To put your money where your mouth is, requires that you step up and DEMONSTRATE the truth, by showing in PHYSICAL FORM, PROOF AND EVIDENCE, that what you believe you REALLY believe, it cannot be refuted, and no-one can deny it. We have to learn to SHOW what we have learned.

I love this list of demonstration-related quotes, because it really speaks to how we are to SHOW people that the truth is true through PHYSICAL manifestations of miracles. Jesus providing there is no death by resurrecting the body, is the ultimate example.

ACIM:

"The resurrection of the world awaits your healing and your happiness, that you may DEMONSTRATE the healing of the world."

"Pain is a sign illusions reign in place of truth. It DEMONSTRATES God is denied, confused with fear, perceived as mad and seen as traitor to Himself."

"The world recedes as we light up our minds, and realize these holy words are true. They are the message sent to us today from our Creator. Now we DEMONSTRATE how they have changed our minds about ourselves and what our function is. For as we prove that we accept no will we do not share, our many gifts from our Creator will spring to our sight and leap into our hands, and we recognize what we received."

"This does Atonement teach, and DEMONSTRATES the oneness of God’s Son is unassailed by his belief he knows not what he is."

"Sickness would prove that lies must be the truth. But healing DEMONSTRATES that truth is true."

"So healing, never needed by the truth, must DEMONSTRATE that sickness is not real."

"Healing is freedom. For it DEMONSTRATES that dreams will not prevail against the truth. Healing is shared. And by this attribute it proves that laws unlike the ones which hold that sickness is inevitable are more potent than their sickly opposites."

"It is this fact which DEMONSTRATES that time is an illusion."

"Concepts maintain the world. But they can not be used to DEMONSTRATE the world is real. For all of them are made within the world, born in its shadow, growing in its ways, and finally "maturing" in its thought."

"The miracle is means to DEMONSTRATE that all appearances can change because they are appearances, and cannot have the changelessness reality entails. The miracle attests salvation from appearances by SHOWING they can change."

"The miracle is proof he is not bound by loss or suffering in any form, because it can so easily be CHANGED. This DEMONSTRATES that it was never real, and could not stem from his reality. For that is changeless, and has no effects which anything in Heaven or on earth could ever alter. But appearances are shown to be unreal BECAUSE they change."

"Like EVERY lesson that the Holy Spirit requests you learn, the miracle is clear. It DEMONSTRATES what He would have you learn, and SHOWS you its effects are what you WANT. In its forgiving dream, are the EFFECTS of yours undone, and hated enemies perceived as friends, with merciful intent."

"Pain DEMONSTRATES the body must be real. It is a loud, obscuring voice, whose shrieks would silence what the Holy Spirit says, and keep His words from your awareness. Pain compels attention, drawing it away from Him, and focusing upon itself. Its purpose is the same as pleasure, for they both are means TO MAKE THE BODY REAL."

"Health is the witness unto health. As long as it is unattested, it remains without conviction. Only when DEMONSTRATED has it BEEN proved, and MUST compel belief. No-one is healed through double messages. If you wish ONLY to be healed, you heal. Your single PURPOSE makes this possible. But if you are AFRAID of healing, then it cannot come through you. The ONLY thing that is required for a healing is a lack of fear. The fearful are NOT healed, and cannot heal. This does NOT mean the conflict must be gone forever from your mind. For if it were, there were no NEED for healing anymore. But it DOES mean, if only for an instant, you love without attack. An instant is sufficient. Miracles wait not on time."

"The holy instant is the miracle’s abiding-place. From there, each one is born into this world, as witness to a state of mind which has TRANSCENDED conflict, and has reached to peace. It carries comfort from the place of peace into the battle-ground, and DEMONSTRATES that war has no effects. For all the hurt that war has sought to bring; the broken bodies and the shattered limbs, the screaming dying and the silent dead, are gently lifted up and comforted. There IS no sadness, where a miracle has come to heal. And nothing more than just ONE instant of your love WITHOUT attack is necessary, that all this occur."

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to DEMONSTRATE they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt?

Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the PROOF that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself. A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."

"God gives no special favors, and no one has any powers that are not available to everyone. Only by tricks of magic are special powers "demonstrated."" (talking about psychic powers/magic vs miracles)

"Healing is always certain. It is impossible to let illusions be brought to truth and keep the illusions. Truth DEMONSTRATES illusions have no value."

"When this occurs, the body becomes its weapon, used AGAINST this Purpose to DEMONSTRATE the "fact" that separation HAS occurred."

"The holy instant is the shining example, the clear and unequivocal DEMONSTRATION of the meaning of EVERY relationship, and EVERY situation SEEN AS A WHOLE."

