I went back and slowly re-read the entire "miracle principles" from a very early urtext version, plus some other sections.

The impression I have of miracles now is different and more cohesive. Whatever our understanding of them is, they must incorporate every single thing Jesus says about them, including the ability to literally move mountains, to heal the sick and raise the dead, and also to correct perception. Here are some key points and new clarity on the subject.

1) Miracles are best understood in a vertical direction. They come down from above and lift upwards, or restore life and reality. "Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from heaven." "performed by those who have more (above) for those who have less (below)". They extend or radiate down into the world from God. They also go out sideways between brothers because brothers are ultimately IN heaven.

2) Every aspect of the "descent" into egotism, separation, degrading reality, becoming insane, unwillingness, unconsciousness, etc which is all an attempt to introduce separation between brother's minds (to split the sonship or divide the Kingdom), to interfere with mind-to-mind communication, is the exact opposite of miracles. Projection is opposite to miracles. Magic is opposite to miracles. Miracles inherently correct level confusion, heal projections, undo magic (which includes sickness), and restores awareness of the truth.

3) Every movement towards restoring communication, reintegrating reality, bringing wholeness to your mind AND your brother's mind, uniting you with your brother, healing relationships, removing separations, all effects resulting from separation and sin (including sickness, illness, suffering, death), and cancelling out the "consequences" of sin, are accomplished by miracles. "Miracles unite you directly with your brother". "The purpose of miracles is to restore reality". "Miracles make brothers one in God" etc. The ultimate aim of miracles is to induce revelation and direct communion with God. This however does not exclude miracles that manipulate forms or move mountains, because mountains are actually also thought-forms in the MIND and are actually BELIEFS which mind can manipulate. "The world IS perception" (in the mind).

4) Miracles originate in the mind of Christ. They require the absence of fear, and an awareness of Christ's presence. Jesus inspires them. While they come FROM the Christ mind, you can be in varying degrees of "miracle mindedness" depending on whether your mind is functioning and responding in an ego-driven way or a love-based way. "Miracles are seen in light" "Miracles reflect an inner awareness of Christ." They are therefore typically requiring quite an advanced state of mind, BUT they also can be performed even by "beginners" who are able to temporarily put fear aside and shift into VERTICAL perception away from the horizontal belief system, which allows them to bring forth a miracle which helps develop "conviction in the ability" by seeing physical appearances change. The ability to make this shift isn't necessarily an act of your own purification but a USE OF the parts of your mind that have already been purified.

5) There are two aspects - miracle-mindedness/readiness, and miracle-working. To be miracle-minded is based on the STATE of your mind. But a mind based on love is not unexpressive or static. It is a mind that extends, gives in order to have, shares, increases, creates. Being miracle-minded/ready emphasizes that you are "ready, willing, and able" to "perform" or "do" miracles. The "action" aspect of miracles should be under Christ control (Jesus) due to the atonement plan and should be "involuntary". You are not supposed to consciously control that part of it yourself, but you ARE responsible for becoming "ready, willing and able".

6) "Miracles are thought-creations". Our mind goes through varying degrees of power to CREATE or project, depending on how much ego there is. We become more able to express creatively as we wake up. The mind can shine INTO and BLESS other minds due to having both been created by the "same spark" of God - being of like kind. Miracles not only unite you with your brother, they also increase your own strength by giving love, and also strengthen your brother. They in a sense "repair" the sense of separation between both of you, increase the level of communication, and therefore UNDO the manifestations of the separation idea (forms of sickness etc). Miracles are tightly associated with CREATION, and therefore are capable of creating. They combine "thought-creation" with belief, in order to produce results, which includes changes to *appearances* - meaning all forms, in a law-defying way (including moving mountains).

7) Miracles are not shifts in perception as such. However they can produce a shift in the perception OF OTHERS. Miracles are inter-personal ACTS. They are something you DO to EXPRESS the state of love that you are. They are an "application" of your holiness, and thus create in the same way that God applies himself to create. Because they can "correct" misperceptions in yourself AND others, they can heal your brother and yourself. They bestow grace and blessing on others. Miracles can correct perception and shift it, but when you yourself "correct thinking" and "change perception" that act itself is not necessarily a miracle. Miracles express from above downwards, changes of mind express from below upwards. You stepping "up" to the miraculous mind can require many steps before you are "high" enough to express "downward" with miracles. In a way though, any movement towards God/truth/love is a step in the right direction. The shifting itself isn't the miracle, the miracle is the love that expresses AFTER the blocks to awareness are removed. Although having said that, when you express a miracle it strengthens you also, increasing your sanity, so....

8) The miracle-mind thought system is totally different to the ego thought system in that it has an omnipresent and holographic nature. This means that the miracle is everywhere. It also means the miracle can express in "a part" of the dream and seem to produce a wide variety of specific results. However all miracles are inherently united and consistent and devoid of any recognition of levels of difficulty or heirarchy or size or any other ego construct. "To God all things are possible." I visualize God as like this ocean of liquid where all aspects are fluidly flowing all over the place and completely defies the entire ego thought system and all of its very rigid, compartmentalizing laws. The miracle-minded are literally miraculous in that they can create anything, can do anything, can heal anything, can produce any changes to any appearance, and there is nothing they cannot do.

9) Miracles collapse time because they introduce sort of a separate "moment" of time in which all of the horizontal laws are defied and a "new state" is directly implemented, instantly, which is almost like taking a tiny clip from "the future" and inserting it into the current timeline "out of the temporal order". Another analogy is a vynil record, as if you suddenly bump the arm and it skips some tracks and resumes playing further along in the song. The interval in-between of the "thousands of years" that were skipped, essentially has collapsed or deleted an entire portion of the timeline. Their purpose IS to collapse time and bring about the end of the need for time. Ultimately they lead to revelation and total wholeness, and then are no longer needed. This is all to do with mind. But this DOES NOT exclude apparent changes to forms, bodies, sickness or death, because all of those things are actually mental states, thought-forms, ideas, images in the mind, which are just as much within the scope of mind-power as anything you would normally consider "inside your mind". You have to realize the entire universe is WITHIN our shared minds, and therefore even physical forms have to be ultimately disappeared and "healed" and "shone away" by our light, in order for the the entire sonship to totally be free from dreaming.

10) Miracles are a maximal service you can render a brother. All expressions of love are maximal. That means they express FROM "total" love, not partial. However, you can be in varying degrees of miracle mindedness depending on how you express or "relate". If in a given situation, you have one possible response which is egotism where you make the problem real and use it for attack etc, and another possible response is that you remain "in love" and affirm the truth of both of you and see your brother as sinless and calling out for love and you "empower" both of you, this is a miracle. You chose to love instead of hate, you chose to express a truthful healing charitable gracious blessing rather than attack.

11) Miracles are also "energizing" in that they give LIFE to others ("all around the signs of life spring up"). They supply a lack. They are given by those who have more to those who have less. Lack is just "lack of love", so by supplying love you bless and remove a curse and energize and shine light onto the "area of separation" which causes it to reintegrate and become whole again. "The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness" because you have to be in a mindset of wholeness (miracle readiness) in order to see your brother's holiness and innocence, which strengthens this in both of you and thus energizes and gives life to both of you. When you heal, therefore, BOTH of you receive healing. Separation isn't a "private idea", it's something that "comes between" like a double-sided sword, and removing this sword restores communication in BOTH directions.

12) Miracles can move mountains and raise the dead. Since both of them are illusions and all forms are illusions, and all illusions are based on separation, the miracle-minded have total power OVER these things, either by bringing life to them and healing them, or by demonstrating this power OVER them by changing appearances. A body returning from death and decay to life, or a mounting moving from left to right, are both "changes to appearance". Miracles change appearances to PROVE and demonstrate that the forms themselves ARE illusions BECAUSE they could be changed, and therefore cannot be real because they are so easily manipulated by the mind. The illusion of objects being physical, heavy, large, or that death is too difficult to undo etc, all these illusions crumble to nothing when they are shown to be changeable.

