"T-23.II.19. There is no life outside of Heaven. 2 Where God created life, there life must be. 3 In any state apart from Heaven life is illusion. 4 At best it seems like life; at worst, like death. 5 Yet both are judgments on what is not life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. 6 Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. 7 Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusion stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. 8 Illusions are but forms. 9 Their content is never true."

"You are at home in God, dreaming of exile, yet perfectly capable of waking to reality."

Let's make this simple and clear.

You are permanently within heaven, within God's being, within reality. You cannot leave. There is nowhere to go. You cannot really be outside of it.

However, you who are in heaven always, fall asleep and dream of NOT being in heaven always. You dream of being EXILED from heaven, in ANOTHER WORLD, which is totally opposite to and unlike Heaven in every way. You dream of space and time. You dream of planets. You dream of suffering and death.

Everything about that dream of exile, seems to place you OUTSIDE the Kingdom of God. It's an ILLUSION that it is possible to be NOT AT HOME. To be not in the eternal presence of the "here and now" of reality. The dream of exile is a dream of NOT BEING HERE NOW, and is a dream of being OUTSIDE the Kingdom. This is also backed up in the bible where it talks of you seeming to be "kicked out" of heaven.

You cannot really be outside of Heaven. You are INSIDE heaven, DREAMING of being outside Heaven. But the dream you have IS a dream of being separated from heaven, rejected by God, seeming to exist in an entirely alien world, and having experiences and hallucinations that aren't real or true.

While you seem to be IN the dream world, which is "the world you made", you seem to be in THIS world, and you seem NOT to be in heaven. Everything in this dream world is an ILLUSION. "The world you see is an illusion of a world, God did not create it." Everything in spacetime is an illusion. All objects, all bodies, all planets and galaxies. It's all part of the dream of exile and the SECOND WORLD that you made in your dreaming of NOT being inside the FIRST WORLD of heaven.

Now, in terms of perspective, sometimes Jesus talks about how Heaven is BEYOND this world. How reality is not OF this world. How what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is not OF this world. How your brother's reality is BEYOND his body. And how reality is beyond the illusion. The physical world IS the "wall of sin" and the "veil" that "covers the face of christ", because it is the dream of denial/death that blocks out or paints an illusion that "you are not in heaven." And this is also why as you forgive the world you should be OVERLOOKING the world and looking BEYOND IT, PAST IT, to the larger truth that you are actually "in heaven", NOT in a dream.

The thing is, just because you are always in heaven, doesn't mean that you are aware of it. When you are IN the dream, you are NOT being aware of being in heaven. You cannot be both awake and asleep. Either you sleep and dream of exile, or you wake and the dream is gone. Either you see the world of death, or you see the real world. While heaven is "here now" and always present, THIS WORLD, the dream of exile, is NOT REALLY HERE NOW.

This also leads to the fact that in order to be fully aware and awake IN heaven, which is awareness of eternity, you must EXPAND your awareness to the size of the CONTAINER within which this dream is housed. The bubble of spacetime. You must transcend space AND time! You have to get OUTSIDE of the little dream of exile, taking place in heaven, so that you can wake up in the larger "room" of Heaven. Spacetime is much much smaller than heaven's eternal scope. "Everything in the world is little because it is made of littleness."

So in a sense we can say, from being in the dream, that in order to wake up you must LEAVE THIS WORLD. In other words, you must expand beyond the limits of the body, beyond the confinement of a location in space and time, and BE EVERYWHERE AT ONCE FOREVER. That is awakening from the dream. That is the end of the dream of exile. You wake up to being fully present everywhere. And that everywhere DOES include the "location" in which Earth seemed to exist, except it shines away the world and REPLACES it with reality.

To onlookers etc, when you wake up to heaven, you DO LEAVE THIS DREAM WORLD. You must. "A dream of death is not left by death, but by truth" tells us that in both cases you LEAVE! You leave the dream. You vanish from the dream. Your body disappears and ceases to exist. It is undone. You become invisible to the dream world. You are then "more here" than ever, as Jesus says he will never leave you, but you are no longer "inside" the dream isolated from reality. You are pervasive. Which is why Jesus says "you cannot remain in the world, with this knowledge" and "the body cannot stay without illusions".

You do leave this world, because it is the "outside the kingdom" world. Which really is inside the kingdom, but a rejection of the kingdom. ie a denial that the kingdom is everywhere. "Enlightenment is but a recognition and not a change at all". It's a recognition of where you ARE and what what you are, that you are HERE NOW and have always been. But this world... this planet.... this universe, IT IS NOT HERE NOW. It is removed from eternity. It is slightly delayed from immediacy. "At no time does the body exist". It is always past and future but never eternal presence. Even the "now" of time is nothing but a symbol in a dream.

