"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.

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!

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."

Nothing in the physical world is exactly identical. The snowflakes, the grains of sand, the bricks in a wall, the tiny atoms, the subatomic particles. Everything is at least in some way ever so slightly different to the rest. Particles in slightly different orientations. Electron clouds with slightly different variances in probability. Wave functions that are waving ever so slightly differently.

Just because we say that all photons seem to be similar and all hydrogen atoms seem to be similar and so on it doesn't mean they are absolutely identical in all ways. The truth is, there is not a single speck of spacetime that is absolutely identical to any other speck. This is because the entire system is founded on separation, which is an idea of inequality.

When you realize that everything here is different, and similarities are just loose approximations, then you also realize that ideas like "a cosmological constant", "a fixed speed of light", "a constant speed of gravity" etc are all bullshit ideas. None of these things are constant. The world doesn't hold still.

There are NO constants in this world because nothing here is certain, nothing stays the same forever, and nothing is consistent. It's a world of illusions, not of reality. This is why really science is incapable of accurately defining what's going on here, because "accuracy" is not its nature. It's just a big pool of variance and almost and possibly and sort-of.

There isn't really such a thing as reliable math - the numbers aren't even really stable. There are no actual categories of anything, types of anything, groups of anything. Some things are similar and seem to behave similarly but they are not identical in the strictest sense. And lumping them together is an approximation. The best anyone can do is make a guess.

Science has somewhat ignored the fact that in this world nothing equals anything. All conclusions are false. Nothing here is stable enough to call it real. Nothing stays the same at all, and everything is always changing. This means even the categories and the math and the numbers is always changing, rendering the science impossible.

"This is why rigidity is regarded AS stability by those who are off the mark."

"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."

"A universal theology is impossible"

"Why share its madness in the sad belief that what is universal here is true? Nothing the world believes is true."

"Not ONE Thought of His makes ANY sense at all within this world. And NOTHING that the world believes as true has ANY meaning in His Mind at all."

"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."

"All your time is spent in dreaming."

Do you ever get the feeling everyone is just making stuff up as they go along? Or do you experience yourself doing this?

From time to time I *think* that I know what I want to do, and sort of talk myself into it, and do it, and it seems right, then later I am disillusioned and don't know what I saw in it. I add justifications and reasons why, in order to "convince myself", and later these turn out to be empty and hold no weight.

This world is insane. And we try to "give it all the meaning it has". We use scapegoats to justify doing or not doing things. We make things into enemies in order to deflect our decision making in a certain direction. And no-one knows what the fuck they're doing.

Half the time it seems all the medical people are just making shit up and don't know what the heck they're doing, cus every solution they come up with has awful side effects. The ads on TV for medications are utterly ridiculous.

People tell you what you eat and why eating this or that is better for you. Turns out none of them have the truth and none of them can agree to anything. Everyone and their cat has an opinion.

I get convinced for a while that doing something is "what I want to do" and get all lost in it and then something interrupts me, and then some time passes, and I come back to it and have no idea why I would want to be doing that thing. What I thought was "salvation" turns out to be another completely meaningless wild goose chase.

In a way, it's like trying to find "real meaning" in a meaningless world. ACIM says the world is meaningless, and we put all the meaning onto it. So when we start weaving a story about "why" something is or is not a good choice, it's all made up. It's all ego bullshit. There is no truth here.

In a way that leads to realizing, there is nothing meaningful in the world. And meaning must be deeper within somewhere. And that also reveals that the world is entirely a senseless, insane illusion that has no truth and doesn't mean shit.

If I choose to make something happen, let's say I decide and go make it happen. Well, now I made it happen cus I force it it to happen. Totally meaningless.

I'm looking around for a sense of "that's really what I love to do" sort of thing, only to find that even the things I thought I loved to do are just empty containers onto which I project various fake motivations and ideas, to try to "dress them up" and explain why they're so great. There's nothing there.

The world seems like a blank canvas. It has nothing inherent to it. It's a effect. So it can't really "do" anything "for" you. It can't save you, or make you happy or sad. It does what you make it do. And that means it has no real opinion, or value. If you don't make it valuable, it's not valuable. If you don't read into it, there's nothing to it.

It's like we're living in some kind of giant snow globe pretending it's an amazing real place with built-in value and importance but it's really all just a pile of tosh, lol.

"I do not know the thing I am."

"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."

Hah!

"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 or on myself."

Yet in learning this is salvation born. And what you are will tell you of Itself.

Come home. You have not found your happiness in foreign places and in alien forms that have no meaning to you, though you sought to make them meaningful. This world is not where you belong. You are a stranger here.

God’s welcome waits for us all, and He will welcome us as I am welcoming you. Forget not the Kingdom of God for anything the world has to offer."

Projection makes perception and makes the world you see. You put it there. You give it its meaning. It has no real meaning at all. This is all just a big lie we keep telling ourselves. THERE IS NO WORLD!

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.

Ego is the idea of being a completely separated off, isolated, alone, totally self-reliant, exclusive special unique self, which has no relationships with anyone and relies on no-one. Completely autonomous as though it is totally cut off from everything.

"The ego's goal is quite explicitly EGO AUTONOMY. From the beginning, then, its PURPOSE is to be separate, sufficient unto itself, and independent of any power EXCEPT ITS OWN. This is WHY it is the symbol of separation."

"The ego ALWAYS attacks on behalf of separation. Believing it HAS the power to do this, it does nothing else, because its goal of autonomy IS nothing else."

"the ego attacks everything it perceives, by breaking it up into small and disconnected parts, without meaningful relationships, and thus without meaning"

"The core of the separation delusion lies simply in the fantasy DESTRUCTION of love's meaning."

"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."

"Sickness is isolation. For it seems to keep one self apart from all the rest, to suffer what the others do not feel. It gives the body final power to make separation real and keep the mind in solitary prison, split apart and held in pieces by a solid wall of sickened flesh which it can not surmount."

"The IDEA of separation PRODUCED the body, and remains connected TO it, MAKING it sick because of its identification WITH it."

"The body is the symbol of the ego, as the ego is the symbol of separation."

"The Separation is merely another term for a split mind. It was not an act, but a thought."

"To fragment IS TO EXCLUDE, and substitution is the strongest defense the ego has for separation."

"For the IDEA of guilt brings a belief of condemnation of one by another, projecting separation in place of unity."

"the separation was a descent from magnitude to littleness"

"You who were prisoners in separation are now made free in Paradise."

"Depression is an inevitable consequence of separation. So are anxiety, worry, a deep sense of helplessness, misery, suffering, and intense fear of loss."

"The ego arose from the Separation, and its continued existence depends on your continuing belief in the Separation."

"All it CAN offer is a sense of temporary existence, which begins with its own beginning and ends with its own ending."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"ALL sickness comes from separation. When the separation is denied, it goes."

"Guilt is ALWAYS disruptive. Anything that engenders fear is divisive, because it obeys the law of division. If the ego is the symbol of the separation, it is also the symbol of guilt. Guilt is more than merely not of God. It is the symbol of the ATTACK on God."

"SEPARATION therefore remains the ego's chosen condition."

"In separation from your brother was the first attack upon yourself begun."

"The separated mind cannot maintain the separation EXCEPT by dissociating."

"The separation IS the notion of rejection. As long as you teach this, YOU still believe it."

I went to God and opened myself up on the topic of unconditional love. I wanted to find out how to be unconditionally loving, and I started to inquire whether God loved me unconditionally.