13) Miracles require faith and trust. Having faith in your brother's innocence even when they show up as guilty/sinful/sick, overcomes/overlooks/forgives their illusions and can shine them away. Your mind CAN enter the mind of another and enlighten it. Also certainty (fearlessness) is required (even if temporarily suspended), because miracles occur as thought-acts which are decisive and committal. You don't have to merely have "strong belief" "of your own", you need to also RELY ON or depend on God, trusting HIS power and strength, and knowing what HE is capable of, so that you have TRUST in the certainty of the outcome and KNOWING that it must occur. This goes beyond your "self" as an individual or separate miracle worker. You can do nothing on your own, but you can work WITH God to co-create. Faith/trust also correlates to belief.

14) Miracles also correlate to acceptance/receiving of atonement. They are expressed through PRAYER, which brings about the active "doing" of miracles, because in the prayer you combine thought and belief and faith (key ingredients that are MUST have's), and ask with the heart (not necessary to use words). This "asking" is almost the same thing as "expressing" or "stating" and "seeing" what change you want to occur, as though it has already happened and has been received. "Believe you have received and you shall have it." Miracles EXPRESS FROM the atonement. You have to accept some atonement to accept some "miracle juice", so that you can give it. That means that in some small way, in some part of you, on some issue, you accepted the truth about you as innocent and loved, rather than condemn yourself with sin. This part of you now has received a miracle or has been restored to a more miracle-oriented way of being, and this now can express to others. In a healed part of you, when confronted with another situation like what happened before, you might now "bless" instead of "see sin", and this IS capable of healing others.

15) Overall it seems miracles are essentially HOW the entire illusion of separation is reversed. In all its way, all its appearances, all its consequences. Every form of suffering, all sickness, death, and also demonstrations of the falseness of the ego's laws. Moving a mountain may well demonstrate and violate laws of physics and weight and size and so on, proving that these are not TRUE, that illusory limitations are not true, and this can bring healing to the mind. Miracles can be teaching devices. They remind you and your brother of what is true about you. The entire "lifting up" of all brothers and the "lifting away" of all forms of separation and the "disappearing" of all suffering and forms and illusions and eventually the universe itself, is "the miracle", which is kind of everywhere and omnipresent and comes from God.

16) You are a miracle. This means that God creates miraculously because God is also miraculous. It's natural to be miraculous. You are miraculous in the sense that anything is possible to the holy, and God who is alive has miraculously created the sonship. To the ego, it should not be possible, but it is. A miracle as a "creative expression of thought" is your natural way of creating in heaven. It's how you express love. It's an extension of yourself and increases joy and overcomes lack and restores BOTH you and the thing you create. When you express miracles or miraculously in the world it similarly follows the same laws of GOD and creates wholeness, healing, health, happiness, freedom, love, perfection, holiness, joy, peace, life.

17) Miracles are super-natural. This means they are totally above the ego's "nature", and fly in the face of everything we think of as "the nature" of this universe. This includes all ego laws and physics and time and space. They express from above the battlefield, from heaven, falling like drops of healing rain on the desert (absence of love) below and supply a lack and bring the dead back to life, raising it up towards resurrection. Miracle workers are like angels or holy beings who step inside a dream of death and start expressing themselves, demonstrating all over the place that nothing here is fixed or limiting or has any power over you at all. As beings of light and immortality and creativity, when we express as this kind of identity (christ-aligned) we totally defy every law of the world and therefore literally produce "miraculous" effects. To the ego, miracles are considered un-natural, but to God they are considered completely natural. There is nothing they cannot do and there is nothing your holiness cannot do. You are UNLIMITED, and the sheer degree of limitation of this ego world is shown to be extremely false by every miracle expression.

18) Being miraculous is your natural inheritance and does not require anyone else to choose to be miraculous. It doesn't "require" a holy relationship. BUT, it can IMPLEMENT a holy relationship due to the fact that it heals the separation between brothers. Jesus as the one who woke up can perform them for anyone, and he inspires all miracles which intercede for your holiness, but in so doing, he also unites you with Himself and the two of your minds join and share love, if you are willing. You still have free will and no-one can force anyone to wake up or be healed if they do not want it or if it would frighten them.

19) If you can grasp how God's mind is omnipresent and this means that all of him is in every location FULLY at the same time, which TOTALLY defies the entire ego world and all its forms of matter and space and time, you can get a better sense of how anything is possible in God. And how, in contrast to that, this world and its laws are set up to be extremely limiting, to suggest no two things share anything, forms are things in their own right, nothing is coming from the mind, mind has no power over anything ("the mind must be stronger than the body, every miracle demonstrates this"), and everything is separated off and compartmentalized into boxes and finite objects. This is SO TOTALLY OPPOSITE to God's nature and the nature of anyone who has access the miracle-working mind or the "attitude of love". Love isn't just a finite thing in a box. It is miraculous, life-giving, spacetime defying, and completely ignores all illusory differences. When the world is PROVEN to be NOT separated out, and NOT disconnected from the mind, and NOT a thing in its own right and can easily be changed by the power of the mind, the true nature of God's UNLIMITEDNESS is revealed.

20) Miracles are what happens when an ego-defying, omnipresent, spatially-defying, time-defying, massively potential, unlimited, whole miraculous mind, comes into contact with the ego illusion of limitation and separateness. You can express them and bestow them everywhere, they are unlimited in number, and all support each other forming a "web" of atonement. You have to realize that all physical objects are part of the MIND, and are thoughts, and are perceptions, and are ideas in the mind. Therefore when mind changes and there are actions of expression of miracle-mindedness, this CAN and DOES also change and manipulate the appearance of physical objects. Separating mind from body is an error in this sense. Mind has power OVER the body. "That the mind can heal the body but the body cannot heal the mind proves the mind must be stronger than the body." Whenever you elect to "be a bit more miraculous" or "be a bit more loving" or "express and stay strong in the truth" or "utilize your creative power" or "bless another" or "repair separation" or "reveal the unreality of an illusion" or "demonstrate that you are not limited" or "join minds with your brother" in any way, you are being miraculous.

THIS IS IMPORTANT!

"Some miracles may seem to be of greater magnitude than others. But remember the first principle of the course; there is no order of difficulty in miracles. In reality you are perfectly unaffected by all expressions of lack of love." - ACIM

Miracle principle 1: "There is no order of difficulty in miracles. One is not "harder" or "bigger" than another. They are all the same. All expressions of love are maximal." - ACIM

In the ego's dream, there is an ILLUSION of a hierarchy of difficulty. That is, forms appear to take on different properties and meanings or different levels of severity. It may seem "easy" to cut an apple, but "hard" to fix a broken leg. It may seem "easy" to walk down a street, but "hard" to teleport yourself to your destination.

The appearance of a given form, and all forms are illusions, dictates what it SEEMS its qualities are, or how much of a challenge it presents, or how difficult it would be to change it.

You will find that in the ego thought system, when something "more serious" happens, you also have a bigger reaction. This is practically automatic, psychologically. For example if someone tells you you have a booger hanging out of your nose, your reaction might be slight embarrassment. But if someone tells you you are terminally ill and will die in a week, your reaction will be horror and terror. Buy does it HAVE to be? Unchecked, the ego will react to the degree it perceives a threat, and you'll find that big problems cause big reactions, only because we're convinced by their appearance or order of difficulty.

These reactions that you have, are directly in proportion to the appearance or illusion of what this "external cause" is capable of doing to you. If the thing seems like a tiny threat, you consider it insignificant and have insignificant reactions. If it seems "life threatening", you consider it to have some kind of profound power, that it's really serious and dangerous, and you subsequently exhibit really strong symptoms or reactions within yourself, or in your body.

BUT ALL OF THESE ARE ILLUSIONS. All of these levels of meaning and significance and severity are illusions. There IS nothing special or important or difficult or harder to change about someone's broken leg, than to get them to wipe their nose. If someone shows up with a broken leg we'd have bigger automatic reactions. We think it's more serious, that it contains more "power" to make bad things happen, and therefore is much more of an opponent, is harder to change, harder to heal, harder to fix. It's not.

