In ACIM the term "solid" or "solidity" obviously refers to what we recognize it to mean..... things which seem solid to us. Physical matter, heavy objects, solid materials, walls, bodies, planets, all things which science would tell us are in a solid state of matter. Hard, tangible, measurable, biological, chemical, physical. Planet earth.
The course goes on to tell us that these things which appear to be solid will eventually be seen as transparent, like a shadow, or a smoke-screen, or a veil of illusions. And that these solid things stand in front of the face of Christ, initially blocking its view entirely but later moving aside and fading away to reveal the true light of the real world. That the "world", ie the solid earth, is nothing but a wall of illusions standing in the way of reality.
Christ vision becomes able to "see through" solid matter, kind of like x-ray vision. This is because it is forgiving, and "to forgive is to overlook." To overlook something is to not see it, which is why what you forgive must disappear. By forgiving the physical material solid world, therefore, you become able to see through and past and beyond it to the light of another world. A world which is not earth and is not the physical solid material plane.
In fact, Jesus says that it is the guilt in our minds which makes the veil of illusions - earth and spacetime - appear to have solidity. It is guilt which drags our mind down into false perceptions, blinded by perception of form, looking through and believing the body's eyesight which is completely incapable of forgiving or looking past the solidity of matter.
It is our belief in guilt and sin and fear and death which locks us in to the prison of solid matter and makes it appear opaque to our minds. It is only because we are not forgiving that the world appears to show up at all as "solid". And once we forgive completely, the whole world must disappear, and that does mean the solid physical world will fade into nothingness, leaving behind only the light of heaven, because the world IS nothing but a veil of illusions we made to cover up reality.
The physical material solid world literally was made as a kind of curtain or screen or wall to come "between" you and yourself, between you and God, to hide God and block out heaven. It is like a layer of dirt covering over what should be bright and obvious, a stain upon the creation of God, a shadow of darkness. Belief in it causes the body to be lit up and made to seem real and solid, emphasizing the rift of the gap of separation which contains the entire separation from God in the split mind.
Christ vision looks past this world to the light. It does not mistake the body for the son of God. It does not fixate on physical forms. It does not believe the world of separate objects is real. It doesn't merely look upon and regard it as unified, it looks fully beyond it entirely. It glances at the disappearing thin veil of nothingness as it leave the mind's awareness and opens up fully to perceiving only the light of reality. Then it is game over for the world, which was nothing to begin with.
This is then the end of solidity, the end of matter, the end of the physical, the end of the world of shadows, the end of darkness, the end of separation, and the end of death. The world is at first forgiven, seen past, overlooked, and ignored, and then ultimately returns to nothing at all which it is. There is no world, and only heaven remains.
"It can indeed be said the ego MADE its world on sin. Only in such a world COULD everything be upside down. This IS the strange illusion which makes the clouds of guilt seem heavy and impenetrable. The solidness this world's foundation SEEMS to have is FOUND in this. For sin HAS changed creation from an Idea of God to an IDEAL the EGO wants; a world IT rules, made up of bodies, mindless, and capable of COMPLETE corruption and decay."
"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. "
"Sin is impossible, and on this fact forgiveness rests upon a certain base more solid than the shadow world we see."
"And so you stand, here in this holy place, before the veil of sin that hangs between you and the face of Christ. LET it be lifted! Raise it together, for it is but a veil that stands between you. Either alone will see it as a solid block, nor realize how thin the drapery that separates you now."
"Standing BEFORE the veil, it still seems difficult. But hold out your JOINED hands and touch this heavy-seeming block, and you will learn how easily your fingers slip through its nothingness. It is no solid wall. And only an illusion stands between you and the holy Self you share."
"The mechanisms of illusion have been born instead. And now they go to find what has been given them to seek. Their aim is to fulfill the purpose which the world was made to witness and make real. They see in its illusions but a solid base where truth exists, upheld apart from lies. Yet everything which they report is but illusion which is kept apart from truth."
"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."
"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."
"Sickness is isolation. For it seems to keep one self apart from all the rest, to suffer what the others do not feel. It gives the body final power to make separation real and keep the mind in solitary prison, split apart and held in pieces by a solid wall of sickened flesh which it can not surmount."
"For anti-Christ becomes more powerful than Christ to those who dream the world is real. The body seems to be more solid and more stable than the mind. And love becomes a dream, while fear remains the one reality which can be seen and justified and fully understood."
"This heavy-seeming barrier, this artificial floor that looks like rock, is like a bank of low, dark clouds that seem to be a solid wall before the sun. Its impenetrable appearance is WHOLLY an illusion."
"Yet in this cloud bank it is easy to see a whole world rising. A solid mountain range, a lake, a city, all arise in your imagination, and FROM the clouds, the messengers of your perception return to you, assuring you that it is all THERE. Figures stand out and move about, actions seem real, and forms appear and shift from loveliness to the grotesque. And back and forth they go, as long as you would play the game of children's "make believe.""
"Christ's vision is the bridge between the worlds, and in its power can you safely trust to carry you from this world into one made holy by forgiveness. Things which seem quite solid here are merely shadows there, transparent, faintly seen, at times forgot, and never able to obscure the light that shines beyond them. Holiness has been restored to vision, and the blind can see."
"If you are not a body, what are you? You need to be aware of what the Holy Spirit uses to replace the image of a body in your mind. You need to feel something to put your faith in, as you lift it from the body. You need a real experience of something else, something more solid and more sure; more worthy of your faith, and really there."
"The world you see is based on SACRIFICE of oneness. It is a picture of a COMPLETE disunity and total LACK of joining. Around each entity is built a wall so seeming solid that it looks as if what is inside can never reach without, and what is out can never reach and join with what is locked away within the wall."
"The final one, the hardest to believe is nothing, and a seeming obstacle with the appearance of a solid block, impenetrable, fearful and beyond surmounting, is the fear of God Himself."
"You who believe you walk in sanity, with feet on solid ground, and through a world where meaning CAN be found, consider this: These ARE the laws on which your "sanity" appears to rest. These ARE the principles which makes the ground beneath your feet seem solid. And it IS here you look for meaning. These are the laws YOU made for your salvation. They hold in place the substitute for Heaven that you prefer."
"This world is not the Will of God, and so it is not real. Yet those who think it real must still believe there is another will, and one which leads to opposite effects from those He wills. Impossible indeed; but every mind which looks upon the world and judges it as certain, solid, trustworthy and true believes in two creators; or in one, himself alone. But never in One God."
"The actions of the body are perceived as coming from the "baser" part of you, and thus of him as well. 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 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. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."
"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."
"Beyond the body, beyond the sun and stars, past EVERYTHING you see and yet somehow familiar, is an arc of golden light that stretches, as you look, into a great and shining circle. And all the circle fills with light before your eyes."
"Such is your resurrection, for your life is not a part of anything you see. It stands beyond the body and the world, past every witness for unholiness, within the Holy, holy as Itself."
"Desiring to look upon their brothers in holiness, the power of belief and faith goes far BEYOND the body, SUPPORTING vision, NOT obstructing it."
"Grace is not given to a BODY, but to a MIND. And the mind that RECEIVES it, looks INSTANTLY beyond the body, and sees the holy place where IT was healed."
"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."
Let's talk about sickness purely as a matter of cause and effect. Your mind is causal, and when sane has no confusion about this fact. It does not mistake its own effects for causes, and especially does not believe its effects are causing it.
When the mind is sick, it uses denial to block out of awareness its own causal power. This is a denial of creative power or authorship. The mind REVERSES cause and effect. It believes it is not the cause of the effects, and it believes the effects are the cause of it.
The mind now perceives itself is "at the effect of" an external, separate cause. There are two very important things happening here:
1) The mind now sees itself as being an effect, and begins to distort the body in order to represent those effects. The mind believes it is caused by, and under attack by, an external cause, and that this cause defines the self. And the mind, under this perception, now subconsciously PRODUCES SYMPTOMS in the body. These symptoms are the expected effects that the mind believes "should" be the result or causal consequence of the external cause (which is secretly the mind itself).
2) In order TO believe that the mind is at the effect of the world or another person, the mind HAS to assign causality TO the world or person. And that means, that person is believed to be RESPONSIBLE FOR CAUSING the effects in your body. By being "the causer", they are effectively "the sinner". And so the mind sees "their will" as causing the effects that it, itself, is putting into the body based on this belief. By seeing itself as under attack, the mind thus ACCUSES its brothers of sin SO THAT it can pin the blame for the effects on your brother.
This results in an unfortunate scenario because now the presence of "effects" in the body, put there BY YOUR MIND, are acting as the "consequences" or cause-effect RESULT, of what SOMEONE ELSE DID TO YOU. This belief is inescapable because it's founded on the reversal of cause and effect. You can't see yourself as victimized and "at the effect" WITHOUT a scapegoat to pin the causality on. And that leads to this simple fact.
"Sick bodies are accusers."
The presence of sickness in your body is part of a dynamic of believing that your brother is the cause of you. And there is another way to put that. Your mind is ATTACKING YOUR BROTHER, by believing that he is the cause of you. Your mind ATTACKS HIM through the body, by assigning to him a causal power OVER you, which he does not have. And because causality is closely tied to sin, the idea of "who did it" .... this is nothing short of accusing your brother of SIN.
And we know WHY a person would accuse a brother of sin. "You but accuse your brother of your OWN sins." Which means that as soon as the mind is going into an attack mode, it believes in its own sinfulness and then PROJECTS this onto your brother THROUGH the reversal of cause and effect. The cause effect reversal is an absolutely essential part of the dynamic and it produces a perception that HE DID THIS TO YOU, and now YOU have the effects to show for it, which act as PROOF that he DID SIN. And this leads to a simple fact.
