Bodies, the Earth, the Sun, all the stars, all the galaxies, will vanish, because they are an illusion and not of God. This will mark the "disappearance of the universe". And all that will remain is the Kingdom of God, which was there before spacetime was ever dreamed of. And not one single thing which appeared to come into existence will exist in any way, and will simply fade into nothing without a trace. No-one needs the world except to help us to leave it behind and go home.
"Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does so." (Special messages 19)
"Like all things in the world its meaning is temporary, and will ultimately fade into the nothingness from which it came when there is no more use for it." UrM14A1
"Let us today behold earth disappear, at first transformed, and then, forgiven, fade entirely into God's holy Will." UrW326L4
"in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came." UrU5A4
"When not one thought of sin remains, the world is over. It will not be destroyed nor attacked nor even touched. It will merely cease to seem to be." UrM15A2
"An unremembered world will leave no trace behind its going, when God's gifts have been accepted as the only thing you want." UrG1A8
"Idols MUST disappear, and leave no trace behind their going." UrT20G9
"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end." UrU5A1
"To close all things of time, to end the sight
Of all things visible; and to undo
All things that change." UrM30A8
"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way." UrW137L1
"Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came." UrU5A4
"The song of our rejoicing is the call to all the world that freedom is returned, that time is almost over, and God's Son has but an instant more to wait until his Father is remembered, dreams are done, eternity has shined away the world, and only Heaven now exists at all." UrW230W25
We don't want to ask for help. Because in our ego we think we don't need help. Because we think we're so amazing and masterful all on our own, that we can do everything on our own, and don't even need any help. This means we believe there's not even anything wrong with us, and that we're amazing super advanced beings already. But the fact is that we need to admit that we are LESS THAN PERFECT, having attacked ourselves and limited ourselves. And we are IN DENIAL about this. We don't want to admit that we suck.
Admitting it is frightening because it means realising that we're "not in a good spot". That we might even be believing we're in danger or are living in fear or are full of guilt or are sick or whatever. But ADMITTING this also means, your mind is going to accept that you DO NEED HELP. And only by recognizing that you are in NEED, will you be willing to ASK FOR HELP. Only by recognising that you are NOT DOING WELL, will you reach out, or acknowledge the fact that you cannot get out of this all by yourself.
Only by having that honesty to admit to failure and lack and not knowing how to get yourself out of it, resigning as your own teacher, will you ASK the Holy Spirit to help you. And then you will be WILLING with a little willingness to LET HIM help you, to let him heal you and guide you. If you can't admit that you are crap all on your own and you don't know what to do about it, you're never going to get to the point where you realize you need God to save you, in which you will turn to him.
People sometimes only reach this when they hit rock bottom and crash agains the rocks and realize they can't help themselves, which is an excellent thing to recognize because it finally means you surrender your egoic efforts to save yourself and become open to something from outside the ego. This is when we are wiling to admit ego defeat, ie failure, which is a GOOD THING, and can then crack open and let some light in from beyond the ego. This is when we want a better way, because our tolerance for pain and suffering has reached its limit.
Those who have suffered and have been tested and have failed and have realised the meagre limitation and powerlessness of their ego self, have been blessed with an opportunity to find God, to turn to him and to trust him. If we're not willing to "admit defeat", we'll just keep fighting ourselves all on our own and continue the suffering, trying to tolerate the pain and misery for as long as we can stand it.
"The misuse of will engenders a situation which, in the extreme, becomes altogether intolerable. Pain thresholds can be high, but they are not limitless. Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point. This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight. The alternating investment in the two types or levels of perception is usually experienced as conflict for a long time, and can become very acute."
I remind myself of heaven's nature. I remind myself that in reality nothing has ever gone wrong. Nothing God created has ever changed. Reality cannot be affected. Nothing real can be hurt. There is no sickness or suffering or pain or death. Nothing ever breaks or malfunctions or decays or fails. Everything is absolutely perfect at all times and nothing can prevail against the Kingdom.
Then I take a look at the alternative suggestion. The notion that EVERYTHING has gone wrong. That everything breaks, dies, fails, malfunctions, distorts, decays, suffers and is corrupt. The world we made, the hell we made, space and time, with its laws of sin and rules of destruction.
Then I compare the two, and I ask myself, how can it be possible that they are both true? They cannot be. I attempt to reconcile them together as if they could exist at the same time, but one cancels out the other. They cannot both be true. They are so opposite that they are completely incompatible. Only one of them can be true.
If heaven is true and real and if I put my faith in that, then what is this suggestion that everything has gone wrong? What is that made of? How is it claiming that there's been sin? What is this feeling of disaster and guilt and things turning sour and doom and gloom? How can this experience of suffering and despair be true?
