"Reality is a constant state."
"Reality is changeless. It does not deceive at all."
"His REALITY is forever sinless."
"Reality is not insane"
"In Heaven, reality is SHARED"
"The only part of your mind that has reality, is the part that links you still with God."
"Man's reality is ONLY his soul."
"Reality observes the laws of God"
"your reality, which you share with God."
"the true relationship the Son of God has with his Father in reality."
"Faith in the unreal leads to adjustments of reality"
"To know Reality is not to see the ego"
"the peace to which your reality entitles you."
"What dies was never living in reality"
"Repeat His Name and you acknowledge Him as sole Creator of Reality."
"Today we try to bring reality still closer to your mind."
"If you are Spirit, then the body must be meaningless to your reality."
"So is its Self the one Reality in Which its will and That of God are joined."
"Illusions have no direction in reality. They are merely not true."
"your Identity, which God alone established in reality."
"In reality, this is his ONLY choice, because his free will was made for his own joy in creating the perfect."
"God knows you only in peace, and this IS your reality. "Reality is that which, above all else, is persistent and continuous.
Reality has nothing higher or prior to its existence.
Reality is first-hand, primary, fundamental and original.
Reality is final.
Reality simply is.
Reality is what really is, and what always is.
Reality is permanence and exists forever the same.
Reality cannot change, otherwise it would not be permanent.
Reality is not a term you can use to describe a changing world.
Reality is not some background soup that houses differences.
Reality is singular, it is complete, it is unwavering.
Reality never changes, and can never be changed.
Reality always is real.
Reality always is the same as reality always was and will be.
Reality is forever, reality is eternal.
Reality cannot be altered, modified, changed or transformed.
Reality has no differences in it.
Reality does not waver or fluctuate or change shape.
Reality is always the same, always constant.
Reality cannot be adjusted or taken away.
Reality cannot be attacked or destroyed.
Reality cannot be hurt, offended, upset or influenced.
Reality does not change its viewpoint.
Reality is consistent and consistency is truth.
Reality cannot be damaged or made to suffer.
Reality cannot be sick.
Reality cannot die.
Reality cannot be corrupted.
Reality cannot be willed against.
Reality cannot be forced, coerced or manipulated.
Reality cannot lack or lose anything.
Reality cannot be made to diminish or distort.
Reality is sanity.
Reality is whole.
Reality is perfection.
Reality is permanence.
Reality is immortal.
Reality is invulnerable.
Reality is pure and innocent.
Reality is immaculate.
Reality is indestructible.
Reality is safe from attack.
Reality is safe from sickness and death.
Reality is safe from harm or hurt.
Reality is safe from time or space.
Reality is safe from death.
Reality is free from fear.
Reality cannot be afraid.
Reality cannot be attacked so cannot be threatened.
Reality has never changed or lost its peace.
God is real. Therefore, God is permanent, immortal, unchanging, unattackable, unthreatenable, invulnerable, eternal, constantly the same, safe from all threat, incapable of sickness or death, and whole and complete.
You are a creation of God. Therefore you are real. You are permanent, immortal, unchanging, unattackable, unthreatenable, invulnerable, eternal, constantly the same, safe from all threat, incapable of sickness or death, and whole and complete.
"I am not an illusion but a reality."
You are safe because you are real.
You are safe because you cannot be threatened.
You are safe because you are invulnerable and immortal.
You are safe in God because God is real.
You are safe from death because reality can never die.
You are safe from attack because you cannot be attacked.
You have never been attacked and never will be.
Since reality is existence, nothing unreal exists.
Since attack is unreal, reality cannot be attacked.
Since there is nothing unreal to attack, nothing real can be threatened.
Since reality cannot be threatened, reality has nothing to fear.
Since there is nothing to fear, because nothing threatening exists, reality is at peace.
Since you are unthreatenable, you are at peace.
Since you are at peace, you are unafraid.
Since you are unafraid, you are safe in God.
A simple, easy technique I recently learned helps with healing emotions.
Most of your emotions are felt and stored in your belly. Your 'heart', emotionally, extends from your chest down into your belly.
When you cry, you will notice that most of what you feel is located in the belly region. Some people say there's kind of a 'second brain' there, because there's a lot of nerve endings in that area. You also might sometimes hear a 'voice' from that area, which is the voice of the inner child or the voice of an emotional hurt. Also if you are strongly upset e.g. deep grief, you'll notice it can upset your whole stomach area and interfere with digestion.
Now, with your attention/focus, think of your focus as a bucket in a well. The top of the well is in your head. Lower the bucket/attention down into your belly, i.e. shift your attention to the 'pit of your stomach' where you feel deeply.
Holding your attention there, perhaps focusing on an upsetting feeling you have, invite Jesus to come into your body and to heal this feeling. Invite him to join you in that low stomach area where you're having the feeling.
You should hopefully notice that He will come in and wash away the feeling like it's practically nothing, leaving you feeling happier.
Worth a try. I've tried it a few times, it seems to work
When you are angry, you are using projection to try to make someone guilty. It's really an attempt to take some guilt or pain or upset from inside of you and push it out onto the world.
"ALL anger is nothing more than an attempt to MAKE SOMEONE FEEL GUILTY."
When you do this, if you watch carefully, you may notice a sensation of "separating off". While it seems like you are attacking outwardly, as if pushing something onto the world, you also feel a sense of withdrawing, distancing, stepping away. As though you are breaking off from the thing you're attacking and being more separate from it.
Although the feeling you have may be one of hurt or pain or guilt or justified anger, which you're trying to accuse someone else of, the actual side effect is that you are attacking yourself from the outside in and pulling yourself away from others. So you simultaneously are pushing and pulling at the same time, which splits the mind, like ripping it apart. It's this splitting that actually produces suffering.
"Projection will ALWAYS hurt you. It reinforces your belief in your own split mind, and its ONLY purpose is to KEEP THE SEPARATION GOING. It is solely a device of the ego to make you feel DIFFERENT from your brothers and separated FROM them."
What this means is that you are trying to "separate from" what you see. In the workbook there is a curious lesson which speaks of you joining with what you see instead.
"For vision CAN but represent a wish, because it has NO power to create. Yet it can look with love or look with hate, depending only on the simple choice of whether you would JOIN with what you see, or keep yourself apart and separate."
"Today we are trying to use the new kind of projection. We are not attempting to get rid of what we do not like by seeing it outside. Instead, we are trying to see in the world what is in our minds, and what we want to recognize is there. Thus we are trying to join with what we see, rather than keeping it apart from us. That is the fundamental difference between vision and the way you see."
When I first read this in Lesson 30 I had no clue what it meant by "joining with what you see." Like, how do you do that? How do you join with a world which is supposed to be an illusion? How am I not joining now? Surely I'm not separated off, in a position to need to join?
But for sure when we are angry and expressing ego pain we are indeed separating off. We attack in anger and hatred. We make everything an enemy. We make the whole world wrong and condemn it for its shortcomings. And while doing this, our own mind is actually splitting.
The split then seems to take place between you and the other, or you and the world, not realizing that part of your mind includes them and is in them. So you split off from the fact that you are here AND there. And then you see yourself as only here, and not there. This is something you can actually notice happening in your mind while you do this.
To join with what you see then means to stop attacking, stop splitting, stop projecting guilt, stop making guilty, and essentially, "stop separating."
