It suddenly occurred to me last night why this is true.

In truth, whatever the illusion is, it has no truth to it and does not really exist. Because it's an illusion, it isn't real. It is really actually nothing. It is ALREADY not there.

It is only when we believe in it, have bought into it, see truth in it, think it is real and are now fighting with it, that we are no longer recognizing that nothing is happening. We think something is now happening, that something is true about it.

To believe an illusion is to fail to RECOGNIZE that it is an illusion, but instead we are recognizing it as a reality or truth which it is not. We're not seeing correctly, so have blocks in our perception.

When you can RECOGNIZE that an illusion is just an illusion, that means that you realize what you thought it was wasn't true, it is completely false, AND it is not REAL.

There is a significant power in discerning the difference between an illusion and reality. Only when you can see and acknowledge that something is a completely false illusion which really is not there and has no reality to it at all - that in truth it does not exist whatsoever, then you are recognizing that it HAS disappeared because it was never really happening to begin with.

Once recognized, ie seen clearly and correctly, the illusion is no longer believed in, it is accepted as being not there, is gone already, never happened and never really existed. This is UNDOING. Whatever that illusion was it must then disappear because you recognize and believe it no longer is true and so are no longer willing to MAKE it or sustain it. This translates even to the extent of physical healing if the physical "issue" is fully recognized as completely illusory and not a real sickness.

I saw this because yesterday I got a surprise sunburn and decided to use it with Holy Spirit to learn more about healing and forgiveness. As I worked with it, I eventually came to see that I didn't even have a "real" sunburn, I had an ILLUSION of a sunburn, and was then able to withdraw my belief in it.

I eventually was prompted by Holy Spirit to realize it is "already gone", which reminds me of a Greg Braden video where he's in a hospital in China where they affirm "already gone" as a way to undo sickness in a short space of time.

When we are sick in some way, we are tempted to believe it is REAL, to believe it's happening and exists and having an effect on us. That we're being caused by it, it has power, it's got truth in it. We're tempted to then fight with "it" but really we're fighting with the illusion of a FAKE sickness that we believe is a real one. ALL sickness is fake. There is no truth in suffering. Recognizing the ILLUSION of sickness as an illusion deflates and disempowers it.

Today my sunburn is a lot better already. I can't scientifically say, hey presto, this change in attitude produced X amount of healing, but I did learn more about the undoing of sickness and how to better recognize an illusion when it is one.

There is no such thing as real sickness, all sickness is an illusion of separation seeming to be real.

If you have cancer, you don't have "real cancer". There is no such thing as real cancer. There is only an ILLUSION of cancer. If you have a broken leg, you don't really have a broken leg, you have an ILLUSION of a broken leg. If you have brain damage, you don't have real brain damage, you have an ILLUSION of brain damage. It's a fiction. Like a pretend image which you're holding in place. Something you made up, literally.

This is why dead and sickness can be abolished because you MADE THEM. They are not true or real at all.

Receiving of miracles it not something that you "get" from God and then just sit there with it as though it is now in your possession. It is not possible to actually receive miracles WITHOUT being also willing to give and extend them. They are not personal. You will only allow yourself to receive them if you believe you are worthy, and having believed you are worthy you will automatically believe everyone else is worthy of receiving them from you.

Those who believe miracles are merely shifts in your own personal perception are much mistaken, because miracles affirm that giving and receiving are One and therefore, because you are one with God, you will automatically give what you received from Him, being also its giver to yourself and others.

Miracles therefore are EXPRESSIONS or extensions of the truth through you, for you, and for others, to others and to yourself, from God. They are SHARED. They are the embodiment of sharing and wholeness and inclusiveness. They are not personal or found in isolation. You must GIVE ALL to have all. And even Jesus said of his own atonement that by receiving it he received it for all and now expresses it for all. How else would you be the light of the world or truly helpful in any way if you just hoard the goodness of heaven for yourself?

This is why if you are to receive miracles for yourself you MUST also become willing to SHARE IN THEM and to receive AND give them, otherwise you cannot have them. You cannot have the kingdom without its extension and it is extended by sharing. You cannot have anything real without it being GIVEN also. This is why miracles are not just about you, they are about you giving TO your brother. They are the maximal service you can render to your brother.

Members of Jesus's party are active miracle workers.

It's a bit similar to "use it or lose it". Give it, or you cannot have it.

"You are saved, and your salvation thus becomes the gift you give the world, because you have received" - ACIM

"They are received where they are given" - ACIM

"You will receive miracles because of what God is. And you will offer miracles because you are one with God" - ACIM

"No one can give what he has not received. To give a thing requires first you have it in your own possession. Here the laws of Heaven and the world agree. But here they also separate. The world believes that to possess a thing, it must be kept. Salvation teaches otherwise. To give is how to recognize you have received. It is the proof that what you have is yours." - ACIM

"You understand that you are healed when you give healing. You accept forgiveness as accomplished in yourself when you forgive. You recognize your brother as yourself, and thus do you perceive that you are whole. There is no miracle you cannot give, for all are given you. Receive them now by opening the storehouse of your mind where they are laid, and giving them away. " - ACIM

"What you want in yourself you will make manifest, and you will accept it from the world because you put it there by wanting it." - ACIM

"Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." - Bible

Lesson 159 - I give the miracles I have received:

You can heal with the ego, or with God.

The ego's form of healing is terrifying. It involves becoming very very certain that you know what the problem is. It's entirely based around looking at the problem so closely that you see every part of it intensely, describe its every detail, explain its every reason for happening, analyse and disect it and do studies on it, and even give it a name. Another word for this is diagnosis. The real name for this is insanity.

When you go to a doctor who is operating with the ego, and they give you a diagnosis, they are doing the best they can given their belief system. They've been trained by other ego's that the diagnosis-and-prescription model is healing. But when they do this, it is terrifying. And it's not just terrifying because you're a scaredy cat.

