There is a common trend towards trying to accept everything in the world. To allow it. To give it permission. To let it be whatever way it is.
There is one part of this which is beneficial. If you resist things, you make them real. If you control things, you make them real. If you judge and attack things, you make them real. It would imply that if you accept them "as they are", you can find some kind of peace, where you're not really attached to outcomes or conditions or situations or people. As if the world will just fluidly flow over your experience without triggering anything or upsetting you. Because you accept it. But this also can be a trap, and a massive justification for keeping suffering and death.
Because the fact is that this world is not real. It's an illusion, and everything in it is a lie. It's not supposed to be happening. It's not natural. Whatever you accept into your mind you make real to you. If you accept the world into your mind, you make it real. If you are in a position of "allowing" it, you are handing over causality and permission and power to it. If you are trying to simply be at peace with whatever happens, you are not owning the fact that you are making everything happen. If you focus on trying to transcend whatever's going on, which can bring a sense of peace, it does not necessarily bring into question whether things are happening or not.
The task at hand is more to do with learning to recognize that this world is NOT happening. There is not anything to really ACCEPT about it because it isn't really doing anything. You don't have to ADJUST TO conditions, or try to persuade yourself to be okay with suffering, sickness, unhappiness and death. You're not supposed to be having any of these things.
The only true acceptance, the only thing you should ever accept, and thus believe in fully, is THE ATONEMENT. God's truth. Reality. This world is not reality. In accepting the atonement you are accepting something that should be accepted. Something which will bring a cure. Something which will instill miracle mindedness and the ability to be invulnerable. Something which puts you in touch with the power of God, to have dominion over this fake world.
There is merit in not being in such a 'fight' with the world, not resisting it or taking sides against it or having this whole ego un-peaceful counter-attack scenario in your mind. Yes, so it's good to accept things on that basis, because it at least includes less conflict mentally. BUT, this also should not be on a basis that "the world is real" and "things are really happening" and "bodies are really sick" and so on. You should not be accepting that these things are true. You should not be "allowing" them as such. Otherwise you become a passive, miracle-less fence sitter with no power to do anything.
Detaching from the world is great. But it must include the *recognition* that the world is not real, it is entirely illusory, you should be not "agreeing with" it, you should not be justifying it, and you should not be confusing acceptance with authorizing death. It may seem paradoxical but accepting the TRUTH should entail the DENIAL OF the world, the rejection of death, and a demonstration of symbolic immortality in the body.
You are not supposed to just find a way to "let the world happen", you're supposed to become aware you are DREAMING IT and MAKING IT happen, and thus regain power OVER it to change it at will. That's a massively different position than merely trying to get comfortable with "real suffering" or "whatever happens that I did not cause." There is no causality in that kind of acceptance, it's a total passivity. Yes you can try to accept that you feel unhappy but you shouldn't be feeling unhappy. You can try to accept your body is sick but it is not supposed to be sick. Are you going to accept your death?
You might think well, if I am so at peace and accepting of what's SEEMING to happen in this illusory world, why would I bother changing it? Because if the body is sick, the mind is STILL sick. The body can't get healthy unless the mind is healthy. And the mind cannot get healthy while the body is being constantly bombarded with mind attack. "A broken body IS PROOF the MIND HAS NOT BEEN HEALED." So the body DOES have to get healed as well, which means the reversal of sickness and death. Death has to get UNDONE, not accepted. Otherwise there is no true resurrection of mind OR body.
ACIM does not teach to "accept everything that happens in a dream world". It teaches there IS no dream world and YOU are the dreamer who makes it be whatever you decide it is. And if you change your mind, THE WHOLE WORLD MUST CHANGE. This is a course in CAUSE, not being passive. "Members of my party are ACTIVE workers." Will you lay down and let death happen against your will, and try to "accept it"? You cannot be at peace with death. Death can only "happen" if you CONSENT to it, which means you CAUSE it, because you have an attacking unhealed mind that's not at peace.
If you want people, you must learn to undo the world and stop dreaming of nightmares. Not because otherwise you'd be at the effect of external causes of un-peace but because being at peace goes hand in hand with HAVING POWER AND BEING THE CAUSE.
OK.
This is going to have to be pretty long because this is a very difficult subject to explain, so bear with me. Some of you may be willing to accept what I'm going to say, some will not.
Oneness. What does it seem to mean? God is whole. God is complete. God is "all there is". God is everywhere, omnipresent, lacking nothing. God is the same everywhere. So... if this is true in terms of ego logic, it means the following:
God has no son. God is dreaming this world. God is a murderer. God created death. God makes people suffer. The separation happened inside God. God is mistaken. God is afraid. God is all people. God is experiencing "himself" through and as all people in the world. There is nothing other than God. We are God. Separation is real. God created this world. etc.
