"Hold onto nothing."

Loss is self-induced suffering. It is a feeling of not getting what you want, like a childish temper tantrum. It's produced by the demand that things should be the way you want them to be, at the same time as them NOT being that way.

There is a sense of space and time, a gap, a separation, between what you seem to want, and what is. This gap is produced by two anchors. One anchor is the thing which is already gone, has left, has died, doesn't exist, is now in the past. The other anchor is your WANTING that thing to be not gone, to be still here in the present with you.

The stronger you want something to be a certain way, and the greater the contrast between that and how things actually are, the more you will suffer and feel despair, a feeling that something you really want strongly has been taken away or denied to you. But this is because YOU are denying how things are now, and so experience as though you are being denied something. If you deny, you will be denied due to the golden rule.

Wanting is actually denial, in which you are denying that things are the way they are, instead of accepting the facts. It is an unwillingness to accept the "reality" of what has changed. If something or someone has left, they have left. This is a fact. But if you want it to not be this way, you are in denial.

This denial produces lack, which produces neediness, which produces desire and wanting. If you are wanting, it means you do not have something - wanting=lacking, as in "you are left wanting." But wanting masquerades as an attraction or desire to have something, which the ego uses as a substitute for love. Wanting is part of specialness, and wanting is a way of saying "I do not want this."

When something leaves, it has left. It is in the past. It is not here. This is a fact. You should allow it to be free to be gone. But if you cannot accept and allow this fact, you will resist it. This resistance is like insisting that it shouldn't be this way, it's not right, it's not fair, you don't "want" it, because you want things to carry on as they were.

This insistence that worldly things NOT change, is in direct contradiction to the nature of all things in this world - which is that they AWAYS change, and sooner or later they "die" (change). It is their nature to change because they are illusions, and illusions are always temporary, with beginnings and endings alike.

Trying to make changing things NOT change, is an attempt to control "reality" and deny what has changed, because you "want it thus." It also means you are trying to give permanence to something that is not permanent, such as body or home or whatever.

"Dreams are perceptual temper tantrums, in which you literally scream, 'I want it THUS!'"

When things have changed, and you have not accepted that they have changed, you are denying the change. You do this to try to suggest that - if you hold on, if you resist, if you don't want the change, if you keep wanting things strongly to be the way they were, then you'll actually stop the thing from going away, you'll stop it from leaving, you'll stop the loss. This is like a desperate pleading that something doesn't leave when it's already left.

When this involves the seeming loss of a person - really just a change in the status of the body - you can resist and deny that they've gone, because you believe that by doing so you'll prevent their death. You try to keep them around by holding onto them, attaching to them, wanting them. And it seems counter to your desires to have to question whether you should even "want them" anymore, as if that would mean itself the loss of what you want.

The thing is, that the stronger you deny what has changed, the more you go into denial, the more you will feel that you are being denied something. It could take the form of you being in a different country with an inability to travel to see your family at christmas for example, and just because you are denied access, it creates a sense of a rift or gap or spacetime, a distance of separateness, which induces horrible feelings of despair - which we call loss or grief.

The intensity of the loss is really in proportion to how much you are denying and holding onto something which is not there. The more you want to keep it and not let it go, the more you feel awful when faced with the fact that it has already gone. And indeed the desire to keep it around is a way to NOT SEE that it has already gone, because you do not WANT that to be true. You want the person to still be around etc.

So there becomes this mismatch between... what is in front of your face as the "reality" or configuration of the illusory world right now, and what you PREFER that it be. If you prefer that your dead partner or family member be still in a body, and they are not, that is a contrast between what is and what is not. That contrast is a separation of spacetime, which turns into a pit of hell and despair.

Jesus in the course is leading us to learn to let everything go. To hold onto nothing. That means letting everything that is in the past be in the past. It means not WANTING to control whether something seems present or not. It means not DENYING what is happening now.

Ultimately there is a plot twist here, in that the use of denial to deny that something has gone, which places focus on something that is past and amplifies the sense of its absence while simultaneously focusing on it, takes you away from the PRESENT. And so the denial of death for example becomes a way to choose it and thus to avoid life. Being in a state of despairing loss is a way to not live in the present moment, and instead to focus on what is NOT present.

Eventually we have to get to a place where we are so detached from whatever seems to come and go, recognizing that all illusory things like bodies and places are indeed just transient fleeting things, in no way deceived into the idea that they can be permanent or last forever. When you are a "under no illusion" that temporary things are temporary, then you become able to accept the illusion's transient nature, and can ALLOW it to be the way it is.

Essentially the antidote to loss and grief is then is to learn recognize the that you are in denial and cannot allow things to be the way they are, you have to stop wanting something that you cannot have, let go of the thing so that it CAN go, allow it to move away from you, accept that it is gone and not present, give it freedom and set it free so that it can come and go without your controlling it (conditional love), and therefore reach a point of acceptance and freedom.

When you can GIVE freedom to the thing that has gone away, you can RECEIVE freedom for yourself that enables you to "move on." If you do not let the thing itself "move on" ie into the past, away from you, then you will not be able to move on either. If you deny the thing its nature of change and temporariness, you will feel denied by the way that the illusory world keeps changing in ways that you do not want. But as you come to allow the thing to go, you will allow yourself to live and be set free. And as you can accept that the thing HAS gone, you can set yourself free by accepting where you ARE in the present. Life and living is always in the present, not the past.

Essentially it all boils down to something very simple. Let all illusory things leave when they leave, live in the present, and stop trying to "stop change" from happening. Find away to accept the circumstance that you "do not want" rather than fighting against it and "wishing" it were different. This is a kind of "sobering up".

Do not BECOME attached, which will only set you up for loss when you find you have difficulty allowing the cord to be severed when the thing leaves. Non-attachment doesn't mean no life or relationship it just means not being confused about whether illusory things are permanent or temporary. People are not bodies. Places are not your real home - which is in God. Everyone in spirit are always joined to each other forever.

Accept that all temporary things are temporary, let them all come and go, and you will enter into acceptance. This is simply a willingness to accept the FACT of what has changed. In acceptance you will be in the present, because you have let all past things stay in the past instead of trying to drag them into the present as baggage. This acceptance opens the way to the acceptance of that which IS permanent, as changeless reality, in which nothing real is ever lost, no-one created ever dies, and there is no possibility of despair.

We are all a part of each other in God. You are the person you think you lost. Everyone is you. There is no death and no separation. Everyone is everyone forever.

"Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God."

This really makes no sense. If you are thinking the way most people think most of the time, it makes no sense.

If I give you all my money, I have no money left. If I give you my food, I cannot have the food. If I give you myself, I sacrifice myself. If I give you my time, my time is used up.

Surely this is the real truth? At least this is the truth of THIS WORLD. In this physical world, under the laws of physics, it appears to be true that everything is finite and limited. There is only so much of things.

This is because nothing in the world is whole. Everything in the world is lacking. An apple lacks the materials and properties of a banana. A car lacks the materials and properties of a newborn baby. One thing here is not another thing. What I have, you lack, and what you have, I lack. Therefore there is a finite limit on what there is to have, and who has it.

This is why the law of this world is "do not share anything." When you think you are sharing through the physical ownership transfer of objects, you are not really sharing. If I give you half of the pizza, believing I'm sharing it with you, I'm really not. I'm sacrificing and losing half the pizza and cannot have what you have.

The part you have is not the part I have. We do not really share the same part. We have separate and competing parts, and we are both losing and sacrificing in a "compromise" in order to have anything at all. Sharing in this world is based on loss and exclusion. The only way we can appear to share anything is to not share it, but instead to restrict what is shared. This is not true sharing.

A Course in Miracles makes a claim which many people might just accept as if it makes sense, but in terms of how this world functions and how people think, it makes no sense at all. It says that giving and receiving are one. It also says that what you give away you will receive. It also says that in order to have "all", ie everything, you must give everything to everyone. This makes NO sense. How can I still have everything if I've given everything away? And why, if I were to give nothing away, would I HAVE nothing? Surely I'd still have everything? It makes no sense.

You see, the people of the world have been so accustomed to living in spacetime, which is is a realm of illusions. It's a realm of laws which are OPPOSITE to the laws of God. Here it only seems to "make sense" to say that "If I give, I lose". If I give you something, I must lack it. If I give you everything, I will have nothing. And therefore giving is self-destructive and self-denial and not in my best interests. Which means that being selfish and hoarding and possessing exclusive ownership rights is entirely "natural" in this world. But that's not remotely spiritual.

