"Perception is a mirror, not a fact. And what I look on is my state of mind reflected outward. I would bless the world by looking on it through the eyes of Christ. And I will look upon the certain signs that all my sins have been forgiven me." UrW304

There is a trap which people may not be aware of, which can cause you to get very stuck. And the more egoic you are the more likely you are to get stuck.

The problem is, what we are "being" in our mind and identity, directly influences what aspects of the world we focus on and what we see IN it.

If we are being very separate and body-identified and full of guilt etc, the world will actually seem to take on these qualities and reflect back an experience of it being fragmented, discordant, warring, unsafe, etc.

This doesn't depend on the things that happen in the world, or the specific forms or objects or people. It's more to do with how it registers to your awareness, that it means to you, what you read into it, what stands out to you and what it means.

You actually have a SUBJECTIVE experience of the world. All perception is subjective. The world does not objectively exist. Only heaven is objectively real. In the world what's going on in YOU, directly CORRELATES to what you "make of" what's out there.

THIS can become a horrible trap because if you don't realize that your inner state is influencing how you see things, you could think that the world "is just like this". That if you FEEL that the world is dangerous and guilt-ridden and fearful and full of sin, it's because YOU are being these things.

If you don't realize that your experience of the world is a MIXTURE of the world itself and your inner state of mind, you could by mistake believe that "the world is just like this". As if how it appears to you, what it means to you, what you focus on in it, is INHERENT to the world itself.

For example if you are filled with guilt and shame and fear and darkness, the world will see to be a very dark guilty nightmarish place. You will focus on separations and physicality. The solidity of matter will seem heavy and impenetrable like a prison. Things will loom over you and threaten you. You won't feel safe anywhere and everything will seem evil. And then you will think the whole world IS an evil place, and it's impossible to escape it.

If you're sort of living in an experience of "a world" that seems like that, you will reason to yourself that it makes sense for you to act certain ways, to defend yourself from it, to not love it, to hate it and resent it. You might be thinking that you hate the world because it's a horrible place. But the reason that it seems horrible is because you hate yourself. You are MIXING your attitudes about yourself, WITH your perceptions of the world. You are FLAVORING the world with your mind.

Essentially, you cannot see OUTSIDE OF your own sense of identity and nature. You project this identity and nature onto spacetime. You then "relate" to this projected mixture of objects and meanings and regard it as "objective truth", but it isn't. It's a sort of blind closed-box experience, in which YOU are making the world seem to justify hate and resentment.

The problem is that then you will feel that you cannot forgive the world. No-one who believes the world is evil and horrible can forgive it. If it REALLY IS these things, you cannot forgive it. You cannot feel safe in it, you cannot trust it. You know it would make no sense to trust an UNTRUSTWORTHY world. And the idea of TRUSTING it seems completely risky and opening yourself up to attack. Forgiveness is unjustified and attack is justified.

God also DOES NOT love "such a world". He does not and cannot love a world in which there is this content of fear and guilt. Because in order to BE IN such a world, his mind would have to contain fear and guilt, and then he would be lost in unreality and attack, and find it IMPOSSIBLE to forgive and love such an "experience" of a world.

But we are told God does love "the world", because he sees it WITH love and GIVES love and thus his reflection of love is upon it. And thus he EXPERIENCES love because the love is in him. As in "God is in the world I see because God is in my mind." The reflection of heaven is possible when YOU are being heaven-like, and holy-minded, and forgiving of yourself, such that you PROJECT this out and see it REFLECTED back to you.

Essentially, THE WORLD IS A MIRROR. It is NOT a separate thing from you. It is not "having its own" stuff. Believing that the world is separate from you and has its own objective truth which you have no influence over, is the ego mindset of false perception. It causes you to focus on separations and differences and sees no cohesion or unity. This is a mistake, because the egoic mind is experiencing "the world" AS THOUGH IT IS ITSELF.

If you are experiencing the world LIKE the way you experience yourself, but you BELIEVE that you are "separate", you will believe that your experience of the world has no CONNECTION to your state of mind, and that now means YOU ARE TRAPPED. You are lost in a mirror, believing that what you see in the mirror is NOT YOU and is nothing like you. Yet alone that you might be putting it there.

In higher states of mind you come to see that because you are holy and innocent and loving and inclusive, because you are not separate and not attacking, you don't see these things "in the world". Or rather, you experience the world in a way that de-emphasizes these things. You don't experience or notice or pay attention to differences and separations. The more whole YOU become, the more the world SEEMS more whole.

So the big trap is, which most people are falling into, is that the more you think the world itself is SEPARTELY evil, the more you will emphasise that YOU are separated off, and your mind will become darker and darker. The darker your mind becomes the MORE the world will seem darker still. And you will think that your HATRED of it is totally justified and makes total sense. You will point and finger and believe the world ITSELF is inherently evil, and its evil has nothing to do with you. That it is NOT a mirror.

And that means you're quite capable of driving yourself into a "pit of hell", a nightmare of your own making, where you keep attacking the world over and over and making your relationship to YOURSELF worse, which makes your experience of the world worse, which just keeps you going down and down further into a hellish experience because you don't realize the world is a mirror. If it IS a mirror, and you treat it like it is NOT a mirror, you will think IT is "getting worse", when really YOU are getting worse, and you will justify hating "it" (as if not you) even more. This is the split in the mind.

The more you dissociate, separate, project guilt, attack, be unforgiving etc, the more you experience that the world has NOTHING to do with you. That its conditions are an inherent evil of its own, objectively evil. That you are not contributing to this evilness in ANY way. And that's a serious trap, you can get very lost in believing that you SHOULD hate and be outraged toward the world because "it" seems like a horrible evil place. But it isn't inherently a horrible evil place. YOU are being horrible evil in it, and it's making you FILTER your perception to show you aspects which seem to reflect that back to you.

The world IS a mirror, and if this is not recognised, you will see no way out. To get out of the hellish nightmare, you have to be able to RISE ABOVE, ie transcend, which means YOU have to become more heavenly if you want to experience the world as more heaven-like. YOU have to become less separated off if you want to experience the world as a less separating place. YOU have to stop attacking if you want to experience that the world isn't attacking you. YOU have to be what you want to SEE in the world.

And that means that no matter what you are experiencing the world as NOW, that's just the result of what you chose to BE previously. If you want to see the world in a better light, YOU have to get yourself into a better light. And then the qualities you saw IN the world in the darkness WILL DISAPPEAR, or become less emphasised, because YOU are being a better person.

Ultimately this leads to you reflecting heaven within yourself, which results in you projecting heavenly qualities, which results in the world appearing to reflect heaven back to you. And that allows you to transcend all the limits and separations and differences, allows you to ignore hierarchies of illusions, stops you being deceived by forms, and allows you to overcome temptations.

Essentially your EXPERIENCE of the world becomes more like a oneness the transcends all the forms things take. And then the world reflects the MEANING of God. When you reach that state you're in the real world, the world you made is the forgiven world, and you're ready to go home to heaven.

"In the world you, can become a spotless mirror, in which the holiness of your Creator shines forth from you, to all around you. You can REFLECT HEAVEN here. But no reflections of the images of other gods must dim the mirror that would hold God's reflection in it. Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego. You need but leave the mirror clean, and clear of all the images of hidden darkness you have drawn upon it. God will shine upon it of Himself. Only the clear reflection OF Himself can BE perceived upon it. Reflections are seen in light. In darkness, they are obscure, and their meaning seems to lie only in shifting interpretations, rather than in themselves." UrT14E5

"This is a question everyone must ask. Certainly peace seems to be impossible here. Yet the Word of God promises other things that seem impossible, as well as this. His Word has promised peace. It has also promised that there is no death; that resurrection must occur, and that rebirth is man's inheritance. The world you see cannot be the world God loves, and yet His Word assures us that He loves the world. God's Word has promised us that peace is possible here, and what He promises can hardly be impossible. But it is true that the world must be looked at differently, if His promises are to be accepted. What the world is, is but a fact. You cannot choose what this should be. But you can choose how you would see it. Indeed, you must choose this." UrM12A1

"The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real. Perhaps you think you did not make the world, but came unwillingly to what was made already, hardly waiting for your thoughts to give it meaning. Yet in truth you found exactly what you looked for when you came. There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly." UrW132L4

"Projection makes perception; the world you see is what you GAVE it, nothing more than that." UrT21A1

"Projection MAKES perception, and you CANNOT see beyond it. Again and again have men attacked each other, because they saw IN THEM a shadow figure in their private world." UrT12E3

"To the extent to which you value guilt, to that extent will you perceive a world in which attack is justified. To the extent to which you recognize that guilt is meaningless, to that extent will you perceive attack cannot BE justified. This is in strict accord with vision's FUNDAMENTAL law: You see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you WANT it there. Perception HAS no other law than this." UrT25D1

"In His (Holy Spirits) perception of the world, nothing is seen but justifies forgiveness and the sight of perfect sinlessness. Nothing arises but is met with instant and complete forgiveness. Nothing remains an instant, to obscure the sinlessness that shines unchanged, beyond the pitiful attempts of specialness to put it out of mind, where it MUST be, and light the BODY up INSTEAD of it." UrT25D5

You hear often that 'the world' as a term becomes substituted with terms like "its a dream", "its an illusion", "its not real", "we made it up", "its a projection" etc.

But, this doesn't really grasp what an illusion is. It's not just some word you can replace other words with.

The definition of an illusion is something appearing tobe something it is not, designed to deliberately deceive and block awareness of the truth. It is a device that lies to you and tricks you into believing something that isn't true. But in order to even KNOW that it is an illusion, you have to have enough awareness of what it's like to NOT be deceived by the illusion. You have to be aware of how the illusion works, what it's actually 'doing' to portray an appearance, how it is distracting you, and basically to 'see through it'.

Overlooking illusions is forgiveness. This means being aware of all of the 'tricks' that the illusion attempts to perform, but seeing through them and past them and not being fooled by them. And this is an entirely different state of consciousness and awareness, than to simply stay IN the ego illusion and start labeling it 'illusion'. That's like just switching out the term "planet earth" for "planet illusion". That doesn't really reveal HOW it deceives you.

So the big problem we have is that we do NOT realize how the illusion is an illusion. We do not recognize it AS an illusion. We do not see through it, or past it. We are fooled by it. We are made unconscious by it. It's like being hypnotized or put into an unconscious stupor, in which we take the illusion seriously, at face value, and listen to its appearance as if that is reality. Mistaking an illusion for reality is our only mistake.

Here's an example of an illusion. You are in the dark. The room is unlit. In the room there are objects. One of the objects you touch and it feels really strange and it seems to move as you touch it, and this makes you suddenly afraid that there's maybe a person in the room, and you scream. So you've fallen for the illusion, the impression, that there is something serious and frightening happening. But what happens when you switch the light on, suddenly you have MORE INFORMATION. You are now aware of more parts and pieces that you couldn't even see before, and were not aware of at all. Suddenly you realize that the thing you touched was in fact just a large house plant which you brushed up against, and it's completely safe and not scary at all. You feel relieved, right?

