I've heard some people saying that we do not perform miracles. I've also heard some people saying that Jesus always acknowledged God as the one who does miracles. I've also heard people saying that we do not have any power to do anything, we're supposed to "do nothing", and our only job is not to interfere. I'd like to clarify this.

Consider these quotes:

"To recognize that all power is of God is to gain all power."

"The power of God and not of you engenders miracles."

"What the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world."

"You do not do them."

"The power to work miracles belongs to you."

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

"There is nothing your holiness cannot do."

"You share the Holy Spirit's function on Earth." "Your function on earth is Healing."

"Do His works."

"I have nothing that does not come from God."

"You are forever host to God."

"You must be ready, willing and able."

"All power in heaven and earth has been given you."

"It was only my DECISION that gave me all power in Heaven and earth."

"All power in Heaven and earth is therefore given him and he will share it with you when you have completed yours."

"All power is given unto you in Earth and Heaven. There is nothing you cannot do."

There is no contraction in these statements even though some of them seem to talk about God/HS doing stuff, some talk about you doing stuff, and some about you both doing stuff.

If you think in terms of EITHER OR... like, either God has the power OR I do. Or.... either God does miracles OR I do.. .. this is how the ego thinks. It's a separation-based form of reasoning, because the ego does not like to acknowledge any kind of sharing or oneness or joining.

It's not a question of whether God OR you perform miracles. Or whether God OR you have power. Nor is it really a question of whether God OR you do them. The "setup", or the arrangements of parts and functions in the machinery of miracle working, is more sophisticated than this.

We can't think of this RELATIONSHIP between you and God, in terms of either-or. Either him or me. That's ego thinking. We have to look at how we actually relate to him.

In heaven, God GAVE all of Himself to you in your creation. He EXTENDED Himself AS you, giving you His power, His will, His Mind, His strength, His love, His freedom etc. You HAVE all of this stuff, because He gave it to you. And He gave it to you FULLY.

"God is my strength."

"God is the mind with which I think" etc

"The soul has not only been created perfect, it has been FULLY created."

"All loving creation is freely given."

So now this sets up a scenario where you have God IN you. You are HOST to God. You have an "inner altar" where God is shining within you, with HIS light. You shine brightly WITH light, because the light is IN you AS you, but the you didn't PUT the light there, the light IS GOD ie "of God". Yet it IS your light.

It is true to say, that all love is God's love and there is no other love. It is also true to say that God IS the light in which you see and there is no other light. And it is true to say that vision is GIVEN you just as love is given you. God is the SOURCE and PROVIDER of these things. What you have is an INHERITANCE. You INHERIT power from God.

Since God does FULLY GIVE these gifts, you do FULLY HAVE them. In fact, in your creation you were created to BE a POWERFUL CO-CREATOR. This does not mean that you are just some kind of puppet for God to manipulate. Nor does it mean that God coerces you into doing His will. Nor does it mean that you just sort of "step aside" or "get out of the way" and DON'T PARTICIPATE, so that God goes about HIS business without your grubby little hands getting into the mix. God Wills that YOU will to create WITH Him. This is why you have "children of my will."

The way it's set up, you actually CONTRIBUTE. You have the power TO CREATE. You actually CO-CREATE with God. BOTH of you create together. And you create in ACCORD with His will. But this isn't coercion, or being a puppet, or having no say in what is created. God has given you free will and the power to choose. So now you AND GOD, together, are co-creating the Kingdom. This is why YOU have YOUR OWN CREATIONS, because YOU have the power to create them.

Now, because His will is YOUR will, and his power is your power, by acknowledging that all power is OF (from) Him, allows you to ACCEPT that He has GIVEN you His power, and therefore YOUR sense of "my power" is in fact HIS power. This is what it means that "God is the mind with which I think" and "God is my strength". What seems to be YOURS, is ALSO his. The power that you inherently have is in fact God Himself, in you.

The distinction that has to be made is that God is not the ONLY ONE who has power. God is not the ONLY ONE who creates. And God is not the ONLY ONE who does anything.

The ego likes to claim that it has a power which is OF itself. A power which IT HAS, which God DID NOT give to it. It's an invented power, an alien will. This is the authority problem. It's the attempt to believe that you have and can do things which God did not allow or give. That you "gave yourself" your own creation and your own power. And now you depend on "yourself alone".

But then let's consider what is the OPPOSITE to this. And this is where we have to be VERY careful. It is NOT appropriate to say that, since the ego is the idea of "a power of my own"... that the opposite of this is "I have no power". That is NOT the truth. It is only the "of my own" that changes.

Before joining with God, you will believe that any power you have is YOUR OWN power, in isolation, separate from God. But as you join with God, you have to be careful not to believe that you are entering into a state of having NO POWER. God did not create powerless beings. Christ is not a powerless being.

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

It's the "by myself" part that goes away. Which means, that when you are not doing everything ALONE, you are now doing everything WITH God. And this is a relationship of SHARING! It's not the same thing as a relationship where God is the ONLY ONE who has power. That's the ego's idea of its opposite, a tyrannical God who has power OVER it who makes IT have no power and takes everything away from it. That's the idea of NOT sharing anything. And that's not how God operates.

YOU are to reclaim and regain YOUR power. BUT, this can only be done by recognizing that the power which is YOURS, is not OF you. "Of" means "from". You do not originate your power in yourself, it comes from God. And your power IS God Himself being powerful. But because you are ONE with Him and joined and share with Him, literally, IT IS YOURS. God has created you to BE a powerful CO-CREATOR with Him. You will TOGETHER.

Jesus for example performed miracles and he attributed the power to accomplish the miracles to God. However, this can be misunderstood. If it is taken to mean "ONLY GOD did anything", this ignores the FUNCTION that Jesus had as a miracle WORKER. It is completely appropriate to attribute all power - the source of the power - TO God, but it is NOT appropriate to DISOWN that power, because it IS yours. And Jesus IS POWERFULLY MIRACULOUS.

You see, there is a function that you fill. "The only function of spirit is to extend God's being." "Miracles are a universal blessing from God, through me, to all my brothers." "Love goes out because of what it is, but you are needed that it can begin." YOU.... have to fulfill a FUNCTION.... in order for miracles to GO OUT. When you block this function, which is extension and expression of YOUR mind's power, miracles do not happen. "Miracles should be happening all the time, but when they do not something has gone wrong."

Your function, which is healing while on earth, and creating while in heaven, are mirrors. Being a miracle worker is in line with being a co-creator. You are an extender of God. But YOU yourself HAVE to fulfill a comprehensive list of requirements in order to do this. You can't just sit there "doing nothing".

Your mind has to be miracle minded. Your heart has to be open. You have to be willing to love. You have to express love. You need to be free from fear. You have to have purified yourself. You have to be placing faith and trust in God and the Holy Spirit. You have to be open to the Holy Spirit working through you because He is the mechanism of miracles. You have to be willing to go and be where the people are that Jesus sends to you, lay your hands on them, pray for them etc. In fact, Jesus says this about doing nothing...

"This quiet center, IN WHICH YOU DO NOTHING, will remain with you, giving you rest in the midst of every busy doing on which you are sent."

"I need do nothing" is a state of inner calm WHILE you are operating in the world. It is NOT a state of inactivity.

So you have to actually step up and BE the powerful, co-creative, extending, loving, miraculous, unified, whole being that God created you to be, in order for you to perform miracles. There is a ROLE that you play. A function that you have. You are NEEDED to fulfill this function, as the light of the world, in order FOR miracles to be ABLE to express and extend. You actually HOLD BACK God's miracles when you resist doing this. If you weren't holding back, they'd be happening ALL THE TIME.

Jesus is clear that YOU are a powerful entity. The only distinction is that this power that you have, did not COME FROM you. God IS this power. He literally is embedded into your being like a battery. He POWERS you. And you in turn USE His power, which is YOURS, to perform miracles. And by being ONE WITH His Power, when you use his power, it IS HIM doing this through you, but it is ALSO you doing it WITH him.

If you were to perform such miracles and then CLAIM, that "I did this all by myself WITHOUT God", this would be arrogant. But to claim "I did this WITH God" or "God did this THROUGH me" AND "I fulfilled MY function as well", that's appropriate. Because you ARE powerful and loving and creative and a force to be reckoned with. There is nothing egoic about acknowledging that you are a powerful creative being, provided you don't claim to be that way WITHOUT God.