We are tasked with learning to change our perception to such a degree that we do not BELIEVE these illusions. When the Course tells us that we've given everything the meaning it has for us, this goes even to the extent of how we perceive and believe that some things in the world are more serious than others or warrant a bigger response. Getting rid of a hurricane is NO MORE DIFFICULT than getting rid of a booger, IF you can recognize clearly - and RECOGNITION is the key here - that the profound ILLUSION of the intense severity of a hurricane IS NOT REAL, IS NOT TRUE, and HAS NO POWER more than a booger on someone's face.

The ego deliberately made illusions of death and destruction, in contrast to illusions of "relative calm", to tempt us to believe that some illusions are worse than others, some should be avoided, some should be kept, and some are preferred. Jesus warns us not to mistake an illusion of peace (absence of "hard levels of difficulty"), for real peace. Similarly we need to learn to completely overlook ie NOT BUY INTO, any suggestion by any FORM - physical bodies, environmental objects etc - that what it is is dictated by HOW IT APPEARS. It is not that. All of those appearances are FALSE!

If we want to become miracle workers, it DOES REQUIRE us to learn NOT to believe in the hierarchy of illusions. And that means, if someone comes along with cancer, we RECOGNIZE that IT IS NOT REAL CANCER, it has nothing true about it, it is not difficult, it is not a "bigger threat", it does not cause more fear, it has literally NOTHING to it any more significant than a puff of air. If we can't see and recognize it this way, we will fall for the illusion of the reversal of cause and effect, disempower ourselves, react with the ego, and FAIL to work a miracle of healing.

We need to so completely collapse our own belief in the STORY of how cancer, heart attacks, diabetes, broken limbs, strokes, organ failure, brain damage etc, are all ILLUSIONS with ABSOLUTELY NO TRUTH TO THEM WHATSOEVER. Not one single aspect of any of these things is true, and every way that they TRY TO TEMPT US TO BELIEVE THEY ARE, is the ego's attempt to tempt us to believe the Son of God is a body which can die. Basically in a word - bullshit.

Miracles CAN heal the sick and raise the dead, literally. They CAN move mountains, literally. They CAN part the sea, literally. And they CAN heal absolutely all forms of sickness, all illusions of separation, and all ways in which problems show up. And this is because to be MIRACLE MINDED you MUST RECOGNIZE illusions for what they are and not be fooled by them, otherwise you WILL believe in a hierarchy of illusions, you will believe in orders of difficulty, and you will therefore incapacitate yourself and be unable to change those forms because you yourself believe they have a special power to RESIST the miracle.

No-ones sickness, no matter how advanced, or how much the person believes in it, or how much they have chosen it, or how much they want to keep it to protect them from the truth, or how much they want to die, NOTHING has power over miracles. There is NO order of difficulty. Not some, not a little, NONE. All illusions are the same illusion. Believed in, tempted by, convinced by, is a state of not being miracle minded. Once you CAN recognize illusions properly and not be FOOLED by them, you WILL be able to change them at will, in an INSTANT, and **EASILY!** Jesus himself said in the course how EASILY these thing can be changed.

Make no mistake, the entire world and all forms and objects and bodies are ILLUSIONS within a MIND which is dreaming them, and it's not just about fixing your own personal perception OF those things or about those things. You need to learn to recognize those things for what they are and not believe in them whatsoever. If you think you are awake and you're still incapable of healing the sick or raising the dead, you probably are not awake all the way. You are still subject to the laws of chaos. And the dream is still telling you where to get off.

Miracles are miracles for a reason. They completely defy ALL of the laws of the ego's world, completely IGNORE all appearances of the severity of problems, and TRANSCEND form entirely. "Miracles are shifts into invisibility, that is why they heal" - meaning they are a movement by mind AWAY from the illusion of form and therefore has power OVER form to change form and "heal" form. Even if that healing is temporary, and even if we are not bodies, and even if the entire world is just a symptom of sickness, we CAN and SHOULD and WILL develop a miracle-working ability IF we are to truly awaken from this world. To not do so is to be convinced by illusions and remain in the cycle of birth and death. This is also why the Bible says, "signs and wonders follow those who believe."

The body is a separation device. It was made to section off and fence in a SMALL PORTION of mind, which seems then to find itself housed "inside" the body, while the larger portion of mind appears to be "separated off" or unconscious, outside the body. The sense of being isolated, separated, limited, partial, not whole, thus belongs to the "inside the body" experience, which is an experience of being only PART of yourself. To return to wholeness you have to thus transcend the body, erase the body, have no separation devices in the mind, and therefore collapse the gap between the outer and inner. The body symbolizes the split in the mind and once the split is erased the body is erased.

"God cannot come into a body, nor can you join Him there. Limits on love will ALWAYS seem to shut Him out, and to keep you APART from Him. The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and completely limitless idea. It draws a circle, infinitely small, around a very little segment of Heaven, splintered from the whole, proclaiming that, within it, is YOUR Kingdom, where God can enter not. Within this kingdom the ego rules, and cruelly. And, to defend this little speck of dust, it bids you fight against the universe."

Since the body itself is a separation device BETWEEN parts of mind, designed to keep one part of mind sectioned off from the other part, it can only seem to EXIST at all while there is a sense of separation. If the mind is split, the split shows up as a body coming between "you" (within the body) and the rest of you (outside the body, in others). The body is thus a symbol of separation in the mind, and when the mind does not have separation in it there cannot be a body at all.

This is why God cannot enter a body, because that's like saying you can keep a separation device, something which sections off inner and outer, and keeps them apart. It's like saying the whole of God which is everywhere (within and without) can be stuffed inside a container which is less than everywhere, and all of God can thus be housed inside a box and be ABSENT from the outside. This is utterly impossible because God is unlimited and infinite and all encompassing.

Thus God, all of God, cannot enter a body or dwell in a body entirely. Nor can you, who find yourself to "be in a body" or rather, who have a split mind which shows up AS a body coming between you and the rest of you, join with God fully while maintaining a body. The body can only be there IF there is separation in the mind. If the mind has NO belief in separation it utterly not only transcends the body but ERASES the body. There can be no body at all without a belief in separation. Total wholeness wipes the body away completely. Meaning that to truly be whole you cannot be inside a body. And you therefore cannot fully MEET, join, be one with all of God, while there is a body present. You have to leave the realm of bodies entirely to be infinite and unlimited.

"Forgiveness is an earthly form of love, which as it is in Heaven has no form. Yet what is needed here is given here as it is needed. In this form you can fulfill your function even here, although ***what love will mean to you when formlessness has been restored to you is greater still.***"

This is similarly why you cannot be Christ in a body, IMO. Christ is similarly unlimited and whole and infinite. Just as is your soul. Your soul cannot enter a body either. "The body neither lives nor dies because it cannot contain you who are life." Christ cannot directly in a first-person way be CONFINED in a body or sectioned off and found to be isolated to one place and not another. However, I believe ACIM is saying that you can "channel" Christ in a body, to some extent. You can be close to Christ and you can extend His love and miracles, but it's like he is working "through you" once removed, not directly.

I don't think Jesus was thus "Christ in a body" because if Christ could be in a body, fully, with no limitation at all, bodies could coexist with Christ and be his equal, and bodies would then have to exist in heaven as creations. Christ is unlimited, infinite, everywhere, and bigger than the universe. In ACIM Jesus lets us know that he "was a man who remembered his soul" and he remembered it in the atonement and ascension to heaven. And prior to that, he still had some trials and lessons, not least of which was the crucifixion. He BECAME identified fully with Christ, but not until getting out of here.

"To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body’s nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear."

"The death of an illusion means nothing. It disappears when you awaken and decide to dream no more."

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it. The last one had gone. It was laid in the tomb, but there was nothing left to bury. It did not disintegrate because the unreal cannot die. It merely became what it always was."

If something seems to have gone wrong with your body, the temptation is to believe it is has reality and truth to it.

ACIM: "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, unable to escape its frailty and bound by what it orders him to feel."