This is what it means to see through the illusion. It means, you have seen the truth, which has revealed to you, by shining a light of increased awareness, ALL of what is present, rather than only a narrow context or portion of what is present. When things are taken out of context they become a nightmare. Meaning becomes distorted. Reality becomes disjointed. We start to hallucinate that things might be happening that aren't really happening. This is how someone experiences insanity - losing touch with the bigger picture and becoming fixated on something whose relationship to real meaning has been distorted and blocked, such that you can no longer tell what anything really is and everything becomes frighteningly animated and motivated by bizarre nonsense forces that you don't understand.

The physical world, in the form that it appears, is an illusion. This does not mean that the physical world of form is being seen 'correctly' and fully, by seeing objects as they are. Or like, you become more aware of how all the objects contain beauty or contain God etc. That isn't seeing through the whole illusion. What you do not realize, because you have forgotten what it means to be NOT DELUDED AT ALL, is that the physical world of forms is, in its entirety, designed to block and distract away from the awareness of the presence of God. Even if you awaken to some 'stage' in which you see God in all things, if you are still seeing forms you are still deluded by the illusion.

"Nothing so blinding as sight of form" - ACIM

"Everything the body's eyes can see is a mistake, an error in perception, a distorted fragment of the whole without the meaning that the whole would give." - ACIM - "T-22.III.4."

Also.. "T-22.III.5. 3 The body's eyes see only form. 4 They cannot see beyond what they were made to see. 5 And they were made to look on error and not see past it. 6 Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see only illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside form of nothing. 7 To this distorted form of vision the outside of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true. 8 Yet how can sight that stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, see truly? 9 It is held back by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but form will be perceived." - ACIM

What you may not realize is, this entire physical universe is a holographic projection, designed SPECIFICALLY and INTENTIONALLY, to distort and block all trace of the nature of God. It is deliberately designed to obfuscate, distort, give an opposite appearance to, and completely make it appear, that God does not exist at all. The form that it takes is DELIBERATELY designed by the ego to show you something that looks nothing like God, has no properties of God, completely diffuses and blocks God's character, and makes you completely BLIND to God. The body's eyes then can only see this form, the appearance of the absence of God, and cannot see past it TO God. The entire physical universe is a DECEPTION!

The way this works is, every 'form', every object, presents to your awareness the idea that all things are different. It presents the idea that all objects are separate from each other, none of them share anything at all including the same space or time, none of them truly are equal or perfectly alike, and all of them are in conflict. Does that sound like a picture of God? No. That's intentional. Form, the form of error, was deliberately made make God not apparent, and to make it seem to your awareness that God does not exist at all anymore. That's the ego's wish. That's why it made this illusion.

So the 'illusion' is, that forms present an image to you which is not the truth, which is extremely deceptive, and which you fall for easily. For example, consider problems. The ego presents to you a specific problem which is usually limited to a handful of forms. It tells you that only these forms are a problem, so you need to solve it. You solve it, but this has no effect on the 50 billion other problems in the world. The ego's solution to problems only seems to apply to a tiny portion of the world, and has no transfer value to other problems.

The ego absolutely hates the idea of it being possible to solve ALL problems with ONE solution - that is the Holy Spirit's attitude. It does not want that at all. So it keeps you focussed on looking at objects as being very DIFFERENT to each other. A dog is not a cat. A car is not a house. An attack by a coworkers is not an attack by a neighbor. The ego makes it all APPEAR different and separate. THAT is how it deceives you. Because in truth, there is only ONE problem and ONLY solution resolves the entirety of it completely.

The abstraction needed to SEE and to RECOGNIZE that all forms are THE SAME THING, the same illusion, takes some significant forgiveness and awakening. Being able to look at all forms and recognize, every single one of the deceptions and temptations that every one of these forms is trying to SHOW me, to try to convince me that they are TRUE, is the SAME LIE, and they are all using the SAME STRATEGY. Ultimately, the entire world is the same ONE illusion, presented by the ONE ego, using ONE set of seemingly diverse and apparently highly fragmented deceptions. Each time that you fall for one of its deceptions and think, hey, yes, this illusion is real and this problem is separate from others, and this object is not one with other objects, and that person is separate from this person etc... that's you FAILING to see through the illusion. That's you FALLING FOR THE TRICK!

So yes, there is a way of seeing, which doesn't just overlook illusions but which is AWARE ONLY OF GOD. There is a way of recognizing everything that is false for what it is - false. There is a way of no longer believing a single thing that any appearance of object or form or separation or expression of fragmentation/multiplicity suggests to you in any way. There is a way of COMPLETELY IGNORING what the senses are shown via external signals. There is a way of absolutely not listening to a single shred of ego consciousness whatsoever. And there is a way of SEEING GOD DIRECTLY AND FULLY. And guess what? God does not look ANYTHING like how the physical world looks, and they have nothing in common at all.

In revelation, the entire world disappears. The entire illusion disappears. All physical objects disappear and are replaced with brilliant bright light and total awareness of love. That is all. This is reality. This is an experience of no illusions. Compare that to the PURPOSE of the world that the ego made, and recognize that forms looks like forms FOR A REASON, and separate objects appear to be separate FOR A REASON, and separate problems appear to be distinct and unique FOR A REASON, and all temptations and deceptions are designed to distract you and lead you into unconsciousness FOR A REASON.

The ego's use of the world is NOT that it is neutral. The ego's use of the world is to create a 'veil', an illusion, a huge TRICK, a distortion of consciousness, a BLOCK to awareness, over your awareness, so that you can no longer fully experience God or recognize His nature. God is the same everywhere. God is in all parts equally. All of God is in every part of God. When you are presented with objects which appears to only contain distinct separate parts in each part and there is no sign of any sharing or oneness whatsoever, in form, THAT is the illusion that there is no God. You have to learn NOT TO BELIEVE YOUR EYES!

This is what illusion means. You have to get out of the illusion to know that it is an illusion. You have to awaken to a greater reality in which you are aware of how God is everywhere, God shares everything, God is in everything fully, all of God is in all parts of existence, there is no separation, and all appearances are a LIE. Lies are not meant to be paid attention to, you are meant to discern that they are lies and not listen to them and not take what they present to you seriously or as though it is even real. Recognize the entire physical universe was made to SHUT OUT GOD, and not just in terms of you having a separate perception OF the world that has errors in it, but that the world ITSELF is an error and has taken on a multitude of forms to completely deceive your comprehension of 'what is'. We fall for this every single day and every time we believe in any kind of differences whatsoever.

There are no forms in God, not even forms that seem like they have God in them. NO FORMS. Complete formlessness. Forms are separation and separation is not real.

Every time we think one thing is not something else. Every time we think one object is not another object. Every time we experience separate problems and separate solutions. Every time we believe that we are separated from other people by bodies. Every time we don't recognize that there is only ONE problem, and only ONE solution is needed once and for all to solve them all, permanently. Every time we fall for this grand illusion and can't find a vantage point in awareness from which we can see 'the whole', the one, we fall for the ego's deception. Truly this world is not just a 'thing' and not just a 'place', it is a mechanism for reality distortion, consciousness obstruction, enforced unconsciousness, fragmentation of mind, and loss of life. This is what we have to see past and not believe what our senses are saying is out there.

"There is no world. This is the central thought the Course would attempt to teach." - ACIM - think about that deeply, the entire physical world is a magic trick aimed at stopping Creation, stopping awareness, and stopping God.

We are immortal Spirit. We are God's creation. We are infinite and unlimited by form. We are equal everywhere. And we are real. And we have no differences. And we are not separate objects. And we are not limited by space or time.

"I cannot see in darkness but in light" - "I am not an illusion but a reality." - ACIM

There's a technique you can try, to help with removing sickness. I call it cancelling. Sometimes Holy Spirit advises me to do this.Basically, you attempt to focus on the NON-EXISTENCE of the symptom or problem. To recognize it as nothing. Or more importantly, that it is already gone. You affirm in various ways that it is not there. That it is gone. That it never did exist. You need to recognize it is NOTHING AT ALL.

"What is understood as nothing must disappear." - Jesus

There is a catch to this though. If you focus on the problem itself or the physical symptom, this lends it some reality. And this actually is a way that your mind KEEPS it and maintains it.

"Whenever you attempt to reach a goal in which the body's betterment is cast as major beneficiary, you try to bring about your death."

So as you say something like "This pain isn't there", you are in fact making the pain real by your belief that you are addressing a pain. And that means you're believing the body is REAL and are trying to "fix it", which actually attacks it. It then seems very difficult, and sometimes quite subtle, to figure out how to focus on it not being there, without implying that it is.

So the question is, how do you work to recognize that something does not exist, without giving it any existence? It seems like a catch 22.

Ideally what you want to do is simply focus on what you want things to be like, and NOT on what you want them to not be like. Think of this is a choice. It's an attempt to choose a new reality. To choose a new condition. You want to focus solely on what you want the body or whatever to be like, and emphasis and energize that.

"Miracles are energizing."

"Mind makes this decision as it makes all decisions responsible for the condition of the body."

I've found it's also very useful to place the symptom in the PAST. Because your mind already strongly believes that when something is GONE, it is not here NOW, because it is in the past. Placing it in the past removes it from the present. So by talking about the symptom on the PAST tense, this helps you to not lend it much reality.

This is why the focus should be on the fact that the symptom is ALREADY GONE, is not here now, has passed, has ALREADY been healed, and has been replaced by health. Since it's in the past, you are not working on it NOW, you are simply focus on what is here now. This helps your mind to visualize and focus on the CURRENT condition that you want to acknowledge as being healthy and healed.

This is a form of PRAYER. In prayer, you attempt to visualize, feel and experience what it is what you WANT. Not what you don't want. You give mental attention, energy and belief to what you NOW CHOOSE as your new reality. If you focus on what you don't want with efforts too attack it to make it go away, you will only increase it and keep it. As in the common 'new age' concept that "what you resist persists" or "what you fear comes to you".

For example to make it rain, you might visualize a heavy storm cloud, hear the rain falling, see the splashes in your mind, etc. Or to make it stop raining, you might visualize the ABSENCE of a storm, which has been REPLACED BY what you DO want, such as a blue sky, the sun shining, feeling the warmth of the sun, hearing the birds singing again etc.

This prayer is a way of "asking for" what you WANT. And you always are asking for what you WANT, even when you focus on what you think you don't want. So you have to be careful NOT to target or dwell on what you DON'T want. You have to experience it as having been REPLACED in your mind. Just as atonement REPLACES sin with love and undoes it. Just as reality replaces illusions. And just as forgiveness replaces attack.

If you think of the sickness as being simply a mistaken choice, then the question arises, how do you undo the sickness? Do you undo the sickness by focusing on the sickness? If you do, you are not really making a new choice, you are dwelling on the old choice. This doesn't allow it to go. And you'll think that you NEED to focus on it because it's a real problem, and this will compel you to try to force it to leave, which WILL NOT WORK. If you think about it, shifting to a NEW choice, should really entail completely IGNORING what you chose before.

Believe me, I've tried the approach of trying to "intensely go up against" sickness to try to force it to leave, and it devolves into nothing but anger and aggression and ridiculous attempts to get rid of something that you're making real. It simply is a total fail and is unmiraculous. You can't make something "go away", you can only RE-CHOOSE a NEW CHOICE.

