Another word for forgiveness is "honesty". It's to do with admitting to the truth and being clear about what the truth is. This entails surrendering of the ego's motivations and lies and owning up to responsibility and authenticity. But it's also an honesty that goes beyond appearances, physical events, what it looks like happened or who seemed to be the cause. Because, in all honesty, such "truth" is not the truth.

If you are in the middle of some ego tangle, upset emotions flying all over the place, believing that it's caused by someone or something other than yourself, then you're not really being honest. To be honest you'll have to really take a good look at what you're doing any why, and if you can discern and see what it is you're doing, you will have to admit to yourself that you've been deceiving yourself.

A big part of the problem of how to forgive, is that when you're in the middle of a dramatic story you're really quite lost. You've lost track of clarity. You've lost sight of what the truth is. You're deluded and distracted by something big and ominous which *seems* to be the problem but really isn't.

You've pinned the blame or cause for this story onto something that isn't the cause of it. You generally aren't seeing clearly. There's so much going on and so many things which seem to mean something, that it's just all very confusing. This confusion essentially is dishonesty because you've lost touch with the truth and are defending evidence of that which is false.

So really, if you have no other practice, it would be useful to remind yourself from time to time, that you need to get HONEST as quickly as you can. And this honesty involves questioning what you've been doing, how you've been perceiving, what you've been believing, and all the "truth" that you made up that hasn't come from God.

Honesty shines a light to help you see clearly and puts everything into its proper place. It's admitting to what's really happening, admitting to how you feel, admitting to what you're experiencing and admitting to what's really causing it.

When you're upset and its because someone else did something or didn't do something correctly, it's because you've disowned responsibility and are projecting guilt, which is a dishonest act. It's not the other person's guilt or sin. You're passing your sin off onto them and believing they're the cause of it. This is dishonest. It's deceptive.

The person who stands to gain from your honesty is yourself. Owning up to the truth sets you free, aligns your mind to the truth, clarifies what is happening in the situation and helps you to see correctly. When you can see correctly and clearly you get back in touch with the experience that, in truth, you are perfectly happy and at peace and free of all ego suffering.

Honesty is not good for the ego. It's not good for the part of you that wants to keep a story going. It's not good for the part that wants to control and blame and manipulate. It's not good for maintaining a cover or keeping up appearances or putting on a face/persona. It's means revealing what is real, and that means there can be no cover-up.

Where are you being dishonest with yourself, what do you need to own up to and admit to, and are you willing to surrender your support for maintaining lies that are only bringing you suffering?

When I am upset, feeling unhappy, having a cry, feeling guilty or afraid, or whatever, Holy Spirit is gentle and compassionate. He often says, "I know". Sometimes I feel a hand on my shoulder from Him or Jesus.

They are compassionate in that they know that *I* believe I am experiencing something upsetting, that *I* feel sad or whatever. They are there for me, and they don't judge it. They don't even use the opportunity to push me towards some kind of forgiveness or greater awareness. They just hold me and hug me.

However, the fact is that all upset feelings come from a mis-perception that I chose. And I chose that mis-perception so that I could further my separation from God.

So for example, I might feel upset because I saw myself victimized by someone. I might feel sad about how someone rejected me or whatever. And those feelings seem genuine, it seems like I really feel this way and that it's very sad and unfortunate. But, once I'm done with feeling, at some point I need to find the willingness to move beyond this.

I've witnessed how, in particular, when old hurts come up from the past, to be healed, they always feel like how it felt at the time. They're always based on how I was perceiving when I was younger and less aware. Even though at the time I did not understand what was going on, or what it meant, how it made me feel at the time based on that perception is now the feeling that I need to work through and release. But I've also seen how obvious it is, that these feelings were just how I felt 'within' the framework of a certain way of looking at life, and there is usually some kind of mistake in that.

I saw myself as hurt because I didn't perceive correctly. I saw myself as unloved because I didn't recognize my infinite lovability. I saw myself as unworthy because I devalued myself sort of 'by accident' because I didn't know what i was doing. And so I created feelings of unworthy and unlove and so on, which I must 'heal' and release, but even though these feelings seem like they reflected some kind of 'truth', they're not really the ultimate truth.

I need to become willing to admit that, once I've allowed myself to feel and release the 'energy' produced by a false perception, that the perception ITSELF was faulty. And it was the fault perception that LED to faulty feelings. Unhappy feelings come from unhappy perceptions. So I need to now be willing to see differently, to look for a greater truth, to own up to the part that I played in choosing to suffer, to take back my power, to claim responsibility for doing this to myself, and to realize that nobody involved was doing it without my will.

So there is a 'forgiveness' process that needs to occur, above and beyond unhappy feelings, to correct the perception that led to them. And even though Holy Spirit knows this, he seldom prompts or forces me to 'go there' especially not right when I'm feeling how the feelings felt. I let myself fully feel because this releases the energy, even though it's a FALSE energy, to clear it out. To cathart it. THEN my mind is clearer and can have a cognitive shift, as well as being more willing and able to now apply a 'forgiveness' to change my perception.

It's important to let yourself feel and let out the trapped negative emotions, but recognize also that they are only there because of a mistaken way of looking at life, and that mistake needs to be corrected at some point. When you are ready. And not before. And nobody is pushing you or forcing you to have to do that, especially not when you're in the middle of a deep release. Trying to rush someone out of feeling into truth isn't compassionate.

So it's possible to have compassion for someone who is feeling upset even if you know that their upset is false, and there really isn't a need to be upset. Holy Spirit knows that nothing has gone wrong and there is ONLY reason to celebrate, but to tell me that in the middle of me believing heavily that I've been wronged, isn't entirely helpful because I can't hear it until I'm ready and willing. We really believe we've done something terrible to God and deserve to be punished for it, and as we work through those feelings, Holy Spirit is very patient to give you time to 'process' the consequences of a mistaken decision. And then at some point, when you're ready, you will undo the belief that caused it.

I woke up in the night last night with terrible heartburn. It was so uncomfortable, I was ready to get in the car and go to the store to get something for it. Probably the strongest and worst heartburn I've ever had.

I thought I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep because it was way too unpleasant and I had to do *something* about it.

In the middle of that concern, in which I thought I definitely would need an external magical solution, Holy Spirit started shaking me and healing me.

I did not believe at first that He would be able to correct it. It seemed too strong and definitely "physical". But He kept doing the same process over and over for like 5 minutes or more. My body was shaking all over the place and I just surrendered, relaxed and allowed.

Surprisingly, it seemed to be improving. He kept going. And eventually it got to where it really felt like it had completely healed. I was in a bit of disbelief. My fearful thoughts hadn't quite caught up to what had happened.

But there I was, the Holy Spirit said "done", and all I could feel was stillness and peace. The roaring heartburn soreness had been completely healed. I got up and walked around a bit to test it. I then tentatively headed back to bed, not being able to find any trace of discomfort.

And then I started to experience bigtime gratitude for this healing. Part of my ego mind couldn't quite let go of the belief that it was healed and kept wanting to fear its return, but it was nonsense. It was gone.

Thank God for that :-)

Although these things are unpleasant to go through, they definitely are a way to increase trust in Holy Spirit and His miracle-working power.

I think a lot of people have a belief that they are 'supposed' to suffer.

When an opportunity for healing is presented, unconditionally, with no strings attached, we actually recoil a bit in suspicion that we're not 'supposed' to be free of the suffering.

We believe the sickness is honorable, truthful, justified and deserved, and we defend it, and would even feel guilty for throwing all that away in favor of instant healing. How dare you heal someone when they're in the middle of good bit of suffering?! They were really getting into it ;-)

It seems 'too easy' that God would just come along and take away any degree of sickness instantly, as if, that's not allowed. Or it's breaking some kind of rules. Or some kind of 'agreement' that we all seem to have about how the common level of 'mutual suffering' is agreed upon and normal.

How dare you step out of the ego and be healed with no repercussions, throwing all guilt aside and claiming innocence. Blasphemy!

I noticed this in my path where I felt like some kind of 'rightness' in taking the very-longwinded suffering route through forgiveness, like, I was not supposed to skip any steps, was not supposed to just 'jump to innocence'.

I had to go 'through' and handle and spend time with all this guilt and fear like, it was not 'correct' (with the Course) to move on from it quickly without having 'properly suffered' first.

The ego says, you must ATONE on its terms, first, before you are 'allowed' to move on. You must atone by suffering and sacrifice and punishment, in hell. If you haven't suffered enough, it's wrong to seek healing.

Even if I were able to access healing quickly, some part of me believed I was meant to suffer for a long time and make sure to thoroughly look at every fault, and really beat it to death, just to make sure that I am really really really prepared to then start to heal it.

Silly nonsense. How can guilt and suffering be justified?

What about healing right now, full and complete, as an unconditional gift of love from God? Do we deserve it? Do we want it? Why don't we want it? Why do we believe we are supposed to suffer, right to suffer, meant to suffer, doing a service to God by suffering, carrying out God's will by suffering, going along with society by suffering, being aligned to truth by suffering, and being honest by suffering?

lol, you have to laugh.

Miracles are available right now.

Sometimes when I am upset and I am asking God to help, I am in a state of begging, and that's because I believe there is such a tremendous distance (separation) between where I am and where the solution seems to be.

As I "ask" God to "do things" (lol)... the suggestion to me by Holy Spirit is to, instead, THANK GOD. Well... in a state of upset and begging, the idea of thanking seems totally opposite of what I can muster or believe in, because when I am EXPERIENCING things happening that I DO NOT WANT, I am being the OPPOSITE OF GRATEFUL.

I seem to be having a pity party in my upset feelings and here it's being simply suggested that I lighten up and 'rejoice' in God by ACCEPTING that God IS helping or HAS/WILL help, by entering into the stream of thought which appreciates and THANKS Him for doing so.. like, it's a given, because then I am PARTICIPATING IN THE MIRACLE.

There's a world of difference between "God please help, things are so fucked", and "Thank you God, thank you for restoring ... to peace and love" or whatever.

The question is, can we love, can we be willing to rise up out of despair and actually JOIN GOD in love, and to then have a celebration party about how wonderful he already is and how much he is already going to solve this entire problem... THANK GOD.... can we jump to that from the middle of despair?

It's hard. But not impossible. Sometimes you have to have good old fit first of all and feel it all and get it out of your system to use up all that stupid ego energy. Then you might be more ready and able to reach up to the higher truth of God and align with it in gratitude.

It's a leap. And to go from 'I need help' to 'thank you for helping' also requires that I LET GO OF my ego misery pot. I mean, after all, if I'm asking for help, then I better dam well get prepared to RECEIVE THE HELP and stop just wallowing in the darkness, right? I'm asking for it, so I need to shift gears and actually open up to receiving and thanking.

Ego doesn't want to thank God for anything ;-) But this is the simple difference between ego prayers and Holy prayers. Ego prayers come from the dark and cry out in anguish and in belief at how everything sucks and there's nothing to be thankful for. Holy prayers align with Heaven and extend and express love in gratitude and happiness. Big difference. It's night and day, as well, in terms of the POWER that will come when you enter gratitude and COMMAND situations to heal instead of being a victim.

Thank you God for extending your love through me.

Before the separation, let's say you were wholly Christ, you were everywhere, and you looked upon yourself and saw yourself everywhere.

Then the separation came along and put a "rift" down the middle of you, separating you from the other half of yourself, like a deep wound.

The other half of you remained in Heaven, but this half of you seemed to believe in the split and saw a wall keeping you from yourself. You couldn't see through this gap that formed, because it looked like a solid wall of sin.

That wall is this universe. Physical matter is that wall of sin. This world is the content of the wound. It is the world of attack and pain and misery and death attempting to convince you that you are separate from yourself and God.

As you awaken, you gradually learn that this wall of sin is not really there, the universe doesn't really exist, and you start to look past its illusory forms and obstacles. To heal the world, is really to heal the world away, so that it is Christ who is healed, and the world-shaped wound is undone. Your vision begins to see through it, like it becomes transparent, as if the mists are clearing and you see beyond the veil.

Eventually, you start to catch a glimpse of Christ, which seems to reflect back to you from across the gap, and the gap diminishes in this sight. You are starting to see the reflection of yourself, or rather, the other half of you. You see this by not seeing the wound any more, and forgetting the world that arose in your madness.

As the gap closes, swallowing up the entire universe in its going, and disappearing into nothingness, Christ's Vision is finally healed, the wound is fully undone, and there is a wholeness again. In this wholeness there is no gap, no separation, no rift, no world, no bodies, no images, no forms.

There is only Christ looking upon himself once again, just as the Holy Spirit loves to do, sharing His vision. The wall of sin is gone, invisible. The planet has faded into nothing. And all that remains is the Heaven God created. The Son of God in all His glory.

Often when I'm in the middle of some kind of upset, or a pain, or a sickness, or a struggle with someone or whatever, Jesus or Holy Spirit will simply say "its a lesson".

When they say this, they aren't saying "its a punishment", even though that's what I'm interpreting it as - some kind of unfair treatment. By saying its a lesson, it lets me know I have something to learn.

But it also lets me know, that this isn't something that they're trying to hide from me. They're not being assholes and concealing the answer to the lesson. It's totally available, and I'm aware somehow that the only reason I'm having the lesson is because *I* need to change in some way. There's something about my perception that is faulty, or something is unforgiven, or some healing is needed.

At the same time, I get this feeling like, there is a prize... a gift... there's something valuable that is 'mine' but its hidden from me, like a buried treasure or something. I can have it, and there's nothing stopping me from having it, other than that I need to learn the lesson. It's not a lesson in punishment or how I need to suffer. So then this makes it feel more like a challenge.

Also knowing it's a lesson helps me to not see it as 'against me' or 'unwanted' like I was before. If its just a lesson then things are happening for a reason, and there's just something I don't accept or don't realize/recognize yet. This sort of makes it almost an exciting challenge to find out what it is that I'm not 'getting' yet. This then sends me on a journey of discovery to look within and investigate what's really going on here. It's a call to do some radical honesty and inquire within.

And actually it's not like Jesus or Holy Spirit are mean school teachers who put up walls or reprimand you or anything. They are actually willing to HELP, with the lesson. But it entails a certain amount of willingness on my part. I can even ask them for guidance and they can provide some.. sort of like clues... because they don't often just outright reveal the 'answer' or solution or truth. But they're there to help as much as I'm willing to learn. Ultimately, how quickly I learn the lesson is up to me.

See we each have our own curriculum and like ACIM says, we get to decide when to learn - ie we can delay or be willing - but we don't necessarily set what the curriculum contains. And usually when lessons come along they are always unwanted at first. That's why they happen, lol. But they're there to help. They're nudges toward God. So if something seems to have gone wrong I need to become willing to at least accept that this is trying to help me somehow, and that I need to open up to something because I've made some mistakes. I need to learn the lesson. It's not there to torture me but to free me. My mighty companions just want the best for me.

Thanks Jesus/Holy Spirit.

Had a nice chat with Jesus last night.

One observation made is, that you can't just jump straight into fear or guilt. It's not like you can go from innocence straight to feeling afraid, although it seems this is what we do because it can happen quite fast. There are steps that MUST precede it.

e.g. if you are afraid, you have to:

1) separate from love, 2) believe its really happened (sin), 3) become guilty, 4) feel compelled to fear punishment.

So you don't just 'get afraid', you have to have first done these other things. Similarly if you find yourself mainly in guilt, you didn't just become guilty, there had be these other steps before it (ie separation and sin).

Once you see where you are on the spectrum between love and death, ie:

1) Love/atonement/Holy Spirit

2) Separation idea

3) Sin (something really has happened)

4) Guilt (guilty for making it happen)

5) Fear (afraid of the punishment that guilt suggests will come)

6) Punishment (actually experiencing punishment)

7) Death/ego

... then you can figure out how you need to 'undo' the preceding steps. If you find yourself mainly in fear on an issue, figure out what guilt it was based on. If you are afraid, you ALWAYS have guilt underneath it. If you mainly find yourself feeling guilty about something - at least you haven't moved into fear, but now you need to realize there was some sense of 'sin' underneath it.

As you move away from the 'death' end of the spectrum you are moving away from the ego. As you move away from the Love end of the spectrum you are moving towards the ego.

You need to move yourself toward the atonement end of the spectrum if you want to be at peace. AND... this is the important part, you need to go ALL the way. You don't want to go all the way because the closer you get to it the more it challenges the ego's deepest-held truths (e.g. that the world has happened - which is a 'sin' idea). It also means getting up-close and personal with God which your ego does not want to do.

Many people (me too) get stuck in the middle of the spectrum somewhere around the fear or guilt areas, and think we need to just undo the fear or guilt, but really we need to look at what the guilt is based on, which is some kind of sin, then look at what the sin is based on, which is some sense of separation from God and yourself, and then undo even the idea of being separate, so that you can REUNITE with God and yourself in the At-one-ment.

At any time, all you need to ask yourself is:

1) Where am I at on the spectrum between holy spirit and ego?

2) Where do I want to be? (ideally, with Holy Spirit)

Then work your way one step at a time uncovering the foundation of where you find yourself.

It's not easy to recognize the need for forgiveness. It's not easy to realize that you're even being unforgiving. It's not easy to notice that the way you're experiencing a situation or problem is you falling for some illusion. And it's not easy to see that you even have "another way" to deal with this.

The ego has been our faithful companion for a long long time. Almost every interaction with this physical world has been according to its perceptions. It has shown us an interpretation of everything that happens, making it seem real and true, and showing us a world where everything goes wrong.

And our use of the ego to respond to this broken world, has to be to use more ego to try to fix it. To solve problems. To correct people. To wrestle with what's happening. To just assume that what APPEARS to happen is real and fixed and irreversible, even though it's not.

And then we come to a sort of middle ground where people say, well, you should just accept what is, stop resisting, stop fighting it, let stuff happen etc. Yes, it's a stepping stone.

But ultimately, that's not the end of the story. That's sort of like saying, I've made my bed now I will lie in it. Or, I invented a prison, now instead of fighting with the prison I will just stay imprisoned and try to see the good in it. Or it's okay to die.

No.

When we're accepting illusions and are still inside illusions and are still responding to the world through the ego viewpoint that things are going wrong and problems are real and people are supposed to be suffering, that's not awakening. Its a form of rationalization.

We are meant to recognize that NOTHING in this world is real or true. This world itself is an illusion. It doesn't even exist. It is not happening. Nothing has gone wrong. Nobody is REALLY doing anything that they seem to be doing. We're meant to not take ANY of it seriously. We're not meant to believe our eyes and take things as though they're factually happening. We're NOT meant to just 'accept' the world.

We're meant to completely DENY the illusion of a world. We're meant to UNDO the world. We're meant to OVERLOOK the world. We're meant to recognize that this world IS AN ILLUSION not a reality. We're meant to RECOGNIZE that only what God has created - only his design - is true and real and valid. And if that is not being expressed here, then MIRACLES are called for.

Divine health. Perfect abundance. Immediate supply. Instantaneous travel. Absolute worthiness. Eternal life. If THAT is not happening, something has gone wrong, because THAT comes from love and miracles come from love and if miracles are not happening, love is not happening, then something has gone wrong.

A simple meditation technique I tried last night with unexpected results - it basically revolves around intense listening.

1) Know/imagine that there is going to be an extremely quiet sound that you are going to hear in your mind. It's so quiet, it's quieter than even your thoughts. It will be very very subtle so you're going to have to listen very carefully. If you want to anticipate that this sound will be a voice, that's ok too, but it's going to be really really quiet and barely noticeable.

2) Spend time listening really really carefully within, listening for this very quiet sound. Do not try to listen for 'silence' or to become silent or to silence your thoughts - that's too hard. Anticipate there will be a very quiet sound you're trying to find. You're trying to seek out a very quiet sound in your mind and it's going to be really almost too quiet to notice unless you listen really really intently, so you're going to have to pay really careful attention.

3) Do this for a while and you'll probably drift into normal thinking several times and go off on tangents. Hopefully you'll remember to come back to listening for this quiet sound again and focus again on listening intently. When I did this I got distracted several times but kept coming back to listening for something very very quiet.

4) At some point when you're ready and you've been doing this a while, your mind will have quieted down and you'll be quite focused, and you'll notice you haven't heard the sound yet. If you heard thoughts or voices that's ok, but that's not the sound we want. We want to focus on something subtler, a bit like transcendental meditation. However, we're now going to switch our focus a little bit.

5) Instead of listening for that quiet sound, which we didn't hear yet ;-), we're going to now shift to listening to God. The sound is going to come from God. We're going to put all our attention on God and listen really really carefully in his direction, just as before, because God has a really quiet voice. Just listen intently, be receptive.

6) You should hopefully notice that you feel you are directly 'in front of God' and that He is right in front of you, with nothing else coming between you. It may feel more intimate than you've ever felt with God before. And you'll just keep listening and staying focused on His presence, listening to what sound He might make. You can stay doing that as long as you like.

7) Optional final step, if you want, is to ask God something, and then continue listening to see if he will answer. Even if you don't do this step, I feel it's been helping in quieting your mind and helping you to focus on God, which is communion, which is good. I was really surprised how much I felt I was in direct contact with God more than ever before, with no middle-men/thoughts anywhere.

Give it a try ?

The world is full of advice. Some of it seems useful, most of it is bullshit.

The son of God does not need any advice. This is because He does not need to 'get' anything from anyone because He is not lacking anything in himself. He has been completed by God's presence in Him.

All he does is extend the truth that is already within Him.

So what happens when someone else comes along and starts telling Him.... you should this... you need to that..... you can live longer if you eat this..... you can live longer if you don't do that.... 5 tips for losing weight..... 10 tips for being a better this and that.... etc... all bullshit. All unneeded.

You do not need anyone's advice. You do not need anyone to tell you what you do, or to give their so-called "opinion". You do not need suggestions for how to live or how to exist or how to behave or what to do to be yourself. You don't need anything.

When I was in the middle of having an experience of God, I felt like I did not need anything. And I mean that literally. I felt like I did not need to eat food. I had to eat a meal but I felt like I was shoving lumps of material into my mouth for absolutely no reason and that it was completely foreign. I also felt a great amount of joy radiating out of me toward others - extending to others - such that it was all give give give give give. It wasn't take take take or get get get or need need need. I had no needs. And yet all these people kept trying to "help" and kept offering advice and suggestions and trying to tell me what I should do or who I should be. And I was like, why are they doing that, I don't need anything.

You don't have any real needs other than God's love. All of the other advice is bullshit. You don't need any "teachers" to come along and tell you what's what. The only teacher you need is the Holy Spirit who speaks for God.

You especially don't need to be inundated by a society that is chronically judgemental and insane, constantly shoving shit down your throat to tell you that you have to be this way or that way, or you're not enough of a person if you're not doing this, or most people do that, or you should be doing this more often. We're addicted to being told what to do. Victims. And people are addicted to telling each other what to do. Look at me... sitting her typing this shit and offering more 'perspective'. Disregard!

You're already you. Stop listening to the ego.

Do you notice when people most likely give advice? It's when you show that you are suffering or upset. It's when they look at you trying to make guilt real and they make it real right along with you and then come across as being a savior and rescuer. And then comes all the advice. If I post something on here and I say, well, I've had a pretty rough time lately or feeling shitty and confused or something like that, people will suddenly chime in and start giving advice. The response SHOULD be to remind me of how I'm mistaken and how I am loved and to offer true correction for my mistaken perceptions, not buying into my bullshit story. But this isn't how people function. They launch into an instant hero role and start telling you what to do. We're addicted to this. And it's just another part of the way we skapegoat - conveniently finding poor broken sheep in the flock and then targeting them either with our fears and guilts or with our judgements and rescue attempts.

Bleh.

My wife had said she was getting a foot cramp and that pain was coming down her leg from the middle of the shin bone downwards.

This was the site where, some 15-odd years ago, she had bashed into the dishwasher door and probably chipped the bone. She had a hard bump there ever since due to how the body had tried to heal it, which was a little painful to push on. It protruded out of the smooth shinbone and was easily visible and easy to feel with the fingers. It was an area a little smaller than a 25-cent coin.

I put my two fingers on the area and was in quite a strong inner condition, relatively free from fear. I intended that it be healed. My fingers started vibrating as Holy Spirit began to flow.

I did not say anything for a while. I felt that instead of trying to force the thing to heal, I would sort of step back and stay within my inner strength. I had a sense of certainty and knowing. I didn't feel the need to go out of my center and try to force it, but rather, remained centered in being free from fear.

She said "there's no point, it's been there for years". I said, "that doesn't matter". I was certain that this was irrelevant.

Holy Spirit suggested words: "go down". So I spoke this at the bump. I also told it to "heal". I could feel beneath my fingers a sense of "sinking" or collapsing. I commanded it again "be healed" "bone fuse together".

I could feel under my fingers two or three times the sensation of something disappearing. About a minute later I checked. The whole area had reduced down and was much flatter. The whole upper area had become completely flat. All that remained was a small area about half the size of half of a 1 cent coin which was still protruding.

We stopped there, but it was quite cool to see that there was a marked difference. She tested it herself and remarked that it had indeed seemed to have worked.

I learned from this the difference between going off-center and trying to become aggressive or pushy in trying to force something to change, versus staying clearly centered in strength and freedom from fear and commanding "from a distance". I felt much stronger and more certain this way, as though I didn't need to fight with it because I knew with more certainty that I was in the truth and it was not.

I later was asking Holy Spirit about this. It turns out that this remaining centered in truth is the same thing as "having faith". It's not wishful thinking nor blind hope. It's a sense of certainty and truth and freedom from fear or indecisiveness. I also was shown how miracle-working is very similar to how God creates, He simply remains strong in the truth and remains "centered" and then "shines" outward from there, staying within Himself but "expressing" from that point of Authority. This is how we need to be when we are working miracles, otherwise if we step down from the position of authority in trying to make something happen, we move away from strength and certainty and thus become weaker.

This is why the ego's version of power is to have power over something through force, while God's version of power is to BE IN strength (love, fearlessness, certainty, truth) and stay IN it while "emitting" the creative power.

Here's some very simple logic which will be hard to actually accept if you have an ego.

In God's truth, nothing real has happened to warrant any kind of upset, suffering or concern. Absolutely nothing has gone wrong. There's no grounds for any kind of upset whatsoever.

SOooooo... IF you are upset or suffering in some way, you are not upset about something that's REALLY happened because it has, in truth, NOT really happened.

THEREFORE..... ALL of your upsets and suffering are FALSE, are COMPLETELY UNFOUNDED, you have NO good reason why you should be upset, all of your upset is 100% unjustified, and the ONLY thing that is justified is that you be happy and alive and joyfully with God.

This SHOULD mean, that if you could get this, you'd simply cast aside every single problem and upset and form of suffering instantly and it would leave you. Immediately. Because it is utterly without any basis in reality.

There IS no REAL reason to be upset about anything!

