When minds are separated, there is a gap between you and others. You become isolated. This prevents your mind from extending to and joining with other minds. It prevents you from recognizing your oneness with your brother, and so disrupts the holy relationship, induces separation, fosters specialness, and in turn increases body identification. You become anchored to the body and this increased fixation on the body causes it to become sick. It is under attack by beliefs in not sharing, selfishness and defensiveness.
"Perceiving the body AS A SEPARATE ENTITY cannot but foster illness"
"Learning must lead beyond the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it. This can be accomplished only if the mind EXTENDS to other minds, and does not ARREST ITSELF in its extension. 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."
"Sickness is a defense against the truth"
"All forms of sickness even unto death are physical expressions of the fear of awakening."
Sickness arises, physically, as a result of the "fear of awakening" to the joined nature you share with your brother. It defends against the truth that you and your brother are one.
Therefore, by resuming extension of the mind through the body, to connect with and join to the minds of your brothers, recognizing your oneness with them, your sense of self expands back out past the body to be inclusive of others, the gap between you closes, the separation is erased, there is nothing to split your mind away from your brother's mind, and thus unity results. This unity erases all forms of separation and sickness. The gap, the "wound", is closed up.
"Healing is when two minds recognize their oneness and become glad."
"Miracles unite you with your brother."
The inevitable result of this is that the body is no longer the focus of identity, the mind is not contracting itself into the body, the body is not being attacked by the idea of isolation and separation, love is flowing through it again rather than visions of hell, and in turn the BODY is now healed as an effect of the joining of minds.
"The mind makes this decision as it makes every decision responsible for the condition of the body."
"The mind being sane heals the body."
All physical sickness results from and symbolizes the psychological sickness of contraction (fear) away from your brothers and the attempted severing of oneness with them. The restoration of that oneness is miraculous and forces the body to symbolize wholeness, healing, health, innocence, harmlessness, unity and freedom from attack. The body is induced into health as a natural byproduct of healed minds joining as one.
The body is a part of the equation. The body has not STATE of its own, it is ONLY a symbol, and not an end in itself, and it can only symbolize what the mind wants it to represent. It can either represent attack (sickness) as a result of separation of minds, or it can represent eternal life (wholeness, health) as a result of joined minds. Its condition is entirely an effect of the mind.
"The must be stronger than the body. Every miracle demonstrates this."
Where the mind is separating from others, it WILL induce physical sickness as a result of the fear of awakening to oneness, and as a defense against the truth of that oneness. When the mind is joining with others in love it WILL induce physical healing as a result of the overcoming of the fear of awakening and the disregarding of a NEED for a defense against the truth of your oneness with your brother.
Holy relationships heal the mind AND the body.
Special relationships cause sickness and death.
"***UNITING with a brother's mind prevents the CAUSE of sickness, and perceived effects***. ***Healing is the effect of minds that join***, as sickness comes from minds that separate. The miracle does nothing just because the minds ARE joined, and CANNOT separate. Yet, in the dreaming, has this been reversed, and separate minds are seen as bodies, which ARE separated, and which cannot JOIN."
From the vantage point of someone who sees themselves as "separate", healing another person suggest you must give them something which they lack, which you have, which sets you apart, and only they will be changed by the giving. This is actually part of the unhealed healer's mindset. An unhealed healer is someone who is not having a shared identity, is body identified, sees themselves as separated off and different, and believes they have what others lack. The "giving" then is on the basis that what they give will not be received, and so it has limited helpfulness.
I'm seeing more now that in ACIM, true miracle working really entails a joining and sharing, in which the minds have to actually kind of merge together in oneness, there has to be an openness and trust, a sense of mutual identity and mutual benefit. The two minds both recognize their oneness and share the love. Love isn't something exclusive. Both of them have to be immersed in the love and share it, the minds have to be connected and the sense of self has to be inclusive.
Both the giver and the receiver must benefit because miracles have a "universal" quality to them. They are about wholeness, and wholeness means a shared oneness. To really heal another then is in part to heal oneself, and to recognize there is one shared mind, one shared self/identity in christ, and to see your neighbor as part of yourself. This "merging" with another to join minds and undo separation is quite different to the idea of sending "love messages" across the gap of spacetime. The sense of self as "separate" has to be put aside in order to heal.
