You are free to perceive yourself as persecuted if you choose, but you must be equating yourself with the destructible...

You have probably reacted for years as if you were being crucified. This is a marked tendency of the separated, who always refuse to consider what they have done to themselves. If you react as if you are persecuted, you must be equating yourself with the destructible, and are therefore regarding yourself insanely. The truth in you cannot BE assailed. Do not try to protect it yourself, or you are believing that it is assailable. 

You are free to perceive yourself as persecuted if you choose. When you do choose to react that way, however, you might remember that I was persecuted as the world judges, and I did not share this evaluation for myself. And because I did not share it, I did not strengthen it. I therefore offered a different interpretation on attack, and one which I want to share with you. If you will believe it, you will help Me teach it.

Assault can ultimately be made only on the body. There is little doubt that one body can assault another, and can even destroy it. But I elected, for your sake and mine, to demonstrate that the most outrageous assault, as judged by the world, does not matter. As the world judges these things, I was betrayed, abandoned, beaten, torn, and finally killed. But the message the crucifixion intended to teach was, Teach only Love, for that is what you are.

The message of the crucifixion is perfectly clear, although the Apostles often misunderstood it, and for the same reason that anyone misunderstands it. If the Apostles had really understood Me, they would not have described my reactions to Judas as they did. I could not have said, “Betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss?” unless I believed in betrayal. The whole message of the crucifixion was simply that I did not. Was it likely that I would condemn him when I was ready to demonstrate that condemnation is impossible? Judas was my brother and a Son of God, as much a part of the Sonship as myself.

You will not find peace until you have removed the nails from the hands of God’s Son, and have taken the last thorn from his forehead. You have nailed yourself to a cross, and placed a crown of thorns upon your own head. Yet you cannot crucify God’s Son, or assign to death whom God has given eternal life. The Love of God surrounds His Son whom the god of crucifixion condemns. That is why you must teach only one lesson. If you are to be conflict-free yourself, you must learn you are only love. When you deny this, you make what you are something you must learn to remember.

You are not asked to be crucified, which was part of my own teaching contribution. You are merely asked to follow my example in the face of much less extreme temptations to misperceive, and not to accept them as false justifications for anger.

The dream of crucifixion still lies heavy on your eyes, but what you see in dreams is not reality. While you perceive the Son of God as crucified, you are asleep. And as long as your believe you can crucify him, you are only having nightmares.

Would you join in the resurrection or the crucifixion? Would you condemn your brothers or set them free? Would you transcend your prison and ascend to the Father? These questions are all the same, and are answered together.

The world IS a picture of the crucifixion of God’s Son. And until you realize that God’s Son cannot be crucified, this is the world you will see.

Judgment Is Totally Misunderstood By The World

Judgment is totally misunderstood by the world. As the world uses the term, an individual is capable of “good” and “bad” judgment, and his education aims at strengthening the former and minimizing the latter. There is, however, considerable confusion about what these categories mean. What is “good” judgment to one is “bad” judgment to another. Further, even the same person classifies the same action as showing “good” judgment at one time and “bad” judgment at another time. Nor can any consistent criteria for determining what these categories are be really taught.

The aim of our curriculum, unlike the goal of the world’s learning, is the recognition that judgment in the usual sense is impossible.

This is not an opinion but a fact.

In order to judge anything rightly, one would have to be fully aware of an inconceivably wide range of things; past, present, and to come. One would have to recognize in advance all the effects of his judgments on everyone and everything involved in them in any way. And one would have to be certain there is no distortion in his perception, so that his judgment would be wholly fair to everyone on whom it rests now and in the future. Who is in a position to do this? Who except in grandiose fantasies would claim this for himself?

Remember all the times you thought you knew all the “facts” you needed for judgment, and how wrong you were! To judge is to be dishonest, for to judge is to assume a position you do not have.

