "help" us is actually an attempt to deceive us, to trick us into hurting ourselves "in the name of" helping ourselves. In other words, the ego's advice produces the opposite result from what it promises.

While we believe the ego has truth to it, we will not be WILLING to accept the atonement. In fact we'll not be able. We can't ACCEPT it, to really deeply abide in it and feel it and welcome it and want it and admit its truth and ALLOW IT to love us. That's because we have allegiance to the ego and "want" what it is offering instead. AND YOU CAN'T HAVE BOTH! You have to choose. This valuing of the ego's offering produces DOUBT. Being in two minds, or even entirely in ego, will make us very uncertain about whether the truth even IS true, and whether we even DO want it.

Failure to discern what IS true, and what IS false, forms the basis of this confusion, which makes us unwilling and unable to accept it. No-one wants to accept what they think will destroy them. It's just that, believing the ego we will believe GOD is the one who is going to destroy us, and the ego is our savior. It simply "makes sense" to us not to accept God's version of events, because His truth does not "make sense" when the ego perceives it.

If we believe there is really death, really punishment, really fear, really victimhood, really guilt, really sin, really separation, really sickness, really suffering, we will not be WILLING to accept the atonement. The atonement says the exact opposite is true. This means we WILL have to become willing to RECOGNIZE all of these illusions for what they ARE, how we are using them to support the ego, and how they are not TRUE or real.

So we are going to have to systematically let go of all belief that there is such a thing as real sickness, real death, real sin, real guilt, real fear, real suffering, real victims, etc. To do this, we will have to be a LITTLE WILLING to believe that the ego beliefs do NOT contain truth, they in fact are FALSE, and something else is MORE TRUE. If any of this ego stuff - illusions appearing to be real - is within our perception, i.e. within our attitude or beliefs about ourselves, it has to GO, BEFORE we will genuinely, deeply, feel WILLING and READY to accept the truth of God.

Each time that we are attempting to perform a "forgiveness", i.e. we're upset and suffering in some way and we want to get back to the truth, to apply the Course principles and heal ourselves, it's going to have to entail the UNDOING OF FALSE BELIEFS. i.e. the undoing of listening to the ego's interpretation, stopping listening to its voice, stopping believing its bullshit is true, discerning HOW and WHY it is not true, and RECOGNIZING the illusions - i.e. the lies - that you are perpetuating. This can take tremendous radical HONESTY. Honesty admits the truth - allows the truth to enter.

Applying forgiveness SHOULD also therefore mean, that you start with wherever you're at, with whatever you are experiencing now, and you need to transition from there ALL THE WAY TO THE ATONEMENT. If you do not go all the way, if you stop short and keep some beliefs, you will not "complete" the forgiveness because you're not getting to the point where you FULLY ACCEPT the truth and FULLY LET GO of the ego.

While over time you generally will move gradually towards truth, on the whole, you actually can take yourself ALL the way to the atonement at any time, on a SPECIFIC topic. For example if you have issues with a parent or a coworker or something, some belief that is getting triggered... to FULLY forgive that issue, or at least a big chunk of it, you need to look at the beliefs involved and undo them, ALL the way until you get to "sin did not happen in reality, there is no sin at all, therefore I'm still innocent".

Taking back a projection, for example, is only a FIRST STEP in forgiving. It only means then that you recognize some measure of responsibility, that it's actually "about you" and not "about" another person. That's a vital step, and taking of responsibility is essential to any application of forgiveness. But that's not the end of the story.

The problem is, even if you can recognize it's not about other people, you may still believe you are afraid, you are guilty, and you are sinful. These beliefs have to be uncovered as well. Part of the problem is, there are various stages of separation: sin > guilt > fear > punishment > death and each stage entails a shitload of DENIAL. That denial makes content in your mind UNCONSCIOUS. That means you don't even REALIZE that you have this stuff in your mind somewhere, buried, behind a wall of illusions.

So if all you do is take back a projection and then sit with it and don't really realize how you have unconscious guilt lurking in your mind, which your state of victimhood was made to cover up and distract away from, you may not even get to the stage of becoming AWARE of that guilt, to undo it. And even if you get to where you are undoing the guilt, you may not even be aware - there is such a things as UNCONSCIOUS SIN. That has to be undone as well. Only when all of these layers of DENIAL in the mind are undone, ONLY then will you find yourself actually WILLING and able and ready to wholeheartedly ACCEPT that the Atonement is true. That is the point where forgiveness is COMPLETE.

You can do this on any given topic. It doesn't have to just be the overall whole issue of separation. Every time you forgive all the way to the atonement you receive a miracle, and then can offer it. Every time you make a genuine effort to becoming WILLING to accept the truth - your innocence, that literally nothing happened in reality - your mind gets healed one more giant leap towards God. As much as you can accept at the time. This will have PROFOUND healing effects on your perception.

There was a woman that I couldn't stand, a social worker, who had poor sense of boundaries and was always overstepping her role. I had fear about seeing her, anger about her behavior and various other upsets. I thought she was the problem. Later I became willing to see how I was actually seeing some unhealed stuff about ANOTHER person, in this person. I applied forgiveness through various steps and went all the way to atonement on this issue about that person. This was a strong healing.

Later, when I saw this woman again, my entire perception of her was so different. She seemed like a completely different person, as though I'd never seen her before. I had no reaction to her and saw no "sin" in her. She didn't seem to bother me and I knew that I'd been accusing her of something that I thought someone else was guilty of, but which *I* was guilty of. The interesting thing is, when you lift off of other people your own sin, it doesn't necessarily make that person disappear. Instead, you see them more clearly for what is there, and what is theirs. It's interesting then how their OWN call for love suddenly becomes obvious, distinct from anything going on in yourself.

Anyway. I have many other examples where when I've gone all the way to really thoroughly undoing false beliefs and accepting God's truth, it's healed my mind in a major way and really cleared up my perception. It has allowed me to see "truth" where once I saw a distortion. Or rather, to see correctly and accurately where I once only saw what I wanted to see.

If you have been forgiving in some way but not going ALL the way to atonement, I recommend giving it a try. Even if it's on just one small topic. Forgiveness is only complete when you recognize there literally has not been a "real sin" in reality, that whatever it was only took place in a dream, and therefore has had no real effects.

Atonement DOES cure everything. There was an accident that happened years ago where I hurt someone. It produced tremendous guilt. A lot of things happened because of it including a major depression, ostracision from society and various other nightmares. I healed a lot of it over the years and rationalized in various ways why it was ok or not ok or whatever. But I could never QUITE really let go of it. That is, until I went to the atonement with it.

Going to the atonement on this, I FINALLY got to the point of realizing that what I thought happened DID NOT HAPPEN in reality. It only happened as part of a dream. All of my other healing efforts had been to somehow justify "what happened" or to explain "why" it was ok. That never healed me fully. I had to undo the belief it happened AT ALL. When I finally could accept and SEE and RECOGNIZE that it is TRUE, and makes sense, that I REALLY DID NOT DO ANYTHING, and nothing real can be threatened, I could actually willingly ACCEPT that God's truth is true. I could ACCEPT how God sees me. I could ACCEPT that I must still be innocent. And then there were tears of joy at FINALLY being able to LET GO of this "sin" and RECEIVE GOD's LOVE!

Only atonement can be said to cure. Miracles express from the atonement.

What A Course in Miracles calls "the separation", was a rejection of reality. We denied what was real and blocked our awareness of it. We lost touch with reality and forgot what it was like.

"The separation is merely a faulty formulation of reality, WITH NO EFFECT AT ALL."

"For separation IS the source of guilt, and to APPEAL to it for salvation IS TO BELIEVE YOU ARE ALONE."

This event - the fall of man, the detour into fear - marked our entry into a "separated state" of mind, which we are still in. The separated state is an entire system of thought in which separation is constantly being perpetuated and chosen.

"Separateness" is a mindset in which we believe in being cut off, we separate ourselves off from each other, we stop sharing and become selfish, we try to be special and different, we withdraw from reality, and we exclude ourselves in isolation and imprisonment. We're still doing this right now and every day.

"The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought that is PERFECTLY real in time, though not in Eternity. All beliefs are real to the believer."

"Separation is only the decision NOT to know yourself. Its whole thought-system is a carefully-contrived learning experience, designed to lead AWAY from truth, and into fantasy."

"The separation IS the notion of rejection. As long as you teach this, YOU still believe it."

Denying reality means we cannot tell what is true and what is false. We cannot tell what is real and what is unreal. This produces tremendous confusion. This confusion is insanity. It means we are now distracted with things which are not true, deceived by things which are impossible, believe in things which cannot be of God, and become lost.

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

Being lost in an illusory world and not being able to find the way out is the common symptom of all of us "separated ones". We're like little children who have been told a bunch of lies, we've been deceived, led astray, convinced we're evil when we're not, and have been sent off into the wilderness in exile not knowing where we are, who we are, how we got here, why we're here, what home is, where home is, or how to get there.

The real issue as ACIM says is that there is only one problem, and it is this sense of separation from reality (God). In our denial and self-deception we keep believing things which are not true. We keep being heavily mistaken. We keep pretending to know what we're talking about when we don't, we think all our beliefs are valid, we don't want to admit to being wrong, and we stay committed to lies.

What much of this boils down to is an inability to RECOGNIZE what something is. Whether it is one thing or another. To recognize that we are even really suffering, or that there is fear, or that we are in denial. To recognize that we believe something false, or to even have the humility to recognize we are probably way more mistaken than we realize. We don't even know what we don't know, and we don't even know the ways we are mistaken and confused.

"The intrusion of the ability to perceive, which is inherently judgmental, was introduced only after the Separation. No one has been sure of anything since then."

Not recognizing anything is insanity. This is why the opposite - enlightenment - is a recognition. It is a state in which you recognize clearly what everything is, what is true, what is false, what is real and what is unreal. If you could just get everything straightened out in your mind, and ACT like someone who accepts only God's truth (atonement), you would stop participating in "being separate". You would drop all the defenses and illusions and lies, all the false beliefs and attitudes, all attacking and rejecting and excluding and separating.

As far as heaven is concerned, they look upon us as simply lost lonely little children who are very confused and don't know what they're doing. We're like in a kind of daze, disoriented, wandering around in the dark trying to find something we think we lost without really knowing what it is. We are believing in things which don't exist, and are taking things out of context, and this leads to tremendous distortions of reality. These distortions show up as hallucinations and nightmares and being freaked out by monsters.

We literally see things which are not there, hear things which are not really sounds, touch things which don't exist, and believe everything our bodies tell us. But "only the body makes the world seem real", and without it the world would not seem real. Without it the world would be clearly apparent in its unreality, because it is so opposite to reality. We don't recognize reality because we buy into everything the body says is true. "The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen." It is literally incapable of detecting reality. "You made the body in attempting to deceive yourself." And so the body is a deceiver and everything it tells you is a lie, and the whole world is set up to tempt you to believe things which are not true. To distort your mind and take you away from SANITY, and towards insanity. To bind you to confusion and to the loss of self. Separate from God, hopeless and alone.

What we then experience when our mind is insane, while in this world, is what we call false perception. It's a distorting twisting perception in which we USE the world, which is meaningless in itself, and interpret it as though it is a nightmarish hell. We read into it, attack it, use it for separation, reject it, blame it, condemn it, hate it, all in order to split our minds further and go more insane. What we then experience is an "unreal world."

"The Separation is merely another term for a split mind. It was not an act, but a thought."

Jesus asks us in ACIM to "make the world real unto yourself." This means to see it only for what it really is. This doesn't mean it is ultimate reality, but it means having accurate perception which just looks straight at it and recognizes what is true and false. Recognizing its actual nature, which is an illusion and is nothing. And what you thought was a nightmare turns into a happier dream because you no longer are having a psychological nightmare in relationship to it. This is true perception and shows you a forgiven world.

The "real world" therefore is a view of the world which is closer to "reality". A view in which you are not insane, are not deceived, are not twisted and distorted, are not lost and alone, are not separated off, are not isolated or excluded, or selfish or special. It's a view which stems from being more integrated and whole and healed, without a split mind and without attack or condemnation or dissociation or guilt. Looking upon the world from this view can only show you "the real world", ie what the world "actually is", rather than a filtered and mangled view of it.

Either way, our task then is the return to reality. This entails recognizing that we are not in a state of reality because we do not recognize what is real. It also entails a willingness to admit to being insane, an openness to asking for the Holy Spirit's help, and a desire to move towards sanity. To become sane you have to become very deeply honest in looking at what you are believing and doing that is out of accord with God's will. Out of accord with reality itself. And accepting the atonement is nothing more than accepting reality.

"Perhaps you do not feel that a course which, in the end, teaches nothing more than that only reality is true is necessary. BUT DO YOU BELIEVE IT?"

This is also why Jesus refers to "reality contact", in that we are to move out of a state of being very heavily mistaken, lost, confused, distorting, deceiving, admit to our efforts to attack reality, and move our minds back into a more natural, peaceful, happy and whole state. To heal the split in the mind. As Jesus says all you can do is either separate or join. That means you can either split your mind or undo the split and return to wholeness.

So the whole path of ACIM or any spiritual "awakening" is really nothing more than a movement out of insanity back to sanity, our of unreality back to reality. Just waking up to what is real. To just being real and getting in touch with real existence. Real existence is The Kingdom of God. In order to become sane we're going to have to heal our insanity. And our insanity is driven by a "belief in separation."

Note though that believing in separation isn't about believing that there was a separation event a long time ago, although there was. THE separation DID happen, as a belief in a false thought. But it's now about realizing you are STILL believing in separation, you are still actively separating, you are continually using your mind TO separate, and you keep re-enacting separation over and over again.

Every time that you attack, condemn, accuse, blame, hate, judge, reject, withdraw, fear, become angry at, project guilt, make sinful, try to destroy, push away from, or any other mental act which seems to create a "distance" or gap between you and ANYTHING, you are separating from reality. You are splitting your mind. This is the belief in separation, an actual psychological act in which you are trying to keep the separation going, to deepen the wound, to emphasize the guilt and to split yourself off from being one.

Any attack you make which you think is an attack upon something "not yourself", is a result of dissociation. Dissociation is the same thing as separation, and as exclusion. It means you HAVE separated and have split, and now you think something is not a part of you. It is excluded from you, and you attack it in what seems to be "externally" in order to push it away from you. To distance yourself from you. This distancing is SPACETIME. It means you are MAKING time and space in your mind by rejecting stuff. The gap of separation, the pit of hell, is in your mind. And stuff only appears to be outside your mind because you HAVE separated it off. Ideas leave not their source.

Any time you attack anyone thinking they are not you, and that they are receiving the attack and not you, you are deluded. Your mind is attacking itself and projecting the split and seeing the "other part" outside of what's left "within". It has dissociated the guilty part of mind and hates it. And the more it hates it and wants it dead, the more it is wanting to increase the split and thus increase the insanity. We are doing this every minute of every day.

"You ATTACK the real world every day and every hour and every minute, and yet you are surprised that you cannot SEE it."

To see "the real world" is literally to simply be in touch with reality and look out from reality and look upon the world we made (the illusion/dream/physical) and see what's there. It is a state of recognition, in which the illusory nature of the world is recognized clearly. In which there is no DECEPTION. In which you are no longer deceived by what you see.

"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."

Awareness of dreaming is sanity. It is as close to ultimate reality as we can be while still slightly separated from it. Because "perception still is a separated state." So the entire course is really just telling us that we've gone nuts and we need help to get back to reality. We've become lost in a fantasy-land and we need to get back to the Kingdom of God. And along the way we need to see the world we made as "the real world", ie the truth about it in reality, and then leave it behind as we move on to actual existence. To our real life in heaven with God.

"There is only one way out of the world's thinking, just as there was only one way INTO it. Understand totally by understanding TOTALITY. Perceive ANY part of the ego's thought system as wholly insane, wholly delusional, and wholly undesirable, and you have CORRECTLY EVALUATED ALL OF IT."

"You are no longer wholly insane, NOR NO LONGER ALONE."

"When the "lies of the serpent" were introduced, they were specifically called lies because they are not true. When man listened, all he heard was untruth. He does not have to continue to believe what is not true, unless he chooses to do so. All of his miscreations can disappear in the well known "twinkling of an eye", because it is a visual misperception."

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.

"Father, I come to You through Him Who is Your Son and my true Self as well. Amen."

"To be alive and not to know yourself is to believe that you are really dead. For what is life except to be yourself, and what but you can be alive instead?"

"The sudden EXPANSION of the self that takes place with your DESIRE for it, is the irresistible appeal the holy instant holds. It calls to you to be yourself, within its safe embrace."

It's really just a matter of, are you really being your true self, or are you pretending to be something you're not?

If you're pretending, you're people-pleasing. That means you're putting on a persona. The persona is a fake mask, sometimes the "face of innocence", which tries to show people what you want them to see, or what you think will manipulate them into giving you the love and attention and validation that you yearn for as a result of hating your real self.

But even though the pleasing of others might please them, and maybe elicit some of the positive responses that you think you need, it's not really you that gets validated. It's the fake mask of a self that you put over the top of you. People like your little fake self but you only hold it up because you think people will hate and judge and reject the real you.

The truth though is that you yourself are hating and judging and rejecting the real you, by putting on this false image of yourself. While you try to be what you think other people want, and what will make them want you, you simultaneously hide and bury who you actually are.

It also prevents anyone from really loving you for who you are. Which means that even if you can get people to adore your fake presentation, it's still not you that they adore. And you constantly have to bend over backwards, walk on eggshells, hide yourself, stuff your feelings and avoid being seen, just to get some scraps of external love.

Another aspect to this is that by being unwilling to look within and to let people know that you have "defiled yourself", you also become unable to recognize the limitations of others. This produces false grandiose expectations that other people will be perfect toward you, because your persona is only willing to acknowledge what appears to be "good and acceptable". By only wanting to admit to that in yourself, in denial of the darkness, you become unable to see the darkness of others.

This then leads to an inability to acknowledge that other people are unloving, will never love you due to their chosen limits, that they can't give you what you want, cannot appease or validate you, and that they don't really want you because of their own egos. This harsh seeming truth lies hidden behind attempts to only find appealing "surface" signals that look as if nothing is wrong. It's an illusion of peace and acceptable and love that blinds you and covers over the deeper truth that things are not okay in you OR in them, and that therefore they can't save you from your self attack.

Often this all starts in childhood, seemingly, when the parents are not totally unconditionally loving, coupled with the physically-induced belief that you as a baby depend on the whole world to look after you. It sets up a dependency and an expectation that you will get everything from your parents or from the world. And if the world is not forthcoming with total love and validation, you'll feel empty and lost and alone, which will then compel you to overcompensate by busting a gut to try to get some response out of it/them, but it's like sucking blood from a stone. The broken saviours can't rescue you from your self destruction.

The less you can get the love from the world the more desperate you become, trying to suck up to it, putting yourself beneath it as though you are worthless, acting like a slave, hating yourself, castrating yourself and whipping yourself, trying to diminish who you are in order to only be what you think other people want you to be. And all this is a form of bargaining, trying to create a deal in which if you will let other people use you for their own selfish needs and wants, then you might at least get a little bit of something in return. So then you become a willing doormat with low self-esteem. Punish me please, thank you.

When you are not willing to confess to being broken, exposing the darkness and allowing others to see that you are not perfect, it makes it impossible for you to recognize that other people are imperfect also. Imagining that your ego is perfect and the your persona is without flaw, you other people as artificially flawless, which ignores their limitations and sets up huge expectations for them to serve you. And then they can't, and then there's anger and disappointment.

Only when you become willing to look at the dark stuff and let the light shine on it, will that same light illuminate the darkness of others, revealing their calls for love and their limitations. And this will bring an end to the external dependency, desperation for love, and the unwillingness to be your real self. And yet, paradoxically, by confessing to your "secret sins and hidden hates", which are not true of you anyway, it shines a light on them and dispels them. This reveals the real you, which has no faults or problems or weaknesses to be solved or defended against.

All of these disguises and facades and dishonesties and ways of not being yourself have to be undone. It means being willing to be exposed. And that means being willing to let people see and be aware of the various ways that you think you're defective. Your flaws, your sicknesses, your limitations, your faults, your bad attitudes, your off-days, the fact that things are sucking right now and you don't want to keep hiding it. That also leads to a willingness to be seen to be broken in public, crying and emoting and being upset around people and letting them know that no, you're not doing okay today, you're having a shit time of it.

But this exposure begins to let the truth in, admits the truth, and sheds light on what's going on. And actually this means that you're starting to step out into the light and let God see you. It means you're stopping hiding, no longer willing to be a fake self, wanting to be true to yourself. And you'll find that in fact your real self is profoundly strong and powerful and capable of remaining centred and peaceful no matter what is happening outside, if you'll only stay true to it and not keep abandoning yourself.

The more you are willing to be seen and heard, faults and all, crappy days and all, depression and anxiety and sickness and terrible attitudes and all, the more you're letting the healing come in. It means you're dropping your defences and lowering your walls and learning to trust yourself. It takes some courage to stand up and be seen. To tell people that you're not doing well. To own up to anything that's going on with you instead of just putting on a smile and pretending life is all roses. But this ownership is exactly what you need to own your true self, your real life, and your whole mind. Your sanity and freedom depends on it.

To know yourself, to be yourself, to trust yourself, to love yourself, to let yourself exist and be seen, to find peace from not having to modify who you are constantly, having a single unconditional response of love to everything, and meeting your brothers on this firm footing of reality and truth is our ultimate goal. Because God exists in the light and if we want to go home to God we have to expose ourselves fully. And in that exposure we are completely protected and safe. It is only the darkness that haunts us. And light always dispels darkness.

"It is only in darkness and in ignorance that you perceive the frightening, and you shrink away from it to further darkness."

"The steady brilliance of this light remains, and leads you out of darkness, nor will you be able to forget the way again."

"Everyone here has entered darkness, yet no-one has entered it alone. Nor need he stay more than an instant. For he has come with Heaven's help within him, ready to lead him OUT of darkness into light at ANY time."

"Coming out of the dark. I finally see the light now. It's shining on me. I know that love can save me." - Gloria Estephan

When you are angry, you are using projection to try to make someone guilty. It's really an attempt to take some guilt or pain or upset from inside of you and push it out onto the world.

"ALL anger is nothing more than an attempt to MAKE SOMEONE FEEL GUILTY."

When you do this, if you watch carefully, you may notice a sensation of "separating off". While it seems like you are attacking outwardly, as if pushing something onto the world, you also feel a sense of withdrawing, distancing, stepping away. As though you are breaking off from the thing you're attacking and being more separate from it.

Although the feeling you have may be one of hurt or pain or guilt or justified anger, which you're trying to accuse someone else of, the actual side effect is that you are attacking yourself from the outside in and pulling yourself away from others. So you simultaneously are pushing and pulling at the same time, which splits the mind, like ripping it apart. It's this splitting that actually produces suffering.

"Projection will ALWAYS hurt you. It reinforces your belief in your own split mind, and its ONLY purpose is to KEEP THE SEPARATION GOING. It is solely a device of the ego to make you feel DIFFERENT from your brothers and separated FROM them."

What this means is that you are trying to "separate from" what you see. In the workbook there is a curious lesson which speaks of you joining with what you see instead.

"For vision CAN but represent a wish, because it has NO power to create. Yet it can look with love or look with hate, depending only on the simple choice of whether you would JOIN with what you see, or keep yourself apart and separate."

"Today we are trying to use the new kind of projection. We are not attempting to get rid of what we do not like by seeing it outside. Instead, we are trying to see in the world what is in our minds, and what we want to recognize is there. Thus we are trying to join with what we see, rather than keeping it apart from us. That is the fundamental difference between vision and the way you see."

When I first read this in Lesson 30 I had no clue what it meant by "joining with what you see." Like, how do you do that? How do you join with a world which is supposed to be an illusion? How am I not joining now? Surely I'm not separated off, in a position to need to join?