Waking up, you become omnipresent. But this dream world, it's days are numbered. When no-one remains believing in it or needing it to learn to awaken, it WILL vanish. And in its place there will only be heaven. "Eternity will shine away the world." "The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came." The dream bubble of spacetime exile, will disappear. Light will envelop it and infuse it and shine it away. Only heaven will remain.

So yes, heaven in a sense IS elsewhere, it certainly is not this dream world, it is not exile, and it is not outside the kingdom. But in another sense heaven is everywhere and here, moreso here than anything else. You seem to ascend to and be in heaven, but you really just wake up to realize you are where you've always been, and you journeyed without distance from your home that you can never leave. You just thought you were outside the kingdom for a while. And the people who still think they are outside the kingdom will not be aware of your immediate presence.

Jesus is not in the world. But then again, the world doesn't exist. So Jesus is everywhere.

Since there is no life outside of heaven, and everything outside of heaven is an illusion, the dream of death is NOT LIFE. This WORLD, is not life. It is "at best it seems like life, at worst, death". Life is ONLY "inside" the kingdom, which is an exterior kind of way of looking at it. From within the kingdom life is everywhere because there is really no outside. "Life forms" in the dream of exile are NOT LIFE FORMS. They are illusions of life. Only eternal life in the kingdom is real life. "To be without a body (in heaven) is to be in your natural environment."

You disperse, to everywhere. Here, there, everywhere. Not localized. Not in space or time. Eternal. Endless. Ever-present. Transcendent of location or limitation. The all in everything. But the dream of exile, though it is in heaven, is not really anywhere. It is the idea of not existing. It is the idea that you are not here or there or anywhere. It is the idea of death. And there is no death, thus no world. This tiny speck of what seems like a world is absolutely nothing. That is the message of the course. There is no world - central lesson. The dream does not really exist, you are not really exiled, and you are already home.

Dreams disappear when you wake up.

The belief in separation, which you are working to undo through forgiveness, does not just heal your own mind.

What is it that you have been separated from? It is yourself, it is God, and it is your brother.

When you undo separation in what you think of as "your mind", the boundaries which confined your mind are expanded. Separation was COMING BETWEEN you and others. It was defining you as "not them".

Separation is an artificial wall which seems to make people into isolated individuals, with private minds experiencing private worlds.

When separation is lifted, you are literally going to become ONE with other people. They are you. They are other parts of you which you have been separated from. You, and what appeared before to be "others", in fact SHARE A MIND as the One Son of God.

You are NOT just working on your own private spiritual path in isolation. If you are truly making progress to undo separation, you are undoing the separation BETWEEN you and other people. This means it is IMPOSSIBLE to make progress in spiritual awakening without INCLUDING more and more of what it was you thought was "other people", which is actually parts of yourself that you previously were separate from. Your spiritual awakening is everyone's spiritual awakening.

That which kept you feeling isolated, imprisoned, alone, separate and in the dark, was essentially FEAR, which when it is lifted, *reconnects you* with other people. You begin to see them AS YOURSELF. And you begin to treat them how you would be treated.

In the ego's thought system, what applies to you does not apply to others. This is because it sees each individual as an isolated separated identity, cut off and kept apart. In the Holy Spirit's thought system, what applies to you applies to everyone equally, because they ARE YOU. You, and your brother, are PART OF the One Son of God. ONE identity. ONE mind. ONE Self.

Therefore as you are removing blocks to awareness of love, you are removing artificial limitations placed on "who you are", which put you in a little box and labelled you as separate. As these blocks are lifted, you will come to LOVE yourself more, and LOVE other people more. This love will JOIN and CONNECT you to other minds.

Separated minds produce sickness. Joined minds produce healing. You must set your brother free from his prison by rejoining with him as one. You must stop demonstrating sickness so as to stop accusing BOTH of you of sin. You must be the example of the love that applies to BOTH of you. It is literally in your own best interests to do this, because they ARE ONE WITH YOU!

Separation is a two-edged sword. It doesn't just apply in isolation. It causes isolation. It comes between brothers and makes them strangers. It makes a shared mind split and kept apart. When separation has gone, your mind will be SHARED with the Son of God. You are OPENING UP to a much larger sense of IDENTITY than who you thought you were, limited to a separate self, stuck in a body, or confused with that which dies.

You are EVERTHING. You are bigger than the universe. You are the Kindgom of God!

Before the physical universe came into being, there was only the Son of God and no "other".

The mind of the Son of God contained a state of guilt, which arose from the belief in the separation happening (sin).

The Son of God then attempted to deny this guilt, making it unconscious. This denial created an illusion, a facade, that the Son of God was not guilty.

To do that, He had to invent a "picture" i.e. illusion to cover up the guilt, a picture of innocence. And this innocence had to be seen as vulnerable and powerless, so that all sense of guilt could be hidden. Only an idea of harmlessness and vulnerability would suffice.

It was through this denial that the physical universe was "put in place" to cover up the guilt in the One mind, which now became the collective unconscious mind.

