Forgiveness is the only way out of the dream. It is the only way to undo error. It is the only salvation. It literally IS the way that you learn illusions are illusions and not the truth. It is your only option, your only hope, your only salvation.

"Forgiveness is for God and toward God but not of Him. It is impossible to think of anything He created that could need forgiveness. Forgiveness, then, is an illusion, but because of its purpose, which is the Holy Spirit's, it has one difference. Unlike all other illusions it lead away from error and not towards it. "

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in that view are all your sins forgiven. What is sin, except a false idea about God's Son? Forgiveness merely sees its falsity, and therefore lets it go. What then is free to take its place is now the Will of God."

"Fear binds the world. Forgiveness sets it free."

"Forgiveness gives the miracle its strength to overlook illusions."

"Let forgiveness be the substitute for fear. This is the only rule for happy dreams. "

"Forgiveness can truly be called salvation. It is the means by which illusions disappear. "

"Illusion makes illusion. Except one. Forgiveness is illusion that is answer to the rest. "

"Forgiveness offers everything I want. What could you want forgiveness cannot give? Do you want peace? Forgiveness offers it. Do you want happiness, a quiet mind, a certainty of purpose, and a sense of worth and beauty that transcends the world? Do you want care and safety, and the warmth of sure protection always? Do you want a quietness that cannot be disturbed, a gentleness that never can be hurt, a deep abiding comfort, and a rest so perfect it can never be upset? All this forgiveness offers you, and more."

"Those who forgive are releasing themselves from illusions, while those who withhold forgiveness are binding themselves to them. As you condemn only yourself, so do you forgive only yourself. "

"The one correction possible for false perception must be true perception. It will not endure. But for the time it lasts it comes to heal. For true perception is a remedy with many names. Forgiveness, salvation, Atonement, true perception, all are one."

"Forgiveness is still, and quietly does nothing. It offends no aspect of reality, nor seeks to twist it to appearances it likes. It merely looks, and waits, and judges not. He who would not forgive must judge, for he must justify his failure to forgive. But he who would forgive himself must learn to welcome truth exactly as it is."

"This is not a course in philosophical speculation, nor is it concerned with precise terminology. It is concerned only with Atonement, or the correction of perception. The means of the Atonement is forgiveness."

There is a VERY EASY way to determine whether this world - Earth etc - is REAL. You simply need to ask yourself, whether real things are capable of change?

As ACIM clearly states, what is real NEVER CHANGES. This is what MAKES it real. It gives it constancy, honesty, truth, consistency, and permanence. What changes is NOT reality.

The things of this world ALL CHANGE. It is a world of changes. This cannot be denied. Seasons, weather, babies and adults, food going mouldy, decay, growth, cycles, it's all change.

If something changes, it is A LIE. Truth does not change. If the truth ever changed it would not have been the truth, would it.

Anything that changes is UNSTABLE, UNCERTAIN, and is both fear and deception.

This is why planet earth IS A LIE. SIMPLY.... because it is made of change and NOT of anything stable or permanent.

There is NO WAY to debate this, deny this, or pretend otherwise. Some people don't seem WILLING to accept the simple plain obvious fact of truth. Anything that changes is NOT OF GOD. Period. Ever. Anywhere. And FOR SURE, planet earth is entirely a place of change, and NOTHING lasts forever here.

Why deny it? We do not need what changes. We need to learn WE ARE CHANGELESS, and therefore immortal, and therefore the world is A DECEPTION and NOT A TRUTH.

The truth is simple. The truth is absolute. The truth never changes.

What never changes is real. It is real because it is stable and consistent and honest and true. It is ALWAYS THE SAME.

Things that change are lies. They are deceptions. They are not the truth. They are not reality.

This is very very simple. Anything which changes is not reality.

Space, time, physical matter, bodies growing and dying, seasons, decay, sickness, death, conversations, changes of ANY kind cannot be reality because they are CHANGES.

Any kind of change is NOT OF GOD.

