"THERE IS ***NO LIFE*** OUTSIDE OF HEAVEN. Where God created life, there life must be. In any state apart from Heaven life is illusion. At best ***it seems like life; at worst, like death.*** Yet both are judgments on WHAT IS NOT LIFE, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. Outside of Heaven (planet Earth, galaxies etc), only the conflict of illusion stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. Illusions are but forms. Their content is never true."

A seed is sown. It sprouts. The plant grows tall. A bud appears. The bud opens and the flower blooms. The flower pollinates. The flower dies. The leaves wilt. The plant is dead. It crumbles, and all it becomes is the ground in which other seeds are sown.

THIS, is the fundamental nature of spacetime. Because you'll notice that the plant has to be in a constant state of CHANGE in order to be in ANY state. It cannot remain constantly the same. It has to always be transforming, growing, sprouting, adjusting, dying.

We like to say that new things are born, and old things die. This is a lie. There are not two states here, there is only one state. It is all death. All things here are changing, always, and they can never stop changing. Change is death, because only permanence is life. So even birth is death as well.

This is what stuff in this universe does, fundamentally, because everything here is based on the idea that "nothing ever stays the same." Which is the opposite of "everything lives forever."

We made it to be this way. It's a world based on the laws of death. Death is built into it. Not just the end result of death but even the sprouting and the flowering is a sign of death. It's death because it's not an eternal state. Change means the opposite of immortality, and therefore the opposite of life.

"Without the idea of death there is no world."

"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."

Even if things appear to be born, to grow, to transform, to seem to live and then to die, all of it is death. All of it is what happens when nothing ever lasts and all things are constantly coming and going.

Nothing here is ever still. The idea of something being constantly the same is totally alien. Nothing here ever perpetuates forever. Nothing here can hold onto any sense of stable identity for any amount of time. Nothing is ever quite here and now, it's always transitioning from the past to the future. And therefore nothing here has an identity, because nothing is stable or ongoing or inherently permanent.

There is no self in a world of shifts and changes. There is no reality in such a world either, because reality cannot be shifting and unstable and constantly in flux. That which is real must always be the same, reliable, trustable, constant and changeless. It's like a rock that you can rely on. But nothing in this world provides this stability, because it's an unreal world.

Human bodies in any stage of development, ranging from fetus to birth to children to teens to adults to those older of age, it doesn't matter. Every stage is just one more version of a state of death in a dream of death under laws of death. Death is change. Life is eternal changelessness. Even as a newborn arrives, the body is already not really there and not really anything.

If something can change from one thing into another, it cannot really be what it seems to be. If it were a seed, and now its a plant, and then its a flower, and then it is garbage, it is not any of these things. There is no permanent nature to it. It has no continual identity that is unwavering and consistent. And so every state it transitions through is an illusion of appearances.

This ultimately is why there is no world. Everything that shifts and changes is unreal and does not really have any real here-and-now existence. And the body is never really in a state of complete here-and-now. It seems to be here now, but it is transitioning from what it was to what it will be. It has not stopped to be here and now, it will not stay the same for even a nanosecond.

"The body does not really exist."

"At no SINGLE instant does the body exist at all."

"None of this existed before, nor does it actually exist now."

Fully in the holy instant, in the total present, there is no body and there is no world. The world and the body are a little bit removed from here and now. In fact, the world is the past. And the body is either a memory or an anticipation. There is a slight delay between here and where the body and world are. Even in terms of the body's functioning, there is a delay in the perceiving of the world's signals.

A flower is not a flower, because it was a stalk, and was a seed, and will be a bush, and will be dirt. It is not fully anything, and so it is fully nothing.

Space, in general, is really the idea that nothing fully exists anywhere. It was made to oppose God. God exists fully everywhere. Space, and its contents, which includes flowers and bodies and the planet, depicts the idea that God is not fully anywhere, nothing exists everywhere, and therefore God is dead and has been replaced by non-existence. This is why it is an attack on God, an opposition to the nature of the Kingdom.

Time is no better. Time suggests that everything must always be different and nothing can ever be permanent. This too is an attack on eternity. It constantly changes what is into what it was not, and back again, and on it goes, never stopping to be anything truly. And so time is the idea that you never fully exist, and have no identity, and there is nothing true about you.

Space-time is just a belief. It's an ego belief in separation. When the belief is gone, space time is gone. And without space time you cannot have flowers and bodies and planets. There is nothing to keep things separate. Nothing to hold the atoms apart. Nothing to keep time ticking. They just vanish and all their dream contents go with them. Because there is not really a world here. It's an illusion. A world of death does not exist because death is an illusion. And the world is already dead.

"Their death is sure and this alone is certain in their world. It is the ego's world because of this."

"But the world has none to offer. All its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death."

"In this world, there appears to be a state that is life's opposite. You call it death."

"Yet each must fail and crumble and decay, because a form of death cannot be life, and what is sacrificed cannot be whole."

"Leave the world of death behind, and return quietly to Heaven. There is nothing of value here, and everything of value there."

"It is the world of birth and death, founded on the belief in scarcity, loss, separation and death"

"For this world is the opposite of Heaven, being made to be its opposite, and everything here takes a direction exactly opposite of what is true."

"All the world of pain is not His Will"

"The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear (=death). And what is fear except love's absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God (life) could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him."

"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?"

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world"

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

"Freedom and peace and joy stand there, beside the bier on which they sleep, and call them to come forth and waken from their dream of death."

"He has overcome death because he has accepted life."

What you are, what everyone is, is only that which God has given you to be. There is no other truth about you. The only truth about you is the truth you have inherited from God, who is the only truth.

Since God is immortal and God has created you, you are immortal. You cannot be anything else. You cannot be mortal.

Since God created you to be permanent, nothing can ever interrupt or end your permanence. You cannot be attacked, degraded, changed, damaged, manipulated, destroyed, made to suffer, to be sick or dead.

It is simply literally IMPOSSIBLE that who you really are can ever be sick. There can never ever be anything wrong with you. You were created perfect by God and you are still perfect.

So if it seems that sickness is showing up, and in light of the fact that it is IMPOSSIBLE for you to be sick, the sickness CANNOT be telling the truth. It cannot be real. It cannot be actually happening.

Everything the sickness suggests HAS to be an illusion, some kind of fiction. It can't even be there. It can have no reality, no truth, no validity, no function, no value, no true purpose, no meaning, nothing. It is literally nothing because there is no sickness.

This is how we must regard all sickness, whether seemingly in ourselves or others. Sickness must be recognized as IMPOSSIBLE. The Son of God cannot become sick, get sick, contract illness, be infected, or become diseased. God's son is perfect and immortal forever.

If sickness is showing up, a lie is showing up. It has to be recognized as false. Sickness is not true. Everything about it must be a deception. It must be a fake sickness. Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing real can become sick.

When the illusion of sickness is fully recognized as false, and as impossible, and that this must mean it is LITERALLY NOT THERE, the power of God can shine through and ASSERT LIFE.

Resurrection is the assertion of life, and it has tremendous power because there is truth in it. Life is reality. Life is truth. Life is immortal. To assert that your immortal being is the only truth, is to assert and cause life. Anything that was "not alive" must resurrect. Anything that "was sick" must be overridden.

You cannot die. "You are immortal and you cannot die." "There is no death, the Son of God is free." You can never die. You will never die. You have never died. You are absolutely beyond the reach of all lies of sin and guilt and suffering and punishment.

Simply ask yourself, this simple comparison. If I am immortal and perfect forever, can it be possible that this sickness is real? Either the sickness is real, or the immortality is real. They can't both be true. As you side with the immortality, the sickness has to go.

"Did God create the mortal and corruptible?"

"I will awaken from the dream that I am mortal, fallible and full of sin, and know I am the perfect Son of God."

"You were not born to die."

"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?"

Health, is simply alignment with your true nature. It is simply "being immortal". By being your true self, you can never die. By being true to yourself, you cannot suffer. Being as God created you, and not trying to be anything opposite or contradictory, there can be no sickness in you.

Using denial, through the proper use of denial, you should reject sickness and death. You should assert that only eternal life is true. You should assert that only eternal life is POSSIBLE, because it is all that God willed there to be. And in this recognition, you should recognize that sickness and death are simply NOT POSSIBLE.

When it seems like sickness is happening, that a little death is taking hold, something illusory must be happening. It can't be actually happening. It can seem to be happening. There can be symptoms and signs and pains and disfigurements and seeming malfunctions and lacks and deprivations and decay etc. But these CANNOT be possible.

"There is no pain in God and therefore none in me."

A son of God cannot be sick, otherwise God would have to be sick, because a son of God is only the inherited attributes of the father. If sickness is real, God is sick, and is the God of sickness. This is what the ego believes in.

Through the assertion of your immortal nature, you express love, which is life. You express power, which is life. You express miraculousness, which is life. "Miracles mean life and God is the giver of life." Miracles break all the laws of spacetime which say that sickness is possible and happening. Miracles override the laws of physics. Miracles heal and undo all sickness and death.