Absolutely none of that is true. That is the purest most logically accurate definition of what non-duality means to the ego. It is the most precise conclusion you can draw from how the EGO understands oneness or what it means to be "one". If oneness truly means "there is only one", the God is responsible for hell. And it is grossly mistaken.
If God is one, then God cannot even create anything because there is nowhere for the creation to occur and nothing to add which wasn't already there and so, literally, "there is only God". This is the conclusion many many Course folk have come to. It seems to in some ways make sense TO EGO THINKERS and those who use linear logic who think that such linear logic is capable of encompassing and understanding the nature of God.
God is not like this. And oneness does not mean "there is only God". And non-duality, as the opposite of duality, does not properly describe the holographic creative nature of God or reality. Non-duality is CLOSE to being correct, and is more correct than duality, but it is still a concept and it falls way short, as you will see. If there is non-duality there should be just "one thing". In that, there can be no Son of God at all, no creation, no love, no extension, no sharing, no sonship, and no holy relationship.
In fact, what's happened widespread in ACIM folk is various false conclusions which have established themselves as if written in stone "what the course says". And yet the consequences of these errors are quite horrific. To believe God is all there is is to equate God with ego and death. To claim that God is all there is also denies and murders every Son of God.
OK.
Now, let's talk about how God actually exists and thinks and creates and the nature of His creation. If the strictest definition of oneness or non duality is true, then God cannot even create anything. And in a sense, PARTS of the Course speak to this. E.g. "God is". And also, "nothing real can be increased except by sharing". So anything real, like God, is permanent, fixed, unchanging, does not increase or decrease, and therefore there can be no creation whatsoever. Which means no son. UNLESS, this thing called "sharing" happens.
Recognize that God is love, and because of what love is, it automatically goes out and shares and extends. It shares because it has no reason to hold anything back. It is fundamentally a state of sharing, including, giving, and this radiation of love is another way of describing the act of creation.
God in and of Himself is whole, complete, lacking nothing, needing nothing, and is already permanent. Like a solid rock. Unchanging. That does not really sound like something that can create, does it? It seems very fixed. Like absolutely nothing is happening or possible. That's strictly what most definitions of "oneness" imply also. That nothing else is possible besides God existing. That's false.
God loves, and in that love, God radiates, extends, shares, creates, miraculously. Ego logic will NEVER account for "the miraculous", and God's creative ability is truly miraculous, which is why YOU ARE A MIRACLE. To the ego, God CANNOT create, and the act of His creating defies ALL EGO LOGIC and demonstrates that God is a miracle worker. Something happens in God which defies explanation and seems impossible yet happens. God SHARES AND CREATES something "other" than Himself, out of nowhere.
If you think of God like a light bulb, God is the fixed light bulb which does not move or change really, but the bulb radiates and SHINES light. The light goes outward and illuminates. That "shining", that light radiating, that is creation. The light radiating is not necessarily the same thing as God Himself. God is complete and whole already, but God SHARES Himself by shining light and radiating and extending, and that which extends outward is creation.
It is in this way that God created the world of Heaven. Here is how the Course describes it is a NATURAL division:
"The world was made as "a natural grand division," or a projecting outward of God. That is why everything that He created is like Him. Projection, as undertaken by God, is very similar to the kind of inner radiance which the Children of the Father inherit from Him. It is important to note that the term "project outward" necessarily implies that the real source of projection is internal. This is as true of the Son as of the Father."
So God in and of Himself is complete and whole, but He "projects outward" (extends) and that which is projected forms a "world" (heaven). This world is, in a sense, "divided from" God in a natural way, in that it comes FROM God and is God SHARING, but God as its SOURCE still remains in a sense, beyond it.
This is because God is the "first cause" and what God radiates is the "effect" of God. His Thought/Shining is the effect of Him as the "thinker". The effect of God is not capable of turning around and "causing God" in reverse, or of making God its effect. The creation (the Son/sonship) is being constantly sustained by, projected by God, forever, is coming FROM God, and therefore the Son is ONLY "as God created Him" and cannot change what He is. The Son has no real say in what He is at all, He merely gives thanks for having been created perfect.
God is cause, not effect. God cannot be affected. This causal extension or "creating of effect" in a way puts up a kind of "wall" or division you could say, just on a causality level, which in a sense, separates the creation from God's own Self, but only in the sense that the created Son cannot cause God back. But the Son CAN share love with Him.
This is not the same thing as the "separation" that we are accustomed to thinking of as what the ego does or relating to the "separation from God" which was a different matter. The "separation from God" happened when the Son, who is only effect and not capable of causing God, attempted to cause God. That means the Son tried to will against God's will or to undo what God has created, trying to replace it with something else. That was an act of impossible denial, which brought about the separation and the "fall of man".