If what Jesus says is true, that giving and receiving are one, and that I must give in order to receive, and that when I give I will receive, and that when I give I will RETAIN what I have - and yet the other person will have it AS WELL, he is teaching a principle which completely transcends the nature of this world. He is saying that when there is true giving, I will KEEP what I have, AND YET at the same time the other person will ALSO have it. Which means that we both now have the WHOLE of what has been given. Not that we compromise, not that we "share" by splitting it in half, not that we each can only have part of it.

He is saying that we can in fact BOTH have ALL of what there is, AT the same time, WITHOUT lack and without sacrifice and without limitation. That does NOT compute in terms of the physical laws. It is totally against the laws of this world. It does not make ANY sense at all in terms of how physical objects function and interact.

Jesus is not only suggesting that when you give, you will receive all of what you have given, and will still have all of it, and that the other person will ALSO have all of it, but he's even saying that therefore when you give to another, and you both share in it simultaneously and fully, there is now an INCREASE. How can anything which has been given away cause an increase in what you have? Yet this is heaven's law, that BECAUSE everything is given fully, it is received fully, and is shared fully, and now more people have it and there has been an increase in what is had.

He presents this also in terms of the idea that "ideas can be shared" and that "ideas increase by being shared". This is to clarify that physicality cannot be shared in this way, but mind-content can. When mind gives all, it still has all to give, and yet has shared all, and now all have all, and everything belongs to everyone all at once. Ideas increase by being "given away", because in truth, when you give something real away you still have it, because you also receive it. Because giving and receiving are the same thing.

So this teaching is really telling you something important. The LAWS of reality, of god, of the Kingdom of Heaven, ARE NOT the same as the laws of space or time or planet Earth. The functioning of reality does not correspond to how physical objects are "shared". The nature of God's mind does not operate according to finite laws of "either I have it or you do". And all real relationship operates on this basis that "everything is fully accessible to everyone always." Even YOU are shared with others, and everyone has full access to you as even part of themselves.

This is the nature of oneness, a system in which what belongs to one belong to another. What is mine is yours. What is me is you. And yet there IS sharing, because there ARE many to share WITH. Without there being ANOTHER, there cannot be anyone TO share with. This is why in reality in God's system of sharing, in which everything MUST be shared ("Nothing real can be increased except by sharing"), THERE MUST BE multiple recipients TO share in what exists. And this again further supports the fact that God has many sons.

So if you think that somehow ACIM is non-duality or that God only has one son or that God can't have many creations, etc, you should really take a good hard look at this idea of giving and receiving being one. Because it is clearly a law and a dynamic which utterly defies what you have come to expect of spacetime and its contents, it completely transcends all notions of things being "separated off" and compartmentalized, and really completely destroys the idea that in oneness there is nothing to share WITH.

You cannot accept the idea that giving and receiving are one, while simultaneously claiming that ACIM is a non-dualistic teaching, that there are no brothers to share with, or that reality is just one thing. If Jesus is correct in his teaching, then the oneness of giving and receiving automatically implies that God's Kingdom MUST entail the sharing, and the giving, and the receiving, of everything by everything, and thus the creation of many sharers who must share in everything together and in unison. Indeed this uni-son is the one son, who IN unison is the sharing by many sons, all of whom God created TO share in everything, together, forever.

"Here are both giving and receiving seen as different aspects of one Thought Whose truth does not depend on which is seen as first, nor which appears to be in second place. Here it is understood that both occur together, that the Thought remains complete. And in this understanding is the base on which all opposites are reconciled, because they are perceived from the same frame of reference which unifies this Thought."

"Father, I must return Your Love for me. For giving and receiving are the same, and You have given all Your Love to me."

"For giving and receiving ARE the same. And to ACCEPT the limits of a body is to IMPOSE these limits on each brother that you see. For you MUST see him as you see yourself."

"The unforgiving mind does not believe that giving and receiving are the same."

"The interval you think lies in between the giving and receiving of the gift SEEMS to be one in which you sacrifice, and suffer loss."

"It is this joining that we undertake to recognize today. We will not seek to keep our minds apart from Him Who speaks for us, for it is but our voice we hear as we attend Him. He alone can speak to us and for us, joining in One Voice the getting and the giving of God's Word; the giving and receiving of His Will."

"It IS awareness that giving and receiving ARE the same. BECAUSE it does not make the same unlike, it sees no differences where none exist. And thus it is the SAME for everyone, because it sees no differences in THEM. Its offering is universal, and it teaches but one message. What is God's BELONGS to everyone, and IS his due."

"If paying is associated with giving, IT CANNOT BE PERCEIVED AS LOSS, and the RECIPROCAL relationship of giving and RECEIVING will be recognized."

In truth, the self that is real and the self that we really are, is our soul, which is part of the sonship in/as heaven. That self is perfect already and is incapable of being imperfect. The soul needs no salvation or healing or resurrection.

The thing is, the soul also has a mind, and it is in the mind that we have a problem. We've used our minds against ourselves, against the soul, to deny the soul. This means we've put our minds into a state where we re denying having a self.

This is also reflected in the authority problem which is a rejection of being authored by God, and brings with it a doubts as to whether we have even really been created, or exist at all. Denying God as our father makes us wonder who we even are.

Similarly in denying reality we have put ourselves out of touch with reality, which is an insane state of mind. This state of mind is filled with ego, and ego is literally the denial of self/soul. Ego isn't really a self, it's a lack of real self. It's like a sense of self that has parts missing and is unstable and changeable and lacks reality.

Ego is more like a temporary sense of "self-consciousness", in which you feel like the centre of the universe and under attack by everything. It's a tight contraction of fear, holding on for dear life, small and weak, separated off and exclusive, seeming to peer out upon an insurmountable world which it sees as a threat, divorced from itself and alien to it. But this is all due to a kind of 'lack of wholeness', ie a lack of soul.

When we're doing the course, applying forgiveness, trying to wake up, we might think that we - our self - is waking up. That's because we think that the way that we are, in our ego, in a body, not yet awakened, is our "self". That we're somehow having a self right now. And that we're taking that self and transforming it into an awakened state.

But this isnt' really the case. We're not even really being ourselves right now. And we're not really taking ourselves into reality. Our real self/soul is already in reality and is already perfect, it can learn nothing and needs no correction, it cannot grow and it cannot sleep.

So what are you - who are you - what is this sense of "my self" that you're having? Who or what it is that thinks about waking up?

Really we have a problem in the mind, where the mind is confused and has lost touch with reality and with the self/soul. This has made the mind selfish, rather than wholly self. Selfishness makes everything revolve around being separate and isolated, while the self-wholeness of the soul revolves around sharing everything with everyone.

Mind is that which is varying. Mind is that which is changing its mind about itself. Mind is that which is seeming to sleep, or seeming to wake up. Mind is that which needs correction. Mind is what is learning and unlearning. Mind is the realm of nightmares and happy dreams. It's all something to do with the mind.

But mind is not the self. Mind is a medium that the soul/self uses for creative expression and decision making. The will is part of the mind, which the soul uses TO will things, but the mind isn't the self itself.

So who or what is trying to wake up? Mind is trying to wake up, but mind is not a self. Instead we need to shift a bit in how we think of what is happening.

First we need to recognize self is really the soul/spirit/christ which is in God in/as heaven. It is already perfect and whole and immortal. It doesn't need any learning or fixing.

Then we need to recognize that mind is where something has gone wrong, and it's mind that is confused. Soul has used mind against itself to deny self. So now mind is in a state where it is not serving the soul, it is not recognising that the soul IS the self, and it is thinking that self is something else - such as an ego or a body or a fluctuating transitioning self, or an image of a self.

Mind changing is not about 'you' becoming and growing and learning and transforming into an awakened being. It's more about mind recognising the pre-existing presence of the soul/self and identifying that it IS the self. That you are a soul, not a body or an ego. This mind recognition though isn't a matter of a 'you' that shifts into being a soul, it's more to do with accepting and recognising and seeing the soul and knowing it as self.

That said, as the mind changes and opens up to awareness of the soul, its "sense of self" changes, and that sense of having or being a self or what the self is like seems to change, and that makes 'you' think that 'you' are changing and growing and expanding your self. But really you are tapping onto more and more of a self that is already fully formed in God, and its your degree of awareness of it that changes.

Part of that entails also recognising that 'who or what' you are seeming to be right now, your sense of self, is a mixture of some sense of 'me' and a whole bunch of things which are not the soul. Believing you are a body, or an ego, or a made-up sense of identity, or identification with emotions or relationships or the world. Things which are not the spirit, which you have mistaken for a self.