Does planet earth spin? Oops, that's a change. That means it's not real. Period.

"Reality is changeless. It is this that MAKES it real, and KEEPS it separate from all appearances. It MUST transcend all form to be itself. It CANNOT change."

"Your brother has a changelessness in him beyond appearance and deception both"

"The changelessness of Heaven is in you, so deep within that nothing in this world but passes by, unnoticed and unseen."

"Nothing is asked of you but to ACCEPT the Changeless and Eternal that abide in him, for YOUR Identity is there."

"I will remain forever as I was Created by the Changeless like Himself."

"Who uses but Christ's vision finds a peace so deep and quiet, undisturbable and wholly changeless, that the world contains no counterpart."

"He does not teach, because His Creations are changeless."

"What is timeless IS ALWAYS THERE because its BEING is eternally changeless."

"You are still My holy Son, forever innocent, forever loving and forever loved, as limitless as Your Creator, and completely changeless and forever pure."

"And now God's KNOWLEDGE, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its Kingdom."

"Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of God remain forever changeless, with the power to extend forever changelessly but yet within Themselves, for They are everywhere."

"He Who is changeless shares His attributes with His creation."

"Nothing that God knows not exists. And what He knows exists forever, changelessly."

"Teaching aims at change, but God created ONLY the changeless."

"The Christ revealed to you NOW has no past, for He is changeless. AND IN HIS CHANGELESSNESS LIES YOUR RELEASE."

"The Soul always remains changeless, because it never leaves the sight of God."

This might sound obvious and a no-brainer, but it can be quite obscure to both realize and believe and accept that God is with you at all times. Like, intimately inside you.

It can feel safer, for example, to relate to the Holy Spirit or Jesus, keep an abstract, nebulous idea of God further afield at a distance. After all, direct full experience of God is typically a revelation experience, seemingly once in a lifetime.

I only occasionally remember to really commune with God and to get an experience of Him being right here with me right now, like, close-up, inside my mind. Experiencable. Then I forget. As my mind then wanders off on tangents of thinking, it's as if I'm so quickly forgetting that God is present each and every time. God is like this ultimate truth and reality which is "blocked" by any kind of block to awareness and so easily out of sight, out of mind.

But I've been dabbling with this moreso recently, of allowing and accepting God to be with me. The other day I had this nice open experience, where the Holy Spirit was revealing his love and helping me to know that God has not only "always been here" but will "always be here".

It's interesting that God is so permanently present. He is always here. He's with you now. He's always been with you. Just saying that fills me with something divine. The question isn't so much whether God connects with you or not but whether you slip off into a snooze and start dreaming of something else, imagining you are exiled away from where God is.

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

It seems so basic and primitive, just the notion that God Himself would be close to you, that you would share with Him, directly communicate with Him, allow His Presence to fill you, receive His love, know HIm, on a long-term basis and not as a "hi how are ya" that lasts for 10 seconds. But as we approach God, perhaps this time accepting, allowing, inviting and being with God, in God, extends until it becomes permanent. And then you are always AWARE that you are with God at all times.

As Jesus said, he was always with God and aware of His Presence. It is that kind of openness and clarity and joining and relationship that is a prerequisite for miracle working.

The passages below are pretty intense (each is from different parts of the course). They're basically saying that EVERYTHING IN THIS WORLD IS DESTINED TO DIE. And that isn't an easy thing to comprehend yet alone accept. And if you CAN accept it (the meaninglessness of the world), perhaps you will be willing to go home?

The main reason we don't accept it is because it SEEMS as though, in the short term, some things live. That there can be seeming gaps in the dying, or sometimes paths will seem lighter and easier, even "pleasant" and enjoyable, and yet, NEVERTHELESS, even these brief vacations from death ultimately TURN INTO DEATH.

