There is a strange tug of war between the idea that a person is a body who dies, and the idea that the person is more than a body.

If you believe the person is a body, and only a body, and the body dies, you will believe heavily that the person has literally ceased existing. No soul moving on to heaven, nothing. That will be the basis for the worst kind of grief imaginable. "Reality died" is the basis of all grief and loss.

As I transition to the truth about my brothers/sisters I am to learn that they are not even remotely their body. Who and what they are isn't their flesh and bones, not by a long shot. Or at all. And that means learning to "associate" them with their permanent spiritual self. And that means recognizing their permanent spiritual self cannot die. So if the body ends up dead the person has not died at all in my mind.

With that kind of view, that death applies ONLY to the form and NOT to the spirit, and having a relationship with the person at the spirit level not confusing their form with their self, the entire basis for grief and loss is cancelled. There is merely a constant continuation of eternal life at all times and ultimately there should be no perceived difference between who a brother is while in a body vs out of one.

And so if the spirit of the person is permanent, it doesn't or shouldn't matter one iota whether their body ends up dead or not because nothing will have really changed or affected who they really are. And so if physical death changed absolutely nothing (nothing real can be affected), what grounds is there for anything but celebration?

Of course this becomes more difficult when the person themselves is body identified and presents themselves as if they are an isolated egoic person, because that egoic self is partly going to pass along with the body and this will seem like a death. We have to look past what our brother even thinks of themselves and learn to see their Christ self or Real/Holy/Spirit/Soul self beyond it, recognizing that THAT is the person and THAT self cannot die ever.

So after a while of focusing in this way, you might have thoughts that a person will die and how tragic this will be (if it seems real), but then also thoughts of well, their real self is permanent and they will just continue unaffected, just not in a body. No harm done, as it were. And that's a reassurance. Until you can get to the point where you're SO convinced by the spirit and not the flesh that for you, death means absolutely nothing, does not prove any kind of separation, has no reality and does not signal the end of anything real.

Then the time of tears is over forever.

"There is no death, the son of God is free".

"The world will end in laughter because it is a place of sorrow."

"And God himself shall wipe away all tears"

This is a central ACIM teaching, that death is not "normal" or "natural", but rather a choice, and that if you do not make the choice, death does not happen. It literally speaks to the real possibility of immortality, and the impossibility of death.

Think about this. Death cannot happen without you in some way being victimized. Something has to "happen to you". And that means, you are at the effect of the world in some way. That there is some kind of cause outside of you which somehow seemed to have power over you, which overpowered you, and did something against your will.

The only way that this kind of scenario can occur, is if there is something seriously mistaken about your mind. Your mind has to be seeing itself as a victim. It has to be believing it is affected by an illusion. It has to be playing the part of victim and of being attacked. It also has to be using the world, or people in the world, as scapegoats. Without the ability to accuse the world of causing the death against your will, the death cannot happen.

A key part of this is that even when it appears that death is happening against your will, even if you do choose it and play along with the victim role and being affected by something external, even then you are still giving full consent. You are still involved. Your mind is actually participating in laying down life and becoming un-willing to live. This is not passive.

The mind cannot ever be passive. The mind is always active and creating. If the mind chooses to have a sickness, the mind is still choosing the sickness and the mind is still putting the sickness there. The sickness isn't just happening on its own. And when the mind chooses not to put the sickness there the sickness disappears.

Even if it may *appear* at the time as though the sickness is happening outside the scope of your choice, or beyond what you can control, or that you were not even the one who chose it, the truth is that you did choose it, you put it in place yourself, it is you who are maintaining it, and it cannot even continue showing up without your consent.

So you have to realize what death is. Death is only "possible" as a state where our mind has something seriously fucked up about how it is seeing itself. It can only come about by the mind deciding to pretend that it is being seriously affected. Jesus describes it as a vain attempt to make no choice at all - really the disownership of choice or the attempt to be completely irresponsible for your existence.

In the activity or implementation of dying and death, the mind is actively choosing to pretend that it has nothing to do with living, nothing to do with what happens, and nothing to do with the circumstances that are arising. It is faking it. It is going under-cover, putting on a tremendous performance as if everyone and everything else is causal other than itself, and that it is purely an effect.

So what death really is, is an attempt to NOT be causal at all, to have no power, to appear to be making no choice, and to paint this picture of stuff happening seemingly against your will. But it's such an extraordinary lie, such a cover-up, that everyone seems to believe it. All the fingers will point in the direction of "cause of death" or "why they died" to explain how this death came about. But this will only explain the manner in which the death seemed to "happen", it will not in any way implicate the person as having been the author of these events, or of being the one who made it happen to themselves.

Death is a state of extreme lying. It is the most dishonest condition possible. It is a state of not only denying God, denying the unchangeable fact of eternal life, and denying that nothing can happen to you against your will (because that is God's Will and God has given you a will which cannot be affected).

If life seems to be degrading, and diminishing, and slipping away, and the external world seems to be mounting a successful attack, and the body seems to have a mind of its own, and circumstances appear to be transpiring against the person, and it starts to look AS IF it is unfair and unchosen and the person is not doing ANYTHING to contribute to this condition, that's because the illusion is INCREASING and the person is moving further away from truth.

Death is a complete reversal of sanity, a total reversal of the proper functioning of the mind, and a complete reversal of cause and effect. It places all power and will and choice and causality as outside of oneself, making oneself entirely an "effect" of something separate from oneself.

Death actually is an attempt to claim that God is external, that God is separate, that God has a will which opposes your own, that God is to blame for destroying you, that you have no power to stop Him, and that this is all happening to you entirely against your will. In other words, it is an attempt to claim that God is the cause of all death, and not the cause of life.

It then will appear that anyone who dies does not want to die. It will appear as if the person had no say in the matter, as if life just threw them a shit sandwich. It will seem as if they are being dragged kicking and screaming against their will into the firey pits of hell as if having absolutely no power to do anything about it. This is the most grandiose, lying, fabricated, fictional, deceptive, denying, dishonest, irresponsible and bullshit state of being possible. It's an attempt to accuse the entire world of destroying oneself.

Another way to put it is that we are inside this dream which WE are dreaming, and then we turn around and attempt to claim that this dream - which is coming from us - suddenly has the ability to cause us, to decide for us what we are, to make us what we are, that we are born from it and according to its nature, that we inherit from it, that is has power over us, that it decides if we live (are born) or if and when we die, and now we are a completely powerless victim of it. That's the entire illusion of death. The suggestion that a dream that WE MADE UP, is willing against us and has taken over possession of the very mind that dreamed it in the first place.

Another word for this also is "level confusion". Every single aspect of the ego thought system is level confusion. It means that cause and effect have been reversed and what was just an effect seems to be causal and what was always causal is seen to be at its effect. This means that the lower level - the effect - now seems to turn around and inflict a deadly blow against the higher level that made it in the first place, thus reversing the levels and creating an 'upward' direction of causality.

