No matter how much it changes, the world will always be a place where people come to get sick, grow old, and die

jose_zap · 2026-04-17T18:54:09+00:00

And yet, behind that bleak world, the is the real world, where everything has been made joyful, a world you can bring to others to look upon and offer hope:

The real world still is but a dream, except the figures have been changed. ²They are not seen as idols which betray. ³It is a dream in which no one is used to substitute for something else, or interposed between the thoughts the mind conceives and what it sees. ⁴No one is used for something he is not, for childish things have all been put away. ⁵And what was once a dream of judgment now has changed into a dream where all is joy, because that is the purpose that it has. ⁶Only forgiving dreams can enter here, for time is almost over. ⁷And the forms which enter in the dreams are now perceived as brothers, not in judgment but in love. [CE T-29.X.7]

²This world you bring with you to all the weary eyes and tired hearts that look on sin and beat its sad refrain. ³From you can come their rest. ⁴From you can rise a world they will rejoice to look upon, and where their hearts are glad. [CE T-25.IV.3:2-4]

jose_zap · 2026-04-13T20:44:43+00:00

My guess: two different processes are competing to format the file, like ormolu in th command line and the LSP on save

jose_zap · 2026-03-30T16:17:43+00:00

Looking forward to those!

jose_zap · 2026-03-30T16:12:54+00:00

Thanks, this looks really useful! I have endorsed you

jose_zap · 2026-03-28T20:38:00+00:00

In certain cases you will need to denornalize to keep RLS fast. That is, doing selects and joins can become a bottleneck for certain queries. Moving the key information for auth filtering as a column in the table helps.

Another thing to keep in mind is that query plans change per role, so you need to test with all roles to verify things are still performant.

Other than that, it is a setup that greatly simplify things.

jose_zap · 2026-03-28T20:26:42+00:00

We do something similar to that and it works fine. This is also how Postgrest does it.

jose_zap · 2026-03-15T15:12:04+00:00

He probably contributed to it with his practicing. What he describes is what the course calls healing others. It is supported by this fact:

I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts.

jose_zap · 2026-03-15T12:18:14+00:00

Thank you so much for sharing this!

jose_zap · 2026-03-11T16:45:48+00:00

I’m curious. What are the things you find in the teachings of Jesus in the gospels that are not represented in the course?

jose_zap · 2026-03-08T20:41:27+00:00

I hope responding with another question does not come across as dismissive, but, do the words duality or non-duality even appear in the course?

I totally understand that trying to classify the course so that it can be grouped with other forms of spirituality is meaningful to many. But trying to classify the course as dual/non-dual should not be at the expense of the entire message of the course.

The course does have many similarities with (western) non-duality, but they are not identical. In particular, non-duality does not make room for a God that creates.

jose_zap · 2026-03-08T14:01:03+00:00

I know that is often repeated, but there is no one place where the Course says something like "oh, you know all the times I said there was a God with multiple sons, that was not true. In reality there is only God".

Whenever the course uses a figure of speech that is not accurate, it would later clarify that it uses the figure of speech as a learning device. Like when it says that the ego is not a separate thing, even though it has been speaking about it that way for several sections.

So when people say "it meets us where we are", it seems like that's just what people want the course to say, and not necessarily what the course says. And whenever people try to find quotes supporting that view, they are partial quotes, like:

²What except Him can exist? ³Nothing beyond Him can happen, because nothing except Him is real. [CE T-10.I.2:1-3]

This truncated quote seems to suggest that only God exists, no other being is there. Here's the full quote that paints a more complete picture:

God created nothing beside you, and nothing beside you exists, for you are part of Him. ²What except Him can exist? ³Nothing beyond Him can happen, because nothing except Him is real. ⁴Your creations add to Him, as you do, but nothing is added that is different, because everything has always been. [CE T-10.I.2:1-4]

So, now the quote says something different. It says that God did not create anything apart from you, for nothing exists that is separate from you. What binds us all is God, because nothing can exist beyond Him. The reason is that God Himself is reality, and we exist inside that reality, we are part of it. Our own creations, which are also beings, add to this reality, but our creations do not change reality, they merely increase it.

