We rely on our own abilities. We rely on ourselves to be able to figure things out. We rely on the ability to be able to understand why things happen. We basically have appointed ourselves as some kind of know-it-all guru who supposedly has the actual ability to find out the reasons and causes of everything.

This is a complete farce. The ego cannot figure out why things happen. All the ego does is make things worse. It adds to problems, it does not objectively diagnose them. It also presents situations in which we are seeking a lot but not finding.

And this is because, as soon as the ego thinks something is happening or has gone wrong, it ACCEPT THAT AS TRUTH, and that alone shuts the entire door on all possibility of actually doing anything constructive 'about' that problem at all. You can see this in almost all medical circles where the problem is accepted as real and then 'treatment' is nothing more than maintenance, and there are no real 'cures'.

The only thing that can come from believing that something really has gone wrong, is an endless - yet seemingly purposeful and well intentioned - tirade of exploration and explanation, attempting to justify, rationalize and explain 'why' ....under the artificial hope that IF you can figure out why, you will somehow access some kind of other SPECIAL ABILITY to then do something about it.

And so not only is our ego the appointed assessor and figures-outerer, it is also going to save us from this problem once it figures it out, supposedly, with its expertise and its own reliance on itself to get itself out of this mess (which it created by the way). Pretty unlikely, and pretty funny that it was the ego who created and affirmed the reality of the problem and is now supposedly going to save us from it.

And when we do this, which is pretty much all the time, we're basically on a wild goose chase hunting after ghosts and never really solving anything. All this does is enhances our reliance on the ego, our trust in the ego - our ego self - and prevents us from turning to Holy Spirit.

The situation with Holy Spirit is that if we were trusting Him instead of attempting to do ANYTHING about this problem on our own, which requires surrendering the ego (go figure), we would not ever get into the mode of trying to figure out the 'why' of what's happening. In fact, it would be like doing absolutely nothing about the problem, not even attempting to understand it or to describe it or explain it.

To the ego that seems ridiculous. It seems ridiculous to our own ego self to suggest we should just not even attempt to get into explaining, to not even begin to figure it out, and to not even try to understand what's going on. Because what we really need to do, and all we need to do, is completely turn to Holy Spirit in trust and surrender and ALLOW HIM to solve it for us. There are parts in ACIM where it tells us this, that we need to not only turn to Him and trust Him, but that He will also then turn around and DO IT FOR US, IF we will let Him.

Allowing Him to do healing and correction for us takes a development of trust. It means putting aside the ego. It means SWITCHING OFF the ego's use of the mind to attempt to control the situation or diagnose it, and to be quiet and receptive. It means allowing our mind to be put under the control of SPIRIT, to use as it wills, and to trust that it knows what it's doing. This is an entirely different mode of functioning than depending on our own ego self to solve everything.

IF we do trust Holy Spirit and open our mind and turn over management of our mind to Him, for Him to use, then He CAN work miracles through us to solve ALL problems instantly. This doesn't take any figuring out. It doesn't take use of the mind to figure it out. The mind's function is not really as a figure-it-outer, that's just how the EGO is using the mind for controlling situations. The mind can be put into more of a passive mode of sorts where it is under the expression of Spirit, and then it is much more powerful to be a conduit for change and to receive correction.

So we need to stop depending on ourselves, our own lowly little abilities and 'learning' that we're oh-so-proud of and special because of,, and this constant determination that we are *supposed* to solve problems on our own or to try to understand and gain some kind of know-how about the problem which allegedly will help us fix it. This *seems* to work sometimes, in magical ways, to change furniture and move it around, but it does not work to actually undo problems or to correct the mind that believes they are real. And indeed the ego is incapable of solving many problems whatsoever.

Let go. Let God work through you.

Everything about this world points in the direction of death. "All its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death." It was designed to do so. Our job as beings from another world, is to demonstrate that we are not under any of these laws, all of them can be broken, and that it is possible to reconfigure the body to symbolize eternal life here in the dream. A body that shows health and vitality and life, has no scars, has no damage, is perfectly functioning, rejuvenated by the Holy Spirit, and filled with what we'll call "life". Its condition must be completely under the "control" of the mind, requiring not a single belief that there are any other external separate causes of sickness or death.

To overcome death, death MUST be a choice. And the only way to surmount death must entail the ability to choose not to produce death. To choose not to die physically. It has to be possible for the mind to have power over and be stronger than not only the body but all supposed external worldly causes, otherwise the belief remains that something "out there" can come along with an alien will and decide for you against your will that the body should die. The secret of salvation tells us we do EVERYTHING to ourselves, and therefore have the power, should we so choose, to simply choose NOT TO "do death".

The body has to respond, it has no will of its own, no decision of its own, and is ONLY an effect of the mind, not the world. It must line up and obey and correspond to mental health. The belief that the body has its own choice/mind/power to make itself sick or well, or that the world can do the same, IS the belief in death ie the belief in an external separate power that can choose FOR you (the dream choosing for you) that you shall be affected and powerless to stop it. A child of God could never be in a position to be powerless to stop such an attempted attack. God does not will that we be in a position where something can ever happen that we do not ask for. "My self is ruler of the universe" ... "nothing comes to me unbidden by myself" .... "what I want to happen I receive" .... "what I do not want does not occur" etc.