Every time you are upset, it is about something that IS NOT REALLY HAPPENING. This is reflected in the workbook lesson "I am not upset for the reason I think", and also "I am upset because I see something that is not there".

Recently, I was quite upset and emotional and crying about something that seemed big and intense and not at all pleasant. It seemed to me that this amount of upset was justified or called for (hierarchy of illusions). However, I had this little thought, "maybe I'm making this into something more than it is". And Jesus chimed in, "BIGTIME".

And yet, here I was, upset, snot and tears, and believing that something has gone wrong and I should be upset.. and yet... in the middle of that... there's this idea... this ENTIRE UPSET is completely without any basis in the truth WHATSOEVER. I am upset about something that I should not even be upset about because it's not true!!!

I am literally upset for reasons that are not a "real" cause for upset, because they are not real. I am upset because I believe something is happening in this scary dream which is not really happening and IS just a dream. I am upset because I think all kinds of shit has gone wrong and people are suffering and I'm suffering, but all of that is based in and around this ONE simple core belief.... that separation from God HAS really happened, something REALLY has gone wrong, and therefore I SHOULD be upset about this.

Its bullshit!

As unpleasant as it is to suffer, and as unpleasant as it is to feel upset and unhappy and releasing emotions, and as gentle and kind and patient as Holy Spirit and Jesus will be with me when I am like that, comforting me and supporting me and not pushing me at all, IF I am willing, there is a much bigger truth at hand. The truth is, you have no reason whatsoever for being upset or to suffer at all. There is no reason to die. There is no reason to be in pain. There is no reason to be unhappy. There is no reason to be in ANY state other than a state of total happiness, which is God's WILL for you!

So all this other stuff... lol.... fetch the kleenex... but ... really, it's all very very mistaken. If we could just get this, it's so simple but the ego has so many defenses against it. In truth nothing has happened. In truth, only Love is real. In truth, there is only cause for celebration and joy. In truth, everyone is okay. In truth, disasters and murder and death and destruction are not real. In truth, nobody is really abused. In truth, nobody has been truly victimized. In truth, nothing unreal has happened and nothing unreal exists.

We should be jumping for joy all day long every day! This is the "good news" that Jesus is bringing to us in the Course.

But.... much easier said than done, to one who believes in suffering. And that's me and probably most of you too.

More forgiveness to do.

The aim of our purification, of sorting out the true from the false, is to become fully committed only to the truth. This means purifying or filtering out anything which is not of God, and accepting everything that is of God.

It's kind of like firmly taking sides. You are to fully and completely side with heaven, and completely refuse to accept anything illusory. To become completely 100% clear about what is true, totally distinct from what is false. Having absolutely no false mixed in with the true, and being entirely clear about the difference.

"For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM."

Being able to work miracles for example requires maximal love, which is a state in which there is no fear at all. When there is some fear mixed in, you're essentially an unhealed healer, and can only partly heal. You call forth two simultaneous opposing goals, and so you ask for healing and attack at the same time.

"The way out of conflict between two opposing thought systems is clearly TO CHOOSE ONE AND RELINQUISH THE OTHER"

So there is one goal of the Holy Spirit which is pure life, and the ego's goal is pure death. And we're talking here in the extreme of contrast. In accepting truth, we need to accept all of the truth and nothing but the truth. And we need to properly use denial to reject anything that is not true. And you can be sure that ALL illusions will tempt you toward the false.

"It is in the sorting out and categorizing activities of the mind that errors in perception enter. And it is here correction must be made."

"But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal. This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world."

"The first step toward freedom, then, MUST entail a sorting out of the false from the true."

Until we get there, to that place of certainty and doubtlessness, of acceptance and clarity, of clear recognition and the Holy Spirit's perfect judgement, we will find ourselves in a kind of muddy middle ground. We will in our minds have some commitment to some of the truth, and some to lies. We'll be partly convinced by the ego and the body and the world. We'll fall into temptation and be deceived.

"The reason this is upsetting you is because the Atonement is a TOTAL commitment."

"I have no function but the one God gave me. This recognition releases me from all conflict, because it means I cannot have conflicting goals." "Doubt is the result of conflicting wishes."

"You, then, have two conflicting evaluations of yourself in your minds, and they CANNOT BOTH BE TRUE."

When we are in this in-between state we are "in two minds", because it means the mind is split between two masters. It is trying to achieve two opposing goals at the same time, producing tension and thwarting and cancellation of power. In this "untrained" state we are ineffective and disempowered, we keep hurting ourselves by mistake, and we are frequently lost and confused.

"You cannot be faithful to two masters, who ask of you conflicting things."

"An untrained mind can accomplish nothing."

This middle-ground is where most of us find ourselves most of the time, perhaps sometimes moving closer to a clearer unequivocal immersion in reality, and at other times descending into the darkness of false perceptions. In this state we are not certain, which means we are afraid. We are not clear on what is what, so we are confused, and as a result are able to be deceived, and so fall for temptation only because we don't recognize what's happening.

"A mind and body cannot both exist."

"Time and Eternity cannot both be real, because they contradict each other."

"The power of decision is all that is yours. What you can decide BETWEEN is fixed, because there are no alternatives, EXCEPT truth and illusion. And there is no overlap between them, because they are opposites which CANNOT be reconciled, and CANNOT both be true. You are guilty OR guiltless, bound OR free, happy OR unhappy."

Without a clear full and firm commitment to truth and reality and the laws of God, our whole perception falls down into a fight with the world. We see bodies and suffering and enter into false empathy. We become forgetful of who we are. We buy into mortality and fear. And then we have reactions based on making illusions real, trying to solve unsolvable problems and trying to escape from hell.

"Both are not true, yet either one will seem as real to you as the amount to which you hold it dear. And yet their power is NOT the same, because their real attraction to you is unequal. You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began."

The only reason for this is because we have our feet in two canoes at once, and they're heading in different directions. We want the world and we want heaven. We want the mind and the body. We want bodies but without problems. We want worldly magical solutions to make bad stuff go away so that we can get what we want. And so we are torn and adrift and lost.

It is clear then that in order to really access the power of God, to work miracles, to have conviction and fearlessness, to be certain and empowered, to be not deceived or tempted, we have to more consistently side with God. We have to be more fully vigilant for the Kingdom as the only reality and the only truth. It's always when we're in this no-man's-land of in-between that we can't tell which way is up.

"If you believe in truth AND illusion you CANNOT TELL WHICH IS TRUE."

I find that when I am more firmly siding with the truth I can dispel illusions more easily. I can rise above the battlefield, pay less attention to bodies, be less deceived by what I see and assert more strength and light. When I become out of touch with heaven I sink into the darkness and lose sight of the truth, becoming confused and tempted, deceived and lost, and this arising of false perceptions always leads to suffering.

It's salvation that we really need, and salvation is true perception. It is also miracle mindedness. But we can only get into that state and stay there if we're really fully committed to the whole truth all the time. To get there and stay there will take a lot of purification because every attitude, every grievance, ever unforgiveness, has to be purified of its support for death, its siding with darkness, its choice for fear and for guilt.

"Forgiveness, salvation, Atonement, true perception, all are one."

We are moving into the light. When we are fully in the light there will be no more hesitation, no more guessing, no more uncertainty or temptation. Until we get there, we will continue to be thrown around on the rollercoaster. Tempted into the belief that the world is hell, and tempted away from the recognition that it is nothing. Only as we rise above and into the light do we regain our sanity.

"Miracles are seen in light, and light and strength are one."

So ideally, in the long run, we want to get into miracle-mindedness and stay there all the time. Into forgiveness, the state of christ vision. To stay above the battlefield, away from deception, identified with spirit, owning of our immortality and siding with God's laws only. That's how you are fully siding with reality and full against unreality. A clear distinction between what is true and what is false.

"The former needs YOUR careful protection, because it is a state of miracle-READINESS. This is what the Bible means in the many references to "Hold yourself ready" and other similar injunctions.

Readiness here means keep your perception right side up, (or valid), so you will ALWAYS be ready, willing, and able. These are the essentials for "listen, learn, and do."

"As long as perception lasts, prayer has a place. Since perception rests on lack, those who perceive have not totally accepted the Atonement and given over themselves to truth. Perception IS a separated state, and the perceiver DOES need healing. Communion, not prayer, is the natural state of those who know. God and HIS miracles are inseparable."

You believe that it is true that you are meant to suffer and die and that doing so is right and happy and is your salvation. How nuts is that? Even worse, you do not even REALIZE you are suffering because you think it's your idea of heaven.

But here we are, in the middle of suffering, asking for more suffering, wanting to keep suffering, because we falsely believe that suffering and attack is SAVING US from something even worse.

What could be worse than suffering a death? Happiness and eternal life? The ego actually believes this. It's replaced the truth with what is false and identified what's false as true and something ELSE is where all the suffering lies.

So if you believe suffering is happiness, death is your way to be free, you deserve to suffer more because you don't deserve love, or that it's true that you need to keep the ego because it is totally your friend, then you're going to keep on suffering. The only reason you will keep suffering is because you think it is perfectly sane and real and true.

Jesus has told us, you do not need to suffer. Period. There is no call for, justification for, need for, or purpose for suffering. All you need is God's love. Yet to the ego, it has all these reasons 'why' you need to suffer more... reasons which justify suffering, reasons which build up a picture to defend suffering, to protect suffering, to want it and to keep it, because you're convinced it's actually in your best interests.

Whatever you think is true you will defend because you believe that, conversely, whatever is NOT true is against you and is your enemy. And this is how you defend against God because you think God is not the truth. Why would ANYONE want to deliberately stay away from God? Not in their right mind! Nobody has any valid reason to. But people have a LOT of really invalid reasons to. A lot of beliefs that all reinforce this conviction that what the EGO is offering is better, truer, more correct, more safe, more reliable, more trustable. We've put a lot of faith into the ego.

There is no reason to not be with God. There is no reason to suffer. There is nothing keeping you away from God other than your own desire to not be with God, based on your beliefs that tell you God is not what you want. The only way you can not want God is to not be aware of God's true nature. You MUST cover it up and distort it otherwise, if you were to RECOGNIZE God you would jump into His arms in an instant. The attraction to love is very powerful. And it is this attraction to love that you are trying to HIDE underneath and using your ego beliefs. Their only purpose is to cover up God so that you don't remember how much you want and love Him.

If you've got reasons to not accept God's love... you're definitely deceived by the ego and definitely mistaken in your grasp of what God is like. Its good to admit that. God's got a whole shitload of love coming your way.

This world is populated by egos. People who want to broadcast themselves but without listening. This results in a state of competition, conflict and war, where everyone is trying to overpower everyone else. Your brother attacks you by rejecting you. He transmits his illusions about himself and tries to accuse you of sins. He puts up walls against you. He hates and attacks you. And he tries to prevent you from loving him. You do the same and you "meet in the middle", but neither of you moves any closer than a standoff.

Most of the time, the ego in ourselves reacts to the ego in others by regarding them as enemies. If we fall for their illusions, if we believe their attack, if we hold it against them, if we regard it as who they are, the extension of our own mind stops at the obstacles we’re seeing. We fail to overlook these obstacles. In other words, we are being unforgiving. If when he portrays hilmsef as an enemy, attacks you in any way, or convinces you of your or his sinfulness, you fail to love him unconditionally, you too have an ego problem.

The challenge, and this seems difficult at first, is to "love past" their hate. And this means, learning to love absolutely everyone no matter who they are, how they act, what they look like, how evil they seem to be, or what they’ve tried to do to you. Even the really bad extreme cases. Yes EVERYONE. That is unconditional love. Always loving no matter what. That is the atonement, and atonement is forgiveness. Forgiveness overlooks errors and looks past illusions to the truth.

So what I’m finding is, per the Golden Rule, if I actually "have my brother’s back" or "look out for" them, for their HIGHEST SELF, for the truth about them, acknowledging that in truth they are a lovable, holy, innocent equal, sinless and guiltless, who deserve the utmost love, this will put us in a position of being above the battlefield. It means you are transcending all illusions, overlooking their unloving attitude, and upholding the truth about them FOR them. Which means advocating for the true nature of all your enemies. Turning every enemy into a beloved brother, regardless of what they believe or how they behave.

YOU ARE YOUR BROTHER’S KEEPER.

This is the same way that the holy spirit holds a vision of your perfection FOR you until you can recognize it yourself. It means looking way past your brother’s "protest", standing up for his true self on his behalf, extending your mind past his illusions, seeing him as truly an equal who has temporarily lost sight of himself, and taking nothing personally. Because all of his attack, is against himself only, when seen correctly.

It feels unusual at first. There’s your brother being an asshole. Or seeming to. Before you would’ve taken it personally, reacted, held it against him, made it real, and seen nothing else. But the challenge now is to shine your love so strongly that it dispels and moves past all that bullshit to the REAL brother. To the brother who is in pain, who is calling our for love, and who is attacking himself. Loving past the enemy, not becoming what he tries to make of you, and rising far above his delusions.

That means you no longer get to USE him as a scapegoat for your own self attacks.

This means loving the people who attack you, even if they continue to try to do so. Not loving the "attacker self", but loving the person who is behind the projection of pain. Moving past their obstacles to peace. Supporting, defending, standing up for, wanting to heal, loving, caring about, recognizing and remembering, the TRUE nature of that person’s divine innocence. FOR THEM. Because they have temporarily forgotten who they are and have lost their minds. Your remembering is his. Remember the truth about him for him, and help him to remember himself.

"But YOUR remembering is HIS, for God cannot be remembered alone. THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN. To perceive the healing of your brother as the healing of yourself, is thus the way to remember God."

It's "pride month" which is a sort of pro-queer celebration and revenge-quest rolled into one. People should be happy to be who they really are, without the need for any validation from anyone. It's not necessary to have other people treat us in a certain way or agree with us or even respect us. Insecure people depend on others for making themselves okay. Immortal beings laugh in the face of all judgements and opinions. The world doesn't do anything to us and other people do not define who or what we are.

Often I hear things along the lines of - the straight heteronormative people have told us this, done that to us, treated us this way, and so now we're going to be extremely "loud and proud" as a kind of counter-protest. That isn't really pride, it's an ego thing pretending to be pride. If people were really proud of who they are they wouldn't feel a need to go to war over it because they'd know that no-one and nothing can take it away from them. The pride must be pretty fragile and NOT pride if it depends on other people to reinforce it.

So as usual like most things in the world there's a whole lot of special-relationship bullshit and ego dynamics around this. Many of the pride posts I've seen are nothing short of seeking revenge against perceived persecutors. People trying to insist on their 'right to exist' as a special kind of person. People 'fighting' for something. Nothing natural has to be fought for, it's given by God with no strings attached.

If we get into any kind of need to have other people change to see us, accept us, recognize us, validate us, respect us, treat us well, stop abusing us, etc... anything at all, we're saying that we do not want to be fully ourselves, do not not accept ourselves, and are shifting responsibility for that onto someone else. We don't want that, it's not an improvement. We should all be happy and proud of who and what we are on the basis that we are perfect in God and have no need to get love and appreciation from anything outside of us.

I know there has been a lot of history and conflict surrounding this, and yes still a lot of people are horrendous and murderous in their attitudes about queer people. But ultimately we have to be responsible for our own choice of whether to be happy or not. If we give anyone the power to determine that for us then we give power away and are asking to be victimized. And then going on a sassy middle-finger quest to try to pretend not to care, isn't exactly a solid foundation.

We should not be wanting or needing other people to 'treat us well' in order for us to be happy and who we really are. This is the problem with the world, everyone's expecting everyone else to "do to them" what they want, to "make them happy", to "cause them" to be this way or that way, which is "positive victimhood". It's a way of giving away power and hoping that the world will treat you nice. If you need the world to treat you a certain way your entire mental health is pretty fragile.

You are an immortal being, you do not NEED anyone to treat you nice. You are invulnerable, you do not NEED people to validate you or be respectful toward you. Let them be as vicious as they want, it's not supposed to affect you in any way if you are owning who you are. There is no strength in surrounding yourself with only the people that treat you well. You are not 'treated' well or not well. You are the one who chooses everything you experience.

"Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes."

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are."

As you become more aware that you are doing everything to yourself, and you gradually learn to take responsibility for everything you are experiencing, at some point you'll start noticing more and more that you keep attacking yourself.

Whereas before you noticed perhaps when you were attacking other people, and were thinking that this had no effect on you, and somewhat learned to forgive them and see their innocence, now the focus shifts a bit more directly to yourself.

"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability" takes on a more obvious meaning. You literally keep attacking your own self.

The way these attacks happen is through moments of fear and guilt.

I'll be in the middle of some form of questioning, or self doubt, or worrying about something, and Jesus will poke me... ."Paul".... and then I know that means, I'm making some mistake here. So then I stop and just look at what I'm doing.... and usually it'll be sort of obvious that I'm either in fear, or I'm in guilt. Those are the two main ones.

Often though it's not so obvious what mistake I'm making. Sometimes I have to open up and try to figure it out, especially if I'm far into it. It can be quite confusing and obscure. Fear is not always obvious in its many many forms.

In general, I undermine myself all the time. So what I've become aware of is that, just as the Course says, I keep doing stuff to myself. I keep having attack thoughts and mistaken perceptions which *directly* work against myself.

So its kind of weird when you realize this, that you actually are at war with yourself. You keep on believing, thinking, perceiving, feeling and doing stuff that undermines you, thwarts you, detracts from your confidence, makes you feel unworthy, doesn't give yourself credit, diminishes your value and all kinds of other stuff.

So now it's sort of a cleanup job. You have to realize all the ways that you keep being AGAINST YOURSELF. At the very least, you have to realize you are against yourself, at all.

This being against yourself was completely covered up in a state of denial, when you were more involved with projecting onto others. And that projection really strongly distracted you from *recognizing* that you were attacking yourself. It convinced you that it was always other people who you needed to attack, who were receiving the effects of your attacks, and who this was all about. Once enough of that projecting is undone and you learn to do it less, it suddenly becomes apparent that it's actually not them that you've been attacking, its YOU.

So now you have to deal with yourself. But this is kind of interesting now, because it means that you now know you're really dealing with YOURSELF, not other enemies. You are your ONLY enemy. And there is a lot of hope in that, because it means that you are more aware that you have an opportunity. Since your enemy is yourself, you recognize that if you simply stop attacking yourself, and learn to recognize the ways that you do attack yourself, then there is basically NOTHING STOPPING YOU from becoming a far more capable, empowered, aware, happy person. There is nobody else and nothing else to influence you to stop you once you're on this fast-track to your true self.

So now the challenge for me and you, is recognizing more often and more clearly, when we are attacking ourselves, and learning what that attack comprises - is it fear, is it guilt, is it unlove - and CHOOSING AGAIN and learning not to do that to ourselves. As we do this we will grow in confidence and certainty and love and happiness, on our way home to God.

Identity is completely tied to how much awareness you have.

Everyone believes that "all of their self" is defined by what they are aware of.

When you look within, whatever you are aware of as being within yourself, you will regard that as all of you. If you do not see yourself causing or choosing things to happen, you will believe you did not do it.

It doesn't matter how much awareness you have, either.

You could have a tiny amount of awareness, a very limited sense of consciousness, and would still regard whatever you are aware of as all of yourself.

But what happens when you take away some blocks to awareness and you become aware of some part of you that you didn't even know was there.

Your sense of self expands.

Who and what you are, is tied to, what you are aware of.

As blocks to awareness are removed, your identity changes. Your sense of who and what you are transitions from an isolated, limited, small little being, to a grand, expansive, unlimited and immortal being of light.

It's kind of like russian dolls. If you were inside the smallest russian doll in the middle of the stack, you would not be aware of much. As each layer is removed from the inside out, your sense of "what is there" or what is present, increases. Eventually all limitations are removed.

Your self does not actually expand, as such. Rather, you are already unlimited and infinite and omnipresent, because you are Created by God to be so.

Rather, you have placed severe limiting devices on your awareness and it has seemed to "narrow down" your sense of what you encompass. This is the idea of "littleness". You have tried to make yourself very small and limited. And you did this by adding blocks to awareness, so that you would not be aware of all that there is to you.

So as you lift away these artificial blocks, you find yourself (literally). You find more of yourself. More of what there is to you. More power, more choice, more freedom, more will, more responsibility, more causality, more love. Your identity increases. "You" seem to expand because your notion of self is having its limits removed.

As limitations are removed, you may even experience this as though your identity is being threatened and that you are dying.

You may have experienced this for example when you make a big life change and move to live in a new location or city. When many things change, aspects of you which had formed your identity, based on limitations, are shaken up in a big way. You can start to feel overwhelmed by all the new stimuli, behaviors and habits and patterns which are no longer supported start to break down, and you can start to experience a quite strong sense that you are falling apart and "dying".

This is really that the old sense of who you were, your limited self, is being broken down and the limitations themselves are being recognized for what they are. Rather than thought of as defining you, you're learning from a larger perspective that these things are not really a part of your identity. And so they seem to have to be let go, which the ego - who wants to cling to these as "identity", experiences as loss or death. I have experienced this a few times when we moved to a new city and I did not know why I felt like everything was falling apart.

Nevertheless, this gives way to an actual increase in identity, a removal of limitations, a freeing-up of borders and boundaries, and a sense of rising up to a higher level. You are becoming more of yourself and are opening up to awareness of discovering things about yourself that you did not even know were there. Choices and powers that you have that were hidden. Things you have the freedom and power to cause which you forgot you even had.

Eventually when you remove all blocks to awareness your unlimited underlying identity will be revealed. There is really no limit to who and what you are, buried beneath these blocks. So when you finally realize that you literally are unlimited, your identity now shifts away from littleness to the most magnificent expansive beingness. Your true identity as God's Son.

It may sound simple enough to say "you but accuse your brother of your own sins." But if you think on this deeply, you'll realize how strange this is. It holds up even when you are angry at someone, and even when it seems like they are doing something wrong all on their own.

Jesus is basically saying you NEVER accuse your brother of THEIR sins. You actually ONLY EVER accuse your brother of YOUR SINS. When you think about that it's quite strange.

1) You believe YOU have sinned.

2) You try to pin YOUR sin onto someone else.

3) You project YOUR actual sense of sin and guilt ONTO someone else, to try to attach it to them and blame THEM for it.

How deceiving is that? What a disguise! What a way to frame someone for something they didn't do. What is this but finding a scapegoat? Blaming someone who is completely innocent and completely unrelated to your sin, for something YOU think you did.

Jesus goes even further to say that, not only do you only ever accuse others of YOUR shit, you actually are not even capable of seeing THEIR sins, yet alone holding THEIR sins against them. So it can't be possible that you SEE objectively "they are sinning and I am not", to enable you to be able to point a neutral finger and say "you are sinning, and I am not."

If you regard them as sinful or guilty, you are NOT seeing their sin or guilt. You are actually seeing the projection of YOUR OWN. Your own pain is hurled out of your mind onto them, your anger attempts to MAKE them be guilty, and you now see them as the CAUSE of YOUR suffering.

This happens because as you project sin and guilt, your perception inverts and becomes completely backwards. Cause and effect are reversed. You see causation or sin as outside of you coming into you, rather than inside you extending outward.

If your brother is guilty of WHAT YOU DID, then they are now the one who is sinful and "doing it", thus doing it TO YOU. You now see yourself as threatened and attacked BY THEIR sinfulness, but it is in fact YOUR OWN sinfulness coming back at you. You may fear their wrath but really you only fear YOUR OWN.

It's such a bizarre thing to do. It's like someone accuses you of being guilty, you feel bad about it, then because you don't want to heal it in yourself or admit it is yours, you find some random target outside of you, some innocent party, and suddenly hurl all of your guilt onto them, try to FRAME them as being sinners, ACCUSING them of all kinds of stuff, to try to SHIFT THE BLAME, so that you can dissociate from your guilt and associate them with it. So they can take the fall FOR you. And if you can be convincing enough, you may even convince yourself and others that YOU are the innocent one, throwing everyone off the scent.

That's what we're doing every single time we are angry at someone, trying to make them guilty, accusing them, seeing them as doing something to us. In fact, when there is any judgemental sense at all of them "doing something wrong" or not being good enough or failing or sinning or attacking, it MUST MEAN that we ourselves are projecting OUR OWN inner misery, pain, unhealed wounds, onto them.

Jesus is clearly saying that you are actually INCAPABLE of judging another's innocence or guilt. You can ONLY see that either you believe BOTH of you are guilty, or BOTH of you are innocent. Because if you have guilt in your own mind, you can ONLY see guilt. And being unable to see innocence at all, you have no way to discern whether they are separately innocent. And if there is innocence in you, you CANNOT see their guilt, because your own innocence blinds you to guilt. So again you cannot discern separately whether they are innocent or guilty.

If you accuse yourself of sin or guilt, you ARE accusing BOTH yourself AND others. And the truth is that NEITHER of you are guilty or sinful. This is why it's not enough to simply take back projections and reclaim ownership responsibility for the sinful junk in your mind. You have to actually UNDO it, FOR BOTH of you, through forgiving yourself. Because you and your brother are one, and either you condemn you both to hell or lift you both to heaven.

Next time you are in the middle of heated anger or blame or judgement to any degree, even if it seems the other person is definitely doing something wrong, even if it seems they are the whole CAUSE of the problem, and MAKING you suffer, even if it seems you have done nothing to ask for this, and especially then because you are in denial, YOU ARE in the middle of hurling YOUR GUILT onto them.

It will seem like it is NOT your guilt at all, and entirely theirs. And you will make them responsible for CHANGING in order that YOUR upset be resolved, so that they stop seeming to CAUSE YOU to be at the effect of them. And you will seek for THEM to stop their sinful behavior so that YOU can be happy, believing THEY have the POWER OVER YOU to cause you to suffer. How dare they be so guilty! How dare they infect you with THEIR sin! But it's all YOURS!

You take your hidden hates and secret sins and sense of guilt and unworthiness and self-hate and miserableness and hurt and pain and unhealed disgust, and you try to PIN IT ON innocent passers by who have nothing to do with it. And now they look like an enemy, and you hate YOUR sin IN them, you attack them for YOUR sin, and you try to destroy YOUR sin IN them. But ideas leave not their source, and it is still your mind attacking ITSELF. Your mind is still containing the shit you are accusing them of.

How strange that you would first of all hurt yourself, then displace the hurt onto someone else who has nothing to do with it. That you would then attack the hurt that is in them, trying to destroy it and the owner of the hurt along with it, to get rid of it. All the while still secretly believing it is YOU who is hurt, and YOU who you are attacking FOR it. Because if you attack your brother for YOUR guilt, that really means you are trying to destroy YOURSELF for being guilty.

