We assert that we do not see innocently: healing entails learning to perceive without condemnation. I and my cohost examine chapter three of A Course in Miracles and explain atonement without sacrifice and the link between resurrection and atonement. We describe miracles as true perception and contrast perception with knowledge, showing that judgment and the ego distort our view. I discuss the authority problem and how the ego defends a manufactured self image that blocks peace. We urge listeners to practice forgiveness, choose love over fear, and let spirit guide daily life. We invite you to begin or continue the Course practice and to bring the light of innocent perception into your relationships and actions. We explain the doctrine of innocent perception and its practical implications for spiritual living. I outline the distinction between perception and knowledge and describe how perception is filtered through judgment, guilt, and fear, whereas knowledge is a state of unity and certainty that precedes all experience. We argue that the atonement is established by resurrection rather than by crucifixion, and we show how the Course dismantles the notion that love demands sacrifice. I emphasize the lamb and lion metaphor to demonstrate that true innocence is strength and cannot be attacked. We then link miracles to true perception, describing miracles as corrections of misperception that allow us to see our neighbor as they truly are and to restore inner peace. We also address the authority problem and the construction of the self image. I describe how the ego claims authorship of the self and defends an illusory autonomy that invites fear of spirit and a compulsion to judge. We explain that judgment presumes sufficient context that we do not possess, and that correction, not punishment, is the appropriate response to error. Finally, we connect these ideas to practice: surrendering authorship, practicing pardon, and cultivating communion rather than petitionary prayer are offered as the means by which knowledge reasserts itself and the split mind heals.

Takeaways:

• We present that innocent perception requires choosing love over judgment and practicing forgiveness daily.
• I observed that miracles are described as true perception which corrects misperception and heals the mind.
• We explain that the atonement is established by resurrection, not by punishment, and love demands no sacrifice.
• I note the distinction between perception and knowledge, where knowledge is unity and perception invites error and division.
• We describe the ego as an authority problem that defends a manufactured self image and resists surrender to spirit.
• I assert that true healing comes from correcting perception through forgiveness, leading to inner resurrection and return home.
• We argue that practicing love and surrender dissolves the split mind, allowing us to perceive neighbors as perfect creations rather than objects of fear, guilt, or judgment.

Welcome back to practicum.

This is episode four.

My name is Aaron.

And I'm Daniel.

And we're here to talk to you about chapter three of A Course in Miracles.

We're going to be going through the innocent perception today, and we're going to be talking about that chapter which is up for today.

So, Daniel, how was your week?

How are you doing?

My week was incredible, I have to say.

I've been through a lot of outer turmoil which didn't seem to affect my inner world so much.

So it was really great to see that through.

A car breakdown, a computer error, all of that kind of stuff that normally would get me upset or worried.

I was just like, oh, interesting.

It was just like, interesting.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

So I'm at the end of this week.

We had lovely, lovely concert a few days ago and it felt great to share some of the music about coming home and.

And source and God and.

Yeah.

And I met some friends I started a Course in Miracles with a few years ago.

So it was really, really nice.

Wonderful.

I know last week we had entered.

We had entered into it.

We were both saying we had.

We were in our own search, in our own practices.

We had both felt a little bit of a vibrational, that we were a little out of sync.

And then we had.

Had found ourselves going into the podcast.

What was beautiful is I felt connected all week.

I didn't.

I didn't feel like I'd missed a beat.

Great, great conversations with friends, beautiful skies, observance of nature.

Just things like that.

It's.

It's a lovely world when you perceive it in that way, isn't it?

I'm pretty much sure people can hear it in your voice, but I see your smiling face.

So if this was a video podcast, you could.

If I could.

Looking very happy.

Very happy.

Yeah.

If I could hold on to the energy that, you know, is.

Hold on to it.

Stay in this frequency.

What's beautiful is the.

The study for this chapter, I think also leads to kind of, you know, getting you in that headspace.

I know.

At least for me.

I mean, when we're talking about the innocent perception, we're talking about atonement without sacrifice.

Yeah, incredible.

We're talking about miracles as true perception.

Perception of knowledge.

Arrow and the ego.

Love it.

Love that part.

Beyond perception.

And then for me, really sunk in deeper in my prep judgment and the authority problem.

Very, very powerful.

But it's not very powerful stuff.

And was there one other one?

Is that.

Yeah, yeah.

No.

Creating versus the creating versus self image.

Which, you know, it was, it was like the, I found that as I was going through the preparation, because I began preparation right after our last podcast, that a lot of the experiences I was having was reinforcing, where I was kind of trying to understand a little bit better, particularly on the self image one.

So I've been thinking about that for a couple of weeks now and I'm very excited to kind of talk about that from my perspective.

So shall we, shall we get going?

Yes, absolutely.

I just want to encourage anybody who has not yet started, studied, or actually it's not a study, practice the course in miracles to just get started, whatever, wherever you are, calendar lesson today, or just get started.

It's a life, a lifetime pursuit, I guess, or maybe at one point it will drop away as the course predicts that it won't have any meaning in itself.

But for me, every day I'm delving into it, especially because within the podcast I'm doing more of it.

I just see the power of it.

I love to just start with the innocent perception and maybe just link it back to chapter two, because chapter two explains the belief in separation, you could say.

And in chapter three it starts to show what that belief does to your perception.

And I think in a one word summary, in a one line summary, that is we do not see innocently.