"No mind is sick until another mind AGREES that they are separate. And thus, it is their JOINT decision to be sick."
"You HAVE done miracles, but it is QUITE apparent that you have NOT done them alone. ***You have succeeded whenever you have reached another mind, and JOINED with it.***"
"But, having OBSCURED it, the light in ANOTHER mind must shine into theirs, because that light IS theirs."
"The power to HEAL the Son of God is given you, BECAUSE he MUST be one with you. ***You ARE responsible for how he sees himself. But reason tells you it is GIVEN you to change his whole mind, which is one with YOU***, in just an instant. And ANY instant serves to bring COMPLETE correction of his errors, and make him whole. The instant that you choose to let YOURSELF be healed, in that same instant is his whole salvation seen as complete WITH yours."
Give someone a mind-hug.
In the physical world, the ego has cleverly set things up so that cause and effect seem separate.
It is even a "law" of physics that each action has an equal and opposite reaction. Or that if you put some energy in, some energy comes out. Or that if you cause some object to move, it will have to move.
This whole world is set up to show you a picture of causes having effects.
Object A moves and hits object B and therefore object B now gains some energy and moves.
And to your perception, this looks as though some parts of the world are causes and some parts of the world are effects.
And this is pretty malleable because in any given situation something which was causing an effect on something else can, itself, become the effect of something else.
So this world, in how it appears, as physical matter that moves through time and space, is MEANT to show you a picture of cause and effect being separate.
And that means, if cause is separate from effect, YOU can be caused by this world and affected by it.
It also seems to mean that you can do stuff to this world which does not affect you. This is how you get away with murder.
The illusion that something "made something happen" here, shows your mind a very convincing picture which seems to train it to believe e.g. the body is sick because it was attacked by the wrong food, or the body is sick because the weather changed, or the body is sick because someone just cut your leg off.
Well, that's a pretty darn convincing illusion right there, portraying and "proving" that your leg is powerless over a chainsaw and it is now laying on the floor in a bloody mess.
Except that..... ... you, as immortal spirit, and not a body, and not a part of this world, DO have the power to overcome even this convincing illusion.
You could, if you so chose, manifest an entirely new body. You could undo all of the effects of the dismembered leg.
You could make the illusion appear as though nothing happened.
You could even in fact become so invulnerable "in" your body that it is impossible even for your body to be moved or hurt or damaged in any way at all, even if someone lets off a nuclear bomb in your vicinity!
What God creates is permanent. Therefore it is invulnerable. And therefore it cannot be hurt. And therefore it is immortal. And that is what you are. So ....
All of this world with its ILLUSION that there are causes and powers and wills outside of you that can do something to you or make accidents happen or harm you in any way, IT IS NOT REAL and IT CAN BE OVERCOME.
And when you overcome it, this will be thought of as miraculous. Because it is, in a certain context. But miracles are natural. They are everyone's birthright. And when they're not happening something has gone wrong.
You cannot be hurt by a dream that isn't really there.
MIRACLES ARE ABLE TO CHANGE PHYSICAL FORMS!
"T-22.III.7. Only mistakes have different forms, and so they can deceive. 2 You can change form because it is not true. 3 It could not be reality because it can be changed."
"Your experience of miracles is proof that you are not bound by loss or suffering in ANY FORM because they can be so easily changed. This demonstrates that they were never real and that they could not stem from Reality. Reality is Changeless and Its Effects cannot be altered. Appearances are shown to be unreal because they change."
Miracles DEMONSTRATE that this world is unreal BY CHANGING IT, to prove that its laws do not hold it in place or determine its nature.
People say, well, this world doesn't exist so there is no point changing it. THERE IS A POINT. You MUST change it to prove that it CAN be changed in ways that this world ITSELF claims is impossible. You MUST BREAK THE EGOS LAWS in order to TEACH (miracles are teaching devices) that God's laws are the only authority.
You are not bound by loss or suffering in any form. THAT INCLUDES PHYSICAL, because all FORMS are energetic or physical. "All thoughts produce form at some level". And since Jesus says that MIRACLES PROVE you are not bound by suffering in ANY FORM, MIRACLES MUST BE CAPABLE OF CHANGING PHYSICAL MATTER.