I go back and forth comparing the two options and it should become clearer and clearer that only God's truth is true. Nothing real has ever been threatened. Nothing real can be attacked. There cannot be a sin. There cannot be failure and death. So what IS this other suggestion, that everything has gone wrong? It must surely in fact be a LIE!
At first this seems surprising and shocking. Because all along we have been believing it and thinking it is the truth. We bought into it and valued it and held it as sacredly real. And now when comparing the world to another world we suddenly find out the whole idea of destruction is false. We suddenly discover that all of these notions of sin and attack and death cannot be true. What ARE they if they are not true? What IS this idea of things going wrong?
It has to be a total lie. It has to in fact be completely false. It is not what you thought it was. You were deceived. The very thing which you thought was completely true all this time turns out to be completely false. The ego has been lying to you this whole time.
There never was anything that went wrong in reality. Nothing in heaven has been changed. What a crock of bullshit this lie of sin is. What a bunch of crap that suggests anything has EVER gone wrong to disturb the perfection of God?
This may seem horrifying at first to realize, the cherished treasure of insane separation has been entirely UNFOUNDED this whole time. The whole notion of sin has been totally made-up and unjustified. The total assumption you had your whole life that failure was natural and destruction was commonplace and death was normal is upended at its root.
The whole system is totally NOT WHAT IT CLAIMS. And now you see through the illusion and can no longer buy it. Because no-one can believe something that is obviously impossible.
The problem in your mind is that you have condemned yourself to be a sinner. You've accused and attacked yourself, claiming you are guilty. You cannot tolerate this guilt, so you want to make it go away, but your belief in the ego/sin is a desire to also keep it.
The ego then provides what seems like a solution. It suggests you can make the guilt go OUTSIDE of your mind, and the blame can then be pinned on someone who is completely separate from you. An external scapegoat will take the fall for you.
This of course requires that you identify yourself as separate from other people, typically on the basis of them being "a separate body". If you are body-identified, you will see yourself AS the body. So anything inside the body is you, and anything outside is not. This is how the body serves the purpose of a separation device.
The ego will say that if you push the guilt outside of you, and pin it on someone else, you will escape it. What it does NOT tell you is that this is impossible. You cannot take an idea or a thought or feeling or belief which is mind content, and make it exist OUTSIDE the mind itself. It has to stay in the mind, which is why "ideas leave not their source."
What happens is, you go into denial that the guilt is in you, and you deny that trying to make it go outside your mind is impossible. This forms a block to awareness. You then attempt what we call "projection", or the ego's use of projection, in which you try to displace the guilt beyond the outer limits of what you consider to be yourself.
Again, what the ego doesn't tell you is that this will not work, because you cannot make anything go outside your mind or your self. The whole world is inside of you. "You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts." "Heaven and earth are both in your mind."
What you actually do is you split your mind into two compartments. You place the guilt into one compartment, and you IMAGINE that this compartment is OUTSIDE of the second compartment. The second compartment, inside the body, is considered to be the whole of yourself, or your whole mind.
So now what you're doing is you are actually increasing the belief in separation WITHIN your mind, are making a rift in your mind which hurts it, you are emphasizing separation within yourself, and you are dissociating from a part of your own mind. You now believe that part of your mind is NOT part of your mind, and is EXTERNAL to your mind. And you also believe this must be outside of the body.
So now it becomes easy to associate this guilt with anything external, whether it be the wrong weather, another human body, a group of people, some organization, an event, certain types of foods, belief systems other people have, body traits, or whatever. It's easy to believe the guilt BELONGS to them, because you believe the guilt is OUTSIDE your body - outside of yourself. It then MUST belong to someone else.
What you will then do is believe that your guilt is bound to the other person. You project it onto them, mixing them with it, as though it is an inherent part of what they are. A part of their sinfulness.
This is ESPECIALLY easy if the other person appears to make a mistake or do something wrong. It is certainly a blessing in disguise if they commit some kind of serious crime or sin. Because now you have a wonderful opportunity to seize their error, holding it against them as a sin, to AMPLIFY how guilty they are, on the apparent basis of what THEY did, as if to suggest they are guilty because of THEIR OWN sin.
This appears to exonerate you, because now you can point a finger at a "self-contained" guilty person and say, YOU are guilty, and I am not. While doing this, however, your mind secretly tries to ADD YOUR OWN guilt to what you think is theirs. You try to secretly slip your guilt into the situation while claiming it belongs to them, and is justified in being attributed to them. You give them YOUR guilt, and call it theirs.