This is the temptation, the ego's attempt to get us to BELIEVE that the sickness is true, the damage is real, the suffering is really happening, something really has gone wrong. It's all part of the belief in sin.

Our challenge then is to do the opposite of be tempted, which is to seek Atonement, by learning to UNDO the false perceptions which are causing you to see an illusion as something more than just an illusion.

If you have come to believe that your sickness is a REAL SICKNESS, then you're got a problem far more deceptive than the sickness itself. You not only have "a sickness" but also a sickness of perception, a mental illness, in which you believe that an ILLUSION of sickness in the body is actually reality and truth. You are having perceptual hallucinations. You are not seeing correctly.

To UNDO these false perceptions, you must be willing to re-frame what you thought was sickness and see it in a different way. You must become able to see it in such a way that it "registers" with you as completely "false". You need to come to recognize it as and be convinced that it is, nothing more than an ILLUSION and NOT a reality.

This does imply, and means, that all forms of sickness are FICTIONAL, and all forms of sickness are merely fake images which you have MADE in an attempt to put on a show of sickness really happening. Whatever the sickness allegedly is, it is not a REAL sickness, it can only be a fake sickness.

In God's reality, there is no such thing as real sickness. Sickness is separation from God. And one expression of such a sickness, which believes an illusion of separation is real, shows up as physical sickness. That means that in how you're looking at this sickness, your belief in it, your seeing SIN in it, your belief that it's really happening and has weight and is tangibly real and NOT an illusion, IS your sickness because it's an expression of separation from HEALTH, which is separation from WHOLENESS or God.

It is tempting to believe the body's signals, like, well, I have this thing going on in my body and it's doing stuff to me and I don't know how it got there and it's a threat and it has power over me and I don't want it. If you believe this, then you WILL start trying to fight with it and to get rid of it.

But you're trying to get rid of an ILLUSION which YOU yourself believe is really there, so your BELIEF in it is actually you VALUING it, giving it credit as truth and reality, which means you will KEEP it. And then you will be attempting to fight against your own belief that it is real, which is an attempt to keep it, so your war against it will just be a state of conflict between yourself and yourself.

To become single-minded and whole you can't be believing in it while trying to get rid of it. You must UNDO your belief that you have a REAL sickness. You must convince yourself in any way possible that it is NOT a real sickness, it is NOT really happening, it does NOT have truth to it, you are NOT at the effect of it, it does NOT have power over you, and it is not REAL at all. It's completely fictional. It's an illusion, not a reality.

It's a made-up, faked, artificial, PRETEND SICKNESS, which you invented. You are the one who has fallen for the temptation to believe in it. You are the one who put it there. You are not a victim of it. And you do have power over it. And in truth, because it IS an illusion, it is completely FALSE, you do NOT have a real sickness, there IS NO SICKNESS, and the sickness is ALREADY GONE! The truth of all sickness is that it has not really happened at all.

Seeing that about the sickness is seeing the Atonement, which means you are forgiving or overlooking the sickness. You overlook sickness by overlooking the temptation to believe that the ILLUSION of sickness is the truth. If the sickness has literally not happened because separation has not happened, and if it is recognized as completely FALSE because of your recognition of what the TRUTH is - God's truth, then you will REMEMBER that this "sickness" simply cannot exist at all.

That's the kind of place where your mind needs to get to in order to heal. That's the kind of perception that you need to have. Illusory things are actually RECOGNIZED as illusory. The way that illusions strike your perception is then very different to how they seemed or what they meant when you believed in them. You will EXPERIENCE them as false, have a sense even of the falseness of them. A sense of not believing in them and regarding them as not true. That's the healing of perception which is your mind UNDOING the belief in the sickness so that it can be recognized as not existing.

Thus you recognize it has disappeared because it never really existed, it's already gone, it never even happened in the first place, you do not believe in it, there is no truth to it, it is completely false, unreal, and God did not create it. Therefore it simply cannot be happening and is not happening.

This reveals that you are actually quite a powerful creator who has literally MADE UP a sickness and presented it as an IMAGE of sickness, showing up in the FORM of your body, and that nevertheless this is not really there. You are a maker of dreams! You brought the illusion of a sickness into being and you can just as much demolish that illusion by becoming willing to see it for what it is. It is not truth, it is fictional. All sickness is fictional. There is no such thing as a real sickness of any kind.

You must learn to withdraw ALL of your belief in the FANTASY of "sickness" that this world holds dear. You must decide that you will never believe sickness is real ever again. You will not be tempted by the illusion of it, you will not see it, you will recognize it as a LIE which you do not fall for or want, and which is always completely false. Sickness is NOT THERE. It must go because it is already gone. Collapse the sickness and get all belief in sickness out of your life forever.

Believing that the truth is true, and only the truth is true, will give you the power to work miracles.

"The Kingdom of Heaven is the dwelling place of the Son of God, who left not his Father, and dwells not apart from Him. Heaven is not a place nor a condition. It is merely an awareness of perfect Oneness, and the knowledge that there is nothing else. Nothing OUTSIDE this Oneness, and NOTHING ELSE within."

There are many things often quoted from the course, perhaps loosely from memory, something that stuck in your head when you read it. But which really is not well thought out or deeply considered. "Heaven is not a place" is one of those things, which has been widely misunderstood.

See, places, in general, are an aspect of spacetime. In space, there are many places. Over here, over there. My place, your place. Many places. There are places in spacetime because space separates everything out, based on the idea of separation and lack. But you have to remember, that spacetime itself is nothing but an illusory ego belief. Space time, does not exist.

Now, when Jesus says that Heaven is not a place, he is merely referring to the fact that SPACETIME does not exist in Heaven. There is no localization or confinement to one area, in heaven. There is no cut off piece of it that is kept apart from others and labelled as if it's not the rest. It's all joined. It's one. Heaven is one huge infinite unlimited PLACE, that has no separate places within it. Everything is everywhere.

It's perfectly legitimate to say it is not a place, while still not contradicting the fact that Heaven IS A SOMEWHERE, a locale, a home, somewhere that you can actually BE, live, dwell, and experience reality. It is actually a something, a somewhere. It's just that it is not limited. It is all things real and everywhere real.

But heaven is not an isolated place. It's not a United States. It's not a Russia. It's everywhere without limit. That's why it is "not a place". It's not a separated off thing with a label to distinguish it from the rest.

Especially if you consider the fact that space-time is a belief that is unreal and an illusion. There is no space or time. Both are made up. Which means ALL PLACES within space and time do not really exist. So every single PLACE that you ever thought of as being a place, is not REALLY a place. In fact, it is not a place at all. It's a nowhere. Spacetime is the idea of NOT EXISTING FULLY ANYWHERE, which is why every "place" within it is NOT THE WHOLE.

So when you throw out spacetime and shove it in the trashcan, what are you left with? You are not left with places. You are not left with isolated boxes and confined locations. You are only left with the only REAL SOMEWHERE, the only ACTUAL REALITY, the only REAL PLACE that you can be. And that is Heaven.

Absolutely. Heaven is the ONLY REALITY, the ONLY REAL PLACE you can truly exist. That's why "You are at home in God, dreaming of exile". You can't leave Home. You can't leave heaven. But you can DREAM of being OUTSIDE of it in another WORLD, full of places, where none of those places are really anywhere.

Where is Jesus? He is IN HEAVEN. There are so many references in the Course to being IN heaven, in stark contrast to being ON the earth. Jesus makes it clear that there are two WORLDS, they are two PLACES, they are OPPOSITES. "Heaven remains the one alternative to the strange world you made" for example. "Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way." "Heaven is all that remains."

When the world disappears, which it will, where will you be? When there is no world, where do you live? When space and time collapse into nothing, where are you then? When the world spins "into the nothingness from which it came", and "gone is place, as well as time", where will you be? How will you exist SOMEWHERE, in a real SOMEWHERE, without any PLACES to exist? You MUST have a home, a real somewhere that you can experience. Where is that? Where is Jesus, in his home, not of this world? He's is in Heaven.