It's terrifying because it makes the problem very very real. It is no accident that when someone is told "you have cancer" or "you've got a disease" or they finally find out what the heck is wrong with you, it scares the living shit out of you. Many doctors are fear-mongers, and they create fear without realizing it, because they do not realize they are in the business of associating truth with illusions. For the most part they don't even know they're doing this because it's so widely accepted to have this approach to sickness.

It's not just because of what the diagnosis says, or what they think is going to happen to you because of it, but because it makes an illusion seem like it is the truth. The alignment of a sense of truth with something that is, in God's terms, NOT true, is horrifying, precisely BECAUSE it is not really true. IF it were true, it WOULD be very upsetting. Anyone who aligned truth with what is false would be forgiven for being upset about doing so because it MUST produce fear.

One time I was at the dentist and as the person announced that I had some signs of 'gum disease', with all their fancy very-serious medical equipment showing pictures of it, and with all sincerity and sense of authority in their voices, it caused me to have a panick attack. Not because it was true, but because it was NOT the real truth, but was being passed for it, and the 'authority' of medical people puts a huge amount of clout behind the ego's barrage of attack. They do think that they are helping, and perhaps to a degree they are, but making the sickness seem real is nothing more than an ego mechanism for inducing fear and death.

Another time, when an authoritative and specialist and highly-educated and responsibility-for-your-life-grabbing guy said of my wife that she had cancer, I just about fainted. Thanks for that! It wasn't because it was true, but because it was not God's truth, and it was an ego attack of fear-inducing unconsciousness. The same thing happened in hospital visits where I had to depend on the word of very experienced specialists to "give the news" etc, which was just so nerve-wracking and horrible, not because of the news, but because of the arrangement of the ego portraying itself as knowing so seriously and so provably that "something terrible has happened". For me it was a lesson in not believing them. But I digress...

To the ego, getting a good hard look at the problem and describing it, and asking you to accept that it is what IS happening, and therefore it is the TRUTH, means it is being accurate and correct. Its sense of certainty is basically a death sentence, whereby it claims that all evidence points to you being 'actually sick'. As if sickness is real.

And then, having made the problem intensely real and accepting it as true, and therefore deciding to keep it real, it will prescribe for you some kind of measures that you must undergo, which also are nothing but terrifying, which allegedly, and in some cases appears to, produce certain changes which you might find preferable.

Yes, some of these procedures do seem to 'help' if you think of help as maybe trading one problem for another, or if you're comfortable with the side-effects, etc. Maybe a surgery might well seem to save your life by hacking a tumor out of your body. This might seem better than the alternative, but it is still terrifying.

The reason the's ego's diagnosis is terrifying is that it makes illusions seem real. When you associate something that, in God's terms, is false, with an idea of it being true, this is what makes shadows turn into monsters. It causes insanity. You can become very good at figuring out "what is really happening" or "what is really the cause", which really is an act of trying to prove with the ego that the problem really does have a cause. If you can prove that a problem has a cause, that means the problem must be real, and so the effort to do this is actually a choice to CAUSE the problem to be real, in the name of trying to fix it.

To a degree, this does mean that those who diagnose, cause sickness, or at least that they tend to believe in sickness so strongly that all they can do is reflect back your own belief in sickness rather than liberating you from it. The ego's efforts to "cure" are extremely rare, even if it has this as a supposed goal. It is not really intent on curing, only in disguising and temporarily alleviating, only to bring a return of the suffering in some other form at some other time, perhaps to some other person.

It is one thing to find out and know "for sure" that someone is sick. But doing so keeps them sick. And the solutions offered based on this belief generally are magic, not miracles. Magic seeks to keep the problem and the belief in it, while pretending to get rid of the problem.

God is not like this.

God's form of healing is nothing like the ego's form of healing. God's healing does not make illusions real. That means that God's healing really has nothing to do with diagnosis, and that only the bare minimum of diagnosis might be needed, and in fact really none at all. Describing the problem has nothing to do with whether God is healing it. Knowing what is causing the problem has nothing to do with God healing it. Being very certain about how the problem came to be or how long someone had it has nothing to do with God's healing.

When we see someone who is sick, if we see their sickness as acceptable, that it is normal and natural, that it cannot be reversed, that we do not have the power to do and that it would be frightening to do so, we KEEP the person sick. We compound the sickness. This is the same thing as describing (diagnosing) a person as sick, making the sickness real, believing it is true, and that it is happening, and that it is supposed to be happening.

"When miracles are not happening, something has gone wrong." - ACIM

Why do we tolerate sickness like it is a normal part of life? Why do we think the only way to deal with it is through the ego's medical system? God has a way to heal. It's called a miracle. And this is what Jesus is trying to teach us to do. It's not called A Course in MIRACLES for nothing.

The ONLY truth, is that a person is NOT SICK. The ONLY truth, is that it is NOT true that they have a disease. The only truth is that they are perfectly whole, perfectly innocent, perfectly guiltless, perfectly happy, perfectly divinely healthy. That's what the TRUTH is about everyone. That is the only truth.

When your sense of truth is aligned with this truth, you WILL NOT be afraid. You will not find this truth to be terrifying. And what this truth DOES to deal with the illusion of sickness, will not INSTILL FEAR, and it will not frighten the living shit out of people as they worry about how horrifying procedures will have to be endured in order to be relieved. The idea of having to go through a suffering in order to regain health is the ego's idea of SACRIFICE, which says that you MUST SUFFER, in order to ATONE for having sinned, and that only after enough suffering will you be, maybe, allowed to experience relief. For a while.

God's truth is the only truth that is truly true. When you mistake any other piece of information for truth, you will be afraid. And when you are doing that, you are CAUSING SICKNESS. You read that right. Either you are causing health, or you are causing sickness. Either you are supporting health, or you are attacking it. When you see sickness and think it real and justify keeping it, that is an attack. Would love keep sickness and maintain suffering?

