I think that for years I have been mistaken about the course. Mainly in terms of the orientation of my mind and the direction in which it was heading.

We start out in false perception, in ego, in body identification. As if we are down in hell at the bottom of a ladder. And then we think of heaven or light or truth or atonement as being higher up the ladder, and so we start the process of climbing out of hell.

Along the way we're told of particularly "high" things which become goals to strive for, like true perception, accepting atonement, the real world, christ vision. And we wonder how to achieve these things. We kind of come at it from a "I don't have it, how do I get it?" point of view.

But the thing is, this is all backwards. We're literally starting out in a backwards thought system, moving in the wrong direction, looking in the wrong direction, and trying to get our heads around what the truth is.

I think as we gradually learn more about the truth, God, soul, reality etc over time, we open up to it more. We do more forgiveness, we heal, we let go of old pain etc. Our identity starts to shift away from the body. We begin questioning the reality of the world etc.

Then at some point, perhaps a kind of tipping point, where for a while we've had our feet in both worlds - heaven and earth - we start to lean more towards reality. We start to side more with the truth than with the false. We develop more truth and find a surer footing that anchors us in reality.

The interesting thing then is that our whole orientation seems to do a 180 degree shift. We start looking from the top down instead of from the bottom up. And we feel more secure in the truth of God and more accepting of what's real as "where we are coming from".

I have found it extremely helpful and clarifying to spend time investigating the nature of God, heaven, creation, souls, sonship, mind, free will, causation, etc. Not the things of this world. This has really fleshed out some solid "facts" that I can depend upon.

I see the simple truth that God, who is truth, has extended himself to create me, and whatever is true of me ONLY comes from God. And that I in turn ONLY have what I inherited from God, and can only be and extend that which I have been given. This has now become a kind of "starting point" for me. A rock solid core of truth within my being. Not even I have any real say in what I am or what I can do.

Now I find myself basing my whole thought process on that truth. Regarding myself as not of this world. Recognizing that only the Kingdom is real. Feeling into and aligning myself with God's will and with my real function. Embedding myself in heaven and looking outward from there. This is orienting me from "the top down" to look at everything the course says from a new vantage point. And it's as if I am seeing things in a way I never saw before.

I'm finding is just an avalanche of clarification and insight about what it's getting at. I find for example that while many "bottom-uppers" believe their whole mission is to escape from hell and return home, really the whole course is aimed towards anchoring yourself in your true nature and expressing that, shining a light into the world to produce healing. As if what's at the top of the ladder reaches down to the bottom of the ladder, to either shine it away or raise it up.

There are in fact many parts of the course related to bringing heaven into the world. Shining God's light as a reflection of his being. The extension of miracles which we are literally told fall DOWN like drops of healing rain FROM heaven ONTO the earth.

The fact that christ works through our bodies, that the holy spirit uses the body for his purposes, and that we extend through the body to form holy relationships. Even forgiveness is a matter of allowing the light of heaven's truth to infuse the mind to correct it's perceptions. Where do we get any kind of truth from if not from outside of perception itself? Truth is of God!

It's not so much a "let's just get out of here" thing. It's more of a, let's remember who we really are anchored in heaven's reality and shine outward from that core truth into the world, to be the light of the world, a healing presence, a teacher/extender of God into the dream, and to help shine away the world. This isn't escape from hell, it's a DISPELLING OF DARKNESS by shining the light of heaven onto it. And this will seem "backwards" to those who believe their only goal is to get out of here asap.

I also think that all the discussions about true perception, christ vision, the face of christ, the real world, atonement etc, are all quite misleading. Mainly because it's very clear to me now that true perception is merely a SIDE EFFECT of a mind which is anchoring itself on the OTHER side of the separation. A mind which is identifying with the spirit being that is BEYOND the realm of perception entirely.

Even the perception of the real world is clearly infused with the light of heaven and is really just a stopping point just prior to entering heaven, on the way to TOTAL immersion in heaven. It just represents a state of being ALMOST entirely spirit identified. And giving yourself over entirely to the atonement merely means becoming FULLY dependent on the truth, having been previously only "mostly" dependent upon it. And truth is not of this world.

"Since perception rests on lack, those who perceive have not totally accepted the Atonement (but have partly accepted it) and given themselves over to truth. Perception is based on a separated state, so that anyone who perceives at all needs healing. Communion, not prayer, is the natural state of those who know."

This really tells us that the acceptance of atonement is at first a GRADUAL TRANSITION out of hell towards heaven, out of false perception towards truth, and it is only FULLY or FINALLY accepted at the end, where you are 100% willing to accept the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Until then, you are PARTLY atoned, just as Jesus says you are "not now wholy insane." Truth has corrected your mind to SOME extent.

Indeed the whole idea of forgiveness is riddled with confusion and misunderstanding. To forgive really means, that you recognize what is true - which IS HEAVEN, and to then "defend" that truth through the proper use of denial, to REJECT that anything not of God is real or has any power. It's a recognition that illusions are false, BECAUSE OF what is true. AND what is true is God - not of this world. Forgiveness thus is rooted in and depends on recognizing God's nature, which is itself BEYOND forgiveness.

The most obvious point is that, here we are in bodies starting out in false perception, blind to God and in denial of reality. The question then is how do we solve that. And obviously the only real way to solve that is in "leaving the desert". That means that in order to become more loving, more light, more truthful, more sane, you have to actually identify with something BEYOND the dream, with a real eternal truth that is entirely OUTSIDE of perception, so that your perception transforms to line up with it. The blueprint for right mindedness is the one mind.

You can't just work on perception in a closed box. True perception in fact has to be BASED UPON knowledge. And knowledge is the real truth. Believing that the real truth is true - a truth which is OUTSIDE of spacetime - causes perception to be transformed to line up with it. It's almost like, you have to reach outside of ALL perception first, get a hold of reality, then infuse that reality into your mind so that your perception becomes lighter. This was not at all evident in years of past study and in the common interpretations of the course.

We're also told about miracle working and the fact that miracles in fact come from God and fall down from heaven like healing rain, onto the earth. This is similar to how forgiveness works, in that the light that is higher and more true, shines into the mind and into the world, and bestows life where there was death.

Because "Miracles mean life and God is the giver of life" and "Miracles are a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers". That means they're starting out IN HEAVEN and are expressing FROM God through our minds, transforming perception and healing the world. That's a TOP DOWN mechanic, which is why they cannot be received when fear (false perception) is too strong.

I've also found that until you can get a really solid metaphysical, logical grasp of the nature of God and creation, you can't really have anything clear and true enough to compare anything to. You really need a solid idea of the light, in order for it to clearly contradict the darkness. You need to know the truth of heaven and of your being and nature, in order to compare that to other things that happen in the world, to recognize WHY those things are false and unreal. You can't just compare illusions to true perception, you have to compare them to God, then perception will follow.