Even the lovely fresh bouquet of flowers, withers and dies and rots. Even the newborn baby, grows and ages and wrinkles and malfunctions and dies. Even the planet is born in the cosmos and evolved over billions of years only to be destroyed when its sun explodes. No matter what it is, no matter what you look at, ALL the things of this world are DESIGNED TO DIE, sooner or late.

This is the sense of the inevitability of death in this world, that "the world of bodies is the world of sin" and, therefore, since "the wages of sin is death", ALL types of bodies must die. And please note that I am not being negative or pessimistic here. I'm taking a square look at some facts. Facts that we like to avoid and pretend aren't true.

Such as the fact that EVERYTHING in the world eventually breaks down, goes wrong, malfunctions, decays. Yes it might take a while, and in the meantime it may seem that there are signs of life, of positivity, or purpose and meaning, activity, reasons to live, things to do and places to go. Which is sort of temporarily true. But then what happens eventually? It all goes to shit. Bar nothing.

Not one single thing in this world lasts forever. Not one single thing is permanent. This means the world cannot offer you safety, it cannot offer you freedom, it cannot offer you relief from problems, it cannot offer you life, it cannot offer you happiness, and in fact it really cannot truly promise ANYTHING, because ultimately everything is designed to die. Which means the world really has NOTHING TO GIVE. And that is because IT ONLY TAKES AWAY.

This is why, the only real salvation is found by TRANSCENDING THE WORLD, going within, rising above the battlefield, overcoming the world, moving beyond the earth, opening up to another world, returning to heaven, and waving bye bye to the dream of death. You can't find salvation outside of you because outside you there is only death and illusions of life. And this ultimately means, THERE IS NO WORLD. When will we be done playing with lifeless toys and dreams of mortality?

"Death is the symbol of the fear of God. His Love is blotted out in the idea, which holds It from awareness like a shield held to obscure the sun. The grimness of the symbol is enough to show it cannot co-exist with God. It holds an image of the Son of God in which he is "laid to rest" in devastation's arms, where worms await to greet him and to last a little while by his destruction. Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death. Devouring is nature's "law of life." God is insane, and fear alone is real."

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

"You 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."

"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."

"I see only the perishable.

I see nothing that will last.

What I see is a form of vengeance."

"The world as YOU perceive it cannot have been created by the Father, for the world is NOT as you see it. God created ONLY the eternal, and everything YOU see is perishable. Therefore, there must be another world which you do NOT see."

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

There is a fundamental difficulty in choosing anything in this world. Everything in this world lacks everything else. Everything has taken a side, has separated itself off, has made itself different, and does not have what other things have. This means that nothing is whole, nothing has everything, and nothing is perfect.

There is a fiction perpetrated that suggests you can have it all, get it all, win everything, find the best, be the best, choose the best option, be on a perfect diet, get the perfect body, etc. These are all make-believe, achieve a dream, conquer the world etc.

The separation even applies to colors. Red lacks green, blue lacks orange, and yellow lacks purple. In order to get one color you have to lose its opposite. Picking one color denies aspects which other colors have. So none of the colors are the perfect whole divine color. And you can drive yourself up the wall trying to choose the best one.

So then as you're trying to choose between options, you find yourself in a state of paralysis. You seek to make the perfect choice, the best choice, and to entirely win and succeed in whichever choice to make. But the truth is that whichever thing you choose, will lack something. Whatever option to take, it's going to be defective and limited and lacking.

This drives you nuts, when you're trying to decide what is the best course of action, or the right thing to buy, or the most appropriate selection, or whether to do one thing or another. Both options appeal with equal potential, and with equal lack. Neither of them is completely ideal. So then most of the time you end up throwing your hands in the air and "settling" for whichever one seems the least offensive. Or whichever one seems to have more pros than cons.

I'll just go with this one. I'll settle for that one. I guess this one will do. That one's probably good enough. So then you learn that in this world you usually have to lower your standards, be willing to accept that everything is limited, be okay with scarcity and sacrifice, and realize that every single choice is a compromise. You cannot get anything without losing something. That's how it's all set up.