The surface facade of this cover-up features "newborns" to portray this facade of innocence. Whether it be newborn babies or new plants growing or new puppies or a new planet or whatever.

The "birth" of the universe is based or starts from this idea of vulnerable innocence. Real innocence is strong and invulnerable. Fake innocence is weak and vulnerable, and only this would suffice as the opposite of being responsible for sin.

Human bodies, as babies, then are symbols which represent or try to convince us that the Son of God is not guilty. They portray Him as weak and tiny and powerless and helpless, as though anything could happen to Him and He could not happen to anything. This is the perfect cover-up for guilt. Who would suspect a baby?

The human body, therefore, is the mask of innocence, or the collective "persona" of the Son of God. It is what we wanted to show to ourselves, in denial of what is hidden in the unconscious. And then the larger unconscious mind is projected out as the rest of the universe.

We then find ourselves showing up as innocent, and with a state of so-called "amnesia", not remembering what came before. That amnesia is the implementation of denial in the mind, blocking the unconscious guilt.

The body then is a mask which the mind wears to portray itself as contained inside of that mask, vulnerable to the world and capable of being affected by it. The body, being a victim of and product of the world, is therefore represented as the one who "did not do it", i.e. did not put the world in place.

Even though the mind has created the body to be a victim, susceptible and vulnerable, it secretly wants this because it allows it to maintain denial and keep ownership of the guilt at bay.

Everything outside of the body is the "shadow", the unconscious mind in which the guilt is swirling around producing world events. Literally, and symbolically, we have shadows outside of our bodies.

And so our unconscious mind is now outside of the body, our conscious mind is inside of the body, and the body is our self image. It's not that we have a self image on-top of the body or an imaginary self-image in the mind, the body IS that image in the mind.

Fake innocence therefore is a collective coverup which starts at birth and maintains a denial of the unconscious guilt. The body itself, as the face of that innocence, is the block which prevents us from being aware of this unconscious guilt. The presence of the body at all is a demonstration that the mind behind it does not want to admit to being a sinner. It is a device for maintaining unconsciousness.

We come to believe that all that is left of us is the body, which is innocent, and is who we are, and is all of who we are. We do not remember that there was another portion of our mind which we have made unconscious, have projected outward, and are in denial of even existing.

In order to heal the unconscious guilt, you have to realize that your belief that you are innocent is not real. There is an entire layer of fake innocence stopping your mind from being consciously aware of your own belief in sin. Your belief that the body is real therefore blocks your awareness of your mind and its content (and its power to choose).

You believe your body self is all there is to you. You believe you are not the cause of your problems because you are innocent and you do not see anywhere in your awareness where you seem to be doing anything to yourself. That's because the part of you doing it to yourself is outside of your conscious awareness. It is un-conscious.

We have to then realize that we've made ourselves be in this position of being a victimizable, falsely innocent vulnerable body, as the symbolic representation of the idea of what happens after you deny your guilt. You're automatically in denial and unconscious and believing that you are only your innocent self, as soon as you "emerge" into this fake world of victimhood.

There is thus a veil of fake innocence, which aligns with physical form, which is blocking our awareness not only of unconscious guilt, but also is blocking awareness of the level of mind which came before so-called "incarnation".

Incarnation is just a state of entering into denial and going unconscious and ending up in a state of partial awareness, clueless about the larger mind that you just fled from. Incarnation is seen as an escape from guilt, and a desire to see yourself as innocent, even though deep down you do not believe it.

We have to realize this layer of this belief in being innocent, i.e. this unawareness that we ourselves actually believe we are sinful and guilty, is quite a strong layer of repression and denial. It is making us believe we're not the one who is guilty, even though we are experiencing the presence of guilt outside of us (which is our unconscious mind, made to seem separate from and "outside" of our conscious identity).

We don't suspect that we might have this guilt or that we even believe in it ourselves. We are busy believing that other people are guilty, because we do not even see that we ourselves unconsciously believe that we ourselves are guilty.

What we have done to ourselves, condemning ourselves with sin and judging ourselves as guilty, is the ONLY reason why we are upset, it is the only reason we are incarnate as a body-self, and it is the only reason why stuff is attacking us.

When we can become aware of the fact that we are faking our innocence and own up to believing in our guilt, we bring the guilt back into conscious awareness where we can at least now question whether it is true. This requires us to admit to the ways that we try to defend and maintain our "innocence" in order to keep our denial intact and repress the unconscious guilt.

Upon seeing that you yourself have attacked yourself, that you have condemned yourself, that you are the one who believes you are guilty, it is impossible to continue to pretend to yourself that your situation is being caused by someone else. What they allegedly were causing in you was actually coming from you. Admitting this is the secret to salvation - that you are only doing this to yourself.

We then must question whether we are guilty, because it is not real guilt. It is not causal guilt. Guilt is an effect of sin. And then we must question whether we are sinful, because it is not a real sin. It has not taken place in reality, nor has it affected reality at all. It has taken place only within an illusion and nothing more.