This is why Jesus is getting you to re-acknowledge YOUR power, which is God's.

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

"Power is of God, GIVEN by Him, and re-awakened by the Holy Spirit, Who knows that, as you give you GAIN."

"Those who choose freedom will experience only its results. Their power is of God. And they will give it only to what God has given, to share with them."

"See, then, the power of sinlessness within your brother, and share with him the power of the release from sin you offered him."

"Here again is the paradox often referred to in the course. To say, "Of myself I can do nothing" is to gain all power. And yet it is but a seeming paradox. ***As God created you, you have all power.*** The image you made of yourself has none."

The image you made of yourself is the ego, not your soul/self. It is ONLY the ego that has NO power. This is why it can only seem to have power when YOU give it power, because YOU have power TO give, because it was given to you. By acknowledging that "of yourself you can do nothing" does NOT mean that YOU can do nothing. Only that you cannot do anything WITHOUT the source of power. Add in fact YOUR power IS God IN you, so rejecting God rejects your power and makes you weak.

It means you can only do nothing IF you are alone. It means you can do nothing BY YOURSELF. That isn't the same thing as saying that when you INCLUDE God, you STOP being able to doing anything at all. It's the "by myself" part that is the ego. All by yourself you have no power and are weak and can do nothing. Acknowledging God as the source of your power, YOU CAN DO ANYTHING.

"There is nothing your holiness cannot do."

We are JOINED with God. We SHARE with God. God IS in us. Our power IS his power. His strength is in us AS OUR strength. We are not "separated off" from God, like some kind of weak container that God sometimes visits and passes through. We are literally HIS will. We are HIS power. We are one with Him. And He has established us as having UNLIMITED POWER, BECAUSE He shares His power with us.

You have to stay plugged into God, basically. So long as you are hosting and staying plugged into God, YOU get the electrical charge of his power supply. If you UNPLUG yourself, you become isolated, and become weak, because you have no power OTHER than the power of God. Alone you have no power, but ego will claim there is "self-power" that it made. WITH GOD you ARE all powerful. We must acknowledge that God DOES the miracles, but He only does them WITH you, and CAN only do them when YOU cooperate with Him, because YOU BOTH do them, just as you BOTH create.

This is why YOU are a miracle worker and a miracle doer. This is why YOU have to become miracle minded. This is why YOU have to be willing to extend love. It's not a matter of you stepping out of the way onto the sidelines efforting not to interfere, passively, while a SEPARATE power does stuff. Your function is NOT passive or inert. It's that YOU AND GOD need to get IN LINE with each other, BOTH of you need to WILL together, and BOTH of you fulfill your functions in the machinery.

This is also why Jesus says things like "DO his works" and "What the holy spirit enables YOU TO DO is clearly not of this world." The power is joined. There IS a "doing" component on YOUR PART that is required here. It's just that what you become ABLE to do is BEYOND what you can do ALONE, YOU do not understand miracles because they come FROM God and yet YOU CAN DO THEM. And you are being ASKED TO do them. Add you can only do them by SHARING.

"The power to work miracles belongs to you."

"The distinction has also been made here between "miracle-mindedness" as a STATE, and "miracle-doing" as its expression."

If miracles are expressions of love, then DOING a miracle is to EXPRESS love. Expression is a DOING. It's an ACTIVE role. Expression is not a state. This is why in the great crusade, "members of my party are ACTIVE workers." Not passive sideline-sitters. You are a powerful co-creator and a powerful miracle-worker. But you GET your power from God, and HE IS the power that you utilize. Thus HE AND YOU work together to perform miracles.

"Atonement is the natural profession of the children of God."

"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. Conviction really comes through accomplishment. Remember that ability is the potential, Achievement is its expression, and Atonement is the Purpose."

Let's take a good hard look at something that very few people want to ever admit. Something dark and awful, but true.

Planet Earth, and the rest of this universe, were made in a thought of opposition to Heaven. This was an attempt to make hell real, by dreaming up a world that runs completely opposite to the beautiful divine nature of the Kingdom.

To do this, an opposite to life had to be invented - death, and the entire system of thought had to be based on not only the belief in this but the attempt to make it as real as possible. To bring it about. This alternative world was an attempted weapon to destroy the Kingdom and destroy God, if that were possible.

"The world was made as an attack on God."

Because of this, everything in this world runs contrary to life and is governed solely by the laws of death and destruction. The world is an attempt not to exist and to destroy the Son of God.

"The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

The world wasn't made in order to have a place to live forever. Heaven is where you live forever. The world was made to kill you. Everything in it, even those things which seem to begin or are born, are automatically infused with death right from the outset.

Death, separation, limitation, spacetime, conflict, attack, are all built into every single part of the system. Even the most beautiful flower, the cutest puppy, the loveliest sunset, are made of the illusion of death. They take on forms whose appearance is designed to tempt you to believe they are desirable, valuable, wanted. But they are nothing but illusions, designed to distract and deceive you and keep you in hell.

The fact is, that everything in this universe dies sooner or later. It does not matter what it is, or how long it takes. Planets die. Galaxies die. People die. Animals die. All of it. Sooner or later, death is going to fully express itself, as the entropy and decay gradually erode whatever illusion of life there is. And as Jesus says, this world is "at best an illusion of life, at worst death", since it cannot be alive at all.

"There is no life outside of heaven."

Jesus asks that we take a good hard look at this, because we seem to be quite deceived and deluded in believing that the world can offer us something valuable. We are constantly tempted by its attractions and exciting adventures. It offers us toys and objects and pointless things to keep us entranced. But most of it, is attempts to convince us that avoiding death here is possible, if we will just put our faith in the ego a little while longer, until death arrives.

And so one of the biggest problems we have, is that we do not recognize this world is ENTIRELY made of death, or that ALL its roads lead to death, or that there is NO ESCAPE from this hell if you play by its rules. The idea of "living here" is ridiculous. It can never be experienced as a true home. And everything it does is a murderous attack on your happiness and wellbeing. The world eats you alive. And it is designed to do nothing but destroy you. At least, eventually, when it's done pretending to be your friend.

The problem we have is that in our deception and rose-tinted blind optimism, we keep believing that this world can be or do something that it can never be or do. We keep trying to turn it into heaven. We keep trying to wrap it up and dress it up to be what it's not. In a state of denial. One more flavor, one more combination, one more appearance, one more new distraction, one more toy, one more desirable temptation to lure you in. And by believing that you can achieve some kind of escape from death through this means, the world has deceived you for a while, and you think you like it here. Until it fails. Which it will.

Make no mistake. This world was designed to result in, lead to, culminate in, and guarantee, one thing only. The death of God and his son. It has no other ambition. It has no other direction. It will always enforce this ambition sooner or later. You might spend most of your life pretending that this is not the case, avoiding the inevitable, but regardless of your outlook the world is run by laws of death.

When you don't recognize the world's "nature", its complete failure to accomplish anything, its automatic built-in destruction, and its inability to be heaven, you enter into wishful thinking, delusions, denial, and start down a fairy-tail road of spiritualized egos and thinking that this time you'll win. If you play in the ego's sandpit you will die, by its rules, when it wants you to die.

Expecting the world to be something it's not, can only make you frustrated, and disappointed. You might hope that it can be something, that you can succeed, that you can have your cake, that you can win, that you can escape somehow, but sooner or later it comes crashing down, it turns out to be an empty promise, something you don't really want, and then it breaks, and it fails, and it dies again. Wanting it to be otherwise will only frustrate you. Not recognizing that this is the only way it can be, and letting go of the wish to have it be different, simply traps you in it more.

The world WILL disappoint you, if you try to build your house on its unstable rock. It WILL disappoint you if you forget for a moment that perfection is impossible here. It WILL disappoint you when you start to become attached to hopes and dreams which are later dashed against the rocks. And it WILL disappoint you when you thought that next toy you buy was going to be your salvation, only to discover it was the wrong one, or it broke, or it didn't quite do what you thought it would do.

Nothing really works in hell, it's all broken. How many times will you have to go through the same lesson of expecting it to not be hell, only for it to result in hell, before you you learn? And no this is not an attempt to make hell REAL, it is a reminder that hell IS AN ILLUSION, and to not fall for its tricks. Because hell's biggest weapon is to make itself seem like heaven, something you want, and somewhere you want to live forever.