This is actually nothing more than the attempt to say "I cause God". It is the authority problem. Death is the result of the authority problem. It's an attempt to say, I have a will which is stronger than God's and I am successfully willing that God be dead, or that God is at the effect of me, or I can change God, and God is my victim. This is the idea of sin made real, that we can "actually" sin against God and cause Him harm. When we attempt to do this, instead of God dying, WE DIE. Instead of God receiving the effects, WE receive them. And so death in form is actually an expression of the attempt to kill God, and to kill His Son.

And Jesus goes into this in the Course quite a bit. The body is used as a kind of "anchor" to associate the Son of God with a form which can APPEAR to die or go through suffering, so that we can play out a fictional sadistic story of being successful at torturing and killing God's Son. When our sense of identity as God's Son is associated or identified with the body, or bound to the body, this makes us cling to the body and then we appear to become vulnerable. Eventually the body suffers and becomes weak, because we are using it for attacking ourselves, and then the body dies. And what does our ego think is happening when the body dies? It thinks that we are *succeeding* in destroying the Son of God!. Symbolically anyway. So all death is a SACRIFICE of God's Son.

This is also why this universe that we dreamed up, is a "picture of the crucifixion of God's Son". It's an attempt to implement death, to associate God's son with the form of a body or bodies, and to then destroy those forms in order to act out this idea that God and His Son have been murdered. This is of course utter bullshit and a total lie, because God and His Son are IMMORTAL, and cannot be changed or destroyed or harmed in any way.

God has granted ETERNAL LIFE to all souls He Created and it is absolutely impossible for any soul to truly die or suffer or be sick or upset or unhappy in any way. At the core of your being you know that you are already as God created you, you have not changed since God created you, and you cannot change what God created. At the core of your being you have no authority problem and you know that death is absolutely impossible for you. And yet here we are, pretending to be bodies, stuck in an illusion, bad stuff seeming to happen from our unconscious mind making it seem like we didn't ask for it, yet we are doing it ALL to ourselves.

The secret to salvation is that you are but doing ALL of this to yourself. All of the suffering, all the sickness and disease, all the upsets and unhappiness, all the tragic sudden car accident and airplane crashes and food poisoning and wars and all the rest of it. It's all a massive fictional illusion to make it seem like you are not doing it to yourself - that you are not trying to sacrifice yourself or crucify yourself. But you ARE. It's YOU that is doing it. It is YOU that is giving your consent. It not only that, not just that you are saying to someone hey, I give you consent to come along and kill me so that it seems I didn't do it myself, it's that you actually DO IT YOURSELF.

ALL death is suicide. All of it. Every single person buried in the ground was a suicide. Even the people who "died of old age" committed suicide. All of the people who suffered from terminal illnesses committed suicide. Every single still birth, every tragedy of war crimes, every murder, every unexpected accident, absolutely all of it is CHOSEN. And not one single person had anything happen to them which they did not choose and did not participate in causing to happen.

This is the truth of the Course. This is what Jesus is teaching us, to be responsible for the POWER that we have to make anything happen, and to stop denying it and stop pretending to be victims. We are NOT at the effect of the world we see, the world is nothing but an effect. It has no power to make you ill or weak or afraid or upset in any way! You are invulnerable. You are immortal spirit!

So fundamentally, death is IMPOSSIBLE because you are immortal. Period. You cannot die. But you can pretend to die, or as the course says, you can try to associate your identity with things that appear to die. Such as the body, which is an illusion, and a wonderful way to make it appear that you are not choosing.

It is utterly impossible, in all cases, for someone to move towards death, without their mind having made the decision to use death to try to sacrifice themselves. In every single case, if sickness is showing up, if suffering is happening, if there is punishment occurring, if there is unfair victimhood, or you seem unfairly treated, or something is happening that *seems* you have no power over, it is because you have GIVEN it power over you and you have given AWAY your power TO it, to make IT have the power to seem to choose FOR you that you will suffer and die, so that you can keep your power a secret even unto yourself, and pretend that this is all happening against your will.

Death cannot even begin to happen without your participation. It cannot even begin to happen without your consent. It cannot even begin to happen without your mind doing something wrong and unnatural. Death is NOT natural. It is completely unnatural. Anything that dies is filled with lies. Death is not an exit from the dream either. It is a guarantee of reincarnation. It doesn't matter how much of a famous guru you are. If you still go through death, you are still denying God, are still at the effect of the world, are still putting in place a state of victimhood, are still rallying things against you, and are still believing that God's Son can be killed.

So do not think that death is some kind of option or some kind of thing which is acceptable or peaceful or loving or kind or a sign of success or a way out of dreaming or inevitable or something which just happens against your will. IT DOES NOT. It cannot happen AT ALL unless you are making significant mistakes and are trying to bring about a will against your own will, meaning your will is divided against itself, meaning you still have a split mind. The symptoms of all sickness and death cannot show up AT ALL unless there is something going wrong with your mind.

"A broken body is proof the mind has not been healed." This is absolutely 100% literal. If there is some kind of sign of damage or breakage or sickness in the body, it is because the mind is attempting to attack ITSELF. What you use the body for it will become to you - use it for attack and it will become weak and sick and die. Use it to bring the word of God (immortality) to those who have it not and it becomes holy and being holy it CANNOT be sick, NOR CAN IT DIE. This is pure ACIM teaching.

Death is failure. Death is denial. Death is a lie. Death is a mistake. Death is victimhood. Death is self hatred. Death is sacrifice. Death is illusion. Death is suffering. Death is reluctance to accept the truth. Death is a defense against the truth. Death is sickness. Death is level confusion. Death is a reversal of cause and effect. Death is the authority problem. Death is a belief in the justified consequences of real sin. Death is absolutely the OPPOSITE of everything the course is teaching, everything true about God and His creation, and is a total reversal of sanity. Do not see it as normal or natural or an graceful exit.

Jesus is teaching us to stop killing ourselves. To accept immortality. To demonstrate immortality. To show the world that death is impossible. Jesus was crucified (by his own will) and came back and manifested another body to demonstrate that the MIND makes the body and can make another, to prove that the mind is completely NOT at the effect of the body or the world, and therefore has escaped death entirely. It is proof of immortality. Jesus overcame death. He wants us to overcome death, not give in to it. Not anticipate it or fear it or give it power or expect it or make it into a religion or worship it or put it on a pedestal like some kind of salvation.

Only the creations of light are real. Nothing real can be threatened. What is real is immortal. Spirit is is a state of grace forever. Heaven and earth are total opposites. Heaven is a state of eternal life. There is no death in God's Son.

There is no death! The Son of God is free! The Son of God can only be free if it is completely experientially true that nothing can happen against His will. And it IS true. There is no will but God's. Eternal life is GUARANTEED.

This is a central ACIM teaching, that death is not "normal" or "natural", but rather a choice, and that if you do not make the choice, death does not happen. It literally speaks to the real possibility of immortality, and the impossibility of death.

Think about this. Death cannot happen without you in some way being victimized. Something has to "happen to you". And that means, you are at the effect of the world in some way. That there is some kind of cause outside of you which somehow seemed to have power over you, which overpowered you, and did something against your will.