If your body is showing up as sick and damaged, IT IS accusing your brother of sinning against you, and it's doing so because YOUR MIND is accusing him of causing you. In every case. Without exception. The body's state is part of the mind's accusatory condition. If the mind believes your brother is the cause of your experience, your mind WILL MAKE YOUR BODY SICK TO PROVE IT. And you are now WILLING to suffer and tolerate sickness in the body in order to be able to get away with accusing your brother of sin. And in fact, we will even go so far as to KILL the body through "death" in order to ACCUSE the world or a brother of sin, "suggesting" that we "died innocently" against our will.
"A sick and suffering you but represents your brother's guilt; the witness which you send, lest he forget the injuries (that means PHYSICAL!) he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture (body=picture) YOU accept, if only it can serve to punish him. The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion (that's physical too!) do they seek to kill."
So sickness, all physical sickness, all symptoms, goes HAND IN HAND, with a psychological sickness, which is a condition of believing that cause and effect are reversed. And all such level confusion is EGO. Anyone with an ego is going to attack their own body in an effort to portray themselves as VICTIMIZED, so that OTHERS will stand accused, and thus YOU will appear to be innocent and exonerated. In sickness and damage we then are able to claim, "I DID NOT DO IT, YOU DID". And this is described be Jesus as this attitude:
"Brother, at your hand I die". Ie, because my brother is believed to be the CAUSE of me, and because I have secretly manifested EFFECTS in my body to PROVE it, I now die BECAUSE of my brother. And there IS NO death that isn't "caused" by this precise mechanism. It happens because of the MIND choosing to USE the body for attack against others, which results in sickness and death. This is explicitly stated by Jesus:
"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies."
"The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an ***easy price***, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die."
So we're talking here about the assumption that you HAVE a body. I'm not talking about whether the body is real or not. *IF* you have a body, HOW YOU USE IT is vital. If you use it for attack, ie belief in sin, thus denial and projection, thus reversal of causality, you are using it to attack THROUGH towards your brother. And he now is seen as the CAUSE OF your sickenss. Or at least, he is now the scapegoat onto whom you BLAME for causing your sickness. And your BODY is forced to be sick BY YOU, and accuses him right along with your mind.
Now the question becomes, what happens if you DO NOT DO THIS?
What happens if you stop using the body for attack? What if you stop reversing cause and effect? What if you stop seeing yourself (mind) as "at the effect" of the very things you are causing? What if you recognize:
"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."
Nothing in the world has POWER OVER YOU. Which means nothing in the world CAUSES you. Which means nothing in the world SINS against you. Which means, if you accept this and SEE this way, if your mind is SANE in recognizing IT is the cause of everything ("my self is ruler of the universe"), then it WILL NOT enter into the above described dynamic of USING the body for attack.
This means the mind will now NOT see your brother as causing you. It will NOT see itself as being "at the effect" of the world. It will NOT BELIEVE IN EXTERNAL CAUSES OF SICKNESS. It will not attribute to the world ANY power to cause it to be in any state. It will not see itself as "affected". And what are the CONSEQUENCES of this?
"Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die."
"The mind, being sane, heals the body."
In other words, because YOUR MIND was the ACTUAL cause of THE EFFECTS in your body, as a result of ITS misperception of your brother, and as part of USING the body for attack (to accuse him physically), the removal of this attacking attitude HEALS the body. It takes AWAY from it all the signs of attack and sickness. It stops seeing itself AS "effect". It stops believing in effects. And it stops making itself suffer. This CAUSES love to flow through the body to others. This joins minds. This then RESULTS IN the disappearance of the SYMPTOMS, as PROOF and CONVICTION, that the mind no longer wishes to attack, and therefore **REFUSES** to display signs of attack in the body.
You have to at this point let go of the belief, which is wrong, that the body is CAUSED to be sick BY anyone other than YOU. You also have to let go of the belief that the body can become sick as a result of some cause or power IN THE WORLD. NOTHING in the world has that power to make you weak or frail. Death does NOT OCCUR by accident, NOR does it occur "because of" ANYTHING in the world. Death occurs ONLY by a mind using the body for attack, sending attack through the body, making the body DEPICT ATTACK, and thus destroying it for the sake of some scapegoating.
If there is any shred left in your mind of a belief that sickness is caused by ANYTHING other than your mind's mis-use of the body, you will NOT be able to accept the next step. Which is to realize that when the mind USES the body FOR HEALING, to bring the Word of God to others, to shine light through it, to extend the mind PAST the body, the body actually GETS HEALED. Not only does it get healed, it CANNOT AVOID IT, has no will to choose not to, and MUST heal in order to NOT scapegoat. It cannot be retaining proof of sickness and CLAIM to be coming used by a healed mind.
Once again, explicitly stated by Jesus here:
"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. The arrest of the mind's extension is the cause of all illness, because ONLY EXTENSION IS THE MIND'S FUNCTION. ***Block this, and you have blocked health*** because you have BLOCKED THE MIND'S JOY."
So when you withdraw from your brother in attack, when you see separation in him, when you ACCUSE HIM OF SIN, when you scapegoat him, and when you try to make YOUR body sick so that HE is the accused sinner, you arrest the extension of the mind. The mind begins to fixate on the body and sees itself as the body. The body now is attacked and becomes SICK. Illness is the result, and this illness is a part of the mechanism of accusing OTHERS of sin as part of the scapegoating mechanism.
ALL SCAPEGOATING MAKES YOUR BODY SICK.
ALL FORGIVENESS HEALS YOUR BODY'S SICKNESS.
When the causality is corrected, the mind now USES the body for extension of love, this de-emphasizes the body, it lifts away from the body all PHYSICAL PROOF of attack and pain, and the body now is restored to literal physical heath.
"The Holy Spirit's picture changes not the body into something it is not. It only takes away from it ***ALL signs*** of accusation and of blamefulness." What are the signs? PHYSICAL SYMPTOMS OF SICKNESS. The holy spirit REMOVES the sickness from the body, so that it can ONLY depict health. It now becomes a SYMBOL of eternal life, in the world, which ONLY TEACHES that your brother is INNOCENT. Which means, a HEALTHY body, DEMONSTRATES, PROVES, that the MIND occupying that body IS HEALED, that mind IS NOT STILL attacking, and so the symptoms and signs of attack are gone. If the signs remain, the mind HAS ABSOLUTELY NOT been healed, because the signs ONLY show up when the mind is sick.
The Holy Spirit LITERALLY wants you to SHOW YOUR BROTHER a HEALTHY BODY. A healthy body is a symbol of innocence and forgiveness in this world! This again is EXPLICITLY stated by Jesus:
"Now in the hands made gentle by His touch, ***the Holy Spirit lays a picture of a DIFFERENT you. It is a picture of a body still***, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all. IT witnesses to the eternal truth that you can not BE hurt, and points BEYOND itself to both YOUR innocence and HIS."
Let's repeat it.
"the Holy Spirit lays a picture of a DIFFERENT you. It is a picture of a body still" ... "THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all."
That literally means that the Holy Spirit will heal all physical sickness so that your body can ONLY SHOW symbolic innocence and total lack of harm or attack to your brother. Add by doing so, the body now becomes a teaching device, which PHYSICALLY relays a message of healing to your brother.
"The body can become a sign of life, a promise of redemption, and a breath of immortality to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death. Let it have healing as its PURPOSE. Then will it send forth the message it received, and ****by its health**** and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that it represents. Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever ***unattacked*** (no physical sickness). And to your brother let its message be, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I live."
THIS is the ONLY appropriate state of the body for a HEALED MIND. God's teachers, God's miracle workers, WILL always have a healed body. If they don't, their mind is not healed.
"Show THIS unto your brother, who will see that every scar is healed, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. And he will look on his forgiveness there, and with healed eyes will look BEYOND it, to the innocence that he beholds in you. Here is the proof that he has NEVER sinned; that NOTHING that his madness bid him do was ever done, or ever had effects of any kind. (all physical effects are GONE, miraculously!) That NO reproach he laid upon his heart was EVER justified, and NO attack can touch him with the poisoned sting of fear. Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health. BECAUSE it proves illusions were not true."
This is what A Course in Miracles teaches. A sick mind WILL attack the body and make it sick and dead, ALWAYS in an effort to ACCUSE others of sin. Sickness is scapegoating! And when the mind STOPS doing this, it sends healing and health through the body which REVERSES the effects and straightens out the cause-effect relationship, thus TAKING AWAY the sickness which the mind put there in the first place.
"They can heal the sick and raise the dead because man himself made both death and taxes (strain and sickness), and can abolish both."
Your mind CAN MAKE SICKNESS.
Your mind CAN REMOVE SICKNESS.
If your body is sick, your mind IS STILL using it for attack. Which is why "a broken body shows the mind has not been healed."
If your MIND is healed, it MUST AND WILL ALWAYS heal the body. Because "a sick body makes no sense."
The mind WILL NEVER keep the body sick on purpose unless it is attacking. The body cannot stay sick on its own. There are NO causes of sickness beyond your mind. Nothing in the world MAINTAINS body sickness. The body is not an end in itself, or a thing, or a living entity. It is a SYMBOL.
"The body is the symbol of what you THINK you are. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist."
"Regarding the body as an end, it has no real use for it at all, because it is not an end."
