In our attempts to run away from pain and suffering, we might view ACIM as a path that leads us out of the world and into God.

There are a great many students who believe the course is telling them to do just this, to essentially turn their back on the world and seek for an escape. Trying to find a sense of peace that let's them no longer be bothered by the world, eventually to hit the eject button and exit it entirely, leaving it behind for all the other sorry souls to suffer alone.

But what actually happens when you uncover the light within, the love of God, is this light shines out and extends and radiates. You are actually supposed to be the light of the world, a teacher of God, a healer, a manifestation of Christ, using the body for a holy purpose. You are supposed to be part of the great crusade, working miracles in the world and bringing life to death.

That means that in fact we have it totally backwards. We are not tasked with fleeing a sinking ship. We are tasked with replacing the ship with God's Kingdom. Not of disappearing off into a safe house while everyone else remains in hell, but rather of bringing heaven into the prison cell to melt the walls and set everyone free.

The light of heaven has to be shine into the spacetime, in order to bring life to death, and produce resurrection. The entire course is about resurrection, and this world is nothing more than an illusion of a death area of heaven that needs healing. Essentially we need to heal a "part of heaven" that has temporarily taken on a form that seems to be heaven's opposite, so that the forms will disappear and only heaven will remain. You can't do that if you are trying to flee to higher ground.

Thus we actually are tasked with bringing light INTO the darkness, SO THAT the darkness is shone away and replaced with light. That's how the light works, it dispels and shines away the darkness and replaces it. It doesn't hide on a fence or in some passive back alley avoiding the world.

You can't really be a teacher of God if you are not extending God. And that means you are shining love into the world here and now. And that love will bring life and healing to minds and bodies, a love which eventually will actually infuse the world so much that it will shine it away, leaving only the light of God.

Heaven is means to REPLACE the world we made, and we are meant to be part of the means by which this replacement happens. And that means you have to bring God's reflection into the world, bring the light into the darkness, shed miracles onto spacetime, and essentially to reverse the attack on God that made the world in the first place.

The world is basically like a wound that needs healing, but the purpose of healing the wound isn't to keep the wound but in a healed condition. The purpose of healing is to erase the wound entirely. At first the wound appears to heal, to transform, to reflect wholeness, then eventually it itself gives way to the underlying wholeness it was hiding.

And then only heaven remains, and there is no longer an attempt to escape (which is a form of separation), but simply a dwelling in the here and now of eternity within heaven itself, since there is no longer anywhere else to be.

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures came to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality."

"Fail not in your function of loving in a loveless place, made out of darkness and deceit, for thus are darkness and deception UNdone."

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

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

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

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"God created every mind by communicating His Mind to it, thus establishing it forever as a channel for the reception of His Mind and Will. Since only beings of a like order can truly communicate, His Creations naturally communicate WITH Him and communicate LIKE Him."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus clearly refers to the physical body dying. He remarks about how the physical worms eat the physical body. Which is indeed true. Go dig up a freshly buried corpse and look at the worms. Just as the body is destructible and can be destroyed, so too are the worms destructible and can be destroyed. What do you suppose the worms would eat if this world was heaven and there was no destruction and no way to take anything away from anything?

The worms wouldn't even eat, because eating is part of the devouring aspect of destruction. And human bodies wouldn't eat or digest either because all that means is they harvest chunks of the world and kill them off and destroy them and shit them out.

"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."

When people suggest that planet Earth is God's creation and is real, it sets off my immediate bullshit alarms. There is absolutely no two ways about it, and no way to twist it around. We could say, well, the world is totally neutral, it doesn't have any meaning, so if an animal seems to die and we strip away all meaning, we could say that's totally neutral and means nothing and its not really death and its not really life. We could smile on it and love it and be joyful even as it happens and clap our hands as human bodies are mowed down my machine guns and bombs which we celebrate along with God as the children are savagely killed.

We could celebrate happily as the bodies are blown up. And if the bodies were real, that would indeed be quite insane. Who would be able to feel joyful about people's bodies getting killed off if the bodies are really people and the world is real? If the world is real all those victims are horribly mistreated and destroyed against their will and it is all terribly upsetting. There is NO WAY to be happy about that, if it is true. The mind HAS to suffer because of its belief that it is true.

We could say, well, if you lift away all judgements and all meanings and sense of guilt and attack and calling some things bad or wrong and labelling some things as horrible etc, then what are we left with? A strangely neutral meaningless world in which, even so, the machine guns are blazing and the bombs are ripping through the bodies and all the nice creatures are snuffing it still. Can this really be completely natural and normal and sane and the way things really are? Can this really be the hallmark of a completely loving creator?

Can it be, in all honesty, the will of a loving creator God, to create a world which is simultaneously regarded as perfect and harmless and holy and innocent and joyous and eternal and safe and free from all attack, smiling upon it like it's an absolutely beautiful creation, while simultaneously the actual forms of the world continues to fight and kill each other and suffer? While the pain receptors are still firing and the bombs are still destroying the houses and the bullets are still ripping holes in people's bodies. If you are totally forgiving toward it and seeing it with love and holiness then it could perhaps reflect heaven. But this heaven would have to be still separate from the things that occur.

It would be quite ridiculous to suggest that God in his infinite love would simultaneously love AND attack, or create beautiful things AND cause them to not last and to destroy each other and to change their forms such that none of them have long to exist at all, becoming unrecognisable and forgotten. Does it really make sense to suggest that even a world loved and forgiven that continues to have creatures falling down holes and weather freezing bodies and starvation and pain and all manner of limitations and difficulties, that this would make Earth BE heaven? It simply cannot be.

Who wants a God that is so contradictory that he produces a chaotic world while laughing about it? Who wants a God that in his infinite unlimited unconditional love produces environments for his creations to live in which simultaneously attack them and make their lives difficult? Who wants a God that "allows death to happen" as though He Himself condones and causes and sanctions and lives it? And who wants a world created by such a split-minded freak? Surely anyone with half a brain can at least see that the idea of God creating this world is utterly nonsense.