The only way that this kind of scenario can occur, is if there is something seriously mistaken about your mind. Your mind has to be seeing itself as a victim. It has to be believing it is affected by an illusion. It has to be playing the part of victim and of being attacked. It also has to be using the world, or people in the world, as scapegoats. Without the ability to accuse the world of causing the death against your will, the death cannot happen.

A key part of this is that even when it appears that death is happening against your will, even if you do choose it and play along with the victim role and being affected by something external, even then you are still giving full consent. You are still involved. Your mind is actually participating in laying down life and becoming un-willing to live. This is not passive.

The mind cannot ever be passive. The mind is always active and creating. If the mind chooses to have a sickness, the mind is still choosing the sickness and the mind is still putting the sickness there. The sickness isn't just happening on its own. And when the mind chooses not to put the sickness there the sickness disappears.

Even if it may *appear* at the time as though the sickness is happening outside the scope of your choice, or beyond what you can control, or that you were not even the one who chose it, the truth is that you did choose it, you put it in place yourself, it is you who are maintaining it, and it cannot even continue showing up without your consent.

So you have to realize what death is. Death is only "possible" as a state where our mind has something seriously fucked up about how it is seeing itself. It can only come about by the mind deciding to pretend that it is being seriously affected. Jesus describes it as a vain attempt to make no choice at all - really the disownership of choice or the attempt to be completely irresponsible for your existence.

In the activity or implementation of dying and death, the mind is actively choosing to pretend that it has nothing to do with living, nothing to do with what happens, and nothing to do with the circumstances that are arising. It is faking it. It is going under-cover, putting on a tremendous performance as if everyone and everything else is causal other than itself, and that it is purely an effect.

So what death really is, is an attempt to NOT be causal at all, to have no power, to appear to be making no choice, and to paint this picture of stuff happening seemingly against your will. But it's such an extraordinary lie, such a cover-up, that everyone seems to believe it. All the fingers will point in the direction of "cause of death" or "why they died" to explain how this death came about. But this will only explain the manner in which the death seemed to "happen", it will not in any way implicate the person as having been the author of these events, or of being the one who made it happen to themselves.

Death is a state of extreme lying. It is the most dishonest condition possible. It is a state of not only denying God, denying the unchangeable fact of eternal life, and denying that nothing can happen to you against your will (because that is God's Will and God has given you a will which cannot be affected).

If life seems to be degrading, and diminishing, and slipping away, and the external world seems to be mounting a successful attack, and the body seems to have a mind of its own, and circumstances appear to be transpiring against the person, and it starts to look AS IF it is unfair and unchosen and the person is not doing ANYTHING to contribute to this condition, that's because the illusion is INCREASING and the person is moving further away from truth.

Death is a complete reversal of sanity, a total reversal of the proper functioning of the mind, and a complete reversal of cause and effect. It places all power and will and choice and causality as outside of oneself, making oneself entirely an "effect" of something separate from oneself.

Death actually is an attempt to claim that God is external, that God is separate, that God has a will which opposes your own, that God is to blame for destroying you, that you have no power to stop Him, and that this is all happening to you entirely against your will. In other words, it is an attempt to claim that God is the cause of all death, and not the cause of life.

It then will appear that anyone who dies does not want to die. It will appear as if the person had no say in the matter, as if life just threw them a shit sandwich. It will seem as if they are being dragged kicking and screaming against their will into the firey pits of hell as if having absolutely no power to do anything about it. This is the most grandiose, lying, fabricated, fictional, deceptive, denying, dishonest, irresponsible and bullshit state of being possible. It's an attempt to accuse the entire world of destroying oneself.

Another way to put it is that we are inside this dream which WE are dreaming, and then we turn around and attempt to claim that this dream - which is coming from us - suddenly has the ability to cause us, to decide for us what we are, to make us what we are, that we are born from it and according to its nature, that we inherit from it, that is has power over us, that it decides if we live (are born) or if and when we die, and now we are a completely powerless victim of it. That's the entire illusion of death. The suggestion that a dream that WE MADE UP, is willing against us and has taken over possession of the very mind that dreamed it in the first place.

Another word for this also is "level confusion". Every single aspect of the ego thought system is level confusion. It means that cause and effect have been reversed and what was just an effect seems to be causal and what was always causal is seen to be at its effect. This means that the lower level - the effect - now seems to turn around and inflict a deadly blow against the higher level that made it in the first place, thus reversing the levels and creating an 'upward' direction of causality.

This is actually nothing more than the attempt to say "I cause God". It is the authority problem. Death is the result of the authority problem. It's an attempt to say, I have a will which is stronger than God's and I am successfully willing that God be dead, or that God is at the effect of me, or I can change God, and God is my victim. This is the idea of sin made real, that we can "actually" sin against God and cause Him harm. When we attempt to do this, instead of God dying, WE DIE. Instead of God receiving the effects, WE receive them. And so death in form is actually an expression of the attempt to kill God, and to kill His Son.

And Jesus goes into this in the Course quite a bit. The body is used as a kind of "anchor" to associate the Son of God with a form which can APPEAR to die or go through suffering, so that we can play out a fictional sadistic story of being successful at torturing and killing God's Son. When our sense of identity as God's Son is associated or identified with the body, or bound to the body, this makes us cling to the body and then we appear to become vulnerable. Eventually the body suffers and becomes weak, because we are using it for attacking ourselves, and then the body dies. And what does our ego think is happening when the body dies? It thinks that we are *succeeding* in destroying the Son of God!. Symbolically anyway. So all death is a SACRIFICE of God's Son.

This is also why this universe that we dreamed up, is a "picture of the crucifixion of God's Son". It's an attempt to implement death, to associate God's son with the form of a body or bodies, and to then destroy those forms in order to act out this idea that God and His Son have been murdered. This is of course utter bullshit and a total lie, because God and His Son are IMMORTAL, and cannot be changed or destroyed or harmed in any way.

God has granted ETERNAL LIFE to all souls He Created and it is absolutely impossible for any soul to truly die or suffer or be sick or upset or unhappy in any way. At the core of your being you know that you are already as God created you, you have not changed since God created you, and you cannot change what God created. At the core of your being you have no authority problem and you know that death is absolutely impossible for you. And yet here we are, pretending to be bodies, stuck in an illusion, bad stuff seeming to happen from our unconscious mind making it seem like we didn't ask for it, yet we are doing it ALL to ourselves.

The secret to salvation is that you are but doing ALL of this to yourself. All of the suffering, all the sickness and disease, all the upsets and unhappiness, all the tragic sudden car accident and airplane crashes and food poisoning and wars and all the rest of it. It's all a massive fictional illusion to make it seem like you are not doing it to yourself - that you are not trying to sacrifice yourself or crucify yourself. But you ARE. It's YOU that is doing it. It is YOU that is giving your consent. It not only that, not just that you are saying to someone hey, I give you consent to come along and kill me so that it seems I didn't do it myself, it's that you actually DO IT YOURSELF.

ALL death is suicide. All of it. Every single person buried in the ground was a suicide. Even the people who "died of old age" committed suicide. All of the people who suffered from terminal illnesses committed suicide. Every single still birth, every tragedy of war crimes, every murder, every unexpected accident, absolutely all of it is CHOSEN. And not one single person had anything happen to them which they did not choose and did not participate in causing to happen.