The separation from God wasn't just some ancient moment of leaving heaven. It was a movement into a dissociated state in which your mind becomes split, and then attempts to continue that state indefinitely. The separation was the beginning of the war upon yourself, and the ego tries to keep it going.
It is something that takes place in your mind between your mind and itself. It's actually a form of dissociation. It's a way whereby you experience internal conflict and attack upon yourself, split off part of yourself and see it as a separate enemy.
"Exclusion and separation are synonymous. So are separation and dissociation. We have said before that the separation was and IS dissociation, and also that once it had occurred, projection became its main defense, or the device which KEEPS IT GOING."
So notice here that Jesus is saying we've put ourselves into a separated state by attacking ourselves and splitting our mind, AND then we KEEP IT GOING, by projecting it through hate onto what SEEMS to be stuff outside or separate from yourself, in order to REINFORCE the idea that "it" IS separate from yourself, in order to keep perpetuating separation.
So if you are angry at something, you are trying to be separated off. And if you'll notice, if you attempt to "not separate", ie not attack, your projection of guilt subsides and your ego deflates and you stop projecting and separating. And what you then experience is more of a sense of unity or wholeness, a sense of joining ,a sense of love and connection.
You can actually try to "not separate", ie to not resist, attack, push away, condemn, judge, or make guilty, etc. Instead embracing and opening and allowing and accepting, loving and sharing and joining. Separation is you REJECTING stuff, trying to EXCLUDE it.
So really the question is, are we walking around being separators, or are we walking around being joiners? Are we attacking or healing? Are we projecting guilt or withholding judgement? Are we broadcasting hate and hurt or are we giving love?
"What you project you disown, and therefore DO NOT BELIEVE IS YOURS. You are therefore EXCLUDING yourself from it, by the very statement you are making that you are DIFFERENT from someone else. Since you have also judged AGAINST what you project, you attack it because you have already attacked it BY rejecting it. By doing this UNCONSCIOUSLY, you try to keep the fact that you must have attacked yourself FIRST out of awareness, and thus imagine that you have made yourself safe."
If you exclude, ie attack, ie project guilt, you are increasing separation and insanity. By excluding, you are separating off. This is forming an ego or a sense of being separate. When you are separate you will feel like the whole world is against you and that you are at war with it, that you have taken a side against it and are not on the same side as it or anyone else. This is because there is internal conflict in the mind. An excluding mind is a split mind, because it does not want to share a single space with anyone else. Another word for joining is INTEGRATION.
You may also notice that fear produces the same split mind, the same separation, and the same desire to push something away. Fear is an attempt to run away from and thus separate off from something else. There is a pulling away and a sense of wanting to be separate or distanced from something. To get away from it.
This is a rejection, just as the projection of guilt through anger is also secretly an attempt to reject. Anger seems less obvious of a rejection because it has overtones of attack aimed outward, but subtly you'll find that fear also is a form of attack in a more passive way. If anger is over outward attack, with subtle withdrawal, fear is overt withdrawal with subtle outward attack. Both are just more forms of the same attempt to SEPARATE. "Fear produces dissociation because it induces SEPARATION. Healing ALWAYS induces harmony because it proceeds from integration."
"When you think you are projecting what you do NOT want, it is still because you DO want it. This leads DIRECTLY to dissociation, for it represents the acceptance of two goals, each perceived IN A DIFFERENT PLACE, separated from each other BECAUSE YOU MADE THEM DIFFERENT. The mind then sees a divided world OUTSIDE ITSELF, but NOT within. This gives it an illusion of integrity, and enables it to believe that IT is pursuing one goal. As long as you perceive the world as split, YOU are not healed. For to be healed is to pursue one goal, because you have ACCEPTED only one, and WANT but one."
"Can you be separated from your identification and be at peace? Dissociation is NOT a solution; it is a DELUSION."
"What better vocation could there be for any part of the Kingdom than to restore it to the perfect integration that can make it whole?"
"The mind always strives for integration, and if it is split, and WANTS TO KEEP THE SPLIT, it will believe it has ONE goal by MAKING IT ONE."
"True depth perception becomes possible only at the highest order of perceptual integration."
God was talking to me last night.
I began to ask Him to forgive me for some things. Jesus nudged me that I was making a mistake to ask this. I then wondered if God would forgive me then. God said, "You are my Holy Creation. How could I not love you?". I melted, with an immediate emotional response.
The sense of love pouring out was palpable. It seemed so obvious and clear that, simply by the fact that He had created me, that MUST have meant He loved me. There was no other interference or reason not to. It was so simple.
As I opened up to try to absorb this truth and feel this love, it was curious how suddenly a voice popped up from inside my belly. It was like the ego just suddenly got really pissed off and came out of its little house with its fists in the air shouting "how dare you, this can't be true, look at what you've done!".
It was referring then, and starting to bring into my awareness (because light was shining brightly upon me) things that I'd done in the past which I apparently still felt that I was SINFUL for. It particularly revolved around an event when I was 11 where a terrible event happened and someone got injured "because of me".
Apparently some part of me still believed I was sinful for this, having done it. And this is in spite of spending 30+ years working on this event trying to heal it, trying to find different ways of looking at it. I'd even become aware of how it transpired due to a past last reversal of karma, and how it was a lesson, and the various aspects of whether or not I really wanted to hurt the person. I thought I'd come to what seemed to be peace about it, but apparently it was not quite done with.
The ego (really me), screamed at myself, pointing to how I'd sinned and was guilty. How could God POSSIBLY love me without any strings attached whatsoever, when so OBVIOUSLY I had done something so "wrong"? It seemed to have a point. Deep down I still believed in my guilt.
However, what then transpired was a true forgiveness. It was clear that God loved me and as I felt into this, I could tell how God was not accusing me. Somehow in my mind I had to reconcile this because either what God was saying was true, or what my ego/hurt-self was saying was true. They couldn't both be true.
This is when God told me the simple, pivotal, clarifying fact which is the very foundation of the Atonement and of ALL forgiveness: "It wasn't real".
This brought on a tremendous sense of relief and began to make me laugh extensively. I started to explore this idea, because I didn't quite believe it yet, but if it was true, it seemed like FINALLY, after all this time, and after all of the ways that I tried to rationalize why I was innocent, this was the key to a REAL INNOCENCE.
If the events that transpired at 11 were not REAL, and were just illusions, then absolutely everything that seemed to occur did not REALLY happen. And therefore that is why I cannot have possibly have REALLY sinned. If the world was not real, if the person was not real, if my body was not real, if the events were not real, and if what I "did" was not real, how could it have been a real sin?
For the first time, I could finally see how if the events weren't real, I *ACTUALLY* could be forgiven. Like, all the way forgiven. Forgiveness apparently is completely dependent on this FACT, because if the world is actually "happening", if it is "real", if events in it are having "real effects" on real people, then there is just no way that there can be any innocence. And so there I was, finally after all these years, revealing in this simply clear truth, that I CANNOT be sinful because it didn't even really happen!
Trusting God's word on this, I explored this a little further, because it now had to imply something. If THAT sin was not real because it didn't really happen, then.... doesn't that mean that there is no such thing as a REAL SIN? Yes! There cannot be any such thing as a real sin. This made me think of some people's view of sin as that you actually did sin and need to get forgiveness. The TRUE perspective on this is that the sin you thought you did, you DID NOT REALLY DO, and that is why you are forgiven!