We do not see through the eyes of Christ or through the eyes of love, because we look through our eyes through judgment, guilt, fear and the idea of self concept.

And that is what is so commonly just called the ego, like the perception, the error, the belief is really that creates that misperception.

And healing is learning to perceive without condemnation.

Because the moment you have judgment, guilt, fear and self concept, you see other as something that might attack you.

So you attack first.

And I think that's, that's for me at the outset what really blows me away.

I, I mean I think we were talking a lot last week about radiating truth or having this, this, this light inside of us that brings out this joy and everyone can see it and experience it.

You were remarking on my disposition this morning.

And I mean that's an example of it, right?

If you can be your most authentic self, not the image that you created, but in being, just sharing with your neighbor love, helping your friends with their opportunities, or just being a good human and just giving love.

And what's beautiful about it is it's a selfish act because the more you give, the more you receive.

And that's the lesson.

That's a huge lesson.

I mean, Jim Rohn one of my favorite business philosophers, I think he called himself, he said, giving starts the receiving process.

And so many people do the opposite.

They're like arms crossed, saying, show me first that I receive, then I might give.

And that of course, blocks the flow of abundance.

Right?

Right.

We live in a cynical world right now, but the cynicism may be our own projection onto the world.

Because as you shift perception, you don't see the cynicism, you don't see the negativity because you don't value what is valueless.

You're not watching the news, you're not watching.

You're engaging with humanity in a local level.

This is an attempt to do it at an international level.

You begin to teach love, you begin to live love, you begin to just.

You just need to continue to drink it, to feed on it, and it's wonderful.

So when I think about the atonement without sacrifice, what comes to my mind is a major statement here.

The crucifixion did not establish the atonement.

The resurrection established the atonement.

Right.

So anything of the body, anything of the, the physical nature, you know, we were talking, I think we were talking a lot about identifying with spirit versus versus the body in the last one as well.

You know, I think the idea that God punished humanity or his own son, and we're getting back into that original sin concept in a lot of ways.

The idea that perfect love would punish in such a way is a ridiculous thought.

And you can accept that truth in your heart.

It's going to be hard because you're part of that process.

And we're going to get into that.

As we get into the different chapters,.

I just want to say this is, I think, one of the biggest challenges here.

If you have a traditional Christian belief, then this atonement without sacrifice is a huge challenge because the idea that God requires suffering, payment, sacrifice or punishment is very much part of the dogma.

It's very much entrenched in the idea of the original sin and sinner.

And the cause in miracles argues in a radical way that love does not demand sacrifice.

And what I like about it, the course says, very smart.

If we imagine that God requires suffering, we are projecting our own ideas of guilt and punishment onto God.

So if you sitting here and you have this belief that God requires suffering, the course says it's your perception, it's your misperception of your own guilt and punishment, which is just proof of your own separation, that you think God would want them from you.

So the emphasis is not that God was angry, and therefore he caused suffering.

But the opposite is almost true.

That love, the love that Jesus lived cannot be destroyed by attack.

And this is what you said to Aaron, that the atonement, you know, is linked directly to the resurrection, not to the crucifixion.

You know, I think the other piece that I like, where it comes to somewhat of an end, is in the first section of chapter three.

Sacrifice is unknown to God.

And the symbol of this is the lamb and the lion laying together.

Yes.

That innocence is strength.

And that from this place, when we accept truth, our altars inside of us radiate.

And that's kind of how that first section ends.

And then it gets into miracles as true perception.

Do you want to.

Do you want to.

Do you want to start that?

I just want to tag on to this lamb and lion idea because again, we in our distorted mythology have the lamb, the sacrificial lamb.

And I know it's been used in the scripture as well this way.

But the innocence of the lamb, I think is the key point here and that there is enormous strength symbolized through the lion.

There's absolute power.

Innocence cannot be attacked.

True innocence doesn't have to be defended, therefore it cannot be attacked because it is eternal.

So I think that's.

That's such a powerful statement.

And I want to speak to the cynicism that you said spoke to right at the beginning, Aaron, before I go into this sub chapter, chapter two of part three.

Cynicism is.

Is just a way to avoid feeling purity of heart, feeling innocence, admitting to goodness.

Right.

When what it does, it kills joy.

It's a bit like when you see people who, who are just feeling so cool.

They are, you know, they're closing themselves off to innocence and joy, and they just look so bored.

Right.

Is that there's an aspect of coolness and cynical which is just hard and sharp, and it's not really something you.

You get, you derive any joy from.

And you and I spoke about it.

I don't know if it's offline or on a podc.

We said, you know, if we recognize truly that we're children of God.

And it's.

I think it says it in one of Paul's scriptures in Timothy, he said we should be pretty much exalted with joy.

We should be exploding with joy.

We should be running around singing the top of our voice because of the miracle that it is to exist and be alive.

So whenever you feel, oh, I can't express my joy in this world of cynicism that's maybe exactly where these darkness and light are meeting, where you're invited to.

Just turn on the brightness button a little bit.

Right?

Turn it up so that.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I mean, I think it's just the likeness of the altars coming together and recognizing the divine, the divinity.

Whenever you're meeting another human being, you're meeting an aspect of the Creator, or whenever you're engaging with nature, you're engaging with an aspect of the Creator.

So to become like little children, to live in that, that space of your innocence when you, when you finally accept your innocence through the atonement.

Right?

The atonement is.

The is.

Is again the principle, the met.

The method to.

To accept the atonement is, is by learning how to perform miracles, which are another word for love.