"This power INSTANTLY transforms ALL situations into one sure and continuous means for ESTABLISHING His purpose, and DEMONSTRATING its reality. What has been DEMONSTRATED has called for faith, and has been GIVEN it. Now it becomes a fact, from which faith can no longer BE withheld."

"Concern yourselves not with the EXTENSION of holiness, for the nature of miracles you do NOT understand. Nor do you DO them. It is their extension, far beyond the limits you perceive, that DEMONSTRATES you did not do them."

"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 GENERALIZATION is DEMONSTRATED as you use it in more and more situations."

"That is why the recognition of your OWN invulnerability is so important in the restoration of your sanity. For if you accept your invulnerability, you are recognizing that attack HAS no effect. Although you have attacked yourself, and very brutally, you will DEMONSTRATE that NOTHING HAPPENED. Therefore, by attacking, you have NOT DONE ANYTHING."

" Thereby you teach yourself that fear does not exist IN YOU, for you have in YOURSELF, the means for removing it, and have DEMONSTRATED this by GIVING it."

"To teach the WHOLE Sonship WITHOUT EXCEPTION DEMONSTRATES that you PERCEIVE ITS WHOLENESS and have learned that it IS One."

"If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind must be STRONGER. Every miracle DEMONSTRATES this."

"That is because the Holy Spirit IS one, and anyone who listens is inevitably led to DEMONSTRATE His way for ALL."

"The ego cannot withstand the conditioning process, because the process itself DEMONSTRATES that there is another way."

"My trust in you is greater than yours in me at the moment, but it will not always be that way. Your mission is very simple. You have been chosen to live so as to DEMONSTRATE that You are NOT an ego."

"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. "

"The Resurrection DEMONSTRATED that NOTHING can destroy truth. Good can withstand ANY form of evil, because light abolishes ALL forms of darkness. The Atonement is thus the perfect lesson. It is the final demonstration that all of the other lessons which I taught are true."

"Death is a human affirmation of a belief in hate. That is why the Bible says "There is no death," and that is why I DEMONSTRATED that death does not exist."

Jesus says when you recognize an illusion AS an illusion, it disappears. But how does this work? How do you recognize an illusion?

An illusion is something that does not exist, but which seems like it exists. Or more fundamentally, something false, which you BELIEVE is true. This means that you are not recognizing it for what it IS - that it is false, and you a mistaken, deceived, deluded, in believing it is something it is not. It's a state of not RECOGNIZING what something actually is, and mistaking it for something else.

For example, sin is an illusion. The truth is that anything real cannot be sinned against, can never be attacked, and cannot be damaged. This makes any kind of sin fundamentally impossible. Anything real cannot be threatened because it is permanent and has immortality. It is quite literally impossible to sin. This is why in truth, there literally IS no such thing as a real sin.

But if you were to IGNORE this recognition of what is true, and become confused about what is true, you might believe that "sin is possible". And in this belief you might perceive a world in which sins are seeming to HAPPEN. And they may seem to have real-seeming consequences. And there can be seemingly irreversible effects.

The body and the world, which are illusions of something non-existent seeming to exist, may seem to suggest that sin is real and is happening. For example, "The world of bodies is the world of sin" and "The body is the idea of sin made flesh" and "The world was made as an attack on God" etc. IF this is true, and IF it is real, and IF it is possible that these things EXIST, and are HAPPENING, then sin is real.

But if you BELIEVE this, you are mistaken. How can sin BE real, when anything real cannot BE sinned against? How can sin exist, when immortality is the truth? How can bodies possibly sin when there literally is no sin? How can there BE attack, when nothing REAL is attackable? How can there be real effects, consequences, damage, harm, destruction, of any kind, if nothing real can ever be hurt or changed?

When you contrast actual reality against what this "thing" is that you're seeing, it really brings it into question. When you compare what it's ASSERTING (death), when you look at how it is TEMPTING you to believe something, when you examine how it tries to TESTIFY AGAINST God's nature, it starts to become apparent that they can't BOTH be true. It can't be true that God's reality is immortal while the world is trying to assert that mortality is the truth.

Only one of them can be true. And it's when you look at the illusion of sin in the LIGHT of the real truth, that it's shown to be FALSE. It's the light of the ACTUAL truth, that frames the illusion in its proper perspective. It's the light, the clarity, the facts, that give your mind the ability to RECOGNIZE what actually IS true, and what MUST therefore be false. And this allows you NOT to be deceived by illusions. Who can buy into the idea of real sin and consequences, when it becomes accepted that sin literally cannot BE possible?

Falling for temptation, buying into illusions, taking what they SUGGEST is true and agreeing with it, giving illusions "reality", assigning "truth" to them, believing them, siding with them, trusting them, accepting them, regarding them as God's nature, or in any other way becoming deceived by the world of bodies, is you "falling for" illusions. It's a failure to recognize that the world is NOTHING, and a belief that it is SOMETHING.

