What if this wondrously engaging, intensely stressful, fear- and love-filled experience we call life is simply what an eternal being does as a cosmic act of youthful rebellion, mixed with an element of hyper-immersive virtual reality? Could it be that time and space are nothing more than an imaginary, multi-dimensional field of play that serves no other purpose than to move the One Game forward to its inevitable conclusion.
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You are the One Game. Play Well.

A Divinely Twisted, Brilliantly Conceived, Game of Mind.

Overview
The diagram shown here represents the complete material and spiritual environ in which the One Game (OG) is played. As you will soon learn, there are seemingly impenetrable barriers to breach, daunting challenges to be faced, and life and death issues to be resolved in order for you to master the Game.

​This page serves to provide a brief overview of the ten levels of awareness that comprise the One Game. As you progress through the levels, you'll be introduced to the means by which you can become a seer of the real world, an agent of forgiveness, a conveyer of miracles, and finally the bringer of salvation, all of which you'll achieve in communion with the Holy Spirit through progressive mastery of your mind. Each level strengthens your God-given ability to see the face of Christ in every person you meet and recognize the true nature of your holy-loving relationship with the One Source: God our Creator. ​
LEVEL 1 - The Great Escape: How to Run Away From Your Self and Not Get Caught
A Course in Miracles (ACIM or Course) tells us that a thought entered the collective mind of God's children questioning what it would mean to be one's own creator. From that "tiny mad idea" sprang space and time, the material universe, consciousness, and the making of the cosmic ego. 
Picture Click Image to Enlarge

​As with all epic quests, it's good to know where you're seeking to be at journey's end.  The image to the left, with you at the center, represents the tenth and final level in the One Game. This is where your true Self yearns to be, and is in fact, now.
To allow for a fully immersive experience of our own self creation, we made an imaginary Game in which we choose to separate the One Son, or Christ Mind, from God. This allows us to assume a variety of imagined roles (hero, villain, victim, saint) with an underlying storyline that tells of how we betrayed God's love, lost our eternal oneness, and are now distinct beings, human beings, separate from both God and our fellow man and protected from the wrath of a now vengeful God through the raising of mental barriers to the awareness of His eternal love, as shown to the right. 
LEVEL 2 - Arise the Holy Spirit: God's Divine Antidote to All Things Dark & Fearful
At the same instant that the children of God, referred to in the Course as the Sonship, questioned their creation, God responded with His answer, which resulted in two seemingly opposing identifies: a material body capable of conscious thought; and an eternal mind, or spirit, that exists in an immortal state of All Being. In hearing God's response, we remained as One in the Mind of God because a thought can never truly leave its Source. But we also made the ego, through which we imagine that we're separated from God's love.

​God's answer to our thought of separation is the Holy Spirit. His tools for our remembering include miracles (through forgiveness) and holy vision, which allows us to see God's light in our brothers.  His plan for the undoing of the ego is Atonement, which is led by the Holy Spirit and represented by the yellow band. A key part of God's plan includes His teachers and a major learning device for them is A Course in Miracles, although it should be noted that the Course isn't the only tool, and there are other equally useful spiritual resources in the world for achieving the same aim. ​
LEVEL 3 - State of Blur: Our Sad Shift From Knowledge to Confusion
A defining aspect of the human condition is consciousness, which we experience through our awareness of our own existence within space and time, and our sometimes tortured relationship with past memories and fear-filled thoughts of the future. Without consciousness, the ego would starve for lack of the daily drama that we consume to sustain it. Through the mechanism of consciousness we are able to construct an identity for ourselves that we believe to be uniquely our own, special and distinct from all others, but at the same time, sensing that we are something more.