"T-10.III.3. To believe that a Son of God can be sick is to believe that part of God can suffer. 2 Love cannot suffer, because it cannot attack. 3 The remembrance of love therefore brings invulnerability with it. 4 Do not side with sickness in the presence of a Son of God even if he believes in it, for your acceptance of God in him acknowledges the Love of God he has forgotten. 5 Your recognition of him as part of God reminds him of the truth about himself, which he is denying. 6 Would you strengthen his denial of God and thus lose sight of yourself? 7 Or would you remind him of his wholeness and remember your Creator with him?"

"To believe a Son of God is sick is to worship the same idol he does. 2 God created love, not idolatry. 3 All forms of idolatry are caricatures of creation, taught by sick minds too divided to know that creation shares power and never usurps it. 4 Sickness is idolatry, because it is the belief that power can be taken from you. 5 Yet this is impossible, because you are part of God, Who is all power."

"You made the god of sickness, and by making him you made yourself able to hear him. 5 Yet you did not create him, because he is not the Will of the Father. 6 He is therefore not eternal and will be unmade for you the instant you signify your willingness to accept only the eternal."

"You can give up the god of sickness for your brothers; in fact, you would have to do so if you give him up for yourself. 5 For if you see the god of sickness anywhere, you have accepted him. 6 And if you accept him you will bow down and worship him, because he was made as God's replacement. 7 He is the belief that you can choose which god is real. 8 Although it is clear this has nothing to do with reality, it is equally clear that it has everything to do with reality as you perceive it."

"Miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead." "You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both."

"You can do anything I ask. 2 I have asked you to perform miracles, and have made it clear that miracles are natural, corrective, healing and universal. 3 There is nothing they cannot do, but they cannot be performed in the spirit of doubt or fear. 4 When you are afraid of anything, you are acknowledging its power to hurt you. 5 Remember that where your heart is, there is your treasure also. 6 You believe in what you value. 7 If you are afraid, you are valuing wrongly. 8 Your understanding will then inevitably value wrongly, and by endowing all thoughts with equal power will inevitably destroy peace. 9 That is why the Bible speaks of "the peace of God which passeth understanding." 10 This peace is totally incapable of being shaken by errors of any kind. 11 It denies the ability of anything not of God to affect you. 12 This is the proper use of denial. 13 It is not used to hide anything, but to correct error. 14 It brings all error into the light, and since error and darkness are the same, it corrects error automatically.

T-2.II.2. True denial is a powerful protective device. 2 You can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you. 3 This kind of denial is not a concealment but a correction. 4 Your right mind depends on it. 5 Denial of error is a strong defense of truth, but denial of truth results in miscreation, the projections of the ego. 6 In the service of the right mind the denial of error frees the mind, and re-establishes the freedom of the will. 7 When the will is really free it cannot miscreate, because it recognizes only truth."

"God made not death. Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion. This the stand we take today. And it is given us to look past death and see the life beyond."

You can say that death is bad, and everything should be moved towards life. That includes healing the body and mind. There should be resurrection happening, a reversal of aging, an undoing of the effects of space and time. A return to life from death.

But this can also be mixed in with an active avoidance of death, a fear of it happening, and a wish to stop a suffering that seems real. If a person's body is real, and it is sick, you'll be motivated to "perform miracles" to heal and rescue them from death. You just want it to all go away.

This attitude of death avoidance can seem like it is in support of miracles, and even can compel and entail attempts at healing. But it's still the behaviour of an unhealed healer - a mixture of trying to resurrect the dead while still believing death is real. If bodies are real, then fixing them becomes a priority.

I went through this whole phase over the course of many years, presented with an endless supply of pictures of my wife being sick and disabled. It was practically an embarrassment to a budding ACIM miracle-worker, the amount of assistive devices we had to use - lifts and wheelchairs and special beds and medicines.

Here I was, trying to stave off death at all costs, keep the body going, undo the sickness, reverse the symptoms, resurrect the dying and make it all better. But this too was driven by a belief that my wife was a body, constantly mixing her spirit and mind with the physical form, where references to "her" always included the body.

I resisted the sickness and the death. I didn't want it to happen. I wanted to keep the body-person around for as long as possible, and couldn't even conceive of any other way of living. Keeping her ticking over was a constant struggle and a daily effort, thwarting wrong diagnoses and fending off stupid medical staff. Trying to keep the death-mongers at bay.

But eventually it got to a point where it was all exhausted, and it occurred to me that I really should just let her die. And that seemed totally against everything I believed. Not that it was up to me anyway, but I had to stop fighting it. I realised I should stop trying to keep her here, and stop trying to prevent all hell breaking loose. She didn't want to really be here any more and we were both quite done with the daily drudgery of bodily upkeep.

It was within a week of that surrendering that she died. Well, I should say, she went to heaven. Her body for sure died, and she for sure did not. Which presented its own confusing challenges to get my head around. But a few things became super clear to me.

My entire attitude about death being "a really bad thing" was totally bullshit. It was fuelled by a belief that the body was the person and must be kept alive. My fear of it and avoidance of it just attracted it. My belief in the sickness just fuelled it. But all of a sudden she was in a state of extreme freedom and happiness, relieved and grateful, totally stunned yet overjoyed.

All the suffering simply switched off. All the daily grind came to an end. All the resistance to it happening was blown out of the water. And it seemed nothing but wonderful for her. I was really thrilled for her to be free at last, which she exclaimed to me "I'm free!" and "I'm happy".

So death really wasn't that bad, after all. In fact, it appeared like a kind of liberation and mercy, given how much she'd suffered for years. I wouldn't wish her for a second to return to that body, and her joy just made me realise more how cruel the world was in not allowing her to leave sooner. The whole idea of keeping someone in a body for as long as possible was shown to be utter bullshit. A multi-lifetime soul doesn't give a shit about it.

It taught me many things all at once. The bullshit of my anti-death pro-miracle deception. My demonising of death and making it out to be a terrible thing. My resistance to the fact that everything in the world dies. It all just popped the bubble. I stopped fighting against it, and that was liberating in its own right. If you try to stop it happening, you make it happen more. But if you stop resisting it, life can take over.

It's another one of those kind of paradoxes. If you make death out to be a bad thing you will choose it. If you don't make it out to be a bad thing, people will think you're anti-miraculous and a death worshipper. But giving it any reality, importance, meaning or value, even if its negative meanings, is just more ego. Death is supposed to be nothing, nothing whatsoever. Meaningless. It's not supposed to be the opposite end of some spiritual warfare between good and evil.

I still recognize and fully believe that death in any form is not supposed to happen. It is not God's nature. Nothing real ever dies. And pretty much everything in the world does. But we also can use the mind to reverse the world's laws and perform miracles, which does still include raising the dead and healing the sick, even to the extent of bodies recovering. In fact Jesus would like for us to demonstrate bodies so healthy and lovely and filled with life that they become symbols of immortality in the dream.

Still, you're not going to get there by opposing death. And when you decide to stop opposing death, that doesn't mean you condone it. It just means you stop fueling it and stop believing in it. Avoiding it just keeps it around. And believing in it while trying not to resist it just condones it. You have to stop believing in it entirely if you want to raise the dead, and believe only in life.

I have perhaps become more truly miracle-minded now that I am no longer fighting against sickness and death. I've stopped making them my enemies. I've stopped resisting them. Well, at least to some extent. My attitude is kind of, "let it all just die", but that too could sound like some murderous idea. The world is hell-bent on dying anyway, so fighting that is bullshit. But at the same time, in that same attitude of letting it go, we can also step into a power that's able to reverse those laws and undo death.

In effect, you bring an end to death by not making it out to be an ending. You withdraw your belief in it being some terrible tragic thing that everyone must avoid at all costs. So shit dies, so what. Fuck it. Who cares. Souls don't care. They just move on and have more lifetimes with fresh healthy new bodies. And being out of the body is fantastic in comparison to coming into one.

This is not in any way to glorify death or sickness, or to suggest to let people keep suffering and not be helpful. But make it real and you die alone with it. Only the living can raise the dead. We are still called to be miracle workers, to raise the dead and heal the sick where possible. To be truly helpful to everyone, to choose not to die ourselves, and to be an example of resurrection. Even to the extent of having our bodies become incapable of death.

But we don't get there by first believing in death and then trying to forgive or undo it. We're the ones that make death have power over us by believing in it. And having made it out to be a power that we can't prevent, which is a projection and disowning of our own power, all we do is end up fighting with ourselves in turmoil. I'm not interested in trying to come off as having some kind of saviour complex, wanting to heal and save everyone from dying.