Therefore in reality, nothing has happened, and in truth, we MUST still be TRULY innocent. Believing this and accepting this as true is accepting the atonement. The atonement locates and identifies who we are OUTSIDE of the physical universe.

To uncover the unconscious mind and make it conscious and heal it, is to make your mind whole again. It also MUST mean that the facade of fake innocence must disappear. It was a device to maintain denial, and if you are no longer in denial, you do not have such a mask.

Given the human body IS that mask, and it is the belief in separation made manifest, and it is a device for denial, and its purpose was to maintain unconsciousness, if you are now choosing awareness you are literally undoing the need for or purpose of having a body at all. It is the persona, the false self image, designed to cover up the mind and block you from admitting to the truth, or from taking responsibility for what you have done to yourself.

Without a belief in sin and guilt, there is no further need for a body. The mind will simply cease to implement denial, which was a defense against the truth. And therefore the body, which was a defense against the truth, and therefore a sickness, MUST simply cease to exist. It must disappear because the guilt, which compelled the NEED for a body, has been undone.

This is because the mind has exited its identification and location within the realm of the fake innocent self - the physical universe - which WAS the unconscious mind, now made conscious, and therefore the mind has transcended the physical universe. This is ascension. This is what happens upon full completion of the atonement. It is a return to Heaven because it is an acceptance that Heaven is real and this world of fakery and false masks does not really exist.

We are children of God. We belong in the realm of love. We are innocent, forgiven and worthy of love, forever holy and eternally beautiful as an extension of God. None of this universe even happened and when it is recognized as the illusory device of denial that it is, it will disappear.

One of the really tricky things about A Course in Miracles, is the way that Jesus writes in certain contexts and sometimes it SOUNDS AS IF He is saying something which is totally opposite to what He says somewhere else. He is very "extreme" in his writing, in order to be very clear and black-and-white in his impeccable reasoning. And this can lead people to become confused as to what he really means.

For example, he could be talking in one part about how the world can be forgiven, it becomes lovely and beautiful and a reflection of holiness, then in another passage, turn around and say, from a different context, that the world is entirely a dream of death and is totally illusory and will never make you happy. It seems totally opposite.

For example, he could talk about using the body as a communication device and to help others. But then in another passage he can turn around and say, the body doesn't exist and it's the idea of sin, totally an illusion made to attack the son of God. It seems like a totally opposite attitude.

For example, he could say that the meaning of love cannot be taught, then tell you to "teach only love". Seems like a contradiction.

For example, he could be saying in one place, that God only has one son. But then in another passage, is talking about all the children of God who are co-creators with you and are your brothers. Seems like a totally opposite contradictory statement.

So what happens is, people will read the course and will tend to see these contradictions. And then they will be confused. And then to try to "fix" the contradiction, they will select WHICH of the two things are "true", and will reframe the other thing and change its meaning to "fit". This is usually fairly random but mostly people will "side with" whichever statement SEEMS more true or "bigger" or "higher".

So then for example, "one brother is all brothers" would turn into "all brothers are one self and there aren't really many brothers", as an attempt to rectify the seeming contradiction. But this is INCORRECT. It's a mistake to change what IT means in order to fit with YOUR thinking. It is YOUR thinking that needs to change to accommodate and ACCEPT what He is saying. That it is literally true, there are MANY brothers, who are one. And that means you're going to have to learn an entirely different way of thinking in order to see WHY it makes SENSE the way it is, without having to change it.

See, Jesus is not contradictory, and to claim he is really is an attack on his uniformity and consistency. He is not confused. He is an awakened being. He knows everything. He doesn't teach conflicting messages. He even says "no one can learn through double messages." He doesn't give contradictory statements. He gives statements at various LEVELS and CONTEXTS, and within one context, it can seem to be saying one thing, while in another larger context, it can blow that out of the water. Or he can talk about aspects of creation where ego laws are broken entirely, and be TELLING THE TRUTH when he says God has many children who are "all one". It does not erase the many, it doesn't result in "only one". IT IS BOTH.

We are supposed to learn to open our minds and accept ALL OF THE COURSE and EVERYTHING JESUS SAYS in it, not just the parts we like, and not just the parts that seem to make sense, and we're definitely not supposed to be hacking it apart to try to MAKE IT FIT into a thought system that is, itself, broken. God is a creator. He has many children. They are all one. Such is the truth.

"Everything God created (many things) KNOWS its Creator (individually). For this is how creation (as one thing) is accomplished, by (producing many, who are one) the Creator, and by His creations (many). In the holy meeting-place are joined the Father and His creations (many direct creations/sons), and the creations of His Son (their many creations, as one), with them together (as one, yet many). "

In A Course in Miracles, forgiveness is a movement away from believing that illusions are true and real, towards recognizing that they are in fact not true or real. This becomes clear when your awareness increases sufficiently to reveal a larger truth, which shows you the ways in which the "smaller truth", i.e. illusory lies, are in fact limited and untrue.