But for sure when we are angry and expressing ego pain we are indeed separating off. We attack in anger and hatred. We make everything an enemy. We make the whole world wrong and condemn it for its shortcomings. And while doing this, our own mind is actually splitting.

The split then seems to take place between you and the other, or you and the world, not realizing that part of your mind includes them and is in them. So you split off from the fact that you are here AND there. And then you see yourself as only here, and not there. This is something you can actually notice happening in your mind while you do this.

To join with what you see then means to stop attacking, stop splitting, stop projecting guilt, stop making guilty, and essentially, "stop separating."

The separation from God wasn't just some ancient moment of leaving heaven. It was a movement into a dissociated state in which your mind becomes split, and then attempts to continue that state indefinitely. The separation was the beginning of the war upon yourself, and the ego tries to keep it going.

It is something that takes place in your mind between your mind and itself. It's actually a form of dissociation. It's a way whereby you experience internal conflict and attack upon yourself, split off part of yourself and see it as a separate enemy.

"Exclusion and separation are synonymous. So are separation and dissociation. We have said before that the separation was and IS dissociation, and also that once it had occurred, projection became its main defense, or the device which KEEPS IT GOING."

So notice here that Jesus is saying we've put ourselves into a separated state by attacking ourselves and splitting our mind, AND then we KEEP IT GOING, by projecting it through hate onto what SEEMS to be stuff outside or separate from yourself, in order to REINFORCE the idea that "it" IS separate from yourself, in order to keep perpetuating separation.

So if you are angry at something, you are trying to be separated off. And if you'll notice, if you attempt to "not separate", ie not attack, your projection of guilt subsides and your ego deflates and you stop projecting and separating. And what you then experience is more of a sense of unity or wholeness, a sense of joining ,a sense of love and connection.

You can actually try to "not separate", ie to not resist, attack, push away, condemn, judge, or make guilty, etc. Instead embracing and opening and allowing and accepting, loving and sharing and joining. Separation is you REJECTING stuff, trying to EXCLUDE it.

So really the question is, are we walking around being separators, or are we walking around being joiners? Are we attacking or healing? Are we projecting guilt or withholding judgement? Are we broadcasting hate and hurt or are we giving love?

"What you project you disown, and therefore DO NOT BELIEVE IS YOURS. You are therefore EXCLUDING yourself from it, by the very statement you are making that you are DIFFERENT from someone else. Since you have also judged AGAINST what you project, you attack it because you have already attacked it BY rejecting it. By doing this UNCONSCIOUSLY, you try to keep the fact that you must have attacked yourself FIRST out of awareness, and thus imagine that you have made yourself safe."

If you exclude, ie attack, ie project guilt, you are increasing separation and insanity. By excluding, you are separating off. This is forming an ego or a sense of being separate. When you are separate you will feel like the whole world is against you and that you are at war with it, that you have taken a side against it and are not on the same side as it or anyone else. This is because there is internal conflict in the mind. An excluding mind is a split mind, because it does not want to share a single space with anyone else. Another word for joining is INTEGRATION.

You may also notice that fear produces the same split mind, the same separation, and the same desire to push something away. Fear is an attempt to run away from and thus separate off from something else. There is a pulling away and a sense of wanting to be separate or distanced from something. To get away from it.

This is a rejection, just as the projection of guilt through anger is also secretly an attempt to reject. Anger seems less obvious of a rejection because it has overtones of attack aimed outward, but subtly you'll find that fear also is a form of attack in a more passive way. If anger is over outward attack, with subtle withdrawal, fear is overt withdrawal with subtle outward attack. Both are just more forms of the same attempt to SEPARATE. "Fear produces dissociation because it induces SEPARATION. Healing ALWAYS induces harmony because it proceeds from integration."

"When you think you are projecting what you do NOT want, it is still because you DO want it. This leads DIRECTLY to dissociation, for it represents the acceptance of two goals, each perceived IN A DIFFERENT PLACE, separated from each other BECAUSE YOU MADE THEM DIFFERENT. The mind then sees a divided world OUTSIDE ITSELF, but NOT within. This gives it an illusion of integrity, and enables it to believe that IT is pursuing one goal. As long as you perceive the world as split, YOU are not healed. For to be healed is to pursue one goal, because you have ACCEPTED only one, and WANT but one."

"Can you be separated from your identification and be at peace? Dissociation is NOT a solution; it is a DELUSION."

"What better vocation could there be for any part of the Kingdom than to restore it to the perfect integration that can make it whole?"

"The mind always strives for integration, and if it is split, and WANTS TO KEEP THE SPLIT, it will believe it has ONE goal by MAKING IT ONE."

"True depth perception becomes possible only at the highest order of perceptual integration."

It was only about a year ago that I finally 'came out' as a bisexual person and owned it after 49 years in a dark closet. Since then I've been exploring and expressing and working on more deeply coming to terms with this and living it more - being more visible.

But one aspect that has been nagging in the background is a fear that I will be attacked and judged and hurt by others about this. Largely this is based on an awareness of what people can be like, especially the bigoted angry people, and what's happened to others in brutal attacks and judgement.

I didn't realize for a while that I was taking this position, or playing at being a victim, or that it was even something I needed to do some forgiveness about. But then I became aware of it. So how does one forgive such a thing, where we're at the mercy of the world and afraid of what it might do to us? Safety is a primary concern of everyone and all of us can relate to feeling afraid of being hurt in some way.

I first had to recognize that I was even in a state of "not peace" about it, that I was having worries and thoughts about it, and this was not normal. It's quite easy to just "have" those thoughts and feelings and not even have the awareness to step outside of it or notice that it's a problem or something to even work on. In that mindset, even the idea that there's something wrong can be out of awareness and we just go through the motions of suffering.

Having recognised something is bothering me, I then start to look at it. What's going on here, who is doing what, what is this based on, and am I willing to explore more honestly what's really happening?

As I looked at this I remembered that if I'm immortal I can't really be attacked, so if I believe I'm attackable that's a mistake on my part. That cuts through a lot of crap. Nothing real can be threatened, so I must be believing something faulty if I think people can attack me. That gives some quick relief.

Then I started to notice that I believe other people are going to do something to me, have power over me, hurt me, judge me, attack me, maybe even violence. But then I had to notice, who am I in that scenario, what role am I playing? It becomes clear that I'm seeing myself as a victim, being victimised by others. They're doing something to me, and I'm afraid of it, afraid of being attacked and judged.

When I stayed in the viewpoint that people are going to do something threatening, I couldn't see an option other than to fantasise about how I might try to stand up to them, become angry at them, give them a speech, have to get into a fight, or otherwise keep the belief in being victimised while trying to fend them off. But that was like a closed loop of suffering and the cracks were starting to show.

It's always valuable to remember that nothing in the world is doing anything to me, no-one out there is the cause of me, other people don't cause me or have power over me, and I cannot be affected or changed by anything because I am immortal. So where does that leave the victim role?

I saw that I am positioning myself as a victim for some reason, and setting people up in my mind as attackers to play a role, so that I can get some kind of payoff. And what's that? To have a reason to find them guilty of something. To justify anger on my part or to reinforce defenses. If they were to do anything to me, I would be justified in revenge, and blame, and scapegoating.

So then again this recognition that I'm actually scapegoating comes in. I'm using these people and actually want them to be attacking me, am framing them as attackers, so that I can take the opportunity to have them look like they're the ones sinning, so that I can take advantage of their guilt and shove some of my own guilt in there with it. If they do something to me I can happily project my own guilt onto them, mix it in with their guiltiness, and get rid of it.

In other words, being a victim boils down to wanting to be attacked in order to get a payoff of being able to take advantage of the attacker and project my own guilt onto them. In effect, by becoming the face of innocence, the innocent victim, I can get away with saying "brother at your hand I die", and am willing to suffer and be hurt and die for it, seemingly a small price to pay if it means I can use these attackers to get rid of my guilt.

"Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die."

So then this reveals the basic dynamic of projecting and blaming. I first attack myself, I make myself guilty for some reason, I then find someone willing to play the role of attacker/sinner, I bait them and want them to attack me through fantasies of suffering, I hope they'll do it while pretending to be afraid of them doing it, and if they go through with it I'll have a great opportunity to blame them and shove my self-inflicted guilt onto them. Yay.

So there's that. And that has to be unraveled and taken back. Once you see what you're doing it becomes obvious. I fear being attacked for "seeming to be gay" in any way, based on seeming "proof of sin" that this does happen in society, reinforcing a victim role, so that I can hopefully be attacked and get rid of some guilt in the process. So I'm really using these people as scapegoats so that I can benefit.

What I then have to look at or ask is, why am I projecting guilt, and how or why am I making myself guilty in the first place? Are these people really the ones who are denying me, attacking me, judging me, not accepting me, OR ... could it be that I am the one who is attacking me, judging me, not accepting me? Maybe it really is that I am the one who is "not okay with" me being the way that I am, and the fantasies of other people attacking me for it are really the way that I'm using my own mind to attack myself.

The insight from this is that, I really need to more fully own who and what I am (as God created me, transcendent of body/sex roles), allow myself the guiltless freedom, and accept myself, and if I were to do this I would be completely unconcerned with what anyone else might try to do to me.

If I am centered and solid in knowing myself, and fully owning being myself, not only will other people's attempted attacks be correctly viewed as "calls for love" on their part - a way that they attack themselves, but also I'll not take it personally because it won't resonate with an unhealed guilt within myself.

And probably, if I own and am at peace with myself, I will give off peace-vibes, and other people will not feel drawn to attack me for it anyway. Because really an attitude of "I should be punished for this, please attack me" is an energetic and psychological invitation broadcast to everyone if I'm not okay with myself. A temptation asking others to fulfil the role I expect of them.

In effect then, the real issue I/we have is that we are not being entirely true to ourselves, are not fully accepting ourselves, are not granting ourselves absolute freedom, are guilting ourselves and accusing ourselves of sins and shames and guilts, and this puts us into an insecure position. We then seek to problem-solve this in a faulty way by projecting the insecurities onto others, asking them to play roles in which they do to us what we are already doing to ourselves, so that we can pretend not to be doing it to ourselves.

I find and have found then, that my real challenge is the forgiveness of myself, the undoing of my own self-inflicted guilts and shames, and the need for taking full responsibility for who and what I am. If I become fully aligned with and on-the-side-of myself in terms of acceptance and allowing, I won't need to play the victim role or imagine how people would do things to me. And thus I will take away the self-threatening mental activities that were causing fear. When you have no guilt about yourself, nothing anyone does can target you.

Because ultimately we really just are using our own disowned power against ourselves, which turns into a projected indirect form of self-threat, which produces a fear reaction. I was doing this all to myself, and that's what the "secret of salvation" reveals.

Coming to recognize full responsibility for "I have done this to myself" leads to the miracle of healing and to freedom. If you are free to be as you are, then you don't invent or interpret people attacking you for it, and can walk in peace. Personally I still have to work on this some more, it's a work in progress, but at least I can now see the way out by recognising what was the way in. Know Thyself is what 'pride' should be about, and not a victimy disowning and projecting of guilt onto fictional attackers.

"And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

"Only the self-accused condemn."

"I can be attacked by nothing but my thoughts."

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

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

The ego mind is a mind of separation and conflict.

The ego mind always has two faces - a persona and a shadow.

Within the ego mind itself, one part of itself is against the other part. The ego mind attacks itself, being an idea of self attack.

The persona portion of the ego mind is what most people most often identify with, thinking that this is their entire 'self'.

The shadow portion of the ego mind is the part most people disassociate from, project onto others, and hide unconsciously. This part of the mind we do not identify with, and believe it is not even a part of ourself. Therefore we scapegoat it onto others and accuse other people of being it.

But at all times, both the positive and negative are within the confines of our ego mind. Both the stuff we think is good and the stuff we think is bad are within our mind. And the stuff we think is our 'self' and the stuff we think is 'not self' (i.e. 'others) is still within our own mind.

Both the enemies that we perceive as 'not me', or 'out there', and the innocent victim that we try to position ourselves as 'in here', are both a part of a single mind which is at war with itself.

This war is taking place between your mind and your mind. It is a war of self-attack. Within the arena of your mind, you have these two sides, comprising the persona judger and the shadow retaliator. Or, the persona victim and the shadow victimizer.

Most of the time the shadow is projected and disassociated from, meaning we see it outside of 'our self' (the persona self) and disconnected from it. We literally believe through disassociation that it is not our own self, we want nothing to do with it, we try to get rid of it, and we use the persona part of our mind to attack it. Even though it's a part of (not apart from) this one mind.

We become so deceived by this 'split' in consciousness, this mental delusion of two selves, that the persona part of us, which we most typically believe is the whole ego, does everything it can to disassociate itself from the projected sin/guilt/fear/wrongness. It wants nothing to do with it, entirely because this attitude increases the sense of *separation*, or the severity of the 'split' within the mind, between the good-favoring and bad-favoring parts.

We need to learn the secret to salvation, according to Jesus, which is that "you are doing this to yourself".

What this means is, our whole mind is a container in which there is both the ego persona and the ego shadow. The stuff we deny, reject, judge, project, and attack is the shadow part, but it's still a part of our own mind. And the persona part which tries to reject that part is also in our own mind. It is not that the good parts are good or that it is being attacked by the bad parts that's the issue. That's not the problem. The problem is the sense of *separation* between these two parts.

The sense that the 'bad stuff in me' is 'someone else', is our major error. The accusation of sin onto someone else, which is really our own sin, is a mistake. The belief that someone is not One with us, is a mistake. The projection of our darkness outward, and our cutting it off from ourselves to create an enemy, is a mistake.

The darkness of the shadow ONLY appears to be dark and unwanted because of how intensely the 'good-seeking' persona part of us, that we retain identification with, tries to increase the 'contrast' between the two. The darkness would not appear AS dark if this separation or rift or split were not as pronounced. But this would also have to mean that the good-focused part of the mind be diminished in its exclusivity, its favor and its judgement.

See it is not just the bad icky shadow stuff that we need to 'get rid of'. In fact it is the ego persona that tries to get rid of that stuff, which means the ego persona is kept, and therefore the ego is kept, making this a trap. The more you try to get rid of stuff the more you manufacture a story about how dark that stuff is, and it will grow stronger as an enemy of the persona. All enemies are pretty much tied into the persona's idea of what it does not want, in order to make itself look better. But if the persona is going to attack the shadow, then the mind is going to become more split, and both parts are still going to stay within the confines of the single mind. So you will suffer.

Enemies are not the problem. Separation between good and bad is the problem. Separation between good-loving persona and good-hating shadow is the problem. And not realizing that both of these parts of your experience are entirely WITHIN your own mind, and has NOTHING to do with anyone else, is the big realization here.

You need to come to a perspective, an awareness, where you are looking at the contents of your mind, and realize that both the persona part of your mind is within you, AND the shadow part - the enemy, the attacker, the things you don't want, the parts you think are 'other people', that is ALSO in your mind. And you need to get to where you can see BOTH at the same time as being part of YOU. It is that awareness, where a sense of Self 'spans' and INCLUDES both parts, that you are in the kind of space where you can see that you are, literally, doing this to yourself. You are the victim and the victimizer. You are the persona and the shadow. You are both parts of this separated ego.

When you see this, and hold this perspective for a moment, where you can see both 'characters' if you will, both parts of you at once, you will see in that light how ridiculous it is that you are against yourself. The awareness that who you thought was an enemy, is YOU, will wake you up. The awareness that you thought you were against some other person but were in fact against YOU, will wake you up. The awareness that the behavior of the enemy, which you thought you had nothing to do with, is actually just another puppet - another part of YOU, that YOU are using against yourself... seeing that will wake you up.

You have to get to where you can see and accept that both sides of the split-mind war are WITHIN your mind and are both parts of what's going on inside yourself. This awareness will show you the utter ridiculousness of the war that you are waging against yourself, the roles that you are playing in your mind which you thought were distinct, the Self that you are - the awareness which encompasses the persona and the shadow, which is your real PERSONALITY. You are the awareness in which you see the war that you are waging, and the fact that you are playing BOTH SIDES, that you are literally against yourself with two artificial personalities.

You have to see that you are BEING both of those fake personalities (persona and shadow, victim and victimizer), and that it makes absolutely no SENSE that you can possibly be truly both at once unless you lose sight of this awareness. And since you are in this awareness, the 'illusion' that you are only one of these two parts cannot be maintained. It's like realizing that two characters in a play - enemies - are both being played by the same actor. And that awareness will set you free from the illusion of a separation.

This awareness is the key to salvation, because in this awareness and in the admitting that you are both the victim and victimizer, you will see how utterly futile and ridiculous that is, as well as owning up to the awareness that you are the one doing this... nobody else is involved, because the 'other person' was actually your own shadow, which is part of your own mind, part of your split identity - one of two parts of you. This UNIFIES your awareness, because you are likely willing to drop this stupid activity as soon as you see it, because it is so obviously insane and self-defeating.

When you see this... just wait to see how long you need to have this awareness before the entire thing just disappears ... it only takes a moment. It only takes for you to glimpse this, and both the persona and the shadow will cancel each other out. As soon as you see that you've been doing this all to yourself, both sides will collapse. The awareness that saw both these parts as parts of itself, is the light which will dispel this darkness. The darkness was the *illusion* of a separation between these two parts - the idea that one of these parts was 'not you'. But it is you. And that undoes the separation, so both sides have to now cease to be separate. They come together, unify, all contrast disappears, and ONENESS is restored. And it will be like nothing even happened.

The secret to salvation... you are doing this to yourself.

"The real world still is but a dream." - section 7 of Chapter 29, section 4 of ACIM.

The real world is what it means to still be IN the world, perceiving with Holy Spirit, recognizing the presence of the *reflection* of truth/God/love, still SEEING earth and the body, but seeing it completely accurately for what it IS.

In this state we are still perceiving, and yet our mind has entered a state of peace where we see peace "in" everything regardless of what happens here. And nasty bad things still happen here, but we see with such forgiveness that we know they are not true, nothing real can be hurt, and nothing is really happening.

It is in a way, a transcendence of a layer of illusions that was covering the Earth, causing you to "not see" the light of truth. Now you see both the Earth and also even more subtly a "container" of peacefulness and certainty. It is like standing on the outer edges of a scene, and looking in on it from a perspective of safety, even while the scene contains wars still raging, people being born into limiting bodies, suffering and dying.

In this "true perception", you are sort of seeing the background fabric of the physical universe. As though there is but at thin veil in between this universe and God, such that God’s light is starting to shine through from the other side.

In perception of the real world, there is an underlying awareness of unity and harmony and peace and gratitude behind everything. When the course speaks of "God is in everything I see because God is in my mind", this is the "level" of perceiving the "real world". We see God seemingly "in" everything, surrounding everything, but it is ONLY a reflection of God.

The mind is still *perceiving* and you’ve reached the absolute upper limit of what perception is capable of showing. It’s like getting a glimpse of heaven from across a bridge. You are still not in heaven, but it seems so close you can almost touch it. You will at this point still be able to walk around the earth and see people and do stuff, but you will also be seeing an interconnecting unity underlying all things, which will indeed seem beautiful.

You looking AT this underlying unity which cradles everything else (all forms etc) "within it", is the "real world" that you will be looking at. You will be fixated on the UNITY, not on the forms.

What this unity will show you, as a *reflection* of truth, is the way in which all of the physical forms within this perception are ILLUSIONS. It will be a perfectly clear RECOGNITION, an ability to see correctly, that everything in this "real world" is only what it IS, not what you would try to make of it as an additional layer of interpretation.

You will RECOGNIZE that bodies are illusions, that mountains and oceans are illusions, that death is an illusion, that birth is an illusion, that nothing is really happening here, and that all of the FORMS - the physical matter of planet earth - are NOT REAL. The "Reality" you’re seeing in the real world itself, the underlying fabric of the physical content, the "container" of all this, will contrast so strongly and clearly in showing you that all of the "phenomena" that is showing up, IS A DREAM and isn’t really happening.

So that means, the underlying truth that you’re seeing BEHIND matter, is a reflection of reality, and it is showing you that the matter ITSELF, seen in its proper context, is NOT reality.

This means the physical planet earth is part of the phenomena that’s showing up as an ILLUSION. It means the physical planet earth is essentially ON TOP OF or INSIDE OF the real world, but it is NOT the part of the real world that is showing you reality. It is a projected image, a dream, a layer, and that layer is NOT what is going to be "translated into heaven".

The layer of physical forms, bodies, earth itself, this physical universe, is NOT what is going to be translated into heaven. And you will know this, because you will be RECOGNIZING clearly that the earth is just an illusion, the "real world" is a SYMBOL of or reflection of truth that TRANSCENDS the illusion of physical matter, and ONLY the reflection of truth is the actual "real world".

And yet, it is not real, because as Jesus confirms, "the real world is still but a dream." And dreams do not exist. And they are not happening. And they are nowhere. And they have no real content. And they do not last. They are ILLUSIONS. And when illusions are recognized, they *disappear* because to overlook an illusion (forgiveness) brings about the recognition that what you thought was there (an illusion) IS NOT THERE.

When God then takes the last step by scooping you up and taking you HOME - meaning that you were NOT experiencing being at home while in the "Real world", the "reflection of heaven" that you saw in the real world (correct perception) is TRANSLATED into heaven, NOT the physical forms and objects and ILLUSIONS which includes planet earth. IT will not get translated into heaven. It will have ALREADY BEEN RECOGNIZED AS NOT BEING REAL, not existing, and having nothing to do with truth. Earth will have been recognized as a DREAM that does not exist. It will NOT be coming along forthe ride.

All the universe along with planets and stars will DISAPPEAR in light. Or lets put that more simply. It will all DISAPPEAR, full. Stop. Not because it has "become light" but because it was NEVER THERE to begin with. This is the meaning of "there is NO WORLD". None. Zip. There IS no earth TO translate. But the "real world" (true perception) IS translated into heaven, ie the mind is taken from a state of "perceiving correctly and recognizing there is no world", to TOTAL AWARENESS OF HEAVEN.

Quotes:

"The real world is a symbol, like the rest of what perception offers. Yet it stands for what is opposite to what you made. Your world is seen through eyes of fear, and brings the witnesses of terror to your mind. The real world cannot be perceived except through eyes forgiveness blesses, so they see a world where terror is impossible, and witnesses to fear can not be found. W-pII.8.1:1-4"

Comment: If the real world cannot be perceived except through forgiving eyes, then when you see the form of planet earth, you are NOT seeing the real world. Therefore, logically, the form of planet earth is NOT part of the real world. It is an illusion HIDING the real world.

Quote:

"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 there. There are no cries of pain and sorrow heard, for nothing there remains outside forgiveness. And the sights are gentle. Only happy sights and sounds can reach the mind that has forgiven itself. W-pII.8.2:1-6"

Comment: Just because the real world lets you SEE in a happy way, it does not stop you seeing "battles". It simply lets you see that nothing is really being hurt, because nothing is really happening. Literally you won’t be able to see sickness AS sickness, or death AS death. You will see a kind of unity which spans all of these things and reframed them in a different light. It will show you the "movie reel" of the movie that is playing out, so that you know it isn’t true or real. Objects and bodie will not seem separate. There will be a sense of oneness. But you will STILL not be 100% one with God because you are still perceiving. Perception is a state of consciousness, not a state of awareness.

Quote:

"What need has such a mind for thoughts of death, attack and murder? What can it perceive surrounding it but safety, love and joy? What is there it would choose to be condemned, and what is there that it would judge against? The world it sees arises from a mind at peace within itself. No danger lurks in anything it sees, for it is kind, and only kindness does it look upon. W-pII.8.3:1-5"

Comment: Notice that it says that SURROUNDING murder and death you will see a sense of safety, love and joy. The death is still going to be seeming to play out, but it will be framed in such a way that you will not be upset by it. It will seem like nothing. Bodies will grow and die and you will keep smiling, knowing that it is NOT PROOF that the Son of God can be killed. Seeing this is seeing "the real world", but it is NOT seeing heaven directly.