Your body, the bodies of others, the moving of physical mountains, changing objects into other objects, healing the sick, raising the dead, whatever it is... MIRACLES CHANGE THE WORLD in order to demonstrate that, BECAUSE it can be changed, the world is not real. Miracles are THE ONLY DEVICE YOU HAVE at your disposal capable of doing this.
Miracles do not change the world in order to "make a better world". They change the world in order to PROVE and DEMONSTRATE and SHOW, that this world is FALSE. Thus they lead OUT of the world. When people claim "there's no point trying to dress up the dream or make a better world", this is only because they assume the miracles would "improve your life" and you'd just stay in the dream deluded. That's not their function. Miracles "heal the world" IN ORDER TO SHOW that the world is FALSE, not in order to support the ego, and so this argument is logically unfounded.
Since all miracles that CHANGE FORMS, MUST run contrary to the "natural laws" of the ego (horizontal laws), they must supercede them or act from ABOVE them, meaning that ALL MIRACLES ARE SUPERNATURAL (above ego nature) because they reverse the ego's physical laws.
Using miracles to "change or fix" the world IS CORRECT, given that miraculous demonstrations will always PROVE this world is FALSE, and so lead AWAY from the world, not towards it. To use the idea that you should not change the world with miracles as an explanation for why miracles are pointless, is a misunderstanding of what miracles DO, and their function in SHOWING that this world is not your home. You change the world to PROVE it can change, to PROVE it CANNOT BE REAL because nothing real can be changed.
Here is an interesting teaching.
In its natural state, the body is a communication medium. The mind is supposed to flow through it and extend BEYOND it outwards. The body itself is not supposed to be part of the message as such.
But when the mind starts to STOP at the body, or to be blocked by the body, or runs up against the body, it prevents it from extending PAST the body. The communication medium can no longer communicate because the flow is blocked. This is what blocks to love do. They make you fixate on form and be blinded by illusion, which get in the way of seeing Christ.
When there are blocks to love, mind cannot extend through and past and overlook the body, and so fixates ON the body. This causes you to perceive that the body is what is there, in the mind, rather than looking PAST it. The body becomes what you are looking AT, rather than that you are looking at Christ PAST the body.
Making perception stop AT the body and blocking the flow of love, basically cuts that flow off and stops it from moving outward. That means it has become stifled, and now there is a kind of "separation" which has been introduced between the body and the outside. Or a gap, where extension of love was supposed to fill it externally, but is now left empty due to the blocked expression.
This blocking of extension makes the body SICK, because it focuses the mind ON the body and AT the body, instead of PAST the body. The body then becomes attacked by the mind as though "colliding with it" instead of flowing naturally through it and past it and onward in communication. Kind of like a dirty camera lens, or a blocked toilet, or a bunch of boarded up windows made to block the light. Another example would be a "blocked artery", making the blood flow impeded, and resulting in death.
So the blocks to love have to be removed so that the "surface" of the communication medium doesn't turn into the "message" and so that love can flow and extend, which means love is radiated and increased, which means HEALING comes through the body and the body is MADE WHOLE because it is COMMUNICATING WHOLENESS. When the mind is sane and flowing fully and freely THROUGH the body, the body is HEALED as the love passes through it making it essentially immortal, incapable of sickness or death.
Here is how Jesus says it:
"The removal of blocks, then, is the ONLY way to guarantee help and healing. Help and healing are the normal expressions of a mind which is working through the body but not in it. If the mind believes the body is its GOAL, it WILL distort its perception OF the body, and by blocking its own extension BEYOND it, will INDUCE illness by FOSTERING SEPARATION. Perceiving the body AS A SEPARATE ENTITY cannot but foster illness, because it is not true. A medium of communication WILL lose its usefulness if it is used for anything else.
To use a medium of communication as a medium of ATTACK is an obvious confusion in purpose. To communicate is to join and to attack is to separate. How can you do both simultaneously WITH THE SAME THING, and NOT suffer? Perception of the body can be unified only by ONE PURPOSE. This releases the mind from the temptation to see it in many lights, and gives it over ENTIRELY to the One Light in which it can be really understood at all."
In this world we've all heard the statement "I love you". This is usually from one person to another one person. Also this is not usually true unconditional love, and is most often special love.
This is an exclusive love, which is directed by one separate person to one separate person, maintaining a sense of separation while also claiming to reach the heights of at least "some loving sentiment" toward them. But not too much mind you, lest it challenge the very notion of being separate.