Heaven absolutely 100% is a PLACE. You can GO THERE. You already are there but you don't realize it because you're sleeping and pretending not to be in Heaven. When the dream world stops existing, you will wake up IN HEAVEN. It's reality. It's a REAL PLACE. It's where God lives. It's not "merely" an "awareness of perfect oneness", as if to imply you will KEEP THE WORLD and have some kind of heavenly mindset at the same time. Newsflash... not possible. "You cannot remain in this world with this knowledge."

There is no world. Central lesson. The world is NOT A REAL PLACE. When there is no world, the ONLY PLACE LEFT, to live and experience and be real, is Heaven. Heaven is THE ONLY PLACE THAT EXISTS. There is no other place. All other places are illusions.

So absolutely, it is false to interpret Jesus as saying that Heaven is NOT A PLACE. That's not what He means. He means only that it is not SPATIAL. And in that He also acknowledges that ALL SPATIAL PLACES ARE ILLUSIONS, which is why Heaven is NOT AN ILLUSORY PLACE. It's real.

It's your home. And it's the ONLY place that you can ever really exist.

Notice the quote also ends "Nothing OUTSIDE this Oneness, and NOTHING ELSE within." Which means heaven as a place does not coexist with THE ILLUSORY WORLD. There is NO WORLD outside the oneness of heaven, the place of heaven. The world you THINK exists right now, is an illusion of being outside the Kingdom. It does not exist. It is not HERE NOW. You are not in a place NOW. You WILL be in a place when you wake up to reality.

The golden rule is the nature and law of God. In God, everything is equal and shared. What applies to one brother applies to all brothers. What is true of me is true of you. But even moreso, because brothers are ONE, they literally share identity and soul. I am in you and you are in me. We are part of each other. We are irrevocably joined and share everything, even our selves.

We can describe this as the golden rule, in which what I do to you I also do to myself. There is no option or clause that your brother MIGHT treat you a certain way. You treat your brother a certain way SO THAT you are treated a certain way, because you ARE him, and so you are DIRECTLY treating yourself how you would wish to be treated.

There are no exceptions to this and it is impossible to violate or break this law or be outside of it. It is always operating, whether you are accepting of it and living by it, or whether you are attempting to ignore it and pretend it doesn't apply to you.

If we are one, then I have a shared interest with you. Whatever I do to you I do to myself. Whatever I give to you I receive. Giving and receiving are one. If I were to attack you, I'd be attacking myself. Therefore, it's in my own best interests to ONLY LOVE, otherwise I will make MYSELF suffer, and by my own hand. I have to INCLUDE you, otherwise I will suffer from exclusion.

"Ego" is nothing more than an attempt to oppose, deny and ignore this law. It is an attempt to pretend that it does not apply. That I am not you and you are not me. That we are not equal. That what applies to me doesn't apply to you, because we are different. If we are separate, we not one, and now I should have my own selfish interests - survival of the fittest.

It's like, were both standing on the same floor. Then there is a separation, like an earthquake. The floor cracks in two. I now seem to be on one side, and you on the other. But also the heights of the floors have shifted, and mine is slightly above yours. The two floors are now separate and different and not equal.

This is the separation from God, the seeming split in the mind, which suggests that instead of us all being one, we are now two, split apart, separated off, isolated in our own private territories, and kept apart. We can't seem to share because we can't span the divide of the broken ground, and everything we do is separate.

On this basis of separation, or not being able to share, the breakdown in unity, the collapse of oneness, the arising of exclusion, and the seeming imprisonment on either side of the rift, we get the denial of the golden rule. It seems possible now that because I am not a part of you, and am separate and isolated on my own island, I can only now think of my OWN interests. What I do to myself is done to myself alone, and if I throw a rock over at you, it hurts only you and not me.

While I might believe that what I do to you is NOT done to myself, or what is true of you is NOT true of me, it becomes possible to enter this state where we're trying to get away with murder. It suggests I could attack you, and escape the consequences. I could do something to you which is not done to me. I could give something that I do NOT receive, because I am not INCLUDED in it, because I've become EXCLUDED from you. As though giving and receiving are not one.

So the whole ego system is all about this sense of being exclusive, separated off, not sharing, not one, unequal, different, disconnected, dis-associated, and isolated. Our whole belief then shifts to it seeming to be plausible that we can attack without being hurt, or we can accuse without being accused, or we can make someone be guilty to take the guilt off our own shoulders. That no matter what we cause, we can escape the effects. I can hurt you, and not myself.

So this is then what the ego does, all the time. IT HAS ONE MODE of functioning. It's all it CAN do, because it is ONLY the idea of separation. Its aim is to emphasize, enhance, increase, and deepen the sense of being separate, so that IT increases. That's it's only goal. To attack ever more strongly and cause ever more disruption in equality. It's entire existence DEPENDS on the continuation of this inequality, this rift between brothers, and this sense that you cannot share anything with anyone because they're separated from you.

If the two floors or islands were to meet, and reconnect, and level out, and become one single unified space again, the two brothers could be reunited, and all sense of inequality and difference would melt. And ALSO there would have to now be an acceptance of the golden rule, because if we are sharing everything, then what applies to me now also applies to you and vice versa. We are now the SAME. We are one. So I cannot do anything to you without doing it to myself.

The interesting thing is that even when we're in an ego state of believing that we ARE separate, and are not a part of others, the golden rule actually still applies. We can BELIEVE that we are attacking something "not myself", and we can BELIEVE that the effects are being felt ONLY by that other separate person, and we can BELIEVE that we completely escape any consequences for it, BUT WE DO NOT. Because there are dire consequences STILL operating, consequences which are SELF INFLICTED, which CANNOT be avoided.

If you attack another, you STILL attack yourself, because you STILL ARE them. If you hurt another, you ARE hurting yourself. If you try to destroy another, you ARE destroying yourself. You may not REALIZE that you are, because you think of yourself as PROTECTED BY THE SEPARATENESS, as if the prison walls keep you SAFE. And so you think that attacking someone makes you SAFER. But it in fact erodes your safety because the more you attack the more YOU become imprisoned and weakened.

"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 reason, however, may not be as clear to you as you think. 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."

You cannot be strong without your brother. You cannot be happy without your brother. You cannot be healthy without your brother. You cannot be loved without your brother. You cannot be powerful without your brother. You cannot be free without your brother. You cannot be innocent without your brother. You cannot be holy without your brother.

So if you try to attack in any way, to produce the separation, to make yourself MORE separate, emphasizing the ways that someone else is an inferior evil shit that you hate and who should feel terribly guilty for being so wrong, YOU ARE accusing yourself of this. So you might ask yourself, "would I accuse myself of this?" You will think you're NOT accusing yourself because you don't see yourself as A PART OF the other person, but you are still doing it.

There is a HUGE COST to attempting to ignore the golden rule. The cost is that your mind becomes split, you become self-destructive and suicidal, you become alone and lonely, you become weakened and live in darkness, the world becomes a nightmare of conflict and war, you lose all sense of peace and happiness, communication breaks down and you become unable to relate to anyone, it makes you question whether you even exist, and you will try to destroy yourself. That's a pretty major cost for believing something that isn't true, as if it were real.

You DO have a vested interest, because when you attack you DO experience consequences, even if you do not REALIZE that you do. You may not recognize that every time you attack you feel worse. You may not recognize that when you hate someone you feel awful and guilty.

You may not recognize that when you accuse someone angrily of being guilty of something, to make yourself feel better, you increase your sense of being separate and small and weak and alone. Or that anger hurts your mind and body. You have to recognize what the consequences of attack ARE, so that you will decide that you do not WANT to be murderous anymore, because it actually is not REALLY in your best interests.

The golden rule always applies. It is never broken or violated. You can deny it. If you deny it you will suffer. If you deny it you will be confused as to why your life sucks, and you will probably blame it on someone else, thinking that they are not you, and that therefore you haven't blamed yourself. Everything you do you to do yourself and to all your brothers, to the entire sonship and to God. This is also the secret of salvation. You are INCLUDED IN EVERYTHING. And inclusion is ultimately love.

The only problem we have is that we are not recognizing what is true and what is false correctly.