That's an entirely different thing to the "natural division" between God and His Son. The division between God and Son is NATURAL in that this is How God intended it, that the Son is imbued with the SAME WILL TO CREATE, the same love, the same completeness, the same wholeness, AND SHARING the WHOLE OF GOD within itself, as well as sharing THE WHOLE OF CREATION within itself. All of God is in the Son, shared with the Son, and yet the Son is in some way also "divided" from God as a creation of God or thought of God.
In nonduality and oneness concepts there is no accounting for God thinking anything at all, yet alone creating a son. It completely glosses over the fact that God is LOVE, and love radiates and extends and creates. When people tell you what the definition of oneness is they become very clinical and ego-specific in describing God as a kind of "single blob". There is no love in that concept, nor does it appreciate the NATURE of Oneness, which is to share, extend everywhere, create, increase, and to experience JOY. Do you equate oneness with joy, or power, or love, or creativity, or miracles? As a logical device, no. But God is joyful and creative and all powerful and miraculous.
Now, it is possible for God to create AT LEAST One Son, and the Course references the "one son of God" in various places. And due to misunderstandings, many people have come to believe God only has one Son. So now there are two camps - a set of people believing that God is one therefore has no son or "I am God", and a camp of people accepting there is One Son (somehow) but not more. It relates to how much of the nature of God is grasped.
OK. So holograms. Did you know God thinks holographically? Do you know what a hologram is or why this is totally different to how the ego thinks? If you are thinking about God's creation or oneness without thinking about holograms, then you WILL come to false conclusions, such as that there are no divisions in heaven or God has only one Son or no son, because non-holographic logic CAN ONLY arrive at these conclusions. Ego logic is FAULTY and limited.
The essential idea of a hologram is that the whole is able to express in many "parts" and yet each part contains ALL of the whole. This makes NO SENSE to the ego, because it thinks in terms of separated space, where it is impossible for all of God to be in one part AND all of God to be in another part simultaneously. The ego will wager, "there is not enough God for God to be elsewhere, if God is fully here". And that's why the ego is BLIND to the nature of heaven. It does not account for SHARING.
Here's what the Course says about the holographic nature of God and the Sonship - note how ILLOGICAL and CONTRADICTORY these all sound, at first:
"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part is perfectly natural, for it is the way God thinks, and what is natural to Him is natural to you."
"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."
"It should be noted that God has begotten only one Son. If you believe that all of the Souls that God created are His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul must be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship. You do not find the concept that the whole is greater than its parts difficult to understand. You should therefore not have too great difficulty with this. The Sonship in its Oneness does transcend the sum of its parts."
"Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite."
"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."
So Jesus is saying two things, which seem to clash. 1) God created One Son. 2) God created many sons. The conclusion here, to THE EGO, is either, a) God only created one Son, or b) The "many" or "multitude" nature of the sonship tells us that it is OF THE EGO and is therefore not real. Are either of these conclusions true? NO! They are both mistakes, and reveal the limitations of the ego's thought system when it tires to understand the EGO DEFYING nature of God.
In a hologram, the whole is present in EVERY part. Now, if you think in terms you are familiar with in this world, like physical objects and space, you think ok, if I take 1 gallon of water and I pour it into a 1 gallon container, there is no water left to fill another container. Yes? This is ego thinking. And ego thinking gave rise to this ENTIRE universe, including all physical forms, and all laws of physics, to paint a picture that attempts to PROVE that God's NATURE is NOT the way things are. And we have used physical form as a way to understand the nature of existence. This is a major error. We are BLINDED by sight of form, because forms express the EGO IDEA of separation, limitation, "measuring" how much of something there is in a finite way, and then concluding that there is lack and limitation.
When ALL of God is poured into one creation, how much God is there left to pour into another? ALL OF HIM! He does not run out. He INCREASES BY SHARING. The ego cannot believe this. The multiplying of fish and bread to feed 5000 people is a good example of this principle. Giving ALL to something does not diminish it AT ALL, it merely increases by being given away.
God puts ALL of the whole of his nature into His creation, in EACH thought. And what He creates is FULL, complete, and whole, AND shares ALL of itself with God, and includes all of God, and all of any other creation God creates. So then God has another thought, creates another WHOLE, and then another WHOLE, and another. You should get the idea then, spatially, even in ego terms, that adding more wholes INCREASES the sum total - and this is How the Kingdom expands.
