Let's take a moment to remember our immortality. Forgiveness is based on immortality and symbolises it. If you are immortal nothing can change you in any way, nothing can happen to you, nothing can attack you or hurt you. If that's true, no-one is doing anything to you, nothing has ever been done to you, and sin is impossible.

If we claim ownership of our true nature - to know thyself as immortal spirit - then we are fully centered and holding the reins of our power. But this power and freedom requires total responsibility and ownership of our true identity as Christ.

When we slip and fall and start to displace our responsibility outside of ourselves, through dissociation (separation, split mind), we dis-associate from the immortality and the invulnerability it brings. We start to perceive that power and causation are outside of ourselves, that our own power has done a 180 and is now staring us in the face, doing things to us.

Except now we have disowned ourselves, we have disowned our power, and we have associated it with other people, external things, places and environments, so-called causes of suffering and death. We start believing we can be attacked, we can be caused to change, we can be made to feel one way or another, tossed around on the sea.

Before long this dis-ownership of responsibility has us believing that we are victims of the world, caused by other people, attacked and threatened, made to experience certain feelings against our will, upset "because of" this and that outside of us, things which we seem to have no control or power over.

This all entails a belief in being guilty, because immortality in its harmlessness is also innocence. If we move away from innocence we move into guilt, and you can't believe you are a mortal victim without it. This guilt arises from the self attack upon your own invulnerability, via your own self-attack thoughts. And then before you know it you're projecting it onto other people.

When you are guilty you will become lost and tangled up in what seems to be causes coming from other people. Whatever they do will seem to be about you in some way, causing you, influencing you, commenting on your nature, defining you, condemning you to some fate. A guilty person sees signs and proof of their guilt everywhere.

And this will appear to be actually about you because, in your guilt you become self conscious, with a sense of constant vulnerability. A sense of persecution and being judged, or being constantly under attack and safe nowhere. If someone says something inflammatory about you, you secretly believe it and agree with it. You already decided you're guilty so someone else pointing it out just triggers off your own self-hate. Except now you mistakenly think they're the ones who put the guilt in you.

Then it starts to seem as though what other people are doing is affecting you, that their attacks are really about you personally, that their projections of their own guilt is justified, and that you can be hurt by them. But all they're really doing is triggering off a pre-existing guilt that you put there on your own.

Failing to claim total responsibility for everything you experience, and seeing yourself as disempowered, you'll see others as having power over you to change you. And that means you see them as responsible for you. And that also means you do not recognize that they are responsible for themselves. Anything they choose or experience is their own doing, but in your attempt to disown yourself you also don't recognize they're attacking themselves.

Their self attack seems to bleed over into an attack on you, and vice versa, and before you know it you're all tangled up in a special relationship of mutual victimisation. They're doing stuff to you, you're doing stuff to them, and now it seems like no-one is responsible for anything.

What is needed is a relief from the inner guilt produced by your mistaken decision to try to be mortal. The denial and rejection of God has led to your attempt to make yourself his opposite, to suffer instead of be at peace, to be upset instead of happy, to be vulnerable and weak instead of immortal and powerful. Without the guilt you would not become confused about who is attacking who.

Ultimately we have to take back all of the power that we keep giving away, which requires a total ownership of who and what we are. We can't be playing the role of victim or victimiser - which are the same thing - if we are to be invulnerable. We can't be believing we're doing something to anyone, or that anyone is doing something to us. And that means we have to own up to being immortal, and no longer can claim to be guilty sinners.

In this recognition of your own innocence, you automatically cease to see yourself as a target for punishment. Having not targeted yourself, you are no longer self-conscious or self-absorbed. Having owned yourself and your God-given power, you can no longer see yourself as overpowered by anything in the world.

This recognition leads also to the recognition that other people are not attacking you, they are not talking about you in their attacks, they are not accusing you of anything, and are not doing anything to you at all. Instead, it is a recognition that - just as you were doing this all to yourself (the secret of salvation), they are doing it all to themselves. And this allows you to see that what they're doing is hurting themselves - as a call for love - rather than as hurting you.

This entails a positive "stepping back" or "separating" from the illusion that there is any kind of causation between you and other people, or you and the body, or you and the world. People and bodies and the world do nothing to you ever. What you are cannot be changed by anything or anyone. And your brother is not the cause of you - God is.

Ultimately, accepting that God is your creator, that you are his holy child, and that you are still permanently sustained by his mind and power as an innocent immortal being, is the key to salvation from all suffering. Owning it is total freedom and total responsibility.

Owning it makes suffering and guilt and murderous attack impossible. It is the end of the confusion that anything in the world is responsible for anything you experience. And it indeed marks the end of this world as well, because a world which has no causal power is not alive.

God created you to live forever, and you will never die.

"But the Face of Christ is the great symbol of forgiveness. It is salvation. It is the symbol of the real world. Whoever looks on this no longer sees the world. He is as near to Heaven as is possible outside the gate."

"You are God's Son. In immortality you live forever. Would you not return your mind to this?"

"And immortality is the opposite of time, for time passes away, while immortality is constant. Accepting the Atonement teaches you WHAT IMMORTALITY IS, for by accepting your guiltlessness, you learn that the past has never been, and so the future is needless."

"There IS no change in immortality, and Heaven knows it not."

"Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF."

"Immortality is a constant state. It is as true now as it ever was or will be, because it implies NO CHANGE AT ALL. It is not a continuum, and it is NOT understood by comparing it with any opposite."

"The Son of Life cannot BE killed. He is immortal as his Father. What he is cannot be changed."

"Yet, for all the wild insanity inherent in the whole IDEA of sin, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE. For the wages of sin IS death, and how can the immortal die?"

"You are immortal BECAUSE you are eternal, and always MUST be now."

"What is immortal cannot BE attacked; what is but temporal HAS no effect."

God created you as a holy child of God. He gave you an individual soul with a mind and a free will. God has many creative children, forming the family of God.

"The soul is the idea of self fullness." It's the idea that you are fully a self, and that the whole of your soul/self is shared with the fullness of the Kingdom of God.

"We have also emphasized that man, insofar as the term relates to Soul, has not only been fully Created, but also been created perfect. There is no emptiness in him."

The idea of separation is simply an idea of denial. It's an attempt to deny and block reality. In a way, it's an attempt to disown what you are. Its a refusal to accept yourself as God created you. It's an attempt to NOT will, moving into unwillingness and imprisonment.

This means, "the ego" is not really the production of an additional self, or the manufacture of a first-and-only self. It is in fact the idea of NOT HAVING A SELF. It is self denial.

The ego is also the attempt to not be yourself. Being a denial of your soul, it's a withdrawal away from the awareness of what you are. As a rejection of light, this throws you into what seems to be the illusion of darkness.

Generally speaking, your soul is infinite and unlimited. It is everywhere, like God, sharing all of existence with Him. God occupies all "space" in the Kingdom and so does your soul in an "overlapping", sharing union.

In the idea of denial of self, you become withdrawn from being everywhere. You attempt to isolate yourself, to not share, to close down, to possess some small part of yourself which you claim is yours alone and NOT shared with the rest. It's the idea of having something exclusively yours which is unique and different and not accessible to anyone else.

This really is the idea of selfishness, the desire to have something special that no-one else has.

"The ego is the idea of selfishness." An idea of selfishness is NOT the idea of A SELF, it's the idea of a self having a poor attitude and not wanting to share with others.

But we have to frame this correctly. The ego is not a self. The ego is the idea of what you are NOT. It's the idea of NOT HAVING a self. It only SEEMS to be "a something" that you made, when in fact it is NOTHING. The belief that it has existence IS a state of deception, believing illusions are true. The ego is NOT really a self at all.

The ego, or egotism, is really the idea of self destruction, which is why the entire system of thought is centered on and leads towards death - the destruction of your self.

In death you are attempting to finish off the intention of becoming completely unwilling to exist. This is a selfish act. And it is there that the so-called ego reaches its climax. In essence, by trying to be selfish, a soul/mind tries to have private ownership, and ends up losing everything instead.

So it's not so much that we really made an ego. We didn't really invent a separate self. We didn't start out with no self and come up with a new self. We HAD a self before the separation and WILL have a self afterwards. Every soul that God created has individuality and eternal life.

The problem is not a matter of whether or not you have a self or are an individual being. The problem is a matter of whether you are willing to SHARE EXISTENCE with all of the rest of creation.

To be the fullness of the soul, you have to expand infinitely and unlimited. You have to be open to allowing access to YOU by everyone else, and to have access to everyone else. To join minds, to share all that exists, you cannot be closed off, isolated, excluded or imprisoned.

So by "going into egotism", we basically "made an ego" but only in the sense that we really did NOT create anything. Th ego has not been created, and in fact it does not exist at all. Not only is the ego the idea of what you would be if you did not exist, it also does not exist. In essence, "the separate self" is total fiction and DOES NOT EXIST. The belief that you ARE IT, is a mistaken belief and needs correction.

So you really can't be the ego, but you can believe you are. You can't be not yourself, but you can pretend to be. You can't lose your soul, but you can think you gain the whole world and lose it all anyway. You can't stop being as God created you, but you can dream of being something you're not.

The ego isn't the idea of a self. It's not a separate self. It's the idea of NOT a self, of NO self. An illusion that appears o be a something, but is a nothing. Believing that the ego is a self, or that you have an ego, is an upside-down belief. It suggests that in reality there is no self, and in illusions there are selves. This is an EGO perspective, having bought into the illusion that the ego state is a state of existence, not recognizing it as NON existence.