The thing is, even while you do this, YOUR guilt IS NOT leaving your mind. You will, however, believe that it is outside of you and even see and experience it as if it is. In fact this dissociation can become very strong. You can become extremely convinced, and therefore perceive, that the guilt is entirely theirs and not in you at all. Look at what THEY are doing wrong! But this IS a state of tremendous self-deception.
What is really happening is your mind is PRETENDING that it has projected or displaced the guilt outside the borders of your self, it is convincing itself that it has succeeded in getting rid of it, it has convinced itself that the guilty party is NOT itself, that the guilt is NOT in the mind any more, and that YOU have been set free from it. This is all a lie, and is all a state of mental illness, because a mind AT WAR WITH ITSELF is insane.
When you are then attacking what seems to be the other guilty person for what you think is THEIR guilt, your mind IS in fact attacking ITSELF, WITHIN itself. It is attacking the portion of your mind that you have believed is "not a part of me", which YOU have attacked, causing a split in your mind, and the guilt that you think you're looking at IS STILL inside the limits of your mind. Your mind believes the guilty mind is SEPARATE, but it is STILL joined to your mind.
"It can be but myself I crucify." "You're doing this to yourself."
"YOU CAN BUT HURT YOURSELF."
So as you attack another in anger, attempting to make someone else - someone "not me" - seem guilty, you ARE in fact STILL ATTACKING YOURSELF, trying to make YOU NOT BE YOU. You only seem to be indirectly doing this because of the seeming separation IN your mind. You may think separation is now taking place BETWEEN brothers, ie between your separate body self and your brother's separate body self, but really it is taking place INSIDE OF YOU.
The guilt you see in them is STILL your guilt. The sin you are accusing them of you are still accusing yourself of, but are heavily in denial of that fact. The idea of guilt NEVER leaves your mind. You are SEEING your own guilt projected onto someone else. You BELIEVE if you can angrily attack them and find them to be extra guilty, then this will mean YOU are not guilty. But in fact it REINFORCES your own guilt.
This happens because not only did you start out with guilt from your OWN self attack, you have now believed that you have successfully attacked another, and justly, causing them to be hurt, which now induces even more guilt in you. And while you are busy BELIEVING that you are destroying your enemy, the enemy is actually part of your own mind, and your mind is destroying itself.
"Anger is never justified."
Each time that you become angry, you are projecting your guilt. Each time that you find ANYONE to be guilty of anything even slightly, you are trying to escape from YOUR guilt. Each time you find someone to be accused of anything, YOU NEED a scapegoat because YOU deep down believe you are guilty. This means you are running away from your guilt by trying to use DISSOCIATION to PRETEND that it is not inside of you.
The more you intensify your attack on another, the more you hate them, the more you seem to find them to be sinful, the more you want to separate from them, the more you think you cannot stand being around them and want nothing to do with them, the more murderous you become, the more YOUR MIND SPLITS. You THINK that you're finding someone else guilty but you are ONLY EVER finding yourself guilty.
In effect, the mechanism of denial, dissociation and projection, DOES NOT WORK. It does not heal you! The ego claims it will work every time, and you can convince yourself very profoundly that you are succeeding at doing this. But you ARE mistaken. The thought of guilt CANNOT leave your mind. It cannot exist outside the scope of a mind that thinks of it. And there IS nothing outside of mind, because mind is all-encompassing.
Therefore, everytime that you think you are successfully finding someone ELSE guilty, you ARE NOT succeeding in removing guilt from your mind. You are side-steppping and avoiding it, denying that you hate yourself. You are PRETENDING that it is not in you, by believing it is outside of you. And every attack you make upon it IN your brother, IS a direct attack UPON YOURSELF. And YOU DO therefore experience the consequences. The Golden Rule is always in effect.
This means every single time you try to get rid of your guilt this way, which really is an attempt to KEEP IT AND NOT HEAL IT, you magnify your guilt and run way from it. Your denial increases and you become ever more divided within yourself. You will sense yourself as being separated from your brothers, but even worse, you are separating WITHIN YOURSELF. This is self destruction.
Every time you accuse anyone of guilt, YOU ARE literally directly accusing a part of your mind of being guilty. You NEVER accuse anyone of their own sins, or their own guilt. You can't even really tell if anyone is guilty or not. You can only try to shove YOUR guilt onto them and accuse them of it. You ADD your guilt to their mistakes, turning them into sins.
You only EVER accuse anyone of YOUR sin and YOUR guilt. You try to MAKE others be guilty because of how guilty YOU feel. Which means you USE them as scapegoats so that YOU will convince yourself you are less guilty. Even if you're lying to yourself.