There are things that the ego says are true, which are actually false. But we believe they are true.

There are things which God says are true, which we believe are false, but are actually true.

It has a lot to do with willingness. The willingness to ACCEPT that God's truth is true, and the ego's truth is not true.

But see... if we think the ego's truth actually IS true, we're going to automatically think God's truth is false.

For example.

If we believe we sinned and are guilty, we will believe we deserve punishment and not love.

This belief will distort our perception.

We will see the worthiness of being punished as TRUTH, and we will agree with it.

We will then see the punishment NOT as punishment, but as welcome. Something we want.

We will even welcome death, seeing it as salvation.

As soon as we start being convinced that what the ego says is the truth, our perception just gets all flipped upside down and the things which would HURT us start to look like they're going to be HELPFUL.

Things which are NOT true, start to look true. Things which HURT us, start to seem appealing. Things which make things WORSE for us, start to look like solutions. Things which make us SUFFER, start to look like they are helping us.

And then, things which REALLY are true, start to look false. Things which would HEAL us, start to seem like a threat. Things which would make things BETTER, start to seem like something that would make things worse. Things which would UNDO suffering, start to seem like things which would ADD suffering.

This is how mixed up we become. We do not ****RECOGNIZE**** what is true and what is false.

We MISTAKE false things for true things, and true things for false things.

This makes us very CONFUSED, and yet we will still believe in the midst of that insanity, that we are TOTALLY sane, things TOTALLY make sense, we are TOTALLY right, we HAVE the whole truth, and we're seeing everything PERFECTLY. We will not even REALIZE that we are in a state of suffering or denial or unhappiness. We will not ACKNOWLEDGE it, or see it, or recognize it for what it is.

By believing the ego's lies are truth, those lies STOP LOOKING LIKE LIES, and start looking like truth. It doesn't matter how sane or insane someone is, or how confused, EVERYONE will always believe they are seeing fully, clearly, perfectly, correctly, rightly, accurately, and that their discernment is 100% correct. Even if the are believing the death is the only way to live, they will believe they are TOTALLY CORRECT in that perception. They simply have become BLIND to the ability to DISCERN that their own perception is very distorted.

We would, in the ego, happily jump into a vat of acid, or destroy ourselves in any number of horrific ways, BELIEVING SINCERELY, that it is going to SAVE US FROM GOD's WRATH. Death actually start to look APPEALING to those who are insane and whose thought system is so backwards that they think SUICIDE is actually SALVATION.

The ego has flipped everything around. It sees lies in the truth and truth in lies. It sees life in death and death in life. it sees gains in losses and losses in gains. It sees hurt in love and love in hurt. It sees sin in innocence and innocence as sinful. It sees death as the doorway to eternal peace. It sees sacrifice as a way to gain everything. It becomes ATTRACTED TO GUILT AND DEATH, simply because it does not RECOGNIZE them as guilt and death, it instead thinks they are sacred and HOLY and PURE and WELCOMING!!!

This is how insane it gets. And all death is suicide, CHOSEN, by people whose perception is so back to front that they think that moving AWAY from life will bring them closer to it. That death is a way OUT of the suffering that seems real. That death is a "real option" that will "solve all problems". Only the blind would choose such a solution.

"Forgive them father for they know not what they do."

Literally, anyone in the ego DOES NOT KNOW that they are in the ego. They don't RECOGNIZE it for what it is. They think they are in heaven when they are in hell. They think they are in hell when they are in heaven. They think their successes are failures and their failures are successes. It's all back to front, and it's not even RECOGNIZED.

Being in the ego means being UNCONSCIOUS, and in unconsciousness, what is true and what is false loses ALL CONTEXT. That means REAL TRUTH has been shut out of awareness, and now there is nothing to COMPARE anything to. No yard stick or hard and fast reliable consistent truth to compare things to to say, is THIS true, or is THIS false? There is a loss of perspective. A loss of sight. A loss of contrast. A loss of sanity. And all that remains is to thrash about in the dark MAKING UP truth and being totally confused about whether it is actually true or not.

To correct this we need to do only really ONE THING. That is, to become willing to consider we might be MISTAKEN about what we believe is true.... to consider, maybe we were mistaken about God's truth, and maybe what we BELIEVE IS TRUE, is actually FALSE. Every belief of the ego SEEMS true, but is false. Yet we currently believe it. Whether it be a belief that we sinned, a belief that we're guilty, a believe that we're unworthy of love, a belief that we're not good enough, or don't deserve forgiveness, or are lacking, or whatever.

These "false beliefs", these untruths masquerading as truth, NEED to be CORRECTED. The course says that perception needs to be corrected but its really your BELIEFS, because belief is your conviction about what is true. What you BELIEVE you WILL PERCEIVE. And you will perceive it BECAUSE you believed it. And then, upon perceiving it, it will seem to CONFIRM that what you believe is true, not realizing you're stuck inside a closed box of your own making.

You have to be willing to dig out and challenge your ego beliefs. Then you need to be willing to RECOGNIZE THEM AS FALSE, by "deprogramming" yourself. Whatever way works for you. To DISBELIEVE these lies, to strip them of all belief, to collapse your trust in them, to REVERSE them, to stop believing they are TRUE, and to start believing, simply, THEY ARE NOT TRUE. They are false. It's NOT TRUE that you are a sinner. It's NOT TRUE that you are guilty. It's NOT TRUE that you don't deserve love. It's NOT TRUE that you can't be forgiven. etc.

I have found personally that any act of affirming or clarifying or emphasizing that some false ego belief IS NOT TRUE, is an act of moving towards God and towards healing. It is an act of transitioning from a mistaken truth to a real truth. It seems to be ONLY this changing of hands, this willingness to CHANGE BELIEF, so that what you thought had truth to it, is BELIEVED LESS, and what you thought was false, is BELIEVED MORE. ***THAT*** right there is the way to change your perception, and THE ONLY WAY.

This sorting out of what is true and what is false will take you ALL THE WAY to the atonement. It's the ONLY process to get there. Somehow, you have to shift allegiance from listening to and trusting the ego's voice, to listening to and trusting the Holy Spirit's voice. To stop BELIEVING that the ego's beliefs are true, and to RECOGNIZE them as FALSE. That's all you need to do! Just keep systematically reversing these beliefs, undoing them, stopping believing them, withdrawing faith from them, learning to MISTRUST the ego and to TRUST God, and to CLEARLY DISTINGUISH.. what is true, from what is false.

This clarification is what will make your perception CORRECT. Correct perception, or true perception, means you are perceiving WITHOUT DISTORTION. It means you can SEE, but what you see ... you recognize which parts of it are actually true, and which parts are actually false, in terms of the REAL TRUTH. Rather than, MIS-IDENTIFYING some parts as false which are true, or some parts as true which are false.

For example do you believe people have real sickness? All those people in hospitals? THEY DO NOT HAVE "real sickness". They only have FAKE SICKNESS. There IS no such thing as real sickness. So this is a major belief which has to be CORRECTED. How about your belief that something "bad happened"? That's a belief that sin is real. Is it true? You have to question that. It did not REALLY HAPPEN. It was an illusion in a dream. There have NOT been any real consequences in reality. You did NOT lose your innocence.

Discernment. What is true. What is false. Being completely clear about which is which in reality, and not what you've made them to be. This will liberate you from all suffering and make you CONVINCED that God's truth is the ONLY TRUTH, and the ego's truth is THE ONLY LIE. Then you are ready to accept the atonement.

Ego's world is run by the egoic thought system, based on an EITHER-OR mindset of separation.

God's world is run by God's thought system, based on a BOTH-AND mindset of sharing.

EITHER-OR is based on the idea of separation - there is a separation between who has and who has not, who does and who does not, what is and what is not, etc. An object is this, but not that. It's either red or blue. It's either here or there.

BOTH-AND is based on sharing, something is equally true of both me and you, we both have everything, me and you are loved the same by God, etc. There is no separation in that. What exists is in all locations simultaneously, space and time do not place limits on anything.