The body only EVER SYMBOLIZES what the MIND is doing. It does not have its own STATE or continuity. The mind is AT ALL TIMES determining the health of the body. And the only way to have the body be constantly sick is to be constantly attacking with it. As soon as you stop attacking yourself, the sickness MUST DISAPPEAR to SYMBOLIZE forgiveness. "Sickness is a defense against the truth" - no defense, no sickness!!! If you want TRUTH, you will NOT have defenses, and thus NO SICKNESS.
There are no exceptions.
Healthy mind, healthy body.
Sick mind, sick body.
This is the central lesson.
THE OMNIPRESENCE OF GOD (and why many sons)
Understand omnipresence and you will understand how God created many sons.
The course appears here to contradict itself, saying there is only one son, and yet that there are many sons, in the same paragraph. But it is not contradictory...
"It should especially be noted that God has only one Son. If all His creations are His Sons, every one must be an integral part of the whole Sonship. The Sonship in its oneness transcends the sum of its parts."
Here it is further clarified that God has one son AND many sons (souls) all of whom make up the sonship....
"It should be noted that God has begotten only one Son. If you believe that all of the Souls that God created are His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul must be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship. You do not find the concept that the whole is greater than its parts difficult to understand. You should therefore not have too great difficulty with this. "
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The question is, how it is possible for God to have one son AND many sons and for both facts to be true at the same time, without contradicting?
God is omnipresent. What does that mean? It means God is fully present everywhere. But let's draw some analogies to what the ego thinks that means, to show why it is not what the ego thinks it means.
A cloud .... may seem to be the same everywhere. Today here the sky is overcast and gray, as if one cloud. But there are particles of cloud "over there" which are not "over here". All of the particles are separated out and cut off from each other. It is an illusion of oneness, simply a gathering of many separate parts huddled together. This is not what omnipresence means.
A human body - may seem to be "one body", joined together with its arms and legs. But the arms are not the legs. The hands and feet are separate. A hand is not a foot or vice versa. All of the parts are separated out. They seem to share to some degree but there are clear separations between parts. What is in the hand is not in the foot. What is in the eye is not in the knee. This is an illusion of a "blob", or semi-oneness. A collection of parts again huddled together to make an illusion of a whole or sharing, but where there is no sharing at all. All of the body's cells and particles are separate. It is a collections of separate parts. This is ego.
Omnipresence is not like this. Omnipresence defies every single property of matter. It transcends space time. The laws of omnipresence totally ignore every single law of physicality and physical limitation.
In omnipresence, it is possible, for the entirety of God, to be entirely present in one location. This sounds reasonable to the ego so far. But what does not sound reasonable is this additional fact: While God is being fully and completely present in one location, showing up with all of his being and all of his attention in that location, He is ALSO SIMULTANEOUSLY fully showing up and fully present in another location. ALL of His presence and attention and being are in that other location AT THE SAME TIME.
To the ego, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It can only think in terms of finite amounts or volumes. To it, if God is fully present over here, there is nothing left to be present over there. Or rather, this is the idea of conditional love, in that there is only so much "amount" of love to go around, so if all the love is showing up in one place or given to one person, it must be exclusive, and there is no love left for anyone else. This is not what God is like.
God loves unconditionally. A part of unconditionality means that God can FULLY LOVE every single PART of existence. Without reservation. This does not mean He is spread thin, either. He has no limitation. It does not mean He has a really great big huge amount of love, like a 10 gallon container of water, and happens to be so much "bigger' than a row of glasses that he can fill all of them and have some left over. That's more ego logic. What really happens is, God puts ALL of Himself into every glass, to the point where there should to the ego be nothing left to put in another. And yet, there's God, fully present in the other glass. And all the rest equally. ALL OF HIM, IN ALL LOCATIONS, SIMULTANEOUSLY. This concept is completely alien to the ego.
If you can get a sense of this in your mind, it will help you to understand the metaphysics of God's creation, and will allow you to make sense of HOW it is possible that God has MANY SONS, and how all of them are also simultaneously one.
If God shares ALL of Himself, in order to create "the first son", the ego will then say, well, God just used up all of what he has, and now there is nothing left to share with any other son or to create again. But this is not true. God has not reduced whatsoever by sharing Himself. He has in fact increased. "Creation is increased only by sharing". AND, his omnipresent nature means He is perfectly capable of putting ALL of Himself into A BILLION SONS, without diminishing in any way, and without lacking anything, and without "running out" of Himself. Every single one of them has ALL of Him.
And here is the crucial point, as to why God creates MANY Sons and not just one...
When God shares all of Himself to create the first son, this in no way - due to his omnipresent nature - confines him or limits Him. He is able to be FULLY PRESENT and to create wholeness, EVERYWHERE, simultaneously. The creation of one son is merely the radiation of God in "one location", and... there are a lot of other locations! Other locations can simultaneously express all of God, to create a Son, in EVERY location. Simultaneously.
Here is an analogy.
A single point of light may seem to create a single photon. That photon is one created son. However, if the light source spans a large volume of space, such as a fluorescent tube, or an array of LED's, then it is capable of producing, simultaneously, an extraordinary number of photons i.e. creations. This is completely NATURAL to the nature of God, to simultaneously create MANY instances/wholes, because God is actually INFINITE in His ability to be present fully in every location. It is totally natural to God to create INFINITE SONS and to create each of them unlimited.
It is not natural for God, to claim that He can only therefore "create one son" and, be confined to that. That's as if to say, He uses all His creative juice, because the fullness of him is a limited "amount" (ego logic) and therefore if He puts all of Himself into ONE son, there is nothing left. BUT THERE IS. Not only is there something left, EVERYTHING IS LEFT. God has not reduced AT ALL. And as such, God goes on CREATING MULTIPLE SONS... perhaps INFINITE SONS.
That is his Omnipresent nature. To create many children, not just one. If there will be creation at all, given the massive expanse of God, and given that God will create in ALL locations simultaneously, and that He will give ALL of Himself in EVERY location, he will create WHOLE SONS in every single location.
Each son is a WHOLE, because ALL of the Father is shared with Him. Not just some parts. Not just a little bit of God. ALL of God is shared with every created soul. And every single soul has EVERYTHING, lacking nothing, because it does not lack ANY of God. The fullness of God is in every part of His Sonship. His entire creation thus contains many, many, many sons, each one of them is experiencing ALL OF GOD, simultaneously, and yet each one is therefore a WHOLE in and of itself. It must be, because God is a whole and can only create more wholes. Again, this makes NO SENSE to the ego's way of thinking, but it makes perfect sense holographically. The all is in every part and every part is a whole.
There is no "unnatural division" in this (ego separation). There is only "natural division".
The so-called "one son", aka Christ, is simply the entire "sum total" of all the individual free-willed Sons that God created. Yet it is more than just a sum of its parts. Again this is to do with holographic creation. Since ALL of God is in EVERY Son, adding up the number of Sons does not tell you what is there. The sum total of all Sons is not the totality. Since every sons SHARES ALL OF GOD, there is MORE to each Son than just "himself". He is SHARING GOD. So the Sonship, is more than the sum of its parts, because they are all sharing and extending a wholeness which is far bigger than any of them - the One Father.
To God, since he is IN all of the sons fully, shared with them, one with them, yet they are distinct, his experience of "all the sons" is simultaneous. As such he experiences the total as "one son" or "one unified experience". Another word for this one son is Christ. It is a sense of, every son sharing one parent. Of every son having ALL of God in them. That unity, that, connectedness, is "christ". But the christ is not just "one son", it is the immediate shared experience of the fact that ALL of God is in every son. Every son experiences and shares the whole of creation.
So it then is true to say, that each individual son, is in fact
1) A distinct son, a whole, containing the whole of God or made from the whole of God
and
2) Also intimately connected to and sharing God with every other son, as christ.
Therefore every son is christ. He is both "the whole sonship" AND "one son" simultaneously. The all, and the part, simultaneously.
Every creation of God also inherits God's omnipresent nature. Every single son, every being of light, every angel, every son of a son of a son, is OMNIPRESENT as well. It can be everywhere. And it can manifest multiple occurrences of images of an identity simultaneously, at any point in time or space, if needed. For example, angels are capable of being with MANY people simultaneously. This is only possible because they are omnipresent, otherwise they'd be jumping all over the place trying to keep up. This is true of them and it is also true of every Son.
Jesus is able to appear to MANY people individually, simultaneously, because he is EVERYWHERE, and is OMNIPRESENT, and is not limited in these finite ego-logical ways. Jesus can be FULLY present here with me right now, and be FULLY present with you right now wherever you are. This is NATURAL for all creations of God. This is part of our divine nature.
It is only this world of FORM and matter and time and objects and bodies, that APPEARS totally the opposite of this. In form, it is suggested that what is in one location IS NOT in any other location AT ALL. Matter also suggests that there *IS* no "all" in ANY of the parts. That all parts are separate, all parts are NOT JOINED, none of the parts are SHARING at all, and there is NO ONENESS. That was the POINT of making this universe of illusion, to be the TOTAL OPPOSITE of the nature of Heaven, God, and the Sonship.
Every single object in this world testifies that there is no God and that every son is separated. Every single body demonstrates this. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards". The planet itself, Earth, is a physical expression of the idea of separation, in which it is "OPPOSITE TO HEAVEN IN EVERY WAY", because it does not demonstrate ANY omnipresence whatsoever. It does not appear to be a hologram (though it is), it does not show that the all is in any of the parts, no two parts share anything, there is no true joining, nothing overlaps, and basically every single physical particle of matter says "God is not here".