Some people will take this obviousness - that the suffering in the world is ridiculous and no-one can love it if it's real - and draw a conclusion. Either you could conclude the world is real and therefore life is bullshit and God is an asshole or doesn't exist at all. Or you could conclude that God does exist and is not an asshole and instead the whole world is not his creation. Either the world is real and God sucks, or the world is not real and God is great. Those are the only options. And thankfully God's reality guarantees that the suffering can end forever.

The strange twisted unforgiving loveless difficult limiting world of Earth and space and time is not of God. You can look upon it without judgement and forgive it, you can project the meaning of love onto it, you can transcend its separations and overlook its differences of form, you can bypass its behaviours and its faults and shortcomings, and remain in a happy state in spite of it. But to think that this means the world IS heaven is a huge mistake.

Heaven, the Kingdom of God, the world created by a truly loving and benevolent creator, could never even so much as CONCEIVE of forms and shapes that conflict, of scarcities that require feeding, of such things as weather which threatens existence, of wars and war machine and weapons, of having any such bullshit as a part of his pure perfect divine holy mind and life. Regardless of forgiving these things, of lifting away the demonising of these things, or labelling them as sinful, regardless of shining happily upon them as the light of the world and blessing them with love and healing, EVEN THEN the machinery of spacetime marches on its dismal chaotic endless tirade of destruction and uncertainty and constant indecision.

God could never create a world such as this. And if he could, he could not be a God, nor could he live, because his own nature would be to be partly alive and partly dead. He would be literally devouring parts of himself, destroying parts of himself only to make up new parts that were nothing like the ones that came before. This constant shifting and changing and fluxing of reality would mean that nothing is real AT ALL because there is no stable reality or constant state or perfect dependable anything. If God created the Earth, God is fragmented and deceptive and has multiple personalities and is at war with himself and is insane.

Anyone with half an ounce of sanity should recognize that a world such as the physical is absolutely in all ways and to all degrees utterly removed from what God could EVER be capable of creating or condoning. It is NOT his will that you live in this environment, in this way, with these objects, around these things, with these happenings. The world is insane and God wants better for you than this. God has created an environment for you in and as heaven which is so perfect you would laugh hysterically at even the suggestion that Earth could match up to its qualities.

This has nothing to do with hating Earth, or judging it or attacking it, or condemning it, or dwelling on its negativities, or amplifying its faults. It just is what it is. It is a flawed mistaken world made from insane minds that thought they could do better WITHOUT God. It just is what it is and nothing more. It simply is far short of the divinity of heaven and the perfection of real creation. A beautiful mistake at best, a half-hearted effort at best, and a rather confused strange twisted mistaken effort at best. But you can do better, and you deserve better.

Forget the world for a moment, and think only of heaven existing. You are in heaven with God.

Then we had this separation event where we dreamed of spacetime and made up a physical universe. This world was like a small area of heaven which we fenced off with police tape and tried to keep God out of it.

"The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and completely limitless idea. It draws a circle, infinitely small, around a very little segment of Heaven, splintered from the whole, proclaiming that, within it, is YOUR Kingdom, where God can enter not. Within this kingdom the ego rules, and cruelly. And, to defend this little speck of dust, it bids you fight against the universe."

We blocked off heaven's light from shining upon it, we tried to insist that God was not inside the walls, we insisted on it being a barren empty desert, and used whatever means we could to make its seem like an area of darkness and death.

This little area of attempted lifelessness houses Earth and bodies and physical objects etc. But more to the point it's an area where mind rejects love and tries to keep God out.

To overcome this, what needs to happen basically is the walls have to come down, the flood waters of love have to be allowed to come rushing in, the light of heaven has to be allowed to shine on the barren wasteland, God has to be allowed to infuse and be present in the place where the illusion of a world was, and the entire area has to be resurrected into a state of heaven.

This means that while you are seeming to be a prisoner inside the walls, occupying the desert, you have to find ways to let heaven flood the prison. To let the light in, to have God be acknowledged in your mind, to grant access to heaven to occupy the seeming space where the world was.

And heaven will enter and shine upon the desert and seem to give it life, seen in a new light, forgiven and blessed. We uncover the light of God so that the light can shine upon the world, that we may be the light of the world, in order ultimately to shine the world away. To erase the walls, melt the prison cells, undo the separations, and cancel out the idea of a place where God can enter not.

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there is a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time."

Along the way, this means we are in a sense bringing heaven to Earth, but more accurately we're allowing heaven to occupy the space that Earth was made to block. To let the light of Christ shine through the body. To bring as much of heaven to Earth as possible such that you may reflect heaven here and see through a more heavenly vision. To be a kind of walking emissary of God - a Teacher of God, a healer.

As this inner awareness of heaven increases, the outward projection of it increases also. God begins to be seen as though "in" all things because God is in your mind. This means God is becoming visible, and the world is becoming invisible.

The solidity of the physical is diffusing and fading into the light of reality, because light shines away darkness. And what once seemed solid turns transparent and eventually to nothing. At first seen with the love and light that we bring into this "space", and then replaced by that love and light.

Our goal is ultimately to return entirely to heaven, in which the world is no more. But to get there, we have to first uncover the light within, and secondly allow this light to shine without. We first go to God to let the light shine, and then we bring the light of God into the world to shine the world away. It's not about escaping the world, it's about replacing it with God.

"Christ is within a frame of holiness, whose ONLY purpose is that He may be made manifest to those who know Him not; that He may call to them to come to Him, and see Him where they THOUGHT their bodies were. Then will their bodies melt away, that they may frame His holiness in them."

"Through your holiness the power of God is made manifest. Through your holiness the power of God is made available. And there is nothing the power of God cannot do."