The world is FALSE. It is NOT true. It is the opposite of truth. If you believe it IS true and real, you are in FALSE PERCEPTION, because you are perceiving that something false is true. You are giving reality to lies and deceptions. You are NOT seeing clearly or correctly. You are not RECOGNIZING what the world is. When you believe the world is NOT false, you are mistaken, and are NOT aware of the truth, and are NOT seeing with Christ Vision.

When the world is RECOGNIZED AS FALSE, untrue, unreal, impossible, a lie, total fiction, an error, a suggestion of something being possible that is IN REALITY utterly impossible, then you are in TRUE PERCEPTION. Because now you see truly and accurately. You recognize the world for WHAT IT IS. Which is that the world is false. The world is the opposite of reality. "Earth, heaven's opposite". Recognizing it AS IMPOSSIBLE, as the opposite of existence, and eventually as NON EXISTENT, is the acceptance of atonement. "It is the world you see that is impossible."

So you have to compare and contrast. If the truth is THIS ..... referring to the properties, qualities, characteristics of HEAVEN .... and if the world is saying THE OPPOSITE, then the world MUST not be true or real. You then recognize that BECAUSE the light shows you the big picture, and puts everything in perspective, IN TRUTH the world IS SIMPLY FALSE. It is nothing. It is not true at all. And you should therefore NOT believe it. And not invest in it psychologically. And not regard it as your home. And not take it to be reality. And not react to it.

In fact, to DENY IT, is the proper use of denial. "The world you see must be denied". You deny it by RECOGNIZING it for what it IS, which is an illusory world of lies. You DENY IT, by recognizing what IS true. And so you have to be able to CLEARLY DISTINGUISH between what IS TRUE, and what IS FALSE, and you have to do BOTH at once. It's not just about recognizing what is true. It must ALSO be that you recognize what is FALSE. So that you realize that ONLY the truth is true, and NOTHING ELSE is true.

"The real world can actually be perceived. All that is necessary is a willingness to perceive nothing else. For if you perceive both good and evil, you are accepting both the false and the true and making no distinction between them."

Atonement therefore is not JUST acceptance of the real truth. It's ALSO the REJECTION of what is actually false and "not there".

When an illusion is seen through, when you do not buy its appearance, when you do not believe in it, and don't think that it is the truth the deception goes away. It is the blindness, confusion, deception, darkness, insanity, that goes away, when illusions are recognized for what they are.

When you take a puzzle, maybe a Rubik's cube or something similar, at first you do not SEE the solution. You see something puzzling. It's puzzling because there is an OBFUSCATION of the truth. In other words, there are deceptions, things are obscured, they are made difficult to see correctly. Everything is scattered and confused. There is a lack of information. But when you "solve" it, you SEE the solution, and the deception is undone, and now you cannot buy into it any more.

It's similar with other puzzles where, at first, you cannot see HOW to solve the puzzle. In this state, you are deceived. You believe the illusion is true. And something about it is deceiving you. But when you see THROUGH or OVERLOOK (forgive) the deception, and recognize what is ACTUALLY happening, how it is ACTUALLY deceiving you, what it's doing in truth, then you see BEYOND the deception to the solution. And now you can no longer be trapped by the illusion because you've reached the freedom of the answer. And then once you know the answer, once you know how it was tricking you, you can never be fooled by it again. You recognize the MECHANISM of deception.

Illusions all work the same way. When NOT recognized correctly, they seem to deceive you and present truths which are false, and lies which seem like facts, and temptations to believe something that is mistaken. And this is the state of the whole planet when not forgiven or seen correctly. This is what makes sin and attack and war and murder and death and sickness all seem "real" and upsetting. Such a world is a cruel world.

But once you DO NOT fall for the trickery, and are NOT deceived, you see beyond it with forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook - to see beyond error. And to not fall for the illusion or its appearance. Overlooking the world solves the puzzle and frames the world in its correct light. It is simply seen for what IT IS, rather than what you THOUGHT it was. And all its appearances and suggestions of suffering are forgiven, seen through, not believed and not fallen for. And upon being RECOGNIZED AS NOTHING, it disappears, revealing ONLY the light of the real world, as you prepare to more onto the pure truth of Heaven.

He did this by appearing to go through death of the body, and yet being not that body was able to make that body disappear, and then re-materialized another body image which looked and felt just as "real" as before, to SHOW that what He was is beyond and has mastery over the body and over death.

Can you imagine being there as Jesus "as a body", who was just crucified and supposedly killed, which you saw with your own eyes and believed, suddenly materializes out of nowhere as though nothing had happened? Imagine how much of an EDUCATION that would be, blowing your mind and totally undermining your belief system in which the body is thought to be real and all physical effects are thought to be irreversible. This is why miracles are teaching devices.