Forgiveness, as a process, is also a movement from unawareness, in which you don't see clearly or fully, to a state of expanded awareness where you see more of the whole picture and with greater accuracy. As you go through this, what seemed to be true of your illusions starts to be recognized as being not as true as the larger truth.

It's a matter of becoming clear about what REALLY is true, and what is actually false. Getting truth and illusions confused is the ENTIRE content of the ego, and the entire content of the separation from God - which is you trying to make illusions become reality.

As you become more aware of what the truth really is, and less convinced about what the truth is not, your discernment of true vs false becomes clearer. You learn to recognize the truth for what it is (not the illusion you thought it was), and recognize the illusion for what it is (not the reality you thought it was).

Through forgiveness you will eventually reach a truly, fully "forgiving" state of awareness, which recognizes ALL of the truth, which is that nothing has really happened, there is only innocence, and therefore there is nothing to forgive.

Now, there are a couple of pieces of the puzzles of performing miracles which I did not really get, but which certain Christian practitioners tried to describe. They would say that you have to a) believe in Jesus ("be a believer"), and b) have "faith". Since their belief in Jesus was heavily wrapped in Christian theology, I had trouble discerning exactly WHAT it was about Jesus that I was supposed to believe - such as that He died for our sins and such, which is not an ACIM teaching. I also have never really 'got' what faith means, because it was never explained in a clear context.

But I've become clearer on this now.

The only way that "believing in Jesus" and "having faith" become meaningful, is when you can discern that the ENTIRE WORLD IS AN ILLUSION. It is necessary to have a really strong clear distinction between what is TRUE, and what is FALSE. So as you go about your life believing in the world, (even if you're trying to learn not to believe in it you probably still do), while you're in this sort of in-between phase of "some of the truth is true, but some of it I don't get", you will also be similarly confused about what it means to believe in Jesus, and what faith is.

If parts of the world are real to you, in spite of what you might claim otherwise, this HAS to mean that you in part also believe that God is not entirely real. It also means that you have 'faith in' the ego, and faith in sickness and death.

Now, this isn't something that people want to admit but, the simple fact is, either you believe that God is real, fully, or in some way you don't believe it. And that displaced belief will be put into a conviction that the ego is real - that it is truth, and that everything it claims is true. That will go on to mean that when shit happens in the world and it seems real, part of you will be trying to look to God for a way out of it, but part of you will be attached to believing in it. And so you are now torn, or your faith is divided. And Jesus says faith cannot serve two masters.

So what needs to happen is, through proper forgiveness, we need to become REALLY CLEAR about the distinction between reality, and illusions. We can' have this mishmash of partial reality and partial illusion. It will confuse us and rob truth of meaning.

To be able to believe in Jesus, means that you believe Jesus is 100% reality, He is 100% love, He is 100% truth, 100% immortal, 100% innocent, 100% at peace etc. He shares this truth with God 100%.

IF that is true, if that's your definition of truth, then it HAS to mean, that anything not of God is not truth. So now you need to be very clear, WHAT is not of God? Because if you go on believing God created the world, and yet the world seems to be the place where things fuck up big time, then... well, now you are super confused. And of course you are confused because it makes no sense that God would create a world with sickness in it, because that means God creates sickness. So now if you were to follow that truth, and you were trying to find some healing or peace from experiencing sickness, how the heck would you have any kind of power to turn to if that power believes in sickness? You'd be hopeless.

So... to believe in Jesus means to believe in God, that God is the one and only truth, and only things which are completely in accord with unconditional love are of God. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else at all can be permitted to take up the label of "real" or "true".

So then you have to ask yourself, did God create the world? No. He did not. So that means the world is not real. And that's mind-blowing, if you really take in deeply. It completely undermines your entire view of reality - or rather, your mistaken view in which you think illusions are reality. Because all this time you've been thinking you're living in a 'real' world and now you find out, it's a tricking illusion pretending to be real!

But this is how you can then have faith. You can have faith because, now that you believe in God's truth, and you know that God's truth is the only truth, and that this world is NOT a part of God's truth, that means whenever any shit happens in the world, you can BYPASS it, OVERLOOK it (forgiveness), and HOLD STRONG to the truth as God would have it be. That means, NO MATTER WHAT is in front of your face, no matter what happens, no matter how serious it seems, no matter how final - even death, YOU DO NOT BELIEVE IN IT, because believing in it would have to mean - you really do not believe in God all the way.

But if you DO believe in God, then.... no matter what happens, no matter how serious, you do NOT pay it attention, you do NOT believe in it, and you instead express and extend GOD'S REALITY in place of it. You cancel it out. You overwrite it. You clarify that the problem is NOT real, is NOT the truth, and you replace it with love. This shows the nothingness of the illusion, puts everything in its correct order, and corrects all confusion. It also produces miracles.