To the ego, it is impossible that God be fully in one location and yet fully in another. This is completely impossible in terms of a physical object. However, bi-location is a miracle because it demonstrates that we are not bound by space or by instances or amounts. The Course says that God has many thoughts, INFINITE IN NUMBER. That amounts to an INFINITE number of Sons of God. And each Son of God is WHOLE and complete and perfect in itself, has free will just like God, extends and creates just like God (you have your own creations in Heaven), and radiates love just like God. This means each son is not just some "partial person" or limited or unlike the rest, it means EVEY son is FULL, whole, complete, absolutely unlimited, and shares EVERYTHING with God in perfection. And so do all the rest.
That God does not diminish when sharing himself fully to create a WHOLE SON, means automatically that God can create MANY sons without any diminishing of Himself at all. And all of God is in every Son. AND every Son is within every Son. And the ENTIRE SONSHIP is within every Son. This is entirely NATURAL AND NORMAL in Heaven. Heaven therefore contains INFINITE "naturally divided" (causally divided) INDIVIDUAL WHOLES - which are souls or Sons of God - each one holy and perfect.
Ok.
So now we need to talk about why some people are confused in constantly saying that God has One Son or there is "only oneness" or the Sonship is an part of separation etc. It's because people are getting PART of the picture and not the whole picture, because EGO LOGIC is telling them to EXCLUDE some parts of the holographic nature of God. They can "see" that God's oneness makes sense, but this seems to imply there is no son or at least not more than one. They can't see HOW God can have created many sons OR how a "division" is natural. And so they just can't get their heads around the nature of God or how it's possible for there to be a sonship at all.
And if you will go looking, ACIM contains specific quotes which SEEM to support the ego's interpretations by focusing on only one PART of the holographic picture, using that as justification for why "the course said this". For example, "God has but one Son", or countless references to "God's Son". Well, this leads God people to conclude that the Course is saying God doesn't have more sons. It's a mistake. With no grasp of God's NATURE - which is holographic, it makes sense people will be in error. And then they will say well, since God has only one Son, the sonship is a lie, or I do not exist, or I am God, or I do not have a self, or there is no-one here, or whatever else.
These are NON-DUALITY concepts which FAIL to appreciate God's nature. And you can see how, if it is true that God has many sons, these kind of "beliefs" are HARMFUL. They basically DESTROY the sonship, DENY the Self, and render God impotent.
When I finally understood how God thinks holographically and realized that non-duality is bullshit and a limited EGO concept of God, I felt great RELIEF about the simple recognition that "GOD CREATED ME". Me, as an INDIVIDUAL. Not me as an EGO, that's different, but that I have a HOLY SELF, which is sharing with other holy selves, and all of us are PERMANENT and INTENDED by God to have free will. When I saw this, I cried tears of joy, and also release of sadness, which had built up from the non-duality teachers, who have MISLED countless students and spread LIES ABOUT HEAVEN, resulting in the belief that "I do not exist", which can only lead to despair and depression because it DENIES GOD'S CREATION.
A course in miracles is NOT non-duality at all. The principle of Oneness is NOT that there is "only one and nothing else". Oneness truly means, sharing, creation, unlimited extension, INFINITE wholes, and a heaven filled with SOULS that live forever in a state of perfection and wholeness, sharing everything they are with ALL OTHERS including God. Why do you think Jesus refers to you as a brother? It's not just a temporary thing. You will ALWAYS be equal to and a brother of Jesus, AND at the same time, one with Him, and literally sharing everything WITH Him, AND still having your own soul, and still having your own free will which happens to be the same in focus as God's.
So now we have a very different picture of Heaven, and it has NOTHING to do with Earth or this universe. "Heaven and Earth are opposite in EVERY way." Heaven is a PLACE in the sense that it EXISTS as God's creation and you can experience it and BE there in it/with it. There are many references in the course where Jesus says "in Heaven" and also referring to Heaven as a "world" and as something God created. And given that THIS world - earth, physical universe, DOES NOT EXIST BECAUSE THERE IS NO WORLD - where IS there to BE or live or exist other than Heaven? In that sense, it IS a place, far more a REAL place than planet earth. Earth is not a place at all.
Heaven is within the mind of God. "The kingdom of God is you" is another reference to you being The Son of God and one of may sons of God. You are part of and all of heaven. Something you can be INSIDE OF and BE, and where there are infinite souls and angels, plus the Holy Spirit, plus an entire sonship of equal souls, all equal with Jesus, all individually a Son of God, AND also every one of those souls is THE Son of God as well. And each soul continues to CREATE MORE. There is nothing unnatural about this at all. All PARTS of heaven are of ONE ORDER.
Per Jesus: "The world, in the original connotation of the term, included both the proper creation of man by God and the proper creation by man in his right mind. The latter required the endowment of man by God with free will because all loving creation is freely given. Nothing in these statements implies any sort of level involvement or in fact anything except one continuous line of creation in which all aspects are of the same order." (Here "man" is the same thing as soul or son of God, not humans.)