The ego does not want you ever looking within at the guilt that you think is there. It wants you believing its plan of "forgiveness to destroy" will work. Its plan is that if you will just place the guilt OUTSIDE yourself, someone ELSE can take the fall for it. But this literally is absolutely impossible. All you end up doing is making yourself worse off, increasing your belief in separation, and hurting yourself more.
Given that the ego's "magical solution" to the guilt is really an attempt to KEEP IT AND HIDE FROM IT, it simply DOES NOT actually make the guilt go away. It does not reduce it or heal it. You use denial to try to block it out of awareness, and you use dissociation to try to pretend it's not yours. But it remains in you, festering and unforgiven. Because it is always YOU that needs your forgiveness, because "all attack is self attack."
Your brother is NOT GUILTY. The guilt IS NOT THEIRS. YOU think you are guilty. You are in denial about it. YOU need to heal this guilt and actually undo it, because it is based on a lie. YOU are not guilty because sin is not real.
YOU don't NEED to project guilt because you are NOT a sinner. This is the forgiveness YOUR MIND needs in order to heal the separation. Because the separation is IN YOU. And it is in YOUR MIND that it needs to be healed.
"You but accuse your brother of your OWN sins."
"Only the self-accused condemn."
"But consider how strange a solution the ego's arrangement is. You PROJECT guilt to get rid of it, but you actually merely CONCEAL it."
"The ultimate purpose of projection, as the ego uses it, is ALWAYS to get rid of guilt. But, characteristically, it attempts to get rid of it FROM ITS VIEWPOINT ONLY. For much as the ego wants to RETAIN guilt, YOU find it intolerable."
"Only by persuading you that IT is you, could the ego possibly induce you to PROJECT guilt, and thereby keep it in your mind."
"Ideas are of the mind. What is projected OUT, and seems to be EXTERNAL to the mind, is NOT outside at all, but an effect of what is in, and has NOT left its source. God's Answer lies where the belief in sin MUST be, for only there can its effects be utterly undone, and without cause."
"ALL anger is nothing more than an attempt to MAKE SOMEONE FEEL GUILTY, and this attempt is the ONLY basis which the ego accepts for special relationships. Guilt is the only need the ego has, and, as long as you identify WITH it, guilt will remain ATTRACTIVE to you."
"When you have accepted the Atonement for yourselves, you will realize that THERE IS NO GUILT IN GOD'S SON. And ONLY as you look upon him as guiltless, can you understand his Oneness. For the IDEA of guilt brings a belief of condemnation of one by another, projecting separation in place of unity. You can condemn only yourself, and by doing so, you cannot know that you are God's Son."
"Forgiveness-to-destroy will overlook no sin, no crime, no guilt that it can find and "love."
"Let me perceive forgiveness as it is.
Would I accuse myself of doing this?
I will not lay this chain upon myself."
"Minds that are joined, AND RECOGNIZE THEY ARE, can feel no guilt. For they can NOT attack, and they REJOICE that this is so, seeing their safety in this happy fact."
"See no-one, then, as guilty, and you will affirm the truth of guiltlessness UNTO YOURSELF. In every condemnation that you offer the Son of God, lies the conviction of your OWN guilt. If you would have the Holy Spirit make YOU free of it, accept His offer of Atonement for ALL your brothers. For so you learn that IT IS TRUE FOR YOU. "
You are an immortal permanent being, changeless and the same forever. The goal of awakening is to KNOW THYSELF as this fixed, unchangeable, eternal spirit. A being that is utterly unaffected by anything no matter where it goes or what it does, certain of who and what it is forever.
The question then is, why do you have fear if you are such an unchangeable being? Nothing can attack you, nothing can hurt you, nothing can stop you from existing, nothing can make you dead. So why are you afraid all the time?
The main cause of fear is the idea of death, that you might stop existing and not live forever. It's something that has to undermine your sense of permanence and immortality, to make you mortal, in order for you to be threatenable. If you might not live forever, you might die, and now you are afraid.
But the real issue here isn't that you might die - because you can't. You are an immortal being that is always the same forever. The issue is that you BELIEVE you are something else. You don't recognize yourself as permanent. You think you've become something that can be attacked or threatened or in danger.
So really most of our fears stem from body-identification, false ideas about who and what you are, a failure to recognize your permanence, forgetting your invulnerability, having artificial values and specialness, separating yourself off from the whole of eternity and trying to be limited.
If you are in states of confusion about what you are, you are mistaken. And that mistakenness inspires fear in you. You make false conclusions and then you suffer, and you're doing it to yourself. If you could know yourself as you really are you could never have any reason to be afraid, knowing that you are eternal and live forever.