"Perception (even true perception) is a RESULT, not a cause".And so it sort of comes down to not just the question of what things are, but of the question of WHY they are that way. The understanding or logical reason that they are based on. Illusions are illusions BECAUSE of what the truth is. Sickness is unreal BECAUSE of the immortal nature of God. The world is a dream BEACUSE reality is not like it. Miracles can raise the dead BEACUSE of their expression of eternal life. If you don't have your mind anchored in heaven, you really don't have any solid ground to stand on at all.

For me, my whole orientation with the course is quite strongly transitioning to a totally top-down view at the moment. This reflects the changes in myself which are transitioning to a "going within in order to be able to express outward", or seeking the higher mind in order to shine FROM it into the world. Or aligning myself with a higher light, so that I can shine darkness way. I am finding out WHO I AM, so that I can REJECT what I am not.

"Yet when they find their own Reality is even here, then they step back and let It lead the way. What other choice is really theirs to make?"

"And so again we make the only choice that ever can be made; we choose between illusions and the truth, or pain and joy, or hell and Heaven."

Ultimately what we're really doing is we are rising up from the pits of hell and ascending into heaven. But the closer you get to heaven the more you feel like you are IN heaven, looking back downward towards hell. It's most like returning to HERE, having been AWAY. Or becoming more PRESENT, having been absent. Or becoming more authentic, having been artificial.

That orientation of "peering out from the truth" or "operating under the laws of God" or "being true to yourself first" or "having innocence in you first which you project out", is what MAKES the real world and true perception be what they are. They are reflections of the light that is IN you, which you have stepped into and are radiating. The love which you give in order to see love. "Love looks upon itself."

So it's really about you deciding to change which ROOM you are located in. Are you in hell, or in heaven. When you seek for a better way than suffering, to any degree at all, you are seeking to be in the room of heaven, where you are happy. And then you start to move between the rooms. You want to get yourself as much immersed in heaven as possible, so that almost all of you is very close to being in heaven just before you leave the world. That means you are practically a REFLECTION OF DIVINITY, while in the dream, allowing you to perform miracles and heal the world. To extend God's love and light and to keep illusions from tempting you.

It's all top-down. All the correction is top-down. All the extension of love and light and power is top-down. All of the being true to yourself is top-down. All of the health of the body is caused from the top-down. All dispelling of illusions and the sanity of the mind is brought about from the top-down. Death is conquered throught the top-down expression of eternal life. True perception and the forgiven world and the real world all come about through the top-down application and expression of your true nature. And eventually the goal is to be SO completely vigilant for the Kingdom, or to seek first the Kingdom of God, so that you put God FIRST in all things, and everything else just follows naturally from there.

"There is one miracle, as there is one reality. 4 And every miracle you do contains them all, as every aspect of reality you see blends quietly into the one reality of God. 5 The only miracle that ever was is God's most holy Son, created in the one reality that is his Father."

"Miracles are blessings from God, through me to all my brothers."

"You are a miracle." "That is the miraculousness of the soul."

"Miracles are thought creations." "All expressions of love/God are miraculous in the true sense."

Ok so.

1) God is miraculous.

2) Creation is a miracle.

3) The sons of God are miracles and miraculous

4) In this world, miracles are symbols of the original miracle, and a reminder of the truth of creation - that everything is miraculous.

In a sense, "miraculousness" is the NATURE of God's reality in which the Golden Rule is always true and everything is shared by everything always.

Being "miracle minded" is a state of perception, the same as "miracle readiness".

Miracle doing, miracle working, being a miracle worker, performing miracles, is an EXPRESSION of love, from God, through Christ/Jesus, to all brothers, in this world, to heal our minds and return us TO miraculousness.

"Miracles make minds one in God."

There is really only only miracle, or one miraculousness. It is "the miracle". The Holy Spirit, in effect, is "the miracle" as in when ACIM says "the miracle" vs "miracles". He is the blessing of Healing given by God, through Christ, to all brothers. This is why "The holy spirit is the mechanism of miracles."

"Performing a miracle" heals the separation, raises communication, moves towards the Golden Rule, unites brothers with each other, corrects perception, reverses the symptoms of false perception (sickness/death), gives miraculousness to you and your brother, restores the state of miracle-mindedness, and brings us closer to God in whom we are permanently a miraculous miracle of creation.

In heaven, we are powerful creative beings and co-creators with God. The proper use of our creative power is constructive and cooperative and aligned with God's will. We create only perfection, beauty, happiness and eternal life.

"Child of God, you were created to create the good, the beautiful, and the holy. Do not lose sight of this."

"In reality, this is his ONLY choice, because his free will was made for his own joy in creating the perfect."

God gave us freedom to create, but that freedom includes the potential ability to TRY to use freedom to imprison freedom, to create something without extending God, to will that we be unwilling, and to deny reality.

This mis-use of creative power that essentially runs against the very nature of creative power itself, produces what's called a "mis-creation". It results in nightmarish hallucinations of impossible things happening, a world without God, a place of suffering and mortality. These "creations" are the result of mis-guided, insane, contradictory, amateurish and childish uses of creative power.

"Your Father created you Wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

"The creation of the Soul itself has already been perfectly accomplished, but the creation BY Souls has not."

The stuff we mis-create (make), which includes spacetime and Earth and bodies and death, is like a lower and more primitive form of expression. It's really an attempt to create a dead-end, or a world which cannot co-create and cannot live forever.

We use our infinite power to create an uncreative world that we do not want. We're still being essentially creative, but we're creating stuff that isn't ultimately real or true or alive. The "content" that we come up with isn't aligned with God's nature. Like we've "devolved" somewhat and everything we create is lacking in some way (lack of love=sin - a world of sin).

"Miscreation is still a genuine creative act in terms of the underlying IMPULSE, but NOT in terms of the CONTENT of the creation."

"The instinct for creation is NOT obliterated in miscreation. That is why it is always invested with reality."

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

"While the miscreation is NECESSARILY believed in by its own creator, it does not exist at all at the level of true Creation."

"Both the Separation and the fear were MISCREATIONS of the mind, which have to be undone."

So essentially mind has one of two "modes", it can either create constructively in line with God and love, or it can mis-create which produces fearful things which seem to lack perfection and do not last.

If we completely leave out any sense of judgement about miscreation being wrong, or a sin, or something to be guilty for, or to attack the miscreation or condemn it in any way, we would see that it is simply a mistake. It is just a mis-use of the mind by someone that doesn't recognize the futility and self-deception and pointlessness and confusion that is inherent in trying to create the uncreateful.

We could look upon such miscreations, such as Earth, without any judgement. We could think of it as like the creation of a child that has not learned or perfected or mastered its abilities yet. It makes things which are broken, primitive, don't work, contradict themselves, are full of limits, are ugly, designed to malfunction and to fall short.

And then we could consider what God's attitude would be as a loving parent. God would not condemn or hate or judge harshly what had been mis-created by the child. He would recognize the shortcomings, the mistakes, the limitations of what had been made, but would see it as at least a "good first effort" by his children, with potential for improvement. And he would encourage them to continue perfecting the use of their creative power.