One final word then. Each Son of God, being a hologram of God, is whole and complete in and of itself, lacking nothing. And AT THE SAME TIME, is so OPEN and so SHARING, that it is wired into the ENTIRE CREATION of God. Picture it as your mind is so expanded that you are "one with" ie sharing in, the entire sonship. God therefore experiences ALL of his many thoughts, as ONE, while simultaneously allowing them to be many.
This is why there are many references to God having only one son. When it's speaking of this, it refers to how God experiences all Sons as though they are all the same and one, experienced simultaneously and so sharing that they do not seem "separate". Yet they are still divided. And then when the course speaks 250+ times about the many sons of God, this is not contradictory because God DOES have many sons AND one son.
God thinks holographically. All of God is in every son and all of every son is in every son. The whole sonship is in every son and every son in the sonship. You are the ONE SON of God, AND you are one of many. This is heavenly logic, not ego logic. When every individual PART of the sonship has returned to its true nature, all of the sonship as a whole communicates with God again.
The only other point to make I think is the difference between division and ego separation. In heaven you are divided from others and from God. But only in the sense that you are a loving family who shares everything together. Loving families are still individuals yet joined. The individuality does not go away. When walls are erected between family members, ie artificial separations are introduced, there is denial of the sharing, denial of the oneness, and denial of wholeness. This UNNATURAL DIVISION is the ego. This is what the course refers to as separation.
You have to get your head around the idea that you can be individual AND joined and that this is normal, natural and real. It is not your individual soul nature that makes you an ego. It is not that you are PART of a huge family of souls (sonship) that makes you an ego. What makes you an ego is that you withdraw your connection from God, withdraw your connection from the sonship, and become ISOLATED behind artificial imaginary walls of denial. It's got nothing to do with whether you are an individual or not.
Perhaps the most misunderstood thing about ACIM is the belief that ego means separate self, and therefore means individuality, and therefore having an individuality is ego. THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!!!! Individuality is not the problem. Cutting your individuality off from sharing with the whole is the problem. Trying to be a "part" of the hologram that does NOT contain the whole. Trying to not be an effect of God. Trying to cause God and change Him and affect Him. Cutting yourself off from the sonship. Believing you are not equal to all brothers. Being special. THAT is the problem and that is what the ego is made of, not your individuality.
Individuality does not mean you are separate from God, it means you are one of God's Son's. YOU DO EXIST. Just not as an illusion of an isolated self who has no connection to others. What is death but the end of all connection and the bringing about of total separation from Life? Joining with Life does not make you disappear! It's not about "you're not really out there". It's more like, "you are MORE than you APPEAR to be." You are God's Son and one of many sons. You are one with God and with all others and you SHARE with them all, one in sharing, not in number.
ACIM is not non-duality. And ACIM is not about the ego's idea of what oneness means. ACIM is not teaching that God only has a single son "separate from" the many sons. Heaven is a cascade of creation and miracles and light and souls and beauty and sharing and union and freedom. This is why YOU are responsible for everything YOU CHOOSE. Choose again.
After some recent insights, I have a theory... that God's Kingdom actually has locality and non-locality, meaning there is a kind of timeless time, and spaceless space. Whereas 'spacetime' is the idea of locality only.
God's whole system runs on a BOTH/AND kind of logic. Something true of me is true of you - golden rule, etc.
God is both personal and impersonal. He's personal because he gives 100% full attention to each individual being, yet he is impersonal because he treats all beings the same.
Similarly there has to be locality in order to have a creation distinct from God - "separate beings", souls that God created. It requires some sense of multitudes and some way to say "I'm here, you're there" sort of thing. But at the same time, non-local as in - we're both overlapping at one everywhere.
I think what happened in the separation is we denied the non-locality shared qualities of reality and tried to emphasise just the local ones, which produced space and time. Space is this idea of being isolated to one location, similarly with time being isolated to one moment.
If true, this suggests that in heaven there is a kind of "space" but it's not the same as the space of spacetime... its simultaneously locations but also the presence of everything everywhere all at once. That God is in everything still. Both local and non-local.
This would go on to allow there to be multiple creations, and for example the course makes reference to things like "you too have a kingdom your soul has created" and "your mind has the power to create worlds" etc. Why have the power to create worlds, if we haven't created worlds somewhere? And he says we basically have created kingdoms somewhere.
It requires a kind of 'space' but it's like... the things in the space are so shared and so one that everything is also everywhere. And it could imply that there is an enormous amount of universes of 'stuff' up there in reality. Not PHYSICAL forms, but forms of some kind that are also formless.
Another important property of reality is that everything is always open and fully accessible to everyone. And nothing real can be threatened. This means there's no hard surfaces, no walls, no impacts, no possibility of destruction or attack, nothing firm or solid, no things that can reject or repel or resist.