If you think that awakening means the end of self, due to the end of ego, you are thinking upside down. Selves ONLY exist in the Kingdom of God, NOT in the world of illusions. All illusory selves DO NOT exist, all REAL selves do exist.

"The Kingdom of God includes all His children, and their creations."

The Kingdom of ego death contains NO selves. Selves attempting to destroy themselves and ending in death.

This world of ego perspectives is merely a world of pretend selves, blocking and covering up the world of real selves. Trying to end self is just another extension of the ego's suicidal approach resulting in SELF DENIAL. Rejecting the soul results in death, not life. The ego does need to be "let go", but since it was never who you were to begin with, this is a loss of NOTHING. You give up nothing, to gain everything.

Recognizing that this no-self does not exist, and that you are the self God created, is the atonement. The ego doesn't have to "die" because it never existed in the first place. All we really need to do is stop pretending to be OTHER than the self that God created, or opposed to our self in any way.

Jesus also clarifies that our sense of self will EXPAND as we awaken. It will expand to INCLUDE all of the brothers and creations that we tried to deny. And it will expand to include the infinite immortal soul that you forgot is who you really are.

Losing the ego isn't the end of you. It's a return to your self. It's a reclamation of your immortal identity - still a God created you.

The separate self is really just the idea of being a SEPARATED self.. a self that had a self before the separation, which BECAME separated due to a lack of sharing, and will RESUME sharing and cease being separated after the atonement. This is why Jesus refers to such selves as "separated ones", NOT "separate ones". Just because you are separated does not mean you throw out your self when the "separateness" ends.

Awakening is a return to your real self. An acceptance that you are as God created you. A remembering of your soul.

"NOTHING can prevail against a Son of God who commends his Spirit into the hands of His Father. By doing this, the mind awakens from its sleep, and the Soul remembers its Creator. All sense of Separation disappears, and level confusion vanishes."

"Separation" does not mean that which allows there to be many. It means that which keeps many things from sharing anything.

"God who encompasses all being nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually and want to share it to increase their joy."

We are all permanent beings in the heart of God.

I find very often that if I am not constantly "rebuking" everything the world seems to portray, I will fall into temptation and buy into problems. Then I'll have reactions based on ego and form and bodies and appearances, and will suffer, wondering how to get out of it.

The fact is that we're presented with a false word, right in our faces, 24/7, every single day. The body continuously reports on it as if it's real and makes it seem real. Every single sensory input is a lie to the mind, suggesting that something untrue is true, something impossible is possible, and something that can never happen in reality is happening.

It may seem completely casual, living our everyday lives, interacting with objects, doing household tasks, looking at things and commenting on them, seeing bodies, etc... as though this is totally normal and natural. We can just "live an ego life", a body life, functioning the same way we always have. Immersed in space and time and physicality. Interacting with the world as if it's just another day, things are just ticking over as they always do, as is this is totally normal.

But as we start trying to wake up to reality, we start to find that the world is absolutely opposite to reality. And now we're tasked with trying to peel ourselves away from absolutely everything the world throws at us. Every appearance is false, every body sickness is a lie, every picture of death is unnatural, every problem isn't really there. If we don't counteract these inputs, they become overwhelming and we just sink down into them like it's what everyone does.

It seems then that we have to constantly fight against illusions. Every second. The kind of life we live without even thinking about it, as if it's normal, is riddled with deception. If we drop our guard and just go through the motions acting like everything in the world is how things are supposed to be, within seconds we'll find ourselves thinking and speaking and acting based on what the body says is real. And now we're lost all over again. And every morning we wake up immersed back into the same dungeon of deception and darkness.

It sure as heck seems that if we aren't CONSTANTLY asserting God's truth, constantly denying what is not of God, constantly stating and affirming that body states are not fact, constantly PUSHING and broadcasting God's truth and light all the time, repelling sin and hell, then we will just once again fall for the next subtle trap. The next little everyday seemingly insignificant scrap of an illusory world which is just as deceptive and distorting as all the rest.

The impression I'm getting lately then is that we have to eventually get to a state where we are "professing christ" all the time. And I mean like, being on our guard at all times. In a sense, praying a higher prayer all the time. Giving off happier more loving vibes all the time. Teaching only love, all the time. Refusing to accept anything we see in the world, all the time. And that means being really heavily centered in God's truth and laws and mindset and just constantly vigilant for staying in that mindset as much as possible, even when the world is sandblasting you in the face with visual lies.

Jesus says in the course that atonement is our natural profession. That we should PROFESS christ. Which means to express, emit, teach, radiate, give christ at all times. To counteract and fly in the face of the world. To be coming from God at all times. To be healers at all times, in the world but not of it at all times. Under no worldly laws but God's at all times.

Because, quite frankly, what I've found is that if I DON'T attempt to do that, I will just sink right back down into ego land, body sensations, false perceptions, reactions to bodies and sicknesses appearing real. At every turn, someone's sick body is attempting to testify to them having been changed and corrupted against God's will. And it is our task to NOT believe that, to assert and SEE and claim the truth of the person that they are still as God created them. Which is in complete defiance of what their body looks like, staring you in the face with its fake suffering and temptation.

The degree of temptation is just so totally off the charts. It seems that if we don't rise above it and stay above it and continually REPEL it every minute of the day, we're just going to keep falling back into it. Maybe over time we can talk ourselves into such a state of conviction that we can more effortlessly remain in the light and the truth and not have to make such an effort of it. But meanwhile it seems like a constant fight, a constantly struggle, to get out of hell and get back into a more heavenly state. Day after day after day of the world trying to pull us back down.

"The Disciples were officially and specifically told to heal others, as Physicians of the Lord. They were also told to heal themselves, and were promised that I would never leave them or forsake them. Atonement is the natural profession of the Children of God, because they have professed Me."

"In His perception of the world, nothing is seen but justifies forgiveness and the sight of perfect sinlessness. Nothing arises but is met with instant and complete forgiveness."

If we are to INSTANTLY meet every perception with forgiveness, that means we have to CONSTANTLY be in a state of forgiveness every single second. We have to be on our toes. We have to be totally ready and right minded at all times. As in keeping our mind right-side up at all times and sane in order to be ready to perform miracles.

"Readiness here means keep your perception right side up, (or valid), so you will ALWAYS be ready, willing, and able. These are the essentials for "listen, learn, and do. You must be READY to listen WILLING to learn and ABLE to do"

To stay OUT of deception and temptation and distraction is difficult. Everything the world believes is not true. Everything physical matter shows is false. We have to pierce the veil and push past the body and connect with the divine. To have "reality contact".

"Miracles are examples of right thinking. Reality contact at all levels becomes strong and accurate, thus permitting correct delineation of intra- and interpersonal boundaries. As a result, the doer sees the truth as God created it. This is what is meant by the point on "perspective adjustment."

It really seems to me that in order to be a consistent miracle worker we have to be practically from another world, a temporary visitor here, come to help and heal and uplift, siding entirely with God, falling for no temptation, buying into nothing the world suggests. As if we were briefed before we came, that the world was going to try to eat us alive, and that we had to stay on our toes and not for a second believe a single bit of it. To float above the battlefield constantly lest we fall off the wagon again and again and again. To clarify just how extremely difficult it can be, Jesus even says that the most advanced teachers still succumb to temptation at times.

The world can seem insurmountable in its immensity, its diversity of illusions, its deceptions. Gradually the mind HAS to be trained away from believing any of it. Has to learn to see through and past illusory things. Has to learn NOT to believe in what the body reports. And that takes time to reinforce the mind's attitude over and over and over and over again with affirmations and restatements and reframing.

"Even the most advanced of God's teachers will give way to temptation in this world."

Every day, every hour, every minute, every second, we have to be watchful for buying into the world. Over and over again we will keep slipping back down the slippery slope to hell, and have to keep pulling ourselves back out of the muck again and again and again until we can learn to fly enough that we stay out of it for good.

Everything about practicing the Course could be described as moving "backwards". Accustomed to how the ego operates always "forwards" this can at first seem counter-intuitive and a difficult "direction" for the mind to operate in.

Purification and correction are entirely geared towards a backwards motion, such as retracing your steps, seeking inward rather than outward, undoing, reversing, collapsing, deflating ego, re-winding time, digging deeper to find the true inner cause, looking "behind", getting to the core of oneself, going within, taking attention away from illusions, becoming whole, acknowledging what already is, accepting what is already true, receiving what is already given, lifting away layers of false belief, recognizing things for how they are, taking back projections, claiming responsibility for yourself, re-owning yourself, coming back to center, un-ravelling, seeking back through time to when beliefs were formed, reversing the effects of sin, cancelling, deleting, removing, restoring to a former state, moving backward to before any sense of something happening, returning to innocence, becoming aware of love which is already present, listening, receiving, accepting, allowing, reversing sickness and death, resurrection etc.

Notice that all of these procedures take you from being externally focused to focusing within, in the direction of yourself. The truth is inside of you. All of these actions return you to yourself.

Now, the ego is the total opposite of this in every way. The ego wants to always add something, increase denial, hide stuff behind new layers of illusions, implement things, find success, seek outside yourself, lose yourself, forget who you are, move away from yourself and God, project, attack, point a finger of blame away from you, destroy others, fight with an opposing will, acquire, get, consume the external (food etc), implement magical solutions which undo nothing, add lie upon lie, twist and distort things out of recognition, get rid of sin onto others, disassociate from yourself, believe that cause is outside of you, see yourself as an effect of the external, positioning yourself as a victim of something separate, pursuing wild goose chases and dead ends, running away from God, becoming alone and isolated, losing your mind and sanity, fragmentation, making others responsible for your existence, trying to get someone else to choose for you, trying to get someone else to love for you or to wake you up, going to sleep, living in ignorance, becoming unconscious, entering darkness, achieve, strive for goals, develop an image, accumulate and build stuff that never existed, fill the emptiness with idols, idol worship, seeking external salvation, believing that things outside you can save you and solve all problems, being sick as a result of an external cause, dying by someone else's hand, listening to the ego's counsel, making things worse, an eye for an eye, waging war, murder, etc.