This is why this world is a bullshit lie, and no matter HOW you look at it or perceive it, its FORM is fundamentally in opposition to the nature of Heaven and God and the Sonship. It is NOT divine. It opposes divinity in every way. Every single particle of matter or energy is an expression of the idea of separation. Every subatomic particle. Every wave. Every quantum. However you deep you want to go, this universes is the OPPOSITE of omnipresence. And that was on purpose. The ego MADE THIS on purpose to try to create a picture of SHUTTING OUT GOD.
This is also the meaning of "this world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son". In every way, the separateness of matter is an attempt to claim that the son is CUT OFF from his father, because he no longer shares anything with the whole and no part contains ANY of God. That is an idea of the DEATH of God's Son, portrayed as physical particles which make up a demonstration of the Son being so completely devoid of God's presence that he must not be alive at all.
This is why we are not to make this world SPECIAL, or to worship it, or to want to keep it, or to try to have it somehow turn into heaven, or to put it on a pedestal, or to suggest God created it, or that it will be a permanent part of Creation. It CANNOT BE, because ALL that it is made of is this suggested idea of being UNLIKE HEAVEN. So there is no way that it can BECOME like heaven and still exist. Its entire NATURE is to be OPPOSITE TO HEAVEN. It exists AS "what God is not like". ... so it can't be IN what God is like and still exist. It cannot enter heaven or be part of it. This is why ... "THERE IS NO WORLD."
God's creation is one of holographic omnipresence. Every one of his MANY sons is a holographic omnipresent creation. Every single part of God's creation is the same everywhere and fully present in all parts. This is utterly IMPOSSIBLE to be expressed in form or matter, although any of God's children DOES have the ability to materialize illusory forms in any and MANY simultaneous locations if they choose to do so.
"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." - ACIM"There is nothing my holiness cannot do." - ACIMI want to be clear about this, because this is an often misunderstood matter. It's a question of who does what, who has the power, and who should get the credit. Is God the miracle worker? Are we? Both?First of all, let's tackle this term "of myself". Of yourself, you have and are nothing. This does not mean you do not exist. It means that what you are, YOU did not put there. You did not create yourself. What you have did not come from you. You did not originate it - it wasn't "of" (from) you. But this DOES NOT in any way mean that you HAVE NOTHING or that you can do nothing. Far from it.For example, children do not create themselves. Of themselves, they did not give themselves life. But they have life. They have life because their creator SHARED their life with them. Their parent EXTENDED life and GAVE life to them, creating them as a standalone life joined with the parent's life. The child is not devoid of life or incapable, but what they have was inherited.God extended his own will to us to create us. He shares the Kingdom with us. He put everything he HAS into us. He invested us with HIS POWER. His light is our light. His love and joy are shared with us. It's in us. We didn't put it there, but you sure as heck HAVE it. We are HOST TO GOD but this doesn't mean "only God exists and we do not".
God does not create weak beings who can do nothing. God creates POWERFUL beings of light. In fact, unlimited, holy beings who can do literally ANYTHING. They are fully equipped to CREATE. They are unlimited. They have been GIVEN the ABILITY to accomplish anything.
In fact, God has established his children as CO-CREATORS, which does NOT mean that God is the only one doing the creative act. It's not just God sitting there creating "through His children with His children doing nothing at all. His children MUST collaborate, MUST be included, MUST share, MUST exercise free will, and MUST CHOOSE to co-create with and like the father. BOTH of them produce creative ACTS together in collaboration.
God created the sonship, and the sonship is fully equipped with the ability to ADD TO the Kingdom. They create additional beings - "children of my will". But they create them WITH their brothers, AND with God. This doesn't mean any individual part of the Kingdom "does all the work". EVERY part of the Kingdom does all the work. Even the Holy Spirit participates in co-creation. So who gets credit? They all do.
So when we say that of ourselves we can do nothing, we have to be very careful not to imply that we do the OPPOSITE of doing something. Because it is absolutely NOT TRUE that we "do nothing" or that God is "the doer" through us, excluding us from the process. Without us God CANNOT act through us.
This is why ACIM says "Love goes out because of what it is, but you are needed that it can begin" and why "Love cannot enter where it's not welcome." YOU have to participate, not merely in an act of getting out of the way and allowing, but ACTIVELY WILLING in accord with God's will.
God has GIVEN YOU His power, making you a powerful co-creator with a powerful mind. That means there is stuff you can do. Not only is there stuff you can do, there is nothing you cannot do. You are unlimited in your power. YOUR power. But YOUR power is ALSO HIS. You don't OWN it exclusively, but you DO own it.
The point Jesus is making is not that you can't do anything or that God does everything. He's making the point that your symbiotic relationship with God means that anything you CAN do is BECAUSE you and God are working TOGETHER in unison. You are sharing in God's power. You are extending HIS love, AS your own. How could you even experience the ability to love another if you could not YOURSELF be capable of loving? YOU love others, along with God.
We need to be careful, indeed, not to believe that our power is "of ourself". This is an ego belief that everything we are and can do is because we independently have superpowers that do NOT depend on God, or that are not shared or accessible to all. It would be egoic and arrogant to claim that everything we do, we do WITHOUT God. We would be merely bragging at our prowess with our limited "skills."
This is why Jesus deferred "ownership" of miraculous acts to the Power of God through Him. But he did not mean that HE Himself had no power or did not participate or merely sat on the sideline and watched. Jesus's mind was powerful. HE was a powerful miracle worker. It's just that in terms of WHO does the act or WHO makes it possible, ownership is SHARED with God. Of Himself Jesus HAD nothing and WAS nothing. He was not OF Himself, He was an extended creation of God. But he definitely HAD power and DID acts. HIS mind was miraculous.
Here for example, Jesus explains that ownership to God does not mean "God gets all the credit and we get none". To Him, ownership is about SHARING, meaning that ALL created beings HAVE the power to USE as they see fit. And while God DOES deserve "full" credit, He is not the ONLY one who deserves credit. Omitting credit from yourself omits it from one of God's extensions, which in turn omits it from God.
"It is yours BECAUSE it belongs to Him, for ownership is sharing to Him."
This makes sense because anything created is FULLY given EVERYTHING that its creator has. Through extension, what is God's IS YOURS. This is YOUR INHERITANCE!!! Which means you are a divine, holy, powerful, creative being, because God has created you to be this. It's just that your power isn't yours ALONE, exclusive to you, special, different, or something that God doesn't ALSO SHARE. God has equipped and enabled to you to be miraculous WITH him.
So what we need to say more clearly perhaps is, what we have did not come from ourselves. Of (from) ourselves, we have and are nothing. There is nothing IN us that WE put there. We didn't create ourselves. God made everything that WE can do possible. God gave us the power TO perform miracles, because HE is miraculous and is involved in the miracle. "Miracles are a universal blessing from God". Yet WE are powerful miracle workers as well.
We should be very careful not to transition from the ego position of "everything I have is mine alone", to "I have and do nothing. And we should be careful not to transition from "I believe I am powerful" to "I have no power". It is in fact the EGO that thinks this way, jumping to what seem to be opposites. To go from one state of exclusivity to another, because it does not understand inclusive thinking.
It is NOT an improvement to switch from the ego position of "I exclusively have power" to "God exclusively has the power". That is NOT correct. That's an ego conclusion. God does not think this way. God thinks INCLUSIVELY. We need to transition from "I exclusively have power" to "WE SHARE ALL POWER WITH GOD."
It would be ridiculous to say Jesus, a Son of God, had NO power. Jesus was immensely powerful and strong minded with an undivided constructive will, aligned with God's will, working in unison with the Holy Spirit. His own mind was miraculous BECAUSE he shared His mind with God. It's fine to have the humility to not "claim exclusive ownership" of miracle working, but this does NOT mean Jesus himself had no power or ability.
In order for a "separate God" to work through us, and for us to be a passive conduit, which is also NOT how it works, you'd have to be NOTHING. You are not nothing. You become loving in order that love can move through you. This means still that YOU have to be loving. This is why you are NEEDED by love so that it can go out. On its own it is blocked if you do not cooperate. God sends the love, you must RELAY it by ALSO loving like and with God, amplifying the signal. Your will must ACT and be INCLUDED, FREELY.
"Miracles are expressions of love" and "All expressions of love are maximal" and "Miracles are everyone's right but purification is necessary first" is telling us that miracle can only function "through you" with YOU being miracle minded and miraculous, by YOU entering a state of WILLING TO LOVE in a maximal and powerful way, SO THAT you are OPEN to RECEIVE love from God, acknowledge the love that is IN you because God put it there, and in turn willingly EXPRESS it as miracles. YOU have to be miraculously minded AND maximally loving in order to perform them. If YOU are not, YOU are not "doing your part", and then the miracles do not happen because "something has gone wrong" (ie you are blocking love).
We need to drop the idea that we merely "step aside". Yes we need to get our EGO out of the way, but not our SELF. We need to get our selfishness out of the way, but not our soul. We need to BE very loving in order to BE miraculous. And WE MUST have miracle mindedness in order to perform miracles. But miracle mindedness does not mean "a mind that cannot do anything." It means a mind that cannot do anything WITHOUT God, and CAN do EVERYTHING WITH God.
By being open to receive and admit and aknowledge and allow God to work THROUGH us, it does not mean that WE aren't doing something. That again is ego exclusive thinking. "God or me" is EGO thinking. "God AND me" is divine thinking. "God does it all" is TRUE, but NOT if you make that exclusive. "God does it all and no one else does anything" is an ego conclusion. You are a CO-CREATOR, not just a medium.
We need to acknowledge that we didn't give ourselves the power to heal. But we do have it, and we need to acknowledge that also. We need to admit we cannot heal WITHOUT God, but this does not mean that WE do not do anything. Our function is to SHARE in the state of power. And that means WE have to be powerful, healed, whole beings of love and light, which in their own right are very capable.