Most people are going to snuff it in this lifetime because they'r not ready to go all the way. I spent decades trying to heal my wife and reverse her amputations and paralysis and heart disease and brain damage, but bullshit to that because, as it turns out, that was not the plan anyway. The plan was to use the opportunity to learn that making sickness and death real and then resisting it is not the way to be miraculous. To use the sickness as a way to learn to stop believing in it. The plan was never to radically zap her body into a state of perfection. Not in this life.

I totally failed to raise the dead, and it was a great lesson. It almost couldn't have gone any better. In the big picture, this is what I was ready to learn, not that I was some hero that could just zap away death with miracles all over the place. That heroic rescuer bullshit had to die as well. You're far better off letting shit go sometimes. Just as Jesus kept saying to me, "let her."

So some people are not meant to be resurrected in this life. The bigger plan might not call for it and they might not be willing. The Holy Spirit knows what's best and what's possible or appropriate. Some people don't want healing. Some are not ready for an "undiluted miracle." Some want to die too much and aren't ready to forgive themselves. Some are there to play a role for a while and then leave, perhaps to rejoin at a later encounter and carry on. It doesn't all have to happen in one lifetime, and most of the time doesn't.

So I have a much looser attitude now. I recognise the world is just full of disappointment and death so I get much less attached to the bullshit of temptation. I am no longer so mistaken to get all wound up if someone is sick. I'm not feeling like trying to fix and save and stop it happening out of some inability to let it be. Jesus was forever telling me "it's fine" even as my wife's leg was getting chopped off, even as she had a stroke, even as she was in the ICU twice and on her death bed. "It's fine" he said, because ultimately it doesn't matter whatsoever. Nothing real can be threatened. No-one ever dies. Just the body.

This has shown me that from the soul's perspective this world is just here for us to use temporarily. To repurpose. We go through bodies like water. We take on roles and challenges, lessons to learn and people to meet, and we move on. Probably across countless lifetimes. None of the physical shit really matters. It's not important at all. If people are to come and go and die off and leave, so what, you'll see them again. They were never a body in the first place, and the body is worthless anyway. This whole world will be thrown down the toilet and flushed away eventually "as the world spins into the nothingness from which it came."

So yeah. Be miraculous and overcome death by not believing in death and not resisting it. Gotta not resist it if you want there to be any freedom there. If you want to replace it with life you can't be dimming your light with death-believing thoughts of resistances rooted in a fear of loss. This is why we let the dead (in mind/heart) bury the dead (in body). It doesn't matter. Graveyards aren't even real. All of us are spiritual immortal beings who will live forever, and we will never ever be separate or alone.

When we're ready to surmount death and stop dying entirely, we'll resurrect the body and make it disappear. The body then becomes incapable of being sick or dying, so it can only leave by vanishing. The mind overlooks the illusion of death and recognises it as nothing, and away it goes. Then the body is no more, and never was, and you will never again go through death, or birth for that matter. I'm no longer an anti-death spokesperson. Death doesn't exist.

"There is no death. The Son of God is free."

"We call it death, but it is liberty. It does not come in forms that seem to be thrust down in pain upon unwilling flesh, but as a gentle welcome to release. If there has been true healing, this can be the form in which death comes when it is time to rest a while from labor gladly done and gladly ended. Now we go in peace to freer air and gentler climate, where it is not hard to see the gifts we gave were saved for us. For Christ is clearer now; His vision more sustained in us; His Voice, the Word of God, more certainly our own."

"THE CENTRAL LESSON IS ALWAYS THIS; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. 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."

Ok.

If you can FULLY accept what Jesus is saying here, it means very simply that the body has absolutely NO SAY in its own condition. It has no mind and no will. There are no outside causes that determine the body's health or sickness. The body is nothing but a SLAVE to the mind. The body OBEYS the mind at all times. It is the EFFECT of the mind and the mind is the CAUSE of it. This boils down to a simple mechanic which is always in effect:

***** The mind projects the body. *****

The mind is like a movie projector. The body is like a movie. The mind projects the body outward. Jesus confirmed this clearly in this notes about his resurrection:

"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 illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand."

So here, notice particularly Jesus says "THE MIND THAT MADE THE BODY CAN MAKE ANOTHER".

So that means, 100%, the mind is responsible for MAKING the body, PROJECTING it, maintaining it, causing it, defining it, establishing its condition, deciding whether or not it shows up as sick or healthy, and the body is NOTHING but an EFFECT.

This is also why Jesus confirms:

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

So once again we are taught there are NO OTHER CAUSES of the body's health - whether it is ill or not - other than YOU and YOUR MIND.

So now you have to realize something important here. The body is *ALWAYS* an outward picture of an inward condition. The body is *ALWAYS* being determined by the mind. And the mind is *ALWAYS* responsible for its condition while it persists.

If the mind, like a movie projector, SWITCHES OFF its projection, the movie disappears. The mind can switch the body on or off at any time. The IMAGE that is the body, is entirely COMING FROM the mind. The mind has POWER OVER it in every way. The movie cannot turn around and determine its own content, nor can it maintain its own stories or keep its own state. The body has no STATE of its own. It has no history. It is NOT the result of "past causes" or past decisions or "things that happens to it 10 years ago".

So you have to realize, the state of the body, and the body showing up AT ALL, is because the mind is PROJECTING A FRESH ONE RIGHT NOW. Whatever configuration the body shows up in, your mind RIGHT NOW is projecting that image. The body is NOT being maintained "through time" nor is it the RESULT of the past. That is "horizontal perception" and is a lie of the ego. "Vertical perception" recognizes that the mind is ABOVE the body and projects it downward. It has full authority over it. Just as mind is the dreamer and body is the dream.

THEREFORE. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE consider this VITAL point...

At no time does the body have ANY ABILITY to determine its own condition. It cannot "stay sick" or "keep disability" or "continue being broken" UNLESS the mind is CONSTANTLY STILL CONTINUING to attack it and MAKE IT BE WHAT IT IS.

The mind never disowns the body's condition. The mind is the ONLY CAUSE of the body's condition. And so that means this very important fact which MANY ACIM folk are in denial of and keep rejecting:

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PROJECT A SICK BODY FROM A HEALTHY MIND.

And similarly this leads to this further realization:

You cannot "transcend sickness" of the body and "not care" about the body's state, CLAIMING that your mind is pure and spiritual and filled with LOVE, WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY MAINTAINING A SICK BODY IMAGE.

A sick mind PROJECTS a sick body.

A healthy mind PROJECTS a healthy body.

This is a "central teaching" according to Jesus. If you use the body to attack, ie your mind wants to attack another, it uses the body as a weapon and the body thus becomes affected by attack thoughts and becomes a PICTURE of attack - SICK, broken, damaged. It SHOWS damage to your brother to accuse him of sin, "brother by your hand I die."

If your mind TRULY, genuinely, honestly, is in a state of love and sanity, it HEALS THE BODY. "The mind, being sane, heals the body." This is because the body doesn't keep its own condition. It CANNOT REFUSE TO BE HEALED. If the mind is flowing love and light through it, the body WILL HEAL and the mind will now project FROM a loving mind, a PICTURE of a "loved body image", which will show up as FREE FROM SICKNESS AND DAMAGE.

"Those who are sick (physically, because body health comes FROM mind health) do not love themselves. For if they loved themselves they would HEAL themselves."

And if they were to LOVE themselves, they would Heal their MIND, and this WOULD PROJECT A HEALED BODY. The sick body will VANISH and be REPLACED with a healthy one. Always, at all times, the body is being PROJECTED OUT from the movie projector mind. Change the movie in the MIND, and the PROJECTION MUST CHANGE.

This is the same principle as "projection makes perception."

There is no escaping this mechanism. WHILE you have a body, IF it is sick, YOUR MIND IS SICK. Since "sickness is a defense against the truth'" and since "a broken body is PROOF the mind has not been healed", if sickness REMAINS in the body, the mind MUST NOT be healthy, and there MUST still be a defense against the truth IN THE MIND.

Therefore it is IMPOSSIBLE to have a sick body at the same time as having a healthy mind!!!!

And because of this fact, even if bodies are not real and don't exist and your awakened mind doesn't even produce a body AT ALL because it no longer believes in illusions, *IF* you ARE producing a body still, its condition DOES REFLECT your mental health. At all times. And therefore it is a "barometer" for determining whether your mind is healthy or not. And it is an indicator of what you think of your brother. "Sick bodies are accusers". You cannot continue having a sick body "with a healthy mind" and NOT BE ACCUSING. If your body is sick, YOU ARE AN ACCUSER, and are trying to be contagious. THAT is not sanity.

If you could see that the body is only an image being projected outward by the mind, like a holographic projection, and if you could see that your mind is able to switch that image on and off at will, and if you could experiment to see that when you hate you project a hateful body with signs of distortion and when you love you project a loving body immaculate and undefiled, you would REALIZE that NEVER can you make a healed body show up WHILE you are angry or attacking, and the ONLY way to make a healthy body show up is to USE IT FOR LOVE.

"Use it to bring the word of God to those who have it not and the body BECOMES holy (is projected as healed/whole). Being holy, it CANNOT BE SICK, NOR CAN IT DIE."