This is why the secret of salvation is ALWAYS true. No matter who seems to be the victim or victimizer, or who seems to be doing what to whom, it is always YOU DOING IT TO YOU, even when it seems like someone else is doing it to you. Barking at someone for doing something wrong is your way of hating the sin in you in an externalized way, so that you pretend that you're not targeting yourself. Attack is always made upon a stranger, and that stranger is you.

"Learn this, and learn it well, for it is here delay of happiness is shortened by a span of time you cannot realize. You NEVER hate your brother for HIS "sins", but ONLY for your own. Whatever form his sins appear to take, the form obscures the fact that you believe it to be yours, and THEREFORE meriting a just attack."

"As prayer is always for yourself, so is forgiveness given you. It is impossible to forgive another, for it is only your sins you see in him. You want to see them there, and not in you."

"Only in someone else can you forgive yourself, for you have called him guilty of your sins, and in him must your innocence be found. Who but the sinful need to be forgiven? And do not ever think you can see sin in anyone except yourself."

"Let it never be forgotten that prayer at any level is always for yourself. If you unite with anyone in prayer, you make him part of you. The enemy is you, as is the Christ. Before it can become holy, then, prayer becomes a choice. You do not choose for another. You can but choose for yourself. Pray truly for your enemies, then, for herein lies your own salvation. Forgive them for your sins, and you will be forgiven indeed."

"If he be lost in sin so must you be; if you see light in him your sins have been forgiven by yourself."

"How can he live, with all your sins upon him?"

"BEYOND his errors is his holiness, and YOUR salvation. You gave him not his holiness, but tried to see your sins in him, to save yourself. And yet his holiness IS your forgiveness. Can YOU be saved by making sinful the one whose holiness IS your salvation?"

"And you are each the symbol of your sins to one another, silently, and yet with ceaseless urgency condemning still your brother for the hated thing you are."

"For I became the symbol of your sin, and so I had to die INSTEAD of you."

"When you feel that you are tempted to accuse someone of sin in any form, do not allow your mind to dwell on what you think he did, for this is self-deception. Ask instead, "Should I accuse myself of doing this?"

"Who would send messages of hatred and attack, if he but understood he sends them to HIMSELF? Who would accuse, make guilty and condemn HIMSELF?The ego's messages are ALWAYS sent AWAY from you, in the belief that, for your message of attack and guilt, will someone OTHER than yourself suffer. And, even if YOU suffer, yet someone ELSE will suffer more."

"What you project you disown, and therefore DO NOT BELIEVE IS YOURS. You are therefore EXCLUDING yourself from it, by the very statement you are making that you are DIFFERENT from someone else. Since you have also judged AGAINST what you project, you attack it because you have already attacked it BY rejecting it. By doing this UNCONSCIOUSLY, you try to keep the fact that you must have attacked yourself FIRST out of awareness, and thus imagine that you have made yourself safe."

"It can be but myself I crucify." All that I do I do unto myself. If I attack, I suffer. But if I forgive, salvation will be given me."

"You will not attack yourself, and you will realize that to attack another is but to attack yourself. You will be free of the insane belief that to attack a brother saves yourself."

"The dreary, hopeless thought that you can make attacks on others and escape yourself has nailed you to the cross."

"Such is the form of madness you believe, if you accept the fearful thought you can attack another and be free yourself."

"Each of your perceptions of "external reality" is a pictorial representation of your own attack thoughts."

"In every condemnation that you offer the Son of God, lies the conviction of your OWN guilt."

"You cannot see his sins and not your own."

A couple of days ago, I rubbed my eyes a bit too much and triggered some swelling. Maybe a small blood vessel was broken or something. My upper eyelid swelled up and was red and sore and uncomfortable all day.

I at first wasn't sure whether to try to perform some kind of miracle on it or not. I knew that if I were to "fight it" I would be making it real and making a drama about it, which wouldn't help. At first that made me feel like I had to just accept it and live with it.

But part of me also wondered, what is it that stops me from accepting a complete and total healing instantaneously right now? Why should I tolerate this? How can I accept it and have it disappear as well?

So then I went to Holy Spirit. I asked, should I do something about this?

He said no.

But I had this sense that, I hadn't asked the right question. I indeed needed to DO nothing in the truest sense that, really, this thing had not really happened. But this also keyed me in to realize that, I needed to believe that it had not happened in order to truly embody the need to do nothing.

So I set about cancelling it by collapsing every belief and sense of truth about what had caused it. I told myself plainly that it did not exist, was not there, was already healed, there was no swelling, no soreness, no discomfort, no damage.

I undid all belief in the various causes that I'd convinced myself of such as "because I rubbed it" or "too many tears" or "didn't want to see something" or that issues about certain people were responsible.

When there were no more imagined "reasons why" it should be there, I really got into the sense that it is gone already and did not exist at all. This is an important point because we need to assert the state that we choose to manifest right now, not something off in the future. It's like painting a new picture of what you believe is real now - a vision of divine health and present happiness - rather than in any way accepting that sickness still exists.

So as part of that, I started to affirm gratitude to God that He had already healed this, that it was already resolved, already undone, had already disappeared, and that there was now a completely restored and healed eyelid free from all problems.

This was when I think Holy Spirit stepped in and suddenly I started with the energetic shaking. But also something 'new' happened, right after I thanked God for having healed it already.

Thanking God for healing in effect invites the receiving of healing while simultaneously affirming that the problem is gone, which is the proper mental "direction" for allowing God to extend and flow. God works in the now and in the awareness that the problem is solved already, so we need to learn to shine "thank you that it is healed already" (acknowledgement of receipt) rather than "please heal it because it's not healed".

Note that in the bible there is a phrase about asking, and that if you believe you have received it, you shall have it. The believing it is received, through thanks to God, and therefore acknowledgement of its PRESENCE, is the key to miracles flowing.

The area in question suddenly was filled with what I can only describe as an extremely high "heat", so hot and intense that I wondered for a moment if something had burst or become worse. It was very intensely focused right in the middle spot where this issue was located. It seemed to cover an area no more than a couple of millimeters, and held there in one spot.

I just observed it for what seemed like maybe 20 seconds or more. It didn't move or change. It was just there. It seemed hotter than any physical heat you could experience. Yet it didn't burn and was not uncomfortable at all. It was not pain. It almost felt like an intense presence, hard to ignore. Like some kind of "liquid fire".

I've heard some Christian healers etc talking about Holy Fire and this idea that Holy Spirit can bring some kind of intense healing "fire" from heaven or something, which heals stuff. I am presuming this was my first encounter with it.

I then relaxed and eventually went to sleep. I could already tell even then, that it was much less sore, I couldn't barely feel it anymore, and it was much more comfortable. This morning the problem has almost disappeared. It looks and feels a lot better.

Sometimes I am grateful for little, relatively minor physical issues, because they can present good opportunities for practicing miracle-working and healing. They indeed are lessons when used appropriately.

Miracles and supernatural interventions occur more readily when there is physical relaxation and a willingness to surrender and receive.

The act of not 'acting', of not transmitting, of not even giving, but simply a willingness to let go and be open and RECEIVE, invites and allows Holy Spirit to access and help you.

I have now over the past few months received healing from the Holy Spirit on an almost daily basis. And I don't just mean he fixes some perceptual issues. I'm talking, supernatural power! Sometimes it will occur spontaneously even if I am in public, or anywhere that I need it, but Holy Spirit can be discreet and is able to tone-down the visual signs of this happening (which usually entails much shaking of body parts), lol.

Most readily I am open to this happening when laying in bed either towards sleeping or in the morning. Typically Holy Spirit begins by simply saying either "relax" or "surrender". This could be in the middle of some rant or some other conversation and is often unexpected and I don't always clue-in at first that this means He is going to do something, but then it begins.

Even if I am laying there relaxing, sometimes He knows that I am not necessarily letting go of a situation in order to let Him help, and so he will say "surrender". This signals me that I need to actively surrender.

To do this, I will repeat in words, "I surrender", several times. At first I seem to say this slowly and with gaps between, because I am not yet very willing to let go. But I notice that the healing really starts to flow when I say it quickly and in quick succession, so that there is no time in-between for my ego to get in there and keep holding on. "I surrender, I surrender, I surrender." After saying this several times, Holy Spirit will likely spontaneously activate and begin healing.

By surrendering, what I mean is, having a willingness to let go and give up and stop fighting. It's actually a 'feeling' I get of like, how you'd feel if you'd tried everything and failed and just threw up your arms and admitted defeat. It's an openness, a giving in, and an admitting. Admitting the truth literally means "allowing the truth to come in". This is why surrender is apparently a VITAL part of the miracle process, because it means you're willing to put aside doing this yourself, and admit that you cannot, and stop trying to be God.

Then God comes.

Sometimes I've heard Holy Spirit say, "come", and I'm not sure if this means for me to come to Him, but I've also had Him basically put words in my mouth as to what He wants me to say to Him to get things flowing, which is cool. So I will say, "come Holy Spirit", "come into me". This is an invitation. Also sometimes I will ask Him to join with me or to help me to join with Him.

In my willingness to surrender, there is much activity which I'll describe in a moment. But I've also found that in addition to surrendering and allowing Him to operate on me, if I am also actively doing some kind of forgiveness during this time, like, really getting down to the truth that stuff isn't real and it hasn't happened and I'm not a victim and so on, this will also activate additional 'phases' of healing. So just when I think it's kind of done, there'll be another whole wave of it.

What almost always happens, I'm finding, is there are about 4 or so different expressions of Holy Spirit healing me. The first one is that my head literally starts to shake from side to side "violently", i.e. very very rapidly, like a vibration, and the speed of this can be so fast that it's like just a really intense vibrating, and I have to trust that this is safe (lol), which it is. This seems to dislodge... I don't know what, from my head area. This can last anywhere from a few seconds to up to 20 seconds or more. Then there will often be a short pause, and then it kicks into phase 2.

In phase 2, all of a sudden whatever energy or whatever was drained from my head area flows down into the belly area. I suddenly start to experience muscle contractions in that area, which can be quite intense. The muscles become so contracting that it forces me to hunch over or partly sit up, and in the really strong cases there is such vibrational tension in the 'floor' of the abdominal area, that it feels like an earthquake vibrating very deeply. This will go on for possibly 15-30 seconds depending. As the energy or whatever clears, and He gets done, I relax back down, and I immediately notice that ... just something has changed in my experience.

Often I immediately notice that I feel expanded, calm, peaceful and relaxed, and soft. It feels really good. It's as though something happened on the inside of me and my whole awareness is different. Sometimes after several rounds of this, per my willingness to invite more and do more healing, I have felt really really peaceful. It also energizes me somewhat but can also make me a little ungrounded for a while.

A third way it manifests is that sometimes the energy or whatever goes out through my arms which will shake, sometimes quite aggressively. Sometimes this is followed by a series of belly contractions as well. A fourth way, which actually I think was the first way that I started to experience this, was that gradually some kind of presence would begin to fill me up from my feet upwards, causing the muscles to all become tensed all the way up my legs to my stomache, and then there would be much shaking and 'draining' where emotions and other energy from the upper torso would just seem to drain out of me quickly.

I have absolutely no idea really what Holy Spirit is doing. No idea. I don't know why His presence causes the body to shake. I have no clue why His healing focuses around the head and later around the belly, other than that these are the two main area of nervous systems and the "two brains".

Similarly, if I ask Jesus to come into my belly area when I am having intense feelings, He will do almost the same thing, resulting in a complete undoing of that feeling, its cause, and a state of happiness and laughter at the end.

Also I forgot there is also another way that this manifests, and it's to do with if I am focussing my attention on another person. If I am doing a forgiveness about someone and I am asking Holy Spirit to heal some part of them, I will start to experiencing shaking and vibrations in that area of MY body, sometimes quite intensely, and sometimes it's so unusual in its focus on that body part that there is just no way I could even conceive of making that body part move that way. Like it could be a healing in the lower back or something and it's shaking all over the place but if I were to think, how could I make the back muscles shake in just that one area like that, it's just totally impossible.

I have been learning to trust that when I do this for some other person, it is helping them, but this is an area of doubt for me, which I am still working on. I have, however, noticed that after some rounds of healing for someone else in this way, they do appear to exhibit signs of SOMETHING having changed in their experience, afterwards, through at least some kind of shift in mood or renewed clarity of awareness or even some physical side effects. This is especially an area that challenges me to trust because I am not the recipient of the benefits and I cannot tell from my own sensations whether it is helping or not.

This has all has come about through SURRENDER. Also through trust. Just opening up to Holy Spirit and inviting Him to come into me and to do whatever he wants to do... that alone is a big trust step at first, because you don't know what might happen. I did that numerous times with 'milder' healings taking place before it ever progressed to the intense shaking. Another way to approach this if you prefer, is to just address God, "God, I receive your healing love".... do that a few times and tell me you don't feel some sense of love come around and into you. This also can be sufficient to signal to Holy Spirit to allow healing love to flow into you, as much as you are willing to receive it. Receiving love from God takes seemingly a bit more willingness than letting Holy Spirit run riot, maybe it's a trust thing.

These are all acts of RECEIVING, and they entail that I relax. If in the middle of the healing I start to tighten up and resist, He reminds me to relax, because it does seem to interfere to some degree, whereby the shaking etc may stop or lessen if I start fighting it. I have had to learn to TRUST it and not be afraid of it and to just let Him do whatever. It is often quite funny when my head is shaking all over the place and my cheeks and mouth are flapping around and I'm actually relaxed, it's sort of fun!

I look forward in particular now to doing a pretty strong session of this for myself on the weekends, either toward sleep or upon waking, but really Holy Spirit I'm finding out doesn't care about schedules and sometimes will start doing the shakes even before I really seem to be ready. It's gotten to where even a slight 'hint' to Him to do it can kick it in, at any time. I believe the same is true of miracle performed for others - which is where this is leading, whereby we are to just spontaneously funnel the power of God without even thinking about it.

I was watching some videos today of a pastor who performs many many many miracles and has risen the dead etc, and one of his teachings is that you need to get the RECIPIENT of healing to surrender and relax a lot, in order to RECEIVE the full transformation and healing. This seems to be key. If the person is interfering and trying to pray and do stuff at the same time, that's actually a block. Receiving and transmitting are two different functions, and the person receiving the healing needs to be ideally in a RECEIVING mindset.

So relax! Surrender a lot. Be willing. Have courage and trust and invite Holy Spirit to come into you. He is willing and ready, He's just waiting on YOU to be RECEPTIVE. This is how you can receive your own healing miracles effortlessly. I think this is actually EASIER than sharing miracles with other people, which is a whole different dynamic. But I think,... Holy Spirit may be about to reveal a new way of looking at that, based on surrender.

Let us know how you get on! Happy shaking. And remember, "He will correct the consequences of my wrong decisions if I will let Him, and I choose to LET HIM"!!

Ok so.... weird as this will sound... when Holy Spirit does healing with me, it usually entails significant shaking of the body and also movement of body parts. Usually it entails the movement of my head into some kind of seemingly random sequence of positions.

There will be involuntary movements of the arms and legs, tensing of various muscles, vibrations, sometimes quite rapid and intense alternations from side to side, etc.

This morning after He'd done some healing for a while, which involved the movement of my head, I asked Holy Spirit if he could deliberately move my head. After a couple seconds, vibrations/shaking began and my head moved to the right.

I said ok, now move it all the way to the left. After a few seconds, the vibrations/shaking started and my head moved all the way to the left.

Then I said ok, move it to the middle. After a few seconds, the vibrations/shaking started and my head centered. I then asked and received Him moving it again to the left.

Then I thought ok, to finish off, let's move it all the way to the right. This one took several seconds before it began perhaps because I thought that, for me, this would really prove that He was moving my body. And the the vibrations/shaking started, and He moved my head all the way to the right.

Ok... so... pretty interesting. Even though I'd been used to Him moving my body around as part of healing, I hadn't really thought before to ask if He can cause it to move on purpose outside of the healing mode.

So I took it further.

I said to Him ok, can you raise my arm? After a few moments, vibrations/shaking began in my arm, muscles began to tense, and my arm raised up off the bed to over my head.

I said ok, and put it back down again. So he did.

And then I said ok, can you make it point? After a few moments vibrations/shaking again began and muscles tensed and in a somewhat shaky way, he moved it into an outreached "finger pointing" posture.

I thought ok. This is interesting. Let's do one more thing. So I asked Him to raise my leg. A few moments later, the same vibrations/shaking started in my right foot and travelled up my leg, and then my leg began to raise off the bed. It then returned to the bed.

I know this may sound very weird, because it's supernatural. And it may seem unexplained or frightening to some people. But this is happening because I have trust. And I know it is the Holy Spirit.

These things don't happen in a kind of forceful or overpowering way. They happen because the Holy Spirit has a mind and respects free will and because we hold conversations and have developed trust. And therefore I can ask Him to do things and He will do it. And I can ask Him to stop and He will stop. And I can ask Him to resume and He will resume. We work together. It is a live, conscious, dynamic relationship.

I am endeavoring to take my trust in Holy Spirit and Christ to new levels. I know there is more. I explore and discover and try new things. I experiment. This is the kind of openness you need in order to develop this. You have to be willing and interested in exploring what is possible, without fear.

Somewhere in the urtext Jesus says that some things are on a need-to-know basis and they seem to be kept hidden because you don't need to know. And when you develop a need or desire to know, they become revealed to you. Because you are ready for them.

When you see the manifestations or effects of the Holy Spirit, when you experience Him operating on your physical body, or that or another, you come to trust and recognize that He must exist. That he must be there. Because what is happening is beyond your doing.

And so as you see yourself moved by an unseen spirit force and interact with Him and talk to Him and experience direct real-time cooperative interactions, then you develop the knowing that He is there and He is real and He is powerful and He is working with you. And only by doing this do you come to be aware that He is really there.

"You cannot see the Holy Spirit, ***but you can see His manifestations. And unless you do, you will not realize He is there.*** Miracles are His witnesses, and speak for his Presence. What you cannot see becomes real to you only through the witnesses who speak for it. For you can be AWARE of what you cannot see, and it can become compellingly real to you, ***as its presence becomes manifest THROUGH you.*** Do His work, for you SHARE in His function. As your function in Heaven is creation, so your function on earth is healing. God shares His function with you in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit shares His with you on earth."

Sometimes I find it difficult to relate when people suggest that you "just" do this or that, in order to be awakened or spiritual.

Even if it's coming from a masterful person and even if it makes total sense and even if its deeply simple and pure and lovely, I can't relate to it or use it.

Expressions coming from a certain 'level 'of consciousness can only really be related to by people who are also AT that level of consciousness. Those broadcasts are NOT helpful for people at a lower level, except as perhaps an inspiration. There's a big difference between an expression of "this is what it is like here" versus "this is how you come up to this level".

The reason is because the 'level' that I'm currently at, I need ways to remove the blocks to awareness in order to become aware of a truth/love/experience that "already is".

I don't need to work on learning how to 'do' what is already done. I don't need to practice 'being'. I don't need to TRY to be still or quiet or meditative or whatever.

The Course tells us that we need to focus on simply removing the blocks to love. This is akin to severing the anchors which keep us attached to the bottom of the ocean, dragging us down. Once let go, we naturally float back to the surface.

This to me can be a problem with teachings coming from a higher level. They can be impractical and not really helpful. They sound fantastic. They're beautiful. And they're truthful expressions from a greater perspective. But they're not always relatable for people who are stuck down in the quagmire of illusions and delusions.

We don't need to construct reality, or make things heavenly, or spend heaps of time trying to produce some kind of skill or ability to be what we naturally already are underneath our disguises. We just need to learn to take our disguises off. And that process is a practical one in the application of forgiveness or other methods to undo delusions.

I could say, well, just be still, be at peace, stop thinking. But that's not going to last. You're not going to be able to do it. And then it will just be annoying and you'll feel like you're inferior for not being able to just flip spirituality on like a switch.

This can be why the spiritual quotathon can produce not only a sense of confusion and impossible expectation, but also attempts to give to students things they are not ready for and which don't really help them to get out of their confusion. If things are too abstract, the only way you can really relate to that abstraction is to be experiencing it. There needs to be more of a middle ground.

This is why often you get teachers who are perhaps awakened on like "level 3" or whatever but they don't have a practical "level 2" teaching platform that helps people to go from where they are actually at to their next steps. To move them forward. And then the things they say which are so beautiful and lofty sort of make them into a mysterious yet inaccessible idol that becomes worshipped and followed in a state of confusion and misunderstanding.

If I go visit God and I come back and I say, well, hey, all you have to do is be with God. Easy right? Can you do it? Then you'll try to do it and you'll fail, then get frustrated and disappointed and believe separation is real and you'll beat yourself up and compare yourself and judge yourself as insufficient, unworthy or inferior, which is the perfect foundation for turning me into a spiritual idol that you worship. You don't need that.

You need guidance that you can relate to that works for you at the level you're at, in the language you currently are speaking, that nudges you forward just a little bit past your current reality, and leads you on to the next steps. That's how you gradually wake up. Not by hitting yourself over the head with a giant space mallet trying to digest things which your mind really cannot comprehend yet.

Trying to get ahead of yourself doesn't work. The ego likes to suggest you should do that, but then you end up just emphasizing how "far behind" you are from the special chosen ones. Not that the masters are in any way wrong or bad or whatever, just that if truly they're a helpful teacher they need to be recognizing where YOU are at and what YOU can currently understand and speak your language, not just sit on a throne and radiate abstract experiences as though this is "all you need to do". Yes its true, yes they're correct, but.... that advice is next to useless when your mind is fucked.

Gotta walk before you can run. Gotta learn to flap wings before you can fly. Gotta take steps to get to the temple before you can go in. You need help walking, not jumping off cliffs.

Holy Spirit is an expert teacher in this regard, He recognizes our illusions (as illusions) and doesn't believe them, but knows that we do, and is able to not only speak our language but support us at whatever level we're at with whatever guidance we're willing to accept and are ready for. One step at a time. Non-threatening, non-pressuring, just loving gentle awakening.

Your relationships can turn from hate to holiness, if you will recognize that you have a common enemy.

Your relationship is not just you and the other person.

Your relationship is you, the other person, and the ego.

The two of you may seem to be in conflict, and you believe that there is no one else involved in this conflict. Just the two of you.

But there is always another third party involved in every conflict. The ego.

The ego is like this vicious little monster, sort of like how Christianity refers to the devil, which sits on the sidelines and attempts to COME BETWEEN people.

Its intentions are malicious and it tries to pit people against each other, to instigate fights and wars, and to get people to see each other as separate and different.

Since the ego is more or less invisible, people do not notice that it is part of the relationship. And since they do not realize that THEY have sided with the ego, they do not notice it standing out in contrast to who they are.

If you are in the middle of a fight, argument, conflict, war, tension, drama, toxic relationship etc, the two of you are being PLAYED by the ego.

It is helpful for you to both recognize and learn that you're not really upset with each other. You're upset because THE EGO is trying to make you against each other. IT is influencing you both. IT wants for you to attack each other and find each other guilty. IT wants you to be at war.

So now, in this 3-way relationship, recognize that there is an opportunity. The opportunity is for you and your enemy to decide to TEAM UP, against the ego.

It is only because of your mutual lack of RECOGNITION that the ego is involved at all, that you allow its influence to continue destroying your relationship.

Once you recognize the ego is a third party, now there comes a scenario where you have a new option. You can team up with your supposed enemy - the other person - by recognizing that you BOTH have a common, mutual enemy.

The ego is your common enemy, because it is attacking BOTH of you at the same time, it is pitting you both against each other, it is trying to SEPARATE you more, and is emphasizing all the ways that you are different from each other.

Its strategy is to split you apart and produce hatred. Really, to instigate murder. It wants you both dead, and does not CARE one iota who does it to whom. It would cheer you BOTH on as you attack each other, and would hope that you will destroy EACH OTHER.

This is its secret plan all along. As soon as you have started to fall for the ILLUSION that the ego is not involved, and that you really are an enemy of your brother or sister, you have actually bought into the EGO's TRICK that it wants you BOTH to fall for. You've bought into ITS plan for your mutual destruction.

It takes three to tango! It takes two to buy into the ego's conflict of separation. However, it takes a REUNION and therefore ONE in order to instigate a Holy Relationship.

When one person looks at the situation and realizes that the ego is a third party, and sees its ambitions to create war between you and your brother, you thus recognize the SHARED INTEREST that you and you brother have.

Your shared interest becomes that you are on each other's side and are in support of each other, because you recognize that each other is not really the enemy. The ego is. It is the ego mind that is really the culprit behind the conflict, and it is the ego mind that is trying to increase the flames of war between you.

When one person remembers this and recognizes that the ego is at play, and that you have fallen for its plot of separation, that *IT* is coming between you and your brother/sister, your UNWILLINGNESS to continue playing into ITS hands automatically disarms the conflict. Your perception of your brother changes from them being your "real enemy" to the ego being the "real enemy", and therefore your brother is now on your side.

If you will acknowledge that instead of you being right or the other person being right, you are BOTH losing out because the EGO is winning, and that IT wants you both to be separated, then you can JOIN with your brother and refuse to participate in the ego's game.

When you decide not to play the game, even if the other person is still playing the game, you cannot experience separation. You are having a holy relationship. Even if the other person is not aware of your perception of them as holy. And because it is holy, no real conflict can produce any real effects in the relationship. At least not to you. The other person may still be attacking themselves but your relationship to them is now forgiven.

If you can both join in holiness and return to ONENESS together, that is even more powerful. It is a decision to unite in saying no to the ego and yes to wholeness, yes to God and yes to peace. It is the end of war. It is first the end of the war for individual parts of the sonship and then it is the end of war for the entire sonship.

You don't have a beef with your enemies. The ego is using both of you. IT is the thing that you both need to be questioning together. Stop your fight. It's not about your brother at all.

Please forgive me if this message isn't well formed because I think I am going to express something that is sort of 'new' to me and I am not well into it yet.

Love has been coming to me... the possibility of love... the possibility of being loving toward other people in general. Its a change in my attitude about others. Part of this seems to involve realizing that I've been doing all this healing and forgiveness work on 'myself' with... lets be honest... a somewhat selfish intention. I mean, even though it's a spiritual path and all that, it's always been about me healing myself, me forgiving for my own benefit, me applying the Course to get myself to feel better, etc. And now... this 'me' part doesn't seem as much the focus, or as important. And instead, I'm starting to let real LOVE come through me, and its starting to become about - sharing that love.

I'll also be honest in telling you that I generally have not really felt loving towards most people for a long time. Whether its a remnant of childhood suffering or a personality thing or whatever I've accepted, or maybe I've just been pretty normal/typical all this time and nobody could really expect more. ... but I'm finding now, there IS more. There is the possibility of not just being another one of many strangers that pass each other and barely acknowledge each other, but rather of actually LOVING PEOPLE.