This then started to extend to, well, if I have not ever sinned and I'm innocent, then doesn't that mean, nobody else has ever sinned either? That there has never been a real sin? Yes! Everyone is TRULY innocent because sin has never happened.
This just seemed so simple and so clear and so easy. Once again, withdrawing a sense of "reality" from illusions presented the truth. And the truth set me free. Finally I was able to feel a genuine sense of love-ability, a genuine sense of innocence, a genuine sense that God DOES see me with forgiveness, that this "sin is forgiven". I believe all of the laughter that followed was a healing release from my belly area.
By the way these things spring from the belly because that's actually the area of the "2nd brain" which is an emotional center where most feelings are felt. We carry most emotional pain there.
For years I had been secretly hanging on to the supposed "need" that I needed to have this other person forgive me in order for me to be forgiven. I was able to let that go! I do not need that person's forgiveness because I am not really sinful. Those events were not real, the person has not really been hurt because they are immortal spirit, NOTHING HAPPENED, and therefore .... I could see, this new truth emerging.....
I DID THIS TO MYSELF!
All of the events, all of the people involved, all of the activities, all of what transpired, all of the reactions from myself and other people, all of it was orchestrated by me! This was when Jesus stepped in and told me "It was a lesson". "In forgiveness". And indeed it was, because I'd learned so much about forgiveness from this one calamity in my efforts to heal from it. Seeing I did it to myself I could see that ALL aspects of it were "within" my own doing, and NONE of it was done "to me" by anyone else. Freeing!
The simple truth then was completely obvious. The atonement principle! "Nothing happened". This is literally, factually true. The world is an illusion. All events in the world are an illusion. People's bodies are illusions. The whole physical universe is an illusion. Nothing REAL has happened. There have not been any REAL problems or REAL wars or REAL deaths or REAL sicknesses. There has been no REAL damage. It is all a fucking illusion!!!
I could see this finally, relating to this incident, and it brough such relief and a sense of JOY. I could actually feel joy. Joyful because there was no real reason not to be. Naturally joyful. And I was smiling as I fell asleep.
Today I feel strangely peaceful, like something that was once present is no longer present.
Jesus said to me, "Because you were willing to receive love, this will enable you to perform miracles"!
This clued me into something else. "It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive" - ACIM .... i.e., if you have reasons to believe that YOU do not deserve healing, that YOU are sinful, that YOU really did something bad that proves you aren't lovable, then YOU will not be WILLING to receive healing for yourself. Your unwillingness to allow yourself to be forgiven means that you will not allow yourself to receive the miracle on behalf of someone else. Therefore this will prevent you from performing miracles!
When you can therefore become healed and willing to receive God's love, to receive the Atonement, to recognize you are WORTHY, this WILLINGNESS for healing now opens up the doors to allow you to be willing to heal others. Before this you would be fighting against your own belief that healing should not occur, because your belief in your own sinfulness blocks your belief that the other person deserves healing either.
This reveals a simple truth. There is no real sin! Sin is not REAL. You have not REALLY done anything wrong. You deserve God's love because you HAVE NOT really sinned. Whatever you did was an ILLUSION, not a reality. THANK FUCKING GOD FOR THAT!
Jesus asked me to write this.
You are immortal spirit, pretending not to be. You may not think that immortality is a real thing, but it is the only reality, and everything else is unnatural.
Being immortal spirit, you are real, and nothing real can be threatened. What is immortal has no enemies, is innocent and pure, has divine health, lasts forever, is always happy, is incapable of sin or attack, cannot be hurt, is incapable of victimhood, and cannot be sick or die.
This is what you are. This is what it means to remain as God created you. God does not create things which perish and suffer and die. God gives eternal life forever, divinely protected and permanently perfect. Your soul or spirit cannot be changed. "Spirit is in a state of grace forever."
Feel this for a moment. The inability for anything to ever happen to you. The inability to be sick or dead. The inability to attack or harm. The total absence of needs of any kind. This is the true meaning of "I need do nothing". That which is immortal has no needs, lacking nothing.
That which is immortal does not need a spiritual path. It does not need magical solutions. It does not depend on anything of this world, not even food or water or air. That which is immortal is already complete, already done, already totally what it naturally is and always has been. It needs no correction or healing or help.
God created you to be permanently as God intended for you to naturally be. It is in fact 100% impossible for you to stop being the way God intended. It is impossible for you to destroy yourself or others. It is impossible for you to be attacked or hurt in any way. You cannot remove from yourself the divinity that God created you as. Nor can you put it into you or earn it or build it or get it from somewhere else.
There is a place in you where the love of God has not been forgotten, where there is perfect peace and sanity, here you are utterly invulnerable, where nothing can affect you and where you have no needs at all. You cannot undo or remove or delete this core nature - it is your eternal spirit. And this spirit is not just some esoteric concept or puff of smoke, it is everything that you are. A living being of light and love, given free will by God to create and extend in joy.
There is nothing you can do to stop being immortal. You cannot change the truth. You cannot undo God’s will or make it different. You cannot stop being alive forever. God’s will for you is eternal, permanent happiness. And God’s will is already done. It is more permanent than sin, more rock solid than matter, and has no flaws or uncertainties.
So here you are, this being who seems to be in a strange alien world, clawing at survival, trying to defend yourself from what seems to be the possibility of real threat, not remembering that it is absolutely impossible for you to change. That it is impossible that you die or suffer in any reality. That if it seems that you are experiencing anything other than perfection and immortality, it must be some kind of illusion because it cannot be true.
You literally are immortal. You are immortal spirit pretending that it’s possible to not be immortal. Pretending that reality can be threatened and that something unreal exists. Pretending that you are capable of death. Pretending that you can be victimized, that things can happen without and against your will, and that there is nothing you can do about this.
You are lying to yourself. Did you forget that you are immortal? That you have no needs and no lack and already have been given everything by God? That there is nothing else you can add to heaven but its extension? That it is literally, ultimately, absolutely impossible for sin, guilt, fear, suffering, sickness and death to ever be real? You are trying to convince yourself that the impossible is possible. You are putting on a pretty good show.
Look at the trillions of immortal beings who have pretended to come into a body, to suffer a while, and die. Every single one of those performances was fake. Not one single person ceased to exist. Not one single soul has ended. Death is a most fantastic lie. Actors in a play can pretend to demonstrate a most elaborate and convincing death, convincing even to themselves perhaps, only to suddenly get up off the stage and take a bow at the end.
You can’t die. Death isn’t real. Nothing real can be threatened, and you are real. Being immortal means living and demonstrating at all times that you are as God created you, that you are perfect invulnerable, can never be sick, cannot be hurt or suffer in any way, are not at the effect of any "causes" in the world, that you are utterly beyond the reach of death or any form of attack, that you have zero needs and have total power over everything.
I find it is always very helpful to remember the truth. To recall into my awareness the basic fact, that I and everyone else are immortal. That nothing can or has happened to anyone. That there is no sin, no suffering, and no death. This gives a sense of perspective. It is only through denial and unconsciousness that we have lost all sense of perspective and do not have a rock-solid truth to compare things to.
Having even a conceptual idea in your mind that you are immortal, and using it to contrast what you are experiencing, reveals to you what is actually happening. If it is true that you are immortal, that sense of unfair victimhood you are experiencing is immediately shown up for the fake lie and self-deceiving performance that it is.