The body then reaches a state where it is a SYMBOL of immortality. It is not immortal ITSELF because, remember, it is a second-hand projected effect from the mind. The MIND becomes immortal and the body image REFLECTS it. The body, ALWAYS a symbol, now shows a symbolic representation of health and wholeness and being healed and free from attack of any kind. It REPRESENTS holiness in the mind. And the holy, sane mind, CAN ONLY project this kind of body. For a "sane mind" to project an "attacked body" is a DOUBLE MESSAGE, and is a split minded teaching. Absolute bullshit, AND impossible.

You then USE this symbol of immortality and health to SHOW OTHERS PROOF that your mind is healed and that your brother is exonerated. "Brother, at your hand I live" is the message it transmits to anyone who encounters it. And in it there are NO SIGNS of attack or sicknesss, PROVING that your brother CANNOT ATTACK IT, is not the cause of it, has no effect on it, CANNOT MAKE IT SICK, and CANNOT KILL IT. It literally is invulerable because the mind simply is TOTALLY responsible for its projection and its condition.

The mind can simply KEEP PROJECTING a healed body, in realtime, live, each moment, to OVERRIDE any attempted affects or attacks that ANYTHING EXTERNAL tries to "do to it." This is a supernatural state of PROTECTION which "sickness is a defense against the truth" mentions.

Jesus even goes on to say that you can relieve the body of the laws you made it serve before, and it is no longer even subject to FOOD, or WEATHER, or TIME (aging) or any other EXTERNAL CAUSALITY. Because now if the mind is in PURE CAUSALITY, the body CAN ONLY BE what the mind wants to show itself as. Therefore the body no longer HAS ANY EXTERNAL NEEDS, which were all fake to begin with. Why would a holographically projected IMAGE need anything from the world, when it's just an IMAGE being PROJECTED like a movie?! The mind now OVERRIDES ALL OF THE EGO'S LAWS and because of ITS transcendence of death, can project a body that CANNOT BE AFFECTED.

It is only then through a sane mind which SHOWS A HEALED BODY, that you can reach atonement in the mind, OR access resurrection. The curriculum ENDS in the resurrection, which is a state of MIND that has TOTAL POWER OVER DEATH, and is PURELY CAUSAL. This is a course in cause, not effect. And for a while, it can project a "perfect body" to represent the mind's resurrected state. When you are done using it, you DISAPPEAR IT, and it literally vanishes into nothingness, because THE MIND WAS PROJECTING IT AS AN IMAGE. When you switch off the projector, the movie disappears!

That is the ONLY WAY to exit the dream of death. You exit THROUGH LIFE. Through immortality. You can NEVER EVER exit through "my body is sick and it died". EVER. Under no conditions. No exceptions. If you are CAUSING your body to be sick or to die, through a CHOICE TO DIE, (and all death is suicide and FAILURE) you are OPPOSING GOD's WILL because your MIND is opposing LIFE and is using the body to ATTACK, not only yourself but your brother. Sick and dead bodies are accusers and they COME FROM sick minds.

You cannot leave this dream through death or sickness. And since the body's condition COMES FROM the MINDS CONDITION, they are TIED TOGETHER, and that means the ONLY WAY to exit the dream is to FIRST ACHIEVE perfect physical health as an out-picturing of a SANE MIND - a "healed body", AND THEN to disappear the body purely by the power of the mind. If the body is still sick, YOU CANNOT BE AWAKE. "A broken body is PROOF the mind HAS NOT been healed."

"That the body cannot heal the mind but the mind can heal the body, proves the mind must be stronger than the body. Even miracle demonstrates this." Therefore a MIRACLE is supposed to produce BODY HEALING. To SHOW that the mind is MORE POWERFUL THAN FORM and more powerful than matter and the world and any external causes. Miracles REVEAL that the mind IS THE CAUSE OF THE BODY, and that the mind has power over sickness and death. And EXERCISES THAT POWER to reverse sickness and death and to make sickness and death IMPOSSIBLE.

You must demonstrate LIFE.

You must NOT demonstrate sickness or death.

Miracles restore life to what was sick and dead. Miracles are the means of the resurrection. Miracles can raise the dead and RETURN TO LIFE that which was less alive before. If there is still sickness in the body, THERE HAS NOT BEEN RESURRECTION.

Only when you can embrace a doctrine of "ONLY LIFE EXISTS" can you finish the curriculum and go home. Because in Heaven, in reality, only life exists. There is no death. You cannot be PROVING that there IS DEATH and BELIEVE that there is NOT death. You HAVE to demonstrate that you REALLY believe it by SHOWING IT through your body. Otherwise if your body has a DIFFERENT state to your mind (which is impossible) you are in deception, denial, and death.

Only life is real. Only life is true. Only life is the way out of death. "Only life" is the entire teaching of A Course in Miracles.

"Swear not to die, you holy son of God!!!"

Jesus left the dream through a FULLY HEALED SICK-FREE BODY. So must you.

When we say something is unnatural, we think of it being creepy, disgusting, maybe bad for your health, opposed to the way that a loving person would be, not supposed to be happening, a bad idea, going against the grain and sure to produce suffering etc.

The world is unnatural. God did not create it.

We think of it is "natural", and we call it natural. We think of "nature" and all the forests and oceans and trees and animals and plants and fish in the sea, and puppies and kittens and rainbows and sunsets, we think it is all natural. Part of the "nature" of how things are in this so-called universe.

We even think the body is natural, part of nature, a given thing. We think having babies is natural. We think that dying is natural. We think that growth and evolution are natural. We think it is natural to be able to see and sense things with the body. We think it is natural that we are here and that we should enjoy it as much as possible then die. All of this is UN-NATURAL.

We even think that this universe is run by natural laws. We think there are laws of physics, chemistry, biology, which govern the functioning of all things we see. Laws about how two being have relationships. Laws about having to eat food and consume liquids from the external world in order to survive. We think surviving is natural. We think wanting to avoid death is natural, and yet believe death is natural. All of the ego's laws are unnatural. They are laws of chaos.

We may even think that this world is SO natural that God created it, with its natural beauty and its lovely sunsets and beautiful animals and wonderful ocean beaches. But are these things natural, an extension of the "true nature" of being, true nature of Creation or a loving creator? No.

Nothing in this world is natural. Nothing to do with our bodies is natural. Nothing in this entire physical universe is natural. This is an UNNATURAL PLACE TO BE. This world is not your home!

You would only come to recognize this IF you were to become aware of a DIFFERENT way of existing which you knew was incredibly natural, and that by contrast to it, you could recognize that the physical world is so incredibly unnatural by comparison.

Is it natural that light can be blocked by form and then produces shadows of darkness? Does that seem natural? What if it is natural that light is everywhere and darkness (matter) cannot block it at all?

Is it natural that things are born and multiply and change and evolve and grow and wither and die? How about if cell division is separation and fragmentation? How about if an increasing population is a sign of increasing fragmentation? How about if growth and change are symptomatic of trying to CHANGE GOD, and to cover up permanence? What if change and time are unnatural?

What if you experienced permanence and knew it to be changeless and constant and consistent and something you can truly TRUST and RELY ON, and then could contrast the world against that to recognize that the world is utterly UNRELIABLE, cannot be trusted, and that its changes are a pathetic substitute for life?

Change itself is an expression of the idea that we left God. Something changed. What we were experiencing before, stopped being our experience and we shifted to something else. Reality seems to adjust, change, adapt, become forever altered, incapable of returning to how it was previously. Hence time and space, which are UNNATURAL. The body itself is an idea of SIN made flesh and projected outwards. The entire physical universe is the idea of SIN projected outwards. That's hardly natural, more like a cancerous growth.

Change is not natural. Change is an illusion of impossibility - that you are succeeding in changing yourself into something you are not, and changing God's will against His will. Is this world God's will? Not in the slightest. A loving God could not create a world like this and subject his Children to it and be loving.

Is it natural for bodies to sense environments and to have the environment tell the body what exists? This is not natural. What exists is WITHIN YOU ALREADY. To have to "sense" what is out there is a poor substitute, an attempt to suggest that you have NO INNER VISION and therefore need to ask SOMETHING ELSE to tell you what exists. How unnatural is that? The bodies eyes are made to make you blind, not to make you see what exists. The world that the body looks upon is NOT THERE.

How can it be in God's nature, for any of the things that we witness in this world to be correlated with complete unconditional love and perfect PERMANENT creation? All things that perish and wither and die, including bodies, cannot be God's creation. God did not create trees and animals and people and planets. God can only create more of what he ALREADY IS, which is pure love. Nothing else. No exceptions. Anything else showing up is UNNATURAL. Something has gone wrong.

Miracles are supposed to be happening ALL THE TIME. When miracles are not happening all the time, something has gone wrong. This is because miracles express the timeless perfection and TRUTH of Love, the NATURE of God. The NATURE of real existence. It is natural to be miraculous. It is natural to be capable of ANYTHING. There is NOTHING your holiness cannot do.