Wisdom is not judgment; it is the relinquishment of judgment. It is necessary for the teacher of God to realize , not that he should not judge, but that he cannot.

Ask yourself whether your judgment or the Word of God is more likely to be true. For they say different things about the world, and things so opposite that it is pointless to try to reconcile them.

Certainly peace seems to be impossible here, yet His Word has promised peace. God says there is no death; your judgment see but death as the inevitable end of life. God offers the world salvation; your judgment would condemn it. The world you see cannot be the world God loves, and yet His Word assures us that He loves the world.  Who is right? For One of you is wrong. It must be so.

In your judgment peace is not possible in this world, and can never be possible. But in the Judgment of God what is reflected here is only peace. Make then but one more judgment. . It is this: There is Someone with you Whose judgment is perfect.

Gently His judgment substitutes for yours. And through this substitution you lay judgment down, not with regret but with a sigh of gratitude. Now are you free of a burden so great that you could merely stagger and fall down beneath it. Now can the teacher of God rise up unburdened, and walk lightly on. Yet it is not only this that is his benefit. His sense of care is gone, for he has none. He has given it away, along with judgment. He gave himself to Him Whose judgment he has chosen now to trust, instead of his own. Now he makes no mistakes. His Guide is sure. And where he came to judge, he comes to bless. 

It is not difficult to relinquish judgment. But it is difficult to keep it.  The teacher of God lays it down happily the instant he recognizes its cost. All of the ugliness he sees about him is its outcome. All of the pain he looks upon is its result. All of the loneliness and sense of loss; of passing time and growing hopelessness; of sickening despair and fear of death; all these have come of it. And now he knows that these things need not be. Not one is true. For he has given up their cause, and they, which never were but effects of his mistaken choice, have fallen from him. Teacher of God, this step will bring you peace.

I Gave God One Year... Which Took 3 Years of Practice

Today I completed the last lesson of the Workbook from A Course in Miracles. It is the final day of this one year I gave to God. (It took me three years of practice to give God one year of my focus.)

The workbook is 365 daily lessons that have the overall aim of training the mind in a systematic way to a different perception of everyone and everything. Some of the ideas the workbook presents you will find hard to believe, and others may seem to be quite startling. This does not matter. You need not believe the ideas, you need not accept them, and you need not even welcome them. Some of them you may actively resist. None of this will matter, or decrease their efficacy.

We come in honesty to God and say we did not understand, and ask him to help us to learn His Lessons, through the Voice of His Own Teacher. Let Him prepare you further and guide you through every difficulty and all pain that you may think is real. He has earned my trust by speaking daily to me of our Father and our brother and our Self. He will continue. Now you walk with Him.

Together, you and I, we found a single purpose that we shared. And thus you joined with me, so what I am are you as well.

It is our function to remember Him on earth, as it is given us to be His own completion in reality.

This course is a beginning, not an end. Your friend goes with you. You are not alone. No one who calls on Him can call in vain. Would He hurt His son? Or would He rush to answer him, and say, “This is My Son, and all I have is his.” Be certain He will answer thus, for these are His own words to you. And more than that can no one ever have, for in these words is all there is, and all that there will be throughout all time and in eternity.

Henceforth, hear but the Voice for God and for your Self when you retire from the world, to seek reality instead. He will direct your efforts, telling you exactly what to do, how to direct your mind, and when to come to Him in silence, asking for His sure direction and His certain word.

And if I need a word to help me, He will give it to me. If I need a thought, that will He also give. And if I need but stillness and a tranquil, open mind, these are gifts I will receive of Him. He is in charge by my request. And He will hear and answer me, because He speaks for God my Father and His holy Son.

God's Movie

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Our Often Backwards And Uncivilized Nation

The overwhelming majority of people will continue to believe as they always have. They’ll continue to live in denial. They will try to bring God into the world and spiritualize the universe, thinking there is some kind of compassionate intelligence behind what is really a murderous thought. They will see death as part of a “circle of life,” when it is really just a symbol of the great mistake. So they’ll gloss everything over.