Right?

And so the interaction of, of, of the day to day of, of choosing love over.

Over your cynicism, over your egoic kind spirit to come in and allowing spirit to be your guide and allowing spirit to lead you through the day, you're naturally going to engage with life and the grass and the trees and the animals and ultimately a fellow human being from that place of your altar, you're going to be experiencing a miraculous life.

Because love is just present everywhere in everything.

I think that piece of wood and.

You'll see it, you know, that kind.

Of, you know, it's exactly what it means by miracle is true perception.

Again, the course points to saying that the miracle is just.

And I mean, I'm making the inverted comma sign in the audio podcast just a correction of perception.

So miracles is your natural state of experiencing the world.

If you are corrected from misperception and miracles is true perception is exactly that says currently most people, most of us most of the time see other people through what they have done, what we think they might have done, fear they might do all of this, all this projection onto them.

And true perception begins to see beyond that.

And the miracle effectively says, there is so much more to this person than I am currently judging.

There is so much more to this thing that I'm currently judging because.

And my understanding is, because I clearly don't know everything.

Therefore what I am judging is misperception.

And I think that really helped me because I'm like, I have every right to be, you know, fill in the blanks.

But because you don't know the full picture, because no, no one person can, no person can, no human can.

You can 100% deduce, scientifically deduce that what you are judging cannot be the truth of what is actually happening.

So there is so much more to this person or idea.

And if you can tell yourself that, it will immediately take the edge off your judgment, it will correct your perception.

You accept your neighbor's truth as it is and you accept it for them, right?

So when somebody's attacking you, you have every right to be vigilant for your own personal safety and security.

And when we're saying attack, we're mostly talking about interactions on a day to day that happen where somebody makes a shirty comment at you or something like that and you immediately want to respond to that, rather than responding to that, just let it slide past you, pardon that person.

It's an error of how they're perceiving the world.

Your perception of the world is stronger than that.

And in your strength you stand in your truth and that truth radiates from you and it will have an impact on that person.

And that is the little miracle that's taking place.

We shall see him as he is, right?

We shall see our brother as he is.

I mean, I think this miracles as a true perception is a great explanation of the Trinity, right?

Because it's describing how.

And the Trinity is another concept from traditional Christianity that I could never quite get my head wrapped around.

You know, I understood in concept God, right?

And I understood in concept His Son Jesus.

And then I understood, well, sort of that there was this, this spiritual aspect to all this in the Holy Ghost, right?

But when you think about the Trinity from this place, from of understanding and knowing, it's the idea is that, you know, you are really God, is, is all right?

And you're a thought in God's mind and the inner relationship between God and His Son.

And again, we're defining his Son as all, all life, all sons and daughters of God, all, all that is, that is the Son of God is not.

Jesus himself created from God.

Everything created from God in his mind, right?

And if you understand that, then the communication vehicle between the two is the Holy Spirit.

The ability to relate between the two is the Holy Spirit.

So I think this kind of sets all this out in a really nice way.

So give your mind over to the Father.

Be of one mind, be of one will and experience this type of way of living.

So perception versus knowledge.

We should get into that.

I would just like to add to this Holy Ghost thing because for me, Holy Spirit, Holy Ghost again, depicted as the white dove above Jesus's head.

I never fully understood that either.

I can't claim I do fully understand it now, but my current best Experience of the Holy Ghost is the animation, the anima.

And anima.

The Latin word from anima is soul, which is.

Which is beautiful.

The ani, it's Easter, it's in the word animal, but it's also in the animation.

The thing that animates that, that is alive, the aliveness in.

In me that that sponsors and carries the word.

That's for me, spirit, Holy Spirit.

And that is the link or the.

The expression of the sonship going to perception versus knowledge.

I had to look at the German translation because knowledge for me was still a cognitive word.

And the Germans use a great word, akandness.

And perception is vahnemung.

So if I had to translate it into English, perception or vahnehmen would be to take as truth.

And acantness is recognition.

So for me they're almost at least clearer in my inner being when I say what I take as truth.

Perception clearly filtered through my own ideas versus the idea of actually perceiving something or acantness to recognize something.

So for me, perception versus knowledge.

I had to translate it into my mother tongue German to get a deeper understanding.

Perception.

In the courses, description involves interpretation.

The perceiver and something perceived, therefore separation subject and object.

Therefore perception can never be truth, therefore you always are mistaken because there is the seen and the seer.

And knowledge in the course of the terminology, in the course terminology is actually comes from unity.

So I think this is where the course also delves into non duality in a way.

It's for the first time proposes that knowledge is not open to interpretation.

It's not about developing deeper beliefs, better opinions.

It actually points to beyond perception altogether.

So it's.

Once you corrected perception at one point, it doesn't operate in that level anymore.

How did you.

How do you see that?

What's your take on.

On?

Well, there's just some things that little notes that I wrote down here.

I think I'm going to start at the end where it says something along the lines of Knowledge precedes everything.

So this is what.

And.

And it is the end of everything.

God knows you only in peace.

I am the Alpha and the Omega.

So the sense of knowledge.

Knowledge is eternal.

Knowledge is certainty.

Right.

And you will not experience knowledge or have knowledge in the physical mind, right?

In the physical.

In the physical.

In the physical time space.

In fact it says, you know, you.

You do not remember who and what you are in time space.

That you know this sense of a stable state of time and past.

And it's not going to, you know, it's not going to, you know, you're not going to feel, you're not going to feel stability in time space because of this unknowing.