"It is curious that the perfect must now be perfected. In fact, it is impossible. But you must remember that when you put yourselves in an impossible situation, you believed that the impossible WAS possible."

If we think of the world therefore as "somewhat bad, not all that bad, a good try" ... recognizing it for what it is and is not, realizing the mistakes inherent in its making, we can be what we call "forgiving" toward it.

Forgiveness could be described as a loving attitude that you have towards something unloving. A less limited viewpoint towards the limited. A more inclusive mindset towards something made to exclude. A less judgemental or attacking perspective on something which was made as an attempted attack on God.

Instead of the world being seen as a horrible hellscape, or as a half-empty cup, we can see the half-full cup and at least give the son of God credit for "trying" (lol). Even if that trying involved some failing. We can let the world be the limited broken thing that it is, while being mindful to "do better in future". To master our creative power and to create greater higher works of art that are more aligned with God and more in-keeping with sanity and harmony with eternal life.

God doesn't condemn or judge our mis-created world. But he would rather that we return to co-creatorship in heaven with him to create only the eternal and the loving.

"God offers the world salvation; your judgment would condemn it. God says there is no death; your judgment sees but death as the inevitable end of life. God's Word assures you that He loves the world; your judgment says it is unlovable. Who is right? For one of you is wrong. It must be so."

It sounds like maybe we have a guilty conscience for what we think we've made, doesn't it? A guilt over an attack on God, a guilt about having mis-created, a hatred of what we mis-created, a sense of shame and fear that the hideous thing we made is lurching at us and trying to kill us, even though we are its maker. It's like we made a terrible mistake (a supposed sin) by mis-creating, and it induced guilt, and now we're living with the fallout of believing God would hate us for it.

Jesus also warns us that if we somehow regard the world as a sin, something to be hated, even destroyed, then we're actually denying the fact that we have very powerful minds that can create entire worlds. We need to acknowledge what we HAVE "created", even if it was in a spirit of fear and murder (unmiraculous creation), as being a not-entirely-evil "first attempt" that at least demonstrates the sheer power we DO have to create, even if WHAT we created falls short in so many ways.

"...it is not necessary to protect the mind by denying the un-mindful (physical). There is little doubt that the mind can miscreate. If one denies this unfortunate aspect of its power, one is also denying the power itself.)"

Earth and its surroundings, spacetime, is simply something we've mis-created in a mis-use of our divine power, in a form which is unlike what God would create, and of a nature which tends to attack itself. It is seemingly partly creative and partly destructive, partly good and partly evil, partly light and partly dark. It's an expression of the belief that an opposite to God is possible, even if such a belief is mistaken.

What we created (made, dreamed, hallucinated) is not real and cannot last. But for what it is, it at least shows that we do have infinite power and we did come up with something. And we keep mis-creating horrible nightmares as we go along. It's just that we need to create higher, better, and more loving creations. We need a higher prayer, a higher song, a better way, a more beautiful content.

Meanwhile, in our forgiveness of what we did mis-create, we must find a way to acknowledge and respect its maker. Even if we did "a shit job of it", it at least reveals some of our qualities, here and there. There are aspects to the world which are symbolic of light things, as well as dark things.

There are some forms of beauty, forgiveness is an earthly form of love, bodies can be repurposed to serve the mind, and perhaps the decrepit shit-heap that we came up with isn't entirely devoid of traces of the son of God's perfection. Even in subtle ways perhaps there is a trace of beauty, of order, of health, of cooperation, of peace, and of love, intermingled with the mis-created forms.

"Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release."

"All this beauty will rise to bless your sight, as you look upon the world with forgiving eyes. For forgiveness literally TRANSFORMS vision, and lets you see the real world, reaching quietly and gently across chaos, and removing all illusions that had twisted your perception, and fixed it on the past. The smallest leaf becomes a thing of wonder, and a blade of grass a sign of God's perfection."

We made a chaotic universe, complete with every imaginable form of limitation and difficulty and problem and struggle. A world whose nature and laws are not the perfect unity and harmony of heaven, and which indeed attempts to be as opposite and lacking as possible.

But we still must look on the brighter side and find the proper higher interpretation of it. The way God would look upon the rudimentary and somewhat laughable deformities made by an inexperienced child. The world is what it is, complete with all its faults and partial symbols of heaven. And it will end, because it mis-created as an idea of limiting existence and life.

In heaven perfection is even greater, even more broad, even more natural and ever-present. It is the absolutely perfectly divine expression of a perfect creator. And it is your true home in which you co-create absolute perfection and beauty with God.

"Forgiveness is an earthly form of love which as it is in Heaven has no form. Yet what is needed here is given here as it is needed. In this form you can fulfill your function even here, although what love will mean to you when formlessness has been restored to you is greater still."

"From the forgiven world, the Son of God is lifted easily to his home. And there, he knows that he has ALWAYS rested there in peace."

1. Everything in reality is miraculous. Miraculousness is the nature of God's thought system. Everything real is permanently miraculous. The omnipresent and holographic nature of God's thought system is literally miraculous, in that it does not adhere to limitations, fears, blocks, constructs, physics, ego laws, space or time. It's a holographic system where the whole is in every part which defies all ego systems of thought.

"You are a miracle"

"Miracles mean life and God is the giver of life"

"Miracles are a universal blessing from God"

"The miraculous nature of the soul"

"Miracles are natural to God, and to the One Who speaks for Him." (holy spirit)

These kind of statements are all aimed at "level 1". Everything in reality/heaven is miraculous, creation is a miraculous act, your "children of your will" are miraculously created by your will alone, and Heaven's laws break all the laws of the ego world. Everything real is ALWAYS miraculous and returning to being ALWAYS miraculous is the goal of the course.

"That is what we meant when we once said that miracles are NATURAL, and when they do NOT occur, something has gone wrong."

"I KNOW that miracles are natural, because they are expressions of love."

2. "The miracle" (singular) refers to God's answer to the separation. It is represented by the Holy Spirit who is the medium of miracles. This is a singular whole miracle which encompasses and includes all the miracles of type 3. In a similar way to how Christ encompasses all the Sons of God in the Sonship. The miracle is the state of atonement, true perception, salvation, right mindedness, forgiveness. THE miracle is hidden underneath all blocks to awareness and egotism. It's how Heaven touches on this world very lightly. Being miracle MINDED allows you to access your miraculous nature, FROM which you can perform miracles (type 3).

"The miracle forgives; the ego damns"

"This terrible mistake about yourself the miracle corrects as gently as a loving mother sings her child to rest."

"The Children of God are very holy. The miracle honors their holiness."

"The miracle, therefore, has a unique function, and is motivated by a unique Teacher, Who brings the laws of another world to this one. The miracle is the one thing you can do that TRANSCENDS order, being based, NOT on differences, but on equality "

"The miracle offers EXACTLY the same response to EVERY call for help."