Some people will have higher standards and will try to fine-tune the selection process. They will have in their minds the idealistic idea that some choices are actually completely perfect. That you can win without losing. That you can gain without loss. That you can get without having to give. And much of society and industry is geared towards trying to maximize the "return on investment". To get as much of what seems perfect and ideal, with as little loss as possible. There's an art to it, but it can never succeed.

If you are perfectionistic, thus, usually because you see yourself as imperfect and are trying to find what you think you don't have, you'll find this familiar. It drives you nuts trying to ideally look for the absolute best possible outcome, the most amazing toy, the completely perfect choice. It literally can make you more insane by expecting, or rather misunderstanding, that the world has the capability of offering you something that is whole and complete. It can't.

You will feel far more at ease and sane about your interactions and goals in the world if you can recognize that, fundamentally, all physical matter is a state of partiality. It's based on separation, so everything has only a small portion of the whole. Each item is lacking something that the other items have. If you go for the TV with the bigger speakers you lose out on the TV with the cool remote. You can't win everything. You can't have it all.

If you can accept that every choice in the world falls short, every option is incomplete, every possible outcome is not ideal, and realize this is just how a world of separation must be, then you can stop fighting with it or setting yourself up for disappointment. As jesus says in the course, "the world has disappointed you since time began." That's because everything it promises, it fails to deliver. Everything it gives you, it takes away.

"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."

Nothing in the world is whole. It was designed to reject wholeness. Space is an assertion of the idea that nothing is everywhere and the everywhere (God) is nowhere. Every object, every piece of matter, every physical attribute, every choice, is divided. It is only because there has BEEN a division that you even have two things to choose between, and each of those options is only half of the whole. So at best, any choice you make leaves you empty handed, second-guessing, and wishing you picked the other one. And surely the best of the best will bring you salvation!

The world is two-faced, just as the ego is. It gives and takes away. If you gain you lose. If you win you lose. If you get you lack. If you want not to share anything with anyone you end up with nothing. What you get is taken from you. What you accomplish is destroyed. What you build comes tumbling down. Nothing lasts, nothing is whole, nothing completes you. That's how this world is. The sooner you accept that this is its nature you can work within its limits and use it for a higher purpose without trying to expect it to suddenly act like heaven. Pigs will never be able to fly.

"Against this sense of temporary existence, the Soul offers the knowledge of permanence and unshakeable BEING. No one who has experienced the revelation of this can ever fully believe in the ego again. How can its meager offering to you prevail against the glorious gift of God?"

"You look for permanence in the impermanent; for love where there is none; for safety in the midst of danger; immortality within the darkness of the dream of death."

What God created is permanent. What you create is permanent. It has eternal life and exists forever, unchanging and unwavering. Nothing real can be threatened or changed, nor does it change, because reality is a constant state. It is permanently the same. Absolutely unchangeable, unassailable, unaffected.

You cannot change what is permanent. You cannot establish the truth. You cannot decide what is real. You cannot change God's mind. You cannot define what you are. You cannot change what you are. You cannot destroy anything real. You cannot truly be sick or die. You cannot leave Heaven. You cannot modify what God has created. And you cannot make yourself mortal.

BUT...... you can be in denial. You can be delusional. You can be trying to use belief to pretend to convince yourself that this isn't the case. You can TRY to effort to make what is permanent, impermanent. This is an attempt, by immortal beings, to pretend to be mortal.

In every way that you attempt to prove to yourself and others that you and they are not permanently as God created us, those are futile attempts to convince yourself that something else is true. That you are not permanent. Every time that you attack your body and make it sick, you are trying to prove that you can be hurt, even though it is literally impossible to hurt that which is permanent.

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt."

Similarly death is an attempt to prove the permanent Son of God can be made impermanent and dead. It does not work. It has NO EFFECT on the Son of God. Death does not kill you. It does nothing. Therefore attempting to prove you can die, by committing suicide, by hurting and attacking yourself and your temporary illusory body, is clearly a demonstration of someone who is strongly trying to PROVE that they are NOT permanent.