Quote:

"The real world is the symbol that the dream of sin and guilt is over, and God's Son no longer sleeps. His waking eyes perceive the sure reflection of his Father's Love; the certain promise that he is redeemed. The real world signifies the end of time, for its perception makes time purposeless. W-pII.8.4:1-3"

Comment: At the real world, you will be effectively "fully awake INSIDE the dream". Seeing a reflection of love is a sign of the promise of what lies ahead, it IS only a reflection. Full-on God Oness/permanent eternity CANNOT be experienced inside of perception. You are simply getting ready to go to heaven, and the sights you see now are a very small step away, as small as they can be, from Heaven’s true state.

Quote:

"The Holy Spirit has no need of time when it has served His purpose. Now He waits but that one instant more for God to take His final step, and time has disappeared, taking perception with it as it goes, and leaving but the truth to be itself. That instant is our goal, for it contains the memory of God. 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. W-pII.8.5:1-4"

Comment: Once you see the "real world", aka, "the world as it actually is without denial or attack", which is still not reality, where "real world" simply means "an undistorted perception of an illusion" - real in comparison to false perception - you will have NO FURTHER USE for it. You have learned everything thre is to learn. You have seen that this world is an illusion, that God did not create. You will recognize that forms are not real.

God now takes the final step to take you OUT of perception and into awareness. OUT of this universe and into HEAVEN. True Reality!

Time has disappeared, space has disappeared, all of the planets and stars have disappeared in light. The "fusing together" of all parts of the illusory universe, as "one content", gives way to such a presence of God, that it shines away absolutely all forms and images. All bodies. Planet earth. All disappears completely. Like being dissolved in water. No trace left.

The final step "takes perception with it as it goes, leaving but the truth to be itself". Ie, everything perceived disappears, including earth, only what is LEFT is the truth. Everything that was covering up the truth does not exist any more. Earth is not turned into heaven or kept in form or made into reality. It has been SWEPT AWAY. It was a BLOCK to awareness, a world made by those mad with guilt, a delusion, and it is now UNDONE.

What is left, after that, is simply, the same thing, that was there, BEFORE separation took place.

What is left, MUST be the same, as what was there BEFORE we dreamed of worlds like the earth.

What is left, can only be, the EXACT SAME heavenly state, that was present and created eternally, which has not been affected in any way, which contains no planet earth, which has no illusions in it, and no forms.

It does not scoop up the earth and merge it into itself. THERE IS NO WORLD. There was no world in heaven before you separated, and there will be no world in heaven when the separation is collapsed. Heaven is a CONSTANT STATE. It will not be blended with earth.

Where there seemed to be "two" states, as in "the two become one", LOVE HAS NO OPPOSITE, and therefore the two become one BY GETTING RID OF THE SECOND STATE which NEVER EXISTED. In other words, separation is undone, and the CONTENT of separation was a one-sided viewpoint which made the earth. Separation is not two sided, heaven is not on one side of it and earth on another. The side of earth is the ONLY side which believes there are two sides! Love has no opposite, so heaven has no opposite, so there IS NO WORLD *TO* translate into heaven.

The entire physical universe is going to disappear in light. Light is going to SHINE IT AWAY. There will not BE a physical universe. And this is simply because, THERE IS NO PHYSICAL UNIVERSE OR PLANET EARTH RIGHT NOW! It’s all an illusion!!!!!! There is nothing TO merge with heaven, because the world (earth) is not real.

"There is no life outside of heaven." (EARTH IS NOT LIFE)

"Heaven is an awareness of perfect Oneness, and the knowledge that there is nothing else; nothing outside this Oneness, and nothing else within" (NO EARTH, NO WORLD)

"The new perspective you will gain from crossing over will be the understanding of where Heaven is. From this side, it seems to be outside and across the bridge. (NOT IN THE EARTH) Yet 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! (EARTH IS NOTHING) The joy of Heaven, which has no limit, is increased with each light that returns to take its rightful place within it. Wait no longer, for the Love of God and you. And may the holy instant speed you on the way, as it will surely do if you but let it come to you."

Disassociation plays a big part in making your forgiveness seem much more difficult.

Disassociation means that you are "not associating your self" with something. You're trying to put distance between you and something.

The problem is that you use disassociation on your SELF. You split off a part of your own self, the content of your mind, by having an unforgiving attitude of judgement. Then you try to reject that part of yourself, label it, judge it, hate it. You try to think of it as something you don't want, that is not your self.

You use these tools of separation against it because this helps you to have the impression that it's got nothing to do with you. You want nothing to do with it, like you want nothing to do with an enemy.

It is possible with your mind, to so thoroughly disassociate yourself from this "part" of yourself that you've decided to hate, and to have such a strong sense of rejection against it, that you come to believe it is NOT YOU.

So now that this part of you seems like it is not you, you quite literally perceive, experience, and belief that this thing is 'someone else'. You believe it is "not me".

If you've ever had an enemy in the form of a person, someone who perhaps seemed to abuse or hurt you a lot or who you were really angry with, or who over time you built up a hate towards, it could be a family member or an old friend or lover or a politician etc... notice how you had this sense of wanting nothing to do with them. You did not want to associate yourself with them, didn't want to be near them, even wanted to "get rid of them" from your experience. Maybe you even wouldn't have minded if they were dead or something.

Well this is what happens with a part of yourself that you disassociate from. You attack this part of yourself so strongly and pull yourself away from it, split yourself off from it, and there is this seeming "rift" between you. A separation. You use denial and illusions to make it SEEM like it is not part of your "self". You dis-identify with it, and form a different sense of identity that shuts it out. And the way that you perceive this part - which now appears like an 'other', with an alien will - looks to you like someone completely separate from you.

So as you break off parts of yourself and reject them, you form an attitude of tremendous rejection and attack towards them, and this makes them change how they appear to you. They look like something you don't want, like an enemy. And your sense of 'self' is disconnected from it. You say it is not you. You perceive it not you. You isolate your sense of "self" from it so much that you really believe it is not you. And that means, it's not "inside you". It's not part of yourself. And therefore, it has to be NOT YOU. So... if it's not you, it must be someone else's stuff, right? It must belong to someone else.

So this is where you then perceive that this rejected part of yourself is in fact intimately tied into someone else. And as you walk around the planet and meet people, you will still continue to experience this condemned part of yourself, within yourself, but you will have disassociated from it so much that you will perceive it's part of other people. You will think it is theirs. And this is what we usually refer to as "projection". This is how you seem to project things onto other people. You overlay your disassociated self onto others.

So then when you're in this situation where it seems like someone is an enemy, and you hate their guts, they really have nothing to do with this. There is a portion of your mind that you hate the guts of, and you're seeing this on top of the person. And you're so dis-identified with that part of you, that you think it's not you, or yours.

Like, it seems like it the other person is quite literally the one who is doing this stuff to you, because you think that this hated part of yourself is attacking or enemy of what remains of your "self". And so is born the idea and perception that you are being victimized by "other" people, by "not me". And this also means, you are now completely irresponsible because you are allegedly not the one who is doing this to you. And simultaneously this paints whats left of you as "innocent" - the innocent victim who has nothing to do with this evil thing.

But you are not really in a victim/victimizer relationship with other people. You're in this relationship with this broken-off part of your own self, which you hate, which is STILL within the confines of your own mind. So the question arises, who are you? What is left of you, if you are not this part you rejected?

Well when you've broken off part of yourself and judged it and disowned it, the part that remains is what we call the ego persona. You think it is the part of you that you are identified with and which is your "self". You think it is all of your self, your whole self, because it's the only parts of you that you have accepted and allowed. It's the parts of you related to what you want to be, how you want to be seen, the good citizen, the successful achiever, the strong personality, whatever. The parts you "keep" are the parts that you have not disassociated from, so you think this is still you. You don't realize that the other parts you've cut off within yourself are also you.

So now within your total mind, there is this small portion that remains, the persona, which is who you THINK you are, and this persona self focuses on including what it wants and rejecting what it doesn't want. And what it doesn't want are the things that it judges and attacks, within you. So this persona attacks you. And it relegates part of you off as not worthy, not allowed, not acceptable, not lovable, not forgivable, not good enough, bad, evil, etc. All of those parts form this disassociated self, another word for which is the "shadow".

This shadow portion of your own self is still within your mind, and there is a war going on between it and your persona. The persona wants to get rid of it at all costs, and does so by continually refining and trimming down what's left of you, chopping off parts it doesn't like with goal of artificial perfection. If it were to succeed with that goal, there would be nothing left of you because it will have relegated so much of you to the hated shadow. The shadow part of you, the disassociated self, which you think is in other people, is really still within your mind, and there is a war waging between these two parts.

So the stuff you hate about you, projected onto others, is believed to be attacking the stuff you exalt about you, which now sees itself as under attack and needing to defend itself. But the hilariously ridiculous, insane thing is, both of these perspectives, these two identities, are both inside of YOU. You have a split mind. Everything you think is inside you, inside your body, you have kept, and now the surface of your body shows this 'mask' of the persona to represent where you stop and where "otherness" starts. And anything outside your body that you think of as "not you" is where you DUMP all of the parts of you that you cannot love. And by relegating all these parts to "not me", "other", "external", it is very easy to perceive that this stuff belongs to someone else.

So now it's someone else'e fault that you nice tidy ego persona is being attacked. Or someone else is doing it to you. Or there is a cause outside of you - so you think. Or you are being affected and upset by something, some separate self, some alien will, that is outside of what you think is 'you', attacking you and trying to destroy you. But it's really part of you. It wants to be integrated and it wants to be unified and it wants to actually cancel out the persona so that your IDENTITY can become WHOLE.

The separation between these two parts of you is the problem. The fact that the persona attacks you by saying only a part of you is acceptable, and the rest is not, creates a split in your mind and therefore creates the shadow. So now the persona has become the defender of a false idea of self, and the shadow that it ITSELF has created, now becomes its apparent enemy.

This makes forgiveness difficult at first because you walk around this planet constantly perceiving that everything to do with "other people" has nothing to do with you, is not your stuff, is not your problem, is not in your mind, is not something you put there, you can do nothing about, you are a victim of it, and you want nothing to do with it. This is disassociation. It IS your stuff. It IS your self. It IS your content. So you have to see that your upset about so-called "other people" has NOTHING to do with them. It's your upset about a part of your own self. It's your persona being upset about the shadow. Part A being upset about Part B, of you.

So you are at war with yourself. And you are attacking yourself. And both sides of yourself are attacking each other. And there is a separation between them. And you hallucinate that the separated-off you is not yourself. So this has to be healed somehow. The separateness of these two split parts needs to be undone.

The only way this can be achieved is when you become willing and able to see, and recognize, that this whole drama is taking place WITHIN YOU. It's really not outside of you. It's got absolutely nothing to do with other people. The problem you see in them is YOUR STUFF. It's your power. It's your attack. So there's this victimizer that you think is out there, and this victim that you think is in here, and BOTH of these characters are inside the whole of your own mind. Both of them are being PLAYED BY YOU. You are simultaneously being the victim and the victimizer. The part of you that you think remains - your persona self, is being animated by your mind. And the part of you you think is not you, the projected shadow, is also being animated by your mind - like a remote puppet on a string.

Now, when you see this, it is very powerful because no longer are you paralyzed by believing in disassociation. No longer are you locked in from being able to do anything about this as a result of believing it's totally under someone else's control, is not within the realm of your mind and is not something you can wield control over. By seeing that you are the actor who is playing BOTH SIDES, the person and the shadow, the wanted and the unwanted, the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, the innocent and the guilty, the attacker and the attackee, you will see this war going on INSIDE YOURSELF.... and recognizing that YOU are the one who is playing both parts, that must snap you out of falling for this ILLUSION that it's got something to do with someone else. You must see that your identity, your actual identity, is "behind" both of these split characters, and therefore YOU are doing this, YOU are creating this 'performance', and YOU are the one who is having a war with yourself.

So if you can see this, that you're doing this to yourself, that you're playing both roles, and nobody else is involved, then this AWARENESS unmasks both characters, because it is so utterly ridiculously that you can no longer be deceived by it, and you recognize that they're both you. So now you have become INCLUSIVE, instead of exclusive. Inclusivity is healing, unifying. The awareness in which you see both characters simultaneously shows you that it is IMPOSSIBLE for you to have been one and not the other. It's impossible for you to be maintaining this position of "I'm the victim who isn't doing this to myself". And it's impossible to also maintain the position of "I'm the victimizer who is doing it to the persona". The cover is blown. The illusion is broken. They're both you. And you're doing it to yourself. It can be shocking to see this. But it is liberating. It sets you free to see the truth of what's going on.

Anyone who sees this, that they are doing this to themselves, will be set free. The persona and the shadow both will be undone, and an awareness will take their place. This awareness is your real self. Or in other words, your WHOLE SELF, which does not have these parts disassociated from each other. Your whole self is not stuck inside the illusion of victim/victimizer roles. It is not deluded that someone is doing something to it, or that it is doing something to someone. So now you are set free by the light of truth.

This also then means, automatically, that you will stop believing that this has got anything to do with other people, and that they're not really your enemies, and they really had nothing to do with this from the start. You thought it was to do with them because you were projecting your shadow self onto them and accusing it, attacking it, trying to get rid of it. Jesus describes this completely clearly in the course, that we project our own sin onto others and then attack it in attempting to destroy it. But other people are all innocent. This war was never with anyone else, it was with yourself.

This is the secret to salvation. You are doing this to yourself. You are your own enemy - but not just the receiver of attack, but also the one who attacks. You are both parties. And its you that needs healing and forgiveness between what has become two parts of you.

You may not realize this, but physical matter was designed to completely obscure God and make it seem like he does not exist.

You won't realize this unless you also realize what God's nature is, because then the sheer contrast becomes obvious.

We most often think about God like a physical object, covering some amount of space. As if to say, God is a very large person, with his arms spanning different parts of the world, even different solar systems, and his legs reaching between galaxies.

But we are so used to thinking in terms of the limitations of space, that we would have to say that if his left arm is stretched out over the earth, his left arm can't be anywhere else. His right arm could stretch elsewhere, but he's one got one pair of arms.

That's how people think about God. But God is not like this at all. God is not a physical object, God is not limited by space or time, God is not confined to spatial relationships or sizes or distances or issues of location.

For God, the entirety of God can be fully present in EVERY location simultaneously. This involves absolutely no compromise. It's not that only part of God can pay attention to one part, while a different part of God pays attention to another. It's not like God has to switch back and forth, or can only give his "all" to one thing at a time.

God is capable of being FULLY present, in his entirety, in one location, while also being FULLY present, in his entirety, in another location. At the same time. He stretches across spatial boundaries and transcends limitations. This is his omnipresence. ALL of God can be present in ALL locations simultaneously. Full localisation in all locations, beyond trillions, beyond count, all at once.

If you can feel into that and get a sense of that, you might begin to get an idea of what God is like. God is not just some big cloud or some large expanse or a big container. God is transcendental of ALL known spatial limits, boxes, and rules about having to be in one place and not another. God TOTALLY transcends all known limits of space and time, and all rules about where things can exist and how.

So all of God, is in all parts of God, at all times. No matter where you are, no matter what location you're in, GOD IS THERE IN FULL. And yet he is also in all other places in full as well. He is like a giant kind of "blur" which is simultaneously massively spread out and massively localised. God is in-finite.

When you then look at what spacetime is ... this "universe" ... SPACE itself is completely based on the idea that "what is over here is not over there". A SEPARATION between locations, with walls of distance and time. In which what is in one location IS NOT IN ANY OTHER location. In which what exists here, does not exist there.

In spacetime there is no transcendental omnipresence. There is a strict requirement that every single object is local only, anchored to one fixed spot. And that object IS NOT anywhere else. It's not even really connected to anything else, rendering all objects separate. Not one single speck of spacetime houses the whole.

And this is where you get the massive contrast between God's reality and the illusion of spacetime. God is omnipresent. Spacetime says, there is NOWHERE that THE WHOLE exists. Whatever is in one place, IS NOWHERE else. Whatever exists is not whole, and is only partial, and is not joined to anything.

Effectively, space means GOD DOES NOT EXIST ANYWHERE. It is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to God's nature.

God is of a nature in which all of God is in all locations at all times.

Spacetime's nature is that NONE of God is ANYWHERE EVER!

Considering that we made spacetime in order to ATTACK GOD'S NATURE, you can then see that PHYSICAL MATTER has a nature NOTHING like God. In fact, it disguises, hides, shuts out, blocks, and presents a PICTURE which is so obscure and unlike God that, if you look at this picture and believe it, you are COMPLETELY BLINDED by matter. If there was ever a need for a perfect disguise, the physical world is it.

So now here we have the major issue. When you look at an object, you look at a single independent separate object. You look at its properties, its shape, its forms, its texture, its materials, its color etc. And while you are busy looking at those things, you are seeing the outside surface of an illusion.

All your attention is put onto this narrow, isolated, extremely confined limitation. And while you are busy looking at the object, be it a house or a car or a body or an apple or whatever, you are effectively DISTRACTED from the nature of God.

If you are not seeing ALL OF GOD in each speck of that object, you are not seeing. If you are not experiencing that what you see IN each object, no matter where you look, is the same ONE WHOLENESS, you are blinded by perception of form.

In essence, God's nature is to be fully present everywhere, and matter's essence is to OBSCURE that completely so that it appears that NOTHING is whole, THERE IS NO WHOLE, and what is seen "in" the object is NOT THE SAME as what is "in" the other objects.

So long as you focus on the ways that an object is DIFFERENT to another object, you are focusing on FORM. And that includes using perception to judge, using the mind to narrow and select, looking at bodies and cars and houses, judging anything at all on your own with anything less than wholeness. If you do not look from wholeness you do not SEE the wholeness of God.

What you have to then realize is that you are not going to be transitioning from looking at the same separate objects "one way", and looking at the same separate objects "another way". That's not a change. God is not like this. If you want to see differently, you have to look for the OMNIPRESENT NATURE. This nature TRANSCENDS ALL FORMS, transcends all differences, transcends all object boundaries. And in particular it is a vision which sees ALL OF GOD, in EACH PART, holographically.

So "vision", or "true perception", which is also salvation and forgiveness, is a way of seeing WITH an omnipresent mind, based on wholeness - not just wholeness as in "a big inclusive thing" but wholeness that INTERNALLY also features ALL of it in EACH part. To see a reflection of God - or to see God in everything you see, you are not looking for an OBJECT, or a finite limited thing, or a large blob, you're looking for a transcendental omnipresent holographic space-defying blur of love.

Essentially then, false perception, ego perception, judgement, making things a sin, focusing on form, seeing bodies and all that, is a way of narrowing perception down so that you are particularly CONVINCED that physical separateness IS TRUE, and that the omnipresent wholeness of God is NOWHERE to be seen.

As we rise up out of false perception and awaken, we are not just trying to find a way to forgive specific small things, or finite limited scenarios, or particular people. It's all leading up to a UNIVERSAL FORGIVENESS, which sees with the Holy Spirit's WHOLENESS, which is also omnipresent and transcendent. And we're trying to see that wholeness - ALL OF the Holy Spirit, in EACH thing, everywhere. Because he IS IN everyone just a God is.

To gloss over the differences of forms, to not focus on picking out "oh that's a separate body", to not dwell on appearances, or be DECEIVED BY one object saying "Hey look at me, I'm different to that other object, so we're NOT the same, so sameness is obscured and doesn't exist", is to be forgiving. It's about overlooking space and time itself! Overlooking all limits and all ways that the things in front of you say "we're not one."

The world was made as an attack on God, to shut him out, and to cover him over with a veil of illusions, in order to make it seem that God did not exist. We believed in this illusory world in our egoic perception, and we're learning to transcend and rise above it with the Holy Spirit. Eventually we'll see the REFLECTION of wholeness "in" everything we see materially, but this forgiving sight will also go so far BEYOND separateness that it will eventually lead to a grand exit from spacetime entirely, after a short stop-off in the "real world".

The real world is just another term for you becoming able to see a reflected transcendental omnipresence in spacetime, seen from wholeness with total forgiveness. And this is also why Workbook lesson 1 begins with us looking around us and having the SAME view of each DIFFERENT object. Because we have to now train our minds to stop paying attention to the DECEPTION OF FORM, and focus on finding a way to see the reflection of oneness - a sameness - in all things.

Not as a "big object", but toward ALL OF GOD ... IS EVERYWHERE I LOOK.

"Nothing I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place) means anything." URW1

"Notice that these statements are not arranged in any order, and make no allowance for differences in the kinds of things to which they are applied." UrW1

"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 was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear. And what is fear except love's absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him. Here was perception born, for knowledge could not cause such insane thoughts. But eyes deceive, and ears hear falsely. Now mistakes become quite possible, for certainty has gone." UrW240W32

"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." UrW158L7

"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." UrT22D6

"I thank you, Father, knowing you will come to close each little gap that lies between the broken pieces of Your holy Son. Your Holiness, complete and perfect, lies in every one of them. And they ARE joined, because what is in one IS in them all. How holy is the smallest grain of sand, when it is recognized as being part of the completed picture of God's Son. The forms the broken pieces seem to take mean nothing. For the Whole is in each one. And every aspect of the Son of God is just the same as every other part. Join not your brother's dream, but join with HIM, and where you join His Son, the Father IS." UrT28E8

"Nothing so blinding as perception of form. For sight of form MEANS understanding HAS BEEN obscured. Only MISTAKES have different forms, and so they CAN deceive. You CAN change form, BECAUSE it is not true. It COULD not be reality, BECAUSE it can be changed. Reason will tell you that, if form is NOT reality, it MUST be an illusion. And is Not THERE to see. And, IF you see it, you MUST be mistaken, for you are seeing what can NOT be real, as if it WERE. What cannot see BEYOND what is not there, MUST be distorted perception. And must perceive illusions AS THE TRUTH. Could it, then, RECOGNIZE the truth?" UrT22D7

"You, then, have two conflicting evaluations of yourself in your minds, and they CANNOT BOTH BE TRUE. You do not yet realize how COMPLETELY different these evaluations are, because you do not understand how lofty the Holy Spirit's perception of you really is."

It is vital to have a firm grip of what the truth is, in order to be able to make a clear comparison with what is false. The light of heaven, the immortal soul, the truth of the laws of God, the nature of reality, must be very clearly discerned. In light of this truth, all things which are not of God become very obvious. But you have to see IN AND FROM the light of truth in order to tell what everything is.

You cannot have clarity or see clearly without being able to clearly discern what things are. You cannot clearly discern whether you are a body or not unless you can get a clear view of who and what you really are. In light of that, with everything seen in its proper place, you can then clearly see that the body is totally opposite to what you are. Now it is recognized as not the same, and clearly not your self.

In order to find recognition, which is enlightenment, you must use contrast. It needs to become extremely clear to you the difference between reality and unreality, truth and illusions, spirit and form, immortality and mortality, innocence and guilt, health and suffering, eternal life and death. You can't find clarity if you cannot recognize what things are and why they are not the same.

In the ego states of confusion, there is a great loss of clarity and a total lack of recognition. All of its reasoning leads to total confusion about everything, in which it cannot tell what is true or false, it does not know whether something is real or not, it does not recognize who or what you really are, or are not, and it is incapable of telling anything apart. It is so out of touch with what is actually real, distinct from what is not, that it has lost touch with reality and is insane.

You need an anchor. You need something very very dependable and firm and unchanging. You need a fixed perspective. You need a light which does not waver and does not lie. You need even a conceptual or theoretical foundation of what the truth is like, what is of God and what isn't, what reality's nature is, what is true of you, and who you really are. Even if at least in theory you can build up a picture of the qualities and aspects of what is true of you, you can hold onto that and then use it to compare.

Comparison then becomes a very valuable tool when used AGAINST the ego. The ego would use it make all things part of the same soup, within which it uses comparison to produce inequality and specialness, to upset the balance and to produce war. This is a horizontal use of comparison. When you use comparison vertically to compare between reality and illusions, or heaven and earth, or spirit and bodies, or eternal immortality vs sickness and death, it becomes fare more constructive.