There could be for example some kind of 'thought creation' or 'idea' of a thing, perhaps a place, a gathering, a created world/environment or structure perhaps .... but its not made of of things which "keep people out" or "keep people in". You can't attack it because it's made of spirit. You go to touch it and you become one with it, overlap it, pass through it. No-one is denied any access ever.
So I think its possible on this basis that heaven could have "stuff in it", made of spirit/light, but the stuff doesn't have the repelling hard surfaces of spacetime matter, and because everyone IS everything nothing can sort of "block you" or "attack you" or anything like we see with physical objects. There could be spirit forms, ideas, thought-creations ("miracles are thought creations"), which we can merge with, pass through, overlap with, share, be one with.
Our experience there would be quite different than in the physical realm. In physicality, it's all made of walls, blocks, resistance, attack, denial, imprisonment, impacts, rebounds, forces keeping things separate, damage, decay, etc.... all these physics things all require a 'barrier' of some kind that says "keep out". Those barriers don't exist in heaven - you can pass right through it and be one with it. Total freedom to come and go anywhere and everywhere.
This is also why spacetime and the physical are illusions because they're basically formed from the idea of saying "no" to something, not allowing freedom, not allowing access, pushing away, forcing, etc.... a world of walls and blocks and solid lies and prison cells. This is how spacetime is fundamentally different from heaven. And also is why the physical world is a total illusion, formed from ideas of separations between everything rather than shared unity. And without separateness there can be no solid matter.
Also an interesting part of this is the non-locality of time. In 'time' we have localised time but not non-local time. So it's all sort of like one moment of 'now' but the things in it come and go (die), there is no sense of "always and forever". In heaven there could be local time - which is actually necessary in order to allow for example "the kingdom to increase", and for you to "add to the kingdom". And for God to create the holy spirit in response to the separation, and being in our right minds before the separation etc, and there being an "after the atonement".
All that creation requires is essentially a kind of causal chain which requires a kind of linear progression - a sort of time. But at the same time, heaven has total non-locality so it has non-local time everywhere as well, meaning, the now moment ie every moment in which we "live and move" through local/non-local space, also features a sense of this being always and forever, that all times exist at once as one thing, transcending 'local time' as we know it.
Cus there's some things about heaven's reality, creation, God's nature, which really need to have the presence of some kind of progression or time or sequence, as well as some kind of order or sort of places to create kingdoms and such. It has to have a 'kind of spacetime', it's just that it's not purely spacetime - it's spacetime + non-localised space and non-localised time. It's BOTH, eternal and time, unlimited and local.
Space is the local+non-local space of heaven stripped of its non-local shared nature. Time is the local+non-local time of heaven stripped of its non-local eternal nature. Separate spaces, separate times, instead of 'oneness spaces' and 'all times'. This idea at least seems to, for me, clean up some loose ends and open some doors to some possibilities that were overlooked.
Talking out loud to flesh this out... might be right, might not. But it's interesting.
"When you have looked on what seemed terrifying, and SEEN it change to sights of loveliness and peace; when you have looked on scenes of violence and death, and WATCHED them change to quiet views of gardens under open skies, with clear life-giving water running happily beside them in dancing brooks that never waste away; who need PERSUADE you to accept the gift of vision?" UrT20I12
"You are wholly lovely. A perfect shaft of pure light." UrT1B30W
"The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky." UrT30D8
"When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was." UrW167L9 "If you created GOD and He created you, the KINGDOM could not increase through its OWN creative thought. Creation would therefore be limited, and you would NOT be co-creators WITH God. As God's creative Thought proceeds FROM Him TO you, so must YOUR creative thoughts proceed FROM you to YOUR creations. In this way only can ALL creative power EXTEND OUTWARD. God's accomplishments are NOT yours. But yours are LIKE His. HE created the Sonship, and YOU increase it. You HAVE the power to ADD to the Kingdom, but NOT to add to the Creator OF the Kingdom." UrT7A2
"it was forever created TO increase. If you perceive it as NOT increasing, you do not know what it IS." URT7B5
"And His Sons, who create LIKE Him, follow it gladly, knowing that the INCREASE of the Kingdom depends on it, just as THEIR creation did." UrT7C7
"We have spoken often of the INCREASE of the Kingdom by YOUR creations, which can only BE created as YOU were." UrT7F12
"You, too, have a Kingdom which your Soul has created. It has not ceased to create because your ego has set you on the road of perception." URT4D3
"A co-creator with the Father must have a Son. Yet must this Son have been created like Himself. A perfect Being, all-encompassing and all-encompassed, nothing to add and nothing taken FROM; not born of size nor weight nor time, nor held to limits or uncertainties of ANY kind." UrT24H7
"Nothing in either of these statements implies any sort of level involvement, or, in fact, anything except one continuous line of creation, in which all aspects are of the same order." UrT9A2
"What if you looked within and saw there IS no sin?"
Fact: God is permanent, nothing real can be changed.
Fact: You cannot change God's will.
Fact: You cannot produce effects in God against His will.
Fact: You cannot sin against His will or cause Him in any way.
Fact: You have not caused God, you cannot cause God, and you never will cause God.
Fact: You have not sinned in reality, against reality, to reality, or in any real way.
Fact: It is IMPOSSIBLE to sin. It is IMPOSSIBLE to affect God. You have NOT done so. Nothing real has happened.
So, the question we now have is... what is this state that we're in, where it seems like something went wrong and we're suffering?
There was this tiny mad idea which basically was the idea that something impossible is possible. Even though you knew it was IMPOSSIBLE to affect God, you tried to BELIEVE it was actually possible. You wanted to believe you COULD sin, and that you HAD done so, and that it had produced ACTUAL real effects in reality against God. However, the impossible remains impossible so you HAVE NOT DONE IT AT ALL. Believing that you have, is an obvious ERROR.
So all that this separated state entails is BELIEVING IN something which isn't true. Believing and investing "reality" into and trying to MAKE REAL, something which is not real and never will be. You are trying to convince yourself that you can, and have, sinned. All your states of suffering, sin, guilt, fear, punishment, sickness, death, are all attempts to prove that you CAN DO what you cannot do. That you CAN kill God and His son. Or that you have. You cannot. And you have not. And you never will.
So you are immortal and you're trying to prove that you can be mortal, but you can't. Nothing you do can change the facts. You cannot actually sin. You cannot change God or His Creation. It is literally impossible. So all this other stuff that you BELIEVE, all the ways that you think you should be suffering, all the fear that comes from the guilt, all the guilt that comes from believing you DID sin, it is in fact TOTALLY UNFOUNDED AND UNNECESSARY.
It's kind of like, a long time ago you THOUGHT that you HAD committed some terrible crime, or that you tried to attack God, and in the scuffle you IMAGINED that you had in fact lashed out at Him and hurt Him. And it seemed to happen so quickly you took one glance and thought you SAW evidence or proof that you had actually inflicted harm. And then you suddenly recoiled and went into the sin belief and then into guilt and then into fear and suffering. You went off by yourself hanging your head low and BELIEVING that you had done something REALLY BAD back there. That you committed a terrible crime and all of reality was affected.
But here's the good news. In your moment of attempted attack you were ONLY MISTAKEN in believing that you DID actually do something. You made an ERROR in believing that a sin was committed. The good news is, God was in fact NOT AFFECTED, you DID NOT change Him, and there HAS NOT been any harm done. So now here you are, suffering and hating yourself and hurting yourself ONLY because you think that you deserve it because you THINK that you actually DID commit a sin. But in truth... this is the good bit... YOU DID NOT SUCCEED.
So if you could turn back time and go look at that moment where you thought you attacked God, you'll be surprised to find out, that YOU DIDN'T. And God has been happy and healthy all this time. And He's not even mad at you. He isn't holding any grievance and He just wants to love you. He sees in fact that you became horrified by your own belief in your own attack, which DIDN'T DO ANYTHING, but you didn't realize that it didn't do anything. You THOUGHT it was real. You put reality into it and believed in it. You convinced yourself you were a sinner, when in fact you've been innocent all along.
So this state we find ourselves in, in this world, suffering and unhappy, is ENTIRELY a case of mistaken identity, mistaken criminality, and being TOTALLY IN ERROR about what we think happened. NOTHING HAPPENED. You DID NOT SIN. NOTHING HAS CHANGED. REALITY IS NOT AFFECTED. GOD IS HAPPY WITH YOU. And yet here you are believing, in a dream, that you did in fact commit a sin.
So you're not really dealing here with real sin, at all. Reality, is kind of "over there", unharmed, unchanged, completely the same as it always was. Even your own holy self is there, innocent as ever. And then "over here", where you're hanging out, you're immersed in this cloud of confusion and self deception, believing that you did a crime YOU DID NOT COMMIT, and becoming suicidal and beating yourself up for it, when in fact you DIDN'T EVEN DO IT! You're living in a fantasy world of believing you DID, and trying to PROVE that you COULD, but you can't and NEVER WILL prove it. "You've made a bargain you cannot keep."
