Every time you believe you are attacking someone else and not yourself, you are attacking yourself indirectly.

Your attack is always self-attack. Your attack is never an attack on someone else at all.

If they were Christ, they would exhibit no symptoms to prove or demonstrate that your attempted attack did anything to them.

And this would show you, that even as you believe you are attacking Christ, it is having no effect, so the only one receiving effects is YOU.

You are really just attacking yourself. All of the rest of your denial of this fact is your attempt to pretend that you don't hate yourself.

Your only problem is your self separation, your self attack, what you are doing to yourself, and is the only problem that needs correcting.

Fix your belief that you are really sinful and guilty and all of your other problems will disappear. This belief is an attack on yourself, by yourself, and all the ways it gets repressed and projected doesn't undo that fact.

Projection and scapegoating is just denial. You're denying that YOU believe that YOU are sinful. And nobody else is going to be able to undo that for you if you are not willing to look at that fact.

You need a little willingness to look WITH Holy Spirit, upon this sin, to recognize that IN LIGHT, it does not really exist, it is NOT true about you, and it is not REAL. There is no real sin. What if you looked within and saw there was no real sin? You would recognize your innocence and accept the atonement.

Your entire war with the world is not the problem at all. That's just a projection of your war with yourself. It all boils down to this. YOU need forgiveness to undo YOUR belief that YOU are a sinner.

Undo that and it will undo the world.

Unless we are in heaven with God right now, and only that, and have relinquished all of the ego and its world, we are in a state of DEATH right now. Fictional death yes, but still death.

This is why we need RESURRECTION. Resurrection wouldn’t even be called for if we were already ALIVE. Resurrection means to BRING BACK TO LIFE from a state of death, aka "raising the dead".

What you think is life in this world (earth) is not life. It is death. People are already dead. Bodies are already walking around dead. There are degrees of death, it seems, but actually even a newborn baby is *already in death*. ALL BODIES ARE FORMS OF DEATH.

We do not recognize what death is, because we are deluded by the ego’s illusions about what is life. It has attempted to make an ILLUSION OF LIFE from death.

This entire universe is a dream of death. We are not living here. There are no life forms here. There are only forms of death. That is why we should not WANT this world.

If we do not recognize the LIE the ego has made, to try to suggest that this universe contains LIFE, then we will be deluded and deceived and will buy into this illusion. We will think our body is life or we are living. We are not. This world is not a place of living.

We will then start to think that parts of this world are more alive than others, that there are life forms, that there is "nature", that the little cute puppies and kittens are "alive". This is not life. These are just IMAGES the ego made as SUBSTITUTES FOR ETERNAL LIFE.

Mortal life is not life. It’s an idea of dying. The world is RUN by laws of death, not laws of life, or laws of life and death. Just death. But if we do not recognize it AS death, we are going to think, we’re already alive and therefore DO NOT NEED RESURRECTION. And so we will KEEP DEATH by keeping the ILLUSION OF LIFE, and WILL END UP IN THE GROUND!!

We do not have to be like this. God has a creation for us to live in, our HOME, in heaven, where there is REAL LIFE. It is a "place" (state) of perfect joy, peace, love, happiness, eternal safety, completely harmlessness, innocence, and it is 100% ALIVE! And you are part of that! It’s the only reality. This world is NOTHING in comparison.

We need resurrection beacuse we are mostly dead and heading for death. BUT we know, death is illusion, so NOTHING TO FEAR OR HAVE A REACTION ABOUT ;-) .... but we do need to still choose God again. Or rather, stop being in denial that we DO HAVE eternal life already and can never die.

Resurrection restores life where there was death. Raising the dead is NEEDED in this world to REVERSE SIN AND DEATH in all ways imaginable, both in mind and in body. This is why Jesus speaks of miracles as drops of healing rain which bring signs of live back to a dead world.

"The world was made as an attack on God….Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him. (W-pII.3:2:1, 4)

"There is another Maker of the world, the simultaneous Corrector of the mad belief that anything could be established and maintained without some link that kept it still within the laws of God. (T-25.III.4:1)

"There is another purpose in the world that error made, because it has another Maker Who can reconcile its goal with His Creator's purpose. (T-25.III.5:1)"

What this means as I currently understand it, is that "the world you made" ie we attempted to MAKE this physical universe, wasn't quite fully 100% made, because that would mean "permanent creation". It was in a sense "almost fully made". And as the first quote says, no matter how extremely we tried to separate from God, we couldn't QUITE separate all the way. So even this dream world still has to have a LITTLE bit of truth woven through it.