Therefore what we need to UNLEARN is the ego's system of healing, which is really a system of keeping problems real and terrifying you with them, while prescribing you with half-baked solutions of unconsciousness which either don't work or work partly or have side effects. Side effects are produced by a dualistic thought system which is not operating from a mind of wholeness. When the ego is coming up with a magical prescription, it is going to have both positive and negative effects. That is because it is based in a thought system of separation. Even food - the perfect diet - is a myth, because all food is an attempted magical attack.

"I am sustained by the love of God" is literal. 100%. Insert the word "only".

We need to recognize that we're operating in the ego and are attempting to heal through the attack of making illusions real, and that our main tool (weapon) is aligning truth with the untrue. Mistaking sickness for reality. Mistaking disease for health. Mistaking the appearance of sickness for something which cannot be reversed or undone - which is the idea of sin. We need to see and notice ourselves ACCEPTING that an accurate diagnosis of disease, even if it seems to be completely convincing and backed up by evidence and proven and true, IT IS STLL NOT THE TRUTH. It is the ego's truth.

"Only love is real" - ACIM

"Only the truth is true" -ACIM

What we then need to do is open up to GOD'S WAY OF HEALING, which is divine health. And this will appear to the ego's of the world to be supernatural. Beyond the ways of the ego. Ultra-natural. God's way of healing does not look at the problem in fine detail and terrify people with it and then shock them with it and then tell them to suck on a pill. God's way of healing is to recognize that the person IS NOT REALLY SICK, and to NOT BELIEVE in sickness, and to DENY the illusion of sickness any sense of reality at all. This is the absolute OPPOSITE of diagnosis. It is CORRECTION, and correction is true healing.

God's way of healing is to affirm, enforce, express and extend, God's natural order, divine health and truth. It is to affirm what is really true about a person, and to focus on that, even if it is not what appears to be how they are currently expressing themselves. Even if it is in the face of sickness or disease or death. That stuff is NOT TRUTH. Even the most convincing ego lie of all - that someone has died, IS NOT TRUTH. We are not meant to just lay down and take it and accept it and go along with it. That's going along with the ego.

We're to RESURRECT our brothers and BRING THEM BACK TO LIFE. Bring them back to God. Bring them back to divine health, invulnerability, strength, power, illumination, awareness, and truth. Real truth, not the ego's fake truth masquerading as "what is happening".

God' truth does not harm. It does not cause fear. It does not focus on what has gone wrong. It does not pay attention to what appears to be happening to a person. It does not VALIDATE sickness. It does not make it real. And it does not take it seriously. It sees that sickness HAS NO POWER OVER GOD. And it recognizes that sickness CANNOT HAPPEN, IS NOT HAPPENING, and WILL NOT HAPPEN, because it is not God's will.

God does not will that people be sick. It is sick to believe that God wants people to be sick for a reason, that sickness is karma, that sickness is asked for, that sickness is true and real or that sickness is natural. God does not will people to be suffering. God does not require people to go through trials and tests and difficult times for special mystrious reasons. God does not allow people difficulties and suffering and make them go through hell. What kind of a love would that be?

God only wills perfect health, immortality, eternal life, invulnerability, innocence, happiness, peace, and abundance. That's it. Anything else is false and is not true. Anything else you need to learn to IGNORE and not believe in and not ALLOW.

All sickness is hereby banned. There is no such thing as "real sickness". Reality and sickness do not go together and should never be associated. To do so is to claim that God is sick. Would you hold your brother in bondage and keep him sick rather than set Him and yourself free?

If your brother is standing before you sick and you stand there and let him be sick, and you do nothing, you are keeping him sick and adding to it. Why do we do this? Why do we just keep tolerating illusions and letting them run our lives? It is time to perform miracles. It is time to stop believing that sickness is true, that it has a place, that it is acceptable, that it is tolerable, that there is nothing we can do about it, and that God created it.

God did not create sickness, therefore sickness is not real, and therefore that person is NOT sick. Any illusion or appearance that they are sick is NOT the truth. I OVERLOOK THEIR SICKNESS (that's forgiveness), and recognize and acknowledge ONLY the True Christ in them, and affirm the absolute perfection of the person, and NOT the shoddy diseased IMAGE that is trying to block the light.

Sickness and disease is not reality. Only love is real.

The ego's problem solving solution is to separate. It will tell you that the way to forgive something and free yourself from suffering at its expense, is to separate from it and/or attack it.

The way you'll separate from it is to deny it, try to believe it's not real, to see it as not happening, attach a label of illusion to it, affirm over and over how God didn't create it, label it as duality, and generally weaponise various parts of ACIM against it to "make it go away."

This is what the course calls "forgiveness to destroy". It demands that either a) the thing itself changes so that you're not affected, or b) you destroy its existence so that you're not affected. Both entail you not really changing yourself, while increasing separation - but disguised as "forgiveness."

The main problem is sin. Sin is a combination of two things: form and meaning. Meaning or interpretation is given to a form and associated with it, but then it seems like the form IS the meaning and you're dealing with ONE thing. One object that is evil, one act that is bad, one person body that is sinning, etc.

The combination of ego interpretation and form, makes it seem like your only solution is to get rid of the form. You have to throw it away in order to free yourself from the meaning. This immediately produces the spiritual bypass in which experience is denied, feelings are repressed, guilt is not looked at, beliefs are not questioned, the world is denied, bodies are denied, and the person tries to "escape" from the world of form.

The insight that HAS to happen for proper forgiveness to take place, is to recognize that "the problem" IS a combination of two things - form and a meaning you're giving it. You have to recognize that YOU are contributing something extra to the thing, you're adding something to it, you're giving it a meaning. And that means that there is an ASPECT of the thing that you can change your mind about.

This then leads to the realisation that if you were to think differently, believe differently, undo guilts, change your attitude, interpret in a lighter higher way, or generally alter YOUR MIND, it would change how you experience the thing. We're not talking here about doing this to make the form of the thing go away, but we're talking bout making the FALSE MEANING go away by REPLACING it with a higher meaning.