As we open up to the atonement, which is all about sharing, we have to actually learn that we don't do anything alone. We are not alone. The Holy Spirit being with us guarantees we will never be alone, and our acknowledgement of his presence ensures an end to our solitude and loneliness.
Then it becomes not so much about what you are doing alone, but what you and the Holy Spirit are doing together. That he becomes involved in your doings and you become involved in his. "Do his works". And now as you go to express and give and love, you should find that he becomes involved in this as well. And now the two of you are doing it together.
If you take this to its logical extreme, you should have the experience that you and the Holy Spirit are completely one, joined, fully open to each other, willing God's will together, and that together you are expressing the same intention and love. That the two of you are, for example, sending love to a person. The two of you love that person.
This also extends outward to be fully inclusive, in which you should experience that, in truth, you are the whole sonship, including Jesus. And Jesus is also with you and you should be aware of being one with him. And you and the Holy Spirit and Jesus all together should be functioning as one unit, expressing one love.
And then it becomes more obvious that you aren't just a solitary lonesome loser expressing limited exclusive love to one special individual, it's more that you AND the whole Kingdom of God AND God also are expressing love together in a co-creative act of mutual willing and sharing.
The whole kingdom creates as one. The whole sonship gives everything to everyone. And one single person is not even the only target, because the love spills over and resonates and is shared among everyone when you give it to even one person - because they too ARE the whole.
In my healing efforts now to send love to a person, I now find myself including the Holy Spirit, Jesus and God. That all of us together express and extend love. This is in alignment with our co-creative ability and natural function.
For me it brings to light a renewed meaning to when Jesus says repeatedly, "you will see miracles through your hands through mine." Because if we can join with Jesus and be aware of his presence in us, sharing with him, and TOGETHER we can operate and function as one, then BOTH you and Jesus can perform the functioning of miracle working. And thus you will see HIS miracles AND your own working together as one, through your hands.
I fully imagine at this point, that at some future time I will become so much immersed in union with Jesus and Holy Spirit that it will be as though Christ is working through my body and the whole light of heaven is pouring through it along with me at the same time. We don't do this work alone. It's a team effort. The whole Kingdom of God is professing christ, which is the work of the atonement.
There are a set of steps by which your own sin comes to find itself inside of your brother.
1) Believe you are sinful (oops, are you sure?)
2) Grab ahold of that sin
3) Hand it over to your brother and shove it down his throat (project)
4) Disassociate yourself from it and wash your hands of it
5) Put on your 'happy face' and pretend you are innocent
6) Point a finger at the sin, which is now in your brother
7) Accuse your brother's sin of being evil, and attack it
You then see sin in your brother and seemingly 'not' in yourself, because your mask of pretend innocence HIDES the fact that the sin is still in you and never left. The face of innocence covers up your guilt and makes everyone believe you didn't do it.
The one left holding the baby is then your brother in whom you see your projected sin, and you attack him for it, to make sure it stays well away from you.
At the same time, you are then terried that your own sin, which you got rid of, might come back to haunt you. You start to suspect it's going to attack you, find you, hunt you down and enact itself upon you again.
As this is playing out, it seems to transpire that 'the sin' does indeed come back to attack you, manifested in forms of punishment and victimhood, seemingly done 'by' the person in whom you shoved your sin, and now you get to claim:
"I am an innocent victim, I did not ask for this, they are attacking me without my will, the sin is in them, look look I can see the sin in them, it's all their fault".
Well, pretty convenient, to keep up this charade, given that it conceals the sin in you, within your own mind, and puts on a show that you are not sinful at all. You're trying to convince yourself and everyone around you that you do not believe you are the sinner, all the while keeping your sin hidden in the shadows of your mind underneath your blanket of fake innocence.
Now, to reverse this is going to mean, you have to take off the fake mask of innocence, you are going to have to stop being a victim, AND - horror of all horrors - you are going to have to TAKE BACK the sin that you shoved into your brother. It's yours, anyway. You have to separate your brother from your sin, i.e. from the guilt. You have to find a way to see them as innocent and as not `owning` the sin. It's not theirs. They are not sinful.