"From here we give salvation to the world, for it is here salvation was received. The song of our rejoicing is the call to all the world that freedom is returned, that time is almost over, and God's Son has but an instant more to wait until his Father is remembered, dreams are done, eternity has shined away the world, and only Heaven now exists at all."

"And from this light will the Great Rays extend back into darkness and forward unto God, to shine away the past and so make room for His Eternal Presence, in which everything is radiant in the light."

"Because my feet are on the ground and my hands are in heaven, I can bring down the glories of Heaven to my brothers on earth."

"Everyone on earth has formed special relationships, and, although this is not so in Heaven, the Holy Spirit knows how to bring a touch of Heaven to them here."

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

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures came to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality."

"Fail not in your function of loving in a loveless place, made out of darkness and deceit, for thus are darkness and deception UNdone."

"In your relationship, you have joined with me in bringing Heaven to the Son of God, who hid in darkness. You have been willing to bring the darkness to light, and this willingness has given strength to everyone who would REMAIN in darkness."

"The Thought of God surrounds your little kingdom, waiting at the barrier you built, to come in and shine upon the barren ground. See how life springs up everywhere! The desert becomes a garden, green and deep and quiet, offering rest to those who lost their way, and wander in the dust. Give them a place of refuge, prepared by love for them, where once a desert was. And every one you welcome will bring love with him, from Heaven for you. They enter one by one into this holy place, but they will not depart as they had come, alone."

"As faithlessness will keep your little kingdoms barren and separate, so will faith help the Holy Spirit prepare the ground for the most holy garden that He would make of it. For faith brings peace, and so it calls on truth to enter and make lovely, what has already BEEN prepared for loveliness."

"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."

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

"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."

Read this carefully from ACIM.

"The Separation HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial."

These are Jesus's words. They are correct. It does not say that impossible separation from God has been made possible. It does not say that we in fact DID separate from God. It says that something called "the separation" HAS happened. There is a major difference between THE separation, and the general impossible potential for actual separation.

There is a very popular myth in ACIM circles that we're supposed to just assert that "nothing happened." Jesus is saying this is NOT appropriate and is a misuse of denial. Did you ever notice that for example you actually are having SOME KIND of experience of a world, a world in which you have a body, you type posts on facebook, you respond to people and so on? Technically speaking if these "things" were UTTERLY impossible, in the strictest sense, there is no way that you would even be able to dream of them happening. You wouldn't be ABLE to sit there right now reading these words, whether they're real or not.

There is a view of many people that the separation - confused with separation in general - did NOT happen, and therefore the logical conclusion is that "there is no facebook". This is CLEARLY A DENIAL. It makes no sense at all. It does not explain how it is clearly obviously possible for there to be some kind of a facebook, some kind of a body, some kind of a physical life.

No-one who believes that "it never happened" has ever been able to satisfactorily explain HOW ITS POSSIBLE that we can be sitting here typing little text messages to each other. They don't have an explanation because they believe we're supposed to just sort of turn a blind eye to all this stuff, slap a label of "not real" on it, PRETEND ITS NOT THERE (denial), and carry on trying to assert its unreality.

Jesus is telling you that this is a MISUSE OF DENIAL. Because in fact, per his words, "THE SEPARATION HAS OCCURRED." This isn't a real separation, it is fictional. But a fictional separation HAS occurred. A belief in, a dream of, an illusion of, an impossible separation, HAS occurred in thought, in the mind. It HAS in fact produced a whole other "order of thought" in the mind.

"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."

Read it carefully. The separation is NOT symbolic. Jesus says it is an ORDER OF REALITY. And that while it "lasts" ie in time, it is PERFECTLY REAL. This is NOT something that most ACIM students are very happy about, do not want to admit to, and will run away from at high speed. It seems to fly in the face of what so many people are saying, that "it never happened". Well, if it could not have possibly happened in ANY WAY, you literally would not be reading these words right now. And you are. Whether its a dream or an hallucination it doesn't matter, you ARE reading.

In the separation we did in fact produce a second order of thought and gave it a sense of reality. "Whatever you accept into your mind becomes real to you." It doesn't mean it is ULTIMATELY real, or that it really has permanent existence. It is truly an illusion of a possibility. But Jesus is clear the mind is perfectly equipped to sleep and to dream. These are NATURAL CAPABILITIES.

In fact, God gave our minds free will. And part of that TOTAL FREEDOM, is that you can freely try to use your mind to deny its own freedom. Yes, you have that freedom. It doesn't mean that anything real or possible can necessarily come from it, and it hasn't, but you CAN TRY TO. And when you do try to, your mind DOES SEEM to go to sleep, entering a state in which it dreams. This is entirely WITHIN THE LAWS OF GOD.

"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."

This means God has given you the POTENTIAL, the freedom, to choose, per your own free will, whether to accept reality or not. You are CAPABLE of denying reality. This denial doesn't remove reality because denial is a pretense that you're doing something impossible. But while you are IN denial, your mind IS in a certain state. You ARE IN "the separation." This is why we DID produce a state of mind which Jesus refers to as "the separation". We DID have a mad idea, we DID fall asleep, we DID dream of spacetime, and we DID make bodies and facetime.

Denying any of this is not in line with the course. This isn't to say that these things we dream of are ultimately real, but they ARE real to the dreamer. They don't have permanence because they are denials of permanence, making them temporary, and reversible. But while they are HAPPENING, while the mind IS sleeping and dreaming, we ARE in fact CAUSING the mis-creation, the production, of states of mind, which entail a denial of reality.

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

In order to return TO ultimate reality, the denial has to be undone. But the denial is, itself, an actual state of mind. It's something you're holding in your thought. You are having a dream of being separate. "You are safe in God, dreaming of exile". It is not helpful to claim that you are NOT DREAMING. "you MUST change your mind and help others change theirs. It is pointless to refuse to tolerate change or changing because you believe that you can demonstrate by doing so that the Separation never occurred. The dreamer who doubts the reality of his dream while he is still dreaming it is not really healing the level-split."