I found a great deal of clarification by simply focusing on heaven and investigating the qualities of reality. Building in my mind a description of God and or creation, or the holographic principles of a shared existence, looking at cause-effect relationships in truth and the nature of an immortal life. This really helped me to greatly "compare" this clear picture of the light, with the darkness, in order to be able to tell which is which. And this is what we have to do. This is what the "sorting out" is all about.

For me lately the fleshing out of "what is true" has for me been converging ever more upon "who am I". Recognizing that I need to learn to know myself, to acknowledge my original self as God created me, to recognize my immortality and permanence, my invulnerability and unchangeability. A sense of self which is rock-solid fixed and unalterable, an IDENTITY that I can not only latch onto but identify WITH, and recognize it as the truth about me.

This also provides for me now a basis for recognizing the truth about others. By accessing the christ in me and opening to the holy spirit, learning of my immortal nature behind everything, which is non-physical, I can also think similarly of my brothers. I can now compare and contrast and see that, in comparison to who people are in the light of God, the body and its form cannot be who they are. Sickness cannot be true of their immortal nature. Death cannot be happening to them.

This also reveals that all physical form is a lie, the whole world is nothing but an illusory appearance, something appearing to be something it's not. Something appearing to show something as if it's true, which cannot be true. And the reason I can discern it cannot be true is because I have an increasingly clear grasp of what the truth MUST BE. By very strongly and intensely focusing on God's truth about me and others, I can REJECT and properly deny the illusory lies of apparent matter when I am presented with it. I NEED the clear handle on the light in order to recognize the darkness for what it is.

As the course says, the Holy Spirit also uses contrasts, and that you need contrast in order to correctly discern anything. You need to be able to COMPARE God's truth to the world's truth and recognize just how OPPOSITE they are, how they are totally unlike, and how they are INCOMPATIBLE. And it is in the light of bringing these two opposites into awareness that your mind becomes able to see. ... that it must reject one of them, THEY CANNOT BOTH BE TRUE. When placed side by side and compared and are seen to be opposites, you CANNOT confuse them OR accept both of them. Only one can be true.

It is the totally clear CATEGORIZATION of all things true into the "true" box, and all things false into the "false" or unreal box, that gives you the recognition of enlightenment. The GOAL here then is to sort out what is true and what is false, what is of God and what is not, what is God's law and what isn't, what is real and what is unreal, what is immortal and what is mortal. Everything that gets in the way of this or makes it seem like the two are unclear and not different, is CONFUSION. And to become SANE again is nothing more or less than undoing your confusion about which is which.

We are to completely separate out the true from the false, so that ONLY THE TRUTH IS TRUE, and NOTHING ELSE IS TRUE. And that is a matter of comparing and contrasting until it becomes COMPLETELY black and white. Clearly discerning what is and what is not, is what this ENTIRE course is about. Increasing the CONTRAST between the two so that you can make a CLEAR choice and RECOGNIZE that reality is real, and unreality is not. Only in that intensely black-and-white contrast can you be CERTAIN, and therefore free from fear.

"You have need of contrast only here. Contrast and differences are necessary teaching aids, for by them you learn what to avoid, and what to seek."

"You can only GO BEYOND it, and look back from a point where SANITY exists, and SEE THE CONTRAST. Only BY this contrast, can insanity be judged as insane."

"They ARE together, and when they are SEEN together, ALL attempts to KEEP both truth AND illusion in the mind, where both MUST be, are recognized as DEDICATION TO ILLUSION. And GIVEN UP when BROUGHT to truth, and seen as totally UNRECONCILABLE with truth, in ANY aspect, or in any WAY."

"The Holy Spirit points quietly to the contrast, knowing that you will finally let Him judge the difference FOR you, allowing Him to demonstrate which MUST be true."

"For you will NEED no contrast to help you realize that THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT, and ONLY this."

"ou who are steadfastly devoted to misery, MUST first recognize that you ARE miserable and NOT happy. The Holy Spirit cannot teach WITHOUT this contrast, for you believe that misery IS happiness."

"The contrast between what is true, and what is not, is PERFECTLY apparent, yet you do NOT see it."

"And changing concepts IS salvation's task. For it must deal in contrasts, not in truth, which has no opposite and cannot change."

"In contrast, the Soul reacts in the same way to everything it knows is true, and does not respond at all to anything else."

"Nothing can show the contrast better than the experience of both a holy and an unholy relationship."

"The picture of light, in clear-cut and unmistakable contrast, is transformed into what lies BEYOND the picture."

"If sin is real then happiness must be illusion, for they cannot both be true."

"Now need you but to learn that BOTH of you are innocent OR guilty. The one thing that is impossible is that you be UNLIKE each other; that they BOTH be true."

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

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal. This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world."

"Let us try today to realize that only the truth is true."

"He made a clean distinction, still obscure to us, between the false and true."

"The real world can ACTUALLY BE PERCEIVED. All that is necessary is a willingness to perceive nothing ELSE. For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM."

"There are only two thought systems, and you demonstrate that you believe one or the other is true all the time."

"They are all true OR all false. It is absolutely essential that you understand completely that behavior is erratic until a firm commitment to one or the other is made."

"That is why I always choose between truth and illusion; between what is there and what is not. The light has come. I can but choose the light, for it has no alternative. It has replaced the darkness, and the dark is gone."

"What COULD you choose between, but life or death, waking or sleeping, war or peace, your dream or your reality?"

"Now MUST you choose between yourself and this ILLUSION of yourself. NOT both, but ONE."

"The real and the unreal are all there is to choose between, and nothing more than these."

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

"This is the world of opposites. And you must choose between them every instant while this world retains reality for you."

"You will have to choose between TOTAL freedom and TOTAL bondage, for there are no alternatives but these."

"You ALWAYS choose between YOUR weakness and the strength of Christ in you."

"Remember that you ALWAYS choose between truth and illusion, between the REAL Atonement that would heal, and the ego's "atonement," that would destroy."

"Consider what temptation is, and see the real alternatives you choose between. There ARE but two. Be not deceived by what appears as many choices. There is hell or Heaven. And of these you choose but ONE."

"Some see it suddenly on point of death, and rise to teach it. 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."

God has given you free will. Anything you choose is yours to choose. No-one else has any say in what your choices are. No-one has any right to decide for you what your choices are, to make commentary about your choices, to judge your choices, or to accuse you of making the wrong choice. It is none of their business.

Each person is solely responsible for their own personal freedom, which means that anything that a person experiences is entirely chosen, and not induced by anyone or anything else. God is the only cause of anyone. "I am forever an effect of God." One brother does not cause or create another brother. All brothers are equals as siblings precisely because they are not the cause of each other. No one else has EVER been the cause of anything you have experienced. If you believe otherwise you are confused.

You do not have the power to cause anyone else. No one else has the power to cause you. Being entirely responsible for your own freedom can only arise when you grant everyone else total responsibility for their own freedom. If you attempt to control, manipulate, judge, coerce, persuade, condemn, or otherwise alter other people's freedoms, you are denying your own and imprisoning yourself. It will not help you.

When you are entirely responsible for your own perfect freedom, which is a gift from God, you will recognize that absolutely nothing happens against your will. Not suffering, not sickness, not even death. "The power of decision is my own." Your sole responsibility is acceptance of atonement for yourself, so that you can offer it to others. But it is not for you to shove it down their throats, nor can you force anyone to be at peace, or to be loving, or to choose what you think they should.

When a person begins to lose sight of their own freedom, they lose touch with responsibility for the power of choice. And they begin to believe that causation and power are outside of them. They disempower themselves by blaming others. And then they automatically begin to try to make sense of why things are happening seemingly outside of their choosing, and it starts to make sense that someone else is choosing for you. And now you have assigned responsibility for your freedom to someone else.

When you think that someone else is responsible for your freedom, you are being irresponsible, and you will now depend on them making decisions that you approve of. You will encourage them to choose for you, provided it's the right choice that you indirectly want. If they do not choose what you want, for you, you will attack them for failing to give you what you want.

This then becomes the ego's mandate of "forgiveness to destroy", in which responsibility for freedom and for change is assigned to someone other than yourself, instead of you taking the responsibility to make your own decisions. You also cannot claim total responsibility for your own decision-making, while simultaneously believing that other persons are responsible for your decisions. Which means you have to allow other people to be entirely responsible for whatever decisions they make.

When you enter into coercion, control, blame, judgement, accusation, condemnation, taking sides, demanding that people comply with your beliefs, trying to force people to act a certain way, requiring people to make certain choices that you think are the right choices (for any reason), or have expectations or "needs" relating to what they do to or for you, you are entering into insanity, a special relationship, and false perception.

"God does not coerce".

"Your will is lost to you in this strange bartering, in which guilt is traded back and forth, and grievances increase with each exchange."

"Your will is free, and nothing can prevail against it."

You can easily spot when someone is moving into ego. Instead of being responsible ONLY for their own free will choice, they begin to displace responsibility onto other people. Causation is placed outside of them. They then begin trying to manipulate or "guilt-trip" others into acting certain ways, to comply indirectly with their wishes. The seeming "boundary" of freedom between them and others is disrupted, they trespass on the sacred territory of another, and the invasion of war begins.

When people are arguing about whether they should or should not do something, or what is the right thing to do, or who did what to whom, or who is responsible for causing other people to be sick, or who is putting who in danger, or any other dynamic where one person is accused of being responsible for another, the ego is involved. The two people are becoming tangled in a special relationship, anchored at the body level of insane illusions and fictional causes.

Interestingly, when someone is doing this, which always involves projection and anger, which is an attempt to make someone guilty, the person is claiming to be acting in the interests of freedom and the good of all, but are simultaneously rejecting their own freedom by trying to control the freedom of others. Or rather, they place their own freedom into the hands of other people and then try to accuse them of mis-handling it, meaning you don't really believe that other people are free to use YOUR freedom as they see fit.

To make a long story short, what other people choose to do is absolutely none of your business. This is why Jesus asks you to "be passerby". You are only free when you recognize that your brother is free. You cannot recognize his freedom if you are trying to control him, trying to get him to side with you, are waging a war and trying to win allies, or when you're accusing him of inappropriate choices (sin).

If you reject the freedom of others you are in fact shutting down your own freedom, but you do this in the name of trying to uphold your freedom, which is insane. You clearly cannot increase your freedom, or secure your rights, by taking freedom and rights away from other people. If other people are making poor decisions, then the consequences of those decisions are their responsibility only. You cannot be affected by them, unless you yourself personally make a poor choice as well. You cannot be cursed unless you curse yourself first, and other people's poor decisions DO NOT affect you against your will.

"Casting spells" merely means "affirming error", and error is lack of love. When man projects this onto others, he DOES imprison them, but only to the extent that he reinforces errors they have already made. This distortion makes them vulnerable to the curse of others, since they have already cursed themselves. The miracle worker can only bless, and this undoes the curse and frees the soul from prison."

When you move into an area of believing that other people greatly affect you, can destroy your life, can interfere with your health, can threaten your family, or can in any way do anything to you by their free choosing, you yourself have a mental health problem. You are denying your own freedom to such an extent that you think other people are the owners of your freedom. You have given them the power to do this to and for you, meaning also that you do not love yourself. And yet you accuse them of acting against your love.

You in fact want other people to be responsible for you, and in fact you want them to do things to you against your will, so that you can maintain that you are not free. You therefore use your enemies as devices to keep yourself imprisoned, and the more you hate them the more you succeed in imprisoning yourself. The only way to be free yourself is to grant freedom to everyone. Blaming people for imprisoning you or violating your rights is a great way to violate your own rights.

You might think that if you were to do this there would be anarchy, you would be vulnerable, idiots would run the country, fools would steal your possessions, stupid nutjobs would try to hurt your family, and the broken would try to infect you with their diseases. But these are actually part of your own attempt to reject health, reject life, reject protection, reject invulnerability, and reject safety. None of this can happen without your psychological consent.

You can't have it both ways. You can't be in the business of disempowering yourself and disowning your supernatural power of immortality, while at the same time claiming that other people are responsible for your wellbeing and are able to hurt you. You do in fact have a mind-over-matter power innate to all children of God, capable of rendering you immune and invulnerable to all the things of the world. You have an automatic God-given miraculous ability to heal anything and overcome anything. And nothing can prevail against you.

"Today it is the ego which stands powerless before your will. Your will is free, and nothing can prevail against it."

"Nothing can prevail against our united wills, because nothing can prevail against God's."

"NOTHING can prevail against a Son of God who commends his Spirit into the hands of His Father."

When you are in the business of making other people's business your business, you are not in business. You are out of business, which is why you are trying to get the business of others by being involved in their business. You busy yourself with their business because you have no business doing so. And by doing so, you have no business at all.

The people who are having an utter shit fit about whether or not to vaccinate need to pay attention to sanity and reason. You are immortal and you cannot die. No-one and nothing can happen against your will. So who are you accusing of being responsible for things happening to you? It is in fact you who is disempowering yourself and setting yourself up as a victim, and you want to have victimizers in your life who you believe oppose you, to pretend that you don't want their opposition, so that you can keep being a victim about it.

All forms of sickness are illusions produced by an insane mind, acted out upon a body. This is something that you do to yourself. "The mind makes this decision as it makes all decisions responsible for the condition of the body." Your mind has the power to decide whether or not to live or die, to be sick or well, to be happy or unhappy. No one has the right or the responsibility to take this power or freedom away from you. And no-one can. Only you can give it away, disown it, or try to lose it, by your own free will. That's your choice.

If you fear that you can be infected by another's contagion, or by some random environmental evil, then your mind is already sick and needs help. If you are not willing to receive the help, then you are in a bind. It means you do not want to be healthy and you want to die. And yet in this condition you will claim that you want to be healthy and not be sick. But you cannot be even believe that you can be sick while simultaneously bringing about the ONLY decision capable of making you suffer. Nor can you be blaming the cause of your suffering on a speck of particles, or a car crash, or any kind of external causation.

"No-one can die, unless he chooses death. What seems to be the FEAR of death, is really its ATTRACTION."

The real deeper issue behind all this covid panick, is the fear of death and "how to be safe". However...

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives. Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped."

"There IS no safety in a battleground. You can look down on it in safety from above, and NOT be touched. But, from within it, you can find NO safety."

"The world provides no safety. It is rooted in attack, and all its "gifts" of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. It attacks and then attacks again. No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus."

When we are body identified, we place ourselves on the battlefield and accuse ourselves of weakness. Then we set ourselves up for being subject to a warzone and threaten ourselves with causes on the same level. We then try to escape this threat with magical means and silly maneuvers which are supposed to somehow make you invulnerable and safe, as if this solves the problem. The problem is not whether or not you are susceptible to a disease, the problem is that you are choosing to believe in disease in the first place, therefore threatening yourself with inducing it.

It then does not matter whatsoever whether you choose to get a vaccine or not. Getting one is insane. Not getting one is insane. Both are insane because they are based on a false premise. If the premise is "sickness is real and I am vulnerable to death against my will", then you are already insane. And making the decision to be vaccined OR not vaccinnated are both equally insane outcomes based on a lie.

"The world was made that problems could not be escaped." You cannot go either way and claim to be making a sane decision.

You cannot escape from or have external salvation from sickness, while looking for external solutions to an externalized problem. If the world does not exist, who is doing this to you? Who is deciding that you are weak and vulnerable and attackable and destroyable? This is nothing other than your resposnibility and your belief. "I can be attacked by nothing but my thoughts." ...

"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."

If you are not able to accept total responsibility, which is atonement, then you are in a predicament. You say you want salvation but you don't. You say you want life but you keep choosing death. You say you want health but you believe in sickness and then panick in fear trying to scramble to find ways to defend agaisnt it, knowing it cannot work. What are you going to do? If you are not willing to entertain a miracle, then you are left with no other option. If you are not willing to forgive and rise above the battlefield, you have no other option.

The only remedy you are then left with is a solution which can at best seem to partially work, and at worst destroy you. This is true of any vaccine as much as it is true of ANY magical solution. No magical solution will ever induce wholeness, nor will it make you invulnerable, nor cause you to be what you are. Magic will not correct your mind, it will likely have no effect on your insane beliefs, and it will not ultimately save you from death. It is your thoughts alone that decide whether or not you are choosing to die, and this overrides all magic, and the world.

So you are then in a predicament because you cannot possibly choose a remedy that truly works, all the remedies are broken, the only action you can take is incomplete, and nothing external can truly cause you to be peaceful. "salvation comes from nothing outside of you."

"THERE IS NOTHING OUTSIDE YOU. That is what you must ultimately learn, for it is in that realization that the Kingdom of Heaven is restored to you."

A vaccine is, at best, an illusion of a solution. It might seem to work for some people and not for others. It may seem to work to a degree, but not totally. It absolutely MUST attack the body in some way as all magic does. It will not stop any virus from entering your body and beginning to take hold.

It will not prevent your body from being vulnerable. It will not ward off death nor will it cause you to feel safe. It might, potentially, seem to manipulate the body so that it might, perhaps, if your mind consents, avoid contagion or transmission of a disease some of the time. But it will not bring peace to your soul. God doesn't live in a syringe. Nor does God need booster shots.

If all you can choose is a senseless insane choice, a partial choice, a choice which you know cannot truly work, which can at best produce an illusion of health, and which may in fact hurt you, what are you to do? This is where you need to ideally be willing to turn to someone who knows better than you. Ask the Holy Spirit. Ask Jesus. Ask your angels. Get some guidance from a higher perspective. If you are not willing or ready to go there yourself, get their input. Let them decide for you.

And this again is where we must acknowledge the freedom of your will. No divine being is ever going to mandate a vaccination, nor are they necessarily going to always advise against it in a given situation. What is right for YOU, is dependent upon every speck of your mental state and what is appropriate, not only for you, but in the atonement plan and in the script for your life.

There may be a reason for you to elect temporary sickness. There may be a reason for you to meet certain people. There may be a good reason for YOU in particular NOT to choose a vaccine. There may be a cascade of outcomes that are only possible if you do, or do not, get medicated. There may be a good reason why you SHOULD, just as there may be a good reason you shouldn't. And it has absolutely NOTHING to do with anyone else, solely because the curriculum is individualized.

The Holy Spirit knows what is best for you given YOUR situation, where you are at and what you are ready for. He knows where your trust is. He knows what you are capable of and will accept. Turn to his advice rather than that of fear or the ego. And especially beware of the egos of other well-meaning people especially the ones who are religious about the "reasons why" you should or should not make a certain choice. EVERY reason on this level is fiction.

If you cannot or will not turn to the advice of a wiser counsel, and if you refuse health, and if you actively are choosing sickness, and if you are living therefore in fear of contagion, then your options are limited. Love does not enter where it is not welcome. You can be prayed for. You can be loved. But you may reject all support. You may have a death wish. You may want to die. It might be "your time", based on your plan. Who knows. I do not know and no-one else likely knows either. Matters are far deeper than some "statics" about viruses or medicines.

Long story short, if you made it this far. .... you are always absolutely free to make any choice you want to make, and it has absolutely nothing to do with anyone else. If anyone is trying to control your decision for ANY reason at all, they are denying their own freedom and are trying to make you responsible for them. They are like children looking for a parent to depend on, to decide everything for them.

This is because they have become undependeable and irresponsible. It's up to YOU to decide how to discern where they are at, and to be responsible yourself for your own choice. And whatever you choose, God loves you.

At the end of the day all you can do is make your own choice in freedom, and free from guilt, and do so decisively and with conviction. But not a conviction that turns into tyranny, or the attempt to recruit others to your cause. Let people be where they are at. Let them make their own decisions. Let them be mistaken and recognize that they are.

Not because they don't do what you want them to do, but because they are free of you. You have no business trying to coerce people to agree with YOUR fearful belief in laws that are not of God.

What I decide to do is none of your business, or anyone's. What guidance I receive regarding my own choices, is none of your business either. What I decide to do or not do has nothing to do with you either. And if you think that my choice affects you, you are deliberately disempowering yourself, because nothing happens to you against your will. This is not supposed to be a selfish free-for-all, or a war, where people are opposing each other and digging in their heels thinking they know what's true. Nothing in this world is true, it's just a dream.

Go within, and go above. That's the only place where there is any sanity.

You can't sell God, because God is not tangible. So what's the dam issue with supposedly being guilty for selling spirituality?

You can't really sell spirituality because you can't sell Spirit. You can't hoard and deny spirit to someone and then charge for it, because spirit is free.

Love is the only reality which can be shared, and love is the only "thing" which can be exchanged, being present everywhere already and open to all. Anyone can have access to it already, for free. You can't get it from anyone else, and nobody can take it away either. It's available to you right now freely. Because it is freedom.

Everything else is an illusion. Everything in this dream world, all of the ways that people do stuff. Whether they are selling objects or services or time or effort or information or therapy or whatever, it's all the same illusion.

It is the spiritual ego that has come up with this idea that "spirituality within a real dream" would be a sin. That first and foremost, the dream is real, and secondly, if you try to do anything spiritual for ego purposes within the real dream, that's a sin. Fuck that stupid logic. It's nothing more than the ego's attempt to spiritualize the dream while simultaneously repressing that spirituality behind a wall of sin.

So now this behavior over here, you know, selling knock-off goods for a huge markup and making tons of evil profit... that's ok and acceptable. But, if you try to sell someone a loving service or some healing or spiritual education or something that really helps them in a worthwhile way, then, you know.... SIN BE UPON YOU!

This is all because of the ego's back-ass claptrap system of logic. Bad and evil and terrible nasty things are okay to charge an arm and a leg for, but truly helpful beautiful love and spiritual inspiration which might get you out of the dream - NOooooooo... not allowed to mix that with the nasty evil money. No way.

It's bullshit. It's basically the ego's split mind, in which it has created a persona and a shadow. All of the stuff the ego approves of and wants to keep it puts into the persona, and all of the guilty sinful stuff it shoves into the shadow to get rid of it. The ego has a huge interest in getting rid of any real spirituality. So it shoves it into the guilty shadow department.

So it now divides up the world into "good and bad" and "right and wrong", and firmly puts any kind of spirituality into the "wrong" camp and anything that symbolizes much more "egotism" into the right camp. And now it's okay that the right stuff be acceptable and paid for, but you dare to charge money for the wrong stuff, suddenly it's a sin.

ITS ALL THE SAME! You especially should charge money for your spiritual services and products and you perhaps should be getting even MORE money for that than you would get for selling a pile of doughnuts. Why is it LESS VALUABLE?

I've seen so many well intentioned, good-hearted, spiritual people, develop a spiritualized ego version of value, where they try to symbolically implement spiritual concepts into their behaviors in the illusion. This is LEVEL CONFUSION! It does not work. And in almost every single example, these people's endeavors either never barely get off the ground, they flounder and struggle and then die, or they just flat out die before they get started.

This world is not READY to function on a basis of never-ending generosity and gratitude and freedom and selfless giving. To expect it to do so is to set up a tiny tent in an unnoticed corner and be basically ignored. The system will not acknowledge you. People have LEARNED that money symbolizes value, so why is it not okay to align money with what is truly VALUABLE? Why can we charge for guns and wars, but not for peace and love? SINNNNNNNN!!!!!

And then there will be this super-selfless symbolic notion of "money is evil" and "profit isn't spiritual" and .. you know, you should not have any more at all if you are spiritual because money is "real ego" and illusory spirituality within the dream is "not ego". So... only charge for the parts of the dream that you deem as ego and don't charge for the spiritual parts. It's bullshit. Self deception.

So many potential "spiritual businesses", or services, or people trying to create a community, or people opening up retreat centers, or creating courses, or spending hours and hours writing books, or putting their heart and soul into healing practices, just basically FLOP because they have fallen for the ego's trick of a level-confusion based model of what's the right thing to do. ie... ALWAYS, do not earn money from your "spirituality" in the dream, otherwise you are SINFUL.

i.e., if it doesn't LOOK LIKE it's spiritual, and if there isn't a lot of SACRIFICE happening, then you better say some hail Mary's. And heaven forbid you might actually value yourself and your time and effort enough to ask for money and make some profit. I mean, okay, let's all start a non-profit organization and have the absolute bare minimum of income to get by and barely be able to expand the business at all, it can't possibly grow because there isn't enough cash flow, and it just sits there shriveling up.