So really it's not that 'you wake up', it's more that the mind reconnects with and receives input from the soul and aligns with it and comes to recognize that the soul is the self that you forgot you had. And to get there, other senses of self, and other senses of it being 'your self' that is changing, has to go out the window. Really your self doesn't change at all - false senses of self shift and change and seem to grow and transform but they are not really what you are. You wake up FROM senses of self that are mistaken, returning TO the only self you ever really had.

You are a soul, safe in God, dreaming of exile with the mind and within the mind, lost and confused and unsure of who or what you are, temporarily believing that the self is the ego or the body or other things you made up, but gradually coming to recognize that the self is none of these things and was the perfect soul all along, merely hidden by blocks to awareness, and finally revealed as having been you all-along.

"Your Soul does not need salvation, but your mind needs to learn what salvation IS." UrT10E1

"The Soul never loses its communion with God. Only the mind and body need Atonement." URT1B27E

"The forgiven are filled with the Soul, and their Soul forgives in return." UrT1B29A

"The soul is in a state of grace forever. Man's reality is ONLY his soul. Therefore, man is in a state of Grace forever." UrT1B300

"It should be quite apparent to you by now why the ego regards the Soul as its "enemy." The ego arose from the Separation, and its continued existence depends on your continuing belief in the Separation. Reducing the Soul impulses to the unconscious, the ego has to offer you some sort of reward for maintaining this belief. All it CAN offer is a sense of temporary existence, which begins with its own beginning and ends with its own ending. It tells you that this life is YOUR existence because it IS its own." UrT4D9

"The ego is trying to teach you how to gain the whole world, and lose your own Soul. The Holy Spirit teaches that you CANNOT lose your Soul and there IS no gain in the world, for OF ITSELF, it profits nothing." URT11G1

"The Soul does not need healing, but the mind DOES." UrT3F10

"The term "salvation" does NOT apply to the Soul, which is not in danger and does not need to be salvaged." UrT4C23

"The Soul is therefore unalterable because it is ALREADY perfect, but the mind can elect the level it chooses to serve." UrT1B37C

"Free will is the attribute of the mind, NOT the Soul. The Soul always remains changeless, because it never leaves the sight of God." URT1B37F

When someone seems to die, it is an opportunity. Either you can experience the death as a symbol of separation, or as meaning nothing has happened at all (the atonement).

When you experience it as separation, you will resist it and a you'll think of it as being an end. You'll think something has been lost. Someone bad has happened. Something sad has occurred. Something of value has ended. Because these all take the illusion of 'an end' and believe it is real. IF something really has ended, then all of these experiences would be appropriate. So it really depends on how you see things.

Its possible when someone 'dies' to not have an experience of there having been an end at all. You can think of it as the person transitioning to a different place, that they continue on, and there hasn't been an end at all. Just like a change of rooms, or moving to a different location. Nothing is lost, there hasn't become an absence of value, separation hasn't been increased, the person hasn't been diminished, who and what they are hasn't had anything happen to them, and, essentially, its nothing to be upset about. You can see things this way, but only if you really are ready and willing to do so, which means having to question separation and all of its forms, which can take a lot of time and forgiveness.

So it's okay if you are in the 'something really happened' camp, having the feelings, feeling grief and loss and separation. Those are normal 'natural' feelings to have IF you are perceiving that "real death" has happened. But this isn't the only way to interpret death. It's also possible to recognize that nothing has happened. The person is not affected. They are Christ. They are immortal spirit. They are not a body. They never were a body. They have not ended and nothing has really come to an end at all. It's just a continuation of life - eternal life. That's the only real truth about it. And when you can experience it in this way, not believing in separation and not USING it to separate, you can be free of the 'side effects' of grief, loss, sadness, loneliness, anger etc... ALL of which arise out of *believing in* separation, which is a choice.

So when we get REAAAALLY honest and spiritual about this... it is in fact our OWN belief in separation which creates all sense of grief and loss. It is our own belief in it that gives it its power. The perceptions we have of something 'real' being lost or ending IS an optional way to perceive and you do not HAVE to perceive this way. There is another way. You can choose not to believe in separation at all and you can choose not to use death as an attack or a demonstration that ends are real.

So we have to admit that, even though when we perceive someone has died, which WILL make us very upset because we think separation has happened, WE are the one who is actually choosing to perceive separation and to USE the death to reinforce our belief in separation. AND, the use of it for that purpose IS in fact using it to prove that GOD IS DEAD... which is not exactly an insignificant side-effect. In fact it is the ego's secret intention, to make sure that all of the grief and upset and anger and abandonment that stems from 'they left me' or 'they died' is actually secretly WANTED, because it reinforces the belief that we are separate from God and this is precisely what our little ego wants to accomplish. So while we are in grief, we MUST also be secretly glad that the person or whatever has 'really died', and that there has really been a separation, because without that belief in separation you CANNOT GRIEVE. There is no loss.

This is all very hard to accept, of course. But that doesn't mean it is impossible, and it IS what is REQUIRED to come to if we are to FULLY accept Holy Spirit's healing and Jesus's truth and God's reality. We HAVE to be willing to stop using death to drive a wedge between ourselves and others. We have to stop using it as an ATTACK on them AND on ourselves.

In fact, when we use death to make a demonstration/statement about how the person 'does not exist', that is an ATTACK on that person. That isn't exactly a way of honoring them, and it isn't a way of respecting them or acknowledging their life or their innocence. Why do we launch automatically into an attitude of "you're dead" as soon as the person croaks? It's kind of like kicking the door shut as they leave, having just thrown them under the bus. Hardly loving or appreciative of who they are OR the fact that they are immortal. We effectively "celebrate the fact they died", regardless of the fact that we do it with tears and grief and sadness, when instead we should be celebrating that they are ALIVE. Maybe if we celebrated their immortality they WOULD NOT DIE and instead be HEALED? Hmmm, fancy that. So yes, now you're responsible for their death because you did not offer them healing. ;-)

We have to stop making out that it's ALL terrible and bad that a person 'really died' because we're only being dishonest about our ego motives. And we have to stop making out that when bodies 'die', there is an end of any kind. Ends are separations and separations are NOT REAL.

Jesus said, "let the dead bury the dead". This means, the people who believe in death - who are thus already dead themselves - are the only ones who VALUE it and are the only ones who GRIEVE and are the only ones who BELIEVE it has really happened and therefore they are the only ones who NEED a funeral. And when you think about it, although we love to hark on about the specialness of a person at a funeral - and I know this will push some buttons so I apologize - but let's be truthful. .. we must simultaneously be glad that the person is dead because if death is real that means we WANTED it. There is no escaping that. Either we support death or we don't. Either we say "yes death happened" or "there is only life". Which will you choose? And what you choose will completely determine the 'reactions' that you'll have when such events seem to transpire.

I am writing this partly because my Grandfather died yesterday. And I was thinking that I would or should feel upset, and Jesus stopped me, and he asked, "why?"... or more to the point, it was an assertion of strength that... NO.. you do not have to enter into perceptions of grief and loss and separation. You don't. It's optional. I can choose to focus on the TRUTH, which is that my "grandfather" is actually secretly CHRIST and he is completely immortal and innocent and nothing has ever happened to him, and he has never died, and he was never a body. If I DON'T perceive and believe this (without being in denial either - this is about honesty), then I am literally also saying that I AM DEAD AS WELL... or that I DIED WITH HIM.

To the ego what happens to others does not happen to us, due to the sense of separation - "he is dead, but I am alive, poor sod, rather him than me". But in truth, we are all joined and we are all ONE. And what we believe is true of others we HAVE to believe it applies to us also, whether consciously or unconsciously. So if I believe, ok, yes, that person is dead and separation is real and there has been a great big loss... then... that's what I'm saying about MYSELF, and it's what I'm saying about my relationship with God!

Because ultimately, all 'deaths' are symbolic expressions of the ego's attempt to destroy God, at which it chuckles with a sinister laugh and wrings its hands in glee. So I will not be party to that - to MY OWN death vicariously through that of another. I will not be party to the support of the idea of death and I will not be party to reinforcing the idea that the Son of God can be killed or that God is dead. And that means, I will only acknowledge our shared eternal life - that we are invulnerable and everlasting and DEATH HAS NOT OCCURRED.

So thanks Granddad for all the life and death that you demonstrated, but it's not true and I'm not buying it. And I know you still exist, so your cover is blown and death didn't work. Oh well.