Remembering you are immortal, when you are experiencing sickness, shows you that this sickness cannot be true or real, because the immortal cannot become sick. Recalling your immortal invulnerability when you are tempted to believe someone caused you upset, immediately incites a reality check and admittance to the fact that you can’t possibility have experienced something against your divine will. And therefore you must have made this decision yourself, to experience what you are experiencing, not matter how much it appears that someone else chose this for you.
This is not just a course in miracles. This is a course in immortality.
You think the idea of death not being real is controversial? How about the idea of real experiential and demonstrable immortality? How many people in this world believe in real death vs how many people believe in real immortality? How many people consider immortality a fantasy best left for tv shows and movies? This is a world of death believers. People come here to suffer and be sick and die. Where are the demonstrators of immortality and invulnerability and miraculous power?
Immortality is the core truth about you and about everyone. Everything else is absolutely bullshit. The biggest charade imaginable. Billions of humans pretending to demonstrate that what is immortal can die. All of it is a lie. Death is impossible. "It is the world you see that is impossible." Remember that you are immortal at all times and absolutely anything else that’s seeming to be true for you, must be a lie that you are perpetrating. Your body cannot even suffer or be sick or age or die if you use it to demonstrate your immortality.
This is the core truth of existence. God creates eternal life. Eternal life cannot be attacked. Nothing unreal exists. You cannot stop being immortal but you can pretend not to be, and you are doing a lot of pretending. You are going to have to own up to being immortal, and demonstrate it, and have it be your only acceptable state of being, on a permanent basis, if you are to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and stay there. It is a kingdom of immortality and only the immortal can live in it, and live forever. And it is where you really are already.
"You are immortal because you are eternal, and "always" must be now."
"What is the ego? But a dream of what you really are. A thought you are apart from your Creator and a wish to be what He created not. It is a thing of madness, not reality at all. A name for namelessness is all it is. A symbol of impossibility; a choice for options that do not exist. We name it but to help us understand that it is nothing but an ancient thought that what is made has immortality. But what could come of this except a dream which, like all dreams, can only end in death?"
"What has life has immortality."
Jesus merely asks us to choose again. To keep choosing again until we make the correct choice.
"I must have made a wrong decision because I am not at peace. I made the decision myself but I can choose otherwise."
He tells us that whenever we are not at peace, ie suffering in any form, it is because we have chosen to do so, and this resulted from making a wrong decision. We chose to suffer, and this was a mistake. He now invites us to try again to choose heaven, heaven being a choice I must make.
"Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one, and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you. In every difficulty, all distress, and each perplexity you face, Christ calls to you, and gently says, "My brother, choose again.""
We are exercising our free will at all times, our ability to choose freely. Anything that we experience other than peace and joy and love is because we chose it. We can only attack ourselves and are the only one able to seem to hurt ourselves through a mistaken choice. And we have just as much power to choose otherwise.
"And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo.""
"Mind is the mechanism of decision."
At all times, we are simply deciding. We are simply choosing. Do I want to accept that I am as God created me still, and therefore accept the whole Atonement principle and return to awareness of my soul, or do I want to continue choosing to suffer in various ways. It is up to me.
"God does not coerce."
"Learn of His happiness, which is yours. But to accomplish this, all your dark lessons MUST be brought willingly to truth, and joyously laid down, by hands open to receive, not closed to take. Every dark lesson that you bring to Him Who teaches light, He will accept FROM you, BECAUSE YOU DO NOT WANT IT. And He will gladly EXCHANGE each one for the bright lesson He has learned FOR you."
Lessons are nothing other than choices. By choosing that you want something, you put yourself into a psychological position. You have taught yourself that something seems to be true which is not, through a mistaken choice. Now the lesson is that you must unlearn this mistaken choice and re-learn or remember what the truth really is.
All lessons have the same outcome of re-accessing God's truth, because the only universal curriculum (which is mandatory) is the same for everyone - learning the single simple truth of God and awakening to acceptance of it.
What seem to be trials are simply present conditions that have been chosen, or scenarios arranged, offering an opportunity to change your mind about what you want, to learn to forgive and overlook rather than to use these mistaken selections to hurt yourself.
Always it is simply a matter of, what do I want. Do I want the world more than I want God? What do I value? What do I accept as true? What am I willing to do and accept? Do I want heaven today or do I want hell? It's up to you, you have the freedom always to come and go as you wish. And God waits patiently for you to freely choose to return Home to Him.
If you are suffering, you chose to. If you are experiencing unlove, you chose not to love yourself. If you are sick, you wanted to be for a reason. If you are happy, you chose only happiness for yourself. If you feel attacked, you decided to feel attacked. If you are in pain, the pain is serving your wishes. Only if this is true is the secret of salvation true without exception, and only if this is true is there any kind of hope for escape from hell by your own choice.
"In every difficulty, all distress, and each perplexity you face, Christ calls to you, and gently says, "My brother, choose again.""
"Be never fearful of temptation, then, but see it as it is; another chance to choose again, and let Christ's strength prevail in every circumstance and every place you raised an image of yourself before. For what appears to hide the Face of Christ is powerless before His Majesty, and disappears before His holy sight."
"For you WILL hear, and you WILL choose again. And in this choice is everyone made free."
"The power of decision is my own. .... No-one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No-one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No-one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. And no-one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."
"My Self is ruler of the universe. ... It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept. For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my Will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them, and Him Who has created me."
Gradually over time as you recognize more clearly who is responsible for doing what to whom, and that all attack is self-attack, you will start noticing that other people's attacks are not really attacks.
Their attack, is not really something which connects to you, bridges a gap between you, or leaves the other person to come into you.
Instead, you will start to get this idea, or simply to notice, to recognize, that although they are TRYING to attack you, it isn't actually attacking you.
If you recognize the person is the one "under attack", and that it's not really about you, you can choose not to USE IT to attack yourself. You can choose not to participate.
Deciding not to participate in their attempted madness makes it possible for you to be present and loving in spite of their attack, to see them as innocent and guiltless, and to offer healing.
Someone could be ranting and raving right in front of your face and, somehow, it's not about you. They're the one who is in pain or calling out for love. It's their expression. And their attempted attack doesn't necessarily have to have any effect on you.
When you are more in-tune with being causal, taking responsibility for what you experience, and knowing that you can only be hurt by yourself, this just becomes clearer and clearer.
This is the beginning of invulnerability and a step towards your immortality and permanent peace.
Your mind is always obeying the laws which Oneness established for all minds, regardless of whether you are in the ego or not. These laws are permanent and unavoidable.
These laws are fully obvious and correctly obeyed when you have True Perception. These apply to God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. They also apply to the ego even though it will deny it.
The ego will attempt to PRETEND that these laws do not apply or are not operating. (more on that later)
The laws:
1) Whatever applies to you applies to the entire Sonship and all of existence equally, and vice versa. It is not possible for something to apply to you which does not apply to others the same. It is not possible for something to apply to them which does not apply to you. If something applies to you, it applies everywhere instantly. If something applies to another, it applies to you immediately. In other words, THERE ARE NO PRIVATE LAWS.
2) Ideas leave not their source, therefore you can only experience what is INSIDE your mind. You cannot experience attack from outside the mind or outside of your Self. Attack has to be manifest WITHIN your mind, put there by yourself. You can only be aware of the content of your mind, not what is separate from it.