Nothing could happen to what He is, because He is Spirit, not body, and He was able to PROVE that this is true by dematerializing and rematerializing the body. Who and what He is MUST be "not a body" if the body is able to be switched on and off at will, and therefore anything the body experiences (such as death) cannot be real or have any power to do anything.

WE are also asked to DEMONSTRATE THE TRUTH through our seemingly miraculous ability to completely defy all laws of the physical world. What Jesus did was miraculous. Miracles are expressions which come from a higher state of awareness/mind/spirit, outside of spacetime, outside of the universe, manipulating what is "inside" the universe, to prove that the world is not real or true. Another word for this is SUPERNATURAL.

Jesus asks us to demonstrate, for example, that we are not sick in the body, and that our brother has not done anying to us to cause us harm. We can only do this supernaturally. We have to have the power of God working with us to defy the ego's laws of biology, physics, chemistry etc, to show that even if someone tries to harm us, we cannot be harmed. We demonstrate this USING the body as a teaching device, just as Jesus did.

Miracles in A Course in Miracles are supernatural ACTS, effects or results which are considered IMPOSSIBLE in the ego's thought system. Their "shifts into invisibility" are shifts away from the level of form (physical world) and towards the One Mind. They transcend the worldly laws and enable you to do LITERALLY ANYTHING. There is NOTHING your holiness cannot do! NOTHING!

Miracles are not shifts in perception or mere changes of mind. Miracles are possible AFTER mind has been restored to its natural state of miracle-mindedness. And the miracle-working ability remains a PERMANENT FEATURE of the Son of God, NOT a temporary measure of restoration with no power to do anything.

If you are to truly learn A Course in Miracles and recognize and prove what miracles are, you MUST become a supernatural miracle worker, OTHERWISE you will remain confined to the body and subject to death, determined to prove and demonstrate that the world has power over you and there is nothing you can do about it. That is nothing short of a state of victimhood and unconsciousness.

We need to becoming open to, and capable of, performing miracles to demonstrate and prove that God's truth is true, by defying the laws of the world, right here in the dream. If you are not willing to ACT on your belief that God's truth is true, then it is not true for you. Your miraculous acts will demonstrate that the truth is true, and destroy the ego's illusions that the body has power over the mind.

Here is an interesting teaching.

In its natural state, the body is a communication medium. The mind is supposed to flow through it and extend BEYOND it outwards. The body itself is not supposed to be part of the message as such.

But when the mind starts to STOP at the body, or to be blocked by the body, or runs up against the body, it prevents it from extending PAST the body. The communication medium can no longer communicate because the flow is blocked. This is what blocks to love do. They make you fixate on form and be blinded by illusion, which get in the way of seeing Christ.

When there are blocks to love, mind cannot extend through and past and overlook the body, and so fixates ON the body. This causes you to perceive that the body is what is there, in the mind, rather than looking PAST it. The body becomes what you are looking AT, rather than that you are looking at Christ PAST the body.

Making perception stop AT the body and blocking the flow of love, basically cuts that flow off and stops it from moving outward. That means it has become stifled, and now there is a kind of "separation" which has been introduced between the body and the outside. Or a gap, where extension of love was supposed to fill it externally, but is now left empty due to the blocked expression.

This blocking of extension makes the body SICK, because it focuses the mind ON the body and AT the body, instead of PAST the body. The body then becomes attacked by the mind as though "colliding with it" instead of flowing naturally through it and past it and onward in communication. Kind of like a dirty camera lens, or a blocked toilet, or a bunch of boarded up windows made to block the light. Another example would be a "blocked artery", making the blood flow impeded, and resulting in death.

So the blocks to love have to be removed so that the "surface" of the communication medium doesn't turn into the "message" and so that love can flow and extend, which means love is radiated and increased, which means HEALING comes through the body and the body is MADE WHOLE because it is COMMUNICATING WHOLENESS. When the mind is sane and flowing fully and freely THROUGH the body, the body is HEALED as the love passes through it making it essentially immortal, incapable of sickness or death.

Here is how Jesus says it:

"The removal of blocks, then, is the ONLY way to guarantee help and healing. Help and healing are the normal expressions of a mind which is working through the body but not in it. If the mind believes the body is its GOAL, it WILL distort its perception OF the body, and by blocking its own extension BEYOND it, will INDUCE illness by FOSTERING SEPARATION. Perceiving the body AS A SEPARATE ENTITY cannot but foster illness, because it is not true. A medium of communication WILL lose its usefulness if it is used for anything else.

To use a medium of communication as a medium of ATTACK is an obvious confusion in purpose. To communicate is to join and to attack is to separate. How can you do both simultaneously WITH THE SAME THING, and NOT suffer? Perception of the body can be unified only by ONE PURPOSE. This releases the mind from the temptation to see it in many lights, and gives it over ENTIRELY to the One Light in which it can be really understood at all."