The Bible asks us to know ourselves because of the certainty that comes from that and the peace that comes from that certainty.

So naturally, knowledge comes from that certain place in the altar within.

And God communicates to his altars with certainty.

So to know is to establish a tunnel.

I don't know how to describe it.

A certain way within yourself, in meditation, to experience that knowledge that's within you and to identify with that.

And then it kind of gets to this place and kind of perception leads to attack, which leads to fear, which leads to hurting yourself, which leads to ignorance.

And the cycle stays there until you break that cycle, until you begin to question the illusions, begin to see the miracle of changing your mind, changing your decision, and how you're perceiving the world and giving your brother that pardon as you're experiencing an attack or something like that.

Or maybe you're the one that's attacking first and you need to give the freedom of a miracle, you know, in your mind and ask spirit to intervene.

Right.

And I just think this is a, this creates a whole setup where we start to, we start to begin to talk about the image of yourself.

Right?

Totally.

And this.

I'm at error.

I'm at error and ego.

But I want, but I think that, but I think just kind of getting into the end of, the end of this chapter, it starts to get into the image of yourself.

So you can see it building towards that, that concept.

Yeah, I just, it's so profound.

I mean, I always feel like we're only looking at one chapter at a time and already there's so much depth.

But for me, I have become aware how much I have interpreted different words.

For me, knowledge was so much linked to cognition or understanding, you know, scientifically.

So knowing.

I never saw it in the actual word, in the Greek word gnosis.

Right.

The self acantness.

That's why the German word really helped me.

And I do feel sometimes we have to allow ourselves to look at multiple words, to expand what it actually can mean to us.

Otherwise you can get trapped in your own experience of the word.

But it leads to, as Aaron so aptly said, arrow.

And the ego.

Ego depends on error because it depends on separation.

And I think what's so important as well, and we've done this before, we talk about a difference between error and sin.

The, the chat, the chet, the, the Hebrew word of missing the mark.

It's Very different.

Right.

Because an error calls for correction.

A sin calls for punishment or punitive response.

It demands judgment.

Right.

So arrow and the ego.

If you understand that ego can only exist in the error, because separation, that is the basis of ego, is an error in itself.

But the miracle would correct that error of perception.

It doesn't need punishment or retribution or judgment.

And for me, that's, again, not only a huge relief, it's also scary for the ego because we define ourselves.

And this is leading on to the self image part you already alluded to.

Aaron, before we jumped on the podcast, you shared your thesis.

Can I.

Well, I want to.

I'll get it.

I'll get it.

I'll get into that in a minute.

I want to hold off on that one.

I think if we can get through the.

Maybe we can do this at the end.

A couple.

Yeah, yeah.

Because it fits perfectly into this.

Right.

And then we could just talk freely at the end.

So I want to kind of get through.

Maybe we can get through the sections.

Then maybe at the end we can chat a little bit.

So.

So I.

And I was.

I think this error and ego section is really important.

I think this lays out the split mind.

And.

And if.

If in your creative power to, you know, if you're.

If you've split off from the whole, you feel guilt from that.

You feel guilt from that separation because in your decision to eat the apple, proverbial, you know, the metaphoric apple, you split your mind.

You split to create perception.

You split to create this idea where the ego attempts to see yourself as you wish, not as God created you.

And then you're going to begin to perceive a world from that place where you have separated seeing yourself as you wish, not as God created you.

The ability to perceive made the body possible because you needed something to perceive with yourself.

Right?

And we've talked about this idea of if light wanted to know what it was, it would naturally have to open itself to a dark room to see the contrast of darkness.

And so if all you are is this beautiful light of love and peace, safe at home with your father, but you wanted to know yourself.

You wanted to challenge yourself.

It's the metaphor for the hero's journey.

I mean, there's so much here that's so rich with mythologies and metaphors and things for us to look at.

It also talks about how truth is fragmented in this physical place.

Right?

You can never lose your original truth.

You can see it in symbols, but it's fragmented.

It's not going to show up in your perceptions, because your perceptions are misguided, they're not clear.

And so through the acceptance of miracles in your life and practicing love and becoming a master of love, then.

Then you're going to perceive a world that is loving and you're going to heal your perceptions and therefore you're going to begin to heal this split mind, the split perceived state.

And what it lays out is at the very end of this section it talks about spirit is perceived as a threat, and therefore you'll go to great lengths to not engage with spirit.

Wow, right.

Because the conflict is in the perception of what you did.

And so you're hiding this because again, we went back to you can't bear to see your altar defiled.

And so it lays out this very natural way of people just tunneling down into their ingenuity, into their intellectual mind, but splitting off their creative mind, their ingenuity to make.

To make things, but splitting off their other potentials to create.

And in the dialogue of the Savior I love.

I mean, this is my favorite gospel, if any.

You should listen to that one.

I mean, it's fantastic.

It talks a lot about this aspect here in this desire to not know yourself.

So you know, and the need to find yourself and to find this knowledge that's within you.

Beautiful.

I think it leads very naturally to chapter five, the beyond Perception.

In this.

In this part three or chapter three.

And the course suggests this idea that it's not about changing your perception, but moving beyond.

But a correct perception or good perception is a bridge, right?

We do start in a world of me and you, subject and object, right and wrong, innocent and guilty, light and dark.

And as Aaron said correctly, even the Indian creation myths speak about God being oneness.

And out of him emanates the feminine principle which moves around him.