When you are failing to be able to do hardly anything, but move a little body around and only do things which the body says you can do, having no direct power of the mind over matter, and no ability to affect anything external from the body, SOMETHING HAS GONE WRONG. The body was made to block vision, to block life, to block God. It is not natural to be in or showing up as a body. It goes against your God-given nature.

Miracles express the idea that what is of God is SUPERNATURAL. Or to put it more accurately, everything of God is truly NATURAL, and everything else is UNNATURAL. The world, bodies, life/death, growth/change, planets and stars, events in time, are all unnatural. This is not creation. God's creation has power over all of these unnatural things. Heaven has power over all these unnatural things. And all of these unnatural things are EASILY CHANGED if so desired, by the power of the mind.

Miracles always PROVE that the mind is more powerful than the body/form/illusion because they are capable of changing those things at will, or making or unmaking them at will, and those things can do NOTHING to prevent it. All miracles demonstrate that the mind is more powerful than the body. As demonstrations, they demonstrate what us "nature-believers" would call SUPER-NATURAL. Beyond the nature of THIS world, beyond what we think is NATURAL, because what we think is natural is NOT NATURAL.

The ego's laws are not natural. Death is not natural. Aging is not natural. Sickness is not natural. Needing to DEPEND ON something in the world to exist and survive is NOT NATURAL. We are supposed to be FULLY SUSTAINED BY THE LOVE OF GOD AT ALL TIMES, needing NOTHING ELSE. That's what is natural. Powered by love! We have no other real needs. All other needs are UNNATURAL NEEDS that we made up to replace nature, not to be nature.

When miracles demonstrate that the ego's "nature" is BULLSHIT, perhaps by instantly reversing blindness, or curing cancer, or rematerializing a missing limb, or raising someone's body from death, or curing a mental illness, or parting the ocean, or walking on water, or whatever... it is only POSSIBLE because the ego's world is UNNATURAL. What is NATURAL is to be completely free of the ego's laws, able to totally overthrow them, to IGNORE them, to demonstrate that NONE OF THEM APPLY, and therefore prove that THIS WORLD'S "NATURE" IS NOT THE WAY THINGS ARE. The world's nature is fake nature.

It is natural to be with God. It is natural to be happy all the time. It is natural to be miraculous all the time. It is is natural to receive absolutely all needs and supplies directly from God, even if that means materializing items out of thin air on demand. It is natural to be directed by God's will where to go and what to do and what to say and how to heal.

It is natural to be in a permanent state of HEALTH and HEALING. It is natural to be a healer at all times. It is natural to be awake and free of all fear, sin, guilt, suffering, sickness and death. It is natural to be IMMORTAL. It is natural to have total power over all illusions, all forms, bodies, worldly "laws" and everything else which is ego bullshit lies. That's what's natural.

God's nature is the only true nature. All other natures are false. You want the nature of the world and its naturalness? The world holds NOTHING that you want. You really want God. That's the nature you should be recognizing as real.

A lie is when something false is presented as if it's true. The false thing is still false, but it is disguised as truth. This false thing is deceptive because it isn't what it seems to be. It seems true on the surface, but it isn't.

If someone presents something false as if it's true, that person is being deceptive. They are hiding what the truth really is, behind a pretend truth, which substitutes for it.

What then seems to be true is actually false, but while you don't recognize it AS false, you are fixated on it. The way that a false thing seems to be true, is what we call an illusion. It appears like truth but isn't. Perhaps its shape, its form, its color, its movement, all are a facade covering up the lie.

To fall for this presentation of something false "as if its true" is to be deceived. The presentation of this illusion is a temptation. It tempts you to believe that something false is true when it isn't. It is lying to you. If you fall for the trick you will buy into it and be convinced. But you can only fall for it by not knowing or recognizing what the truth really is.

The real truth, God's truth, is like a light which frames everything in its proper perspective. In light of what you are aware of as true, it is impossible to be convinced that something false is true. The real truth is obvious, and provided you remain aware of it, you cannot but laugh at the ridiculous efforts of illusions to pretend to be the truth. They are obviously false when you are sane.

As you lose sight of the truth, blocked in your awareness, confused about whether the truth really is true or not, you will enter into a doubting of the truth, and doubt is fear. Being uncertain what the truth is is automatically a state of fear. And so fear (and death) are the nature of all illusions.

To question the truth is the authority problem, an attempt to assert that the truth (God) isn't what it is, and is something else. It's an accusation that the truth is an illusion, that it is deceptive, that it can't be trusted, and is false.

In other words, the deceptive nature of illusions - false things pretending to be truth - is projected onto the truth to try to make out that the truth is deceptive and is "not really true." While claiming that God's truth is lying to you, the ego simultaneously lies to you with untruths masquerading as truth.

Simultaneously, that which is false begins to seem plausible, believable, realistic, convincing, possible, tempting, and seemingly true. You couldn't possibly experience it this way if you were recognizing what the truth really is. "You aren't seriously buying into that lie, are you?"

But because you don't, or have lost sight of it, or it's unclear, false things seem to "make sense", take on an air of reality, and are assumed to be unchallengeable.

The world is a lie. It is false. It was made to oppose the nature of the Kingdom of God. Since the Kingdom is the real truth, the artificial world must take on all the characteristics of something false.

That means the world must be an illusion, it must be deceptive, it must be a lie, it must be made to tempt you to believe it's real, it must seem like reality, it must seem believable based on surface appearances (forms), it seems to true, and it must also seem to block reality.

Lies also have a lot to do with honesty. Someone who is honest does not lie, is not deceived or deceptive, does not tempt sin and does not believe in illusions. An honest person recognizes what is really true AND what is really false. They go hand in hand. Only the truth is true, and everything false is false.

Someone who is honest does not deceive, just as someone who is dishonest does seek to deceive. The ego, as we call it, is a label for an attempt to deceive or be deceived. It is a symbol for "a liar", someone who is putting forth a state of something false, made of illusions, pretending they are the truth. It claims that false things are true and true things are false. It lies to you.

The ego's lies have taken on the form of a physical planet, human bodies, birds in the sky, forests and mountains, lakes and rivers and fish, weather, solar systems, galaxies and the like. These are all false. They are all illusions. They are lies. They are not what they appear to be. They are not the Kingdom of God and they are not real, but they tempt you to believe they are.

Death is a lie. Sickness is a lie. Suffering is a lie. Unhappiness is a lie. Guilt is a lie. Sin is a lie. Fear is a lie. Bodies are lies. Planets are lies. The sun is a lie. Physics is a lie. Cancer and heart disease and strokes and trauma and abuse and pain are lies. Aging is a lie. Time is a lie. Facebook is a lie. Your clothes are lies. This whole universe is a lie. Separation from God is a lie.

It's a lie because it is literally a vast illusory realm of utter nonsense, manufacturer by a "lying" dishonest mind, projected based on the lie of separation, taking on myriad forms of lies, all trying to tempt you to believe the lie. The whole world was made to tempt you to think you are a body, that others are bodies, and that the world is real. It's a big stinking lie.

"Temptation has one lesson it would teach, in all its forms, wherever it occurs. It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what must die, unable to escape its frailty, and bound by what it orders him to feel. It sets the limits on what he can do; its power is the only strength he has; his grasp cannot exceed its tiny reach."

The only way not to be tempted by the world, is to not believe in it. And the only way not to believe is to not attribute truth to it. Which means recognizing that it is purely false. To see the falseness that it is made of, recognizing it AS false, and not for an instant giving it the slightest credit as anything true or real.

You might seem to be surrounded and bombarded by a lying world day in and day out but you must not be deceived by it if you want to be aware of the truth. The truth is of God and it is completely opposite to everything this world presents to your senses.

This world is as if someone told the biggest lie that could ever possibly be told, so big, so vast, so far reaching, that it produced an entire universe-sized lie. The world holds nothing that you want. It's not your home. It's not even really existing. The whole idea of "there is no world" is telling you that the world is fiction, a dream, imagined, made up.

All lies are made up. They are like stories. We invent them. We make them out of nowhere, weave them into what seem like feasible meaningful sequences, but they are total nonsense. Like fairtytales. They're not even based on the truth. Just outright total lies. Lies of things happening and people doing things that are impossible. Things that in reality could NEVER be true.

It could NEVER be true that God's son suffers, is sick, dies, reincarnates as a horse, shits on his former grave, and is then blown up by a rocket. It could NEVER be true that anything real be threatenable or damaged or that you could ever sin against it. It could NEVER be true that you can die or really suffer in any way. And it could NEVER be true that THE LIE ITSELF can ever take the place of or have power over the real truth.

It's a world of lies, based on a lie, made of lies, telling lies all the time. The body lies all the time. There is nothing to see or hear or touch or taste or smell. There isn't even a world here. Nothing has even happened.