Then I started to regurgitate all of the things I did during the day which could've been considered guilty or judgmental or fearful. I seemed to be confessing these things, thinking perhaps that God would only love me unconditionally IF I hadn't done these things or IF I was willing to admit them.

For some reason it seemed difficult to simply accept that God loves me unconditionally. In my mind I kept thinking there had to be 'reasons' why God would love me, like, certain conditions that I had to be meeting, certain ways I had to be behaving. So I seemed to keep offering up these things that I'd 'done', believing that at least exposing them to His light was some kind of 'offering' or that He needs to forgive me for them, or something.

But what happened was, I think Holy Spirit chimed in that none of these things were important. I felt the presence of God, which was just 'there', while off to one side it seemed Holy Spirit spoke for Him. I still struggled to understand how God could be loving me unconditionally if I'd done certain things or made certain mistakes or whatever... there was just this ... expectation, of 'only being loved IF', a love that's based on conditions and requirements, that I found hard to push past mentally.

What I couldn't 'get', but what was being very simply offered, was that... all God wants to do is love me. Not me in exclusion, but, ... He had no other agenda. No other interests. He wasn't asking me to do certain mental somersaults. He wasn't even remotely interested in all the things I'd 'done'. He didn't seem at all concerned about any of the stuff I felt guilty about. It was really like He was oblivious to all this. And all that He WAS doing... was loving.

Holy Spirit chimed in... that all God wants to do is love. The impression I got was of like a 'being' that just loves, only loves, doesn't do anything else, has no other interests or motives, isn't even remotely excited or upset about other stuff I've done, isn't even remotely concerned with punishment or judgement, and JUST WANTS TO LOVE THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF ME.

And nothing else.

Just love. Just loving. Just being in love and wanting to share that love with me. Just embracing me with love and surrounding me with love, like love was its ONLY function, love was its only capability, and it couldn't DO anything else but love. It was almost like a handicapped child with severe limitations, as an analogy, which just runs up to you and hugs you spontaneously for no reason, and doesn't really do much else. It just loves. God just loves.

It blew me away that this was all God was interested in. Just to love me. Nothing else was important to Him in that moment. There were no distractions. Just this totally single-minded perfectly pure absolutely overwhelmingly unbridled passionate, embracing love, for me, for no reason whatsoever other than its own self-evident love.

I felt that, some. But parts of me still couldn't understand how this was possible. My ego mind kept reaching to "but what about ...."... and none of that was important.

God just loves us, 100%, all the time. We are in that love with Him, 100%, all the time. Just love everywhere. That's all there is.

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.

"Anger takes many forms, but it cannot long deceive those who will learn that love brings no guilt at all, and what brings guilt cannot be love and must be anger. All anger is nothing more than an attempt to make someone feel guilty, and this attempt is the only basis the ego accepts for special relationships. Guilt is the only need the ego has, and as long as you identify with it, guilt will remain attractive to you."

"Very simply, the attempt to make guilty is ALWAYS directed against God. For the ego would have you see Him, AND HIM ALONE, as guilty, leaving the Sonship OPEN to attack, and unprotected from it."

If you look, when you are angry or frustrated or even slightly annoyed with someone, while the feeling may be one of "anger", the process is really an attempt to make someone feel guilty, and the purpose is to displace your own guilt onto them. When you look at it as "trying to make them guilty", it's exactly that and only that.

Any attempt to point a finger of blame and say, "you are wrong" or "you did it" or "you shouldn't have done it" or "it was you" etc... is really an attempt to try to force the person to BE guilty, trying to cause guilt in them, trying to enforce guilt upon them and turn them INTO a guilty party. It's therefore a form of attack and a denial of free will.

When you get done being angry with someone you'll notice you were trying to make them guilty. You wanted them to be intensely identified as the sinner. You wanted to be right about this. And you wanted them to admit to their sinfulness. It's like a demand, and "love makes no demands."

What this shows you is that whenever we are angry, we are attacking, and are actively trying to hurt someone through guilt-inducing force. We are trying to convert them into the guilty party and are justifying it and backing it up with all our "reasons why" they actually are guilty.

So that means being angry at someone is not a neutral activity, or an unharmful activity, or a loving activity. It is actually an outright attack for purposes of displacing your own guilt onto another. "You but accuse your brother of your own sins."

In the anger it will always seem like you have amazingly justified reasons as to why you should be angry, because it's very clear why the person IS guilty. They DID seem to do something. They DID make a mistake. They DID hurt you. They DID move your cheese. They WERE abusive. They DID steal from you, or whatever. At least on the level of form.

This gives you a free pass of righteousness. This "righteous anger" is an excuse for making it okay to attack a person. The "justified outrage" passes for some kind of "right" that you have, because the occurrence is so obviously awful, inhumane, unjustified, un-asked for, vicious and the various other forms of what we'd identify as sinful based on appearances. But there is NO forgiveness in that view.

This means if we're not being forgiving we're not being loving, and you can't be loving or forgiving while you are being angry. This is because in the anger you are being unloving and unforgiving toward yourself, have accused yourself of sin and are now attempting to project that onto someone else, taking this wonderful opportunity they presented as a low-hanging fruit that you can easily attach your guilt to.

If someone does actually mess up, if they do attack, if they do something "wrong", this makes it extremely easy for your ego to pounce on them. Because now they've presented you with what seems to be an "actual sin". This makes it easy for you because you don't even have to invent a sin for them, they did it all by themselves. And now you can take this chance to push YOUR sin onto them by NOT forgiving them for theirs. It's a free pass.

There is no such thing as justification for anger. As ACIM says, "Anger is never justified". The justifications are lies, the appearance of sin happening is blindness and judgmental, the feeling of righteousness or deserving is completely unforgiving and a form of attack. Only by overlooking what your brother did can you be forgiving to him and to yourself.

"Forgiveness recognizes that what you thought your brother did has not OCCURRED."

"In this view are all your sins forgiven."

Every question contains fear. Knowledge is a state of total certainty, in which there is nothing to ask, no questions, no doubts, no fear. When you have knowledge, there is no basis for needing to ask anything.

When you don't have knowledge, due to a denial of knowledge, you enter into a state of lack. Here, knowledge is missing, so you now have a basis of "needing" to ask questions. The questions are part of seeking for what seems to be missing, trying to make sense of what is now confusing.

This means you have gone into fear. Fear is uncertainty. Knowledge is certainty. Without knowledge you must be afraid. Something becomes "unknown", leaving an open door for possibilities, imagined monsters, unexpected threats and things you cannot predict. Instantly you are in fear because you are uncertain.

There is a spiritual self-help idea of "questioning everything". Now, what's important to realize is NOT everything should be questioned. What should be questioned is anything to do with questions. Because questions are fear, and that is ego. So you should be questioning whether the fear is true, whether you really need to ask the question, and why you have blocked knowledge.

But if you are asking any other kind of question, which is based on the assumption that knowledge is denied, an entire world has arisen from ignorance, a universe of fear is in front of your eyes, and now you are asking questions about it... those kind of questions are not helpful. "What is it?" "What is happening?" "What is causing it" etc are all based in the assumption that a world of doubt is happening, inspiring questions.

You could continue being in a state of fear and questioning for a very long time, asking a billion questions, and not becoming any more certain. In fact many ego questions are designed merely to maintain fear, keep you searching, distract you from knowledge, and send you on a very long wild goose chase "not finding" any real sense of answer, certainty, clarity or knowledge. Questions that take you away from the TRUE answer, are not really helpful.

