By Gonny 
There is a moment many students of A Course in Miracles recognize immediately.
You say something….carefully, honestly, like: “The world is an illusion.”
And someone laughs…. and 99 times out of 100, they say:
“Go on then, pinch my arm.”
And suddenly the room feels colder. Not because you are wrong, but because you feel exposed. You weren’t trying to be clever, or wanted to preache. You were sharing something tender, something still forming inside you. And it hurt.
What the Course never tells us explicitly, but quietly assumes, is this:
You are not meant to explain the illusion from the outside.
The ego hears “illusion” as: “Nothing is real, so nothing matters.”
The Course means something entirely different: “What you think gives
you pain is not what you are.”
Trying to explain that to someone who isn’t asking is almost impossible.
So how can you speak about it, without being ridiculed or misunderstood?
First…and this is important…you don’t have to defend it.
You don’t have to convince anyone that the world is an illusion.
Not even slightly.
ACIM is not a belief system to argue for. It is an inner shift that slowly
shows itself in how you respond to life.
If someone challenges you by saying: “But it feels real!”….you don’t need to correct them.
You can agree: “Yes. It feels real.”
That one sentence already lowers the tension, because the Course never denies feeling…it questions identification.
A gentler way of speaking about the illusion is not: “The world is not real,”
but: “I’m learning that things don’t have the meaning I always thought
they had.”
Or: “I notice that what hurts me is often my interpretation, not the event itself.”
That’s not something to laugh at. That’s something almost everyone recognizes.
And if someone still mocks it, remember this quietly to yourself:
The discomfort you felt was not proof that you failed. It was proof that something new in you met something old in them.
The Course says: “You are not asked to make judgments.” Including judgments about yourself.
You were not naïve.
You were early. Early in a way of seeing that doesn’t yet have everyday language.
And here is perhaps the most liberating insight of all: You don’t need better explanations. You need permission to be unfinished.
ACIM is not learned by defending it, but by letting it change how you listen, forgive, pause.
People may never understand your words, but they will feel the difference when you don’t react the way you used to.
That is the explanation.
And the moment you stop trying to justify the illusion, you begin to live beyond it.
With love and light,
G.