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

We need to at least acknowledge this. We need to recognize it, see it, notice it. We need to realize this is its nature. The world is not a perfect living place. It's a place of destruction and conflict and incompletion and damage and problems and everything going wrong. It can't be any other way. All illusions have this nature built into them, because they lack the harmony, perfection and love of the Kingdom.

THE WORLD JUST SUCKS It simply does. It can't not suck. But by recognizing it inherently sucks, you can at least let go of the expectation of it not sucking. Which in fact is a truer perception, a more accurate way of looking at it. The world was made to be hell. If you can recognize that, you can be free of it. NOT recognizing illusions deceives you. And "Illusions recognized must disappear."

You are only trapped in it if you resist it, make it real, believe it's true, consider it heaven, or mistake it for God's creation. And you only keep holding onto it if you think you want it or it offers you something of value. But it cannot. Ever.

"This world holds nothing that I want."

"Teachers of God are willing to give up all the pleasures of the world."

"It takes great learning to both recognize and accept that the world has nothing to give."

"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. Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to gain that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. ***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."

Jesus isn't being negative here. He isn't being judgement or closed-minded. He's not in ego. He's being very truthful and honest and sane. He's simply pointing out what the world's nature is, without flinching or looking away or being in denial about it. The world was made from the idea of death and everything in it is designed to fail and die and cease existing. That's just how it is. It can't be any other way.

Even in the happy dream, or the real world, the laws of the physical world still remain in effect. Trees still die in storms. Animals get eaten. Planets die in supernova explosions. Stars get swallowed in black holes. Your car rusts, your shoes wear out, your food rots, and people die. It's supposed to happen this way. It's not fate, but it is an illusion of fate, based on the idea of sin being real. The wages of sin is death, and everything in this world is designed to make death and sin real.

"The world of bodies is the world of sin. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place?"

"From the world of bodies, MADE by insanity, insane messages seem to be returned to the mind which made it."

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death. Children are born into it through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its power declines if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel."

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end? We have asked this question before, but now we need to consider it more carefully. It is the one fixed, unchangeable belief of the world that all things in it are born only to die. This is regarded as "the way of nature," not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the "natural" law of life. The cyclical, the changing and unsure; the undependable and the unsteady, waxing and waning in a certain way upon a certain path, - all this is taken as the Will of God. And no one asks if a benign Creator could will this."

When you "get excited" about something, there's a very high likelihood that you will enter into disappointment. Maybe it's a new car. Maybe you're going on a wonder vacation. Maybe it's a new pet or some new food you're trying. And maybe it will seem to you that these things are great and enjoyable and nothing to complain about. But then, maybe ignorance is bliss and you didn't notice the experience of HEAVEN that you did not have, while these falling-short substitutes came to drag you into hell.

I got a new car. Winter came. The snow and salt fucked up the interior. Oh well. I got a new fish tank. A fish died, plants died, it didn't go quite to plan. Oh well. I ordered items online, they came, they were the wrong items. Oh well. This is the kind of stuff that happens here. But if you expect it NOT to happen, you are expecting some kind of spiritualized salvation and external perfection, which is setting you up for total disappointment. The more you worship idols and seek for external saviors, the more you will be let down. And even your most valued teachers have their skeleton-full closets hidden away.

"God's teachers choose to look on dreams a while. It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences. The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are? Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. ***They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die.*** Yet they are not deceived by what they see."

Even for a teacher of God, a highly healed and awakened individual, the world continues to SUCK AND DIE!

THE WORLD SIMPLY SUCKS ASS! It was designed that way. It will never not suck. Even if you are happy. Even if you are truly forgiving and loving. It will still keep doing what it does until it finally vanishes into nothingness. Waking up doesn't stop the world from killing 130,000 people a day. Waking up doesn't repair everyone's broken limbs. Waking up doesn't make waterfalls flow uphill or prevent planets from colliding. Stuff still keeps ticking over, per the laws of death, and there is no hope here.

This is essentially the crux of the matter. The belief that there is hope, faith, trust, in the ego and its death world. That it has a redeeming quality, some possibility of being heaven or home, and a chance of escape from God. It's this wishful thinking that just maybe, you can get away with murder, just maybe you can be God, and just maybe you can overthrow the Kingdom and prove the Son of God is dead. Or that this world can be perfect. But you can't. And you never will. So the whole endeavor is pointless.

There is no hope in the world. Hope is of God. There is only hop because the wrold is NOT real and its illusions of hell are fictional WHEN RECOGNIZED. If you want hope, you have to look beyond the world, and forget the world and all its twisted ways. We can but recognize the world's limitations and laugh at them. The world will end in laughter because it is a place of sorrow. In laughter we will shine it away because of its fundamentally unhappy nature. The world will never be your home. You do not belong in hell.

Is it not far saner to recognize and accept that no matter what you do in this world, its laws will steer it towards failure? Because if you expect the opposite, you will be disappointed, again and again and again. This does not mean there is no hope at all. Only that trying to find it where it is not, cannot work. God and His Kingdom are your only home and your only happiness.

"The thing to do with a desert is to LEAVE."

"A Son of God is happy only when he knows he is WITH God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond ANYTHING that he can make."

"To be without a body is to be in your natural environment."

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. 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."

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

T-23.II.20. The laws of chaos govern all illusions. 2 Their forms conflict, making it seem quite possible to value some above the others. 3 Yet each one rests as surely on the belief the laws of chaos are the laws of order as do the others. 4 Each one upholds these laws completely, offering a certain witness that these laws are true. 5 The seeming gentler forms of the attack are no less certain in their witnessing, or their results. 6 Certain it is illusions will bring fear because of the beliefs that they imply, not for their form. 7 And lack of faith in love, in any form, attests to chaos as reality.

T-23.II.21. From the belief in sin, the faith in chaos must follow. 2 It is because it follows that it seems to be a logical conclusion; a valid step in ordered thought. 3 The steps to chaos do follow neatly from their starting point. 4 Each is a different form in the progression of truth's reversal, leading still deeper into terror and away from truth. 5 Think not one step is smaller than another, nor that return from one is easier. 6 The whole descent from Heaven lies in each one. 7 And where your thinking starts, there must it end.

T-23.II.22. Brother, take not one step in the descent to hell. 2 For having taken one, you will not recognize the rest for what they are. 3 And they will follow. 4 Attack in any form has placed your foot upon the twisted stairway that leads from Heaven. 5 Yet any instant it is possible to have all this undone. 6 How can you know whether you chose the stairs to Heaven or the way to hell? 7 Quite easily. 8 How do you feel? 9 Is peace in your awareness? 10 Are you certain which way you go? 11 And are you sure the goal of Heaven can be reached? 12 If not, you walk alone. 13 Ask, then, your Friend to join with you, and give you certainty of where you go."

----TL;DR: Changing your perception OF a sick body, isn't enough to change what you are projecting. You are projecting your body and the symptoms.----

"Projection makes perception. The world that you see is what you have put there to see; nothing more and nothing less and so it is important to you. The world that you perceive is the witness to your state of mind, the outward picture of your inward condition. As you think so do you perceive."

Recognize that projection COMES FIRST, then perception happens SECOND.

"The world you see" (perceive) "is what you have put there to see" (what you projected first).

"The world you perceive" (second) "is witness to your state of mind" - your perception "witnesses", perceives, and reflects back to you, your state of mind, because your state of mind PROJECTED what it is that you are now PERCEIVING.

These are two different processes. The act of having a certain state of mind, which you then project FROM, puts stuff "out there", which you THEN perceive as a secondary process.

Even the body itself is a projection. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards". The body then PERCEIVES, AFTER having been projected.

Jesus talks about how this is a circular logic for us, a trap, whereby we believe what we want to see, we project it because we believe in it, we "make it appear" (manifest it), then we "perceive" ie let the body tell us what it is we projected.

Perception then, is distinct from projection. It is a secondary act. Without projecting, there would be nothing TO perceive.

So here's what you need to realize about perceptions of sickness.

The mind, in whatever state it is in, has beliefs in it, thoughts, which then project. These projections MANIFEST the body and many other forms and objects. The mind for example projects the body ITSELF.