"The miracle is the act of a Son of God who has laid aside all false gods, and who calls on his brothers to do likewise."

"The miracle ITSELF is but the witness that you HAVE the power of God in you."

"The miracle extends WITHOUT your help, but you ARE needed that it can begin."

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone."

"There is ONE miracle, as there is ONE reality. And every miracle you do (see #3) contains them all, as every aspect of reality you see blends quietly into the One Reality of God. The only miracle that ever was (on level 1), is God's most holy Son, created in the One Reality that is his Father."

3. "Miracles" (plural) refers to individual expressions of the one miracle, whereby the holographic wholeness of The Miracle EXPRESSES in this world, through the Holy Spirit, as an act of giving and receiving the miraculous nature of love. Miracles break all the laws of the world because they're coming from another world whose laws are totally different. They can override the laws of physics. They can reverse death and restore life. They can heal the body. They can move mountains. They can allow you to walk on water and do everything Jesus did. They are interpersonal acts in which another person benefits from what you give. They fulfill your function of healing in this world and eventually lead to revelation and atonement for yourself and others. Miracles happen mainly on level 2, but you are still miraculous on level 1.

"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."

"Miracles are a part of an interlocking chain of forgiveness which, when completed, is the Atonement. "

"Miracles make minds one in God."

"Miracles do not obey the laws of this world. They merely follow from the laws of God."

"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another."

"Miracles are NOT in competition, and the number that you can do is LIMITLESS. They can be simultaneous and legion."

"Your holiness reverses all the laws of the world. It is beyond every restriction of time, space, distance and limits of any kind."

" Miracles are a form of healing. They supply a lack, and are performed by those who have more for those who have less. "

"Miracles are teaching devices for demonstrating that it is more blessed to give than to receive. They simultaneously increase the reserve strength of the giver, and supply the lack of strength in the receiver."

"Like all expressions of love, which are ALWAYS miraculous in the true sense, the exchange reverses the physical laws "

"Miracles make time and tide wait for all men. They can heal the sick and raise the dead because man himself made both death and taxes, and can abolish both."

"Miracles are a form of healing."

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

"Being sane, it heals the body because IT has been healed."

"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 "

And sometimes Jesus speaks on all these levels at once. e.g.

"Miracles are thought-creations. Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities. "

"Miracles are a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers."

Being miraculous is normal and natural and permanent. It's your NATURE to be miraculous. You are miraculous in heaven, where you create miraculously. On Earth, it is your function to rediscover your miraculous nature, by uncovering and restoring a state of miracle mindedness by removing blocks to awareness and becoming forgiving. As denial is removed, your miraculous ability is made accessible and you become MORE miraculous. You continue becoming MORE miraculous until you are unlimited in what you can do. And you will NEVER lose this miracle-working ability.

Jesus asks that we PRACTICE working miracles. "Doing them brings conviction in the ability". Without attempting to TRY to do them, we remain in fear. Miracles can only be performed in love, which is a state of truer perception. ("Wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles.")

Purification must be done first to remove ego blocks so that the light can shine. Once the clouds are parted, love can come through to express miraculous power. It is by EXPRESSING FROM a state of love, that you perform miracles.

"There is nothing my holiness cannot do."

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

"The miracle is an expression of an inner awareness of Christ and acceptance of his Atonement."

"The power to work Miracles BELONGS to you. I will create the right opportunities for you to do them. But you must be ready and willing to do them, since you are already able to. Doing them will bring conviction in the ability. I repeat that you will see Miracles through your hands through MINE. Conviction really comes through accomplishment. Remember that ability is the potential, Achievement is its expression, and Atonement is the Purpose."

"You once said that souls cannot rest until everyone has found salvation. This happens to be true. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive. 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. "

The first time that I became able to accept the atonement for myself, undoing a long-standing belief in a "real sin" that I had never been able to completely let go, Jesus said to me "now you will be able to perform miracles".

Notice that the steps I took to get to the atonement and accept it, which was an undoing and correction of fear, guilt, shame, and sin, was not in itself a miracle as such.

By being willing to accept that I was actually innocent in God's eyes because what I thought I had done had not really happened, that meant I was willing to agree that I deserved God's love and that I was, in truth, forgiven.

This meant I was willing and able to now receive love and therefore to love myself. And that means, I was now able to love others. At least a bit. The ability to express love only comes when you have becoming willing to receive it. And you don't have that willingness UNTIL you have accepted that the sin is not real - i.e. accept the atonement.

Miracles are EXPRESSIONS of love. They aren't just you shifting perception or accepting that you are lovable. That process is like opening the door for love to shine through. It is love shining through which has miracle-working power.

Today's lesson 140 says, "only salvation can be said to cure". And from this pertinent lesson:

"Atonement heals with certainty, and cures all sickness. For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take.

Sickness where guilt is absent cannot come, for it is but another form of guilt. Atonement does not heal the sick, for that is not a cure. It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible. And that is cure indeed. For sickness now is gone, with nothing left to which it can return."

Accepting the atonement gives you ACCESS to a state of mind which can CURE. A state of mind which can undo all sickness. A state of mind which has the power to perform miracles, which includes the likes of healing those who appear to be sick, helping your brothers and so on.

Just as Jesus did, you can forgive the so-called sins of others. Jesus said many times "your sins are forgiven". He had the power and authority to bestow that forgiveness on others, not just recognizing their sins were not real but also the ability to undo the symptoms and effects of that sin. He could produce a healing miracle on their behalf as an EXPRESSION of love. This is what you are capable of also.

All you need is love.

Time, in human form, is different to Time for God. For God, there is only "always". For us, it seems there are states where some things have happened, and some have not happened yet.

Because of this, we are confused about who needs to do what, when, in order for miracles to occur. We think that because we're in "time", where a problem currently exists, and we are not yet at the "time" where it isgone, that this applies to God too.

Then we will go to God, thinking that God is also bound by time, and ask Him ... hey God, can you please do xyz? This is completely assuming that, because of time, He has in some way not already completely done everything. We think He's waiting, or holding back, or hasn't yet decided, or has not acted, or isn't sharing the miracle yet. We petition asking for something to be done about the problem. But this is a mistake.

For God, there is no time, and he isn't going "through time" with us. There is no before or after. There is no state in which some things are true and some other state in which other things are true. There is no change for God. There is no progression from not having to having, or from sickness to health, or from lack to abundance.

For God, there is only "always true". This is the perspective of eternity.

WE need to therefore get ourselves aligned with God's perspective, in order to accept, understand, and extend what God has already done. For us, in time, it seems weird to do this because it's like asking for something to happen which already happened. It seems like it did not happen yet, but in God's world everything is already complete.

Since God has already fully given, from His perspective, "it is done". It's us who have to wrangle with "time". The willingness to accept that God's Will is done already, even when it APPEARS in time that it has not happened yet, requires FAITH. Trust, that regardless of how the entire world of matter is showing up *currently*, God's miracle will express itself. It is this willingness of faith and trust that BRINGS the manifestation of God's will.