Because the world of physical matter is entirely an expression of the egoic thought system, space and time and everything within them (bodies, planets, etc) are governed by this idea of EITHER OR. Living in such a world, the seemingly "natural" way to think about anything is to align our thought processes to the "natural world" and think in accord with it.

So now we "learn" to think in an EITHER-OR way. Either I will turn left or right. Either I will eat at 5 or at 6. Either I'm male or female. Either I am asleep or awake. Either I choose option A or option B.

We adopt this as an entire way of thinking about the world, of reasoning about anything, of what to do, where to go, what to choose, always a selective judgement based on either this or that. It seems to "fit" well with the way the physical world is structured and how it behaves. But it is completely unnatural and completely opposite to God's world.

In God's world, seemingly miraculous things are possible. Everywhere. All the time. Everything in God's world breaks all the ego's laws of separation, and therefore the entire basis of EITHER-OR thinking. God does not think, hey, either one son or another will get my attention. He thinks, BOTH of them get my FULL attention. Nor does he think, I will give 50% attention to one and 50% to another. He thinks, I will give 100% love to both at the same time. And this is done WITHOUT loss, without sacrifice or lack, and without compromise.

The true meaning of divine sharing is that everything applies to BOTH me and you equally, simultaneously, and always. If there were such a thing as a divine pizza, I could eat the whole pizza and you could eat the whole pizza. We both get everything. This is not possible in the physical world, but it is possible in spirit.

One of the tricky things about understanding ACIM is that we come at it with the ego thought system. We come at it with EITHER-OR thinking. And that's a serious problem. Because whenever ACIM speaks of ANYTHING to do with God, Heaven, Creation, Sonship, Holy Spirit, Laws of God, beyond spacetime, etc.... any of those topics, the laws of GOD are applying, not the laws of ego.

So then a statement like "I and my father are One", is completely misunderstood. It's a truth WITHIN the scope of God's BOTH AND system of thought. There, I can be one with God while still being an individual. I am both, myself and part of God. The course also states that God has only one son, BUT that the one son is also many sons. It literally states that BOTH statements are true, that there is one, and many. The Sonship comprises many children, who are ALSO one.

But to the ego this seems nonsense, it cannot fathom how there can be ONE AND MANY at the same time. It insists that it is EITHER one, OR many. And then it decides that many sounds like an ego thing, and one sounds "more spiritual", so it hacks out the many from the one and ends up with its version of what Heaven must be like. And it's totally bullshit.

To grasp anything of the divine nature of the Kingdom, on ANY topic "that side" of the separation boundary, anything real and true, anything to do with Sonship or Creation or God, you have to totally put aside the EITHER OR exclusive separatist way of reasoning logically, think WAY out side the box, and adopt a BOTH AND way of reasoning. THEN the things that Jesus says that sound totally contradictory finally make perfect sense, WITHOUT having to change anything or turn stuff into ridiculous metaphors.

"One brother is all brothers." "One mind is all minds."

Does not mean there is EITHER one brother OR many brothers. Nor does it mean there is either ONE mind OR many minds. Literally, the entire statement is true. There are many brothers, and they are all one. There many minds, and they are all one. And as soon as your thought process tries to "axe" the "many" part of those statements in favor of keeping only the seemingly unifying "one" part of the statement, you're off on an ego tangent of error.

We are one, but we are still brothers. We are the one son of God, but we are also PART of a sonship of many sons. I am a child of God, and so are you. I have individuality, and so do you, and yet simultaneously we share everything. I have everything that God is, which should to the ego mean there is nothing left for you, but you also have everything that God is, simultaneously, because we share it all. Sharing does not mean a collapse of individuality either.

The BOTH AND system of thought, which "runs heaven", is a completely miraculous thought system. It defies all ego laws. It breaks space and time. It ignores silly limitations and false conclusions. It allows to be possible that which the world of EITHER OR would find absolutely impossible. It ignores spatial limitations of all kinds. This is why God is omnipresent, meaning existing in all locations simultaneously. It ignores the idea that we must be kept apart in order to be individuals. And it defies every attempt to split it up and compartmentalize it into nice little prison cells.

The entire Kingdom of God and everything in it is miraculous because of this fundamental logical premise of the whole system. "Nothing real can be increased (God cannot create) except by sharing". As God SHARES, this is an AND scenario. God AND his creation. God AND his son. BOTH God and His son exist. His son is in his likeness because they BOTH are of the same Kingdom and nature.

When I give to you, BOTH of us have it, and I do not lose it. This is why sharing INCREASES the supply in heaven, while sharing causes scarcity in the ego world. When God creates you, God gives ALL of himself to you and yet loses nothing and HAS everything still - BOTH you and God now share everything and there has been an INCREASE. This is miraculous, it dissolves the idea of separation and exclusivity, transcending all ego concepts. The entirety of reality depends on it.

The system of God's mind, his thought system, how the Kingdom is run, is entirely based on this idea of simultaneous sharing, union at the same time as creation, multiplicity at the same time as oneness, having everything while also sharing it with others without anyone being excluded in any way. Heaven is not like this world. It's laws are totally different to the separated-out world the ego made to depict isolation and selfishness. There is no selfishness in the Kingdom, only self-fullness.

"The ego is the idea of selfishness. The soul is the idea of self-fullness."

You have everything, and we all share it as God's family.

When you first perceive that someone has something wrong with them, is sick or suffering in some way, and this strikes you as real, you will have a reaction.

Your reaction will be part of what you have put in place in your mind, because both what you see in the other as sickness and your reaction to it coexist in a single split-minded dynamic.

You will react to what you've shown yourself, believing it. If it is real to you, you will be horrified and upset and will want to stop the suffering as if that will solve your upset, but the other person's suffering isn't the cause of your upset - your split minded perception is.

You will want for the person to be free of this pain or sickness or situation. You think that if you solve that, your own upset will go away, but it won't. You will then automatically start trying to fix them and change them and even force them to be different.

Your attempts to fix them will then compel you a great deal and produce a lot of what seems like a genuine desire to help, a motivation to research and figure out and find solutions. You can get into that quite deeply.

You will convince yourself that you are being caring, that you just want to help the person, are trying to heal them, want to take away their hurt and save them.

But what you don't realize is that you're doing all this as a reaction to something you perceived which frightened you and upset you. You think that your response is based in helpfulness and selflessness but it's really a selfish reaction to what you showed yourself and what you saw in the person.

Your use of them entailed you seeing truth within their sickness, believing their sickness to be real, showing yourself their illusion of sickness as though it is the truth and is really happening. That is actually an attack on your part. That is you using the opportunity to imprison them by holding these perceptions as true of them, maintaining the sickness and keeping it.

Your efforts later to get rid of the sickness, as extremely caring as they may appear to be, are actually an egoic cover-up to the fact that you are keeping the sickness in place, have attacked the person with the sickness by agreeing with it, and some part of you actually wants them to be sick.

The truth can be upsetting to admit to. Shocking isn't it, that you thought you were just trying to help and care about them and in fact you were hurting them, contributing to their suffering and keeping them imprisoned.

All you've been doing this whole time is rebounding off your own false, erroneous perception, which showed you an illusion of sickness as though it was God's given truth, which must be horrifying if sickness is the truth, and then were attempting to get rid of that as though it was in the person and not in your own mind. The making-real of what you thought was in the person, was just a projected portion of your of mind attacking itself.

If you admit to this then you will learn to stop trying to fix and heal and correct and help and solve the person's problem, because in REAL truth they do NOT have a problem. You do. YOU are upset about what you see. YOU are upset about what appears to be a real suffering. IF it were real, your upset would be justified indeed. But it's not. You are mistaken. And that means that all your attempts to help based on keeping it real and believing it's truly happening, are actually counter-attacks and are NOT forms of healing.

So all this time you thought you were trying to help, you were hurting, agreeing with what the person believes about themselves, and holding them captive to their own suffering. Your failure to UNDO their sickness is an attack. Your failure to see through and overlook the illusion of their sickness - which is not REAL sickness (it doesn't exist), is actually an attack. Since you did not forgive, you must have judged, and judgement is condemnation.