When your body is having problems, when the world is threatening, when stuff is going wrong, when the fires are raging, when you've lost things, when you're angry at someone etc, you're believing that you are not an immortal being. And that makes you start believing that these other things have power over you, causing you to be suffering and sick and unhappy. But this is a mistake. Every source of fear is a mistaken belief in a power outside of you that isn't really doing anything.
It wouldn't even matter to you if you were being in a body or not, or coming or going, seeming to exit the world or not, because you'd know it has no bearing whatsoever on who and what you are. It doesn't change you or affect you or make you dead. You just carry on being you, forever, guaranteed and protected by God.
So really all our suffering stems from the belief in death, which is a belief in mortality, which is a denial of being immortal. We need to remember our immortal nature in order to assert that we cannot be hurt, have never been hurt, and therefore all is forgiven.
"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." UrT8D6
"To be alive and not to know yourself is to believe that you are really dead." UrW139L3
"This is a course in how to KNOW yourself. You have TAUGHT what you are, but have NOT let what you are, teach YOU." UrT16D4
"It means that you are willing NOT to know yourself, IN ORDER to be sick." URT9K3
"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die. I am not a body. I would recognize my reality today." UrW84L2
"Now do we live, for now we cannot die. The wish for death is answered, and the sight that looked upon it now has been replaced by vision which perceives that you are not what you pretend to be." W166L11
"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do." UrT9K8
You as Christ have not been changed even a tiny little bit by anything that supposedly has happened in the world.
You as Christ are perfect love, perfectly invulnerable, perfectly loved and adored by God, and perfectly healthy. You are absolutely immortal. You stand as a beacon of perfect love shining as a brilliant light and nothing can happen to you.
This is your real identity. This is what is buried underneath layers and layers of bullshit in your mind. False beliefs about who you are. False beliefs about who did what to you.
Nobody has ever done anything to you wholly intentionally in full awareness and sanity. Anyone sane could not harm another. Anyone sane could not do anything to victimize you. If anyone has ever seemed to do anything to you, you are grossly mistaken for believing that they did so on purpose, intentionally, from a completely sane and aware state of mind. They were NOT in their right mind. And it is only by not being in the right mind that a person could even conceive of treating you as anything but the perfect love that you are.
So if there's anyone in your story who has ever seemed to do something to you, and you believe that they did it from a place of rational mind, a place of love, a place of full awareness, you are mistaken. Nobody has ever done anything harmful from a state of sanity and love. That person must be insane, and they must not realize what they are doing.
This is why Jesus says, "forgive them for they know not what they do". There is a tremendous recognition in this statement. It sees that when a person is 100% love, they can only be loving. When they are not 100% love, they enter into illusions and darkness and despair and DO NOT KNOW what they are doing. So they can only act mistakenly, wrongly, incorrectly, and with faulty reasoning or justification.
They can't ever do something unloving from a foundation of perfect love and innocence. So whoever hurt you, whatever they did, they were NOT in their right mind, and this is why they are forgivable. It's only because you believe they WERE in their right mind and that therefore they deliberately chose to do what they did, that they are guilty. They did not choose sanely. THEY were experiencing an unlove, an unworthiness, a guilt, a self-attack, a shame and an abandonment, and they tried to project this onto you thinking you were the same. They were just mistaken.
So you have to peel away all these layers of false belief that you've formed in your mind which still are convinced someone did something intentionally to hurt you. There is no such thing as intentional hurt or willful hurt or intentional victimizing. Victimizing can only occur in the minds of those who believe they are not loved by God and who have attacked themselves already. This is why they act out. This is why they find scapegoats, and maybe is why you ended up being their target. They were not sane. You need to recognize this in order to be able to let go of feeling unfairly treated and blaming them for what they did. Again, as Jesus said, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Underneath all of this, you are still absolutely loved by God, absolutely innocent, absolutely immortal, absolutely unchanged and unaffected by anything in the world or history of time and space. You are perfectly whole and innocent and healed and powerful. You are unassailable, invulnerable, immortal, permanent and strong. Nothing can happen to you. Nothing has ever happened to you. This is the secret truth hiding underneath all of the LIES which try to portray you as having been affected, changed, modified, hurt, damaged, or in any way made to be or mean something other than God intended. You are not any of that. You ARE and CAN ONLY BE as God intended.
You are Christ. You are holy and innocent and free.
Was talking to Holy Spirit last night, and received some unexpected input about miracles.
This is hot on the heels of the stuff I posted from "the mechanism of miracles" which made a few basic points: 1) your brother implements denial to block love and health, 2) this produces sickness, 3) another brother must shine light into their mind to heal them.
So I asked, if someone has implemented denial, how does my love remove the denial? Like, if the person has unconsciousness and a layer of denial and isn't aware of love, put in place by their belief or mind, how can love fix that?