So you have faith by believing that God's truth is true, and that this is shared by Jesus.... and you have faith by holding true to that fact regardless of how the world seems to be. The only question of your faith wavering is when you believe the illusion enough that your belief in God's power wavers, and that means you've temporarily forgotten that God's truth is true. You've believed in the ego again. So you lose faith when that happens.

This kind of faith in God is not blind faith or just 'hope'... it is CERTAINTY, it is KNOWING, it is TRUTH, and it is CORRECTION.

Holy Spirit interjected while writing that the word "trust" is really what faith means. Trusting God. Trusting the real truth. Trusting that BECAUSE of what the truth is, that "this problem" is not insurmountable or irreversible. It is that knowing of the truth, that trust in the truth, which powers miracles.

So forgiveness leads you to miracle mindedness, a clarity about what is true and what is false gives you miracle mindedness, and a certainty about the truth being true (and that therefore the world is not real) gives you the foundation for faith. Your trust/faith in God's Way gives you miracle-working capabilities.

To get there you're going to have to question the validity of every way that you're trying to find truth in the world, because it means that you're looking for truth in an illusion. It means you're not clear yet about what is true and what is false. The world is false - head's up!. Entirely false. It is entirely an illusion that doesn't really exist or mean anything at all. Every time you 'seek' for truth in it, you will not find it, because it is not there. You need to learn to stop trying to do that and instead believe in God.

The miracles will flow from there.

"The simple and the obvious are NOT apparent to those who would make palaces and royal robes of nothing, believing they are kings with golden crowns BECAUSE of them."

Last night what came to awareness is the nature of the ego. It was shown to me as a picture of a selfish king.

The king was riding on a golden jewel-laden platform, lounging casually while being attended to by guards and servants. Eating luxuriously, wearing elaborate robes made of the finest materials, complete with jewels and gold and a crown.

He thought highly of himself, of his own self importance. He saw himself as above everyone, and because of this he really did not care to even mingle with those lesser than himself. He was distanced and cut off from the larger population, and didn't really care for anyone at all besides himself.

He wanted to live an opulent, wealthy, care-free life, waited-on and pampered and adored and worshipped as a lord. Skimming along the surface of society barely involved in anything or helping anyone, wanting nothing to do with the unclean peasants nor to barely give a single thing to anyone.

He wanted to live in his big castle with his special toys and his expensive furnishings. To be told how great he is, to sit on his portable throne and be escorted according to his shallow wishes. It seemed he had everything he wanted, having gained the whole world, sitting at the apex of the pyramid on top of a mountain of riches, and yet bereft of any real relationships with anyone.

Living out his days in the illusion of perfection and the fantasy of having everything there is worth having. Of owning and ruling over the whole kingdom, a kingdom that he had no real interest in other than to be ruler of it and exalted by it. And for all this selfishness and seeming success and wealth and grandiosity, he lived as if on a tiny island all alone and had nothing of any real value.

His life was empty and narrow and shallow and greedy. He got everything he wanted and no-one could oppose his tyranny. And so he thought himself to be of the utmost specialness, important above all others, and the greatest of all rulers. Caring not for anything he ruled over nor for the lives of others. He was fat from the feasting and lazy in his lifestyle. And he wanted nothing but to keep the lesser-kind away from himself.

He lived like a king, but he had no soul. He thought everyone wanted what he had, and that therefore everyone envied him, and therefore that he was entitled and better than all of them. And not once did he think of anyone besides himself. His castle was a prison, to keep him and his riches protected from thieves and beggars and the hungry, to keep them out and to keep him in. For he wanted only to have everything for himself.

"Would you remain WITHIN your tiny kingdom, a sorry king, a bitter ruler of all he surveys, who looks on nothing, but who would still die to DEFEND it?" "In your tiny kingdom you have so little!"

"The ego is trying to teach you how to gain the whole world, and lose your own Soul."

"What profiteth a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own Soul?"

Your whole mind is supposed to be everywhere.

The mind inside your body seems to be your conscious mind. The mind outside your body seems to be your unconscious mind.

While what is within your body seems to be different and separate from what is outside your body, you will see yourself as being the limits of your conscious self. Parts of you which are unconscious will be seen as outside of you.

Guilt which you put into your unconscious, so that your conscious mind can pretend to be innocent, will come up as seeming "events" in the outer world which come to teach you lessons. You will see them as attacks on your identity, at least at first, depending on your willingness to use them differently.

When what is within you is the same as what is outside of you, and when there is no further need for a separation to keep the two apart, the body will have no purpose and will disappear.

When what is within you is seen as also being within others, whereby what is in both of you is the same Christ mind, the same Self, your whole mind will be experienced as everywhere. That's because, like God, you are omnipresent.

The body was made only to create a sense of separation in the mind, a split between what hides within it and what hides outside of it. Its only purpose was to maintain an illusion of division so strong that it suggests the limits of your conscious self is the confines of the body.

