A Course in Miracles

(see: attack)

(see: Holy Spirit)

the Holy Spirit’s plan of correction to undo the ego and heal the belief in separation; came into being
after the separation, and will be completed when every separated Son has fulfilled his part in the Atonement
by total forgiveness; its principle is that the separation never occurred.

the attempt to justify the projection of guilt onto others, demonstrating their sinfulness and guilt so that
we may feel free of it; because attack is always a projection of responsibility for the separation, it is never
justified; also used to denote the thought of separation from God, for which we believe God will attack and
punish us in return.

(Note – ” attack” and ” anger” are used as virtual
synonyms.)

the Course speaks of the separation as being a dream from which we need to awaken; salvation
therefore consists of hearing the Holy Spirit – the Call to awaken – in ourselves and in our
brothers: thus accepting the oneness with each other that undoes the separation which gave rise to the
dream in the beginning.

level I: the embodiment of the ego; the thought of separation projected by the mind and
becoming form; the witness to the seeming reality of the separation by being a limitation on love, excluding it
from our awareness; includes both our physical bodies as well as our personalities.

level II: inherently neutral, neither ” good” nor ” evil” ; its purpose is
given it by the mind.

w-m: the symbol of guilt and attack

r-m: the means of teaching and learning forgiveness, whereby the ego’s guilt is undone; the
instrument of salvation through which the Holy Spirit speaks.

symbol for the transition from perception to knowledge, and thus is equated variously with the Holy
Spirit, the real world, and God’s last step; used also to denote the shift from false to true perception and the
real world.

the process of undoing denial and dissociation, expressing the decision to bring our guilt to the light of
the Holy Spirit to be looked at and forgiven, rather than fearfully keeping it in the darkness of our
unconscious minds where it could never be seen and undone; living in illusions brings sickness and pain,
bringing them to truth is healing and salvation.

cause and effect are mutually dependent, since the existence of one determines the existence of the
other; moreover, if something is not a cause it cannot exist, since all being has effects.

knowledge: God is the only Cause, and His Son is His Effect.

perception: the thought of separation – sin – is the cause of the
dream of suffering and death, which is sin’s effect; forgiveness undoes sin by demonstrating that sin
has no effect; i.e., the peace of God and our loving relationship with Him is totally unaffected by what
others have done to us; therefore, not having effects, sin cannot be a cause and thus cannot
exist.

the Second Person of the Trinity; the one Son of God or totality of the Sonship; the Self that God
created by extension of His spirit; though Christ creates as does His Father, He is not the Father since God
created Christ, but Christ did not create God.

(Note – not to be equated exclusively with Jesus.)

see: creations,
vision

knowledge: synonymous with creation, an expression of our unified relationship to God
which can be likened to a flow of spirit and love; only spirit can communicate, unlike the ego, which is
separate by nature.

true perception: we experience communication in our right minds through the Holy Spirit,
allowing His Love to be shared through us.

the extension of God’s being or spirit, the Cause, that resulted in His Son, the Effect; described as the
First Coming of Christ; it is the Son’s function in Heaven to create, as it was God’s in creating Him.

(Note – exists only at the level of knowledge, and is not equivalent to creation or creativity as
the terms are used in the world of perception.)

see: creations

the extensions of our spirit; the effects of our creating, analogous to the creation when God created His
Son by extending Himself; as extensions of Christ, our creations are part of the Second Person of the
Trinity; creation is ongoing in Heaven, beyond time and space, and independent of the Son’s lack of
awareness of it in this world.

see: creation

a symbol of the ego’s attack on God and therefore on His Son, witnessing to the ” reality”
of suffering, sacrifice, victimization, and death which the world seems to manifest; also refers to the killing of
Jesus, an extreme example that taught that our true Identity of love can never be destroyed, for death has
no power over life.

w-m: the final witness to the seeming reality of the body and the separation from our Creator,
Who is life; if the body dies then it must have lived, which means its maker – the ego – must
be real and alive as well; also seen by the ego as the ultimate punishment for our sin of separation from
God.

r-m: the quiet laying down of the body after it has fulfilled its purpose as a teaching
device.

