Being abused is not fun. Being punished or victimized or attacked is not fun. Being hurt by others, or by anything, is not fun. Being in pain and sickness is not fun. All forms of suffering suck bad.

Every episode of being hurt by the world always looks like you being victimized, against your will. You seeming not to choose it, not wanting it, and doing nothing to ask for it, yet alone deserving it. It always appears unsought and unfair.

When you look only at appearances, every abusive situation looks completely awful. Children being abused. Babies born with disabilities. Parents killed in a car crash. Someone being shot. Murder and rape and all manner of horrors.

However, when you read A Course in Miracles, we're told something which may not seem possible, yet alone true - that you are always doing this to yourself. Not matter who seems to be doing what to whom.

"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."

(Urtext T27I10)

In all seemingly un-asked for scenarios of suffering, it always seems that the problem began with attack by another. You were apparently doing nothing and minding your own business. Then along came the horror out of nowhere. You seemed to not even remotely choose it. You did nothing on the physical level to ask for it or to make it happen. You are a genuine victim.

However, such attacks in fact begin long before they ever manifest. And to realize this will take a lot of willingness and healing. Just even getting past the misery could take a lifetime. But hiding behind every experience of punishment is a secret decision, which happened in your mind long before the punishment happened.

Everyone who has believed in separation from God, attacked themselves first. They believed in their own sin and guilt. They tried to crucify themselves. Long before any abuser came along. each of us was responsible for deciding that we deserve to suffer and be punished. We chose to insist on a willingness to allow ourselves to be hurt. We literally wanted to be hurt. Or even worse, to die, because the belief in sin demands death.

"They do not realize that, to deny God, is to deny their own identity, and in this sense, the wages of sin IS death. The sense is very literal; -- denial of Life perceives its opposite, as ALL forms of denial replace what IS, with what is NOT. No-one can really DO this, but that you can THINK you can, and BELIEVE YOU HAVE, is beyond dispute."

Having decided you are sinful - the original sin, for trying to attack God, you quickly believe you no longer deserve love. Or even to live. You believe you should suffer and die to atone through the ego. To pay the consequences for what you did. And NOW you start to seek out ways to suffer.

Deciding you should suffer, you now attract, choose, hire, coerce, opt for and want, various people, scenarios and problems to bring the penalty to you. You elect freely and seemingly unconsciously to incarnate into defective bodies, broken families, abusive relationships and all manner of tortures. You arrange it all.

As each form of suffering comes to you, as you asked, and looking solely at the physical way by which it happens, it gives no hint that you asked for it. Especially not that you want it. Each blow is enacted by another body. Each attack appears unasked for. Stuff goes wrong seemingly chaotically and at random. Then the world seems to decide it's your time to die. Sucks to be you.

Who would suspect that you asked for this? That you consented to death, no matter how it came? Who would see the secret wish to suffer hidden behind the face of innocence?

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants, and ***no one dies without his own consent***. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

No-one, not even the person suffering, thinks that they started all this. It always seems to begin outside of you, beyond your will. And then you can point fingers of blame and say, you abused me, you hit me, you hurt me, you punished me, you screwed up my life, you did this and I didn't choose it. Its all your fault.

And now the other is a scapegoat. Secretly someone you hired to hurt you on your behalf, they now take the blame for being the one who did it to you, so no-one notices the contract you signed. Ands so long as the projection of blame remains, it completely hides what you are doing to yourself. All power and responsibility is projected onto anyone except you.

You won't want to ever look at the fact you asked for this, so long as you don't see one key fact: You believed you deserved to suffer BEFORE you suffered. Before you were attacked, you attacked yourself. You believed it as soon as you left God. The denial of God was the denial of entitlement to forgiveness, happiness, health and life. You threw it all away and wanted life to suck.

And THEN you masterminded a lifestyle of awful things seeming to happen to you, inducing suffering while trying to achieve an illusion of redemption. You think if you suffer enough you'll pay off the debt. How much is enough? Only permanent suffering and death is an acceptable fee for your ego.

You chose everyone in your life. You hired them to not love you. You wanted to be sick. You wanted to be attacked, hurt and abused. Terrible lack of self love and respect happened before you brought a ton of bricks down upon yourself. You hated yourself.

Every hurt, every punishment, every abuse, every attack, IS in fact the working of your psyche to guarantee that you get what you think you desreve. It always appears that other agents are doing this to you, so that you can hide your death wish. But it is ALWAYS you that is deciding to orchestrate ALL forms of suffering. Your mind makes it happen.

"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."

(Urtext T27I10)

The ONLY WAY to be set free from ALL forms of suffering, is to recognize that in every case, the power of your decision begins the whole process. You decide you deserve to suffer, then you project abusers and punishers and prison guards, all of whome you hate and blame, in order to to hide how YOU feel about yourself.

"If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves."

You can only suffer by choosing to. If you do not choose to, you CANNOT SUFFER OR DIE. Giving away your power to another to be the fall guy to disguise your self hate, is the only cause of ALL your problems. Choose to love yourself, and you will reclaim immortality.

All abusers, attackers, haters, hurters, punishers, terrorists, murderers and enemies must be forgiven. And to forgive them is a recognition that they were NEVER the starting point of any suffering. Spacetime began and ends with your decision. Nothing EVER happens without your consent.

"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 will worship no idols, nor raise my own self-concepts to replace my Self. I am in the likeness of my Creator. Love created me like Itself."

"The emphasis this course has placed on that idea is due to its centrality in our attempts to ***change your mind about yourself***. It is the reason you can heal. It is the cause of healing. It is why you cannot die. Its truth established you as one with God."

"Yet you CANNOT crucify God's Son, for the Will of God cannot die. His Son HAS BEEN redeemed ***from his own crucifixion***, and you cannot assign to death whom God has given eternal life."

In ACIM Jesus warns us against mind-wandering, ie allowing your mind to just go wherever it seems to go with no sense of choosing or spiritual responsibility.

I've found myself mind-wandering about grief recently, causing a lot of upsets. And a lot of emotion had to be felt. But now that it's simmering down I find myself noticing my thoughts more and how they cause suffering.

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

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain."

Hmm.

Well, a few years ago I was at a hospital often with my wife, and quite often there would have to be conversations about the future. And often these were based on circumstantial evidence and opinion, but as a result of even considering the outcomes at all it would cause a lot of upset. Just even having the thoughts at all produced strong nightmarish emotions. But you're "supposed" to think these things through, right? The emotions are just natural right, and you're supposed to have them?

Over time, eventually, I realised that just even having these thoughts, going through these motions, even to just think about and consider "what might happen", was an egoic pursuit that simply generated a lot of unnecessary suffering. The outcomes almost never actually came to pass, the circumstances kept changing, and after a while it seemed pointless to even think about it. People would say that's "irresponsible" but it was really not that helpful to consider how hellish hell was going to be.

In various situations in life, based on the hierarchy of illusions, ie that some things external cause upsets more than others, we also can get lost in kind of "automatic" thought processes. Lines of thinking which are triggered off by external situations, which we think we "have to" think about and entertain. Something happens and our mind goes off on a tangent trying to solve a problem or explore what's happening etc. Victim consciousness kicks in and before you know it you're having a nightmare.

The problem is that all of these reaction-based trains of thought are a form of victimhood and self-attack. Just even going on these thought journeys actually stirs up and chooses suffering, making things worse than they had to be. No wonder you're upset all the time if you're constantly thinking about how upsetting things are.

Over time it becomes more obvious that it's the thoughts really that are the starting point of the suffering. If I just don't think about something, and don't let my ego throw me into certain lines of thinking, I can avoid quite a lot of suffering. This isn't the same as being in denial, in the negative sense, but there can be a positive use of denial which helps you to remain in the truth.