Notice that all of these actions are in an outward direction, away from yourself. They are all designed to disconnect you from God and put distance between you and God and therefore between you and yourself. They take you away from yourself and place every attribute of yourself outside of you into someone else's hands.

The main difficulty I find is that having been in the ego mindset for such a long time, my mind has sort of become very used to or unconsciously has formed habits whereby the mind moves in a direction away from myself. It pursues the external and thinks in externalizing ways. It's like there's all these arrows pointing outward and it seems to make the mind "flow" in that direction automatically. Even normal "thinking" processes seem to head in the direction of the external and these are just accepted as automatic or "normal".

So then when we come to the Course, our mind is coming up against a set of truths and techniques which are all INWARD pointing, and basically flowing in totally the OPPOSITE direction to the ego's thought system. They all point towards God, towards your true self, towards what is inside of you already. Even just the simple idea that you need not seek to find love or teach love because that is what you are but that you need to REMOVE the obstacles you've built against it. We are not accustomed to REMOVING anything. We're accustomed to believing that we LACK God and therefore need to go seek for specialness and ADD it to ourselves in order to "become" loving or spiritual. That's totally the ego, KEEPING its belief in sin and hiding it and then pretending to try to find solutions to it externally, where solutions do not exist, and thus building layer upon layer of denial and failure. It's all the authority problem, believing we can add to or change God's creation into something better or more true.

So it's quite difficult to get the mind to even move in the direction of thinking inwards, thinking upwards, thinking IN REVERSE, or thinking towards what ALREADY EXISTS within you. To think in reverse means to go from where your mind is at to what came BEFORE it, rather than going from where your mind is at and proceeding forwards to some kind of next step. It seems alien. It seems unnatural at first. It seems to take steps that bring all of the illusion into question, all assumptions are undermined, and all beliefs have to be examined and exhumed and tossed out, all values are brought into question, every attachment has to be surrendered, all external structures are collapsed, and your whole life is brought into question. And that's not what the ego wants at all, and it's not how we're used to thinking. To question everything, to question sin and sickness and death. To assume nothing, and to believe nothing that even our body's senses are telling us. To travel backwards up the chain of causality to where we came from.

You are already as God created you, you are already love, you are already perfect, there is NOTHING you can add to God's creation or Kingdom other than to increase what is already in it, which is perfect joy and love and happiness. And you are already WHOLE, already complete, needing nothing, lacking nothing. All of this other stuff that you keep trying to deal with by ADDING or CHANGING layers of illusions, are ego solutions and ways of dealing with this, really attempts to hide it even more.

So like, something happens and your ego steps in with a reaction and says, oh my God, this thing is so externally real, it is really happening, and the future is going to suck, so I better do something about this. I know, I'm going to do this and that... and then comes up with a long list of reactions and plans and solutions which it is going to DO, to tackle what it itself made real, as though something really occurred. It creates this entire "chain of thought" or train of thought, which goes from "here" to way off in the distance down all kinds of twists and turns, taking you away from presence. We need to stop the train before it even leaves the station, get off it, and then look backwards down the tracks to where we CAME FROM and go in THAT direction, undoing, backtracking, reversing and returning, inwardly and upwardly BACK to the truth, BACK to the answer to end all questions, and BACK Home to God.

To think with Holy Spirit is to think BACKWARDS. This requires us to initially STOP and put the pause button on. Freeze-frame things. Freeze the entire scenario and just observe what it contains, from a big perspective. And then start to REVERSE the steps we have already taken, to backtrack, to look at our real hidden motives (secret sins/hates etc), and to UNDO layer upon layer of false beliefs and projections and stuff that we basically tried to ADD to ourselves already, that has led to us witnessing a falsely perceived situation. But this seems awkward and counter-intuitive - or at least counter-ego. It's therefore essentially all about letting go and letting God, relinquishing attachments, surrendering to what is already true, accepting God as God is, returning to yourself, and becoming EMPTY of all the stuff that you "added" to yourself to try to make yourself become something you are not - different to how God created you (and how you still are, buried under the ego lies).

To question... "has this even really happened" - that's a totally backwards step which brings into question any ASSUMPTION that the ego has made, and digs way deeper into what is happening than to react to it and try to fix it or attack it with Course quotes or to deny it with fake positivity or to build a spiritual ego to defend against it (and keep it). To stop and go backwards, to ask, is this even real? Why do I believe this? Where is my perception coming from? Why have I chosen this? How did I put this in place myself? Who am I really underneath this? Is this really true of me? Not ACCEPTING stuff into your mind.

As Jesus says, whatever you accept into your mind, it becomes real to you. The ego automatically is just accepting everything "into" the mind like a black hole sucking the life out of everything. We have to learn to stop that, to think in reverse, and to cancel the ego, to go within, to reverse our thinking processes and develop this new "inward direction" which flows away from illusions and towards the PRE-EXISTING truth and love within us, which is already there and is already perfect. To ACKNOWLEDGE what is already true and accept it, rather than trying to REPLACE it or cover it up or deny it with stuff we MAKE (invent/add) with the ego.

At first this kind of backwards thinking is not at all easy for the mind to do. It seems like the mind has become "wired" to think forwards with the ego, outwardly. But gradually over time as you "practice" this and go through this PURIFICATION process, digging out and releasing old pain, getting to the bottom of things, finding yourself, taking back your power, returning to responsibility, accessing the power of choice, accepting atonement, it becomes easier because there is less of your own ego-aligned will working against you.

It's like you're literally learning how to reverse the direction of flow of a river. The mind has become separated from Spirit and is flowing out all by itself, broadcasting its own ideas and trying to replace God's creation with something of its own. That needs to be totally reversed and undone. We need to go back within and reconnect with God and plug ourselves back into the service of Spirit. It takes time to break out of the unconscious habits of flowing outward with the ego.

And there is a paradox here. Funnily enough, the more you go within and withdraw your projections away from the external and get to the core love that's already in you, THEN that's when love starts to radiate out from you. You don't become loving by trying to give give give without receiving.

You must receive inwards first. It's more like, you become a light bulb, the switch goes on, and you simply stay CENTERED and rooted in your true self, in Spirit, and you RADIATE from there, staying in that center at all times, instead of going away from yourself or abandoning or losing yourself. To the ego giving is a loss of yourself. To Spirit, giving INCREASES and you not only keep/hold onto your inner real self but you also SHARE that and it extends out on its own. Love extends because of what it is, without your help.

So to be more loving, stop dwelling on the external or on trying to sacrifice yourself or martyr yourself. Return inward to access awareness of love's presence and then simply SHINE from within. This is how God creates, by shining and radiating and sharing and extending, remaining true to Himself and still complete and anchored within Himself. He does not lose Himself in the process. This is how the Kingdom is increased. This is what it means to be the light of the world. To shine from within rather than to lose yourself. To become an intensely bright light which goes out from within. You have to BE WITHIN first in order to do that, and stay there. This outward shining is CREATION, and it is the same thing as sharing and extending. It is how God created you to begin with. And in that light you have never stopped being God's innocent child.

I recently had to struggle through a period of intense emotional release, coupled with a lot of crying. It was triggered seemingly by father's day, inducing a grieving period and sense of loss, but it seemed to also move into some release relating to childhood abuse.

With such heavy feelings I became quite caught up in it, lost and immersed in ego. Also during this period I lost sight of the course teachings and of forgiveness. I felt too overwhelmed and upset to want to add more ego-challenging stress in the form of extra course stuff.

It also then became very annoying and frustrating that there was so much emotion, and that it wasn't stopping. I was forced to rest a lot. But it started to make me question, why do I keep having to have so much emotion coming out? Is there really a benefit to crying and releasing it? Is crying a part of my real self's healing or is it just some aspect of the ego and the body?

When I considered that I've had hundreds if not thousands of cries in recent years, and that I tend to throw myself into it, I also couldn't fathom how there could be so much to feel through. Why did things from 40 years ago keep coming up? Why did it require so many releases in order to make such slow progress? Was this really necessary and important in my spiritual path? Yes the crying does seem to move me past hurts and on to deeper stuff but is it really necessary?

I also recently started to consider the idea in ACIM of there being two levels of mind, higher and lower. Real thoughts shared with God produce the creation of spirit, and unreal thoughts shared with the ego produce intellect and physicality. So that made me start to realize, there are higher and lower parts to my mind.

I think this is a kind of turning point of "there must be a better way" because I'm also now starting to step back from the lower mind more often. I'm asking myself, is this feeling or perspective really a part of me as a higher-self, or is it coming up from the depths of a lower ego self? Even to the extent, are these hurt emotions, emotional pain and loss and grief and so on, really coming from or about "me" or is it part of the ego? Is it perhaps the ego that cries and is constantly upset?

Today perhaps for the first time, with a continued oozing out of further emotions, I started to assert the idea at the end of my rope, that "these feelings are not mine." Who and what I am seems to somehow be stepping back from or dis-associating from them. This seems pretty radical to suggest that any upset feeling is not really a part of me, is not mine, and is not part of my identity. It makes me realize I have been identifying with these things for a very long time.