The only answer to all questions is God. Only the truth is true. The true answer is there is no question. In knowledge of the Kingdom nothing is missing or lacking or unknown or absent. All is known. And so there is no fear, because there is no uncertainty. There is also nothing to learn, so no questions to ask in an attempt to learn. When you are learning, you are really moving away from the truth, UNLESS you are learning the Unreality of your doubts and fears.

If you use questioning to unravel false questions, then this is helpful. If you are being radically honest for example, going within and finding out the deeper truth through a kind of inquiry, that's great. If it's moving you out of fear into certainty, great. If it's moving you away from ignorance toward knowledge, great. But if it's moving you outward away from yourself, away from peace and certainty, and you're becoming lost in doubt and not knowing and worry and fear and terror, which turns into stress and desperation, then you're asking ego-affirming questions instead of ego-dissolving questions.

"I have no question, I forgot what to decide".

"I know nothing"

These are important elements of the course's approach. It's not that you must know nothing. In fact, you must become reunited with knowledge and know everything! But the stuff that you THINK you know, but which is NOT really knowledge, has to be identified as NOT real knowledge. It's fake ego knowledge. It's great to recognize you don't REALLY know that things are going to work out badly - you are just speculating. It's good to drop your past learning, your self-taught lies, your false beliefs, your made-up rules, your justifications and so on... to make room for ACTUAL knowledge.

Ego knowledge always goes hand in hand with not knowing, and so always entails uncertainty, and therefore fear.

"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."

Even true perception is not knowledge. Nor is it wholly certain. It is fundamentally unstable. It can be stabilized to seem to align with certainty but it is not fundamentally certain. All perception is a separated state, and anyone still perceiving still needs healing. Only when perception is gone can there be knowledge. And that means the body must go as well, because the body is the device you made to perceiving with. "Indeed, you cannot remain in this world with this knowledge."

The world you made is a world of fear, a world of lies, and a world of uncertainty. Nothing in it can really be known. It's all made up bullshit. Questioning its reality is useful, but asking questions about what, why, how, when, where such and such is happening IN it, is just the ego going down the rabbit hole. The form of a question seeming to be a question, but really being a desire to fear and NOT KNOW the answer. The answer is in the Holy Spirit. Ask Him the truth.

"The ego will demand many answers that this course does not give. It does not recognize as questions the mere form of a question to which an answer is impossible. The ego may ask, "How did the impossible occur?", "To what did the impossible happen?", and may ask this in many forms. Yet there is no answer; only an experience. Seek only this, and do not let theology delay you."

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."

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."

"Consciousness was the first split that man introduced into himself. He became a PERCEIVER rather than a creator in the true sense."

In ACIM terms, before the separation from God, we simply enjoyed what Jesus calls "awareness". This awareness is tightly tied into oneness and knowledge.

In awareness, you ARE that which you are aware of. There is nothing truly "separate" to observe that isn't already you. Since you ARE that which you are aware of, you have immediate and direct "knowledge" of it. Thus knowledge and awareness and oneness is all tied together.

Awareness also has power and love and creation in it. It can cause by will the creation of extensions to God's kingdom. It extends ITSELF as a co-creator, also extending God, to KNOW that which it creates. Just as God created US through directly KNOWING us.

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

In the separation, we attempted to reject all this. We rejected oneness and introduced separation. This now meant that we wanted something to "come between" ourselves and ourselves. Between us and God. Something which can be different over here than it is over there.

As a result, mind split and now formed what ACIM refers to as "consciousness". It's a separated state. The mind in this state is NOT creative, and does NOT have knowledge. Instead of being causal and powerful and one with everything, it is instead a state relying entirely on maintaining separation.

"Consciousness is correctly identified as the domain of the ego." At the same time of course the sense of identity went from you being the whole, to you being only a part. And now in the egoic consciousness state of mind, the mind became UN-creative (mis-creative) and unwilling to be one with everything.

Mind's rejection of creation and knowledge was kind of like trying to make the mind empty, or to stop broadcasting (creating). So instead of extending and uniting and sharing, it became sort of passive and unwilling.

As a result, mind now regards itself as a sort of RECEIVER of inputs, signals, which come to it from something it regards as NOT part of itself. Not one with itself or known. As such there now develops ideas of space and time, of distance and delay, or separateness between self and brothers and God.

"Perception is a RESULT not a cause."

"Consciousness is thus the level of perception, but NOT of knowledge. Again, to PERCEIVE is NOT to know."

"Consciousness is the level which engages in the world, and is capable of responding to both external and internal impulses. Having no impulses from itself, and being primarily a mechanism for inducing response, it can be very wrong."

The perceiving "consciousness" state has now gone from being a powerful knowing creator-extender that is one with everything, to a disempowered passive state that doesn't know anything and sees everything as separate. Effectively it now sees itself as a victim or at the EFFECT OF things separate from itself.

Signals then enter the conscious mind either from without or within, and from the superconscious (God level) or subconscious (miracle level). Consciousness sort of RECEIVES these signals and thus PERCEIVES what it is TOLD exists. As though something outside of itself is making impressions upon it and giving it signals and telling it that stuff exists.

All of these signals in the perceiving mind are SENSED, in particular by the body. There is now a separation between self and other, so a separation between observer (who has awareness) and the observed. Because of the separation split between these two, it introduces the delay and distance of spacetime.

As such, every single physical object, all matter, space and time themselves, all human bodies, the planet Earth, the sun and moon etc, it's all ONLY a perceptual signal occurring in a state of separation. Separate things, being sensed by a separated mind, in a state in which the mind is not ONE with those things, and in which both the separated things AND the "separate observer" (ego) are illusions.

Both the ego mind (separated self) and the world it perceives (spacetime) depend entirely on maintaining separation and differences in order to maintain the mind split that leads to perception and consciousness. Without this "first split" in the mind, consciousness is not possible, perception is not possible, and separate objects are not possible.

This doesn't mean that the separate objects can be perceived "as one with" the observer. If the two are separate, perception is possible. If the two are one, perception is NOT possible and separation is NOT possible and OBJECTS are not possible. Matter is not possible, space and time are not possible, without a split mind.

"To see a sinless body is impossible."

"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."

Thus if you are still perceiving, you are NOT knowing. Even true perception is NOT knowledge, not oneness, and not a healed mind. Thus you can seem to wake up to or attain very high states of CONSCIOUSNESS, in which you can perceive the "real world", BUT, this is not the same as the realm of total oneness which is heaven.

"Even the perception of the Holy Spirit, as perfect as perception CAN be, is without meaning in Heaven. Perception can reach EVERYWHERE under His guidance, for the vision of Christ beholds EVERYTHING in light. But no perception, however holy, will last FOREVER."

Waking up WITHIN consciousness, in a perceptual realm, is still a split-minded state of separation. Only when consciousness ENDS, the split is entirely healed, and separateness becomes impossible, does the mind return to TOTAL KNOWLEDGE, oneness, perception is impossible, and space and time are impossible. Without the split of consciousness, there is no world. And the mind must wake up FROM consciousness in order to return to the awareness of reality.

No more dreams, no more material objects with differences, no more bodies and planets, no more observers and observed things. Only a directly known realm of SPIRIT AND LIGHT, created by God to last forever.

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

"And now God's KNOWLEDGE, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its Kingdom. Gone is perception, false and true alike. Gone is forgiveness, for its task is done. And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God. God knows it is His Own, as it is his. And here They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant, and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause. For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

"The 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. You will also remember that I made it very clear that the Resurrection was the return to knowledge, which was accomplished by the union of my will with the Father's."