​Thankfully, there are planes of existence that correspond to levels of consciousness, which allow us to move from the denser levels of bodily awareness to ever higher planes of the ascendant mind, thereby gaining a glimpse of our true being. One method for facilitating this change is learning to control our confused thoughts. From a Coursian perspective, we not only have thoughts, but we are in fact a thought of God. In our truest state of being--as God created us and levels no longer exist--we are One thought extended from the Mind of God. The One Game can then be thought of as a thought-based contest between the One that you are in reality, as God created you, and the ego-centric, one unique individual that you believe yourself to be within the imagined confines of space and time. Which one/One you choose determines your reality. ​
LEVEL 4 - The Power of Belief: Why We're So Attracted to the Idea of Sin
Before the separation occurred, and as it exists now in eternity, Cause refers to God, and His created "Effects," which is an extension of His Self, as the Christ Mind or Sonship. This is a much different meaning then what was introduced into the making of the One Game. In order to maintain independence from God, we developed a belief system within the blank space in our minds to support our imagined first cause status and to fortify our defenses against the encroachment of God's Love. The marriage of these twin desires gave rise to the concept of sin. 

​Within the One Game, sin is the home of illusions and the means by which the ego convinces the mind that it is the servant of the body. The Course tells us that sin serves to prove that God's children are evil, timelessness has an end, eternal life must die, love is slain by hate, and God Himself is forever removed from a part of His Being. 

​But all is not lost. God's children may play that they have become a bodies, subject to the effects of evil, hate, fear, and death, but all the while their Father shines on them with an everlasting Love that their childish game can never truly change.
LEVEL 5 - Seeing is Believing: Why Guilt is the Emotion We Love to Hate  
​A basic rule of the One Game is that all things have an opposite, and that what we want we choose.​ Therefore, separation is a choice, made by the Sonship, not to know itself. The means that the ego employs to experience separation is projection, which appears to occur through the senses, but in fact, originates in the mind and is then projected like a virtual reality headset onto one's conscious awareness.

​Through the Course we learn that the ego's standard mode is attack, both in the form of thoughts and behaviors. We try to disguise our attacks as friendship and allegiance, but the basic intent is to take from others--their self-respect, possessions, status, and innocence--for the sake of our own gain. However, all we really receive is the crushing burden of guilt. It's guilt that leads us to believe that we've defiled our original innocence, while also serving as a constant affirmation that we deserve to suffer as punishment for all the evil deeds we've committed.  The Course states that "Guilt is...the sole cause of pain in any form." ​
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LEVEL 6 - Welcome to Ego World: Where Me First Means We Last
Have you ever felt as though there's something essential missing, not only in your everyday life, but in your very being? It's as if a part of your wholeness--the allness to which you may sense you belong--is there and yet seemingly out of reach, being just beyond your mental grasp. This is because your split mind is currently focused on an ego-centric worldview that promotes fear, which in turn makes it difficult for you to grasp the present or now, which is the only real time there is, and where your true Self dwells in perfect peace and joy with its Creator. 

Unlike the present, the only true thing that can be said about the ego's twin deceivers, past and future, is that it isn't there. To picture the past or anticipate the future is to think of illusions. The Course tells us that the mind is actually blank when it does this because it is not really thinking about anything. Therefore, to master the One Game, your mind needs to be trained to recognize when it's not really thinking at all. While thoughtless ideas preoccupy your mind, the truth of your true being is blocked and your sense of lack and isolation is reinforced. Accepting that your mind is merely blank rather than filled with real ideas is the first step toward opening the way to experiencing holy vision and light, which gently leads to right-mindedness, forgiveness, and love.  
LEVEL 7 - Freedom of Choice: Experiencing a Love- or Fear-Filled Life
T​he preceding levels revealed that the fundamental conflict in this world is between creating through extension and making through projection. Love and its joyful attributes are all that is found in the first, while fear and all of its associated effects including anger, worry, depression, anxiety and jealousy, are implicit in the second. As a result, the key conflict of human existence can be seen as one between love and fear. Whichever one you choose decides who and what you believe yourself to be. 

​The ego serves as the symbol of the separation and also of guilt, which is the wellspring from which all fearful thoughts arise. Guilt represents more than simply the fear of God. It is the symbol of attack on God, which is meaningless in eternity, but has tragic effects within the One Game. It is this attack belief from which all guilt and fearful emotions arise. This makes sense if you consider how a part of God could believe it had radically severed itself from Him without believing it would be seen as attacking Him. Key to the Game's storyline is that in response to this perceived injustice, God seeks vengeance upon His children, so best they hide to escape His wrath. But a very difference choice is available. 