God is life. "I can see peace instead of this". And I believe my Gramps would be proud of my standing up FOR him by supporting his LIFE rather than making his illusion of death into a big drama. I do not feel upset and I don't believe I'm in denial. Nothing has happened and death doesn't mean anything.

"I heard one voice because I had learned that learning is attained BY teaching. I understood that I COULD NOT ATONE FOR MYSELF ALONE."On the one hand, we're asked to accept atonement for ourselves. This is because our own mind needs to accept God's truth and become sane, in and of itself. But the fact is that you also share everything with others. Your mind is plugged into other minds. So that now means that you can't accept your own atonement, unless you're also willing accept other people's atonement.

I could say, well, I find myself to be innocent and holy. But if I can't also have that same perspective about EVERYONE, then I can't really claim it either. This is due to the Golden Rule, that what is true of me is true of the whole sonship. Either both of us are innocent, or both of us are guilty.

"Now need you but to learn that BOTH of you are innocent OR guilty."It's not possible to see myself as innocent while seeing someone else as guilty. This means that secretly I find myself to be guilty as well, and am now projecting sin onto another in order to deny that I find myself sinful. I now see the guilt seemingly outside myself in another as if it applies to them and not me. This is how the ego always thinks in a dissociated way.

Nothing true can apply ONLY to myself. Truth has to apply to everyone at once. The truth is that whatever applies to me applies to everyone, because we were all created equal in God. If I believe in guilt I will find both myself and others to be guilty and will see a guilty world. If I truly and genuinely believe in my own innocence, it can't be that I simultaneously hate others and find them to be sinners. No one can love and hate at the same time. So you can't accept atonement just for yourself and leave everyone out of it. Just as you can't be in holy relationship while excluding anyone.

Even though I'm tasked with accepting atonement "for myself", being responsible for using my own free will to choose it, this actually means that I have to be willing to let it APPLY to everyone simultaneously. I cannot in fact accept it for MYSELF at all, if I am not willing for this same truth to be true everywhere. If I fail to recognize its universal application, I have not learned it. Only by SHARING the atonement with the ENTIRE sonship, can I accept it for myself.

This means I have to find EVERYONE to be innocent and accept the atonement FOR everyone. I can't JUST find myself to be innocent and leave others dangling. The truth I claim for myself HAS to be also claimed for everyone. I have to see the holiness of christ in everyone at the same time otherwise I can't see it in myself. And I cannot be true to or know myself without being true to the known reality of everyone's true nature. Only ego would think it can accept atonement exclusively, because it wants everything at the expense of everyone else.

"Atonement as a Lesson in Sharing. Atonement is for all, because it is the way to UNDO the belief that ANYTHING is for you ALONE."

"Holiness MUST be shared, for therein lies everything that makes it holy."

"To the Holy Spirit, it is the fundamental law of sharing, by which you give what you value in order to keep it in your OWN minds."

"Redemption is recognized ONLY by sharing it."

So yes on the one hand, since we "rule" our own mind, which God created in us individually along with our soul, our natural condition is that we are ALSO fused intimately with every child of God. You CANNOT accept the atonement "just for" yourself. It is absolutely impossible and runs completely opposite to the nature of love and of all things God.

The atonement is a reflection of heaven, and of heaven's laws. Those laws are laws of absolute sharing, equality and union. You are literally in and like all your brothers, and thus there is an aspect of you which is completely shared with them all. The entire sonship is your self, just as you are the christ along with everyone. For YOU to accept atonement means, in effect, that you AS THE SONSHIP is accepting it FOR the sonship.

"My mission was simply to UNITE the Will of the Sonship WITH the Will of the Father by being aware of the Father's Will myself."

"Peace be unto you who rest in God, and in whom the whole Sonship rests."

"Every decision is made for the WHOLE SONSHIP, directed in and out, and influencing a constellation larger than anything you ever dreamed of."

"What you give through Him is for the whole Sonship, NOT FOR PART OF IT."

"To heal, then, is to correct perception in your brother AND yourself by SHARING THE HOLY SPIRIT WITH HIM. This places you both WITHIN the Kingdom and restores ITS wholeness in your minds."

"The Kingdom of Heaven (the sonship/one son/christ) IS you. What else BUT you did the Creator create, and what else but you IS His Kingdom? This is the whole message of the Atonement"

You see, you are not just you. You are also everyone else. All your siblings in the sonship are part of you and you of them. We are all together a collection of individual souls who share absolutely everything with each other openly. And so what applies to you applies to everyone and includes everyone. Everyone is included in your self and in your mind, just as you are included in them. And so you CANNOT do anything alone!

The ego is the idea of being alone, separated off, independent of or isolated from others. It's the idea of being "only you" and "not others". It's the rejection of your union with your brothers and an attempt to confine and limited yourself to ONLY what appears to be your individual self. It's an attempt not to share anything with anyone. And it is OUT of this state of exclusivity and imprisonment that you are rising INTO a state of TOTAL sharing and inclusion. So you have to learn that you ARE the whole sonship and everything you do is for everyone.

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."

This doesn't in a any way violate the free will of others. You accepting atonement for "yourself" does in SOME WAY and in some part, accept it FOR others and gives it to them. It lifts them up to the degree they're willing to allow it. You becoming lighter lightens everyone's load. "When I am healed I am not healed alone."

Just as Jesus accepted the atonement for himself AND FOR everyone, this did lift everyone into light, but each individual was only lifted to the degree they allowed themselves to be included in it. Not that Jesus didn't GIVE it to everyone through unlimited sharing, just that they did not full RECEIVE it.

As EACH of us accepts atonement truth for ourselves, we ARE radiating it throughout the sonship and every mind is illuminated by it. This is the same thing that happens when you work miracles. They can touch people far beyond your awareness because we are all joined. We're sort of like a network of individuals. We each can raise up to the highest heights which pulls everyone upward as well, but each has to also be willing to be pulled to fully embrace what is offered them.

So while your "only responsibility" is to accept atonement for yourself, YOUR SELF is not JUST yours. You must accept it for everyone otherwise you cannot have it. "To have all, give all to all." The way by which you share atonement with everyone reflects the holographic nature of the Kingdom, in which everyone has everything simultaneously because every individual is the whole. Atonement, just like miracles, are holographically connected and must be shared in order to be experienced for yourself.

"The purpose of the Atonement is to restore everything TO you. (That is, to restore the awareness. Later clarification.) You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did. Having been restored to your original state, you naturally become part of the Atonement yourself. You now share MY inability to tolerate the lack of love in yourself and in everyone else, and MUST join the GREAT CRUSADE to correct it. The slogan for this Crusade is "Listen, Learn, and DO."

"As peace extends from deep inside yourself to embrace all the Sonship and give it rest"

"For it is the complete equality of the Atonement in which salvation lies."

"My only gift to you is to help you make the same decision FOR YOURSELF. The will for this decision is the will to SHARE it, because the decision itself IS the decision to share. It is MADE BY GIVING, and is therefore the one act of mind that resembles true creation."

"Let the Holy Spirit remind you always of His fairness, and let me teach you how to share it with your brothers. How else can the chance to claim it for yourself be given you?"

"You who share His Life must share it to KNOW it, for sharing IS knowing."

"He leaves you no one OUTSIDE yourself, alone WITHOUT you. And so He gives you what is yours, because your Father would have you share it WITH him"

"I desire this holy instant for myself that I may SHARE it with my brother, whom I love. It is not possible that I can have it WITHOUT him, nor he without me. Yet it is WHOLLY possible for us to SHARE it NOW."

"To have faith is to heal. It is the sign that you HAVE accepted the Atonement for yourself, and would therefore share it. By faith, you OFFER the gift of freedom from the past, which you have RECEIVED.""Salvation IS His Will BECAUSE you share it. NOT for you alone, but for the Self which IS the Son of God."

"This is the light which brings your peace of mind to other minds, to share it and be glad that they are one with you and with themselves."

"Such is your mission now. For God entrusts the giving of His gifts to all who have received them. He has shared His joy with you. And now you go to share it with the world."

"Forgiveness shows us that Godʹs Will is one, and that we share It.""And I accept this vision in its name, both for myself and for the world as well."

"And I, who would be saved, would make it mine, to be the way I live within a world that needs salvation, and that will be saved as I accept Atonement for myself"

"The goal of the curriculum, regardless of the teacher you choose, is KNOW THYSELF. There is nothing else to learn. Everyone is looking for himself and the power and glory he thinks he has lost. Whenever you are with anyone ELSE, you have another opportunity to find them. Your power and glory are in HIM BECAUSE they are yours. The ego tries to find them in YOURSELF, because he does not know where to look. But the Holy Spirit teaches you that if you look only at yourself you CANNOT find yourself because that is NOT what you are."