Nobody will talk about the fact that half of the homeless and prisoners should be getting treatment in mental institutions, or that more police die by suicide than in the line of duty.

Corporations, through the small print in trade agreements, replace the laws of nations with the decisions of international councils. Its put them in a position where they don’t have to follow the laws of many countries and do not have to pay the money from lawsuits that they lose to individuals, effectively placing them above the law.

In the 20TH century money became more important than people in this country. In the 21ST century, money will become more important than the laws that are passed by our elected officials, who owe the money for their campaigns and thus their elections to these same corporations anyway. Thus the big money will put itself in a position of total authority. The process of legislative democracy, which is already a sham, has become more and more like a professional wrestling match where it’s all for show and the result has already been determined.

In our often backwards and uncivilized nation, about 8,000 of our citizens are killed each year with guns—while in our neighboring country of Canada, only about 100 people are killed with guns. Yet the fanatics in our country who treasure weapons more than people will continue to have their way against the will of the majority, and deny that their clearly insane policies cost thousands of people their lives each year—all while the ego smiles with delight.

More people make money their new god, including those who seek abundance through what they think of as spiritual means. There’s nothing wrong with money, but there’s nothing spiritual about it either—and those who seek God first will find Him first.

Now here’s something you probably didn’t notice about these issues; they are all forgiveness lessons! All of them are somehow connected to bodies, because relationships play into every situation in some way eventually. Not only is it your task to forgive what you see on television or read on the Internet, but it is especially vital for you to forgive the bodies your eyes see as the relationships in your every day life. These people are there for a reason.

Newtonian physics held that objects were real and outside of you with a separate existence. Quantum physics demonstrates that this is not true. The universe is not what you assume it to be; everything that appears to exist is really inseparable thought. You can’t even observe something without causing a change in it on the sub-atomic level. Everything is in your mind, including your own body. As aspects of Buddhism correctly teach, the mind that is thinking everything is one mind, and this mind is completely outside the illusion of time and space. What no philosophy except one teaches is a truth that will seldom be well received by anyone: the fact that this mind is itself also an illusion.

Your life is all in your mind. Your head, your brain, your body, your world, your entire universe, any parallel universes, and anything else that can be perceived are projections of the mind. They are all symbolic of just one thought. One thought made all images appear, because they all represent the same thing in seemingly different forms. 

The universe you see is symbolic of the one thought that you have separated yourself from God—presented in many forms—and you feel secretly terrified and enormously guilty over the separation. The thought of separation from God, or individuality, is symbolized by the ego, and it has been projected seemingly outward from the mind—and you along with it.  On this new level of the world of bodies where the thought of separation has been projected, seemingly outside yourself, the substitute causes of sin, the projected responsibility for guilt and the many imagined reasons for fear of any kind can be found somewhere outside of you—and of course, other people see everything as being outside of them.

If nothing is outside of your mind, then to judge it is to grant it power over you, and to not judge it is to withdraw its power over you. This certainly contributes to the end of your suffering. Even judgment in its most basic form, such as to label something as good or bad, would be to differentiate between things that are actually the same because of their unreality. Thus, it is not really valid to judge anything.

Today, you have two huge religions that are controlled by a reactionary majority, both of which are in competition for the hearts and minds of a world that isn’t there—one religion being the symbol of an empire based on money, and the other religion being the symbol of a government that could possibly engage in nuclear war along with its next-door, equally reactionary Muslim neighbor.

Such antics may be good enough for most of the planet, but they don’t have to be good enough for you. The attitude of non-dualism tells you that what you are seeing is not the truth. If it’s not the truth, then how can you judge it? To judge it is to give it reality. But how can you judge and give reality to that which isn’t there? And if it’s not there, why would you need to acquire it, or fight a war over it, or make it more holy or valuable than something else? How could one piece of land on earth be more important than another? Why would it matter what happens in an illusion, unless you have given the illusion a power it does not and cannot have? How could it matter what result is produced in a particular situation unless you have made a false idol out of the situation?