The belief in separation, which you are working to undo through forgiveness, does not just heal your own mind.

What is it that you have been separated from? It is yourself, it is God, and it is your brother.

When you undo separation in what you think of as "your mind", the boundaries which confined your mind are expanded. Separation was COMING BETWEEN you and others. It was defining you as "not them".

Separation is an artificial wall which seems to make people into isolated individuals, with private minds experiencing private worlds.

When separation is lifted, you are literally going to become ONE with other people. They are you. They are other parts of you which you have been separated from. You, and what appeared before to be "others", in fact SHARE A MIND as the One Son of God.

You are NOT just working on your own private spiritual path in isolation. If you are truly making progress to undo separation, you are undoing the separation BETWEEN you and other people. This means it is IMPOSSIBLE to make progress in spiritual awakening without INCLUDING more and more of what it was you thought was "other people", which is actually parts of yourself that you previously were separate from. Your spiritual awakening is everyone's spiritual awakening.

That which kept you feeling isolated, imprisoned, alone, separate and in the dark, was essentially FEAR, which when it is lifted, *reconnects you* with other people. You begin to see them AS YOURSELF. And you begin to treat them how you would be treated.

In the ego's thought system, what applies to you does not apply to others. This is because it sees each individual as an isolated separated identity, cut off and kept apart. In the Holy Spirit's thought system, what applies to you applies to everyone equally, because they ARE YOU. You, and your brother, are PART OF the One Son of God. ONE identity. ONE mind. ONE Self.

Therefore as you are removing blocks to awareness of love, you are removing artificial limitations placed on "who you are", which put you in a little box and labelled you as separate. As these blocks are lifted, you will come to LOVE yourself more, and LOVE other people more. This love will JOIN and CONNECT you to other minds.

Separated minds produce sickness. Joined minds produce healing. You must set your brother free from his prison by rejoining with him as one. You must stop demonstrating sickness so as to stop accusing BOTH of you of sin. You must be the example of the love that applies to BOTH of you. It is literally in your own best interests to do this, because they ARE ONE WITH YOU!

Separation is a two-edged sword. It doesn't just apply in isolation. It causes isolation. It comes between brothers and makes them strangers. It makes a shared mind split and kept apart. When separation has gone, your mind will be SHARED with the Son of God. You are OPENING UP to a much larger sense of IDENTITY than who you thought you were, limited to a separate self, stuck in a body, or confused with that which dies.

You are EVERTHING. You are bigger than the universe. You are the Kindgom of God!

All thoughts create form at some level. This is because thoughts (ego thoughts) are ideas about separation. Regardless of their specific content they are always separation ideas.

Separation ideas always therefore lead to "form" in some way.

What this means is, the idea of separation from God, having that tiny mad idea, AUTOMATICALLY means that form MUST come from it. Form must be the end result of an idea of separation. The thought ITSELF shows up as form - separate images appearing real, and eventually being so "firm" that they seem like solid matter.

Form results from thoughts of separation because separation requires us to make an illusion of how two things are different and disconnected, not sharing space or properties. These illusory appearances make it seem like separation is real and result in the illusion of "separate objects".

Any ego thought therefore emphasizes separation between illusions. As the division between thoughts intensifies, or becomes more "dense", it HAS to eventually lead to the illusory manifestation of what we would call "physical solid matter" - a physical universe - which is essentially just a very heavy/serious thought.

Or to put it simply, the mad idea of being separate from God HAD to create a physical universe. It is a completely logical progression and consequence of having such an idea. Form derives from separation.

If separation is perceived or believed to be real, some kind of universe of forms, to some degree, must seem to manifest.

Before the physical universe there were also prior "stages" if you will, subtler levels of this, which have produced additional levels in the dream. Other dimensions. These are all part of the same ego holographic dream and many of these levels feature form to varying degrees.

As Jesus says for example, nighttime and waking dreams differ only in their forms/content. Being in the physical world is nothing more than being inside the tiny mad idea of separation. It is just an idea, and is not really happening. This is why the physical universe is an illusion. It's an illusory thought of separation - a thought of impossibility.

When you can recognize the illusion correctly, you have completed forgiveness. This means being able to transcend and overlook the thought which has made the physical world. Seeing the truth of this, is seeing the "real world", ie the true nature of the worlds of form (which may pertain to physical level as well as higher levels/dimensions of form).

Overlooking illusions makes them disappear. Overlooking the thought of separation makes it, and everything which has come from it (is inside it), disappear. This is why the physical and other higher dimensional universes MUST eventually disappear, or rather be recognized as having been nothing more than a dream/illusion to begin with. Illusions recognized must disappear. The tiny mad idea, recognized as purely false, must end.