This is the truth of the Course. This is what Jesus is teaching us, to be responsible for the POWER that we have to make anything happen, and to stop denying it and stop pretending to be victims. We are NOT at the effect of the world we see, the world is nothing but an effect. It has no power to make you ill or weak or afraid or upset in any way! You are invulnerable. You are immortal spirit!

So fundamentally, death is IMPOSSIBLE because you are immortal. Period. You cannot die. But you can pretend to die, or as the course says, you can try to associate your identity with things that appear to die. Such as the body, which is an illusion, and a wonderful way to make it appear that you are not choosing.

It is utterly impossible, in all cases, for someone to move towards death, without their mind having made the decision to use death to try to sacrifice themselves. In every single case, if sickness is showing up, if suffering is happening, if there is punishment occurring, if there is unfair victimhood, or you seem unfairly treated, or something is happening that *seems* you have no power over, it is because you have GIVEN it power over you and you have given AWAY your power TO it, to make IT have the power to seem to choose FOR you that you will suffer and die, so that you can keep your power a secret even unto yourself, and pretend that this is all happening against your will.

Death cannot even begin to happen without your participation. It cannot even begin to happen without your consent. It cannot even begin to happen without your mind doing something wrong and unnatural. Death is NOT natural. It is completely unnatural. Anything that dies is filled with lies. Death is not an exit from the dream either. It is a guarantee of reincarnation. It doesn't matter how much of a famous guru you are. If you still go through death, you are still denying God, are still at the effect of the world, are still putting in place a state of victimhood, are still rallying things against you, and are still believing that God's Son can be killed.

So do not think that death is some kind of option or some kind of thing which is acceptable or peaceful or loving or kind or a sign of success or a way out of dreaming or inevitable or something which just happens against your will. IT DOES NOT. It cannot happen AT ALL unless you are making significant mistakes and are trying to bring about a will against your own will, meaning your will is divided against itself, meaning you still have a split mind. The symptoms of all sickness and death cannot show up AT ALL unless there is something going wrong with your mind.

"A broken body is proof the mind has not been healed." This is absolutely 100% literal. If there is some kind of sign of damage or breakage or sickness in the body, it is because the mind is attempting to attack ITSELF. What you use the body for it will become to you - use it for attack and it will become weak and sick and die. Use it to bring the word of God (immortality) to those who have it not and it becomes holy and being holy it CANNOT be sick, NOR CAN IT DIE. This is pure ACIM teaching.

Death is failure. Death is denial. Death is a lie. Death is a mistake. Death is victimhood. Death is self hatred. Death is sacrifice. Death is illusion. Death is suffering. Death is reluctance to accept the truth. Death is a defense against the truth. Death is sickness. Death is level confusion. Death is a reversal of cause and effect. Death is the authority problem. Death is a belief in the justified consequences of real sin. Death is absolutely the OPPOSITE of everything the course is teaching, everything true about God and His creation, and is a total reversal of sanity. Do not see it as normal or natural or an graceful exit.

Jesus is teaching us to stop killing ourselves. To accept immortality. To demonstrate immortality. To show the world that death is impossible. Jesus was crucified (by his own will) and came back and manifested another body to demonstrate that the MIND makes the body and can make another, to prove that the mind is completely NOT at the effect of the body or the world, and therefore has escaped death entirely. It is proof of immortality. Jesus overcame death. He wants us to overcome death, not give in to it. Not anticipate it or fear it or give it power or expect it or make it into a religion or worship it or put it on a pedestal like some kind of salvation.

Only the creations of light are real. Nothing real can be threatened. What is real is immortal. Spirit is is a state of grace forever. Heaven and earth are total opposites. Heaven is a state of eternal life. There is no death in God's Son.

There is no death! The Son of God is free! The Son of God can only be free if it is completely experientially true that nothing can happen against His will. And it IS true. There is no will but God's. Eternal life is GUARANTEED.

A powerful lesson: ACIM 152 - nobody dies without their own consent... this blows absolutely all victimhood out of the water...

"152: **The power of decision is my own.**

No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. And no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is.

You may believe that this position is extreme, and too inclusive to be true. Yet can truth have exceptions? If you have the gift of everything, can loss be real? Can pain be part of peace, or grief of joy? Can fear and sickness enter in a mind where love and perfect holiness abide? Truth must be all-inclusive, if it be the truth at all. Accept no opposites and no exceptions, for to do so is to contradict the truth entirely.

Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true, and nothing else is true."

I asked Jesus last night fairly bluntly about death, whether a person's body can die without any problems in the mind, and whether a person can be fully awake/enlightened and still go through the death process.

His answer was short and sweet and cut to the chase:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Demonstrate death and you must believe in death."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Just to make sure you grasp what this means, recognize the ACIM ideas that "to teach is to learn" and also "all teaching is demonstration" and "you will demonstrate what you believe is true" and "you are always demonstrating even while you sleep".

So that means, whatever you are expressing, whatever you are showing up "as", whatever state your body is in, whatever is coming through you, however you are using the body, whatever you are trying to communicate to others on all levels including the physical, whatever "message" you are giving through the state of your body which reflects the state of your mind, that is your DEMONSTRATION. Which means, it correlates exactly to what you BELIEVE IS TRUE.

This is proven out in this quote, which tells us that whatever you use the body to DEMONSTRATE, it will BECOME THAT, so if you use the body to demonstrate sickness or death, it becomes sick and dead, because you BELIEVE IN DEATH. The mind makes ALL DECISIONS about the body's condition, including whether it lives or dies:

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions that are responsible for the body’s condition. "

So when you are believing in true health, you will demonstrate true health. When you believe in attack you will demonstrate attack. When you believe in sickness you will demonstrate a sickness. When you believe in death, you will demonstrate death!

What Jesus is saying is, in order to demonstrate death - "to die" as we like to refer to it, where the body goes through a death process, that is ONLY POSSIBLE when you BELIEVE that DEATH IS TRUE AND REAL. And it is because you believe in death being true, that you demonstrate that this is your truth.

It also means therefore, that if you DO NOT BELIEVE in death, YOUR BODY CANNOT DIE. Literally ****CANNOT****. Impossible for it to die, no matter what. If that is your 100% perfect belief in absolutely no attack, the body MUST become a symbol of immortality, to remain in perfect AGELESS HEALTH, as long as it is needed. Not even affected by weather or food or time.

Long story short..... DEATH CAN ONLY HAPPEN IF YOU BELIEVE IN IT!

And that also means... TO COMPLETE THE CURRICULUM AND FULLY WAKE UP, YOU MUST NOT BELIEVE IN DEATH, AND YOU MUST DEMONSTRATE IMMORTALITY.

So everyone is constantly demonstrating, teaching, communicating, what it is they believe the truth is, putting on a "show" which exhibits for everyone to see, exactly what it is you believe in.

Jesus also teaches simply that if you REALLY believe that something is true, you WILL be ABLE to demonstrate its truth. Not just a sort of powerless wishful thinking, but that if it is your actual experience that something is true, you will wholeheartedly be willing to demonstrate it to PROVE that you believe it. Nothing will hold you back from demonstrating it. Being fully convinced of its truth, it becomes REAL for you, and that gives you the POWER to demonstrate it.