"When you are afraid of ANYTHING, you are acknowledging its power to hurt you."

"True denial is a very powerful protective device. You can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you. This kind of denial is NOT a concealment device, but a correction device. The "Right Mind" of the mentally healthy DEPENDS on it."

I've been noticing this with myself recently also. I seem to be getting a bit of a handle on at least some thoughts about grief and loss. I can see that there are certain thoughts I have along the lines of "she's gone", in which there's a kind of black and white separation-oriented thought. It's almost like a death thought, a thought of separateness and aloneness. This thought isn't very productive and just induces strongly upset feelings. I might think that these feelings are normal and natural or that I "have to have them", but I don't.

I noticed also that reflecting on the past in various ways also was inducing suffering. Thinking about some times that were unpleasant and far from ideal, times that I saw with false perceptions and victimhood, if I would think about them it would make me upset again. And it seemed like I was dwelling on these things because they were unresolved, which led to more upset. Jesus was guiding me to stop doing that but for a while I felt a bit compelled because I was reacting too easily to these lines of thought without being careful with what my mind was doing. Again I didn't realize there was any other "better way".

We think we can just think about anything and it has no consequences. Jesus is teaching us that our mind is powerful and thought can produce real effects.

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

"Death wishes do not kill in the physical sense, but they DO kill spiritually. ALL destructive thinking is dangerous."

The moral of the story is, you don't necessarily HAVE to have certain lines of thinking. You don't HAVE to consider all possible dire future outcomes. You don't HAVE to dwell on or talk about or go over all the details of stuff that's happened. It's okay to completely avoid talking or thinking about something, not as an attempt to deny it but as a constructive way to have mastery of the power of thought. To be in control of and responsible for what you think, aware of the consequences of what you're choosing.

Thoughts DO have causal power in them and can cause things to happen, as well as being able to cause all forms of suffering. The ego says we can just use thought to think of anything we like with NO effect, but this is totally untrue. It wants to make the mind insert and powerless, and so thinking about "anything" can lead to all kinds of victimhood and upset. You can easily go down dark paths and wander around lost in the woods.

We do have to try to be more vigilant and masterful over our actual thoughts than this. Otherwise we are apt to attack ourselves and make our own situation worse. We need to recognize that thinking can cause pain and suffering, and the right thinking can cause miracles and healing. We need to stay out of drama and thoughts of separateness, of disaster and loss and things being wrong. We need to stay out of thoughts of blame and guilt and it's our own responsibility to stay away from "where angels fear to tread."

At least then we do have the power to prevent ourselves from hurting ourselves, for lessening our own suffering, and preventing having as much upset as we think we must have. We don't have to just go through the motions being a victim, we can get back some power and make a better choice to more responsibly manage and own the minds thought processes. To allow your mind to go into dark places, unchecked and as a string of unconscious reactions, is mis-creation and "makes" suffering and unhappiness and hell.

"Miracle-working entails a full realization of the power of thought, and real avoidance of miscreation. Otherwise, the miracle will be necessary to set the mind ITSELF straight"

"It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains."

"You are much too tolerant of Mind-wandering, thus passively condoning its miscreation."

"What COULD you choose between, but life or death, waking or sleeping, war or peace, your dream or your reality?"

There is only one choice in the world. Not a million choices. Not a million scenarios. Not a million conditions to judge and evaluate and decide upon. There is only one choice. You are always choosing either life or death.

Life here means eternal life, immortality, invulnerability, perfect health, wholeness, happiness, love, peace, joy, etc. The attributes of God and His Kingdom of creation.

Death here means the cessation of eternity, an attack on God, a rejection of health and wholeness, a desire for destruction and death, and an attempt to make God non-existent.

The physical world itself is set up such that everything in it tends to lead towards death. It is not in support of God because it was made as an attack on him. This is why everything in it seems to make death inevitable.

But just because the world says all things must die, it doesn't mean you don't have a choice. It doesn't mean you have to go along with it and just give up and drop dead. Nor does it mean you have to find a way to try to accept death and cozy up to it.

What many in the world do not know is that there IS an alternative to death and dying and destruction and degradation. To embrace it requires a recognition of two things.

1) The world is ONLY offering death and there is no hope of life. 2) There is ANOTHER world which is offering only life and no hope of death.

Only if you can recognize that there IS AN ALTERNATIVE to the world's ways, do you even have a real choice. If there is no better world, no God, no eternal life, no miracles, no healing, no resurrection, then you really DON'T have a choice. You are set on a rollercoaster ride to hell and death and will not get off it until you're worm food.

We might think there are choices be made along the way, electing for different states of dying, different kinds of sicknesses, different unhappinesses, trying to trade-off one thing for another to come out on top. But the world has news for you - it is not ever going to let you come out on top in the long run.

So you have no real choice at all, because death is looming and you have no way to stop it. Or do you? Only IF there is another option do you actually have any real choice in life at all. Otherwise you're destined to die. And you cannot be at peace with such a fate because it is utterly insane.

Only if there is another world, another way, another option, and only if you have some kind of power of decision to choose it and make it be your experience, is there any REAL HOPE at all. There is REAL HOPE if you can in fact CHOOSE not to suffer, be sick, or die. And there is REAL HOPE if you have in your mind the POWER to actually make that choice, to choose away from death, and actually CAUSE life and REVERSE death.

Only if you can surmount death and overcome the world, can you be free from the descent into hell. Only if you can resurrect and raise the dead and reverse sickness and perform miracles, can you head in the direction of God who is life. Only if you can demonstrate harmlessness and invulnerability can you prove your commitment to immortality.

The world does not think immortality is possible. It is seen as a silly idea thought by crazy people. It is seen as having had almost zero examples and certainly does not appear to be commonplace. It seems like no-one gets out of here alive. And everyone has just decided to try and accept this fate and "live with it". To then adjust to it and try to "make the most" of the little lot of life we have, begging death for scraps of time and asking for little gifts of nothingness before we're extinguished.

Unless you are open to God and open to immortality and open to resurrection and miracles and healing, you are NOT open to life. You are committed to dying. And that is the only reason it will happen. You are CHOOSING it by not choosing away from it. And you are free to make this choice. If you do not choose God, you are choosing destruction. If you do not choose resurrection and healing, you are choosing to die.

This is your responsibility because you actually have a power in you to decide what you want. You do not HAVE to die or go through sickness or suffering. You CAN in fact elect not to have any of these things happen, and make it so. This is not a fantasy. Your mind is just as capable of causing life as it is of causing death. But to choose eternal life IS going to require you to fly in the face of the entire world, all its supporters, all its believers, and all of its pathways.

Only with help from beyond the world can you be liberated from the world. Only with the Holy Spirit can you find a solution, an answer, a way, which breaks all the laws of physics and violates all the seeming laws of reality. Only with his power can you recover and heal and resurrect even in the face of what the world would say is an impossible irreversible situation.

You have to choose towards God and towards life, away from death and way from destruction, if you want to live. If you want to escape from death and from sickness and hell, you have to choose life. This is really a no-brainer. If you are choosing life you will have life, if you are choosing death you will have death. You are free to choose.

"You who fear salvation are WILLING death. Life and death, light and darkness, knowledge and perception are irreconcilable."

"Either you give each other life or death; either you are each other's Savior or his judge, offering him sanctuary or condemnation."

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt. The ancient Calling of the Father to His Son, and of the Son unto his own, will yet be the last trumpet that the world will ever hear. Brother, there is no death. And this you learn when you but wish to show your brother that you had no hurt of him. He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned. But it is given you to SHOW him, by your healing, that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream."