(Mind).. "it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substance-less, and all events are nowhere."

To be aware of the real truth is to be clear about what really is true, and what is false. It merely is a recognition of the truth. To accept atonement is to accept that ONLY God's truth is true, and there are no lies mixed in with it. It is not mistaken for something it is not.

It is fully embraced as ONLY God intended it, unchanged and unaltered, free of all deceit and denial. It's a state where the truth is recognized as true and false things are recognized as false. To be clear about this is enlightenment.

"Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all."

You not only have to be extremely honest you have to be ABSOLUTELY perfectly honest. Perfect honesty means fully willing to admit (allow access to) that the truth is true. It means completely accepting and supporting that truth without taking a side against it.

"The peace of mind which the advanced teachers of God experience is largely due to their perfect honesty. It is only the wish to deceive that makes for war. No one at one with himself can even conceive of conflict. Conflict is the inevitable result of self-deception, and self-deception is dishonesty."

"Honesty does not apply only to what you say. The term actually means consistency. There is nothing you say that contradicts what you think or do; no thought opposes any other thought; no act belies your word; and no word lacks agreement with another. Such are the truly honest. At no level are they in conflict with themselves. Therefore it is impossible for them to be in conflict with anyone or anything."

It means honestly presenting and representing that truth without a shred of deception, denial, avoidance, pretense, manipulation, change or distortion. God's teachers are completely honest with themselves and with everything.

Any degree of denial, any block or unwillingness to be aware of the truth, any lack of recognition of what the truth really is (via the real world then heaven), any avoidance of God, any fear, any belief in the world, any movement away from what is, is going into the lie. The state of not truth. Either you want the truth or you want the lie. Either you speak the truth or you speak the lies.

The world simply is false. It is nothing. It is not reality. It is not God's creation. It has nothing to offer. It isn't doing anything. It has no power or meaning. It produces no real consequences. Everything it depicts is false. It has no life. It has no sharing. It has no truth. The truth is not out there in the world. There is no world for the truth to be out there in.

"Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way."

"When the "lies of the serpent" were introduced, they were specifically called lies because they are not true. When man listened, all he heard was untruth. He does not have to continue to believe what is not true, unless he chooses to do so. All of his miscreations can disappear in the well known "twinkling of an eye", because it is a visual misperception."

"The Son of God CAN be mistaken; he CAN deceive himself"

"The mind can not attack, but it CAN deceive itself."

"The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

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

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

Knowledge is not the remedy for false perception since, being another level, they can never meet. The one correction possible for false perception must be true perception. It will not endure. But for the time it lasts it comes to heal. For true perception is a remedy with many names. Forgiveness, salvation, Atonement, true perception, all are one. They are the one beginning, with the end to lead to oneness far beyond themselves. True perception is the means by which the world is saved from sin, for sin does not exist. And it is this that true perception sees.

The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came.

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

Everything in the world is an illusion. Everything. And this includes the bodies which are seemingly healthy, the bodies which are seemingly sick, and the bodies that seem dead. This also means that trees which have fresh green leaves are as much an illusion as trees whose leaves have fallen and are decaying. Images of a lovely sunset are just as much an illusion as stormy skies. Animals leaping around happily is just as much illusion as carcasses on the side of the road.

In the ego world, there are symbols, because it is a dream. And sometimes these symbols seem to imply that some parts of the world are different to others, or mean something that other parts do not mean. So we are used to the idea that a dead body is the idea of death. But bodies that are walking around are also not really alive either. We can think that when the leaves are falling from the trees, it's death happening, but perhaps we didn't realize when the leaves were on the trees that it was still a dream of death.

So in this world, there is deception all over the place. Things appear to be something they are not. The symbols that look like life only seem to be life, while the ones that look like death are only different in their forms. And it is us who have given meaning to them and decided "this one means death and that one means life". All of the forms, in whatever condition they are, are forms of death. As Jesus tells us:

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. *****In any state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it seems like life; at worst, like death.***** Yet both are judgments on ****what is not life****, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. Outside of Heaven (e.g. on Earth), only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true. "

So because illusions are forms (objects, shapes, materials, bodies, planets etc), their content is not true. They are illusions of life and death. An illusion of life is not really life. Life actually means ETERNAL LIFE, that which can never perish, that which is not born and does not grow and does not die and has no sickness or transformation. Life means that which never changes because it is permanent. Only in Heaven's reality is there eternal life, and that is the only REAL life there is. The rest of what we call life, the "life forms" of this world, are an illusion of life AT BEST.

"Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible."

Here Jesus is contrasting vertically the two states or levels. In Heaven all things live and cannot die. In illusions, all things die and cannot really live. The world we see is an illusion of a world that God did not create.

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

So having been in this world a long time, we are likely very used to the deception that some things in the world are more alive than others. Some people seem to have more health than others. Some bodies seem more dead than others. This is an illusion. All bodies are illusions, and their condition or state does not make them more or less real. One is not really more or less dead than another. Even a dead body in the ground is, in terms of miracle mindedness, no more dead than a living body. This is why for a miracle worker "dead-seeming" bodies can be converted or resurrected into living-seeming bodies as a kind of "translation of form".

"EVERYTHING is accomplished through life, and life is of the mind and in the Mind. The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."

Again Jesus is telling us life is to do with mind and heaven, not to do with bodies. And it's reinforced by this idea.

""And the last to be overcome will be death." Of course! ***Without the idea of death there is no world.*** All dreams will end with this one. This is salvation's final goal; the end of all illusions. And in death are all illusions born. What can be born of death and still have life? But what is born of God and still can die? "

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem."

So every illusion, every part of the dream, all objects, all bodies, in all states and configurations, are all made of illusions, and ALL illusions are made of death. We have to therefore realize that death does not mean HORIZONTAL death, as in, at the end of the road of time for a given object. Or a state that follows on after another. Rather, the ENTIRE world we made, the universe, is all a dream of death. This whole planet is an idea of death.

VERTICALLY, anything on this level physically is an attempt to remove ourselves away from where eternal life is, away from Heaven. To move down a level. To drop into illusions, to sink into a dream world. And that world is based entirely on the idea that reality, Heaven, is not real. It's the idea of separation or opposition to Eternal Life, that you are exiled and outside of the Kingdom where eternal life is. And so it's the idea of NOT being alive. It's an idea of the opposite to life and permanence. And everything in it, no matter its form or appearance, is an illusion of death or partial life at best.

Even the most vibrant bunch of flowers is actually an illusion of not life. Even a newborn baby, of any species, is not a "new life" but rather a new form of death. Even as the season of spring seems to give life to new fresh growth, it is only later to transition into the season of "dying" and decay simply because both the birthing and dying are built into the system. Anything made of illusions has the mark of death upon it, meaning it already is formed from ideas of death and separation at the moment it is made. Every particle of matter is a separation idea and therefore an idea of opposition or attack upon God.

"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.****"

So even at the instant that illusory things are first formed, they are formed FROM the idea of death and separation and limitation. They have it built in. If they are born at all, death is guaranteed and "happening" already. Because all forms are lacking in some way, they are all lacking what the other forms seem to have, and all of them are inherently limited and limiting. None of them are whole, none are complete, and not have eternal life. And every single body is an idea of being little and lacking and less than everywhere.

"This aching world (Earth) has not the power to touch the living world (Heaven) at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world."

So this world is not the living world. The Kingdom of God is the living world, because life means permanent life, not some temporary mockery of life. It is insane to think that real life is a matter of existing a little while and then dying at a bodily level. Life perpetuates and sustains and continues forever and cannot be destroyed. God creates ONLY the eternal.

"Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end?"

"What God creates is eternal."

A big part of awakening then must entail the re-framing or re-evaluating of everything you see here. We need to realize the dream entails a hierarchy of illusions, and this hierarchy is entirely fictional. And everything it suggest through different FORMS is a deception and a temptation to believe something that isn't true.

Big bodies, small bodies, healthy bodies, dead bodies, are all the same illusion. None of them are more real than another. None of them are really closer to God. Big sickness, small sickness, tiny headache, massive tumor, none of them are any different. The only reason you would believe they are different, or more or less serious, is by looking to the appearance of their form and taking it as evidence or MEANING as to what the thing is. Every single illusion is deceptive. Every appearance is a lie.

"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.*** ***They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful.*** Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."

When we reach a state of not being deceived by ANY appearance, we are in miracle mindedness. Which is right mindedness. Here the hierarchy of illusions is completely flattened and meaningless. There is no difference between a form in one configuration or another. We are not deceived by physical form, shape or appearance. One type of appearance does not trigger worse reactions than another, or any reactions, nor means something different to the rest. A "dead" appearing body is not regarded as any more dead than a living one. As such raising the dead is seen as NO MORE DIFFICULT than curing a headache, because all illusions are the same and you are not deceived by them. You can raise the dead as easily as heal an upset feeling.

"You who are dedicated to the incorruptible have been given through your acceptance, the power to release from corruption. What better way to teach the first and fundamental principle in a course on miracles than by showing you the one that seems to be the hardest can be accomplished first?"

When you are not deceived by illusions of life and death, forms of sickness, appearances of severity, you cannot be afraid, you can only be miraculous. Miracle mindedness transcends the world of illusions because The Miracle IS the state of Christ Vision which overlooks all forms. There is, from that position, nothing that your holiness cannot do. And it is from this state that you are a miracle worker. Here you are using miracles as demonstrations to PROVE that what appears to be death is not death, and you are under no laws but God's, where miracles break all the illusory laws of the world of appearances.

"Miracles do not obey the laws of this world."

"Miracles reflect the laws of eternity, not of time."

"The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you can see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. 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. Perceiving His results, you will understand where He must be, and finally KNOW what He is."

There is a simple law about health that you need to know about, as described here:

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use if for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. 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."

If you do not regard yourself as an illusion in any way ("I am not an illusion but a reality"), you do not see YOURSELF as an illusion, and therefore you do not SHOW UP AS an illusion. Instead, you show up as INVISIBLE. As if you have no body. You do not need a body, and the body would not be an accurate identification of what you think of yourself.

The body is always coming from your mind, as an outward picture of an inward condition. Always. It is always being projected outward. It never has its own condition or its own state of being or its own mind or will or power or thoughts or anything else. It’s purely a projected mental image. It is YOUR mental image about what you think your identity is. Or, what you are made of. Or, what you think is true of you.

If you think it is true of you that you are less than as God created you, pure spirit, wholeness, having no form or need for form, you WILL materialize - ie mis-create - what appears to be a body out of nowhere. The mind makes the body. And the mind can make as many bodies as it likes. As Jesus said in the special notes to Helen, here are his exact words where he describes exactly what I’ve just said:

"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. 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."

His body disappeared because He had no illusions about himself, his identity. He did not identify himself as dead, or made of separation, and so He stopped showing up as that. He stopped imagining himself as that.

Note he also says, the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. The mind MAKES the body. And it constantly is projecting a body when it sees itself as limited. It is projecting the body at every moment to sustain an illusion of a constant self. But the body is always an effect, never a cause of anything. So if the mind wants to believe something else, the body MUST change. It has no will to stop the mind.

Now, a very important thing to realize is, the state of the body, being a mental picture of "self", directly corresponds ALWAYS to how a person’s mind is seeing itself. What it believes it is. So if it believes it is sinful or guilty, the mind will attack itself, thus attack its own image of itself which will show up as a body infected by or attacked by guilt and sin. This will make the body appear, ie be projected as though, it seems to be "sick". It does not "have" a sickness, it IS a sickness.

It will REMAIN showing up as sick for as long as the MIND decides to be sick. It will have no ability to heal itself. Bodies DO NOT heal themselves. The immune system is a bullshit ego concept. It is an illusion. Bodies does not heal anything. They do nothing. Only the mind orchestrates stuff happening.

When the mind says jump, the body jumps. Literally. When the mind says, I am sick and separate, a body will be projected which shows signs of sickness and separation. When the mind says, now is the time that I am well and joined with God, the body MUST show up as a picture of a body that is in perfect health.

You have to realize, the body has NO ABILITY to counter the choice of the mind as to how it wants to identify itself. It IS the mind’s attempt to identify itself as an illusion. There also IS NO OTHER CAUSE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD that can do anything to the body. It cannot be made sick, or hurt, or damaged in any way, unless the mind is believing it is damaged. And then the MIND puts the damage into the body, not the world. As Jesus says here clearly:

"Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself ... No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail."

That means there is NO CAUSE outside of you, at all. Ever. The body CANNOT be caused against YOUR will. Ever. However it shows up, is how you are MAKING IT show up.

There is nothing in the world that makes your body do or feel or adjust or change in any way at all. Any appearance to the contrary is some illusion the mind is putting in place to pretend it is irresponsible. Sickness IS irresponsibility. The mind however is ALWAYS in charge even if it makes an illusion of death. Death cannot happen to the body unless the mind destroys the body itself. "No-one dies without their own consent".

This also means, that if the body is showing up as sick, SOMETHING IS WRONG with the mind. Guaranteed. 100%. If the body is sick, the mind HAS NOT been healed. This is metaphysical law with zero exceptions. There can be states of mind reached which seem like awakening, but where the body remains sick. In such states, the mind HAS NOT awoken from the dream of death, as proved by the fact that the body still seems to die, because the mind STILL BELIEVES it does not deserve eternal life, and so accepts death - an illusion of giving up all will and causality. An attempt not to choose at all.

Rather than see this as some kind of condemnation or guilt-inducing statement that, if you are sick, it’s your fault, which the ego would love to indulge, instead see it as perhaps shocking or upsetting at first, to have to admit that YOU are responsible for making your sickness. This is not always welcome news, often producing ego reactions of guilt and fear and so on. But it is also revealing to you a POWER that you have. A power and a CHOICE, a FREEDOM, a HOPE, in which IF YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND, you NEED NOT SUFFER.

This does not EVER mean, that if you change your mind, you will transcend sickness and death and not care that it "happens to you". This is 100% missing the point and a total bastardization of the teaching. No-one can be at peace with death because peace is evidence you do not believe in Eternal Life. Sickness and death DO NOT happen to you. YOU HAPPEN. Sickness only happens in your body beacuse it’s a picture of YOUR MIND’s sickness. Death only happens in your body because YOU DESTROY YOURSELF. This has to be owned up to before you can claim the right, and power, and freedom, to EXERCISE your FREE WILL choice to NEVER SUFFER AGAIN.

It does mean, on the one hand, you HAVE to admit to being responsible for causing ALL of the suffering you have experienced, it was ALL you doing it to yourself, and no-one and nothing-else EVER caused anything you’ve experienced. That can be a big chunk of crap to swallow. BUT.... it also opens the door to the POSSIBILITY, that you still have this power, and can CHOOSE AGAIN and therefore produce a state of NO SUFFERING.

You MUST demonstrate a body that is invulnerable, cannot be hurt, cannot be damaged, has no sickness, does not show any signs of attack, and PROVES that your brother and the whole world has done NOTHING to affect the Son of God. OTHERWISE... you WILL attack yourself, and you will suffer, by your own hand. No-one else will be doing it to you but yourself. This is the SECRET TO SALVATION! YOU ARE DOING THIS ALL TO YOURSELF. And because you are - if you OWN IT - you can choose simply to NEVER AGAIN be sick or dead or suffer in any way. Claim your IMMORTALITY!

There is no power in all the world that does anything to you against your will, other than YOU. There is no cause in the world whatsoever to produce effects in you or your body that YOU do not put there yourself. Worldly causes are cover-up jobs for your mind to pretend its irresponsibility is someone else’s fault.

There is no form of sickness, even DEATH, that cannot be reversed, if the MIND decides to no longer believe in it. Whatever you believe about yourself, IT WILL SHOW UP. It must. Mind is cause. Form is the effect of believing in illusions. Your mind has power over ALL MATTER. "My self is ruler of the universe".

So realize this. While you have a body, your body ALWAYS EQUALS your state of mind. So long as you THINK you are a body, YOU WILL MAKE ONE. So long as you think you are separate from God, you will PRESENT A PICTURE of what you believe for all to see. "Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt"!! But there can also be a totally transparent depiction of what’s going on inside of you, if you fully accept atonement.

If the body is showing up as sick, your mind *IS* sick. You ARE responsible for it. No-one else is. The world is not. The body is not. Having mastery over form REQUIRES extreme, absolute ownership and responsibility for EVERYTHING you are experiencing, down to the atoms that make up the body. YOU are putting them there. If the body is not doing well, it’s because you keep attacking yourself. Period. Don’t let this induce guilt or worthlessness. Instead forgive yourself and choose again.

If you can recognize this correlation between mind and body, you will realize that *IF* you change your mind, THE BODY HAS TO FOLLOW. It is guaranteed. It is a depiction of your "Self" as you see yourself. This is why when you shift into a miracle, you temporarily move into INVISIBILITY. "Miracles are temporary shifts into invisibility, that is why they heal." Invisibility (of form) correlates to having a mind which is CLEAR and FREE OF SEPARATIONS. You can see through it because it has become transparent and UNBLOCKED. This movement into formlessness heals the mind and thus the body MUST follow.

This also means, as Jesus has said, *IF* you get your mind into a state of perfect clarity and truth, and given that you are temporarily still projecting a body, the body BECOMES INVULNERABLE because YOU ARE, it cannot BE sick for ANY reason, because you are not sick, and IT CANNOT DIE because you see yourself as immortal spirit. Or at least a glimpse of that. Jesus assures us there is a divine protection that the body will experience IF we will be purely vigilant for the truth. Your body CAN be indestructible, free of aging, weather, the need for food and water, and so on. "I am sustained by the love of God all through the day", goes to the extreme!