"Miracles demonstrate that learning has occurred under the right guidance, for learning is invisible and what has been learned can be recognized ONLY BY ITS RESULTS. Its generalisation is DEMONSTRATED as you use it in more and more situations. You will recognize that you have learned there is no order of difficulty in miracles when you apply them to all situations. There is NO SITUATION (including sickness and death) to which miracles do not apply, and by applying them to ALL situations you will gain the real world."

So what this boils down to is this simple fact.

If your body becomes sick, or if you die, YOU MUST HAVE CHOSEN IT, BECAUSE YOU BELIEVE IN DEATH.

There is no exception to this. If you "demonstrate death" for all to see, you are PROVING that death is something you believe in, and that is why you are TEACHING DEATH to everyone through your EXAMPLE. You're saying, look everyone, look at how death is real, look at how death is happening, look at how death is my truth, and LOOK AT HOW YOU DID THIS TO ME!

When you look at all the passages in the course which talk about "demonstration" this is clearly revealed, that when you demonstrate something it "applies" your belief to others. And therefore when you make your body sick, you are attacking others because you are demonstrating your belief that you have been "made sick" by someone other than yourself. And when you are attacking others, YOUR BODY will be attacked, and will become sick, to DEMONSTRATE that you are believing in attack. And this is nothing other than the attempt to PROVE that your brother must be a sinner because EFFECTS are showing up in you which he MUST have caused.

And even further, when you CEASE believing in death and sickness, you EXONERATE your brother, because you are no longer believing that he is the cause of your state of being, or the world. Jesus used His own resurrection - the re-materialization of a body which was NOT DEAD, proving He had NOT been killed by crucifixion, to DEMONSTRATE that death is not real. Here:

"We said before that the purpose of the Resurrection was to "demonstrate that no amount of misperception has any influence at all on a Son of God." This demonstration EXONERATES those who misperceive, by establishing beyond doubt that they have NOT hurt anyone."

He refers to misperception because in a prior paragraph he spoke of how the misperception of others was the justification for their attempted attack on his life. He resurrected to PROVE that they were EXONERATED, through physical demonstration, because of his BELIEF that there is no death, and therefore showed that they were no longer ACCUSED of having caused the death. Simply, by showing up as "not dead", it immediately cancelled and proved false any belief that anyone had killed him, thus rendering all onlookers INNOCENT. He thus TAUGHT THEIR INNOCENCE through this miracle demonstration, because miracles are teaching devices.

The demonstration of what you believe is important. It is all over the course. When we are making ourselves sick, we are accusing our brother of sin. And yes THIS DOES MEAN AT THE PHYSICAL LEVEL. It is only at the physical level that you can see the RESULTS of miracles and the results of the mind's belief system. And this physical level is used as a COMMUNICATION device to make statements about WHAT IS TRUE OF BOTH YOU AND YOUR BROTHER. Your sickness attacks BOTH of you. Your death attacks BOTH of you. With death you are saying, "you killed me, and I killed you, and both of us are dead". This is spelled out in black and white, that "your sickness" is an attack on others and an attempt to accuse your brother of sin. Your body *MUST* be part of your awakening process and part of your view of yourself and part of what it is you believe in.

"The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an easy price if they can say, "Behold me, brother; at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors must be sins."

Here Jesus is not talking figuratively or metaphorically about death. He's talking plainly about a person's body dying as an attempt to accuse your brother of sin. Anyone who is sick, anyone who dies, is accusing the whole sonship, and the world, and God, of "causing it", and therefore claiming that we are all sinners. Sickness and death OF THE PHYSICAL BODY are WEAPONS OF ATTACK. The body is an IMAGE you are showing your brother to say hey, this is what I think of you, and this is what is true of us both. This is why the body is an integral part of your MIND and an integral part of your entire process of spiritual enlightenment. IT MUST SHOW WHAT YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE.

You can't it be that the body just sits there like a separate "thing" having absolutely no input from your mind and not reflecting your inner condition whatsoever, with you blissing out in some corner of your mind pretending to be awake while the body is still showing everyone that you believe death is real. You can't just be like, oh I'm not a body I am free, I'll just sit here and not be a body, while my body is sick and dies, and I don't care if its sick or dead cus it's an illusion. THAT'S DENIAL. THAT'S A LIE. THAT'S DISHONEST. THAT'S BULLSHIT!!!!!!!

I know that many people cannot accept this and many deny it. But Jesus in A Course in Miracles, and supported by everything He has said in his own words, is telling us to STOP BEING SICK and STOP DYING. That sickness and death are the total OPPOSITE of God's Will, and that we are to DEMONSTRATE AN UNWILLINGNESS TO DIE, in order to PROVE that we really truly believe that death is not real.

It is not enough to sit on a fence and say, ok, I don't believe in death. And to then die. That is a lie. It is dishonest to say you do not believe in sickness and to then demonstrate being sick. Or to claim you are not dying and to then die. Or to say it's not my mind that's dying, it's just my body, which is not me. That's an intellectualization because THE BODY CAN ONLY DIE IF YOU ATTACK IT. It is a lie. The mind IS believing in death and is making the body sick. A SANE MIND heals the body!

"Now is the body healed, because the source of sickness has been opened to relief. "

"The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, the mind HEALS THE BODY (making sickness and death IMPOSSIBLE) because it has been healed. The sane mind cannot conceive of illness because it cannot conceive of attacking anyone or anything."

If your mind is sane, YOUR BODY CANNOT DIE. If your body dies, YOUR MIND IS NOT SANE.

Whatever you demonstrate, whatever you express, whatever you show, it is coming from your inner condition as an outward picture. It is a demonstration of your thought system and what you REALLY believe. If you go through death, YOU DO BELIEVE IN DEATH. No exceptions. If you do NOT believe in death, YOU WILL NOT DEMONSTRATE IT.

You do not get to wake up from being a body in the dream and then go through death. You do not get to wake up from being a body and believe intellectually that you're not the body and to then have the body be sick and die. Where is the correlation of proof that your mind makes your body? Where is the consistent honesty? This is deception. You can't be demonstrating one thing and believing another.

Jesus is literally teaching us to OVERCOME DEATH. "You made sickness and death and can abolish both". This is not an OPTIONAL course teaching. This is not just some side-thread which you can elect whether to participate in. This is a CENTRAL TEACHING. It is inherent to healing. It is inherent to being right minded. It is inherent to miracles. It is inherent in all of the Course's metaphysics, and it is GOD's WILL that you not demonstrate death. Death is an attempt to kill God's Son, no matter what anyone claims about their supposed state of mind. Death is humanity's belief in hatred made manifest. Period.

Anyone who shows that they die in this world, is demonstrating and proving that they believe in death. That's all there is to it. It doesn't matter how much of a guru you are, how enlightened you seem to be, how many miracles you performed, how many yogic skills you have, how many followers you accumulated, how many people adore you, nothing. The proof is in the pudding. If you die, you did not overcome death.