the last remaining freedom as prisoners of this world is our power to decide; while unknown in Heaven,
decision is necessary here as it was our decision to be separate from our Source that must be corrected;
this is accomplished by choosing the Holy Spirit instead of the ego, right-mindedness instead of
wrong-mindedness.

w-m: avoiding guilt by pushing the decision that made it out of awareness, rendering it
inaccessible to correction or Atonement; roughly equivalent to repression; protects the ego’s belief that
it is our source and not God.

r-m: used to deny error and affirm truth: to deny ” the denial of
truth.”

the post-separation state in which the Son of God dreams a world of sin, guilt, and fear, believing this
to be reality and Heaven the dream; the Son, being the dreamer, is the cause of the world which is
the effect, although this relationship between cause and effect appears reversed in this world, where
we seem to be the effect or victim of the world; occasionally used to denote sleeping dreams, although
there is no real difference between them and waking ones, for both belong to the illusory world of
perception.

see: happy dream

the belief in the reality of the separated or false self, made as substitute for the Self Which God created;
the thought of separation that gives rise to sin, guilt, fear, and a thought system based on specialness to
protect itself; the part of the mind that believes it is separate from the Mind of Christ; this split mind has two
parts: wrong- and right-mindedness; almost always used to denote ” wrong-mindedness,” but
can include the part of the split mind that can learn to choose right-mindedness.

(Note – not to be equated with the ” ego” of psychoanalysis, but can be roughly
equated with the entire psyche, of which the psychoanalytic ” ego” is a part.)

symbol of forgiveness; the face of true innocence seen in another when we look through Christ’s vision,
free from our projections of guilt; thus it is the extension to others of the guiltlessness we see in ourselves,
independent of what our physical eyes may see.

(Note – not to be confused with the face of Jesus, nor with anything
external.)

the emotion of the ego, contrasted with love, the emotion given us by God; originates in the expected
punishment for our sins, which our guilt demands; the resulting terror over what we believe we deserve
leads us – through the dynamics of denial and projection – to defend ourselves by attacking
others, which merely reinforces our sense of vulnerability and fear, establishing a vicious circle of fear and
defense.

looking at our specialness with the Holy Spirit or Jesus, without guilt or judgment; our special function
that shifts perception of another as ” enemy” (special hate) or ” savior-idol” (special
love) to brother or friend, removing all projections of guilt from him; the expression of the miracle or vision
of Christ, that sees all people united in the Sonship of God, looking beyond the seeming differences that
reflect separation: thus, perceiving sin as real makes true forgiveness impossible; the recognition that what
we thought was done to us we did to ourselves, since we are responsible for our scripts, and therefore only
we can deprive ourselves of the peace of God: thus, we forgive others for what they have not done
to us, not for what they have done.

see: looking at the ego

knowledge: creation, the extension of God’s Love or spirit; God creates His Son, Christ,
Who in turn creates as does His Father; our function of creating, ongoing throughout eternity, is restored to
our awareness when the Atonement is completed.

perception: forgiveness, healing, salvation, the acceptance of the Atonement for ourselves;
our ” special function” is to forgive our special relationships; the function of the Holy Spirit is to
carry out the plan of the Atonement, reminding each Son of God of his special function.

the First Person in the Trinity; the Creator, the Source of all being or life; the Father, Whose
Fatherhood is established by the existence of His Son, Christ; the First Cause, Whose Son is His Effect;
God’s essence is spirit, which is shared with all creation, whose unity is the state of
Heaven.

the feeling experienced in relation to sin; its reflection from our minds is seen in all the negative feelings
and beliefs we have about ourselves, mostly unconscious; rests on a sense of inherent unworthiness,
seemingly beyond even the forgiving power of God, Who we erroneously believe demands punishment for
our seeming sin of separation against Him; following the ego’s counsel that to look on guilt would destroy
us, we deny its presence in our minds, and then project it outward in the form of attack, either onto others
as anger or onto our own bodies as sickness.

see: scarcity principle

the Holy Spirit’s correction for the ego’s dream of pain and suffering; though still illusory, the happy
dream leads beyond all other illusions to the truth; it is the dream of forgiveness in which the real world is
ultimately seen and salvation attained.