Only Heaven is reality, the home of Immortal Spirit. Only Heaven will be left when all of these illusory universes disappear. Only Heaven is the Home of God and the Son of God. Only Heaven, God's Creation, is the real truth - the real universe of oneness.

Sometimes the Course talks about what you can do for yourself, in terms of receiving your own healing and having your mind corrected so that sickness can be healed.

For example:

"Atonement heals with certainty, and cures all sickness. For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take. Sickness where guilt is absent cannot come, for it is but another form of guilt. Atonement does not heal the sick, for that is not a cure. It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible. And that is cure indeed. For sickness now is gone, with nothing left to which it can return."

And sometimes the Course talks about how you can use your new-found healed state of mind to help others, as expressions of the love that you have become willing to accept as true. That part of the Course is often overlooked and frowned upon as though it is too radical and supernatural to believe.

"Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love." - note that miracles express LOVE once you have become willing to receive love for yourself. What are you going to do with the love when you've got it?

"The miracle is an expression of an inner awareness of Christ and the acceptance of His Atonement." - note that miracles express Christ BECAUSE of your awareness of the atonement.

"A miracle is a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers." - note that miracles bless ALL of your brothers!

"Miracles are natural signs of forgiveness. Through miracles you accept God's forgiveness by extending it to others." - note that miracles are extended to others and they are "signs" of forgiveness - manifestations coming from a forgiven/forgiving mind.

"I [Jesus] inspire all miracles which are intercessions. They intercede for your holiness." - note that Jesus is saying He performs miracles on your behalf!

Believing that the Course is only talking along one line and not two leads to the belief that you should "only" work on your own healing. There is truth in it. And the Course speaks to it on many occasions. BUT... there is also more to this than just this one part of the Course. There is a second part which is in the working of miracles for the benefit of others, directly healing them and alleviating them of suffering.

When the Course says that "it is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive", what it is saying is, once you become able to see yourself as forgiven, through accepting the atonement, you then actually receive the "privilege" of being able to bestow forgiveness on others. That means, YOU CAN UNDO OTHER PEOPLE'S SINS. And that means you can give them miraculous cures. You become an authority, you gain access to the power of love, and you become able to EXPRESS the love that you've received.

The Course isn't all about just what you can do for yourself. It's also about what you can do for your brother as well.

Affirming what is NOT true, and what IS true, can induce miracles.

With regards to sickness for example, you must "cancel" every single perception or belief that suggests the sickness even EXISTS, or any other surrounding beliefs based on that.

e.g. "there is no sickness" "this sickness is an illusion" "I am not sick" "I am not being affected by my body" "my body is not the cause of me" "these symptoms are not real" "this sickness isn’t happening" "I am not caused by pain" "this sickness has no power over me" "Nothing unreal exists" etc

Then, you can switch it around to the affirmative, to emphasize the truth, which should focus squarely on who you are IN TRUTH - your immortal, holy, divine, eternally alive, incapable-of-suffering self, made of love.

e.g. "This sickness has alread gone" "I am free of this" "I cannot be sick because I am immortal" "sickness cannot happen to a son of God" "I must have chosen this myself" "I am responsible for making this sickness" "I choose to be alive" "I am the life of God" "I cannot be attacked" "Nothing real can be threatened" "I am free from this" "I need not suffer" "I am already perfect" "I am as God created me" etc

The important thing here is to always equate anything even slightly short of total immortality with "ego" which is FALSE and NOT true. And to always equate the HIGHEST TRUTH about you with the truth.

Either you are absolutely permanently innocent, safe, healthy, happy and loved, OR anything short of that IS A TOTAL LIE. All you are doing is becoming CLEAR about which is which. Put the true stuff in the TRUTH box, put the bullshit in the FALSE box.

This WILL challenge your beliefs, in order to be EXTREMELY black and white about it. Symptoms, feelings, upsets, suffering of any kind, bad thoughts, mental experiences, whatever... must be categorized strictly. It’s either true, or its false. Nothing in between.

This will challenge you because it means anything short of IMMORTALITY is a lie. Sickness is a lie. Suffering is a lie. Guilt is a lie. Fear is a lie. Sin is a lie. Death is a lie. Symptoms are not real. Suffering is fake. There is NO TRUTH IN IT.

If you want healing and happiness and wholeness, you MUST stretch your mind to CHANGE its beliefs, if it keeps trying to believe that ANY form of suffering is real or true. That means questioning deeply held beliefs about the body, about life and death, about sickness, and about what is real. If you want to go ALL the way to Atonement and Resurrection, every illusion must be RECOGNIZED as false, and the truth must be RECOGNIZED as true.