He said, "HEAL".
What then came to mind is that denial IS a state of sickness or LACK. Holy Spirit said it was "loss". And therefore when you love the person it "heals" the loss by supplying love to the absence of love. He also said this "shines away" the denial and restores awareness.
I then wanted to know, while it seemed to make sense that love can heal or bless or restore the absence of love in someone, mind-to-mind, how does this tie in with moving mountains or walking on water or multiplying bread and fish?
He said, "POWER".
What then came to mind is that love is POWERFUL, it is strong, it has certainty, it is like an unstoppable force. Mind is very powerful. "Mind over matter" becomes very emphasizes the more you go towards love.
This also revealed that the ego has tried to make love out to be WEAK, just as it has rendered innocence as VULNERABLE to attack. In truth, real innocence is completely protected (if I defend myself I am attacked etc). Similarly love is NOT WEAK, love is very, very strong. Love IS POWER.
Since love is very powerful, we need to unlearn the ego's teaching that love is just some kind of wet blanket of softness and gentleness and weakness. Love is very strong. Love is integration, wholeness, unified will, focused intention, single-mindedness, and not being opposed. It is very, very powerful.
This power makes it possible to move mountains literally, or to animate the body to walk on water, or multiply objects, or raise the dead etc. It is STRENGTH in the truth. Love is energizing, miraculous, powerful, healing, effective and firm. As you increase the love in you, you become more powerful and capable of doing these kind of miracles. Just as Jesus says that some healers have healed others but not raised the dead, due to faith not being whole. When faith (trust in love) is not whole enough it makes it seemingly more difficult to perform the more advanced miracles.
What I then asked about is, if we are to SHINE OUR LIGHT into the minds of others, does this mean that all healing miracles are directly "mind to mind"? He said "essentially". Your mind is not only capable of shining into other minds but also enlightening other minds. You can supply the love they are missing. You can heal them directly FROM your mind TO their mind, bypassing the body entirely. You can restore them to health in MIND and this reflects physically. The change in their mind and the undoing of their denial alleviates the denial they had, the block is shone away, which automatically results in health and healing of the body as a result of their mind being healed. So we should target love/healing at the person's MIND.
One thing I've been trying to practice lately is to PRAY for someone in such a way as to be very sincere and LOVING, to muster as much love as possible, to ask for love to be sent and for the person to be loved. To just shoot for the highest level of love and lovingness. This seems quite effective.
"I am not weak but strong"
"I am not afraid but all powerful"
As Jesus says, "it is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive". Here he means that it is the privilege of those who have RECEIVED LOVE for themselves, to be ABLE to express love toward others to GIVE THEM the love and in turn heal them. To be forgiving is to be loving.
But often you feel vulnerable.
Vulnerability is an experience of feeling exposed, accessible, hurt-able, noticeable, visible, targeted and attacked. When you are vulnerable you perceive that the whole world is out to get you.
Experiencing vulnerability is a familiar state that you normally refer to as "afraid". It's another word for it. You can't help but experience what you call 'fear' when you are seeing yourself as being attackable.
However, this sense of being vulnerable has only come about because you have created an enemy within your own mind. You've projected this enemy onto other people or situations, thinking they now are the cause of the threat, but the enemy is still in your own mind. And since you created it, you can undo it.
It is therefore possible to stop feeling vulnerable, and to re-access a state of INVULNERABILITY.
Any form of resistance will create a division in your mind, a separation, and will make your mind be "split". Literally, your mind seems to take on two identities, one which experiences itself as being victimized, and the other which experiences itself as being a victimizer.
Usually the part that is a victim uses denial and disassociation to block awareness that the victimizer part is also a part of the same mind. It is the victim's resistance to the victimizer that makes it a victim in the first place, and denies and therefore projects the victimizer into being. The victim then does not perceive that they themselves are the cause of their own victimization, that they are literally doing it to themselves within their own mind, that their mind is in a state of self-attack, and that they therefore could do something to stop it.
A sense of vulnerability must occur as soon as you have made yourself unwhole. This can happen in many forms including self-abandonment, self-attack, self-rejection, denial, believing in enemies, resistance to the truth, trying to block awareness, blame, scapegoating, trying to stop things from happening, being controlling, not accepting everything as it is, etc. These are all forms of separating and putting up walls. And putting up walls, experientially, actually takes down walls in your mind, producing an experiencing of having become exposed to something that you were previously safe from.
You can't feel safe while you are attacking yourself.