This pretty much explains why you have the freedom to deny God.

"If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of suffering. But to do this, you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgment of your Father IS the acknowledgment of yourself as you ARE. 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.

You do not realize how much you have denied yourself, and how much God, in His love, would not have it so. Yet He would not interfere with you, because He would not know His Son if he were not free. To interfere with you would be to attack HIMSELF, and God is not insane. When you denied HIM, you WERE insane. Would you have Him SHARE your insanity? God will never cease to love His Son, and His Son will never cease to love Him. That was the condition of His Son's Creation, fixed forever in the Mind of God. To know that is sanity. To deny it is insanity. God gave HIMSELF to you in your Creation, and His gifts ARE eternal. Would you deny yourself to Him?"

Note also that "separation" as in the theoretical idea that you CAN BE separate (which is impossible), is totally different from "THE separation", which is another name for the fall of man, the tiny mad idea. We DID in fact have the idea, we DID believe it, and we DID "fall". This is why there appears to be a facebook. BUT, the fall is not actual real separation, it's just belief in it and a denial that actual separation is impossible.

"The Separation (not ACTUAL separation, but the state of believing it's possible) HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial. However, to concentrate on error is merely a further misuse of legitimate psychic mechanisms. The true corrective procedure, which has already been described as the proper use of the spiritual eye (or true vision), is to accept the error temporarily, BUT ONLY as an indication that IMMEDIATE correction is mandatory. This establishes a state of mind in which the Atonement can be accepted without delay."

So we did have the tiny mad idea, we did go into it through belief (which is really denial), and we did find ourselves in a "lower order reality". But this state in which we SEEM separate is not ACTUAL separation or real separation, which is impossible. It's just us MISTAKEDLY believing that it's possible and happening.

THE separation, the fall from Heaven, did occur. But it was not an actual separation.

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

The failure to communicate (to receive, to give equally), resulted in a state of denial, not listening, being unaware of perfection, a breakdown in the experience of oneness. It did not change anything perfect, it just closed the communication channels to a degree.

"What God DOES know is that His communication channels are not open to Him, so that He cannot impart His joy and know that His Children are wholly joyous. This is an ongoing process, not in time, but in eternity. God's extending outward, though not His completeness, is blocked when the Sonship does not communicate with Him as one. So He thinks, "My Children sleep, and must be awakened.""

"Those who communicate fear are promoting attack, and attack always BREAKS communication, and therefore makes communion impossible."

"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. Together, we can laugh them BOTH away, and understand that time can NOT intrude upon eternity. It IS a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which MEANS there is no time."

"Adam's "sin" could have touched none of you, had you not believed that it was the FATHER Who drove him out of Paradise. For it is in that belief that knowledge of the Father was lost, for it is only those who do not understand Him that COULD believe it."

"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.

Man's spiritual eye can sleep, but as will shortly appear in the notes (reference Bob, elevator operator) a sleeping eye can still see. One translation of the Fall, a view emphasized by Mary Baker Eddy, and worthy of note, is that "a deep sleep fell upon Adam". While the Bible continues to associate this sleep as a kind of anaesthetic utilized for protection of Adam during the creation of Eve, Mrs. Eddy was correct in emphasizing that nowhere is there any reference made to his waking up. While Christian Science is clearly incomplete, this point is much in its favor."

"What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substance-less, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was."

"We have discussed the fall or Separation before, but its meaning must be clearly understood, without symbols. 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.

The fruit of only ONE tree was "forbidden" to man in his symbolic garden. But God could not have forbidden it, or it could not have BEEN eaten. If God knows His children, and I assure you he does, would he have put them in a position where their own destruction was possible?"

"Eating of the tree of knowledge is a symbolic expression for incorporating into the self the ability for self-creation. This is the ONLY sense in which God and His souls are NOT co-creators. The belief that they ARE is implicit in the "self concept," a concept now made acceptable by its WEAKNESS, and explained by a tendency of the self to create an IMAGE of itself."

"Until the Separation, which is a better term than the Fall, nothing was lacking. This meant that man had no needs at all. If he had not deprived himself, he would never have experienced them.

After the Separation, needs became the most powerful source of motivation for human action. All behavior is essentially motivated by needs, but behavior itself is not a Divine attribute. The body is the mechanism for behavior."

"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."

"You who prefer specialness to sanity could not obtain it in your right minds. You were at peace until you asked for special favor. And God did not give it. For the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this of a Father who truly loved His Son. Therefore, you made of Him an UNloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father COULD give. And the peace of God's Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his REAL father, having attacked his glorious equality WITH Him.

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

"Whenever projection in its inappropriate sense is utilized, it ALWAYS implies that some emptiness (or lack of everything) must exist, and that it is within man's ability to put his own ideas there INSTEAD of the truth. If you will consider carefully what this entails, the following will become quite apparent:

First, the assumption is implicit that what God has Created can be changed by the mind of Man.

Second, the concept that what is perfect can be rendered imperfect (or wanting) is intruded.

Third, the belief that man can distort the Creations of God (including himself) has arisen, and is tolerated.

Fourth, that since man can create himself, the direction of his own creation is up to him.

These related distortions represent a picture of what actually occurred in the Separation. None of this existed before, nor does it actually exist now."

"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."

"Free will is the attribute of the mind, NOT the Soul. The Soul always remains changeless, because it never leaves the sight of God.

The Creation of the Soul is already fully accomplished. The mind, if it votes to do so, becomes a medium by which the Soul can create along the line of its own creation. If it does not freely elect to do so, it retains this creative ability, but places itself under tyrannous rather than authoritative control. As a result, what it creates is imprisonment, because such are the dictates of tyrants.

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."

So you see, we are IN a state of sleep, dreaming, denying, pretending not to be as God created us, imagining things are true which are not, being unwilling, and trying to give it reality through belief. But none of it is true, or really happening, what it represents (an actual separation) is fictional, and it's just an illusion masquerading as a separation.

"You are safe in God, dreaming of exile, but perfectly capable of waking to reality."

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."

The form that something takes is NOT its meaning. A form is like an instance, or example of something, or a certain variant of its possible range of states, or a specific configuration amongst many possible configurations. Something can take on a form, or take one form, or another form. There can be "forms of" things. Shapes, sizes, parts, configurations, structures, pieces, objects, bodies, states, conditions, etc it's all forms.

When you believe that something about the form is truth, now you are saying that the form IS CONTENT. That its inherent meaning or reality is tied to its form. So now if we say, well, my banana is looking old a rotten, we might now take this to mean the banana is dying and is not edible. Versus an underripe banana which is more firm and green, we might think this MEANS it is not yet edible. And thus we lock the form into certain judgmental definitions of what they are and what they can do.

When we mistake the form that something takes, for what it MEANS, and we derived meaning FROM it or based on it, we are deceived. This means we are listening to an illusory world asking it to tell us what is true. Form IS NOT meaning. Form is not content. Form does not have ANY truth. It is unsubstantial and meaningless and nothing. All forms are fiction and illusions. They are forms of error. They are mistakes, deceptions, lies, illusions, dreams and wishes.

To understand that everything in this world does not MEAN anything, we have to recognize that the form anything takes cannot tell us what it MEANS. One configuration of objects does NOT tell us anything. A certain arrangement of parts does not really mean anything. A bigger object or a smaller object, a certain kind of material, a piece of machinery, old versus new, none of it means anything different.

When we are in a thought system where we seem to ASK the world of form to TELL US what it means, looking to it as a source of truth and to inform us of what is THERE and what is happening, based on its particular aspects, we're literally asking a meaningless nothingness to derive meaning from itself. That a certain body in a certain state means one thing, and a body in another state means something else.