The ego is pretty relentless in its morbid suffering. The body, if it holds certain emotional pain or energies in itself, certainly is also a repository of suffering and pain. It seems to me that every single little upset about anything ever is somehow stored somewhere and has to seemingly be released. But I'm also realizing that who and what I am does not have to be consumed by it, lost in it, playing along with it.

I don't know if this is some kind of attempted denial or repression, but it seems that there is some part of my sense of who and what I am which is detaching from these "lower" experiences and is identifying with something higher and lighter. All pain and misery, all upset, all grief and loss, all sense of shame or guilt, all fears, all hurt and suffering, surely cannot be a part of who or what I am as God created me. There can't be unhappy feelings in God's son. They cannot be real.

As I sit here and I still am having waves of emotion wanting to erupt and release, there's also some part of me now that feels stronger, and does not want to lose myself in it, or have it at all. When emotions become strong and overtake the mind, it can really become immersive and it starts to feel like "I" am the one who is feeling it and is hurt by it. I become centered in it. The emotions seem to describe me. I believe this is identifying with them, and thus with the ego.

As I remember that my identity or self is not these feelings, I immediately feel a deflating effect. The ego is always attempting to inflate things into a huge drama of intensity, especially at the emotional level. I think that identifying with the emotions and feeling like I'm the one who they are a part of, or am "the one" who is hurt, is all part of being lost in the ego.

I recall also some things which Eckhart Tolle has said about "the pain body", which is the ego's emotional body of pain and suffering. He said that this emotional pain body remains dormant a lot but sometimes it erupts into awareness and attempts to flood the mind with negative thoughts and memories of the past, trying to get the mind to identify with it and lose consciousness. I'm asking myself now if all and every single upsetting feeling "from the past" is really this pain body erupting and the ego trying to use my dependency on, and identification with feelings, as a way to keep me bound to it.

It seems weird to say, because what I'm really saying is that suddenly it seems that all my "lower" emotions are not really true of me. All hurt feelings are not really about me as God created me. All emotions that erupt from the bottomless pit of despair are not a part of my self. How can they be if God created me perfect and permanently happy? How can any kind of unhappiness or loss or shame or guilt or anything else be a part of my identity or my experience?

I feel like I've been battling with this emotion-monster for decades now. Years upon years of crying about the past. With the recent intolerability and obnoxiousness of it, it just became too much to a kind of breaking point, and now I feel like I'm snapping out of it. Like I"m done with it. I don't want to feel this crap anymore as though it's something I have to go through, or can't stop, or have no power over, or am destined to feel. It's not God's will for me. And it seems like all of it is a part of illusion.

As I look at it now, and as feelings threaten to "come up" again and flood my experience, I watch as they just emerge out of nowhere, from below, and seem to want to tempt me to believe that I am the one who is upset. But if I recall that I not these feelings, then somehow it seems fairly easy to "stay out of it". And that stepping back also deflates them and seems to cause them to simmer down again.

I think this is another thing that I have just been doing to myself over time. There is some drive in my psyche/personality to just hurl myself into full exposure to any and all emotions. But by identifying with them and believing they relate to me, or are part of me, having no boundaries with them, I have only been burying myself in them and feeling sorry for myself like a victim. Not to mention how much it consumes me and pulls me far away from higher thoughts.

I see Jesus in the course telling me to have more vigilance to protect the higher mind and to have more vigilance against the lower mind. The lower mind is run by the ego and wants to just turn everything into a life-or-death separation drama. I don't want to be a part of that anymore.

While at first I thought my whole self was the lower mind, and the higher mind was much higher, I now see that I'm moving up into the higher mind and the lower self is indeed below me. The ego wants us to identify with it and believe that all its perceptions of suffering are our own. That we are the body and its pains. That we are the suffering self. That's now who or what we are. The pool of misery doesn't seem to have an end. It seems the only thing to do with the desert is to leave.

The truth must be, then, that any unhappy feeling cannot be a part of my real self, cannot be true, cannot be real, and cannot be happening. My real self cannot be upset, cannot suffer loss, and cannot be hurt. It is extraordinary to think that I have lived as "a person" who seems to have suffered and felt hurt and upset so many times, and that not once has this suffering been true. But this is what ACIM is telling me. Only the thoughts and feelings that I share with God are real, and all the rest is ego noise, one of its many forms of the opposite to love.

"You hate it (the body), yet you think it IS your self, and that, WITHOUT it, would your self be lost."

"The ego is also in your mind, because you have ACCEPTED it there. ITS evaluation of you, however, is the exact opposite of the Holy Spirit's, because the ego does NOT love you. It is unaware of what you are, and wholly mistrustful of EVERYTHING it perceives, because its own perceptions are so shifting. The ego is therefore capable of suspiciousness at best, and viciousness at worst."

"the ego is not wholly split off, or it could not be believed at all. For it is your mind that BELIEVES in it, and gives existence TO it. Yet it is ALSO your mind that has the power to DENY its existence, and you will surely do so when you realize exactly what the journey it sets you IS."

"The ego is quite literally a fearful thought."

"Belief that there IS another way is the loftiest idea of which ego-thinking is capable. This is because it contains a hint of recognition that the ego is NOT the self."

"The ego is expert ONLY in confusion. It does not understand ANYTHING ELSE. As a teacher, then, it is totally confused and TOTALLY CONFUSING."

"Every response to the ego is a call to war, and war DOES deprive you of peace."

"The ego IS therefore a confusion in identification, which never had a consistent model, and never developed consistently."

"Jung was right indeed in insisting that the ego is NOT the self, and that the self should be regarded as an achievement."

"To identify with the ego is to attack yourself, and MAKE YOURSELF POOR. That is why everyone who identifies with the ego FEELS DEPRIVED. What he EXPERIENCES is then depression or anger, but what he DID is to exchange his self-love for self-hate, MAKING HIM AFRAID OF HIMSELF. He does NOT realize this. Even if he is fully aware of ANXIETY, he does NOT perceive its source AS HIS OWN EGO IDENTIFICATION, and he ALWAYS tries to handle it by making some sort of insane "arrangement" with the world."

"This is WHY the ego is insane; it teaches that you are NOT what you ARE."

"That is all the world of the ego is. NOTHING. It has no meaning. It does not exist."

"All that the ego is, is an idea that it is possible that things should HAPPEN to the Son of God, WITHOUT his will."

"The ego is the choice for guilt, the Holy Spirit the decision for blamelessness."

"For the ego DOES want to kill you, and if you identify WITH it, you MUST believe ITS GOAL IS YOURS."

"Guilt is the only need the ego has, and, as long as you identify WITH it, guilt will remain ATTRACTIVE to you."

"It is always an interpretation that gives rise to negative emotions"

"Our self-made roles are shifting, and they seem to change from mourner to ecstatic bliss of love and loving. We can laugh or weep, and greet the day with welcome or with tears. "

"who is sinless cannot suffer pain"

"The Self Which God created cannot sin, and therefore cannot suffer."

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die. I am not a body. I would recognize my reality today."

"I cannot suffer any loss or deprivation or pain because of who I am."

"The guiltless mind cannot suffer."

"The gentle have no pain. They cannot suffer. Why would they not be joyous? They are sure they are beloved and must be safe."

"You have enslaved the world with all your fears, with doubts and miseries, your pain and tears, and all your sorrows press upon it, and keep it a prisoner to your beliefs."

"And God Himself shall wipe away all tears."

"Be not afraid of Love. For It alone can heal all sorrow, wipe away all tears, and gently waken from his dreams of pain the Son whom God acknowledges as His."

"Repeat God's Name and all the world responds by laying down illusions. Every dream the world holds dear has suddenly gone by, and where it seemed to stand you find a star; a miracle of grace. The sick arise, healed of their sickly thoughts. The blind can see; the deaf can hear. The sorrowful cast off their mourning, and the tears of pain are dried as happy laughter comes to bless the world."

"And He would have all tears be wiped away, with none remaining yet unshed, and none but waiting their appointed time to fall. For God has willed that laughter should replace each one, and that His Son be free again."

"Perhaps you come in tears, but hear Him say, "My brother, Holy Son of God, behold your idle dream, in which this could occur," and you will leave the holy instant with your laughter and your brother's JOINED with His."

It was only about a year ago that I finally 'came out' as a bisexual person and owned it after 49 years in a dark closet. Since then I've been exploring and expressing and working on more deeply coming to terms with this and living it more - being more visible.

But one aspect that has been nagging in the background is a fear that I will be attacked and judged and hurt by others about this. Largely this is based on an awareness of what people can be like, especially the bigoted angry people, and what's happened to others in brutal attacks and judgement.

I didn't realize for a while that I was taking this position, or playing at being a victim, or that it was even something I needed to do some forgiveness about. But then I became aware of it. So how does one forgive such a thing, where we're at the mercy of the world and afraid of what it might do to us? Safety is a primary concern of everyone and all of us can relate to feeling afraid of being hurt in some way.

I first had to recognize that I was even in a state of "not peace" about it, that I was having worries and thoughts about it, and this was not normal. It's quite easy to just "have" those thoughts and feelings and not even have the awareness to step outside of it or notice that it's a problem or something to even work on. In that mindset, even the idea that there's something wrong can be out of awareness and we just go through the motions of suffering.

Having recognised something is bothering me, I then start to look at it. What's going on here, who is doing what, what is this based on, and am I willing to explore more honestly what's really happening?

As I looked at this I remembered that if I'm immortal I can't really be attacked, so if I believe I'm attackable that's a mistake on my part. That cuts through a lot of crap. Nothing real can be threatened, so I must be believing something faulty if I think people can attack me. That gives some quick relief.