3) Cause and effect are NEVER separated. Where there is a cause, there must be an effect. A mind cannot contain a cause without containing an effect, and vice versa. It is not possible for cause outside the mind to put effects inside the mind - the mind has to contain both cause and effect inside itself. You cannot perceive an attacker without inventing an attacker within yourself.
4) You cannot attack without being attacked. All attack is self attack. It is impossible to do something to a separate part of the Sonship without you experiencing absolutely all of the effects. They are you. You are one with them. You cannot judge, attack, hate, condemn, or find sinful, without it applying to you. It's either BOTH of you are sinful, or neither, but never one or the other. This is the meaning of SHARED INTERESTS.
5) You cannot perceive, access, be aware of, or affected by, anything outside of your mind. There IS no outside. You cannot perceive outside of yourself. Anything you perceive or are aware of must be happening WITHIN your own mind. Believing there is a separate will outside your mind will frighten you because of what it can do outside of the scope of your mind's reach, or in other words, it has power over you which you can do nothing to prevent. Such a belief will result in death.
6) Your mind cannot remain neutral and perceive something which is not neutral. There are no neutral thoughts. Your mind does not have the ability to perceive objectively that someone is being sinful, separate from your own sin. If they are seen as sinning, you are seen as sinning. You DO NOT have an ability to perceive neutrally or objectively while seeing sin. Therefore you cannot tell if your brother is sinful or not, because to see sin in them it MUST be in you, and you cannot see past your own sin, so are blind.
There may be some more ways we can talk about the way a mind of oneness operates, but this is enough for now.
Now, the mind is ALWAYS bound by these laws, no matter what, no matter if the ego is getting involved (false perception) or whether you are enlightened The presence of ego (an attempt to defy the law) DOES NOT stop the laws operating.
However, what the ego TRIES to do, is to DENY the law, and PRETEND that these laws are NOT permanently operating. It pretends it's possible to IGNORE these laws, and to operate in a different way, and not receive the consequences of the law. The ego sees itself as rewriting the laws and having power over the laws (law = God's Will).
The thing is, when the ego tries to pretend the laws don't apply, all kinds of shit happens. It will try to convince you there is a separation between cause and effect. It will try to convince you you can get away with murder, can see objectively that someone is sinful and not you, that what applies to you does not apply to others, that you have escaped consequences of sin and someone else is paying for it, and that you can use the body for attack without being attacked.
ACIM quote: "The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use if for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it CANNOT BE SICK, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all."
Within the laws of God, this means that the ego tells you that you can see the sins of others "through" your body, without your body being affected. This is denial. It is not true. If you attempt to see your brother as sinful, IT MUST APPLY TO YOU ALSO. This automatically will condemn and attack YOU, and this WILL show up in your body image as symptoms or signs of attack. Another word for that is forms of sickness.
You literally cannot judge or accuse or condemn without being condemned, by yourself. What you are actually doing then, is you're trying to use the body as a weapon. Because there is a direct correlation between your belief in and projection of sin, and sickness showing up, you will make your body SICK, in an attempt to prove that your brother is sinful. This is the ONLY WAY you can attempt to prove it. By proving you can be attacked or hurt, you demonstrate that your brother is the sinner and not you. Or at least that's the ego's interpretation of it. In God's law, you are hurt BY YOUR OWN ATTACK.
People literally are walking around projecting sin and hate through their body, trying to get rid of sin onto someone else to escape the consequences of the law, but are nevertheless finding that it makes their body sick. They cannot escape the law, but they're pretending to. The effects of sickness in the body also then reflect the level confusion, that those outside of yourself are causing you to be hurt.
Trying to prove this is level confusion and will implement sickness. All sickness is a form of magic. Magic is the belief that a lower level can cause and higher level (e.g. body causes mind, others cause you, being a victim etc). This turns you into an EFFECT and your body will demonstrate those effects to correlate to the perceived external cause.
When someone gets to the point where their body is so sick that it seems to die, they are actually attempting to severely prove that they can suffer and die, that it is someone or something else *separate* that has caused it, and therefore the dying body is a weapon. It accuses everyone and everything of sin, being the cause of the death - anything other than yourself.
Death of the body is a fulfillment of a belief in sin, an attempt to kill the Son of God by binding him to form, and demonstrates a lack of forgiveness. A dying body is like a kamikaze weapon, attempting to infect and destroy everything and prove that God and His son are dead. God's death (the purpose of the dream of death) cannot be proven without YOU dying. Death is also completely "contained" as an effect upon YOURSELF, because ideas leave not their source and therefore, God is not affected by it.
This is of course an ego cover-up job, because NO-ONE CAN DIE WITHOUT THEIR OWN CONSENT. Meaning, your body cannot die unless you are believing that everyone else must be dead at some level. Death is symptomatic of huge level confusion, where the lower level (world of effects) has produced a "cause" upon the higher level (mind). The person believing this MUST show death in the body image to represent God's law that what applies to others applies to you. All sickness and death is an ACCUSATION that your brother has sinned against you.
This also therefore means that, if you stop accusing your brother of sin, your body CANNOT SHOW SICKNESS. No exceptions. Sickness can ONLY come about through mis-use of the law, where you attempted to perceive your brother as corrupt, sinful, guilty, wrong in some way. YOU will receive the effects of this belief. Your body will show it.
And this also means that if you stop believing in sin, your body MUST show and demonstrate a complete lack of symptoms of sickness. If there was sickness showing up previously due to prior judgement, IT MUST DISAPPEAR. No exceptions. What has no cause cannot remain. If you understand the Course's section on "sickness is a defense against the truth" you will see that we implement sickness only as a form of defense and denial of the truth, and as a form of level confusion. Once this denial and defenses is not needed, it will be dropped, and the sickness MUST DISAPPEAR as a result of having recognized the illusions you were implementing.
You need to also realize that attack can only happen INSIDE your mind. It's not possible to perceive or experience external attack. This means, if there is an "external person" who seems to attack, or is tempting you to believe in sin, the only way you can SEE that attack is if it is INSIDE the scope of your mind. That means, for you to SEE attack, your own mind has to be sectioned off and part of it has to become an attacker. This attacker is part of yourself, and is in ADDITION to the external attacker, projected onto them. Simultaneously, the part that is not seen as the attacker will be sectioned off and seen as a victim of attack. Your mind will now be attacking ITSELF.
Therefore realize, your mind implements both the belief in a CAUSE of sin, AND the effects of sin, simultaneously. This all happens inside yourself, even if it seems like the person attacking it outside of you. You cannot see them as the source of attack. You have to make YOURSELF the attacker. That means, as in the secret to salvation, that you are literally doing this to yourself. Your mind manifests/produces/visualizes and turns into FORM, both the attacker and the attacked, the cause and the effects. You will put effects of sickness into your body and hold it hostage with the part of you that is hallucinating an attacker.
Now here's the trick of healing. You have to recognize you are doing this to yourself. Other people or external causes have NOTHING to do with it. You are the one who invented the cause and the effects of your sickness. You believe in both of them, and your split mind has two identities. You must recognize that illusions of causes are not real causes, you are the one who, within your mind, is attacking yourself and pretending it has something to with others, and YOU put in place ALL of the symptoms/effects of that causality.