"Teachers of God will take over the world because of their strength."
"Now must you share His function" "You share His function only by judging as HE does"
"You cannot see the Holy Spirit, but you can see His manifestations. And unless you do, you will not realize He is there. Miracles are His witnesses, and speak for his Presence. What you cannot see becomes real to you only through the witnesses who speak for it. For you can be AWARE of what you cannot see, and it can become compellingly real to you, as its presence becomes manifest ***THROUGH you***. ***Do His work, for you SHARE in His function.*** 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."
Your function is not "be passive". It's not to "just let God work through you". God CAN'T work through you unless YOU DO SOMETHING AS WELL. Your function is to be a miracle worker, a DOER, to DO HIS work WITH Him. To SHARE His function, not to have Him do all the function. Your mind's condition is VITAL and IMPORTANT in the equation of how miracles happen. Your WILLINGNESS is absolutely required. Your power to love is mandatory. You choosing to DO miracles WITH Him makes them possible.
This is not about giving God 100% credit and giving us zero. That is false humility and false thinking. We must give God 100% credit AND give ourselves 100% credit. This flies against ego thinking. What we can do did not come from us, but we nevertheless are powerful beings. Thinking it is ours exclusively IS ego. Thinking we have NO power is ALSO ego and is NOT true humility. The children of God are not puppets. YOUR strength, shared with Him, enables miracles to happen. Miracles express from YOUR mind. YOU are the miracle worker.
"What the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world." (a shared state of collaboration)
"The creative power of both God AND His Creations is limitless" (God's children have unlimited power)
"It was only my DECISION that gave me all power in Heaven and earth. My only gift to you is to help you make the same decision FOR YOURSELF." (Each of us HAS all of the power of heaven to use as we see fit)
"All power and glory are yours because the Kingdom is His." (YOU deserve glory, not just God. The ONLY problem is you claiming the glory without sharing it)
"By teaching the power of the Kingdom of God Himself, He teaches you that ALL POWER IS YOURS." (see, ALL power is yours. YOU are powerful - it's just that it's not ONLY you that's powerful)
"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 unto you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do.***" (There is nothing YOU cannot do because all power has been GIVEN to you).
"Having been restored to your original state, you naturally become part of the Atonement yourself. You now share MY inability to tolerate the lack of love in yourself and in everyone else, and ***MUST join the GREAT CRUSADE*** to correct it. The slogan for this Crusade is "Listen, Learn, and ***DO***." This means:
Listen to MY Voice, Learn to undo the error, and ***DO something*** to correct it.
***The first two are not enough. The real members of MY party are ACTIVE workers.***
***The power to work Miracles BELONGS to you.*** I will create the right opportunities for you to do them. But ***you must be ready and willing to do*** them, since you are already able to. Doing them will bring conviction in the ***ability***. I repeat that you will see Miracles through your hands through MINE (shared function). Conviction really comes through accomplishment. Remember that ability is the potential, Achievement is its expression, and Atonement is the Purpose."
EGO: I have the power, God does nothing. I gave myself this power, it's special and exclusive.
HOLY: God and I share all power and together we can do anything. What I have God has, and we perform miracles together.
Fail not in your function of loving in a loveless place, made out of darkness and deceit, for thus are darkness and deception UNdone.
This is something I think we've all struggled with. It seems the world is cruel, vicious, hateful, dangerous, murderous, and at times evil. It is filled with horros and torment and suffering and death. How can you love such a place?
It seems that when the world is being evil, you can't love it. More likely you will despise it, hate it, fear it, judge it as wrong, or consider it broken. How can you feel love in the face of atrocities and attack, or when you are witnessing war and destruction?
It then seems even insane to suggest that while the world is being evil, you can love it. Because this implies that somehow you love evil. If the evil is really happening, and it seems real to you, you logically HAVE to despise it. To love evil is itself unthinkable, and seems insane.
What occurred to me today, is that approaching the "how to love it" from this angle, is really looking at a special relationship. We're talking in terms of what the world is causing in us, how we are reacting to it, and how we are affected by it. What IT is doing to us and others, and whether or not IT is CAUSING US to love it. ie we JUDGE it to be lovable.
In specialness, we believe that something outside of us affects us. It can affect us positively or negatively. We believe it causes us and has power over us. We then seem to PREFER that it treat us well, and if it does, we will love it. And if it turns on us, we will hate it.
It's within that framework that we are stuck, when asking how we can love a cruel world. And it seems we can never love the world, because it is always messing up. If the world remains cruel, it is not going to inspire love. More likely it will inspire revoltion and bitterness.
If I allow my relationship with the world to be based on what the world "does to me", and if I'm waiting for the world to be RESPONSIBLE for causing me to love it, then chances are that how I feel about the world will waver by the minute.
Sometimes the world might seem loving, perhaps a lovely sunset or a pleasant smell. We then say that we love it, and become enamored with it. Then we see a car crash and are horrified, just as the smell of death wafts into our noses.
When we are worshipping idols, we are looking for those aspects of the world which "we like" or approve of, or prefer. We may even become obsessed with them, collectors or them, trying to gather them up to surround and immerse ourselves in them. The foods we like, our favorite color, the music we like, our favorite shows, toys and games we like to play with, etc. So long as we avoid the rest and pretend it's not there.
In this mindset we can only sporadically, conditionally, love the world. We love it when it seems to CAUSE us to love it. When it does something TO us that we prefer, we clap our hands. When it seems to meet our rules and does FOR us what we have assigned it responsibility to do.
Responsibility, however, also ties into the cause of sin. If we assign responsibility to the world, and it does not do what we want it to do, we consider it in violation of its duties. And now it has failed to act responsibly, or do what we wanted it to do, and it has now acted against our will, sinning against us.
We can't love the world like this. We can't love it on a basis of what it does to us or for us. In fact we can't love it on a basis of it doing anything at all. It can't be what the world IS that makes us love it. Nor can it be because of what it DOES, whether things we like or not. It can't be some effects we prefer, while despising others. Our love can't be based on the world being RESPONSIBLE for whether we love it or not.
What I'm learning is that a feeling of love or happiness is not supposed to be a REACTION to the world, or something the world causes in me. I shouldn't be feeling love for the world on the basis of what I GET from it or what IT is like. Love based on the world's CONDITIONS is conditional love - special love.
Love actually is supposed to be an outward expression FROM WITHIN, extended from the unconditionality and permanence of God. It is something I GIVE TO what is out there. And this giving should not happen as a reaction, or on the basis of adjusting to external conditions. Nor should I be doing it ONLY when the world lines up with my wishes. Expectation is not love.
The world should be loved, ONLY because YOU are loving, and not because OF the world. We're not loving it for its lovely scenery. We're not loving it's cute animals. And we're not loving it for the things it does for us. These are all special relationships.
We don't want to be getting lost in a state of idol worship or external dependency or only being happy based on worldly conditions. If we jump up and down when the world is in a certain configuration, or cower in fear and hate when it is in another, we are merely on a rollercoaster ride of fake happiness and despair.
The world, itself, is going to keep on being intermittently cruel and vicious and hateful and warring and decaying and deadly. It is going to continue operating within the laws which established it as a weapon against God.
It will try to delight you some of the time, and try to take away your peace at others. It will inspire guilt and fear and continue to attack itself in all its ways. You can't place your happiness or love on such unsure footing, or give the world the POWER to take it away from you when it wishes.
An inner love arises as you forgive yourself and love yourself, applying love at all times. This inner love has permanent qualities. It is unconditional. It is not a REACTION of love. It is not a love you only feel IF or WHEN certain conditions are met. It's a love you just feel, hopefully all the time, for "no seeming reason". "Happiness is a constant state."
It comes FROM WITHIN, and expresses outward. It shines ONTO the world. It is something you GIVE to the world. You PROJECT love onto it. And you then SEE the love you put there, mixed in with the world's cruelty. You enjoy it ONLY because you EN-JOY it, which means to GIVE IT JOY. Love is its own reward.
"Peace is impossible to those who look on war. Peace is inevitable to those who ***offer peace***. How easily, then, is your judgment of the world escaped. It is not the world which makes peace seem impossible. It is the world you see that is impossible."
The world IS a world of impossibilities. It cannot represent love or freedom. It cannot be real. It cannot be true. It is its nature to attack and destroy. That was what it was made to do. But to see only this is to judge it and hold it against itself. Only by GIVING peace and love TO it can you FEEL peace and love in relationship with it.
"Yet has God's Judgment on this distorted world redeemed it and made it fit to welcome peace. And peace descends on it in joyous answer. Peace now belongs here, because a Thought of God has entered. What else but a Thought of God turns hell to Heaven merely by being what it is?"
This projected love changes the framing of the world, and what it means. It shows you that the world's cruelty is not true or real. That it is just an illusion of sickness and suffering. That its images of death are not really death, because they are fake, and powerless to change you.
And at the same time, you look upon love IN SPITE OF the world, thus PUTTING LOVE THERE to see. This is the projection of the "real world", with which you OVERRIDE hell with heaven. And what you project you will perceive.
You OVERRIDE the world with your extension of happiness. You remain happy NO MATTER WHAT is happening, not because of some kind of "acceptance of it" but because of your REFUSAL to allow the world to come INTO you from the outside. You have power OVER it and dominate it with what you radiate. You are master of it. And you experience love because you chose to.
You really cannot love the world from the perspective of expecting the world to BE LOVABLE. The world is NOT lovable. No-one can make murder and death real and love it. That would be insane, to be in love with evil.