Do not make the miscreated world psychologically real for yourself. You make it psychologically real for yourself by failing to forgive. The world is not an evil to be despised. It is a perfect opportunity for forgiveness and salvation. Instead of judging the world and everything in it, perhaps it would be more helpful for you to ask what value you saw in making it up in the first place. It may also be wise to ask yourself what would be a more appropriate response to it now.  Rather than resisting the world, look for ways you can use it as a chance to get home.

You don’t have to wait. Your time is at hand, but only if you’re willing to follow the Holy Spirit’s thought system instead of trying to lead the planet on a wild goose chase. You can’t have both you and God. It’s not possible. You can’t have both your universe and God. The two are mutually exclusive. You’ll have to choose.

You may not want to believe this yet, but God does not make demands of people. You think it is God’s will that is being acted out here, but you and the world are wrong about that. It is something else that is being constantly acted out here— namely your seeming separation from God. We want to help you return to your reality with Him.

The seeming interaction between you and God is really an interaction within your own unconscious split mind—between the part of you that has forgotten your reality and the part of your mind where the Holy Spirit dwells. He has never left you. His Voice, which you will learn how to be vigilant for, is your memory of God—your memory of your true home. This Voice represents your long-forgotten reality. Now you must learn how to choose something that you will have tremendous resistance to choosing. You must learn how to choose between the Holy Spirit, Who represents the real you, and the part of your mind that represents the false you. And you will learn how to do it in such a way that your long-imprisoned unconscious mind can finally be freed.

It’s Independence Day

You’ve been a robot. But the programmer isn’t somebody else. There isn’t anybody else. We’re talking about self pre-determination. Your fate on this level was sealed by your deal with your ego, not God—who makes no deals.

Your entire ego mind is the programmer that sends signals to your brain. Your brain is just part of the hardware. It forwards the signals telling the body, or computer unit, what to do, see and feel. Changes in the electromagnetic fields even regulate how you see things. To say that something is visible to you simply means that it is situated in the region of the electromagnetic spectrum that is perceptible to human vision.

A whole new level of mind has been made in order for the ego thought system to act itself out through you, without you being aware of it. You’re being used, and you don’t even know it. It’s time for you to start taking your life back—your real life. In order to do that however, you have to know what you’re dealing with.

The ego is quite a piece of work. The thought of separation from God has been projected seemingly outward from the mind—and you along with it. That is how the entire universe, including your body, as well as all other bodies were made. Your experience is that you are here on the computer screen—separate from God, separate from your brothers and your sisters, and acting out the thought of separation and the conflict that goes along with the duality of your split mind. Your brothers and sisters are doing exactly what you want them to do.

Your decisions are not really made by you here. They were made on a totally different level when you agreed to the ego’s plan, and the only way out of the whole can of worms is to return to your right mind and choose the Holy Spirit’s alternative interpretation of what you see instead of your ego’s interpretation, which keeps you trapped in the script.

Inventions on this level usually mimic some aspect of what the mind does. You may think you have free will here and that you can determine what’s going to happen to you, but the truth is it’s all happened already. You’re just playing the tape, watching and listening—thinking it’s all real and a result of your own volition or chance on this level, rather than a set-up from another level.

People are like ghosts, except on a seemingly different level. They think their bodies are alive, but they’re not. They just see what they want to see. That’s why Jesus said, “Let the dead bury their dead.”

Your body seems to be attached to you, but it’s actually outside of you like everything else you perceive. Since everything that appears to be outside of you is equally illusory, your body should be regarded as no more real or important to you than anyone else’s.

People need help in order to find the truth and be led home. They need the Holy Spirit’s Help, but the Holy Spirit also needs your help in the form of your forgiveness of the images you see.