Imagine just how amazingly helpful a "spiritual business" could be if it actually were profitable and made some money and not only supported the people who were providing the service, allowing them to enjoy abundance, but also produced enough funds to expand and produce far more materials, goods, services, and helpful support, than could have been possible on a bare-minimum income. Why not?

Why do we have to grovel for donations and suffer in the gutter of hell trying to scrape by just because we're being all spiritual and "good" and buying into the ego persona of people-pleasing, self sacrifice and loss? Like, what is actually going to happen if you strike a profit? Will there be a lightning bolt? Is God going to judge you? Will you be a SINNER? How about some healthy guilt?

It's one thing to let Spirit guide you and be all lovely and everything is free and "don't mind me", but ... IS IT EFFECTIVE? Is it working? Not really. It's a matter of playing small and having false humility. Just make some goddam money and get on with it. Then use that extra money to be even more effective at helping people with even more products and goods and services.

Sure money isn't that important, really. It's just an illusion. It's not meaningful. It's not something you want to keep accumulating for some ego desire. So don't do it for that reason. Do it because IN THIS WORLD, according to the stupid rules of this society, you need to function based on money in order to find success and be effective. It's the rules of the game. It's the system that we're immersed in.

Try to go outside of this and unless you have really, really strong faith and miracle-working power, you're going to find yourself poor. I've seen it happen to many people who deserve better. There is nothing wrong with making money and enjoying it. Is it real? Is it a real sin? Does it prove you are really a sinner? Can you do it without believing that it is sinful or guilty whatsoever? Wouldn't that be SPIRITUAL?!

Don't be yet another heartfelt wannabe trying to be of service to God and not using any of the tools that are possible when you can afford it. Don't set up shop and be all.. you know, I won't charge anything, I'll just barely even mention that I would ... maybe accept donations, if you shoot me first. And .. maybe I should pay YOU to take this stuff off my hands? Wouldn't that be truly selfless.

This is all just symbolism. Trying to make the dream spiritual and trying to behave in a certain way within it in order to "be" spiritual or seen as spiritual. Don't do that. It's an egotistical belief in sacrifice and limitation. That's not the abundance God has planned for you and its not the abundance God wants you to experience. Why can't you be RICH AND SPIRITUAL? What does it matter if your spirituality is going to override any sense of sin or guilt relating to the riches anyway? Then you can REALLY make an impact on this crazy world.

The only reason people do all this is because of the belief that the WORLD IS REAL, and therefore if you are "being spiritual" inside a real world, you must SACRIFICE in order to not associate yourself with the parts of this real world that are clearly the realm of the ego. And so this is nothing more than the age-old attitude of believing the world is real and that it contains some good parts and bad parts. That's NOT SPIRITUAL AT ALL.

If the world is not real, and sin is not real, and you can't be guilty, and there's nothing to fear, then WHY THE FUCK NOT make some money and enjoy it and get yourself into a situation where you actually CAN make a big difference because you have the FUNDS to pull it off? Many things in this world you simply cannot do without money. You can't run a website without costs. You can't create books without a cost. You can't provide a training course without some costs. You can't heal people without it costing some time. That's just how it works here. Accept it. It's okay to require money.

Are you comfortable only with a donation? Then that shows you how much you believe in sin. Are you able to move past donations to maybe an optional, soft-sell? Hmm.. okay... you still believe in sin. Can you go all out and make TONS OF MONEY from your enterprise? hmm... totally and utterly sinful right? NO! It's hilarious to think this can prove sin or make separation real or that God would blink an eye and be pissed at you. Wake up.

Knock yourself out. You can't sin anyway.

The ego is a devious, cunning, manipulative, deceptive monster, acting in deep unconsciousness, unaware of truth, unaware of the present, threatened by everything, threatening to everything, vicious and vile, mean and hateful, deeply suspicious, riddled with terror, certain of the death of itself and everyone else, deeply sick, distorted and distorting, murderous, vengeful and spiteful, dark and twisted, powerless, victimized and a victimizer, deeply sorrowful, alone, separate, lost, confused, uncertain of anything, knowing nothing, and thoroughly deluded.

This 'mind', when present in another person, will attempt to 'tempt' you to agree with it. Particularly if the 'pain body' of another person has activated and is taking over their consciousness, or rather, rendering the person unconscious and unaware of who they are or what the truth is. The ego will distort everything and yet is seemingly extremely cunning and clever at knowing when to strike, how to do so, and how to get what it wants. It can be seemingly formidable and a vicious enemy.

It wants to 'tempt' you to believe what it believes, by attempting to pull you into a drama, to lower your awareness, to distract you from truth, to mislead you, to push your buttons, to trigger off your unhealed upsets which may even entail triggering things that are deeply buried in yourself of which you are also mostly unconscious, just so that it can get you to react negatively and to enter into a state of separation. Once accomplished the ego is then 'feeding off of you' by attempting to take power from you, to possess you with its 'evil' intentions, to convert you to its thought system, to get you to be persuaded that its version of truth is the real truth, and to essentially corrupt you and diminish your light.

It is therefore a significant, deep challenge, to be around someone who is strongly in this kind of mindset, or who is having a pain-body attack, or who has a lot of negative emotion that is unhealed, or who has identified strongly with their ego self. Everything the ego does through another person or in them attempts to 'attract' you out of your peace and out of your mind, to 'tempt' you to believe things which are not true, and to get you to basically side with it so that you are resonating with it. Even as you begin to resonate with it, it is aligning with you and merging with you and thereby accessing you and absorbing you into it like a sponge. It is magnetic in its appeal that death is real and that you should be at war, in conflict with the other person, resisting of them, hating of them, rejecting of them, judging of them, reacting to their lies, or being drawn to basically lose your cool over the way the ego is behaving.

This is especially hard to deal with when you are attached to the person and depend on them, or when you rely on them being sane and sensible, or when you have expectations that the person should be a certain way in order to please your own unconscious bullshit, or that you have 'special bargains' with them in your 'special relationship' that you are still trying to fulfill but which are being ripped apart by the ego's refusal to honor the 'facade' or 'persona' that covers up its darkness (the shadow). When the gloves are off, all hell seems to break loose and at this time it can be extremely difficult to remain unaffected.

It is, however, a tremendous opportunity for learning and growth. Like it or not you will be driven to have to confront the things in yourself that cause you to become deceived by the ego in the other person, including having to examine and let go of attachments, having to look at and release and let go of special relationships and artificial ways of relating, to question why you have reactions or are deeply triggered by certain behaviors, to seek out God even more fervently in order to stay present in the truth, to come to realize that unconditional love is called for at all times because nothing else works, to be confronted with the ways in which your own ego is powerless to solve problems and how you yourself cannot fix anything, to question the motivation for fixing and saving, to be confronted with why it is that you fall for temptations or buy into the drama which is being put there as a deliberate provocation, to recognize where you are coming from your head and not your heart, to find levels of surrender and letting go that you never thought was possible, and to propel you into a greater awareness of God and yourself.

See, the bullshit drives you to awaken, when you allow it to, and when you use it to do so, by deciding that you will learn the lesson that it presents and that you will use it for the purpose of becoming even more honest. As such then it is not a curse but a blessing. And what may at first seem to be a horrendous terrifying unwanted attack may turn into a reason for salvation and a doorway to awakening. It is a catalyst (thank you for that word Holy Spirit). A catalyst for awakening, by getting you to be heavily triggered and to have to look at all the reasons why you are reacting so that you can heal and take responsibility for yourself.

All the ways you fail will be highlighted intensely because the ego in the other person will be very suspicious and rejective and quick to point out your faults and failures. It will not tolerate even tiny suggestions that you are innocent and will insinuate and accuse you of a great many things, some of which you are in fact doing that you do not want to admit to, and some things which you are in fact not doing which still cause you to react in some way.

The ego is like a highly highly untrusting scared sensitive little mouse that has absolutely no trust and no allegiance and no willingness to live or to see anything other than your sins. And because it powerfully highlights your sins, this presents a wonderful opportunity for you to confront false beliefs in yourself and to seek healing for your own sins. It is intense and painful and unpleasant, perhaps, but at the same time, you could think of it as a service, helping you to awaken by being as provocative and triggering of and pointing out all the ways you are being even slightly unloving, so that you will be forced to have to 'cunjour' up other-worldly amounts of love and forgiveness and unconditionality.

Ultimately it is for your good, even though being faced with the profound unconsciousness of ego and its pain can be terrifying and disempowering. For that you can be thankful, if you can finally let go enough to learn that the other person, who seems to have this evil ego inside them, is in fact NOT that ego, and that everything they believe is true about themselves and you is FALSE. They then become your savior, or at least, they provide the 'material' which you can USE to learn to recognize what is true and what is false. They can provide the catalyst for awakening and give motivation to your heart. And you can learn to forgive them, and overlook them, and see instead the light in them, and dismiss and filter out all of the ego's noise and screeches of suffering, which can be very difficult.

In this way and this way alone you could say that the ego is there to wake you up, or at least to provide the 'curriculum' and learning materials and role-play that may be necessary for you to be forced to take a really hard, deep look at yourself and what you believe. And it may be that the ONLY thing that seems to possibly 'work' with an ego-driven person is to COMPLETELY ignore what their ego is asserting, to learn to RECOGNIZE the sometimes subtle deviousness of the ego so that you can stop listening to it, and so that you can become aware that unconditional love is the ONLY TRULY HELPFUL REMEDY that you can offer.

In a way, the vicious 'evil' ego in another person is like a 'test' or exam, a very hard one, in which even slight unholiness in yourself will be pointed out in a big way and used against you. In fact, all of the ways in which you are yourself unconscious or unholy will become your own undoing, as you fall into a cascade of reactions and ego drama, trying desperately to 'fight off' the attacks that you believe are coming from the other person, but which in fact are your OWN self-attacks that you are now projecting onto them. The person in 'pain' is now like a final examiner, determining whether you are still easily fooled, whether you fall for ego lies, whether you still believe dark things about yourself, whether you still use ego yourself, and therefore whether you are truly 'clean' of ego to be in any kind of position to judge the other person. In this way, the ego becomes your motivation for admitting to and healing yourself, rising out of your own ego attitudes, removing your own darkness from your own mind, and stepping into light and power at an entirely higher level of functioning.

There is a way out of hell, but we have lessons to learn and a curriculum to undertake and things that we need to let go of and stop doing and there are also things we have yet to 'access' and become empowered by that we have yet to develop trust in. It's a journey - a journey without distance, and we are guaranteed to find our way home to love. Only in the context that the ego is helping you to awaken, to recognize how the ego is completely false, how it is INSANE, and ultimately does not exist, is the ONLY way it in which it is ever by any stretch of the imagination 'your friend'. Only be using it as a MIRROR or 'tester' to weed out the unconscious darkness within yourself, and to then correct it with Holy Spirit's truth, can you then be 'using' the ego for awakening. Coexisting with it is not the goal, or possible. Freedom from the ego is the goal and it is perfectly attainable. In a way, you 'need' the ego to help you awaken, but you awaken FROM it's and in spite of it.

And then you return to who you really are: invulnerable, unassailable, immortal, unconditional, innocent and holy.

It's really impossible to separate from God, given that God is everywhere and there is nowhere else to go. But the ego mind believes that the impossible is possible. It thinks it can actually succeed in being separate and can have an existence somewhere that God doesn't exist. To be separate from God, if it were possible, would have to mean you exist somewhere that God is absent, and that is why following the separation, God seemed to no longer be present.

But this is all really an illusion, being impossible in truth, and only by some illusory interpretation of what is happening could you believe that you have actually succeeded in achieving this separation. It's as if you found some kind of loophole or exception or special interpretation which allowed the impossible to become possible. There must be an illusion that God does not exist, otherwise you couldn't possibly believe that separation is possible, it would make no sense, and you would not believe it. Only by hiding or denying the truth does an illusion seem to make sense to you.

This mentality carries on through all stages of separation from sin to guilt to fear to death. At every step, we actually believe that if we buy into the ego's illusion, we're actually becoming capable of succeeding at doing something impossible. We then believe that doing it actually "works", that we're actually getting away with it. And because in this illusion there doesn't seem to be any reason why you can't do this, it seems justified and as though you have the freedom to do it. Nothing therefore seems to be stopping you from getting away with murder - the murder of God and His Holy Son.

It's not that you're an inherently evil person. You don't automatically see things in a twisted way. You're not fundamentally broken. You actually keep with you at all times an attempt to maintain some semblance of truth. You also always retain an attempt to make sense out of what you are experiencing, using some kind of logic or reasoning to explain it, to come to conclusions based on it, and to then act on those conclusions. Decisions are actions based on all previous conclusions.

You're actually just in the business of trying to make sense of your experience of reality (or unreality), and base your conclusions on all of the information that you are aware of. You look around you at everything you can see, and you look within at everything you aware of taking place within yourself, and you look at other people, and often it seems to just make sense that they must be the cause of your upset. You do not see what the real cause is because you do not see fully, or the whole of what is happening, but you believe you do.

At all times you believe that whatever is within the scope of your awareness is all that exists, is all that is true, and is all that is happening. This is true whether you are fully with God or whether you are hiding in a dark corner in an unconscious state. The extent of your awareness determines what you can SEE, and therefore the scope of your idea of "wholeness". You believe, even if you are not whole and are in denial of a great many facts, that you are a whole person, with a whole perception, seeing the whole situation clearly.

Given that you believe this is true, and you do not suspect there is anything hidden from you, you then attempt to make sense from the evidence. You look at it and examine it and judge it and then conclude certain things based on that. The trouble is, you're not really in a state of wholeness or full awareness, and there are many important facts and pieces of truth which are hidden from your awareness.

Whatever the scope of your awareness is, you'll also find that this correlates to your sense of identity. You will ALWAYS be believing that you are a whole self, regardless of how limited you are. However, when you become more conscious, to be aware of parts of you that you were blind to before, you become aware that you are more than you thought you were.

Your awareness uncovers not only the truth that love is present, but it also uncovers the rest of your hidden identity. And if you are unaware, you do not fully or clearly perceive who you really are, and so do not see all of your motivations or beliefs, or the full extent of your will, or the full extent of what you might be doing in the situation.

If you are having any kind of experience of unhappiness, unlove, unforgiveness, fear or guilt, punishment or suffering or upset, it is guaranteed that you must be in some kind of state that isn't really whole. Love and forgiveness and happiness come from true wholeness, so if this is absent, then immediately it means that you have some blocks to your awareness which are preventing you from being aware of those conditions. And yet you will believe that you are whole, in your partiality, and that there is nothing more to see.

Whatever is outside of your awareness you will believe does not exist at all, and you might not even suspect that there IS anything else. Whatever is unconscious to you is outside of your conscious awareness, as though it is nowhere, and so you do not see it. Any evidence it might provide you will dismiss. That is, unless you are willing to look deeper for the truth.

If you are upset or unhappy, and given that happiness is wholeness, you cannot truly be whole. There must be something blocked or something you are unaware of. But you will believe you are aware of everything. You don't see what you're choosing or why you're choosing it. You don't see what you're doing to yourself. You don't see who is truly responsible for what you are experiencing. You don't see how you might be using your reactions or behaviors for a secret motive. And you don't remember having asked for suffering.

Along comes what appears to be a situation which seems to attack you, and you look inside the confines of your awareness to examine all the possible causes or influences or reasons why it is happening. You use your ego mind's logic to try to come to some kind of understanding, to try to make sense of what you are experiencing. This is quite natural and everyone does this at all levels of awareness. Whatever you are aware of and are experiencing is the truth to you - reality, and its truth equates with 'sense' or with rationality or sanity, and so you attempt to make sense out of your limited viewpoint.

So you're now experiencing attack and you look around, you do not see that you are involved, you do not see that you're choosing it, you do not see that you're using the other person as an opportunity to get rid of a hidden sin, and you don't realize what you're doing to yourself. You see this other person is present and when they showed up the attack seemed to start and you started to suffer, and not seeing your involvement it seems to "make sense" that they are the cause of it. You seemed innocent, being unaware of any guilt or causality on your part, so it MUST be their fault.

It simply makes sense to you, based on your limited evidence which you think is the whole evidence, that they are the culprit and so you are now justified in being angry. You didn't seem to ask for this, it was unwanted and uncalled for, and it seems real. Given this fundamental basis for your deciding what the truth of the matter is, it seems only logical, sensible, understandable and rational, to be upset about what this other person apparently is doing to you against your will.

Anger becomes justified and so does a counter-attack, which is an attempt to defend yourself. You believe you are acting in self-defense, given that you did not seem to be the one to start all this. You see yourself as upholding your innocence, as having been needlessly and unfairly treated, at which you are outraged. You do not in any way see that your anger has another motive, or that it is self destructive, or that it does not work to alleviate your suffering. Instead, your unawareness of some key facts has led you to be MISTAKEN, so now you actually believe that your angry retaliation can succeed in achieving the impossible, once again.

If you could retaliate against the attack and prove them wrong, it would seem to prove you right, and thereby uphold your obvious innocence and keep you justified in maintaining your sense of identity and wholeness. Your enemy came to attack your truth and you must defend it. The trouble is, the goal being the defense of yourself and the maintaining of your truth, all of that is thrown into jeopardy as soon as you justify your anger.

Your belief in attack attacks yourself and undermines your innocence. Your counter attack therefore renders you guilty, which destroys your innocence and shakes the foundation of your truth. What you thought would "work", does not work. And yet in unconsciousness you may not even realize it is not working, and will just carry on with this device believing that it is helping your situation.

Only with a lack of information and a lack of truth could you continue using a device which is broken, does not work, isn't bringing about the peace you lost, and is working against your own goal. Yet you won't stop using it while you continue to fail to correctly recognize the faults in your system, the lack of truth in your reasoning, and the mistakes that you are making. You don't see them AS mistakes because you believe you're totally logically, naturally, and inherently justified.

This is how we continue to use the ego in the same way we did at the separation from God, all the way through our progress towards death, believing that whatever we are doing with the ego makes sense, is understandable, is justified, it works, it can succeed, and that if you will just do more of it you will reach your goal. It is extraordinary, however, that given how obviously the ego's promises are lies, and how they constantly fail to deliver, and how they always make your situation worse while pretending they will help, that we can so easily "overlook" the truth and believe that we're getting away with the impossible.

We'll keep using the ego this way, keep falling for its traps, keep reacting with anger and justification, and keep remaining in denial, simply because it all seems to make sense and seems rational given what we're aware of. So long as we are keeping our illusions and keeping the truth out of awareness, we're really just doing our best to respond to situations in a way that makes sense to us.

We're simply very mistaken and are making "errors" in perception and judgement, without realizing it. It's not as though we are fully aware of the whole entire truth and are then making a deliberate decision to defy it and ignore it and act in insane ways. We do not SEE them as insane. We've blocked out so much truth that we simply are not aware of the ways that our beliefs and perceptions are mistaken.

If we had all the evidence of what's really going on, and were aware of it, it would once again make sense. We'd evaluate it and look at all of the pieces and see how they fit together. Without any denial, it would be obvious and clear exactly who caused what to happen, why it happened, and what the effects were. There would be no confusion within that context. Everything would be completely clear and obvious and easy to accept.

And you would accept it, because you will always be accepting of whatever you have ALLOWED into your awareness. Whatever is inside your awareness and not outside of it, you have accepted into your mind, and it therefore becomes part of you and is your truth. You can only accept what you believe is true, and anything you believe is not true or of which you are not aware, you will see as false and dismiss it as false evidence.

If you had the whole truth, you'd see the part that you play in all of your experiences. You'd see exactly who it is that is doing things to you - it's yourself. And you'd see the entire chain of cause and effect stemming from your own initial decision to separate from God and all the way through to all of the forms of suffering you are experiencing. You would not be ABLE to deny that it is all coming from you. It would be so obvious. The only sensible conclusion you would be able to draw from it is that you did all of this to yourself and no-one else was ever to blame.

The trouble is, key evidence and key truth has been blocked from your awareness. You do not know what you do not know. And even in a state of profound denial and unconsciousness, whatever little amount of awareness you have left seems to you to be "all" that there is. And whatever you see, from that perspective, seems to show you a reflection outside of you which you also believe is "all there is". And since that is truth to you, that presents to you a world which seems hostile, unfair, confusing, dramatic, upsetting and unsafe.

These are conclusions which you must come to, albeit mistaken. You can't conclude anything else because you have no other evidence to the contrary. All of these beliefs and perceptions about how the world is against you, life is unfair, people are victimizing you, you are alone and afraid, you're suffering against your will, you're constantly in conflict with other people, etc... it all comes solely from a lack of awareness and a lack of truth. It all seems to make sense to you and you believe in it, even if it is very upsetting.

People believe in the inevitability and un-avoidability of death, simply because of a lack of truth and a block to awareness, which seems to show them that they have no say in the matter and no power to choose otherwise. Such power is unconscious, such ability to decide is unconscious, and such truth that shows them that they cannot die because they are really immortal is also unconscious.

Without those key facts, death seems like something that happens to you against your will and it just "makes sense" to you that you must die. You see no other way out of the dark maze of hell and will therefore ACCEPT it and allow it, even if you seem not to want to.

This is also why when things happen to you seemingly against your will, you experience them as upsetting and unwanted. And yet, simultaneously, you experience them. You can't seem to make them go away, because you don't see that you are choosing them. You'll be very upset or afraid or suffering and experience it as though you really, really do not want this and are not in any way choosing it. And death is the ultimate expression of this - the idea that you are not choosing what you experience whatsoever, and therefore have become a passive victim of fate.

You'll experience these upsetting situations as being so against your will that you resist them and hate them and wish they would stop. You'll kick and scream all the way to the grave as though someone else is deciding for you what will happen to you. You seem not to want to be a victim, that you don't want to be afraid, you don't want to be sick, you don't to suffer and die. But it seems to be happening. And given you are unaware of the secret fact that you can CHOOSE for or against all of this, you don't believe you have any power to stop it. And that is terrifying and very upsetting.

You'll then set about trying to change others, trying to stop events, trying to resist life, trying to prevent bad stuff from happening, and trying to defend yourself from all the ways that some "other will" - an unexplained influence - seems to be deciding when you are or are not happy. You want all those bad influences to just go away so that you can carry on being innocent and harmless, to enjoy your "life", but bad stuff keeps cropping up. You don't see what you are doing to yourself so it seems entirely unwelcome and you just wish it would stop. Why is life so unfair? Why can't they just leave you alone and let you live in (an illusion of) peace?

These dramas and stories of suffering and unfairness will continue until you become willing to look at how you might be mistaken. It takes for you to become a little bit open minded about the possibility of something which seems very unlikely. If you are experiencing that you are a whole person, that you are fully aware of everything that's happening, and that you know everything there is to know about what is causing what, then you may not be willing to entertain this idea. But the idea is, that you MIGHT NOT BE WHOLE, and you MIGHT NOT BE FULLY AWARE, and there MIGHT BE MORE TRUTH than you are currently aware of.

Sometimes this is expressed in the form of "there must be a better way". This can be a natural reaction to the experiences of unfairness and strife and misery which all SEEM to happen for no good reason, which perhaps after a while don't seem to make sense, which perhaps seem so unbearable and stupid that it surely can't be the truth. When life becomes too painful and unmanageable, there can be a stirring of awareness or a desire for peace of some kind that prompts you to start to question whether what's happening - your experience of it - is really the truth, or whether there must be some kind of "deeper" truth or meaning that you just aren't seeing.

This requires a willingness, however small, to consider that you MIGHT be mistaken about what you're experiencing, or about the conclusions you keep coming to based on the evidence you have. It means literally a willingness to question your SELF, your own righteousness and your own sense of knowing everything. It even means questioning the truth of your identity - who you are - and what is the basis for yourself. To the ego this seems like self-attack, but in truth it is a willingness to dismantle your false self to reveal the "True You".