So as movement starts, duality starts and the Vesica Pisces and.

And we move into the idea of, you know, the, the seed of life and all of this symbolism that, that.

That always traces back to unity.

So the more you perceive the miracle, the less these divisions are real.

So knowledge in the course's definition or unity doesn't require any perception because you don't need to orient yourself anymore in a time space, dimensionality.

So there's no.

No longer the same experience of an observer looking at a separate world.

And in that case, again, the.

The course becomes distinctly non.

Dual.

It becomes very, very Advaita and I once saw this beautiful interview of two spiritual masters.

I think it was Krishnamurti, who was one of the first Guys, I read when I was in my teens and he spoke to another spiritual master called Punjaji, and they spoke about the idea of emptying the cup.

And they asked Krishnamurti about enlightenment.

And supposedly he held up that cup and he turned over the cup and said this.

He wants to be just like an empty cup, you know, and the other spiritual master just used the cup and threw it away.

And it says, no cup,.

I like that one.

And he's like, okay.

You know, even the cup and the emptying of the cup is an idea that you can hook onto.

So I mean, I think this, I mean, beyond perception is a really important.

There's really important concepts to kind of study.

I love, and I love it because it starts to get into the space of what am I?

It's the one question you keep asking yourself.

And ironically I had people asking me in just random, deeper conversations, not, not necessarily, but trying to define themselves.

Who am I?

What am I?

What am I?

What am I doing?

What am I supposed to do with my life?

And that's a, that's a natural question we all ask ourselves, right?

And this, this says that, you know, the reason for this is because of perception.

Knowledge is not open to interpretation.

I mean, whether you're the cup or throw the cup away because you have no image of yourself to make, right?

You are in being one with God.

And in being you are peace, you are love, you are joy.

And so it's, it's this, it's this abstract way of thinking.

So when you, when you experience our experience of perception, this is, this gets into the concept of making and creating.

So we make with our intellectual mind.

We make things, we build things.

We.

And it says perception is.

This is partial knowledge.

It's of part.

It's science, it's technology.

It's the evolution of our intellectual thought as a species.

It's a series of never ending evaluative processes that leads to judgment.

And from this place of judgment, spirit is alien to the world.

Peace is your inheritance through knowledge.

And you see this through forgiveness and ultimately from your place of surrender.

But the idea that.

It's an inescapable impasse with perception, it will never end.

I love that.

Never ending.

The judgment comes from this, right?

But it also lays out that one last point here is the prayer versus communion.

Like in prayer, you're asking for something because you are, or you're praying for something, or you're praying for something to be completed, or all these things.

It's a tacit acknowledgement of your imperfection Communion is the end.

Right?

Communion is this idea that you accept yourself as perfect.

And it kind of lays out prayer versus meditation in some ways, doesn't it?

In that regard?

Yeah.

I think it perfectly illustrates the trap of science.

Are trying to understand the last piece of the puzzle.

And I heard this beautiful metaphor once.

The scientist would spend all his life to follow the red thread until he comes to the beginning of the thread, only to then not know what to do with it.

Right?

So you now have the.

Okay, now, now here I hold the, the last piece, the, the ingredient that creates our life.

And now what?

Right?

So because you're so fragmented, you're so separate from this, and you might understand now, but not.

You don't know.

Right.

I think that's a classic, a classic trap of our cognitive obsession these days.

So we try to get it, to understand it, to catalog it, label it, and we're missing, you know, the Buddhists have this concept called chastry.

And if you don't know that classic example, somebody meditates for, for months and months, and the master always says, you know, tell me about this tree.

And the guy describes, you know, the oak tree or whatever, and it takes him years.

And then one day goes to the master and says, today I got it.

I just, I saw just three.

I saw it without the label, without me trying to understand what it is.

And, and that takes practice of unlabeling, of deconditioning, unlearning.

So the idea that perception leads to judgment opens the next section, which is judgment and the authority problem.

And I'll just introduce this and then I'll let you jump in.

So judgment is the symbolic process of perception.

Judgment is the rejecting and categorizing of God's creation.

So this idea of judge not yet let you know, lest ye be judged is where I think this is corrected in, in the Bible.

It says it.

You know, in the Bible, perception, judgment and separation place place belief in a place of unreality.

Right.

And I think this is fascinating how it sets this up.

I, I absolutely love it.

I mean, I had to read this part a few times or listen.

I, I listened to it mainly in the beautiful audio app that they created of the course in miracles.

It comes back to what I shared a little bit earlier.

I think it was in Section 3, Perception versus Knowledge.

Judgment and the authority problem.

Judgment assumes that you know enough to decide what something means.

And we can literally categorically say we don't know enough to say anything about anything because you don't know the Whole context.

I mean, if you speak person, right, you can't know someone's history, motivations, consequences, or everything that happened before and, and up to now for you to correctly understand what's going on.

So, and that leads to the idea that underneath this judgment that the ego constantly wants to judge.

We constantly want to run around and have something to say about everything.

There is an authority problem because the ego wants to be the author of itself.

I decide who I am.

I decide what reality means.

I decide what will make me complete.

I believe I know what I need.

Right?

We talked about this in a different conversation.

Even the irony that we think we know what's best for us, we don't.

We have no idea.

So the course says you did not create yourself.

So the ego's authority problem, linked to the idea that we can judge something, is in itself collapsing because we are not creating, we haven't created ourselves.

Right?

Therefore, yeah, go for it.