Now, this is where it gets really fascinating for me at the moment. I've been finding that.. experimenting with. .. the idea that, if I attempt to be loving toward people instead of how I normally would be around them, it is significantly changing my perception. And I'm not talking about some lofty aim like 'see the christ in everyone' and I'm like 'what the fuck is christ?'... it's simply.. .just fricking love them.

Normally around most people, especially strangers, I will become guarded and shy and quiet really quickly. Its a defense mechanism thing, usually triggered by the slightest observation that there is something about the person that is unsafe/unloving. What I did not know, however, all this time, is that the unsafely and unloivingness that I see in people - the triggers - is actually the result of ME not looking at them WITH love. I've always been looking at people with... well, the ego... and seeing the ego reflected back. And now this idea is popping in, why not try instead to extend love and be loving toward them, and see how that feels

Well... when I decide to do this, which is usually after I notice that I just lapsed into zombie mode, something really unexpected happens. I don't feel afraid. It's like, all of the basis for my 'social anxiety' is because I perceive without love and therefore see a lack of love and I see it as an attack. So... if I CHOOSE to see WITH love, then I actually see ONLY love, and I don't even see any reason not to love. It's like, all of the 'reasons' for fear are just not even there. I can't detect them, they don't appear, they don't register. Somehow the love makes me feel safe and prevents me from even perceiving that I can be attacked. If I'm looking WITH love, then it shows me love. If I look with attack, I see attack. And I didn't realize how used I've become to seeing 'with attack' all of the time, such that I thought it was normal, and that people out there 'really are' threatening... when in fact, there is another way to experience it.

I always struggled with this. You have no idea. I mean, really high levels of anxiety around strangers, fear of judgement, unsafely, becoming 'spacey' and losing all focus, becoming avoidant, wanting to get the hell out of there, etc. It has taken a LOOOOOONG time to gradually sift through this all to realize that it is ME and MY attitude which SHOWS ME exactly what is IN ME, and I then think it is in the other people, and then I think that this proves WHY I should feel the way I feel. It JUSTIFIES it. Sure, I should be afraid because that person is judging me, or I should be anxious because that person is threatening me, etc... when instead, it was always that I'd projected MY self-attack onto them and was seeing it there.

And now, along comes love. And I mean... not special love of romantic love or whatever... like, real LOVE... love from GOD. Unconditional love. Spiritual love. And if I allow myself to stand in love and to choose to see other people WITH that love, what do I experience? Well... I feel completely safe. The anxiety has no foundation. And even if I'm feeling afraid or anxious, if I choose love, it instantly disappears. And even if people still are behaving in odd ways or looking at me funny or appearing to be rejective or whatever, if I am in a loving place, then I feel completely invulnerable to that, like, I know it can't do anything to me.

The big lesson here is this... and I'm still exploring this and only just STARTING to experiment with this in real situations.... the big lesson is that... when you extend God's love fully to your brother, and just choose to love them instead of any other attitude, ALL you will see is love and lovability and there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON TO BE AFRAID. So... this is the TRUTH! In truth, there is no reason for fear because in truth, in love, there is perfect safety. There simple IS no attack. There IS no cause for alarm. There IS no threat.

So this is my 'opening up'... the next phase... realizing that the theology and the thoughts and the figuring out and the Course processes etc are... themselves... just tools to open up the heart to love, and that it is THE LOVE that is actually what we need to BE and express. To love it. To be it. To extend it. To share it. Experientially. Actively. For real. Taking the love to the people. Taking the love and letting it love through me. Letting healing come through me. Letting life come through me. But not for some silly selfish 'oh this is my special spiritual path, don't mind me I'm just over here forgiving myself dutifully and staying separate from everyone'.

Love erases all fear. And of course.. the opposite of love is fear... without love, fear HAS to show up. Once love shows up, love is the LIGHT, and fear HAS to disappear. And it does. It does every time!

Reason to celebrate. Only love is real! And the truth isn't just facts and information and thinking... the truth is FELT.

And what's really surprising to me about God's love is... that... it is being freely offered to me right now without me having to really do anything to earn it... almost as though, I'm jumping right from being in the middle of a long drawn out spiritual path, to the end goal. Like. God loves me NOW... I can be loved NOW... It's very surprising. And it's got nothing to do with thinking about love. It's ACTUAL love. God is love. Not just an idea. Love love love love love love love.

In this world, all things lead to death. It's as though a missile has been fired, flying through the sky, and hurtling toward the ground. There is a sense of inevitability of decay, that everything will just gradually erode and age and suffer and die eventually. As though this is the way of the world.

"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."

When you look at the world in this way you can't really help but notice this is the case, except if you are denial of this fact. And while in that denial you might be thinking the world isn't so bad, except that eventually it proves itself. "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."

I recognize that when I am looking with my ego, or my worldly earthly body-identified 'normal view', this is the view I am adopting. I am going along with this "plan" of the world that everything before my eyes will wither and die. "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."

This is just how the world functions. It's how we set it up. It's what we call "natural". So when the leaves fall from the trees we think this is totally normal. When the bodies lay in the graves we think this is totally normal. But this entire system is entirely unnatural and not at all like God's reality.

"Without the idea of death there is no world." When you are aligning yourself with God's reality, with heaven's true nature, you are in support of life. In fact you support eternal longevity. You reject all notions of decay, degradation and death. In fact you not only move away from the downward "arc" of death's direction, you move UPWARD in a direction towards God. In this direction there is an arrow pointing toward the sky, as things which were death come back to life, and life is restored, and things are working out, and there is healing and miracles and reasons for happiness.

After a while of trying to recognize that God's ways are upward-bound, and earth's ways spiral into the dirt, the two "systems" of thinking become more clearly distinguished. And they are very much opposed to each other. The contrast between the two "modes of perception" becomes more intense and obivous.

"Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point. This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight. The alternating investment in the two types or levels of perception is usually experienced as conflict for a long time, and can become very acute."

The world might be giving a message like "this is just going to get worse until there is death". But a God-aligned mind is asserting life, saying "This is going to get better and better until there is immortality." The two paths or viewpoints do not meet in the middle, they do not converge or agree with each other at all. They point in totally different directions - toward heaven or hell, towards life or death.

If you look at something happening and you say to yourself, this is real, and it's true, and this is natural, and this is how it's just going to be, and there is no hope and no future and eventually there's going to be death, then you're in the ego. You're falling for TEMPTATION. You're getting lost in the world and doing nothing to counteract its lies. Because the world is NOTHING like heaven and all its efforts are attempts to prove that sin is real and death is justified.

"This IS the "natural" condition of the separation. And those who learn that it is NOT natural at all, seem to be the UNnatural ones. For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true. In Heaven, where the meaning of love is known, love is the same as UNION. Here, where the ILLUSION of love is accepted IN ITS PLACE, love is perceived as separation and EXCLUSION."

To be in this world but OF ANOTHER WORLD, to be of God and heaven and yet with your feed on the earth, is to be UNNATURAL in terms of what the world thinks is natural. But in fact it is to be ABOVE the nature of the world - which means super-natural. It is the world that is unnatural. It is the world that is false and a lie. To recognize it for what it is, one has to adopt the upward-pointing resurrective miraculous path. Otherwise you are simply heading for the grave.

"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."

"They take a direction EXACTLY opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death. We have followed much of the ego's logic, and have seen its logical conclusions. And HAVING seen them, we have realized that they can NOT be seen but in delusions. For there alone their SEEMING clearness SEEMS TO BE CLEARLY SEEN. Let us now turn AWAY from them, and follow the simple logic, by which the Holy Spirit teaches you the simple conclusions that speak for truth, and ONLY truth."

I'm somewhat tired of hearing people say that, given this world is an illusion and doesn't exist, all you need to do is recognize this and disappear off to heaven. This "seems" to make some logical sense, to the ego.

This is not only level confusion, it is also selfish. It is the EGO trying to interpret what atonement means, because it wants to "get" the atonement without any of the responsibility of sharing it or giving it to help others.

Jesus has a PLAN OF ATONEMENT, which He also refers to as "the great crusade". This plan includes you accepting atonement, but also entails you become PART OF the atonement plan, so that you can HELP to fulfill the rest of the plan.

Accepting Atonement entails a willingness to receive miracles, a willingness to admit you are worthy of love, and thus a willingness to accept that others are worthy of love. This automatically opens the door to you loving others and helping them. And you will help them by sharing the miracles you have received.

"When you have been restored to the recognition of your original state, you naturally become part of the Atonement yourself. 6 As you share my unwillingness to accept error in yourself and others, you must join the great crusade to correct it; listen to my voice, learn to undo error and act to correct it. 7 The power to work miracles belongs to you. 8 I will provide the opportunities to do them, but you must be ready and willing."

Here is how Jesus describes the fact that He did not accept atonement solely for "himself", but in fact had to SHARE it in order to HAVE it.

"I heard one Voice because I understood that I could not atone for myself alone. 2 Listening to one Voice implies the decision to share It in order to hear It yourself. 3 The Mind that was in me is still irresistibly drawn to every mind created by God, because God's Wholeness is the Wholeness of His Son. "

Essentially, by accepting atonement, you receive miracle-working abilities, and are more or less given a "mission" to help others through miracles, teaching, loving, sharing. There is nothing selfish about it.

The other main part of the problem many people have, is the way the ego comes to logical FALSE conclusions. It SEEMS logical to say, well, this world is an illusion and does not exist, therefore I only need to "do nothing" in the world and sort of ignore it and go off to heaven. That's ego bullshit.

The result of that "reasoning" is that the truth of the higher level or "goal" of "there is no world" is used as JUSTIFICATION for behavior WHILE STILL IN THE WORLD. That is pure level confusion. That means, people will then "do nothing" in the world, while still in the world, will not help anyone, will sit on a fence smiling at the illusion, will not perform any miracles, will not heal anyone, and will basically BYPASS MIRACLES.

This is used as a broad brush stroke to GLOSS OVER the REQUIREMENT that you perform miracles as part of Jesus's plan of atonement, IN THIS WORLD. If you jump from "I'm in the world" to "there is no world" while you're still in the world, you will put up a BLINDNESS OF DENIAL against anything you could possibly ever do while in the world.

This has been used, en-masse, to justify NOT performing any miracles, NOT changing the world, NOT helping others, and basically disappearing up your own butt while everyone else "who is an illusion" continues to be in suffering and loss. EVEN IF that suffering and loss is an illusion, that does not mean you should not help anyone who is having a "false experience". How cold and callous can we be, to put up a middle finger to the world just because it's a dream and let everyone who believes in it continue to be in despair?

We have a FUNCTION of being the LIGHT OF THE WORLD, to heal the world, to correct it, to demonstrate truth through miracles, to prove this world is NOT REAL by showing that its forms can be changed by the mind, and to help others to overcome the suffering they have themselves implemented.

It is because people do not want to do this, the ego does not want to do this, that we disappear up our own selfish butt holes imagining how we will "gain" atonement for ourselves and be done with this whole world. "There is no-one to save"? That is level confusion. "No-one is sick so there's nothing to heal"? That is level confusion. "Death isn't real so there's no point reversing it"? That is level confusion.

You can't use a truth that only applies on a much higher level, to explain why you should or should not do something on this lower level. While we are in this world, we are to heal, help, perform miracles, enlighten, share, love, teach, and HELP OUR BROTHERS. Even if this whole world is fiction. Even if no-one is really sick. Even if death isn't real. Even if none of this happened. OTHER BROTHERS do not wake up just because you wake up. Other brothers do not get healed just because you accept healing for yourself.

The function of a miracle worker is to SUPPLY A LACK, to give to those who temporarily have less, from those who temporarily have more. That means when you accept atonement and "have more", you GIVE IT to those who have less. This is your RESPONSIBILITY.

All the belief systems that have interpreted the course in terms of "there is no world so just get out of here and go home", are ALSO the belief systems which POO POO miracles. They are also the belief systems which justify "doing nothing". They are also the belief systems of people who believe ACIM is non-duality. And they are also the belief systems of even some of the best teachers who are IN DENIAL of Jesus's atonement plan, or the fact that giving and receiving are one and that you must GIVE the miracles you have received in order to receive or have them.

And what is behind all of this level confusion? What is the driving force of fear behind all of this BYPASSING of performing miracles? What is the foundation of this "reasoning" which SEEMS to make sense, to the ego, that we need do nothing here other than forgive and go home? What kind of selfish motivation is behind all this?

IT IS THE EGO.

This is the ego's interpretation of the atonement. And it is INHERENTLY FALSE. When something makes sense to the ego, the ego has MADE NONSENSE. It is NOT your only responsibility to accept atonement for yourself. You must accept it SO THAT you can extend it to others through supernatural miracles and healing and being truly helpful. Being, essentially, "a disciple" of Jesus, proving that you ACTUALLY believe God's laws by demonstrating them IN the world, where help is still needed.

For many years I have thought that there are kind of 3 states. There is false perception, then true perception, then heaven. And this is kind of true, and some aspects of ACIM support this.

However, what there really is are just two states. Heaven and hell, reality and illusions. Life and death. Knowledge and Perception.When we think about true perception it's easy to think of it as a state in and of itself. But we need to remember we're talking about PERCEIVING. And that means it's much more to do with "looking at" something.

If you ask yourself, what does false perception LOOK AT, it really kind of looks AT itself. Because false perception IS an internalized, isolated, exclusive state, where perception feeds upon itself and is blinded by form. It does not really see anything, and it cannot see reality. It is selfish and self-deceptive. It's like an obsession with itself, a closed perception that does not see.

When you then look at what the course says about true perception, it's much more to do with NOT dwelling on itself. NOT dwelling on the body. Looking BEYOND illusion. Overlooking. Seeing past. And there is a great deal of evidence that it entails an ability to literally SEE reality. To see God, Christ, the Sonship, perfection, etc, which are IN heaven.

The more I look into it the more it makes sense. Perception is about "what you look at" or how you look at it. Yes you have states of mind - for example wrong mindendess (or closed mindedness) produces false perception. While open mindedness or miracle/right mindedness produces true perception. But from these seeming "states" or the states from which perception EMITS, perception itself LOOKS and is a form of vision. So it needs something to look AT. So let's say...

False perception LOOKS AT HELL.

True perception LOOKS AT HEAVEN.

While there seem to be two "states of mind" within dreaming, ie wrong-mindedness and right-mindedness, really when it comes to perception there is either "the inability to see reality' (per the body which cannot really see reality), and the vision of christ which can see christ. "Love looks upon love" etc.

If wrong mindedness CAUSES perceptual blindness and an inability to see PAST the illusions of falseness itself, right mindedness CAUSES vision and an ability to see PAST illusions. The only thing that is BEYOND illusions, is GODS KINGDOM.

This seems to in many cases line up with what the course says and in its wording, as to how "the real world" is a PERCEPTION OF THE KINGDOM. That the innocence can see God. That perception can even see "the real world" (heaven) under the holy spirit's guidance. That you can see the face of christ, who is in heaven. etc.

So again I come back to, false perception being like living in a prison cell inside a room with no windows. And true perception is like living in a glass greenhouse where you can see THROUGH the walls and see the outside environment (heaven). The PERCEPTION OF the real world - the perception OF heaven, using perception TO see, is still an illusion. "The real world still is but a dream"... BUT, it IS a perception ABOUT heaven - reality. And it is so close to true sight that it makes crossing over to reality easy. It's like window-shopping then going inside the store.

I don't really see anything that contradicts this model. In fact I see MORE contradictions in the model that true perception is "cut off from heaven" completely. As though, we're hiding inside a completely dark room the whole time with NO ACCESS whatsoever to reality, and only upon leaving the room AFTER true perception do we experience even a hint of God. This seems to fly in the face of so much of what the course says, about you bringing light to the world, a reflection of heaven on earth, how earth can reflect heaven's light, how the light of heaven can shine into the world, how love of God can shine into the world, etc. Heaven clearly LEAKS INTO the dream realm through its radiance. That's how you be the light of the world.

I am finding that this simpler model of "two states", heaven and hell, or reality and illusions, makes things a lot SIMPLER to deal with. We can just look to "what is true in reality" versus "illusions which are false". Or look to God's laws and the nature of the soul, versus the laws of the world and the nature of the ego. It's a much easier comparison, between opposites.

We can also then see that forgiveness really is about overlooking illusions entirely, looking BEYOND them, and there's nothing beyond them but reality. So forgiveness, ie atonement as acceptance of truth, is really about reaching out to heaven from WITHIN the dream. Sitting in the dream with goggles on, looking out beyond the walls of spacetime, to heaven... which is truly "the real world". A reality.

This also then makes more sense in terms of how the course says that God gave the real world to his son.... if the real world is a state in the middle of two other states, it would imply god created the real world to be a permanent creation, which it cannot be.

The quesiton then becomes much easier to think about. Are you aligning with God, or with ego? With life or with death? With light or darkness? With truth or lies? And as you APPRAOCH total alignment with truth you are still within the realm of perception, up until the end, when you cross over into heaven completely. This is akin to walking towards the transparent walls, then passing through the door into the reality of the kingdom beyond.

It's then not so much to do with trying to aim to enter a state of forgiveness or atonement, but that you want to become ABLE TO SEE REALITY, to see past this world to the Kingdom. This also reveals that "it its impossible to see two worlds" and "beyond this world there is a world I want" ties into wanting the Kingdom, or at least a perception of it, NOT some kind of pretend "in-between" state. An inbetween state has no meaning of its own and is logically unsupported. It means nothing other than to say it LOOKS AT one of two opposites. There is either the Kingdom or not the Kingdom, there is nothing else.

A major mistake I keep making, or at least am starting to notice I'm making, is trying to find answers in the world.

Jesus is often hinting to me that I'm doing something wrong when I do this.

I'll be lost in the middle of trying to figure something out or decide between two things, or determine what the "real reason is", or find a cause, or basically find any sense of truth to do with anything in this world.

It's difficult because my mind is so used to thinking this way - looking outside of myself for truth, for salvation etc. I'm so accustomed to being in this "mode" of "is it this or that?"... when in fact BOTH of those things are not the answer.

It also happens any time I am in any amount of fear, which is often, whereby Jesus will poke me because I'm once again lost in doubt and trying to decide something. It's really a state of indecision and because of the presence of fear, there is literally no way I can see clearly or find a completely convincing truth.

It often takes several winks and nudges before I I might suddenly have enough awareness to even realize that "I'm doing it again". ... I'm basically trying to find some kind of truth or answer in the world.

A reason why someone is sick. A cause for why something happened. A truth that explains which path to take. Some evidence that shows me something is correct. A sense of certainty that cannot be found in uncertainty. A clear and obvious answer which is profoundly elusive in the presence of fear.

I get lost in all these ways, in what basically is a state of split ego mind, where I am just lost and looking in all the wrong places for a truth that isn't really there.

When I finally am nudged enough by Jesus to look at what I'm really doing, and I've run out of attempts to find answers to what it is that I am doing wrong (lol), and I have pretty much no other option left as to what it is that Jesus is trying to get at, THEN I might suddenly realize..... oh... I'm doing it again.... I'm trying to find truth in the world.

And so what has been really coming to me big time lately, totally unexpected, is this idea that... absolutely everything in this world is NOT THE TRUTH. And cannot be. And it is not real. No matter how it looks, no matter how convincing it is, no matter how well explained, no matter whose credentials are behind it, no matter how real it seems, no matter how I can pinpoint physical causes, no matter how explainable or understandable it seems to be, IT IS STILL NOT THE TRUTH.

It is not God's truth. And God's truth is the ONLY truth. There IS no truth in the world, EVER.

This is quite surprising to me given how much I've been used to finding answers (salvation) outside of myself. It's the totally automatic mode of the ego to find truth externally, or to explain situations, or diagnose sicknesses, or find the "real cause" of stuff. All that is doing is the ego is trying to give truth to its illusions, trying to make mistakes real, making sickness real, making the world real, and that is NOT forgiveness.

Forgiveness HAS to recognize that the ENTIRE WORLD and EVERYTHING IN IT is an illusion, is not the truth, has no truth to it, cannot provide an answer, is not the "final answer", an therefore there is ANOTHER TRUTH which goes beyond this world.

There is a truth which is of God. It is a truth which transcends the world. It is a truth of immortality, eternal life, absolute peace, total happiness, invulnerability, christ consciousness, oneness and love. This is THE ONLY TRUTH.

And so as I've been really really used to finding "some" of the truth outside of me, in the world, in explanations and what appears to be cause and effect in the illusion, where one thing appears to cause something else to happen, THAT is not truth. So I am now going into this process of quite literally becoming clearer and stronger in my discernment that EVERY attempt to find truth in the world will fail, and will only tell me something that is - in God's reality - not the REAL truth.

This is the foundation for miracle mindedness, because miracle mindedness completely defies the laws of physics, chemistry, biology. The laws of nature. The laws of what appears to be separate causes and effects. All rules. All results. All effects. All stuff that seems to "happen" in this world, it is all NOT the truth of God. And therefore, God has power OVER all of it!!!

This is why in order to perform MIRACLES (!!), we need to get our mind into a place where we're very clear about the fact that this world is NOT REAL, that there is NO truth to how it appears whatsoever, that sickness is just a fake image which can be easily changed, that the body is just a fake image which can be easily changed, and that, as ACIM says very early on, "there is nothing my holiness cannot do."

While I'm looking for truth in this world, in all the things I rely on and think are sources of certainty and reality, I am distracting myself from the truth of God. And that means I am not being miraculous. Miracles, the power of God's love, will flow IN SPITE of this world, and with DOMINION over this world, and with a POWER that this world has absolutely no idea about.

And therefore no matter what state or condition this world is in, and no matter how it appears, and what seems to be the "finality" of it, or bodily states which seem irreversible, or even DEATH as a statement of "you can't do anything about this because its real".. THATS BULLSHIT! God CAN do something about it, because God does not buy the lie that this world is reality. And that means miracles can happen, and people CAN be raised from the dead, temporarily or otherwise if its preferable, and you are NOT at the effect of this world.

A Course in Miracles thus makes no sense whatsoever UNLESS this world is an illusion, and unless this world has absolutely no truth to it whatsoever. Only then can it be possible that everything ACIM claims can be true, and only then is it possible that natural MIRACLES can happen, ALL THE TIME!

Hallelujah!

Let's just be VERY, VERY clear for a moment. Heaven and Earth are definitely TWO VERY DISTINCT STATES/PLACES in A Course in Miracles. If they were the same place there'd be no point Jesus referring to them as opposites or as two things. Or as "in heaven" or as "on earth". THEY ARE TWO PLACES. You cannot be in, or see, both of them, at once. THEY ARE OPPOSITES, diametrically opposed in every way.

This is important to realize, because Jesus frequently states how Heaven is DISTINCT from Earth and being IN Heaven is very different to being ON Earth. And yes folks, EARTH DOES MEAN THE PLANET EARTH, not some strange twisted metaphoric interpreted labelling of your inner ego interference "about" a world. The only way the Earth is "about" anything is in that it is an attack on Heaven.

Heaven and Earth. TWO PLACES. Earth has "place" because it is inside spacetime. Heaven is "not a place" only in that it has no FINITE LOCATIONS, because IT IS EVERYWHERE, and so transcends spacetime. It is STILL A PLACE WHERE YOU CAN EXIST AND LIVE!!!

If you EVER think that Earth is Heaven, you are stuck and have totally missed the obvious. Anyone reading theses statements SHOULD, using NORMAL LANGUAGE, get the impression and message that Jesus literally means TWO WORLDS, and that they can never be one because they are OPPOSITES. And only Heaven really exists. If someone reads these and doesn't get that? Read it again and take it literally.

"He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

"Only this is the real world, and perceiving ONLY this will lead you to the real Heaven, because IT WILL MAKE YOU CAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING IT."

"For you share the real world as you share Heaven, and his healing IS yours."

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

"You can REFLECT HEAVEN here. But no reflections of the images of other gods must dim the mirror that would hold God's reflection in it. Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego."

"Both Heaven and Earth are in YOU, because the call of both are in your wills, and therefore in your minds."

"It was only my DECISION that gave me all power in Heaven and earth."

"The Holy Spirit is the way in which God's will can be done on earth as it is in Heaven."

"Jesus is the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, Whom he called down upon the earth after he ascended into Heaven, or became completely identified with the Christ, the Son of God as He created Him."

"All power in Heaven and earth is therefore given him and he will share it with you when you have completed yours. "

"Just under Heaven does he stand, but close enough not to return to earth."

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

"You have been told that your function in this world is healing, and your function in Heaven is creating. The ego teaches that your function on earth is destruction, and that you have no function AT ALL in Heaven."

"The miracle, without a function in Heaven, IS needful here."

"The golden ASPECTS of reality which spring to light under His loving gaze, are partial glimpses of the Heaven that lies beyond them."

"As miracles in this world join you to your brothers, so do your creations establish your fatherhood in Heaven."

"Deny a brother here, and you deny the witnesses to your fatherhood in Heaven."

"The miracles you do on earth are lifted up to Heaven, and to Him."

"This is the ONLY justice Heaven knows, and all the Holy Spirit brings to earth. "

"Reason will tell you that there is no middle ground where you can pause uncertainly, waiting to choose between the joy of Heaven and the misery of hell. Until you choose Heaven, you ARE in hell and misery."

"The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky. So high in Heaven is it set that those outside of Heaven know not it is there."

"The sky embraces it, and softly holds it in its perfect place, which is as far from earth as earth from Heaven. It is not the distance nor the time which keeps this star invisible to earth. But those who seek for idols cannot know this star is there."

"For that is changeless, and has no effects which anything in Heaven or on earth could ever alter. But appearances are shown to be unreal BECAUSE they change."

"No one on earth can grasp what Heaven is, or what its one Creator really means. Yet we have witnesses."

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

"I give You thanks for what my brothers are, and as each one elects to join with me, the song of thanks from earth to Heaven grows from tiny, scattered threads of melody to one inclusive chorus"

"There IS no change in immortality, and Heaven knows it not. Yet here on earth, it has a double purpose, for it can be made to teach opposing things."

"The ego's logic is as impeccable as that of the Holy Spirit, because your mind has all the means at its disposal to side with Heaven or earth, as it elects. But let us again remember that both are in you."

"It but acknowledges the Will of God is done on earth as well as Heaven. It unites all wills on earth in Heaven's plan to save the world, restoring it to Heaven's peace."

"Forgiveness is an earthly form of love which as it is in Heaven has no form."

"His will is done because all power is given him in Heaven and on earth."

"And you will have conviction then of Him Who knows the function that you have on earth as well as Heaven. "

"Just as your light increases every light that shines in Heaven, so your joy on earth calls to all minds to let their sorrows go, and take their place beside you in God's plan."

"There is no sorrow still upon the earth. The joy of Heaven has come upon it."

"It is the bond by which the giver and receiver are united in extension here on earth as they are one in Heaven."

"It is the reflection of God's Love on earth. It will bring me near enough to Heaven that the Love of God can reach down to me and raise me to my home."