The further someone goes towards having this amassed stockpile of "evidence" for why they are not permanent, the further they are in denial. This is why death itself is total denial. It's a total blind inability to accept the TOTAL futility of trying to die. Immortal beings, are trying to prove they can be dead. And the more they are delusional and believe in death's possibility, the more they bring about suffering and sickness and death in themselves and others.

Those who are saner, who are less in denial, and who do not believe in attack because they know that nothing real can be threatened so attack is pointless, automatically produce healing and demonstration of miraculous reversal of "sickness", the stockpile decreases and their demonstration of mortality diminishes and is reversed. Resurrection happens, which is nothing less than the demonstration and symbolic use of the body to show that you truly believe, and can prove, that you cannot die, because you have the POWER to do so.

Resurrection is a demonstration of acceptance of atonement, the sheer truth that what is permanent is STILL permanent, NOTHING has happened to change it, there IS no sin, there IS no attack, there IS no sickness or death, and therefore to PROVE beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are under NO laws but God's. That you are ARE permanent. The body then, in the hands of a sane person, is healed. "The mind, being sane, heals the body." And the body in the hands of someone accepting atonement is UNATTACKABLE. "It cannot be sick, nor can it die."

The body now TEACHES by EXAMPLE, symbolically, to those still dreaming, that the soul is permanent and the Son of God represents eternal life. The body becomes a symbol of eternal life and a breath of immortality in the dream, communicating to those grown sick of the fetid stench of death, that death is futile, pointless exercise, sickness is ridiculously unnecessary, and HEALTH is representative of living forever.

The Holy Spirit has now repurposed what you made, as something unattackable, to demonstrate you CANNOT BE attacked. That harm has never happened, and you are beyond all causes that could possibly ever make you or the body damaged. It is a supernatural demonstration of UNLIMITED POWER. It is truly miraculous. You become invulnerable (aware of your invulnerability) and you USE the body to symbolically demonstrate it to others.

To accept the atonement truly means the TOTAL unconditional acceptance of the total state of PERMANENCE of your reality. It means the complete surrendering and letting go of ALL things temporal or temporary, which includes the body and the world. It requires your transfer or rather, resumption, of Heaven, to resume recognition of your self as permanently Christ, and to remember the truth about you. This resuming or rather continuing of your uninterrupted creative extension, is an awakening, the only awakening, to the experience of eternal life, beyond the body and beyond the dream of death, beyond this world, not of this world, nor in it.

This total awareness of absolute permanence, dissolves the body and makes it IMPOSSIBLE to be in this temporal world. "Indeed, you cannot remain in this world, with this knowledge." It restores the perfect knowledge that you are STILL perfect, nothing EVER happened, there IS no dream world, and bodies do not exist. It is not merely a compromise between staying in the dream and being awake, it is total immersion in reality, in God, in Heaven, where you have never stopped being permanently eternal. It is the awakening to the soul.

In this awakening, there is no remaining memory of even the dream or the world. It is gone. It never existed or happened. There is only the total unlimited experience of total immortality and permanent life. This requires nothing less than the absolute 100% unconditional willingness to will with God, to do His will, to share His mind, and to extend His being forever. In this awareness, there is no Earth, there is no dream, and there is no separation.

Nothing has happened. Only that which is permanent is true. Only that which lasts forever exists. Nothing real can be changed or threatened and never has been. Once you return to being an immortal being, you will realize, you ALWAYS HAVE BEEN and always will be, and now anything of fantasy dream worlds where people die will be complete unbelievable nonsense to you.

You are immortal. You are pretending not to be. When you are done pretending not to be, you will accept your immortality and return to Heaven.

"There is no death, the son of god is free."