To receive is therefore a key element in miracles, not so much in "performing" miracles but as in "receiving" them. God is already miraculous 100% of the time. We need to learn to invite the reception and expression of these miracles through the removal of the BLOCKS to them, through forgiveness.

If something seems to have gone wrong with your body, the temptation is to believe it is has reality and truth to it.

ACIM: "Temptation has one lesson it would teach in all its forms wherever it occurs. It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what must die, unable to escape its frailty and bound by what it orders him to feel."

This is the temptation, the ego's attempt to get us to BELIEVE that the sickness is true, the damage is real, the suffering is really happening, something really has gone wrong. It's all part of the belief in sin.

Our challenge then is to do the opposite of be tempted, which is to seek Atonement, by learning to UNDO the false perceptions which are causing you to see an illusion as something more than just an illusion.

If you have come to believe that your sickness is a REAL SICKNESS, then you're got a problem far more deceptive than the sickness itself. You not only have "a sickness" but also a sickness of perception, a mental illness, in which you believe that an ILLUSION of sickness in the body is actually reality and truth. You are having perceptual hallucinations. You are not seeing correctly.

To UNDO these false perceptions, you must be willing to re-frame what you thought was sickness and see it in a different way. You must become able to see it in such a way that it "registers" with you as completely "false". You need to come to recognize it as and be convinced that it is, nothing more than an ILLUSION and NOT a reality.

This does imply, and means, that all forms of sickness are FICTIONAL, and all forms of sickness are merely fake images which you have MADE in an attempt to put on a show of sickness really happening. Whatever the sickness allegedly is, it is not a REAL sickness, it can only be a fake sickness.

In God's reality, there is no such thing as real sickness. Sickness is separation from God. And one expression of such a sickness, which believes an illusion of separation is real, shows up as physical sickness. That means that in how you're looking at this sickness, your belief in it, your seeing SIN in it, your belief that it's really happening and has weight and is tangibly real and NOT an illusion, IS your sickness because it's an expression of separation from HEALTH, which is separation from WHOLENESS or God.

It is tempting to believe the body's signals, like, well, I have this thing going on in my body and it's doing stuff to me and I don't know how it got there and it's a threat and it has power over me and I don't want it. If you believe this, then you WILL start trying to fight with it and to get rid of it.

But you're trying to get rid of an ILLUSION which YOU yourself believe is really there, so your BELIEF in it is actually you VALUING it, giving it credit as truth and reality, which means you will KEEP it. And then you will be attempting to fight against your own belief that it is real, which is an attempt to keep it, so your war against it will just be a state of conflict between yourself and yourself.

To become single-minded and whole you can't be believing in it while trying to get rid of it. You must UNDO your belief that you have a REAL sickness. You must convince yourself in any way possible that it is NOT a real sickness, it is NOT really happening, it does NOT have truth to it, you are NOT at the effect of it, it does NOT have power over you, and it is not REAL at all. It's completely fictional. It's an illusion, not a reality.

It's a made-up, faked, artificial, PRETEND SICKNESS, which you invented. You are the one who has fallen for the temptation to believe in it. You are the one who put it there. You are not a victim of it. And you do have power over it. And in truth, because it IS an illusion, it is completely FALSE, you do NOT have a real sickness, there IS NO SICKNESS, and the sickness is ALREADY GONE! The truth of all sickness is that it has not really happened at all.

Seeing that about the sickness is seeing the Atonement, which means you are forgiving or overlooking the sickness. You overlook sickness by overlooking the temptation to believe that the ILLUSION of sickness is the truth. If the sickness has literally not happened because separation has not happened, and if it is recognized as completely FALSE because of your recognition of what the TRUTH is - God's truth, then you will REMEMBER that this "sickness" simply cannot exist at all.

That's the kind of place where your mind needs to get to in order to heal. That's the kind of perception that you need to have. Illusory things are actually RECOGNIZED as illusory. The way that illusions strike your perception is then very different to how they seemed or what they meant when you believed in them. You will EXPERIENCE them as false, have a sense even of the falseness of them. A sense of not believing in them and regarding them as not true. That's the healing of perception which is your mind UNDOING the belief in the sickness so that it can be recognized as not existing.

Thus you recognize it has disappeared because it never really existed, it's already gone, it never even happened in the first place, you do not believe in it, there is no truth to it, it is completely false, unreal, and God did not create it. Therefore it simply cannot be happening and is not happening.

This reveals that you are actually quite a powerful creator who has literally MADE UP a sickness and presented it as an IMAGE of sickness, showing up in the FORM of your body, and that nevertheless this is not really there. You are a maker of dreams! You brought the illusion of a sickness into being and you can just as much demolish that illusion by becoming willing to see it for what it is. It is not truth, it is fictional. All sickness is fictional. There is no such thing as a real sickness of any kind.

You must learn to withdraw ALL of your belief in the FANTASY of "sickness" that this world holds dear. You must decide that you will never believe sickness is real ever again. You will not be tempted by the illusion of it, you will not see it, you will recognize it as a LIE which you do not fall for or want, and which is always completely false. Sickness is NOT THERE. It must go because it is already gone. Collapse the sickness and get all belief in sickness out of your life forever.

Believing that the truth is true, and only the truth is true, will give you the power to work miracles.

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

Consider these quotes:

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

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

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

"You do not do them."

"The power to work miracles belongs to you."

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

"There is nothing your holiness cannot do."

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

"Do His works."

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

"You are forever host to God."

"You must be ready, willing and able."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"God is my strength."

"God is the mind with which I think" etc

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

"All loving creation is freely given."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"There is nothing your holiness cannot do."

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

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

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

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

"The power to work miracles belongs to you."

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

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

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

"The first two are not enough. The real members of MY party are ACTIVE workers.

The power to work Miracles BELONGS to you. I will create the right opportunities for you to do them. But you must be ready and willing to do them, since you are already able to. Doing them will bring conviction in the ability. I repeat that you will see Miracles through your hands through MINE. Conviction really comes through accomplishment. Remember that ability is the potential, Achievement is its expression, and Atonement is the Purpose."

And... a real avoidance of MIS-CREATION. Which means not having the kinds of thoughts which are destructive. ONLY having constructive creative thoughts of life and resurrection!

What Jesus is clearly saying is that you can't just go on through life using thought idly, like some kind of ineffective "commentator" on life, as if it can just chatter away in the background with no EFFECT on anything. You have to become fully responsible for ALL YOUR THINKING. ALL THE TIME.

This means learning to have CREATIVE THOUGHT which has the POWER to raise the dead and heal the sick and move mountains. MIND has this power. Miracle working therefore entails the USE OF HIGHER THOUGHT to EXPRESS AND BELIEVE and and commit to, WITH CONVICTION, the powerful ASSERTION OF LIFE, which causes life to be given.

"Miracles mean life, and God is the giver of life."