the correction in the mind of the belief in sickness that makes the separation and the body seem real;
the effect of joining with another in forgiveness, shifting perception from separate bodies – the
source of all sickness – to our shared purpose of healing in this world; since healing is based on the
belief that our true Identity is spirit, not the body, sickness of any kind must be illusory, as only a body or
ego can suffer; healing thus reflects the principle that there is no order of difficulty in
miracles.

the non-dualistic world of knowledge, wherein dwell God and His creation in the perfect unity of His
Will and spirit; though exclusive of the world of perception, Heaven can be reflected here in the holy
relationship and the real world.

see: knowledge

the instant outside time in which we choose forgiveness instead of guilt, the miracle instead of a
grievance, the Holy Spirit instead of the ego; the expression of our little willingness to live in the present,
which opens into eternity, rather than holding on to the past and fearing the future, which keeps us in hell;
also used to denote the ultimate holy instant, the real world, the culmination of all the holy instants we have
chosen along the way.

the Holy Spirit’s means to undo the unholy or special relationship by shifting the goal of guilt to the goal
of forgiveness or truth; the process of forgiveness by which one who had perceived another as separate
joins with him in his mind through Christ’s vision.

the Third Person of the Trinity Who is metaphorically described in the Course as God’s Answer to the
separation; the Communication Link between God and His separated Sons, bridging the gap between the
Mind of Christ and our split mind; the memory of God and His Son we took with us into our dream; the
One Who sees our illusions (perception), leading us through them to the truth (knowledge); the Voice for
God Who speaks for Him and for our real Self, reminding us of the Identity we forgot; also referred to as
Bridge, Comforter, Guide, Mediator, Teacher, and Translator.

the expression of the law of cause and effect, for cause and effect cannot be separate: an idea cannot
leave the mind that thought it.

knowledge: the extension of God’s Thought, His Son, has never left its Source, for what is of
God can never be separate from Him.

perception: the world of separation has never left its source in the separated mind, though it
appears to be external to it; thus, there is no material world, only a projected illusion of one.

w-m: projecting guilt from our minds by attack reinforces its presence in the mind that
thought it.

r-m: extending the Love of the Holy Spirit through forgiveness – seeing Him in
others – increases the awareness of His loving Presence in ourselves.

symbol of the substitution of the ego for our true Self or God; a false belief that there can be something
other than, or more than God, and thus separate from Him, a belief which is then projected onto the special
relationship: people, things, or ideas; the anti-Christ.

something that is believed to be real but is not; the ultimate illusion is the separation from God, upon
which rest all the manifestations of the separated world which may be understood as distortions in
perception; i.e., seeing attack instead of a call for love, sin instead of error; the illusions of the world
reinforce the belief that the body has a value in and of itself, a source of either pleasure or pain; forgiveness
is the final illusion as it forgives what never was, and leads beyond all illusion to the truth of
God.

the source of the Course, its first person or ” I” ; the one who first completed his part in the
Atonement, enabling him to be in charge of the whole plan; transcending his ego, Jesus has become
identified with Christ and can now serve as our model for learning and an ever-present help when we call
upon him in our desire to forgive.

(Note – not to be exclusively identified with Christ, the Second Person of the
Trinity.)

knowledge: strictly speaking God does not judge, since what He creates is perfect and at
one with Him; the Course’s references to God’s Judgment reflect His recognition of His Son as His Son,
forever loved and one with Him.

perception:

w-m: condemnation, whereby people are separated into those to be hated and those to be
” loved,” a judgment always based upon the past.

r-m: vision, whereby people are seen either as expressing love or calling for it, a judgment
inspired by the Holy Spirit and always based upon the present.

see: Last (Final) Judgment

the Holy Spirit’s correction for the world’s injustice; the belief that God’s Sons are equally loved and
equally holy, undoing the judgments based on separation; the end of sacrifice and the belief that one’s gain is
another’s loss; called ” the rock on which salvation rests.”