Then I started to notice that I believe other people are going to do something to me, have power over me, hurt me, judge me, attack me, maybe even violence. But then I had to notice, who am I in that scenario, what role am I playing? It becomes clear that I'm seeing myself as a victim, being victimised by others. They're doing something to me, and I'm afraid of it, afraid of being attacked and judged.

When I stayed in the viewpoint that people are going to do something threatening, I couldn't see an option other than to fantasise about how I might try to stand up to them, become angry at them, give them a speech, have to get into a fight, or otherwise keep the belief in being victimised while trying to fend them off. But that was like a closed loop of suffering and the cracks were starting to show.

It's always valuable to remember that nothing in the world is doing anything to me, no-one out there is the cause of me, other people don't cause me or have power over me, and I cannot be affected or changed by anything because I am immortal. So where does that leave the victim role?

I saw that I am positioning myself as a victim for some reason, and setting people up in my mind as attackers to play a role, so that I can get some kind of payoff. And what's that? To have a reason to find them guilty of something. To justify anger on my part or to reinforce defenses. If they were to do anything to me, I would be justified in revenge, and blame, and scapegoating.

So then again this recognition that I'm actually scapegoating comes in. I'm using these people and actually want them to be attacking me, am framing them as attackers, so that I can take the opportunity to have them look like they're the ones sinning, so that I can take advantage of their guilt and shove some of my own guilt in there with it. If they do something to me I can happily project my own guilt onto them, mix it in with their guiltiness, and get rid of it.

In other words, being a victim boils down to wanting to be attacked in order to get a payoff of being able to take advantage of the attacker and project my own guilt onto them. In effect, by becoming the face of innocence, the innocent victim, I can get away with saying "brother at your hand I die", and am willing to suffer and be hurt and die for it, seemingly a small price to pay if it means I can use these attackers to get rid of my guilt.

"Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die."

So then this reveals the basic dynamic of projecting and blaming. I first attack myself, I make myself guilty for some reason, I then find someone willing to play the role of attacker/sinner, I bait them and want them to attack me through fantasies of suffering, I hope they'll do it while pretending to be afraid of them doing it, and if they go through with it I'll have a great opportunity to blame them and shove my self-inflicted guilt onto them. Yay.

So there's that. And that has to be unraveled and taken back. Once you see what you're doing it becomes obvious. I fear being attacked for "seeming to be gay" in any way, based on seeming "proof of sin" that this does happen in society, reinforcing a victim role, so that I can hopefully be attacked and get rid of some guilt in the process. So I'm really using these people as scapegoats so that I can benefit.

What I then have to look at or ask is, why am I projecting guilt, and how or why am I making myself guilty in the first place? Are these people really the ones who are denying me, attacking me, judging me, not accepting me, OR ... could it be that I am the one who is attacking me, judging me, not accepting me? Maybe it really is that I am the one who is "not okay with" me being the way that I am, and the fantasies of other people attacking me for it are really the way that I'm using my own mind to attack myself.

The insight from this is that, I really need to more fully own who and what I am (as God created me, transcendent of body/sex roles), allow myself the guiltless freedom, and accept myself, and if I were to do this I would be completely unconcerned with what anyone else might try to do to me.

If I am centered and solid in knowing myself, and fully owning being myself, not only will other people's attempted attacks be correctly viewed as "calls for love" on their part - a way that they attack themselves, but also I'll not take it personally because it won't resonate with an unhealed guilt within myself.

And probably, if I own and am at peace with myself, I will give off peace-vibes, and other people will not feel drawn to attack me for it anyway. Because really an attitude of "I should be punished for this, please attack me" is an energetic and psychological invitation broadcast to everyone if I'm not okay with myself. A temptation asking others to fulfil the role I expect of them.

In effect then, the real issue I/we have is that we are not being entirely true to ourselves, are not fully accepting ourselves, are not granting ourselves absolute freedom, are guilting ourselves and accusing ourselves of sins and shames and guilts, and this puts us into an insecure position. We then seek to problem-solve this in a faulty way by projecting the insecurities onto others, asking them to play roles in which they do to us what we are already doing to ourselves, so that we can pretend not to be doing it to ourselves.

I find and have found then, that my real challenge is the forgiveness of myself, the undoing of my own self-inflicted guilts and shames, and the need for taking full responsibility for who and what I am. If I become fully aligned with and on-the-side-of myself in terms of acceptance and allowing, I won't need to play the victim role or imagine how people would do things to me. And thus I will take away the self-threatening mental activities that were causing fear. When you have no guilt about yourself, nothing anyone does can target you.

Because ultimately we really just are using our own disowned power against ourselves, which turns into a projected indirect form of self-threat, which produces a fear reaction. I was doing this all to myself, and that's what the "secret of salvation" reveals.

Coming to recognize full responsibility for "I have done this to myself" leads to the miracle of healing and to freedom. If you are free to be as you are, then you don't invent or interpret people attacking you for it, and can walk in peace. Personally I still have to work on this some more, it's a work in progress, but at least I can now see the way out by recognising what was the way in. Know Thyself is what 'pride' should be about, and not a victimy disowning and projecting of guilt onto fictional attackers.

"And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

"Only the self-accused condemn."

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

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

"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. As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness."

There are many ACIM myths circulating and one of them is an improper idea of what the Holy Spirit is. Some people will say "he is just your right mind". This isn't accurate enough and can be misleading, greatly diminishing the Holy Spirit's function and power.

When you were created by God, you were created complete and lacking nothing. You are a whole being, a son of God, extended from wholeness. At this point, the Holy Spirit did not exist, and was not needed.

It was only in the separation from God, which was the "fall of man" or the attempt to BELIEVE that separation was possible, which has happened. .... that God created the Holy Spirit. God ADDED the Holy Spirit to the mind in order to protect the connection between all parts of mind, and to guarantee the healing of the belief in separation. He is "God's Voice" calling you to return to sanity.

So the Holy Spirit is actually ADDITIONAL. This means that originally there wasn't a holy trinity, there was in effect a holy duality. But when the Holy Spirit was ADDED to creation, as an eternal and permanent being, with a mind and with creative power, the holy duality became a holy trinity.

The Holy Spirit is to be thought of as in addition to you. Something extra. This is why the course tells you that he is actually your "appointed friend". He is in parallel to you, another alongside you, a helper, a supporter, a healer, a teacher, a comforter, and the answer to the question of separation.

"Your teaching has already DONE this, for the Holy Spirit is PART OF YOU. Created by God, He left neither God nor His creation. He is both God and you, as you are God and Him together. For God's answer to the separation added more to you than you tried to TAKE AWAY."

Since the dynamics of heaven are holographic, in which there is a shared oneness, you can say for example that each son of God shares everything with all the others. They are brothers to each other as individuals but they still are one with and united with each other, as though part of each other.

In the same way, the Holy Spirit was ADDED as another created being to be shared with, to be one with, and to be part of you. But when you say he is part of you, you must be careful not to be thinking in separating terms. This doesn't mean he is ONLY a part of you, or exclusive to your mind, or just another name for some pre-existing part of your mind.

The Holy Spirit is shared with all minds and is like an extra layer of mind added on top of the christ mind. Being united in oneness with you, he does share everything with you, which in the holographic sense means you share the same wholeness that he shares with God. Which makes him literally part of you - as the collective sonship/kingdom, but he is STILL a distinct created individual entity.

ACIM actually tells us that the holy spirit is a co-creator with God, is an eternal creation, will always exist even after the atonement, implies that he has his own creations, is a very firm third entity in the trinity of God-Sonship-HolySpirit, and that there ARE "three" components to that. To deny this is to deny that the TRINITY is real.

The Holy Spirit is not your higher self. He is not just some piece of your mind that remained sane while the rest of it went nuts. He is actually a third party. He is an entity, an actual spirit being. He has eternal life. He has mind and thought. He can create as well as heal. He is a living being. And he was given to creation as part of creation to keep all the seemingly separated parts of mind connected and to act as a savior and healer of the mind's insanity.

Your higher self is your soul, which is a son of God, which God created originally. Your higher self is your ONLY real self, and it's what and who you are. The Holy Spirit having been added to creation has become part of you, just as God is part of you and your brothers are part of you and your creations are part of you. That doesn't mean he's some kind of little compartment that's in your mind that was always there since the start. He is secondary and additional to your mind. Him being "part you" doesn't mean he is "just a part of you". He spans beyond you and includes others as well.

"The Holy Spirit is the Christ mind that senses the knowledge that lies beyond perception. It came into being with the separation as a protection, and inspired the beginning of the Atonement at the same time. Before that, there was no need for healing and no-one was comfortless."

Here for example there is a suggestion that the Holy Spirit is "nothing more than" the christ mind, as if to say that he is a synonym for christ. But that is not an appropriate interpretation because christ is the second part of the trinity, and the Holy Spirit is actually a distinct third part. He symbolizes God and he symbolizes christ, having a somewhat symbolic function, but that doesn't mean he isn't a fully created being in his own right.

As it says, the Holy Spirit came into being along with the separation (tiny mad idea) as God's answer to that idea, his guarantee of its undoing. He should rightly be thought of as your friend and helper because he literally is an additional being that God added to creation.

When we say the Holy Spirit is some kind of "synonym" for "my right mind", we're stripping him of all his life and his eternal nature, his power and his creative ability. We're trying to then exclude him from existing as a standalone third party, and are trying to REDUCE him to being "just" some little part of our mind that remembers God. He isn't "your memory of God", but he does remember/know God FOR you until you can remember and know God for yourself.