We have spent our whole lives using THOUGHT to destroy ourselves and others. The world has not been the problem. Our feelings have not been the problem. The body has not been the problem. It's always been WHAT YOU ARE THINKING.

We have to learn to think in a more heavenly way. We have to have HIGHER THOUGHTS. Thoughts we think with God, or closer to God. Thoughts of strengthening, of innocence, of wholeness. Thoughts of the true nature of another. Thoughts which AFFIRM AND REINFORCE AND INCREASE their happiness, wholeness and health. Thoughts that uplift and bring light. Thoughts of POWER which DEMAND there be life.

Miracle working is in the USE OF THOUGHT, the application of thought, using the power of God which is inherently present WITHIN all higher thoughts. All thoughts of love and all loving thought expressions are communications and prayers. They are the expression of your will. WHAT YOU WANT TO HAPPEN. This is the power of the mind. The power to be the CAUSE of everything you experience and elect and decide.

"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely." "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."

I'd like to try to explain from my point of view what a miracle is. However, I have to acknowledge that there are still some aspects of miracles I do not understand. So this is a work in progress. Take what you like and leave the rest.

Firstly, there are two levels. A higher level and a lower level. Think of each level as a realm of existence. The higher level is where God hangs out. In-between them is the idea of separation, and then below is where the ego hangs out. You could equate these to heaven and earth.

In truth, the higher level is the only causal power. In this higher level sits the Son of God who is dreaming, and in His dreaming he makes the lower level. He sort of projects it downwards from above. Mind, as cause, produces the picture of the world, an effect.

This picture of the world contains *everything* in the world, and he simultaneously puts in place everything that moves or seems to have affects on other things, plus the effects that those causes seem to have.

There are no causes inside the dream, only effects. So he is actually like a puppeteer pulling the strings to make BOTH the "causes and effects" or "victims and victimizers" do everything that they seem to do, and the "story" of how one causes the other is FICTIONAL.

In this perspective, cause and effect are VERTICAL. What is above, causes what is below. So this means everything in the world below is only an effect of the dreamer above.

Within the world below, however, there are illusions of separation, and many of these illusions make it SEEM as if there are independent causes within the dream. An example would be that the wind blows and makes the leaves on the tree move. Or a person kicks a ball.

The wind DOES NOT blow the tree - the wind AND the tree moving are BOTH dreamed SIMULTANEOUSLY by the higher level mind. The person does NOT kick the ball, the person kicking and the ball moving are BOTH dreamed simultaneously by a single mind, to create an ILLUSION of cause and effect when viewed in "linear time".

In this perspective, cause and effect are HORIZONTAL. Or in other words, there is an ILLUSION that something in the dream is able to "cause" something else in the dream to be an effect. In essence, this turns the "effect" of dreaming into a cause in its own right. So then we believe that this world contains "causes" which produce "effects". In the horizontal, causes are VICTIMIZERS, and effects are VICTIMS. And it is possible for victimizers to be affected as causes transform into effects and back again, because they are all the same ILLUSION.

Someone kicks you in the leg and you develop a bruise. If you are a body, this puts you AT THE EFFECT of the world, making you an instant VICTIM. Being born "by" the world into a body is an ILLUSION which makes you an instant victim, but in truth you are NOT at the effect of the world, and you are NOT "created by" your parent's bodies.

This horizontal perception of cause and effect is ENTIRELY illusory, because even the things which seem to "cause" other things, and the "effects" of those causes, are actually BOTH EFFECTS of the higher level mind which is the only cause of them. The higher level mind, in its vertical causality, manifests both the person kicking the leg, and the bruise on the leg, simultaneously, making it SEEM as though there was a horizontal cause of the bruise.

In the horizontal perception, we come to believe there are thus illusory "laws" which SEEM to describe what we are seeing happen from within this level, without being awakened to the true nature of cause and effect. It SEEMS to us that every action (cause) has an equal and opposite reaction (effect). The laws of physics are based on this. Science has gone to great lengths to describe the APPARENT way in which stuff happens at the level of being inside the dream, unaware of the higher level.

All of these ego laws, horiziontal laws, are SHOWN to be completely false and illusory, when the higher level decides to DEMONSTRATE that IT is the cause of everything. It is therefore possible for the higher level to decide to project a different image or dream, below, which is unlike the condition it was in previously, WITHOUT OBEYING any of the lower level illusory laws. Because the higher level "overrides" the lower level, any illusions of how things are supposed to happen, or what is supposed to be possible, are completely ignored.

The higher level is the level of love. But it is not just love as we think of love "separate from" other qualities. It is also joy, peace, life etc. In particular, it is ALIVE. God's love is a LIVING PRESENCE, which contains within it life-giving, eternal-life giving qualities. It is able to extend life forever. It is able to express SO MUCH "livingness", that it is permanently in a state of incorruptible "health", it is absolutely impossible for it to become sick or die, and it is therefore a state of immortality.

The life-giving quality of God's love, naturally EXPRESSES at all times. God is therefore ALWAYS giving life and continuing life. God's love is so life-giving and restorative and absolutely refuses to include any form of death or problem, that if any kind of illusion of sickness or death were "exposed" to it, it would be so INFUSED with life, that all signs of decay or sickness or death will be completely reversed. Health (light) will totally obliterate suffering (darkness), shining it away permanently.

This life-giving quality of God, is what we refer to as MIRACULOUS. It literally is 100% unlimited in what it can do, and there is absolutely nothing that can deter it or prevent it from healing, ie being in a permanent state of perfection. God is PERMANENTLY MIRACULOUS. Permanently life-giving. And so is His Son. It is completely NATURAL for God and His Son to be permanently miraculous. If they were to seem to be not miraculous, something must have gone wrong! Miraculousness does not ever stop. It is an eternal aspect of God's creative power.

With this in mind, when we "descend" into the darkness, going down to the lower "level", into the ego world, hell, we are attempting to put distance between ourselves and God. The further we become distant from God, as though descending further downwards towards death (eventually to be buried in the ground), the more we will be blocked from the life-giving properties of God's loving expression. This will result in a mind which believes sickness and death are reality, and it will project a body which is sick and later dead.

Death, in the ego's world, is the final statement that God's life has ended, or that we are so distant from God's Will to Live, that "our" will to live is no longer a will to live, but a will to cease living, ie to die. This means we believe we are becoming *completely* separate from God. Death of the body and mind is the ego's final attempt to completely escape the realm where God's light shines. Only complete "non-existence" can seem to fulfill the ego's wish to be separate from where God is.

In the dark, our mind is believing in separation, and is therefore sick. We have blocks to awareness, so do not see the light very well. This causes us to attack ourselves and our body will show this. Forms of sickness will appear, and eventually the body will die because we have attacked it. In order to UNDO this and reverse it, even to reverse what shows up as physical death, we need a miracle. We need some of the miraculous life-giving radiance of God's love.