Each of us has an identity. God gave us an identity in and as part of Christ or the Sonship, which we share. But in the separation from God, we denied who we were and sought an identity that wasn't shared. That meant denying our mutual identity, placing us in a state of not being certain of who we are. Another way of saying that is that we became afraid of who we are.

Then we started trying to make an identity that would replace the identity we lost. We were out of touch with reality. So we started trying to assemble an identity from various illusions, and from things which are not really who or what we are. In particular we tried to identify with something isolated and alone, that you could call "only yours", rather than sharing an identity with others.

This included identifying with our bodies, believing that our body is our self. To do this our mind has to literally "attach" itself to "mix itself with" the body, trying to become "one" with it. As if to blur the lines between what is the body and what is our self. So that there is only one seeming self, not two. By trying to identify with a body, we're trying to hide our real identity and forget it, so that all that remains is the body self.

If I bind my definition of who and what I am, or what is true of me, to the body, then I am saying I AM a body. And then everything about the body I take personally as if it speaks of and defines me. Maybe I'll feel positive about my body for various reasons, due to how it looks or what it is capable of. Or maybe I'll feel negative about it based on it being ugly or defective. But both are still identifications with the body.

We can also shift to identifying with the mind, or with thoughts. When we have thoughts we can get a sense of an artificial sense of self, mixed in with the thinking. The mind can chatter away with its noise and the more it talks the more you mistake the talking for the person doing the talking. As if the sound of thought is the presence of someone. As if the thoughts are a self. And now you've identified with thinking, perhaps with intelligence or intellect, with memory or accumulation of knowledge.

You can also identify with social standing, your social background, class, race, gender, how much money you have, where your family seems to rank in terms of some social hierarchy, whether you are upper-class or lower, living in wealth or in poverty etc. You can also identify with failing to have much of a worthwhile identity in any of these areas, perhaps with a poor body and poor finances and poor living conditions, seeing yourself as identified as a helpless victim.

I think we can also identify with objects, with animals and pets, with places, with homes and cars etc. We can identify with our children, and literally feel as though what happens to them happens to us. As though they are a part of us, to such an extent that when they suffer we suffer, or we take everything that happens to them as a personal attack. This can lead to the identity of being a father or mother, someone who wants to keep that identity and not let it go, and who cannot deal with the empty nest.

These are all confused senses of who and what you are. And we're all looking for ourselves because think we lost ourselves. We sense that we are uncertain, thus afraid, of who and what we really are - or don't want to know. We don't remember our identity. It's like we have an amnesia. Whether it be an amnesia imposed by birth through crossing the barrier of dimensions and entering a body prison, or the illusion that every time you're born you start from scratch to build an identity.

"Each man makes one ego for himself, although it is subject to enormous variation because of its instability, and one for everyone he perceives, which is equally variable." "The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in the minds of man that some people have gone so far as to doubt whether they were ever created at all."

So the big question really is, who are you? What are you? Are you the son of God as He created you? Or have you become something else? Do you want to be something else? Are you a body? Are you a relationship, or a child that you possess, or an object you own? Are you a social status or a financial position? Are you your job, or your role as a parent? Are you made of the guilt and fear and sin that you feel? Are you your thoughts and your thinking? Are you the intellect? Are you awareness? Do you have a soul?

Finding out who you really are, knowing yourself, is what Jesus says is the entire point of this course. It's about remembering and waking up to the recognition that you are still exactly the same identity that God created you to be forever. You are still Christ, you are still a soul, still part of the sonship, still perfect. Still a spiritual being. And your real identity is shared with all the other Sons of God.

So our whole process here is just sorting out, what are we experiencing as being our identity, who or what have we identified with or latched onto, what is it that we think is our self, and where have we put that? What have we tried to become "one with", other than God? What have we wrapped ourselves around in trying to portray ourselves as something God did not create?

If I think I am my body or my thoughts and have actually bound myself to them such that I seem to experience them "as me", then I am in need of correction. I am out of touch with who I really am and am believing I am something I am not. This means I lack awareness or awakening, or am unconscious. These mis-identifiations with things we are not, are blocks to awareness.

"I am not a body I am free, for I am still as God created me."

"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. "

"The ego IS therefore a confusion in identification, which never had a consistent model, and never developed consistently."

"By accepting the Atonement for YOURSELF, you are deciding AGAINST the belief that you can BE alone, thus dispelling the idea of separation and affirming your true identification with the whole Kingdom as literally PART OF YOU. This identification is as beyond doubt as it is beyond belief. Your wholeness HAS no limits, because its being is in Infinity."

"EVERYTHING you perceive as the outside world, is merely your attempt to maintain your ego identification, for everyone believes that identification is salvation."

"They are reflections both of your own proper identification WITH your brothers, and of your own awareness that YOUR identification IS maintained by extension."

"The IDEA of separation PRODUCED the body, and remains connected TO it, MAKING it sick because of its identification WITH it."

"This false identification makes you incapable of understanding what anything is for."

"When you imprison yourself, you are losing sight of your true identification with me and with the Father. Your identification IS with the Father and with the Son. It CANNOT be with one and not the other. If you are part of one, you MUST be part of the other because they ARE One."

"In his complete identification with the Christ--the perfect Son of God, His one creation and His happiness, forever like Himself and One with Him - Jesus became what all of us must be."

"As long as your identification vacillates, (and B's is weak) you cannot accept the gift that belongs to you."

"Your identification with the Kingdom is totally beyond question except by you WHEN YOU ARE THINKING INSANELY."

"ALL attack is self attack. It cannot BE anything else. Arising from your OWN decision NOT to be what you ARE, IT IS AN ATTACK ON YOUR IDENTIFICATION. "

"Miracles praise God through men. They praise God by honoring his Creations, affirming their perfection. They heal because they deny body-identification and affirm Soul-identification. By perceiving the Spirit, they adjust the levels and see them in proper alignment. This places the Spirit at the center, where Souls can communicate directly."

"This is not my name alone, for ours is a shared identification. "

"The body is the ego's home by its own election. It is the only identification with which it feels safe, because the body's vulnerability is its own best argument that you CANNOT be of God."

"For example, if the identification is with the body, consciousness may distort superconscious impulses by denying their Source, and seeking their impact in the orgasm."

What if when you become healed, the whole world is transformed in some way and is a little lighter?

This may sound radical, but it does appear to be supported in the course in various ways.

Jesus speaks of how when you are healed, others cannot be omitted from your healing.

Jesus speaks of how if you change your mind the WHOLE world must change. This isn't because its ONLY your world, but because you are joined with everyone.

Jesus speaks of how if you join minds with another person and deny/reject their denial of health, they will become healed, and cannot stay sick unless you support their belief.

Jesus also says that you are your brother's keeper. Meaning that HIS condition is YOUR responsibility.

How is this possible? It seems it is only possible if somehow, you and other people are actually connected together and SHARE something. Some part of your self is their self and vice versa. Meaning that if something applies to you, it also applies to them.

In the biggest picture this is the Golden Rule, that what is true of you is true of others. And this rule is God's law which is always in effect everywhere on all levels at all times, even if we deny it.

Let's frame it this way. Let's say there is a kind of collective consciousness. There's this vast sea of being, in which there are concentrations of self, sufficiently organized as to be "individuals", yet intimately joined to the tapestry of everyone else's existence. Sort of like we're all one big joined entity with multiple heads. A bit like siamese twins.

This is actually a vague and not accurate enough description but just for analogy's sake... this would mean that if someone chooses to rise up, they tend to "drag" others up with them. If someone opens their mind to truth, there is sort of a ripple effect that propagates to ALL others.

What that must mean is, any work you to do heal or love yourself, MUST overflow and affect others.

Jesus similarly talks about how you are the light of the world.

Jesus also talks about how it only takes ONE teacher of God to save the world.

Jesus also talks about how the light into your mind can shine into another mind and enlighten it.

Given the fact that then that there is a SHARING component to all of us, there is some part of us that is ONE, joined, connected, it becomes not only impossible to do anything truly in isolation, but also anything you do DOES affect everyone else.

This would be reflected in statements like "There are no private thoughts" for example.

Now, this might sound radical. In fact it will. But this leads to the conclusion that its possible for you to HEAL ANOTHER PERSON, if you will apply an appropriate attitude. Certainly the person still has free will and can choose to resist, to stay anchored down in the darkness. But you can at the very least offer love.