"No-one outside of Heaven knows how this can be. For understanding this is Heaven itself. Even the real world has a purpose still beneath creation and eternity."

"God limits not. And what is limited can NOT be Heaven. So it MUST be hell."

"Now a quiet time has come in which we put away the toys of guilt, and lock our quaint and childish thoughts of sin forever from the pure and holy minds of Heaven's children and the Son of God. We pause but for a moment more, to play our final happy game upon this earth. And then we go to take our rightful place where truth abides and games are meaningless."

"Father, in Heaven it is different, for there, there are no needs. But here on earth the miracle is closer to Your gifts than any other gift which I can give. "

"His Words contain all hope, all blessing and all joy that ever can be found upon this earth. His Words are born in God, and come to you with Heaven's love upon them."

I've been noticing lately, in myself, and also in other people, that guilt may not always look like guilt.

I am familiar with guilt in the sense that, let's say, I steal someone's property and then see them struggling without it, maybe I start to feel remorse or shame or that I should give it back, and so acknowledge that it's wrong in some way and start wanting to make amends, feeling guilty that way. This seems a more typical definition of guilt.

But I think there is an experience of guilt which feels much more like a state of self attack, seriousness, and is very prone to projection. It's a state of accusation, and the person feeling guilty starts to accuse others at the same time. This accusing takes the form of projection and is usually hurled out in the form of anger.

As Jesus says, "All anger is nothing more than an attempt to MAKE SOMEONE FEEL GUILTY"

Why would you attempt to make someone guilty? It's really an attempt to project your own guilt onto them, to make them out to be the one who is guilty rather than it be you. This isn't really the same experiencing as feeling afraid and trying to blame the cause of fear onto someone, but the projection dynamic is similar.

And so the clue here is, that there is a strong correlation between anger and guilt. And I've been noticing especially the past few days, not only that if I am angry there is some subtle but definite sensation of "feeling guilty" or "feeling wrong" or "its my fault" tucked in behind it. And I've been suddenly noticing this in other people as well.

I saw a couple of people today who seemed edgy and short and were a little accusational. While on the surface they seemed like they were sort of "raw" and pointing a finger at others, or were holding a sense of "I'm wrong, because of you", I noticed they also were feeling kind of guilty about something. And in that guilt they felt angry at themselves, but typically so caught up in projecting it that they seemed to be trying to make others guilty instead.

The reason I'm bringing this up is because in the past, for example, I was often afraid for various reasons, but I did not know it. I did not RECOGNIZE it. I would have the fear and all the stuff that goes with it, but I did not label "whatever that feeling is" as fear. I was too immersed in it, like being in a fog. I couldn't see it from the outside. So I would've said, in the middle of feeling fear, no, I'm not afraid. I didn't even know I was in such a state of anxiety. Or that what I felt WAS that.

Similarly with this guilt, I've been doing a lot of healing and I notice often that there is this kind of heavy "something" that seems hidden from my awareness, which always seems to drag me down and makes me feel serious and often moving into anger or projection. And as I try to lift up closer to happier lighter states, this same curtain of something keeps pulling me back down. And I'm realizing gradually that this un-recognized something is actually guilt.

I actually feel guilty for a whole bunch of things and I did not even know that i was feeling this way. I was just "doing the guilt" unconsciously. This came to my attention because in one situation I expressed that I felt guilty about something, not even thinking that this was why I was annoyed, that I had not admitted to before, and after expressing this noticed that I felt significantly better. And that was unexpected, like I accidentally discovered what was really bothering me. And then after admitting to feeling guilty and letting it go, I felt so much freer.

Also per some things I've been reading in the course lately, I see Jesus saying things about guilt and about how without guilt you'd be happy and without guilt you'd have salvation and so on. That guilt is the opposite of love as well. And this all seems to add up. The state of ego, the state of fear, guilt, sin, death, suffering, unhappiness, it all seems to be various "forms" of the movement away from God.

In general a belief in sin leads to a belief in guilt and then to a belief in fear of punishment. But in Jesus's descriptions it sounds more like any amount of separation from God, any movement away from love, puts you simultaneously into a state of fear, and guilt, and sin, and suffering and sickness. It's all a movement towards darkness. And in particular, without guilt or a belief in guilt, there is no support for sin.

Sin says, you sinned. If you believe it, you become guilty. If you do not believe it, you become forgiven. It pivots AROUND sin, but guilt is evidence that you've believed sin to be true. If sin is true, then you ARE guilty and will feel it. But if sin is NOT true, you are NOT guilty, and will experience the innocence that lies beyond sin. Sin is kind of like a principle or concept, an illusion, and whether you believe in it or not sets you on a path to listen to ego or to listen to holy spirit. And "the world of bodies is the world of sin" so believing bodies are real produces guilt, while believing they are not produces innocence.

"The laws of sin demand a victim."

"(body's eyes) For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt."

So now I'm working on the removal and undoing and acknowledging and recognition and noticing of "I feel guilty". And I think that it can be quite subtle at times and elusive. And it is "implied" in a lot of situations, even if its minor. And I think this guilt has a heck of a lot to do with all manner of unhappy feelings and conditions and forms of suffering. It's the heavy anchor that we drag behind us. I think most people are living in heavy guilt and don't even know it, and that has been me too."

I have also been noticing lately that I have not been giving myself enough credit for what I've been able to do. And I also notice myself "over-giving" or "over-serving" in a sacrificial way. And that suggests to me that its because I feel a GUILT, and this guilt is driving an illusory form of service which really is some attempt to "make up for" "being the cause of" the problem, which I'm blaming myself for. I think I don't credit myself with enough innocence and thereby end up making myself guilty for things I'm not even guilty for, and then start over-compensating for it.

Without guilt there is no self blame, and without guilt there is no reason to project guilt onto others through anger. And without guilt you cannot have sinned, so must be innocent.

"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."

"Only by persuading you that IT is you, could the ego possibly induce you to PROJECT guilt, and thereby keep it in your mind."

"All anger is nothing more than an attempt to MAKE SOMEONE FEEL GUILTY, and this attempt is the ONLY basis which the ego accepts for special relationships."

"Projection means anger, anger fosters assault, and assault promotes fear."

"That is why the undoing of guilt is an essential part of the Holy Spirit's teaching."

A Course in Miracles would say no. You always get what you ask for. You only get what you ask for. You never get anything you do not ask for.

There are no victims. There are no accidents. Nothing happens unless it is deliberate. There is no randomness or chaos. Someone somewhere is making decisions all the time.

A leaf does not blow in the wind without someone choosing to make the leaf blow in the wind. The leaf doesn't even appear to exist without someone's mind making it appear to exist.

Where is there any room in this for "might not work" or "not sure if" or "got lost in translation" or "God doesn't always answer" ?

The "Song of Prayer" will tell you that you are always praying and you are always getting precisely what you actually did ask for.

If stuff is happening that you believe was not supposed to happen, or you got results that you seemed to not ask for, or stuff happens that you didn't seem to want.... you need to think again. You DID ask for it, you just didn't realize how you asked for it. You MUST have asked for it otherwise it could not have appeared.

This is the level of certainty that Jesus enjoys. This is how it possible to be completely certain that you are not at the effect of anything. This is the end of victim consciousness.

There is absolutely no room for an idea of being victimized if it is true that you always get what you ask for. The entire fiction of being unfairly treated is absolutely 100% a lie.

You are treating yourself exactly how you wish be treated. You are, right now, experiencing exactly, and ONLY, what you actually did ask to experience. There is nothing happening outside of the script you have written or continue to write.

Nothing happens without your say so. This is how it is true that nobody dies without their own consent. This is how is it true that ALL death is suicide. This is how it is POSSIBLE that if you do not choose death, you will not die, and therefore it is POSSIBLE to be immortal.

Nothing is happening to you that you did not want. So if you do not like it, you need to change your decision. i.e. change your mind and heart.

If you got something you did not want, then you did not realize that you asked for it. It's not a matter of you having not asked for it, it's a matter of you being not AWARE that you asked for it.

Learning to discern HOW the asking happens, is the key to salvation. Recognizing that you ONLY do things to yourself, and nobody else EVER does anything against your will, gives you the key to salvation. Salvation - being saved from all suffering - is possible, because of this.

Every single story about how something happened to someone, some disaster struck out of nowhere, something suddenly went wrong, something occurred that nobody liked, the world went down the toilet, war broke out, there were "acts of nature", "it must be God's will", or any other bullshit, is absolutely a total fictional lie by the ego mind.

Absolutely everything in front of your face right now, you put there. And you wanted it. And not a single thing in your day or your month or your life has ever happened against your will. You have never been victimized.

Nobody has ever died against their will. They were choosing it, wanted it, made it happen, and put every single event in place to cause it to occur, even if those events or causes *appeared* to be coming from something over which they had absolutely no control. They DID choose it. It's just not obvious that they chose it, because of the ILLUSION that they did not, which was part of their cover-up story and part of their way of making it happen.

There has not ever been a victim. There has never been anything happening by accident or out of order or against anyone's will. Nobody has ever suffered a single bit without asking to suffer. No-one has ever been afflicted with sickness without having first put that sickness in place themselves.

Nothing has ever even happened in this world AT ALL, without someone choosing it and making it happen, pulling all the strings and animating all the objects and orchestrating all events. If it were not for minds making such decisions, this world would not even appear to exist at all. It is only here doing its thing because someone somewhere is MAKING IT.

Not one single feeling that you have is caused by anyone other than yourself. They are not caused by events or people or situations or stimuli or any other causes that seem to be separate from your own mind. Any feeling you ever have, you CHOOSE to have. You put it in place.

Not one single physical symptom in your body has ever been caused by any person or object or environmental condition or events seeming to happen against your say-so. Not one single "effect" showing up in your body or your emotional reactions has ever really been put there by anyone or anything other than YOU. You even put in place all of the illusory effects which external causes *allegedly* put in place against your will.

When someone kicks you in the leg, which is you kicking yourself in the leg, YOU put the bruise in the leg. The bruise in the leg is not put there by the person who kicked you, or their physical foot, or anything that happened. You instead conveniently orchestrated and used the situation to attack yourself and make it SEEM as though you have a bruise showing up because of someone else, so that you can project blame for your sin onto them, finding them guilty.

No-one outside of you is guilty of ever doing anything to you ever. Not one single person in this world has ever attacked you or created symptoms or effects in you. There has never been side-effects, symptoms, damage, hurt, pain or suffering occurring in your experience that your own mind didn't put there itself.

When events transpire, by your secret design, to seem to cause something to happen to you, you not only orchestrated the events but you also manifested the causes and the effects all at once, putting them into place in the illusion using your thought.

Nobody ever gets sick. People choose to be sick. Nobody is ever hurt by someone else. They hurt themselves. Nobody ever falls victim to abuse. People abuse themselves. Nobody ever dies of some cause they could not prevent.

People create the illusion that they have no say in the cause, in order to paint this very convincing picture that they are not the one making any choice whatsoever. The denial and displacement of your own mind's decision making, making it look like it has nothing to do with it at all, is an act of irresponsibility and disownership of power.

Nobody is ever weak or suffering or lacking or diminished or limited or disabled or afraid or sick or in poverty or at a loss without having chosen to be so, on purpose, so that it can appear as though they are victims, so that they have a tremendous basis for a huge story about how they do not have any power whatsoever, so that they can fake their own death and blame it on everyone other than themselves.

Death is a choice and death is someone choosing to die. Death is the ultimate cover-up story, all death is fake, there is no real death, every death is a massive illusion orchestrated by the mind to make it look like all power, responsibility, ability to choose and all will to Live have been taken away by someone other than yourself. Not even in death has this been made true.

There is nothing happening in this world, as in, stuff that is just occurring on its own. There are not just events that tick over automatically. There are no forces of nature which just do their own thing like they have their own will. There is no wind that blows on its own or life that grows on its own or cycles of weather that just "happen". Someone somewhere is making it happen.

There is no realm of things which are within control and another realm of things which are outside control. There is only deliberate creation. Either you are making up shit or you are not. Either you are inventing lies or you are being the truth. There is no middle ground where things just occur because of external causes, or alien wills, or fate, or bad luck, or good luck, or any kind of unchosen reason.

You have the power to choose again. You are NOT a victim of the world you see. NOTHING is happening on its own. And nothing CAN happen without you making it happen, wanting it to happen, using it for a purpose, having a fictional need for it, and making it occur in illusions. This whole world is your dream, coming from your mind, coming from your decision making. It is not dreaming itself!

Be free to choose again. Make a better decision. No-one can stop you. You are the immortal unlimited Extension of God, in whom nothing happens without His Will. This is the realm of miracles, where whatever you will, is so.

Whatever you will, will be so. It must. This is your power.

Here’s what I‘ve learned from ACIM and recent experiences.

1. The body does not really exist at all, except as a temporary projected 3D image coming from the mind. It is an illusion. It has no mind, soul, will, power, or causality.

2. When the mind believes in separation and goes into ‘ego’, it regards its identity as an illusion and materializes an illusory self image, which shows up as the form of a body - a device for separation. It then confuses its identity with the body and becomes unaware that it is making it show up. Even tough the mind is projecting the body, and continues doing so unconsciously, it now believes it IS the body. (The body needs no healing for it cannot make itself sick, but a mind that believes it is a body is sick indeed.)

3. When the mind believes it is the body it’s projecting, and starts reading ACIM talking about how you are not a body, and since the mind in this state is unaware it is projecting the body, it takes this to mean 1) the body exists separate from the mind, 2) the mind isn’t putting it there, and 3) therefore I must "detach" from and transcend everything to do with the body and go into my mind. "Seek not to change the world", "I am not a body I am free" etc is all geared toward DIS-IDENTIFYING with the body. Remembering that you are NOT the 3D image you are projecting.

4. Since mind in that state is unaware it’s projecting the body, it tends to think this means "body and mind are separate", and "I must change my perception OF the body, and the world, and this is all I CAN do", as though the body and the world exist ON THEIR OWN (separate from your mind), and not because of your mind. So the mind sets about divorcing itself from the body and trying to shift away from it. This is accompanied by the belief that you must learn to accept the body and the world "as it is", in whatever state it is in, and do NOTHING to try to change it. This justifies never performing miracles, and not being responsible for having power over sickness and death.

5. As mind takes notice of all the teachings which speak of changing your perception OF the body and the world, in order to transition your IDENTITY back to mind/cause, you will start to experience increasing AWARENESS that you are causal. Level confusion and cause-effect are corrected. You realize more and more that mind causes everything, including the state of the body and the world. You have to now question the prior belief that you just "ignore" the world and go home, and realize now that it is coming from you.

6. The previously unconscious projective power of the mind, which is making the body show up, starts to become unavoidable and conscious. To be not a victim does not just mean transcending a sick body and letting it die, it now means acknowledging the second piece of the puzzle that you were not aware of before: your body is coming FROM your mind, at all times. While it’s still true that you must learn to NOT BE THE BODY, you must now take charge of what it is and the form it takes, what it represents, what it symbolizes, what it teaches and what it demonstrates. Because the body is now starting to become TRANSPARENT, meaning it is becoming a window into the mind, rather than a cover over the mind.

7. You realize eventually that even though "you are not the body" is a huge central teaching of the course, and you’re supposed to recognize yourself as not being affected BY it, that inevitably leads to a causal relationship where you are the CAUSE OF IT, rather than it being the cause of you. There is no middle ground of "body doesn’t cause me but it exists on its own." The body MUST have a causer. Someone is making it show up. YOU ARE!

8. This is the deeper KEY to the mind-body relationship that few ACIM students are willing to see or accept. It’s not just about changing your perception OF things, it’s about realizing YOU ARE THE CAUSE OF THEM. "Projection makes perception" doesn’t just mean that you project ONTO what is there. It means you LITERALLY PUT STUFF OUT THERE and THEN perceive what you put there and interpret your perception! "There is no world apart from what you wish" "The world IS perception". You also have power over your projections - you are a creator. And when you exercise that power, miracles happen. "The mind must be stronger than the body, every miracle demonstrates this." It’s not JUST about dis-identifying with the body, the world and external causes. It’s ALSO about realizing YOU ARE THE DREAMER, and if you weren’t dreaming, there WOULDN’T EVEN BE A WORLD TO PERCEIVE! "There is no world."

9. This leads to having to admit that there is a CONNECTION between your mind and your body. It is not merely something to transcend or separate from or leave behind. There is a direct line of causality coming from the mind to MATERIALIZE the body. MInd is the projector. And this is the TIE that "unconscious projectors" deny even exists - a reason why your body is under the authority of your mind, why it symbolizes and represents your state of mental health, and why "sick bodies are accusers". Your body is an image you hold up to represent what your MIND believes is true of you and others. Your body is an image IN YOUR MIND, that your mind is fully responsible for.

10. This ultimately MUST lead to the resurrection state, in which the mind FULLY IDENTIFIES WITH SPIRIT. This doesn’t mean it just separates from, denies, drops dead, or leaves behind the body. How can the body STAY showing up WITHOUT a mind to project it? It cannot lay on the ground looking dead WITHOUT a mind putting it there AND MAINTAINING IT. "The mind being sane, heals the body." And when the mind is fully sane, and is done with dreaming, it will STOP DREAMING THE BODY. It will stop projecting one. The body DISAPPEARS, literally! When the mind regards its identity as SPIRIT, it becomes empty of all illusions, and does not hold a picture of an illusory body in place. The body becomes *transparent*, its image fades, and it CEASES TO EXIST becaue the light shines it away. "Illusions recognized must disappear." This is the only way out of the dream, not through death or sickness or old age!

"The mind makes this decision as it makes every decision that is responsible for the body’s condition."

"The mind that made the body can make another."

"At no time does the body exist."

This is the central teaching of the course. It is simply the principle that MIND is the CAUSE of everything - your body and your world. It has power OVER everything it projects. It chooses WHAT will appear out there, and then perceives it. It PUTS OBJECTS THERE. It materializes matter. "Your mind has the power to create worlds." There IS NO WORLD other than the one YOU ARE PROJECTING. It’s NOT just about you projecting ONTO stuff, onto the world, onto people, or onto your body. You are the one who puts that stuff there in the first place! This is the responsibility we all have to own up to. "Your brother thinks he made the world with you."

The world is a fluid, flexible, non-fixed liquid pool of mental possibilities and illusions. MINDS are dreaming it into being. Bodies are showing up because body-identified minds, which are sick, are trying to manifest illusions and make them seem real. None of this is really here. We’re just collaborating in a grand dream. The world is NOT OBJECTIVELY REAL and nor is the body.

I summary, your task is to:

1) Dis-identify from being a body and realize you are immortal spirit and causality is in your mind.

2) Remember that your mind is MAKING your body show up and the state or health of your body REFLECTS your mental health.

3) Recognize your body is an illusion that YOU were believing in, and without your belief it CANNOT EXIST. Thus you reach resurrection, your illusion of death disappears, and you return to what you alway were - pure spirit in heaven.

"Forgive them for they know not what they do" applies to anyone who believes in separation, because literally a state of ego-mindedness renders you unaware of what you are doing or why.

When you are whole minded you'll see the whole truth. Everything will be in its correct perspective. The truth will be obvious and you'll easily recognize it as true. And in contrast to it, anything that is not true will be very obviously false. There is no effort required in that, only awareness of the whole picture.

In awareness of everything, you need do nothing about the ego because you will recognize it is not real and doesn't exist. It merely needs to be seen for what it is, an illusion, which has disappeared and never was. It is made of nothing and is nothing.

But when separation is introduced to your mind, something else happens. It makes you unconscious to some degree. Separation is a form of denial or a block to awareness, so it blocks out awareness of some parts of the whole picture. It leaves you in a state of partial perception. It's like someone just hid a bunch of facts.

In particular, the truth, which was clear and obvious, becomes obscure and hidden. And without a clear awareness of the whole truth, you don't have a barometer to compare and contrast everything else to in order to find out if its true or false. It's like you forgot what reality is like, so now you're confused about whether what you're experiencing is reality or not.

Without the truth, and with key facts concealed by denial, your mind is now in a state where it is semi-conscious. It does not really realize it is not fully conscious, because it isn't aware of the stuff it isn't aware of. So it thinks it is fully conscious. Even a mind which is severely unconscious and limited still believes that it is fully aware of everything.

At all times, we believe that we're aware of the whole truth, every fact, every detail, and every piece of evidence, regardless of whether we are. Whatever we are perceiving we always believe it is the whole truth. And we are always assuming that we are 100% objective in our perception. We also assume that we are completely unbiased and perceiving clearly and without distorting anything at all, which is far from the truth when the mind has blocks in it (there are no neutral thoughts).

On the basis of this, we also then "make sense" of what reality seems to mean, based on the extent of our awareness, or the facts that we do still have access to. But if we don't actually have all the facts, something strange happens. We come to conclusions, trying to make sense of what we're seeing, based on what we are aware of. And if that means, that we are not aware of what is really causing something, we will try to come up with an alternative cause for things.

So because we're unconscious, we don't "see" that we actually cause everything, that we made the world, that we have orchestrated all events, and that we have attacked ourselves. The causality or the act of choosing to do that, is outside of awareness. So then it seems to us, in partial consciousness, that stuff happens seemingly out of nowhere, unjustified and uncalled for and unfair, as if it happens against your conscious will. It seems like another will has willed stuff to happen, without your permission, and so now you are victimized by it. Yet it it is your own will, unconsciously, making poor choices.

Based on this unawareness, and given only the limited information you have, you'll then try to make sense out of it, you'll assess the evidence, look around you, seek inside you for any sign that you made something happen, and failing to find awareness of such a cause or intention, you'll "rationally conclude" that it must've been someone else. You will then be convinced it's an external cause, or someone else willed against you, or the world did it to you, making you an unfairly treated victim.

This will all seem to make total sense to you. Because you're always trying to make sense of what you perceive, or to understand what it means based on the limited truth. So it seems to make sense, based on not having all the evidence, that other people are guilty sinners and they're attacking you and you are justified in revenge and anger.

You don't become angry on a basis of just being an angry person or as a random thing or just some reaction. You only become angry because to your consciousness, unable to see the full picture, it seems to make total sense to you that it is justified and correct and a truthful conclusion, based on what you're aware of. You look around you and do not see what you did to yourself, or any other signs that you chose it, and so this leads to obvious yet false conclusions about the scapegoats who must've been the cause.

You can't help it, either. In essence, you are not doing this on purpose to be an asshole. You're not intentionally, in your right mind, trying to be hurtful or scapegoat. You are actually simply acting very "naturally" in accord with the scope of your awareness and the resulting effect on your thought system. In essence, anyone who comes to believe in separation, MUST see themselves as being victimized. The mind simply cannot see itself attacking itself so its only option to so believe someone else is responsible.

It's pretty much automatic. Anyone with an ego will react with anger. Anyone with an ego will see themselves treated poorly. Anyone with an ego will hallucinate and be convinced that there are causes outside of their own will doing stuff to them. Anyone with an ego will see themselves as not the cause of problems, but rather at the effect of them, helplessly, and that this is indeed an unfair attack.

There is nothing special at all about the conditions and conclusions that arise in ego mindedness. It is completely predictable, and it applies to absolutely anyone who enters separation. It's like, if you choose separation, you are guaranteed to see yourself as being victimized. And anyone who does this will see themselves this way and will then react to these false conclusions of external causes.

This is why all ego behaviors are forgivable. They are forgivable because, literally, anyone acting in the ego in this way, as a victim or victimizer, MUST NOT see themselves correctly. They are mistaken. They are not aware. They are not aware of the evidence, they don't see the whole picture, they're not aware of what the truth is, they cannot see their own causal power, they are unaware of their own influence over their own perceptions, they don't even recognize their own identity, and they are very confused about what is what.

Any behaviors or attitudes that stem from this state of unawareness HAS to be forgivable, if you can be aware of the larger picture yourself and recognize the simple mistakes that people are making. A person is not trying to be an asshole attacker. They are actually quite naturally reacting and trying to make sense of their distorted reality, based on an inability to see the whole truth. They're literally doing the best they can, or at least are reactive very predictably based on their mental illness.

This is why anyone in the ego is forgivable. Anyone in the ego is simply mistaken. It does not call for attack or revenge. It does not call for condemnation or judgement. It does not call for making guilty or sinful. If you can be in the whole picture and aware of the whole truth, it is obvious once again what is what.

It's obvious that people hurt themselves. It's obvious that people think they know what is true when they don't. It's obvious that they are calling for help. It's obvious that they are confused and hallucinating. It's obvious that they think they sinned when they didn't. It's obvious that they are following perfectly logically consistent conclusions based on the limited information they have. And it's obvious they are not trying to be "bad" or evil on purpose, they're simply unconscious and mentally ill.

People are upset and angry and confused and lashing out only because they have come to believe false truths about what is really happening. They do not see. They are asleep. They think that something bad has happened to them unfairly and people are out to get them and they need to be afraid and defenses are justified and counter-attack is survival. They're acting completely logically and predictably based on their state of awareness, or rather their 'ignorance' of the whole truth. They simply do not know what they are doing.

This is why from the highest levels, you can only have compassion and be forgiving. Forgiveness is justified in the big picture because it recognizes and sees the whole picture, has all the information, can see who does what to whom, sees no victims, does not believe any of the distorted illusions or false conclusions, and simply recognizes that people are mistaken. Awareness of the truth shows you what is true and what is false, clearly and obviously.

All sins are forgivable, because even the idea of sin is just another part of being unconscious and not aware of the whole truth. Sins are forgivable because in truth they cannot cause consequences and have no real effects. Sins are forgivable because no-one can really sin and no-one has really sinned, they just think they have, because there is key information unavailable to them. Blocks to awareness are responsible for all mistaken conclusions.

We simply need someone to tap us on the shoulder the middle of our hissy fit,to remind us, hey.... that thing you thought happened, it didn't happen. You did not hurt anyone. You did not make bad stuff happen. Other people are not trying to destroy you. You actually are doing this to yourself. There is more truth that you do not see or realize. Everything is actually ok. God has taken care of everything. Nothing is out of place. You are still worthy of love. Everything is still exactly in its correct place and everything in heaven is still continuing without missing a single note in heaven's song. It's all good.

I think one of the main reasons people seem to be homophobic, is just because we expect men to be men and women to be women. And if we ourselves are "straight" which largely means squarely or "purely" male or female and not a mix of the two, we project that onto everyone.

I think we become conditioned to think that there are only 100% males and 100% females. Then we project that onto people and expect them to comform to that.

When someone is more of a mix of gender traits, partly male, partly female, in whatever ways, it starts to fall outside of the standard "heteronormative" society model.

This is where a person starts to become offended, because whenever something seems to go outside of our beliefs, it registers to us as false. Whatever we believe or think is the acceptable standard is always regarded as true. When something seems opposite or doesn't fit with our truth, we judge it as false, and that also gets lumped in with negativity, evil, darkness, sin, guilt, perversion, rejection, etc. It's quite a basic mechanism.