If the mind has a belief in separation, it will project a body which shows up with signs and symptoms of sickness, because it is a PICTURE of your inward condition, and your inward condition is one of "I am under attack". So the body SHOWS it. it is a WITNESS ie corresponds to your state of mind. This is why "a broken body is proof the mind has not been healed." The body literally only shows up as the mind's manifestational projection. It's an image being projected by the mind.

Jesus speaks to this in his "special notes to helen"....

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it.. It merely became what it always was. ... The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond... To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness.

I did assume a human form with human attributes afterwards, to speak to those who were to prove the body's worthlessness to the world. This has been much misunderstood.

I came to tell them that death is an illusion, and THE MIND THAT MADE THE BODY CAN MAKE ANOTHER SINCE FORM ITSELF IS AN ILLUSION. They did not understand."

So here we can see, the MIND, MAKES the body. Your mind is projecting your body, and everything about it, right now. However it is showing up, witnesses to your mental content and your belief system. If it is showing up as sick, it is therefore directly correlated, it is PROOF, that your mind is not healed.

This also means, that when the mind IS healed, or close to, and it is still projecting a body, it MUST project a body which appears without signs or symptoms of sickness. This is because the body COMES FROM the mind, mind is its source, and a healthy mind WILL ONLY project a healthy-appearing body image.

Now. There is a problem here in how many people are interpreting the correction of perception.

Remember perception happens to look upon WHAT YOU PROJECTED, after you projected it. The body's eyes receive little photons of light to tell it, oh look, there's a body there. That's part of perception. The illusion that the very thing YOU PROJECTED, is now telling you what IT IS, completely forgetting that you put it there in the first place.

So now perception, is ONCE REMOVED from the direct expression or projection of the mind. Perception therefore is a secondary experience.

So now, let's say that you have projected a body with a broken leg. The broken leg was not caused by anything in the world. It was ONLY projected from the mind. The mind did not project a broken leg ONTO the body. The mind directly projected ONLY an image of a body with a broken leg. The body does not EXIST as a separate object, or a "thing", or something as an end in itself. If you do not project it, nothing shows up! If you do not project it, there is no body!

So now, that you projected an image of a body with a broken leg, you now will perceive. Perception can be in a state of correctness/clarity or in a state of false perception/distortion. Since your MIND has a belief in sickness in it, and has made a sick-appearing body image materialize, it also now believes sickness is real. Perception is now going to take place, and that same mind which PROJECTED the "sick body", is also going to see that same belief in sickness IN the body that was projected.

This means perception is now going to show you a hallucination of "sickness is real", "something is wrong", "sin and guilt" etc, as though it is *IN* the body. It is not in the body, it's in the mind. Thus the idea of sickness, which made the body to begin with, is now SECONDARILY projected ON TOP OF the body that you projected.

Then you will have various ego reactions to what you are misperceiving, and will start to seek a resolution. But your planned strategy here isn't typically anything to do with fixing your PROJECTION, it's always to do with fixing your PERCEPTION. And that means, something very obvious is about to happen.

If all you do, is fix your perception OF what you projected, you might be able to seem to "be at peace" with what is showing up. You might seem to become less upset or resistant or less fighting with, your broken leg. You'll tell yourself, if your perception OF the body is healed, you will be TOTALLY DONE. But this leaves you with a problem, and a state of denial.

Fact is, even if your so-called "perception" is perceiving your broken leg as "lovely and wonderful", oh how lovely that death looks.... your leg is STILL BROKEN. And that's a problem. Because now you are demonstrating that you can be hurt, you are attacking the entire world by claiming that something OTHER THAN YOU put the break there, you are holding this broken leg up for everyone to see to make them guilty and accuse them of sin, and you are attempting to demonstrate that God's Son can be killed.

It also means that since ALL sickness manifests as a DEFENSE against the truth, in the mind, which then projects a "defending body", which shows up as attacked, you CANNOT accept full and total peace while still maintaining that defense. It is impossible. The defense has to go, which means the belief in separation has to go, which MUST produce a projected body which shows up as HEALED.

Nothing happens to the body that was sick that you projected previously. It does not exist. You just RE-PROJECT A NEW ONE, every moment. Sickness in the body can only show up if the mind is defending against truth, and sickness can only show up in the body if the mind has GUILT. "Sickness is but another form of guilt". Therefore, if the mind does not have guilt and defenses, the body WILL ONLY show up as healed, as PROOF, that the mind is healed. The mind will PROJECT a healed-appearing body to testify to ITS inner condition.

So while that broken leg persists, you are in denial. You may be owning up to the fact that you have some control over your PERCEPTION. But you are not admitting that you have the power to PROJECT what you are even looking at.

This is a fundamental difference and there is a pretty big divide in the ACIM community based around this one distinction. Many people believe all they need to do is fix their perception OF the world, or what's showing up, and then they are done. In this belief system, it becomes justified that you can still have sickness show up and have a "healthy mind", that you can still DIE and be innocent, you can welcome death, you can keep your sickness and be totally happy, etc.

Yes, to a degree, as a preparatory step, you can come to be "relatively peaceful" about these things through changing your perception. What you are INDIRECTLY doing there, is that it's not actually your perception that you're fixing, is the content of your mind that PROJECTS the body in the first place. Attempting to change your perception is a second-hand roundabout way of trying to address the content in your mind, which is "showing you" a belief in sin and sickness "in" the broken leg. But at some point.... you're going to hit a wall.

The wall will simply be, that in order for you to really thoroughly change your perception so that you do not believe in sickness, and have no sickness in your mind, you're going to have to also ADMIT, that your mind is projecting the FORM OF SICKNESS *AS* the body, in the first place, regardless of your perception OF it.

So many people are onto this "change my mind about the world" kick, which changes perception OF the world. But they do not realize, at some point, if you are not going to perceive sickness, your mind has to be emptied of all belief in sickness, AND THIS MUST result in the PROJECTION changing. It has to. The mind can't retain some small amount of belief in separation and have *perception* be a state of peace.

If that broken leg is still showing up, but you are relatively "ok with it", you are IN DENIAL. That broken leg is NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SHOWING UP AT ALL. A sick body is PROOF the mind HAS NOT been healed.

There is this second camp of ACIM folk then who see this, and acknowledge, that the mind projects the body. Jesus Himself said it in that quote above. The mind that projects the body can make another. And if the mind can project the ENTIRE BODY, then IT is 100% responsible for making the body show up with ANY sign of sickness or death. This is how no-one can die without his own consent! If your mind does not put it there, it cannot be.

So if you just stop at.... I'm going to just be okay with this sickness, I'm going to perceive this sickness differently, I'm going to perceive this BODY differently, I'm going to look at this body in a more loving way etc.... that's a step TOWARDS healing the mind's content. But if that body is still showing up as BROKEN, you are NOT DONE.

This is where there comes to be a lot of denial, because not only is it often difficult to see that you projected the sickness AS the body (it can happen really fast and then go unconscious), there is also a lot of FEAR about this idea that your mind is THAT POWERFUL, that it can not only make sickness and death happen to you BY your will, but that the mind can also reverse that. Yet Jesus teaches:

"You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both." ABOLISH means, to TOTALLY REMOVE. That means, the reversal of ALL forms and signs and symptoms of sickness in the body AND mind, and EVEN DEATH. It Literally means, the ability to reverse death, to raise the dead, and to completely restore life. It is the ability to REWIND SIN and UNDO ALL OF THE CONSEQUENCES (effects) of your wrong decision.

Your mind is cause. Your body is your effect. The body is NOT CAUSED by the world in any way whatsoever. Ever. Your sickness is NOT PUT THERE by any cause outside of your mind, EVER. You are responsible for what you have chosen. And because you are, you can CHANGE YOUR MIND and it MUST CHANGE THE PROJECTION.

So yes it's one thing to work on changing your perception, but your perception has arisen from what you have projected. And that means, if you are GENUINELY undoing the sinful content in your mind, are taking full ownership of your power, are NOT believing that anything in the world has the power to affect you or your body, and are NOT attempting to demonstrate that the Son of God can be hurt and killed THROUGH the symbol of the body (the body can become a sign of immortality), then YOU WILL STOP PROJECTING SICKNESS AND DEATH.

You do not project it ONTO the body. You project it AS the body. No-one else put the body there. Your parents did not put the body there. Biology did not put the body there. Chemical reactions and physical interactions did not put the body there. The world, the dream, other people, did not put the body there. ONLY YOU DID.