I mean, just picking up on that.

I mean, I think this gets back to this idea where your, your fear of spirit, right, comes from is because you want to defend your, the authority of your life, the authorship of your life, where it's going, where it's headed.

You want to control the events that you're experiencing, and this creates a fear of God.

The irony, of course, is God doesn't see any of this.

Right, Very true.

You think you have usurped in your subconscious.

You think you have usurped the power of God.

The truth is you haven't usurped the power of God, but you've diminished your own power of God within, in you, right?

And that's why you're experiencing suffering, that's why you're experiencing loss, that's why you might be stuck in poverty, whatever, whatever the issues are, because the root of all evil is this mind split, is this contradiction that's within you that you need to resolve.

And you resolve that through making the decision to surrender, through making the decision to practice love, through making the decision to master love and refusing to see anything else.

I mean, it leads perfectly to section seven, right?

Creation versus a self image.

But before I even go then, I'd like to introduce that and then hear you speak about it.

For the judgment and the authority problem, I think one of the key questions we can ask ourselves is our resistance to God or our resistance to surrender to God or the spirit, partly or totally the resistance of being afraid that we are not the authority over ourselves.

So pretty much what Aaron spoke about is this tension field between, I want to believe That I am in charge of my life.

I want to believe this is, this is the exact fear of God.

What if I surrendered?

What if I let go?

Who am I if I accept non authorship for my life?

And then it's gonna.

You're gonna experience the deconstruction of the ego, which leads to what we spoke.

Before we came on, which is.

Which is.

Which is.

Which is a very painful process to go through, but a necessary and important process to master love.

Because the imprisoned mind is an intolerable place to be free.

Will leads to freedom, must lead to freedom.

And it commands us to accept our inheritance of that beauty, of that freedom, as opposed to keeping ourselves in chains by our own misperceptions and our own unwillingness to accept the truth of that God is within us, that we are innocent, and that our strength comes from our innocence as opposed to the egoic ideas of strength.

I want to introduce this part 7 here, creating versus self image, and then hear you on that topic as well.

But the end the chapter here, the chapter ends with this creating versus self image.

And it proposes that the image we have constructed of ourselves is manufactured, is manufactured by the ego from things like achievement, failures, personality, body status, relationships, wounds, beliefs, what others say about you.

So this idea of who we are, and again, if we just extend that to what we just spoke about, judgment.

You cannot see all that you are, just like you cannot see anybody else in all that they are.

So therefore you are separating yourself from the whole by just even believing.

I am Daniel from Austria who is 60 years old and doing a podcast with Aaron.

Right.

Even that reduces what is here to, to a fraction.

Right.

But we spend like all our time.

At last, on the last podcast we were talking about.

How dare I with my walnut brain, Walnut sheep ravine in this.

Flying around as a ghost in the meat suit on a rock, flying around the universe.

That was poetic.

A ghost lying around in a meat suit on a rock.

Yeah, I say that out again with all the planets, with all the stars.

How dare I control how I dare.

I attempt to control.

And you can see the fear that comes from being that ghost in the meat suit on a planet, flying around, you know, on a rock, flying around the universe.

It's kind of terrifying to think about the abstract nature of the universe.

Yeah.

And.

And you're in this like, little town, wherever you live and all, and you're experiencing your business and, or whatever you're doing, you're teaching whatever it is, and you're trying to control things.

This is the authority problem.

Right.

And it kind of gets into the space that, you know.

You know, if you say it like.

This, Aaron, it just feels like total madness.

Right?

What are we defending?

Am I defending the image of my achievements, my personality, my failure, my origin, my so called religion?

You know, why are we expending so much time and it becomes clear we're spending all this energy and time to uphold a self image that is illusory.

Because if we really are a ghost in a meat suit on a rock flying around a sun that is part of a Milky Way, a part of, of a galaxy, of a universe that is expanding at a speed of three times the light, it's like, how can you come to terms with that?

And the answer is your mind will never be.

So you might as well just enjoy the ride, right?

Be here with that.

And what comes from that?

So you'll establish incredible defenses to attack this truth, right?

To defend your authorship of your life, to defend your authorship of the self image that you made.

This belief is the devil.

This idea that you can, that you can attack truth is where this comes from.

And this leads, you know, this, this notion of leading to further separation.

Yeah, right, it, but fear not, it dissolves in a blink of an eye because truth must return to truth.

Much has been seen, but nothing has happened.

I exactly heard that part today.

A lot of there is no death, but a belief in death.

Yeah, no, I think that is very true, but it talks back to the Much has been seen but nothing happened.

Nothing ever really happened here in the one as Satyan Parikh sings so beautifully and I think what's important here.

We spoke last week in the last episode aloud around psychology, psychotherapy and the development of the different schools of psychotherapy.

And one of the biggest problems I see, looking at this through the lens of today, the psychology would ask, so how did you develop that self image?

Aaron, I'm really fascinated.

Tell me more about where you come from and your beliefs and your religion.

And we actually self, you know, was spiraled down, down the rabbit hole and, and you cannot resolve that within itself.

The course in miracles ask a much more radical question.

You know, is this self image true in the first place?

And it's very clear that it demand dismantles all of that and says what you believe to be is not who you are.

And that is coming back to your observation earlier.

Right.

We're so afraid to potentially open the door to this altar and realizing the blindness and the suffering.

That's why so often when people recognize or see Jesus, they break down into tears.

There is so much release of shame and guilt and the misfortune of the lie that they have believed in it.