I was contemplating again any possible conceivable way that the physical world might somehow be part of heaven, or preserved, or keepable, or transformable. Like, if we all became very christly and "dreamed" it into some kind of much higher form, a forgiven world, a sparkling beautiful world full of life, could such a world be integrated into heaven and literally kept as an eternal thing? Could the mis-creation be converted into or replaced by a creation that lasts forever, such that Earth would essentially be "saved" to such an extent that it could qualify as a legitimate created part of the kingdom of God forever?

To this Jesus remarked, "No. Spacetime will end."

A key thing to realize is that the physical world, the planet, bodies etc, matter, atoms, it all DEPENDS entirely on separation. Space itself is the very idea that what is over here is not over there. That's a separation idea of exclusion. One atom is excluded from another. There might be a HINT of sharing but certainly not oneness.

Without separateness you can't have atoms and molecules or bodies or planets. You have to have a way that something is different over here than over there, forms lack other forms, what is found in one place is not found in another. That's the very idea of space itself. Without space, or spatial separation, physical matter is impossible. My car being separate from my house is impossible. My body being separate from other bodies is impossible. Without separation Earth is impossible.

When the spacetime world is forgiven, it no longer has a PURPOSE. Because the purpose of it originally was to attack God, and this purpose was exchanged for the purpose of forgiveness. Using the world to undo the NEED for the world. Using the body to undo the NEED for a body. And once perception has been perfected there is no longer any NEED for perception.

And so the body and perception and the world and space and time become PURPOSELESS, ie there is no need or USE for it, no further repurposing of it, and being completely pointless and unneeded it is simply forgotten and VANISHES COMPLETELY. Cast off and un-remembered, like a dream that passes and has no bearing on what really exists.

The world does not reach a state of becoming totally needed, totally wanted, totally valuable, totally eternal, or totally useful. Its usefulness is temporary because in and of itself it is meaningless. IT WILL END. And every single piece of content inside of the spacetime bubble will disappear, all matter, all bodies, along with space and time itself. And all that will remain is the heaven that existed BEFORE this whole illusion of a world emerged in our imaginations in the first place.

"The real world signifies the end of time, for its perception makes time purposeless."

"So do the parts of God's Son gradually join in time, and with each joining is the end of time brought nearer."

"Salvation is a promise, made by God, that you would find your way to Him at last. It cannot not be kept. It guarantees that time will have an end, and all the thoughts that have been born in time will end as well."

"And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time."

"Ultimately, of course, space is as meaningless as time. The concept is really one of space-time BELIEF."

"The Atonement was built into the space-time belief in order to set a limit on the need for the belief, and ultimately to make learning complete."

"And here They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant"

"The stars will disappear in light, and the sun, which opened up the world to beauty, will vanish."

"The world will end in an illusion, as it began. Yet will its ending be an illusion of mercy. The illusion of forgiveness, complete, excluding no-one, limitless in gentleness, will cover it, hiding all evil, concealing all sin and ending guilt forever. So ends the world that guilt had made, for now it has no purpose and is gone."

"The world will end when all things in it have been rightly judged by His judgment. The world will end with the benediction of holiness upon it. When not one thought of sin remains, the world is over. It will not be destroyed nor attacked nor even touched. It will merely cease to seem to be."

"The world will end when its thought system has been completely reversed."

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

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

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

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

The children's PHYSICAL bodies grow and suffer.

Their minds are trapped in the PHYSICAL brain.

Their PHYSICAL bodies become hurt.

Their PHYSICAL bodies wither and die.

These are not perceptions. These are physical states.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the separation from God we made what seems to be a world, opposite to God - space and time and bodies etc. But we're told this world is unreal. What does "unreal" mean? Because while we're told it's unreal we're also told we believe in it, and that by believing in it it becomes real to us.

Being unreal is a way to say it's not ultimately true and isn't how God creates. So in a sense, it is dream-like. But people DO have dreams, and the mind IS dreaming of a world of space and time. This dream can seem very real and solid and effectual to the dreamer.

As such even though the world is ultimately unreal, which would seem to write off anything that seems to happen in it, while we are still in it believing in it we do still have experience of it AS IF it were real. In fact we can make it extremely real to ourselves and have a horrible nightmare.