"Only the truth is true." The truth about you is extremely lofty. You have to be willing to let that be true of you. YOU ARE PURE LOVE. YOU ARE IMMORTAL SPIRIT. YOU ARE NOT A BODY. YOU CANNOT DIE. Embrace it and live forever in happiness and peace.

Why do 'lessons' show up in your life as negative, unwanted, like things are going wrong, or something bad is happening?

Whatever your current beliefs are, your idea of truth is what you think of as 100% true. If there is anything that happens that seems to agree with these beliefs, you see those things as truth. You welcome them, see them as an ally, experience them as wanted and desirable. They reinforce your belief and confirm or provide evidence that your belief is the truth.

Even if something bad happens, let's say that you have a belief that you are unworthy of love. You will create in your life an experience where someone is mistreating you perhaps. But at first you won't really be able to see that this person is doing that, instead you'll believe that they are treating you how you are supposed to be treated, because you agree that you are unworthy. In contrast, if someone comes along and loves you unconditionally, you will recoil and attack them, certain that they are lying to you, deceiving you, and must have some secret ulterior motive. Your belief in suffering does not and cannot understand a healing presence.

So like any thought system or belief, whatever agrees with your belief you will experience as welcome and true, and anything that seems to be against your belief you will experience like it is your worst enemy. You will see everything 'false' in them and will reject them. This has nothing to do with whether they are actually the Real Truth or not, and hinges entirely around what you believe the truth is.

So now because you have a false belief, there is something that you believe falsely and so you are in need of 'learning' what the real truth is. It wouldn't really be helpful to you to send you a situation or event or person who simply exactly mirrors your own false belief, because you would see that as highly agreeable, as proof that what you believe is true. You would welcome them and learn nothing from them.

In the interests of your spiritual growth and awakening, it serves you to, instead, be given events and situations and people who seem to represent a Real Truth, or who 'carry a potential' to teach you a Real Truth, so that you will be challenged. When they show up, however, you will initially believe they fall into your 'false' category, you'll experience them as though they're your enemy, or exactly what you don't want, or you didn't ask for this, or you hate it when this happens etc. You do not yet recognize the opportunity or the benefit that's hiding in the presence of this thing. You don't recognize it AS a bringer of truth, so you think it's just there to piss you off.

Each thing that shows up in your life, that seems to be what you don't want, is put there by arrangement to help you awaken. But that means that you're going to have to go through some kind of transformation of your perspective. Your idea of truth is going to have to be challenged. It is directly challenged by what you think of as intolerably false, showing up and being *experienced* by you as unwanted, because of what you currently believe you want. You will hate and reject it and wish it weren't happening and like it's unfair and everything sucks. But, this thing, whatever it is, is actually there as your savior, attempting to help you to awaken to a shift in allegiance, from what is Truly false, to what is Truly True.

So this thing will trigger off and push your buttons and disturb your sense of status quo. It will put a crow bar in your resistance to Truth and leverage it to try to open you up. And often this happens because the thing that comes along to bother you practically 'forces' you to have to change your perspective, in order to deal with that stimuli.

For example, perhaps someone close to you becomes sick and you absolutely can't stand the fact this is happening, and it keeps triggering you, and you get upset about it a lot. Obviously this is very upsetting as though some curse has come upon your life. BUT, over the course of time, you will find that, if you are working some program of purification, healing and honesty, that this thing is triggering you only because you've got some kind of false belief or unhealed pain stuck in your awareness that needs to change.

The stimuli triggers that pain and it keeps coming up, so if you keep trying to make it go away, or if you keep trying to fix the seeming cause of the trigger - the other person or event - you are actually avoiding learning the lesson. And you WILL have this resistance to some extent especially at the beginning. Nobody in their right mind who believes they know what the truth is, would accept and not reject something that appears to be completely false. It's just that we're very mistaken about what its actually true and false.

Over time, in this example, you might come to realize that in order to not be upset and triggered, YOU need to change something about yourself. You need healing, correction, light, and a higher truth. You need to, and are often forced to, confront your own inner mental condition and belief system and bring it into question. You might even have to get down on your knees and be pleading with God before you become willing to surrender your false view of reality. But eventually, it will transform you and you will come to realize a greater truth, and you will actually let go of your false belief, and you will open up to a higher level of functioning that you never thought you were even capable of. You will find an unconditional love that you never thought you were capable of. And this was what the challenge came to give to you.

It's not until this so-called 'problem' has finished transforming you, or has 'completed the mission' that it has to stimulate your errors and to get you to look at and transform your false ATTITUDE, that it will be 'done with'. It's actually there to help you wake up, but it definitely doesn't look like this at first. It can take some time. And if you ask Holy Spirit for guidance along the way He might tell you, this is a lesson. And it's not as though the answer to the lesson is being concealed from you or made to be especially hard to 'get'... and many times you'll find yourself saying "I just don't get it!" "what am I supposed to be learning here?!".... it's just that, you need to be transformed by the situation and the transformation isn't quite complete yet. And whatever it is supposed to provoke in you, or push out of you, or get you to question, or however it's meant to open your heart or deepen your unconditionality, it has to DO that and finish doing that before the lesson is learned.