Suddenly this burden falls off and freedom and love is available.

It was always there.

But we separate ourselves from it.

That I think is huge.

And this is just how I think Jung, when we come back to wrapping this to last week's episode, Jung and Freud would look at that very differently, right?

Jung at least said there is a larger self beyond the ego.

And Freud just almost put it down to projection, you know?

You know that.

But yeah, I mean, Freud, Freud, Freud is.

And, and I mean, this is where I think psychotherapy falls down, is that it's.

It.

Because it will never heal that original split and it'll never reconcile the split mind, you know, and, and establish the oneness of knowledge, right?

Because it's playing within the game of the fragmentation of the ego's experiences, of the self image.

And you're just kind of.

You're not.

You're just looking at the symptoms.

You're not looking at the root cause, right?

The root cause is much deeper.

And I think Young, in my readings of Jung at least, was.

Was more looking for that, that, that wholeness, right?

That completion.

The world can only be left by truth.

It cannot be left through this misperception.

The kingdom awaits.

And you.

And we were talking.

You wanted me to say something.

So I have, I have this hypothesis that essentially, you know, and it's kind of.

I'm sure it could be backed by a scientific principle of relativity, right?

So.

So if you think about your experience in life and we're seeing all this darkness, I was thinking about the second coming and what.

What that might.

And I have an interpretation that I'd like to throw out.

And by, by no means do I think.

I don't know anything.

I can't see the whole.

I'm just throwing out.

It's probably dangerous to even do this.

But, But I was thinking to myself around the theory of relativity.

I was thinking, what.

I wonder if the acceptance of my own divinity first is.

It happens, and then you begin to work through the deconstruction of your ego, right?

To where you're at a place where the cup is gone.

You know the metaphor you were using earlier?

There's no water in the cup.

The cup's gone.

It's not about the cup.

It's about just being.

Just being an experience from a place of state of being that you get to that place and all you're doing and you're giving love to all Your neighbors.

But at the same time, the world around you seems to be falling apart.

And perhaps the second coming is the acceptance within ourselves of our brothers and sisters in oneness.

And that, and that acceptance is our pathway home.

And there's no more reincarnations, no more trials, no more things to learn, because learning is now complete.

And you've accepted the knowledge that's within you.

And you can experience that.

I don't know, but I was just playing around with that idea.

I really like that when you just.

When you explained it or shared it with me before we jumped on the call, it felt to me like you spoke about.

Everyone has to go through their individual death to experience resurrection.

Every single one has to do that.

We can be inspired by our brothers helping us, leading us, praying for us.

But ultimately you have to let go of that hold that the ego holds on you.

You personally have to experience the death of your ego to experience that you're so much more than that.

And I feel that the collapsing or confusing world around us is just a symbol, almost a causal link.

Because while the world out there made sense in the past to me, it allowed me to hold on to the illusion of the ego.

It seemed to almost support and fundament the illusion.

But as the illusion internally crumbles, of course the sense making capacity out there has to crumble as well.

Hermetic principle, you know, as inside, so outside.

So I don't think we can experience the death of ego and the resurrection and looking at the outside world as being static.

Oh, it's still the same out there.

It has to reflect that change.

Inner shift.

Yeah, I mean Jesus is, and Jesus is a, as a cosmic event that is a, is a, an an act that corrects the atom and the apple and it creates the potential for the, for the second coming, for the sonship to accept its, its, this, this truth as a whole.

But we each individually have to go through our own crucifixion and resurrection, the crucifixion of the ego and the resurrection of our heart, to unify our, our rational minds with our, with our ability to love, ultimately transcending that with perfect perception to get to the place of our return home.

Right.

And this is the overcoming of the duality.

It's the overcoming and recognizing that if eternity is real, then it's only in this present moment that we can find it.

There's no future, there's no past.

It doesn't exist.

It's gone.

The only thing you have is right now.

I was also thinking about things like light has no opposite, right?

But darkness does.

There's no opposite to light because once light comes into the room of the darkness, it shines it away.

So in your own trials and tribulations, as you see the greater trials and tribulations of the world, if you can overcome and fix yourself to see from a place of a perfected perception, you're going to look out on a world and recognize that it's false.

And that's a hard place to get to because you've had to deconstruct your ego first to see that.

But to experience that in the present moment, that doesn't exist because of what's in front of you.

The people that come to you are loving, kind and sweet.

But as you just described it, once you have experienced yourself as wholeness, as love, as unity, as the spaciousness, when you then look at the world, the world would and is a reflection of that experience as well, right?

So I obviously, I cannot understand how someone else perceives the world.

But I also believe that when we are in this expanded state of present moment awareness, that we are in the same heart of, of God, that we are experiencing a like experience.

Like in the egos, we're all separate.

Everyone's got their own world, right?

I. I know that I spend my partner where sometimes we feel, we feel so connected, we feel like we're merging.

And then I ask her, so what are you perceiving right now?

And she's got a totally different perception to love.

Although we're feeling we're in the same oneness when we actually speak about what our mind produces.

While the body is feeling connected, our space is for connected.

We're like, oh, my Lord, we're having a very, very different experience of life, right?

Well, I mean, I think we have about five more minutes or so.

I was thinking about all week.

I kept having this image pop in my head as I was studying chapter three.

And the image that kept coming into my head was this idea of, first of all, there's a circle.

And encompassed in that circle, the circle represents God, right?

And within that circle represents his son, right?