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die."

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

"The emphasis this course has placed on that idea is due to its centrality in our attempts to change your mind about yourself. It is the reason you can heal. It is the cause of healing. It is why you cannot die. Its truth established you as one with God."

"Now do we live, for now we cannot die. The wish for death is answered, and the sight that looked upon it now has been replaced by vision which perceives that you are not what you pretend to be."

"Even in time you cannot live apart from Him, for sleep is not death. What He created can sleep, but it CANNOT die. Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF. Yet God's Son cannot will death for himself, because His Father is Life, and HIS SON IS LIKE HIM."

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do."

"And BEING loving, they are like the Father, and therefore cannot die."

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

"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."

Sometimes doing ACIM seems very difficult. It boils down to a simple fact. Everything in the world is opposite to the truth. And that means you're going to have to become opposite to everything in the world!

"This IS the "natural" condition of the separation. And those who learn that it is NOT natural at all, seem to be the UNnatural ones. For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true."

This is no easy feat. Everything in the world is totally backwards, inside out, and upside down. It is opposite to heaven's laws and nature in EVERY way.

"...earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

So it's calling for you to totally go against the grain in order to be sane, to deny and defy the whole nature of this entire world and not believe a single thing about it. The world is insane, and you want sanity.

"What does this prove except the world is mad? Why share its madness in the sad belief that what is universal here is true? Nothing the world believes is true. It is a place whose purpose is to be a home where those who claim they do not know themselves can come to question what it is they are."

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death."

"This IS an insane world, and do not underestimate the actual extent of its insanity. There is no area of your perception that it has not touched, and your dream IS sacred to you."

Our position in "false perception" is one where we have reversed or swapped cause and effect. We've also swapped what is true and what is false. Everything is totally back to front. We now believe the world is happening to us, causing us. And yet, we are immortal beings, causers, creators, rulers of the universe, to whom nothing is supposed to be happening.

There are very strong empowerment themes in ACIM to do with you learning to re-adopt the position of having power OVER the world. Over even sickness and death. Over all problems and forms of suffering. In which you are the cause of the dream, and not its effect. Where you are invulnerable and incapable of being hurt. Where you would show and demonstrate to others that you cannot be hurt even physically.

"Show your brother you've had no hurt of him."

"The body can become a sign of life, a promise of redemption, and a breath of immortality to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death. Let it have healing as its PURPOSE. Then will it send forth the message it received, and by its health and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that it represents. Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever unattacked. And to your brother let its message be, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I live."

Whenever our mind believes for a second that cause and effect have been swapped, we see ourselves as at the effect of the world and other people. They're doing it to us. We're being affected. We are now passive victims, suffering against our will, experiencing things we seem to have not chosen or wanted. But then the course is saying, absolutely everything that happens you must have chosen and wanted, and you did it to yourself.

This is reflected in the secret of salvation "you're doing this to yourself." It doesn't even matter what form it takes or who seems to be the victimizer. If you see yourself as an effect of the very thing you made, you are playing a role of victim and are positioning yourself to be hurt by it. And yet you are an immortal being, who cannot be hurt.

"Nothing real can be threatened."

The real meaning of this is that you are an immortal being and you are CAUSAL. You caused this world. You are the dreamer of it. It is nothing but an effect and it cannot do anything to who or what you really are. You've dreamed up dream figures and set them about attacking your body.

"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you REALLY understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who SEEM to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are WHOLLY unreal? "

"The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did."

"My Self is ruler of the universe. It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen."

And then Jesus even goes on to say that you cannot suffer or be sick or hurt or killed or anything against your will. That even death is CONSENTED to in all its forms.

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details."

So we've got the world seeming to function backwards, in which it seems capable of causing your body, making it an effect of the world. You've got random chaotic events "happening to it". You've got all manner of inescapable problems, people attacking you, stuff going wrong. And you're supposed to fly in the face of it all exclaim, THIS IS DOING NOTHING TO ME.

That's not easy. You're asked to act like an immortal being in a mortal world. And that means if you are not vigilant, you're going to be constantly drawn into the world's ways, tempted to believe what it shows you, deceived by its illusions and frightened by its images. You have to constantly be on-guard and vigilant in your willingness to take a forgiving attitude instead.

Forgiveness means little more than looking at the world from a point of view of it BEING NOTHING LIKE YOU, and therefore that you are immortal and it is not. Forgiveness symbolizes your immortality and points to your invulnerability. You can accuse no-one of sin if it is impossible for you to be sinned against. If the world can do nothing to you, you cannot be angry at it. You can only be benevolent by recognizing that you cannot be changed.

That's difficult work. Being confronted with a totally backwards world all day every day, and being asked to totally go against it and deny it in every way. That even your body lies to you. Even your planet is a false world. Even the events that sure as hell look like they're happening aren't happening. That even the suggested proof of sin that your body can be crucified is a total deception. The world is COMPLETELY UNNATURAL.

"as it seems to be the most unnatural and difficult for the untrained mind."

"Deny your own identity and you will not escape the madness which induced this weird, unnatural and ghostly thought which mocks creation and which laughs at God."

"The ego wants to teach you that you want to OPPOSE God's Will. This unnatural lesson CANNOT be learned"

"Miracles seem unnatural to the ego"

"To you the miracle CANNOT seem natural, because what you have done to hurt your minds, has made THEM so UNnatural that they do not remember what is natural to them. And when you are TOLD about it, you cannot UNDERSTAND it. The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is PERFECTLY natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you."

"Guilt is a sure sign that your thinking is UNnatural. Perverted thinking will ALWAYS be attended with guilt, because it IS the belief in sin."

For you to become your natural self, you're going to have to stop believing anything the world says or does. That's not exactly easy if your'e used to being in false perceptions where you buy into the entire system and think it's the truth. You're quite literally stuck in hell and trying to get back to heaven. And the only way to get back there is to become heaven-like while you're in the midst of evil.

You're being PULLED in two different directions. The world is trying to pull you into hell and darkness and death. God is trying to pull you into heaven and light and happiness. The two are irreconcilable. They are totally opposite. You will have to abandon the world if you want to go home to God. You will have to turn your back on death and reject sickness and choose away from sin and guilt and fear. And most of all, you will have to learn to see yourself as the RULER of the universe, in no way a victim, and entirely equipped with the power of God.

The whole problem with false perception is really just one of confusion about "what is the cause." Or more to the point, who is causing it. We could rephrase that as "I don't know what God (cause) is."

In the separation there was a disassociation from the role of "causer" or chooser (creator), and the ownership and responsibility of this causing was projected onto others. We then ended up in an extremely confused state of not being able to clearly discern, "who is doing what to whom?"

In the ego thought system, cause and effect are completely reversed, things which are true seem false, things which are false seem true. There is a breakdown of the Golden Rule, in which anything that's true is true of both of us.

It's replaced with the ego's idea that what is true for me is not true for you. Which really is another way of saying, cause and effect are separate. I can cause you without being affected. And you can cause me without being affected. I can accuse you of doing something I did not do, and thereby believe I am innocent while you're guilty.

This is the ego's idea of "getting away with murder", because it believes it can cause things to happen and escape the consequences. So when we get into "its you not me", or "you did this to me", any kind of blame or finger-pointing or scapegoating or believing that "cause" is outside of you, you will instantly go into a victim role. And victims are always confused about who is attacking them.