Exposure to such radiance will RESURRECT us back to life, first a restoration of health and life in the mind and body, and then later the completion of the resurrection in which the body disappears, because the mind has become SO pure that it can no longer be bound by a body image. There are degrees of darkness and because the body is an outward picture of an inner condition at all times, if the mind resurrects, the body will also. Any "symptoms" (fake effects) from the illusion of horizontal causality, will be UNDONE by the shift to vertical perception (true causality - mind over matter).

A "miracle" as we tend to think of it, seems to be a step towards God. Or as some people call it, a "shift in perception" from death to life. However, we need to be clear that God is permanently miraculous and so is His Son. The miraculous life-giving property of God never stops. The ability to do absolutely anything never comes to an end. The creative power of the mind never ceases. And God is ALWAYS being loving. Anything that comes from love as an expression of love, IS MIRACULOUS. This means that God is ALWAYS MIRACULOUS.

A miracle then, CANNOT BE defined as the shift from death to life itself. The miracle is the LOVE which EXPRESSES in order to PRODUCE a shift from death to life. The shift is an EFFECT. The shift takes place entirely in the realm of the ego's world, the lower level, the level of EFFECT, because a miracle is an expression from the higher level of love, shining down onto what is below, and lifting it upwards towards God.

A helpful analogy, is when Jesus says beautifully:

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures come 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."

What this is saying is, miraculous healing love shines "down from above" onto the illusory world below where stuff seemed dead, giving it life, pulling it closer to itself, and "life" erupts to show SIGNS (symbols) of the immortality that has been extended from love. Love expresses, the dead come back to life, even forms and bodies and objects come back towards life. As far as forms of life can, being limited as symbols in a dream.

Corresponding to this then, realize that miracles come down from heaven, from the higher level, FROM LOVE, as an expression of Love, and BLESS what is below (the dusty dead world), bestowing upon it the MIRACULOUS radiance of love's life-giving properties, and therefore "bringing life" to what is there, RESTORING to being "more alive".

Jesus says in his analogy that the signs of life now spring up. Simply, what once was seemingly dead or even partly dead, has had some measure of its "dead-ness" lifted away, that thing has been RAISED upwards, vertically, towards God, and therefore is now in closer proximity to the life-giving power of God's love, and therefore COMES BACK TO LIFE. This even means that ROADKILL can be brought back to life, all "effects" of war can be undone, and all death reversed. The body can even be made immortal, incapable of sickness and death, because it is SO infused with the life-giving power of love. A miracle indeed.

Miracles are also referred to as a shift in perception - FROM HORIZONTAL TO VERTICAL PERCEPTION. As I described, when the mind changes how it sees things, and no longer sees things entirely in a "horizontal" way in terms of cause and effect, is no longer believing that one thing in the dream caused another thing, it shifts its VIEWPOINT by moving awareness VERTICALLY up towards God.

Vertical perception is the awareness that the higher level (love) is the ONLY CAUSE, and everything "below" that seems to be in the world - bodies and such, is ONLY EFFECT. This so-called shift into alignment with how God operates, is a shift into the recognition that cause is inside you not outside you, or to put it another way, cause is above, and all effects are below.

The "shifting" itself IS NOT the miracle as such. The shifting itself, the transition from darkness to light, is not really what causes healing. What causes healing is God's LOVE expressing FROM above, shining down onto what is below, causing what is below to be partly dissolved, such that the mind seems to shift upward.

This has to be true, because if the miracle itself - the miraculousness of love - were ONLY the shifting from horizontal to vertical, then once the "shifting" itself had been completed, the miracle would be ENDED, and that means, love would stop being miraculous. Love is PERMANENTLY MIRACULOUS. It cannot stop being miraculous.

What happens is, once a shift to vertical has taken place and healing has been RECEIVED FROM ABOVE, and the level of communication has been raised (oneness increased, separation decreased), there are simply LESS BLOCKS to the extension of love. More love is allowed to SHINE from above, through the mind, and to extend outward.

It extends outward completely naturally because that is what love does all the time. So when you remove your block to awareness, whether you call it a shift or not, you REVEAL the presence of love in the mind, you open up to the higher level and allow it to shine through you, and therefore love can now EXTEND THROUGH YOU.

Removing blocks to love, is an act of removing blocks to the AWARENESS of love's presence, because love is ALREADY FULLY PRESENT, being miraculous all the time. Correction, shifting, purification, or removal of blocks, simply UNCOVERS the love which was trying to express, allowing it to express more.

Shifting perception DOES NOT CAUSE A MIRACLE and DOES NOT CAUSE LOVE TO EXIST. Love, miraculousness, already exists. That is the *ego's version of miracles*, which it thinks IT causes, because IT thinks that IT has power over love to make healing happen! The shift is seen by the ego as a cause, but it is an EFFECT from a higher level. A gift. A sign that the mind is WILLING TO RECEIVE LOVE, not an ability to 'make love happen'.

The shift merely puts us closer TO it and allows us to EXTEND it, thus RECEIVING healing FROM love. "We" do not cause healing by shifting perception, LOVE DOES ALL THE WORK. And this also means, that being open to RECEIVING LOVE from God is important in healing, not just doing stuff with your mind on your own. You do not have to do everything yourself, God WANTS TO HEAL YOU FOR YOU.

The INCREASE in the expressability of that love through you is what HEALS YOU. The shift does not heal, the unblocking does not heal, LOVE IS THE ONLY HEALER. Love is the miracle.

After a while, when you have removed enough blocks to love that you are starting to RADIATE LOVE on a more constant basis, or at least something approaching towards love, YOUR MIND is now being restored as a conduit or medium through which love can naturally extend.

This means you will now be willing and able to extend love outward. And since you're still in the body at the moment, that means you will be able to DO GOD'S WILL ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN, ie you will be able to express the LOVE OF GOD, here, which means expressing God's LIFE-GIVING POWER, here, to HEAL and undo absolutely any sign of "non-life" you encounter.

In other words, you do not simply perform a miracle in order to shift your mind towards love. You shift your mind towards love SO THAT you can be miraculous. Otherwise it would mean that someone who is heavily steeped in ego lies, upon making their first little shift, is suddenly a full-blown miracle worker. That is pretty much impossible.

"Miracles are everyone's right, but PURIFICATION IS NECESSARY FIRST". This means that your purification efforts will have to happen first, possibly over a prolonged period of time, BEFORE you will GAIN ACCESS TO the right to perform miracles. This is because you need to remove quite a lot of blocks to love BEFORE love can flow through you fully enough to show up as miracles in your life or on behalf of others. If you have a lot of blocks to love, you are GETTING IN THE WAY of the extension of love and therefore are blocking miracles.

You are not miraculous just because you start studying the course or doing the workbook, or "shifting your perception". Miracles come LATER, after much purification work ie correction of your mind, letting go of ego, applying forgiveness etc. Shifts in perception are not miracles, but eventually they LEAD TO miracles. If you could suddenly shift your perception very much to a highly vertical perception, you could conceivably perform a miracle right now. But it is uncommon. Usually we have to "prepare" to be able to do that.