"To you the miracle CANNOT seem natural, because what you have done to hurt your minds, has made THEM so UNnatural that they do not remember what is natural to them."

"For you HAVE hurt yourself, and made your Self your enemy."

Jesus does not really ask that we "deny the dream is real" while STILL dreaming it. Because this is an false denial. The proper denial should END dreaming entirely. If you are still dreaming, then you are still giving reality to an order of thought.

"The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought"

This order of reality is being maintained by the mind and it HAS some reality while it is being maintained. That is why the world seems real. It is a kind of subjective reality but it's still a reality. Jesus asks us instead to ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THERE HAS BEEN A SUBJECTIVE SEPARATION - at least a state of denial and belief, a state of TRYING to oppose God - and that we must admit to this before we can heal it.

"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."

He doesn't say "just assert that it never happened." He doesn't say "just assert that separation is impossible." He says that you are supposed to ACCEPT THE ERROR TEMPORARILY, to acknowledge that your mind is in an unnatural state, so that you can change your mind into a more natural state. Eventually the unnatural state will diminish and be replaced by, or reveal, a more natural state. And by CHANGING YOUR MIND, which is always your freedom, you can revert it back to the service of spirit.

Remember that "The Separation HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial."

We HAVE chosen poorly, we HAVE used psychic mechanisms - mind power - thought and belief - to mis-create an illusory world. We did not create a NOTHING. We mis-created a distortion of reality. That HAS happened. But it can be undone. This far more accurately acknowledges your ACTUAL EXPERIENCE that you drive a car and eat food and go to the bathroom. There is SOME reality to this, some possibility to this, otherwise you literally could not even dream of it.

The dream is not nothing, it is a way of thinking that's out of alignment with God's will. That's why we NEED atonement. "Thus he becomes uncertain of his life, for what it is has been denied by him. It is for this denial that you need Atonement. Your denial made no change in what you are. But you have split your mind into what knows and does not know the truth."

"It is obvious, then, that when you are afraid you have placed yourself in a position where you NEED Atonement BECAUSE you have DONE something loveless because you WILLED without love. This is precisely the situation for which the Atonement was offered. The need for the remedy inspired its CREATION."

So Jesus is really saying that we did in fact enter a state of mind in which the mind does in fact experience strange illusory worlds as if they are real. A state of insanity. And we have given reality to this and it HAS SOME reality. It is relatively real, but not absolutely real. And because of this entering into a freely-chosen state of denial, a legitimate mind-state that is POSSIBLE because you have the freedom to try to deny your freedom - we DID in fact experience a "separate from God" - the fall of man.

And now we find ourselves in a mental state that NEEDS correction. There is a legitimate NEED for atonement, and we NEED to change our mind by free will in order to return to the acceptance of God's reality as the only reality that truly makes sense. A movement out of a state of sleep and denial, into a state of awakening and acceptance.

That's why the Holy Spirit was created, to guide us out of a state that we are PERFECTLY FREE TO ENTER, but which does not resonate well with our true nature, and so brings experiences of suffering. The atonement legitimately offers correction for this and restores the mind to a more natural functioning. It's not enough to just say "oh it never happened." You HAVE used your freedom and your power to choose something unnatural, and you DO need to choose again.

The ego's problem solving solution is to separate. It will tell you that the way to forgive something and free yourself from suffering at its expense, is to separate from it and/or attack it.

The way you'll separate from it is to deny it, try to believe it's not real, to see it as not happening, attach a label of illusion to it, affirm over and over how God didn't create it, label it as duality, and generally weaponise various parts of ACIM against it to "make it go away."

This is what the course calls "forgiveness to destroy". It demands that either a) the thing itself changes so that you're not affected, or b) you destroy its existence so that you're not affected. Both entail you not really changing yourself, while increasing separation - but disguised as "forgiveness."

The main problem is sin. Sin is a combination of two things: form and meaning. Meaning or interpretation is given to a form and associated with it, but then it seems like the form IS the meaning and you're dealing with ONE thing. One object that is evil, one act that is bad, one person body that is sinning, etc.

The combination of ego interpretation and form, makes it seem like your only solution is to get rid of the form. You have to throw it away in order to free yourself from the meaning. This immediately produces the spiritual bypass in which experience is denied, feelings are repressed, guilt is not looked at, beliefs are not questioned, the world is denied, bodies are denied, and the person tries to "escape" from the world of form.

The insight that HAS to happen for proper forgiveness to take place, is to recognize that "the problem" IS a combination of two things - form and a meaning you're giving it. You have to recognize that YOU are contributing something extra to the thing, you're adding something to it, you're giving it a meaning. And that means that there is an ASPECT of the thing that you can change your mind about.

This then leads to the realisation that if you were to think differently, believe differently, undo guilts, change your attitude, interpret in a lighter higher way, or generally alter YOUR MIND, it would change how you experience the thing. We're not talking here about doing this to make the form of the thing go away, but we're talking bout making the FALSE MEANING go away by REPLACING it with a higher meaning.

What this then does is it acknowledges the continued possible presence of the form without bypassing, without denying it's there, without trying to make it unreal, without attacking it with quotes, without ignoring the body, without numbing the feelings, without pretending you're not unhappy, and without denying the guilt.

Instead of being a "shove this thing into the pit of hell so that it's out of my way", it's more like "I'll change MY contribution to this so that I see it in a better way". This entails an honesty and a willingness to question your beliefs, to consider that your interpretation might be mistaken, to have a little willingness to admit to being wrong, and certainly a willingness to stop denying what you are experiencing. In fact you need to acknowledge the forms that are taking place EVEN MORE, before you can properly move into forgiveness.