As Jesus tells us, "you made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both". Sickness has NO CAUSE other than your mind's decision to make it. Sickness has no reason to remain, other than your NEED to keep it (as a defense against truth).
When you do not need or choose to keep it, and recognize the illusion you made (that cause is unloving and sinful - which is really the belief that God in evil and has attacked you), the symptoms of sickness MUST DISAPPEAR. You DID make your sickness, and you DID make death, and you CAN abolish them. Not only that, because you are bound by the laws of God, you cannot FAIL to abolish them if you stop using your body for attack. Sickness simply must vanish to comply with the law.
There are no loopholes in the law. There are no exceptions. There are no other causes of sickness beyond yourself. Sickness has no mind, will or power of its own. No-one maintains it besides you. It can and must disappear when you return to True Perception. Illusions recognized must disappear. A guiltless mind cannot suffer, because a guiltless mind CANNOT MAINTAIN SICKNESS. Sickness has to disappear.
This is so black and white a law, that Jesus tells us, "a sick body is proof that the mind has not been healed." You literally CANNOT be sick if your mind is healed. If sickness is showing up, or remains, your mind IS NOT healed. You can be in denial of this, as most people are. You can believe that it's possible to be at peace and keep sickness. But you can't. The law confirms that sickness WILL NOT and CANNOT show up at all if the mind is sane and free. Similarly you cannot be at peace with death or dying, because to die is the ULTIMATE expression of a belief in sin.
The dead can be raised and all sickness can be healed, BECAUSE of the law. If this were not true, resurrection would be impossible. You cannot believe in death and make the body die and believe in resurrection. Using the body lovelessly will make it suffer and die. Believing only in eternal life will bring the body to health, since it is not being attacked and twisted and deformed by the mind's attitude. The body is just an image being projected, it can EASILY be changed by the healed mind.
Jesus tells us not to use sickness to attempt to demonstrate that our brother is a sinner. If our body is sick in any way, we ARE using it to prove he is a sinner. He asks us to demonstrate that WE CANNOT BE HURT, which proves that our brother is not sinful and cannot cause death. HIS innocence is proven when YOUR innocence is proven. This DOES play out on the visual, perceptible, illusory dream level of the world, because the world is a symbol in the mind. The body can become a symbol of holiness and innocence, used as a teaching device to prove to your brother that he has not sinned. HE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO ATTACK IT, because YOU will not put symptoms of sickness into it, and HE is not an evil cause of effects!
You must understand the law. The law applies to you. You cannot escape it. But you can be in denial and pretend it does not apply. And then you will suffer and die. Choose the equal innocence of the entire Sonship and Live.
Is there a power OTHER than the mind that can cause things to happen to us? What causes sickness? What makes death happen? Do we actually have any control over this world? Do we have a power, to such an extent, that we can actually determine what happens or doesn't happen? Can we actually CHOOSE to cause or not cause sickness and death?
This is an important issue because if we are not the ones orchestrating everything that occurs, everything we experience, then that places us in a rather vulnerable position. If there is a power or cause or law or something that drives stuff to occur, without our consent, without our choosing it, this basically means we are capable of being victims. Stuff can happen to us against our will.
It may seem SUPER radical to suggest that you could be in a position of having so much deliberateness, so much choice, so much power, that you could be orchestrating an entire dream. That the things that happen are what YOU decide will happen. That nothing else happens, because you haven't chosen it. It really then boils down to, are you actually able to choose not to suffer, to not be sick, to not die? Can you choose that events don't occur at all? Do you have the power to CAUSE these to not happen, and do you have the power to cause them TO happen?
This then really becomes a question of RESPONSIBILITY. Who or what is responsible, in every case, for what happens in your life? Do you shift responsibility and therefore "blame" onto others, onto the body or the world itself? For what seems to happen TO you? Who is responsible for whether you are attacked or not? Who is responsible for whether your body becomes sick, or is healed, or just carries on being sick without hope of relief? Because ultimately someone or some "thing" HAS to be the cause. It's either you, or it's something else. There are NO effects without causes.
If you look at the teachings of ACIM closely you will see that there is a huge theme of EMPOWERMENT. This empowerment is saying that you are so powerful that you literally are the dreamer of the dream. It says that you are ruler of the universe. It says that you can be attacked by nothing but your thoughts. It says you cannot die without your own consent. It says that you are not the victim of the world you see. All of these themes point towards you having POWER OVER what happens. YOU CHOOSE!
"If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God."
"Here again is the paradox often referred to in the course. To say, "Of myself I can do nothing" is to gain all power. And yet it is but a seeming paradox. As God created you, you have all power."
Indeed it leads to what ACIM calls "the secret of salvation". This is quite a radical passage because it basically says that unless you were to go into a kind of unconscious state of denial in which you disown power and see the dream as "happening against your will", NOTHING In the world can do anything to you - no matter how vicious it seems. And in fact, that the secret to being SAVED FROM all forms of suffering, is to realize and own fully that you are "doing it to yourself." That takes great OWNERSHIP of power.
We immediately start to bark with objections about how this can't be true in all situations. But the passage tells us that no matter who is the victim or victimizer, it is true. No matter who seems to do what to whom, or what the apparent severity, it is still true. So it's then telling us that despite any appearances, despite what may look like external causes or separate people acting in certain ways, no matter what it looks like on the surface, it is ALWAYS TRUE that you are doing it to yourself.
And it calls this the "secret of salvation" because it talks of how this is the ONE LESSON the holy spirit is teaching to SAVE YOU from ALL forms of suffering. That the cause of ALL forms of suffering, no matter what form it takes, including physical sickness, is the fact that you are the one doing it to yourself. And because you are doing it yourself, you can change your mind and STOP doing it.
"I must have decided wrongly because I am NOT at peace. I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise."
Because in truth, really, UNLESS you are actually the one with the power to CAUSE anything to happen, you would not be in a position to be able to USE that power to NOT cause it to happen, or to undo it. It is because you DO cause it, that there is IS hope for salvation. There is a way out of hell and suffering and sickness and death BECAUSE you are the one that keeps putting it in place. And if you weren't the one putting it in place, you'd be stuck having to tolerate it, experience it, suffer from it, and go through it, without any hope of relief, ie no salvation.
This is quite a radical teaching and it is extremely central to the entire A Course in Miracles view of cause and effect, of who causes what, and of how POWERFUL you are. It rests on the fact that you are an immortal being, a permanent changeless being, who is always the same and is incapable of change or of being changed. A being that is NOT AFFECTED by the world.
"The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did."
Forgiveness rests on this immortal fact, because obviously if you are immortal nothing can happen to you, so you have no grounds for playing at being a victim, no grounds for believing that something is happening against your will, and no grounds for suffering. If you are immortal then you quite literally are invulnerable to the entire world, and there is not a single thing in all the world that has even the slightest power to cause anything that you do not want. In fact it means you have power OVER DEATH, because you cannot die.
This is what the entire teaching of ACIM is leading to. The total identification with spirit as Christ, the immortal son of God. The total owning of RESPONSIBILITY FOR BEING CAUSAL - a causal CREATOR. The total reclaiming of absolute unlimited POWER, which can do literally anything. The reclaiming of the power to work miracles, to heal sickness and to prevent death, and to change the world if needed. It is asking of you to reclaim a role and position of nothing LESS than TOTAL ABSOLUTE POWER.