So that means, if you're to go all the way with this.... this is where you get into MIRACLE WORKING. Because it means, you are willing to DEMONSTRATE, to live by example, that it is possible to reverse all sickness and death in yourself, AND IN OTHERS.

You first reverse it in yourself by accepting atonement. This allows you to receive miracles. Then you are able to express those miracles to and for others. If they are willing to accept it.

We are not supposed to be walking around with limbs hanging off and body parts failing and organs malfunctioning and eyesight going bad and developing a limp and a having cancers and diseases and various other forms of SIN.

Death is an attempt to demonstrate that the Son of God can be killed. Pain is an attempt to bind the son to the body to fixate him on and identify with being a real body. Sickness is an attempt to prove the Son can be hurt. Sickness is an attack on your brother. Sickness is the result of seeking outside of yourself, and demonstrates level confusion. None of this is God's will. It is a demonstration of the OPPOSITE OF GOD'S WILL for you.

No-one is supposed to be dying. Bodies are not supposed to be decaying and dying. There is NOT supposed to be 7 billion people planning their own death, who will very likely die in the next 100 years, putting 7 billion corpses in the ground, just because they did not want God's healing and love. That's their choice. It does not have to be yours.

If we are to demonstrate that we are immortal and invulnerable, we ARE supposed to demonstrate here, in the flesh, that the body cannot be hurt, BECAUSE, the body is ONLY coming from the mind, and therefore if you project a healthy body it will STAY HEALTHY at all times. And nothing can attack it. It is IMPOSSIBLE for it to be sick. NOR CAN IT DIE.

"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. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as IT MAKES ALL DECISIONS THAT ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE BODY'S CONDITION."

Later, when it's done being useful, it is simply DISAPPEARED. Just as Jesus did:

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it.. 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... To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. "

It was not a matter of it disappearing from his perception OF it. The body ITSELF disappeared because HE STOPPED PROJECTING IT.

THIS is our natural inheritance, this ability to work miracles, to reverse all sickness and death, to not only correct perception but to CORRECT PROJECTION. To UNDO everything we have PROJECTED. AND that ultimately includes your body, everyone else's body, all sickness, all death, all forms of separation, all objects, all planets, and this entire ILLUSORY UNIVERSE which is a PROJECTION coming from the mind.

So don't stop at "I will just change how I see the world." "Seek not to change the world, seek to change your mind about the world. Perception is a RESULT (effect of projecting) and not a cause (the body that shows up is not alive!). "And that is why order of difficulty in miracles is meaningless." ie... change your MIND, your body and the world MUST CHANGE to reflect the content of your mind. Without exception.

There are people who wake up in this world. There are people who are awake in the dream. There are people who have purified perception to such an extent that they seem to be seeing the real world or something close to it. They recognize that they were contributing sin to what is here, projecting it "onto" the body and world. But what they usually do not realize is, THEY are projecting the body and the world. And therefore, typically, they age, and they die. And then they reincarnate and make another body. Why? Because they did not get to the level where they woke up FROM dreaming, and FROM perceiving.

To wake up FROM the dream, you have to get in touch with the fact that you are the DREAMER of it, the one who is PROJECTING IT, and you are the one who is PUTTING ALL OF ITS OBJECTS OUT THERE. This puts you in touch with miracle working because now you are able to enact VERTICAL PERCEPTION, cause and effect are now vertical not linear, and you recognize the power of YOUR MIND to manifest absolutely anything in this dream, or change it, at will. Because you will realize, you have been DOING THAT all along. Your body was coming from YOUR MIND, and your mind only.

To wake up from the dream requires the undoing of dreaming, which overrides ALL perception, deals with separation at ITS CAUSE, and therefore DISAPPEARS THE DREAM UNIVERSE. That means, the disappearance of the physical universe, including precious "planet earth", which was never anything but a mental projection. All that is then left, is God's creation, which is Heaven.

I want to make an important point which I think many people overlook with what the Course is teaching.

There is something that you may not have realized about this world. It is not what you think it is.

Physical matter ITSELF, is an ILLUSION, of such profoundly convincing proportions, that you do not even suspect that there is something unnatural about it.

Its form and appearance are so deceiving, and so successful at convincing you it is "natural", that you don't even consider that there is something untrue about it. It is SO BLINDING that it is assumed to be "just the way it is", as if any universe would have objects like this.

This blindness about form has led many ACIM students to not even question physical form, as if it's just there and is real. Like it's a given, so vast and seemingly consistent that it seems to be outside of our minds and impossible to influence directly. And this then leads to a severely mistaken interpretation of the Course.

If physical form is natural, and it's not even up for question, then the only thing that seems changeable is "inside your mind", which will be interpreted to mean "inside your personal non-form self", separate from the world.

You will then start to interpret the course as meaning you should only change your mind "about" the world, because it seems to be the only part of "you" that CAN be modified easily.

It's as if, the world is a separate "thing", so big and so unchangeable by you, that you don't even begin to question its nature. The Course then becomes entirely about you accepting atonement "for yourself", you changing "your mind" ABOUT the world, you not changing the world at all, and you not having any miraculous power to do so.

What also results from this is a false sense of context, that your "perception" is kind of a personal thing, inside your mind, inside your body. Everything physically external to your body is considered to be something else.

Indeed there is barely any consideration for this entire universe being "inside your mind" in any way - that seems like FAR too big of a responsibility or a magnitude of identity FAR too big to be able to accept or relate to. We have become SO USED TO LITTLENESS, that we do not think big at all.

I want to make it clear just how BLINDING form is, and WHY it is so deceiving, lying, unnatural, false and unreal.

I also want to reframe this entire world as being inside the collective mind of the Sonship. This leads to a very important point, which is, that the appearance, manifestation, physicality and nature of "physical matter" is actually nothing more than a STATE OF MIND. Or to put it another way, it is PERCEPTION.

The Course literally says "This world IS perception." This does not mean perception OF the world, which is once removed. It means literally, the mind of the Son of God which is dreaming this universe, is having a false perception, which is showing up as a tree, a car, and a young child. These seeming forms are not really physical matter, they are IDEAS IN THE MIND. And all of these ideas are just thoughts. And thoughts are nothing more than PERCEPTIONS. So this seemingly physical universe is in fact the Son of God mis-perceiving, and the hallucinations He's having in his false perception are showing up as IMAGES which we think are physical objects.

There is a huge camp of people in the ACIM community who generally do not see or believe this. As described above, they think that this world is somehow real and natural and that we are only supposed to change our "little" minds about it, to see IT differently. Not realizing whatsoever that IT ITSELF is perception, INSIDE A MIND, a mind so vast and powerful that we don't even conceive of it as being who we really are or what we are capable of.

Now. How is it that form is blinding, or an illusion, and exactly HOW does form deceive you? How is it lying to you? What is it trying to DO? And what is its PURPOSE? Remember the Course tells us to ask, "what is it FOR"? What is form FOR?

Physical form is a device for massively obscuring the nature of God, by presenting a "picture of the crucifixion of God's Son" (ACIM terms), so that you see something completely UNNATURAL presenting itself as if it is "the nature" of existence, so that God's presence will be HIDDEN.

This entire world, this planet Earth, this universe and everything with it, IS A LIE. It is FALSE. It is unreal. And it does not exist. This is reflected in "there is no world". IT IS LITERALLY TRUE. So exactly how is physical matter lying or covering up God's nature?

In terms of how the ego thinks and how this world SUGGESTS things are true, it seems to us that physical objects cannot occupy the same space. It is also suggested that whatever is contained within one area of space, cannot be contained elsewhere. It seems there is only so much material (matter) to go around, and that in order to make something presence elsewhere it has to be *removed* from where it was, thus indicating a lack or limitation to "how much" there is of anything.

This is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to the nature of God. God is omnipresent. He is everywhere, fully, at all times. If you were to think of God as occupying "space" - as an analogy for the sake of explaining this - then ALL of God is in one location, AND, God is also fully in another location, at the same time, without any lack, any diminishing, or any limitation. All of God is in America, all of God is in Africa, all of God is in Europe, etc. This does not mean God has sectioned off 1/3rd of himself to be in the USA so that there is "some left" for the other places. He is fully 100% present in ALL of these locations simultaneously.