The attempt to think of him as "only my right mind" or "my true self" is really an attempt to limit what he is and pretend he doesn't exist. This was part of the teaching of certain individuals who did not like the idea of the Holy Spirit actually existing. It's something you should be wary of because the Holy Spirit is there for you, is there to help you and heal you and guide you, to teach you and decide for you, to give you the eyes of christ, and to resurrect you from death. To say he is just some part of your own mind is self-centered as if you can "save yourself". Which is a usurping of his function.

He must be acknowledged as something that God did in fact deliberately create and ADD as a response, as a purposeful act of creation, and one which is eternal. You tried to take something away from God and God ADDED even more than you took away by creating the Holy Spirit. He is MORE THAN just you. He is also partly God. He also has functions that you do not have. He is due proper acknowledgement and recognition as a truly fully created being in his own right.

It is once again "separatist thinking", based on exclusive either/or logic, that leads people to conclude the Holy Spirit is EITHER part of me own self or EXCLUDED from me. And since the course says he is part of you, people then think that he is EXCLUSIVELY part of you and does not exist beyond you. That is the fallacy of this kind of thinking. In truth the Holy Spirit is you AND is others AND is God. He is more than just you and more than just a part of you. He is the third entity in the trinity of God's creation and always will be.

"The Holy Spirit is the only part of the Holy Trinity which is symbolic. He is referred to in the Bible as the Healer, the Comforter, and the Guide. He is also described as something separate, apart from the Father and from the Son. I myself said, "and if I go I will send you ANOTHER comforter, and he will abide with you."

"He is part of the Holy Trinity, because His Mind is partly YOURS and also PARTLY GOD's."

"The Holy Spirit abides in the part of your mind that is part of the Christ Mind. He represents your Self and your Creator, Who are One. He speaks for God and also for you, being joined with both."

"The voice of the Holy Spirit IS the call to Atonement, or the restoration of the integrity of the mind. When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed, there will be no call to return, but what God creates is eternal. The Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless THEIR creations and keep them in the light of joy."

What if our mind has the power to modify the world, given we are the dreamer and it is a dream - our effect? What if by mental intention you can cause events to proceed differently? What if you can steer outcomes? What if you can change physical matter? What if the world is really NOT the seemingly fixed, closed, solid, permanent-seeming thing that we think it is, and that's all an illusion?

This is the next area of exploration for me having recently focused very much on how the world is very locked into its nature. By realizing the world is stuck being the way it is, I had to then naturally ask myself, how does one go about escaping its impossible ways, forgiving it, and being free of it? How can it be overridden? And this is now leading to me to the simple progression of QUESTIONING the world, what it is, and what our minds can do to CHANGE IT DIRECTLY. And the fact that IT IS THE EFFECT OF MY DREAMING.

Jesus says in ACIM that if you change your mind about the world, ALL THE WORLD MUST CHANGE. He also says the world is an effect, and therefore, that if you change the CAUSE in your mind the world MUST change. Like LITERALLY PHYSICALLY change. He also tells us we are the dreamer of the dream. To me what he is actually getting at is that our minds are powerful, thought exerts real influence, the physical is not really physical but dream-stuff, and we have the POWER to modify it.

I've seen some evidence for this INFLUENCE of mind over the "physical world". so I'll tell you some stories.

At my job, I deal with computer stuff, as a sort of IT-department fix-it person at times. But it would turn out that very often the problems people came up with would seem to "fix themselves" when I showed up. They definitely had the problem beforehand, but then suddenly it seemed like something "in the world" just happened out of the blue to changed the course of events. The problem became seemingly "magically" (miraculously really) solved. It usually took the form of someone realizing something, a change of mind, some fact that was overlooked comes to light, or even literally physical devices which were not working suddenly work and no-one could explain why.

Over time some people called me "the computer whisperer" because it literally seemed uncanny that when I came along to help them the problem just melted into "not a problem any more". And I mean on a physical level. Something kept transpiring in terms of the FORM of how it seemed to change, something tangible or what you might call what APPEAR to be natural changes in circumstances, environmental factors, whatever, but although it LOOKED LIKE just normal "reasons why" stuff got fixed, it was actually due to something in my mind that caused a change.

There are also some times where in my mind I am not interested in playing into a problem or having to deal with an issue. So my mental attitude is one of "I do not agree with this", not like in an annoyed wanting it to go away sense, but like I don't believe in this - not buying it. I hold firm somehow to another truth, or perhaps to another intent or desire, and somehow this has a power in it. And this power seems to alter the course of events and cause problems to go away.

A boss approaches with some issue and then I mentally reject it or want nothing to do with it and suddenly he seems to realize something or changes his mind or things just suddenly resolve themselves. And I can't tell you how man times when I've needed some "time to myself" he just seems to have somewhere else to be. What I'm literally saying here is along the lines of .... when you walk through a dying forest flowers start springing up around your feet out of nowhere. That would be a very vivid example and I'm not at that level but it seems like that is possible.

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures came to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality."

Mind can have such power and influence that it can actually produce real changes in what we call "physical stuff". In effect, your mind can "dream" a different dream and have power over what the dream contains. And as I read about how the physical world/earth IS A DREAM, and see Jesus's references to us dreaming of worldly events and how he calls it a dream, it seems to make so much sense that our mind ACTUALLY IS dreaming and producing the environment in realtime, AND it can change the environment to another form at will. And behind material happenings there are "mind forces" at play, including the atonement plan.

"But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life."

Some years ago some people were walking down a path and it was spring, so the blossom petals on a tree were falling across the path. The couple walked under it and the petals fell onto them and for some reason this was a happy thing to me. I watched this from inside a room with a closed window, from probably a couple-hundred feet away. I had a sudden feeling of joy in my mind out of nowhere, and suddenly literal blossom petals materialized in front of my face, inside the closed window in the room with me.

Another time I was looking for money in a coin box, in which there was no "pound coins". There were only 1p a 2p bronze coins left (british). I rifled through insisting that there must be higher value money there. I did this for some time maybe even a minute, and somehow in my mind I was convinced and insistent that there MUST be some higher currency in there. Suddenly in front of my eyes as if they had been there all along, yet out of nowhere, two pound coins appeared on the top of the pile. There was no magical effect of anything to them being there, they were just not there one moment and the next they were there. And they were definitely not in the coin box hidden before.

There have also been other times where if I am fairly centered in my mind and in what I believe is true, or perhaps what Jesus calls "being strong in the truth" or at least clear about when someone is bullshitting, if I mentally stand my ground and do not buy into someone projecting or scapegoating me, it actually has an influence on them. Something changes in their mind and they suddenly become self-aware of what they're doing as if they adopted my view of them, and will suddenly realize there's something about what they said which isn't true. And then they will take it back and reconsider what their position is, because somehow the truth-focus in MY mind influenced theirs.

"People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally AFRAID of them."

"The mind is a very powerful creator, and it never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating, and ALWAYS as you will."

I've had to pick up subtle clues and nuances to come to realize this and this is definitely still new territory, but it seems clear that this world we're calling a physical solid world IS NOT THAT. It is in truth actually just a bunch of dream images. And our minds are not just inert little observers, they are powerful and quite capable of CAUSING the dream to change. And by dream I am NOT talking about projected meanings and interpretations of perception, I'm talking about the PHYSICAL MATERIAL WORLD. It can be changed by the mind. Mind literally has power over matter. It can steer events, cause objects to materialize, can manipulate weather, and can do all kinds of stuff - including healing sickness and reversing death and decay.

My wife has a strong will also and she has this ability too. In the past we would joke about having power to control the weather, which has proven a number of times. If I ask her to pray for me for example, my whole inner experience lights up and becomes far more happy and light and energized. She is quite capable of having a powerful influence, even at a distance. One time that we went to visit the UK for example usually the weather is crap and very consistently cloudy, but for like 3 days solid as soon as we arrived it became very clear and sunny non-stop which was very unusual. Also I know I've had influence in calming storms a couple times that I've tried to do that.

I am also convinced from some stories other people have shared that our minds influence each other including each other's bodies. Such as that for example a person was in fear and this fear was affecting the other person they were with and causing a medical condition. And then as this was pointed out the fear lifted and the medical condition just went away quickly. How is that possible unless mind has the power to influence the minds and bodies of others? That it can actually cause a different dream to just emerge out of nowhere?

Are we to really believe that the world is literally this kind of paper-thin fragile tentative sort of "material only" existence, in which everything is just the laws of physics holding it together and there's nothing else to it besides solid form? Because that's just how it APPEARS to be. The world is not actually that, because it's a dream, and it is an illusion, and it presents an illusion of a world, and this illusion CAN BE CHANGED BY THE MIND.

"Appearances deceive BUT CAN BE CHANGED."

"Yet nothing in the world of dreams remains without the hope of change and betterment, for here is NOT where changelessness is found."

"You CAN change form, BECAUSE it is not true. It COULD not be reality, BECAUSE it can be changed."

We are being asked to become aware that the world is an EFFECT of our mind. Jesus literally says "You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts" and "Both heaven and earth are in your mind." The whole planet, the whole dream, is a mental construct. It's a fairytale of imagination in the mind, and the mind is literally projecting an imaginary world complete with all its "physical" details. And even though it LOOKS physical and as if it has laws that govern it and reasons why it cannot BE changed, that's all illusions, because it can EASILY be changed by a mind that knows it is dreaming.

"But hold out your JOINED hands and touch this heavy-seeming block, and you will learn how easily your fingers slip through its nothingness. It is no solid wall. And only an illusion stands between you and the holy Self you share."