That truth is the Holy Spirit's atonement plan, which you could also think of as the forgiven world - sort of, a subtle aspect of this world which can be seen as lovely because it still in a way has a little bit of God to it.

We're also told Holy Spirit was the corrector of the mad belief. The belief was the idea that we could make something WITHOUT it being part of God's laws. We failed to accomplish that. God's laws had to be upheld.

Elsewhere it says that even the idea of separation had to be shared. And that the mind had to project "an empty shell" in order to project its ideas onto it... that the son of God can't create "nothing", it had to create an illusion of emptiness first and the pretend it was something.

This doesn't mean God created the world, because it hasn't really been created. Not all the way. It's been dreamed of. There is a "spacetime belief". But Holy Spirit couldn't be totally shut out from the mind and so is "woven into" this belief in order that the insane part of mind is guaranteed to still be retained within God's creation.

This is kind of a complicated and subtle topic open to speculation and I'm not sure how useful it is, but... kind of interesting.

Miracle principle 15: "Prayer is the medium of miracles. It is a means of communication of the created with the Creator. Through prayer love is received, and through miracles love is expressed."

If you want to be performing miracles, you will need to understand how to pray.

Notice in this principle that prayer is RECEIVING. This seems contrary to how we usually think of prayer as some kind of asking, petitioning, announcing how we lack and want something, or asking as though it is not already given. You can ask all you want but if you're not willing to RECEIVE IT, how is the result going to come?

Prayer AS receiving correlates to the truth that God has already fully given all of Himself.

Before the separation, there was no need for prayer or miracles. All was shared. You had everything you need. It was only because you've attempted to DENY God, to stop sharing, to stop receiving and to be unwilling to receive His love, that you're not in a constantly miraculous state.

It's not that God is not giving miracles, it's that we're not receiving them. We're stopping them all the time with our ego. We don't want what God offers.

When you pray, you need to be clear about the fact that it's not God who has the problem. God isn't in need of forgiveness. God isn't waiting to decide what to do about something. He's already finished. He is always being miraculously loving. It's us who are not willing to accept or receive what God would have us have.

So don't pray asking for God to do something, because He's already done it. Prayer is supposed to be a receiving of God, a receiving of the miracle, an openness to accept the TRUTH that correlates with God, and a willingness to have love be EXPRESSED.

God is already doing the expressing.

As Jesus tells us in the Course, we are to demonstrate that we truly believe God's truth, by showing up even PHYSICALLY with demonstrations of it being true, even in symbolic form. Sick bodies demonstrate that you do not really believe and have not really received God's miracle. They demonstrate a continued belief in attack and a willingness to keep suffering to PROVE that someone is guilty. Sickness is an unwillingness to receive the miracle fully.

We need to learn how to fully receive and allow the miracle to express itself, to allow God's expression to go unhindered.

Jesus asks us to be willing to demonstrate that what our brother attempted to do to us has had NO EFFECTS.

This means that if someone is against you or argues or attacks you, if you are experiencing effects, two things are happening:

1) The situation is neutral but you are choosing to CREATE effects yourself but are blaming the cause of those effects on the other person.

2) You are maintaining those effects in order to prove that the other person is wrong.

So if I feel hurt and upset about something someone said or did, I'm trying to prove that they have done something real to me... that its had real consequences... and therefore that person is a sinner. I'm not just feeling hurt because they hurt me, I'm feeling hurt because I have a secret agenda of PROVING that that person is wrong by SHOWING that it has done something to me. I'm actually creating symptoms within my own mind in order to have evidence that 'they did it' and therefore they can be skapegoated.

So I find myself wondering... what if I chose to completely IGNORE what the person did and to choose to remain in innocence and to see them as innocent, and completely DENY the situation any 'power' over me to cause me or impel me to create effects within myself? What if I just remain calm and neutral and unaffected? What if I can deliberately CHOOSE invulnerability? After all, I can't put effects of vulnerability into my own self (for the purpose of skapegoating and blame) without it undermining my invulnerability, but if I choose NOT to put effects into myself, surely this ESTABLISHES my invulnerability? :-D AND it establishes the invulnerability of the other person!

It's definitely something to practice and something I am looking to trying to do more often, because I definitely know that my normal mode of function is 'have a reaction'. We need to break that pattern and know that we can choose not to participate in the ego's assertions that something has gone wrong. This is a choice to heal.

Remember (note to self).... "if I defend myself, I am attacked".

In other words, if I put effects into myself and blame the cause of it on someone else, I am trying to defend myself by attacking myself and the other person. What would it be like if we could walk around being completely invulnerable to everything by not choosing to create effects from anything?

