Unexpected Ways We Set Our Relationships Up for Failure

“Make no illusion truth, and do not make illusions friends. For if you do, you will have but replaced your true relationship with illusions, and you will not recognize truth.”

— A Course in Miracles (T-16.VII.4:4)

At first glance, this line can feel puzzling. What does it mean not to make “illusions” our friends? And if we lean toward the belief, as many mystics suggest, that the world itself is an illusion or dream, doesn’t that idea risk sliding us into a kind of nihilism — “nothing is real, so nothing matters”?

But ACIM, even with its unapologetic statements that the world is an illusion, is not about existing

 in despair. It’s offering us a way to untangle ourselves from patterns that quietly sabotage our relationships.

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Dreams as a Mirror

Nighttime dreams give us a perfect analogy for how perception works. When we sleep, the mind spins entire worlds populated with characters who feel vividly real. In a single dream we might face danger, fall in love, solve puzzles, or even die — and our bodies respond with pounding hearts, tears, laughter, or sweat. Yet when we wake, we recognize that no matter how convincing the experience was, it all came from one source: the mind of the dreamer.

Carl Jung taught that dreams are communications from the unconscious, and that every element in a dream — the people, animals, objects, and settings — reflects an aspect of the dreamer’s psyche. The frightened child may reveal our own vulnerability. The angry villain may embody repressed aggression. The nurturing figure may represent our capacity to love. In this sense, each dream character is “me” in disguise.

What’s most striking is that no single character in the dream can claim to be the real dreamer. The “me” that I identify with inside the dream is no more or less real than the dog, the stranger, or the landscape. All are expressions of the same mind.

This is why dreams are such a powerful mirror: they show us that experience is not something delivered from outside, but something generated from within. The mind projects its contents outward into a stage-play, and then forgets it is the author.

And if that’s true at night, A Course in Miracles asks us: why not in waking life as well? What if the world we move through each day is just as much a projection of the mind, equally dreamlike, equally revealing? What if every figure, whether friend or enemy, is reflecting something inside ourselves waiting to be seen?

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Hamlet’s Reminder

When Hamlet tells Rosencrantz, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” he is pointing us toward a profound truth: our experience of life is shaped less by the raw facts of what happens, and more by the meanings we assign to those facts. Similar to the way our sleeping dreams reflect back to us what is in our subconscious; our day to day life reflects back what is in our conscious and subconscious. 

Two people can stand in the very same place, surrounded by the same walls, events, and circumstances — and yet live in entirely different worlds. Rosencrantz looks at Denmark and sees a kingdom; Hamlet, weighed down by grief and suspicion, sees a prison. The difference is not in the stones of Elsinore, but in the lenses through which each man perceives them.

This is how perception works. It is not a passive reception of reality, but an active creation of it. Our inner world — our beliefs, emotions, and unconscious filters — paints itself onto the canvas of the outer world. Where one person sees opportunity, another sees threat. Where one sees love, another sees rejection.

Hamlet intuits this when he acknowledges that Denmark is not inherently a prison. It becomes one because his thoughts make it so. And in that insight, Shakespeare aligns with both psychology and mysticism: perception doesn’t just influence reality; in a sense, it appears to create it.

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ACIM on Projection

A Course in Miracles takes the idea of perception one step further. It doesn’t just say that our thoughts color experience — it insists that the entire world we see is a projection of the mind.

“Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that. It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition.” (T-21.In.1)

According to the Course, we live inside a movie screen of our own making. The images we encounter — people, events, circumstances — are not random or fixed. They are the outpicturing of what the mind carries within it. If the mind is burdened with guilt, the world will appear punishing and harsh. If the mind is filled with fear, the world will look threatening. If the mind is angry, the world will seem unjust.

This is why ACIM describes the world as “the delusional system of those made mad by guilt” (T-13.In.2). Our sense of separation from God (Oneness/Love) generates a deep unconscious guilt, which then gets pushed outward and dressed up as external circumstances. We forget that the story began in our own minds, and we blame the world for our suffering.

The good news is that projection works both ways. The same mind that projects fear and guilt can also project forgiveness. When we choose to see with the eyes of innocence (spirit of wholeness or what ACIM calls the Holy Spirit) instead of the ego (separate identity), the world reflects back peace, innocence, and love. The “facts” outside may remain the same, but the interpretation changes — and with it, our entire experience of life.

So in ACIM, healing doesn’t come from fixing the world or controlling circumstances. It comes from correcting the mind that is projecting them. When the projector changes, the movie changes.

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Relationships Through This Lens

When A Course in Miracles says “make no illusion friend,” it is offering us a profound key to how relationships actually work.

If the world itself is a projection of the mind, then relationships are the most vivid screens onto which we cast our hidden beliefs. Partners, friends, coworkers, and even strangers on the street become mirrors reflecting what is going on inside us. This means the love we feel is not really caused by another person, nor is the rejection, criticism, or abandonment. Each experience arises first in the mind and is then perceived “out there” as if it came from someone else.

This is why relationships can feel so charged. We are not only seeing another person — we are encountering projections of ourselves. The loyalty we admire in a partner points to our own capacity for loyalty. The irritation we feel toward a friend may be touching an unhealed impatience within us. Even betrayal, as painful as it is, reflects the guilt and fear the ego is still holding.

From this perspective, illusions are the patterns we project onto others — the belief that you can give me the love I lack, or that you are the source of my unhappiness. When ACIM warns not to make illusions “friends,” it is really saying: don’t mistake projections for truth. Don’t expect fulfillment from outside when everything you seek is already in your mind.

Only when I begin from a place of love within my mind can I truly recognize love in another. I am not in relationship with the person in front of me at all — I am in relationship with my own illusions about them or the remembrance of loves presents.

This reframing is not meant to dismiss the  connections we experience with other people. Rather, it gives us a way to anchor relationships in what is stable and real, instead of in the shifting projections of the ego. When we release illusions and see with forgiveness, relationships become classrooms of awakening — places where truth can shine through.

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Reflection Prompt:

• Where in my relationships do I look to another person to supply something I am unwilling to claim in myself?

• What would shift if I stopped befriending illusions of fear, guilt, or lack — and turned instead toward the truth of love already within?