So imagine the physical world is in fact like a LUCID DREAM. A dream in which you are awake and aware that IT IS a dream. And then you are aware that even though it appears solid and fixed, it is in fact your dream, and you CAN DO ANYTHING. "There is nothing my holiness cannot do." You can literally put your hands through physical matter, you can materialize objects, you can fly if you want to. You can change one thing into another. This is all a totally malleable dream environment, NOT really a hard solid fixed physical reality.

Do not be deceived by its illusion of hardness, solidity and so on. "What He (Holy Spirit) 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."

And as MIRACLE WORKERS we are being trained and asked to adopt a position as the "dreamers of the dream", where we recognize it IS coming from us, and WE CAN CHANGE IT in any way we see fit at any time, just by the power of the mind. The Holy Spirit is capable of manipulating the atoms of the world, just as Jesus also says that space and time are under his control.

"If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind MUST BE STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this."

Jesus was masterful at this "dream manipulation". His mind was in touch with being THE CAUSE (the dreamer), and knew the world was HIS EFFECT. Therefore he was not a victim of it in any way, and had power OVER IT. He recognized he was not affected BY IT in any way because he was DREAMING it - putting it there. This is what resurrection is about, the SURMOUNTING of death - the ability to have POWER OVER DEATH. Which includes the ability to reverse "physical death" and to manipulate bodies by the mind, into any state, and any form.

He was able to give body parts that were missing, he could walk on water, calm storms, change outcomes, turn objects into other objects, multiply and materialize objects out of nowhere, appear in different body forms, could likely levitate and fly if he so willed it, and pretty much NO LIMIT to what he could do. The examples of his USE OF his power only paints a limited picture of the fact that he was able to do literally anything. And so can you, because this world is NOT a fixed solid world, it's totally at your whim and under your power!

We have barely begun to realize the sheer power of our minds, the influence our minds have on the world, the ability of our minds to change matter, the ability of our minds to heal both mind AND body, and the influence we have on ALL THE WORLD when we change our mind. Our healing literally heals the world. Our focus on truth literally awakens our brothers. And our broadcast signal of love literally transforms the dream in unlimited ways.

Miracles as expressions of love are expressions of love from a powerful mind. I think in ACIM terms perhaps miracles are actually a SUBSET of what the mind can do. When mind is aware and expresses, which must also be a loving state, it has tremendous power, and this can CHANGE THE DREAM. It can cause literal physical transformations, impossible changes, violation of laws, breaking of space and time and distance and possibility. It can heal the sick and raise the dead, produce and change objects, and even move entire mountains.

This is not even a difficult feat for such a power, but so many people are afraid and skeptical and not even suspecting that such a power of POSSIBLE, yet alone that it is in their own minds. "While expressions like "think big" give some recognition to the power of thought, they still come nowhere near the truth. You do not expect to grow when you say it, because you don't really believe it. It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains."

"Why is it strange to you that faith can move mountains? This is indeed a little feat for such a power."

A major theme in ACIM is that you are supposed to come out of the PAST into the PRESENT. Basically it's saying that in the separation from God, we made time, by inventing a sense of the past being different to what is here now. Or as an attempt to change what is here now into something it is not, resulting in a different future. Time was an attempt to destroy or deny what exists, by claiming that it has changed, being no longer like it was.

In doing this we kind of avoided the eternal always now of the present in ETERNITY, which is timeless. And instead we positioned ourselves separate and distanced from that sense of now-ness, inventing the past and the future which are both avoidances of the now. The past is also the idea of sin, suggesting that your past sin caused a guilty present and will be punished in the future, as a kind of chain of cause and effect.

So we literally invented time displacement, which is also distance, and is thus also space. We invented spacetime, a belief in not being now or of being distanced from what is. The "now" moment in time, while still being IN time, is actually symbolic of eternity. It is the holy instant. It is not eternity but it is very close to it because it centers time on a rejection of "past and future", and therefore invites the end of time.

In ACIM therefore we are literally being asked to bring about the END OF TIME AND SPACE, by moving out of the past and future into the present. Because it's only in the present that you can be forgiving, and have vision, and be healed. Love is present, God is present.

We are told that "I see only the past", and to then gradually learn to come out of the past into the present so that "I see only the present." To see relationships in terms of what your brother is NOW without his past, which is forgiveness, laying the basis for holy-relating.

This is rather similar to the "Power of Now" that Eckhart Tolle has touted. ACIM is actually asking us to stop believing in the past and the future and to become very focused and centered in the present, so that we can align our mind with the eternal now. Heaven is always in a state of "now is always and forever", unchanging and never moving away from what is here now - never avoiding God.

Avoiding the present is the avoidance of God. Which is why the ego is dedicated to the past, and to maintaining time - or a gap between what is and where you are. We are literally being asked to come out of time, out of the sense of history or future, and into a pristine, clean, "new", fresh look at what is here NOW, so that we can truly see what is here now, which allows us to see the real world, and thereby forgive the world.

All condemnation of sin is always about the past. All projections of guilt and blame are based on past doings. Even in the moment that someone sins, it is already old. Holding it against them is holding the past against them and against ourselves. PRESENCE, therefore, is a major central pillar in ACIM's teaching.

We are being asked to be fully present, fully aware, fully attentive to what is, fully wholly undivided in our dedication to the immediacy of reality. This leads to holy instants, to the real world, and lays the path back to heaven. By coming out of the past and future we literally are undoing the gap of separation, and are therefore collapsing both time and space.

The present is the key to the disappearing of spacetime and everything it. And it is the doorway to resurrection and to miracles. It is in the PRESENT that we become a "born again Christ-ian."

"To be born again is to let the PAST go, and LOOK WITHOUT CONDEMNATION UPON THE PRESENT. For the cloud which obscures God's Son to you IS the past, and if you would have it past AND GONE, you must NOT SEE IT NOW."

"At no SINGLE instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered or anticipated, but NEVER experienced just now. Only its past and future make it seem real. Time controls it entirely. For sin is never present."

"The miracle enables you to see your brother WITHOUT his past, and so perceive him as born again. His errors ARE all past, and by perceiving him WITHOUT them, you are RELEASING him. And since his past is yours, you SHARE in this release."

"His past has NO reality in the present, and you CANNOT see it."

"Your past was made in anger, and if you use it to ATTACK the present you will NOT SEE the freedom that the present holds."

"Look lovingly upon the present, for it holds the ONLY things that are forever true."

"The present is before time WAS, and WILL BE when time is no more. In it is everything that is eternal, and they ARE one."

"The ego invests heavily in the past, and in the end, believes that the past is the ONLY aspect of time that is meaningful. You will remember that we said its emphasis on guilt enables it to ensure its continuity, by MAKING THE FUTURE LIKE THE PAST, and thus AVOIDING the present."

"For the ego uses the present ONLY as a brief transition TO the future, in which it brings the past TO the future, BY INTERPRETING THE PRESENT IN PAST TERMS."

"NOW has no meaning to the ego. The present merely reminds it of PAST hurts, and it reacts to the present AS IF it were past."

"The ego teaches that you always encounter your PAST, and because your dreams WERE not holy, the future CANNOT be, and the present is without meaning."

"The continuity of past and future, UNDER ITS DIRECTION, is the only purpose it perceives in time, and it closes over the present, so that no gap in the EGO's continuity can occur. ITS continuity, then, would KEEP you in time, while the Holy Spirit would release you FROM it."

"For healing CANNOT be accomplished in the past, and MUST be accomplished in the present to RELEASE the future. THIS interpretation ties the future to the present, and EXTENDS THE PRESENT, rather than the past. But if you interpret your function as DESTRUCTION, you will lose sight of the present, and hold on to the past TO ENSURE A DESTRUCTIVE FUTURE."

"Who can grieve or suffer, when the present has been freed, extending its security and peace into a quiet future filled with hope?"

"Father, we were mistaken in the past, and choose to use the present to be free. Now do we leave the future in Your hands, leaving behind our past mistakes, and sure that You will keep Your present Promises, and guide the future in their holy light."

"There is a real world which the present holds safe from all past mistakes." "The Holy Spirit teaches thus: There IS no hell. Hell is only what the ego has made OF THE PRESENT."

"Fear is NOT of the present, but ONLY of the past and future, which do not exist."

"The choice is not whether to see the past or the present: it is merely whether to see or not."

"For the present IS forgiveness."

"The special relationship TAKES VENGEANCE ON THE PAST. By seeking to remove suffering IN THE PAST, it OVERLOOKS the present, in its preoccupation with the past, and its TOTAL COMMITMENT to it. NO SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP IS EXPERIENCED IN THE PRESENT."

"Your mind cannot grasp the present, which is the only time there is. It therefore cannot understand time, and cannot, in fact, understand anything." "Sometimes the past seems real, as if it WERE the present. Voices FROM the past are heard, and then are doubted."

"The aim of prayer is to release the present from its chains of past illusions; to let it be a freely chosen remedy from every choice that stood for a mistake."

"Your learning gives the present NO MEANING AT ALL. Nothing you have ever learned can help you understand the present, or teach you how to undo the past. Your past IS what you have taught yourselves."

"The present now remains the only time."

"A miracle is a beginning and an end(ing). It thus abolishes time. It is always an affirmation of re-birth, which seems to go back, but really goes forward. It undoes the past in the present, and thus releases the future."

"We look neither ahead nor backwards. We look straight into the present. And we give our trust to the experience we ask for now."

"What time but now can truth be recognized? The present is the only time there is."

"The making of time, to TAKE THE PLACE of timelessness, lay in the decision to BE NOT as you WERE. Thus, truth was made past, and the present was dedicated to illusion. And the past, too, was changed, and INTERPOSED between what ALWAYS was, and NOW. The past that YOU remember NEVER was, and represents only denial of what ALWAYS was."