For example if you are full of guilt but are in denial about it, you will project that guilt onto forms. And then you'll associate it with the forms. And then you'll think that the form + guilt is actually just "formguilt", like it's locked in as one thing. In order to move away from this delusion, you would have to be willing to stop denying that you feel guilty, stop denying that you believe you are guilty, and look at the guilt with the Holy Spirit and find a better to look at it so that you can overlook it and see your innocence.

As no time are we looking to write off, ignore, relegate, label, attack, dismiss, deny, pretend, or otherwise "make go away" anything physical or emotional or mental. We just want a different ANGLE on it. As soon as we start getting into "I want to make this go away", we're very likely binding meaning with form and are trying to get rid of it all at once. And that means we're going to move into a "reaction to sin", with a counter-measure of forgiveness to destroy. And then we're in a bypass.

When we use high-level lofty truths, the proper use of them is NOT to deny form or experience, or to create another separation or rift between heaven and earth. It's to use it to steer the mind towards truth WITHOUT negating or attacking or denying the illusory world. If there is any hint of "separate from it" in your forgiving, you're got some ego in there.

For example if you say "there is no world" and you're using that to try to write off the world and make it go away, that's a spiritual bypass and an attack. If you are saying it with the purpose of affirming your true identity and increasing the recognition of what the world IS, that's a proper use of it. There's a subtle difference there, but it's also huge.

If we say for example "I am not a body" the purpose isn't to destroy the body or make bodies go away. The purpose should be to affirm your identification with spirit and shift your identification away from the body. This isn't to be used as a statement with a hidden meaning of "bodies aren't real" or "bodies don't exist." Because the truth is that you DO believe very strongly that bodies exist. Your aim is to dis-identify from them not destroy them and not see them, at least not until much much later when you're ready for that.

We have to therefore always be careful to check whether how we're USING the course is using denial properly. If we've got some "make it go away" vibes in there, we're introducing some ego. If we're weaponising statements in order to "defend against", we're got some ego in there. If we're trying to say I am immortal spirit in an effort to get rid of the body and shut it out, that's a huge bypass.

Overall, the best way to avoid bypassing is to adopt an attitude that you are in this world, in this body, and you will remain in this world in this body, even when you are very close to awakening. An attitude that you will find peace even here in this world, and not initially attempt to escape the world in order to find it.

An attitude that you will repurpose and re-use the body and express the love of God through it to others here in this world while you have it. That you'll use the body for teaching and healing, rather than trying to not have a body at all.

That instead of trying to attack the world away, you'll find a way to forgive it and arrive at the forgiven world, seen here in a body with christ vision. An attitude that you will STAY AND HELP, rather than trying to "escape from hell", that you will be a healer and a teacher of God and bring light INTO this world. To be the light of the world!

As soon as the course is being used in an effort to escape from the world, you're going to go into a spiritual bypass. As soon as you're trying to write the world off, get rid of the body, demonise death, repress feelings, deny suffering, or make the whole of spacetime out to be some defective sinful thing that you want nothing to do with, you're going to be bypassing.

This bypass results in escaping into the intellect, using very lofty level 1 statements to try to "write off" the world and the body, using non-duality ideas to invalidate everything you experience, makes you sacrifice and control and limit everything you do including anything you enjoy, produces a cold dismissive attitude of rejection, develops a sense of total separation between heaven and earth, and generally increases the ego.

Jesus suggests to avoid this "top down" sort of approach where we just try to hammer high truths into our minds or force ourselves to believe things. We're meant instead to work from the bottom up, from where we are at now, without denial of experience or feelings or suffering, and work with whatever we're open to as the next step, to question our current beliefs and consider a better way to look at things. So that we can work our way up from the bottom, instead of pretending to sit on the mountain-top hurling down judgements.

"And as a man, I did not attempt to counteract error with knowledge, so much as to CORRECT error from the bottom up."

"True denial is a very powerful protective device. You can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you. This kind of denial is NOT a concealment device, but a correction device. The "Right Mind" of the mentally healthy DEPENDS on it."

"Fail not in your function of loving in a loveless place, made out of darkness and deceit, for thus are darkness and deception UNdone."

"When I said "I am come as a light into the world," I surely came to share this light with you."

"I am the light of the world. That is my only function. That is why I am here."

God and his Kingdom of Heaven are the truth. God's laws are the only laws. Anything which is true is true of God and his creation. There is no other truth because God's truth is absolute and all-encompassing.

In the "separation from God", we tried to make an opposite to this. We wanted to oppose the truth. The opposite of what is true, is clearly what is false. It must be false if it does not share any of the properties of what is true, and claims the exact opposite.

And so we actually made up a world, a fiction or fantasy world, which depicts things AS IF they are true, but which are inherently false. Since what is true is also what is real, and alive, the world that we tried to invent is both unreal and unalive.

It is also true that God and his truth are the only meaning. God is fully meaningful because he is fully truthful. That means he is honest, and accepts only the truth as true. He does not confuse what is true with what is false.

This also means that the world we made is meaningless, because we wanted to oppose meaningfulness. And so we made a meaningless, unreal, false, untrue, artificial world. A world which isn't really what it seems to be.

Another word for what is false, is a lie. Or we can also call it a deception. All illusory unreal things deceive because they cannot be true, but attempt to assert that they are. This effort to be something they are not, is what we call temptation. It is the temptation to believe that what is false is true, what is unreal is real, and what is impossible is possible.

This is why the world depicts a great many things which seem like they are possible, are happening, are true, are real, as if the world is even alive and existing. This cannot BE true, because the world opposes all of these things. It opposes possibility, truth, reality, and existence.

What this basically boils down to is that the world is a fiction and everything in it is impossible. It is a lie. A huge gigantic universe-sized lie. Absolutely everything in it is not true. Not one single thing that seems to be happening is happening. Not one single thing that seems possible is possible. Not one thing which seems to prove evidence that it HAS happened, has happened at all.