"I made the decision myself. I want to choose otherwise"

This means that to "heal a sickness" isn't so much to do with zapping a real sickness with healing vibes, but rather to simply shift all your attention to what you DO WANT. Visualizing how the body is, now that the sickness is gone. You want to shift all your attention to the here-and-now renewed state, literally to the extent that you don't even really focus on the state that you used to be in.

"Holy Spirit does not attack the ego." It's more a matter of TUNIGN OUT of the ego (form, separation, suffering), and tuning INTO the Holy Spirit, light, wholeness, love.

It may seem like this wouldn't work, because you're not even really doing anything "to" the sickness. You aren't even sending love to it or trying to shine it away. Instead you're "forgetting" it and "remembering health". If it was your mistaken choice and focus that made the sickness in the first place, the way to correct it is to choose and focus on something else. This is similar to the idea of getting out of the desert or leaving hell. You can't fix it by dwelling on it - you need to move to a different territory.

In China, there is a hospital where they don't use any medicine. All they use is basically this technique, in which they focus on affirming and FEELING the state you would be in when the sickness is GONE. This isn't a way to attack the sickness at all. It's simply a NEW CHOICE, to tune INTO the body being in a state of healthy, in which the OLD choice is in the past. And in this new state you should be experiencing gratitude and thanks and appreciation that you are IN HEALTH.

By focusing on this idea that "it's already gone", which really is a focus on "what's is here now" minus any energy or attention given to what was removed, you celebrate being healthy as if there is no ill health at all. And when they do this in that hospital with a few people doing it at once, cancerous tumors shrink in a matter of minutes. And they can watch this happening on an ultrasound and see it simply disappearing.

Holy Spirit can also help with this and its always worth inviting His Healing Help. In fact your willingness to move from making illusions real, to focusing on the truth, IS an invitation too Him. Ask him to help you to "shift" into a truer perception, where your focus is on health and wholeness and light, rather than on the making real of illusions that you find in false perception. So really this "tool" is an attempt to heal the MIND, of its false focus on making bodies real, and shifting to a more care-free state where the body isn't that important.

It's actually when your mind stops AT the body, that it induces illness. And then the illness seems to demand your attention and distract you with pain and symptoms. And now it seems hard NOT to focus on the body. But it is really the focusing on the body that MADE it ill in the first place. Jesus refers to this as "arresting the extension of the mind", whereby if you do not let the mind go out PAST the body and focus on joining with your brother's mind, and it gets hung up or blinded by physical form, this INDUCES illness.

"Learning must lead beyond the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind in it. This can be accomplished only if the mind extends to other minds, and does not arrest itself in its extension. This arrest is the cause of all illness, because only extension is the mind's function."

So he's telling you that if your mind doesn't go out and JOIN with others, if it doesn't overlook form, and if it starts to get hung up on form itself, then it stops going out all the way, stops extending all the way, starts to dip down and make bodies real, this turns the body into a separation device, it is a form of attack and separation, and this induces all physical illness.

The antidote therefore is to rejoin and re-extend and move BEYOND the body. And this means not focusing ON the body or making it real. So in "canceling" a symptom, the aim is to NOT give the symptom any reality. To NOT focus on it. To try to move past it to a more expanded, more healed perspective of mind, in which you have no NEED to focus on the body because it's not sick, as a result or side effect of being more open and connected spiritually.

You really want to be moving from false perception to trust perception, which means moving from body focus to ignoring the body. Placing the body's sickness in the past helps you to move your focus from it now, so that you focus on the absence of what you were dwelling on. Even if you still have some body focus while you do this, you at least have reduced the intensity of making the symptoms real.

The more you cancel this, the more you affirm in various statements and ways that "it is gone already", "it is healed already", "I am healthy and whole now", the more it should disappear.

I've found that some things which maybe in normal terms should've become a more developed problem, or lasted longer, are halted in their tracks, shortened, and sometimes completely reversed by doing this.

It also ties into what I've been focusing on lately regarding the power of your mind to choose, your free will, being totally responsible for what you cause to happen etc, the secret of salvation. You need to recognize that you chose the symptom and put it there, so you can UNDO IT, by the use of miraculous thinking.

"Miracles reflect the statement - I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

Getting yourself OUT OF what you got yourself INTO, is a shift of focus, attention and belief, away from dwelling on the effects of what you MADE, and moving towards a future in which you no longer are choosing that. See yourself free from what you do not want, by NOT focusing on what you do not want, and ONLY focusing on what you do want.

This somewhat goes back to the 'new age' concept that "what you focus on increases."

As you experiment with this and try it out, and more than once, you'll start to notice the ways you imply or focus on the problem, rather than on a state in which there is no problem. You'll become more refined in your affirmations of health, and less likely to give any energy to the sickness. It is not healed by "healing it", it is healed by putting your attention back on the truth. Nothing can be forgiven or undone by making it real. It was making it real that made it show up in the first place.

"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects."

The idea of separation is madness, because what it implies is impossible. It is not possible to be separate from God. But the mad idea was the idea that you CAN be separate from God, even though it is impossible.

To insist it is possible, must be madness, because to believe it you have to deny reality and truth and blind yourself to sanity and sense. This belief makes the mind insane, because it now believes impossible things are possible. This is why the separation from God was an entry into a state of mental illness, ie insanity.

"When the "lies of the serpent" were introduced, they were specifically called lies because they are not true. When man listened, all he heard was untruth."

"The instant that the mad idea of making your relationship with God unholy seemed to be possible, ALL relationships were made meaningless. In that unholy instant time was born, and bodies made to house the mad idea, and give it the ILLUSION of reality."

The mad idea gave rise to a mad world, based on insane notions and crazy laws, devoid of meaning and empty of truth. And into this insane world we projected our insane beliefs, producing a mad and false world to reflect our inner madness. And all who participate in it are mentally ill.

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death."

What we've ended up with then is a fictional world which insane people believe exists. And it is populated with people who have insane beliefs about who and what they are. They do not know themselves, are out of touch with their own reality, and think they are something they're not. This especially is entwined with the belief that they are physical bodies, which their immortal souls could never be. And they see themselves as limited and lacking.

"Sin is insanity. It is the means by which the mind is driven mad, and seeks to let illusions take the place of truth. And being mad, it sees illusions where truth should be, and where it really is. Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold?"

Realize then that the world as we know it is populated by beings who originally were, and in truth still are, wholly immortal, perfect, innocent, loving, healthy, happy and completely invulnerable. Beings who God created to live forever in divine perfection, who lacked nothing and were capable of anything.

In the separation, these beings gave belief to impossible nonsense and thus moved their minds into insane states. This produced the anti-christ or otherwise known as the ego, which is an idea of what you THINK you are, as a kind of wishful thinking or denial of your true nature. Thus each person developed a SECOND self for themselves, which they identified with and as, and thought to be the whole of who they are.

"This is the anti-Christ; ... Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

"The body is the symbol of WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE."

So now you have a world seemingly populated by individual beings who strongly believe they are NOT as God created them. They've added an entire layer of lies on top of themselves, to cover themselves up. They've invented a second self to suit their preferences.

They have profound denial which means they actively resist admitting to the truth about themselves and each other, and instead participate in lies and fantasies about what they are. They want to be a body and they want to suffer and they want to die, and they think this is normal because they think the hell they created is heaven.

"He has come to save me from the evil self I made."

"They DO believe that Heaven is hell, and ARE afraid of love. "

"For your definition of Heaven IS hell and oblivion, and the REAL Heaven is the greatest threat you think you COULD experience."

This has thrown these individuals into states of mind that are distorted and unnatural. They are mentally ill. They believe they are something or someone they are not. They have associated with being a physical object. They think they came into existence with the body. They believe they are limited and lacking and insufficient and defective and broken and sinful and guilty and in need of fear. And they relate to others through specialness and selfishness and mistrust and victimhood.

"the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt."

On the level of the world then it always seems that you're interacting with a whole person, who is egoic, and who has major selfishness issues, and who relates in special ways, and strikes bargains, and wants to get, and sees themselves as limited and lacking and defective. And it seems this is ALL THERE IS to the person. As if they ACTUALLY ARE a limited dysfunctional individual.

You see this appearance as the whole truth about the person, and people seem to really be in states of "becoming", of "growing", of transformation, learning, progression, acquisition and so on. As if they have started out with nothing and are lacking and little and weak and frail. And so the whole world seems to be populated with egoic individuals who are all far less than magnificent and most of whom find themselves to be unworthy of love or life. Which drives them all to self-punishment and suicide.

"...the sense of loneliness and abandonment which all the separated ones experience. Depression is an inevitable consequence of separation. So are anxiety, worry, a deep sense of helplessness, misery, suffering, and intense fear of loss."

"the delusions of the Separated ones."

"All the separated ones have a basic fear of retaliation and abandonment. This is because they BELIEVE in attack and rejection, so this is what they perceive and teach and LEARN. "

It seems then that we're living in a world where people represent varying degrees of ability, accomplishment, skill, confidence, and a very wide range of personalities and potentials. And in all cases no-one is perfect and everyone is lacking in some way. And everyone is trying to improve themselves because they all think they were created broken. And now there is competition and everyone fights to be better than all the other defective ones, while the defective ones lick their wounds and want to die.

If you take this at face value, if you think this is normal and natural, then you'll think that the EGOS that you interact with ARE people. That their egotism is NOT a mental illness, but is in fact just some normal psychological structure. A personality trait perhaps. And that it's completely normal for people to hate themselves, to attack others, to be angry, to worship idols, to take from others, and to seek for exclusive relationships. As if this is what completely natural mentally-sane people do. So normal because it's so common.

What we have to realize is that this is NOT sanity. And these ego people, the way they present themselves, is NOT really their self. It's not their real identity. They in fact are pretending to be something they're not. They present themselves as fictional characters, with traits and behaviors that aren't even natural. With beliefs about themselves that are unfounded and false. In denial of their own self and repressive of their own freedom.

"If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves. Therefore, they are asking for the love that would heal them, but which they are DENYING TO THEMSELVES. If they knew the truth about themselves, they could not be sick."

They don't even know who they really are. They don't know where they came from or how they got here. And they certainly don't even suspect that they even have a real self. And even think that maybe they don't exist at all, have no real creator, invented themselves, and maybe aren't even real.

"The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in the minds of man that some people have gone so far as to doubt whether they were ever created at all."

What we're looking at, when we look at the world, is in fact a place where a very large number of mentally ill people are gathered together. And all of their mental illnesses are regarded as largely normal and natural, ie not an illness at all. We don't even recognize insanity when we see it. We think it's normal that people relate the way they do, think of themselves in such unnatural ways, and are completely lost and out of touch with their own reality. On a planet filled with suffering, how can you remember what it's like not to suffer?

If we don't suspect that there is a higher, larger truth about people, then it's going to make it seem like their ego self is REAL, that it is the WHOLE truth of them, and there is nothing more to it. And in that view you will relate to their EGO in terms of special relationship, and with no sense of forgiveness. Anything they do in insanity will be a sin, and you will justify holding it against them. Because you don't recognize they are mentally ill. And all their twisted behaviors are in fact part of their illness.