So then if some man is partly female, but the model in the viewers mind is that they are supposed to be purely male, the person will seem to be violating the model. That will register as that they're not conforming to the norm, and are doing something they're not supposed to be doing. That registers as sin and violation and offence.

It's interesting that if a man is feminine and doing some things that a straight man would judge as wrong, but if you then ramped up the femininity of that man to the point where he turns into a complete woman, then the straight man suddenly would find no problem with them, because now they are conforming again to the model of strictly separate genders. So it's only the middle-ground where someone isn't entirely fitting into the strict model, that registers as an offence against the model.

This then leads to the viewer becoming offended, feeling violated, attacked, threatened, upset by the hideous creature they they see, which seems to be doing things and acting in ways that are not "normal" to them, or rather, not conforming to their model of what a man or woman is.

The problem really is that there is an expectation and a projection of the idea of what a man or women must be, and the ego especially likes to keep these extremely separated out. That you can be either one or the other, not both. "Not both" is the ego's standard function of "not God", because God's whole system of truth is based on both/and. The opposite of both/and is either/or, which the ego loves to uphold.

And indeed its sense of identity requires a strong contrast between exclusive opposites, in which the males try to keep the females outside of themselves so that they "know who they are" and have a firmer and clearer sense of identification with their gender. Or rather, so that their ego can stand out as being more separate and different, in order to have an identity, because the ego depends on opposition. And if you are not being "man enough" then you somehow are becoming too feminine and are stepping over the line.

If someone seems to fall outside of the projected model, it registers as false, evil, wrong, offensive, upsetting, an attack, violent against their very sense of identity. This does two things - it threatens the clarity of distinguishing who they are, in which they need to keep male and female separate in order to "exist", and secondly it seems to threaten the model of what a man or woman is.

This perceived violation is then interpreted as that the stranger is actually breaking rules, attacking their truth, going outside the bounds of what is acceptable into territory of "perversion", is seen as unnatural, vile and disgusting, can't be tolerated, and is seen as actually a direct attack upon the viewer and everything they stand for and are. Indeed if the person IS really purely a man AND then proceeds to act like a women, that would be register as an actual perversion.

Having perceived that the not-quite-straight person is threatening them and offending their ways, this then produces the perception of justified anger, because they feel actually literally under attack by the non-conforming person, as if that person will infect them, change them, influence them, invade their integrity, remind them of the fragility of their masculine identity, invade their boundaries, and do things to them which persons of a given gender are not supposed to be doing.

This can take on ridiculous forms such as fearing that the queer person will turn the kids gay just by living nearby, or radiate gay rainbow vibes into their minds, or have ultra evil sexual powers of lust after their treasured ones such that they'll be taken into a cult and subjected to satanic abuses, or that the queer person is simply am abomination against their God and breaking all the laws of heaven in a state of sin and madness.

So then they project hate and rejection onto the queer person, which they see as completely justified, because they've perceived that the queer person has attacked them first just by existing, and now this evil spectre must be destroyed in order to protect oneself. Which means the homophobia is seen as a justified and needed act of self-preservation based on fear. This is where the "phobia" part comes in, because the anger and abuse literally stems from a perceived fear, that something outside of what is acceptable is threatening to undermine their truth. Not just their truth, but their whole sense of identity and reality.

Because if a man can be partly not a man, and a woman can be partly not a woman, then that brings into question what is a man or woman, how are they defined, and how to distinguish a sense of self in the midsts of the seemingly "vague and muddy" mixture of gender and identity.

The ego would like things to be clear-cut, but the queer person is presenting a picture of something not so clear-cut, something which appears to be crossing over boundaries, "gender bending", breaking the ego rules of either-this-or-that, and corrupting the whole model of "man and woman produce male or female kids only." And now queerness is a boundary-violating attack upon families and marriage and religious institutions. And all this is is a concern for what happens when something transcends the rigid boxes that everyone wants to live in.

Really all of these reactions, which are just ego projections of a rigid model of identity, are only happening because the viewer lacks discernment and sees things in a very black-and-white exclusive and special way. They are not recognizing something, which is always the failing of the ego mindset. By not recognizing that the person is not JUST male or JUST female, and that people actually can be "not entirely one thing", there is no account made for people who seem to blend across the boundaries. And then "non-binary" is seen as the ultimate sin and rejection of all that is good and proper in the human race.

If they would open their minds from the closed-off either/or mindset of male/female strictness, which is closed-mindedness and a lack of spirituality, they would consider that some people (in body terms) are not purely male or purely famale, and that such people are completely acceptable and part of "nature".

If the viewer would then stop trying to force the person to be eieither man or woman, they wouldn't actually produce all the distorted reactions - which they do to themselves - that arise from trying to fit something into a box that it doesn't belong in. It's only because of the projecting of the "I know what a man is!" that a person requires someone else to conform to that.

There has to be an opening up to a greater repertoir of how many different types of human bodies there are, just as we have to open up to accept people from other countries and enthicities without judgement. And to then drop the expectation and conditioning that says you have to be one of only two things, and you must never be a mixture in any way. It's only those strict rules that give rise to a sense of the rules being violated, which then leads to the fear of invasion and the discomfort of being "pursued by a gay rapist", which then leads to the angry projections of guilt, which becomes homophobic abuse - all an attempt to maintain the ego.

If we could better recognize what people ARE, rather than what we think they SHOULD BE, we'll be better able to accomodate everyone and stop trying to force people to conform to a rigid tight little structure. The problem is really that egos are JUDEGMENTAL, and this judgement is always flawed and narrow and wrong.

Homophobia is actually just an expression of the regular ego doing its regular ego thing, just in the same way as any other conditioned belief which results in a sense of being offended by anyone or anything that outside of that belief - be it someone of another religion, another race, another gender, another color, size, hairstyle, whatever.

The fact is that the world is not black and white, it is not purely either/or, it quite often happens - though to less of a percentage usually - that there are exceptions to rules. Flowers that sometimes grow double heads, creatures which sometimes are half female and half male, humans that sometimes have a mix of sex-oriented organs, people with darker skin who become albino, people that are sometimes born as siamese conjined twins instead of separate bodies, etc.... nature isn't completely strict in its forms.

People only have prejudice against various aspects of the physical world when they think it's supposed to be a very very basic black-and-white model, where you have to be 100% this or 100% that. And as the mind believes strongly in separation the egotism emphasizes this contrast and exepcts everything to conform to it. And anything that deosn't is labeled as a sin. That's standard ego functioning, nothing special. It's unforgiveness. It's based on the belief that the world is absolutely real, and therefore separation is truth.

To be more forgiving we have to be willing to really look at what things are, not what we wish they would be, or what category they're supposed to fall into, or to judge them based on appearances while trying to fit them into neat little boxes. Some people are such a mix of things that you'd have a hard time even describing them accurately. In the past society was much more recognizing of the fact that everyone is to some degree bisexual, which is still true, even if people try to deny it.

Long story short, society needs to become more forgiving and learn that the human race isn't composed of pure men and pure women, but rather than absolutely everyone is at least to some degree partly both. All human embrios start out as female and even the males still have some trace of that in them. This is a world of relativity, in which nothing is absolute and nothing is extremely pure and nothing is completely separate. There is no real man or real woman. We are ALL hybrids, and everyone is queer. That's not wishful thinking etiher, that's the nature of spacetime.

You will continue to protect, defend, empower, give energy to, support, believe in, have faith in, trust, consider worthwhile, see innocence in, be willing to sacrifice for, side with, cooperate with, and generally try to become one with THE EGO .... so long as you think that it is YOU.

Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't have all of these upholding, sustaining, supporting attitudes about SELF, regardless of what your definition of that self is. If you believe that you are made of what the ego is made of, or that you believe what it believes, you won't care. You will STILL defend and protect and try to sustain it. Even if it kills you.

This is how people choose to die. They are identified with the ego and what it is is made of, what it perceives and believes, thinking it is their SELF, and therefore they are perfectly prepared to do ANYTHING NECESSARY to defend what they think they ARE.

It's a totally "natural" seeming defense mechanism, in the name of trying to preserve your existence, to sustain your "life". Even if it means that by your identity being "the ego", your effort to "defend your life" is actually defending death, and therefore is a choice to die. In trying to save your own life, as the ego, you will choose death.

It's not really that you need to change the ego at all. It's just a sort of machine that is on autopilot doing only one thing, running one story, seeing things one way. It's not ever meant to do things another way. It can't. It's made of the idea of separation. It's made from beliefs in sin and guilt and fear and death. That's all it can ever believe in or be made of. But that has nothing to really do with YOU.

It only becomes something that is to do with YOU - your sense of SELF - when YOU decide to take ahold of it and convert your identity to it. When you believe that what is true of IT, is true of YOU.

So if you believe that for some reason you are sinful, let's say, and are therefore guilty, and therefore afraid of punishment and death, that means you believe that you are MADE OF sin/guilt/fear/death, that these things are TRUE of you, and that's because you've sort of borrowed these things from the ego. You've tuned into the ego and made it YOU. You've possessed it as an identity, to try to change your identity away from your real self, and away from God.

So now that you believe that YOU are sin, YOU are guilt, etc, your belief now is that your *SELF* is these things. And yet, your primary mode of functioning, your "defense of what you are", your "sustaining of SELF" which is completely inherently permanent in the functioning of the mind regardless of your definition of self, will just simply defend that sin and guilt and fear up and down until you're blue in the face. Of COURSE you will defend it because you think it is TRUE of you, and therefore it is your TRUE SELF.

Everyone is defending, protecting, supporting, and trying to sustain, who they believe they ARE. So if you believe you "are" sin, because of something you seemed to do that you thought was really bad, regardless of how much that sucks and feels awful, you will STILL defend that sin up and down like it's the God given truth of you, because if you are IT, it is YOU, and you are just trying to be "true to yourself". It's just that your IDEA of yourself, your view of yourself, is very mistaken and misplaced.

So this is how you latch on to the ego. And because of this, you will defend the ego's viewpoint, you will side with it, you will support it and feed it and give yourself to it, and all in the name of "preservation of my self", you will literally come to believe that death is real for you. That it defines you, describes you, proves you, and dictates you. So you will choose death. This is why everyone who dies has sided with the ego and has CHOSEN death. All death is suicide in the name of "sustaining me".

All people are trying to do is to stay alive - to continue their self - but because they are mistaken about who and WHAT they are, they keep protecting a self that is NOT who they really are, and that self believes in death. So hey presto, death is defended like it's who you are. And what you defend you will get closer to and become one with.

So you don't really actually need to work on changing the ego. The ego is NOT THE PROBLEM. You don't need to defend yourself against the ego. You don't need to, sort of, "undo" the ego as such, because the ego is already an illusion. It' just that you think it is a "real ego" because you have given YOUR reality to it - your sense of real self. The MISTPLACEMENT of yourself is what needs to be corrected.

So like, there's a burning pit of fire with you standing in it the middle of it. Hell. And you have two options how to deal with this. Either a) stay there and try to change hell to put the fire out, or b) get OUT of hell. And those who believe they are their ego will choose a ... they will try to CHANGE hell and to turn it into heaven, by trying to manipulate what the ego IS.

But the ego is ALWAYS, and will always be, a device for death. It does not change. CHANGE is death. The ego cannot change into non-change, and it cannot change into not-death. It is always death. It is always going to be perceiving wrongly, upside-down and inside out. It is always going to see God as evil and it's always going to try to get as separate from God as possible. It is a faithful machine, and that's how you designed it when you MADE it. It's like a car-ride that you invented in you back yard which is hardwired to drive around a fixed track, and that's all it can do. It can't go free-riding across the countryside. It is on rails. It just does what it was designed to do.

Changing the ego does nothing at all. That's a "spiritual ego". That's trying to emphasize the persona and reject the shadow in an attempt to make some PART of the ego be special and good and happy, while the other part is relegated to all the bad stuff. That's not going to work because both parts are still the ego and regardless of whether you try to emphasize the "good or bad" parts of that illusion, it still energizes that illusion and leads to death.

But it's what we've all been doing, trying to be in denial of the fact that the ego is 100% "bad", not 50%. It CANNOT hold the truth. It CANNOT have anything about it that is spiritual. It CANNOT even really exist. Yet here we are trying to dress it up and be selective about it, as if we can somehow redeem it or make it more tolerable or have some kind of option or exception to how it function. The ego is a one-way train to death and THAT IS ALL IT CAN BE.

So your REAL choice, your sensible choice, is to stop believing that YOU are the ego. That is really the ONLY way to wake up from it and be free of it. There is no other way to get off the ride. The ride is going to hell, and you with it, unless you change your sense of SELF. Who you are. What you are. What you are made of.

If you are made of real sin, you are believing you are the ego, and you will die. If you are really guilty, you will be afraid of inevitable punishment. You have no say in changing that dynamic. What you CAN do is recognize that the ego is an illusion, that it is NOT the truth about YOU, and in some way "separate" your sense of identity from it.

You need to get your mind peeled away from the ego, and then hook it back up to God. i.e., to DETACH from the ego thought system, and ATTACH yourself to God's mind/Holy Spirit. Trying to fight with the ego is 100% pointless. It doesn't actually WORK. The only thing that works is letting it go. Not BEING it. Not believing that you ARE it.

That means you must BELIEVE that you are NOT really sinful, you are NOT guilty, you are INNOCENT. God's truth is the truth about you, not the ego's. God's "version" of you is the truth about you, not the ego's version. Your IDENTITY needs to step back and NOT BELIEVE that you are "made of" anything whatsoever that is of the ego. You are not sinful, guilty, weak, afraid, sick, vulnerable, suffering, or dying. Those things cannot be part of your SELF TRUTH. The truth about your SELF. What and who you are.

Your transition away from the ego identity to your REAL identity is what wakes you up. It's your relinquishment of a false idea of who you ARE. A false sense. That's all the ego is, a self that you are NOT. A framework of identity pretending to be an individual, that is NOT who you are, but who you have tried to become through your belief that it is TRUE of you. The ego is not true of you and nothing it believes is true of you. So for you to detach, YOU must be convinced that it is not true of you.

If you are not really sinful, you MUST still be innocent. And if you are not sinful, nothing can have happened. And that means the Atonement principle. Recognizing that IN TRUTH, you are innocent, and therefore CANNOT BE THE EGO. Seeing your real innocent self clearly. That's all you need to get to. The ego will just vanish when you have no further belief in it. It must, because it only seems to exist in your mind because of your belief that you are not yourself.

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision."

"The miracle is proof he is not bound by loss or suffering in any form, because it can so easily be changed."

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer I cannot experience loss and I cannot die. I am not a body. Love created me like Itself."

-------------------

Grief from a loss can be very, very difficult to deal with. I've personally had to go through a ton of it. 18 years ago I left my home country of England and immigrated to the USA.

This entailed a significant sense of loss in ways I never imagined and was just horrendous to go through producing massive amounts of tears over a span of several years. Some of the losses included:

Loss of family - not being around them or able to be around them, even on holidays. Not being able to travel easily to see them. Not a single member of my family was at our wedding or any other event. Although no-one literally died, it was as though they all had. Actually just even writing that just now has brought me to tears again.

Loss of culture - not being immersed in the culture and not even realizing it was a culture. Being surrounded by a completely alien environment where no-one even speaks your language or sounds like you, where there are no recognizable holidays or shared events, with no familiar social cues, no familiar traditions, sense of dress code, or anything. Top this off by being surrounded by an entire country that celebrates things you have no familiarity with or sense of identification with, and it adds up to even more alienation.

Loss of familiar forms - an entirely different set of foods, brands, products, money, buildings that are completely different in design, traffic laws totally flipped around, extremely different weather, totally different tv shows, clothing, standards, a different style of working, all new holidays, etc. Not to mention the loss of a sense of "home" or belonging or fitting in or being part of anything.

Loss of identity - I assumed that so much of what made me "me" was inherent to me. It was not. It was inherent to the country and culture. Once I was outside of it it brought into question who I even am, what is truly "mine" and what was just something I inherited or assumed as part of "normality". My whole sense of self was shaken to the core and transformed. I grieved even for who I used to be.

Each year various thing would trigger me off. Especially holidays, birthdays, christmas, and even American holidays which were celebrated en masse but which I could not relate to, making me feel deeply left out in a whole other way. Christmas was a nightmare. The first sign of decorations or snow or holiday jingles would immediately trigger 2 months of hell. Sometimes I felt powerfully compelled to just run away and get the hell out of here.

What I had to learn, was about what this grief is, what is causing it, and what I can do about it. Besides hundreds of boxes of tissues, accompanying the massive purge of "losses" that I perceived, I tried various things. One thing which did immediately help was EFT (emotional freedom technique) - a form of acupressure, which alleviates emotional pain. It takes the edge off and offers some relief. But I wanted to truly heal this suffering.

What I've learned about grief is that is stems entirely from ego beliefs. Just as the course say, "No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision." Meaning, unless I am doing something to myself, there can be no basis for grief.

Every single sense of grief or loss comes from a perceived "real separation" occurring. Something which seemed real, which is now inaccessible, unavailable, distant, kept apart, or more permanently removed. This can be a loss of a person's life or a country or a pet or a culture or a favorite job or a tv show or whatever.

The ego first values these things by making them special, making them real, attaching to them, identifying with them, and believing they are important. Then, when one of these things is "lost" or separated from us, we literally are experiencing this idea that we're separated from reality, from what we "love", from what we think is valuable or important. This produces a rift within our mind, a split, and it can be very deep.

This sense of "real separation happening" is absolutely nothing short of a reflection or fragment of the idea of being separated from God. Every "loss" is the idea that God has been lost. That love has gone away. This produces horrendous feelings of lack, emptiness, depression, sadness, loss, loneliness, hurt, anger, fear, guilt, shame, you name it.

Additionally, in the ego thought system there is an idea of sacrifice. Sacrifice means that you first of all make something real or valuable or special, and then you believe that in order to atone you have to forceably be deprived of it, even while you still value it, which *guarantees* that you will suffer a sense of having lost something important to you. It is the idea that if you lose i.e. sacrifice something, you will gain something. The ego is totally nuts.

Even giving something to someone else through the ego and perceiving it as you being diminished or lacking or losing in some way, is the exact same dynamic which all grief is based on. And your reaction to it will be varying degrees of a sense of loss. It may not be a deep deep grief when you begrudgingly give up something you liked, but it's still the same dynamic.

I've found over time that all of my grief stems from my false perception. i.e., it ENTIRELY erupts out of the perception that a "real separation" has occurred. There is no other cause of it. It is not really about "oh I miss that person" or "oh I lost that job I loved" or "oh I don't have my family any more". These are mere forms of the same basic content of separation. It is the sense of having lost something you are attached to or which is special to you, i.e. fake reality, that produces the ego responses of grief.

I have also found, that even if I am deep in feelings of grief and it becomes possible to reclaim or get back or visit people or things which were "lost", this still does not in any way fix the grief. It is my own perception of real separation which causes the upset and until that is undone, as a false belief, I can still be in the presence of the very people or things I lost and still feel a loss. All loss is an inside job.

The grieving is actually taking place INSIDE my mind, between one part of myself that I made special and another part which has lost it. I've seen that my grieving is entirely selfish and about myself, and never really about anything outside of me. This has also taught me that e.g. returning home or going back to family will NOT resolve the problem of grieving, and through my own experience it never has. For the ego it's a fake promise of salvation.

I've also found therefore that any grief that I am having is entirely due to my own beliefs, my own choices, my own perceptions, my own attitude, and what I choose to perceive. If I choose to believe death is real, I WILL automatically be very upset when someone dies. If I choose to make someone special or attach to them or "need" them, I will AUTOMATICALLY grieve whether I like it or not when they are taken away. I set myself up for loss every time that I try to take possession of something or depend on it too heavily or make it special or considering it more exclusively valuable or conditional. And so, I literally do this to myself.

Every ego attempt to make something special, to "have it" or value it or attach to it or believe in it (ego beliefs) or possess it or need it, will AUTOMATICALLY bring with it the conditions for its INEVITABLE LOSS. It is a total trap. You literally are signing up for LOSS, when you sign up for "getting".

The truth is, no-one needs to grieve, no-one is supposed to be experiencing loss, no-one is supposed to be crying or unhappy, no-one is supposed to spend 50 years getting over the loss of a parent or child, no-one is supposed to be SUFFERING like this. Without using ACIM whatsoever, and just fudging our way through this stuff, we will take however long it takes to cry and cathartic and remember and try to keep them alive etc...ie reluctantly letting go. Without any other tools, most people spend years dealign with deep losses.

And then there is another camp of people who are so level-confused that they'll try to force you to just "get over it" or repress it or censor it or not feel any feelings or never cry or bypass it with ACIM pleasantries like "it never happened" etc. For most people, they HAVE to go through a "grieving process" because its the only way they have to heal the ACTUAL problem, which is a sense of separation from God. And that is the ONLY problem, even in the case of grief, and even in the case of death.

If a person is having such a deep emotional pain, there is nothing helpful in repressing it or trying to ignore it or not letting it out or trying not to cry or to shove it down in some way to pretend it's not there. Feelings, once they are created, MUST be felt and allowed to flow. And usually the sense of loss is so deep that it simply generates a ton of feelings. They must be felt, not turned into emotional constipation. But that said.... tentatively.... there must be a better way, and there is.

Tackling the real issue, which is a sense of "real separation" or "real loss" or "real sacrifice" or "real absence", which is a BELIEF in your mind that has nothing to do with the world or other people, there is much more HOPE for a swifter recovery. What a person has "suffered" in a "loss" is really that they are suffering from a false perception of reality (God) being lost permanently, as though completely real. It is very, very convincing to the ego, and it produces just horrendous depths of unhappiness.

But this separation, this loss, it can be healed. And it can be SIGNIFICANTLY undone if not entirely, through applications of ACIM principles. i.e. forgiveness, seeing the truth, unearthing the lies about "justified grief" or "everyone grieves" or "loss is normal after death" or whatever else... stuff that well-meaning psychiatrists have made up to explain why most ego-driven people suffer. Jesus has a different message: "You need not suffer."

It is ONLY a perception of real separation that produces grief or loss, ever. There is no other cause. And perception CAN be healed because beliefs CAN be changed. It is NOT necessary to have terrible grief. It is NOT necessary to have a deep, bottomless pit of misery for years and years. It is NOT necessary to feel like you lost part of yourself forever and ever. It is NOT necessary to feel hurt and angry and abandoned and upset for the rest of your life. There is nothing that cannot be healed.

For me now, every single year my "christmas grief" has dwindled at a rapid rate, since doing the course. This years was the least upset I've ever been. Triggers have been collapsed. Ideas of real loss undone. A sense of major separation significantly reduced. Tears have dwindled. It's not simply been through years of suffering and tears or "normal grieving process". It's because I apply forgiveness principles to what I am experiencing. In the middle of a moment of grief, if I can even remember that "I am not separate from God", and that this grief is about that... it immediately cuts through it like a knife.

Grieving can be a very long term process for many people, me included, but it does not HAVE to be. There is no requirement in God's Creation that anyone be upset for any reason. There is no justification for unhappiness. There is no rational for why it's "normal" to be seriously upset about anything. The Course is offering us the END of all death, all suffering, all sickness, and all grieving. To restore us to life, to happiness, to joy, to freedom, to liberation from all sad feelings and all sense of God being dead.

You need not suffer. What can you possibly grieve for but the belief in separation from God, which is not real? There has been no loss. Separation has not happened. God is alive and well and loves you. What's to be grieving about in truth?

If you are immortal, you cannot suffer. You cannot be hurt, damaged, offended, upset, sad, unhappy, depressed, lacking joy, unloved, abused, made sick, killed, harmed, bruised, wounded, angered, nothing. You can only be immortal.

So what does that mean, in light of what seems to be "you suffering"? Even "your suffering" cannot be truly happening to you. YOU cannot be suffering. Your immortal self CANNOT be experiencing suffering. You cannot suffer. So who is suffering?

"Spirit is in a state of grace forever."

So when you seem to be suffering, let's say you feel hurt because someone called you a "stinky fart face", can it really be that you ACTUALLY are hurt? And if you FEEL hurt by this, is this "you feeling hurt" actually really happening? Even if you feel it, even if it seems "it applies to me", even if it seems it was targeted "at you", even if its "highly personal and reminds me of the time I kept farting in church", CAN IT BE POSSIBLE that YOUR IMMORTAL SELF is actually experiencing this or believing it?

It must be that even when under attack, "you" that feels attacked is some kind of fictional construct. It can't REALLY be your immortal self that is attacked. Your immortal self cannot be sad or upset or feeling betrayed or victimized. It's impossible for your real self to feel anything but joy and love and happiness. So when you have an "I feel hurt" moment, even if it involves HEAVY emotions, and terrible pain, and totally seems to be all about YOU and how you feel... CAN IT BE?

It cannot ever be really your true identity that is suffering. Even if you seem to "hurt yourself", you are not hurting yourself. You can't BE hurt. So who or what are you hurting? If you even decide to kill yourself, YOU cannot be killed. So what is dying?

"You are immortal and you cannot die."

WHO or what is being killed? Sure enough it is the body that is involved. But in addition, how is it that there seems to be a sensation that it's YOU that is going down with the ship? WHO or what is under attack? Is this taking place IN YOUR MIND?

Is it possible, that when there is a sensation of hurt or upset feeling or guilt etc, that the feeling ITSELF brings with it a kind of illusion or "sense of" "self"? Could it be that when you are feeling guilty, and you feel like a target, and it feels like everyone can see you and knows you are there, and you are "self conscious" in public, and you want to hide from everyone because you feel like they KNOW your inner guilty secret.... is it perhaps that the guilt ITSELF brings a sense of "centric identity"? Is not anything other than love, a sense of selfishness, and thus a sense of ego?

Some years ago some stuff happened and I had a large amount of guilt because of it. And because of this guilt, I felt ashamed and took it with me everywhere I went. And I felt constantly threatened. Anywhere especially in public, which I avoided, it felt like I had a target on my back, that EVERYONE knew that I was guilty, and they could see this guilty self, and MY experience of this guilty self was a feeling of being very "self conscious". Nervous about what I AM. Feeling like I am "evil" or "bad". Feeling certain that I AM THE GUILT. And that everyone was pointing a finger at me.

It would then happen that if people would attack me, or call me names, or accuse me or whatever, I would feel like "this guilty self" is vulnerable AND attackable. If they would accuse me of something, they were accusing THIS guilty self of it, and IT was self conscious, and IT felt attackable and vulnerable, and IT believed that it deserved punishment and that IT was the ACTUAL target of what people were putting out there. So when they called me by name, and then hurled an abuse, this "guilty self" felt like it was ABOUT IT, personally, and that they were directly addressing this guilty self.