Love has such healing power it can dislodge even the resistance to truth in another. As Jesus says, "the task of the miracle worker is to deny the denial of truth." And also that there is not really any point in miracles at all unless they are able to affect someone who NEEDS healing, and thus is in a state of resistance. Healing of the person would not be possible otherwise.

For this to be "ok", there must be some aspect of another person that IS LITERALLY YOU. Or that is so intimately shared with you as to be essentially your self. If you love someone "against their will", it can still overthrow their unloving nature and heal them, to the degree it can be accepted.

What's radical is, this means that the condition of the body of another person, is not entirely "up to them". You have an influence as well. For example "Forgiveness is not complete unless it has brought a healing to both your brother and yourself." "He is healed along with you." "Miracles benefit both the giver and the receiver" etc.

There is something about miracles that is based on sharing, and on returning to the state where you SHARE everything with others. That return to sharing is "joining". In a shared state, your brother's health is yours. In fact "YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health."

Jesus even says that when YOU heal your mind and body and it now represents and symbolizes the absence of attack, the presence of innocence and love etc, the state of YOUR healing AFFECTS your brother, exonerates him, lifts sin from his mind, heals him, and thus heals HIS body as well.

At the level of the ego and the physical world, the ego suggests that there is total separation between you and others due to bodies. And thus changes in you have NO effect on anyone. That your mind can change is perceptions of the world WITHOUT changing the world. This is not what Jesus says is possible, because its not true that there is absolute separation. Even the world's separation is slightly joined, as proven by quantum entanglement and the holographic universe theory etc. Even duality is not quite fully duality.

This means that we ARE all ALWAYS at least slightly joined. We are always part of the experience of others. And this reflects our status as co-creators. So if someone has a sickness, this means there IS something I can do about it, because their sickness is not ENTIRELY their own sickness. Moreso, sickness arises from the belief in separation BETWEEN brothers, and is a two-sided sword which attempts to accuse both.

The sense of separation that it is based on cannot be sustained if I choose to acknowledge that we are JOINED and SHARING. If I do not AGREE to the separation-based sickness, and do not uphold my end of keeping the division between us maintained, it cannot be there and the person must be healed.

If I float my mind to a high level of love and light, I also become far more powerful in my ability to "affect" others. Or rather, to extend and share my healed state and the healing agent of spirit WITH the other person, lifting them up also. This is how it becomes possible to raise the dead for example, to GIVE life to others that they seem to lack, because you have it. This is only possible if we truly are joined together in some way, whereby a person fundamentally has "access" to the being and mind of another.

Total unconditional absolute sharing is the natural state of the Kingdom of God, which all of His children (as brothers) share forever. It is completely natural and real. "One mind is all minds, one brother is all brothers, such is the truth." While I have a self, a soul, it is STILL true that I am "one with" all other brothers, and their souls are joined to mine in such intimacy that we literally are FUSED together in some way. And that fused sharing "network" between us is what Jesus calls the Christ Mind.

So truly, we are not separate people. We are in fact totally the opposite. And that means that we can't consider ourselves to be totally incapable of healing others. Whatever we do, however we focus, whatever we feel, it's going to influence everyone in the universe. This is how holographic reality works. Each individual is a whole in and of themselves but shares the whole with all the rest. I am you and you are me and we are brothers eternally.

It then isn't a question of whether you can heal another person or by what mechanism this happens. It's more a fact that you can't AVOID influencing them. You share everything. If you have a bad day you drag everyone down. If you have a good day you are the light of the world and lift everyone up. People are literally lightened and healed when you bring the light. "you ARE your brother's keeper."

This is perhaps why there the "great awakening" happening. It's because there are contributions from an increasing number of awakening individuals whose influence is more powerful than those who sleep. "Teachers of God will take over the world because of their strength." And so the entire world is going through a spiritual transformation.

Each time that you have a loving thought, each time that you recognize joining and sharing, each time that you forgive, you are healing the entire sonship. Because every single child of God shares itself with you. You are part of a vast network of interconnected parts that depend on each other. You are responsible thus for your brother because what you choose either blesses or curses him, either heals him or compounds his sickness.

This ties further into holy relationships, in that when you are holy towards another, and they thus become more holy, the shared state of joined consenting minds transcends their individual contributions. The fact that there are two souls sharing everything is more powerful than any sense of "one in isolation". To be joined is to share and to share is to love and to love is to wield God's miraculous power.

You do have the authority, power, and ability, connections, and access, to heal other people if you so choose. Shining your light of love into their minds cannot help but offer healing. Your prayers of love can lift others up from despair. And through you the Holy Spirit can move mountains.

"HOW MANY TEACHERS OF GOD ARE NEEDED TO SAVE THE WORLD?

The answer to this question is - one.One wholly perfect teacher, whose learning is complete, suffices. This one, sanctified and redeemed, becomes the Self Who is the Son of God.He who was always wholly spirit now no longer sees himself as a body, or even as in a body.Therefore he is limitless.And being limitless, his thoughts are joined with God's forever and ever. His perception of himself is based upon God's Judgment, not his own.Thus does he share God's Will, and bring His thoughts to still deluded minds. He is forever one, because he is as God created him. He has accepted Christ, and he is saved."

---

"God's teachers appear to be many, for that is what is the world's need.Yet being joined in one purpose, and one they share with God, how could they be separate from each other? What does it matter if they then appear in many forms? Their minds are one; their joining is complete. And God works through them now as one, for that is what they are."

I asked Jesus some questions about "the script", what it is, how it works, what freedom we have, etc.

He pulled together information from all over the Course in ways I would have never imagined. Here are the key points.

1) Scripts, as sequences of events or arrangements to meet, set up in what seems to be "before" incarnation but which is somewhat in parallel to it, are better described as "templates". They are frameworks which present lessons which you may, or may not, learn from.

2) You ALWAYS have the freedom to choose WHEN you will take the curriculum. You can deny it, you can avoid it, you can prolong suffering, you can fail temporarily to learn a lesson, and then it will be presented at a later date. That means you are not 100% "locked in" to being "forced to wake up" against your will just because it's written into some kind of premeditated sequence of events.

3) YOUR MIND has to choose when it will awaken. Awakening cannot be forced upon it, and the script cannot MAKE the awakening happen, because you have to wake up FROM scripts. The scripts can only contain an exit point, a doorway, through which you must still willingly walk by free will.

4) The Holy Spirit's script is also referred to as the curriculum, and it is considered Holy. The curriculum means that the truth is OFFERED, just as love is always offered, but it is up to you when you will accept it. You can choose to delay accepting it. But sooner or later you will accept it, depending on how much tolerance for pain you have or how much willingness to elect to give.

5) In the Holy Spirit's curriculum, all events are planned by Him in general. This is also referred to as the "plan of atonement", which Jesus is in charge of, and which you are to become a PART of. This is reflected upon here: "What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything that happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to eternal life."

6) The Holy Spirit came into the dream in a sense, with us, "this world has two makers" and reorganized what we made in order to GUARANTEE that we would eventually return to God. Thus events and life situations and people you meet ("those who are to meet will meet"), and the general themes of your life, and certain things you have chosen to "work on" in this life, are presented at the appropriate time when learning is optimally possible.

7) Challenges and what seems at first to be difficult situations or lessons, are only difficult due to what has NOT been learned yet, and present an opportunity to change what you believe, when seen correctly and accepted as helpful. When the lesson is not accepted or learned but resisted, now you are into the ego's script. What that means is, you are now choosing to interpret the world using the ego and plan or enforce selective attitudes about the world which influence your perception and adjust your experiences in isolated ways. Since the ego thought system generally leads towards death, participating in this way of being puts you "under tyrannical rule" and you now become sort of "subject to" the consequences of that decision. Not because you are forced to, but because you choose to.

8) Because those who are to meet will meet, the manual for teachers talks about 3 types of relationships, short term, mid-term, and long-term, depending on how much learning is possible, whereby the long-term ones are the ideal balance of teaching and learning for both involved, such that a great deal of progress can be made over a long time period without destroying each other.

9) Within the scope of the "template" of your life, there is room to maneuver. Because you have free will and can choose whether to learn or not, there MUST be some degree of freedom of mind not just to manipulate your perceptions or thoughts but also your actions, because your actions stem from your thoughts and beliefs. While "people who meet" may be scripted, and while certain properties of those people or why those people were chosen is scripted, to present an "opportunity", the fine details of how you interact and physically move and what you do in situations or whether you are willing to change, is up to you.