In that confused state of ego reactions, it always seems like it's someone else doing this to us, some external event happened, some unforseen circumstance, some unwanted happening

Usually you'll feel devoid of all responsibility for causing it. ie it'll seem like you didn't choose any of it, and you don't want it. But this is because you have no clue whatsoever what is really causing anything. And so random fingers point at random targets hoping some mud will stick.

As you apply forgiveness, ie you become more honest and less in denial about your contribution, you start to sort out exactly WHO is causing stuff to happen. At first it seems like it's everyone except you, but then gradually each time you see that YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF, or was something you did in fact choose, or that it did have an effect on you, the picture starts to become clearer.

The more you can take responsibility for choosing the more you will discern clearly and recognize that you are the cause of your suffering. You will also start to notice that the ego's breaking of God's laws does not work, and in fact when you do attack or scapegoat another you do NOT escape the consequences. It makes you feel guilty, it frightens you, it upsets and stresses you out.

Eventually, there becomes a clear association between "being a victim" and "attacking yourself". A clear line of causation from what you are choosing and the effect YOU experience as a result. You'll see it's not possible to blame another without feeling blamed. It's not possible to judge without feeling judged. It's not possible to attack without feeling attacked. And it's not possible to accuse someone of being the cause of you without you feeling like a vulnerable victim.

And so then it becomes obvious, that you feel like a victim BECAUSE you positioned yourself as one, seeing yourself in that role, and wanting to do so in order to try and get a payoff of scapegoating. But you no longer can pretend that your attacks on another don't hurt yourself. You can't help but notice that the instant you try to shift guilt to someone else, you will immediately feel that familiar weakness, threat and lack of safety that accompanies a victim mentality.

It then becomes an unavoidable no-brainer. That is, you clearly recognize and distinguish, whenever I attack, I feel attacked. Whenever I want to make someone out to be guilty, I feel like a victim. Whenever I try to be unforgiving, I feel unforgiven. It has a direct correlation, because I AM the cause of everything I experience, NOT the other person.

It then becomes harder to pretend to yourself that your attempted attacks on others have no effect on you. You are affected every time. You simply cannot maintain peace and happiness at the same time as being angry with someone. You can't truly honestly justify anger in any situation because you know that it's bullshit. And it'll become increasingly noticeable that you're bullshitting yourself as you sort out exactly who is causing everything you feel.

So then it becomes quicker and easier to catch yourself. You can see, well, as soon as I went to point a finger at someone and use them as a scapegoat, I felt like a victim under attack. Funny that. I made that happen. I gave myself that experience. And so I can choose again and withdraw that self-attack, that self-positioning of "I'm the victim here!". That demand that I be weak and vulnerable and recognized as a suffering frightened liar.

Since I then see that I do this to myself and it was very obvious that I did this, the entire "appeal" of playing the victim role withers away. There's no point to it when you can more accurately discern that it very much does hurt you. There are consequences. And so the challenge then is to no longer see yourself unfairly treated or as a victim of anyone or anything, recognizing that it's only when you do that you feel that way at all. And you no longer want to feel that way.

Fortunately since it's an inside job where you're the only one causing, and other people are never the cause of you AT ALL, it really boils down to your own willingness to admit to what you're doing to yourself and to want a better way. To prefer not suffering over suffering. To recognize that hurting hurts and attack attacks, rather than believing it does something else. Because in our confusion we don't even realize what the fuck we're doing to ourselves, and we end up killing ourselves in the name of self preservation.

True perception is accurate perception. It is recognition. It is awareness and discernment. It is the ability to SEE, clearly, what the truth of this situation is. What is really going on. Who is really causing and choosing. Where things really originate and what their effects actually are. It's the willingness and ability to not be blinded or confused by the ego temptation to think its one-sidedness can work. It's simply honesty and openness to the truth.

Who would hurt themselves unless they thought they weren't hurting themselves in doing so?

Who would hurt themelves once they recognized that they cannot be hurt unless they do so?

Who would hurt themselves if they recognized that even the slightest attempt to hurt others diminishes your own happiness?

Who would hurt themselves when joy and peace and love are the price?

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

"No-one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No-one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No-one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. And no-one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

""My Self is ruler of the universe." - It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept."

When we are greatly distracted by, tempted by, and lost in the world, it is hard to recognize the secret of salvation.

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF."

But the real key part of this isn't just that you are doing things to yourself, rather than it being others who do it. It's that it can ONLY BE YOU who can hurt yourself.

Jesus describes many times that you have hurt yourself. You have hurt your mind. You have attacked yourself.

"Because you had attacked yourself, and BELIEVED THAT THE ATTACK WAS EFFECTIVE, you behold yourself as weakened."

"Although you have attacked yourself, and very brutally, you will demonstrate that NOTHING HAPPENED. Therefore, by attacking, you have NOT DONE ANYTHING."

"By doing this UNCONSCIOUSLY, you try to keep the fact that you must have attacked yourself FIRST out of awareness, and thus imagine that you have made yourself safe."

"You HAVE attacked him, and you MUST have attacked yourself first."

It is easy to place a lot of focus on other people. On forgiving the world. On healing the body. On world events and problems. It is easy to spend a great deal of time caught up in relationships and dramas. But all of these forms of suffering are really quite far down the line in terms of what came first, and where the real power is.

What comes first happens quickly and so close to home, that it is easy to miss. YOU .... attack yourself....... BEFORE. ... the entire world happens.

"Only the self-accused condemn."

You accuse yourself FIRST. You attack your invulnerability FIRST. You try to undermine your immortality FIRST. You position yourself as afraid FIRST. You make yourself a victim FIRST. You see yourself as lacking FIRST. You condemn yourself FIRST. You accuse yourself of sin FIRST. You do everything to yourself FIRST.

THEN ..... having attacked yourself, the whole thing starts to cascade into projection and blame and dissociation and denial and displacement and various other ways to "disown" responsibility for what you have done to yourself.

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you."

It then becomes possible to become confused as to WHO did this to you. You deny that you did it to you. You pretend that someone else did it to you. You shift the responsibility. You hide from your own self attack. You don't want to look at the fact that YOU are trying to self destruct. All self attack is an attempt to kill God's son - which is YOU - which is suicide. And eventually this results in suffering, sickness, and death, ALL OF WHICH are self inflicted.

"It means that you cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness." "YOU CAN BUT HURT YOURSELF. This has been oft repeated, but is difficult to grasp as yet."

"For you HAVE hurt yourself, and made your Self your enemy. And now you MUST believe you are not you, but something alien to yourself and "something else," a "something" to be feared instead of loved."

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt."

This doesn't have ANYTHING to do with anyone else, or the body, or the world, or spacetime. It's entirely to do with. ... do you love yourself or not? Do you accept and live in your IMMORTAL nature which is given by God, or do you DENY that you are immortal and TRY to make yourself mortal? The only ambition of trying not to be mortal, is that you try to destroy (kill) yourself. But since your immortal self cannot die, you confuse yourself with a body and kill it instead, as a representation of yourself dying.

"If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves"

"Yet you CANNOT crucify God's Son, for the Will of God cannot die"

"What He created can sleep, but it CANNOT die. Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF."

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do."

The attack upon YOURSELF, is all the only problem. You thinking that you attack others, is YOUR problem of being confused, and you are mistaken. You thinking that others attack you, is you being confused, and you are mistaken. NO ONE has ever attacked you against your will. You have never suffered against your will. You have never been sick against your will. You have never died against your will.

"Would you not rather live than choose to die?"

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

Salvation, and the secret of salvation, is simply that ANYTHING you experience other than immortality, YOU are doing to yourself. You are the SOLE cause of it. There are no external causes of suffering. There are no external causes of sickness or death. "There are no accidents in salvation." Nothing in the world can do ANYTHING to you against your will. No one can vioalte you or offend you or hurt you against your will. You CANNOT BE A VICTIM unless you deliberately decide to be one.