What this then does is it acknowledges the continued possible presence of the form without bypassing, without denying it's there, without trying to make it unreal, without attacking it with quotes, without ignoring the body, without numbing the feelings, without pretending you're not unhappy, and without denying the guilt.

Instead of being a "shove this thing into the pit of hell so that it's out of my way", it's more like "I'll change MY contribution to this so that I see it in a better way". This entails an honesty and a willingness to question your beliefs, to consider that your interpretation might be mistaken, to have a little willingness to admit to being wrong, and certainly a willingness to stop denying what you are experiencing. In fact you need to acknowledge the forms that are taking place EVEN MORE, before you can properly move into forgiveness.

For example if you are full of guilt but are in denial about it, you will project that guilt onto forms. And then you'll associate it with the forms. And then you'll think that the form + guilt is actually just "formguilt", like it's locked in as one thing. In order to move away from this delusion, you would have to be willing to stop denying that you feel guilty, stop denying that you believe you are guilty, and look at the guilt with the Holy Spirit and find a better to look at it so that you can overlook it and see your innocence.

As no time are we looking to write off, ignore, relegate, label, attack, dismiss, deny, pretend, or otherwise "make go away" anything physical or emotional or mental. We just want a different ANGLE on it. As soon as we start getting into "I want to make this go away", we're very likely binding meaning with form and are trying to get rid of it all at once. And that means we're going to move into a "reaction to sin", with a counter-measure of forgiveness to destroy. And then we're in a bypass.

When we use high-level lofty truths, the proper use of them is NOT to deny form or experience, or to create another separation or rift between heaven and earth. It's to use it to steer the mind towards truth WITHOUT negating or attacking or denying the illusory world. If there is any hint of "separate from it" in your forgiving, you're got some ego in there.

For example if you say "there is no world" and you're using that to try to write off the world and make it go away, that's a spiritual bypass and an attack. If you are saying it with the purpose of affirming your true identity and increasing the recognition of what the world IS, that's a proper use of it. There's a subtle difference there, but it's also huge.

If we say for example "I am not a body" the purpose isn't to destroy the body or make bodies go away. The purpose should be to affirm your identification with spirit and shift your identification away from the body. This isn't to be used as a statement with a hidden meaning of "bodies aren't real" or "bodies don't exist." Because the truth is that you DO believe very strongly that bodies exist. Your aim is to dis-identify from them not destroy them and not see them, at least not until much much later when you're ready for that.

We have to therefore always be careful to check whether how we're USING the course is using denial properly. If we've got some "make it go away" vibes in there, we're introducing some ego. If we're weaponising statements in order to "defend against", we're got some ego in there. If we're trying to say I am immortal spirit in an effort to get rid of the body and shut it out, that's a huge bypass.

Overall, the best way to avoid bypassing is to adopt an attitude that you are in this world, in this body, and you will remain in this world in this body, even when you are very close to awakening. An attitude that you will find peace even here in this world, and not initially attempt to escape the world in order to find it.

An attitude that you will repurpose and re-use the body and express the love of God through it to others here in this world while you have it. That you'll use the body for teaching and healing, rather than trying to not have a body at all.

That instead of trying to attack the world away, you'll find a way to forgive it and arrive at the forgiven world, seen here in a body with christ vision. An attitude that you will STAY AND HELP, rather than trying to "escape from hell", that you will be a healer and a teacher of God and bring light INTO this world. To be the light of the world!

As soon as the course is being used in an effort to escape from the world, you're going to go into a spiritual bypass. As soon as you're trying to write the world off, get rid of the body, demonise death, repress feelings, deny suffering, or make the whole of spacetime out to be some defective sinful thing that you want nothing to do with, you're going to be bypassing.

This bypass results in escaping into the intellect, using very lofty level 1 statements to try to "write off" the world and the body, using non-duality ideas to invalidate everything you experience, makes you sacrifice and control and limit everything you do including anything you enjoy, produces a cold dismissive attitude of rejection, develops a sense of total separation between heaven and earth, and generally increases the ego.

Jesus suggests to avoid this "top down" sort of approach where we just try to hammer high truths into our minds or force ourselves to believe things. We're meant instead to work from the bottom up, from where we are at now, without denial of experience or feelings or suffering, and work with whatever we're open to as the next step, to question our current beliefs and consider a better way to look at things. So that we can work our way up from the bottom, instead of pretending to sit on the mountain-top hurling down judgements.

"And as a man, I did not attempt to counteract error with knowledge, so much as to CORRECT error from the bottom up."

"True denial is a very powerful protective device. You can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you. This kind of denial is NOT a concealment device, but a correction device. The "Right Mind" of the mentally healthy DEPENDS on it."

"Fail not in your function of loving in a loveless place, made out of darkness and deceit, for thus are darkness and deception UNdone."

"When I said "I am come as a light into the world," I surely came to share this light with you."

"I am the light of the world. That is my only function. That is why I am here."

Yesterday was quite a breakthrough. After making a video about immortality and writing a long post about how fear is self attack, Holy Spirit invited me to "practice" the ideas during a visit to a doctor. Usually at these visits (for another person) I pick up all kinds of anxiety and have reactions and fear thoughts.

So what I did was, remembered that every single fearful thought is in fact my attempt to attack myself, and attack others. Every fear thought is actually me trying to undermine my immortality. Every fearful idea or response, whether it's mine or not, is an attempt to get rid of, push away, attack, myself and others.

So as I sat there, and as fear thoughts started popping in, I instantly saw.... hey, that's me attacking myself. That's me trying to attack. And it completely diffused the thought in a split-second, made it disappear, and didn't allow it to "progress" or linger. I felt empowered because I realized that I was doing all of this fearing TO MYSELF, and I did not have to do that. It turned out to be the calmest, easiest, most relaxed visit ever. Total success.

Because you see, while I think that fear is "just fear" and it's justified or caused by external things, I'm not really being aware of what's happening. If I reframe it that fear is actually an attempt to attack (e.g. my attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability, and fear is an attack thought), then I'm much more compelled to not do that.

I mean, if you realize that fear is actually you attacking, yourself and others, and you don't want to attack yourself or others, perhaps even because you would feel guilty about doing so, and if you realize that your fearing is you attacking, then you become motivated in quite a different way. It's now about not wanting to be a murderous asshole towards yourself and others, instead of it seeming to be about you being just some victim that is entirely affected by others doing stuff to YOU, and not the other way around. When you are afraid, YOU are the one doing the attacking!

So it's a complete reversal of cause and effect. It acknowledges that fear is coming OUT of you, towards the situation, towards other people, and NOT that the fear is being caused from the outside in. And that really is the secret of salvation. Because it then suddenly becomes starkly obvious that you are doing the fear to yourself. You are literally attacking your invulnerability with your fearful thought. You are trying to undermine, weaken, overthrow, get rid of, diminish or destroy your immortality. And you don't want to do that.

The reframing of fear as "attack coming from me" is very very useful as a tool. Because it has truth in it. Fear actually IS coming from you. It IS your attempt to separate. It's your attempt to push things away (which is attack/murder). It's your attempt to stop things (which is attack/murder). It's your attempt to 'kill off' the thing that you perceive as a threat.

All of the sense you have that you are "afraid of" something and "want it to go away" or "want it to stop", if you look at it, is really you trying to destroy it. You want to get rid of it. That's murderous thinking. You want it to end. That's an attempt to end life. Resistance isn't passive, or a defense, it's an attack. And similarly, "if I defend myself I am attacked". Fear seems like a defense, a protective mechanism. It's not, it's totally a weapon.

And in fact you will hear stories from some people as to how 'fearing' caused someone else to suffer. How being anxious and doubtful and uncertain and concerned and worrying about someone, actually sends nasty psychic attack vibes to them. These kind of thoughts are actually attacks. They're attempts to picture someone as weak and suffering and vulnerable and threatened. It's a belief that there's something wrong with them, they're sinful, they're capable of being hurt, and this "fake concern" is entirely an ego thing. A weapon of attack disguised as "caring".

The opposite of being concerned about someone and telling them "be careful you don't...." or "try not to"... etc... is to EMPOWER them, to support their integrity and strength, to affirm why they are confident and fearless and will prevail. To focus on their strength, not their potential weakness. That's empowering, and it's totally the opposite of what can pass for "caring" in the form of worries and fears and "concerns". Concern is fear, full stop. Concern is seriousness. Seriousness is attack. And fear is an attempt NOT to acknowledge someone's immortality, but to deny it and make the person weak.

It's very eye opening. The way I felt lighter, brighter, stronger, fearless, and more tranquil after nipping all these self-attack fear thoughts in the bud, was a reward in itself. Definitely something to keep applying. I had like 10 fear-driven attack thoughts before breakfast this morning. I had to re-frame every one of them as attempts to attack myself, and to stop doing so. I had no idea just how many of my thoughts are attack thoughts. It seems that almost all of them are driven by fear. And every one of them is my attempt to prove I am not immortal.

A couple of days ago, I rubbed my eyes a bit too much and triggered some swelling. Maybe a small blood vessel was broken or something. My upper eyelid swelled up and was red and sore and uncomfortable all day.

I at first wasn't sure whether to try to perform some kind of miracle on it or not. I knew that if I were to "fight it" I would be making it real and making a drama about it, which wouldn't help. At first that made me feel like I had to just accept it and live with it.

But part of me also wondered, what is it that stops me from accepting a complete and total healing instantaneously right now? Why should I tolerate this? How can I accept it and have it disappear as well?

So then I went to Holy Spirit. I asked, should I do something about this?

He said no.

But I had this sense that, I hadn't asked the right question. I indeed needed to DO nothing in the truest sense that, really, this thing had not really happened. But this also keyed me in to realize that, I needed to believe that it had not happened in order to truly embody the need to do nothing.

So I set about cancelling it by collapsing every belief and sense of truth about what had caused it. I told myself plainly that it did not exist, was not there, was already healed, there was no swelling, no soreness, no discomfort, no damage.

I undid all belief in the various causes that I'd convinced myself of such as "because I rubbed it" or "too many tears" or "didn't want to see something" or that issues about certain people were responsible.

When there were no more imagined "reasons why" it should be there, I really got into the sense that it is gone already and did not exist at all. This is an important point because we need to assert the state that we choose to manifest right now, not something off in the future. It's like painting a new picture of what you believe is real now - a vision of divine health and present happiness - rather than in any way accepting that sickness still exists.

So as part of that, I started to affirm gratitude to God that He had already healed this, that it was already resolved, already undone, had already disappeared, and that there was now a completely restored and healed eyelid free from all problems.

This was when I think Holy Spirit stepped in and suddenly I started with the energetic shaking. But also something 'new' happened, right after I thanked God for having healed it already.

Thanking God for healing in effect invites the receiving of healing while simultaneously affirming that the problem is gone, which is the proper mental "direction" for allowing God to extend and flow. God works in the now and in the awareness that the problem is solved already, so we need to learn to shine "thank you that it is healed already" (acknowledgement of receipt) rather than "please heal it because it's not healed".

Note that in the bible there is a phrase about asking, and that if you believe you have received it, you shall have it. The believing it is received, through thanks to God, and therefore acknowledgement of its PRESENCE, is the key to miracles flowing.

The area in question suddenly was filled with what I can only describe as an extremely high "heat", so hot and intense that I wondered for a moment if something had burst or become worse. It was very intensely focused right in the middle spot where this issue was located. It seemed to cover an area no more than a couple of millimeters, and held there in one spot.