"anything else is only his own nightmare, and does not exist."

"The mind can make the belief in Separation VERY real and VERY fearful. And this belief IS the devil. It is powerful, active, destructive, and clearly in opposition to God, because it literally denies His Fatherhood. Never underestimate the power of this denial. Look at your lives and see what the devil has made. But KNOW that this making will surely dissolve in the light of truth, because its foundation IS a lie."

But nightmares do in fact seem very real and frightening and full of suffering and stress to the believer. To the believer, even if they are hallucinating, even if what they experence is total fantasy and not possible in God's laws, it nevertheless can seem VERY real and true to a mind that belives in it.

How do we overcome this nightmarish experience of a world in which everything suffers and dies? What is NEEDED? What is called for? If the problem is that the mind is believing in it and giving it power, then the mind has to withdraw that power and stop believing in it. And by not believing in it, the mind will ultimately stop seeing it.

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

Here the course doesn't say that the remedy or approach we're supposed to take is to just write the world off with labels like "unreal, illusion, nothing, doesn't exist" ESPECIALLY when the mind IS honestly still believing in it and giving it reality. That's a form of denial. Instead it says we are to use RECOGNITION to realize that the world isn't real and isn't true, WHILE still in it. That's different from PRETENDING TO BE OUTSIDE IT.

A hallucinated world will disappear only when RECOGNIZED that it is a dream and not a reality. This is what "awareness of dreaming" is about. Awareness of dreaming isn't denial. It's in fact a state in which you are still asleep and dreaming, but you have the awareness of what you're doing.

We're not supposed to keep bypassing the world in an attempt to overcome or escape it. In fact, Jesus's remedy for us is to CHANGE PERCEPTION so that we will come to first see this world from a different vantage point. That does require us to "love the world" and to find peace in the world. Before we can leave it. As the course says:

"First you will dream of peace, then you will awaken to it."

If we try to skip the dream of peace, or the happy dream, or the forgiven world, and just try to jump from false perception to knowledge, we're doing a bypass.

"Knowledge is not the remedy for false perception since, being another level, they can never meet. The one correction possible for false perception must be true perception. It will not endure. But for the time it lasts it comes to heal. For true perception is a remedy with many names. Forgiveness, salvation, Atonement, true perception, all are one. They are the one beginning with the end to lead to Oneness far beyond themselves. True perception is the means by which the world is saved from sin, for sin does not exist. And it is this that true perception sees."

Those who use non-dual-seeming statements like "the world doesn't exist so it doen't matter what you do", "the body isn't real so don't bother healing it" etc... are trying to use truths from the level of KNOWLEDGE, to correct the problem. But Jesus says this will not really work. THE ONE CORRECTION for false perception is true perception. We can't skip having true perception. We have to find a way to forgive this world and everything in it first instead of trying to jump ahead to being what is only really experienced AFTER we complete the curriculum.

"Miracles are thought-creations. Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities. This is the basic distinction between intellectualization and thinking. One creates the physical, and the other the spiritual, and we believe in what we create."

"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."

"You have expressed surprise at hearing how VERY different is reality from what YOU see. You do not realize the magnitude of that ONE error. It was so vast and so COMPLETELY incredible, that from it, a world of total unreality HAD to emerge."

"You looked upon the unreal and found despair. But by SEEKING the unreal, what else COULD you find? The UNreal world IS a thing of despair, for it can never be."

"The Separation 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."

"The separation is merely a faulty formulation of reality, WITH NO EFFECT AT ALL. The miracle, without a function in Heaven, IS needful here. ASPECTS of reality can still be seen, and they will replace aspects of UNREALITY. Aspects of reality can be seen IN EVERYTHING and EVERYWHERE. Yet only God can gather them together by crowning them AS ONE with the final gift of eternity."

"You are immortal BECAUSE you are eternal"

You are immortal. Generally that means you live forever without any kind of end, you can never be changed, and you are permanently the same all the time.