It's the beginning of humility, it's the beginning of honesty, and it's the beginning of opening up to a possible truth that exists in 'addition' to your current idea of Self. In other words, you are beginning to make ROOM for the truth in your life, creating a space where a larger truth can dwell where you are not filling that space with all of your own egoic conclusions and interpretations. It means you are making room for God, stepping aside a little bit from your ego mind and becoming willing to LOOK AT the situation from a slightly different perspective. And that means, you are starting to ALLOW a bigger truth to enter your awareness - therefore you are starting to wake up.

Illusions will be kept so long as they make sense to you, so long as you do not see their real purpose, and so long as they seem to work. Or at least, even if they don't work, you keep them because you believe they CAN work, if you will just use them hard enough. You think for example that in your justified anger, your anger will somehow bring about happiness.

If you can be angry enough at someone else for what they did, and thus prove that you are right and justified, then there will be some kind of acceptance by the other person, a backing down of their attack on your truth, and you will get the respect and recognition that you believe your truth deserves.

In their acceptance and admittance of how they were wrong and you were right, you'll feel vindicated and satisfied having "proven" that your truth is true. It's as though you need others to admit to YOUR truth and accept it and humble themselves, in order for YOU to believe your own truth more - that you've given them the power to accept your truth for you, which is what you want because it's part of your disowning of responsibility for you own decision-making.

You think then that you'll find peace and satisfaction from this. But does anger ever produce peace and happiness? No. It does not really work. Getting someone else to admit to your truth for you will not cause you to be happy indirectly, but you think it will. And most likely their ego will not be humble enough to accept your truth on your behalf, meaning you cannot gain the happiness that lies in their hands. To admit to that fact is to admit to the truth, which means you are allowing a greater truth to shine its light on this response and to show that it is false.

Everything that you do in the ego thought system has a justification, a purpose, a reason behind it, a motive, a secret plan and an attempted goal that it would achieve. Just as in the truth everything you do is deliberate and intentional, producing exactly the results you ask for every time, this still holds true in your use of the ego. Every decision you make to believe in the ego's interpretation and follow its advice, is based in a deliberate, intentional decision to do so. You have a purpose and a use for every ego device you use.

Generally speaking the overall purpose of the entire ego thought system is to get rid of yourself by becoming an artificial self that doesn't exist. To replace yourself with non-existence. To replace God with death. And because your attempt to do this is based in your belief in SIN, the attempt to get rid of your sin is just another part of your attempt to get rid of yourself. Every step of the way, in every ego device that you use whether it be denial or projection or anger or reactions or suppression of guilt or punishment or death, all of these "tools" have a purpose for you, in furthering your attempt to get rid of sin and to get rid of yourself.

So when you are angry with someone, even though you are angry because it seems completely justified and sensible, given the (lack of) facts, this anger is actually also serving this goal. It is an attempt to get rid of sin by finding someone else guilty. Behind this anger, in greater truth, you actually are the one who believes YOU sinned, you have accused yourself of a horrible crime, and subsequently felt extremely guilty. You are trying to cover that up and get rid of it, because you believe deep down that YOU are the one who "did it".

When someone comes along and SEEMS to be the one who must have done something to you, instead of seeing that you believe that YOU are the sinful one, you take the opportunity quickly, based on the lack of awareness and the presence of denial, to scapegoat the person and put all your sense of guilt onto them. You might seem as though you are projecting onto them because "clearly" they did something to you against your will, and it therefore seems justified, but the rest of the evidence shows that you actually are USING that person to get rid of your sin and ultimately yourself.

In light of that additional information, it would also show you that your attempt to use them to get rid of sin is actually an attack on YOUR part, towards someone who is NOT the cause of your sin, and they in fact are the one who is innocent. So now you have committed a further crime, for which you will feel guilty. Even if you think your anger is justified, you will not be able to explain why you feel remorse and guilt and "bad" about having done so.

The truth would also reveal that you in fact WANTED that person to "seem" to attack you, because you wanted to have an opportunity to get rid of your sin. Even if it seems to you as though you did not want it, did not choose it or ask for it, and that it was completely uncalled for, you in fact DID call for it, ask for it, and were given what you asked for. You hired the person to play the role of attacker so that you could use them. Even if you suffered, even if you didn't SEEM to want it in your semi-conscious state, you really DID want it. You wanted to be hurt so that you could make out that you are not the one who is guilty.

Without this key information, without the awareness of what you are doing to yourself, without realizing and recognizing how you are using these ego devices for an ego purpose, and how everything is a deliberate part of your plan to get rid of yourself, it is easy to see how and why you would conclude what you do. It also then becomes easy to see why you are MISTAKEN, and are making an error, and why you therefore need CORRECTION. You need the truth in order to see what is REALLY happening here, and to have any hope of being set free.

If it is true that you did not ask for suffering, then you are stuck. Suffering is going to happen against your will and you will not be able to stop it. If it is true that you did not ask for death, then death will happen against your will and you will have no power over it. But if it is true that you made sickness and death and suffering, and have chosen them, and are using them for a special purpose (to get rid of yourself), and you want them, and you yourself are using them against yourself, then at least now there is potential for you to CHOOSE AGAIN and to decide to stop doing this to yourself.

It also means realizing that because you are doing this all to yourself - this is the truth which you have been keeping hidden from yourself - there is a possibility now for SALVATION. If you are doing it to yourself, you can change your mind. You can stop your self attack. You can forgive yourself. Your mistakes can be undone and corrected by your willingness to become more aware of the whole truth, and you can be free of all suffering and death. It also means you will realize that no-one else ever attacks you, there is no other will acting against you, and therefore you are perfectly safe forever.

The secret to salvation is that you are doing this all to yourself. But until you can become aware of and admit to this truth, allowing this truth into your awareness, you will not be aware of it and will not be able to use it to make sense out of what you are experiencing. If it also remains in the realm of intellectual concepts, you will not be able to experience it and know it and feel it and trust it.

You have to actually be willing to shift your experience by expanding your awareness, becoming more conscious of what was unconscious, admitting to or owning up to what you have been doing yourself, and bringing your unconscious mind back into your conscious awareness. That is only going to be possible if you are willing to question or doubt your current experience, reconsider whether what you think is true is really true, undermine your own beliefs which hold the truth prisoner or judge it wrongly as "false", and be willing to be corrected in your mistakes.

Essentially this means you need to be willing to surrender and let go of your ego's illusions, its holding onto false truths, its blame and denial, and its various ways of convincing you that you can actually get away with or succeed at using its tools to produce a desirable outcome. It is only because you do not see what the ego's outcomes are (always worse, leading to death), that you think they must work. And even if they don't work you'll still keep using them, insisting that they MUST work because they seem to make sense to you. You won't question what makes sense to you because you trust it as the basis for your whole reality.

But what makes sense in a limited ego consciousness makes no sense in a greater expanded awareness. And even if you believe that you know all there is to know or are aware of all there is to be aware of, both within you and without you, you need to be willing to question that. There IS stuff outside of your conscious awareness, stuff you have denied, stuff you have forgotten, stuff you have deliberately avoided wanting to admit to or allow into awareness.

Even if you see yourself as whole, complete, innocent, truthful, loving and caring, or seeing completely clearly, be assured that if there is something in your unconscious mind - if you have an unconscious mind - your facade of innocence and perfection WILL NOT hold up to the truth. And it will not be capable of stopping bad stuff from happening to you. Being ultra perfect and ultra pure is not going to stop your unconscious separate will from attacking you, and it's not going to keep you safe, and it's not going to prevent you from attacking yourself indirectly.

So if you think you are perfect and your life is still filled with suffering of any kind, you must KNOW that this means you have something outside of your conscious awareness, some way that you are attacking yourself and therefore you need to become willing to question whether your idea of perfection is really sound. There must be some way that you are in denial and there must be some truth you do not want to admit to. There must be some false belief you have which you think is true but which is not. And your sense of identity - of who you even ARE - must be not quite whole or complete or as true as you thought.

It can be difficult to look more deeply for a greater truth, and it can seem at first to be pointless given how much you are convinced you are all of yourself. But you have attempted to get rid of yourself, in a big way. You are Christ, maker of this universe, pretending to be a little suffering self in a body that dies.

There is much more to who you are than you are AWARE of, and that means that there is more to BE aware of than you are aware of right now. And that means it is highly likely you are going to be mistaken and come to false conclusions about what things mean and what sense it makes. It means you will act and respond to "reality" based in false perceptions and will make errors, and these will seem to hurt you against your will. But there is a way out.

The Holy Spirit, maintainer of truth in your mind, protector of your connection to Truth as God, is always with you and is the very truth in which you are recognized as being set free. Even your sin isn't real. Even your self attack isn't happening. And even your real identity has not been lost or changed or damaged. There is much truth that awaits you in which you literally will be set free from all suffering forever. There is no real death. There is no real sin. The Son of God is free.

A little willingness is all it takes to invite the truth into you - to invite Holy Spirit into you. A little willingness to put aside your ego identity and make room for the truth. A little willingness to open up to receiving a truth from beyond your little ego self, which also means receiving love. A little willingness to let go of what you thought was real, what you valued and what you thought was important, based only on false conclusions you came to just because you didn't have all the information.

There is more to your identity and more to your sense of self than you may be currently aware. Even if you think you are the whole of you, there is more to you than this. You are bigger and more magnificent than you realize. And you are far more free from suffering and death than you realize as well. There is no cause for fear because sin is impossible and separation is impossible. There is only cause for gratitude to God, that because of what God is, you can never be anything other than how He Created you.

You are innocent and holy, forgiven because you have done nothing wrong, are immortal and invulnerable, and permanently reside in Heaven as One with your Creator. And all is well.

In terms of possibility, and impossibility, heaven is the only possibility. God has made it possible, because God is possible. God's freedom is all possibility, and the one possibility or outcome is the creation of the Kingdom.

In the separation from God, we imagined an opposite to possibility. We tried to be unwilling to do what is possible. We placed limitations on ourselves and hid behind denial. This produced what seems to be a world. And this world seems to make possible what is utterly impossible in heaven. But what seems possible here is in fact an impossibilities disguised as a possibility - an illusion of a possibility.

In heaven it is not possible to die. In this world, however, death seems so common and possible that it's even considered inevitable. Some kind of a given that death is certain. But if in heaven's reality death is impossible, death cannot actually be possible. Which means whatever this death thing is, it's something utterly impossible and must be at best pretending to be possible. This means death must be an illusion of death because real death is impossible.

In terms of miracles, we say that the things of this world are possible. We see sickness and regard it as possible. We see things breaking and destroyed and regard it as possible. We see death happening and attack and murder and think these things are possible. But they cannot be possible in heaven's reality and so they cannot really be possible.

The things then that we consider to be possible in this world, are actually impossibilities. They appear to be possible because they are illusions. They are lies. They are deception. They are wishful thinking and a belief in things which are false. They simply cannot be possible and are utterly impossible. Yet to the everyday person we would say all these things are possibilities. They are so possible that everyone believes they're totally normal and natural.

In light of this, and not recognizing that we live in a world of such limitation that we have in fact limited possibility heavily, we would regard certain things as "impossible". We'd say, it is impossible to reverse death. It is impossible to break the laws of physics. It is impossible to heal a sickness in a split second. It's impossible to be in two places at once. It's impossible to turn water into wine or cause bread to multiply out of thin air.

We think these things are impossible because they ignore and break all the rules that we've made up as to what is possible in this world. But what we think of as possibilities here are lies at best, and fiction at worse. They are not really possibilities at all.

They are attempts to do something that is NOT possible, but disgused as something SO possible that it seems to be PROVEN that it is happening. You can see and touch and taste and so on to sample the evidence. Because "only the body makes the world seem real." But in truth all the things of this world are impossibilities, masquerading as ALL that is possible, while shutting out everything that is REALLY possible. And we think this is reality.

Someone being sick in any way is not possible in reality. Someone dying is utterly nonense. These things cannot happen in reality. We say they represent the natural scope of what "can happen" in the world, but they aren't even remotely possible AT ALL. Except in some kind of tiny mad dream of hell.

Miracles then recognize that this is a world in which seemingly impossible things present themselves as possibilities. Miracles reverse all the things the world says are possible, by recognizing they are in fact not possible. Sickness and death are recognized as NOT possible.

Miracles then enable you to do things which the world would consider or label as impossible, because these things not only cancel all notion that the things of this world are even possible, they reverse and undo all things the world says can NEVER be undone.

Essentially, to be miraculous is to assert life, which is the assertion that only heaven is real. It is the assertion that what the world calls impossible is the ONLY possibility, and the things the world claims are the ONLY possibility are in fact IMPOSSIBLE. This is a complete reversal of what the world thinks can happen, and it results in things being able to happen which defy the world, break its laws, undo its consequences, and cancel the world entirely.

Only the laws of God are possible. Only the truth is true. Only the kingdom is real. Only miracles can happen. Everything else is impossible. Miracle workers are NOT BOUND by the laws of this world. They operate based on the laws of God, laws which this world would judge as IMPOSSIBLE. And yet God's laws are the ONLY POSSIBILITY, rendering the impossible fictions of this world as truly imposible. It is by recognizing their impossibility that they vanish.

"All power is of God. What is not of him has no power to do anything."

"miracles reverse the physical or lower order laws"

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt."

"THE MIRACLE DOES NOTHING. All it does is to UNdo. And thus it cancels out the interference to what HAS BEEN done. It does not add, but merely takes away."

"The miracle but shows the past is gone, and what has truly gone HAS no effects."

"The miracle does nothing but to show him that HE has done nothing."

"Your holiness reverses all the laws of the world. It is beyond every restriction of time, space, distance, and limits of any kind."

"Today we practice making free our minds of all the laws you think you must obey; of all the limits under which you live, and all the changes which you think are part of human destiny."

"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."

"My oneness with the Christ establishes me as Your Son, beyond the reach of time, and wholly free of every law but Yours."

"For fifteen minutes twice today escape from every law in which you now believe."

"A miracle is a reversal of the physical order"

"Miracles are a kind of exchange. Like all expressions of love, which are ALWAYS miraculous in the true sense, the exchange reverses the physical laws."

"Christ inspires all miracles, which are essentially intercessions. They intercede for man's holiness, and make him holy. They place man beyond the physical laws, and raise him into the sphere of celestial order. In this order, man IS perfect."

"The mind that serves the Holy Spirit is unlimited forever, in all ways, beyond the laws of time and space, unbound by any preconceptions, and with strength and power to do whatever it is asked."

"time and space are under My control"

"The ego may ask, "How did the impossible occur?", "To what did the impossible happen?", and may ask in many forms."

"Pain is impossible."

"In fact, it is impossible. But you must remember that when you put yourselves in an impossible situation, you believed that the impossible WAS possible."

"You are in an impossible situation only because you thought it was possible to be in one."

"You CAN wish for the impossible, but you can only WILL with God."

"It is the world you see that is impossible."

"Fear is deception. It attests that you have seen yourself as you could never be, and therefore look upon a world which is impossible. Not one thing in this world is true. It does not matter what the form in which it may appear. It witnesses but to your own illusions of yourself. Let us not be deceived today."

"The laws of this world cease to hold any meaning at all."

"There are no laws except the laws of God."

"Magic imprisons, but the laws of God set free. The light has come because there are no laws but His."

"Healing is also a science because it obeys the laws of God, whose laws are true."

"Miracles do not obey the laws of this world. They merely follow from the laws of God."

"What I seek today transcends all laws of time and things perceived in time."

"Reality observes the laws of God, and NOT the rules you set."

"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."

"Time can have no sway upon you, nor can any laws of earth have power over you. Your hands will heal, and give the gifts that you accept of me."

"The miracle, therefore, has a unique function, and is motivated by a unique Teacher, Who brings the laws of another world to this one."

"When you feel guilty, KNOW that your ego has indeed violated the laws of God, but YOU have not. Leave the sins of the ego to me. That is what the Atonement is for."

"Brother, there is no death. And this you learn when you but wish to show your brother that you had no hurt of him. He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned. But it is given you to SHOW him, by your healing, that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream."

"But you can show him his suffering is purposeless and wholly without cause. Show him YOUR healing, and he will consent no more to suffer. For his innocence HAS BEEN established in your sight AND his."

"Show him that he CANNOT hurt you, and hold nothing against him, or you hold it against yourself."

"Show THIS (healed body) unto your brother, who will see that every scar is healed, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. And he will look on his forgiveness there, and with healed eyes will look BEYOND it, to the innocence that he beholds in you. Here is the proof that he has NEVER sinned; that NOTHING that his madness bid him do was ever done, or ever had effects of any kind. That NO reproach he laid upon his heart was EVER justified, and NO attack can touch him with the poisoned sting of fear. Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health. BECAUSE it proves illusions were not true.

The great lie of the world is that we are all separate. Each of our bodies testifies to this. I have my own body, my own feelings, my own mind, my own thoughts, my own beliefs. It seems that you have your own as well, and mine is separate from yours. We don't seem to really share anything. And any changes I make seem not to affect you.

This is what bodies were designed to do. They were meant to be "separation devices", to separate me off from you, to isolate each of us in our own little prisons, keeping us apart. They were made to imply that nothing is shared, what is mine is not yours, I am not like you, we are not the same in any way, I am unique and so are you. We're cut off and different. What I have you lack. What you have I lack. And thus we have no oneness.

But this is utterly completely opposite to the nature of spirit and mind as God created it. It's utterly opposite to your true nature, and mine as well. We're not meant to think of ourselves as separate from each other, sharing nothing, not overlapping, or kept at arm's length. We have to transcend the limits of the body entirely.

The truth is that there is a part of you which is shared by me. And there is a part of me that is shared by you. Kind of like one thing which has two people controlling it simultaneously. Kind of like siamese twins, with two heads and one torso. There is actually some of you in me and vice versa. There are actually aspects of your self which is what I am, and aspects of my own self which is you.

In truth we are joined together as one. In truth we share everything. And this is not in any way the same thing as sharing between two separate people, where they remain separate but there is some kind of transfer between them to bridge the gap. It's a real sharing where I literally am overlapping with where you are located, and vice versa. Where we are literally fused together as one thing, but from two vantage points. One mind, with two focal points.

Because of this, we are actually part of a collective consciousness. And the really big thing is this. Everything that I do or think or feel or choose or believe, affects the entire universe. And everything you do or think or feel or choose or believe, affects the entire universe. If I lift myself up, it must lift you up in some way as well because I am a part of your self. If you lift yourself up, I must be lifted up in some way because part of me is you.

We are NOT isolated, alone, separate, cut-off, imprisoned, separated, orphaned, divorced, abandoned, relegated, split apart or confined. Everything that we each do, affects us both. And even affects the whole sonship beyond us. What that means is that there are no private thoughts. Not simply from the vantage point of there being two separate people who send thought transmissions across the gap between them which they pick up on, but where my mind and your mind are literally welded together such that when I think something YOU think it with me. Part of your thought process is taking place in my mind and vice versa.

Jesus teaches similarly that if I am healed, I am never healed alone. If some kind of healing takes place for me, it is also on behalf of the whole universe, which is the sonship (not spacetime). Jesus also tells us that we are not alone in experiencing the effects of our thoughts. That if I have a thought, both me and you are affected by it. And your thoughts affect me. Not in terms of you sending them over to me across a brick wall but in terms of part of me BEING you and vice versa, SHARING those effects as one, transcendentally of space of time.

Jesus is even telling us that vision transcends all spatial limitations, depends not on any thing physical, can see and experience without regard for distance or seeming remoteness. Simply because you can BE everywhere, in everyone. This is the true nature of mind, that it is not really naturally limited to any one location at a time. Or to any one person at a time.

What this also leads to is a matter of responsibility. Anything that I think affects the whole world. Anything you think affects the whole world. In that sense, and given that these thoughts are never private or isolated from anyone, everyone experiences the effects of our thoughts, and therefore I have to consider that I need to "think responsibly", and without guilt, because my thoughts are actually affecting everyone.

I think on behalf of everyone, just as you do, and just as everyone does. And all our minds are joined. Which means that we're sort of like this one tapestry where each of us seems anchored to the fabric of it in different places, but if I pull upwards I'm pulling you all with me. And if you pull down you're going to drag a lot of others down with you. Unless of course they are pulling up at the same time. This means that we really are all a TEAM. Because we have to now consider that EACH PART of the sonship INFLUENCES THE WHOLE.

You ARE part of a holographic system and since you are the whole of the sonship at the same time as being part of it, your relationship INCLUDES everyone. It affects everyone. Every thought is offered to everyone. Every healing brings peace to everyone. Maybe in ways they might not entirely be aware of but in some way on some level, everyone affects everyone.

This also brings me to the proper understanding of why joined minds produce the healing of sickness in others. A part of your mind is actually my mind. And my mind is part of your mind. We are NOT separated off with entirely isolated minds. Our minds overlap and are shared. I actually manipulate part of your mind, so to speak, and you manipulate part of mine. Our minds are actually one and shared. Mutual minds. Like two people driving the same bus.

So let's say you believe in your part of the mind that you are sick, which is really an attempt to believe the whole sonship is sick. And then let's say that normally this belief would attempt to weaken me and others. But then let's say that I'm in a particularly loving space in my mind which is more powerful than your assertion of weakness.

If I choose to believe that there is nothing wrong with you, while you are believing there is something wrong with you, I override your belief. The part of your mind which is shared with me, which is my mind, changes your belief FOR you. Part of your mind is in me. If I change my mind, I am literally changing a part of your mind. And that actually influences what you might think of as the rest of your own mind.

As Jesus says, when you do not believe the falsehoods that your brother believes about himself, you weaken his own belief in being faulty. And so you weaken his sickness. If your mind, which is part of his, and his as part of yours, asserts strongly that your brother and you are not sick, then you are actually taking a part of HIS mind (as yours) and are causing it to not believe in sickness. And so he cannot get "his" mind to project sickness onto his body because YOU, as part of his mind, are not allowing it.

This is why Jesus says that you are your brother's keeper. This is why he says you should not allow your brother to be sick. This is why you are in a sense responsible for everyone, because your contribution to their experience is part of the fact that your minds are shared.

It's not simply that you are joining minds, because God actually joined all minds together in the creation. But moving away from the belief in being separate/isolated and returning to an awareness that your minds ARE joined, naturally, lets you tap into the ability to influence the minds of others more consciously. And naturally this openness to sharing is rooted in love, so can only be used for good.

So instead of seeing ourselves as separate people, living separate lives in separate bodies, as if everything we think and do is utterly isolated and affects no-one else, we need to really think of ourselves as part of a combined mind-mesh, part of a team, part of a collective hive mind, and there isn't anything we can think without it being shared by everyone in that collective. And any effects which those thoughts might produce are going to be shared by everyone.

This is also of course the foundation for shared interests. Because if mind is really yours AND your brother's, then what you use it for is being used on his behalf as well as your own. As per the golden rule, whatever applies to him applies to you equally. This is also why Jesus says that forgiveness is not real unless it brings a healing to both your brother and yourself. Your healing IS HIS healing. When you heal, HE ALSO is healed along with you in a very direct way - because he is part of your self.

And further, this also tells us that forgiveness is not just a gift of healing you give to yourself, it is also something that extends and is given to everyone. If you are healed you become an instrument of healing. If you are the light you shed light into other's minds and enlighten them. If you are filled with the Holy Spirit you can fill others with the Holy Spirit. If you are whole you can make others whole. And atonement is a lesson in sharing, not a lesson in isolated enlightenment.

When you forgive, you actually do heal both yourself and the mind of your brother. When you forgive and undo your belief in someone being sick, you do actually in fact undo some of their belief in being sick. This is sort of tied into the idea of "holding them in the light", not through some wishful thinking that the light might rub off on them but much moreso the fact that since you ARE them, you being the light "forces" them to be the light also.