You built a wall around the conscious self which, through a condensing of that idea, formed the illusion of bodies. Bodies are a barrier between what has been retained - the little innocent self - versus what has been rejected - the larger body of unconscious guilt which is disassociated from and appears to comprise "other people", i.e. "not self".

What is happening outside of the body is just a drama being orchestrated and run by the unconscious mind. Your unconscious mind. Events which happen in it represent the content of your own mind coming up into awareness to be reconsidered for forgiveness.

Forgiveness must entail a repair of the inner joining with the outer, of the separate embodied self rejoining with and beyond the embodied selves of others. What is in you is in them. What you are is what they are. You are one.

Joining of minds, which is miraculous, causes the body to be healed, because the body temporarily disappears. Its shift into invisibility, in light of the truth of oneness, heals it of its use as a device for separation.

Attempting to anchor self more heavily into the body and to tie the self to the body, simply makes the body more real and reinforces the separation between yourself and yourself. Such is the purpose of sickness which defends against unity by reinforcing separation, i.e. reinforcing the reality of the body as a wall that comes between you and your brother.

Your brother IS yourself. Those "others", those "not me"'s outside of you, ARE you. They are parts of the split mind of the sonship. You are to be reunited with them and share with them and join with them. This overlooks the body and it becomes meaningless and non-existent. It must disappear as inner and outer, self and not-self, become One.

In oneness there can be no separations.

You are everywhere. You are the whole sonship. You are the One Omnipresent Son of God.

It's very useful as a tool to consider what something means if God were included. We think far too often "separately" and without including God.

Since God created you as a part of him, you are literally part of God. Such as in the lesson which says "Love created me loving" "Peace created me peaceful" etc. You inherited God. And you actually live within God within his being and mind. You're part of him.

So properly speaking, anything which applies to YOU, or to anyone, ALSO applies to God. Something can't be true of you unless it is also true of God. That's very useful to keep in mind.

So for example, if someone seems to be sick, we shouldn't just think of that person in isolation. We should include God. We should remind ourselves, if that person is a part of God, and God cannot be sick, then that person cannot be sick. Otherwise God would have to also be sick. This is along similar lines to:

"If God is real there is no pain. If pain is real there is no God."

"There is no cruelty in God and none in me."

That's the simple logic of it. If your brother, or yourself, is a part of God, and if God has a certain divine attribute, then you and your brother must also have that attribute. If they seem to have attributes that God cannot have, then they and you cannot have that attribute either.

Also if you accuse yourself, blame yourself, feel guilty, condemn yourself, attack yourself, etc, you should also remember that you are doing this to God as well. And in fact, also to the whole sonship.

We have to learn that we are not JUST ourselves, isolated and separate and disconnected from everyone. Everything we do or think affects the whole universe. When we assert that something ungodly applies to ourselves, or to others, we're also saying it applies to God.

We can use this fact to deprogram ourselves from illusions. We can say, since God is innocent, and I am part of God, I must also be innocent. If I were guilty, part of God would be guilty, and God can't be guilty. Therefore I can't be guilty. Or, since my brother is a part of God, he cannot be sick, because otherwise God would be sick. This is also a way to seeing God in yourself and others.

In general we need to open up more to being joined, connected, one, sharing, united in identity, with a truth (the golden rule) which applies to ourselves AND to others. An inclusive truth, instead of always cutting everyone off and pointing fingers at exclusive little boxes.

"If what you do to my brother you do to me, and if you do everything for yourself because we are PART of you, everything WE do belongs to you as well."

"It is not true that you can make decisions BY yourself, or FOR yourself alone. No thought of God's Son CAN be separate, or isolated in its effects. Every decision is made for the WHOLE SONSHIP, directed in and out, and influencing a constellation larger than anything you ever dreamed of."

"His Father's Love for him belongs to you. Your function here on earth is only to forgive him, that you may accept him back as your identity. He is as God created him. And you are what he is. Forgive him now his sins, and you will see that you are one with him."

"You can overlook your brother's dreams. So perfectly can you forgive him his illusions, he becomes your Savior from YOUR dreams."

"Today let me give honor to Your Son, for thus alone I find the way to You. Father, I lay no limits on the Son You love, and You created limitless. The honor that I give to him is Yours, and what is Yours belongs to me as well."

Years ago I did a miracle kind of by accident. I didn't even really know how I did this or why, it just kind of happened.

I had this box which had coins in it. I'd used up all the larger-denomination coins and there was only like 1 and 2 pence pieces left (British currency). I knew there was basically nothing in there besides this. I'd sifted through it several times and totally extracted all the good stuff.

But for some reason that day, I needed a couple of `pounds`, and was for some reason in a different state of mind. I kept having this feeling of insisting that there MUST be more money in there somewhere. I turned through the coins with my fingers, looking for it. For probably 30 seconds there was nothing, and I knew from previous checks that I wouldn't find anything. But, something in me was becoming very insistent.