If you had only ever known someone in an ill condition, and had never known them when they were healthy, you would have great difficulty seeing past their illness. If you had only met them after they became dysfunctional, you'd have a hard time having any notion of what they are REALLY like when they're not sick. And if the whole planet is sick, how can you know what society is supposed to be like, when no-one can even remember a time when there was no suffering at all?

If we have no sense of the actual REALITY of each person, then this is what we're going to do. We're going to BUY INTO their illusions of who and what they are, fall for the same temptations, go into false empathy, join them in suffering, and compound their ego. This keeps them imprisoned and does not offer any kind of healing. And they need healing because they are not sane. Falling for this means YOU are insane, because you've failed to recognize that the illusion of sanity is not sanity, and so think that you are sane when you're not.

Everyone, when sane, is a loving, powerful, supernatural, immortal, eternal being of light, filled with joy and laughter and miracles. Such a person is invulnerable, cannot be sick, cannot die, cannot be upset, has no grievances, doesn't judge or blame anyone, is perfectly innocent and holy, knows God intimately, depends on God for everything, and has no authority problem. This is what EVERY person in the world was like when they were created. This is the kind of self they ARE behind their mental illness. And if their mental illness was cured, this is how they would be. A world of christs!

To not RECOGNIZE that people's egos are not their real self, is to fail to forgive. To forgive requires having in mind an awareness BEYOND THE LIES, of what the person's souls is really like, as created by God. The original self. The real self. The holy self. The higher self. That is their true self. And that self has no limitations or lacks or failures or malfunctions or depressions or sicknesses or lies about themselves or others.

So then we have to realize that we join with the Holy Spirit as therapists in the world, as healers, come to offer SANITY to those who are insane, and to lift them up and resurrect them to truth and light, so that they are restored to their true function and true abilities. To their real identity. To remember who they are, to know themselves and to live out from the love that God put in them.

"Now must you share His function, and forgive whom He has saved, whose sinlessness He sees, and whom He honors as the Son of God."

"your function in this world is healing"

"As your function in Heaven is creation, so your function on earth is healing. God shares His function with you in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit shares HIS with you on earth."

The only way you can forgive someone is to know the real truth about them on a higher level. The bigger picture. Their true nature as established by God. And this truth has to STILL be true, even if it is covered up by their own mind, and obscure and hard to see. Even if they themselves don't know it's there, and even if they themselves deny that it's true of them. Because people are in fact out of touch with their own souls and don't even remember what their real identity is. It is our task to REMEMBER FOR THEM, so that they might remember also and wake up to their true nature.

"Remember for everyone your Father's power, that He has given them"

"He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God. YOU CAN REMEMBER THIS FOR ALL THE SONSHIP. Do not allow your brother not to remember, for his forgetfulness is YOURS. But YOUR remembering is HIS, for God cannot be remembered alone. THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN. To perceive the healing of your brother as the healing of yourself, is thus the way to remember God. For you forgot your brothers WITH Him, and God's answer to your forgetting is but the way to remember."

"Do not allow your brother to be sick, for if he is, have YOU abandoned him to his own dream, by SHARING it with him."

Since the ego is really a smokescreen of lies, it is not true of a person. Even if they are holding it up strongly in front of your face as an obstacle to peace. To forgive is to OVERLOOK it, and see BEYOND it, beyond their body, and beyond their false sense of identity. To recognize who they are in spirit, and to acknowledge the PERMANENT TRUTH about them. To hold them in the light and acknowledge that they ARE in the light.

This means in fact bypassing their illusory ego beliefs, their ego self, and realizing that on a higher level their mind is SANE. Only a small portion of their mind is insane and their soul is still perfect. By tapping into the higher self and truth of the person, you JOIN with them in love. This bypasses the ego and increases the wholeness within the mind, which in turn undoes the false ego identification - the sickness - the mental illness. Because "all sickness is mental illness." This is how miracles are performed.

Don't be deceived. People are not who they say they are. Everyone has an imposter in them. The Holy Spirit knows who we really are, and will awaken this truth in us if we will let him.

"Seek not to make the Son of God ADJUST to his insanity. There IS a stranger in him, who wandered carelessly into the home of Truth, and who will wander off. He came WITHOUT a purpose. But he will not remain before the shining light the Holy Spirit offered, and you accepted. For there the STRANGER is made homeless, and YOU are welcome. Ask not this transient stranger, "who am I?" He is the only thing in all the universe that does not know."

"To perceive the healing of your brother as the healing of yourself, is thus the way to remember God."

"To HAVE, GIVE all TO all."

This is hard for an ego-identified person to understand. It sounds backwards. It's saying that if you want to have anything, you have to give it someone else. We are not used to functioning this way. It seems counter intuitive, to give to someone ELSE what YOU want. We are used to trying to have stuff by getting it, or taking it away from another, and excluding them from it. We think we should receive first, in order to be able to give.

The natural functioning of mind, per God's law, however, is the opposite. Since we all share everything, you have to actually give what you want to someone else, so that they are included in it along with it. In order to have anything, everyone must receive it. The direction of this acquisition therefore seems to be outward, in that you seem to "give away" the very thing you want to receive. And the ego would interpret this as loss and sacrifice.

If you are ego identified, you are probably used to applying forgiveness for "self benefit". Whether you see it as forgiving yourself or others, you are doing it to improve your own situation. You take your projections away from others, and work on your internal stuff, and accept atonement for yourself. But this all revolves around you as a separate ego. It's really a selfish and isolated way of doing the course.

What Jesus is telling us is that true forgiveness entails the forgiving of your brother and yourself, AS yourself, not simply that your separate self takes YOUR accusations away from him, but that your forgiveness undoes BOTH his accusations and yours. That your healing and his healing are supposed to occur together. That you forgive him FOR him, bringing light and love to his mind, as the only real way that your own mind can be restored to health.

"My forgiveness is the means by which the world is healed, together with myself. Let me, then, forgive the world that it may be healed along with me."

"And as you let yourself be healed, you see all those around you, or who cross your mind, or whom you touch, or those who seem to have no contact with you, healed along with you."

This is because you are one with your brother, a part of you is in him and so it seems like you have to give love to the part of you that seems "outside of you", in order for what's inside of you to be included in healing. And in the extreme you can't really attain a state of love that's exclusive, it has to include everyone in it and you have to be joined in mind with everyone. That means you are giving love to everyone as much as you are giving it to yourself.

Jesus is basically saying, how your mind expresses toward others, lines up with how it expresses toward itself. If you want to BE healed, you have to GIVE healing to another. We're used to thinking that our mind lives separately inside our body, and no part of us is in other people. But in truth your mind spans beyond bodies and includes your brother.

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."

So the truth is your mind is shared with and is in your brother, as much as it seems to be in you. And it's really your ego that is the idea of being a separated-off exclusive isolated self, stuck in a body. Forgiveness can't apply ONLY to this "separate you", it has to span bodies and apply to others as well.

To love your neighbor as yourself means you recognize that you are the whole sonship, and your brother is the whole sonship, and everyone contains everyone, and you therefore have to love everyone as if they are everyone, in order for you as everyone to be loved.

In a sense, we're actually used to "doing the course" for a somewhat selfish motive, based on a selfish view of ourselves, seeing ourselves as separate people with a separate ego in a separate body. We see forgiveness as a means to "get more for ourselves". As a way of attaining some higher "stuff" for ourselves. We think that to forgive, we have to withdraw OUR ego projection and work on our inner content. As if this inner content exists solely inside the boundaries of our bodies. But in truth you are everywhere and in everyone.

If I am isolating myself off as a separate self, or ego-identified, thinking of myself as "not others", I will try to apply the whole course to my separate self. And I will expect to receive the benefits separately. And this will mean I am not including my brother in what I receive, and am excluding them from being part of myself. That means I literally am only feeding one half of myself, and am depriving the part of me what is in them.

So the only way to truly fully "receive all", is to "give all" to all, ie everyone. To truly give it to myself, I have to give it to them, because they are part of me. Nor does this mean giving ONLY to them, whereby I become excluded, or where I am unwilling to receive. Because now the ego twists it backward into a state of sacrifice and self-deprivation. To be "selfless" in this sense, where I'm not included in the receipt, is really sacrificial.

Ultimately, giving and receiving are ONE. Which means if I want to receive love, I have to also give love. Giving is the part of the mechanism of sharing, that gives to the part of myself that seems to be my "separate brothers". In truth we are not even really separate at all, but through a separation lens it appears that way.

True giving is sharing inclusively. If I want to have anything, I have to share it, because nothing is for me alone. Everything God gives is for everyone and belongs to everyone. I can have all of the gifts of God, IF I am also willing to share it with my brothers. Which means a willingness to do what we call "giving it" to them. Giving and receiving are two ASPECTS of the same one thing. The part that seems to come to me I call receiving, and the part that shares with others I call giving. Yet to give to another IS to give to myself. It kind of goes out and comes right back.

Love purely gives, because it has to go out, because it is unlimited. It has to be shared. God purely gives, and does not take. He doesn't need to take (away) because his total giving gives everything to himself, and he is included in what is given and received.

As I give God to another, as I resurrect, as I shine my light into another's mind, as I uplift and empower, I am doing this TO MYSELF as well. And I can't do this ONLY to myself at the EXCLUSION of another. I can't have the receiving of shared gifts come ONLY to me, so that only I have it and no-one else has it. That's been the ego's approach - the approach of me seeing myself a a separate self - all along.

It's kind of like the pay-it-forward thing. God gives you all of himself in your creation, and you inherit ie receive everything from him. But by giving it, God also has it to give. And so for you to have it as well, you have to share it with him. You can't have it exclusively, because it is his, and thus it is yours also. And in order to have it, you cannot hold onto it exclusively, you have to give it, by using your inheritance to create, to bestow on your creations the same gifts God gave you. You have to give what you have been given because it was given so that it could BE given.

"The gifts you have are not for you alone. What He has come to offer you, you now must learn to give. This is the lesson that His giving holds, for He has saved you from the solitude you sought to make, in which to hide from God."

So now to function correctly, for your mind to be healed and natural, it has to be part of this creative flow. Of giving what is received, and receiving all from God, and having no lack or need, and therefore no need to get or take, and therefore to give everything away to others, so that you share it all, so that you can share IN it all, and thus have it all. It's all about total inclusion.

You AND your brother need healing. You AND your brother must receive your love. You AND your brother need to be reminded of their innocence. You AND your brother are healed together. This is the shift from "I'm doing this course for myself" to "I am doing this course for US". From "I am healing myself" to "I am healing US". From "I will give to myself and thus receive" to "I will give to US and WE will receive together."

All this time we've been trying to do the course "alone" and "for me." It's time that we need to open up and join and realize that the only way forward, to take it to the next level, is to do it for US. To share it and to give it to your brother, SO THAT you can share in it and have it. This means you are now a minister, healer, teacher, guide and giver of life.

You must give life to have life. And you must resurrect BOTH yourself and others, if you are to receive atonement. If you want to be loved, you're going to HAVE TO give love to others. This is part of your natural function. "Your function on earth is healing." To give healing is to receive healing. You will BE healed as you let the Holy Spirit teach you HOW to heal others. "The Atonement is a lesson in sharing, which is given you because YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW TO DO IT."

"When I am healed I am not healed alone.

And I would share my healing with the world,

That sickness may be banished from the mind

Of God's One Son, Who is my only Self."

"It is impossible that anyone be healed alone. In sickness must he be apart and separate. But healing is his own decision to be one again, and to accept his Self with all its parts intact and unassailed."

"God gives and does not ask for recompense. There is no giving but to give like Him." ... "God GIVES; He does NOT take."

"A miracle is a reversal of the physical order because it brings more love to the giver AND the receiver."

"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously."

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

"And you MUST see your brother as yourself. Framed in his body you will see YOUR sinfulness, wherein YOU stand condemned. Set in his holiness, the Christ in him proclaims HIMSELF as you."

"It is no dream to love your brother as yourself."

"When you have seen your brothers as yourself, you will be RELEASED to knowledge, having learned to FREE yourself, of Him who knows of freedom." "And God created it for YOU. Look at your holy brother, sinless as yourself, and let him LEAD you there."

"Faith is the acknowledgment of UNION. It is the gracious acknowledgment of everyone as a Son of your most loving Father, loved by Him like you, and therefore loved by you as yourself."

"For sin would keep you separate, but your Redeemer would have you look upon each other as yourself."

"Perceive in sickness but another call for love, and offer your brother what he believes he cannot offer HIMSELF. Whatever the sickness, there is but one remedy. You will be made whole as you MAKE whole, for to perceive in sickness the appeal for health, is to recognize in hatred the call for love. And to give a brother what he REALLY wants, is to offer it unto yourself. For your Father wills you to know your brother AS yourself. Answer HIS call for love, and YOURS is answered. Healing is the love of Christ for His Father, and for HIMSELF."

"I will be healed as I let him teach me to heal."

"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."

"Every altar to God is part of your Soul, because the Light He created is One with Him. Would you cut a brother off from the Light that is yours? You could not do so, if you realized that YOU CAN ONLY DARKEN YOUR OWN MIND. As you bring HIM back, so will YOUR mind return. That is the law of God, for the protection of the wholeness of His Son."

"Your brother's holiness shows you that God is One with him AND you; that what he has is yours BECAUSE you are not separate from him OR from his Father."

"For you dwell in the Mind of God WITH your brother, for God Himself did not will to be alone."

"Join not your brother's dream, but join with HIM, and where you join His Son, the Father IS."

"A Miracle makes souls one in God"

"The present offers you your brothers in the light that would unite you WITH them, and free YOU from the past"

"Healing is an act of thought by which two minds perceive their oneness, and become glad."

"To learn that giving and receiving are the same has special usefulness, because it can be tried so easily and seen as true."

"Peace to my brother, who is one with me."

"Salvation is a better gift than this, and true forgiveness, as the means by which it is attained, must heal the mind that gives, for giving is receiving. What remains as unreceived has not been given, but what has been given must have been received."

"Here are both giving and receiving seen as different aspects of one Thought Whose truth does not depend on which is seen as first, nor which appears to be in second place. Here it is understood that both occur together, that the Thought remains complete."

"Father, I must return Your Love for me. For giving and receiving are the same, and You have given all Your Love to me. I must return It, for I want It mine in full awareness, blazing in my mind, and keeping it within Its kindly light, inviolate, beloved, with fear behind and only peace ahead."

"The unforgiving mind does not believe that giving and receiving are the same." ... "In the teaching-learning situation, each one learns that giving and receiving are the same."

"Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

"Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health."

"Accept him as his Father accepts him, and heal him unto Christ, for Christ is his healing AND YOURS."

"And not one sin you see in him but keeps you BOTH in hell. Yet will his perfect sinlessness RELEASE you both, for holiness is quite impartial, with one judgment made for all it looks upon."

"Look on your brother, and see in him the gift of God you would RECEIVE." "He is as free from this as you are, and in the freedom that you see in HIM, you see your own."

Is there a power OTHER than the mind that can cause things to happen to us? What causes sickness? What makes death happen? Do we actually have any control over this world? Do we have a power, to such an extent, that we can actually determine what happens or doesn't happen? Can we actually CHOOSE to cause or not cause sickness and death?

This is an important issue because if we are not the ones orchestrating everything that occurs, everything we experience, then that places us in a rather vulnerable position. If there is a power or cause or law or something that drives stuff to occur, without our consent, without our choosing it, this basically means we are capable of being victims. Stuff can happen to us against our will.

It may seem SUPER radical to suggest that you could be in a position of having so much deliberateness, so much choice, so much power, that you could be orchestrating an entire dream. That the things that happen are what YOU decide will happen. That nothing else happens, because you haven't chosen it. It really then boils down to, are you actually able to choose not to suffer, to not be sick, to not die? Can you choose that events don't occur at all? Do you have the power to CAUSE these to not happen, and do you have the power to cause them TO happen?

This then really becomes a question of RESPONSIBILITY. Who or what is responsible, in every case, for what happens in your life? Do you shift responsibility and therefore "blame" onto others, onto the body or the world itself? For what seems to happen TO you? Who is responsible for whether you are attacked or not? Who is responsible for whether your body becomes sick, or is healed, or just carries on being sick without hope of relief? Because ultimately someone or some "thing" HAS to be the cause. It's either you, or it's something else. There are NO effects without causes.

If you look at the teachings of ACIM closely you will see that there is a huge theme of EMPOWERMENT. This empowerment is saying that you are so powerful that you literally are the dreamer of the dream. It says that you are ruler of the universe. It says that you can be attacked by nothing but your thoughts. It says you cannot die without your own consent. It says that you are not the victim of the world you see. All of these themes point towards you having POWER OVER what happens. YOU CHOOSE!

"If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God."

"Here again is the paradox often referred to in the course. To say, "Of myself I can do nothing" is to gain all power. And yet it is but a seeming paradox. As God created you, you have all power."

Indeed it leads to what ACIM calls "the secret of salvation". This is quite a radical passage because it basically says that unless you were to go into a kind of unconscious state of denial in which you disown power and see the dream as "happening against your will", NOTHING In the world can do anything to you - no matter how vicious it seems. And in fact, that the secret to being SAVED FROM all forms of suffering, is to realize and own fully that you are "doing it to yourself." That takes great OWNERSHIP of power.

We immediately start to bark with objections about how this can't be true in all situations. But the passage tells us that no matter who is the victim or victimizer, it is true. No matter who seems to do what to whom, or what the apparent severity, it is still true. So it's then telling us that despite any appearances, despite what may look like external causes or separate people acting in certain ways, no matter what it looks like on the surface, it is ALWAYS TRUE that you are doing it to yourself.

And it calls this the "secret of salvation" because it talks of how this is the ONE LESSON the holy spirit is teaching to SAVE YOU from ALL forms of suffering. That the cause of ALL forms of suffering, no matter what form it takes, including physical sickness, is the fact that you are the one doing it to yourself. And because you are doing it yourself, you can change your mind and STOP doing it.

"I must have decided wrongly because I am NOT at peace. I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise."

Because in truth, really, UNLESS you are actually the one with the power to CAUSE anything to happen, you would not be in a position to be able to USE that power to NOT cause it to happen, or to undo it. It is because you DO cause it, that there is IS hope for salvation. There is a way out of hell and suffering and sickness and death BECAUSE you are the one that keeps putting it in place. And if you weren't the one putting it in place, you'd be stuck having to tolerate it, experience it, suffer from it, and go through it, without any hope of relief, ie no salvation.

This is quite a radical teaching and it is extremely central to the entire A Course in Miracles view of cause and effect, of who causes what, and of how POWERFUL you are. It rests on the fact that you are an immortal being, a permanent changeless being, who is always the same and is incapable of change or of being changed. A being that is NOT AFFECTED by the world.

"The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did."

Forgiveness rests on this immortal fact, because obviously if you are immortal nothing can happen to you, so you have no grounds for playing at being a victim, no grounds for believing that something is happening against your will, and no grounds for suffering. If you are immortal then you quite literally are invulnerable to the entire world, and there is not a single thing in all the world that has even the slightest power to cause anything that you do not want. In fact it means you have power OVER DEATH, because you cannot die.

This is what the entire teaching of ACIM is leading to. The total identification with spirit as Christ, the immortal son of God. The total owning of RESPONSIBILITY FOR BEING CAUSAL - a causal CREATOR. The total reclaiming of absolute unlimited POWER, which can do literally anything. The reclaiming of the power to work miracles, to heal sickness and to prevent death, and to change the world if needed. It is asking of you to reclaim a role and position of nothing LESS than TOTAL ABSOLUTE POWER.

By having such a power, a power so great that literally the entire dream is being dreamed up BY your mind, a power that puts the world in place and makes it spin, a power that materializes bodies, a power that causes events to transpire, we're talking about you being extremely DELIBERATE and CHOOSING everything that occurs or is experienced. And this does mean without exception. Not one single thing occurs that you do not choose, and because the power of decision is yours, you CAN CHOOSE not to have the body be sick, or die. YOU make the world go round.

This isn't a course in leaving any room open for some kind of fictional "alien will", a separate power, an external power, some kind of power the "dream" seems to have over you, some victim consciousness, some kind of external causation that can do things to you against your will, some kind of power that puts sickness into your body without your asking for it, or some kind of power other than your choice that seems to make death happen.

These are all the views that the EGO has, in its sense of weakness and powerlessness and vulnerability and fear. It sees itself as utterly at war with a separated-off power not within itself, that does things to it against its desires. And it sees itself as having no control or real power over anything, so instead to uses "force" and "doing" to try to make things happen.

"All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the FEAR OF AWAKENING. They are attempts to reinforce UNCONSCIOUSNESS out of fear of CONSCIOUSNESS. This is a pathetic way of TRYING NOT TO KNOW by rendering the faculties for knowing ineffectual."

We are being asked to own up to being immortal beings. Beings who are purely CAUSAL and CREATIVE. Beings who express from love and whose expressions come out as what you want, and as what you create and thus as what happens or exists. Where you are constantly choosing WHAT shows up and what occurs. There is no room in the mind of a creator/co-creator for stuff happening "by some other means", or of your choices being unheard, or of your decisions lacking power, or of your causation lacking effects.

This is a course in TAKING BACK YOUR POWER. And that means and includes the total responsibility and ownership of being THE CAUSE OF all your suffering, in every form it takes, INCLUDING the condition of the body, all of its forms and sickness and suffering, and even over death itself. You even have the power to literally move mountains and to make worlds. Only in this extreme of absolute ownership of the POWER OF GOD, which is your inheritance, is victimhood and vulnerability and pain and misery snuffed out forever. There is no power OTHER THAN the power of God that you share with him.

The question is whether you are willing to go all the way to accept this power, to take on this role and position of being ruler of the universe, whether you are willing to OWN this power and regain access to USE it consciously. Whether you are ready to let go of all victimhood roles and all sense of not choosing or not being the one who makes things happen. It's putting you in the hot-seat. If you are to reach the resurrection and FINISH the curriculum, you MUST gain the absolute power over death, which gives you the ability to cancel and reverse and prevent it EVEN on a physical level.