The only way to love is to recognize the evil is NOT REAL. It is not compatible with love. The world makes love IMPOSSIBLE. The only way TO love is to love it in spite of itself. And as such, you can love unconditionally precisely because you love IN SPITE OF the world being cruel. This also grants you the miraculous power to override its cruelty.
I find myself now, more often, smiling upon the world - upon subtle things, small objects, textures, colors. Feeling an inner sense of projected beauty. A sort of gentle happiness that bestows love, which shines upon, the world. And this is not because of what the world IS or what it DOES. It is because of what I am GIVING to it. Because I am staying IN MY LIGHT and shining it ONTO what I see, even if faced with a twisted hell.
It is more like an inner choice. A choice to love, regardless of what something is. To love something, even if it is a picture of brokenness or damage or malfunction. Not because IT is lovable, in its form or nature, but because I can CHOOSE to love, and will not ALLOW the thing to interfere with whether I am loving or not.
This means a love which is not DEPENDENT upon the world, triggered BY the world, or an EFFECT OF the world. It is not a love I GET FROM the world, and reciprocate, in some kind of bargain.
It is a love which is given outward TO the world, regardless of whether it seems to deserve it. Because *I* deserve it. Because if I stop being love, then I stop experiencing love. If I let my love switch on and off depending on externals, then I am a victim of the world, allowing it to affect me both positively and negatively.
Real love, or let's say, a holy relationship with the world, can only take place by IGNORING what the world suggests, and REPLACING IT with love. Giving it love even when IT hates, recognizing IT as calling for love.
We're told in ACIM that the cruel world is NOT the world God could love. And this makes perfect sense. But it also tells us that God loves the REAL world. God DOES love HIS PROJECTION OF LOVE. He gives peace, and sees peace. He feels love, and so is loving "toward" the world REGARDLESS of what the world is like. He doesn't love it BECAUSE OF what it is. He loves it IN SPITE of what it is. In spite of its evil ways.
If you think about this, it ties in properly with forgiveness. Unconditional love overlooks and ignores what something claims about itself, and sees past its illusion, and sees love instead. And only because it GIVES love and innocence.
Not because the thing is "being innocent". The world cannot be sinless or guiltless. "To see a sinless body is impossible." But we can choose to not believe in sin and guilt, and to thus project forgiveness and light UPON a sinful world. And we then see the reflection of our light, or of God, IN it. Because we PUT it there.
No one can love the world we made, on the basis of it being lovable, or on the basis of it acting lovingly. It is not that, and it cannot be that. It will always be a world of separation and death for as long as it appears to exist.
But we can love ... while the world seems to be there... in spite of what IT says or does, even WHILE it is being cruel, because the choice to love does not DEPEND on the world, or come from it. We can love in the FACE OF cruelty, in spite of the cruelty, which will render the cruelty seen with loving eyes. But this will not JUSTIFY the cruelty, because the love is not BASED ON the cruelty.
This is the only way to "love hell". No one can love hell, on the basis of what hell does to or offers them. The world in fact holds NOTHING that you want, and has NOTHING to give you. It effectively has NO redeeming qualities. Because it is nothing.
"The world can ADD nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons"
But you can "love hell" - which does not mean BEING IN SPECIAL LOVE WITH hell, on the basis of what you OFFER TO IT. You be loving, even when surrounded with evil people. You can love unconditionally regardless of whether the world was made from love. It wasn't made of love, and never will be. But this must not stop us from loving. Otherwise we cannot feel happy.
Our challenge is to stay strong IN OUR LIGHT, even when confronted with evil. To remain IN THE TRUTH, even when faced with lies and deception. To remain IN POWER, even when the world pretends to take power away. And to NOT ADJUST to the world in any way, or allow it to cause us to waver or change our decision to love. This is the only way God is able to love the world. To love it, because he can do nothing BUT love, REGARDLESS of whether the world "is lovable" or not.
"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."
This will be a touchy and controversial subject. But we need to be more honest about death and what exactly is going on when spiritual people keep getting sick.
When someone's body dies, and when people have believed that the body IS the person through body-identification, there is a sense of loss. And this makes sense.
Something "real" seems to have been destroyed. If this were true, it SHOULD induce grief. If a real being has ended, it is definitely grounds for grief. This perceived "real death" can induce horrifyingly intense feelings of loss, massive waves of grieving and anger and hurt and loneliness etc.
All of those experiences and feelings can be extremely difficult to go through. Pangs of grief that come out of nowhere. Constant floods of emotions causing huge amounts of crying. A sense of missing and longing, an unfairness, and a justified anger. All of this accompanies the belief that something real has died.
Because of this, it then becomes very difficult to say ANYTHING about death, about what the person chose, about how the sickness came about, or to QUESTION in any way whether the person themselves had something to do with it. To even suggest that someone wanted to die, caused it to happen, chose it, or used it on purpose, seems like a horrible slander against the central character in the dying.
Indeed, when some body person dies, the dying, as the ego interprets it, appears to be the loss of an innocent victim. Ego beliefs tell you that they did not ask for this, they could not stop it, they did not want it, it could not be avoided, it happened unfairly, it victimized them, the person suffered greatly, it was horrible to watch, it was so sad and such a loss, etc. All of this appears to be true when a person is regarded as a body.
In light of this, when we are framing a person as the face of innocence, an innocent helpless victim of death "happening to them" or of diseases being "acquired" from the world, or the environment hurting someone etc, we make it look like the person is "untouchable" in their innocence. We start talking about them as if they were an angel. We go into a total denial of anything they seemed to do wrong. And no-one then dares to say a single word which might imply the person was anything OTHER than absolutely pure and perfect.
As a result of this behavior and this "falling for" the APPEARANCE that the person died against their will, death itself becomes protected. It becomes shielded by a facade of innocence and victimhood, helplessness and powerlessness. As if the person couldn't lift a single finger to influence anything that happened, and as a result was completely unfairly ripped away by forces beyond their control.
Death itself benefits from this view. By framing "dyers" as innocent victims, it puts up a powerful shield of denial, which seems impenetrable. And because it is framed as innocence, everyone suddenly is watchful of anyone even remotely suggesting that the person was "not innocent" in any way. There is a protectiveness that suddenly comes over people, which then justifies immense anger and projection, if anyone should dare to even HINT at the idea that the death was not how it appeared to be. As if death is an innocent baby that no-one can touch with a bargepole.
To even then question death at all, to suggest a person might've chosen it, that they caused it, or wanted it, or made it happen, or used it to try to kill the Son of God, would be considered a kind of blasphemy. And anyone who speaks out against death then is considered some kind of horrible insensitive accuser, victimizer and attacker, who has come to trample on the very carefully laid picture-frame of death-encrusted jewels that surrounds the tomb. To question death then seems completely off-topic, inappropriate, un-asked for, unwanted, and an act of war. How dare you suggest death is a lie or that all death is suicide?
By doing do, we never really get to question death itself. We keep hiding it behind this shield of illusions. We keep framing people as innocent victims who never wanted what happened. We keep denying that anyone ever chose any of it. And all that revolves around false perceptions, perceptions of a person AS a body, and AS a victim of the world.
It is a fact, however, that A Course in Miracles takes a radically OPPOSITE view of death than this. A view which would actually reveal a lot of activities taking place by the egos of not only those who die, but by those who mourn for them also. Those who are in grief and loss, as horrible as those experiences may be, are revealed to nevertheless be mistaken. Jesus even goes so far as to quite blatantly point out that those who attend funerals and who grieve over dead bodies, are completely going against God's will. He basically calls them death-worshippers.
"But what of those whose dedication it is NOT to live? The black-draped "sinners," the ego's mournful chorus, plodding so heavily AWAY from life, dragging their chains and marching in the slow procession that honors their grim master, lord of death."
"One thing is sure; God, Who created neither sin nor death, wills not that you be bound by them. He knows of neither sin NOR its result. The shrouded figures in the funeral procession march not in honor of their Creator, ***Whose Will it is they LIVE. They are not FOLLOWING it; they are OPPOSING it.*** And what is the black-draped body they would bury? A body THEY dedicated to death, a symbol of corruption, a sacrifice to sin, OFFERED to sin to feed upon, and keep ITSELF alive. A thing condemned, ***damned by its maker***, and lamented by every mourner who looks upon it as himself."
So the way Jesus describes this is that, those who die, AND those who react to the death on the basis of body-identification and ego loss and "something real died", which is a mistaken perception, are death worshippers. They are people who are themselves dead. The walking psychologically dead, who are actually worshippers of death and sickness, who make bodies real, who react to body deaths in horror, but whose egos are secretly celebrating the proof that yet another Son of God has been slain.
These truths are underneath the grief and the loss and the horrible aftershocks of "someone dying", and as such remain buried in the minds of most people. These truths are so opposite to "how terrible it is that someone died" attitudes that it would embarrass and likely induce guilt in someone to whom it were revealed. And that's because people who are circling around death like vultures are trying to perpetuate death and keep it going.
Jesus is very clear in A Course in Miracles that this is a course in life, in living, in resurrection, and in the surmounting of death. We are being asked to "swear not to die", and to be so committed to the goal of LIFE, that we completely blot out and make death IMPOSSIBLE. Even that our bodies should enter a state of completely healthy functioning, not merely devoid of sickness but actually INCAPABLE of becoming sick or dead. Where they are locked into health because the mind is healed.
Jesus once told me personally, that the entire purpose of this life, is "to eradicate death in all its forms."