You will OPEN UP TO miracles over time, the more you release blocks to love, because you will be placing yourself closer to God and therefore regaining access to love, a willingness to extend it, and therefore miracles can work through you from God. You can then perform God's WILL, but you are not going to be able to perform God's will after a few perceptual adjustments.

However, at some point, you WILL get to the point where you are spending much more of your time IN vertical perception, not believing in the horizontal ILLUSION of causality, and will become much more miraculous. When miracles are not happening ALL THE TIME, something has gone wrong. This means that miracles are a PERMANENT PART of the NATURE of the Son of God. And of God. It is a natural part of love and life. When we are not being constantly miraculous, constantly loving, we are not performing miracles all the time, so something is wrong.

When we do become more consistently aligned with God's Will, the Power of God will now extend through us. We will now be ABLE to EXPRESS LOVE. And since we're still in this world, this means, we are able to render the MAXIMAL SERVICE to our brothers, which is what every miracle does. At this point, "miracle working" does NOT simply entail shifting someone's perception towards truth. It entails utilizing the vertical perception of the higher level (God/Love/Life) to OVERRIDE any and every illusory "effect", or "cause" in this world.

This means your holiness is very powerful and there is literally nothing that it cannot do in the world. Miracles expressing from the higher level, love, do not see orders of difficulty because they do not believe the lower-level illusion of cause and effect. They overthrow ALL physical laws because all laws on the horizontal level are FICTION. What appears to be a cause in the world is NOT A CAUSE. Any state or condition or sickness or form of suffering or even physical death, CAN BE REVERSED.

Why would you do this? Well, you're going be expressing a LOT OF LOVE. And it is NATURAL for love to be miraculous. It is NATURAL for love to want to HEAL, to reverse suffering, to undo ego pain, to heal the SEPARATION, and so if separation is showing up as physical sickness or broken bodies, LOVE WANTS TO HEAL IT. It is not God's will that ANYONE suffer or die. It is God's Will that EVERYONE experience perfect health and resurrection and permanent happiness.

Why express miracles in a world which isn't real? First of all, that's level confusion. Second of all, it's because this is what LOVE WANTS TO DO. Love wants to HEAL THE WORLD to resurrect everything to a reflection of perfect health and incorruptability, and to then bring everyone home across the tiny gap between that "real world" and heaven. The world NEEDS miracles of healing from love. And third of all, it is our FUNCTION in this world to HEAL, a function which we share with the holy spirit, and while we are here, it is our natural RIGHT and PURPOSE to heal at all times.

This means PERFORMING MIRACLES EVERY SINGLE DAY. God wants us to BE MIRACLE WORKERS, in the world, helping our brother, healing our brother SUPERNATURALLY through the Holy Spirit, DEMONSTRATING that vertical perception is the truth, demonstrating that ego laws DO NOT APPLY, and teaching everyone by EXAMPLE what the TRUTH OF LOVE IS. We ARE supposed to be going out and healing the sick and raising the dead and teaching everyone that God is Love and all limitations are fictional. Miracles are the MAXIMAL SERVICE you can render your brother, and that means, extending God's love TO EVERYONE, which WILL HEAL THEM.

And what will the nature of these miracles be, will it be that we help someone to see differently? Perhaps. ANY expression of love is miraculous. But love is also capable of healing the sick, raising the dead, reversing death, undoing all suffering, curing all incurable diseases, even transforming bodies into different bodies. Love has so much power that it also is capable of DEFYING ALL PHYSICAL LAWS, including laws of gravity and space and time and size and mass and properties of matter and anything else which is an ILLUSION on this level.

This means, if necessary, you will have the ability to DO ANYTHING if it is helpful and loving. If it demonstrates that the egos' horizontal laws are COMPLETELY UNTRUE, and easily proven to be false, you will be willing to do it. If that means, lifting up a car with your mind to show that gravity means nothing, so be it. If it means, moving an entire physical mountain in order to show that the mind has power over the world, so be it. If it means manifesting food out of thin air to feed 5000 people, so be it. If it means making your body walk on water to prove that the laws of physics are bullshit, so be it.

You will walk this earth PROVING that cause and effect are VERTICAL, proving that love has the power to GIVE LIFE to the dead, curing what everyone says cannot be undone, proving that resurrection is God's Guarantee, and there will be literally NOTHING that your holiness cannot do. You will heal sick people, you will raise the dead, you will move mountains, and you will SAVE THE WORLD.

Saving the world does not so much mean that you save it FROM some attacker, but rather, that you save it from itself, because it is an ILLUSION. The ultimate healing of all the world will be the restoration of "immortal bodies" temporarily, the total undoing of all sickness across the entire planet, the recognition of the real world by the entire sonship, and then the complete DISAPPEARANCE of the universe, revealing that ONLY HEAVEN IS REAL.

Miracles are the MEANS of the atonement - how YOU get there, but because they are expressions from a higher level of love, you will also BECOME PART OF THE ATONEMENT by continuing to express love even as you are about to accept the atonement, still in a body, walking the earth. You become part of the atonement by becoming part of LOVE, part of God's Will, and DOING WHAT GOD WANTS YOU TO DO, which is to extend love and healing to everyone who needs it!

This is why you will join the "great crusade" and be part of the plan of atonement long-term, because it is YOUR NATURAL FUNCTION when you have received healing and naturally desire to alleviate the suffering of others. You will not have any willingness to support or keep sickness in yourself OR in others. You will be miraculous ALL THE TIME, EVERY DAY. Being miraculous is a PERMANENT QUALITY of the Son of God and all of God's creations. Being constantly miraculous in this world is NORMAL. Being un-miraculous is ABNORMAL. You will also have no desire to "opt out" of this crusade. Jesus needs active miracle workers to bring about the resurrection!

Miracles raise everyone towards God's eternal life. We are to use them WHILE it seems there is a "need". But miracles really acknowledge that "there is nothing to heal" just as forgiveness recognizes "there is nothing to forgive" and God's power recognizes "there is nothing to have power over". So long as illusions persist however, miracles HEAL the illusion, forgiveness UNDOES the ego, and God's power DEMONSTRATES what is true.

Miracles mean life. Resurrection of "what is dead" and brought back to life is the goal of the atonement. Miracles lead to revelation and atonement as the ultimate healing. We are in a state of semi-death right now, in this dream world, separate from God. We NEED miracles. The whole world NEEDS miracles from God. This world NEEDS LOVE.

And love will restore life, to turn the world into a SYMBOL of life, and then the symbol will give way to REAL LIFE. The lower level will disappear (since it was never real) and all that will be LEFT will be the higher level of God/heaven/truth. This is a course in CAUSE, not effect, a cause in how to express the miracle of love from that higher level, not to suffer as a victim of fake effects of death in an ego illusion!

Then we will simply extend God's love forever, which has been happening all along, continuing the miracle of eternal life.