"I raised the dead by KNOWING that life is an eternal attribute of everything that the living God Created. Why do you believe that it is harder for me to inspire the dis-spirited or to stabilize the unstable? I do not believe that there is an order of difficulty in miracles: YOU do."

If you believe that sickness happens through some other reason, by some other cause, something in the world or body, something environmental, something someone else does to you, if events happen on their own chaotically or randomly, if death chooses for you when you will die, if sickness happens to the body, if sickness can remain within the body against the mind's choice, and if you believe that you do NOT have the power to do anything about this, that IS an egoic position of victimhood and powerlessness. And we are all-too comfortable playing this role.

It means you are "playing the game of death", as an immortal being, PRETENDING that you do NOT have the power of God, and trying to pull off a stunt of making it look AS IF you are not the one causing everything to occur. When it appears you did not choose something, it is an illusion. You are ALWAYS choosing what you experience, what you feel, what happens with the body, what events transpire. NOTHING happens without your consent. This is because you are an infinitely powerful being with an extremely powerful unlimited mind capable of creating entire worlds.

"There are no accidents in salvation."

"Your Father created you Wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

Owning up to this power - the shared Power of God - which is UNLIMITED, and there is NOTHING that this power (thus your holiness) cannot do .... places you in a position of being co-creator with God. For a creator there is nothing that comes IN to you from the outside, there is ONLY an outflowing from the inside outward. An extension so strong it cannot be stopped. The unlimited will of God.

You cannot have things coming at you, attacking you, changing you, affecting you, choosing for you. YOU are the master. You dominate everything. You are the ultimate cause. YOU are in charge of your destiny. You are NEVER a victim, and NOTHING happens without your choosing it and causing it. OWN THIS, and you will be free from suffering and death forever.

"My Self is ruler of the universe." It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept."

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are."

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

"I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts."

"When you are weary, remember you have hurt yourself. Your Comforter will rest you, but YOU cannot. YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW, for if you did, you could never have grown weary. Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way, for that is not God's Will for His Son. Pain is not of Him, for He knows no attack, and His peace surrounds you silently."

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF. No matter what the form of the attack, this STILL is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, STILL is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is STILL true. For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes."

"The Holy Spirit will repeat this ONE inclusive lesson of deliverance, until it has been learned, REGARDLESS of the form of suffering that brings you pain. Whatever hurt you bring to Him, He will make answer with this very simple truth. For this one answer TAKES AWAY the cause of every form of sorrow and of pain. The form affects His answer not at all, for He would teach you but the SINGLE cause of all of them, no matter WHAT their form. And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you. Yet when you accord it mercy, will its mercy shine on you."

"Your holiness reverses all the laws of the world. It is beyond every restriction of time, space, distance, and limits of any kind. Your holiness is totally unlimited in its power because it establishes you as a Son of God, at one with the Mind of his Creator. Through your holiness the power of God is made manifest. Through your holiness the power of God is made available. And there is nothing the power of God cannot do."

"Say ONLY this, but MEAN it with NO reservations, for here the power of salvation lies: ... I AM responsible for what I see. I CHOSE the feelings I experience, and I DECIDED ON the goal I would achieve. And everything that SEEMS to happen TO me, I ASKED FOR and received as I had asked. ... Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done TO you. Acknowledge but that YOU have been mistaken, and ALL effects of your mistakes will disappear."

Every time I see a body, I am tempted to believe I'm seeing a person. The person seems separate from me, they are not me at all, their body belongs exclusively to them, it's not my body, we are not in any way connected to each other. What applies to them does not apply to me at all.

That is the horrendous lie that bodies present to us. The temptation that your brother, who in truth is literally one with and a part of your self, is somehow cut off from you. On the basis of assuming that people are "not me", we then proceed with an entire culture and way of relating that revolves around "I am separate from you."

Ultimately this boils down to a question of, are you living by God's law of the Golden Rule, or are you denying it and trying to break God's law? First let's be clear that the Golden Rule is not some optional thing, it's fundamental to the nature of reality and all creations. We are all one with each other, part of each other, joined together and sharing, like a collective consciousness hive mind. In that arrangement we are still individual beings but we also share everything.

Within that thought system of sharing, overlap and oneness, the natural way to relate to someone is to regard them as YOURSELF. They are thus your brother, an equal, as perfect and whole as you, and literally part of yourself. This produces shared interests and an automatic motivation to ONLY treat them with love so that you are directly treating yourself - the part of you that's in them - with love. Everything belongs to everyone, everyone has everything, and everything is mutual.

In the ego's rendition, the body is a separation device. And make no mistake that the body literally symbolically CUTS YOU OFF from the hive mind. It represents the idea of being separate, disconnected, not sharing, not joined, not a part of anyone else, and completely alone. It is absolutely the opposite of the true nature of our collective sonship and brotherhood, and is totally unnatural.

This means that if you are in a body being identified with a body, believing bodies are separate people, you are literally LOOKING AT the denial of the laws of God. You are looking at the opposite of the golden rule, manifested as images of forms walking around, testifying that separation is real. The body ITSELF is nothing less than a demonstration of the idea of being completely separate.

"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind"

"This separating off is symbolized, in your perception, by a body which is clearly separate and a thing apart. Yet what this symbol REPRESENTS is but your wish to BE apart and separate."

Therefore just the mere sight of a body is enough to tempt you into the belief that God's law has been broken, the Golden Rule does not apply to anyone, and you are NOT in any way sharing anything with your brothers. You don't even have to act or relate to people or treat people a certain way for God's law to be broken by the mere appearance of the body.

Therefore, as the course is teaching, if you see a body, you are seeing WITH specialness, with selfishness, and thus with the ego. And the result is false perception, which fixates on physical form and makes bodies real to you. Upon seeing this, you have already believed in separation, and now the body is lit up and appears to you as a separation device, anchoring and fixing your brother into a prison within space and time, and cutting you off from them.

As soon as you are relating on a basis of "I am not you", ie your body is separate from my body, and I see you AS a body, and regard myself as my body, and we are NOT each other, we are in a state of special relationship. And that literally means we are at war. We have withdrawn the shared part of ourselves from each other and have gone to our separate corners, ready to fight.

We are at war merely by the very fact that we are identifying who and what we are with a device for separation, and have therefore believed that we ARE separate, and therefore are different, and thus not equals, and thus competitors.

Any time that I associate anything at all exclusively with a body, whether it be my own or that of another, I am in the ego and at war. I am having a special relationship, taking sides, judging, projecting guilt, attacking, accusing, and trying to destroy. Just by seeing a body and regarding it as the anchor and prison wall which is surrounding and sectioning off you or another, you are taking sides.

Once you've taken sides, you will not be able to help but relate to the other person AS a body, ie as a separated off, exclusive, isolated, distinctly separate being. One with whom you are NOT sharing, are not one, and they are NOT seen OR recognized as being a part of yourself. The entire vision of recognition and enlightenment which would show you that your brother IS part of you, is obscured by the body.

"the BODY of the other, ALREADY a severely limited perception of him"

"For sin is the IDEA you are alone, and separated OFF from what is whole."

Then you will proceed to go to war. You will find it effortless to accuse someone of being, doing, having, making, causing something, which ONLY they are doing, and you are not. You will now be into the realm of "getting away with murder", because it now seems that what applies to the other does NOT apply to you. What applies to what their body is doing, is not what your body is doing. Their separated-off will is now disconnected from your own, and you are not sharing or cooperating or willing in accord. Therefore you are against each other.

The loss of the awareness that you are one with your brother has devastating consequences. As soon as you have slipped away from unity ie holy relationship even slightly, you've pulled away from being joined to the other and have identified yourself as exclusive. That exclusivity is selfish and special, and will manifest as a body, which will show up in the mind to testify HOW you are separated off from the other. The body literally symbolizes your separateness.

"The body is the symbol of the ego, as the ego is the symbol of separation. And both are nothing more than attempts to LIMIT communication, and thereby TO MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE."

By believing that you are not your brother, you are not a part of him and he is not a part of you, you cannot help but see yourself and your brother as separated off by a body. This identifies both of you with your bodies, and holds you apart from each other like inmates in separate prison cells. This is a breakdown in communication and an attack on love. It is a lack of relationship and a disconnect from each other.

It doesn't matter if the other person is someone you are allegedly married to, a spouse or partner, a lover, a sibling or child or parent, some stranger or neighbor, a boss or remote stranger, any time that we are unaware of our oneness with each other we have moved inside an entirely separate thought system of separation, in which the ONLY culture is "me not you".

Nor will you be able to sufficiently repair the relationship and bring it to a state of holiness WITHOUT questioning whether or not you and your brother are a body. The belief that they ARE their body, automatically cuts them off from you, and your believing this is HOW you imprison them.

"The special relationship is a device for limiting YOUR self to a body, and for limiting your perception of others to THEIRS."

"For the ego would limit everyone TO a body for ITS purposes, and, while you think it HAS a purpose, you will choose to utilize the means by which IT tries to turn its purpose into accomplishment."

"As long as you believe that, to be with a body, is companionship, you will be COMPELLED to attempt to keep your brother IN his body, HELD THERE BY GUILT."

No matter what you think your relationship is, regardless of how close or intimate you seem to be with another body-person, you are NOT intimate if you are not one. You are also not happily married if you are married to a body. Nor are you head over heels in love if what you're in love with is a body. To love a body is to separate yourself from the other person, to NOT SEE them, and to keep them at arm's length, pun intended.

If you want to overcome the conflict, the war, the fighting, the disagreements, the arguments, the special hate, the special love, the lack of communication and connection, your only choice is to transcend bodies. You have to get your mind out of the separation-oriented culture and resume an entirely opposite culture based on the Golden Rule. You have to learn that you ARE part of the other person, neither of you is separated off BY a body, and the bodies are not even there. You have to see yourself INCLUDED in them as you look upon them, and NOT look to their bodies to identify them.

If you are heavily into the association that the person IS their body, and you've bound their identity to it, and every time you see the body you think that's them, you have a lot of work to do. And it could take some considerable time to undo all the ways that you've taught yourself to separate people off, bind them to physical objects, identify them by those objects, and therefore stay separate from them.

The ego culture of exclusivity and separateness is completely opposite to God's natural culture of sharing and unity. Bodies cannot and will not ever depict or accomplish God's culture. They have to be bypassed and transcended and overlooked. Your whole sense of who and what you are has to expand to INCLUDE others. And then how you relate to them, WHO you are defending, WHAT you are relating with and to, radically changes.

"Minds need not bodies to communicate."

"It is only the awareness of the body that makes love seem limited. For the body IS a limit on love. The belief in limited love was its origin, and it was MADE to limit the UNlimited. Think not that this is merely allegorical; for it was made to limit YOU."

If you have relationship issues which, guaranteed, every body-to-body relationship HAS, the real problem is THE BODY. Allowing, supporting, and facilitating the use of the body as a separation device, anchoring people TO bodies, is the whole foundation of your relationship woes. Nor can you overcome those woes and KEEP the body. You have to be willing to stop identifying people with bodies, including yourself, and including your "loved ones."

"The body cannot KNOW. And while you limit your awareness to its tiny senses, you will not see the grandeur that surrounds you."