We start to then believe that there can be a DIAGNOSIS. Or a prognosis. Or a judgement or evaluation of what condition something is in, and the possible outcomes that may be consequences of that specific state. As if that means something or would lead to possible futures or potentials, while shutting off the path to other possibilities that aren't "appropriate" for this specific form. Possibilities that the FORM "claims" is not possible, BECAUSE OF the form.

So now a dead body rotting and decaying is believed to MEAN an irreversible process is taking place and the decomposition PROVES that life has ended. This is all completely bullshit and made-up. The body in this state is really absolutely no different to a body running a marathon. If we are DECEIVED by the appearance of form, then we are BLINDED. ALL appearances, all forms, all configurations, all shapes and sizes and colors are utterly meaningless and nothing true can be derived from them.

"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?"

Recognizing all objects as EQUALLY meaningless, their forms now become irrelevant. Who cares if something is taking on a certain shape? What does it matter that there SEEMS to be a certain specific sickness? Why should our response or reaction be profoundly different when the FORM is in a certain state versus another? To have different responses or to react in fear is really a sign that you BELIEVE that the form MEANS something different in a hierarchy of illusions. That a body in "this state" means "its terribly bad", while a body in "that state" is "not cause for concern." This is all bullshit, both the good and the bad evaluations.

All forms are deceptions. That's why the world is an illusion. It SEEMS to be something that it is not. It appears to be something it isn't. IT IS NOT TRUTH. It attempts to demonstrate PROOF OF SIN, that sins and events and happenings are taking place as, as if the world and the body have some kind of power, causation, will, mind, or ability to produce certain specific outcomes, chain reactions, or consequences. None of these pretend causations are real. All of these forms are equally just fake images being projected. They are empty pictures on a blank screen.

This is why ACIM even starts out the workbook having you look around the room and identifying that none of this means anything. To apply a single response (unconditionality) to ALL illusory forms, to all objects, in order to train your mind in the recognition that the form DOES NOT MATTER. That the form IS NOT MEANING. That the form of one object is no more or less important or relevant or significant than another. To deprogram you from the belief that certain kinds of objects in certain conditions MEAN one thing while others are more preferable.

The world is just a giant soup of jumbled up bits and pieces of nothingness, scrambled together into untold seeming numbers of configurations, designed to make it look as if there are a great MANY DIFFERENT things. As if there are contrasts and conflicts and ways that one thing IS NOT LIKE another. That this object is not that object. That this sick body is distinct from that healthy body. These are all DECEPTIONS. All illusions, trying to make it seem like ONE THING is many things. That the ONE DREAM is composed of many parts. That the illusion of separation isn't just an illusion of separateness, but a collective of untold numbers.

The ONLY way to recognize that all objects are equal, is to recognize they are all equally THE SAME. And the since they are all illusions of difference, their differences cannot be TRUE. Their FORMS cannot be true, when they conflict and differ. To be truth they have to be IDENTICAL. But their forms are NOT identical, so sameness reveals that their forms are NOT TRUTH. And different forms cannot be KEPT if there is to be equality. Their forms and their appearances of difference must not BE reality, because they're all contradictory. Therefore ALL FORM IS A LIE.

Not one object means anything more or less than another. Not one body means anything more or less than another in any state or seeming condition. Extreme torment and death and suffering is not any worse, bigger, stronger, harder, more difficult to undo, or more powerful and causative, than the slightest hint of a disturbance. Form cannot be taken to be meaning, it cannot be content, it cannot tell you WHAT SOMETHING IS, and all it can do is present a smokescreen.

The world is nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's not there. Without its forms there is no world. It is empty and nothingness. A void of meaninglessness. And not one thing in it means anything at all. And so there is no order, and no levels of difficulty, and no hierarchy, and no inherent meaning in any of it.

Therefore miracles respond to it with a single response, an unconditional response, which must be love, because only love can be unconditional. And so to recognize the world is all nothing is to love it, and light will shine away the darkness of forms and separations.

"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."

"There IS no meaning in the form, AND THERE WILL NEVER BE. "

"What is perceived takes many forms, but NONE has meaning."

"Realize that, whatever form they take, they have no meaning and no power."

"Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."

"You have not found your happiness in foreign places, and in alien forms which have no meaning to you"

"Bodies may battle, but the clash of forms is meaningless."

"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."

"Take not the form for content"

"Elusive happiness, or happiness in changing forms that shift with time and place, is an illusion that has no meaning."

"What God did not create can only be in your own mind apart from His. Therefore, it has no meaning."

"I do not choose to value what is totally insane and has no meaning."

"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."

"The world you made is therefore totally chaotic, governed by arbitrary and senseless "laws," and without meaning of ANY kind."

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?"

One thing has been a constant throughout your whole life. You have always been you alone. You have always been a separate person, autonomous within the confines of a body, and not once has there been anyone in there with you. Everyone else is just like you, in that they are unlike you, and unlike everyone else. And never have you found anyone who is the same as you.

This experience comes with a sense of "I am only me", completely cut off from others by a wall of bodies. And that seems to suggest "I am wholly myself." And yet, it is not an experience of knowing who you are, but of being out of touch with who you are. It's an experience of "I don't know who I am" while at the same time clutching at straws to define who you are. Looking for something to identify with, to convince yourself it is your self, because you have lost yourself.

You have been lost, confused, afraid, alone, lonely, weak, powerless and constantly bombarded with attack. And every time it has been "only my self" that has experienced this - the poor-me victim. And every time you have been unhappy it has seemed you are unhappy alone, afraid alone, suffering alone, sick alone, guilty alone, dying alone. And not once has it seemed that anything you have felt within yourself has been the same as that of anyone else at all. You haven't even had the slightest clue what anyone else is thinking or experiencing.

This is the experience of what we might call someone who is "being an ego". It is the automatic experience of anyone whose sense of self is a "separated off" self. A self that is excluded, isolated, imprisoned in a body, kept apart from sharing anything with anyone, and thoroughly limited to what the body dictates.

"This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time" Such a person has not really changed in terms of their perfection, but they have changed in terms of their relationship. There has been a communication breakdown between themselves and others. The body depicts this breakdown as a tremendous hurdle which filters and translates everything into confusing symbols. This is a person who once was free, but who has been locked up inside a body and has forgotten what it means to share. Their mind seems isolated and unaware of anyone else's mind.

Let's say there is no such thing as "an ego" at all. There are only people. And some of these people have decided to try to cut themselves off from others. They have done this by placing themselves inside a prison cell, and have tried to identify with that prison cell so that their whole sense of self narrows and confines to within its walls. They are a self which once was glorious and magnificent, expansive and unlimited, which has dimmed its light and condemned itself to a dungeon, to die alone and in solitude.

"The dreaming of the world takes many forms, because the body seeks in many ways to PROVE it is autonomous and real. "There is no man who does not feel that he is imprisoned in some way. If this has been the result of his own free will, he must regard his will as if it were NOT free, or the obviously circular reasoning of his own position would be quite apparent."

"For his belief in limits HAS imprisoned him."

"An imprisoned mind is not free by definition. It is possessed, or held back, by ITSELF. Its will is therefore limited, and not free to assert itself."

It is unnatural to be only yourself. Some people will model what ACIM says on the basis that, when you are awake, you are wholly yourself. And therefore when you are in ego, you are not entirely yourself, or are unwhole. But this is not entirely accurate. It is more accurate to say that when you are in ego you are ONLY yourself to the EXCLUSION of others, and when you wake up you are waking up to being MORE THAN just yourself. You are a whole self AND MORE THAN a whole self.