So this really has nothing at all to do with anyone else. It is entirely to do with .... are you going to forgive yourself, or not? Are you going to love yourself, or not? There is another subtle part to this though. Your soul and your mind are two different things. Your soul is your self, your identity in christ. But your mind is a medium that your soul uses for expression. Your soul does NOT need salvation because it is permanently immortal. It has never been attacked and never will. But your MIND is confused and HAS tried to hurt itself. It DOES need "healing" or correction.

This means that, even your own self attack, even your mind's efforts to destroy you, even your belief in sin and evil, even your death wish, in truth has NO EFFECT on your immortal soul. Nothing changes about the truth of you. Even your self induced suffering is not REAL suffering. Even your self inflicted pain is not real pain. And as you try to kill yourself off, you as the son of God is totally unaffected.

This means that EVEN IF you attack yourself, you are not REALLY attacking yourself. You have not REALLY ever done anything to yourself. "I am still as God created me."

Recognize first that ALL attack is SELF attack. This is not easy when you have slipped down the slipper slope into projection. It has to all come back to YOU being totally responsible for sin. BUT, you must not stop at being responsible for sin because it is not real. You need swift correction, so that you will recognize you HAVE NOT even sinned against yourself. You must admit that YOU are the ONLY cause of ALL your suffering, and decide to STOP HURTING YOURSELF. And then you can receive healing.

This simple truth, that YOU are the only one hurting yourself, and YOU can decide to love yourself instead. .. is the CORE of A Course in Miracles. Once you love yourself, or. .. seek first the Kingdom of God (which is you) .... your way will be made straight. Everythign else will fall into line naturally, including performing miracles, healing the body, and undoing the world.

"The Separation HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial. However, to concentrate on error is merely a further misuse of legitimate psychic mechanisms. The true corrective procedure, which has already been described as the proper use of the spiritual eye (or true vision), is to accept the error temporarily, BUT ONLY as an indication that IMMEDIATE correction is mandatory. This establishes a state of mind in which the Atonement can be accepted without delay."

"When you are weary, remember you have hurt yourself. Your Comforter will rest you, but YOU cannot. YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW, for if you did, you could never have grown weary. Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way, for that is not God's Will for His Son."

"It can be but myself I crucify."

All that I do I do unto myself.

If I attack, I suffer. But if I

forgive, salvation will be given me."

"As prayer is always for yourself, so is forgiveness given you. It is impossible to forgive another, for it is only your sins you see in him."

"I repeat again that if you ATTACK error, you will hurt yourself."

"To see a body as anything EXCEPT a means of pure extension is to limit your mind and HURT YOURSELF."

"To you the miracle CANNOT seem natural, because what you have done to hurt your minds, has made THEM so UNnatural that they do not remember what is natural to them."

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

"When he thinks that he is hurt in any way, it is because he has forgotten who he is, and that he is as You created him." "If ever I am sad or hurt or ill, I have forgotten what You think, and put my little, meaningless ideas in place of where Your Thoughts belong, and where They are. I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts."

"I will not hurt myself today."

"His thoughts can frighten him, but since these thoughts belong to him alone, he has the power to change them, and exchange each fear thought for a happy thought of love. He crucified himself. Yet God has planned that His beloved Son will be redeemed."

"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."

A collection of A Course in Miracles quotes...

"The body can be made a home like this, BECAUSE it lacks foundation in the truth. And yet, BECAUSE it does, it can be seen as NOT your home, but merely as an aid to help you reach the home where God abides.

With THIS as purpose IS the ***body healed***. It is NOT used to witness to the dream of separation and disease. Nor is it idly blamed for what it did not do. It serves to help the HEALING of God's Son, and, for THIS purpose, it cannot BE sick. It will not join a purpose not your own, and you have chosen that it NOT be sick. All miracles are based upon this choice, and GIVEN you the instant it is made. No forms of sickness are immune, because the choice cannot be MADE in terms of form. The choice of SICKNESS seems to be a form, yet it is one, as is its opposite. And YOU are sick or well, accordingly."

----

"Healing will flash across your open mind as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings. There will be no dark corners sickness can conceal and keep defended from the light of truth. There will be no dim figures from your dreams, nor their obscure and meaningless pursuits with double purposes insanely sought, remaining in your mind. It will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey.

Now is the ***body healed*** because the source of sickness has been opened to relief."

----

"The miracle returns the CAUSE of fear to you who made it. But it ALSO shows that, HAVING no effects it is NOT cause, because the function of causation is to HAVE effects. And where effects are gone, there IS no cause. Thus is the ***body healed*** by miracles BECAUSE they show the mind MADE sickness, and employed the body to be victim, or EFFECT of what it made."

----

"I am as God created me"

"Holy indeed is he who makes these words his own; arising with them in his mind, recalling them throughout the day, at night bringing them with him as he goes to sleep. His dreams are happy and his rest secure; his safety certain and his ***body healed***, because he sleeps and wakens with the truth before him always. He will save the world because he gives the world what he receives each time he practices the words of truth."

----

"Now in the hands made gentle by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays a picture of a DIFFERENT you. It is a picture of ***a body*** still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore ***never suffered pain at all. IT witnesses to the eternal truth that you can not BE hurt***, and points BEYOND itself to both YOUR innocence and HIS."

----

"A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed."

----

"A gentler dream, in which his suffering was healed, and where his brother was his friend."

----

"Very simply, the resurrection is the overcoming or surmounting of death. It is a reawakening or a rebirth; a change of mind about the meaning of the world. It is the acceptance of the Holy Spirit's interpretation of the world's purpose; the acceptance of the Atonement for oneself. It is the end of dreams of misery, and the glad awareness of the Holy Spirit's final dream. It is the recognition of the gifts of God. It is the dream ***in which the body functions perfectly***, having no function except communication."

----

"Every situation, properly perceived, becomes an opportunity to heal the Son of God. And he is healed BECAUSE you offered faith to him, giving him to the Holy Spirit and RELEASING him from every demand your ego would make of him. Thus do you SEE HIM FREE, and in this vision does the Holy Spirit SHARE. And since He SHARES it He HAS given it, and so He healed THROUGH YOU. It is this JOINING Him in a UNITED purpose that MAKES this purpose real because YOU make it WHOLE. And this IS healing. ***The BODY is healed*** BECAUSE YOU CAME WITHOUT IT and joined the Mind in which all healing rests."

----

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

----

"Health is the witness unto health. As long as it is unattested, it remains without conviction. Only ***when DEMONSTRATED*** has it BEEN proved, and MUST compel belief. No-one is healed through double messages. If you wish ONLY to be healed, you heal. Your single PURPOSE makes this possible."

----

"The body, then, is not the source of its own health. Its condition lies solely in your interpretation of its function."

----

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and ***the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die.*** When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions that are responsible for the body's condition."

----

"What you would prove to him you will believe. The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. ***Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him***. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him."

----

"Here its peace can come, and perfect healing take the place of death. The body can become a sign of life, a promise of redemption, and a breath of immortality to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death. ***Let it have healing as its PURPOSE. Then will it send forth the message it received, and by its health and loveliness*** proclaim the truth and value that it represents. Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever unattacked. And to your brother let its message be, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I live.""

----

"Learning must lead beyond the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it. This can be accomplished only if the mind EXTENDS to other minds, and does not ARREST ITSELF in its extension. The arrest of the mind's extension is the ***cause of all illness***, because ONLY EXTENSION IS THE MIND'S FUNCTION. Block this, and you have ***blocked health*** because you have BLOCKED THE MIND'S JOY."