By having such a power, a power so great that literally the entire dream is being dreamed up BY your mind, a power that puts the world in place and makes it spin, a power that materializes bodies, a power that causes events to transpire, we're talking about you being extremely DELIBERATE and CHOOSING everything that occurs or is experienced. And this does mean without exception. Not one single thing occurs that you do not choose, and because the power of decision is yours, you CAN CHOOSE not to have the body be sick, or die. YOU make the world go round.
This isn't a course in leaving any room open for some kind of fictional "alien will", a separate power, an external power, some kind of power the "dream" seems to have over you, some victim consciousness, some kind of external causation that can do things to you against your will, some kind of power that puts sickness into your body without your asking for it, or some kind of power other than your choice that seems to make death happen.
These are all the views that the EGO has, in its sense of weakness and powerlessness and vulnerability and fear. It sees itself as utterly at war with a separated-off power not within itself, that does things to it against its desires. And it sees itself as having no control or real power over anything, so instead to uses "force" and "doing" to try to make things happen.
"All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the FEAR OF AWAKENING. They are attempts to reinforce UNCONSCIOUSNESS out of fear of CONSCIOUSNESS. This is a pathetic way of TRYING NOT TO KNOW by rendering the faculties for knowing ineffectual."
We are being asked to own up to being immortal beings. Beings who are purely CAUSAL and CREATIVE. Beings who express from love and whose expressions come out as what you want, and as what you create and thus as what happens or exists. Where you are constantly choosing WHAT shows up and what occurs. There is no room in the mind of a creator/co-creator for stuff happening "by some other means", or of your choices being unheard, or of your decisions lacking power, or of your causation lacking effects.
This is a course in TAKING BACK YOUR POWER. And that means and includes the total responsibility and ownership of being THE CAUSE OF all your suffering, in every form it takes, INCLUDING the condition of the body, all of its forms and sickness and suffering, and even over death itself. You even have the power to literally move mountains and to make worlds. Only in this extreme of absolute ownership of the POWER OF GOD, which is your inheritance, is victimhood and vulnerability and pain and misery snuffed out forever. There is no power OTHER THAN the power of God that you share with him.
The question is whether you are willing to go all the way to accept this power, to take on this role and position of being ruler of the universe, whether you are willing to OWN this power and regain access to USE it consciously. Whether you are ready to let go of all victimhood roles and all sense of not choosing or not being the one who makes things happen. It's putting you in the hot-seat. If you are to reach the resurrection and FINISH the curriculum, you MUST gain the absolute power over death, which gives you the ability to cancel and reverse and prevent it EVEN on a physical level.
"I raised the dead by KNOWING that life is an eternal attribute of everything that the living God Created. Why do you believe that it is harder for me to inspire the dis-spirited or to stabilize the unstable? I do not believe that there is an order of difficulty in miracles: YOU do."
If you believe that sickness happens through some other reason, by some other cause, something in the world or body, something environmental, something someone else does to you, if events happen on their own chaotically or randomly, if death chooses for you when you will die, if sickness happens to the body, if sickness can remain within the body against the mind's choice, and if you believe that you do NOT have the power to do anything about this, that IS an egoic position of victimhood and powerlessness. And we are all-too comfortable playing this role.
It means you are "playing the game of death", as an immortal being, PRETENDING that you do NOT have the power of God, and trying to pull off a stunt of making it look AS IF you are not the one causing everything to occur. When it appears you did not choose something, it is an illusion. You are ALWAYS choosing what you experience, what you feel, what happens with the body, what events transpire. NOTHING happens without your consent. This is because you are an infinitely powerful being with an extremely powerful unlimited mind capable of creating entire worlds.
"There are no accidents in salvation."
"Your Father created you Wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."
Owning up to this power - the shared Power of God - which is UNLIMITED, and there is NOTHING that this power (thus your holiness) cannot do .... places you in a position of being co-creator with God. For a creator there is nothing that comes IN to you from the outside, there is ONLY an outflowing from the inside outward. An extension so strong it cannot be stopped. The unlimited will of God.
You cannot have things coming at you, attacking you, changing you, affecting you, choosing for you. YOU are the master. You dominate everything. You are the ultimate cause. YOU are in charge of your destiny. You are NEVER a victim, and NOTHING happens without your choosing it and causing it. OWN THIS, and you will be free from suffering and death forever.
"My Self is ruler of the universe." It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept."
"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are."
"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."
"I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts."
"When you are weary, remember you have hurt yourself. Your Comforter will rest you, but YOU cannot. YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW, for if you did, you could never have grown weary. Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way, for that is not God's Will for His Son. Pain is not of Him, for He knows no attack, and His peace surrounds you silently."
"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF. No matter what the form of the attack, this STILL is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, STILL is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is STILL true. For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes."
"The Holy Spirit will repeat this ONE inclusive lesson of deliverance, until it has been learned, REGARDLESS of the form of suffering that brings you pain. Whatever hurt you bring to Him, He will make answer with this very simple truth. For this one answer TAKES AWAY the cause of every form of sorrow and of pain. The form affects His answer not at all, for He would teach you but the SINGLE cause of all of them, no matter WHAT their form. And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."
"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you. Yet when you accord it mercy, will its mercy shine on you."
"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."
"Say ONLY this, but MEAN it with NO reservations, for here the power of salvation lies: ... I AM responsible for what I see. I CHOSE the feelings I experience, and I DECIDED ON the goal I would achieve. And everything that SEEMS to happen TO me, I ASKED FOR and received as I had asked. ... Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done TO you. Acknowledge but that YOU have been mistaken, and ALL effects of your mistakes will disappear."
There is a simple law about health that you need to know about, as described here:
"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use if for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all."
If you do not regard yourself as an illusion in any way ("I am not an illusion but a reality"), you do not see YOURSELF as an illusion, and therefore you do not SHOW UP AS an illusion. Instead, you show up as INVISIBLE. As if you have no body. You do not need a body, and the body would not be an accurate identification of what you think of yourself.
The body is always coming from your mind, as an outward picture of an inward condition. Always. It is always being projected outward. It never has its own condition or its own state of being or its own mind or will or power or thoughts or anything else. It’s purely a projected mental image. It is YOUR mental image about what you think your identity is. Or, what you are made of. Or, what you think is true of you.
If you think it is true of you that you are less than as God created you, pure spirit, wholeness, having no form or need for form, you WILL materialize - ie mis-create - what appears to be a body out of nowhere. The mind makes the body. And the mind can make as many bodies as it likes. As Jesus said in the special notes to Helen, here are his exact words where he describes exactly what I’ve just said:
"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it.. It merely became what it always was. And that is what 'rolling the stone away means.' The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond... To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. I did assume a human form with human attributes afterwards, to speak to those who were to prove the body's worthlessness to the world. This has been much misunderstood. I came to tell them that death is an illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand."
His body disappeared because He had no illusions about himself, his identity. He did not identify himself as dead, or made of separation, and so He stopped showing up as that. He stopped imagining himself as that.
Note he also says, the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. The mind MAKES the body. And it constantly is projecting a body when it sees itself as limited. It is projecting the body at every moment to sustain an illusion of a constant self. But the body is always an effect, never a cause of anything. So if the mind wants to believe something else, the body MUST change. It has no will to stop the mind.