"the Son of God is risen from the past, and has awakened to the present. Now is he free, unlimited in his communion with all that is within him."

"In the holy instant, you see, in each relationship, what it WILL be, when you perceive ONLY the present."

"He is as safe in the present as he was before illusions were accepted into his mind, and as he will be when he has let them go."

"The real world signifies the end of time, for its perception makes time purposeless."

"Today the light has come. And you will see the world that has been promised you since time began, and in which is the end of time ensured."

"So do the parts of God's Son gradually join in time, and with each joining is the end of time brought nearer. Each miracle of joining is a mighty herald of eternity."

"Everyone seen WITHOUT the past thus brings you nearer to the end of time, by bringing healed and healing sight into the darkness, and ENABLING THE WORLD TO SEE."

"And it is given you to be the means

Through which His Voice is heard around the world

To close all things of time, to end the sight

Of all things visible; and to undo

All things that change. Through you is ushered in

A world unseen, unheard, yet truly there."

"I do not know what anything, INCLUDING THIS, means. And so I do NOT know HOW TO RESPOND TO IT. And I will not use my own past learning as the light to guide me now."

I've been having some unexpected encounters with angels recently.

After researching more about miracle-working and watching some more videos from people doing it, I learned that it's possible to use your mind and imagination to not only visualize someone being healed, but to also perceive the current state of their body on a "spiritual" level. The imagination and/or inner vision provides this capability.

I ask Holy Spirit to show me someone's "spiritual body". I don't necessarily need Him to do this, as I can see it myself, but it doesn't hurt to be including Him and getting some support. I don't necessarily mean the physical body, but more like their "astral" or "mind body". This shows up in my inner vision as seeing the person's body, if I will reach out a bit in belief that I can do this. The body shows up not as physical flesh but usually as transparent.

A healthy person typically has a transparent or light-filled body on the mind level, while a person with sickness or issues often has "dark areas". The contrast between the very light joyful transparent areas and the dark areas is really obvious. You can use your inner vision to "scan" the person's body, with your eyes closed, and literally SEE if there's any issues.

These dark areas, some would refer to as "evil spirits". You can also think of them as thought forms, attitudes, or energy formations produced by the person's thinking. It's important to be centered in truth and in authority when doing this because if you start buying into fear or making it real or turning it into some kind of battle, you will give your power away and thereby open yourself up to self attack.

When I saw several of these in a person I commanded them to leave, authoritatively, in the name of Jesus, very directly. "In the name of Jesus Christ you MUST leave, I take authority over you in Jesus's name and I command you to leave right now, and do not come back, in the name of Jesus. Go! Get out!" or words to that effect. They must obey, provided you are sure enough of the truth of Jesus to not buy into fear or take no for an answer.

Some just left. One said to me, telepathically, it was not leaving. However this is not optional. You must be firm and persistent. I told it to go nevertheless and that it must, in Jesus' name. These illusions MUST leave because the Christ mind has authority over them. They have no power to truly resist if you don't give them any, and they must comply "in the name of Jesus", which means with the authority of Christ. Christ has authority over all illusions.

One such "entity" said, after some persistence, "I will leave", and I could sense its presence leaving the person and flying off. These things, whatever they are, however you want to interpret them, while they remain in the person they can be "causing", or at least be the illusion of a belief in causing, the person to be sick. They are the embodiment of their ego beliefs about themselves. So they need to be cast out ie the "cause in the mind" needs to be removed. Or to put it another way, the "consequences of a wrong decision" needs to be undone.

A few of these things which I saw even had teeth, or other partial body parts, or may be attempting to clamp onto something or wrap around something, as though they are partially formed entities. And they can come across as being very "mean" or even vicious. You might call it evil. Jesus told me they essentially are "just fear", either generated by the person or attracted to them as a result of their own belief in sin and ego. They seem to attach to certain parts of the body and produce symptoms either there or in any other area that's seemingly unrelated. They must go, because they are not the truth.

Bear in mind that your own focus on these darknesses, which is ego, is you giving power to them and asking for them. You will attract them to you by making them real or believing in them as reality. They are ultimately nothing. And you do not need to think about "defense" because that's just belief in them. Keep it calm and confident and minimal. You don't want to be attracting some kind of revenge.

I won't get much more into that, and I suggest you have confidence in God's truth enough before you attempt to mess with these things. Not because they are a "real threat", but because if you believe they are, you'll make yourself more vulnerable and maybe scare yourself.

But another part of this is that once the dark parts are cleared, you may sense the overwhelming joy and transparency of that person's body parts, and the energetic feeling of this is so profoundly different that it's literally like night and day. When I cleared a person's body in this way, that person on the higher level thanked me. And as I sensed the area of the body which was now transparent, it was SO incredibly joyful and light and free that at first I could not believe I was seeing it properly. The contrast between extreme vicious darkness and brilliant joyful light is huge.

Now, after clearing these "thought forms" and "attack thoughts", repairs need to be made, ie healing, ie miracles which reconfigure the demonstration and representation of the new state of truth in the mind. This is where things get pretty cool.

I now begin to make statements affirming God's truth about the person, and holding out my hands, begin visualizing that Holy Spirit and "light", or "waters of life", are flowing out or firing out like a laser, into the body part that needs correction. As I apply forgiveness to cancel out illusions and COMMAND correction into that area, with a dedicated focus and not being distracted or trying to do several things at once, I start to feel Holy Spirit flowing.

It's important to point out that you need to use your imagination to VISUALIZE the healing taking place. You can also use your imagination to visualize the dark "entities" leaving. You need to SEE on the spiritual level what the healed final result body condition will look like, what is the new truth of it, before it will show up in the physical. And as you visualize what a "healed brain" or "completely recreated knee" or whatever looks like, this starts a manifestational process.

This is because you need to CONCEIVE of the "future healed state" BEFORE it can manifest. So picture what it's going to look like when the healing is done, as though it has "already happened", avoiding the idea of it not having happened yet and not focussing on signs and symptoms and physical illusions that "prove" nothing has changed..

Now, most of what I've been experiencing doing this has been totally unexpected. I did not expect to be able to "see in the spirit", or to be able to discern "negativities" in people, nor how they'd show up, nor how they would at times appear to be interactive. But what I also did not expect, and what has happened 2 or 3 times now, is that when you start to VISUALIZE the body part in its healed state, while commanding and being authoritative over the illusion of sickness, ANGELS start to show up.

When this happened the first time, I felt suddenly that there was a LARGE, joyful, powerful being that was like, overlapping me. Standing just in front of me or actually in the same place as me. It was definitely larger than myself, maybe like 10 feet tall. It had a joyous, calmly confident, helpful feel to it. I did not know what this was at first. I could really feel the presence of this angel much more than I've ever felt them before, and it seemed to be assisting me with the healing. I thought maybe I was imagining this or making it up.

The second time this happened I noticed it again, and it was completely unexpected, and the angel just showed up in my energy field and awareness as though it once again had noticed what I was doing and had come to provide support. Notice that I DID NOT "ask" for angelic support in any way at all, OTHER than by a direct expression and willingness to DO the will of God and carry out His truth and extend His love. That IS asking for God's support, because this is the highest form of prayer. Not asking for what does not exist, but taking an active role in bringing about what you want to exist. I was, you could say, "fulfilling my function", and when you do this, Heaven rushes in to support and empower you!

This happened last night and I could feel this large angel once again as though I was "inside" of it, and it was bigger than me. I asked if it had a name, and it responded (if I remember) "Adam". I asked if the same angel came each time, and the answer was no.

Now, I think this is pretty cool, but I'm still just getting started. The guy that I learned about this from goes further and has much more experience performing miracles. When he does this stuff, the angel doesn't just show up and join with him, it actually goes to the person, and puts its hands into the person's body and fixes stuff. And those fixes show up in the physical body almost immediately. I feel that I haven't quite got to that stage yet, and there is some step or level of commitment or focus or something that I haven't quite opened up to yet, to cause them to take the next steps on their side.

But basically, your mind is capable of interfacing with other people's minds - their mental body - directly, using your inner vision. And because this is happening on the "spiritual plane" (like astral level), the angels notice this and come to assist. As you step into your role as doing God's healing work, and fulfilling your function as the light of the world, Mighty Companions DO come to help you and to carry out God's will. You get support!

This is also similar to the fact that you need to have faith in God in order for miracles to happen. Faith sort of means, you go ahead and just DO IT even though you may not have evidence or proof that it's going to work. You do it first, based on the TRUST that when you take action, the support will happen, the miracle will come, things will fall into alignment, and stuff will get reorganized to match your commitment and conviction. It's like you have to act "as if" it is going to work based on unseen faith first, and this is the confidence needed to CAUSE the effects to occur.

So similarly, as you start to work at expressing miracles and affirming God's truth and sharing healing with people and so on, Heaven DOES come to support you and help you in your service, BECAUSE you had faith and because you took a risk and stepped up and defended the truth about someone. You are not in this alone. I think there is some ACIM quote about how heaven will rush in to support you and so on, but I'm not sure on the wording.

So, if you're feeling adventurous, give this a try. I'm looking forward to expanding on this as we go along and as this working with the angels unfolds more.

Here's some ACIM quotes:

"The Atonement is so gentle you need but whisper to it, and all its power will rush to your assistance and support"

" Yet to the dedication to the truth as God established it no sacrifice is asked, no strain called forth, and all the power of Heaven and the might of truth itself is given to provide the means, and guarantee the goal's accomplishment."