Heaven, or the pre-separation world of God and His unified creation in which there are no differences
or forms, and thus it is exclusive of the world of perception; not to be confused with the common use of
” knowledge,” which implies the dualism of a subject who knows and an object which
is known; in the Course it reflects the pure experience of non-duality, with no subject-object
dichotomy.

see: Heaven

knowledge: contrasted with the traditional Christian view of judgment and punishment to
reflect God’s loving relationship with all His Sons: His Final Judgment.

true perception: contrasted with the traditional Christian view of judgment and punishment
and equated with the end of the Atonement when, following the Second Coming, the final distinction is
made between truth and illusion, all guilt is undone, and awareness is restored to us as Christ – the
Son of the living God.

this step, belonging to God, occurs when the Atonement is complete and all ego interferences have
been removed; when nothing remains to separate us from God, He takes the last step, raising us unto
Himself; strictly speaking God does not take steps, and the term actually refers to our experience
of returning to our Source Which we never truly left.

the Course asks us not to take the ego and its world seriously, for this makes them real in our minds;
rather, we are urged to laugh gently at the ego thought system and all its seeming consequences,
remembering at last to laugh at the ” tiny, mad idea.”

the essence of forgiveness: looking with the Holy Spirit’s or Jesus’ nonjudgmental gentleness and
patience at our ego thought system; since it is guilt that prevents us from looking at our specialness, thus
sustaining the ego and keeping its true nature hidden, it is looking without judgment at our attack thoughts
that undoes the ego: thus, looking at the ego without guilt and fear is the essence of the Atonement.

(see: bringing darkness (illusions) to the light
(truth))

knowledge: the essence of God’s being and relationship to His creation, which is unchanging
and eternal; beyond definition and teaching, and can only be experienced or known once the barriers of
guilt have been removed through forgiveness.

true perception: impossible in the illusory world of perception, yet expressed here through
forgiveness; the emotion given by God, in contrast to the ego’s emotion of fear, and reflected in any
expression of true joining with another.

the attempt to solve a problem where it is not, i.e., trying to solve a problem in the mind through
physical or ” mindless” measures: the ego’s strategy to keep the real problem – the belief
in separation – from God’s Answer; guilt is projected outside our minds onto others (attack) or our
bodies (sickness) and sought to be corrected there, rather than being undone in our minds by bringing it to
the Holy Spirit; referred to as ” false healing” in ” The Song of
Prayer.”

the Atonement’s final stage, which follows seeing the face of Christ in all our brothers and precedes the
last step, taken by God Himself; we remember God through forgiveness, undoing all beliefs in separation
that obscured His Presence to us.

knowledge: the activating agent of spirit, to which it is roughly equivalent, supplying its
creative energy.

perception: the agent of choice; we are free to believe that our minds can be separated or
split off from the Mind of God (wrong-mindedness), or that they can be returned to it (right-mindedness);
thus, the split mind can be understood as having three parts: the wrong mind, the right mind, and the part of
the mind (decision maker) that chooses between them; not to be confused with the brain, which is a
physical organ and thus an aspect of our bodily self.

see: Mind of God

equated with the creative function of God which represents the activating agent of spirit, supplying its
creative energy; as an extension of God, the Mind of Christ – God’s Thought – shares in the
attributes of the Mind of God – One-mindedness; after the separation, the Mind of Christ
appeared to be split in two: Mind and mind.

the change of mind that shifts our perception from the ego’s world of sin, guilt, and fear, to the Holy
Spirit’s world of forgiveness; reverses projection by restoring to the mind its causative function, allowing us
to choose again; transcends the laws of this world to reflect the laws of God; accomplished by our joining
with the Holy Spirit or Jesus, being the means of healing our own and others’ minds.

(Note – not to be confused with the traditional understanding of miracles as changes in external
phenomena.)

the Mind of God or Christ; the extension of God which is the unified Mind of the Sonship; transcending
both right- and wrong-mindedness, it exists only at the level of knowledge and Heaven.

knowledge: the reality of God and Christ, Whose perfect unity constitutes Heaven.

perception: reflected in the world through forgiveness, the undoing of our belief in separate
interests; our joining together with others, through the undoing of our thoughts of specialness, is simply the
acceptance of our inherent oneness as God’s Son; sharing this purpose of forgiveness is our one and only
function, reflecting our function of creating in Heaven.

see: One-mindedness

level I: the post-separation, dualistic world of form and differences, mutually exclusive of the
non-dualistic world of knowledge; this world arises from our belief in separation and has no reality outside
of this thought.

level II: comes from projection: what we see inwardly determines what we see outside
ourselves; crucial to perception, therefore, is our interpretation of ” reality,” rather than
what seems to be objectively real.

w-m: perception of sin and guilt reinforces the belief in the reality of the separation.

r-m: perception of opportunities to forgive serves to undo the belief in the reality of the
separation.

see: true perception

our guilt and fear cannot be undone without dealing with them through the opportunities for forgiveness
used by the Holy Spirit; this honest looking within our minds with the Holy Spirit or Jesus – a
process the ego counsels against – is what leads to the periods of discomfort and anxiety
we almost inevitably feel in the process of shifting from wrong- to right-mindedness.