To the ego, this is absolutely impossible and absolute nonsense. In terms of physical matter it is impossible for some amount of substance to be fully located in more than one place. So physical matter inherently has this "belief system" built into it, of finite limitation, lack, difference, competition, murder, attacking (causing) without being affected, the opposite of abundance, absolutely no sharing, no unity, no stability, no sameness or equality, no constancy, nothing permanent, everything changing. Physical matter is the EMBODIMENT of the ego's thought system. THIS WHOLE UNIVERSE IS THE EGO THOUGHT SYSTEM!

Given that God's nature is to be everywhere fully, simultaneously, at all times, without lack, and completely defying all ego laws, when we are presented with an image of FORM, we are being presented with a picture of the OPPOSITE to God's nature. It is a massive lie. It is DELIBERATELY DESIGNED to obscure God's nature, to paint a picture of attack and crucifixion and death, to make it SEEM AS IF there is absolutely no sharing or abundance, that it is "natural" to lack or have limitations.

Even the way that one physical object seems to be separate from another, sharing nothing with it, unable to merge or be "one" with each other, different in their properties and which "physical laws" (ego laws) apply to them, influencing each other differently and unequally, is specifically INTENDED by the ego to LIE TO YOU, so that you will be convinced that it is normal and natural for things to be this way. It is NOT NORMAL OR NATURAL for objects to not share space, for there to be limitation and lack, or for there to be DIFFERENCES or different appearances.

So the fact is this. You are surrounded by a massive, very solid-seeming ILLUSION, which IS PART OF THE EGO, part of the ego thought system, and is inside of MIND, and is being thought by those who are separate from God, and is coming from a state of belief in sin and separation. Physical objects are SIN. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outward."

Whenever "events" seem to happen in this world, and something seems to go wrong, this is an IDEA playing out, an idea of sin made real. This is why the REVERSAL OF THE PHYSICAL STATE represents a supernatural MIRACLE. To rewind time, to undo the symptoms, to cancel the chain of illusory cause-effect, to modify the outcome of sinful events, is an expression of miracles. Physical form is the idea of sin made flesh, and to reverse that IDEA will make that flesh DISAPPEAR. It must disappear because it is an idea in the MIND. Physical forms are IN THE MIND. Change your mind and "the world" MUST CHANGE ITS FORM, or disappear entirely.

This presents an entirely radically different view of some of the Course principles, that somehow PHYSICALITY is actually INCLUDED IN changes that are made to mind. The body is not outside the mind, nor is this world. They are not solid or real. They are IDEAS OF SEPARATION. That means as mind changes, physical form must change as well. This is why the physical body can become a symbol of immortality, why all sickness must be reversed, why a broken body is PROOF that the MIND has not been healed, and why there is a VERY PHYSICALLY ORIENTED aspect to performing miracles.

Miracles, true miracles, are not restricted to the "scope" of your LITTLE MIND. Nor are they limited to the scope of what you THINK of as mind, separate from matter. Miracles apply to THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE, because it is inside the mind, and IT IS perception. Physical matter is misperception of God. Period. You can change how "you" seem to perceive it, to see God "in it" etc, but if you are still seeing physical matter according to ITS ILLUSORY LAWS, and still think of yourself as separate, then you are still not perceiving correctly.

Fact is, because physical forms are IN THE MIND and are thoughts/ideas, changing the mind HAS TO CHANGE THE FORM. So what that means is something very interesting.... there is a direct connection between "changing your perception" and changing PHYSICALLY. So if for example Jesus changes water into wine, he is not really changing water into wine, he is CHANGING HIS MIND and it's showing up as water changing into wine.

This means, we have to stop thinking of physical bodies and forms as "separate from mind". That's part of the ILLUSION that they are trying to convince us of, that they REALLY ARE SEPARATE, because forms "prove" that separation IS REAL. Believing forms are real is falling for the illusion they were intended to convince you of. Instead we need to think of physical matter as IDEAS or THOUGHTS IN THE MIND. And that means, we are not living in a physical world, we are living INSIDE A MIND, and as the Course says, "everything is an idea". That means, if you HAVE A DIFFERENT IDEA, it will materialize as an image of a form.

It also means if you change your ideas/thoughts, IT WILL show up as things changing in the world. And this testifies to the POWER OF THE MIND, which most of us are scared shitless about. We literally MUST change forms if we change our mind and form MUST ALWAYS REPRESENT our state of mind. There is no matter separate from mind. There is no matter separate from our ideas and thoughts or misperceptions. Whatever form is showing up, that testifies to what we think about God. So a change in perception is not without power - a change in perception LITERALLY MUST show up as a change in physical images, because we are LIVING INSIDE A MIND and everything is fluid and changeable. Form is not "solid and fixed" implying that mind is only that which is flexible. Form IS WITHIN the mind.

This is NOT a physical world. This "world" is a THOUGHT. It is an idea, in the mind. Inside a VAST mind. The mind of the Son of God, not just the mind of a little separate human. If we are to be miracle workers, it MUST MEAN that we demonstrate that this PHYSICAL WORLD IS A LIE, by showing HOW it is a lie, by changing it, in order to SHOW that it is a lie, so that people are educated experientially. The course literally tells us to do this, and that our demonstrations will exonerate our brothers from belief in sin.

When the Course also teaches, which it does, that we are supposed to demonstrate a PERFECTLY HEALTHY BODY, free of all sin and symptoms and signs of death, it tells us this because our physical body is an IDEA in our MIND, which we are presenting to our brother. If the body is broken, the MIND IS DREAMING OF A LIE. So that proves the mind is not healed.

So if we show sickness to a brother, to his physical eyes, we are actually presenting a THOUGHT OF DEATH AND ATTACK, which shows up in what we call "physical form", but is really an IDEA in the mind. So now our physical body HAS TO BE USED as a "medium" through which God's laws are demonstrated, and the mind is SHOWN to be healed, through the miraculous absence of all signs of mental illness.

You cannot have mental health without physical health, and you cannot have sickness without mental illness. "All sickness is mental illness." And that's simply because, the body is IN THE MIND, so whatever state of mind you have it WILL SHOW UP as the body. And when the mind is perfectly purified, the body will disappear entirely.

What this reveals is that in A Course in Miracles, which many people think is about the mind (inside the body), MUST INCLUDE the transformation of FORM, as a symbol of truth, to use form to demonstrate the truth, and to use form to show that form is a lie. And these demonstrations are what the Course refers to as MIRACLES. They DO incorporate changes of mind, because form IS IN THE MIND. The body is not separate from the mind, nor are physical objects, nor is the world.

And this is why our PROVING of God's truth and laws must take place IN THIS WORLD, using miracles which demonstrate SUPERNATURALLY (beyond the illusory nature of physical matter), that the truth is true. If one object is multiplied into two objects, with no lack or limitation, this is a miraculous demonstration of the fact that the EGO'S LIE, which is physical form, does not apply to the nature of God.

"That the body cannot heal the mind but the mind can heal the body proves that the mind must be stronger than the body. EVERY MIRACLE DEMONSTRATES THIS." Miracles can ONLY demonstrate this by showing that the mind can HEAL the body, mind is more powerful than matter, mind is free of the ego's laws of physics, and therefore the mind has SUPERNATURAL POWER over physicality. This is a central, core teaching of A Course in Miracles.

"What you use the body for it will become to you." tells us that if you use the body with love, the body should BECOME A PICTURE OF LOVE. If it is being used for attack, IT WILL become a picture of sickness, proving the mind is not healed. The body is literally A REFLECTION OF YOUR MENTAL STATE. Because it is being projected by your mind. Just as this whole universe is being projected by the mind of the Sonship. And everything which seems physical IS NOT, it is in the mind. And so if you change your mind, THE WORLD MUST CHANGE.

We are not inside a physical world. The physical world is a lie inside our mind. Nothing more than an idea or thought, or a false perception. It is a visualization of mental illness. And because it is IN the mind, within the scope of the mind's influence, it can EASILY BE CHANGED by someone who is purified in their awareness of love's power.

So ACIM is not just about hey, I'm going to heal my mind in isolation, regardless of what other people do, in private, and not have ANY EFFECT on others or on the world. There are entire sections in the course talking about how we are afraid of the FACT that thoughts produce effects. "All thought produces form at some level." Therefore, all form is a thought, therefore it must be within the mind, therefore it must be changeable if the mind changes.