"A dream of death is not left by death but by truth."

It's plain and simple. All the arguments about "oh this is just a dream and death isn't real so it doesn't matter if you die"... it's a logical ERROR, it's level confusion. All the arguments about "well I don't have the power to stop my own death", is also bullshit. It is UNWILLINGNESS TO LIVE. All the arguments about "death is natural" - absolutely false. All the arguments about death is inevitable - absolutely false. All the arguments about "everything dies" or "everyone dies"... how SORRY IS THAT?

That 99.99% of the human race is FAILING TO BELIEVE IN LIFE. That 99.99% of the human race is suicidal. "A dry and dusty world where starved and thirsty creatures come to die." And world where we come "to hate a while, whither and die".

This is not God's will.

It is God's will that you believe in life, you demonstrate that you believe in life, you ABOLISH DEATH, you undo ALL sickness, and you SHOW and PROVE that you cannot be killed, nothing can affect you in any way, and that the body can be overcome. You leave the dream through TRUTH, not through death. And truth brings light to illusions and disappears them.

This is the new frontier of A Course in Miracles. This is the true message Jesus is teaching. That you DO NOT NEED TO DIE and YOU SHOULD NOT DIE if you are to believe in everlasting life.

Again "demonstrate death and you must believe in death".

Death is what you are teaching. Death is what you believe in. If you are overpowered by disease and forces in the ego world, which you made, you have not undone your own self-attack. If your body is wracked with sickness, which are defenses you yourself put in place, and you have not removed those defenses, then you are still blocking God's Will.

No-one dies without their own consent. All death is suicide. Death is the opposite of God's Will.

"Sickness and death seemed to enter the mind of God's Son against His Will. 2 The "attack on God" made His Son think he was Fatherless, and out of his depression he made the god of depression."

"4 Many are afraid of blasphemy, but they do not understand what it means. 5 They do not realize that to deny God is to deny their own Identity, and in this sense the wages of sin is death. 6 The sense is very literal; denial of life perceives its opposite, as all forms of denial replace what is with what is not. 7 No one can really do this, but that you can think you can and believe you have is beyond dispute."

"T-10.V.2. Do not forget, however, that to deny God will inevitably result in projection, and you will believe that others and not yourself have done this to you."

"From the ego came sin and guilt and death, in opposition to life and innocence and to the Will of God Himself. Where can such opposition lie but in the sick minds of the insane, dedicated to madness and set against the peace of Heaven. One thing is sure—God, Who created neither sin nor death, wills not that you be bound by them. He knows of neither sin nor its results. The shrouded figures in the funeral procession march not in honor of their Creator, Whose Will it is they live. They are not following it; they are opposing it.

81 And what is the black-draped body they would bury? A body which they dedicated to death, a symbol of corruption, a sacrifice to sin, offered to sin to feed upon and keep itself alive—a thing condemned, damned by its maker, and lamented by every mourner who looks upon it as himself. You who believe you have condemned the Son of God to this are arrogant."

If you REALLY believe in God's Will and that God is eternal life, you WILL DEMONSTRATE IT IN THIS WORLD by proving you cannot be affected by the world IN ANY WAY, not even death can happen to you, and you are IMMORTAL. If you are not doing that, it is because you do not believe it, it means you do not fully want to do God's Will, and MUST still have mental illness. If you die, you are NOT awake. Death is a symbol of sleep within sleep. It is the total opposite of progress, the total opposite of awakening, and the total opposite of truth.

"There is no death, the Son of God is free" is true ONLY IF you can PROVE IT, by being INCAPABLE of dying, not merely as a mind, but in any way that you show up. If you are in a body, you MUST SHOW IT by showing you CANNOT DIE PHYSICALLY EITHER.

Do you really think if Jesus showed up in the world, projecting a body from His mind, that anything in the world could make that body dead? That you could hurt it in any way or make it sick against Jesus's will? THAT would be arrogant, and that is the arrogance of the ego. "There is no death, the Son of God is free" WHEN HE FULLY BELIEVES IN THE END OF DEATH and has the balls to show it to the world.

"My Self is ruler of the universe

It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept. For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my Will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them, and Him Who has created me."

and

"No-one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No-one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No-one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. And no-one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is.

You may believe that this position is extreme, and too inclusive to be true. Yet can truth have exceptions?"

and

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No-one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are."

and

"No-one can die unless he chooses death."

"No-one dies without their own consent."

"You cannot die unless you choose to do so."

and

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF. No matter what the form of the attack, this STILL is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, STILL is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is STILL true. For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes."

"The power of decision is my own." OWN IT!

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use if for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all." - ACIM

Look at the pivotal second line. "What you use the body for it will become to you."

So this literally means, the body *exactly matches* what you use it for.

This means, if just a moment ago you were using the body for one purpose, and you change your mind, the body MUST change. If you then change your mind back to how it was before, the body MUST change back as well. There ARE no other causes of the body’s condition besides the mind.

The state of the body directly matches, is tied to, and absolutely has NO SEPARATE WILL OR POWER over the mind’s choice of what it wants to express.

If the mind chooses to express beliefs in sin and death, the body will SHOW UP as a picture of sin and death.

If the mind chooses to express acceptance of atonement, the body will SHOW UP as a picture of perfection and immortality.

The body is a projection from the mind. Mind changes, body changes. Mind is cause, body is effect.

It is ONLY the belief that the body has a mind of its own, a will of its own, that it persists without your input, that it came to exist without your decision, and that it can die *against your will* - - all of which is a belief in MAGIC and VICTIMHOOD, that ever sustains the idea that the body can still be sick when the mind awakens.

There is no loophole in cause and effect. The idea that there are some effects which "escape" the influence of the mind’s causality, somehow caused by "some other power" - alien will - is a belief in *separation* between cause and effect, which is an illusion.

There are no OTHER reasons why the body can sustain sickness "on its own" or "because of the world" or "because of a pre-existing sickness". The body is ONLY ever a picture projected by the mind, REFLECTING its beliefs perfectly. If the mind changes, the body changes.

No-one dies without their own consent. The only way this is POSSIBLE is by mind having ABSOLUTE POWER over the body at all times. Otherwise, death could happen "for some other reason". It would also mean, when the mind wakes up, the body can STILL BE DESTROYED by some "other" will or force. This is impossible if no-one can die without their own consent. Their own consent is THE ONLY CAUSE of sickness.

Therefore, a sick body cannot possibly be maintained at all if the mind is free.

"A broken body is PROOF the mind has not been healed."

We cannot optionally, or technically, demonstrate sickness if we are to awaken fully to the truth. It is metaphysically impossible, meaning it is literally impossible for the body to be sick if the mind is not sick.

"Because it is holy it CANNOT be sick, nor can it die."

(...and why a sick body means the mind has NOT been healed)

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use if for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies." - ACIM

Think of the body as a blank canvas, onto which you can paint a picture representing who and what you are.

If you are in the business of believing in sin, you will deny it and attempt to project blame onto someone else. Perceptually you will see them as causing you in some way, and simultaneously your mind MUST implement the "effects" of that causality onto yourself.