Now, a very important thing to realize is, the state of the body, being a mental picture of "self", directly corresponds ALWAYS to how a person’s mind is seeing itself. What it believes it is. So if it believes it is sinful or guilty, the mind will attack itself, thus attack its own image of itself which will show up as a body infected by or attacked by guilt and sin. This will make the body appear, ie be projected as though, it seems to be "sick". It does not "have" a sickness, it IS a sickness.
It will REMAIN showing up as sick for as long as the MIND decides to be sick. It will have no ability to heal itself. Bodies DO NOT heal themselves. The immune system is a bullshit ego concept. It is an illusion. Bodies does not heal anything. They do nothing. Only the mind orchestrates stuff happening.
When the mind says jump, the body jumps. Literally. When the mind says, I am sick and separate, a body will be projected which shows signs of sickness and separation. When the mind says, now is the time that I am well and joined with God, the body MUST show up as a picture of a body that is in perfect health.
You have to realize, the body has NO ABILITY to counter the choice of the mind as to how it wants to identify itself. It IS the mind’s attempt to identify itself as an illusion. There also IS NO OTHER CAUSE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD that can do anything to the body. It cannot be made sick, or hurt, or damaged in any way, unless the mind is believing it is damaged. And then the MIND puts the damage into the body, not the world. As Jesus says here clearly:
"Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself ... No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail."
That means there is NO CAUSE outside of you, at all. Ever. The body CANNOT be caused against YOUR will. Ever. However it shows up, is how you are MAKING IT show up.
There is nothing in the world that makes your body do or feel or adjust or change in any way at all. Any appearance to the contrary is some illusion the mind is putting in place to pretend it is irresponsible. Sickness IS irresponsibility. The mind however is ALWAYS in charge even if it makes an illusion of death. Death cannot happen to the body unless the mind destroys the body itself. "No-one dies without their own consent".
This also means, that if the body is showing up as sick, SOMETHING IS WRONG with the mind. Guaranteed. 100%. If the body is sick, the mind HAS NOT been healed. This is metaphysical law with zero exceptions. There can be states of mind reached which seem like awakening, but where the body remains sick. In such states, the mind HAS NOT awoken from the dream of death, as proved by the fact that the body still seems to die, because the mind STILL BELIEVES it does not deserve eternal life, and so accepts death - an illusion of giving up all will and causality. An attempt not to choose at all.
Rather than see this as some kind of condemnation or guilt-inducing statement that, if you are sick, it’s your fault, which the ego would love to indulge, instead see it as perhaps shocking or upsetting at first, to have to admit that YOU are responsible for making your sickness. This is not always welcome news, often producing ego reactions of guilt and fear and so on. But it is also revealing to you a POWER that you have. A power and a CHOICE, a FREEDOM, a HOPE, in which IF YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND, you NEED NOT SUFFER.
This does not EVER mean, that if you change your mind, you will transcend sickness and death and not care that it "happens to you". This is 100% missing the point and a total bastardization of the teaching. No-one can be at peace with death because peace is evidence you do not believe in Eternal Life. Sickness and death DO NOT happen to you. YOU HAPPEN. Sickness only happens in your body beacuse it’s a picture of YOUR MIND’s sickness. Death only happens in your body because YOU DESTROY YOURSELF. This has to be owned up to before you can claim the right, and power, and freedom, to EXERCISE your FREE WILL choice to NEVER SUFFER AGAIN.
It does mean, on the one hand, you HAVE to admit to being responsible for causing ALL of the suffering you have experienced, it was ALL you doing it to yourself, and no-one and nothing-else EVER caused anything you’ve experienced. That can be a big chunk of crap to swallow. BUT.... it also opens the door to the POSSIBILITY, that you still have this power, and can CHOOSE AGAIN and therefore produce a state of NO SUFFERING.
You MUST demonstrate a body that is invulnerable, cannot be hurt, cannot be damaged, has no sickness, does not show any signs of attack, and PROVES that your brother and the whole world has done NOTHING to affect the Son of God. OTHERWISE... you WILL attack yourself, and you will suffer, by your own hand. No-one else will be doing it to you but yourself. This is the SECRET TO SALVATION! YOU ARE DOING THIS ALL TO YOURSELF. And because you are - if you OWN IT - you can choose simply to NEVER AGAIN be sick or dead or suffer in any way. Claim your IMMORTALITY!
There is no power in all the world that does anything to you against your will, other than YOU. There is no cause in the world whatsoever to produce effects in you or your body that YOU do not put there yourself. Worldly causes are cover-up jobs for your mind to pretend its irresponsibility is someone else’s fault.
There is no form of sickness, even DEATH, that cannot be reversed, if the MIND decides to no longer believe in it. Whatever you believe about yourself, IT WILL SHOW UP. It must. Mind is cause. Form is the effect of believing in illusions. Your mind has power over ALL MATTER. "My self is ruler of the universe".
So realize this. While you have a body, your body ALWAYS EQUALS your state of mind. So long as you THINK you are a body, YOU WILL MAKE ONE. So long as you think you are separate from God, you will PRESENT A PICTURE of what you believe for all to see. "Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt"!! But there can also be a totally transparent depiction of what’s going on inside of you, if you fully accept atonement.
If the body is showing up as sick, your mind *IS* sick. You ARE responsible for it. No-one else is. The world is not. The body is not. Having mastery over form REQUIRES extreme, absolute ownership and responsibility for EVERYTHING you are experiencing, down to the atoms that make up the body. YOU are putting them there. If the body is not doing well, it’s because you keep attacking yourself. Period. Don’t let this induce guilt or worthlessness. Instead forgive yourself and choose again.
If you can recognize this correlation between mind and body, you will realize that *IF* you change your mind, THE BODY HAS TO FOLLOW. It is guaranteed. It is a depiction of your "Self" as you see yourself. This is why when you shift into a miracle, you temporarily move into INVISIBILITY. "Miracles are temporary shifts into invisibility, that is why they heal." Invisibility (of form) correlates to having a mind which is CLEAR and FREE OF SEPARATIONS. You can see through it because it has become transparent and UNBLOCKED. This movement into formlessness heals the mind and thus the body MUST follow.
This also means, as Jesus has said, *IF* you get your mind into a state of perfect clarity and truth, and given that you are temporarily still projecting a body, the body BECOMES INVULNERABLE because YOU ARE, it cannot BE sick for ANY reason, because you are not sick, and IT CANNOT DIE because you see yourself as immortal spirit. Or at least a glimpse of that. Jesus assures us there is a divine protection that the body will experience IF we will be purely vigilant for the truth. Your body CAN be indestructible, free of aging, weather, the need for food and water, and so on. "I am sustained by the love of God all through the day", goes to the extreme!
And He literally means this..... IT CANNOT be sick. Sickness is IMPOSSIBLE where guilt has been removed. Sickness CANNOT RETURN where guilt has been removed. A guiltless mind cannot produce a suffering body. And why would it. A suffering body is an attack on your brother and yourself, due to a belief the world is causing you. Sickness is NONSENSE. It is a portrayal of a victim who believes they are sinful. But everyone is free to choose. You can choose whatever you want, but you cannot escape the consequences of your decisions.
You are cause. This is a course in cause, not effect. Choose health by choosing to heal the mind of its misperception of itself, and it will automatically take care of projecting a healthy body in the short term. This is the same as saying to seek first the kingdom of God and your way will be made straight.