By exercising "a little willingness" we can acknowledge and accept the vision and guidance of the Holy Spirit, as opposed to that of the ego. This simple act transforms our illusions by allowing the light of God to shine through the dark shadows of our disbelief, thereby revealing the real world to us. 
LEVEL 8 - Reason to Change: Lessons for the Happy Dreamer
As children of the One God, we each have the power to change our state of mind from fear-filled madness to one of continual joy. We do this by choosing to listen to the Holy Spirit, Who speaks with reason as a means of bringing our reasoning in line with His own. All that's required is a willingness to let reason be the means by which He would guide you, for the light that madness would conceal the Holy Spirit stands ready to reveal to all the Sonship through you. 

The Course tells us that "faith and belief are strong in madness, guiding perception toward what the mind has valued," which is always some expression of the material world as experienced through the body. We are told that, "if you would defend the body against your reason, you will not understand the body or yourself."

Instead choose the happy dream by shifting your allegiance to the Holy Spirit and His holy gift of reason. The Course assures us that "Faith and belief upheld by reason cannot fail to lead to changed perception. And in this change is room made way for vision." And finally, "Spend but an instant in the glad acceptance of what is given you to give your brother, and learn with him what has been given both of you."
LEVEL 9 - The Thing About Walls: Why Breaking Through Beats Building Up
To escape punishment, we project our guilt and attack thoughts onto our fellow humans--who we blame for our unholy predicament--in the form of wars, politics, crimes, and an endless list of imagined disputes, grievances, and petty judgments. This projected anger creates seemingly impenetrable walls between ourselves and "others." 

​When guilt is displaced to the body--which is itself an illusion promoted by the ego to protect what it perceives to be its home--the result is sickness, which often leads to physical and emotional pain and eventually death. So essential is death to the maintenance of the One Game that it serves as the central dream from which all illusions stem and acts as the key symbol for the fear of God. By continually feeding off the fear we think we see in the world, we reinforce and strengthen the barriers that we've erected to keep our minds from recognizing our true relationship with God. 

By simply expressing a little willingness to see things differently we can be taught to train our minds to only think of love and offer only love to the world through gratitude, patience, and honesty. By doing so we weaken the ego's hold on our minds and begin to break down the walls that divide us. This in turn begins the divine process of allowing the light of the Holy Spirit to show us a new vision of the world and to guide our thoughts and behaviors toward miraculous aims. 
LEVEL 10 - Making Miracles: Why It Takes Two to Find the Meaning of One
So fear not, for you are a holy child of God and what He creates shares His eternal life, within which death plays no role. Fear not because an opposite to God doesn't exist and the Mind of God and the Christ Mind are One. Herein lies the secret to winning the One Game and releasing yourself and all of the Sonship from our fearful dream. The end of the Game we made to hide from our Creator is near and you are a key player in bringing about its inevitable conclusion. But first you must progressively develop your spiritual awareness as detailed within the previous nine levels. This will bring about your awakening/atonement, which makes it possible for miracles to be extended through you to others in need. 

Your awakening depends on an understanding that to give and to receive are one in truth. In the holy light, born of peace, that emanates from this one simple thought are all the seeming opposites, conflicts, and mistaken thoughts of this world reconciled into one concept which is wholly true.
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From this one thought shines a light that shows no opposites, heals your clouded vision of all you think you see, and reveals to you the power to heal the world. This is the light that brings your newfound peace of mind to other minds, to share and be glad that they are One with you and and their Creator.

Your willingness lays the path for God to take the final step needed to complete the One Game. And now you are at peace forever, along with all of God’s children, for the mad idea that sought to make a game of fear is now over and the One Self, with which you are joined and never truly were without, is united with its Creator in the Light of His eternal Love.

God calls to you to assume your role in His wondrous plan for salvation. He can't do it without you. So how will you choose to respond?