But then after a time and much healing, this guilt was gone. And then I noticed that when these same people were being the same way they seemed to be before, it clearly did not appear to be ABOUT ME, and it was not targeting "that self", that guilty self, that was in me before. And that guilty self and its sense of being "self conscious" ie in fear, was not there to "receive" the attack. It did not exist, so they could not AIM their attack AT it. And so "I", my identity, which was no longer bound up with the guilt, saw myself as NOT being the target of their expressions. And so I felt invulnerable and could now recognize that they were attacking themselves. What happened to the sense of SELF that was present IN THE GUILT?

See, whatever you make TRUE of you you will believe is WHAT YOU ARE, and in effect WHO you are. So if you believe of yourself, "I am guilty", you will believe this DEFINES you. And now you ARE guilt. And this guilt has components of ego in it. And ego is selfish. Ego is a kind of "self centeredness", a self-important self-interest.

If the absence of separation means that there is pervasive light everywhere throughout the universe, then ego is a massive CONDENSING of that, down to a point, such as a star, so that all you are now left with is masses of darkness and a tiny CENTER of a point of light. And this "all that's left" little concentration of "self" now seems to be separated off and small and weak and vulnerable. That littleness is the sense of EGO, and it is experienced like a focus on yourself alone, in isolation.

Everything about ego is about becoming small, little, contracted, compressed, diminished, weakened, self-focused, self-centered, selfish, self-attacking, self-important, self aggrandizing, delusions of grandeur, etc. This condensing produces a kind of "sense" of "me", distinguished from the rest, broken off and separate. This sense of self is "self conscious" ie made of CONCERN for self and FEAR of its own weakness and littleness. The "self conscious" self is in fear and looks out frightened of the world that threatens it. The more EGO you have, the more ego stuff you have, baggage, dark feelings, guilts and hurts, the MORE you feel self centered and like this stuff "is a self". A sense of "separated me", cut off from the rest and not sharing.

It brings with it a kind of "focal point", a contracted little fearful corner of the mind, and the more this little corner withdraws and hides and tries to be even smaller and weaker, the MORE the sense of artificial "self" increases. Because the amount of selfishness is going up, the amount of self importance is going up, the amount of superiority/inferiority complex is going up, and this all produces what SEEMS LIKE a sense of "there is something here", "I am something", "I am all these feelings", "I am these thoughts". You become identified with FORM.

The whole egotism, the attitude, inherently has this bunching up, crunching together, condensing, tightening, contracting kind of thing about it, and this SENSE of this happening FEELS like the formation of a hot-spot in the mind that seems like "where something is, moreso than the rest", or "self interest". A sense of an island within the mind. A "self".

When the guilt goes, when the self attack goes, when the sin is gone, the egotism is gone, and all this tightened contracted littleness "dissipates" and stops being so focused, and without the focus on a tiny little huddled-in-a-corner-hiding sense of identity and truth, that sense of being "separated off" and "a separate identity" goes with it. It just disappears. But that isn't the end of YOU, because your sense of self EXPANDS and moves towards the UNLIMITED, universal, endless holy christ self that you really are.

So who is it that suffers? Who is it that can BE hurt and FEEL vulnerable? It is not your immortal christ self. It is not the real you. But it can seem to be a SENSE of "you" because part of your mind gets caught up in the contraction and withdrawal into "a center", into a little prison, a bodily identity, an identification with locality in space-time. And the more ego-stuff you have in your mind, the more intensely that your mind forms into a huddle of tightly-held-onto stuff, creating an IMPRESSION of you being kind of snagged or caught up on this collection of ego material. And being localized around a "point" it makes you feel like you are this little separated off dot of identity.

It is kind of like.... the suffering, ITSELF, suffers. Just as how fear is self-fulfilling. The guilt ITSELF brings with it a feeling of separate self. Any ego emotions, be it anger or sadness or grief or loss or lack or abandonment or unworthiness or sinfulness or fear or whatever, all brings with it SELFISHNESS, which is isolation and contraction and that attempt to GET AWAY FROM everything else, producing an increasing sense that you are "this something" in the middle of the ocean of mind. And this "sense of self" always feels vulnerable and threatened and unsafe. But this sense of self is PART OF the ego material that's in the mind, and without it your mind DOES NOT experience being a target.

Without the guilt, you cannot feel this. Without the unworthiness or loathing, you cannot feel this. Your mind is elastic and sort of snaps-back into its expanded, non-localized state, spread out evenly and smoothly instead of tightened and restricted and limited. When the guilt goes, YOU stop feeling like "you" are susceptible and attackable. You stop feeling like YOU are guilty. And that sense of "contracted self" goes.

Your sense of identity stops being "caught up in" the "truth" that the guilt expresses. Because if you believe "I AM guilty" then this will set you up to experience that you AND the guilt ARE ONE. And now you ARE guilt. And in the guilt is your "self", your identity. And you will not want to let it go if you believe that letting it go will be the loss of who and what you are. So there is a kind of addiction to the ego materials and an unwillingness to see YOUR SELF as being something NOT associated with, or identified with, the ego materials. e.g. with the guilt. "I am guilty" will feel like you are MADE OF guilt. That it is fundamentally your nature.

So who is suffering? Who is hurt? Who is it that is having loss? Who is sad? Who is unworthy? Who is afraid? THOSE THINGS, combined with your mind, produce a sense of identity, or identification WITH those things, that makes YOU feel and perceive that it is YOU that is those things. That they APPLY to you. Because you think they are PART of your makeup. But it is those things themselves that bring with them the sense of artificial SELF, that is the ego, the selfish self-centered self, the hoarding possessing self, the playing small self. And without YOUR CONSENT, without your BELIEF, that these things are true of you, that sense of little self cannot remain. Because true self is expansive and infinite.

You seem to suffer because you identify WITH and AS ego stuff. Which temporarily makes you believe YOU are being attacked and YOU are the guilty one suffering. But it is really "the ego", the non-existent fictional self, the selfishenss, that is the guilty one. IT feels like IT is guilty, made of guilt. And when you WITHDRAW your allegiance from THE GUILT, that sense of "its about me" goes with it. And then you recognize that your REAL self, your immortal self, was NEVER guilty. It CANNOT BE guilty. And your immortal self doesn't have that sense of self-consciousness, self-concern, self-importance and selfishness.

You can think you are suffering, but you aren't. In a way, it is the ego that is suffering. Ego = suffering. You can think you are "the little self that suffers", but it is NOT really you. Your mind can get CAUGHT IN the trap of the ego viewpoints, which bring with them a sense of self-focus and self-worship and vulnerability, but you are not ever really those things. It is the ego that suffers because the ego IS suffering. It is the ego that has guilt because the ego IS guilt. Without guilt there is no ego. Without a bodily identity there is no body. Without sin there is no world of sin. And without death there is no world.

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

So when you feel like "I am guilty" or "I am anything" other than as God created you, know that you are lost in the ego and are feeling ego stuff and ego stuff feels this way and the sense of artificial "me", self importance, being self-absorbed, selfish, comes with that territory. And it is that vulnerable, sensitive false self that seems to be the target of the suffering, NOT your immortal self. And once you dis-identify from that EGOTISM, the whole ego thought system, you let go of these false accusations and the falsely accused goes with it. And all that is left is your immortal spirit. Your true identity in God which can never be attacked.

Very simply the entire separation from God is a matter of becoming confused about what is true and what is false. That which is really true (God's truth) has been associated with all the properties of what is false, and that which is false (ego truth) has been associated with all the properties of what is true. This produces a state of TOTAL CONFUSION. But this all hinges around your BELIEF in what is true and what is false.

Wherever you place your sense of "what is true", you will anchor yourself to that and BELIEVE that it's completely true. You'll also believe you are 100% sane to believe it. And you'll defend it to the death because you think it is your life. Even if you're becoming identified with something very untrue and you are very mistaken, your BELIEF that it's true will blind you and distort your perception.

You will SEE or regard genuinely true things as enemies, the opposition, false, unwanted, attacking you, trying to steal away your truth. And only anything that supports, resonates with, seems to confirm or justifies your current truth will be seen as accepted, truthful, allowed, welcomed. So you could be right in the middle of being extremely confused, believing something totally false is true and real, defending it with your life, trying to keep everything else from undermining it, believing you are TOTALLY justified and sane, while simultaneously being very very mistaken.

So wherever you are AT right now, whatever your belief system is, whatever is TRUE for you, you actually believe you are FULLY in the truth right now. Doesn't matter how mistaken you actually are. Even if you believe death is life and hell is heaven and the Holy Spirit is your sworn enemy, which the extreme of ego does believe, you'll think you're totally totally "right" to believe what you do, that's it's reasonable and makes sense to you. And any insinuation that you might be mistaken will be experienced as a threat, an enemy, an attack, by some person who is obviously "wrong", and are seen as someone you have to defend against and counter-attack to keep them from infiltrating your sacred truth.

Everyone does this. Every single person with an ego is doing this. Because every such person believes something is true which isn't, is mistaken and confused, and wants to protect and defend all the lies that they think are not lies. And so what happens is, if you try to tell someone something that isn't "their truth", it will conflict with their truth instantly. And this will be experienced as conflict and there will be a war that comes from it. Particularly if a person is very strong willed or stubborn, they will resist being questioned or undermined moreso than others. Or in other words, there is an unwillingness to learn, and too much faith placed in being right/true already instead of humility or self-honesty.

Others may be in general more open minded or more willing to listen and consider alternatives which may well lead to them having to question their own beliefs. And that's a position of greater self honesty and willingness. It takes a "little willingness", therefore, to be willing to open up to the possibility that you might be mistaken. That what you really firmly think is true, might not be. And if indeed what you believe is not actually true, but you think it is, you will make no progress towards God without being a little bit willing to question just how true your beliefs are. His truth cannot become true for you, until you can accept that your fake truth is FALSE.

This is more or less why the majority of people (truth defenders) do not agree with each other, and also is why most of those who do agree with each other are either mutually sane or just happen to share the same delusions. This is how the ego forms "allegiances" with people who seem to oppose their truth the least, forming a circle of "friends" who support and uphold their mistakes without questioning them. This is all begun in the ego's FIRST law of chaos, which says that the truth is different for everyone!

Everyone believes they KNOW the truth. They HAVE the truth. This is a fundamental carry-over from BEING the truth prior to the separation. Everyone attached themselves to SOME kind of truth no matter whether it's true or not. It's only a matter of sorting out what is *actually* true in terms of God's truth, from what is a fake truth in terms of ego, in order to proceed in the direction of Atonement. While we cling to lies, we are kept in the dark and away from eternal life.

The thing is, you can present a greater truth, you can explain it, you can show it and demonstrate it as clear as day, but if someone is not WILLING to undermine what they believe is already true, and doesn't see a reason to abandon their existing false beliefs, they simply will stay right where they are. Because they think they already have all the answers. All of the truth. And that they're very right about it, having convinced themselves over and over again WHY this truth is supposedly true. And this especially becomes a problem when very abstract or fundamental "cornerstones" in the belief system are upheld, supported, and reinforced, by a whole host of beliefs that keep the person highly unwilling to question fundamental issues such as whether the body or the world are real, or whether you are supposed to die, or what miracles are capable of.

We build great defenses against admitting to being

mistaken. We resist it. We in fact experience "the real truth" as an opponent or enemy, come to war with us and destroy us, and it keeps going on and on about this and that as if trying to make something "false" true, when you obviously know better. In other words, the real truth, at first, is experienced as the very thing we DO NOT WANT. Our ego ensures we see it as our nemesis, come to destroy us. The idea of oneness alone is enough to scare the pants off the ego since it implies the end of separation and thus the undoing of ALL false beliefs and false identities. This is why the ego wants NOTHING to do with the Holy Spirit. And this is why we have profound RESISTANCE to accepting the atonement.

Anything of the true nature of God, anything to do with God's laws, anything to do with the Holy Spirit, anything to do with breaking the laws of physics of this world, anything to do with performing extraordinary supernatural miracles which would probably shock most people, anything to do with Spirit, anything to do with receiving input from outside of this dimension, anything which would prove you are not a body or that God did not create the world, or that death is fake and can be undone, anything like that... which would bring doubt into the mind about what our MISTAKEN beliefs say is true, is seen as a THREAT, and a danger, and an attack. And WE DO NOT WANT IT. And seeing it as a threat we put up defenses against it, which by the way induces sickness.

And yet, all of these things are truth based, all of them are of God, and all of them are benevolent. So it is not that the truth IS an attacker, it's that it SEEMS like an attacker when YOU are an attacker. When YOU believe in a false truth you are believing in attack while BELIEVING you are peaceful, BELIEVING you are being neutral and objective, but are seriously biased away from truth. This is why most people DO NOT WANT the truth, they do not want miracles, they do not want the Holy Spirit to do anything. The very idea of Him having a power that causes things to happen that you can witness scares the pants off people who would much prefer to be in control of life and keep A Course in Miracles nice and small and safe and tolerable. Which has resulted in the various watered down "sanitized" versions of ACIM being spread and taught.

So this is a fact.... if you are not in God's truth, you will experience God's truth as a sworn enemy that you DO NOT WANT, and which you think is WRONG. And that means in order to approach the truth and genuinely wake up and become spiritual, you may well have to encounter or at least deal with, your false perception OF the truth and therefore get past this belief that true things are false, that holy things are hateful, that life is death and that the Holy Spirit can't be trusted. It more or less means... opening up to accept what you DID NOT WANT TO accept, and that REQUIRES you having a "little willingness" (eventually total willingness) to question your beliefs about what is true already. And that's going to require some radical self honesty and impeccable reasoning.

The Holy Spirit only wants to help you and heal you and give you love and support. He is not a threat at all. But He DOES represent the opposite of the FALSE truths (lies) that you've told yourself, and that means THROUGH those truths you will defend against him. This is how we chose AGAINST Heaven in the first place, substituting truth for another truth. We tried to MAKE God out to be evil and opposite to what we want. We tried to replace life with death, and now *actually believe* that death is salvation. That means the road back home MAY SEEM to be unwanted, uncomfortable, undesirable, upsetting, frightening and something you DON'T WANT, merely because of how confused you are. It may seem to had in the WRONG direction, just as Jesus says that often our greatest advances are SEEN as our worst retreats and vice versa.

WILLINGNESS is key to going home. No-one comes to the Atonement without it. God does not coerce. And the Holy Spirit will not do ANYTHING on your behalf until you are willing to invite him to do so and trust him to do so. Your free will is respected. But you DO have to be willing to want a different truth. To reconsider that what you believe, may not be true. That maybe even though you have *A* truth right now that seems consistent and whole, maybe it's NOT. Maybe it's not actually God's truth. And maybe that means you're going to have to surrender and let go some stuff that you valued, believed, and wanted, that isn't serving you on the way home. This is the work we have to do. And it takes a lot of willingness and honesty and surrendering of what is not true or worthy of a Son of God.

Moving towards God can ONLY occur through your FREE WILL. And this is why there is a required "development of trust" and a "sorting out" of what is really true and what is really false. Trust has to be developed by gradually putting aside fear and TRUSTING the Holy Spirit to do something for you or "to you" on your behalf, for your highest good. To accept HIS truth and way of perceiving with forgiveness. What is false has to be sorted out from what is true so that you are not confused about which is which, and can have accurate true perception. True perception is a state where the truth is RECOGNIZED as true, and what is actually false is RECOGNIZED as false. It's not merely a state of only perceiving the truth, it's a state of perceiving TRUTHFULLY so that false things REGISTER as false. And only in that state of SANITY and clarity and accuracy are you ready to go Home.

A little willingness is all it takes to get started. To be a HAPPY LEARNER, willing to learn "new tricks". Willing to question what you assumed was always true. And willing to open up to a new truth that's bigger and more true than anything you dreamed of.

"The holy instant does NOT come from your little willingness alone. It is ALWAYS the result of your SMALL willingness COMBINED with the unlimited power of HIS WILL. You have been wrong in thinking that it is needful to prepare YOURSELF for Him. It is impossible to make arrogant preparations for holiness, and NOT believe that it is up to YOU to establish the conditions for peace. GOD HAS ESTABLISHED THEM. They do NOT wait upon your willingness for what they ARE. Your willingness is needed ONLY to make it possible to TEACH you what they are."

When you are in the ego, you will experience various symptoms. You will:

* Feel afraid, confused, indecisive, uncertain, doubtful.

* Be in a state of questioning, trying to find answers.

* Believing there are multiple possible truths, explanations, diagnoses and possibilities outside of you in the world.

* Trying to find "the correct" possibility from all the possibilities, as if to do so will bring salvation and an answer.

* Feel like something in the world might actually be true, and therefore you are afraid, and can't quite trust the truth.

I often find myself in this state. Once I'm in this state, hallmarked by fear and questioning, I will BELIEVE that I am trying really hard to find an answer. BUT, I will be looking in all the wrong places, looking with the ego, using my separate "abilities" such as the intellect or past experiences, and I will just be going around and around frantic to find "the answer".

I will think that if I look hard enough I will find out what the truth is. But it's going to be one of many possible truths, which is confusing in its own right. So then I think that if I can just "figure out" on my own, know on my own, which one of them is the "real answer", then I will find it and can then get salvation. It never works, because the ego's rule is "seek and do not find", which means to seek passionately, to question everything, to reject all real answers, and to just stay in a state of fear.

When I get like this, there IS no truth out there. There IS no answer that I will find, from an "objective world", which will be "the" truth. But I will be perceiving not only that there IS an objective world, which is real, but that it therefore MUST contain the truth. If the world is real, it automatically has truth in it, so I just need to figure out where it is. Trouble is that NEVER works, because the world is NOT really real, it does NOT really contain any truth, and nothing I figure out about it will undo the FEAR.

Fear is produced BECAUSE I've made the world real. "I am upset because I see something which is not there", i.e. I've made an illusion real, am deluded, and MUST now experience fear because it seems like something UNTRUE has taken on a life of its own. Who wouldn't be afraid if imaginary monsters suddenly seemed real?

In this state of egotism, victimhood, fear, confusion and questioning, I am NOT really making any headway towards salvation. I'm not really getting closer to the answer. I'm actually doing the opposite. It is because I have moved AWAY from the answer, that I am even feeling this experience of "questioning" at all. The experience of questioning is really a state of being answerless, lacking in all certainty, knowing nothing, failing to be at peace, a complete loss of clarity, total victimhood, and is terrifying.

When I get like this, Jesus often now prompts me with a single wise word: "decide".

At first, I do not know what what this means or why the heck it is even relevant in the situation. If I'm stuck in the middle of trying to understand HOW or WHY "something has happened", or how or why "something really is this way", it seems to make no sense as to why deciding something would help, or what the decision even is.

But what I gradually come around to is this. The state that I'm in, as a state of victimhood and ego, is only happening BECAUSE I'm believing that stuff can happen to me against my will, that I have no choice, that I have to put up with whatever this external truth is, and that I need to find out what that "external law" is so that I can do something about it. It's not a decisive state at all. It's a loss of decisiveness. A loss of confidence. A loss of clarity and certainty. In other words, it is FEAR.

To get out of fear, and to get out of the entire game of "what if its this" "what if its that"..... which is all entirely terrifying, you have to SHIFT your perspective to something entirely different. A whole different model for what things are and how stuff happens. You've got to get out of victimhood into EMPOWERMENT. That means:

1) Owning up to you being totally responsible for everything

2) Reclaiming your power, in that whatever you choose will happen, nothing will happen unless you choose it, and therefore whatever you choose WILL BE your experience

3) Realize then that you do not need to defend yourself against illusory threats, because NOTHING IS HAPPENING TO YOU against your will

4) You are decisive, confident, powerful, certain and creative. You can CHOOSE AGAIN. And that means

5) You can choose to align yourself with God's truth, and to make a statement of what the truth IS, instead of attempting to "find out" what the truth is. Thus

6) If you choose NOT to create enemies, fears, disasters, problems, sickness, death, monsters, etc... THEY WILL NOT EXIST and will not be able to do anything to you.

*YOU* HAVE THAT POWER! You get what you ask for! There is no such thing as stuff happening that you did not ask for and do not want!!!!

BE THE TRUTH!

If you think that you will become free of a belief if you can figure out why stuff "really happens", or why someone "really does something", or "why evil is evil" or "why people are sick" etc.... you will not only fail to find a peaceful answer, you will also CREATE THOSE THINGS. This is why in your MASTERY of yourself, you have to come to realize that nothing can happen to you against your will, and that the only thing you've really been doing wrong is believing that something can be true WITHOUT YOU CHOOSING IT.

So when Jesus says decide, he means, flip into a state of confidence and DECIDE whether you believe the ego's truth or God's truth. Which one of these realities will you ALIGN yourself with. Which one of these two truths is going to be TRUE for you and are you going to believe in?

See, you think you have a choice beyond the ego and God. You think there is a third choice. You think that somehow there is 1) God, 2) Ego, 3) Your selective ability to pick and choose what the truth is. You do not have that ability really. You ONLY have the ability to decide which thought system you will BE a part of. If you choose to be part of the ego's thought system, you will choose to believe that everything about the ego is REAL for you. If you choose to be part of God's thought system, you will choose to believe that everything about GOD is REAL for you. And believing one, you will disbelieve in the other. And that IS your protection!

So recognize this. Fear that the ego is true, MUST disappear, IF you choose to believe in God's truth, BECAUSE they are opposite and mutually exclusive. They cannot coexist. If you want to be safe from evil, CHOOSE GOD, SO THAT *YOU* do not create your own evil. YOU are the one who empowers it. YOU are the one who give reality to it. YOU are the one who makes yourself vulnerable by trying to become at peace or saved from a "real threat".

If the ego's world of threats and dangers is real for you, there is NO WAY that you will ever find peace. You simply cannot find salvation, truth, a peaceful answer, a resolution, a cure, a magical description, a satisfactory diagnosis, or any kind of convincing TRUTH if you are CHOOSING to believe the ego is real. Because even if you think that you are in a state of questioning and NOT having a choice, you actually ARE choosing the ego. You are never not choosing.

Choose the ego and you'll believe you have no choice and that you don't want to choose what the ego is offering.

Choose God and you will believe you are free to choose but you only want to choose God after all.

So get out of your ego's attempt to intellectually discover the truth in the world, or explain sickness, or figure out why evil happens, or why someone did something. There is NO TRUTH there. Choose instead to reclaim your POWER OF DECISION, get out of the victimy complete lack of confidence, become decisive, be determined you will MAKE A DECISION about what you believe, and MAKE IT!

I CHOOSE THAT GOD'S TRUTH IS TRUE AND NOTHING ELSE IS TRUE!

THAT is your immortal protection against all illusions, all evil, all suffering, and all death. Going back into fear to "check" if evil is gone simply will make more evil. Going back into fear to "prove" that something is true, will just invalidate the truth again. This is why you must TRUST in God's truth, SURRENDER your belief that the ego's world is real, and become fully committed to the REALITY that God has already decided FOR you.

Choosing for yourself, versus accepting God's decision. That's all.

In ACIM the definition of forgiveness is not well understood. I did not understand it for many years.

I especially got caught up in this seemingly 'better than just theoretical' wave of 'you need to APPLY the course', which typically then means you need to 'do forgiveness' through some kind of process, and that this is what forgiveness is. And then you hear terms like 'quantum forgiveness' and 'true forgiveness' and stuff thrown around like this describes 'what you do to forgive', which most people take to mean the process of applying it.

But that's not it.

There were also phrases like "Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing ... It merely looks and waits and judges not." and "I need do nothing" which seemed to totally contradict this idea of 'doing' forgiveness.

And it continues with "he who would not forgive must judge" which then leads to further confusions like 'well that means I must stop judging'.

That's not it either.

There are really two different vantage points and it depends on which vantage point you're currently taking as to what forgiveness means for you or what your role is. You could think of it as two different levels. On the ego's level (level 1) there is no forgiveness, only unforgiveness. On the Holy Spirit's level (level 2) there is absolute forgiveness.

Much of the course, when it speaks of forgiveness, speaks of how the Holy Spirit perceives, such as "forgiveness is the light in which I see" and "forgiveness is still, and quietly does nothing". For the Holy Spirit, he is in a state of BEING FORGIVING. Now, this has absolutely nothing to do with some kind of activity. Activity is not needed. Because Holy Spirit is BEING forgiving, he is looking from above the battlefield upon everything and is recognizing that there is only innocence. He is only SEEING innocence because He is in the light. He is not seeing guilt, he is not seeing projections. He is in effect in a state of perfect, constant forgiveness. And here forgiveness is not a 'doing word', it's a 'being' word.

The Holy Spirit's forgiveness is proactively forgiving, SO THAT there is nothing that needs to be done. He overlooks error SO THAT there is no messy errors to clean up. He sees WITH light so that he does not SEE darkness. He has a forgiving attitude, which does not mean that something happens and then He forgives it. It means, he is FORE-giving, giving ahead of the need to forgive, which is a kind of blessing, in order to MAKE CERTAIN that there is nothing TO forgive. If he were to stop having a forgiving attitude, he would enter into error, create illusions, invent guilt, and then there would be 'work' to do. Correction would be needed, and He would NOT be in a forgiving attitude any more.

Forgiveness, in terms of the Holy Spirit's state of perpetual forgiveness, forgives SO THAT judgement does not arise. He sees that all are innocent and knows that there is no sin. "In that view, are all your sins forgiven." So the Holy Spirit doesn't have to 'do forgiveness', because there is nothing to forgive when you ARE ALREADY FORGIVEN. He knows that nothing has happened and forgiving in order to correct something that's happened is not required. He looks, is still and quiet, and does nothing. And this also does not mean that he undoes ego. There is no ego to undo while His attitude is still perfect forgiveness. This is a perfect, pure state of total forgiveness, the atonement, in which there is only innocence recognized everywhere. It's described also in how you will see 'the forgiven world' which will sparkle with innocence and no guilt anywhere. That's what BEING FORGIVING really means, it has NOTHING to do with any kind of process of correction or sorting out perception or changing your mind. It's the FINAL STATE where there is nothing left to forgive.

Now, this isn't typically the state we find ourselves in. Instead, we find ourselves in a state where we have already failed to be forgiving, and we now have an 'unforgiving' attitude, which results in judgement. And that judgement encapsulates all belief in separation, sin, guilt, fear, projection, victimhood, punishment and death. That's the state we find ourselves in most often. In this state, we are NOT being forgiving. So now we ask ourselves, how do I get out of this state and return to innocence? And usually the answer to that is, "you need to apply forgiveness".

No, not really. You can't suddenly take Holy Spirit's 'forgiveness is already accomplished' attitude and 'use it' in the midst of 'level 1' ego bullshit. And you certainly can't use it like a weapon to be used ON the ego's bullshit or TO it.