10) You are not locked into a rollercoaster ride which forces awakening upon you or enforces that you will learn a lesson or implements experience into your mind. Lessons are PRESENTED, but it is up to you how you USE them. We should not concern ourselves with being so locked into some kind of pre-recorded "movie of time" as to think there is no flexibility of outcome or that you "must succeed" in that sense. What makes you succeed is the Holy Spirit's infinite patience in presenting further lifetimes as needed until you are finished resisting the truth, by your free will.

11) You decide on what your script for your lifetime will be before you incarnate into it. You decide which family to choose, the type of body, your name, your astrological background, how your brain will function, any special bodily conditions you might be "born with" or manifest early, any scenarios which will arise, who you will meet and when, what lessons/trials you will be exposed to, and so on. Sometimes people's life lessons turn out to be too strong and the person is allowed to "die early" in order to "rest" between lifetimes. Love is compassionate not cruel. It's like we're all people with mental illness who are gradually going through a healing process and there is give and take and always a gentleness in terms of "mercy" from God about what you can tolerate.

12) There is some truth to the idea that God only gives you lessons you can handle, although this speaks more to the script you chose knowing what it would likely entail and also knowing the long-term outcome if you were to be successful at learning from it. Since you know, when not incarnate, the long-term goal of being with God, and can see sense in "whatever it takes to get there", you are WILLING to expose yourself to all manner of positive and negative situations AS NEEDED in order to awaken. What seems like short-term suffering can ultimately be a blessing in the long-term plan.

13) In the biggest possible picture, there never was a real separation or any real time. However our belief in it made it seem real to us, which is why we "need" these "scripts" to help us learn that it is not so. We wrote the need for the scripts, the Holy Spirit provided the curriculum for the correction. That means we wrote a script with the ego for what we wanted to be true, and Holy Spirit wrote a counter-script of lessons and learning which would lead us back to what is really true. The time you elect to LEARN His curriculum is up to you. No-one is forcing you to be awake and no-one is keeping you asleep.

14) Ultimately free will is only free when it is embracing freedom which means embracing God's Will. It is free in Heaven. It is free to willingly choose to agree with God's will and to extend it in joy and love. That is why it was given you, that you would share and increase it. When you will against yourself/God, you are trying to NOT will, which renders your will ineffectual, and stops your will. Thus your will seems to become powerless and you turn to wishful thinking which produces no effects. As you regain your power and your will becomes more whole, you become stronger in the truth and more miraculous, and more able to consciously will whatever you want to happen. Ultimately you can master this to the point where EVEN in this world, what you desire happens and what you do not desire does not happen. At that point, you do not need corrective scripts because you are not writing ego scripts.

15) While from a high vantage point it seems all of time was "written" at once, or all possible moments of time were expressed simultaneously, they were organized by the Holy Spirit into a linear sequence NOT as an ego creation but as part of His plan of atonement, in order to USE TIME for the purpose of learning, and when time's usefulness for leaning is done, it will be UNMADE. Our ego self perceives time as linear in an attempt to believe in appearances, but time is not inherently linear.

16) From a high vantage point, the time that you began dreaming and the time that time began and the time that you stop dreaming and the time that time ends, are all essentially seen as happening at once. Dreaming began and God answered it with the Holy Spirit who has already succeeded in undoing it all. We are guaranteed to return to God because God's Answer is perfect and cannot fail. That doesn't mean that "in time" our experience will be as if all of time's events or sequence is pre-written. There is some flexibility built-in. There are multiple "dimensions" to time, parallel timelines, and you can skip between slices of time depending on your willingness to awaken. Nor does it mean that within each slice of time there are only certain pre-scripted actions you can make. YOUR MIND HAS FREE WILL and it can choose to ignore the script if it wants to. That's why the time you take Holy Spirit's curriculum is voluntary. Ultimately, one way or another, from the highest perspective, "all paths lead to God", and Holy Spirit has ensured that they will.

17) Miracles are the only means at your disposal for controlling time. Also miracles entail a shift into vertical perception which positions you and the person you heal further along in time than you were, having skipped an interval. This tells you that since miracles happen within the world `in time`, that they are capable of manipulating time and thus essentially take you out of the script. Ultimately they lead to revelation and atonement, because they are the means of the atonement, and so miracles must be performed in order to receive and give and share the truth, to have it.

That's all for now.

There are many ACIM myths circulating and one of them is an improper idea of what the Holy Spirit is. Some people will say "he is just your right mind". This isn't accurate enough and can be misleading, greatly diminishing the Holy Spirit's function and power.

When you were created by God, you were created complete and lacking nothing. You are a whole being, a son of God, extended from wholeness. At this point, the Holy Spirit did not exist, and was not needed.

It was only in the separation from God, which was the "fall of man" or the attempt to BELIEVE that separation was possible, which has happened. .... that God created the Holy Spirit. God ADDED the Holy Spirit to the mind in order to protect the connection between all parts of mind, and to guarantee the healing of the belief in separation. He is "God's Voice" calling you to return to sanity.

So the Holy Spirit is actually ADDITIONAL. This means that originally there wasn't a holy trinity, there was in effect a holy duality. But when the Holy Spirit was ADDED to creation, as an eternal and permanent being, with a mind and with creative power, the holy duality became a holy trinity.

The Holy Spirit is to be thought of as in addition to you. Something extra. This is why the course tells you that he is actually your "appointed friend". He is in parallel to you, another alongside you, a helper, a supporter, a healer, a teacher, a comforter, and the answer to the question of separation.

"Your teaching has already DONE this, for the Holy Spirit is PART OF YOU. Created by God, He left neither God nor His creation. He is both God and you, as you are God and Him together. For God's answer to the separation added more to you than you tried to TAKE AWAY."

Since the dynamics of heaven are holographic, in which there is a shared oneness, you can say for example that each son of God shares everything with all the others. They are brothers to each other as individuals but they still are one with and united with each other, as though part of each other.

In the same way, the Holy Spirit was ADDED as another created being to be shared with, to be one with, and to be part of you. But when you say he is part of you, you must be careful not to be thinking in separating terms. This doesn't mean he is ONLY a part of you, or exclusive to your mind, or just another name for some pre-existing part of your mind.

The Holy Spirit is shared with all minds and is like an extra layer of mind added on top of the christ mind. Being united in oneness with you, he does share everything with you, which in the holographic sense means you share the same wholeness that he shares with God. Which makes him literally part of you - as the collective sonship/kingdom, but he is STILL a distinct created individual entity.

ACIM actually tells us that the holy spirit is a co-creator with God, is an eternal creation, will always exist even after the atonement, implies that he has his own creations, is a very firm third entity in the trinity of God-Sonship-HolySpirit, and that there ARE "three" components to that. To deny this is to deny that the TRINITY is real.

The Holy Spirit is not your higher self. He is not just some piece of your mind that remained sane while the rest of it went nuts. He is actually a third party. He is an entity, an actual spirit being. He has eternal life. He has mind and thought. He can create as well as heal. He is a living being. And he was given to creation as part of creation to keep all the seemingly separated parts of mind connected and to act as a savior and healer of the mind's insanity.

Your higher self is your soul, which is a son of God, which God created originally. Your higher self is your ONLY real self, and it's what and who you are. The Holy Spirit having been added to creation has become part of you, just as God is part of you and your brothers are part of you and your creations are part of you. That doesn't mean he's some kind of little compartment that's in your mind that was always there since the start. He is secondary and additional to your mind. Him being "part you" doesn't mean he is "just a part of you". He spans beyond you and includes others as well.

"The Holy Spirit is the Christ mind that senses the knowledge that lies beyond perception. It came into being with the separation as a protection, and inspired the beginning of the Atonement at the same time. Before that, there was no need for healing and no-one was comfortless."

Here for example there is a suggestion that the Holy Spirit is "nothing more than" the christ mind, as if to say that he is a synonym for christ. But that is not an appropriate interpretation because christ is the second part of the trinity, and the Holy Spirit is actually a distinct third part. He symbolizes God and he symbolizes christ, having a somewhat symbolic function, but that doesn't mean he isn't a fully created being in his own right.

As it says, the Holy Spirit came into being along with the separation (tiny mad idea) as God's answer to that idea, his guarantee of its undoing. He should rightly be thought of as your friend and helper because he literally is an additional being that God added to creation.

When we say the Holy Spirit is some kind of "synonym" for "my right mind", we're stripping him of all his life and his eternal nature, his power and his creative ability. We're trying to then exclude him from existing as a standalone third party, and are trying to REDUCE him to being "just" some little part of our mind that remembers God. He isn't "your memory of God", but he does remember/know God FOR you until you can remember and know God for yourself.