It's a position of tremendous empowerment and causality. Mastery over the world, the body, sickness and death. A living demonstration of life and holiness - wholeness, which is health. Taking a hold of a body of this world, from a vantage point of another world, with a power not of this world, and using it as a tool, a window, through which the light of heaven can extend and shine with healing and love into this world, causing this bodily figure to be animated like a puppet via supernatural power that breaks and defies all the laws of the world. Spirit is in charge, not the dream world. The primary laws of the Kingdom overthrow the secondary laws of spacetime. All laws of physics can be broken by the Spirit. "There is nothing my holiness cannot do." "What the holy spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world."

Death ultimately is learned to be not even a threat, not even a thing, not even a possibility, to one who recognizes that the only way to die is to choose to do so. "You cannot die unless you choose to do so." "No one dies without their own consent" "You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself." Ultimately the teaching is that we are IMMORTAL, invulnerable, unassailable, invincible, unlimited beings. Any testifying of any other kind can only result when we, ourselves, consent to misuse our free will to weave what must be lies and illusions and fictions, trying to prove that we are not immortal. "Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt." You cannot be hurt if you are immortal.

The body is used by a twisted mind to pretend it is not immortal, to put on a show and to try to convince itself and others that it can die. It cannot. "You are immortal and you cannot die." When we recognize the futility and pointlessness of trying to die when we never can, we'll stop MAKING it happen, and will simply choose to live eternally. The supernatural power of God will protect us and make sickness and death impossible. Nothing can happen against our will. Not even death. There are no "accidents" or "environmental influences" or "acts of nature" or "just old age" creeping in like some kind of unwanted invader. There is only our own mind and what it is doing to itself. When it chooses never again to die, it will make death impossible and raise the dead. "Swear not to die you holy son of God, you've made a bargain that you cannot keep" .... you cannot die, you cannot succeed at it, it does not work, you carry on. You already have eternal life.

ALL of your ego's functioning stems from a very very simple premise. Once you start to realize what this foundation is, it frames everything the ego does as just another example of this one thing.

The foundation of the ego is simply the suggestion that you are not love - the love is not in you or what you are - so you are deprived of it - so now you need to go restore the sense of lack by finding it somewhere ELSE other than in you. You go off hunting for a way to fill the emptiness, which reinforces your belief in the emptiness. And even if you find something, it won't heal the sense of LACK, and you won't accept it, because it's not really what you want. You want yourself back. You want God's love.

The separation of your identity from God's Son leads to:

Seeking outside yourself

Creating sickness

All idol worship

Creating fear

All attack

All victimhood

All loss and grief and loneliness

All sense of abandonment and rejection

Seeing yourself as separate from God and others

Having nothing to depend on ("independence")

Insanity

Not being true to yourself

Seeking for what you lost where it does not exist and not finding it

Losing even more of what you are by being compelled to replace it

A belief that you can die

All vulnerability and sense of threat

Mistrust (in yourself)

All paths efforting to 'find yourself' but remain separate

The spiritualized ego

The inability to share or join

Condemnation and judgement and blame (of yourself)

Shame and guilt for who you are

Unworthiness and unloveability

Suffering and suicide and war (with yourself)

All anger and upset and disasters and terrible events

...And on and on.

Just this one thing. This one idea of - I'm not myself - where am I - who am I - I am separate from what I am - I am not as God created me - leads to all of these other dynamics and activities and perceptions.

You can't have any of them without this one foundation - this sense of separation from yourself. And since you and God are one, it is simultaneously a sense of separation from God.

"A sense of separation from God is the only lack you really need correct." - ACIM

And here's the clincher. Every single one of those things on that list above that you currently believe are caused by all kinds of things OTHER than the ego's foundation, are NOT caused by anything other than the ego's foundation. And so it is the sheer 'fact' of 'being' an ego - separate from the love you are - that causes every single problem you face. All hell comes from it. Being separate from God and your True Self is the ONLY problem that needs correction. All other problems are illusory problems masking the one problem so that you will not correct it.

So each time I am in the ego, in some way I must be believing that I am separate from God and myself. I must be going down some path which tells me it's going to help me RESTORE who I am and what I lost, BUT which will NOT restore it, because the entire NEED for that path comes from believing I LACK what I'm looking to restore, and until I stop beleiving that I won't ever be able to ACCEPT that I HAVE WHAT I REALLY HAVE ALREADY.

You ARE as God Created you. You ARE love already. This you need to accept, and let go of all these other ego pursuits that trick you and lead you away from it. Everyone is being deceived by the ego's suggestions of everything you need to do to 'fix' the separation, which seem to lead you to resolution but in fact lead you to an EVEN WORSE situation. Seek and do not find. Fix and do not correct. Pursue and fail. Search and lose. Try to have and do not have at all. Hold on and lose everything. This is all the ego's deceit.

One error, one correction. Holy Spirit's is the Answer from God because He Knows the solution to this problem - that the problem really IS NOT REAL. You are NOT separate from God or Your Self and the separation NEVER HAPPENED. So you are love. And that is why you need do nothing.

"And thus they see in you their holiness, saluting you as savior and as God."

Sometimes we like to think that we are God. But then we start to feel that this tempts the ego and is arrogant and wrong. Sometimes we like to think that we are not God, which makes us separate from God and non-existent, which also tempts the ego and is arrogant.

It can seem grandiose to suggest you are God. But ACIM's teaching on this is a kind of "yes and no".

You are God, because God created you by sharing and extending himself. You have God in you, God goes with you everywhere, you are part of him forever. There really is no way for you to exist or live without being a functioning aspect of himself.

Since God shares all of himself with you, and thus is one with you, you are in this sense every bit as much "Godly" as God is. But at the same time, you are a creation of God's, an effect of His, which he has produced by his causal power. He created you by sharing himself, and by retaining you within himself. This has caused you to exist as though an independent being, but nevertheless you are still one with him.

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought, and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. All His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other."

What becomes arrogant and mistaken is when you start to go into the either/or thinking process of... either I am entirely God alone, or I am not God at all. Neither of those conclusions is correct. ACIM is not non-duality, or duality. God has created many beings, but they are still part of him and cannot exist without him. You are 100% God, and 100% yourself.

So the truth is that yes you are God, but you are also God's creation. God existed and was complete before he created you. He added you to himself, using himself, made of himself, as and within himself. But he is also himself, first-cause, prime creator, and origin of all that exists.

You do not cause him or create him, so your role is different being a kind of second-order co-creator. But being "a separate being", while granting you total freedom, also doesn't separate you off from him in the sense of being divorced from him or orphaned. You are still a part of him and every part of you is a part of him. You both exist, but you are both one. I and my father, as two, are one. "This may appear to contradict the statement “I and my Father are one,” but there are two parts to the statement in recognition that the Father is greater."

So yes you are God, entirely and fully, but you also are a created individual with a mind and soul and freedom. It's not grandiose to claim to be God, therefore, so long as you are not claiming to be exclusively God and nothing else. You have to still acknowledge that you are his effect, inheriting everything from him, in awe of him, because God IS in and of himself greater than you. He encompasses a great many beings and creations besides you, in the sonship, spanning beyond your own self.

You are as much God as God is, but God is also greater. I know that sounds contradictory but only to the ego's either/or logic. To claim your authority, power and natural state of being part of God is accepting atonement and regaining your inheritance. You can't be anything without being part of him, and you live in him forever.

It is also true to say that the Holy Spirit, while being the voice for God, and a standalone creation, is also still God. One with God, fixed on God, and wholly God, yet himself. Just like you, and part of you also. Anything that exists is you, and you are also yourself. "the Holy Spirit is part of you. Created by God, He left neither God nor His creation. He is both God and you, as you are God and Him together."

All of spacetime, and everything within the realm of relativity, is contradictory, impossible, insane, self-defeating, lacking and unwhole.

The reason is that it was made entirely by denying God, denying the absolute, denying wholeness, and trying to bring about something completely impossible - an opposite to God.

But as soon as you lack wholeness, you have things like separation, specialness, scarcity, contradictions, differences and lies.

The problem with such a system is that it contradicts itself. For example, anything separate seeks to destroy other things and to be different from that, so that it can stand out more and be distinct and exist.

It's the same with the ego, the ego wants to separate off and exclude and isolate, because the more contrast there is the more it has a seeming identity. Its identity is then made from the walls of separation.

The problem then is that even though the ego and the world define themselves based on what they lack about other things - what they do not have, and through the attempt to attack everything, they simultaneuosly need those things to exist in order to have any contast.

You can see this with ecosystems for example, where you depend on plants to create oxygen so you can breathe and yet you also eat the plants, thus depriving yourself. If you were have a population explosion that eats all available food, suddenly you would have mass extinction. So now "total life" contains "total death."

The reason is that a relative world is a denial of God's law of the golden rule - that giving and receiving are one. In relativity, this is denied and the rule is now that what you give you lose.

So each time you go to do anything at all in spacetime, you simultaneously get the opposite. Any gain is a loss, any advancement is a retreat from something else, anything you try to destroy you need for your own survival, if you don't share you end up with nothing, when you give what you have you don't get to keep it, etc.

Ultimately the binding rule in spacetime is that every single thing you do is thwarted by the fact that its opposite is also included. You literally cannot have wholeness. You have to choose what you stand to gain, and what you stand to lose, at the same time.

It's an extremely frustrating system because it means there is no whole truth, you can't win without losing, you can't gain without loss, you can't choose one thing without sacrificing the other things, you can't even breathe without reducing the oxygen that you depend on to live.

It's a totally self-defeating, self-destructive, contradictory, frustrating, impossible, nonsense, bullshit system in which nothing can really work and nothing is as it seems.

This is encapsulated by the idea of yin-and-yang, in which there are seeming opposites or polarities, but also you'll find some trace of the other opposite with each. As one increases the other decreases. As one is gained, the other is lost.

Basically, it means that no matter what you do in a relative system you can only partially win, and you must also partially lose, because every gain contains some loss, and every loss contains some win. Nothing is just one thing, nothing is just itself, and nothing is whole. It's all a mixture.

And that means on a physical level everything is a compromise, and a sacrifice, and a limitation. It means you can't have your cake and eat it. It means you can only ever partially succeed at anything, all the options available to you are lacking in some way, there is no way to pick one thing and be totally satisfied with it, and everything is broken in some way.

The ego depends on separating off from and attacking others in order to reinforce its sense of being special and different and unique, of existing at all. Its whole identity is increased by contrast. But at the same time, the very thing it attacks it needs to exist, and if it were to destroy it there would be no contrast and the ego would have no definition. So it cannot fulfill its own goal and must be frustrated in its entire functioning.

This is also why making choices in this world is utterly ridiculous, because no matter what you choose there will always be something lacking and missing, because nothing is perfect. You can't get the whole of anything ever. You pick one thing and you get that sinking feeling that you should've picked the other, because the other has some valid parts and yet not all the parts. And yet the other thing if chosen lacks these parts as well, and so you can't decide. Because every single choice the world offers you is between partial success and partial success, and never does it offer you a choice of completion, totality, wholeness or satisfaction.

How frustrating and stupid is such a system, founded on a belief in the impossible, an attempt to bring about the contradictory, and a state which totally denies itself in every way. While yin-yang is supposed to be a symbol of balance, it's really a symbol of complete dis-satisfaction and impossible inequality. All it really means is that every single thing is equally unwhole, not itself, contradictory and against itself.

"God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

Do you need to be fully awake in Christ in order to perform miracles? NO!!!!!!!!!

ACIM says of the miracle, "The miracle is taken first on faith, because to ask for it implies the mind has been made ready to conceive of what it cannot see and does not understand. Yet faith will bring its witnesses to show that what it rested on is really there. And thus the miracle will justify your faith in it, and show it rested on a world more real than what you saw before; a world redeemed from what you thought was there."

I think this is telling us that there are sort of two 'modes' in which miracles can occur.

1) You have a degree of "faith" in the truth being true, which means believing in God, and disbelieving illusions, to at least some degree. And as a result of this, you TRUST a higher source of miracles to provide them. Jesus is the source of said miracles, and Holy Spirit is the mechanism. They come through you and around you, but you DO play a certain facilitating role in being a "conduit" for them. aka laying on of hands, speaking truth etc.

2) Eventually the faith that you had that God's truth was true, which was used to 'bridge the gap' between where you were and where God's truth was, is no longer "needed" as such because you have moved yourself into the Kingdom, into the Holy Spirit's mindset, and you are now in the position to actually perform the miracles directly.

In the paragraph, Jesus explains that the miracle is FIRST taken on faith, and you may not be able to see or understand its origins. This means it's still happening (the witnesses to faith still show up), and it's still a miracle, just that it's coming from a place you presently cannot see and you don't fully understand. But you're open enough to CONCEIVE of it, and that is enough to get you "access" to be part of the miracle process. You're willing to believe in it even if you don't FULLY trust it yet, and this is enough, because miracles depend on God's love, not on YOUR personal strength.

This initial faith will produce miracles and it will provide "proof" to your perception that there must really BE a God, there must really BE a source of miracles beyond what you currently can perceive. And then as your faith grows stronger or you become more awakened (same thing), as you gain trust in the truth, you will become aware of the "world" which the miracles were coming from (Heaven). You are then the Christ, sharing in the source of miracles, and having a fully miraculous mind (miracle readiness).

I think from this metaphysical structure, we can see that most miracles being performed today are in the first category, are based on faith, STILL PRODUCE RESULTS, and demonstrate that God's world is real.

However, there are FEW, if any, who are in the world right now, who are performing miracles as a result of being fully awakened to the Christ mind.

When you look at pretty much all of the Bible-based miracle workers, because they quite strongly believe that Jesus is the only Son of God (most of them anyway), this in a way puts a cap on their ability to "become Christ". Therefore almost the entirety of the miracles they perform appear to be based in a faith in the miracle-working power of Jesus, though unseen, and strengthen through faith. These miracles are impressive, but there is EVEN MORE beyond this that Christ is capable of in those who have fully mastered the illusion. That level of functioning is the final goal, as demonstrated by Jesus.

So yes you can perform miracles, or at least participate in the miracle process, even while you are "not yet Christ". While you are not fully awakened, they can still occur through you and around you and produce significant results. This type of miracle working can even raise the dead. There is no real distinguishing as to what is possible. You can share and extend Jesus' miraculous authority over illusions to produce supernatural results. But if you want to REALLY go all the way, able to demonstrate such things as walking on water, changing one object to another, flying, teleporting, dematerializing, multiplying food, manifesting stuff out of thin air, etc.. the FULL POTENTIAL of miracles, then you need to get yourself all the way to the Christ mind.

The passage also tells us that it is normal and natural as part of our awakening "process" to develop faith first, to have trust in the real truth, to some degree, and that this trust is ENOUGH to bring forth "signs" which demonstrate that miracles are occurring. You yourself are not as yet ONE with their Source, or even aware of their source directly, but you're still able to like... cast a fishing rod into the invisible ocean and pull out a miracle. Later, as you advance, you will become more "directly" positioned in the role of miracle worker.

Gotta start somewhere!

This passage by the way is followed by one of Jesus's beautiful paragraphs, which speaks again to our IMMORTALITY:

"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."

(signs of Life as in signs of Eternal Life as in Miracles).

Quotes from workbook, p. 463; W-pII.13

"Because He did not will to be alone, He created a Son like Himself." It was not His Will to be alone. And neither is it yours."

There are two thought systems, one is God’s system, the other is of the ego’s system. God’s thought system produces Creation/Heaven, the ego’s thought system produces hell/earth. Both systems run on impeccable logic based on a logical premise, and are systems of thought. They both start with a premise and follow through to a logical and natural conclusion. The conclusion of Heaven’s thought system is eternal life, the conclusion of the ego’s thought system is death. Both are arrived at through perfectly logical reasoning. As Jesus describes:

"The ego's logic is as impeccable as that of the Holy Spirit"

"From the belief in sin, the faith in chaos MUST follow. It is because it follows that it seems to be a logical conclusion; a valid step in ordered thought. The steps to chaos DO follow neatly from their starting-point. Each is a different form in the progression of truth's reversal, leading still deeper into terror, and away from truth. Think not one step is smaller than another, nor that return from one is easier. The whole descent from Heaven lies in each one. And where your thinking starts, there must it end."

The two systems THINK differently. The ego’s system is entirely founded on separation and exclusion. Everything in the system obeys the premise of exclusivity. God’s system is totally opposite, and is founded on INCLUSION and sharing. Jesus tasks us to learn to "think like God", which does not merely mean to use EGO thinking to think about God, or to use exclusive logic at all when considering the nature of Heaven.

One of the biggest fundamental errors in ACIM circles is USING the ego’s thought system to THINK ABOUT the thought system of God. God’s system is SO unlike the ego’s, that doing so automatically produces two effects: a) what seems to make sense is nonsense, b) what seems like nonsense is actually true sense.

The ego always thinks in terms of separations and exclusions. And this maps directly onto objects in SPACE. You can say for example, if bananas are yellow, and this fruit is purple, it is not a banana. Or if my car is parked in the first space, it is not parked in the last space. Or if I have the whole pizza, you do not have any. Everything is put into a contained, confined box (body) and what is inside the box is considered separate from what is outside. What is outside is *excluded*, and there is no SHARING between the two regions.

This kind of thinking is based entirely in separation thought, a way of thinking that excludes, isolates, separates off, and "reasons" based on whether something is fully in or out of a box. You think about objcts in the world this way because the world ITSELF is the ego thought system, based on the same reasoning, the same logic, the same functioning and the same relationships of separation.

This WAY of thinking, exclusive logical reasoning, is EXTREMEY POOR at evaluating the nature of God’s thought system. When it looks at God’s system (everything in Heaven), it tries to put everything into nice tidy boxes. It separates things out. IT excludes. It has no regard for ANY form of sharing, oneness, Union, or anything that transcends boundaries.

It cannot SEE or comprehend how it makes SENSE, that something can be in more than one box at once, that the inside and outside of the box are joined, that something can be in more than one place at the same time, that two entities can have full access to share the same thing at the same time without compromise, or that two seemingly opposite statements can be NOT contradictory.

For example, when ACIM says something like "God has one son", the ego is delighted, because it gets to put God’s system into a nice confined box. When ACIM then says something like "We are creation, we, the sons of God", it now concludes either a) they can’t both be true, b) the statement about the one son is true and the statement about multiple sons is false, or c) God has many sons and not one son. These are the ONLY ways that can seem to "make sense" to ego thinking. NONE OF THEM ARE CORRECT.

The correct truth about God’s system,is that God has one Son AND many sons. The truth is also that each son has full unlimited access to share ALL of God, WITHOUT excluding anyone else from doing the same at the same time. The truth is also that as you give, you do not lose anything, and you keep what you had, and now BOTH of you have it. This sounds like absolute nonsense to the ego thinker. It does not conform to boxes. If there were pizza in heaven, you and I both would be able to eat the entire pizza. That sounds ABSURD to the ego. It is the way God’s system works!

His thought system is entirely run by INCLUSIVE logic. This is based entirely on sharing. Logically it means, we BOTH share things. Everything applies to me AND you. This is what the Golden Rule is based on. Equality. Whatever is true of me, is true of you. So if I have the whole of something, and I share it with you, we BOTH have the WHOLE of it. We share space. We overlap. We commune. We share . We are united. We are one. All things real COMPLETELY DEFY exclusive boxes. If you are thinking about Heaven, God, sonship, sons, creation etc WITH exclusivity in your logical reasoning, you HAVE TO come to a false conclusion.

For example, "I and my father are one". What does the EGO make of it? It thinks ok, it said me and my father , that’s two things, two boxes. So now we have two boxes. It then says "are one". So now..... there are two seemingly contradictory things happening (to the ego). Is it two boxes, or one box? And usually this is where an ego thinker wil THROW OUT the first half of the statement or forget it entirely, and home in on the second part., in an attempt to RESOLVE the contradiction. This is BULLSHIT. Total failure. Trying to MAKE it make sense, by butchering it.

The ONLY correct way to grasp what is said, is to literally think outside the box. You have to THINK differently. Use inclusivity. Inclusivity says, two things can SHARE. It says two things can JOIN. It says two things can be mutual in their likeness and nature. And it even says that two things can be TWO THINGS, while simultaneously SHARING EVERYTHING. And so here, being one with God does NOT end the TWO-ness. Two distinct things are SHARING with each other.

Jesus: "This appears to contradict another statement: "I and my Father are one." It doesn't. There are still separate parts in the statement, in recognition of the fact that the Father is GREATER. Actually, the original statement was "are of one KIND."

And so oneness, being one-with, are-one, DOES NOT mean "one box". In fact Jesus even says you can "be one with your self". It means BOX DEFYING sharing and singularity of NATURE, in which the two ARE STILL TWO, while ALSO being as if one. They are two AND one. Oneness to THE EGO means "one thing". Oneness to God means OF LIKE KIND. And here also SHARING does not mean "only has one" like a single identity, it means TWO THINGS are joined in their NATURE while still retaining their two-ness and INDIVIDUALITY! AND THIS IS NOT DUALITY. NOR IS IT NONDUALITY!

Similarly when Jesus says something hyper cryptic like "one brother is all brothers, one mind is all minds" or "healing is when two minds recognize their oneness and become glad", IT DOES NOT mean that "the one box" is true, NOR does it mean the "two boxes" is true. It is not oneness (as in a count of one) OR duality. THEY ARE BOTH TRUE. There is simultaneously INDIVIDUALITY AND ONENESS. This is why you have a self AND are one. This is why you are one of many sons of God AND part of THE son of God. And this is also why the idea of many sons is NOT a separation idea. It is NOT an idea of "many boxes". It is more like the idea of many boxes which share the same space and overlap each other and share their contents.

The Kingdom of God, the sonship, creation, the relationship of souls, the nature of reality, the way God thinks, Heaven’s functioning, the Holy Spirit, extension, giving and receiving being one, the golden rule, sharing, communication, multiple minds, etc are all GROSSLY misunderstood, because anyone USING ego logic to think ABOUT them is blind, making no sense, using faulty tools, and coming to automatically false conclusions, putting stuff in boxes that is not in a box, and just creates confusion upon confusion.

You have to THINK LIKE GOD if you want to understand these things correctly. And the Holy Spirit’s thought system is based on this inclusive logic. And you are supposed to be learning HOW to think this way, as part of true perception. You have to let go of thought processes that follow the LAWS OF SEPARATION AND EXCLUSION. Otherwise you will think in terms of boxes and shutting everything out. You cannot INCLUDE your brother with that kind of thought process. And you cannot grasp oneness by locking it in a prison cell and falsely concluding "there is only one thing" or "its all one thing" or "there is only god" or "only one son". All of that is ego bullshit.

Creation is one and many. The "one" sonship has many perrmanent parts. You have brothers who are one with you. God has many children who are a united family. Not one or two. Many AND one. And that is natural.

"The whole power of God's Son lies in all of us, but not in any of us alone. God would not have us be alone because He does not will to be alone. That is why He created His Son and gave him the power to create with Him. Our creations are as holy as we are, and we are the Sons of God Himself, and therefore as holy as He is. Through our creations we extend our Love, and thus increase the joy of the Holy Trinity."

In the Authority problem, there is a great reversal of roles, and a confusing of levels.

Jesus refers to this as being the source of sickness ("all sickness comes from confusing the levels").

He also says that miracles realign the 'levels of perception' into their proper order. Miracle principle 30:

"By recognizing spirit, miracles adjust the levels of perception and show them in proper alignment." - ACIM

What this means is, awareness is supposed to begin in God and extend outward, and any 'perception' you have is supposed to flow outward from God. Like, there is a level of perception higher than the physical level, and then there is a lower level of perception to which you are most accustomed. They are supposed to flow in the order/sequence of higher-flowing-to-lower. The light within illuminating perception.

When you have an authority problem, it means that down here in lala land you have turned around 180 degrees and now instead of facing outward extending God's love from within, you are effectively 'out of your mind', looking back toward God with the suggestion that there is nothing 'backing you up'. Your perception then seems to run against God's extension and collides with it head on. Mis-creation! You start to see yourself as the source of everything, with God as your opponent opposite you, to which you are now opposed, and as such you develop a sense of being an authority opposed to God.

It also means that when I have an authority problem, an ego problem, I will not be willing to lay down my ego and allow myself to be owned by God, I will not allow myself to extend God, I will not allow myself to love, I will not allow myself to let God be the authority, I will not allow myself to receive from God, I will not allow myself to follow God's guidance, I will not allow myself to listen to God, and I will not allow myself to surrender. Instead I stand against God in everything I do and try to go off and control everything all by myself.

This is the fundamental action of the ego, being opposed to God. This is why we think we have an authority that we do NOT have. And it is this false sense of authority that builds up as what you're familiar with - that sense of an 'inflated ego', or a sense of self that is righteous, or a sense of you being important in ego ways, or a sense of entitlement, or a sense of having power that you do not really possess, etc... all false idol worship and forms of ego trying to be in charge, in control, in power, ruler of the universe.

WE HAVE TO LEARN TO DROP AND REVERSE THIS ATTITUDE.

This is what I am learning now. The orders of perception are working against each other, and I have level confusion, and I am in sickness, precisely because I am functioning WITHOUT GOD. I am opposed to God and I need to surrender my 'trying to be God' position, turn back around 180 degrees so that I am flowing WITH God and extending WITH God, and I need to therefore ADMIT TO AND RECOGNIZE !!!!!!. .. that GOD is the one who is the authority here.

This is quite a powerful turning point. It means letting down all of those opposing ego attitudes in myself, learning to put them aside and to recognize that they interfere with God, learning that all love and POWER flows FROM God, that God is the one who is in charge, and becoming WILLING to ALLOW this to be true. It's really part of accepting the truth of the atonement - the truth that God is the primary authority. We can join him in it and SHARE in it, but we can't take it over and use it against Him or ourselves or others.

This is a complete flip, really, to the ego. My little ego is all hell-bent on being God, being a savior, fixing everyone, being a hero, being responsible for and carrying the weight of the world, and trying to be some kind of spiritualized exalted ego. This is the COMPLETE OPPOSITE of the 'natural' "divine order". The divine order has me properly positioned as God's SON, extending His love, sharing in His creation, flowing His love, sharing His miracles. And that means, JOINING God in His kingdom, in awareness of His spirit, and facing the same direction as Him, flowing WITH His will, recognizing that His will and my will are One (that's an ACIM theme too), and that I can now share in God's truth and power and healing.

I cannot be a powerful healer, super spiritual hero, mega savior, ultra do-it-yourselfer conqueror. I T D O E S N O T W O R K ! :-) Try fixing something which absolutely cannot be fixed by you and you'll soon encounter just how flawed your fix-it power-over-everything attitude is.

The only way that works is turning around and getting aligned to, open to, accepting of, flowing with, and being with God's will and God's love. That's where miracles flow from. But it means you have to stop trying to do this all by yourself. You have to admit you cannot do ANYTHING by yourself. And it's true. And that means a) surrendering, b) admitting God is in charge not you, c) this opens the doorway to the RELIEF of FINALLY connecting with God and being willing to LET GOD WORK THROUGH YOU. Yay.

Here come the miracles.

In ACIM Jesus sometimes says some things which would be .... possibly offensive... to many people. These truth bombs don't go so far as to point fingers or to try to make people guilty, but it's quite likely that people will either feel guilt or anger about it. For example when he says basically that all sick people are trying to kill others through contagion. ....

"A sick and suffering you but represents your brother's guilt; the witness which you send, lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture YOU accept, if only it can serve to punish him. *****The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill*****. Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."

He's literally saying that those of us who choose sickness, or really any form of victimhood or suffering, even fear, are ATTACKING others. "The ego's purpose is FEAR, because only the fearful can be egotistic."

"frightened people are apt to be vicious"

"those who are afraid are apt to be vicious"

This isn't exactly sugar-coating anything or walking on eggshells. Again he doesn't linger on it such as to try to make people feel guilty for it or worsen their state, but he IS literally saying that if you are afraid you are being vicious. That fear is a state of attacking others.

You'll notice that in both sickness and in fear, it always SEEMS like we're victims. Someone or something else is causing it. WE didn't cause it. WE aren't doing anything! WE are the innocent one! As little victims we get to portray ourselves with the "face of innocent", exonerated and harmless and helpless. SO THAT someone else can play the role of victimizer, accusers, inflicter of wounds and source of viciousness.

But let's make no mistake either that if we go into fear, we ARE in fact attacking love, trying to oppose love, and are trying to bring about a state of love's absence. We might not LIKE how it feels, but we're willing to do it for a payoff of ACCUSING someone else of causing it. It's part of how we scapegoat and project our sins onto others. So the fearful are actually frightening THEMSELVES by projecting "the cause of sin" onto someone else, making themselves the EFFECT of their own efforts to attack.

Similarly with sickness, no one seems to really WANT to be sick. Sickness sucks bigtime. Pain is a bitch. But we put sickness there so that someone else is accused of causing it, so that we again get a secret payoff of appearing to be innocent. We didn't apparently choose it or cause it, so we can blame it on the world. And now we are willing to be helpless, powerless, victimized and suffering, if it means we can accuse the world of causing it. There's a big payoff in that.

It means we're actually very vicious when we're in fear, and we're also very vicious when we're sick. Just as we're vicious in death, vicious when depressed, vicious when unhappy, vicious when unfairly treated, and vicious when terrorized. The ILLUSION OF victimhood covers up the underlying desire TO ATTACK.

And so attack is COVERED UP by defensiveness. Sickness COVERS UP a desire to CAUSE others to be sick. Fear COVERS UP an accusation that others have power over you, affecting you against your will. ie that you WANT to be use them to victimize yourself. There is a whole lot of vicious attack under the surface.

This is what Jesus is pointing to. Not to make anyone MORE guilty or to accuse anyone of anything, but just calmly to look at what's going on and to be honest about it. When I am afraid I am far more likely to become vicious and angry. When I am sick I am somehow trying to prove that the world sucks. That's just what it is.

But the world is ignorant of this and blinded by appearances, and so has "sympathy" for sickness and fear, protecting it like it's unasked for and unchosen. As if the sick or fearful person is innocent. This is a huge trap, and the fearful person DELIGHTS in persuading others to go along with the lie and side with them. Fearful people act like black holes sucking the life out of others.

I know because I used to be that. I've seen it up close. I had to learn that my fear was really MY vicious attack on others which framed them as evil and produced reactions of "fear" in my mind. That my sickness was an attempt to avoid and accuse and be victimized and suffer, for various reasons. What the world thinks is normal is not normal. The false empathy it has for suffering is a total ego smokescreen which we all have fallen for. We have to look deeper and not buy into the bullshit.

We even have to look at the fact that "being a victim" is not only always chosen, it's an attempt by the victim TO victimize. Do you think that's enough of an eggshell to walk around and not touch with a bargepole? Because most people will react to that with ego and hate and accusation of guilt, as if to even utter it is a sin. But the truth is, as Jesus would confirm, is that if I become victimy I AM victimizing the world. I am accusing it of doing things to me. I am WANTING to suffer. And that's entirely my doing it to myself.

We have to outgrow all these old ego modes of operating, of problem solving, and of functioning. They are attempts to solve the separation from God in ways that don't work. They are efforts to deal with the fallout and psychological effects. But they have to be replaced with something that does work. Real honesty and willingness and forgiveness.

I'm seeing that a lot of people literally do not know how to be a certain way. We're all sort of hardwired into our personalities and they have a number of limitations. Where one personality trait seems like a plus, it always has a flipside. Every pro has a con. Every talent has a curse behind it.

This is how everything is in spacetime. In order for any form or illusion to have any properties at all, it has to lack some other properties. A little bulge over here results in a lack of something over there. Something that sticks out means there's less of something. A 'commitment' to one thing produces a movement away from its opposite.

This seems to be true of the body and the personality at this level. We each sort of have a random set of character traits, a real mixed bag, like we reached into the lucky dip and pulled out the first 5 things in a weird combination. And that means we didn't get this trait or that trait or that special trait. So now we're stuck with being a jumbled up collection of parts and pieces.

I for example am wired to be very sensitive which results in a lot of empathy and acute awareness of feelings and so on. But that means I'm not very comfortable being bombarded with a lot of stimuli in a social setting, so socialising is quite awkward and like a minefield. I can't go deep AND broad at the same time. I don't do "smalltalk" well at all.

Then you have someone who is a social butterfly, extroverted and adept at being the life of the party. They can talk 'shallow' with countless people and flit around sampling everything as they go, seemingly confident and outgoing. Yet they also likely lack empathy and depth and don't really get deeply into anything with anyone, afraid to reveal their deeper feelings. Yet on the surface they seem super confident.

I've seen also how there are some people who seem very confident and attractive and have a ton of one-night-stands and are very much single, but have an incredible inability to have a deeper commitment to anyone or a proper relationship. A bias in favour of one thing seems to produce a real disability in another area. Like, we actually can't have our cake and eat it, we have to always be one thing or another.

I used to think there were people who "had it all", and were just somehow "better" than others. ie Better than me, or that I was better than them. But that's not the case at all. Even those who stand out as seeming superstars have a host of issues and blindspots. Being good at one thing usually means being bad at something else. This is just how things work when they're made of separations and illusions of form. Every gain is a loss. There is no "total package" because there is no wholeness here.

I'm finding it at the moment interesting to look at what things I'm good at AND what things I'm not good at. Because if we just focus on thinking that we're 'right' with regard to our pros, we don't have the humility to recognize our shortcomings. Seeing our 'issues' from the outside in comparison to others is quite useful in deconstructing the ego and not buying into the illusion that we're perfect in our imperfection.

Fortunately who we really are is above and beyond all such limitations and biases. If we can recognize the unique configuration of "what we're born with", both the positives and the negatives, we can more easily detach from it and rise above it rather than seeing ourselves as defined by it.

"The surface traits of God's teachers are not at all alike. They do not look alike to the body's eyes, they come from vastly different backgrounds, their experiences of the world vary greatly, and their superficial "personalities" are quite distinct. Nor at the beginning stages of their functioning as teachers of God, have they yet acquired the deeper characteristics that will establish them as what they are. God gives special gifts to His teachers because they have a special role in His plan for Atonement. Their specialness is, of course, only temporary; set in time as a means of leading out of time. These special gifts, born in the holy relationship toward which the teaching-learning situation is geared, become characteristic of all teachers of God who have advanced in their own learning. In this respect they are all alike." UrM5A1