Remember Forgiveness, per the Holy Spirit, is not a process of doing something 'to' an illusion to make it go away. It's a state of it having not existed in the first place. We need to get INTO that state, and return to having a forgiving attitude. And only AFTER we have returned to that forgiving attitude will we be able to SEE innocence. "Forgiveness is the light in which I see" literally means that you CANNOT see clearly when you're in the middle of unforgiveness, and you cannot see the innocence of yourself or your brother while you still believe something has HAPPENED that needs forgiving.

But still we seem to cling to the need for this so called 'process' to try to somehow bridge the gap, to get us from the state of suffering we're experiencing now (ego mind), to some other state where there is no suffering (Holy Spirit's mind). So then we think we have to DO something. And then we think we have to DO forgiveness. And then we think we have to go through some steps or whatever and that this is dutifully doing forgiveness, ie applying the course. This isn't what it means to be forgiving. But this is a 'process of correction'. This is the undoing of the ego. In effect, forgiveness shows you that THERE IS NO EGO (death), and in this sense only does it 'un-do' ie NOT-DO ego. But it doesn't do something 'TO' the ego. "Holy Spirit does not attack the ego."

When we are doing this process, we are not doing forgiveness, but we are doing this process SO THAT we take back judgements and projections and remove blocks to awareness so that we might become AWARE that there is nothing to be forgiven. We are lifting the illusions from our mind so that we can join with Holy Spirit in His light where, forgivingly, it is seen that all are innocent already - that nothing's really happened and therefore there is only cause for acknowledgement/acceptance of the atonement. In effect, we only get into 'forgiveness' at the END of the process of undoing, and as soon as we enter into that perfect forgiving-ness we immediate RECOGNIZE that there is nothing to forgive because everyone is already innocent and nothing's happened.

All this other ego junk, the judgements, the projections, the belief in sin and guilt, the view that we're victims, etc... this is all ego. We need to cancel this stuff out. We don't do something TO it, we don't apply forgiveness TO it. We UN-DO, ie not-do these ego things. By not continuing to DO these ego things, we are undoing the ego. It's hard to get your head around that because it's really like making the mind work backwards, retracing your steps. You need to withdraw your belief that something has even HAPPENED at all, rather than work on trying to make 'what happened' go away.

If I need to 'do a forgiveness' it really means I am being unforgiving and my attitude needs to change back to being forgiving. Only when my attitude HAS shifted to 'being forgiving', and the 'process of correction' is complete, ONLY THEN am I actually forgiving. And only then can I see innocence. And only then am I in forgiveness, with Holy Spirit. And only then do "I need do nothing", having stopped doing all the stuff my ego WAS doing to try to 'do something'. So be aware, 'doing forgiveness' is an EGO DECOY because the ego loves to 'do' as a way to perpetuate itself. Getting your mind to 'not do' seems very counter-intuitive and not at all what you are used to.

Forgiveness is the end result of stopping an unforgiving attitude.

or..

Forgiveness is the natural state of the Son of God when He has not failed in that attitude, and where any belief that there is something to forgive has been healed.

It is not what gets you TO a forgiving attitude. Correction, ie HEALING, is what gets you there. Or in a term the Course uses in the miracle principles, "miracles are everyone's right, but PURIFICATION is necessary first". Purification. That's what we seem to be 'doing', so that we can RETURN to being forgiving.

The Holy Spirit does have a function of HEALING, which is, an ACTIVE role of correction which is capable of undoing what the ego has made - "the consequences of your wrong decision". And this is also where MIRACLES come in. Miracles are the means by which Holy Spirit ACTIVELY CORRECTS the mind (thus the emotions and body also), by blessing it with a forgiving attitude. Holy Spirit is miracle minded. He has miracle readiness. He has a role to play of LIFTING YOU UP to His state of forgiveness, where all that needed to be 'forgiven' is already healed. He has a function of RESTORATION, of restoring you to an awareness of your God-given condition of innocence, holiness, and health. This extends from His forgiving attitude, through you, and on to others.

We need to no longer 'do forgiveness'. My only job is to offer up to Holy Spirit the wrong decisions I've made for HIS correction and healing, and to open up to allowing Him to heal me, so that I can enter INTO a forgiving state of mind with Him.

"The blameless cannot blame, and those who have accepted their innocence see nothing to forgive."

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

See here that it says forgiveness RECOGNIZES that nothing occurred... which is a state where the idea of that 'something happened' has ALREADY BEEN UNDONE, a state where innocence has ALREADY BEEN RESTORED. Forgiveness sees WITH forgiveness in order to see that there IS nothing to forgive. It doesn't look at 'things still to undo'. We need to join Holy Spirit in this state, and 'getting there' is really a matter of stopping avoiding being there, which is what the ego's distractions are for.

Also recognize that once you are IN forgiveness, it is automatic to RECOGNIZE a pre-existing innocence and atonement. There is no effort involved, and the innocence you see is simply REVEALED to you, because it was always there and always true. You have removed the block to the awareness of its presence. Getting yourself into the Holy Spirit's state of mind is the only seeming 'task' that we seem to have to 'do' and really it does not involve doing... but rather recognizing all the ego things we are 'doing' and STOPPING THEM.

Yes, stop judging, but moreso, stop being unforgiving. Stop projecting. Stop believing in sickness and death. Stop hating yourself. Stop believing in sin. Stop being separate from God. Say no to the ego by giving it no power or energy. Stop buying into illusions. And start opening up to your relationship with God based on love and innocence and a forgiving attitude that recognizes, and shows you, that Christ is still innocent.

I will explain now in one sentence, why there is no world, the entire foundation for miracle-working, and the meaning of cause and effect....

*** This universe (world) is once removed from reality. ***

Did you catch that? Read it again if it’s too short. Here’s the breakdown.

This world, including Earth, is not a thing in its own right. It is not direct reality. It is the EFFECT of a cause which is unseen and unmanifest. It is a projection, from a mind which seems invisible.

Being an effect of that mind, this universe itself has no identity of its own, no mind, no will, no causality, no truth, no reality, no purpose, no love, and basically does not exist.

If this world were a direct experience of reality, it would be different. Then it would make sense to believe its illusion that it exists on its own and is a real thing. But it’s not. This world is a by-product of dreaming, and whatever the dreamer decides to dream, shows up as this world.

This world has no will. It cannot decide to make something happen. It has no mind. It cannot think for itself. It has no purpose. It is not alive. It does not even move unless the hidden dreamer decides to move it. Nothing here breathes or seems to live unless a hidden mind somewhere else is causing every single moment of motion. It is absolutely nothing more than a "movie" being projected. It is nothing more than an IDEA that someone, somewhere, is HAVING.

A movie is a lifeless, inert, neutral, illusory nothingness. A movie does not cause anything to happen in reality. A movie is the EFFECT put in place by a mind entirely separate from the movie, who is choosing to make the movie appear one way or another.

Everything in this world, this world itself, this planet, all objects and bodies, all of it is SECOND HAND. It is showing up like a REFLECTION. It’s not really there. And since it has absolutely no life of its own, it can DO nothing without the hidden mind saying so.

The dreamer of this dream is the Son(s) of God. They are invisible to this world. This world is being PROJECTED from their mind. It seems to be outside of them. But this world is not first-hand reality. It is second-hand. Just an effect and nothing else.

Nothing within the world can change the world. Nothing within the world causes the world. Nothing within the world made the world appear. Nothing within the world is alive. Nothing within the world has a mind, or a will, nor does it think for itself. Nothing within the world is the cause of life or death. Nothing within the world makes events happen. There is nothing within the world, because the world is nothing. It does not DO anything. IT does not EXIST.

This correlates to miracles and to cause and effect. The mind which is causing this universe is the mind of the Son(s) of God. Everything that is showing up, the Sonship is putting there. Everything that moves, all chemical processes, all physical interaction, all events, the entire history of the universe, is all being WRITTEN from ANOTHER PLACE that you are not seeing with your eyes.

Cause is not IN THE WORLD. Cause is OUTSIDE THE WORLD. Cause is DREAMING THE WORLD. The cause of this universe is unseen, a mind so vast and powerful that it is able to make anything seem to happen.

Cause is the mind, the world is the EFFECT of its dreaming. Cause, from a holy mind, would normally CREATE. But we’re a little bit confused. Cause from a confused mind MIS-CREATES and MAKES a universe.

This does not mean that the mind literally creates a world that exists on its own with its own will and causality and life! The world NEVER is more than an EFFECT and it can do NOTHING on its own. This world/universe is the result of mis-creation, or dreaming, COMING FROM a LEVEL OF REALITY beyond this entire universe. Mind is cause, this world is effect.

Because of this, recognize that a miracle is what happens when it is REVEALED, that a mind BEYOND this world has the power to CAUSE this world. It only appears that there IS no such separate cause, ONLY beause the dream has not featured miracles very much. For the most part, the dream seems to just tick over, and its FAKE LAWS seem to just keep on applying with very little evidence that there is ANOTHER CAUSE outside of it. So we think this is normal, and believe those fake laws, and take the world to be real.

From within the world, within its illusion, we take it at face value for how it appears. "Nothing so blinding as sight of form". This leads us to believe (in ego) that this world is a thing in its own right, living and breathing and existing. This is NOT TRUE. It is not DOING ANYTHING. It’s like an image being projected onto a wall. It can’t change itself!

Everything happening in this world, and this world itself, is just an effect FROM a hidden, higher level of reality. Mind is causing it. Which means, in order for ANYTHING to seem to show up in this world, indeed for ANYTHING to happen in the world AT ALL, the mind has to put it there. It has to dream it. In order for objects to even MOVE, the MIND has to move them. In order for a river to flow down a hill, the MIND has to move every single particle. NOTHING HAPPENS without the consent of the one who is dreaming it. Not even death. If mind were not dreaming it, there would be nothing here!

This means that the mind which is BEYOND this world, causing it, would have to PRETEND that things WITHIIN it are causing each other. There is, factually, absolutely NOTHIING within this world that causes anything else to happen. Laws of physics are an illusion. Time is an Illusion. Death is an illusion. Something happening to someone against their will is an illusion. There CANNOT BE causes within the world itself, because it is ALL coming from the mind.

Mind MAKES ILLUSIONS that SEEM to appear as though one thing causes another within the world, and all the while the mind is secretly pulling all the strings. Nothing in the world "makes something happen". Nothing in the world "affects something". Nothing can BE affected "by" the world UNLESS the mind CHOOSES to PUT THE EFFECTS THERE. This is why the proper loving use of the body, temporarily, makes it IMPOSSIBLE for it to be sick or die! If mind does not will it, NOTHING happens to it.

So absolutely every so-called "cause" in the world is not real. And the "effects" which those so-called causes produce ARE NOT the result of those causes. That’s linear fiction. Believing that is FAILNG TO RECOGNIZE THE ILLUSION. Believing that something WITHIN this level causes effects WITHIN this lever, is "horizontal" or linear cause-and-effect. There IS no such thing! It’s not real. It’s a totally made-up fictional explanation by SLEEPING IDENTITIES who think this word is first-hand reality. ONLY THE MIND causes anything to seem to happen here. ONLY THE HIDDEN LEVEL of causality produces CHANGES in this world.

The mind is ALREADY CHANGING THE WORLD. The mind is MAKING THE WORLD TURN. The mind is animating the oceans. The mind is dreaming of life and death, things being born and growing and dying. None of this happens without the mind making it happen.

If there seems to be a flower growing, the MIND is growing the flower. If there seems to be a person walking, the MIND is walking the person. If there seems to be a drop of rain falling totally unbeknownst to any human in the middle of nowherer, it is ONLY falling because SOMEWHERE, MIND is making it move.

If there was a pause button to this projection, you would be able to stop and look at objects suspended in mid-air, wondering at how they can even be there, and demonstrating that they do not move by their own will. They are just EFFECTS, and being in touch with CAUSALITY ("this is a course in cause and not effect") gives you MIRACLE WORKING FREEDOM to IGNORE the laws of this world (which cause nothing), demonstrating the TRUTH that mind is the cause of this world.

Miracles occur as EXPRESSIONS from the mind of Love, the hidden mind, which is a DIRECT REALITY. That level of reality expresses and DEMONSTRATES that *this* level of reality, EFFECT, is TOTALLY UNDER ITS CONTROL. The "miraculous" mind has no limits to what it can do nor does it care what is in othe world, nor how big or small it seems to be, or the illusion of how "difficult" it might be to perform a particular miracle. It knows that MIND IS POWERFUL and MIND IS DREAMING THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE!

Any illusion of a fictional linear cause or effect has absolutely NO POWER to prevent the mind from manipulating the dream in any way it chooses. If the mind decides to throw pebbles in the air and turn them into butterflies, THAT WILL HAPPEN. If the mind chooses to freeze-frame a waterfall and to hold a lump of mid-flow water in the hand in suspended animation, that WILL happen. If the mind decides to LITERALLY MOVE A MOUNTAIN from one location to another, completely defying "gravity", SO BE IT!

This is all possible, and more. Nothing happens here AT ALL without the mind’s consent! No-one dies without their consent! No-one is attacked against their will! No-one can be sick unless they attack themselves. Nothing affects the body. Time does not even PASS unless the mind MAKES IT PASS. The cells in your body do not even move or eat or divide or anything unless the dreaming mind MAKES THEM APPEAR TO DO IT. Absolutely NOTHING HAPPENS HERE other than what the mind projects. That’s because there is no world, and this universe DOES NOT EXIST unless we keep dreaming of it.

Realize also that because even those cells in the body are nothing but a projection, even the shift from one "state" to another is ONLY happening because mind is making it happen. Mind is projecting, projecting, projecting, projecting, and over time, that makes it seem like "the object" being projected exist IN ITS OWN RIGHT. It does not. It is NOT ALIVE. It is just a constantly shifting IMAGE that the MIND IS DREAMING. It’s not there. It is NOT a life form.

So when you look at the world, realize this. You’re NOT looking directly at reality. You’re looking at a ONCE-REMOVED side-effect or projection from SOMEWHERE ELSE. All of the DECISION MAKING, all of the CONTROL, all of the choices as to what will show up, is happening somewhere else entirely, out of sight. You’re seeing an EFFECT. A big giant effect, like a huge movie that’s being broadcast from SOMEWHERE ELSE, to create the illusion that there is no projector. The projector is the MIND, not the world. Earth is a fairytale.

This is why "there is nothing my holiness cannot do". The mind of the Son of God who is DREAMING this world, can choose to do whatever he likes with it. HE ALREADY IS. The year 2017 is being projected by Him NOW. If He weren’t projecting this, there would be NOTHING HERE. No planet, no world. He is ALREADY CHANGING THE WORLD, every second of time, every moment, is only seeming to happen beacuse HIS MIND is making it change! Right now!

To be fully in touch with this TRUTH, and to therefore RECOGNIZE that everything in this entire universe is an ILLUSION, with NO real cause-and-effect happening within it, and having NO INHERENT EXISTENCE of its own, and with cause being SOLELY the mind that is dreaming it, will grant you ACCESS to "make changes". Free will.

The ability to make these changes was eloquently demonstrated by Jesus. Walking on water proved gravity is bullshit. HE MADE GRAVITY. Healing the sick proved there was no such thing as sickness and it had no power to resist him. And he also demonstrated that death can be overcome. "You made sickness and death and can therefore abolish both." They’re just DREAMS! WE make them up ourselves and pretend they’re happening against our will.

Everything about the Course makes sense in this simple framework. Cause is in the mind. Mind is projecting the world. The world is nothing but an effect of your mind and doesn’t really exist. You can do anything you want to change it beacuse you already are the one putting it there.

"There is no order of difficulty in miracles" because YOUR MIND is CAUSING EVERYTHING HERE. "Here", this world, this universe, this planet, isn’t doing anything on its own. It has no life, mind, will, or intentions. It causes nothing. All of its causes are ILLUSIONS. All cause is BEYOND this world. There is no world!!!!!!!

If you believe planet earth is real, or created by God, or causing stuff to happen, or has truth in it, or is alive in any way, YOU HAVE FALLEN FOR THE ILLUSION. It means you believe the PROJECTION from the mind IS the mind.

It means you believe Earth is alive and has a will of its own, which will automatically make you a victim of magical causes, suffer and die. It is LEVEL CONFUSION on a grand scale. Higher level mind CAUSES everything! The world causes nothing.

That which cannot cause anything cannot create, and so it cannot extend life, and therefore it is DEAD. This is a dream of death. "There is no life outside of heaven." There is no world here. It does not exist apart from our dreaming it, and no part of it has its "own existence".

There is no world because it is just an effect. Our effect. We are the cause.

Looking for love outside of yourself is the primary function of the ego and one of the toughest lessons to overcome. We all seem to want other people to love us. We have some kind of need to have parents and children love us, to be loved by another special person or persons, to be surrounded with friends who love us, etc.

Being loved by a lot of people is a trap, if you depend on it. And if you haven't become willing to NOT be loved by others, you still are in the ego. You will not be able to be true to yourself or to speak the truth or demonstrate love's reality if you are not willing to allow others to reject it.

God is the source of love, as are all your brothers in Heaven, but the love they share with you is no different to the love that is in you, which you are created from. You already have this love inherently, so do not really need it at all from anywhere else. You are not being loved by God due to some "need", you are loved by God as an act of sharing His love with you who are already love. You were created by love, as love, to love, and there is no lack of love in you, therefore no neediness.

What happens is, due to the separation ie egoic blocks to the awareness that we already have all the love we need, we perceive a lack of love in ourselves. This is the same thing as believing God is absent - that we ourselves are absent. This perceived lack is a darkness, and it compels us to want to alleviate the unhappy sensation of that absence.

But the ego counsels, instead of actually questioning if the blocks are real, or that the love might STILL be present behind them (if you were to just remove them), to believe the blocks have really made the love go away and to then seek for a solution somewhere else.

This seeking is a sense of false neediness, which believes that the only way to have salvation is by finding it anywhere other than within yourself. The ego suggests it is not in you already, so you better look elsewhere, and that by looking elsewhere there is some kind of hope or possibility of finding it. This is a lie.

So then begins the external searching, and since you are not responsible for or aware of the love in yourself, you now look to make others responsible for providing it for you. So now they automatically are perceived as having to fulfill this "function" of being the source of love and salvation for you. Absolutely everyone will perceive this function as belonging to others if there is any block to awareness or ego present in the mind, guaranteed.

First of all, there is a fundamental problem with this. By believing there is not already the love of God in you, you believe it is absent due to some kind of unworthiness or impossibility. That belief, which is an error, when left uncorrected, lingers in the mind and asserts that you will NOT ACCEPT love within yourself. Separation from the awareness that love is in you already was an act of rejection, not acceptance, so now you are not willing to let there be love in you.

So even though your mind is now making others responsible for supplying the lack due to the belief that it's not inside you, and cannot come from God (this is one of the ego's "laws of chaos"), even IF someone external were to try to supply you with love, you would not be willing to actually let it enter you. You will do what you can to try to get it inside of you, but so long as you believe in your inner lack of it, and therefore the need for it, you are actively blocking its receipt. So then people could be surrounding you with the most magnificent love and you STILL would not believe you are loved enough.

The other part to this then, is that by believing the only possible location of love is "not in you" ie outside of you, you depend entirely on other people or objects or idols or false Gods or specialness to do FOR you and TO you what you refuse to do yourself. This is another step in the ego's laws of chaos - seeking for this "special something" which is supposed to solve your inner lack, by finding it outside of you in people or drugs or alcohol or possessions or money or success or idol worship etc.

IF those external sources, for some reason, seem to be willing to give to you something that you think you want, be it specialness or some kind of semblance of "love", your ego will to some degree seem to be satisfied. The problem is, you won't be able to fully receive it. Not only is it impossible to get fictional special love into you, you are not really wanting to receive it anyway. So now you will go back and forth between delighting in what this person "does to you", and resenting them for failing to undo your emptiness. You'll think that them loving you is the most wonderful thing you ever experienced, but it still falls short of the love of God or, more importantly, falls short of your own willingness to accept love for yourself.

IF on the other hand, the person or external source is taken away or denied or there is a refusal or rejection, well now you are really up shit creek. Because now your mind is believing the only source of salvation is external, you have this huge pressing need to "get" it, and the external is saying "no" and sticking its middle finger up at you. So now you are left hanging. You have this huge unconscious self hatred, a huge sense of neediness and lack, and no-one is willing to supply something to fill the hole.

That leaves you in a state of unfulfillable turmoil, like there is absolutely no way to solve your problem, and that throws you into a rage. This is essentially the definition of hell - a state in which you need something and the need can never be filled, so you have absolutely no hope of "escape", there is no one to save you, you are left suffering alone and with no way to solve it, and so you are more or less eternally damned. That is, unless you question the lies this is based on.

The unconscious self hatred will then surface as "special hate" and will blame the other for not doing to you what they are supposed to be doing to you. It will be all their fault that they are not "loving you" or giving you what you think you want. And this can be in the form of a bad parent or an abusive partner or a job that makes your life suck or the government sucking off all your money or whatever. When the love is denied you, you go off the rails with insanity because all you can see before you is a hopelessness and an impossibility of meeting your need.

This can also be the driving force behind people turning to crimes like rape and murder in an effort to forceably "take" from others what they are refusing to give you. It's a state of desperation. The ego has convinced the person they are so lacking in love that they are so empty and so unlovable that there is a really, really strong neediness and dependency on others to supply it, and no-one seems willing to supply it, so other people must be evil hoarders of the "specialness'' and it now has to be wrestled from them against their will.

This is the culmination of the ego's laws of chaos, in which it inspires attack and rape and murder and hatred in an effort to get from others what they refuse to give. And such a person will see those others are being entirely to blame for failing to love them, and they will see themselves as completely justified and entitled to take what they want, as if it is what they deserve and are being unfairly denied. They will believe that others have "stolen" what is theirs, and that they must rightfully take it back. Things get pretty vicious at this stage.

If you look at this with compassion and understanding you can see that when people get really desperate and needy for external sources of salvation like this, which is mental illness (inner peace is healthy, external searching is mental illness), they are really just trying to address this sense of lack and emptiness and the absence of love within themselves. They are just going about it in the only way that their broken perception tells them is possible - getting it from outside - and if the sense of it being denied is too great internally, they will feel *dependant* on getting it from outside and driven to HAVE to take it by force, almost like someone who is gasping for air and trying to stay alive.

Therefore the attempted rape and murder of others is actually someone who perceives such absence of love within themselves that no matter how hard they try they can't get the love into themselves, and so claw at others viciously and violently trying to take it, as if their life depends on it. All that's happening is their perception is very backwards and they are so convinced of their unworthiness and unlovability that they see others are unworthy and unlovable and so deserving of being taken from. It is really that the person has taken away from themselves and now perceives this denial of love as if coming from others.

So while some of us are in sort of in-between states of feeling a neediness or "why it is unfair that other people don't love me" and "surely I'm lovable, why are people not liking me" and "if only they would love me more" or whatever... we are still on the downward spiral towards viciousness. We just didn't become quite so desperate yet as for it to turn into a violent attempt to take it from others, but we're doing basically the same process. A perceived absence of love within, leads to an automatic quest to get it from without. And then it is everyone else's responsibility to supply it, and if they do not, it is their fault not ours. "What is not love is murder" because when love is perceived to be absent it produces a murderous desire to take it from someone else against their will.

Even if others were to supply huge amounts of love to us, if we are not willing to accept that it is deep inside of us and therefore has been deeply received and acknowledged as something we are worthy of, we will reject it. You can be surrounded by people loving the heck out of you and still believe there is something wrong with you. It's really got nothing to do with whether someone else loves you or not.

Them loving you does not make you believe you are lovable. Them not loving you does not make you believe you are lovable. The only way to believe you are lovable is for YOU to believe it ABOUT YOURSELF, IN SPITE OF what anyone else believes or does. And this boils down to simply accepting that love is INSIDE you, it is present, and it's there because God is there, and God is love, and God is the ONLY SOURCE OF LOVE. "There is no love but God's". God IS the only source of love, you cannot get it anywhere else, it does not exist separate from you, and seeking for it externally is absolutely guaranteed to fail every time because it is NOT OUT THERE.

So we all go through this dynamic and to varying degrees, some of us accept God's love more than others. It's all about degrees of awareness of the presence of love within us, and therefore a WILLINGNESS to ACCEPT that it is there and that we are worthy of it. We ARE worthy of God's love, but even though we are worthy of it, we can still choose to deny it believe otherwise if we want to. In other words, love does not FORCE us to be loved.

Love does not enter where it is not welcome! And that means, love from other people CANNOT get into you if it is not welcome. And so in order to welcome and receive the love from others, you HAVE to be willing to have love be welcome WITHIN YOU FIRST, which means you then accept there is love within you ALREADY, are aware of it (God's Presence in your mind and heart), and therefore DO NOT NEED TO GET IT FROM ELSEWHERE.

Opening up to accept the atonement, which is the acknowledgement and recognition and acceptance and awareness of the CONSTANT LOVE being shared by God and your TOTAL WILLINGNESS to receive it and accept it as the truth about you, is the *ONLY SOLUTION* to this problem of love's absence.

And once this problem is solved, there is no further need to get love from anywhere else, no need to have people love you or not love you, no need to be special, no need for special attention, no neediness or attention-seeking or acting out or being a sexual slave or selling yourself out or abandoning yourself or people pleasing or vicious attempts to take "yourself" from those who supposedly stole YOU from you. Since you are love, you believe that if others have the love and are supposed to give it to you, you believe they are supposed to give YOU to you and therefore are responsible for making you what you are. And it doesn't work.

You ARE love. Accepting that you are love accepts the love is IN YOU and therefore there is no LACK and therefore no NEED to seek for it where it does not exist, and therefore you couldn't GIVE A SHIT what anyone thinks of you, whether they love you or hate you, it has absolutely no bearing on whether you are happy or not. YOU are responsible for choosing your happiness, no-one else is responsible for your happiness, and no-one else has any power to take it from you.

Getting your love from within/God gives you thus tremendous psychological strength and invulnerability and resilience and confidence and certainty and knowing, which cannot be swayed or affected by anything external. Having not GIVEN anything external the power to give TO you the love you are lacking, you also have not given anything external the power to deny your lovability on your behalf, and therefore you are NOT at the effect of the world. Accepting the atonement is the key to immortality.

Once you accept it from God, it's a done deal. Permanent love within you and flowing through you. Then it becomes more about you extending love to others through you so that you SHARE IN IT and thus experience it as having been received by you from God (to have all, give all to all), rather than trying to manipulate others into making this decision for you. Now that you are able to love IN SPITE OF whether other people are loving you back or not, that is unconditional love. To love others even if they hate your guts, are attacking you, are pushing you away, and want nothing to do with you. Even if they don't see you, or acknowledge you, or recognize you. To love them anyway. Teach only love because that is what you are.

God loves you right now 100%. Can you accept it? You already ARE it, whether you accept it or not.