If you can admit this to yourself and collapse this whole illusory response to a misperception, you will stop trying to fix and solve the person based on what is "really happening to them." It's a false reaction, because it's not TRUE that something is really happening to them. Their sickness is an illusion, not a reality. Their immortal self is NOT threatened. There is no real danger. Life isn't under attack. Only by perceiving and believing as such do you support life and set your brother free from their imprisonment.

Once you admit you were only reacting to your own upset, because of what seemed like a really deep "genuine" feeling of caring and wanting to help and make everything better, you will see that this desire to help is really an illusion. It's part of the ego. As supportive as it SEEMS, it is not helping at all. It is just your own emotional upset flaring up into a nightmare and causing you to go on the offensive trying to solve everything that doesn't exist. Pretty funny actually.

When this denial has been undone, you are now more clearly confronted with a greater degree of truth about the situation. Your challenge now is to ACTUALLY FORGIVE what you see, to not believe in it, to truly UNDO it, by correcting your mind and offering this correction to your brother. Your lack of support for their belief that they are sick will be healing, helping to guide them towards the truth that will set them free.

Now you can be TRULY HELPFUL, by offering a miracle of forgiveness and coming from real love, which isn't a love that enters into FALSE EMPATHY. False empathy means you are believing in the suffering of others and agree with it and therefore are attacking them and yourself with it by joining in it with them. That isn't helping you or them. True empathy means representing God, genuinely, offering miracles of love, and shining a light for your brother to see.

There are parts of the Course describing miracles where it says that they shine a light to reveal all the ways that we are in error. It doesn't necessarily do anything but it reveals how we are in fear and let's us see that clearly so that we can recognize illusions and thus make them disappear. It points the way to the truth.

We must learn to OVERLOOK the appearance of sickness, instead of reacting to it. We must learn not to believe our eyes or think that this is proof. We must recognize our own ego reactions based on our own nightmare of hallucinating that sickness contains the truth. Sickness is always an illusion and if we're not recognizing that we will become upset and try to attack it with "help". That is not forgiveness and it is not healing or helpful. Such helpfulness is hurtful.

Strangely, you will become more loving and truly compassionate when you are not having your own gigantic mega reaction to someone's plight. You'll be more present and available and productive and constructive. You'll be able to truly help them and support them, rather than making it all real and going on a rollercoaster ride. It's not easy. The ego has lots of traps up its sleeves and this is one of the big ones.

"This means that I cannot allow them to leave their mind unguarded, or they will not be able to help me. Miracle-working entails a full realization of the power of thought, and real avoidance of miscreation. Otherwise, the miracle will be necessary to set the mind ITSELF straight, a circular process which would hardly foster the time-collapse for which the miracle was intended. Nor would it induce the healthy respect that every miracle-worker must have for true cause and effect."

When you're having emotions, typically they are reactions. You have a thought which produces a perception of the world. And in this thought you're seeing yourself as a victim or being affected in some way. And this produces a negative emotion.

These ego emotions seem to be changes in you, which you believe are the effect of causes outside of you. They cause you to change against your will, and so your "emotions" or "effects" go on a rollercoaster ride or constant shifts, seemingly chosen BY the world and enforced upon you.

But if you'll look you'll notice that all ego emotions have this backwards cause-effect quality to them. They all seem like they are telling YOU what you feel. They seem like they are happening to you. And the basis for these feelings always seems to be something you believe is happening to you outside of you.

How can it be that if you are the cause of everything you experience, per the secret of salvation, that you can be at the effect of emotions? How can it even be that you even HAVE emotions that have this affected quality to them? Emotions of fear and guilt, emotions of grief and loss, emotions of suffering?

If you are cause, and are owning up to being the cause, then you must realize your emotions are coming from you. You are causing them. Not the world, not the circumstances, not other people or the body. You must be choosing them. You must have made a wrong decision if your emotion is not peace.

Surely you have the ability to choose what you are going to feel? Or at least, you have the ability to choose whether to produce upset feelings or not. You can choose whether you feel guilty. You can choose whether to feel grief. You can choose whether to feel unhappy for any reason. It is always you that chooses what you are experiencing.

So this then means we have to get behind the feelings and stop regarding them as just "happening to us". And stop interacting with them as if they are telling US how we feel. We need to stop listening to them as if looking to them to guide us and inform us of what state we're in. WE PUT THEM THERE. We shouldn't be asking something WE PUT THERE to tell us how we feel, as if they know and we don't.

All ego emotions are "effects" which your mind puts in place, under the belief that the world puts them in place. If you believe the world has power over you then you will produce emotions, effects, symptoms, reactions, which all seem to try to TELL YOU what you are and how you feel and what you must experience. You have to stop listening to them. But even more you have to stop creating them.

This all goes back to the mind. It goes back to thought. If you look at thought you will notice that it is the CAUSE of all your suffering. You can be affected by nothing but your thoughts. It is your thoughts alone that bring you pain. Nothing in the world can bring oppression. Your thoughts literally cause all of your upset emotions.

The origin of upset feelings therefore is the nature of your thinking. You might be used to thinking and feeling like a victim, in which you seem to only have feelings if they happen "to you", and you only have thoughts as a kind of passive "commentary" on what is "happening to you." But this is really a destructive use of thought, which reverses cause and effect, and sees you as at the effect of the world.

You have to realize also then that your thoughts have been acting just like a victim, just like your ego emotions, pretending to be happening to you. They have been thoughts of suffering, thoughts of despair, thoughts of being victimized, thoughts of being attacked, thoughts of sickness and death. These thoughts have CAUSED what you have been experiencing, emotionally and physically.

Your thoughts, or rather your thinking, therefore has to go through a transformation in terms of how much destructiveness they contain. Thought has been used by the mind in its belief in death, to produce suffering. Thought can similarly be used far more constructively, positively, in a life affirming way, to uplift and heal and bring life. Thought can be used to give strength.

But you are not used to thinking like this. You are used to being a victim on a battlefield where everything happens to you. You even think that your thoughts are thinking you. This has to be reversed. You have to start using your POWER to think higher thoughts. To think well of yourself and others. To think of happiness. To elect light and love and life.

At first it will seem like you can't do this because you have been so used to just "having" thought and you don't realize you can control it and master it. This is why it takes some practice. But you need to learn that you can actively choose to have uplifting thoughts. You can just as easily have a thought that someone actually is doing well, as you can have a thought that they are suffering. And you have to realize your thoughts have a REAL POWER which can produce REAL EFFECTS.

Your thoughts can and do affect you AND other people. You are not alone in experiencing the EFFECTS of YOUR THINKING. Probably all your life you've been thinking in an egoic way, in a victimy way, which has actually contributed to the suffering of yourself and others. Now you are going to think deliberate, intentional, chosen, free-willed and higher thoughts. Purposeful thoughts of deciding that someone IS doing well, IS healthy, IS healed, IS happy, IS safe, IS innocent, IS resurrected.

You may have never even conceived that your thoughts even have any power. You might've only experienced thoughts like a mental chatter which seems to ramble on without seeming to affect anyone or anything. You might not have put two-and-two together to realize your thoughts have a causal power in them. That they are creative. And that you have been using them TO destroy.

Your mind can heal. Your mind can raise the dead. Your mind can think of miracles. Your mind can decide someone is not sick. Your mind can strengthen and reinforce the truth. Your mind can give life. And your mind can be filled with the power of God. Your thoughts are extremely powerful. The misuse of them has been the sole cause of all your suffering. And now you can turn your thoughts to God and to reality and truth and light and love and express the power of love through thought to others.

"Miracles are thought-creations. Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities."

"He, too, MUST begin to think of himself as a very powerful receiving and sending channel"

"The mind is a very powerful creator, and it never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating, and ALWAYS as you will. Many of your ordinary expressions reflect this. For example, when you say "don't give it a thought", you are implying that if you do not think about something, it will have no effect on you. This is true enough."

"While expressions like "think big" give some recognition to the power of thought, they still come nowhere near the truth. You do not expect to grow when you say it, because you don't really believe it. It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains."