Communication means sharing. Not sharing where one person hands over something to someone else, who now possesses that thing, but the first person doesn't. It means, you both have access to the same state at the same time concurrently. In other words, communication means Oneness.
When there is a breakdown in Oneness, where separations are introduced, it' like erecting walls that come between. Separate parts of mind - or individuals - now seem to be on either side of the wall, like the Berlin wall. This wall breaks communication. It makes it hard to share and join and connect.
Once communication has broken down, i.e. sharing has broken down, we get into a state where there is barely any real sharing. Separate individuals now seem cut off from each other with various forms of distance between them.
The physical world with all its illusions arises out of this breakdown in communication, resulting from separation and illusions of fragmentation and distance. "Spacetime" really means "distance from here."
When communication is diminished, it degrades and devolves into what we commonly think of as forms of communication. These forms of communication are severely strained because there is so much separation involved.
While you can write or speak to others, across a gap of separation there must be misinterpretation. Information will be lost, mis-perceived, and disagreed upon. When two people seem to be a little more eye-to-eye, communication may be elevated, or they may seem to share more.
But there is also an illusion of sharing. Prowess at using the ego's forms of communication doesn't necessarily mean there is openness to true sharing. There are excellent "communicators" in the world but they are not necessarily One with God, or experiencing the same exact identity and state of being as the One Son of God.
The body limits communication, and every way that we use it to express through its forms, are breakdowns in communication. Once in the body this way, unless you are so awakened that you are communicating from pure love, you will feel this urge to try to, or to have to, force others to see things the way you see them.
This happens because you know that there is a major difference between the way you perceive separately and the way they perceive separately. You have to make egoic efforts to force them to listen, and the ego then produces this fictional idea that ... if you could just get people to "get" what you are saying, if you could just get them to "see" your point of view, or if you could just shake the denial out of them to get them to agree with you wholeheartedly, THEN this would be communication. However, this is impossible to achieve.
This automatic compulsion to coerce others to see things your way, is simply because you are not both sharing the same direct experience and there is no Oneness. This means the other person will have to be changed in order for them to seem to share what you are experiencing, and this change can only be brought about through force, in defense of what you perceive as being the whole truth.
While there is a separation, there cannot be perfect communication. The ego will attempt to claim it is possible to KEEP the separation between you and others, to communicate only through its approved channels, and to nevertheless perfectly transfer what is in you to others, or to precisely get from others what is in them. This is impossible and will never work. The separation distorts the message and will always inhibit it.
True communication in ACIM means Oneness. When there is a revelation, God is communicating fully to you. When there is full awakening, you are then able to share in full communication. The Course speaks of how we are to use miracles to help us to "raise the level of communication". What this means is decreasing separation so that there can truly be real sharing - oneness.
"To be with a body is not communication."
"The whole aim of the miracle is to raise the level of communication."
"11. Prayer is the medium of miracles. It is a means of communication of the created with the Creator. Through prayer love is received, and through miracles love is expressed."
"Like any communication medium, the body receives and sends the messages that it is given. It has no feeling for them. All of the feeling with which they are invested is given by the sender and the receiver."
This also means that, in fact, the ego does not facilitate communication - it blocks it. It spins illusions of communication to try to bridge the gap of separation which it itself put in place, which is "special communication" (that's not an official course term but it could be). Illusions of successful communication, or the ways that you improve the ego's forms of communication, covers up and distorts real communication.
In truth then, nothing that the ego attempts to "share" goes anywhere. It's ultimate form of communication is attempted death, whereby the body is used as the ultimate weapon to try to prove that oneself is dead and therefore so are others. And yet, this has no effect on others. The more you enter into the ego the more cut off from others you become, and the effects of what you attempt to bring about cease all the more.
This is also why nothing real can be threatened. The ego cannot attack God. The more it attempts to attack God the less effective it is. The ego's attacks are withdrawals from God. The more it tries to bring about death, the more confined and separated it becomes, and this keeps all of its effects securely at a distance from God. The Kingdom of God cannot be assailed because the ego's forms of communication - "attack" - is actually an act of failing to will anything real.
"Exclude any part of the Kingdom from yourself and you are not whole."
"The body no more dies than it can feel. It does nothing."
"Nothing outside yourself can hurt you, or disturb your peace."
"Nothing can destroy your peace of mind because God goes with you wherever you go."
"There is no death because the Son of God is like his Father. Nothing you can do can change Eternal Love."
Communication means sharing. Not sharing where one person hands over something to someone else, who now possesses that thing, but the first person doesn't. It means, you both have access to the same state at the same time concurrently. In other words, communication means Oneness.
When there is a breakdown in Oneness, where separations are introduced, it' like erecting walls that come between. Separate parts of mind - or individuals - now seem to be on either side of the wall, like the Berlin wall. This wall breaks communication. It makes it hard to share and join and connect.
Once communication has broken down, i.e. sharing has broken down, we get into a state where there is barely any real sharing. Separate individuals now seem cut off from each other with various forms of distance between them.
The physical world with all its illusions arises out of this breakdown in communication, resulting from separation and illusions of fragmentation and distance. "Spacetime" really means "distance from here."
When communication is diminished, it degrades and devolves into what we commonly think of as forms of communication. These forms of communication are severely strained because there is so much separation involved.
While you can write or speak to others, across a gap of separation there must be misinterpretation. Information will be lost, mis-perceived, and disagreed upon. When two people seem to be a little more eye-to-eye, communication may be elevated, or they may seem to share more.
But there is also an illusion of sharing. Prowess at using the ego's forms of communication doesn't necessarily mean there is openness to true sharing. There are excellent "communicators" in the world but they are not necessarily One with God, or experiencing the same exact identity and state of being as the One Son of God.
The body limits communication, and every way that we use it to express through its forms, are breakdowns in communication. Once in the body this way, unless you are so awakened that you are communicating from pure love, you will feel this urge to try to, or to have to, force others to see things the way you see them.
This happens because you know that there is a major difference between the way you perceive separately and the way they perceive separately. You have to make egoic efforts to force them to listen, and the ego then produces this fictional idea that ... if you could just get people to "get" what you are saying, if you could just get them to "see" your point of view, or if you could just shake the denial out of them to get them to agree with you wholeheartedly, THEN this would be communication. However, this is impossible to achieve.
This automatic compulsion to coerce others to see things your way, is simply because you are not both sharing the same direct experience and there is no Oneness. This means the other person will have to be changed in order for them to seem to share what you are experiencing, and this change can only be brought about through force, in defense of what you perceive as being the whole truth.
While there is a separation, there cannot be perfect communication. The ego will attempt to claim it is possible to KEEP the separation between you and others, to communicate only through its approved channels, and to nevertheless perfectly transfer what is in you to others, or to precisely get from others what is in them. This is impossible and will never work. The separation distorts the message and will always inhibit it.
True communication in ACIM means Oneness. When there is a revelation, God is communicating fully to you. When there is full awakening, you are then able to share in full communication. The Course speaks of how we are to use miracles to help us to "raise the level of communication". What this means is decreasing separation so that there can truly be real sharing - oneness.
"To be with a body is not communication."
"The whole aim of the miracle is to raise the level of communication."
"11. Prayer is the medium of miracles. It is a means of communication of the created with the Creator. Through prayer love is received, and through miracles love is expressed."
"Like any communication medium, the body receives and sends the messages that it is given. It has no feeling for them. All of the feeling with which they are invested is given by the sender and the receiver."
This also means that, in fact, the ego does not facilitate communication - it blocks it. It spins illusions of communication to try to bridge the gap of separation which it itself put in place, which is "special communication" (that's not an official course term but it could be). Illusions of successful communication, or the ways that you improve the ego's forms of communication, covers up and distorts real communication.
In truth then, nothing that the ego attempts to "share" goes anywhere. It's ultimate form of communication is attempted death, whereby the body is used as the ultimate weapon to try to prove that oneself is dead and therefore so are others. And yet, this has no effect on others. The more you enter into the ego the more cut off from others you become, and the effects of what you attempt to bring about cease all the more.
This is also why nothing real can be threatened. The ego cannot attack God. The more it attempts to attack God the less effective it is. The ego's attacks are withdrawals from God. The more it tries to bring about death, the more confined and separated it becomes, and this keeps all of its effects securely at a distance from God. The Kingdom of God cannot be assailed because the ego's forms of communication - "attack" - is actually an act of failing to will anything real.
"Exclude any part of the Kingdom from yourself and you are not whole."
"The body no more dies than it can feel. It does nothing."
"Nothing outside yourself can hurt you, or disturb your peace."
"Nothing can destroy your peace of mind because God goes with you wherever you go."
"There is no death because the Son of God is like his Father. Nothing you can do can change Eternal Love."
This I think is a profoundly clear and definitive statement about the Course's core metpahysics. "What is the world?":
"The world is FALSE PERCEPTION. It is BORN OF ERROR, and it has NOT LEFT ITS SOURCE (error/sin). It will REMAIN NO LONGER (must disappear) than the THOUGHT WHICH GAVE IT BIRTH (sin/error) is cherished.
When THE THOUGHT OF SEPARATION has been changed to one of true forgiveness, will the world be SEEN in quite another light (re-interpreted, translated, looked at WITH a different value system, BUT STILL RECOGNIZED AS AN ERROR); and one which leads to truth, where ALL THE WORLD MUST DISAPPEAR and all its errors vanish. Now its source (sin) has gone, and ITS EFFECTS (the world) ARE GONE AS WELL."
Note that it does not say false perception is ABOUT the world. THE WORLD ****IS**** false perception. Falseness is built into it. The world IS a misperception. It is a mistake. The SIN it is made of, was a condemnation and attack on God and His Son. The ATTACK, has to be forgiven, which means the WORLD, has to be LET GO.
Note that it says, the world is BORN OF ERROR. "All forms are forms of error". Which means it was made BY MISTAKE. It is AN ERROR. "The body's eye look upon forms of error and do not see past them."
Note, that it says the world is SEEN **IN** ANOTHER LIGHT, which does not necessarily mean at all that the world STOPS being a form of error, OR a mistake. It merely means you LOOK AT IT IN A DIFFERENT WAY, with a different vantage point, which overlooks the SIN, and recognizes you were JUST MISTAKEN to make this world of sin, and it HASN'T HAPPENED and is forgiven. THE WORLD HASN'T HAPPENED, that is forgiveness. "There is no world", that is ATONEMENT. Only God's creation has ever really happened.
Note that it says, ALL THE WORLD **MUST** DISAPPEAR. This is not talking about your perception or your ego's view of the world. THE WORLD. Itself. Must disappear. Earth, planets, stars, bodies. All must disappear. They are MISTAKES. You can forgive mistakes. You can be loving towards He who was mistaken. You can shine light towards the mistake. But the mistaken HAS TO BE CORRECTED, which means UNDONE.
There is a huge difference between CREATING, and MAKING. "The world you MADE" is NOT a world that's been CREATED.
Creation is the perfect extension of the whole of God. God creates perfect children who are perfect mirror image reflections of Himself. They are given ALL of God. They are equipped to create fully and wholly, just like God, with no lack or limitation. The creations of these creators are also just as equipped to create perfection and wholeness.
At every step of the extension, there is no loss of abilities, no differences, no partial inheritance, no lack, no interruption to creative power, and no interference with sharing absolutely everything of God. Every created being shares the entire whole of creation and is fully unlimited in every way. The creation is a continuous line which extends forever as a whole, which creates wholes, who in turn create wholes, on and on and on. Each created being has ALL THE ABILITIES of its parent, and what is true of the father is true of the son.
Now, **MAKING** is not like this at all.
Making is based on a belief that there is lack, limitation, restriction, a lack of inheritance, a lack of perfection, differences, something missing, and is actually the idea of death. To make, rather than create, is an attempt to put the brakes on extension and bring creation to a halt. It is the attempt to bring about an END to creation, so that that which is made is NOT ABLE to create, CANNOT replicate itself in its own likeness, and completely fails to extend.
The collapsing down of creative power, the distorting and interruption of perfect extension, the mangling of God's will, the twisting of reality, and the dreaming of creating something UNLIKE God, has produced THIS WORLD, which is the idea of sin and death, and is TOTALLY UNLIKE THE FATHER.
It is through MAKING, which is actually an attempt to NOT CREATE ANYTHING, and is also an attempt to deny creation and bring creation to a STOP, that we "made this world." Planet Earth, and the rest of this universe, is "the world you made" per ACIM terms.
When you look at this world you can see WHY this is true. Nothing in this world can extend. Nothing in this world can create a perfect mirror image reflection of itself. What is true of any parent here is NOT perfectly true of its children. Forms and bodies and physical objects are NOT able to extend themselves indefinitely, nor can they create more of their own self in their own likeness.
This is because the world is fundamentally the picture of the crucifixion of God's son, it was MADE as an attack on God/Creation, it was made so that God could enter not, AND it runs completely CONTRARY to your nature. It is the nature of your soul to extend God's being forever. It is this world's nature to PUT A STOP to that. This happens at the level of PHYSICAL MATTER, not perception. Matter is fundamentally made of the thought of the idea of an end to life, the thought of separation.
Through making, we invented "an end to creation" and "an end to life". Making, is death. It produces a condensing of expression, a collapsing of unlimitedness, an imposing of limits, the manifestation of FORMS of error, the production of pictures of sin, and the solidification of the idea of grinding to a halt. This forms PHYSICAL MATTER, which is extremely resistant and dense. Jesus says we made this world from UNWILLINGNESS, which is why it is very hard to change it.
Truly then, this whole universe is what it looks like when you try to stop the extension of God's creation, resist life, deny immortality, reject God's will, oppose the nature of Heaven, and try to bring about DEATH. It literally ENDS in death, and it is literally MADE OF the idea of death, because in this world ALL PHYSICAL FORMS CANNOT CREATE OR EXTEND.
You take a computer and you design a car. The computer operates the machinery and robots and the people play their part to build the car. But, now because the car has been defined as specific forms, with limitations imposed on it, it has now lost the ability that the engineers have. The car, cannot create, other cars.
Even the human body and the bodies of other "death forms" are not capable of creating a perfect reflection of themselves. Human children may inherit traits from one parent and not another, or even from prior generations. None of them are alike and none of them represent the truth of the parent. All forms are different and lacking and every body is incomplete, keeping the rest of existence outside of itself and isolated.
This world, quite literally, down to the particles and energy (really thought) that it seems to be made of, is MADE OF the IDEA - the thought - of "what is it like if life comes to an end" or "what is it like if unlimited extension is limited and stops".... and this is the idea of **death** - the END of eternal life. "Without the idea of death, there is no world." There literally CANNOT BE a planet Earth without the idea of death, which means, without the assertion that EXTENSION MUST STOP, CREATION MUST END, and therefore that LIFE IS ENDED.
Life, REAL LIFE, is of Heaven. "Only the creations of light are real." "There is NO LIFE outside of Heaven." Earth, which is "outside" of Heaven, HAS NO LIFE. It is a picture of death. Real life extends forever, has immortality, lives without sickness or suffering, is fully and wholly creative, ONLY CREATES WHOLENESS, and extends life itself forever. This ONLY happens in Heaven.
Fake life, which is really various degrees of the idea of death, even if the body is "holy" or "a picture of immortality", is STILL A DREAM OF DEATH, and still a separated state, and still NOT perfect unlimited extension of God's being. This world, this planet, your body, my body, are all illusions of life MIXED WITH the idea of death, and so are all limited.
All "semi life, semi death forms" here, WILL PERISH, because they were MADE in the idea of EXCLUDING GOD, which means they are made WITHOUT LIFE, and they are literally made NOT TO LIVE FOREVER. They are LITERALLY an expression of an attempt to MAKE LIFE END. All dreams, are dreams of death. Therefore all things MADE automatically have an END. "The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came". The world WILL END. The dream WILL END. It has to because it has ENDING built into it. It is made FROM the idea of the END of existence.
Jesus says "A world which attacks itself and denies its own existence cannot exist." This is earth. Earth is a DENIAL OF EXISTENCE. It's an attempt to reject Heaven, an attempt to OPPOSE Heaven in every way, and an attempt to assert "there is no heaven." This world was MADE BY YOU from the notion that God's world, God's creation, DOES NOT EXIST, and is the attempt to prove it, by picturing the idea of "world does not exist". This world, is a picture of NOT EXISTING. It is denial of life and denial of self. And that is death. And it is non-existence. WHICH IS WHY IT DOES NOT EXIST.
Similarly, ONLY CREATION IS REALITY. Anything which extends forever perfectly has eternal life and is REAL. Anything which is MADE, which is NOT CREATED, and which is the illusion of a resistance to reality, IS UNREAL, and DEOS NOT EXIST. Therefore, because this world is the world you ***MADE***, NOT the world you "created", IT HAS NOT BEEN CREATED. It has not been created by God because God only creates eternal life and perfect extension. This world IS NOT EXTENSION AT ALL. It is NOT CREATION. It is MAKING. And making is the fiction of opposing God's will. THIS WORLD IS NOT GOD'S WILL. IT HAS NOT BEEN CREATED. IT DOES NOT EXIST. THERE IS NO WORLD!!!
"Life and death seem to be opposites because you have decided death ends life."
"you made death, and it is but illusion of an end."
"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."
This world we seem to be in, is not really a world. It is an illusion of a world, hallucinated by an insane mind, imagining that something impossible exists. It is a meaningless world. It is not good or bad, or evil or holy, or positive or negative, it is absolutely nothing at all.
What we call "the ego" then picks out certain parts of this singular illusion, and says that some parts of it are more alive than others, and other parts more dead. We GIVE it this meaning. We say, ok, this form and shape and behavior means death, and other forms and shapes and behaviors mean life.
And so we assign death to certain states or conditions. We say ok, there's decay and decomposition and damage and seeming lack of life or motion, so we're going to call this death. And when there is motion and vitality and symbols of aliveness, we're going to call this life.
This is literally what you made up. You decided some parts of the one illusion mean death just based purely on appearances. As Jesus says, life and death then seem like opposites in the SAME illusory world, made of ONE substance, and you then decided within that scope that "death ends life". Or that some of the illusions cause other illusions to change and lean towards the "dead state" that you gave the meaning of death to.
It's all made up. There is no part of the illusory world that is more alive OR dead than another part. A dead tree is not really any more dead than a living tree. A dead body in a grave decomposing is really not any different to an exuberant newborn baby smiling at its parents. Nor is a healthy dude at a gym any more alive than a seeming sickly old woman in a hospital. It's all the same stuff.
The ILLUSION is that they are NOT the same. That's the whole trick of it. The suggestion that some FORMS MEAN SOMETHING DIFFERENT to other forms. That their FORM IS their meaning, and their meaning sets them apart as not the same.
"See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning."
"It is HELD BACK by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else BUT form will be perceived."
"The FORM it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from REASON's eyes."
"Therefore, He (Holy Spirit) OPPOSES differences in form as meaningful, and emphasizes always that THESE DIFFERENCES DO NOT MATTER."
In the big picture, ALL of the contents of the illusory world are EQUAL in the illusory nature, EQUALLY unreal, and EQUALLY nothing. There are NOT parts which are more alive, and there are NOT parts which are more dead. The body and the world are not alive, or dead. They are neither and nothing.
"The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."
"The body cannot heal, because it cannot MAKE ITSELF SICK. It NEEDS no healing. Its health or sickness depends ENTIRELY on how the mind perceives it, and the purpose which the mind would use it FOR."
What this means is the body as a meaningless illusion in a meaningless world, cannot HAVE any properties inherent to it. The world HAS no inherent meaning. When you USE it for an ego purpose, you actually distort the body and steer it towards unnatural states which produces what appears to be physical sickness and death. But as we just said even these states are illusions equal to the rest.
When the mind uses the body to bring the word of God, or the perspective of sanity in which the world is all one illusion, to those who lack this awareness, ie when we love and extend God, we stop distorting the world into states of difference, contrasts, conflicts and opposites, and this lifts away from the "body image" the signs of sickness and attack and conflict. Thus the body "resurrects" to what SYMBOLICALLY is a state of health and life. But even this is still not really life.
There is no death because it only seems to happen in a made-up world with made-up meaning based on made-up forms. A dead body is no more dead in truth than what we call a living body. They are totally the same illusion. One illusion of strange separate things, to which we've assigned arbitrary meaning based on nothing in particular.
WHEN the mind can recognize this, it is no longer participating in the hierarchy of illusions, recognizes both "life and death" as the same one illusion, and now has power over ALL states of matter. It has become miraculous because it sees no order of difficulty. It is no longer believed to be any harder or more difficult or strange or intense or chronic or stubborn to make one thing change into another thing.
Then it becomes EASY to change one state of matter into another, just as Jesus demonstrated materializing food and converting a branch into a snake and back, raising the dead and so on.
"Appearances deceive BUT CAN BE CHANGED."
"You CAN change form, BECAUSE it is not true. It COULD not be reality, BECAUSE it can be changed."
You become able to change material objects into any particular form, as part of your awakening to the fact that they are in fact ALL THE SAME. Overlooking their differences is forgiveness. Recognizing there is only ONE PROBLEM is forgiveness. Seeing the world as having no meaning of its own is overlooking illusions. Recognizing that a body IS NOT REALLY DEAD, and is no more dead than another living body, allows you to convert that body back to the living. Or at least to the symbolic illusion of living.
There are a number of stories in the book "The saints who raised the dead" which is a great read to hear about actual miracles. For example one saint visited a woman who was insane, and had attacked her children and killed them, and then was actually chopping them up and cooking them and eating them. And some of the parts had already been eaten. Totally greusome story yes. However, the saint arrived and, knowing none of these appearances were TRUE, performed a miracle and re-constructed the bodies of the children, putting all of the material back together into fully-formed, fully functioning, unharmed and seemingly totally alive and happy young kids again.
In another story, a man had died and was buried and had already been in the ground for several days starting to decompose. Surely this would mean that it was "too difficult" to resurrect the person to life. But a saint arrived and performed a miracle, recognizing that again the states and forms of matter meant nothing at all. And raised the body up out of the grave and recomposed it into a healthy living body, and the man walked away happily.
There are NO LIMITS on what your holiness can do because your holiness has the power of God in it, plus the awareness that this entire world is NOTHING, and so how can it be DIFFICULT to do anything? All forms CAN be changed precisely because they ARE illusions. Nothing here is permanent or fixed or beyond help. It is precisely because the world is NOT real that it CAN be changed by miracles.
"If sin were real it would forever be beyond the hope of healing."
"Yet nothing in the world of dreams remains without the hope of change and betterment, for here is NOT where changelessness is found."
You made death. You invented death. You decided it is death. You made it up, imagined it, labelled in, assigned it to certain forms, and tried to separate it out from other forms. It is not any of that. Death is no different than life in a world of singular illusion. Raising the dead should be effortless for someone who knows this deeply and uses it.
"I raised the dead by KNOWING that life is an eternal attribute of everything that the living God Created. Why do you believe that it is harder for me to inspire the dis-spirited or to stabilize the unstable? I do not believe that there is an order of difficulty in miracles: YOU do."
There is really only ONE problem. That seems easy to say, but think about how many problems you think there really are. Is there really only ONE? A single little problem? A single problem which if you solve it, ALL problems are solved?
Can everything be reduced to the problem of "being separate"? Yes. The entire ego thought system, all of the workings of space and time, all special relationships, all body identification, it's all nothing more than different forms of "being separate". Just different aspects of it in different shapes and sizes.
Therefore the ONLY thing you or anyone really needs to work on, is the undoing of separateness. To stop being separate. To stop fostering separation in all its forms and manifestations. To recognize that separation is the only problem in EVERY situation. And to then recognize that because separation is impossible, it must be already solved.
In effect, there is no real separation, so there is no problem at all. All this takes is to recognize that separation is impossible, just as sin or attack (which is used to increase separation) is impossible. God cannot be separate, and you cannot be separated from him. So you aren't. So there is no real separation at all.
"Salvation does depend on recognizing this one problem, and understanding that it has been solved. One problem -- one solution." W80
"A problem that has been resolved cannot trouble you. Only be certain you do not forget that all problems are the same. Their many forms will not deceive you while you remember this. One problem --one solution." W80
"Above all, remember that you have one problem and that the problem has one solution. It is in this that the simplicity of salvation lies." W80
"We will try to realize that we have only one problem, which we have failed to recognize. We will ask what it is, and wait for the answer. We will be told. Then we will ask for the solution to it. And we will be told." W79
"Our efforts will be directed toward recognizing that there is only one problem and one answer. In this recognition are all problems resolved." W79
"Today I would remember the simplicity of salvation by reinforcing the lesson that there is one problem and one solution. The problem is a grievance; the solution is a miracle. And I invite the solution to come to me through my forgiveness of the grievance, and my welcome of the miracle which takes its place." W90
The world of physical form is a projection of the ego thought system. It is based on a belief in separation, which has produced 3D images of physical objects, all of which appear to be different and unique. And every form screams "we are not one" or "I am not the same."
Miracle mindedness, on the other hand, is an opposite state, in which there is no regard for differences, forms or appearances. All differences are completely ignored. All forms are recognized as a deception. All illusions are the same. All seeming levels and degrees and variations and intensities and difficulties and measures are completely irrelevant.
The world of bodies is the world of form. And form takes on many forms, being the forms of the same one error. The single belief in separation has produced a fragmented world, with an entire hierarchy of differences. Big and small and heavy and light and round and square and near and far and every other conceivable difference is represented here. But they are all forms of separation.
Separateness produces form, and form pictures the ways in which the separate parts are separate. One object sticks out more, another is smaller, another a different color. One has extra parts, which the others lack. One moves in a different way, while the others seem more or less alive. And this results in an entire world filled with contrast and conflict, competition and inequality. A world of a trillion truths.
"Illusions are always illusions of differences."
"Where do all these differences come from? Certainly they seem to be in the world outside."
"The belief in order of difficulties is the basis for the world's perception. It rests on differences; on uneven background and shifting foreground, on unequal heights and diverse sizes, on varying degrees of darkness and light, and thousands of contrasts in which each thing seen competes with every other in order to be recognized. A larger object overshadows a smaller one. A brighter thing draws the attention from another with less intensity of appeal. And a more threatening idea, or one conceived of as more desirable by the world's standards, completely upsets the mental balance. What the body's eyes behold is only conflict. Look not to them for peace and understanding."
"Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation."
"He has one answer to appearances regardless of their form, their size, their depth, or any attribute they seem to have"
"You HAVE no problems, though you THINK you have. And yet you COULD not think so, if you saw them vanish one by one, WITHOUT regard to size, complexity, or place and time, or ANY attribute which you perceive that makes each one seem different from the rest."
"the concept of size exists only in a plane that is itself unreal."
But miracle mindedness is not deceived by any of this. It is a state of mind of wholeness, not fragmentation. It completely ignores all forms of difference, all measures of value, all sense of degrees and proportions and ratios. It has absolutely no regard for the infinite ways in which separation shows up. It does not buy into the temptation to believe that one thing is NOT another thing, seeing ALL illusions as the same and equal.
To live in a world of form is to live as though surrounded by many different things. Countless objects, each with many parts and sub-parts. Even to the extent of all things being formed from tiny little microscopic parts. All of them different, all of them unique. No two objects are even alike.
And so you believe this is normal and natural. You think this is reality. You accept it as if the form of an object defines its meaning, its true inherent nature. As if apples are apples and oranges are oranges, and they have no thing in common. As if cars are not houses and dogs are not cats and Earth is not Mars and one body is not another body.
But moving toward miracle mindedness must entail the questioning of appearances. The questioning of ALL forms. Every disguise. Every temptation to believe that the form of an object is truth. To recognize that all objects are disguises. They are all projected images from an egoic belief in separation. Not one of them is anything else other than just another form of the same one error, the same one problem, the same one illusion.
This must entail moving away from a dependency on different forms. Believing that life is normal when you use a car key to open the car door, and a house key to open your home. Or that one food is different to another. Or that some kinds of weather are better. Or that some relationships are more special. Or that one piece of clothing is different to another and changes your whole appearance.
This whole "lifestyle" of living in a world of differences, has to go. We can't continue believing that there are in fact many things here. That is the deception. We can't keep believing that we're surrounded with an utter buffet of choices. As if there are even any different choices at all. As if things are really any different.
"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives."
We have to stop being dependent on unique special forms, and particular options, and conditions and styles and themes and preferences. We have to let go all prejudices and all ways that we make some parts of the world special.
We should not believe that one form of sickness is different to another, just based on how it looks or its severity or its size or appearance or how it seemed to arrive. We should not be deceived that a dead body is more dead than a living one. Or that a small wound is more difficult to heal than a gaping hole. Or that there is any such thing as "orders of difficulty."
The illusion of separation has not only taken on many forms, it has resulted in a vast hierarchy. A tremendous amount of different values, different amounts, severities, intensities, difficulties, degrees of problem, sizes of activity, degree of value or credit, amount of importance, etc. We've built our whole lives on the basis of fictional differences, buying into illusion after illusion of how "this is not the same as that".
We have to put all of this aside and recognize that ALL FORMS ARE LIES. Every way that one form says "this is how I am not the same", is a lie. They are ALL doing this. Every object is doing this, claiming to be different somehow. And we buy into it. And now we believe in the differences, and set up a whole egoic thought structure of rules and laws and limits of freedom, about how one thing is more or less something than something else.
Miracle mindedness is the state you reach when all of this is undone. When you are not convinced by ANY forms. When you see clearly and recognize the truth that ALL forms are a temptation to believe something that isn't true. You are not deceived by size or weight or severity or strength or proportions or values or importance or colors or shapes or types or classifications. You just put them ALL into one category - they are all equally unreal, equally the same, ONE ILLUSION, ONE PROBLEM, ONE SOLUTION.
This is why in miracle mindedness there are NO ORDERS. There is no hierarchy, no levels, no separations, no divisions. There is no sense of one thing being different to another. No belief in the deception that a slightly broken body is different to a severely damaged one. Why raising the dead is really on different than curing a headache. Why converting water into wine is effortless. Why walking on water is no more special or different than walking on land.
Once all things are equalized, once all differences no longer deceive, once all problems are recognized as one problem, once all forms are seen to be untrue, and once you stop living in a world of many reactions and many relationships and many separate conditions, your mind becomes WHOLE. It becomes unified and singular and "one with itself." It is not divided or twisted or mis-shapen by differences of any kind.
"You are one within yourself, and One with Him. Yours is the unity of all creation. Your perfect unity makes change in you impossible."
Such a mind is miraculous because it utterly ignores differences. It can have power over them all because it is not deceived by them. It sees that to change one small illusion is in fact NOT different to changing a "big one".
That to raise the dead is NOT really a bigger feat than curing a headache. And it is precicely this equality and singularity which gives the mind its POWER. A power which is derived from being undivided and singular. You are a singular whole unified one being, presently confronted with a world of many differences and separations, learning to disregard all of these alien separations so that you can be restored to ONE SINGULAR STATE. One mind. One voice. One will. One power. One wholeness. One capability. And this capability has the power to move mountains, just as much as to reconfigure objects, or materialize different body images, or to do anything at all. Because a mind free from differences is a mind free from limits, and there is nothing your holiness cannot do.
The course is moving us away from fragmentation, towards INTEGRATION. Away from a split mind, towards WHOLENESS. Away from many, towards ONE. Away from separation, towards ATONEMENT. Away from hierarchies, towards UNIFORMITY. Away from exclusion, towards INCLUSION. And away from isolation, towards UNION. Away from rejection towards JOINING. Away from selfishness towards SHARING. Away from the eseparation, towards GOD.
"In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur."
"When you maintain that there MUST be order of difficulty in miracles, all you mean is that there are some things you would WITHHOLD from truth."
"As long as you would have this be, so long will the ILLUSION of order of difficulty in miracles REMAIN with you. For YOU have established this order in REALITY"
"there is no order of difficulty in healing."
"Once the professional therapist has realized that minds are joined, he can also recognize that order of difficulty in healing is meaningless."
"To understand there is no order of difficulty in healing, he must also recognize the equality of himself and the patient."
"This is the message of the crucifixion; there is no order of difficulty in miracles."
"The first thing to remember about miracles is that there is no order of difficulty among them. One is not harder or bigger than another. They are all the same."
"To the Holy Spirit THERE IS NO ORDER OF DIFFICULTY IN MIRACLES."
"Without a range, order of difficulty IS meaningless, and there must BE no range in what you offer to each other."
"There can be no order of difficulty in healing merely because all sickness is illusion. Is it harder to dispel the belief of the insane in a larger hallucination as opposed to a smaller one?"
"By DEMONSTRATING to yourselves that THERE IS NO ORDER OF DIFFICULTY IN MIRACLES, you will convince yourselves that in your NATURAL state there IS no difficulty, because it is a state of Grace."
"Healing and Atonement are not related; they are identical. There is no order of difficulty in miracles because there are no degrees of Atonement. It is the one complete concept possible in this world, because it is the source of a wholly unified perception."
"There is no order of difficulty in miracles, for they ARE all the same."
"WHOLLY natural perception would show you instantly that order of difficulty in miracles is quite impossible, for it involves a contradiction of what miracles MEAN."
"There is no order of difficulty in miracles because all of God's Sons are of equal value, and their equality is their Oneness."
"He need make no distinctions among the problems he perceives, for He to Whom he turns with all of them recognizes no order of difficulty in resolving them."
"I raised the dead by KNOWING that life is an eternal attribute of everything that the living God Created. Why do you believe that it is harder for me to inspire the dis-spirited or to stabilize the unstable? I do not believe that there is an order of difficulty in miracles: YOU do."
"You will recognize that you have learned there is no order of difficulty in miracles, when you have applied them to ALL situations. For there IS no situation to which miracles do not apply, and by applying them TO all situations, you will gain the REAL world."
"It is emphasized here that these differences have no effect at all on the miracle, which can heal any of them with equal ease. This is because of the miracle's inherent avoidance of within-error distinctions. Its SOLE concern is to distinguish between truth, on the one hand, and ALL kinds of error, on the other. This is why some miracles SEEM to be of greater magnitude than others. But remember the first point in this course, i.e., that there is no order of difficulty in miracles."
"The illusion of orders of difficulty is an obstacle the teacher of God must learn to pass by and leave behind."
"The world perceives orders of difficulty in EVERYTHING. This is because the ego perceives nothing as wholly desirable."
"As you survey your inner world, merely let whatever thoughts cross your mind come into your awareness, each to be considered for a moment and then replaced by the next. Try not to establish any thought of hierarchy among them. "
"The concept of ANY sort of need HIERARCHY arose because, having made this fundamental error, he had already fragmented himself into levels with DIFFERENT needs. As he integrates, HE becomes one, and his ONE need becomes one accordingly."
"What is seen as "reality" is simply what the mind prefers. Its hierarchy of values is projected outward, and it sends the body's eyes to find it. The body's eyes will never see except through differences. Yet it is not the messages they bring on which perception rests. Only the mind evaluates their messages, so only the mind is responsible for seeing."
"Again, there is no order, but a SEEMING hierarchy of values."
"It is impossible that one illusion be LESS amenable to truth than are the rest. But it IS possible that some are given greater VALUE, and less willingly OFFERED to truth for healing and for help. NO illusion has ANY truth in it. Yet it appears some are MORE true than others, although this clearly makes no sense at all. All that a hierarchy of illusions can show is PREFERENCE, NOT reality."
"The first chaotic law is that the truth is different for everyone. Like all these principles, this one maintains that each is separate, and has a different set of thoughts which SETS HIM OFF from others. This principle evolves from the belief there is a hierarchy of illusions; some are MORE valuable, and THEREFORE true."
"It is not a thought which judges an illusion by its size, its seeming gravity, or anything that is related to the form it takes. It merely focuses on what it is, and knows that no illusion can be real."
"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal."
"Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeing and yet surely theirs."
Unless we are in heaven with God right now, and only that, and have relinquished all of the ego and its world, we are in a state of DEATH right now. Fictional death yes, but still death.
This is why we need RESURRECTION. Resurrection wouldn’t even be called for if we were already ALIVE. Resurrection means to BRING BACK TO LIFE from a state of death, aka "raising the dead".
What you think is life in this world (earth) is not life. It is death. People are already dead. Bodies are already walking around dead. There are degrees of death, it seems, but actually even a newborn baby is *already in death*. ALL BODIES ARE FORMS OF DEATH.
We do not recognize what death is, because we are deluded by the ego’s illusions about what is life. It has attempted to make an ILLUSION OF LIFE from death.
This entire universe is a dream of death. We are not living here. There are no life forms here. There are only forms of death. That is why we should not WANT this world.
If we do not recognize the LIE the ego has made, to try to suggest that this universe contains LIFE, then we will be deluded and deceived and will buy into this illusion. We will think our body is life or we are living. We are not. This world is not a place of living.
We will then start to think that parts of this world are more alive than others, that there are life forms, that there is "nature", that the little cute puppies and kittens are "alive". This is not life. These are just IMAGES the ego made as SUBSTITUTES FOR ETERNAL LIFE.
Mortal life is not life. It’s an idea of dying. The world is RUN by laws of death, not laws of life, or laws of life and death. Just death. But if we do not recognize it AS death, we are going to think, we’re already alive and therefore DO NOT NEED RESURRECTION. And so we will KEEP DEATH by keeping the ILLUSION OF LIFE, and WILL END UP IN THE GROUND!!
We do not have to be like this. God has a creation for us to live in, our HOME, in heaven, where there is REAL LIFE. It is a "place" (state) of perfect joy, peace, love, happiness, eternal safety, completely harmlessness, innocence, and it is 100% ALIVE! And you are part of that! It’s the only reality. This world is NOTHING in comparison.
We need resurrection beacuse we are mostly dead and heading for death. BUT we know, death is illusion, so NOTHING TO FEAR OR HAVE A REACTION ABOUT ;-) .... but we do need to still choose God again. Or rather, stop being in denial that we DO HAVE eternal life already and can never die.
Resurrection restores life where there was death. Raising the dead is NEEDED in this world to REVERSE SIN AND DEATH in all ways imaginable, both in mind and in body. This is why Jesus speaks of miracles as drops of healing rain which bring signs of live back to a dead world.
All physical forms, all appearances, all physical conditions, all sicknesses, every illness, all disease, even physical death, ..... are all al lie. A MASSIVE lie.
To be a miracle worker requires that you stop believing in sickness. In yourself, in others, in the world. Physical sickness is TEMPTATION. If we for a second believe it is real or true, we are lost and powerless. Seeing this AND believing it is real, is a state of false perception.
In truth, in reality, no one is sick. Everyone is IMMORTAL. SICKNESS IS IMPOSSIBLE.
When something we call sickness "shows up", and our physical eyes show it to us as if it's there, we are blinded by it. Don't underestimate this for a second. Believing it even a little bit is blindness and deception. The sickness is not really THERE.
How can an IMMORTAL BEING be sick? Ever?!!
In order to be a HEALING FORCE, your mind has to get to the point where it ASSERTS LIFE. This is what resurrection means. The assertion of life. You ASSERT LIFE towards everyone. Which means you denounce sickness, death, damage, malfunction, disease, and death. You shine it away. You push past it. You ignore it. It's all a lie.
"The resurrection is the denial of death, being ***the assertion of life***. Thus is ***all the thinking of the world reversed entirely***. Life is now recognized as salvation, and pain and misery of any kind perceived as hell. Love is no longer feared, but gladly welcomed. Idols have disappeared, and the remembrance of God shines unimpeded across the world. Christ's face is seen in every living thing, and nothing is held in darkness, apart from the light of forgiveness. There is no sorrow still upon the earth. The joy of Heaven has come upon it."
Imagine if you will what it will be like to approach everyone from a TRULY FORGIVING attitude which does not see ANY TRUTH in sickness. Which looks beyond all physical forms, all appearances, all matter, no matter what form it takes, how severe it looks, what people think of it, what seemed to cause it, or any other justification for its seriousness.
Imagine what it will be like to be so SURE and CERTAIN that only life is true, that you laugh in the face of even the NOTION that sickness even EXISTS. You laugh in the face of death. You take nothing physical seriously. And you utterly recognize the complete LIE that all sickness represents.
You don't buy into it for a second. You don't believe ANYONE that claims to be sick. And you completely disagree with ALL assertions supporting the idea that sickness is EVEN THERE, yet alone an explanation of what it is or how it came about.
THERE IS NO SICKNESS. This is what our attitude has to be IN ORDER TO HEAL. Healing obliterates sickness. It's a LIGHT, which shines away darkness. Light says to the darkness, YOU ARE NOT THERE. And it SHINES it away.
It removes it. Sickness, in all its forms, all its behaviors, even the concept of sickness, has to be DENIED correctly. This denial doesn't mean turning a blind eye, it means giving absolutely no support to it, no belief in it, giving it no power, and stripping it of every illusion. Rejecting sickness completely as utter bullshit!
This I am sure is how JESUS saw people. He looked completely past all physical forms. He looked beyond bodies. He was joyously loving and certain of the truth that nothing real can be threatened. He laughed in the face of death. He cancelled every manifestation of illness. Even in the face of the death of another he didn't believe for a SECOND that death was occurring.
And this ultimately leads to an attitude of THERE IS NO DEATH. Because death is sickness. And death and sickness are absolute lies. There is no death because ONLY LIFE is real. And asserting, enforcing, powerfully expressing, that THERE IS ONLY LIFE, completely obliterates and undoes and reverses and heals all sickness and all death. This is how the dead are raised. This is how the sick are healed.
The resurrection is the assertion of life. The recognition that life is real and true. The recognition that anything that IS NOT LIFE, which is all forms, all bodies, all galaxies, all illusions of matter, is exactly that - NOT ANYTHING. Nothing at all. It holds no truth. Not one single ATOM has any truth to it. Not one single quantum flux is even remotely real. Even space and time are fictional beliefs!
To heal others, one must adopt this completely "stern", powerful attitude. This utter REFUSAL to ACCEPT that sickness is real. Because what you accept you will accept into YOUR MIND, and this will make your mind sick and dream of real sickness. Sickness has to BE DENIED. This is the whole thing with false perception and the seeing of two worlds.
"The world you see must be denied for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."
"You cannot see both worlds." "Sight of one denies the other."
When you are in false perception you are dreaming of hell and suffering and sickness and death in a dark nightmare of despair. This is a failure to overlook illusions. It's falling for temptation. What is the opposite? The opposite is not believing a SINGLE THING your body says is really happening, not believing it's true that ANY appearance of sickness has ANY validity. Recognizing clearly that illusions of sickness hold NO TRUTH AND NO POWER TO RESIST HEALING. And looking PAST all forms to the light of Christ.
As miracle workers we are to BRUSH OFF sickness and all notions that there EVEN IS such a thing as sickness. We are to UTTERLY DENY it in every way. The entire system of magical solutions. The entire institution of "treatment". The entire thought system of suffering. The entire IDEA, the tiny mad idea, that impossible sickness is possible. Immortal beings can never be sick or die. So what is a sick body trying to claim, that sickness and death CAN happen because you are NOT immortal? It's a LIE.
Completely withdrawing ALL BELIEF in sickness similarly entails the TOTAL RELINQUISHMENT of all temptation to believe that ANYONE is truly sick. You cannot heal someone by believing they are sick! You are useless to them when you join in false empathy and make their dreams of sin real. You have to actually NOT CONSENT to join them in their suffering.
Otherwise you are NOT supporting them, you are weakening them AND contributing to their sickness through attack. Believing someone is sick is a DESIRE TO SEE THEM SICK. Believing in real sickness and real death is an attack thought. It's an attempt to MAKE TRUE and make real, that your brother is LESS THAN HOLY. It's an attack on his health.
You compound his own sickness and ADD TO it, holding him in a psychological PRISON, by AGREEING with him that he is not immortal in any way. That he is affected, suffering, weakened and vulnerable, able to be threatened by death. Not only does he suffer by his own self attack and pretend sickness, but he suffers even further because you won't ACKNOWLEDGE the immortality and safety and wholeness that is true of him.
Seeing your brother AS whole, and recognizing his wholeness, is required to HEAL him. You have to see WITH wholeness, which means NOT seeing or believing sickness, attack, suffering or death.
"Wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles."
This requires that you not even believe what your physical senses are showing you, because they are lies. "To sense is not to know". The body's senses were designed as LIE AGREEMENT DEVICES, to MAKE the world seem real. "Only the body makes the world seem real." And yet "the body is a dream." So even if you SEE physical sickness, even if you HEAR the pain, even if you FEEL the wound, even if you SMELL the rotting flesh, these are all LIES posed by the ego to TEMPT YOU TO BELIEVE THAT HELL IS REAL.
The correct attitude of a miracle worker is the perspective that THERE IS NO DEATH. There is no sickness or suffering. There is no sin or guilt. There is no fear. There is no attack or damage. None of this is happening. The miracle worker recognizes THE TRUTH, God's truth, as THE ONLY TRUTH, and NOTHING ELSE IS TRUE. Meaning that anything which even HINTS at suggesting something else is true, MUST be completely denied, rejected, disbelieved, not invested in, not trusted, not had faith in, not wanted, not desired, and not fallen for.
The miracle worker approaches another with TOTAL CORRECTED PERCEPTION. This perception frames ALL physical illusions AS FALSE. Utterly false. 100% false. Not a single shred of truth to them. Illusions cannot be real BECAUSE they can be changed. They can be made to appear sick, or well, and so they CAN be "healed", and can be changed. Miracles prove this.
"That the mind can heal the body but the body cannot heal the mind shows the mind must be STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this."
Our attitude towards "the sick" should be. ... well... YOU believe you are sick, I DO NOT. I do NOT join you in sickness. I will not validate it. I will not add to it. I will not give it any reality. You are deceived in believing you are sick. You are MISTAKEN. You cannot be sick and you are not sick. This supposed sickness is totally illusion and IS NO THERE. It's a bullshit lie. There is no sickness IN YOU. Get up and walk motherfucker!!! Of course, in a loving way.
By seeing only life in another, they are resurrected. You give life to them through miracles.
"Miracles mean LIFE and God is the giver of life."
You can only GIVE life to another by NOT giving death to them. If you ASSIGN "that's death" or "that's sickness" to someone, you are GIVING them death. You are giving them a diagnosis. You are making it real. In fact you are CURSING them.
"Curse God and die, but not by Him Who made not death, but only in the dreams."
""Casting spells" merely means "affirming error", and error is lack of love. When man ***projects this onto others, he DOES imprison them***, but only ****to the extent that he reinforces errors they have already made.**** This distortion ***makes them vulnerable to the curse of others***, since ****they have already cursed themselves****. ********The miracle worker can only bless********, and this undoes the curse and frees the soul from prison."
When someone curses themselves, it accuses themselves of sin in some way, becoming guilty and IN NEED OF punishment, they set up a psycho-energetic state of seeming vulnerability in which they ACCEPT make-believe "laws of causality", forms of victimhood, in which they weaken themselves and become "sensitive to" or susceptible to certain forms of external causes. And thus they "allow" or rather, do not resist, and in fact AGREE WITH, the seeming external attacks of others. So when someone else tries to "curse them" (any kind of attack), they RECEIVE it and take it upon themselves, using their self-attack as a weapon to INCREASE their own suffering. They use others to hurt themselves more by trying to GET punishment from other people's expressions.
NOT cursing, but rather setting your brother free and UNDOING their curse, is miracle working. If we make someone's sickness real and BELIEVE IN SICKNESS AT ALL, we are directly CURSING people. We are MAKING THEM sick. We are CAUSING sickness. We are projecting sickness. If someone has made themselves sick through their own mistake and judgement, this makes them BELIEVE the are vulnerable. And this now OPENS them to forms of attack which SEEM capable of attacking that vulnerability. ie, that someone can COMPOUND their self attack by ADDING TO their sickness. Amplifying it.
Your fear about another's sickness is murderous. It is an attack. Anything that is not loving is an attack and fear is the opposite of, or lack of love. Either you heal, or you hurt. Either you love or you hate. You are doing one or the other at all times. If you teach love you will heal others and UNDO THEIR CURSE! If you teach cursing, you will HARM others and imprison them in their cursed state and make it WORSE. Feeling bad about someone being sick MAKES them sicker.
Ultimately we have to weed out all the reasons and beliefs as to why we believe sickness is real, bodies are real, suffering is real, guilt is real. This includes NOT BELIEVING a dam thing that the world seems to contain. ALL BODIES ARE ILLUSIONS. And everything the BODY sees is an illusion. "The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen." The body is LITERALLY incapable of seeing reality. It does not look at a REAL world, it looks at A WORLD OF LIES. And to lie is to sin.
"The world of bodies is the world of sin (lies)."
And then we become purified, prepared, to be able to SEE ONLY LOVE, GIVE ONLY LIFE, TEACH ONLY RESURRECTION, and completely OVERRIDE all manifestations of sickness and death. We have to flat out REFUSE to participate in anyone's belief OR proof that they are sick.
Even if they are CONVINCED. Even if they have 100 medical records and have seen 50 doctors. Even if they were at the emergency room or in the ICU. Even if they almost died. It is ALL AL LIE. And if we BUY INTO IT, FALL FOR IT, ARE DECEIVED BY IT, we will be of NO use in helping or healing, left only to commiserate and sympathize in weakness and mutual sadness.
We have to purge ourselves of ALL belief in death in ALL its forms. And "Sickness is but a little death." Even UNHAPPINESS is a form of death. Anything short of TOTAL JOY AND LOVE is a form of death. And all of it has to be REJECTED AS FALSE.
You do not know anyone who is really sick.
You have never met a sick person.
All hospitals are filled with liars.
No-one can ever die.
THERE IS NO SICKNESS AND THERE IS NO DEATH! That is what you must teach! That is how you HEAL!
"There is no death. The son of God is free."
I used to have the view, like most people, that the death of the body means death, and when the body is moving around, it means life. That death is something we all want to avoid, and we want to keep bodies alive.
And then I read ACIM and I thought, okay, death is an illusion, so things aren't supposed to die, meaning that the body supposed to be kept in a state of life. I read support for the idea that a sick body represents attack, and death is failure and an attempt to be unconscious. So it makes sense to say that we should "swear not to die" and try to make the body symbolize eternal life.
But while there is some truth to this and support for it in the course, there can also be mixed in a kind of spiritualization of bodies. We might start to think that a repurposed "holy body" is full of life and totally natural. But this can also disguise an underlying desire to have the body "always be alive" and to still avoid states of death. As if bodily death is still death, and being good at avoiding it is more spiritual.
But there is a deeper teaching in the course. Things which pass for life in this world are not really life, either. And we have arbitrarily decided that certain forms or states mean death. We've decided that a dead body means death, and that moving bodies mean life. But these are really separation-based judgements, designed to take one single illusory world and split it into acceptable and unacceptable parts.
In fact, it must be an illusion that a healthy vital youthful "living" body, is in any way really different to a decrepit diseased broken dying body. Their forms present illusions that they are not the same, as a deception. Their forms are disguises designed to tempt you to believe they are not the same one thing. A decoy, so that you won't realize they are both really the same dream. "The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."
Jesus teaches in the course that bodies do not really live, OR die. That they are not really even remotely similar to life in heaven. Real life is immortal eternal life. A vitality and livingness of the mind, almost like an excited energy, which can spontaneously spawn new life by will alone. And any such life is permanent and lives forever in an immaculate and formless state.
So-called "life" on Earth is not like this. Bodies are inherently etremely limited and limiting. They anchor us into tiny little locations in space and time, inhibit our abilities, and make it difficult to create anything. They appear to be born and to grow and change, all of which cannot happen in reality, where life is a constant state. And then they seem to grow old and wither and die and decompose, something which is utterly unnatural with regard to life in heaven.
What Jesus really says is that so-called "life" in this world is not really life. Nor is it really death, but a dream of death. It is in fact nothing. It is nothingness, an illusion of the ABSENCE of existence (heaven), the opposite of reality. It is an unreality and a lack of either real life OR real death. Real death is impossible because it does not exist at all. So at most this world represents only illusions of living and dying, and neither of them are true.
"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is NOT in Heaven is not ANYWHERE. Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible, and beyond ALL reason, and yet perceived as an eternal BARRIER to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."
"Life and death seem to be opposites because you have decided death ends life."
So in this world, "life" is an illusion of life, which is not really life. And death is an illusion of death, not really death. Because this world itself isn't really a "something", or an anything. It's actually a nothing, pretending to be a something. And in fact Jesus calls the whole thing a "dream of death" with varying degrees of death symbolized in different forms. "Without the idea of death there is no world." Even "life forms" are "forms of death".
As a Teacher of God our task is to recognize that there is NO DIFFERENCE between "living bodies" and "dead bodies", in the big picture. In truth they are just images of bodies, forms, whose appearance is temporary and symbolic at most, and which cannot really be alive or dead. Walking bodies are not really living bodies. Bodies in a morgue are not really dead bodies. In truth, they are EXACTLY the same ONE illusion, pretending to be many illusions. There is no life OR death in a world of fiction.
"They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful."
"But this you do not see; that you made death, and it is but illusion of an end. Death cannot be escape, because it is not life in which the problem lies."
"God made not death. Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion."
"Even in time you cannot live apart from Him, for sleep is not death. What He created can sleep, but it CANNOT die."
At first it might seem as if this means there's not much point "healing" bodies. Or trying to preserve their health. Or raising the physically dead. Or restoring broken limbs. Or any other act which might seem like it is siding with "the illusion of life" versus the illusion of death. Why try to steer bodies towards what we think of as "a living state" rather than a dead state? If all their conditions are the same one illusion, what is the point in avoiding sickness or death in any form?
The clear teaching in ACIM is that, nevertheless, even though a "healthy living" body is just as unreal as a dead one, bodies ARE symbols. And they are communicators. And their form "means" something to those who look upon it. And so the body's form can communicate something. It can communicate for example that there has been attack, or that sin has happened. But it can also communicate that attack has not happened, and therefore symbolize eternal life.
"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."
It is in fact by recognizing that bodies don't live or die, that the body is no longer "attacked" by thoughts and laws you make up to try to preserve them. When you stop trying to believe that a body is alive, or can cause sickness, or be healed, the mind in fact "heals" it, or corrects the image, removing symbolic appearances of attack and death. And now the body seems to resurrect towards "looking like life", because the mind cannot conceive of illness and ceases to project ideas of death onto it.
"The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, it heals the body because IT has been healed. The sane mind cannot conceive of illness, because it cannot conceive of attacking anything or anyone."
A healed healthy body, even if an illusion of health, CAN symbolize eternal life in the world, CAN teach "with a power greater than a thousand tongues" that its harmlessness proves your brother's innocence, and CAN teach innocence. This is a repurposing of the FORM of the body, for a higher purpose, to USE form to symbolize actual eternal life, as best it can, rather than symbolizing the idea of attack and death. It is to this end that we aim to "heal" the body and make it be "more alive". A such, physical health comes from a healthy mind.
"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. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."