I just observed it for what seemed like maybe 20 seconds or more. It didn't move or change. It was just there. It seemed hotter than any physical heat you could experience. Yet it didn't burn and was not uncomfortable at all. It was not pain. It almost felt like an intense presence, hard to ignore. Like some kind of "liquid fire".

I've heard some Christian healers etc talking about Holy Fire and this idea that Holy Spirit can bring some kind of intense healing "fire" from heaven or something, which heals stuff. I am presuming this was my first encounter with it.

I then relaxed and eventually went to sleep. I could already tell even then, that it was much less sore, I couldn't barely feel it anymore, and it was much more comfortable. This morning the problem has almost disappeared. It looks and feels a lot better.

Sometimes I am grateful for little, relatively minor physical issues, because they can present good opportunities for practicing miracle-working and healing. They indeed are lessons when used appropriately.

When a situation presents itself, on a physical level, with signs and symptoms and effects that you can see and touch, it seems to be real to you. If you do not overlook it, they form evidence and proof that something seems to be going wrong. On the basis of this you can't help but go into fear as a logical consequence. If the problem is real, you should be concerned.

What then happens is you'll start going into the "I have to do something about it" mode. This compulsion will arise as a natural logical consequence, following on from the belief that the problem is real. If it's real, it really needs solving. If it's real, it's seen as a real threat, calling for a real solution.

Before you know it, you'll be launching into a tirade of all the things that you thin should happen, need to happen, should be done, that other people should be doing, etc, in order to "save" the situation. And this will take the form of what appears to be genuine concern, caring, wanting to help, trying to fix, compelling others to act, trying to get something to be done about it, a sense or urgency and demand and even anger in the name of getting someone to solve it.

While on the surface this will look and feel like some fervent effort to help, and even if it might bring what many would consider forms of assistance and magical solutions that many would consider a resolution, this performance of drama and urgency is heavily laden with attack. If a person were totally fine and nothing were going wrong, and you were expressing these compulsions toward and about them, it would be attacking their invulnerability.

Claiming "something seriously needs to be done about it" relies entirely on the strong belief that there is attack, there is weakness, there is compromise and suffering. You can't have these kind of thoughts without buying into the belief in these things. And the belief in these things IS a form of attack. It contributes to supporting the notion that the problem exists, and you can't be doing that if you are trying to make it go away.

If I say, ok, someone needs to do something about this right now because there's really a major problem, then mixed in with what seems like selfless helpful attitudes is a whole array of undermining, making real, believing in suffering, giving power away, energizing the problem, holding it in a space of attack, and just generally having a negative fearful attitude about it. And fear, even if it seems to be an experience of being under attack, is itself a form of attack.

While it's seemingly true that a person might really "need help", at least on a physical level, through some magical means, and that this help might indeed seem to help the situation, there is also the fact that this help is in part harmful. And it will always have side effects to prove it. These side effects come from the fact that fear is a form of attack, and concern for physical appearances is actually an attempt to reinforce them, making them worse. The person trying to "save" with the ego is actually against salvation.

There is alternative way to help and to save, and it moves the mind and perception in the direction of true healing. Not just the illusion of healing but actual miraculous support. And for this, the entire ego mechanic of making the problem real and coming from fear and urgency has to be let go. It has to be recognized as fake help, a reaction based on the assumption that the problem is real. As fear turns to anger and insistence, it becomes murderous.

It's better that we move into true forgiveness, where we withdraw belief in the problem, we stop fearing by stopping believing that there is even a real problem happening, we move into a mindset of recognizing the person's wholeness and health, we get our mind out of the gutter of ego temptation, we affirm what is really true about them beyond appearances, step back and allow the Holy Spirit to heal, and dismantle the artificial forms of salvation that were making the problem worse.

In this we undo, take away, cancel, reverse, disbelieve, disempower, disappear, vanish and generally make non-existent the problem. There is no real problem. There is no real suffering. There is nothing real going on here that calls for serious reactions and actions. This stepping back has a power in it far greater and able to actually heal and correct the signs and symptoms and effects, than the measly magical efforts that were an attempt to extend fear. By NOT supporting the existence of the situation, you weaken it and move it towards undoing.

We either get to simply react to what appears to be happening, as though it were dreamed by someone else. Or we get to express God's Power and assert what IS true and make it so. We are the dreamer of the dream. We can change what we choose to occur in the dream. The power of decision is your own. Choosing what must be is far more powerful than reacting to what appears to have come from an alien will. Paradoxically it's by withholding the ego's outward reactions that your inner light intensifies and shines forth to correct all ills. By not trying to fix, you can truly save.

Everyone is immortal and cannot die. So anything suggesting otherwise MUST be an illusion and not a reality. Any sign or symptom MUST be a disguise, a lie, a mistake and is correctable. There can be no suffering in God because it's not God's will that you suffer. Only the truth is true and nothing else is true.

If you are going to pray for someone, you’ll need to first discern what the problem really is.

The problem is NOT what is happening to the person, what they perceive as happening to them, or what your own ego says is the problem.

This means you need to forgive first, come to your senses, and *recognize* what the illusions are.

It’s actually always an ILLUSION that anyone is under attack by anyone other than themselves!

So in this sense, it is then pointless to pray e.g. that someone receives money, or that someone stop being hurt by someone, or someone gets along with their boss, or whatever.

The only meaningful prayer, perhaps, is one which aligns itself with God’s Will. That means, the prayer ACKNOWLEDGES the TRUTH about the person, not what is FALSE about them!

Just as forgiveness does not "make errors real" and THEN attempts to undo them, which cannot work, our prayers should also be forgiving. They should not fall for the ego’s tricks or make us believe the victim’s own interpretation of what is happening.

If someone asks you to pray for them, and then gives the reasons "why", which will entail all the perceived justifications for why they are in danger or under attack or suffering "against their will", take their prayer request and by all means pray, but do not pray for what the person believes is the problem.