The entire premise of being "in ego" or "in separation", is that you are excluded from others. You are not sharing with them. You are not identifying with them. You don't regard them as part of you and you see yourself as a standalone, independent, self-reliant being. Not that being self-reliant is wrong. In fact you were created to be wholly sufficient and complete and lacking nothing, sharing the power of God. It isn't that you are "capable" that's wrong, it's that you try to be capable ON YOUR OWN.

This means that fundamentally the separation is really about you rejecting your inheritance from God. It's about you not wanting to be an effect of God. A rejection of God as your father. An unwillingness to acknowledge that you ONLY have what he has given you. That you do not have anything, nor can you BE or DO anything, WITHOUT him. That everything you are, comes from him, and is part of him and shared with him. Rejecting all that God has given is what makes you "separated off".

As soon as you are separating yourself off, to be a powerful being who does not want power, you immediately disempower yourself. You immediately enter into fear, because you know deep down that you have actually stripped yourself of power. You know you are not capable anymore. You can't successfully do ANYTHING on your own, although you can try. It will fail in some way. Anything you make will die. And all your mis-creations will crumble. You can't give immortality to anything because you are denying it in yourself.

You can be with God and be guaranteed of success. Or you can be without God and be guaranteed of failure. Realize then that everything that you try to do ALONE, WILL FAIL.

Everything. You are fundamentally in a state of fear whenever you try to be without God, think without God, do without God, see without God, think without God, live without God. You are fundamentally rejecting success, and life, and power, and happiness, and health, by trying to go it alone. Imprisonment as a solo-self is not freedom.

What this reveals then is that, for your whole life, you've been acting LIKE an ego. You've been trying to independently figure everything out, to understand what everything is, to give meaning to everything based on your whims, opinions and beliefs, and there is nothing that you've ever done that wasn't a solo effort. Even when you did things in a team or with others, you were still alone. And even your efforts to be a part of something bigger than yourself kept you in the dark.

This means there is a logical premise at work, behind every failure, and guaranteeing everything you do will fail. And it goes like this: IF you are a separated-off self, you LACK EVERYTHING. And therefore everything you do will be a mistake, will break, will be wrong, will upset you, will make you suffer, and will be depressing and frustrating. Being alone IS a limitation.

IF you are a separated-off self, you are automatically in a state of fear and anxiety which you will not be able to get rid of. It doesn't matter how much you work on it. It doesn't matter what path you take, what you believe, what choices you make, what thoughts you have, how you feel. Nothing you do will work completely, if you do it separately. Doing it separately CAUSES you to suffer. Doing everything alone PUTS YOU IN PRISON. There is NO freedom there. Or as some may put it, "there is no rest for the wicked."

"Today's idea will eventually overcome completely 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."

See how Jesus confirms that if you are a "separated one", you WILL experience all manner of unhappy things. Note that he also says that since the separation, no-one has been sure of ANYTHING...

"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."

We have quite literally entered into a state of FAILURE, by participating in the separation. It is a state of being flawed, of fundamental attack, insecurity, unholiness, suffering and despair.

The problem then comes when you start to believe that there is something you can DO about it, WITHIN the confines of this situation, that will make it better. You will try to fix it yourself. You will try to think your way out of it with your own thoughts. You will try to do techniques on your own. You will be the one who decides what you prefer and what will work for you. You will make all the wrong choices. And you will always be the central figure in every single thing that you do. Your whole life will revolve around yourself, and you will be trying to SAVE this self at the same time.

This self will do A Course in Miracles. This self will pray. This self will try to become more spiritual. This self will try to become separately enlightened. This self will try the latest techniques and sample the spiritual buffet-line, looking for something it thinks it needs, something it has lost. Some kind of salvation, which will save it from all the fuck-ups and failures that continue to plague it. And as it seeks for this, it will not find it.

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

"Yet the ego, though encouraging the search very actively, makes one proviso; - do not FIND it. Its dictates, then, can be summed up simply as, "Seek and do NOT find."

The problem is that it is this very sense of being an isolated self that is the ENTIRE problem. The confinement, the walls that surround you, the body, the gap, the lack of communication, the broken relationship, the isolation and the exclusive specialness, all CONTINUE the problem. Being "separated" is the problem, the problem is NOT being a self. Because when you are separated, you are NOT being yourself.

This "self" that you are working WITHIN the confines of, trying to get IT to be holier and more awakened, just stays WITHIN those confines and does not want them to ever be questioned. It doesn't consider that ITSELF, or, its way of identifying itself as "separated", is the whole problem. It's the ONE problem behind all problems. The one issue that isn't getting solved. You think you are already all of yourself, and only yourself.

So then some people will say that you have to GET RID OF, ie KILL AND DESTROY, this self, in order to be free. In order to be truly spiritual, it has to die. This is utterly bullshit. It's just another in a long line of solutions which separated selves have come up with for how to deal with their suffering. The whole act of trying to BE separated off is an attempt to destroy the unlimited nature of yourself, in the first place. So making the self FULLY dead is just a continuation of that. Self needs to expand, not die.

"The sudden EXPANSION of the self that takes place with your DESIRE for it, is the irresistible appeal the holy instant holds."

The self does not need to be destroyed. The self needs to EXPAND its definition of its identity. It needs to realize that it is MORE THAN the confined limited sense of self that it has been living under. That it is MORE THAN ITSELF.

Because ego really is just a notion of selfishness or being self-absorbed, as though to say, putting your whole attention on YOU EXCLUSIVELY. If you being exclusive is the problem, destroying you isn't the solution. What you need is freedom from exclusivity.

"You have made much progress, and are really trying to make still more, but there is one thing you have never done; not for one instant have you utterly forgotten the body."

What Jesus is saying here is that the one thing we have never really done is question THE PRISON that we're in, the sense of what it is that has defined us as "separated". We have not brought into question whether we actually ARE separated, and have not been willing to realize that ALL our suffering has been CAUSED BY that sense of isolation. If I am ONLY me, then I have become separate.

Identifying WITH the body has made us narrow and limited. The body is narrow and limited. It's like an anchor in time and space. When we think of it as "my self", we have to think of ourselves as narrow and limited. And now we are small and special and selfish and cut off. We have to forget the body in order to expand the sense of self beyond the separation. The body symbolizes the separation (as a separation device), so we have to open up to being MORE THAN a body. And if I am more than ONE body, I am more than JUST myself.

Before the separation, every soul that was created by God in heaven, was whole, and also overlapped with each other. Everyone shared everything including identity. Christ is the one identity of every soul, and every soul is a member of that identity. I am christ and you are christ and we are one as two christs. The fundamental premise here is that everything is shared including yourself. You are you, but YOU ARE ALSO me. You are everyone. Therefore you are more than JUST a separate being - you are not just ONE creation of God, you are all of them.

It is natural therefore that you should regard yourself as ... fully wholly yourself, AND fully wholly everyone. This is a normal sense of identity. You are the whole sonship. You are in fact the entire Kingdom of God. And all its contents, every part of it, all its beings and creations, are a part of your self. This is what a natural identity is supposed to be. You, as an individual whole being, are ALSO one with everything.

"The Kingdom of Heaven IS you."

"The sonship is your soul."

"Is he the Christ? Oh yes, along with you."