You therefore put in place, or paint a picture of, an identity which has been affected by something external. You show yourself as suffering, you position yourself as looking like you are sick, you damage yourself, and you take out this attack upon yourself. You do so in an attempt to show everyone that THEY did this to you.

It's really the insight that we implement the EFFECTS upon ourselves BEFORE we blame the cause of those effects onto something outside of ourselves. This also would tie into the fact that in this case, cause and effect have been reversed. We express effects of sickness, suffering, damage, etc in order to attempt to accuse others of doing this to us. We actually sort of wear the costume of looking like someone who has been hurt, and then walk around trying to find someone to blame for causing it.

Projection makes perception, and denial makes for projection. But how about.... we first believe we are attacked and implement the effects that the attack would produce, and then project the cause outward?

So what we do is, we make ourselves sick, we show ourselves as a picture of suffering, and we do this with the body. The body is our canvas, our "picture" of our Self, our identity. We make the body sick in order to accuse our brother of making us sick. We say, "hah, look at me, you did this to me you fucker. It's your fault."

The fact is, it's not possible to accuse another of doing something to you without YOU experiencing the effects. The ego says, no, if you do something to someone else you can escape the effects. But in truth, the mind does not work that way. Whatever applies to you applies equally everywhere. So in order to accuse someone of attack and sin, YOU must picture yourself as attacked and sinful.

YOUR body is like a picture which YOU hold up in order to show to OTHERS what you believe THEY are! It is not just a picture of yourself, it is a picture of BOTH OF YOU. This is because the body is a device for separation and that is two-sided, the selves on both sides are kept apart and affected equally - as within so without. The body then as a separation device is a picture of YOU AND YOUR BROTHER in a state of attack!

You can't hold up a picture of THEM and say, you're sinful and I'm not. Instead you hold up a picture of your "self" (the body) in an attacked state as if to say to someone else, "this is what you are". You're talking to yourself, accusing yourself, and picturing yourself as suffering.

So you can't accuse without attacking your body, meaning you're trying to USE the body to attack someone and the result is that your body MUST become a picture of attack, showing symptoms of a belief in attack. If it applies to your brother, it applies to you. You try to take them down, and take yourself down in the process. This is why all death is suicide. As Jesus says, use the body for attack like this and it will appear weak and it will die.

The opposite of this is that if you do not attack "through" the body, you do not project sin, you do not accuse yourself of sin, and you see the equal innocence of yourself and another, you will not "picture yourself" as attacked, and thus the body WILL SHOW a picture of you in a non-attacked condition. Your mind will project a body which is "healthy". It must.

When the body is not used for attack, and is used only to express/extend love, the body will appear "lovely", or a symbolic picture of a self which has no attack in it. Thus all signs of sickness and disease must vanish from it, and it will demonstrate what you believe is true. You can't project an image of a body which is sick while being truly in the truth, any more than you can project an image of a healthy body while your mind is attacking.

Essentially, this also leads to the realization that when someone dies, they literally have committed suicide, but they also have attempted to "attack with death". Their attempt to die is an attempt to accuse everyone of being dead, to affect everyone, to make everyone suffer as well, and is an attack on everyone. The body becomes a picture of death to show that the mind is using it for attack. It is like a suicide bomber or a kamikaze attacker who is attempting to throw their own body at their enemy in an attempt to eradicate them.

Death is the ultimate attempt to destroy EVERYONE as well as yourself, except that it is only yourself that ends up suffering. It's like saying, I so hate everyone and so believe in separation, that I am going to completely cut myself off from all Life and therefore shrivel up and be weak and die, because this is what I think of myself and you, and I believe that both of us should not exist. What applies to me applies to you, and if I am dead so you will be as well! But the result is that the person's body itself dies, and other people's do not.

Whatever you attempt to do to God, you do to yourself. If you believe that God should be dead, you will destroy yourself. If you try to kill God, you will kill yourself. If you try to make out that God is sinful, you will become sinful. If you try to assert that God does not exist and you have escaped from God's Life, you will die. God won't, you will. Just as other people will not die when you attempt to kill them with your death, but you will. You will do it to yourself. YOU CANNOT ATTACK WITHOUT HURTING YOURSELF FIRST. All attack is self attack, and all attack will destroy YOU and not your so-called enemy.

This is why this is so ridiculously obvious, that it is in YOUR BEST INTEREST not to find anyone sinful or guilty, because it MUST mean that you are sinful and guilty, and YOU will suffer terribly. What you do to another you do to yourself. What you accuse your brother of you have accused yourself of. And what you would have them experience, you will experience. You cannot escape from the law that what you do unto others you literally are directly doing to yourself. You cannot get away with murder without you dying as well. You should recognize it is in your best SHARED INTEREST to not hurt or accuse anyone else, because doing so directly hurts and accuses you.

If you attempt to hurt someone else without hurting yourself, you are buying into the ego's thought system, which is a lie, and you will still receive the effects of your own attack. It is the ego's grand illusion that something can apply to you without applying to others and vice versa. The truth will always be true, and the law will always be in place, that the only way to attack another is to attack yourself and show your attacked self to them, and they may not even be attacked at all. All attack separates you from the other, which protects them in a way. This is why attack on God did not affect God, but affected you greatly.

Death is a weapon that doesn't work. It is always an attempt to prove that someone other than yourself made you be dead, accusing them of sin. Sin is punishable by death alone, in the ego's thought system. To die is to make a statement that everyone is a sinner, all are evil, and they have caused you to die. No-one dies without being a victim, and no-one dies without accusing the world of doing it to them. This is also why death is futile, because it is self-destruction which has no real effect on anyone else and only makes yourself worse off. To choose it is insanity.

It's fortunate that in the metaphysics of truth, there is a kind of protection against death. The illusion of death cannot assail the kingdom of God. God cannot be affected by what is unreal. Attempted attack or death is actually a movement away from Life and a movement away from existence. It is withdrawal, not attack. All forms of attack or illusions of attack seem to be outward expressions but this is an illusion. All forms of attack are withdrawals away from everything. Death is a collapse away from Life, and therefore confines all of the effects of death to the one who dies, not to who they were attempting to make dead.

God has been completely unaffected by our attempts at using death to hurt him. God cannot be changed whatsoever. This is also why death is merely a state of denial. It is powerlessness, weakness, is completely ineffective, and literally does nothing. It is a state of a lack of all will to live, and therefore all will is absent from it, and as such it is a state of total unwillingness and can produce no real effects at all. It is not a cause at all, being purely a state of being at the effect of everything. How WEAK it is then, this weapon of death which is supposed to be the ego's most extreme form of attack possible... the stronger the attack, the weaker the attack. Death is the most pathetic attack of all, causing nothing real to happen.

We do not need to die. We do not need to be under attack. We do not need to be sick. We do not need to suffer. But if we want to be free of these things, we cannot be accusing ourselves and/or others of sin. We USE OURSELVES to show our brother what we are accusing them of, which turns us into shriveled up sickly prunes with no ability to do anything. We cannot escape our own wrath. Accuse others of causing sickness and you will be sick. Blame them and you will suffer in guilt. Try to get rid of God and you will get rid of yourself. Your body is your picture of your state of mind. All of its sicknesses MUST GO if you are to show that you fully believe in your innocence and invulnerability. To be invulnerable is to not be at the effect of anything in the world, and therefore not to PUT EFFECTS into your body.