Just as when you forgive, you need to learn to UNDO the belief that problems are real at all, withdraw belief that sin is real, and NOT believe that sickness and suffering are real, so too this needs to be incorporated into praying.

If you pray "with forgiveness", then you are praying with the power of God, and this CAN produce results because you’re now speaking God’s language of TRUTH. But if you fall for the ego traps and dramas and then use that as the reason to pray, praying for those "real" dramas to stop, it will not work.

Your prayers must ASCEND above the battlefield, above the ego’s lies, above even the illusion that someone is being attacked by a will OTHER than their own.

All attack is SELF ATTACK. The person needing praying for needs to stop attacking themselves! The prayer then should be in support of what is TRUE about the person, acknowledging and being thankful for that, as a way to diffuse the ego’s bullshit about the situation, and then to pray that the person themselves are lifted up into TRUTH, to join in truth, so that THEY stop attacking themselves.

It is therefore helpful to pray that a person stop believing they are vulnerable, to help them to recognize how loved they are, to ask that their mind be clarified, to ask for healing and to remind the person how loved and safe they are. It is helpful to ask for the person to be uplifted and awakened and made conscious and come back to their senses - to truth. It is helpful to send them love. And it is helpful to ask that they be helped by God to RECOGNIZE their own invulnerability, strength, power, certainty and fearlessness.

It is really self-attack that people need prayers about. Their failure to recognize the truth about themselves IS causing them to make theirown life a mess. Their unconsciousness is producing projected attacks. Their resistance against truth is causing problems and dramas.

No-one especially needs to be "saved" from apparently completely separate unfair attackers who come out of the blue for no reason. No one dies without their own consent! The problem is that a person has CONSENTED TO SUFFERING. THEY need help with learning to STOP ATTACKING THEMSELVES. TO stop believing things are true of them which are not true. To remember who they really are.

WE as "prayers" must learn not to be deceived by the ego’s illusions first, including those presented by "those in need". The reason for the prayer must not be an ego reason OR a reaction to an ego way of looking at a situation. If we’re making the problem real, but are saying "prayer words", WE now have a "split mind" and a "split will" and a "split allegiance", and that means we are not going to actually WILL anything with God.

I’ve been trying to remember this myself and to practice it by praying only for the person’s awakening to truth, the recognition of their perfection as Christ, and for them to be healed of the NEED to be prayed for for illusory reasons.

Instead, our prayer is not so much a request about something which needs changing, but moreso an EXTENSION OF GOD, an affirmation of recognition of what is already true, a denial of what is false, and to simply ask that God’s Will (the way that things should be if people weren’t interfering) be expressed. That’s not so much a "new request" as it is a CONTINUATION OF THE TRUTH.

Think about how the person’s HIGHER SELF is. What is true of their higher self, in the highest possible reality of God, THAT is the truth about the person and NOT how they appear. Their body symtoms, their life dramas, etc, are NOT true of them. Affirming what IS true of them, "speaking truth into the situation", is powerful and miraculous. Spoken prayers only posess POWER if they are speaking of what is TRUE IN GOD.

Speak about how God sees the person. Speak about what is only true of them in the most loving way - total innocence, perfect awareness, fearlessness, trust, confidence, happiness, joy, love, worthiness, etc... expressing that is an extension of love, and love heals. You don’t even really need to address the ego junk that is currently showing up. God’s Will is all that needs to be done, ie, you only need affirm and recognize and express what God has already created as TRUTH about the person.

Prayer and forgiveness go hand in hand. To pray with love must be to pray forgivingly. To pray WITH GOD, instead of "to God", is far more powerful than reacting pleadingly to illusions of suffering. Seeing and acknowledging the highest reality of a person is very uplifting.

This is a central teaching in ACIM. The mind projects the body. The mind is *always* responsible for the body's condition. What the mind uses the body FOR (love, or attack) determines the condition the body will show up in, and if the mind CHANGES, the body corresponds to the change instantly whether that means "becoming sick" or "healing". The body has no life, or mind, or will of its own, and cannot become sick or healthy by any cause other than the mind.

The mind is the only thing which can be sick by believing it is a body. And when the mind is sick, it will project a sick body and attack it. A mind riddled with ego will try to kill the body. And a mind which is sane and healed will automatically heal the body. It is impossible for a sane mind to produce or maintain a sick body, and it is impossible for a sick mind to produce or maintain a healthy body.

Healthy mind, healthy body. Sick mind, sick body. It is that simple. TOTALLY sane mind, NO BODY. This is why Jesus emphasizes that the MIND is what needs healing directly and IT will take care of healing the body or projecting a healed body image.

In this teaching, bodies *themselves* do not become sick or well through ANY OTHER CAUSE besides the mind. And therefore "the problem" is the mind, not the body. Fix the mind, and the body MUST return to health through a miracle.

"That the mind can heal the body but the body cannot heal the mind proves the mind must be stronger than the body. EVERY MIRACLE DEMONSTRATES THIS."

Please note: Just because "only the mind can be sick" does NOT MEAN that the body can STAY SICK while the mind is healed!!!! The body's condition is directly COMING FROM the mind's condition at all times.!!!

Here's some quotes.

"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."

"Do not ask Spirit to heal the body. Ask rather that Spirit teach you the right perception of the body."

"The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions that are responsible for the body's condition."

"Sickness is of the mind, and has nothing to do with the body."

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

"A guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, it heals the body."

"The body is not cured. It is merely recognized as what it is."

"Miracles transcend the body. They are sudden shifts into invisibility, away from the bodily level. That is why they heal. "

"They heal because they deny body-identification and affirm spirit-identification. "

"Miracles reawaken the awareness that the spirit, not the body, is the altar of truth. This is the recognition that leads to the healing power of the miracle. "

"All that I do, I do unto myself. If I attack, I suffer. But if I forgive, salvation will be given me. "

"Like any communication medium, the body receives and sends the messages that it is given. It has no feeling for them. All of the feeling with which they are invested is given by the sender and the receiver. "

"It is essential to remember that only the mind can create, and that correction begins at the thought level. Spirit is already perfect and therefore does not require correction. The body does not exist except as a learning device for the mind. "

"Health is the result of relinquishing all attempts to use the body lovelessly."