Form is the "form of error". Error means the unforgiving idea of sin and death considered to be real. All physical form is ERROR. It is an IDEA of attack, separation, difference and UNNATURAL conditions.

There is a great section in the course talking about how the body's physical eyes were designed to look upon FORM (of error) and make it real, BLINDING YOU to true vision or the ability to REALLY SEE or recognize the ILLUSION that matter is.

”The body's eyes see only form. 4 They cannot see beyond what they were made to see. 5 And they were made to look on error and not see past it. 6 Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see only illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside form of nothing. 7 To this distorted form of vision the outside of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true. 8 Yet how can sight that stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, see truly?"

In this section we are told how the ego made form (matter) as errors, vs mistakes, and made the body with physical eyes, to be BLIND YOU, NOT to see. Physical sight is an ILLUSION, pretending to "see" when in fact it is like burying your head in the sand.

From the perspective of the whole of existence, in which you can see everything at once, the body was made to ISOLATE YOUR VISION, to trap you in an illusion, like going inside a closed box, in which you are only allowed to see the inside of the box. It's like being forced to look at a tv screen forever and ever, never allowed to look away or look at anything else. It gives you pre-presecribed images to look at, and to ONLY look at them in a certain way, so that you will NOT SEE ANYTHING REAL.

Physical matter, and sight of it with body eyes, was INTENDED by the ego to BLIND YOU, so that you would never question that physical forms are illusions, or can be changed, or have anything to do with mind, or that you put them there through dreaming for the sole purpose of LYING about the nature of God.

You cannot and should not believe your eyes, or any body senses. They are designed to FAIL TO SEE, to FAIL TO SENSE, and to NOT BE AWARE of what is real. Body sensory organs are LIES, pretending to be able to be "aware of" something when in fact these sensations BLIND YOU to true awareness. This is why pain and pleasure both make the body real. Sight of form, belief in form, and assumption that physicality is natural, is part of the ego thought system.

Demonstrations that it is false and limited is a miracle, revealing the TRUE NATURE OF GOD. If miracles could not demonstrate that the ego's laws, its world, physicality, matter, are NOT REAL OR TRUE, and are not governed by the laws that the ego made up, we would have NO WAY to prove that God's laws are true, there could be NO HEALING, and the ego could not be undone. As Jesus says, the mere fact that illusions CAN BE CHANGED by miracles proves their impermanence.

So open your mind. This world is not what you think it is. It is a huge lie. You are not little, isolated to a body. Nor do you have a private awakening. Your mind is not stuck in your body. You are bigger than this universe, and more powerful than anything this world can demonstrate. This world IS perception and it must be corrected. That's how it turns into a happy dream, not just a happy interpretation of hell, but the TRANSLATION of hell into Heaven, initially through the transformation of matter towards symbols of Heaven, and then its disappearance.

"Heaven and Earth are opposite in EVERY WAY." And that could not be more true - physical matter and its "nature" are SO OPPOSITE to God's nature, they have nothing in common. Matter is a lie. Objects are fiction. Bodies are illusions. Worlds and planets and stars are fake. There is no separation, no difference, no appearance and no forms. There is only God's nature governing the TRUE LAWS of existence, which we are to demonstrate through miracles HERE in this illusion so that we can teach others that this world is NOT NATURAL, and that the truth is therefore SUPER NATURAL.

It can be very difficult to forgive abuse. Typically in abusive situations, both persons are identified with their bodies. One person does something to the other person's body, which is taken very personally and hurtfully.

It seems that one person has power to affect the other, to do something to them against their will. And the whole scenario seems to paint a very closed picture of unfair treatment, unwilling participation, obvious fault on the part of the abuser, and total helplessness on the part of the victim.

If you look solely at what is happening at the physical level, and if this is believed to be reality, then all of this makes sense. The abuser physically does do something. The victim physically or emotionally or mentally does seem to receive the fallout of the abuse. The separation between the bodies and wills seems to portray the victim as "not wanting it" etc. At a purely surface-appearance level, this is all very real and threatening and traumatic. As if the is the whole story.

But viewing the situation purely in terms of surface appearance, is actually an unforgiving perception. It means the form of what happened was blinding. It means you were identified with your body, such that anything happening from the outside in seemed to affect your actual self. There is no recognition that "its just a dream." And there certainly doesn't appear to be any hope of escape from the hellish nightmare.

The difficult part comes when you start to explore how to heal this, forgive it, undo the consequences, or to become free from the aftereffects, some of which can be debilitating and even life threatening. But at some point, there has to be a willingness to entertain the possibility that there was "more happening" than met the eye, and that there might be a different way of looking at it. It is this unwillingness to remain in pain, that inspires the beginning of opening up to spirit.

"The misuse of will engenders a situation which, in the extreme, becomes altogether intolerable. Pain thresholds can be high, but they are not limitless. Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point. This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight."

Even if you are left with pain and scars, emotional hurt, physical damage, psychological wounds or forms of insanity, carrying this baggage around forever becomes intolerable. Pain is not pleasant. Constant fear is a nightmare. The sheer weight of suffering can potentially inspire a person to try to find a way out of hell, unless they become so distraught that it leads to suicide.

For those who do find at least "a little willingness", there becomes a glimmer of openness to at least the possibility that, just maybe, there is some way to heal and be free of this. That maybe if you look at it from a different vantage point you might find out some hidden facts, previously unrecognized influences, or even some ways that you might have caused it. Of course, for abused people, leaping to "I did this to myself" is a pretty huge leap, when everything the physical reports testifies to "they did everything to me and I did nothing."

It can even seem horrendously offensive to a person who is very heavily believing in "what appeared to happen" as the only reality. When pain backs it up, when suffering seemed to come from it, and when the person didn't seem to want any of it, there is tremendous resistance to healing and forgiveness. It is in fact, part of the pyschological blindness that placed their mind in an unforgiving experience to begin with, and this denial may even have been increased through the abusive experiences.

This is why it can take time, a lot of willingness and gradual transformation, to work through the ins-and-outs of everything that happened, all the pain it entailed, to be able to purge and purify the suffering, to even get to a point where you might be open to another way of looking at it. But if there is to be another way of looking at it, it can't be at the physical level. It can't be just another attempt to frame the situation in terms of "it was real, but the person had their reasons."

True forgiveness has to entail moving away from the sheer physcality of the abusive situation, away from appearances and forms, and away from the illusion of causality. It has to rise above the "he did this to me" and the "she did that to me". And it has to go into the "Maybe I had something to do with this." Given how intense and horrifying abuse can be, and the seeming unhealable wounds it leaves behind, even being open to that suggestion can be a seemingly insurmountable stretch.

The key factor which lifts a person out of perception of abuse, is becoming identified with spirit instead of the body. And that all by itself is a journey. And it also requires that you recognize that you can be free from suffering, even if people seem to be vicious and hurtful. As the Course says:

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF. No matter what the form of the attack, this STILL is true.

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

To allow there to be a maximum amount of viciousness and attack by others, yet to be in such a state of mind in which this has NO effect on you, seems like a very tall order. But it is not impossible. It entails the recognition that this world is a dream, and not a reality. Yes it will seem like the abuse was VERY real, with disturbing memories and wounds to show for it, but in the really big picture it nevertheless was still part of a dream.

Jesus suggests that if we can approach the awareness and recognition that this IS a dream world, and not a reality, we will become more identified as spirit, or as the dreamer of the dream. We are the mind/soul that is beyond the dream which houses it within ourselves.

With willingness, it's going to become apparent that the events in dreams are something WE are contributing to. This produces a profound shift in how we look at what the other person "did to us", because now we're starting to question not only whether it really happened in reality at all, but also who was really causing what.

It can seem to be a bitter pill to swallow, that we would be hurtful to ourselves, that we ourselves might've agreed to or arranged or produced suffering, that in effect we wanted to be abused for some other purpose of scapegoating. It's especially heinous to many people to suggest that someone in a victim role is not entirely faultless, that they in fact are using the opportunity to position themselves as victim in order to be ABLE to find the abuser guilty. And as the course says, this has a tremendous payoff in allowing us to position ourselves as innocent, as a way to asuage our OWN guilt for our own sense of sin.