What you can realize though, is that it is YOU that is attacking yourself, and it has nothing to do with anyone else. Immediately you will feel significant reduction in the experience of exposure and vulnerability, if you can remind yourself that you are not being affected by other people or situations. They are NOT the cause. That alone will relieve much of your anxiety. This also deflates some of your belief in separation and your resistance to yourself. But you need to take it further and undo as much as you can of the split that's happened inside your own self.
Quite literally, you can become completely invulnerable. Or rather, recognize that your invulnerability is still completely intact and was simply blocked from your awareness when you thought you were vulnerable. You can become whole, free of the split mind of the ego, and experiencing your SELF as free of attack. In such a state, there is nothing outside of you which can bring about an internal experience of attack, and therefore you are invulnerable to everything. Nobody can give it to you or take it away. If you do not choose to believe in attack, you will have no enemies. And then you will enjoy peace of mind.
When minds are separated, there is a gap between you and others. You become isolated. This prevents your mind from extending to and joining with other minds. It prevents you from recognizing your oneness with your brother, and so disrupts the holy relationship, induces separation, fosters specialness, and in turn increases body identification. You become anchored to the body and this increased fixation on the body causes it to become sick. It is under attack by beliefs in not sharing, selfishness and defensiveness.
"Perceiving the body AS A SEPARATE ENTITY cannot but foster illness"
"Learning must lead beyond the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it. This can be accomplished only if the mind EXTENDS to other minds, and does not ARREST ITSELF in its extension. The arrest of the mind's extension is the cause of all illness, because ONLY EXTENSION IS THE MIND'S FUNCTION. Block this, and you have blocked health because you have BLOCKED THE MIND'S JOY."
"Sickness is a defense against the truth"
"All forms of sickness even unto death are physical expressions of the fear of awakening."
Sickness arises, physically, as a result of the "fear of awakening" to the joined nature you share with your brother. It defends against the truth that you and your brother are one.
Therefore, by resuming extension of the mind through the body, to connect with and join to the minds of your brothers, recognizing your oneness with them, your sense of self expands back out past the body to be inclusive of others, the gap between you closes, the separation is erased, there is nothing to split your mind away from your brother's mind, and thus unity results. This unity erases all forms of separation and sickness. The gap, the "wound", is closed up.
"Healing is when two minds recognize their oneness and become glad."
"Miracles unite you with your brother."
The inevitable result of this is that the body is no longer the focus of identity, the mind is not contracting itself into the body, the body is not being attacked by the idea of isolation and separation, love is flowing through it again rather than visions of hell, and in turn the BODY is now healed as an effect of the joining of minds.
"The mind makes this decision as it makes every decision responsible for the condition of the body."
"The mind being sane heals the body."
All physical sickness results from and symbolizes the psychological sickness of contraction (fear) away from your brothers and the attempted severing of oneness with them. The restoration of that oneness is miraculous and forces the body to symbolize wholeness, healing, health, innocence, harmlessness, unity and freedom from attack. The body is induced into health as a natural byproduct of healed minds joining as one.
The body is a part of the equation. The body has not STATE of its own, it is ONLY a symbol, and not an end in itself, and it can only symbolize what the mind wants it to represent. It can either represent attack (sickness) as a result of separation of minds, or it can represent eternal life (wholeness, health) as a result of joined minds. Its condition is entirely an effect of the mind.
"The must be stronger than the body. Every miracle demonstrates this."
Where the mind is separating from others, it WILL induce physical sickness as a result of the fear of awakening to oneness, and as a defense against the truth of that oneness. When the mind is joining with others in love it WILL induce physical healing as a result of the overcoming of the fear of awakening and the disregarding of a NEED for a defense against the truth of your oneness with your brother.
Holy relationships heal the mind AND the body.
Special relationships cause sickness and death.
In all encounters with people, you have basically two ways of relating. Either you will give love, or you will withhold love. When you give love, you are in alignment with the Golden Rule, and recognize that the only strategy that will work without hurting yourself is to love the person. In so doing, you become empowered by that love, become invulnerable to attack, and gain a boost in confidence due to the absence of fear that it induces. This is a natural "extension" of love and is the healthy way to relate to people. To teach only love.
But learning to be this way and to do this, in actual encounters, is not always easy and for me used to be far from what I thought would "work". For a large portion of my life I was extremely painfully shy, socially anxious, and really not liking people in general. There was so much fear and worry about interacting, and everyone seemed to be a powerful stranger. It was a very isolated and lonely state of being, very fragile, weak and filled with suffering. I would people please all the time and never felt seen or acknowledged, as if I had no right to be equal to anyone.