I kept saying to myself, there MUST be some money in here. I built up this kind of ... I don't know if expectation is the word, it wasn't like having a sense of anticipation and then waiting, it was more like, an insistence, or a demand. I demanded that there be money, that this was TRUE, and that it simply must be. For some reason I wasn't paying attention to what my eyes were showing me, I was defying it and insisting there must be something there.

I don't know how I managed to ignore the ego at this point, because normally I would've been like, well, I know there is no higher denominations in there, I would trust my eyes and trust my previous experiences and just stop right there. But this time for some reason I was more miracle minded, and kept on probing the pile of coins insisting that there must be decent money in there.

And then, suddenly, two gold-colored 1-pound coins suddenly appeared out of nowhere. These are in striking contrast to the other coins because the 1 and 2 pence pieces are a dark brown bronze color. The shiny gold-colored coins were suddenly there at my fingertips. They didn't show up because they were hiding, they simply did not exist before. But somehow, they suddenly appeared. They manifested out of thin air.

I think at the time my mindset didn't seem that phased by this, like it seemed kind of natural or something. It didn't shock me. I also did not repeat it, or even attempt to. It didn't seem out of the ordinary, it's just how I was functioning somehow. It seemed to make sense and I just used the money as intended. It hasn't been until looking back on the event that I realized more that this was a miraculous manifestation and that I was doing something with my mind which was not typical.

This really is the tip of the iceberg of what the mind can do. It's going to be fun opening up to more of this.

Some miracle-working basics are embedded in this story....

1) expecting/demanding/insisting/knowing/requiring that the result must happen

2) ignoring all "better judgement" or ego knowledge or even visual evidence

3) being persistent and consistent and not taking no for an answer - you have to kind of resolve to be "done with" tolerating the conditions that are present and resolve to be 100% determined that it MUST change.

Jesus has said in the Course that when the mind is used to focus thought, combined with strong/firm belief, a huge surge of power results which has the power to literally move mountains. Bring it on! This is what miracles really are all about. Ignoring the ego and bringing forth supernatural results.

I complain that food manufacturers constantly package food in containers which are way larger than the contents, and when you go to open it up you find it's half empty and feel deceived. It IS a dishonest practice. At first it was the 'oh potatoe chips need extra air space to cushion them against breakage' but then it was... well, here's 20 other foods that don't have this risk but still come with a large airspace. The packaging mis-represents what you actually will get. Ok, that's just a deceptive shitty lie.

Ok. That's my complaint. Now, let's look at what has happened because of this complaint.

I've started out by seeing myself as being victimized. I ask, who am *I* in this scenario. There's the food manufacturer over there and there's the product sitting in front of me and I'm seeing this scenario where I'm looking at ME in a particular way. I think I'm looking at the food container and complaining, but that's actually a few steps down the road. What happened before my angry reaction was me seeing myself 'in' the scenario as a victim. ie..

1) If the food item has more empty space than needed, I have decided that this means there is dishonesty. It's dishonesty on the level of form and implies deceit.

2) If there is deceit in the food item, and because I say it means they are being deceiving, and because I have an interest in this food item, I am now a part of the story and it is ME that is being deceived. It's personal!

3) Now that it's 'affecting me' (because of the way I CHOSE to position myself as the victim in the story), I am now justified in anger and annoyance. Now I can blame them. Now I can say it's their fault that I am angry, because what they did happened before what I did. But this covers up the fact that what I did (made it real, gave it meaning it doesn't have, treated it as non-neutral), happened before anything else.

4) If I am seeing guilt in the food container then who is experiencing guilt? I might be trying to get THEM to experience guilt but it's a part of my reality, so *I* am experiencing guilt, albeit displaced. That means there's guilt in my mind, and I believe in my own guilt. That means I believe I've sinned, and I'm trying to pin it on the food container and the people who made it wrongly.

So as I find the huge airspace in a bag of chips annoying, or the gross vomit-like quality of tv dinners to be nothing like the beautiful arrangement on the box cover, or the totally unnecessary container size housing rather less product just to get me to think that I am getting more than I am, I have this opportunity to realize.... this is ONLY there to trigger my own self-attack and to remind me that I am CHOOSING to see myself as a victim, and I'm only choosing that because *I* BELIEVE* I am deceptive and dishonest and guilty. Hmmm.

So... then it boils down to this. I can't hold THEM guilty without holding myself guilty, because this guilt is mine. Hmm. Ok, I forgive them BECAUSE they did not do anything, I DID IT. And I forgive me because I did not really DO anything, nothing has happened. And I am forgiven already because none of this happened in the first place, it's just a dream that isn't real. And I am actually whole and one with GOD right now being HAPPY rather than right. Yay. We are ALL innocent and equal and One and none of us are guilty at all.

Ok now to eat some chips.