Could it be then, quite a shocking but deep truth, that we may well not only consent to abuse but even encourage it and bring it upon ourselves, because of the benefit to us psychologically - that we can convince ourselves that if the other person is especially evil, it portrays us as especially good. And given that we are loaded with uhealed guilt over the separation from God, it provides a wonderful opportunity to exonerate ourselves by finding someone else to be especially sinful. We may in fact be using the abuser as a fall-guy for our own sin.

This then completely turns the tables on the situation, and is the secret hidden truth that the abusive situation seems to reject. While the situation said, "they did this to me, I did nothing", in truth the fact is "I did this to me and used them to make myself look better." That is not something that is easy to admit to, but it has to be admitted to if you want freedom.

Here is Jesus saying that we are even willing to BE KILLED, if it means the payoff that we can find someone ELSE to be the sinner and to exonerate ourselves. And that we may even welcome being highly severly abused, attacked, afflicted, murdered and destroyed, as a tremendously opportunistic bargain, if it means we can be found guiltless. Even that what WE get out of it is even MORE than they get out of it - a great deal!

"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."

This isn't simply a teaching about sickness and how we use the body to try to show proof that our brother caused us to be sick, so that we'll be exonerated of sin. It's a general teaching that in many ways, abuse included, we try to position ourselves as victims in order to get a great payoff. That we're even willing to enter into highly abusive, detrimental, suffering situations, with terrible power loss and mistreatment, if it means that secretly this causes the OTHER person to seem like the sinner. What did abuse turn you into, if not someone justified in anger and blame?

Jesus doesn't hold back, in that he is even saying that we are WILLING TO DIE, if it will provide us with an opportunity to point a finger at the CAUSE of death, other than ourselves, and say "look there, that's where the sin is". And thus to say, "Look at me, I didn't do anything at all." We even lay down in death in a kind of passive way, totally hands-off, making ourselves appear to be COMPLETELY at the effect of something outside our control, so that it paints a very vivid picture of unfair destruction, un-asked for killing, and unwanted torment. In which we appear innocent.

The driving force behind all of this is the guilt that WE feel in OUR mind, over a situation which doesn't even have anything to do with these abusers. It's the fact that we are bringing some very heavy shit, TO the situation, from our past. And we're causing and involving ourselves in relationships and situations which afford us opportunities to PROJECT, dissociate from, and disown this hidden secret suffering, in order to try to deal with it.

What could be so big and deep and hidden and painful that we would want to go so far as to ALLOW ourselves to seem to be destroyed by another, if it would mean escaping it? What possible severity of sin could we have possibly either committed tor accused ourselves of, that we would ENCOURAGE sickness in an attempt to be seen with pity and favor? What kind of hideous act did we commit which could possibly require death as the only "solution", in which by accusing anyone OTHER than ourselves of TERRIBLE mistreatment, we can try to make a dent in it and be seen as the innocent one?

Don't doubt for a second that the ego's entire drive is to use denial to its full extent. It denies who you are, it denies God through sin, it denies sin through guilt, it denies guilt through the face of innocence, and it denies the face of innocence by destroying the body through "a will of punishment not my own." Denial upon denial upon denial are used to gradually remove you from existence and to disown everything. Even in abuse we are disowning the way in which we are abusing ourselves.

All of this is really based on our secret sins and hidden hates, the self accusation, the condenation upon yourself BY yourself, the belief in the reality of sin, the authority problem and desire to overthrow God, and indeed the belief that you HAVE attacked God against His will. It is really the original sin, the belief that you opposed the entire Kingdom of God through evil, that you are running and hiding from. And it is the unforgiven guilt for that perceived sin that you try to push onto others when you form abusive relationships.

Those who feel particularly guilty are apt to not only cause physical sickness, they are also apt to be vicious and very accusatory. They project heavily because trying to dissociate that unconscious guilt from their minds seems like the only way to hide from it. By putting it onto someone else and framing them as an abuser or attacker, it SEEMS to make it look like they are more evil than you, thus you are partly exonerated for your belief in sin against God. And those who are especially OPEN to being a victim, unfairly treated, abused, in fact are the most deceptive and blameful. He who has "been destroyed against his will" has gotten away with the crime of the century.

So now as the tables turn, we find out that a person who on the surface seemed to be the innocent party in the abuse, who was purely victimized, who asked for nothing and who made no contribution to it at all, actually turns out to be the ONLY one who was really doing anything at all, who did it all to themselves, and EVEN went so far as to USE the "abuser" for their own aims. What more benefit could a guilty person find than to position themselves as helplesly suffering, if it would create the illusion that SOMEONE ELSE is guilty? And how sick is it that we would actively WANT to do this, even if it meant we had to suffer to pull it off?

You can see why the truth of these situations is so hard to accept. It litearlly suggests that "the abused" are abusers, that victims are in fact victimizers, that those who are afraid are vicious, and that this is all a secret plot to GAIN from suffering. Even that we would happily die if it meant someone else would pay for what we've done to God.

"We said before that those who are afraid are apt to be vicious. " On the surface, the world being so back to front, it always seems at first glance that those who are suffering are NOT the ones doing the attacking. And that those who are seeming to be the cause of the suffering, are NOT the victims. But this is literally what Jesus is telling us. And it is this complete "180" that our minds have to go through in order to heal this psychological conditioning. And that's not easy.

If I was abused, even if the abuse and the emotional pain tells me that it happened, it was unfair, I did not ask for it, the abusers were evil monsters, and they ought to receive a death sentence, my act to MAINTAIN this position is in fact driven by a motive of wanting to keep BENEFITING from it. And that is not an easy thing to admit to. Yet alone to look at the fact that I was the one doing the abuse to myself and to the abusers. That I was USING them as a scapegoat, and WANTED to be abused in order to get away with FRAMING THEM for my own murder.

It's even harder to admit to any of this if the victim is a helpless innocent young child who appears, at the face of it, to be utterly devoid of sin and guilt, and who has no power or ability to stop anything happening. This all sets up the perfect scenario for the ego to manipulate the situation and USE it to its advantage. Not o much to cause the child to suffer cruelly, but to cause the child to WANT to suffer in order to develop a wonderful collection of scapegoats. Of course, saying something like this is NOT going to be popular with most of society.

Admitting to all this is, nevertheless, the eventual place our mind has to get to if we truly want to be free from pain and suffering. We have to approach the secret of salvation. We have to be willing to admit to what we are doing and the part we play. And we certainly have to completely let the abusers off the hook, otherwise we cannot experience psycholgoical repair. So long as we are looking to project and get rid of our own inner guilt onto these people, we keep ourselves in a prison of denial and suffering. And we can't feel happy while we're AVOIDING the original guilt that we were using the abuser to try to get rid of.

It begs the question, far more importantly, not "why did they do that to me"... but "why did I do this to me?". That's the really deeper issue. Why did you accuse yourself of sin FIRST, before you arranged for someone to sin against you? Why did you believe in sin, at all, before inviting others to seem to sin against you? Why did you fall into the authority problem, prior to ever needing an external authority to pretend to have power over you? Why did you attack yourself first? Why were you overtly vicious against yourself and God, before portraying yourself as a helpless victim? That's the bigger deal to heal.

"I but accuse my brother of my own sins."

"It can be but myself I crucify."

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

"You are doing this to yourself."

"There is no sin."

Self destruction and self attack and self victimization and self punishment, are far more the problem and death-inducing than the two-times removed scapegoats that we find externally. The abuser isn't even the beginning of the process, they're a device that we use later down the line to try to deal with what we've done to oursevles. And the ultimate freedom can only come when you find YOURSELF to be innocent, having never sinned in reality, forming the basis for the total lack of NEED to have an "abuser" take on the burden for you.

These external influencers are not even the cause of anything. They're scapegoats that we use to project sin and disown responsibility. And until this power is taken back and reclaimed, a "victim" cannot feel empowered or free of victimization. It's kind of a two-way street. You can't be secretly victimizing, which all victims do, if you want to be free of being victimized. If you believe in victimization you become a victimizer and pretend you are the opposite. Obviously that's not a sane position to take.

There is hope for healing and true release from all suffering, all abuse, all symptoms and effects, all baggage and all pain. But it does require that you take full responsibility for your choices and your participation on making happen what you thought happened against your will. You cannot see yourself as being an unwilling participant if you want to find the power of the wil. And the only way to be truly free is to accept the atonement truth that you never sinned in the first place, such that you don't need anyone to exonerate you through suffering.

Who is the abuser who really needs your forgiveness? It's you.