----

"Perhaps you do not realize that this removes the limits you had placed upon the body by the purposes you gave to it. As these are laid aside, the strength the body has will always be enough to serve all truly useful purposes. The ***body's health is fully guaranteed*** because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for ***sickness has become impossible.***"

----

"***Your health*** is a result of your desire to see your brother with no blood upon his hands, nor guilt upon his heart made heavy with the proof of sin. And what you wish is GIVEN you to see."

----

"The body needs NO healing (directly). But the mind that thinks it IS a body is sick indeed! And it is here that Christ sets forth the remedy. His PURPOSE ***folds the body in His light, and fills it with the holiness*** that shines from HIM. And nothing that the body says or does but makes HIM manifest."

----

"No-one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No-one ***suffers pain*** except his choice elects this state for him. No-one can grieve nor fear ***nor think him sick*** unless these are the outcomes that he wants. And ***no-one dies without his own consent***. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

----

"The removal of blocks, then, is the only way to ***guarantee help and healing***. Help and healing are the normal expressions of a mind which is working ***THROUGH the body*** but not in it. If the mind believes the body is its goal, it will distort its perception OF the body, and by blocking its own extension BEYOND it, will ***INDUCE illness*** by FOSTERING SEPARATION. Perceiving the body AS A SEPARATE ENTITY cannot but foster illness, because it is not true. A medium of communication WILL lose its usefulness if it is used for anything else."

----

"Sickness is anger taken out upon the body."

----

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt."

----

"A guiltless mind cannot suffer. The mind, being sane, heals the body."

I am gradually learning that there is POWER in making decisions. And I don't just mean some kind of self-help "make more decisions to be productive" kind of thing. I mean, literally it has a supernatural kind of power to it. It's tied into miracle working. It accesses and wields the power of the mind to CAUSE.

Everything in the course points towards becoming more decisive, empowered, certain, clear about what you do or do not want, being responsible for choice, ending victimhood, realizing that nothing can happen to you against your will, and reclaiming the ability to CHOOSE. And in that choosing, you actually CAUSE stuff. And what you do not choose, you do not cause.

Here is what "My self is ruler of the universe" says from Lesson 253:

"It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept. For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my Will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them, and Him Who has created me."

It is also very clear that being in fear is being in indecision. Fearfulness is an attempt NOT to choose, just as "death is an attempt to make no decisions at all." The opposite of that is to make ALL decisions or to be aware that you choose everything that happens to you. ie nothing happens to you, it happens FROM you.

This is the secret to salvation - that you are doing this to yourself. And the secret to salvation, and forgiveness, and atonement, and miracle working, all recognize that you have a POWER in you to choose. And whatever you DECIDE, you CAUSE TO HAPPEN.

Let's put it this way. YOU ARE ALWAYS CHOOSING.

Everything is a choice. "Heaven is a decision I must make". "No one dies without their own consent."

The problem is that we do not believe we are always choosing. When we say things like "such and such is going to happen to me" as though we are not choosing it, we are actually choosing it. When we lay down and just accept that we're in for stormy weather, we are actually choosing it. "I have no neutral thoughts" - because you are always using thought to choose what you will experience.

The whole thing about perception and projection stems from the fact that you perceive what you CHOOSE to perceive, having put it there yourself through your decision.

"I must have decided wrongly because I am not at peace" - the entire prayer and the text prior to it clarifies that if you are not experiencing joy *YOU* MUST have DECIDED NOT TO. And we are supposed to own up to 100% responsibility for that. And to then reclaim that power of decision, and CHOOSE AGAIN. But if we don't recognize that we are always choosing or have the power TO choose, and that choosing MAKES STUFF HAPPEN, then we will just remain in a state of half-baked victimhood and uncertainty and things just seeming to happen on their own.

Since we've been immersed in fear and uncertainty and victimhood for so long, it has become "normal" to us. We've become used to it. We don't realize that we HAVE a choice in every situation and that the things we are experiencing are precisely what we ASKED FOR. We do not realize that we are, as the song of prayer says, ALWAYS PRAYING and thus always asking AND always being answered in accordance with what it is we are asking for. And if we are asking for suffering, we will make suffering. And if we are asking for joy, we will receive joy.

It's all too easy to be lost in states of fearful-mindedness where it does not seem like you have any say in the matter. That you have no power, are not choosing, stuff is happening outside of your decision, things happen that you do not want, you don't seem to be able to do anything about it, and then you start to believe that you don't even HAVE any kind of "power". Like, if you even DID make a decision, you think that the making of the decision ITSELF - the making up of your mind - has no power to CAUSE anything to occur. But this is not true.

"The mind is very powerful, it is always creating and lever loses its creative ability." The whole thing about rendering the faculties of decision ineffective in an attempt to block the mind's power speaks to this. We do not want to admit that THOUGHT HAS POWER. And in fact, "who would have imagined that thought and belief could combine in a power surge strong enough to literally move mountains." This comes about through DECISIVENESS, certainty, confidence, wholeness, strength, truth, love. The qualities of a healed mind is a POWERFUL mind which chooses and is AWARE that it chooses, and that in making choices CAUSES stuff to occur. Miraculously. Powerfully.

I am still struggling with this myself because all too often I am in the egoic sleeping state of not realizing that I CAN CHOOSE something else. But I've also been finding that when I DO make a decision, it immediately DISPELLS fear. Just last night I was cleaning the bathroom and using chemicals and was getting a bit nauseated from the fumes, and after becoming anxious about it for a few minutes I DECIDED with a firm "I am...." decision... "I am not threatened, I am safe". Instantly a whole cloud of fearful energy around me vanished.

Also not long ago I was seeing signs of a sickness showing up and I got mad about it. I REFUSED that it would be allowed to happen. Jesus said "decide". I decided FIRMLY that THIS WILL SIMPLY NOT HAPPEN. Then I walked away. Next day there was no sign of it. And I had no fear or doubt or second-guessing or wondering about it because of the certainty with which I decided. The firmness or assertiveness and power of making a clear decision.

There is more to this than simply choosing which direction to go on a path. It's not some weak little change of plans. When you become decisive and fearless and certain "I am not doubtful but certain, I am not afraid but all powerful", you become quite POWERFUL and that power actually can CAUSE. It can cause stuff to happen. It can cause stuff to not happen. Just as "my self is ruler of the universe" says. Nothing can come to you unbidden by yourself. You choose it all! No-one dies without their own consent. Nothing happens to you that you do not choose. The world contains no causes, nothing can bring oppression or make you ill or weak or afraid.

We are constantly CHOOSING. We need to step into this power, into this state of "consciously choosing". Being decisive. DECIDING. I had another example just recently where I had some heartburn and was worried about it. Out of the blue, while talking to Holy Spirit, I DECIDED "I am healed." I have no idea where it came from. Instantly Holy Spirit went to work doing some kind of miracle in my body and the heartburn was healed.

Jesus also says that when the PURPOSE of any sickness is recognized as being NOT NEEDED (no defense needed) there is no sickness that will not disappear and be healed instantly. That such healing is automatic. That simply by DECIDING to accept truth without fear and being WILLING to let go of suffering, it can simply vanish. This is the power of our mind. Getting in touch with your WILLINGNESS puts you in touch with the Power of God's Will!