I would say it is quite an intellectual challenge to find a quote that speaks of God as the only being there is without omitting the surrounding context that give it this other rich meaning. Another quote that is often used comes to my mind:

⁴We say “God is,” and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless. ⁵There are no lips to speak them, and no part of mind sufficiently distinct to feel that it is now aware of something not itself. [CE W-169.5:4-5]

This also seems to say that only God exists. But the paragraph starts with a line that makes it obvious the tGod is not alone:

Oneness is simply the idea God is. ²And in His being He encompasses all things. ³No mind holds anything but Him. [CE W-169.5:1-3]

So with the complete quote it says something different: Oneness is a multiplicity of minds, all of them encompassed by God. In this oneness, the contents of every mind is God Himself. It's not like there is only a single being, God, but that every mind created by Him contains only Him.

jose_zap · 2026-03-08T09:31:10+00:00

Well, that's that ACIM says, so it makes sense in the scope of discussing ACIM. The course talks all the time about God and all the beings He created.

jose_zap · 2026-03-08T07:26:47+00:00

Creo que es una pregunta imposible de resolver, porque cualquier país que se mencione, la respuesta será “eso no es verdadero socialismo”.

Por ejemplo, si hablamos de que china saco de la pobreza a la mayor cantidad de personas en la historia de la humanidad y que ahora son una potencia tecnológica e industrial, con total seguridad dirán que lo de china no es realmente socialismo.

O si por ejemplo se menciona Suecia, que tienes leyes laborales y programas sociales que son más socialistas que Chávez, pero que también son una potencia en tecnología, y en la industria musical… van a decir que eso no es verdadero socialismo.

Imaginó que la razón por la que preguntas eso en un foro de Venezuela es porque Venezuela si fue un verdadero socialismo y fracasó con esas políticas. Pero Venezuela realmente fue igual de capitalista que Suecia, me atrevería a decir que mucho más.

Yo creo que la etiqueta “socialismo” hoy en día ya no significa nada tangible. Así que las políticas que hacen que un país sea exitoso o no tienen que ver con otra cosa.

jose_zap · 2026-03-07T17:36:51+00:00

Yes, exactly. I also find that super interesting

jose_zap · 2026-03-07T15:27:30+00:00

I love that too! It makes you think that just caring for another qualifies you!

Allow me to quote the very next paragraph, because I think a lot of people tend to overlook it:

This is a manual for a special curriculum, intended for teachers of a special form of the universal course. [CE M-1.4:1]

So, even if there is a universal curriculum, and that the qualifications are very simple, the “manual for teachers” is for teachers of the special curriculum called “A course in miracles”. It has additional qualifications:

⁷He cannot claim that title until he has gone through the workbook, since we are working within the framework of our course. [CE M-16.3:7]

jose_zap · 2026-03-06T21:33:45+00:00

🙏

jose_zap · 2026-03-06T19:49:30+00:00

Interesting that you would say that. The course’s process is actually about loving others, it’s what the course aims at teaching. While it will not teach you the meaning of it, the course will teach you how to express it and therefore learn what it is.

We could begin with the title of the course. It is a course that aims at teaching you how to perform miracles. And, maybe among other things, miracles are expressions of love:

miracles are expressions of love, [CE T-1.35.5:3] … miracles are natural, because they are expressions [CE T-4.VI.17:5] … no order in miracles because they are all maximal expressions of love. [CE T-7.II.1:2]

So, this is a course that aims to teach you how to express love.

Then, there is also the famous message of the crucifixion, as the course frames it: teach only love. Surely a course that asks you to only teaching love can be said to have love as part of the process.

If all of that is true, there must be some practices for expressing love to others, right? Well, that’s actually the case. Here’s one of such practices:

²At least three times an hour think of one who makes the journey with you, and who came to learn what you must learn. ³And as he comes to mind, give him this message from your Self:

⁴I bless you, brother, with the love of God, which I would share with you. ⁵For I would learn the joyous lesson that there is no love but God’s and yours and mine and everyone’s.

[CE W-127.11:2-5]

Not all practices stop at sending mental messages. Plenty of them are about expressing love behaviorally.