Your mind influences other people! Your mind is not JUST your mind. It is yours AND it belongs to others. You are thinking on behalf of everyone. Your whole resurrection is for the benefit of the entire sonship. This is why Jesus's resurrection reconnected the ENTIRE sonship to God, and why in his awakening YOU woke up in some way to some degree as well. How could the whole world not be affected by such an event? Jesus did in fact "save you" from the belief in sin, through his own atonement.

I am you and you are me and we are one and everyone is us and we are all the collective sonship family of God. If I choose the light, you're coming with me.

"And as you let yourself be healed, you see all those around you, or who cross your mind, or whom you touch, or those who seem to have no contact with you, healed along with you. Perhaps you will not recognize them all, nor realize how great your offering to all the world, when you let healing come to you. But you are never healed alone. And legions upon legions will receive the gift which you receive when you are healed."

"Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

"Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health. "

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself."

"Then let him turn within to his Eternal Guide, and let Him Judge what the response should be. So is he healed, and in his healing is his pupil healed with him. 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."

"Healing is an act of thought by which two minds perceive their oneness, and become glad. This gladness calls to every part of the Sonship to rejoice with them, and let God Himself go out into them and through them."

"Two minds with one intent become so strong that what they will becomes the Will of God. For minds can only join in truth."

"When two minds join as one, and share one idea equally, the first link in the awareness of the Sonship as one has been made."

"Whoever says, "There IS no gap between my mind and yours," has kept GOD's promise, NOT his tiny oath to be forever faithful unto death. And by his healing IS his brother healed. Let THIS be your agreement with each one; that you be one with him and NOT apart."

"Do not accept your brother's variable perception of himself, for his split mind is yours, and you will not accept YOUR healing without his. For you share the real world as you share Heaven, and his healing IS yours. To love yourself is to HEAL yourself, and you cannot perceive part of you as sick and achieve your OWN goal. Brother, we heal together as we live together, and love together."

"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. 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."

"You will forsake yourselves and your God if you forsake any of YOUR brothers. You are more than your brother's keeper." "Concern yourselves not with the EXTENSION of holiness, for the nature of miracles you do NOT understand. Nor do you DO them. It is their extension, far beyond the limits you perceive, that demonstrates you did NOT do them. Why should you worry how the miracle extends to all the Sonship, when you do not understand the miracle itself?"

Lesson 54: ""I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts." ... I am alone in nothing. Everything I think or say or do touches all the universe. A Son of God cannot think or speak or act in vain. He cannot be alone in anything. It is therefore in my power to change every mind along with mine, for mine is the power of God."

"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."

The idea of separation is madness, because what it implies is impossible. It is not possible to be separate from God. But the mad idea was the idea that you CAN be separate from God, even though it is impossible.

To insist it is possible, must be madness, because to believe it you have to deny reality and truth and blind yourself to sanity and sense. This belief makes the mind insane, because it now believes impossible things are possible. This is why the separation from God was an entry into a state of mental illness, ie insanity.

"When the "lies of the serpent" were introduced, they were specifically called lies because they are not true. When man listened, all he heard was untruth."

"The instant that the mad idea of making your relationship with God unholy seemed to be possible, ALL relationships were made meaningless. In that unholy instant time was born, and bodies made to house the mad idea, and give it the ILLUSION of reality."

The mad idea gave rise to a mad world, based on insane notions and crazy laws, devoid of meaning and empty of truth. And into this insane world we projected our insane beliefs, producing a mad and false world to reflect our inner madness. And all who participate in it are mentally ill.

"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."

What we've ended up with then is a fictional world which insane people believe exists. And it is populated with people who have insane beliefs about who and what they are. They do not know themselves, are out of touch with their own reality, and think they are something they're not. This especially is entwined with the belief that they are physical bodies, which their immortal souls could never be. And they see themselves as limited and lacking.

"Sin is insanity. It is the means by which the mind is driven mad, and seeks to let illusions take the place of truth. And being mad, it sees illusions where truth should be, and where it really is. Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold?"

Realize then that the world as we know it is populated by beings who originally were, and in truth still are, wholly immortal, perfect, innocent, loving, healthy, happy and completely invulnerable. Beings who God created to live forever in divine perfection, who lacked nothing and were capable of anything.

In the separation, these beings gave belief to impossible nonsense and thus moved their minds into insane states. This produced the anti-christ or otherwise known as the ego, which is an idea of what you THINK you are, as a kind of wishful thinking or denial of your true nature. Thus each person developed a SECOND self for themselves, which they identified with and as, and thought to be the whole of who they are.

"This is the anti-Christ; ... Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

"The body is the symbol of WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE."

So now you have a world seemingly populated by individual beings who strongly believe they are NOT as God created them. They've added an entire layer of lies on top of themselves, to cover themselves up. They've invented a second self to suit their preferences.

They have profound denial which means they actively resist admitting to the truth about themselves and each other, and instead participate in lies and fantasies about what they are. They want to be a body and they want to suffer and they want to die, and they think this is normal because they think the hell they created is heaven.

"He has come to save me from the evil self I made."

"They DO believe that Heaven is hell, and ARE afraid of love. "

"For your definition of Heaven IS hell and oblivion, and the REAL Heaven is the greatest threat you think you COULD experience."

This has thrown these individuals into states of mind that are distorted and unnatural. They are mentally ill. They believe they are something or someone they are not. They have associated with being a physical object. They think they came into existence with the body. They believe they are limited and lacking and insufficient and defective and broken and sinful and guilty and in need of fear. And they relate to others through specialness and selfishness and mistrust and victimhood.

"the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt."

On the level of the world then it always seems that you're interacting with a whole person, who is egoic, and who has major selfishness issues, and who relates in special ways, and strikes bargains, and wants to get, and sees themselves as limited and lacking and defective. And it seems this is ALL THERE IS to the person. As if they ACTUALLY ARE a limited dysfunctional individual.

You see this appearance as the whole truth about the person, and people seem to really be in states of "becoming", of "growing", of transformation, learning, progression, acquisition and so on. As if they have started out with nothing and are lacking and little and weak and frail. And so the whole world seems to be populated with egoic individuals who are all far less than magnificent and most of whom find themselves to be unworthy of love or life. Which drives them all to self-punishment and suicide.

"...the sense of loneliness and abandonment which all the separated ones experience. Depression is an inevitable consequence of separation. So are anxiety, worry, a deep sense of helplessness, misery, suffering, and intense fear of loss."

"the delusions of the Separated ones."

"All the separated ones have a basic fear of retaliation and abandonment. This is because they BELIEVE in attack and rejection, so this is what they perceive and teach and LEARN. "

It seems then that we're living in a world where people represent varying degrees of ability, accomplishment, skill, confidence, and a very wide range of personalities and potentials. And in all cases no-one is perfect and everyone is lacking in some way. And everyone is trying to improve themselves because they all think they were created broken. And now there is competition and everyone fights to be better than all the other defective ones, while the defective ones lick their wounds and want to die.

If you take this at face value, if you think this is normal and natural, then you'll think that the EGOS that you interact with ARE people. That their egotism is NOT a mental illness, but is in fact just some normal psychological structure. A personality trait perhaps. And that it's completely normal for people to hate themselves, to attack others, to be angry, to worship idols, to take from others, and to seek for exclusive relationships. As if this is what completely natural mentally-sane people do. So normal because it's so common.

What we have to realize is that this is NOT sanity. And these ego people, the way they present themselves, is NOT really their self. It's not their real identity. They in fact are pretending to be something they're not. They present themselves as fictional characters, with traits and behaviors that aren't even natural. With beliefs about themselves that are unfounded and false. In denial of their own self and repressive of their own freedom.

"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."

They don't even know who they really are. They don't know where they came from or how they got here. And they certainly don't even suspect that they even have a real self. And even think that maybe they don't exist at all, have no real creator, invented themselves, and maybe aren't even real.

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

What we're looking at, when we look at the world, is in fact a place where a very large number of mentally ill people are gathered together. And all of their mental illnesses are regarded as largely normal and natural, ie not an illness at all. We don't even recognize insanity when we see it. We think it's normal that people relate the way they do, think of themselves in such unnatural ways, and are completely lost and out of touch with their own reality. On a planet filled with suffering, how can you remember what it's like not to suffer?

If we don't suspect that there is a higher, larger truth about people, then it's going to make it seem like their ego self is REAL, that it is the WHOLE truth of them, and there is nothing more to it. And in that view you will relate to their EGO in terms of special relationship, and with no sense of forgiveness. Anything they do in insanity will be a sin, and you will justify holding it against them. Because you don't recognize they are mentally ill. And all their twisted behaviors are in fact part of their illness.

If you had only ever known someone in an ill condition, and had never known them when they were healthy, you would have great difficulty seeing past their illness. If you had only met them after they became dysfunctional, you'd have a hard time having any notion of what they are REALLY like when they're not sick. And if the whole planet is sick, how can you know what society is supposed to be like, when no-one can even remember a time when there was no suffering at all?

If we have no sense of the actual REALITY of each person, then this is what we're going to do. We're going to BUY INTO their illusions of who and what they are, fall for the same temptations, go into false empathy, join them in suffering, and compound their ego. This keeps them imprisoned and does not offer any kind of healing. And they need healing because they are not sane. Falling for this means YOU are insane, because you've failed to recognize that the illusion of sanity is not sanity, and so think that you are sane when you're not.

Everyone, when sane, is a loving, powerful, supernatural, immortal, eternal being of light, filled with joy and laughter and miracles. Such a person is invulnerable, cannot be sick, cannot die, cannot be upset, has no grievances, doesn't judge or blame anyone, is perfectly innocent and holy, knows God intimately, depends on God for everything, and has no authority problem. This is what EVERY person in the world was like when they were created. This is the kind of self they ARE behind their mental illness. And if their mental illness was cured, this is how they would be. A world of christs!

To not RECOGNIZE that people's egos are not their real self, is to fail to forgive. To forgive requires having in mind an awareness BEYOND THE LIES, of what the person's souls is really like, as created by God. The original self. The real self. The holy self. The higher self. That is their true self. And that self has no limitations or lacks or failures or malfunctions or depressions or sicknesses or lies about themselves or others.

So then we have to realize that we join with the Holy Spirit as therapists in the world, as healers, come to offer SANITY to those who are insane, and to lift them up and resurrect them to truth and light, so that they are restored to their true function and true abilities. To their real identity. To remember who they are, to know themselves and to live out from the love that God put in them.

"Now must you share His function, and forgive whom He has saved, whose sinlessness He sees, and whom He honors as the Son of God."

"your function in this world is healing"

"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 only way you can forgive someone is to know the real truth about them on a higher level. The bigger picture. Their true nature as established by God. And this truth has to STILL be true, even if it is covered up by their own mind, and obscure and hard to see. Even if they themselves don't know it's there, and even if they themselves deny that it's true of them. Because people are in fact out of touch with their own souls and don't even remember what their real identity is. It is our task to REMEMBER FOR THEM, so that they might remember also and wake up to their true nature.

"Remember for everyone your Father's power, that He has given them"

"He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God. YOU CAN REMEMBER THIS FOR ALL THE SONSHIP. 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. 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."

"Do not allow your brother to be sick, for if he is, have YOU abandoned him to his own dream, by SHARING it with him."

Since the ego is really a smokescreen of lies, it is not true of a person. Even if they are holding it up strongly in front of your face as an obstacle to peace. To forgive is to OVERLOOK it, and see BEYOND it, beyond their body, and beyond their false sense of identity. To recognize who they are in spirit, and to acknowledge the PERMANENT TRUTH about them. To hold them in the light and acknowledge that they ARE in the light.

This means in fact bypassing their illusory ego beliefs, their ego self, and realizing that on a higher level their mind is SANE. Only a small portion of their mind is insane and their soul is still perfect. By tapping into the higher self and truth of the person, you JOIN with them in love. This bypasses the ego and increases the wholeness within the mind, which in turn undoes the false ego identification - the sickness - the mental illness. Because "all sickness is mental illness." This is how miracles are performed.

Don't be deceived. People are not who they say they are. Everyone has an imposter in them. The Holy Spirit knows who we really are, and will awaken this truth in us if we will let him.

"Seek not to make the Son of God ADJUST to his insanity. There IS a stranger in him, who wandered carelessly into the home of Truth, and who will wander off. He came WITHOUT a purpose. But he will not remain before the shining light the Holy Spirit offered, and you accepted. For there the STRANGER is made homeless, and YOU are welcome. Ask not this transient stranger, "who am I?" He is the only thing in all the universe that does not know."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A collection of ACIM quotes focusing on the UNREALITY of the world. It is vital, and our only task, to correctly identify the world AS unreal, to take away from it all sense of reality and assign it to the truth of God. Only God's reality can be real. The world we made is completely unreal. Nothing in it is real at all. Recognizing its unreality is the awareness of dreaming. Recognizing its unreality is liberation from all suffering.

"Fear has made everything you think you see. All separation, all distinctions, and the multitude of differences you believe make up the world. They are not there. Love's enemy has made them up. Yet love can have no enemy, and so they have no cause, no being and no consequence. They can be valued, but remain unreal."

"It is impossible to see two worlds which have no overlap of any kind. Seek for the one; the other disappears. But one remains. They are the range of choice beyond which your decision cannot go. The real and the unreal are all there is to choose between, and nothing more than these."

"We will not make a thousand meaningless distinctions, nor attempt to bring with us a little part of unreality, as we devote our minds to finding only what is real."

"Dismiss temptation easily today whenever it arises, merely by remembering the limits on your choice. The unreal or the real, the false or true is what you see, and only what you see. Perception is consistent with your choice, and hell or Heaven comes to you as one."

"You looked upon the unreal and found despair. But by SEEKING the unreal, what else COULD you find? The UNreal world IS a thing of despair, for it can never be. And you who share God's Being with Him, could never be content WITHOUT reality."

"It is, then, only your WISH to change reality that is fearful, because, by your wish you think you have ACCOMPLISHED what you wish. This strange position, in a sense, ACKNOWLEDGES your power, yet by DISTORTING it, and devoting it to 'evil,' it also MAKES IT UNREAL."

"It is not my will to grope about in darkness, fearful of shadows and afraid of things unseen and unreal."

"We will attempt to leave the unreal and seek for the real. We will deny the world in favor of truth. We will not let the thoughts of the world hold us back, and we will not let the beliefs of the world tell us that what God would have us do is impossible."

"Then try to go past all the unreal thoughts which cover the truth in your mind, and reach to the eternal. Under all the senseless thoughts and mad ideas with which you have cluttered up your mind are the thoughts which you thought with God in the beginning."

"The miracle is proof he is not bound by loss or suffering in any form BECAUSE IT CAN SO EASILY BE CHANGED. This demonstrates that it was never real, and COULD not stem from his reality. 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."

"Temptation, then, is nothing more than this; - a prayer the miracle touch not some dreams, but KEEP their unreality obscure, and GIVE to them reality instead."

"Reality is changeless. Miracles but show what you have interposed BETWEEN reality and your awareness is unreal, and does not interfere at all."

"There is such a temptation to dismiss fear thoughts as unimportant, trivial, and not worth bothering about that it is essential you recognize them all as equally destructive but equally unreal."

"This is the corollary of the "original sin"; the belief that guilt is real and fully justified. It is therefore the psychotherapist's function to teach that guilt, being unreal, cannot be justified. But neither is it safe. And thus it must remain unwanted as well as unreal."

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it. The last one had gone. It was laid in the tomb, but there was nothing left to bury. It did not disintegrate because the unreal cannot die. It merely became what it always was."

"When you try to bring TRUTH to illusions, you are trying to MAKE THEM REAL, and KEEP them by JUSTIFYING your belief in them. But to give illusions to Truth is to enable truth to teach that the ILLUSIONS are unreal, and thus enable you to ESCAPE from them."

"Love is not special. If you single out PART of the Sonship for your love, you are imposing guilt on ALL your relationships, and MAKING them unreal."

"God would not have His Son embattled, and so His Son's imagined "enemy," which he made, is TOTALLY unreal. You are but trying to escape a bitter war from which you HAVE escaped. The war is gone."

"Nothing destructive ever was, or will be. The war, the guilt, the past, are gone as one, into the unreality from whence they came."

"Forgiveness that is learned of ME does not use fear to UNDO fear. Nor does it make real the UNreal, and then destroy it."

"Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus KEEPING it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your minds AT ALL, or you will also believe that you must UNDO what you have made, in order to BE forgiven. What has no effect does not exist, and to the Holy Spirit, the effects of error are TOTALLY non-existent."

"Include all of the ego-based attributes which you ascribe to yourself, positive or negative, desirable or undesirable, grandiose or debased. All of them are equally unreal because you do not look upon yourself through the eyes of holiness."

"But you have not left open and unoccupied the altar where the gift belongs. Where THEY should be, YOU have set up your idols to something ELSE. This OTHER will, which seems to TELL you what must happen, you GAVE reality. And what would SHOW you otherwise must therefore seem unreal."

"Faith in the UNreal leads to ADJUSTMENTS of reality, to make it fit the goal of madness. The goal of sin induces the perception of a fearful world, to JUSTIFY its purpose. What you desire, you WILL see. And if its reality is false, you will UPHOLD it by NOT realizing all the adjustments YOU have introduced, to MAKE it so."

"But they have names which differ for a time, for time needs symbols, being itself unreal."

"Yet when peace is found, the war is meaningless. And it is conflict now that is perceived as non-existent and unreal."

"You can see yourselves as separated FROM your meaning only by EXPERIENCING YOURSELF AS UNREAL. This is WHY the ego is insane; it teaches that you are NOT what you ARE. This is so contradictory that it is clearly impossible."

"Because God's equal Sons have everything, they CANNOT compete. But if they perceive ANY of their brothers as anything OTHER than their perfect equals, the IDEA of competition HAS entered their minds. Do not underestimate your need to be vigilant AGAINST this idea, because ALL your conflicts come FROM it. It IS the belief that conflicting interests are possible, and therefore means that you have accepted the IMpossible as true. How is that different from saying that you are perceiving YOURSELF as unreal?"

"Is it harder to dispel the belief of the insane in a larger hallucination as opposed to a smaller one? Will he agree more quickly to the unreality of a louder voice he hears than to that of a softer one? Will he dismiss more easily a whispered demand to kill than a shout? And do the number of pitchforks the devils he sees carrying affect their credibility in his perception? His mind has categorized them as real, and so they are real to him. When he realizes they are all illusions they will disappear."

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

"You cannot make the UNreal because the ABSENCE of reality is fearful, and fear cannot BE created. As long as you believe that fear is possible, YOU WILL NOT CREATE. Opposing orders of reality MAKE REALITY MEANINGLESS, and reality is MEANING."

"You cannot DISTORT reality and KNOW WHAT IT IS. And if you DO distort reality you will experience anxiety, depression, and ultimately panic, because you are trying to MAKE YOURSELF UNREAL."

"When you see a brother as a body, you are condemning him BECAUSE you have condemned yourself. But if ALL condemnation is unreal, and it MUST be unreal because it is a form of attack, then it can HAVE no results."

"The self you made is not the Son of God. Therefore this self does not exist at all. And anything it seems to do and think means nothing. It is neither bad nor good. It is unreal, and nothing more than that."

"Pleasure and pain are EQUALLY unreal, because their purpose CANNOT be achieved. Thus are they means for nothing, for they have a goal without a meaning. And they share the lack of meaning that their PURPOSE has."

"He will, in fact, be unable to recognize his brother at all, for his Father did not create bodies, and so he is seeing in a brother only the unreal."

"There is nothing to prevent you from recognizing ALL calls for help as exactly what they are, EXCEPT YOUR OWN PERCEIVED NEED TO ATTACK. It is only THIS that makes you willing to engage in endless "battles" with reality, in which you DENY the reality of the need for healing by making IT unreal."

"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."

"Such is the ONLY rule for happy dreams. The gap is emptied of the toys of fear, and then its unreality is plain. Dreams are for nothing. And the Son of God CAN have no need of them."

"For you have believed that you can injure, and the right you have established for yourself can be now used against you, 'til you lay it down as valueless, unwanted and unreal."

"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. This IS the healing and the remedy."

"The special relationship is your DETERMINATION to keep your hold on unreality, and to PREVENT yourself from waking." "It is not strange that dreams can make a world that is unreal. The WISH to make it IS incredible."

"How can faith in reality be yours, while you are bent on making it UNreal? And are you REALLY safer in maintaining the UNreality of what has happened, than you would be in joyously accepting it FOR WHAT IT IS, and giving thanks for it?"

"Nor could one mind think only for itself, unless the body WERE the mind. For ONLY bodies can be separate, and therefore UNREAL. The home of madness CANNOT be the home of reason. Yet it is easy to LEAVE the home of madness, if you see reason."

"We said before that, to limit love to PART of the Sonship, is to bring guilt into your relationships, and thus MAKE THEM UNREAL."

"It does not really matter, in the end, whether you judge right or wrong. Either way, you are placing your belief in the unreal. This cannot be avoided in any type of judgment, because it IMPLIES the belief that reality is yours to choose FROM."

"Only the timeless must remain unchanged. But everything in time can CHANGE with time. Yet, if the change be real and not IMAGINED, illusions MUST give way to truth, and not to other dreams which are but equally unreal."

"To you who still believe you live in time, and know not it is gone, the Holy Spirit still guides you through the infinitely small and senseless maze you still perceive in time, though it has long since gone. You think you live in what is past. Each thing you look upon you saw but for an instant, long ago, before its unreality gave way to truth. Not one illusion still remains unanswered in your mind."

"And everything that points the way in the direction of the past but sets you on a mission whose accomplishment can ONLY be unreal."

"Every step taken in the making, the maintaining, and the breaking off of the unholy relationship, is a move toward further fragmentation and unreality."

"YOU have made the relationship unreal, and THEREFORE unholy, by seeing it WHERE it is not, and as it IS not. Give the past to Him Who can change YOUR mind about it, FOR you."

"The search for truth is but the honest searching out of everything that INTERFERES with truth. TRUTH IS. And can be neither lost, nor sought, nor found. It is there, wherever YOU are, being WITHIN you. But it CAN be recognized or unrecognized, real or false, to YOU. If you hide it, it becomes unreal to you, BECAUSE you hid it, and SURROUNDED IT WITH FEAR."

"The decision whether or not to listen to this course and follow it, is but the choice between truth and illusion. For here IS truth, SEPARATED from illusion, and NOT confused with it at all. How simple does this choice become when it is perceived as only what it is. For ONLY fantasies made confusion in choosing possible, and they are totally UNreal. "

"The miracle dissolves error because the Spiritual eye identifies error as false or unreal. This is the same as saying that by seeing light, darkness automatically disappears."

"Fantasies are distorted forms of thinking, because they always involve twisting perception into unreality. Fantasy is a debased form of vision."

"But Christ-control takes no account at all of the MAGNITUDE of the miracle itself, because the concept of size exists only in a plane that is itself unreal. Since the miracle aims at RESTORING reality, it would hardly be useful if it were bound by the laws of the same error it aims to correct."

In ACIM the definition of forgiveness is not well understood. I did not understand it for many years.

I especially got caught up in this seemingly 'better than just theoretical' wave of 'you need to APPLY the course', which typically then means you need to 'do forgiveness' through some kind of process, and that this is what forgiveness is. And then you hear terms like 'quantum forgiveness' and 'true forgiveness' and stuff thrown around like this describes 'what you do to forgive', which most people take to mean the process of applying it.

But that's not it.

There were also phrases like "Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing ... It merely looks and waits and judges not." and "I need do nothing" which seemed to totally contradict this idea of 'doing' forgiveness.

And it continues with "he who would not forgive must judge" which then leads to further confusions like 'well that means I must stop judging'.

That's not it either.

There are really two different vantage points and it depends on which vantage point you're currently taking as to what forgiveness means for you or what your role is. You could think of it as two different levels. On the ego's level (level 1) there is no forgiveness, only unforgiveness. On the Holy Spirit's level (level 2) there is absolute forgiveness.