In God, who is cause, He created Christ, who is Effect. Or "Father" created "Son".

At the "separation", the Son attempted to separate from the Father, thereby introducing a separation between Cause and Effect.

Cause and Effect in Heaven are ONE, unified and completely immediately intertwined. But after separation, a "distance" or "gap" arose (illusion of course) between them, suggesting that Cause had been robbed of its ability to produce effects, and that the effects had not been caused by God.

Essentially this means two things. It means God seemed then to not create the Son, making an illusion that God’s will has been stopped (ie the Son has power over God). And then additionally, that the Son has no Father and therefore has to INVENT a false God as a substitute.

What also then happens is, now that there’s a gap between cause and effect, it *seems* as though somehow the "effects" coming from a cause are separated off from the cause. Instead of them being One, they are cut off from each other.

This sets up the entire ego thought system which believes and perceives that you can cause something WITHOUT experiencing the effects. And this further leads to the belief that an external cause (aka God, turned into an evil God) can do things to make you an effect against your will.

The more that your belief in separation between cause and effect increases, the more you become an unconscious victim, aka dead. It heightens your false perception that "causes outside of you" are producing effects inside of you. This makes you suffer and makes you a victim in every way.

If you are "heavily steeped in ego", strongly projecting sin (cause), and are believing that stuff applies to others that does not apply to you or vice versa, or that you can cause effects in others without those effects being in you and vice versa, then you have belief that Cause (Father) is separate from Effect (Son). To the degree that you believe this, you will experience an intensified sense of *separation*, denial, disassociation, war, and unconsciousness.

As we apply forgiveness, we undo the belief in separation by recognizing that what we thought applied "separately" to others but not to ourselves, is actually our attitude about ourselves. What we thought was their own separate sin, is actually our own sin. What we thought happened against our will, must have been caused by ourselves. It also means learning that you cannot be affected by anyone or anything other than yourself, or against your will, in any way!

When finally cause and effect are reunited, Father and Son are reunited, mind becomes ONE and whole, what applies within applies without, what applies to you applies to the entire Sonship, your innocence is everyone’s innocence, you will see your Self in everyone, and you will know sanity again. It is the end of war. It is peace, and the final release from all forms of self-attack which were masquerading as attack by separate causes. It is the end of death.

Think of an apple. Now think of a knife cutting through the apple. The knife is separation. BOTH sides of the knife will experience the effects of separation. The knife will come between them and attack both of them. The inner and the outer will both suffer.

So sickness, as an implementation of the separation idea, isn't just happening to you. It's happening towards yourself and its happening towards others.

What applies to you applies equally to everyone else. That's the rule of the Holy Spirit's thought system, and the truth of how your mind works.

You cannot attack yourself without attacking others. You cannot separate yourself from the truth without pushing others away, which is an attack.

This is why Jesus explains that when we have sickness in the body, we are using sickness as an attack on our brother. The sick are always accusers. A sick body is a sign of an unhealed mind. And sickness is a device for separating you from everything else through attack upon yourself and others.

Death, as pathetically powerless as it seems to be, is the ultimate form of attack. It's not only an attempt to attack yourself so thoroughly that you completely separate from Life, but is also actually an attempt to attack Life - all life. Those who die are attempting to destroy all of creation. And they are attempting to destroy God. Their insistence that God is dead, which is a vicious attack, causes them to die.

So don't think of sickness as, one person has this sickness and another person doesn't. Sickness comes BETWEEN people. It is a separation device, a wall, a crow bar leveraged in-between what once was whole and joined and connected. It comes as a defense and as an attack. All defenses (against the truth or wholeness) are attacks.

So yes, everyone who is sick right now, is attacking not only themselves and God, but also everyone else. Anyone with a common cold is attempting to destroy themselves and others. This is why many supposed forms of sicknesses are contagious as well - an expression of the idea of attacking not only self but others also.

If you are sick it is because you have gone into isolation which means you have attempted to isolate yourself FROM others, but in so doing, also isolating OTHERS from you. Sickness is always a double-edged sword. It hurts you and it hurts everyone. It is applied to the whole sonship simultaneously.

It may seem in this world that for the most part, the sick are the only ones who suffer, or what can happen to them isn't happening to anyone else. But this isn't true. This is why a joining of minds with your brother can heal sickness because sickness is separation in the mind - separation between separate selves, who really are One.

Your sickness keeps you imprisoned and keeps everyone else imprisoned along with you. I'm not trying to make this a guilt-trip, but we need to recognize it for what it is so that we can be free of it. Self-attack is all-attack. Sickness is an attack on everyone.