You'll then find that any notion of "change" introduces the potential for coming to an end. If you can change or be changed, you could be stopped, interfered with, attacked, damaged, or caused to die.

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

So change of any kind cannot be part of immortality. Which is why changelessness is your real nature, and this is also why you remain still as God created you. You have not changed a single bit since you were created.

This then has to mean that if there is anything that does change, it cannot be a part of you. If there is a body that can change, it cannot be a part of you. If there is a building that can be destroyed, it cannot be real. If there is a planet which can go through seasons, it cannot be real. Any kind of change is a form of death.

It's very simple really. You can just ask yourself if something will last forever. If the answer is no, then it is not a real creation and not a part of God. If it lasts only a little while in time and then changes and then goes away, it cannot be part of creation or of God. Nor can it be God's will.

"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."

Here Jesus simply affirms this by saying that all things which are visible will have an end. Some will last longer than others but ALL of the visible things will have an end. It then doesn't matter how you are looking at the visible things, whether you hate the visible things or love them. ALL of them will come to an end.

This again tells you essentially that if anything is visible, it is not a part of God's kingdom. If it is visible, ie forms of matter, energy, bodies, planets, stars and so on, they will come to an end some day, and therefore cannot be a part of immortal reality. Anything that does not last forever uninterrupted is not a part of God, nor can it be made into a part of God.

There is a world that we made, a world of space-time and of physicality and of forms of matter and objects. These things are visible and will end. They end because of their nature being part of a dream of death. And because of this, they are not a part of God or a part of you. Nor are they a part of heaven.

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

Bottom line, if it's not immortal it doesn't really exist. It's a very simple test for anything. If it's not immortal it's not of God. If it changes it is not of God. If it can be attacked it's not of God. if it goes through a transformation process it is not of God. If it can be born or grows or withers or suffers or dies it is not of God.

It also doesn't matter if you change your perceptions about such things, to see objects in a different light or from a different vantage point. Seeing objects that end in a different way doesn't actually override the fact that they still end.

Just because you are happy it will not make the earth last forever. Just because you are loving it will not stop the seasons from changing. Just because you are peaceful it will not change the falling of leaves when the weather get's cold.

These are still proof that these things are not a part of God's reality. It doesn't matter if you see a unity in these things or a reflection of God in these things, they still behave and act and function in ways that are open to a denial of immortality. If the thing, the object, the matter, the form, the body, the world etc, can in any way ever be modified or changed, then fundamentally it cannot be a part of reality.

This is why "there is no world." This is why "God did not create the body." This is why "the body is clearly a device for separation and therefore does not exist." This is why we withdraw investment in physical sight and open up to a different kind of vision which overlooks/forgives the world. And that the world can BE forgiven is purely because is it an illusion of a world, and not a reality. Only illusions can be overlooked and "a world forgiven cannot last."

We can accept the reality of God's Kingdom, which is to accept God's truth and God's law and God's wholeness. That is the wholeness of the Kingdom of heaven, in which all things live forever and never change. It is not a place where bodies are born and planets spin and stars exhaust their fuel supply. It is not a realm where objects get stuck in crevices and the dust of dead flesh settles on surfaces or where food rots and decays and turns to a corpse. None of these things can be a part of heaven.

Only the immortal is true. Only the immortal is alive. Only the immortal is of God. Only the immortal exists. Everything else is an illusion. Not even what ACIM calls "the real world" will last forever. "Even the real world will vanish from your sight." You cannot convert an illusion into a reality. You cannot turn an unreal world into a real one. Nor can you turn a picture of death into real permanent life.

What lives forever must be created by an immortal creator to live forever from the beginning. What is made in an insane mind out of illusions which intended they die, cannot have eternal life. They have not been created or given immortality and so they do not exist at all. Their illusion of existing is nothing but a deception and the recognition of this fact is enlightenment.

"Only the creations of light are real."

"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."