So let's say, someone comes along into your life with an attacking angry attitude. Maybe they accuse you of stuff. They seem like your enemy. They hate you. This provokes and upset you a lot and you seem victimized. You may find it unacceptable to allow them to be this way. And you may find yourself angry and having reactions and being triggered, because you believe deep down some of what they're saying. And maybe it takes time for you to realize and heal those deep-down beliefs that you have. And maybe you'll find yourself admitting, I just can't love this person.. there is just no way I can forgive and love them, I am very limited in my love.

And then if you STICK WITH IT, and persevere with learning, you will actually become willing to DIG EVEN DEEPER to find even more love and patience and unconditionality, such that you thought perhaps you could never access. And so you 'learn' how to love and forgive this person, not necessarily for their benefit, but so that YOU learn to receive and express unconditional love in the face of what appears to be an attack. And this is a GIFT that is hard-won, and this is what the attacking person was trying to GIVE you, through their role play.

So then after you've got past all the victimhood and 'why me' crap, you come to realize, the person has helped you. The person actually forced you to grow and to become more forgiving or loving or whatever. You actually gained in strength, you grew in patience, your heart opened. And that is what you needed to LEARN from this lesson. And then you can be grateful that this person came along to provoke the shit out of you, because now, on a spiritual level, you can recognize that what appeared at first to be the exact opposite of your truth, has transformed your truth to where you can now SEE, that this person is actually welcome, lovable, acceptable, forgiven - i.e. you now see Real Truth where you once saw something false.

This is why shit happens. We only see it as shit because we don't yet realize how it is not only helping us to wake up, but it is also a gift and blessing, in the bigger picture, disguised as something unwanted. It's important not to try to get rid of your lessons, or other people's lessons, or 'bad stuff', if it's meant to be there to transform you. This is not to say you have to suffer, but IF you need to grow, sometimes you need a catalist to coerce you into that growth. Into awakening. And eventually you will be grateful for every 'bad thing' that ever happened. And you can even then be grateful for what we call 'the ego', for having supplied us with every opportunity for awakening. This is how the Holy Spirit USES everything for His purposes.

Eventually it is the end of victimhood when we learn everything about the Real Truth that we need to experience it constantly. Thank you God for that.

This was something that our spiritual guides often told us years ago, and at the time it seemed to have some meaning. But I didn't realize just how far reaching it is.

You get to choose... everything. Total responsibility.

Part of our problem, being unconscious, is that we have attempted to HIDE the fact that we are responsible, and that we have a CHOICE. We seem to not even realize that we have a choice. The hallmark of the disempowered, victim mindset is the apparent absence of the freedom to choose.

In the victim mindset, it seems the victim didn't choose what's happening to them. And death is the ultimate expression of this where, allegedly, it "just happens" on its own. Not only that, there's nothing you can do to stop it or resist it. No choice whatsoever, or at least, that's how it appears.

So if you're in a situation where you are "being a victim", you for sure will in some way believe you do not have a choice. Instead, you'll talk about how such-and-such is going to happen and how you can't do anything about it.

An example of this is the weather. The weather is forecast and then everyone goes apeshit about how such-and-such a weather "is going to happen" (to me) because "they said". This is the victim mindset. You don't want to own the fact that you are responsible for the weather, or that you have power over it, or that you can choose it, or that you ARE choosing it. The weather forecast is just reflecting back to you what YOU already set in motion.

It always boils down to the belief, and the perception, that you do not have any choice and that choice has been taken away from you by some outside force and there's nothing you can do to change it. And these proclamations about how disempowered you are will always be loud and convinced as though you're saying, I don't want this to happen, but at the same time, really not doing ANYTHING to change it. This is "complaint".

Complaining is the act of making a situation real, seeing yourself as victimized by it, completely disowning your power to do anything to change anything, and yet making a great big tirade about why its unfair and who's fault it is and how there's nothing you can do about it. So you basically stay... STUCK. That's why complaining about the situation only KEEPS it, compounds it, and makes it worse. Complaint that you have no choice is a CHOICE to NOT have a choice.

You DO have a choice! But you're not going to be able to access the POWER of that state of "freedom" unless you're willing to drop all the victimhood shit and OWN up to actually having power. Why don't people want to own up to being responsible, or having freedom, or having a choice, or being able to make a change? There's no downsides to that, other than that it means less allegiance to the ego.

So you're not stuck. You can choose again. You have the power. You are free. And everything that's happening NOW is your choice. And if you don't like it, RECLAIM your power to choose and choose something else.