And that is the completion, right?

That's complete.

Then I was thinking about, but beneath that I was thinking about this kind of hourglass shape, right?

And the hourglass shape is at the top of the hourglass is heaven, and at the bottom of the hourglass is hell, right?

And these are our projections of what we think, you know, because to perceive a heaven would not be in a natural state of being.

Would it still be non Dual, you might have perfected perception at a level of spirit, but you're still not in the place of this abstract.

I mean, this is so abstract.

But essentially, when you think about heaven and hell in this hourglass shape, the middle part, where the sand ticks through is earth.

So we are at the lowest point of heaven, but the highest point of hell in our.

In our metaphysical mind, conscious experience of living.

So when you make this image of yourself in.

In this physical place of earth where.

Where there's dense materials and.

And, you know, I was thinking about the ignorance of, you know, if everything's conscious, if everything is part of the quantum field and everything has consciousness, then very naturally one of the lowest forms of consciousness is going to be something like, you know, a rock or something like that.

And you know what I mean?

Like, you're going to be.

It's going to be something very dense and thick and heavy, and it won't.

And it won't be elastic and have the ability to, you know, so.

So as you think about kind of the deeper domains, you know, of the soil and things like that, it's just kind of getting into this idea that, you know, beneath us is, is this a beautiful planet that we live on, and, you know, we get to experience this life and all this stuff, but, you know, it comes with all these hardships, and it's an imperfect existence.

But to bring down the light through our.

Through our acts and our being creates a more.

Brings a little bit of that heaven down to this.

This yin and yang experience of duality at the earthly realm.

Right.

And making that.

And you can make this image of yourself, but you're going to be hiding that light that's inside you.

And as we uncover that light, it's going to be the thing that gives us more joy on the planet.

So if we can inspire more people through this podcast or in whatever way we can do, we're naturally driven to do that because we want to bring more light to these dark times.

We want to bring more light to this experience that we call life.

Yes, yes.

For me, I remember saying many times, I'm here to leave a lasting impact or do this and do that or save somebody.

But in the end, I feel it's just my own journey home.

And as I do it, I meet others on the way.

And then you got more courageous to speaking about it, and you then, you know, this is the journey.

And I feel the good news from this chapter and the good news from us doing the podcast is we don't have to become Innocent, we already are it beneath the judgment that the guilt and the self image that we learn to believe, we already are.

That wholeness, that unity exists, it's covered up.

So many beautiful metaphors exist of the sun is always behind the clouds, or once the wind stops, the ripple on the sea, the lake of consciousness is eternally in depth, right?

So all of these point to the same thing, is that it's already ever present.

If we start to recognize or remember that this is not something we have to earn, that it is an arrow that can be corrected and no real damage can ever be done because in the eternity of spirit of God, all of this is just a glimpse.

It's a microsecond, right?

It's a glimpse of an eye.

It's a.

It's a minute.

Yeah.

The idea of hell, right, What I was getting, what I want to kind of go into that a little bit more, is thinking about like, you know, the mythologies of the earth's crust and probably, you know, the ideas that there's burning fires below and all these other things.

I'm sure these come from our mythologies, right, but the, but what is hell?

It is where light is not right, which means there's no such thing.

So, so you make this image of yourself perceiving form, perceiving this density, and the lower vibrations, the lower you get, right?

It feels like you're walking in hell.

And you can have.

There's plenty of people walking around this planet in a hell like landscape or atmosphere.

And, and their suffering is, is.

Is, you know, incredible.

And, and for us to not want to shine our light on their suffering to help alleviate that, it, it.

It's the natural condition of a son of God to want to do those things, right?

To.

To share and to create that experience.

So very naturally it drives you to do a podcast, it drives you to speak on Instagrams and, And all the variety of other things.

You cannot not do that, because once you turn to the light and you turn that light fully, then you recognize the shared relationship between you, your brothers, your sisters, all aspects of life.

One life, one planet.

That's it.

So go love your neighbors this week.

Go give them as much support as you can give as they're going through the things, but don't ever recognize, don't ever not recognize the perfection that's within them.

Yeah, right.

Because to see from that place of perception is ignored is going to give you projection and all these other things, right?

The cosmic event of the crucifixion and the death and the projection onto the death of Jesus as opposed to the extension of truth, the extension of life, the extension of your perfect resurrection.

You know, you have to identifying with that is.

Is where you want to be.

So hopefully that makes a lot of sense.

We'll have to listen to it totally.

Actually, let me just point.

I think it was this week's lesson.

I think it was 268 or something.

It says today, let me not.

Let me not try to correct your perfect creation.

You know, let me not judge what is in front of me.

And I want.

I think it was 268 and of course my.

The wording is now not as perfect as the courses or as precise.

But I really feel when I had that lesson my whole day, I could really see that everything was created in perfection.

And what I try to do constantly is make it other than with my ideas of how I think it should be, could be or what I wanted I my will over.

Over his will.

That's my last contribution for today, Aaron.

So next week we're going to be talking about the illusions of the ego, right?

Teaching, right.

Learning ego and false autonomy.

Love without conflict.

This need not be beautiful, right?

The ego, body illusion.

The rewards that come from God when you choose this right, right way of living.

As we're both sitting here experiencing, smiling with joy and creation and community communication.

Because God is always in communication with us.

It's our inability to hear that is our problem.

Look forward to the next one.

All right?

Same, same.

Take care, brother.

Have a beautiful day.