The attempt to think of him as "only my right mind" or "my true self" is really an attempt to limit what he is and pretend he doesn't exist. This was part of the teaching of certain individuals who did not like the idea of the Holy Spirit actually existing. It's something you should be wary of because the Holy Spirit is there for you, is there to help you and heal you and guide you, to teach you and decide for you, to give you the eyes of christ, and to resurrect you from death. To say he is just some part of your own mind is self-centered as if you can "save yourself". Which is a usurping of his function.

He must be acknowledged as something that God did in fact deliberately create and ADD as a response, as a purposeful act of creation, and one which is eternal. You tried to take something away from God and God ADDED even more than you took away by creating the Holy Spirit. He is MORE THAN just you. He is also partly God. He also has functions that you do not have. He is due proper acknowledgement and recognition as a truly fully created being in his own right.

It is once again "separatist thinking", based on exclusive either/or logic, that leads people to conclude the Holy Spirit is EITHER part of me own self or EXCLUDED from me. And since the course says he is part of you, people then think that he is EXCLUSIVELY part of you and does not exist beyond you. That is the fallacy of this kind of thinking. In truth the Holy Spirit is you AND is others AND is God. He is more than just you and more than just a part of you. He is the third entity in the trinity of God's creation and always will be.

"The Holy Spirit is the only part of the Holy Trinity which is symbolic. He is referred to in the Bible as the Healer, the Comforter, and the Guide. He is also described as something separate, apart from the Father and from the Son. I myself said, "and if I go I will send you ANOTHER comforter, and he will abide with you."

"He is part of the Holy Trinity, because His Mind is partly YOURS and also PARTLY GOD's."

"The Holy Spirit abides in the part of your mind that is part of the Christ Mind. He represents your Self and your Creator, Who are One. He speaks for God and also for you, being joined with both."

"The voice of the Holy Spirit IS the call to Atonement, or the restoration of the integrity of the mind. When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed, there will be no call to return, but what God creates is eternal. The Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless THEIR creations and keep them in the light of joy."

What appears to be the physical world is not actually "direct reality". It is in fact once removed. It is an effect of an entirely other layer of causality which seems hidden. Just as in the holographic model, the underlying "source" of the appearances you see, is obscured by "sight of form" and you end up believing that this physical world is "verbatim", ie this is all there is.

In understanding why miracles are supernatural, it is very important to recognize this. In order to be supernatural there has to be an order or layer of reality deeper or higher than what appears to be the physical surface of this universe. We have to recognize that bodies and objects are not "immediate reality", they are once removed, and are EFFECTS caused by some other hidden level of causality. There is a whole other layer of causality, and everything in this world is "coming from" that hidden realm, making this world entirely an secondary effect.

When observing just the appearances of the surface of this world, there is a tremendous vast illusion before your eyes, which seems to operate in terms of "horizontal cause and effect". It seems as if some parts of the world cause and effect other parts. But this IS entirely an illusion. It's not what is happening. Anything which looks like being "different" in this world, ie one thing is a cause and another thing is an effect, is an illusion.

What secretly is happening is a higher, hidden level, a more immediate level of reality, is causing this entire universe all at once. Causality moves in a "vertical" direction from above, downwards, projecting the universe below. This means that there is a realm where you are "outside of" or above the entire field of horizontal illusions, outside the dream, where you are under absolutely none of the illusory horizontal laws and free of ALL limitations.

In that realm, you essentially are like a movie editor, someone who can reach into the movie and rearrange parts of it, orchestrate what goes where, and make significant changes. While within the movie itself it seems there is this consistent "story" playing, which utterly depends on the existence of many limitations and props and illusions of things which "must" happen according to certain rules or laws, realize that all of these stories of causality are entirely a fiction, where nothing seems to betray the illusion, nothing hints at this not being all there is, and nothing "blows the illusion" of horizontal or linear causality.

An example is a movie that you go to the cinema to watch. When you watch the movie you believe it is a single seamless story, in which certain limits and rules have been put in place in order to paint a seemingly "consistent" picture. But the fact is, if you could've been in the studio when the movie was being created, you would realize it was simply a bunch of people "acting" and a bunch of computers producing CGI special effects, working "behind the scenes". You as as a miracle worker as a BEHIND THE SCENES OPERATOR who orchestrates and produces the second-hand "effects" or "results" of a creative process. We used this same process initially when FORMING the physical universe, which is an entire order of reality removed from those who pull the strings.

When expression is made from the higher level, the more immediate level of causality, that expression is able to cause changes to the expressed world below. Just as an editor would make changes to a movie sequence from outside the movie which has the potentially to "break the illusion" of linear consistency within the movie itself. And when it DOES "perform a miracle", it literally BREAKS the illusion of linear cause and effect - the horizontal consistency or predictability of one thing leading only to another specific consequence. It's like someone editing the movie, and to those observing from WITHIN the movie, it will look like reality just did something "impossible".

If you seem to be living in the movie and you think that all that can happen is what's inside the movie, then suddenly a spaceship appears out of nowhere because the movie director decided to insert one, you will "witness" what appears to be a miracle. Something happening that seems impossible based on the linear laws. If you think of The Truman Show - a great movie, the same laws and rules and limitations had to happen day after day to maintain an illusion that nothing could happen outside the law, but when the main character started to "wake up" and see through the limitations, the world around him started to "break" and he eventually stepped outside of the whole illusion, coming face to face with the "directory" of the movie. You as a miracle worker are a director of the physical movie.

Or similarly, if it appears that there is a law of gravity where, over time, objects are attracted towards the center of the earth, and therefore human bodies are almost glued to the surface (you can jump, but only so high before you are attracted back down), and if suddenly a human body were to fly up in the air or walk on water, this would BREAK the illusion of horizontal laws. That means, the laws "within" the linear dream, within appearances of horizontal causality, could not have "resulted in" this effect, and it must have required someone to reach in from OUTSIDE of the laws and make an adjustment that the laws themselves are incapable of producing.

The key point to realize is that all of the linear laws are VERY LIMITING. We are confined by them. We are trapped by them. They seem to play out as if having a force or power over us. We don't seem able to escape gravity, time seems to proceed in one direction, one object seems to collide with another, no objects share the same space, very large heavy objects like mountains seem completely immovable, even sickness seems to have a causality in the body or due to external forces. These are all very limiting illusions of things on the SAME LEVEL causing other things on the SAME LEVEL to change.

From the point of view of the miracle worker, who is under no laws but God's, there are NO LIMITS. And so when the miracle worker manipulates the limitations in ways which defy and BREAK the linear laws, this appears to those in the horizontal dream as SUPERNATURAL MIRACLES. Things which should technically be "impossible" according to the limits we have accepted, suddenly become possible. Things we have assumed to be "normal" or "natural" are shown to be ARTIFICIAL LIMITATIONS.

Since we don't generally recognize that we LIVE IN WORLD OF LIMITATIONS, we don't realize that there are additional FREEDOMS and flexibilities that we have decided are off-limits or impossible. Miracles are capable of exercising that freedom and of PROVING that you are NOT BOUND by the horizontal laws of the ego's illusory world. This is why miracles are super-natural, they have a freedom of potential way beyond what any physical law in this second-hand universe suggests is possible.

There is therefore literally NOTHING that they cannot do. We have to open our minds to see past the limitations of physical illusion and realize that even the things we think are impossible are perfectly possible. There is NO REASON why you cannot do anything you can imagine. "There is nothing my holiness cannot do."

So the main keys to this are:

1) This physical world is once removed from true cause, it is not immediate reality

2) This world has no real causes in it, they are all effects of a higher reality

3) Cause-and-effect in this world are totally fictional illusions designed BY a higher level causer, to create a "story" in which limited things happen according to limited rules

4) Miracles wield a freedom way beyond the limitations of this world and express and demonstrate that ANYTHING is possible because they originate in the FIRST ORDER of causal reality, and therefore can BREAK and OVERRIDE any of the limitations or laws present on the physical level, since those laws are limitations PUT IN PLACE BY someone from the more primal level of reality. This is why Jesus says "you made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both."

Here's what ACIM says:

"The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you can see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them."

"Your holiness reverses all the laws of the world. It is beyond every restriction of time, space, distance and limits of any kind. Your holiness is totally unlimited in its power because it establishes you as a Son of God, at one with the Mind of his Creator. Through your holiness the power of God is made manifest. Through your holiness the power of God is made available. And there is nothing the power of God cannot do."

"You cannot see the Holy Spirit, but you can see His manifestations. And unless you do, you will not realize He is there. Miracles are His witnesses, and speak for his Presence."