So now you have a world which is fundamentally a mistake. We were mistaken when we made it, because we believed the impossible was possible - in the tiny mad idea. We made it "by mistake" in the sense that we thought it could be achievable, even though it wasn't. And so all we really did was wish and dream for a world that cannot ever exist.

Ultimately then, heaven is in a state of perfection, reality and truth, wherein everything there is happening and does exist and is alive. Everything there is completely natural and permanent. There is nothing wrong with it, nothing ever goes wrong with it, and it cannot be affected or attacked by anything.

In that truth, which is the only truth, everyone is permanently safe. No one is ever really sick. No one ever dies. There is no suffering of any kind. No-one has any real unhappiness. There is no attack or war or grounds for murder. Everything is permanently perfect and everyone knows it.

So then what we have in front of our physical false faces, is a depiction of a lie, an idea of something utterly impossible, which isn't really there and isn't really happening. All the things you see in the news. All the wars and conflicts, arguments and attacks, people with sicknesses and pain, murder and deaths, and all the claims of "the proof of sin" that say "it really has happened" are entirely lies.

So yes that means that even if there seems to be a dead body laying on the ground PROVING that a murder did happen, and there is police evidence, this is STILL not true. There is not really a dead body anywhere, or even a ground. And so the world is riddled with what we call the "proof" that sin is happening all the time. The seemingly undeniable in-your-face look-at-it-and-don't-deny-it lies which are held up as victory over God and over reality.

NONE OF THIS IS REAL. IT IS ALL A LIE.

The weird thing then is that we have a reality of the Kingdom of God which is perfectly happy and joyous and filled with love and peace and celebration, in which everyone is utterly perfect and harmonious. And then we have "over there" this "picture of crucifixion" which depicts all manner of horrible nightmares and upsetting events transpiring. And only one of these can be true.

Either God's reality is true and there is no nightmare of any kind, or the world is real. Either there are only God's permanent laws, or the laws of physics are true. Either we are immortal unlimited beings or death is real. Either sickness is utterly impossible or sickness is completely happening all over the place.

This is the choice we are making all the time, between heaven or hell. It is the only choice there is. Are we going to be CONVINCED by this LIE OF A WORLD, or are we going to be convinced of the truth of heaven's reality? Is God correct, or is the ego? Is eternal life the only possibility, or is mortality and suffering and death the ultimate truth? You have to pick a side because they can't both be true.

If the world is indeed a lie, then NOTHING IN IT IS TRUE. And learning this fact and accepting it is the recognition of enlightenment. It means being faced with an illusion and SEEING THROUGH it. "To forgive is to overlook." And the world that you forgive has to disappear. "Illusions recognized must disappear." "A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies, but forgiveness looks past bodies."

Heaven asserts, nothing has ever gone wrong, and everything is still perfect. Everything real is still perfectly immortal and unharmed and undefiled and there is absolutely nothing to be upset about. The Earth asserts, everything has gone wrong, it's all falling apart and going to hell, everything dies and there is no escape. Which are you going to listen to? The ego represents the shrieking voice of hell and evil, while the Holy Spirit represents the Voice that speaks For God - in favor of God.

Only one truth can be true. Are you going to trust, have faith in, believe, side with, and adopt God's truth as the only truth, or are you going to allow a completely fictional false world to masquerade as reality?

All miracle workers must recognize the world IS FALSE, and everything in it IS UNREAL. That sick bodies are faking it. That dead bodies are not really dead. That there is nothing they cannot do because they rest on the unlimited laws of God. They dispel and disbelieve any claims by anyone that there is anything wrong with them, disregard all symptoms as lies, and refuse to acknowlege the lie that death can happen. And through this strength of conviction their miracles come forth and resurrect the sleeping and the dead.

"The world is false perception. It is born of error, and it has not left its source."

"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."

"But appearances are shown to be unreal BECAUSE they change." "This is the great deception of the world, and you the great deceiver of yourself."

"Judging truth as something they do NOT want, they perceive deception and block knowledge."

"But to give illusions to Truth is to enable truth to teach that the ILLUSIONS are unreal, and thus enable you to ESCAPE from them."

"to overlook the truth in an unfounded effort to deceive yourself by making an illusion true."

"Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus KEEPING it unreal for you."

"Fear is deception. It attests that you have seen yourself as you could never be, and therefore look upon a world which is impossible."

"the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal."

"We try to hide from Him, and suffer from deception."

"Except for God's teachers there would be no hope of salvation, for the world of sin would be forever real. The self-deceiving must deceive, for they must teach deception. And what else is hell?"

"Pain is a wrong perspective. When it is experienced in any form, it is a proof of self-deception. It is not a fact at all. There is no form it takes which will not disappear if seen aright. For pain proclaims God cruel. How could it be real in any form?"

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

"Each thing you look upon you saw but for an instant, long ago, before its unreality gave way to truth."

"Let not the world deceive you. It was made to be deception. Yet its snares can be so easily escaped a little child can walk through safely, and without a care that would arrest its progress."

"this strange world you made, but do not want. The only effort you need make, to give this world away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

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

"The world you made is therefore totally chaotic, governed by arbitrary and senseless "laws," and without meaning of ANY kind. For it was made out of what you do NOT want, projected FROM your mind, because you were AFRAID of it."

"The real world was given you by God, in loving exchange for the world YOU made, and which you SEE."

"Leave ALL deception behind, and reach beyond all attempts of the ego to hold you back."

"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."

"You are no more a slave to time than to the world you made."

"You made the body in attempting to deceive yourself."

"It IS essential it be understood what they are FOR, because it is their PURPOSE to make meaningless, and to ATTACK the truth. Here are the laws that rule the world you made. And yet they govern nothing, and need NOT be broken; merely looked upon and gone beyond."

"If the center of the thought system is TRUE, only truth extends outward from it. But if a lie is at its center, only DECEPTION proceeds from it."

"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."

"Side with me CONSISTENTLY against this deception, as we have sided against it briefly already."

"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."

"Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done TO you. Acknowledge but that YOU have been mistaken, and ALL effects of your mistakes will disappear."

"Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous, solid body, immovable as is a mountain. Yet, within YOU, there is a force which NO illusions can resist."

"The world was made that problems could not BE escaped. Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given." "You have need to use the symbols of the world a while. But be you not deceived by them as well."

"Now it becomes your task to let the illusion be carried to the truth. Be steadfast but in this; be not deceived by the "reality" of any changing form."

"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."

"For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take." "Fail not in your function of loving in a loveless place, made out of darkness and deceit, for thus are darkness and deception UNdone."

"Leave it behind. Do not listen to it, and do not preserve it. Listen only to God, who is as incapable of deception as are the Souls he created. As teachers and therapists, release yourselves and release others. Do not present a false and unworthy picture of yourselves TO others, or accept such a picture OF them yourselves."

"Illusions serve the purpose they were MADE to serve. And FROM their purpose, they derive whatever meaning that they seem to have. God gave to ALL illusions that were made ANOTHER purpose that would justify a miracle, WHATEVER form they took. In every miracle ALL healing lies, for God gave Answer to them all as one. And what is one to Him must BE the same. If you believe what is the same is different, you but deceive yourself. What God calls one will be forever one, NOT separate. His Kingdom IS united; thus it was created, and thus will it ever be."

"Be not deceived by what appears as many choices. There is hell or Heaven. And of these you choose but ONE."

Fail not in your function of loving in a loveless place, made out of darkness and deceit, for thus are darkness and deception UNdone.

This is something I think we've all struggled with. It seems the world is cruel, vicious, hateful, dangerous, murderous, and at times evil. It is filled with horros and torment and suffering and death. How can you love such a place?

It seems that when the world is being evil, you can't love it. More likely you will despise it, hate it, fear it, judge it as wrong, or consider it broken. How can you feel love in the face of atrocities and attack, or when you are witnessing war and destruction?

It then seems even insane to suggest that while the world is being evil, you can love it. Because this implies that somehow you love evil. If the evil is really happening, and it seems real to you, you logically HAVE to despise it. To love evil is itself unthinkable, and seems insane.

What occurred to me today, is that approaching the "how to love it" from this angle, is really looking at a special relationship. We're talking in terms of what the world is causing in us, how we are reacting to it, and how we are affected by it. What IT is doing to us and others, and whether or not IT is CAUSING US to love it. ie we JUDGE it to be lovable.

In specialness, we believe that something outside of us affects us. It can affect us positively or negatively. We believe it causes us and has power over us. We then seem to PREFER that it treat us well, and if it does, we will love it. And if it turns on us, we will hate it.

It's within that framework that we are stuck, when asking how we can love a cruel world. And it seems we can never love the world, because it is always messing up. If the world remains cruel, it is not going to inspire love. More likely it will inspire revoltion and bitterness.

If I allow my relationship with the world to be based on what the world "does to me", and if I'm waiting for the world to be RESPONSIBLE for causing me to love it, then chances are that how I feel about the world will waver by the minute.

Sometimes the world might seem loving, perhaps a lovely sunset or a pleasant smell. We then say that we love it, and become enamored with it. Then we see a car crash and are horrified, just as the smell of death wafts into our noses.

When we are worshipping idols, we are looking for those aspects of the world which "we like" or approve of, or prefer. We may even become obsessed with them, collectors or them, trying to gather them up to surround and immerse ourselves in them. The foods we like, our favorite color, the music we like, our favorite shows, toys and games we like to play with, etc. So long as we avoid the rest and pretend it's not there.

In this mindset we can only sporadically, conditionally, love the world. We love it when it seems to CAUSE us to love it. When it does something TO us that we prefer, we clap our hands. When it seems to meet our rules and does FOR us what we have assigned it responsibility to do.

Responsibility, however, also ties into the cause of sin. If we assign responsibility to the world, and it does not do what we want it to do, we consider it in violation of its duties. And now it has failed to act responsibly, or do what we wanted it to do, and it has now acted against our will, sinning against us.

We can't love the world like this. We can't love it on a basis of what it does to us or for us. In fact we can't love it on a basis of it doing anything at all. It can't be what the world IS that makes us love it. Nor can it be because of what it DOES, whether things we like or not. It can't be some effects we prefer, while despising others. Our love can't be based on the world being RESPONSIBLE for whether we love it or not.

What I'm learning is that a feeling of love or happiness is not supposed to be a REACTION to the world, or something the world causes in me. I shouldn't be feeling love for the world on the basis of what I GET from it or what IT is like. Love based on the world's CONDITIONS is conditional love - special love.

Love actually is supposed to be an outward expression FROM WITHIN, extended from the unconditionality and permanence of God. It is something I GIVE TO what is out there. And this giving should not happen as a reaction, or on the basis of adjusting to external conditions. Nor should I be doing it ONLY when the world lines up with my wishes. Expectation is not love.

The world should be loved, ONLY because YOU are loving, and not because OF the world. We're not loving it for its lovely scenery. We're not loving it's cute animals. And we're not loving it for the things it does for us. These are all special relationships.

We don't want to be getting lost in a state of idol worship or external dependency or only being happy based on worldly conditions. If we jump up and down when the world is in a certain configuration, or cower in fear and hate when it is in another, we are merely on a rollercoaster ride of fake happiness and despair.

The world, itself, is going to keep on being intermittently cruel and vicious and hateful and warring and decaying and deadly. It is going to continue operating within the laws which established it as a weapon against God.

It will try to delight you some of the time, and try to take away your peace at others. It will inspire guilt and fear and continue to attack itself in all its ways. You can't place your happiness or love on such unsure footing, or give the world the POWER to take it away from you when it wishes.

An inner love arises as you forgive yourself and love yourself, applying love at all times. This inner love has permanent qualities. It is unconditional. It is not a REACTION of love. It is not a love you only feel IF or WHEN certain conditions are met. It's a love you just feel, hopefully all the time, for "no seeming reason". "Happiness is a constant state."