But you don't really want to do this because if you take back your sin, lo and behold, your mask of innocence (which was a total farce) has to be taken off of yourself, and you have to come face to face again with the sin being IN YOU. You do not like the sin being in you, that's why you tried to get rid of it in the first place.
So why would anyone 'seemingly' in their right mind want to take off their lovely sheen of innocence and own up to being a sinner? It's not exactly an attractive offer.
However, until you do this you have no chance to really heal it. And there is a healing option. If you take it quickly to Holy Spirit and let Him decide whether it's true or not, he will guarantee to find you ALWAYS innocent. It's pretty easy, but you have to be open minded about ACCEPTING that it's true that you're innocent.
There is a way out of hell.
If all moments of time were expressed all at once before time existed, then it seems to make sense that "the future" has already been determined because it has already been expressed.
If the "script" of all moments in time was "written" ie put into place, all at once, then within linear time the future is essentially pre-written.
Also if you time travel, whenever you go into a moment in the past, you will find that you experience it as though it is the present - as if "now" is 1952. Similarly in the future, no matter what the date, it will seem that "now" it is that time.
This seems to suggest a sense of "fate" or destiny, whereby whatever will happen or is happening or has happened was all written at once, not on a moment-by-moment basis.
The Holy Spirit nevertheless is able to collapse dimensions or segments or time, based on your learning of lessons.
There are references to "all the dimensions of time" in the Course, suggesting that there are perhaps multiple timelines - all pre-written, and you might shift between them.
It is also said that when we separated and made the world, Holy Spirit came with us and had a hand in organizing it. "There are two makers of the world". So now all the stuff we made, that we pre-wrote, has been restructured in some way to lead to heaven.
This all seems to suggest that we're just strapped into some kind of rollercoaster ride with no choices, as though we are just the movie itself playing. If this were the case, there is absolutely no "choice" or freedom in this scenario.
Yet think of Jesus performing miracles, undoing and reversing sickness, overcoming death, becoming free of the script entirely, able to manipulate objects and defy all of the laws that were made by the ego. It would seem that he attained freedom and the flexibility to not be bound by the script. We would say now that He is completely free of it, able to do anything.
So, the script is only in play if you are in the ego and remaining unconscious? Based in the perception that stuff (script) happens to you against your will? How can there be any victimhood script when you are choosing not to be a victim, not to play along?
It's not as though you are forced to be a victim to the same degree and intensity right up till the moment of awakening. And let's remember that events are designed by the one who has your best interests, Holy Spirit.
It is also said there are two scripts. Since Holy Spirit had a hand in reorganizing and repurposing what we made, not just as a 'way of looking at it' but to actually rearrange time and the sequence of events, there was the ego's attempted purpose for what it made, and then there is Holy Spirit's use of it. A use which we need to learn to trust.
If all events here are lessons and we're not supposed to be hanging out in a make-believe world anyway, it seems to suggest we are to simply follow Holy Spirit's plan and trust Him and eventually this will lead to the gates of Heaven.
If we are simply "wearing" a lifetime, like a piece of clothing, for purposes of waking up, to use it as a choice to experience a certain set of events as a certain person, then it doesn't seem quite so restrictive.
Has everything been made already, or can you change anything at all? It would seem you can change things. Miracles, right? Miracles reverse what we made. Miracles undo the script.
"What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for ***miracles violate every law of reality***, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them."
"What the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world."
"There is nothing my holiness cannot do."
A miracle, is not of this world, and is absolutely unlimited in what it can do, with no order of difficulty whatsoever.
MIRACLES VIOLATE every law of reality that this world thinks is true. Every law of space, and time. All the laws of physics, biology and chemistry. Every suggestion of what is and is not possible. All degrees of magnitude and difficulty and severity and importance and value and possibility. There is NOTHING that you cannot do, by BREAKING the laws of space and time and violating the laws of physics. THIS is what miracles are. Not little shifts in perception, changes in feelings, or adjustments to your belief system.<
Miracles, according to ACIM, include, literally moving mountains, walking on water, multiplying food, converting objects into other objects, levitation, bilocation and teleportation, calming storms, parting oceans, manifesting stuff out of nowhere, healing the sick, raising the dead, controlling time and space, communication that transcends distance, fixing broken objects instantly, dematerializing and materializing, telekinesis, and all manner of other things that some would consider IMPOSSIBLE in this world's reality. Because they BREAK THE LAWS of space and time. Shifting your perception does not break the laws of reality whatsoever.<
Those who believe and spread the lie that miracles are little shifts in perception, are WATERING DOWN A course in Miralces and have far too weak of a vision of what a miracle is and what it is capable of. This is in part due to the fear of the power of the mind. Jesus is clear that what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is in CLEAR VIOLATION of everything this world says is possible. EVERYTHING. And that means there is literally NOTHING that your holiness cannot do. Miracles ignore all the laws of this world.