A Course in Miracles emphasizes that within the dream of separation forgiveness
occurs over time, and is therefore a process of growth; our fear of God’s Love is so great that we cling to
our specialness as protection, and thus we must learn gently and patiently that the ego’s guilt and attack
reinforce pain, while the Holy Spirit’s forgiveness leads to joy.

see: periods of unsettling

the fundamental law of mind: projection makes perception – what we see inwardly determines
what we see outside our minds.

w-m: reinforces guilt by displacing it onto someone else, attacking it there and denying its
presence in ourselves; an attempt to shift responsibility for separation from ourselves to others.

r-m: the principle of extension, undoing guilt by allowing the forgiveness of the Holy Spirit to
be extended (projected) through us.

the state of mind in which, through total forgiveness, the world of perception is released from the
projections of guilt we had placed upon it: thus, it is the mind that has changed, not the world, and we see
through the vision of Christ which blesses rather than condemns; the Holy Spirit’s happy dream; the end of
the Atonement, undoing our thoughts of separation and allowing God to take the last
step.

right-mindedness; thinking in accordance with the Holy Spirit, choosing to follow His guidance and
learn His lessons of forgiveness, seeing sinlessness rather than sin, and choosing vision instead of
judgment.

(Note – not to be confused with rationalism.)

the awakening from the dream of death; the total change in mind that transcends the ego and its
perceptions of the world, the body, and death, allowing us to identify completely with our true Self; also
refers to the resurrection of Jesus.

the part of our separated minds that contains the Holy Spirit – the Voice of forgiveness and
reason; we are repeatedly asked to choose it instead of wrong-mindedness, to follow the Holy Spirit’s
guidance rather than the ego’s, and thus return to the One-mindedness of Christ.

a central belief in the ego’s thought system: someone must lose if another is to gain; the principle of
giving up in order to receive (giving to get); e.g., in order to receive God’s Love we must pay a price,
usually in the form of suffering to expiate our guilt (sin); in order to receive another’s love, we must pay for it
through the special love bargain; the reversal of the principle of salvation or justice: no one loses and
everyone gains.

the Atonement, or undoing of the separation; we are ” saved” from our belief in the
reality of sin and guilt through the change of mind that forgiveness and the miracle bring
about.

an aspect of guilt; the belief that we are empty and incomplete, lacking what we need; this leads to our
seeking idols or special relationships to fill the scarcity we experience within ourselves; inevitably projected
into feelings of deprivation, wherein we believe others are depriving us of the peace which in reality
we have taken from ourselves; in contrast to God’s principle of abundance.

the healing of the mind of the Sonship; the collective return to awareness of our reality as the one Son
of God, which we had at our creation, the First Coming; precedes the Last Judgment, after which this
world of illusion ends.

our true Identity as Son of God; synonymous with Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, and
contrasted with the ego self we made as a substitute for God’s creation; used rarely to refer to the Self of
God.

the belief in sin that affirms an identity separate from our Creator; seemed to happen once, and the
thought system which arose from that idea is represented by the ego; results in a world of perception and
form, of pain, suffering, and death, real in time, but unknown in eternity.

a conflict in the mind (guilt) displaced onto the body; the ego’s attempt to defend itself against truth
(spirit) by focusing attention on the body; a sick body is the effect of the sick or split mind that is its
cause, representing the ego’s desire to make others guilty by sacrificing oneself, projecting
responsibility for the attack onto them.

see: suffering

the belief in the reality of our separation from God, seen by the ego as an act incapable of correction
because it represents our attack on our Creator, Who would therefore never forgive us; leads to guilt,
which demands punishment; equivalent to separation, and the central concept in the ego’s thought system,
from which all others logically follow; to the Holy Spirit, an error in our thinking to be corrected and
therefore forgiven and healed.