Such a teaching is obviously completely diametrically opposed to death, to sickness, to suffering, and to any kind of pity party about someone's body seeming to come to an end. We're even told that the Holy Spirit will produce a "picture of you" (a body) which has never been hurt or suffered pain in any way, and therefore symbolizes eternal life and immortality, teaching your brothers who look upon it that they are sinless.
"Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have It not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die."
"Now in the hands made gentle by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays a picture of a DIFFERENT you. It is a picture of a body still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all. IT witnesses to the eternal truth that you can not BE hurt, and points BEYOND itself to both YOUR innocence and HIS."
There is even an entire radical teaching in ACIM about the fact that when you project sin or use the body for attack in any way, the body itself becomes sick. And the body is thus used as a messenger to try to communicate to those who look upon it that they are the CAUSE of its sickness. Thus, a body which is sick, broken, damaged, diseased, or in any way defective, in fact physically ACCUSES others of being sinful. It is what the course calls "a picture of crucifixion", which you show to your brothers in order to condemn them and be contagious in negatively affecting them.
"This sick and sorry picture YOU accept, if only it can serve to punish him. The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."
As a result, Jesus is EXTREMELY clear that any amount of sickness in the physical body at all IS PROOF that the mind HAS NOT been healed. That if there is still physical sickness, there has NOT been a forgiveness. The forgiveness is not REAL, unless it has brought a healing to your body and to the body of your brother. That if the body remains broken, it CONTINUES to accuse your brother of sin, and teaches by double messages. That no-one can learn from this contradictory demonstration because a) mind is claiming to be healed and b) body is proving otherwise. No-one will listen to such a hypocritical assertion.
So basically Jesus is saying that we need to put our money where our mouth is, and we need to become genuinely healed in the mind, SO THAT the body is FORCED to be healthy. And by doing so, we make all physical sickness and death IMPOSSIBLE. So much so, that the body can no longer become sick, be made to be sick, be caused to die against your will, or in any way decay. That it cannot even age and grow old, or become decrepit over time, or malfunction as a result of "natural processes."
Jesus wants us to learn that we are NOT at the effect of death. That we have power OVER death. And in fact that we MUST gain power over death if we are to reach atonement and resurrection. If there is any way, any loophole, any exception, in which the body could potentially still be made to be sick WITHOUT your consent, there is still a power in the separation that can KEEP the son of God in hell forever. The notion that there is a force in the world that can MAKE you die, against your will, is nothing more than a fantasy belief in death and an attempt to GIVE it power over you.
"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."
Whether you are an ACIM person or not, if the body is sick, it is simply because the MIND is sick. And if the mind is sick, it projects its sickness onto the body. And therefore the mind has to be healed. And when the main is healed, the mind DOES ALWAYS heal the body. And the body cannot resist this, it cannot maintain its own sickness, it cannot keep dying on its own, and it cannot stop the mind from forcing it to be well. A guiltless mind HEALS the body and makes sickness and death impossible.
"It is the dream in which the body functions perfectly, having no function except communication."
THIS ..,. is what everyone is supposed to be achieving...
"The body can become a sign of life, a promise of redemption, and a breath of immortality to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death. Let it have healing as its PURPOSE. Then will it send forth the message it received, and by its health and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that it represents. Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever unattacked. And to your brother let its message be, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I live.""
If you do not reach this state, then you have not reached the resurrection, and you have not finished the curriculum of ACIM. The curriculum of ACIM ends in resurrection, NOT death, and resurrection means LIFE, which is the opposite of death. Anyone who produces sickness in the body HAS in truth CAUSED it to be sick on purpose, for the purpose of hatred and attack and murder, in an attempt to prove that the son of God is guilty and deserves to die. Anyone who HAS died as a seeming "effect" of physical sicknesses such as cancer, HAS NOT HEALED THEIR MIND fully.
So to put it simply, people keep dying because they have not reached resurrection. They keep dying because they keep identifying with the body. They keep dying because they have not fully healed their minds. They keep dying because they are not done with the curriculum. A person can become closer to not dying, for sure, and can still cause death while being mostly healed. But until a person is fully healed the body will be attacked. Only in TOTAL RESURRECTION does a person reach a state in which they can be said to be "fully awake" and able to leave the dream permanently. "A dream of death is not left by death but by truth."
In such a state, the body is INCAPABLE of being sick or becoming sick. It cannot rot or decay. It cannot contain cancers or any other malfunctions. In fact, the only way to remove it then is to make it disappear. And this is precisely what Jesus did in his resurrection, causing his body to DISAPPEAR because he recognized it was NOTHING. This happened because recognized that the body IS an illusion of death (separation) and that it was not true. He erased the body and erased the separation in his mind, attaining total resurrection.
We need to drop the idol worship, we need to stop thinking that death is natural and inevitable, we need to stop buying into body identification which is guaranteed to induce grief and loss, we need to stop thinking that death is God's will, we need to stop believing that you OR your body can die as a result of causes outside of your control, we need to question death and recognize it as a lie, and we need to STOP CHOOSING IT. You do NOT have to die!!!
"A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."
"The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, it heals the body because IT has been healed. The sane mind cannot conceive of illness, because it cannot conceive of attacking anything or anyone."
"To witness sin, and yet forgive it, is a paradox which reason cannot see. For it maintains what has been done to you DESERVES no pardon. And, by GIVING it, you grant your brother mercy, but retain the proof (a sick body) he is not REALLY innocent. The sick remain accusers. They cannot forgive their brothers AND themselves as well."
"The power of witness is beyond belief, because it brings conviction in its wake. The witness is believed BECAUSE he points beyond himself, to what he REPRESENTS. A sick and suffering you but represents your brother's guilt; the witness which you send, lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture YOU accept, if only it can serve to punish him. The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."
"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely."
"Here the curriculum ends."
"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt."
"What you would prove to him you will believe. The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. 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."
Jesus "My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it. The last one had gone. It was laid in the tomb, but there was nothing left to bury. It did not disintegrate because the unreal cannot die. It merely became what it always was. And that is what "rolling the stone away" means. The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear."
"Only salvation can be said to cure."
There is only one problem - the sense of separation from God. God is immortality and permanent health. If you deny God, you are denying life and inducing death. It is ONLY the separation from God which CAUSES ALL SUFFERING, including all forms of sickness and death.
To deny God is to attack your health. Defending yourself against God is an attack thought, attacking your invulnerability. Sickness becomes a defense against the truth (God), made to "protect you from God", but with the actual effect of "protecting you from health." In sickness you are attempting to "save your life" by protecting yourself from life. This is clearly insane and cannot work.
"Allegiance to the denial of God is the ego's religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival."
"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt (are mortal)."
"It is your task to heal the sense of separation that has made him sick."
"The problem of separation, which is really the only problem, has already been solved."
There is no other problem. ALL sickness is caused by separating from God. Denying God induces illness. Your mind is the sole cause of all suffering, even death. The ONLY solution is the atonement, which COMPLETELY erases all sense of separation and accepts God as truth. This makes the denial of health impossible, making sickness and death impossible. Atonement cures wholly because it represents WHOLENESS.
"The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness."
"The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, it heals the body because IT has been healed. The sane mind cannot conceive of illness, because it cannot conceive of attacking anything or anyone."
"Atonement heals with certainty, and cures all sickness. For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take. Sickness where guilt is absent cannot come, for it is but another form of guilt. Atonement does not heal the sick (but does result in this), for that is not a cure. It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible. (which heals the sick) And that is cure indeed.
***For sickness now is gone***, with nothing left to which it can return." Atonement is the restoration of your immortality. It makes you utterly invulnerable. You can no longer be sick or die. Nothing can happen against your will. You have no need for defenses because you know you cannot be attacked. Nothing real can be threatened.
"The mind that serves the Spirit is invulnerable."
"Those who accept Atonement, ARE invulnerable."
"You are invulnerable BECAUSE you are guiltless."
"This heals the Separation, and places within man the one defense against all Separation-mind errors which can make him perfectly invulnerable." When you separate from (deny, oppose) God, you block your awareness of the presence of love (life) within you. Seeing lack and being in need, you seek for what is absent, outside of you. This begins "seek and do not find." You will not find it outside because it is inside.
You look for yourself, your love, your life and health, outside of you, where they do not exist. Seeking outside of yourself for this CAUSES sickness and suffering, because it takes you AWAY from God and life, which are WITHIN you. You try to find them where they do not exist, and the more you try the worse you suffer. Seeking for God outside yourself is the avoidance of God within yourself.
"Peace is an attribute ***in YOU. You cannot find it outside.*** All mental illness is some form of EXTERNAL searching. Mental health is INNER peace." Perceiving a lack of love within, you project lack without. This makes a world of lack. Coming from the internal attack on God, it is a projected attack-world. "The world was made as an attack on God." "The world of bodies is the world of sin." "The world is a (projected) picture of the crucifixion of God's son."
This is also a projection of, and a disowning of, causal power. You don't want to admit that YOU CAUSE YOUR OWN SUFFERING - ie you are the one denying health. You imagine that causation is outside of you, and you see yourself as caused BY it. This frames the world as "sinning against you" ie causing you against your will, making you a powerless effect. This sets you up to be a victim, or receiver of the world, which you now "sense" through the body's inputs.
You have given the world, which you are dreaming/hallucinating, all the power it seems to have. You have given YOUR power away in trying to empower it to have power over you. You have given it your causality and will. You think it has your life, and contains your self. And you see it as causing you. It is therefore attacking you. It is your enemy and your savior, because it does things to you.