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

"The separation" was nothing more than a WITHDRAWAL of the parts of you which are shared with others, a retreat into fear, into being small and scared and vulnerable trapped in a little tiny body in a corner of spacetime. It was simply your unwillingness to SHARE YOUR SELF, and an attempt to have exclusive ownership and control over who you are. It was just your attempt to break away from the family unit and orphan yourself, like a black sheep who has become estranged and unwanted.

After the separation you simply wandered off "alone", as though you had been unplugged from the hive mind, disconnected from the input of spirit/soul, and unable to communicate with God anymore. You saw yourself as lacking everything and absent of anything. And so you were starting out empty and bereft. You had nothing left but your little sense of "there's only myself left". And this "only me, not you", formed your sense of identity. This is what we call "an ego". It's not really something new you made, it's the self God created that has been locked in chains.

The one thing we therefore need to do for salvation, and the one thing we may never have done in our entire lives, is consider that we are NOT JUST OURSELVES. We are more than just ourselves. To really truly SHARE with anyone we have to BE them. We have to open up to an identity, a sense of self, that INCLUDES OTHERS. Others have to actually become a part of you again. Not to the exclusion of you, nor calling for your destruction. You are a self who is whole, who must also reconnect to the whole.

If your every effort to go it alone and do everything independently of God has meant AUTOMATIC FAILURE, in every case, then your ONLY salvation from all forms of suffering is to stop doing everything on your own. The end of separation is simply the end of "trusting in your own strength" to the exclusion of all else. It means waking up from a sense of "I am only me", to "I am us." From ME to WE. From individual, to mutual. This is what shared interests are about.

Only if I am willing to let God decide WITH me can I be sure that the decision will be accurate and wise and certain of success. Only if I am willing to let the Holy Spirit judge the meaning of everything for and with me, can I be sure that the meaning I SEE is correct and sane. Only if I admit that everything I do alone WILL BE FUCKED UP, by default, can I be open to allowing myself to be HELPED. Opening up to His Help is opening up to RECEIVE.

The Holy Spirit is there to HELP us. He is the help, because he is the notion of being more than limited. He is unlimited, as we are in truth. And to remember our unlimited nature we have to be open to allowing something MORE THAN JUST ME to participate in everything I do, think, feel, plan, decide, pursue, live, say, etc. Only by allowing God back into our lives, in effect, can we resume our natural state of DOING EVERYTHING WITH HIM. And therefore, no longer being alone.

Everything you have ever done alone, no matter what it is, no matter how intelligent you've been, no matter how much you planned and schemed, no matter how much you figured out or understood, no matter how many concepts you came up with or how accurate they were, ALWAYS produced suffering in one form or another. Because all of them were attempts to narrow and confine yourself. And always because of the simple fact that YOU DID IT ON YOUR OWN.

That was ALWAYS the problem, because being alone is unnatural. God did not will that you be alone, so to be yourself you must rejoin the brotherhood of light.

"For you dwell in the Mind of God WITH your brother, for God Himself did not will to be alone."

"To be alone is to be separated from Infinity, but how can this be, if Infinity has no end?"

"There IS no end to God and His Son, for we ARE the universe. God is not incomplete, and He is not childless. Because He did not will to be alone, He created a Son like Himself. Do not deny Him His Son, for your unwillingness to accept His Fatherhood has denied you yours. See His creations as HIS Son, for yours were created in honor of Him."

"He is the Voice for God, but never forget that God did not will to be alone. He SHARES His Will with you; He does not thrust it UPON you."

"To be alone MUST mean you are apart, and if you are, you cannot BUT be sick."

"To be alone IS to be guilty. For to experience yourself AS alone, is to deny the Oneness of the Father and His Son, and thus to ATTACK REALITY."

"God would not have us be alone because HE does not will to be alone. That is why He created His Son and gave him the power to create with Him."

"The gratitude of God Himself is freely offered to everyone who shares His Purpose. It was not His Will to be alone. And neither is it YOURS. Forgive your brother, and you CANNOT separate yourself from him, nor from his Father."

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."

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began."

Let me first just say that I don't intend for this to be a "negative" post. Nor is it being pessimistic. But it's going to point out the inherent negativity of the world. Not to try to make it real or be drawn into despair over it, but to just recognize it for what it is. And there is no need to react to it with assertions of "happier interpretations."

There is a tremendous need for us to stop believing that the world is something we WANT. Or something that can offer us any redeeming qualities or content. Jesus actually wants us to learn to recognize that this world has nothing to offer, nothing to give, does nothing, means nothing, and is nothing.

Jesus frames the world - by which I mean EARTH and its physical neighbors regardless of your perceptions - as nothing. And that we are to recognize its nothingness in order to realize that giving it up is not a sacrifice. And that by giving it up, we stand to GAIN EVERYTHING by accepting the reality of the Kingdom that God created for us.

"The world I see has nothing that I want."

"But if I see no value in the world as I behold it, nothing that I want to keep as mine or search for as a goal, it will depart from me. For I have not sought for illusions to replace the truth."

"It takes great learning both to realize and to accept the fact that the world has nothing to give. What can the sacrifice of nothing mean?"

ACIM is teaching that the world is nothing, it has no value, and everything in it is a pain. It says you do not want this world. That even though you made it you do not want it. And even that you made it BY not wanting it - by not wanting what was in your mind, which you projected outward as a world to try to get rid of it.

"the cries of pain that rise to it, from every part of this strange world you made, but do not want."

We are confused and caught up in the world because we keep believing that it can offer us salvation, something of value, something beneficial, something we want. And before you start dreaming up denials via the repurposing of the body and world, let just just clarify that the purpose of the world does not change what it IS.

"The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

Our problem is that we do believe the world has something to offer. That it is a great place to live forever, and never leave. That it has real pleasures and that its pleasures entail no pain. But Jesus also teaches that even the pleasures of the world are really pains in disguise, because the cost is that by indulging in temptation you are separating from God, and real pleasure only comes from doing God's will. Pleasure binds you to the body and takes you away from reality, just as pain does.

He wants us to recognize that pain IS pain, and pleasure IS pain, because truthfully we actually don't quite recognize what anything is. We think that pain is pleasure. We even think that sickness is saving us from life, and death is salvation. In our confusion we keep trying to dress up this world and frame it as somewhere that you can enjoy the full fruits of heaven. But as Jesus aptly explains, you CANNOT ESCAPE from the world's suffering by staying in it.

"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."

Much of our problem then is that we think there really is a way to be in the world that fixes it up and makes it great and provides room for an entire civilizations to emerge. A massive attempt to tame hell and "civilize" it. But this is really a form of DENIAL. The truth is that ALL of the world's roads lead to death, suffering, loss and disappointment. If you are willing to look at it you'll see this is true. And it will just keep on disappointing you until it disappears. That is its NATURE. It is a device for guaranteeing death.

"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"

"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."

These are the facts. Everything in spacetime is limited, it is not even really life (only eternal life is life), bodies are mostly destined to die, flowers can't bloom without dying off, entire planets cease to exist after a while, there is decay and destruction everywhere, sacrifice is built into spacetime itself, and there is scarcity everywhere. The world is TURD floating in cess-pool toilet-bowl of spacetime. Failure is inherent to the entire cosmos. This is not being negative about it either, it's being honest and truthful. This is a dream of mortality.

"Here the world of idols has been set by the idea this power and place and time are given form, and shape the world where the impossible has happened. 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."