You’re not a robot once you get in touch with your power to choose. It’s independence day. You’ll never be the same once you know how to forgive.

You Will Remember

I give you this humble bit of counseling when it comes to all of your relationships in this world, whether they were founded on love or hate. Why don’t you stop worrying about whether or not people love you and just love them? Then it doesn’t matter what they think about you. You can just be love. It’s so simple! And guess what? It will ultimately determine how you feel about yourself!

Nobody knows how to forgive at first. It takes time to learn. People don’t know what they’re doing to their own minds when they judge and condemn others. Even Jesus’s own disciples, didn’t really understand it at first. Sure, they thought they knew a lot at the time. Everybody does. Yet as Jesus says in the Course, in regard to the derivative teachings of the New Testament, some of which originated with and were handed down by certain disciples:

"As you read the teachings of the Apostles, remember that I told them myself that there was much they would understand later, because they were not wholly ready to follow me at the time."

Some people may not want to know it today, but all of the disciples had at least twenty more lifetimes to go through and more lessons to learn before they attained their enlightenment. They certainly did learn a lot from Jesus in that lifetime though, because they couldn’t help but be struck by Jesus’ belief in the one Great Commandment  of the God of Israel: “The Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

Jesus had the kind of humility that said, “God, I just want you.” How many people are ready to say that and mean it? Are you ready to go for the end-game?

Your special loves are simply idols in which you seek to get what you feel is lacking in yourself. Romance is a vain attempt to fill an imagined emptiness—a hole that doesn’t really exist, but that you experience as a result of the separation. That sense of lack can really only be healed by the Atonement and salvation, leading you to the wholeness of your oneness with God.

Home is where the heart is. If your heart is with God, then you’re already home. Renounce the world, not physically but mentally. This world you seem to live in is not home to you. And somewhere in your mind you know that this is true. That attitude will make it ten times easier for you to forgive. The next time it hits the fan my friend, remember God and forgive—for if you forgive then you will remember God.

As you become accomplished in the application of forgiveness, your pain and your discomfort will lessen and sometimes disappear. Notice I didn’t say that the apparent cause of the pain and discomfort would disappear. It would be theoretically possible for a master to die of cancer, or be murdered like Jesus, and not feel the pain associated with such events. If your pain is gone, and your suffering along with it, then does it really matter if the illusory cause of the pain still appears to be there? Which is just one more reason why you should never go by appearances. 

Whatever appears to be causing your pain, whether it’s a circumstance or a relationship or both, may or may not disappear when you practice forgiveness. The ego’s script doesn’t always appear to change when you want it to. But it is possible to end all the suffering that’s called for by the ego’s script and have peace instead of fear. That’s the Holy Spirit’s script.

Another thing you should remember is not to be distracted by teachings that may serve others and help them feel temporarily better, but are not part of the path you’ve chosen.

There will be those who tell you that when you have a problem, person or object to deal with you can say, “I am that,” and it will disappear. Becoming one with something in your projection only makes it real for you, and will not undo the guilt in your mind that you can’t see. Only true forgiveness can do that.

There will also be those who tell you that observing and being aware of your emotions will free you from your compulsions. Yet even though you’ve seen for yourself that observing your feelings can lessen their impact, it is still not the same as forgiving them. Only the true forgiveness of your relationships, and thus the healing of the unconscious guilt in your mind, can really free you from your compulsions or anything else.

Finally, you may hear from those seeking balance: the balancing of body, mind and spirit, or balancing dual forces like yin and yang, or balancing “the force” itself. Balancing illusions is not forgiving them.

Concentrate on the path that was meant for you. Others will follow that same path during different lifetimes. Don’t forget, the Course is a very new thing. Rock’n’roll is twenty years older than the Course! Be grateful you got to play both, and give this new spiritual path a chance to find those it’s meant to find.