It comes FROM WITHIN, and expresses outward. It shines ONTO the world. It is something you GIVE to the world. You PROJECT love onto it. And you then SEE the love you put there, mixed in with the world's cruelty. You enjoy it ONLY because you EN-JOY it, which means to GIVE IT JOY. Love is its own reward.

"Peace is impossible to those who look on war. Peace is inevitable to those who ***offer peace***. How easily, then, is your judgment of the world escaped. It is not the world which makes peace seem impossible. It is the world you see that is impossible."

The world IS a world of impossibilities. It cannot represent love or freedom. It cannot be real. It cannot be true. It is its nature to attack and destroy. That was what it was made to do. But to see only this is to judge it and hold it against itself. Only by GIVING peace and love TO it can you FEEL peace and love in relationship with it.

"Yet has God's Judgment on this distorted world redeemed it and made it fit to welcome peace. And peace descends on it in joyous answer. Peace now belongs here, because a Thought of God has entered. What else but a Thought of God turns hell to Heaven merely by being what it is?"

This projected love changes the framing of the world, and what it means. It shows you that the world's cruelty is not true or real. That it is just an illusion of sickness and suffering. That its images of death are not really death, because they are fake, and powerless to change you.

And at the same time, you look upon love IN SPITE OF the world, thus PUTTING LOVE THERE to see. This is the projection of the "real world", with which you OVERRIDE hell with heaven. And what you project you will perceive.

You OVERRIDE the world with your extension of happiness. You remain happy NO MATTER WHAT is happening, not because of some kind of "acceptance of it" but because of your REFUSAL to allow the world to come INTO you from the outside. You have power OVER it and dominate it with what you radiate. You are master of it. And you experience love because you chose to.

You really cannot love the world from the perspective of expecting the world to BE LOVABLE. The world is NOT lovable. No-one can make murder and death real and love it. That would be insane, to be in love with evil.

The only way to love is to recognize the evil is NOT REAL. It is not compatible with love. The world makes love IMPOSSIBLE. The only way TO love is to love it in spite of itself. And as such, you can love unconditionally precisely because you love IN SPITE OF the world being cruel. This also grants you the miraculous power to override its cruelty.

I find myself now, more often, smiling upon the world - upon subtle things, small objects, textures, colors. Feeling an inner sense of projected beauty. A sort of gentle happiness that bestows love, which shines upon, the world. And this is not because of what the world IS or what it DOES. It is because of what I am GIVING to it. Because I am staying IN MY LIGHT and shining it ONTO what I see, even if faced with a twisted hell.

It is more like an inner choice. A choice to love, regardless of what something is. To love something, even if it is a picture of brokenness or damage or malfunction. Not because IT is lovable, in its form or nature, but because I can CHOOSE to love, and will not ALLOW the thing to interfere with whether I am loving or not.

This means a love which is not DEPENDENT upon the world, triggered BY the world, or an EFFECT OF the world. It is not a love I GET FROM the world, and reciprocate, in some kind of bargain.

It is a love which is given outward TO the world, regardless of whether it seems to deserve it. Because *I* deserve it. Because if I stop being love, then I stop experiencing love. If I let my love switch on and off depending on externals, then I am a victim of the world, allowing it to affect me both positively and negatively.

Real love, or let's say, a holy relationship with the world, can only take place by IGNORING what the world suggests, and REPLACING IT with love. Giving it love even when IT hates, recognizing IT as calling for love.

We're told in ACIM that the cruel world is NOT the world God could love. And this makes perfect sense. But it also tells us that God loves the REAL world. God DOES love HIS PROJECTION OF LOVE. He gives peace, and sees peace. He feels love, and so is loving "toward" the world REGARDLESS of what the world is like. He doesn't love it BECAUSE OF what it is. He loves it IN SPITE of what it is. In spite of its evil ways.

If you think about this, it ties in properly with forgiveness. Unconditional love overlooks and ignores what something claims about itself, and sees past its illusion, and sees love instead. And only because it GIVES love and innocence.

Not because the thing is "being innocent". The world cannot be sinless or guiltless. "To see a sinless body is impossible." But we can choose to not believe in sin and guilt, and to thus project forgiveness and light UPON a sinful world. And we then see the reflection of our light, or of God, IN it. Because we PUT it there.

No one can love the world we made, on the basis of it being lovable, or on the basis of it acting lovingly. It is not that, and it cannot be that. It will always be a world of separation and death for as long as it appears to exist.

But we can love ... while the world seems to be there... in spite of what IT says or does, even WHILE it is being cruel, because the choice to love does not DEPEND on the world, or come from it. We can love in the FACE OF cruelty, in spite of the cruelty, which will render the cruelty seen with loving eyes. But this will not JUSTIFY the cruelty, because the love is not BASED ON the cruelty.

This is the only way to "love hell". No one can love hell, on the basis of what hell does to or offers them. The world in fact holds NOTHING that you want, and has NOTHING to give you. It effectively has NO redeeming qualities. Because it is nothing.

"The world can ADD nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons"

But you can "love hell" - which does not mean BEING IN SPECIAL LOVE WITH hell, on the basis of what you OFFER TO IT. You be loving, even when surrounded with evil people. You can love unconditionally regardless of whether the world was made from love. It wasn't made of love, and never will be. But this must not stop us from loving. Otherwise we cannot feel happy.

Our challenge is to stay strong IN OUR LIGHT, even when confronted with evil. To remain IN THE TRUTH, even when faced with lies and deception. To remain IN POWER, even when the world pretends to take power away. And to NOT ADJUST to the world in any way, or allow it to cause us to waver or change our decision to love. This is the only way God is able to love the world. To love it, because he can do nothing BUT love, REGARDLESS of whether the world "is lovable" or not.

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