The world now is seen as a world of sin, in which the world can hurt you. It decides when you will suffer. It decides how you become sick. It decides when you will die and how much pain you will endure. All of this seems to happen against your will from the outside in. Anything the world can do TO you, is against your will, regardless of it seeming to be positive or negative.
You then divide up the world into separate parts to try to "spiritualize" some and "demonize" others. You pick and choose certain aspects of the world to "do things to you" that you prefer. You try to avoid its attacks, while collecting its lovely treasures. You defend against its harsh weather with your little fragile house. You seek for its fancy cars while trying to avoid a crash. You want only the good food not the bad stuff. And so you make a bargain with the world, to try to induce it to "do only good things to you", while avoiding all the bad things. And when it seems to go well, you think you are "living the dream." But you have gained the world, and lost your soul.
"What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."
The world is two-faced. The world is self-contradictory. It offers you pain, and offers you salvation from that pain. It hurts you, then offers you healing. It threatens to destroy you, then tries to save you. This is because the world has come from the belief that BOTH heaven and hell exist. That life and death are both possible. And so the world depicts the contradiction of opposites. It seems to partly help, and partly hurt.
As a result, EVERYTHING in the world is not one thing, but two. It is a world of dualities and a double-edged sword. Everything which seems to help, MUST also hurt. Everything which seems to hurt, in some way helps. Snake venom can be a partial medicine. Surgery can kill you. ALL foods have toxicity to them, some worse than others. All medicines exaggerate certain body functions while depressing others. The external manipulation of the body is thus seen as the only sane solution to being externally manipulated.
This is actually inescapable. Anything the world can seem to do to you against your will is MAGIC. All magic is a mixture of attack and defense. To be "affected by the world" is still a state of being victimized and in need, regardless of whether the effects are preferred.
We try to focus ourselves on finding the "least harmful solution" to problems, to minimize the risks, and to skew the picture to make it seem like there are "completely harmless solutions". We have a fictional idea that some things in the world are totally harmless. But the world HAS NO harmless solutions. EVERY one of its solutions is a problem in its own right. Its effects cause more effects.
In fact, the world has a somewhat sinister motive, which can appear to be hidden. It basically wants you dead. Sooner or later. Even if it gives you scraps and hopes and promises, every one of its helping hands is laced with poison. Its every attempt to "make you happy" sets you up for loss and sadness.
Anything it can give to you, it can just as easily take away. Anything you "get" from it, is a deception with a cost. This is because the world was made WITH and FROM the notion of the REJECTION OF LIFE. The world is made of the idea of death, because it came from rejecting immortality. So it cannot actually offer you life. It cannot give you wholeness. And it cannot provide a CURE for anything - or a cure for ITSELF. And being the inducer of death, it will do anything BUT cure death.
"There is a tendency to think the world can offer consolation and escape from problems that its purpose is to keep."
"Without the idea of death there is no world."
"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives. Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped. ... All of them will lead to death. On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes."
Because the world comes from the wish to die, ie the wish to deny God and health, it is driven by a MOTIVE of death. That was the PURPOSE in making it, as an attack upon God and life. Death motivates the world, and everything in the world ultimately drives TOWARD death. It cannot therefore induce immortality, cure you completely, or restore your wholeness. It cannot save you, nor can it give you eternal life. It MUST fail, because it came from the failure to recognize the truth.
"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. No worldly thought or act or feeling has a motivation other than this one. These are the witnesses that are called forth to be believed, and lend conviction to the system they speak for and represent."
"Everything in this world is little, because it is a world made out of littleness, in the strange belief that littleness CAN content you. When you strive for anything in the world, WITH THE BELIEF THAT IT WILL BRING YOU PEACE, you are belittling yourself, and blinding yourself to glory." "There is NOTHING in the world to teach him that the logic of the world is totally insane, and leads to nothing."
"There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail."
"There is a light which this world cannot give."
"It means that nothing outside yourself can save you; nothing outside yourself can give you peace. But it also means that nothing outside yourself can hurt you, or disturb your peace, or upset you in any way."
Anything the world "does to you" is magic. Magic is the idea of a cause outside of yourself affecting you against your will. It is the opposite to internally-sourced miracles. This takes the form of anything the world seems to do to harm you, as well as anything the world seems to do to help you.
While you may prefer the "good stuff", having the world "do good things to you" is just as much a state of victimhood. It still focuses on you getting from the outside, what you lack inside, without your insides changing. It's still a state where you WANT the world to do something "to you" against your will, FORCING you to "be happy." This is "forgiveness to destroy", because you seek for the world to be the source of change, rather than yourself.
Since the world attacks and defends, and since its motive is ultimately death, and since it CANNOT induce wholeness or a total cure, ALL of its remedies are AT BEST partial. All of its remedies MUST therefore do the opposite to what they claim to do, as well. They MUST be two-faced and deceptive. If it is to "help you", it MUST also hurt you. There is ALWAYS a price to pay, and it does not help to deny this.
This means that ALL foods have a negative side-effect. There is no such thing as a perfect diet. It means that ALL medicines have harmful side effects. All surgeries have high risks of serious threats to your health. All vaccines INDUCE what they are ultimately trying to avoid. In some cases literally, while in others the form is less obvious.
It may not take the form of a certain vaccine "causing the virus" it was trying to prevent, but the real PURPOSE of a vaccine is to "ward off death", which it CANNOT really do. And in fact it must IN SOME WAY, induce it, to some degree. It MUST induce other symptoms as a result of its "interference". Some of these symptoms may be mild to barely noticeable, while others may be life threatening.
This has nothing to do with the competence of medical workers, or the proficiency of scientists, or the wonders of modern medicine, or the seemingly wonderful "benefits" of an extremely wide range of magical solutions. It would APPEAR that "lives are saved" by such things. Provided you recognize that at the same time, lives were also attacked by such things. There is NEVER a possibility of a perfect total "cure" through ANY magical external means. ONLY atonement can be said to cure completely.
This simply goes back to the fact that the ONLY PROBLEM is the separation from God, which is the sole cause of inducing all sickness, suffering and death. The MIND creates what appear to be viruses and invasions, putting them into the world. The world only then APPEARS to be their source. ONLY by correcting THAT problem, will sickness and death TRULY become impossible. Anything which does not address this ACTUAL problem, will not ultimately ward off death, even if it appears to in the short term.
This is the main problem which ALL magical solutions share. They appear to change the body, BUT NOT the mind. They may make the body seem healthier, but do nothing to fix the dripping tap of death-inducing separation.
There is no pill for "the separation". There is no medication that can induce runion with God. There is no surgery which can cut out the ego. There is no bandaid sufficient enough to heal the wound of the denial of health. And no vaccine can EVER fully guarantee your safety or that of others. It may seem to do SOMETHING, but it cannot do everything.
What that leaves you with is one of two options.
1) Heal the separation from God, accept atonement, receive a complete CURE, and never suffer again. This makes all sickness impossible because you choose to stop causing it, and there is no other cause.
2) Avoid healing the separation, MAINTAIN sickness, choose from a selection of LIMITED and PARTIALLY EFFECTIVE magical treatments which WILL hurt you in some way, and try to live with the consequences.
If you think that you can elect to use magical remedies WITHOUT ill effects, you are in denial. They only seem to do anything BECAUSE of your denial. You might weigh up the seeming risks, look at the manmade "statistics", and decide for yourself (or preferably with God) as to whether to indulge in magic or not. But let's be clear, for your health as well, that any magical solution cannot ONLY heal. It has to also cause some form of harm. It is because you BELIEVE in harm that you think you NEED it in the first place, and this belief works against your health.
Maybe you are willing to accept that, although you cannot honestly be fully at peace about it. No-one who recognizes without denial what magical solutions ARE and WHY they exist and WHAT their motive is, can rest in peace. You can resign yourself to a compromise, willing to suffer in some ways to OFFSET the others. But this is how the world worlds. This is the laws of physics and entropy. You become willing to suffer a seemingly "smaller pain" in exchange for the reduction of a larger one. It's a tradeoff. You buy and sell risk in an effort to minimize cost, while always having a cost.
Do not pretend though that medicines or a vaccine or an injection or a pill or a certain kind of food or drink or even any form of salvation - sex, drugs, rock and roll - can undo the separation in the mind and truly prevent illness. Nothing external can fix the INTERNAL problem. The internal problem has CAUSED the external to appear, as an hallucinated world of suffering. And then you are looking to a made-up death-induced world, to save you from death. It cannot ultimately work.
"For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death."
This doesn't mean you shouldn't necessarily USE magic IF you need to, want to, or for whatever reason. Sometimes such thing can seem to alleviate suffering. People wouldn't likely take them if they didn't "seem to help". Some people cannot "live" without external support, major medications, physical apparatus, and various other help. Surgery can seem to save lives. But surgery can also induce complications.
"All material means which man accepts as remedies for bodily ills are simply restatements of magic principles. It was the first level of the error to believe that the body created its own illness. Thereafter, it is a second mis-step to attempt to heal it through non-creative agents. It does not follow, however, that the application of these very weak corrective devices are evil."
Your best bet is seeking spiritual guidance from a higher source - the Holy Spirit - Jesus - Angels etc.... as to what to choose. And if that means you have to "settle" for non-miraculous external help, for a non-whole treatment, due to what you are willing to accept right now, so be it. But then keep working on your forgiveness and moving towards the acceptance of atonement as well. Atonement is the GUARANTEE of health forever.
Please don't misinterpret that this post is telling you what to do or not to do, NOR is it trying to paint vaccines in an unfair or negative light or to "put you off". They are what they are. They can only do what they do. If you're okay with that, so be it. It's your free will choice.