Much of the course, when it speaks of forgiveness, speaks of how the Holy Spirit perceives, such as "forgiveness is the light in which I see" and "forgiveness is still, and quietly does nothing". For the Holy Spirit, he is in a state of BEING FORGIVING. Now, this has absolutely nothing to do with some kind of activity. Activity is not needed. Because Holy Spirit is BEING forgiving, he is looking from above the battlefield upon everything and is recognizing that there is only innocence. He is only SEEING innocence because He is in the light. He is not seeing guilt, he is not seeing projections. He is in effect in a state of perfect, constant forgiveness. And here forgiveness is not a 'doing word', it's a 'being' word.

The Holy Spirit's forgiveness is proactively forgiving, SO THAT there is nothing that needs to be done. He overlooks error SO THAT there is no messy errors to clean up. He sees WITH light so that he does not SEE darkness. He has a forgiving attitude, which does not mean that something happens and then He forgives it. It means, he is FORE-giving, giving ahead of the need to forgive, which is a kind of blessing, in order to MAKE CERTAIN that there is nothing TO forgive. If he were to stop having a forgiving attitude, he would enter into error, create illusions, invent guilt, and then there would be 'work' to do. Correction would be needed, and He would NOT be in a forgiving attitude any more.

Forgiveness, in terms of the Holy Spirit's state of perpetual forgiveness, forgives SO THAT judgement does not arise. He sees that all are innocent and knows that there is no sin. "In that view, are all your sins forgiven." So the Holy Spirit doesn't have to 'do forgiveness', because there is nothing to forgive when you ARE ALREADY FORGIVEN. He knows that nothing has happened and forgiving in order to correct something that's happened is not required. He looks, is still and quiet, and does nothing. And this also does not mean that he undoes ego. There is no ego to undo while His attitude is still perfect forgiveness. This is a perfect, pure state of total forgiveness, the atonement, in which there is only innocence recognized everywhere. It's described also in how you will see 'the forgiven world' which will sparkle with innocence and no guilt anywhere. That's what BEING FORGIVING really means, it has NOTHING to do with any kind of process of correction or sorting out perception or changing your mind. It's the FINAL STATE where there is nothing left to forgive.

Now, this isn't typically the state we find ourselves in. Instead, we find ourselves in a state where we have already failed to be forgiving, and we now have an 'unforgiving' attitude, which results in judgement. And that judgement encapsulates all belief in separation, sin, guilt, fear, projection, victimhood, punishment and death. That's the state we find ourselves in most often. In this state, we are NOT being forgiving. So now we ask ourselves, how do I get out of this state and return to innocence? And usually the answer to that is, "you need to apply forgiveness".

No, not really. You can't suddenly take Holy Spirit's 'forgiveness is already accomplished' attitude and 'use it' in the midst of 'level 1' ego bullshit. And you certainly can't use it like a weapon to be used ON the ego's bullshit or TO it.

Remember Forgiveness, per the Holy Spirit, is not a process of doing something 'to' an illusion to make it go away. It's a state of it having not existed in the first place. We need to get INTO that state, and return to having a forgiving attitude. And only AFTER we have returned to that forgiving attitude will we be able to SEE innocence. "Forgiveness is the light in which I see" literally means that you CANNOT see clearly when you're in the middle of unforgiveness, and you cannot see the innocence of yourself or your brother while you still believe something has HAPPENED that needs forgiving.

But still we seem to cling to the need for this so called 'process' to try to somehow bridge the gap, to get us from the state of suffering we're experiencing now (ego mind), to some other state where there is no suffering (Holy Spirit's mind). So then we think we have to DO something. And then we think we have to DO forgiveness. And then we think we have to go through some steps or whatever and that this is dutifully doing forgiveness, ie applying the course. This isn't what it means to be forgiving. But this is a 'process of correction'. This is the undoing of the ego. In effect, forgiveness shows you that THERE IS NO EGO (death), and in this sense only does it 'un-do' ie NOT-DO ego. But it doesn't do something 'TO' the ego. "Holy Spirit does not attack the ego."

When we are doing this process, we are not doing forgiveness, but we are doing this process SO THAT we take back judgements and projections and remove blocks to awareness so that we might become AWARE that there is nothing to be forgiven. We are lifting the illusions from our mind so that we can join with Holy Spirit in His light where, forgivingly, it is seen that all are innocent already - that nothing's really happened and therefore there is only cause for acknowledgement/acceptance of the atonement. In effect, we only get into 'forgiveness' at the END of the process of undoing, and as soon as we enter into that perfect forgiving-ness we immediate RECOGNIZE that there is nothing to forgive because everyone is already innocent and nothing's happened.

All this other ego junk, the judgements, the projections, the belief in sin and guilt, the view that we're victims, etc... this is all ego. We need to cancel this stuff out. We don't do something TO it, we don't apply forgiveness TO it. We UN-DO, ie not-do these ego things. By not continuing to DO these ego things, we are undoing the ego. It's hard to get your head around that because it's really like making the mind work backwards, retracing your steps. You need to withdraw your belief that something has even HAPPENED at all, rather than work on trying to make 'what happened' go away.

If I need to 'do a forgiveness' it really means I am being unforgiving and my attitude needs to change back to being forgiving. Only when my attitude HAS shifted to 'being forgiving', and the 'process of correction' is complete, ONLY THEN am I actually forgiving. And only then can I see innocence. And only then am I in forgiveness, with Holy Spirit. And only then do "I need do nothing", having stopped doing all the stuff my ego WAS doing to try to 'do something'. So be aware, 'doing forgiveness' is an EGO DECOY because the ego loves to 'do' as a way to perpetuate itself. Getting your mind to 'not do' seems very counter-intuitive and not at all what you are used to.

Forgiveness is the end result of stopping an unforgiving attitude.

or..

Forgiveness is the natural state of the Son of God when He has not failed in that attitude, and where any belief that there is something to forgive has been healed.

It is not what gets you TO a forgiving attitude. Correction, ie HEALING, is what gets you there. Or in a term the Course uses in the miracle principles, "miracles are everyone's right, but PURIFICATION is necessary first". Purification. That's what we seem to be 'doing', so that we can RETURN to being forgiving.

The Holy Spirit does have a function of HEALING, which is, an ACTIVE role of correction which is capable of undoing what the ego has made - "the consequences of your wrong decision". And this is also where MIRACLES come in. Miracles are the means by which Holy Spirit ACTIVELY CORRECTS the mind (thus the emotions and body also), by blessing it with a forgiving attitude. Holy Spirit is miracle minded. He has miracle readiness. He has a role to play of LIFTING YOU UP to His state of forgiveness, where all that needed to be 'forgiven' is already healed. He has a function of RESTORATION, of restoring you to an awareness of your God-given condition of innocence, holiness, and health. This extends from His forgiving attitude, through you, and on to others.

We need to no longer 'do forgiveness'. My only job is to offer up to Holy Spirit the wrong decisions I've made for HIS correction and healing, and to open up to allowing Him to heal me, so that I can enter INTO a forgiving state of mind with Him.

"The blameless cannot blame, and those who have accepted their innocence see nothing to forgive."

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in that view are all your sins forgiven."

See here that it says forgiveness RECOGNIZES that nothing occurred... which is a state where the idea of that 'something happened' has ALREADY BEEN UNDONE, a state where innocence has ALREADY BEEN RESTORED. Forgiveness sees WITH forgiveness in order to see that there IS nothing to forgive. It doesn't look at 'things still to undo'. We need to join Holy Spirit in this state, and 'getting there' is really a matter of stopping avoiding being there, which is what the ego's distractions are for.

Also recognize that once you are IN forgiveness, it is automatic to RECOGNIZE a pre-existing innocence and atonement. There is no effort involved, and the innocence you see is simply REVEALED to you, because it was always there and always true. You have removed the block to the awareness of its presence. Getting yourself into the Holy Spirit's state of mind is the only seeming 'task' that we seem to have to 'do' and really it does not involve doing... but rather recognizing all the ego things we are 'doing' and STOPPING THEM.

Yes, stop judging, but moreso, stop being unforgiving. Stop projecting. Stop believing in sickness and death. Stop hating yourself. Stop believing in sin. Stop being separate from God. Say no to the ego by giving it no power or energy. Stop buying into illusions. And start opening up to your relationship with God based on love and innocence and a forgiving attitude that recognizes, and shows you, that Christ is still innocent.

In ACIM Jesus makes many clear references to a distinction between heaven and earth. He particularly uses the term "in heaven" as an opposite to "on earth". This clearly implies to most readers that heaven is some kind of place which is "not earth", which is "other than earth", which is "beyond earth", and which you can "be in" as an alternative to "being on earth".

"The Kingdom of Heaven is the dwelling place of the Son of God, who left not his Father, and dwells not apart from Him."

"Heaven waits for his return, for it was created as the dwelling place of God's Son."

Jesus clearly distinguishes that there are two places. You can be in heaven, and you can be on the earth. And they are not the same. Heaven is actually a vast realm of creation and living beings which earth barely has any awareness of. And heaven is a place you can "go to". Do not be deceived by statements such as "heaven is not a place", because this refers only to it not being localized in space. Heaven is everywhere, earth is nowhere.

It is also clear that heaven's properties are not like the properties of earth. We can bring some aspects of heaven "down" onto the earth, such as forgiveness which symbolizes heaven, and such as holy relationships which symbolize real relationships in heaven. Indeed earth can even "reflect" heaven. But it cannot BE heaven.

Jesus is clear that these are two states and two orders of reality and they are opposites. And even when earth is reinterpreted "as if part of heaven", it is still not the same. Nor is there any life outside of heaven, and earth is outside of heaven.

You can be on the earth, or in heaven. On the earth, your function is to forgive and heal to prepare your mind for God to take the final step, which literally takes you OFF the earth and INTO heaven. Back home to God where you belong. Heaven is your home. Earth is an alien world to you. Forgive the world and go home.

"Let me know that I am an Effect of God, and so I have the power to create like You. And as it is in Heaven, so on earth. Your plan I follow here, and at the end I know that You will gather Your Effects into the tranquil Heaven of Your Love, where earth will disappear, and separate things unite in glory as the Son of God."

"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."

"He was "called down upon the earth"

"All power in Heaven and earth is therefore given him and he will share it with you when you have completed yours."

"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."

"His holy will can never be denied, because his Father shines upon his mind, and lays before it all the strength and love in earth and Heaven."

"Forgiveness represents your function here. It is not God's creation, for it is the means by which untruth can be undone. And who would pardon Heaven? Yet on earth you need the means to let illusion go. Creation merely waits for your return to be acknowledged, not to be complete."

"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."

"The gifts of God are in my hands, to give to anyone who would exchange the world for Heaven."

"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."

"For God's Will is done in earth and Heaven."

"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."

"Yet he whom I forgive will give me gifts beyond the worth of anything on earth. Let my forgiven brothers fill my store with Heaven's treasures, which alone are real."

"The song of freedom, which sings the praises of ANOTHER world, brings to it hope of peace. For it REMEMBERS Heaven. And now it sees that Heaven HAS come to earth at last, from which the ego's rule has kept it out so long. Heaven has come because it found a home in your relationship on earth. And earth can hold no longer what has been GIVEN Heaven as its own."

"His Words are born in God, and come to you with Heaven's love upon them. Those who hear His Words have heard the song of Heaven, for these are the words in which all will merge as one at last."

"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. Let today be celebrated both on earth and in your holy home as well."

"Your will be done! In Heaven as on earth this is forever true."

"It does not matter if you think you are in earth or Heaven. What your Father wills for you can never change."

"You become the symbol of his Father here on earth."

"No-one on earth can grasp what Heaven is, or what its One Creator really means. Yet we have witnesses. It is to them that wisdom would appeal." "All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do."

"The Holy Spirit is the way in which God's will can be done on earth as it is in Heaven. 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."

"But God has given him a better Friend, in whom all power in earth and Heaven rests."

"In Heaven, means and end are one, and One with Him. This is the state of true creation, found not within time, but in eternity. To no-one here is this describable."

"His will is done because all power is given him in Heaven and on earth."

"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."

"He denies NOT his own reality BECAUSE it is the truth. Just under Heaven does he stand, but close enough NOT to return to earth. For this relationship HAS Heaven's holiness. How far from home can a relationship so like to Heaven BE?"

"It does not judge your proper role. 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."

"Everyone on earth has formed special relationships, and, although this is not so in Heaven, the Holy Spirit knows how to bring a touch of Heaven to them here."

"It is the bond by which the giver and receiver are united in extension here on earth as they are one in 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."

"For that is changeless, and has no effects which anything in Heaven or on earth could ever alter."

"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 want to see the sunlight and the glow of Heaven shining on the face of earth, redeemed from sin and in the Love of God."

"Prayer is a ladder reaching up to Heaven. At the top there is a transformation much like your own, for prayer is part of you. The things of earth are left behind, all unremembered."

"Today's idea takes another step toward quick salvation, and a giant stride it is indeed! So great the distance is that it encompasses, it sets you down just short of Heaven, with the goal in sight and obstacles behind. Your foot has reached the lawns that welcome you to Heaven's gate; the quiet place of peace where you await with certainty the final step of God. How far are we progressing now from earth!"

"And you will have conviction then of Him Who knows the function that you have on earth as well as Heaven."

"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."

"The miracles you do on earth are lifted up to Heaven, and to Him. They witness to what you do not know, and, as they reach the gates of Heaven, God will open them. For never would He leave His own beloved Son outside them, and beyond Himself."

"How could there be a meeting place at all where earth and Heaven can be reconciled within a mind where both of them exist?"

"He understands all power in earth and Heaven belongs to him because of who he is."

"And then you hold the key that opens Heaven's gate, and brings the Love of God the Father down to earth at last, to raise it up to Heaven. God will take this final step Himself."

"Not yet is Heaven quite remembered, for the purpose of forgiveness still remains. Yet everyone is certain he will go BEYOND forgiveness, and he but remains until it is made perfect in himself."

"There is a hope of happiness in him so sure and constant he can barely stay, and wait a little longer with his feet still touching earth. Yet is he glad to wait 'til every hand is joined, and every heart made ready to arise and go with him. For thus is HE made ready for the step in which is all forgiveness left behind."

"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."

"But what is true in earth and Heaven is beyond your naming."

"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."

"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. And they reflect the teacher who is teaching them."

"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."

"This is the ONLY justice Heaven knows, and all the Holy Spirit brings to earth."

"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."

"Your other life has continued without interruption, and has been and always will be totally unaffected by your attempts to dissociate."

"The body is the symbol of the world. Leave it behind. It cannot enter Heaven. But I can take you there anytime you choose. Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does so."

When we try to make sense of things, we use logical reasoning. You do this all the time even if you don't realize it. You take what you "know is true" and build a conclusion from it.

Everyone tries to make sense of things. Whatever seems to make sense, you accept as true. When something doesn't make sense, you feel confused or regard it as false. This actually means you are HEAVILY dependent on whatever the logical process produces as a result, and usually don't question the process itself.

Everyone has a sense of what is true and what is false. What is true for you is the result of your reasoning. Your reasoning might be very accurate, or it could be very confused, but either way you end up with a conclusion.

The main way that people reason is based on a simple SEPARATION BASED method. It's based in separation because it defines whether or not something IS OR IS NOT something. A similar way we do this is trying to determine that something is EITHER THIS OR THAT. But with the clause that "it cannot be both". ie ... it's a model of NOT BOTH. SO it is "exclusive" and AGAINST equality.

Because the physical world itself, spacetime, is built from the separation idea, physical objects appear to be "separate" from each other. And being NOT equal, they are all DIFFERENT. This arrangement of "separate and different" objects lends itself very well to this kind of "either/or" reasoning.

So you can use this logic to say, my car is either in the garage or parked up front. Or, I will have the ham sandwich not the turkey sandwich. Or, my body is male not female. Or, this is my house not yours.

This kind of thinking maps exactly and very well to the arrangement of the physical world, because the physical world was MADE in an idea of separation. It has separation infused into it. And so Object A and Object B seem to be separate options. Either A, or B.

What this world, and this kind of reasoning, is EXTREMELY poor at, is dealing with matters of SHARING. It has no way to deal with the notion that something applies to BOTH, or to A AND B at the same time. It works very well when things are kept in separate boxes, sectioned off. But it has no way to deal with the idea that something is in two places at once, or that the truth applies equally to two things, or that two things are also one thing.

So in this world we can't usually say, I am sitting in my car AND I'm sitting in my house. Or that I am a human and a fish. Or that both me and my wife each get 100% of the pizza. These kind of ideas seem like nonsense or "not possible". We'd say, they are false.

The thing is, while THIS world is based on separation logic, as a THOUGHT SYSTEM founded on the idea of things being completely separate, God's reality is TOTALLY UNLIKE this.

God doesn't think in terms of separation. He doesn't think in terms of separate boxes. He also doesn't think in terms of EITHER THIS OR THAT. He doesn't draw contrasts between things in this way. He isn't exclusive or special or isolated or one-sided or treating one thing differently than another.

Also, given that God is whole and perfect, when God creates, God creates wholly and perfectly. This means that whatever God creates, has properties which are fully inherited from Himself and his nature. Like father like Son. But this means that, what is true of the father is true of the son. It means they are BOTH something. e.g. they are both holy, both innocent, both have everything, both are creators, etc. In fact this goes to such as an extent as to say they are ONE, and yet they are two, because they BOTH exist even though they share everything.

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

Similarly the Golden Rule, which is God's law, which is based on the idea that what is true of one thing is true of another and all things are treated equally, DEPENDS ON the idea that what is true of me is true of me AND YOU. That BOTH of us get to have everything.

That ME AND YOU are exactly alike. That what is true of me, is true of you, and vice versa. This is perfect equality. And it even goes so far as to mean that there is no compromise, lack, scarcity, or competition, because everyone has FULL access to everything simultaneously. This is true sharing.

"You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did.""Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

However, this kind of equality, with a single truth applying to all things, where the truth is SHARED, and where BOTH elements are "as one", cannot be handled by the either/or logical process. In truth, for example, any thought of God contains all the thoughts of God. Any son of God is all the sons of God. This DOES NOT COMPUTE to the separation-based reasoning.

The ego, using separation thinking, would say, a son of God HAS TO BE EITHER, here, or there. He has to be in this box, or that box. He cannot be in both. God would say, that is totally untrue, that one son of God shares all of himself with another son of God, and BOTH of them are in BOTH boxes at the same time. That you are LITERALLY IN your brother, one with Him, as though he is part of you. This is absolutely sensible, rational, logical, and perfectly impeccable based on HOW GOD THINKS.

What you'll find is that, anything to do with God, his creation, his mind, heaven, reality, the sonship, sons/souls, holy spirit etc, absolutely anything that existed before the separation and without ego. .. is governed NOT by laws of "either this or that", but by laws of "both and". Laws of equality. Laws of identicality. Laws of oneness, which TRANSCEND BOUDARIES.

Therefore, whenever you think of any of these TOPICS, and you start trying to draw conclusions about these topics, IF you use either/or separation based logic to do so, you WILL come to COMPLETELY FALSE conclusions, but these conclusions will seem to make sense. They seem to have consistency, but they are based on a false premise (separation), and so are not sound or valid.

For example, God has created a sonship which comprises many sons. But it is also true that each of these sons IS the other sons. For example "one brother is all brothers. one mind is all minds". A son isn't just a "separate son", it's a son who IS ALSO the other sons. And there are many sons who are each other as well. And this is not in any way a contradiction nor is it anything to do with separation in the ego sense.

But if you use EITHER/OR based reasoning, and you look at heaven, you'll tell yourself, EITHER .... a) God has one son or b) God has many sons. And you'll tell yourself that it would not MAKE SENSE unless it were ONE OR THE OTHER. That the answer must be "not both". But "not both" is a TOTAL DENIAL of the fact that everything in heaven IS BOTH. It's a system founded on "both", on "and", on "sharing and inclusion."

The ego's way of thinking is EXCLUSION BASED. One object is excluded from another object. One boxes content is exclusive to that box and not the other box. This is how 99% of the world population thinks about EVERYTHING.

God's way of thinking is INCLUSION BASED. One object is also in another object. One object is in multiple locations. One object IS the other object. Two boxes contain one object. This is INCLUSIVE reasoning. This is how God thinks, and how his entire thought system functions. Because God is not BOUND by the LIMITATIONS of separation or a separation based system. God DEFIES separation.

So when you think "exclusively" about God's reality and creation, you are MAKING AN ERROR. Because you are using a logic system NOT designed to accommodate a system that overflows boundaries. So you are trying to FORCE boundaries onto that system, are trying to FORCE things into separate boxes that they are not restricted to, and are attempting to PROJECT SEPARATION onto heaven.

It is quite funny but almost everyone does this with regards to course topics. In other words, using an ego-based logic process to think about NON-ego topics, IN an ego way. The result is FALSE conclusions, which masquerade as "making total sense." But in truth, what makes sense to the ego, is totally nonsense, and what makes sense to God, is totally nonsense to the ego. Because the ego is insane.

That means that separation-based reasoning IS INSANITY. And trying to shove God's creations into finite boxes IS ISANITY. And trying to claim that God HAS to have only one son in one box IS INSANITY. And claiming that God can't have ONE son AND many sons AT THE SAME TIME, which is "perfectly legal" in God's system, is INSANITY.

The problem isn't so much that people are drawing false conclusions, it's more that people DO NOT realize that they are USING an ego-affirming thought process to FILTER and JUDGE a NON-egoic system. And so they SEE separations where they don't exist, AND they OVERLOOK separations where they DO exist as well. Such as here:

"God, who encompasses ALL Being, nevertheless ***created separate beings who have everything individually***, but who want to share it to increase their joy."

It would seem "logical" to most to say God EITHER has to have one son OR many sons, and it can't be both. And it seems logical to say that IF God only has one son HE CANNOT have many sons. And it seems logical to say that therefore those sons must be part of "separation" because "the absence of separations" is more spiritual. BUT ALL OF THIS IS A FALSE CONCLUSION, projected onto a divine system of logic, BY a BACKWARDS system of logic based on separation and exclusion.

We just don't realize that we do this. We do this all the time. Like literally EVERY conversation in this forum about the course uses separation-based reasoning. We think that reasoning in terms of either/or is totally normal, natural, and the ONLY way to think. It is TOTALLY not how God thinks and it is actually extremely unnatural. It is what leads to false perception in fact.

If your whole mindset and thought process is always proceeding along the lines of "this or that" "either or" ..... you are literally enforcing separation. You are being EXCLUSIVE, which means you are EXCLUDING others. And this is precisely what separation means - exclusion from the whole, exclusion from relationship, exclusion from communication and sharing.

If you THINK this way, about everything, all the time, you are thinking WITH the ego, even if you think you are being spiritual or thinking about spirit. This forces you into BODY identification because the body symbolizes a SEPARATE BOX, kept apart and exclusive from the other boxes. Exclusive reasoning anchors you into space and time and bodies. It is a thought system of death and isolation. This is NOT how God thinks and it is NOT how his thought system operates.

And anyone wanting to do the course will need to learn to grasp paralogical reasoning. Otherwise you can't possibly comprehend how your brother is yourself, or how you can have a holy relationship, or how you can be one with something without losing your identity.

Oneness with others is an INCLUSIVE idea, not an idea of exclusion, and you can't USE exclusive thinking to understand it. But you CAN use inclusive logic, which is holographic as well. Because God thinks holographically not linearly. We have to INCLUDE if we want to awaken, not shove God's creation into prison cells with only room for "one".

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

It is not JUST true that God has one Son. It IS true that God has one son. AND it is true that he has many sons. And his many sons are direct creations of his, while also the one son encapsulates them all, without removing them from him even slightly as a direct parent. To suggest God's SONSHIP - which is a collection of sons - is "an ego thing", is a COMPLETE LOGICAL FAILURE. To suggest that the presence of many sons is "separation", is a complete logical failure as well.

When there is BOTH AND ..... me AND you .... US as one ..... united and together as brothers forever..... THAT is reality. A system of total equality, sharing and simultaneous union. You exist, AND I exist. WE are one and many.

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