If we go into DENIAL that the world is basically a one-way trip to hell and death, we will start trying to find ways to PRETEND it's not true. We in fact have built up what we call a "civilized society" (a dysfunction), complete with the "comforts" that avoid as much pain as possible, the clever manipulations of matter that result in seeming "fixes" for problems, we've found all kinds of distractions and ways of making life seem "interesting", and have discovered every imaginable toy and play-thing to occupy our time. And yet all the while death can strike at any instant in any number of ways. And no-one knows what the heck they're doing.

"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."

The world really, in truth, is fundamentally broken, and it was broken from the start. It was made from the idea of the malfunction of reality. It was an attack on order and peace and love and harmony. Its separations are constant and relentless. Its isolation and exclusion are rampant. And not one single particle in all of spacetime is without a form that symbolizes separation, repulsion and rejection. The world is made of denial, and it even denies its own existence.

"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."

If you look, you'll notice that the world has a plentiful supply of problems lined up for you, and even if you seem to solve one using a highly specific customized solution made just to perfectly fix this one problem, it WILL NOT EVER stop the onslaught of all the other problems it has lined up for you. Not to mention death. The one problem that everyone seems to be in TOTAL denial about, as if it doesn't matter because it's off in the future. And so we pretend we won't die, while nevertheless rushing towards it and making sure it happens.

We have to be willing to put aside all of these adjustments, these wishful thinkings, these rose-tinted glasses, the ignorant bliss, the framing the world as heaven, the trying to make it be our home, our adjustments to it and our attempts to make it out to be a great place. It is nothing. It can be forgiven, like all illusions can, but its nothingness is what makes this possible.

"YOU make the world and THEN adjust to it."

Adjusting to the world, trying to cope with the world, trying to make it more palatable, trying to make it softer and safer and seem to be a place that's not all that bad, is all forms of denial. The desire for the nice materials, the riches, the shiny objects, the fancy cars and expensive buildings, it's all an attempt to pretend that the world is desirable and that it WON'T disappoint you, as you seem to enjoy SHORT LIVED temporary reprieves from its hell-bent destructiveness. And as you hide behind the next "new thing" which claims to offer escape from death.

It is an avoidance of the fact that the world is just fundamentally not EVER going to really work correctly. It cannot function correctly because it is based on an idea of death and destruction. It is fundamentally a world of suicide and self-attack. Everything in it will always go wrong sooner or later. Expecting it not to will make you suffer.

This isn't a pessimistic view, by the way. This is a truthful view. I am not saying that we should be sad and unhappy and despairing because of it. Or that there is no alternative. In fact, Jesus is trying to get us to look at this truth SO THAT we can be recognize it is something we DO NOT WANT, so that we will in turn change our minds and choose the one reality that God created for us. And in which we will be infinitely happy forever. We only keep choosing the world because we mistakenly think it is WORTH HAVING, but how can you want a world made of rejection?

The world is not supposed to be your home, the thing you are in love with, your special adored idol, or your salvation. If you watch honestly you'll see that everything just goes wrong, eventually. It happens, again and again. Stuff breaks. Things get lost. Objects fall off tabletops. Food splats on the floor. The clothes become worn. The beds become mis-shapen. The roofs leak and cave in. The cars break down. The rust creeps in. I like to say, "there goes the physics again". And the assault of time, which is the idea of change and therefore death, guarantees that everything comes to an end.

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

Shall we live in denial that this is true, that the world can NEVER BE HEAVEN? Shall we live in denial that everything in the worl WILL END? Or even that it has death built into it from the start? That it can never turn into a perfect society or an ideal civilization or even a safe place? We try to make it safer with our defenses and castles and our potions and rituals and our avoidance of dangers, but it remains an unsafe place. Can you escape a supernova?

"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."

The world cannot GIVE us what we want. It cannot make us happy. It cannot provide us with peace. It cannot satisfy us. It gives only to take away. It fails in order to disappoint. Every road, path, way, direction, goal, ambition and achievement in the world is pointless. Yet the world can present seeming illusions of "things going well", for a while, before it attacks and destroys what it has given. It can tempt you will fake happiness and fake values and fake salvation, only to fail you once again and deceive you in doing so.

"On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once."

"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."

Jesus is not being negative when he describes the world like this. The world IS like this, isn't it? It's not a matter of how you look at it. There is no real loss in admitting to this, nor is this an attack upon the world. It isn't an unforgiving accusation. It is just a simple clear look at the world we made, its inherent nature, and its limitations. It is a world of limits, not a world of freedom, which is why it is like a prison for everyone in it.

"Are you not weary of imprisonment? God did not choose this sorry path for you."

"If it (mind) does not freely elect to do so, it retains this creative ability, but places itself under tyrannous rather than authoritative control. As a result, what it creates is imprisonment, because such are the dictates of tyrants."

The world itself is tyrrannical. It is selfish and separate. Each part of it is separate and at war with every other. Even the forms of objects are in conflict, which is why they are different. Conflicting shapes, sizes, colors, textures, they are all forms of war. Everything the body sees is a form of conflict. Every atom is at war. You cannot turn something that is fundamentally conflicting into something that isn't, because this will erase all of its properties and it will cease to exist.

It is by recognizing the world as "the hell you made", that we might be willing to go the other way. It is when we sugarcoat it as "not hell" in a spiritualizing pretense to make it seem wanted and worthy, that we put ourselves to sleep. We are blinded by perception of form and tempted by its luster and flair. Its picture frame of jewel-encrusted death suggests it is not a world of death but our most cherished possession.

We are to correctly identify that the world IS meaningless and IS nothing and HAS nothing that we want and DOES nothing for or to us and ISN'T our inheritance from God and IS NOT real and HAS no power and is basically absolutely NOTHING. The recognition that "there is no world." How can a world which does not really exist appeal to us and be something we want INSTEAD OF God? At the cost of heaven? And in a bargain where we "gain the whole world and lose our soul"?

True escape from the battleground does not entail the faulty belief that the battleground can be made into a pleasant place. You can rise above it, and you can leave the desert, and you can see it in a better light. But you cannot change what it IS. And denying what it is merely keeps you in hell for longer. And that isn't going to make you very happy.

"The world you see must be denied."

"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."

"A desert is a desert is a desert. You can do anything you want in it, but you CANNOT change it from what it IS. It still lacks water, which is why it IS a desert." ... "The thing to do with a deserve is to LEAVE."

"Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to GAIN that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. All of them will lead to death. On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes."

"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."

"That is the only environment in which you can be happy. You cannot make it, any more than you can make yourselves. But it has been created for you, as you were created for it. God watches over His children and denies them nothing."

"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."

"God's teachers can have no regret on giving up the pleasures of the world. Is it a sacrifice to give up pain? Does an adult resent the giving up of children's toys? 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. To them he sacrifices all his freedom. To them he sacrifices all his peace. And to possess them must he sacrifice his hope of Heaven and remembrance of his Father's Love. Who in his sane mind chooses nothing as a substitute for everything?"

"What is the real meaning of sacrifice? It is the cost of believing in illusions. It is the price that must be paid for the denial of truth. There is no pleasure of the world that does not demand this, for otherwise the pleasure would be seen as pain. And no-one asks for pain if he recognizes it. It is the idea of sacrifice that makes him blind. He does not see what he is asking for. And so he seeks it in a thousand ways and in a thousand places, each time believing it is there and each time disappointed in the end. "Seek but do not find" remains this world's stern decree, and no-one who pursues the world's goals can do otherwise."

"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?"

"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."

"YOU DO NOT WANT THE WORLD. The only thing of value in it is whatever part of it YOU look upon with love. This GIVES it the only reality it will ever have. ITS value is NOT in itself, but yours IS in you."

"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."