knowledge: the Second Person of the Trinity; the Christ Who is our true Self.

perception: our identity as separated Sons, or the Son of God as ego with a wrong and right
mind; the biblical phrase “son of man” is used rarely to denote the Son as separated.

relationships onto which we project guilt, substituting them for love and our true relationship with God;
the defenses that reinforce belief in the scarcity principle while appearing to be undoing it – doing
what they would defend against – for special relationships attempt to fill up the perceived lack in
ourselves by taking from others who are inevitably seen as separate, thereby reinforcing a guilt that
ultimately comes from our believed separation from God: the thought of attack that is the original source of
our sense of lack; all relationships in this world begin as special since they begin with the perception of
separation and differences, which must then be corrected by the Holy Spirit through forgiveness, making the
relationship holy; specialness has two forms: special hate justifies the projection of guilt by attack; special
love conceals the attack within the illusion of love, where we believe our special needs are met by special
people with special attributes, for which we love them: in this sense, special love is roughly equivalent to
dependency, which breeds contempt or hatred.

the nature of our true reality which, being of God, is changeless and eternal; contrasted with the body,
the embodiment of the ego, which changes and dies; the Thought in God’s Mind which is the unified
Christ.

one of the basic ego witnesses to the reality of the body and the non-existence of spirit, since the body
appears to experience suffering or pain; to be in pain, therefore, is to deny God, while being aware of our
true invulnerability as God’s Son is to deny the reality of pain.

(Note – suffering and pain are used as virtual synonyms.)

see: sickness

knowledge: the non-spatial extension of God’s Mind or spirit; includes all of creation, our
true Self as well as our own creations; being part of God, His Thoughts share in His attributes: unified,
eternal, formless, creative, and changeless.

true perception: used infrequently to refer to thoughts of the real world; e.g., peace, salvation,
healing, and the miracle.

the unity of Its Levels is not understandable in this world; consists of 1) God, the Father and Creator,
2) His Son, Christ, our true Self, Which includes our creations, and 3) the Holy Spirit, the Voice for
God.

seeing through the eyes of Christ, the vision of forgiveness which corrects the ego’s misperceptions of
separation by reflecting the true unity of the Son of God; not to be equated with physical sight, it is the
attitude that undoes the projections of guilt, allowing us to look upon the real world in place of the world of
sin, fear, suffering, and death.

see: perception

something is either true or false, reality or illusion; there can be no compromise: we are either created
by God or made by the ego; this principle explains why there is no order of difficulty in miracles, since all
that is needed for healing or the miracle to occur is to shift from the illusions of the ego to the truth of the
Holy Spirit.

the perception of Christ or the Holy Spirit that sees beyond the body to the spirit that is our true
Identity; the vision of forgiveness and sinlessness through which is seen the real world; purely internal,
reflecting a decision to accept reality rather than judge it; a shift in attitude from the ego’s purpose for the
body (specialness) to the Holy Spirit’s (forgiveness), and thus is not to be equated with physical
sight.

(see: Holy Spirit)

God’s ” answer” to the separation; used variously for different aspects of this answer: e.g.,
forgiveness, peace, Atonement, and the Holy Spirit.

(Note – does not refer to Jesus or Christ, as it does in the Bible.)

level I: the effect of the ego’s belief in separation, which is its cause; the
thought of separation and attack on God given form; being the expression of the belief in time and space, it
was not created by God, Who transcends time and space entirely; unless specifically referring to the world
of knowledge, refers only to perception, the post-separation domain of the ego.

level II:

w-m: a prison of separation which reinforces the ego’s belief in sin and guilt, perpetuating the
seeming existence of this world.

r-m: a classroom wherein we learn our lessons of forgiveness, the Holy Spirit’s teaching
device to help us transcend the world: thus the purpose of the world is to teach us that there is no
world.

see: real world

the part of our separated and split minds that contains the ego – the voice of sin, guilt, fear, and
attack; we are repeatedly asked to choose right-mindedness instead of wrong-mindedness, which
imprisons us still further in the world of separation.