They don't care about mass or size or weight or distance or time or hardness or materials or nuclear forces or anything else. They are the wielding of the POWER OF THE MIND to cause effects, above and beyond the limitations of the FAKE LAWS that run this world's simulation. And A Course in Miracles is designed to put you BACK in touch with the miracle minded state in which you are CAPABLE of doing all this and more. Jesus even says that your mind has the power to create worlds. You MADE this planet. do you think your mind is so minuscule and weak it cannot even move a single object directly? Jesus asks you to reinstate the power of the mind in the body.
This is a course in regaining ALL POWER and becoming DOMINANT over the world. "It is you who have the power to dominate everything you see merely by recognizing what you are." "Teachers of God will take over the world because of their strength". And it culminates in TOTAL POWER OVER DEATH and thus the entire dream of death. The surmounting of death, in the resurrection state, gives you power to DO ANYTHING. LITERALLY ANYTHING without limit. That is what miracles can offer. And miracles are everyone's right. That is FAR above and beyond the safe little fairytales about how a miracle is just you changing your mind a little bit. Miracles have the POWER OF GOD in them.
In ACIM's teaching, there was originally just one "level" or realm in which to exist - The Kingdom of God, Heaven. This is true because the Kingdom is one logical state or nature.
In the separation, we invented a second level or logical state, by trying to be opposite to the Kingdom. This wasn't a partial opposition it was a total opposition, like light and darkness. This second state is a state of dreaming and perception, opposing knowledge. It's technically inside of Heaven, but it a belief in being exiled or outside of it. So this forms a kind of second "level."
We often visualize the two main levels as "above and below", where Heaven is the higher level and Earth is the lower. The two levels contrast and oppose each other in EVERY way imaginable. Light vs Dark, Reality vs Illusions, Life vs Death, Love vs Fear, Immortality vs Mortality, etc. Some refer to the two main levels as level 1 (heaven) and level 2 (earth).
Within level 2 (earth) - "Earth, heaven's opposite in every way", which is the level of "all perception", there is a wide spectrum of states of mind ranging from false perception to true perception. But it's often helpful to contrast them more extremely which suggests two additional levels within the level of perception - the lower dream and the higher dream.
In the lower dream there is false perception, physical objects, form, bodies, the world/earth, attack, sin, death, sickness etc. In the higher dream there is true perception, no physical objects, no bodies, the real world, no sin or sickness, no death etc. They are effectively opposite states WITHIN level 2.
It's important to realize that this basic logical structure is infused throughout the course, because Jesus is at various times talking within the context of different levels. For example he might talk about the higher dream of true perception, and it can sound glowing and lovely, but if you forget that it is within the CONTEXT of level 2, you might be tempted to forget that ALL of the rules that apply to level 2 still apply.
For example the course tells us a glowing report about the real world, or the forgiven world, or true perception/salvation, but at the same time it also reminds us in other passages that "the real world still is but a dream" and "those who perceive (at all) still need healing." So within level 2, the dream of perception, even when we're talking about true perception or forgiveness or the healed body, we have to keep in mind that both the rules of true perception (higher dream within level 2) AND the rules of level 2 itself are simultaneously applying.
Confusing these levels, not being clear about which statements are referring to which levels, not understanding which contexts certain statements are given in and not keeping in mind that the larger context of levels 1 and 2 always apply when discussing anything to do with the realm of perception, can lead to a whole lot of confusion about what stuff means or implies. This is part of what's called "level confusion", not knowing which level is above or below or inside of another.
The general story, in summary, is that you began in level 1, you dreamed of level 2, and while dreaming of level 2 you dreamed of a level 2 inside of level 2 - a lower dream of hell and form, and then the holy spirit provided a higher dream - a level 1 inside level 2, which reflects the real level 1 of heaven, to lead you out of the dream into reality.