You need not attack yourself today.

"You cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness. Show him that he cannot hurt you and hold nothing against him, or you hold it against yourself. This is the meaning of turning the other cheek." - ACIM

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. And no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose." - Lesson 152

This is an extremely black and white level of responsibility. If you give your CONSENT, then sickness and death will occur. If you do NOT give your consent, then sickness and death of the body become IMPOSSIBLE.

Paraphrase: What you use the body for it becomes to you. If you use it to attack it becomes weak and sick and dies. If you use it for love it is healed and sickness is reversed and death becomes *IMPOSSIBLE*. "A sane mind heals the body."

This as Jesus says is a CENTRAL TEACHING of ACIM - that sickness and death of the body are OPTIONS THAT YOU CHOOSE (or not).

The body is not supposed to die or go through the death process. The body is not supposed to get sick. Death is nothing but another more extreme form of sickness, and sickness is just an earlier form of death. It's all the same thing. The ego mind attacks and kills the body as a result of a belief that sin and death are real, in an ARROGANT attempt to symbolically kill the Son of God. If you do not have that belief, you will not attack the body, it will not become sick, and it cannot die.

"Use it (the body) to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. 5 Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. 6 When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. 7 The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions that are responsible for the body's condition."

The mind makes ALL decisions about the body's condition, including whether it is sick, and whether it dies. It CANNOT DIE if the mind does not CONSENT and CHOOSE to kill it. "From the ego came sin and guilt and death" .... "The glitter of guilt you laid upon the body would kill it. For what the ego loves, it kills for its obedience".

The body then becomes a "symbol of immortality" in the dream, as a DEMONSTRATION that your mind truly believes in God's laws over the egos. It is useful purely as a communication device.

"The body's health is fully guaranteed, because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become IMPOSSIBLE."

You will then retain the body, which is really nothing, but in this state effectively is invulnerable and cannot be destroyed. This produces a supernatural protection because "a broken body is proof the mind has not been healed" and therefore if the mind IS healed it WILL heal the body. It must.

"Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick."

When you have ceased attacking the body, "a sane mind heals the body", the body will be restored miraculously to "perfect health" and become "holy", in the dream. It is used to bring God to those who need help, to perform miracles and raise the dead. And then when its usefulness is done, the body is DISAPPEARED, not laid down on the ground to rot and die. The dream of death is not left by death, but by truth.

Anyone whose body dies does so because THEY BELIEVE IN DEATH AND HAVE CONSENTED TO DIE. Death is a choice against God's Will. Death is NEVER a doorway out of dreaming. Death is DENIAL OF GOD.

Jesus describes how he finished dreaming not through death but through the recognition that the body was nothing/illusion and thus made it literally disappear:

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it.. It merely became what it always was. And that is what 'rolling the stone away means.' The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond... To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. I did assume a human form with human attributes afterwards, to speak to those who were to prove the body's worthlessness to the world. This has been much misunderstood. I came to tell them that death is an illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand."

Death of the body is optional and is a FAILURE to live according to the Will of God. Whatever you believe you demonstrate. If you demonstrate death, you MUST believe in death. If you do not believe in death, you CANNOT demonstrate death. We are to demonstrate "immortality" of the body, in the dream, before we can stop dreaming. "There is no death, the Son of God is free" applies ONLY AFTER PROVING IT by making the body free of death, as demonstration of your actual acceptance that you are under no laws but God's.

When we project our sin onto other people, we position ourselves as wanting to be affected by them or by the world. We want them to be the cause of us, and to experience effects against our will.

This literally is an attempt to sacrifice ourselves. It is attempted suicide.

We seem to be willing somehow to trade our life in order for someone else to suffer for our sin.

We want them to be the sinner, so that we can be not the sinner, and will make ourselves their victim in order to prove that we are not the one who sinned.

And in so doing, will willingly sacrifice ourselves, make ourselves victimized, attack ourselves through them, and eventually render ourselves as "unwillingly dead", in order to prove the point.

At least, we reason, we'll go down as innocence and not the guilty one, and the guilty ones will get all the blame for seeming to cause this tragedy. And in death we will seem to be exalted and a hero, worshipped for the persona of goodness that we fooled the whole world into believing, when all we did was succeed at putting all blame onto everything but ourselves.

Projection is an attempt to get away with murder. To accuse and find someone else guilty of wrongdoing, in contrast to our own innocence, in order to prove that we were not the one who sinned against God. The problem is, when we attempt to do this, we murder ourselves, by attacking ourselves indirectly through other people and through our belief in being at the effect of external causes.

So when you want someone else to take the hit for you, rest assured, you will receive the effects. Jesus is explicit about this in the course. Do not think that the effects you prepared for your brother will be received by them and not you, because you can be assured that you will be the one to receive them.

Try to destroy another, and you will destroy yourself.

And as you try to destroy another, to make out that the world causes you to suffer and die, you might well come across as the least likely, least causative, least choosing, least wanting person in the world, as though there was nothing you could do to prevent this attack. And secretly, unconsciously, you will have orchestrated the entire farce to paint this rosy picture of yourself, in order to condemn the entire world and accuse all your brothers of sinning against you.

Everyone who dies goes down in flames and everyone who looks upon them considers it a tragedy and an unwanted victimization. Poor them. Well... they fucking chose every single part of it, and they did so in order to victimize everyone else in the world. No-one who dies does so without some degree of belief that the world has accused them and condemned them and has done this to them, and that therefore they are justified in being dead in order to accuse the world in return and find it to be the cause of them.

There is nothing glorious about dying. It is not a sign of dignity or respectfulness or accomplishment or unfairness. It is a mistaken choice to present the son of God as attackable and to use the body to attack the entire world. There is nothing justified about dying. It is total failure, the completion of the lie of sin, an absolute reversal of God's will, a complete opposition to sanity, and total denial. It is a movement into unconsciousness and suppression of will, a complete disownership of power and a giving up on God.

No-one dies without their own consent. Death is failure to live. Every person who seems to die has succeeded in fooling the entire world into believing that the son of God is bound to a body and is confused with what seems to by destroyable, and is therefore destroyed. It is a crucifixion of the Son of God.

The funeral which sorrowfully "honors" the person fails to mention that they told the biggest lie in the world, that they attempted to attack the entire world with their death, that they have demonstrated the profound belief that God has caused death not life, and that they have completely failed to awaken from their insanity. It is hardly something to celebrate.

There is no death. The son of God is free. He who believes this will demonstrate it by never again choosing to create the circumstances of death, which is firmly rooted in victimhood and self attack. No ascended master would ever demonstrate that they can be destroyed. All sickness is attempt to prove you can be hurt. And every form of suffering is an accusation that the world has caused this to happen and not yourself.

There is no such thing as a responsible sick person. There is no such thing as an innocent person who died. There is no such thing as a justified victim. And there is no such thing as someone dying in order to leave the dream.

All is choice.