And He literally means this..... IT CANNOT be sick. Sickness is IMPOSSIBLE where guilt has been removed. Sickness CANNOT RETURN where guilt has been removed. A guiltless mind cannot produce a suffering body. And why would it. A suffering body is an attack on your brother and yourself, due to a belief the world is causing you. Sickness is NONSENSE. It is a portrayal of a victim who believes they are sinful. But everyone is free to choose. You can choose whatever you want, but you cannot escape the consequences of your decisions.

You are cause. This is a course in cause, not effect. Choose health by choosing to heal the mind of its misperception of itself, and it will automatically take care of projecting a healthy body in the short term. This is the same as saying to seek first the kingdom of God and your way will be made straight.

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."

The physical world is a world of forms, and forms are blinding and deceptive. All objects appear to be set apart by their differences, and claim they exclude the rest. Exclusion is separation, and all objects are at war.

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do. For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt."

An apple is not an orange. A banana does not agree with a grape. A pear is at war with a peach. But these differences of form is an illusion, disguising the fact that all of these objects are the same illusion of separation.

All physical objects are in a state of transition, transiting between what they were and what they are becoming. They are never permanently anything, lacking any real identity of reality. They are avoidances of the present, and are all forms of the idea of separation, showing up in different appearances and temptations.

If we then move into ego, we divide up the physical world based on these appearances. We categorise and label and we start to put similar things into boxes. Some things go into the life box, and some go into the death box. We think that the form something takes tells us what it means, and how we should respond to it, which is not true.

"Life and death seem to be opposites because you have decided death ends life."

Things which we think symbolise life, such as freshness, newness, youth, cleanliness, order, vitality etc, we put into a life box. The things we think symbolise death, such as decay, damage, sickness, suffering, aging, withering, etc we put into the death box. But these are entirely made-up categories.

"I have given everything I see all the meaning it has for me."

It is us who gives these things these meanings, based on how the forms appear. Things which seem to show more symbols of death, we call death, and things which seem to show more symbols of life we call life. And thus we decide to believe that seemingly living bodies are separated from the dead ones, that living bodies are more alive, and dead bodies are more dead, and we try to keep the two separate.

We end up with a "hierarchy of illusions", an entire collection of boxes and labels, having categorised all forms into one group and not another. But this means we have fallen into the ego's trap and are now perceiving separation everywhere, dividing up a single illusory world into fragmented pieces.

If we believe that the forms of death are different to the forms of life, we will attach all manner of evil, wrongness, badness, guilt, failure etc to death, and try to remove these things from the things we call life. And so we polarise our view of the world and are believing in separation, wearing rose-tinted glasses of denial.

Having failed to recognise that dead bodies are no more dead than living bodies, and that living bodies are no more alive than dead ones, we will start to form a prejudice against death in favour of what we think is life. We will fear the symbols of death, the forms of death, the sickness, and will try to populate our lives with the symbols of life. And when the symbols of death begin to appear, we will go into judgement, fear, resistance, attack and war.

If something we regard as "was once alive" turns into what appears to be "is now dead", such as the seeming death of a living body person, and coupled with a belief that the life and death of illusory forms are separate, we'll go into a grief mode. The grief will testify that something awful has happened, something that was truly alive has died, and death has taken over where life left off.

"The death of an illusion means nothing. It disappears when you awaken and decide to dream no more."

But this of course means that we are in denial of the fact that life was already dead, and death is just another part of the illusion of life. Neither living bodies nor dead bodies are really alive, or dead, or anything. They are in fact nothing at all, being illusions of persons in a dream. The bodies were already dead before they died.

If we are separating out the things of spacetime and calling them death, while separating out other things and calling them life, we are deceiving ourselves. A person's body was not really alive when it seemed to live, anymore than any real difference has taken place now that it appears in a dead form. Death has not increased. The illusion has just shifted its appearance, and this does not mean anything at all.

The deception is that if you believe that physical life and physical death are opposites, you are caught in the belief in separation. The illusion is that they do appear to be different, but the truth is that they are not different at all. Bodies do not live or die. They are not holy or unholy. They are not better off being alive or dead. They are nothing at all because they don't really exist.

"The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."

"To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear."

"To see a SINLESS body is impossible. For holiness is POSITIVE, and the body is merely neutral. It is NOT sinful, but neither is it sinless. As nothing, which it IS, the body cannot meaningfully be invested with attributes of Christ OR of the ego. EITHER must be an error, for both would place the attributes where they cannot BE. And BOTH must be undone, for purposes of truth."

The body is a symbol. It symbolises the state of mind. When the mind is healthy the body will show up as the symbolic forms of what we call life, freshness, newness, vitality, innocence, harmlessness, purity, etc. It will seem to be alive. When the mind is in a state of separation, including perceiving death as separate from life in this world, the body becomes attacked and takes on the symbolic form of death. But physical death is no more death than physical life, in the big picture.

Therefore in this world there are indeed symbols of life and death. It is true that we should aim for the body to show up as healed, in order to teach forgiveness, and to demonstrate resurrection. But at the same time as this "avoidance" of the symbols of death, we have to also recognise that even the healthy body is just as much the same illusion as the dead body.

"Not once do the advanced teachers of God consider the forms of sickness in which their brother believes. To do this is to forget that all of them have the same purpose and therefore are not really different."

"They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful."

All bodies are illusions. "The body is a dream." But healthy bodies can symbolise eternal life, while dead bodies symbolise death. But we must remember this is also a "dream of death", and "without the idea of death there is no world." This means that even a healthy body still contains an idea of death in a dream of death. These are just difference contexts. And just because all bodies are "the same" does not mean we have no reason to move the body towards the symbols of life.

It's possible also that if your perception is separating out the world into opposites of life and death, not recognising death in the life and vice versa (as in yin and yang), you will become averse to the symbols of death, ie dead bodies. That means a fear of death's symbol, which frames the physical symbols of death as something to be afraid of and avoided at all costs. The mind then tries to separate out death and life as a defence, which increase separation, and induces sickness.

It's also then possible to believe that, to be a miracle worker, you must steer the body towards the symbols of life. But not from the perspective that life and death symbols are the same, but as a compulsion based on the fear of death. An attempt to save someone from a fate that you believe in.

To deny death while still making it real. To wage war against the symbols of death, believing that avoiding them is a movement toward resurrection, all the while falling for the deception that all of the death lies in the symbols of death only. Death is hiding in the symbols of life as well.

We have to move beyond the belief that the symbols of death means death, and that the symbols of life means life. They are still just symbols, and all symbols are still illusions. And all illusions are a rejection of reality. Even the symbols of life, on a physical level, have death in them. Even the newest born life forms have death in them. All "life forms" are really "death forms."

"Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death."

"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."

All the things of spacetime have death in them because they are rooted in an idea of opposition to eternal life, and have limitation imposed on them (a lack of immortality). And within that illusion there is a spectrum of symbols, some looking more like life, and others like death. But both are just as equally untrue. Bodies do not really live or die and their states are all telling the same lie.

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In ANY state apart from Heaven (spacetime), life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. "

The world is nothing and does not really exist. Bodies are nothing and do not really exist. If you believe that some forms of objects are more alive or dead than others, you believe in a hierarchy of illusions. And that means you believe in separation. To not believe in separation the entire hierarchy has to be equalised and flattened. All sense of differences has to be erased. All differences have to become meaningless and form has to be completely overlooked (forgiven).

"See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning."

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK. Look, then, BEYOND error, and do not let your perception rest UPON it, for you will believe what your perception HOLDS."

"What is meaningless is neither good nor bad. Why, then, should a meaningless world upset you? If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy. But because it is meaningless, you are impelled to write upon it what you would have it be."

When the forms mean nothing, when physical death means nothing more than physical life, when nothing physical defines what anything means, and when there is a singular whole response to all things equally, you have developed an unconditional mind and a state of miracle mindedness. In this view everything is recognised as one thing, one problem, one error, one separation idea. And in that view, there is no order of difficulty in miracles and no hierarchy of illusions.

Do not be deceived by appearances. Life is death and death is life an all of it is not real in this world. The flowers are filled with death before they bloom. The bodies are born from an idea of separation. All the planets are destined to be destroyed. Nothing here will last because it is all a symbol of God's absence.

"It might be worth a little time to think once more about the value of this world. Perhaps you will concede there is no loss in letting go all thought of value here. The world you see is merciless indeed, unstable, cruel, unconcerned with you, quick to avenge and pitiless with hate. It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while. No lasting love is found, for none is here. This is the world of time, where all things end."

"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."

"Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible, and beyond ALL reason, and yet perceived as an eternal BARRIER to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."

Lesson 1: "Nothing I see means anything. The reason this is so is that I see nothing, and nothing has no meaning. It is necessary that I recognize this that I may learn to see. What I think I see now is taking the place of vision. I must let it go by realizing that it has no meaning, so that vision may take its place."