Any time that you fall for the trap of believing "that person is not me", because you've seen their body and have witnessed to the belief that their body IS SEPARATE FROM YOU, you have gone into the ego culture of separation and war. Any time that you do not recognize your brother as yourself, you will fall into a special relationship. Any time that you can see PAST the bodies, and identify the person with a SHARED IDENTITY in Christ, which is part of your own identity as Christ, you have moved into holiness and union.

"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of ***loving your neighbor as yourself***. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously."

"***It is impossible for a Child of God to love his neighbor EXCEPT as himself.*** That is why the healer's prayer is, "let me know this brother as I know myself."

If you want to perform miracles, you have to transcend the entire mindset, thought system and culture of "separate me versus them". You have to join minds with the other so that your mind can share its light with the other mind and heal it. You cannot save or be saved without doing this, and bodies will always interfere with this.

If you pay any attention to the body AT ALL, you are looking at and emphasizing the separation. The body is separation's symbol. It is the wall around the mind that keeps it separated off from other minds. As long as you are having relationships WITH BODIES, you are not having real relationships with your brothers as God created them.

"Your brother's body is as little use to you as it is to him. When it is used ONLY as the Holy Spirit teaches, it has no function. For minds NEED not the body to communicate. ***The sight that SEES the body, has no use which serves the purpose of a holy relationship***. And while you look upon each other thus, the means and end have NOT been brought in line."

"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind, ***keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time***, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master."

"Within this kingdom the ego rules, and cruelly. And, to defend this little speck of dust, it bids you fight against the universe."

"The urgency is only in dislodging your minds from their FIXED POSITION here."

"The special relationship is totally without meaning WITHOUT A BODY. And, if you VALUE it, you must also VALUE THE BODY."

"To this distorted form of vision, the OUTSIDE of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true."

"The ego's fundamental wish is to replace God. In fact, the ego is the physical embodiment of this wish. For it is this wish which seems to surround the mind with a body, keeping it separate and alone, and unable to reach other minds except through the body which was made to imprison it."

"And BOTH of you stand there before Him now, to let HIM draw aside the veil that SEEMS to keep you separate and apart."

"If you WITHHOLD agreement, and accept the part YOU play in making sickness real, the other mind cannot project its guilt without your aid in LETTING it perceive itself as separate and apart from YOU. Thus is the body NOT perceived as sick by BOTH your minds, from SEPARATE points of view. UNITING with a brother's mind prevents the CAUSE of sickness, and perceived effects."

You can heal with the ego, or with God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God is not like this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Only love is real" - ACIM

"Only the truth is true" -ACIM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a MAJOR axis in the course, transitioning from false perception to true perception. Learning to overlook the world of bodies and see beyond it to the light of the real world, so that you are ready to move on to Heaven. It is VERY CLEAR that the physical world of bodies is ONLY SEEN through the body's eyes, and learning to OVERLOOK it and not believe any of it is forgiveness.

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant."

"Sin is a block, set like a heavy gate, locked and without a key, across the road to peace. No-one who looks on it without the help of reason, would try to pass it. The body's eyes behold it as solid granite, so thick it would be madness to attempt to pass it. Yet reason sees through it easily, BECAUSE it is an error. The form it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from reason's eyes."

"ONLY the form of error attracts the ego. Meaning it does not recognize, and does not know if it is there or not. Everything that the body's eyes can see is a mistake, an error in perception, a distorted fragment of the whole, without the meaning that the whole would give. And yet mistakes, regardless of their form, can be corrected. Sin is but error in a special form the ego venerates. It would preserve all errors, and make them sins. For here is its own stability, its heavy anchor in the shifting world it made; the rock on which its church is built, and where its worshippers are bound to bodies, and believe the body's freedom is their own."

"If you but recognized how little stands between you and your awareness of your union! Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous, solid body, immovable as is a mountain. Yet, within you, there is a force which no illusions can resist. This body only seems to be immovable. This force is irresistible in truth. What, then, must happen when they come together? Can the illusion of immovability be long defended for what is quietly passed through and gone beyond?"

"The body's eyes see ONLY form. They cannot see beyond what they were MADE to see. And they were made to look on error, and not see past it. Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see only illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside form of nothing. To this distorted form of vision, the outside of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true."

"It is not Will for Life, but wish for death, that is the motivation for this world. Its ONLY purpose is TO PROVE GUILT REAL."

"The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not. And what you then will overlook will not be understandable to you, just as its presence once had been your certainty."

"The body's eyes will NEVER look on it. Yet they will SEE what it dictates. The body will remain guilt's messenger, and will act as it directs, as long as YOU believe that guilt is real. For the REALITY of guilt is the illusion which seems to make it heavy and opaque, impenetrable, and a REAL foundation for the ego's thought system. Its thinness and transparency are not apparent, until you see the light BEHIND it. And then you see it as a fragile veil, before the light."

"This world you see (with the body's eyes) MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision (christ vision). YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS. For each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER."

"You do not really want the world you see (with the body), for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust even as you made it."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

"The purpose of these exercises (workbook intro) is to train the mind to a different perception of everything in the world. The workbook is divided into two sections, the first dealing with the undoing of what you see now, and the second with the restoration of sight."

"Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."

"Christ's vision has one law. It does not look upon a body and mistake it for the Son whom God created. It beholds a light beyond the body; an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes, and fearful thoughts of guilt from dreams of sin. It sees no separation. And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees."

"Corrective learning always begins with awakening the spiritual eye, and turning away from belief in physical sight. The reason this entails fear is because man is afraid of what his spiritual eye will see, which was why he closed it in the first place. We said before that the spiritual eye cannot see error, and is capable only of looking beyond it to the defense of Atonement. There is no doubt that the spiritual eye does produce extreme discomfort by what it sees. The thing that man forgets is that the discomfort is not the final outcome of its perception. When the spiritual eye is permitted to look upon the defilement of the altar, it also looks immediately toward Atonement. Nothing which the spiritual eye perceives can induce fear. Everything that results from accurate spiritual awareness merely is channelized toward correction. Discomfort is aroused only to bring the need to correct forcibly into awareness.

What the physical eye sees is not corrective, nor can it be corrected by any device which can be physically seen. As long as a man believes in what his physical sight tells him, all his corrective behavior will be misdirected. The reason why the real vision is obscured is because man cannot endure to see his own defiled altar. But since the altar has BEEN defiled, this fact becomes doubly dangerous unless it IS perceived. This perception is totally not-threatening because of the Atonement. The fear of healing arises in the end from an unwillingness to accept the unequivocal fact that healing is necessary. The fear arises because of the necessary willingness to look at what man has done to himself."

"Pain thresholds can be high, but they are not limitless. Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point. This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight. The alternating investment in the two types or levels of perception is usually experienced as conflict for a long time, and can become very acute."

"But the outcome is as certain as God. The spiritual eye literally CANNOT SEE error, and merely looks for Atonement. All the solutions which the physical eyes seek, dissolve in its sight. The spiritual eye, which looks within, recognizes immediately that the altar has been defiled, and needs to be repaired and protected."

"The REAL beauty of the Temple cannot be seen with the physical eye. The spiritual eye, on the other hand, cannot see the building at all, but it perceives the altar within with perfect clarity. This is because the spiritual eye has perfect vision."

"Vision adapts to wish, for sight is always secondary to desire. And if you see the body, you have chosen judgment, and not vision. For vision, like relationships, has no order. You either SEE, or not."

"By focusing upon the "good" in him, the body grows decreasingly persistent in your sight, and will at length be seen as little more than just a shadow circling round the "good".

"The concept of the self stands like a shield, a silent barricade before the truth, and hides it from your sight. All things you see are images because you look on them as through a barrier which dims your sight and warps your vision, so that you behold nothing with clarity. The light is kept from everything you see. At most, you glimpse a shadow of what lies beyond. At least you merely look on darkness, and perceive the terrified imaginings that come from guilty thoughts and concepts born of fear. And what you see is hell, for fear IS hell. All that is given you is for release; the sight, the vision and the inner Guide all lead you out of hell with those you love beside you, and the universe with them."

"And this he learns when first he looks upon ONE brother as he looks upon himself, and sees the mirror of himself in him. Thus is the concept of himself laid by, for nothing stands between his sight and what he looks upon, to judge what he beholds. And in this single vision does he see the Face of Christ, and understands he looks on everyone as he beholds this One. For there is light where darkness was before, and now the veil is lifted from his sight.

The veil across the Face of Christ, the fear of God and of salvation, and the love of guilt and death, - they all are different names for just one error; that there is a space between you and your brother, kept apart by an illusion of yourself which holds him off from you, and you away from him. The sword of judgment is the weapon which you give to the illusion of yourself, that it may fight to keep the space that holds your brother off unoccupied by love. Yet while you hold this sword, you must perceive the body as yourself, for you are bound to separation from the sight of him who holds the mirror to another view of what he is, and thus what YOU must be."

"Your brother's body is as little use to you as it is to him. When it is used only as the Holy Spirit teaches, it has no function. For minds need not the body to communicate. The sight that sees the body, has no use which serves the purpose of a holy relationship. And while you look upon each other thus, the means and end have not been brought in line."

"If you send forth ONLY the messengers the Holy Spirit gave you, WANTING no messages but theirs, you will see fear no more. The world will be transformed before your sight, cleansed of all guilt, and softly brushed with beauty. The world contains no fear that you laid not upon it. And none you cannot ask love's messengers to REMOVE from it, and see it still. The Holy Spirit has given you HIS messengers, to send each other, and return to each with what love sees. They have been given to REPLACE the hungry dogs of fear you sent instead. And they go forth to signify the END of fear."

"My holy vision sees all things as pure" - "And while we still remain outside the gate of Heaven, let us look on all we see through holy vision and the eyes of Christ. Let all appearances seem pure to us, that we may pass them by in innocence, and walk together to our Father's house as brothers and the holy Sons of God."

"Be willing, then, to see your brother sinless, that Christ may rise before your vision and give you joy. And place no value on your brother's body, which held him to illusions of what he is."

"Vision is freely given to those who ask to see. Your brother's sinlessness is given you in shining light, to look on with the Holy Spirit's vision, and to rejoice in, along with Him."

"There is no problem, no event or situation, no perplexity, that vision will not solve. All is redeemed, when looked upon with vision. For this is not YOUR sight, and brings with it the laws beloved of Him Whose sight it IS. Everything looked upon with vision falls gently into place, according to the laws brought to it by His calm and certain sight. The end, for everything He looks upon, is always sure. For it will meet His purpose, seen in unadjusted form, and suited perfectly to meet it. Destructiveness becomes benign, and sin is turned to blessing under His gentle gaze.

What can the body's eyes perceive, with power to CORRECT? Its eyes ADJUST to sin, unable to overlook it in any form, and seeing it everywhere, in everything. Look through its eyes, and everything will stand condemned before you. All that could save you, you will never see. Your holy relationship, the source of your salvation, will be deprived of meaning, and its most holy purpose bereft of means for its accomplishment. Judgment is but a toy, a whim, the senseless means to play the idle game of death in your imagination. But vision sets all things right, bringing them gently within the kindly sway of Heaven's laws."