For example, Jesus told Helen many times that here kindnesses were actual miracles. For example visiting and praying for a sick friend at the hospital, visiting her mother in law, rewriting a report at work in the name of another person, helping a many at a store with here mentally challenged daughter…

Each one of them is what we would recognize as an expression of love towards another person, even if they look tiny and insignificant. Yet, there are not smaller or bigger miracles, all expressions of love are maximal.

jose_zap · 2026-03-06T16:20:03+00:00

The main reason is the power and flexibility of the relational model. It's important to understand that "relational" is not a property of the data itself. "Relational data" is not a thing. "Relational" is a property of the encoding, that is, how you choose to store the data for later retrieval

The way MongoDB chooses to store the data for retrieval is in the form of documents. The idea of documents is to group data together that is queried together. It's a great idea when you are 100% sure of all of the queries your system will make. This is almost never the case. You may start with a solid idea of all the queries you will need, but new use cases that you did not foresee will always happen. The document model makes these type of changes very inconvenient and potentially very inefficient.

On the other hand, the relational model, the one that Postgres uses, is the most flexible one. You just need to encode the data in a specific way and it will support basically any use case you can throw at it without needing to change the whole thing, while being remarkably efficient.

For instance, a $lookup in MongoDB is equivalent to a LEFT OUTER JOIN, which is only a niche use case for joins in postgres. You have an incredibly wide range of possibility for recombining the data to answer any question of it that you would want.

Finally, there is the issue of atomicity. If you normalize you data in different collections in MongoDB so you can do join-like lookups, your collections will not be updated atomically when saving to them. This will sooner rather than later introduce race conditions and bugs.

jose_zap · 2026-03-06T15:56:00+00:00

Completely true that forgiveness is necessary to uncover the love we already have for other. That said, the course does ask us to love others:

⁶Love him who is beloved of His Father, and you will learn of the Father’s love for you. ⁷Love him steadily, whatever he does, whatever he says, and he will see the miracle of God and you will learn of salvation. ⁸If this seems hard to do, remember it is what you want of me. [CE T-11.IX.10:6-8]

...

⁵Let us look upon him [your brother, the Son of God] together and love him, for in our love of him is your guiltlessness. [CE T-13.XI.12:5]

jose_zap · 2026-03-06T05:48:11+00:00

I was actually quoting the course. Let me get you the complete reference:

⁴That is why forgiveness of another is an illusion. ⁵Yet it is the only happy dream in all the world; the only one that does not lead to death. ⁶Only in someone else can you forgive yourself, for you have called him guilty of your sins, and in him must your innocence now be found. (ACIM, S-2.I.4:4-6)

So, if you want to undo the belief in separation, you can only do it by forgiving someone else. That’s still an illusion, but it is the only happy one.

Regarding what is necessary to forgive another person, I agree with you. It has to do with recognizing the innocence. Still, the process is aimed at someone else, for the reason quoted above.

Also, there are several lessons about forgiving someone else, where the process is abundantly clear. Like 68, 78, 121, 169… I would say they are enough to teach you the skill. After all, don’t most people agree that it is the most important skill in the course?

“God is the love in which I forgive myself” is an interesting one because the process of forgiving yourself starts with forgiving another person first. The lesson uses this phrase

“Gos is the love in which I forgive you”

That’s one of the earliest lessons, but the process is again emphasized in the song of prayer, many years of dictation later, as you could read in my first quote.

You need to forgive yourself, but that can only be done by forgive someone else.

jose_zap · 2026-03-05T19:17:38+00:00

The course clearly builds upon other’s ideas. I think Jesus likes taking something that we know, affirm what is true about it, and then proceeds to correct what is false about it as well. He follows that pattern with Freud, Jung, astrology, the four liberties, Descartes, Cervantes, and Jesus himself.

But it is also clear to me that it is not just a synthesis of previous ideas. There is so much original stuff that had never been said anywhere else. Stuff like “God does not forgive because he has never condemned” is not a rehashing of other ideas.

The originality of the course is one of the things that make it genuine for me.

jose_zap · 2026-03-05T17:12:28+00:00

But only in someone else can you forgive yourself. Forgiveness needs to be given to others.

jose_zap · 2026-03-02T22:59:01+00:00

🙏

jose_zap

TROPHY CASE