Usually my way of dealing with people was to shut them out, avoid them, deny them, and try to escape them. They all seemed to be threatening and I was very dis-empowered. I lacked confidence and felt insecure all the time. I dreaded social situations and when I was forced into them it was excruciating. My perception of and belief that everyone was judging me made me profoundly embarrassed and this inflicted the most horrendously negative, deep emotional pain, not because they actually judged but because I believed they were. I had no idea what I was doing to myself. What I felt as a result of my self attack was 10 times worse than any other emotional upset I've ever experienced resulting from what anyone else ever did.
The strategy I had, which is entirely an ego strategy, was that in order to become safe or better off in any way, I needed to separate myself from people. I didn't see a possibility of feeling calm and happy and confident in any situation, only afraid, and just wanted to escape. It seemed as if escaping would work, and so I had trust in it. But all that escaping did was isolate me more and make me withdrawn from society. This also actually led to years of depression in my late teens and a sense that my life was so stuck that it was coming to an end.
It was around that time also though that I started to get into spiritual things and there was this strange period of mystical experiences at the same time as being mixed in with a lot of fear and inadequacy. I started to work on healing myself in whatever way seemed to work, although at first that was very haphazard and flawed. It was about that time that I suddenly met my wife, whose spiritual light and strength was so bright and filled with unconditional love, that I thought she was literally an angel. It wasn't until my late 20's that I found A Course in Miracles and everything continued to spiral upwards from there.
So for me the idea that in a situation, when I perhaps don't even feel like interacting, trying to push people away doesn't really work. It has a side effect of attacking myself. Whatever I try to make apply to others applies to me. An alternative approach has been gradually revealing itself, and it's one where I realize that I need to extend love, and that by doing so I'm not only going to be healed but the love will also shine away my fears, strengthen me and make my more invulnerable. The love gives me what seemed lacking when I wasn't extending it, and then I feel that I have what is needed to genuinely relate to the person. And then I don't feel like escaping, because the love is there.
It's a strange flipflop but it's like you spend your whole life using this one strategy of separating yourself from others, to "deal with" the way the world seems to be when you have that perspective/perception, only to find that there is another totally opposite alternative whereby you deliberately decide to bring the love and stay put, knowing that it's really the only approach that is going to work in your favor. This is "new" to me as I guess it is to most people but I'm finding out quickly just how beneficial it is to broadcast, radiate, transmit, extend love, in situations that previously I might have wanted to "stop".
I can testify that when you psychologically try to make people go away, stop, you resist them in any way, wish the wouldn't do what they're doing etc, it attacks you and induces sickness and pain. Physically. Very quickly. You can believe that what you're doing is just an attempt to defend yourself in which it does something to them and does nothing to you, but it's not true. It's double-sided and you both get attacked. You are attacked by your own defenses, and never was that more true that "my defenses are attacking my invulnerability". Only by letting the defenses down and shining love instead, exposing yourself, being open and accessible, paradoxically makes you completely invulnerable and strong and unattackable. You can in a sense "hide in plain sight" that way. The light protects you.
It kind of feels like breaking out of a shell or coming out of an egg. Holy Spirit's guidance to me lately has been to "bring" the love to the world that seems to be lacking in it, and to "extend" love in order to work miracles. It's through expressions of love, which is its natural extension, that miracles occur. They are "given" this way. And for sure, living in fear is totally anti-miraculous and more like being a psychic black hole. And it's not merely enough to ask God or Holy Spirit to send love to someone. You yourself have to actually feel and express and extend the love, if you want to benefit from it.
It's actually for our highest good and in our own best interest, and a shared interest, to "only love". The extending of love to others has a profound affect on your OWN mind. But at first it seems unnatural. Like some kind of "new trick" that you need to practice more. To be able to actually muster some love, and really feel it. It's been through all these years of trying to forgive and healing and releasing old pains and so on that I've very gradually "shifted" to being "able" to find this new "mode" of relationship. And it's for the most part still quite spotty. But there's a sort of underlying "more loving" baseline that's there all the time, which was not there in years past, and that's thanks to the course.
I suppose you could correctly call it being the light of the world, it's like you choose to shine and love comes out of you, even if the world itself is so severely lacking in love (which it is). It gives you the protection you were lacking when you were afraid, and it strengthens and empowers you. It solves all of the problems that the ego's remedies never really solved. And it gives you a whole new sense of purpose in life. Not forgetting how much happier it feels :-) It provides strength and confidence. It empowers you and puts you in a position where you can be truly helpful, rather than completely useless.
All it takes is seemingly a change of direction. Rather than being so withdrawing, it is more of a confronting. Instead of being escaping, it's a willingness to be present. Instead of running away in fear, it gives you the power to stand your ground and assert yourself in a healthy way. It's taken a long time to learn this and I'm still learning. But if you could put who I am now alongside who I used to be 20 years ago, you would probably think we're not even the same person. And thank God for that!