"The barren sands, the darkness, and the lifelessness are seen only through the body's eyes. ITS vision IS distorted, and the messages IT transmits to you, who MADE it to limit your awareness, ARE little and limited, so fragmented that they are meaningless. From the world of bodies, MADE by insanity, insane messages seem to be returned to the mind which made it. And these messages bear witness to this world, pronouncing it as true. For YOU sent forth these messengers, to bring this BACK to you."

"Anger but screeches, "Guilt is real!" Reality is blotted out as this insane belief is taken as replacement for God's Word. The body's eyes now "see"; its ears alone can "hear." Its little space and tiny breath become the measure of reality. And truth becomes diminutive and meaningless."

"Reason would tell you that the world you see through eyes that are not yours, MUST make no sense to you. To whom would vision such as this send back its messages? Surely not you, whose sight is wholly independent of the eyes which look upon the world. If this is not your vision, what can it show to you? The brain can not interpret what YOUR vision sees. This you would understand. The brain interprets to the body, of which it is a part. But what it says, YOU cannot understand.

Yet you have listened to it. And long and hard you tried to understand its messages. You did not realize it is impossible to understand what fails entirely to reach you. You have received no messages at all you understood. For you have listened to what can never communicate at all. Think, then, what happened. Denying what you are, and firm in faith that you are something else, this something else, which you have made to be yourself, BECAME your sight. Yet it must be the SOMETHING ELSE which sees, and, as NOT you, explains its sight to you.

YOUR vision would, of course, render this quite unnecessary. But, if your eyes are closed, and you have called upon this thing to lead you, asking it to explain to you the world it sees, you have no reason not to listen, nor to suspect that what it tells you is not true. Reason would tell you that it can't be true, BECAUSE you do not understand it. God has no secrets. He does not lead you through a world of misery, waiting to tell you, at the journey's end, why He did this to you. What could be secret from His Will? Yet you believe that YOU have secrets. What could your secrets be except ANOTHER will, that is your own, APART from His? "

"Your sight was given you, along with everything that you can understand. You will perceive no difficulty in understanding what this vision tells you. For everyone sees only what he thinks he IS. And what your sight will show you, you will understand BECAUSE it is the truth. Only your vision can convey to you what YOU can see. It reaches you directly, without a need to be interpreted to you. What needs interpretation MUST be alien. Nor will it ever be made understandable, by an interpreter you cannot understand. Of all the messages you have received and failed to understand, this course alone is OPEN to your understanding, and CAN be understood."

"Reason will tell you that they must have seen each other through a vision not of the body, and communicated in a language the body does not speak"

"My condemnation keeps my vision dark, and through my sightless eyes I cannot see the vision of my glory."

"The love of God, for a little while, must still be expressed through one body to another. That is because the real vision is still so dim."

"Miracles are seen in light" "It is important to remember that miracles and vision necessarily go together. This needs repeating and frequent repeating. It is a central idea in your new thought system and the perception which it produces. The miracle is always there. Its presence is not caused by your vision; its absence is not the result of your failure to see. It is only your awareness of miracles that is affected. You will see it in the light; you will not see it in the dark."

"Only be quiet. You will need no rule but this to let your practicing today lift you above the thinking of the world, and free your vision from the body's eyes."

"To the extent to which you value guilt, to that extent will you perceive a world in which attack is justified. To the extent to which you recognize that guilt is meaningless, to that extent you will perceive attack cannot BE justified. This is in strict accord with vision's FUNDAMENTAL law: You see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you WANT it there. Perception HAS no other law than this."

"But on His Vision sin can NOT encroach, for sin HAS BEEN corrected by His sight."

"What is the resurrection?" "Here the curriculum ends. From here on, no directions are needed. Vision is wholly corrected and all mistakes undone."

"Now there are no distinctions. Differences have disappeared and Love looks on Itself. What further sight is needed? What remains that vision could accomplish? We have seen the face of Christ, His sinlessness, His Love behind all forms, beyond all purposes."

"These things await us all, but we are not prepared as yet to welcome them with joy. As long as any mind remains possessed of evil dreams, the thought of hell is real. God's teachers have the goal of wakening the minds of those asleep, and seeing there the vision of Christ's face to take the place of what they dream. The thought of murder is replaced with blessing."

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do. For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt. While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt."

"These are among the many magical beliefs that come from the conviction you are a body, and the body's eyes can see. You also believe the body's brain can think. If you but understood the nature of thought, you could but laugh at this insane idea." " Yet this is no more foolish than to believe the body's eyes can see; the brain can know."

"It is your weakness that sees through the body's eyes, peering about in darkness to behold the likeness of itself; the small, the weak, the sickly and the dying, those in need, the helpless and afraid, the sad, the poor, the starving and the joyless. These are seen through eyes which cannot see and cannot bless. Strength overlooks these things by seeing past appearances. It keeps its steady gaze upon the light that lies beyond them. It unites with light, of which it is a part. It sees itself. It brings the light in which your Self appears. In darkness you perceive a self that is not there."

"The body's eyes are closed, and as you think of him who grieved you, let your mind be shown the light in him beyond your grievances."

"You can SEE reason. This is not a play on words, for here is the beginning of a vision that has meaning. Vision is sense, quite literally. If it is not the body's sight, it MUST be understood. For it is PLAIN, and what is obvious is not ambiguous. It CAN be understood. And here do reason and the ego separate, to go their different ways."

"Yet how can sight which stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, see truly? It is HELD BACK by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but form will be perceived. These eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see. For the idea they represent left not its maker, and it is their maker that sees through them. What was its maker's GOAL, but not to see? For this the body's eyes are perfect means. But not for seeing. See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and cannot go beyond. Watch how they stop at nothingness, unable to go beyond the form to meaning."

"Let not the FORM of his mistakes keep you from him whose holiness is yours. Let not the vision of his holiness, the sight of which would show you your forgiveness, be kept from you by what the body's eyes can see. Let your awareness of your brother not be blocked by your perception of his sins, and of his body. What is there in him that you would attack, except what you associate with his body, which YOU believe can sin? Beyond his errors is his holiness, and YOUR salvation. You gave him not his holiness, but tried to see your sins in him, to save yourself. And yet his holiness IS your forgiveness. Can YOU be saved by making sinful the one whose holiness is your salvation?"

"There has been some controversy (in human terms) as to whether seeing is an attribute of the eyes, or an expression of the integrative powers of the brain. Correctly understood, the issue revolves around the question of whether the body or the mind can see (or understand). This is not really open to question at all." " The body is not capable of understanding. Only the mind KNOWS anything." "Only the mind sees".

"Your world is seen through eyes of fear, and brings the witnesses of terror to your mind. The real world cannot be perceived except through eyes forgiveness"

"I would bless the world by looking on it through the eyes of Christ."

"You keep an ancient memory before your eyes. And he who lives in memories alone is unaware of where he IS."

"The real world is attained simply by the COMPLETE forgiveness of the old; the world you see WITHOUT forgiveness. The Great Transformer of perception will undertake WITH you the careful searching of the mind that MADE this world, and uncover TO YOU the SEEMING reasons for your making it. In the light of the REAL reason that He brings, as you follow Him, He will SHOW you that there is NO reason here at all. Each spot HIS reason touches, grows alive with beauty. And what SEEMED ugly, in the darkness of your LACK of reason, is suddenly released to loveliness. Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release.

All this beauty will rise to bless your sight, as you look upon the world with forgiving eyes. For forgiveness literally TRANSFORMS vision, and lets you see the real world, reaching quietly and gently across chaos, and removing ALL illusions that had twisted your perception, and fixed it on the past. The smallest leaf becomes a thing of wonder, and a blade of grass a sign of God's perfection. From the forgiven world, the Son of God is lifted easily to his home. And there he knows that he has ALWAYS rested there, in peace."

"Forgiveness is the home of miracles. The eyes of Christ deliver them to all they look upon in mercy and in love. Perception stands corrected in His sight, and what was meant to curse has come to bless. Each lily of forgiveness offers all the world the silent miracle of love. And each is laid before the Word of God upon the universal altar to Creator and creation, in the Light of perfect purity and endless joy."

"Seen through understanding eyes the holiness of the world is all I see, for I can picture only the thoughts I hold about myself."

"Vision is the means by which the Holy Spirit translates your nightmares into happy dreams; your wild hallucinations, that show you all fearful outcomes of imagined sin, into the calm and reassuring sights with which He would replace them. These gentle sights and sounds are looked on happily, and heard with joy. They are His substitutes for all the terrifying sights and screaming sounds the ego's purpose brought to your horrified awareness. They step away from sin, reminding you that it is not reality that frightens you, and that the errors which you made CAN be corrected.

When you have looked on what seemed terrifying, and seen it change to sights of loveliness and peace; when you have looked on scenes of violence and death, and watched them change to quiet views of gardens under open skies, with clear life-giving water running happily beside them in dancing brooks that never waste away; who need persuade you to accept the gift of vision? And after vision, who is there who could refuse what MUST come after? Think but an instant just on this. You can behold the holiness God gave His Son. And never need you think that there is something else for you to see."

"This is your purpose now, and the vision that makes it yours is ready to be given. You have the vision that enables you to see the body not. And as you look upon each other, you will see an altar to your Father, holy as Heaven, glowing with radiant purity, and sparkling with the shining lilies you laid upon it."

And this will be your concept of YOURSELF, when you have reached the world beyond the sight your eyes alone can offer you to see. For you will not interpret what you see without the Aid that God has given you. And in His sight there IS another world. You live in that world just as much as this, for both are concepts of yourself, which can be interchanged, but never jointly held. The contrast is far greater than you think, for you will love this concept of yourself, because it was not made for you alone. Born as a gift for someone not perceived to be yourself, it has been given YOU. For your forgiveness, offered unto him, has been accepted now for BOTH of you."

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals."

"Accept the one illusion which proclaims there is no condemnation in God's Son, and Heaven is remembered instantly; the world forgotten, all its weird beliefs forgotten with it, as the Face of Christ appears unveiled at last in this one dream. This is the gift the Holy Spirit holds for you from God your Father."

"Now is there silence all around the world. Now is there stillness where before there was a frantic rush of thoughts that made no sense. Now is there tranquil light across the face of earth, made quiet in a dreamless sleep. And now the Word of God alone remains upon it. Only That can be perceived an instant longer. Then are symbols done, and everything you ever thought you made completely vanished from the mind which God forever knows to be His only Son."

"And now God's knowledge, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its kingdom. Gone is perception, false and true alike. Gone is forgiveness, for its task is done. And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God. God knows it is His Own, as it is his. And here They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant, and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause. For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

"The stars will disappear, and night and day will be no more. All things that come and go, the tides, the seasons, and the lives of men; all things that change with time and bloom and fade, will not return."

"The stars will disappear in light, and the sun, which opened up the world to beauty, will vanish. Perception will be meaningless, when it has been perfected. For everything that has been used for learning, will have no function. Nothing will ever change; no shifts nor shadings, no differences, no variations that made perception possible, will occur. The perception of the real world will be so short, that you will barely have time to thank God for it. For God will take the last step swiftly, when you have reached the real world, and have been made ready for Him."