We don't realize how powerful our minds are. We don't recognize it because we're been hanging out in the ego land for too long, drifting from one victimy reaction to the next. Just allowing stuff to happen, going along with it, passively aggressing against ourselves, just laying down and "letting" stuff occur - through our own unconscious choices. It's not that we are not MAKING choices all the time, it's that these choices are being made from an UNCONSCIOUS DEATH WISH and it's causing all kinds of havoc. We need to become AWARE of our decision making moments, our moments of decisiveness and choosing. We can choose what we experience!

I find this choosing to be powerful especially in relation to some kind of statement about myself, termed as "I am..." or "I am not". You don't have to just let stuff carry on "by itself". That's an illusion. Nothing happens "on its own". There isn't any kind of alien will or external causality. You ARE already making everything happen that you experience, you are just doing it outside of awareness. This is part of why we must remove blocks to awareness so that we can stop unconsciously making bad choices that hurt ourselves.

There is power in decision. It is the antithesis of fear and death. YOU CAN CHOOSE NOT TO DIE. And in fact, if you do die, you still chose it. "No-one dies without their own consent." It's just a matter of whether or not you get in touch with that CHOOSING and you USE that power of decision to choose otherwise. You want to choose otherwise because you want to be at peace. You can CHOOSE that. Death is a decision that you make, just as "heaven is a decision I must make." And when you choose Heaven, death becomes IMPOSSIBLE because it cannot happen WITHOUT your consent. If you do not choose it, you are free from it forever.

There is a whole workbook lesson on this as well, Lesson 152 - "The power of decision is my own." Lesson 152. Here's how it starts:

"No-one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No-one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No-one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. And no-one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is.

You may believe that this position is extreme, and too inclusive to be true. Yet can truth have exceptions? If you have the gift of everything can loss be real? Can pain be part of peace, or grief of joy? Can fear and sickness enter in a mind where love and perfect holiness abide? Truth must be all-inclusive if it be the truth at all. Accept no opposite and no exceptions, for to do so is to contradict the truth entirely.

Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true and nothing else is true."

It's a matter of responsibility. Is death of the body caused solely by your mind and is your mind solely responsible for whether or not it happens? Do you actually have the freedom NOT TO DIE if you so choose? Can you prevent death, and cause the body not to die? Can you reverse death and restore life?

Or, does death only happen through external causes, things outside of you, the environment or other people, weapons and wars, poisoned food and toxic water? Are we at the effect of an alien will and alien power not our own, such that we do not ask for death and do not cause it to happen, seeing it as happening solely against our will?

And if death does seem to happen through causes NOT in our own mind or power or choice, will we simply "write it off" by relegating it to an illusion, describing it as unreal, dismissing it as meaningless and not important, as a way to continue the belief that death - if it happens at all, even in a dream - happens BECAUSE OF the dream happening to us?

Are there actually accidents? Do people fall off cliffs through a mis-step? Do planes crash through some mistaken fault that seems random? Do planets collide just through sheer force of the laws of physics? Are we all fated to be swallowed up in a supernova someday when the sun explodes, with no choice or power to prevent it? Are we powerless beings?

Some people like to relegate all things of this world to a bucket of illusions, slap a label of unreality on it, and toss it under the rug. But we can't be dismissing this and writing it off. Yes only the soul/spirit is real and has eternal life and nothing real can be threatened. Yes bodies are illusions and don't even really exist.

But let's look at it another way, right now you have a body, and it has an illusion of existence. There are billions of them. People's minds inhabit them and walk around in them. And for the most part, most of these bodies are sick and have issues. Some much worse than others. And all of these issues are forms of death - as the course says, sickness is but a little death. So most people have a little death going on, "a form of vengeance not yet total", which later becomes total.

If the body seems to "become sick", is that because something happened OTHER THAN your mind and its power? Because if that is the case, then death does in fact have power over the mind. If mind cannot choose away from it, cannot undo it, and did not cause it to begin with, then mind has NO WAY that it can see itself as not at the effect of the dream.

If death just "happens to you", you are a victim. If there can be causes which are beyond the mind, beyond your power, beyond your control, you are a victim. It doesn't matter that the world is just a dream and real things can't be threatened. At the body level, mind is supposed to have power over everything. Might I remind you that your self is ruler of the universe, and nothing is supposed to happen other than what you decide.

There is NO POWER in the view that we do not have power over death. There is NO POWER in the view that death doesn't matter because bodies aren't real. There is NO POWER in the view that we can have bodies becoming sick "on their own" or staying sick "on their own" WITHOUT our consent. There is NO POWER in having bodies die "against our will". And there is NO POWER in pretending that this is all okay to happen "because it's an illusion."

The only place where there is any power, is where your mind has power OVER these things, is RESPONSIBLE FOR these things, CAUSES these things, and therefore HAS THE POWER to choose otherwise. A Course in Miracles is a course in cause and not effect, it is a course is reclaiming your POWER. And might I remind you that Jesus says that our minds are extremely powerful, capable of creating worlds, of moving mountains, and that we are supposed to reach a state of resurrection which means "the surmounting of death."

There is no surmounting of death by just writing it off as an illusion. If your mind does not have the POWER to prevent it from occurring, and does not have the power to raise the dead as Jesus did, then the mind has not reached a state of resurrection. A Course in Miracles' curriculum ends in the resurrection, in which death is OVERCOME FOREVER. Which means, no more sickness, no more death, and no more reincarnation.

It is NOT ENOUGH to accuse the world of causing sickness and death to happen. It is NOT ENOUGH to shift responsibility for the body's condition onto a dream. It is NOT ENOUGH to claim that someone else caused your body to be sick. It is NOT ENOUGH to suggest that death can continue to happen to the body against your will. It is NOT ENOUGH to take a position of continued POWERLESSNESS over death, in which death remains victor at the end of the day, as it proves again and again that a separate alien will is stronger than your own power of decision.

I will remind you that A Course in Miracles makes this unequivocal statement:

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

DO you see where it says that no-one dies without his own consent? That means that if you DO NOT give consent, through your mind's power and responsibility, death WILL NOT happen. That means having power OVER death, not merely sidestepping it or jumping onto a theological high-horse trying to be holier than thou. This is real responsibility. It is BECAUSE nothing happens without your consent that you HAVE the possibility of salvation.

If sickness or death can ever happen or be maintained or continue in a any way, through any cause or responsibility OTHER THAN your mind and its power and choice, YOU DO NOT have any hope whatsoever of salvation. It means there is a power that has power over you which can keep you in hell and suffering for as long as it wants. It means you cannot return to heaven and can be locked into a hellish experience forever. It means endless reincarnation and never waking up. It means death has power over God.

Jesus is teaching us to be powerful responsible creative beings. To reclaim the power of God, which is not only unlimited, there is nothing it cannot do. It can have power over all forms of sickness be they mental or physical. It can have power over all matter and energy and every force in spacetime. ONLY IF we have consented to and thus chose AND CAUSED sickness and death to occur, are we ever in a position to CHOOSE AGAIN, and choose otherwise, choosing NOT to die.

"Swear not to die, thou holy Son of God! You make a bargain that you cannot keep. The Son of Life cannot BE killed. He is immortal as his Father. What he is cannot be changed. He is the only thing in all the universe that MUST be One."

You are responsible for whether or not sickness happens. You are responsible for whether or not death happens. You are ruler of the universe. Nothing happens against your will.

"My Self is ruler of the universe. It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept."

EVEN IN THIS WORLD ..... even in the illusion/dream of Earth, you RULE your destiny. You have power to choose what happens, and what does not happen. If sickness happens, YOU CHOSE IT. If death happens, YOU CHOSE IT. YOU MUST CHOOSE NOT TO CAUSE SICKNESS AND DEATH, and it is within your power to do so, because you are 100% responsible for everything that happens.