The separation from God is otherwise described as dissociation, or as I like to spell it - dis-association.

We were associated with our soul, as God created it, in heaven's reality. We believed it was our self, our identity.

The separation from God was an act of trying to dis-identify from the soul, or to deny reality, ie no longer "associate with" spirit.

This dis-association, trying not to be what we are, produced a counter-attempt to associate WITH ... something that we are not.

As such, when all forms arose from projection, our minds attempted to associate WITH forms, of any kind. To associate with anything not of God, anything outside of heaven, anything which would keep you away from associating with your real self.

So then you attempt to associate with, bind with, identify with, be as, or become one with, anything other than what you really are.

This sort of ... holding on process, of associating with false things - the holding on itself, the identifying, the sense or belief that the thing is your self ... is what we call THE EGO.

It's a mind which had previously identified and associated with spirit, which is temporarily stretching itself to try to reject spirit and bind to something not of God, something other than what is true.

So as mind tries to believe you are something you're not, it forms a "sense of self" as though "you are" things opposite to God. And that sense of self we might call ego.

It's a misplaced artificial false sense of self, a collection of parts and pieces, a disjointed incomplete and unstable attempt to be one with a wide range of unreal stuff.

You can identify with thoughts, emotion, mind, body, the world, objects, relationships, other people, events, roles you play, victimhood, war, etc. Anything at all so long as it's not what you really are.

"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."

"The ego IS therefore a confusion in identification, which never had a consistent model, and never developed consistently. It is the distorted product of the misapplication of the laws of God by distorted minds which are misusing their own power."

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

"When you imprison yourself, you are losing sight of your true identification with me and with the Father. Your identification IS with the Father and with the Son."

"Can you be separated from your identification and be at peace? Dissociation is NOT a solution; it is a DELUSION. "

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

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

"Attack is thus the way in which your identification is lost, because, when you attack, you MUST have forgotten what you are."

"Miracles praise God through men. They praise God by honoring his Creations, affirming their perfection. They heal because they deny body-identification and affirm Soul-identification."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To ego, "having a self" seems to be what it's all about. This suggestion that ego is a "self you made" or some kind of a thing.

But this is actually completely backwards.

The ego is actually the idea of the END OF YOURSELF. It is a DENIAL OF SELF. It is an attempt to DISOWN YOURSELF.

What then "looks like" the formation of a fake self, a lying self, a self built from imaginary images, is in fact the opposite of what that illusion suggests.

It's not that the "ego exists" and you have to undo it, thus throwing out all "individuality" along with it.

The ego IS NOT INDIVIDUALITY. The ego is the END OF INDIVIDUALITY, masquerading as the illusion of "self" being created. This is because the Son of God is dreaming that He created Himself, which requires the SUPPRESSION of HIS SELF using denial.

So the ego is not a self. The ego is the ANTITHESIS of self. The ego is ISOLATION away from Self. The ego is the collapsing of identity, the undoing of what God created, and the attempted DESTRUCTION of Self.

So for anyone to say, well, if you wake up from the ego you will no longer have a self... they have not seen through the ego's lie. Waking up means you REGAIN YOURSELF, you RETURN TO YOUR REAL SELF, you RECLAIM your individuality, you RESTORE AWARENESS that you have always existed. The only thing that "ends" is the fiction that you do NOT exist as God created you.

So don't buy this EGO IDEA that waking up or returning to oneness will make "you" cease to exist. That is the EGO TALKING. *IT* will cease to exist, in the sense that, it always was the idea of not existing, and the idea of NOT EXISTING will end, to be replaced with the awareness that YOU DO EXIST.

So this fictional fuck-off idea of "you have no self", masquerading as spirituality, masquerading as nonduality or acceptance of oneness. It is UTTER BULLSHIT. It is an ego-driven lie.

You are NOT going to end when you wake up. YOU are going to WAKE UP to HAVING A SELF. A self which is driven by love, designed by love, and filled with love. A self which wants to SHARE AND EXTEND ITSELF, in order to exist. A self which is REAL and is PART of GOD.

You, who God created, as permanent, to exist forever, as one of His many sons, as part of his sonship, will ALWAYS EXIST, have always existed, and ALREADY HAVE ETERNAL LIFE.

All this other "you'll stop existing" bullshit is EGO FEAR and a device to turn you away from God and deny His creation. That is not spirituality, it is a lie. Getting rid of yourself is suicide and sacrifice!

God created you. God loves you.