"Temptation has one lesson it would teach in all its forms wherever it occurs. It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what must die"

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do."

"Now are you freed from this much of the dream; the world is neutral, and the bodies which still seem to move about as separate things NEED NOT BE FEARED. And so they are NOT SICK. "

"The body needs NO healing. But the mind that thinks it IS a body is sick indeed! And it is here that Christ sets forth the remedy. His PURPOSE folds the body in His light, and fills it with the holiness that shines from HIM. And nothing that the body says or does but makes HIM manifest. To those who know Him not it carries Him, in gentleness and love, to heal their minds. Such is the mission that your brother has for YOU. And such it MUST be that YOUR mission is for HIM."

"The body cannot heal, because it cannot MAKE ITSELF SICK. It NEEDS no healing. Its health or sickness depends ENTIRELY on how the mind perceives it, and the purpose that the mind would use it FOR."

"Truth is the ABSENCE of illusion; illusion the ABSENCE of truth. Both cannot BE together, nor perceived in the SAME PLACE. To dedicate yourself to BOTH, is to set up a goal forever impossible to attain. For PART of it is sought through the body, THOUGHT OF as a means for seeking out reality through ATTACK. While the OTHER part would HEAL, and therefore calls upon the mind, and NOT the body. The INEVITABLE compromise is the belief that the BODY must be healed, and NOT the mind."

"Grace is not given to a BODY, but to a MIND. And the mind that RECEIVES it, looks INSTANTLY beyond the body, and sees the holy place where IT was healed."

A desire to affirm what is true or spiritual or more positive, can actually be a form of denial.

What you are actually doing is you are trying to make the bad stuff go away, not by its proper undoing, but by glossing over it, replacing it, trying to create an illusion of peace or happiness, or trying to attack it with images of something you prefer.

Years ago this was my only strategy to deal with long-term unhappiness - to try to pull myself out of the mud temporarily and yearn toward the light and try to be positive and look on the bright side and act as if it wasn't there. And then it pulled me right back into it, because I was being a spiritual ego. I was in denial and using denial to try to make stuff go away rather than dealing with it.

So if you are thinking that you just need to repeat what the Course says, or say your favorite quotes, or use certain magical phrases, in an attempt to "deal with" the problem, what you are doing isn't so much correctional as it is a reaction and a way to try to make the bad stuff go away.

It is not our job to make bad stuff go away. This was an ego strategy and it is the ego's attempt at being spiritual. It will try to cover up bad stuff with a glossy surface layer, painting pretty pictures and having positive thoughts and trying to strive towards a happy-go-lucky attitude, all the while keeping depression and self hatred and thoughts of suicide buried underneath.

Dark shit is not healed this way. It doesn't go away, it merely goes out of awareness. The ego's strategy for dealing with anything has always been to make stuff go out of awareness, in an attempt to create the illusion that it no longer exists. This is how it "got rid of God". This is how it denied sin and covered it up with fake guilt instead of undoing it.

This is how it turns guilt into fear and fear into punishment and punishment into death. It uses a form of denial and replaces it with something which looks, on the surface, to be something initially better or more promising or which creates an illusion of things having improved.

But all this does is KEEP the underlying belief, does not correct anything, and in fact makes things worse, because now you have a solid belief in sin covered over with a nice layer of fake innocence, so now you have two layers of problems.

Don't think that denial only looks like denial. Denial takes on whatever form is necessary in order TO deny the truth, and so it is always deceptive in its appearance. It can look like salvation. It can look like peace and light. It can look like becoming more spiritual or being happier. It is the ego's coping mechanism for trying to "deal with" the underling problem in a way which DOES NOT REALLY WORK, but which SEEMS to work.

So if you are trying to combat the bad stuff with quotes and sayings and phrases as if to say these things is getting your mind to believe them more, you are not really directly tackling the problem. You are not looking at the problem squarely and asking yourself, is this even true? Is it even real? Why am I even believing this in the first place? Just assuming it is true and then using denial to make it go away, does not work. At all. Ever.

We come to the course with the ego, and that means we come to it with the ego fully functional in its efforts to cope with life and to manage what it thinks are problems. Its mechanisms for doing this need to be uprooted. If you have always tried to be light and positive and happy while burying your belief in sin and guilt, then you're going to be in for a surprise when someday that 'body of pain' erupts in your mind and cannot be ignored.

When something happens or someone seems to upset us or something goes wrong, if our response to this is to quote course at it or try to be positive or to "see it a different way" (ie see only the good in it, even though we still believe it's happening), then we are using the ego to do the course and are in denial.

Denying what we've already made real does not undo it and this is not forgiveness. Forgiveness is willing to look directly at the dark shit, with truth and light, and examining what it is made of, where it came from, whether there is any real truth or reality to it, and upon recognizing that it is FALSE, letting it go, rather than hiding it.

If your bath is overflowing and there is water all over the floor and it's starting to leak through the floorboards and go all over the place, the solution is not to fetch a magical mop and bucket or to throw down some towels to soak up the water, or to just shut the door and deal with it later. It's to turn off the fricking tap! The problem must be addressed at its CAUSE, its SOURCE, not in terms of its effects or things further down the line.

This is why we have to QUESTION EVERY ASSUMPTION about the ego or about what's seeming to happen. To question even whether it is even really happening at all. To question whether sin is even POSSIBLE, yet alone whether someone sinned. Accepting anything of the ego as a "given" is a mistake, and all of the reactionary band-aids that you use to try to cope with the "effects" of those "real causes" are not going to work. The only thing that will work is to correct the problem at its source by learning to recognize what it is and what it is not.