If you in any way assign responsibility for death to ANYTHING anywhere other than your own mind, you have a victim consciousness and cannot be healed. A mind that believes in BEING AT THE EFFECT OF THE WORLD, is not an awakened mind.

I asked Jesus some questions about "the script", what it is, how it works, what freedom we have, etc.

He pulled together information from all over the Course in ways I would have never imagined. Here are the key points.

1) Scripts, as sequences of events or arrangements to meet, set up in what seems to be "before" incarnation but which is somewhat in parallel to it, are better described as "templates". They are frameworks which present lessons which you may, or may not, learn from.

2) You ALWAYS have the freedom to choose WHEN you will take the curriculum. You can deny it, you can avoid it, you can prolong suffering, you can fail temporarily to learn a lesson, and then it will be presented at a later date. That means you are not 100% "locked in" to being "forced to wake up" against your will just because it's written into some kind of premeditated sequence of events.

3) YOUR MIND has to choose when it will awaken. Awakening cannot be forced upon it, and the script cannot MAKE the awakening happen, because you have to wake up FROM scripts. The scripts can only contain an exit point, a doorway, through which you must still willingly walk by free will.

4) The Holy Spirit's script is also referred to as the curriculum, and it is considered Holy. The curriculum means that the truth is OFFERED, just as love is always offered, but it is up to you when you will accept it. You can choose to delay accepting it. But sooner or later you will accept it, depending on how much tolerance for pain you have or how much willingness to elect to give.

5) In the Holy Spirit's curriculum, all events are planned by Him in general. This is also referred to as the "plan of atonement", which Jesus is in charge of, and which you are to become a PART of. This is reflected upon here: "What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything that happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. 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."

6) The Holy Spirit came into the dream in a sense, with us, "this world has two makers" and reorganized what we made in order to GUARANTEE that we would eventually return to God. Thus events and life situations and people you meet ("those who are to meet will meet"), and the general themes of your life, and certain things you have chosen to "work on" in this life, are presented at the appropriate time when learning is optimally possible.

7) Challenges and what seems at first to be difficult situations or lessons, are only difficult due to what has NOT been learned yet, and present an opportunity to change what you believe, when seen correctly and accepted as helpful. When the lesson is not accepted or learned but resisted, now you are into the ego's script. What that means is, you are now choosing to interpret the world using the ego and plan or enforce selective attitudes about the world which influence your perception and adjust your experiences in isolated ways. Since the ego thought system generally leads towards death, participating in this way of being puts you "under tyrannical rule" and you now become sort of "subject to" the consequences of that decision. Not because you are forced to, but because you choose to.

8) Because those who are to meet will meet, the manual for teachers talks about 3 types of relationships, short term, mid-term, and long-term, depending on how much learning is possible, whereby the long-term ones are the ideal balance of teaching and learning for both involved, such that a great deal of progress can be made over a long time period without destroying each other.

9) Within the scope of the "template" of your life, there is room to maneuver. Because you have free will and can choose whether to learn or not, there MUST be some degree of freedom of mind not just to manipulate your perceptions or thoughts but also your actions, because your actions stem from your thoughts and beliefs. While "people who meet" may be scripted, and while certain properties of those people or why those people were chosen is scripted, to present an "opportunity", the fine details of how you interact and physically move and what you do in situations or whether you are willing to change, is up to you.

10) You are not locked into a rollercoaster ride which forces awakening upon you or enforces that you will learn a lesson or implements experience into your mind. Lessons are PRESENTED, but it is up to you how you USE them. We should not concern ourselves with being so locked into some kind of pre-recorded "movie of time" as to think there is no flexibility of outcome or that you "must succeed" in that sense. What makes you succeed is the Holy Spirit's infinite patience in presenting further lifetimes as needed until you are finished resisting the truth, by your free will.

11) You decide on what your script for your lifetime will be before you incarnate into it. You decide which family to choose, the type of body, your name, your astrological background, how your brain will function, any special bodily conditions you might be "born with" or manifest early, any scenarios which will arise, who you will meet and when, what lessons/trials you will be exposed to, and so on. Sometimes people's life lessons turn out to be too strong and the person is allowed to "die early" in order to "rest" between lifetimes. Love is compassionate not cruel. It's like we're all people with mental illness who are gradually going through a healing process and there is give and take and always a gentleness in terms of "mercy" from God about what you can tolerate.

12) There is some truth to the idea that God only gives you lessons you can handle, although this speaks more to the script you chose knowing what it would likely entail and also knowing the long-term outcome if you were to be successful at learning from it. Since you know, when not incarnate, the long-term goal of being with God, and can see sense in "whatever it takes to get there", you are WILLING to expose yourself to all manner of positive and negative situations AS NEEDED in order to awaken. What seems like short-term suffering can ultimately be a blessing in the long-term plan.

13) In the biggest possible picture, there never was a real separation or any real time. However our belief in it made it seem real to us, which is why we "need" these "scripts" to help us learn that it is not so. We wrote the need for the scripts, the Holy Spirit provided the curriculum for the correction. That means we wrote a script with the ego for what we wanted to be true, and Holy Spirit wrote a counter-script of lessons and learning which would lead us back to what is really true. The time you elect to LEARN His curriculum is up to you. No-one is forcing you to be awake and no-one is keeping you asleep.

14) Ultimately free will is only free when it is embracing freedom which means embracing God's Will. It is free in Heaven. It is free to willingly choose to agree with God's will and to extend it in joy and love. That is why it was given you, that you would share and increase it. When you will against yourself/God, you are trying to NOT will, which renders your will ineffectual, and stops your will. Thus your will seems to become powerless and you turn to wishful thinking which produces no effects. As you regain your power and your will becomes more whole, you become stronger in the truth and more miraculous, and more able to consciously will whatever you want to happen. Ultimately you can master this to the point where EVEN in this world, what you desire happens and what you do not desire does not happen. At that point, you do not need corrective scripts because you are not writing ego scripts.

15) While from a high vantage point it seems all of time was "written" at once, or all possible moments of time were expressed simultaneously, they were organized by the Holy Spirit into a linear sequence NOT as an ego creation but as part of His plan of atonement, in order to USE TIME for the purpose of learning, and when time's usefulness for leaning is done, it will be UNMADE. Our ego self perceives time as linear in an attempt to believe in appearances, but time is not inherently linear.

16) From a high vantage point, the time that you began dreaming and the time that time began and the time that you stop dreaming and the time that time ends, are all essentially seen as happening at once. Dreaming began and God answered it with the Holy Spirit who has already succeeded in undoing it all. We are guaranteed to return to God because God's Answer is perfect and cannot fail. That doesn't mean that "in time" our experience will be as if all of time's events or sequence is pre-written. There is some flexibility built-in. There are multiple "dimensions" to time, parallel timelines, and you can skip between slices of time depending on your willingness to awaken. Nor does it mean that within each slice of time there are only certain pre-scripted actions you can make. YOUR MIND HAS FREE WILL and it can choose to ignore the script if it wants to. That's why the time you take Holy Spirit's curriculum is voluntary. Ultimately, one way or another, from the highest perspective, "all paths lead to God", and Holy Spirit has ensured that they will.

17) Miracles are the only means at your disposal for controlling time. Also miracles entail a shift into vertical perception which positions you and the person you heal further along in time than you were, having skipped an interval. This tells you that since miracles happen within the world `in time`, that they are capable of manipulating time and thus essentially take you out of the script. Ultimately they lead to revelation and atonement, because they are the means of the atonement, and so miracles must be performed in order to receive and give and share the truth, to have it.

That's all for now.