So you're just a bit confused. You're in error. You're mistaken, to believe that you can or have sinned. It's JUST A MISTAKE. You are mistaken ABOUT sinning. That's why it is TOTALLY FORGIVEN and forgivable, because you HAVE NOT DONE ANYTHING REAL. You've frightened yourself and reacted and gone into self loathing purely on the basis of a misunderstanding. And so now our work with A Course in Miracles is all to do with coming to realize that you DIDN'T DO what you think you did. This is the basis of forgiveness, learning to recognize THERE IS NO SIN. Sin is NOT REAL. There is no such thing as real sin because it's impossible. And this whole dream has had NOTHING to do with real sin, and everything to do with IMAGINED SIN.
We're just cleaning up the mess and confusion which came from BELIEVING an illusion is real, BELIEVING that the impossible is possible, BELIEVING that you've done something that you could not POSSIBLY do. The innocent cannot sin. You cannot leave your innocence, nor can you stop being innocent because it's God's will that you be innocent forever. You CANNOT DESTROY GOD'S CREATION. And you have done NOTHING to change it. All you worry and guilt and self-attack and punishments and sinfulness and fear is all FOR NOTHING, because it's all founded on a LIE. A totally false premise. You were MISTAKEN to BELIEVE that you can or did sin. YOU DIDN'T.
This whole "problem" is not to do with healing a sin, it's entirely to do with waking from BELIEVING that you did. From thinking it happened. From thinking it was possible at all. This is why the whole thing is merely an ERROR, as seen by the Holy Spirit. He knows you cannot sin and never have. He knows that this error, this entire illusion of trying to make sin real, is completely a lie. Totally false. You never will separate from God. You never will attack Him. You never will kill His Son - yourself. You never will lose your innocence. You are just dreaming of being a sinner, while all along you are not one.
"But we can dream we have forgiven him in whom all sin remains impossible, and it is this we choose to dream today."
"True perception is the means by which the world is saved from sin, for sin does not exist. And it is ... Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not."
"Sin is insanity. It is the means by which the mind is driven mad, and seeks to let illusions take the place of truth. And being mad, it sees illusions where truth was"
"Today s idea but states the simple truth that makes the thought of sin impossible."
"For it is impossible to think of sin as true and not believe forgiveness is a lie."
"What faith you give to sin, you TAKE AWAY from holiness."
"It is not inherent in a mind, which cannot sin. As sin was an idea you taught yourself, forgiveness must be learned by you as well, but from a Teacher other than yourself".
"Do I DESIRE a world in which I have no enemies, and cannot sin?"
"The Self Which God created cannot sin, and therefore cannot suffer."
"And what is wholly sinless cannot sin. Such is the simple truth."
"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 (planet Earth, galaxies etc), only the conflict of illusion 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."
A seed is sown. It sprouts. The plant grows tall. A bud appears. The bud opens and the flower blooms. The flower pollinates. The flower dies. The leaves wilt. The plant is dead. It crumbles, and all it becomes is the ground in which other seeds are sown.
THIS, is the fundamental nature of spacetime. Because you'll notice that the plant has to be in a constant state of CHANGE in order to be in ANY state. It cannot remain constantly the same. It has to always be transforming, growing, sprouting, adjusting, dying.
We like to say that new things are born, and old things die. This is a lie. There are not two states here, there is only one state. It is all death. All things here are changing, always, and they can never stop changing. Change is death, because only permanence is life. So even birth is death as well.
This is what stuff in this universe does, fundamentally, because everything here is based on the idea that "nothing ever stays the same." Which is the opposite of "everything lives forever."
We made it to be this way. It's a world based on the laws of death. Death is built into it. Not just the end result of death but even the sprouting and the flowering is a sign of death. It's death because it's not an eternal state. Change means the opposite of immortality, and therefore the opposite of life.
"Without the idea of death there is no world."
"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death."
Even if things appear to be born, to grow, to transform, to seem to live and then to die, all of it is death. All of it is what happens when nothing ever lasts and all things are constantly coming and going.
Nothing here is ever still. The idea of something being constantly the same is totally alien. Nothing here ever perpetuates forever. Nothing here can hold onto any sense of stable identity for any amount of time. Nothing is ever quite here and now, it's always transitioning from the past to the future. And therefore nothing here has an identity, because nothing is stable or ongoing or inherently permanent.
There is no self in a world of shifts and changes. There is no reality in such a world either, because reality cannot be shifting and unstable and constantly in flux. That which is real must always be the same, reliable, trustable, constant and changeless. It's like a rock that you can rely on. But nothing in this world provides this stability, because it's an unreal world.
Human bodies in any stage of development, ranging from fetus to birth to children to teens to adults to those older of age, it doesn't matter. Every stage is just one more version of a state of death in a dream of death under laws of death. Death is change. Life is eternal changelessness. Even as a newborn arrives, the body is already not really there and not really anything.
If something can change from one thing into another, it cannot really be what it seems to be. If it were a seed, and now its a plant, and then its a flower, and then it is garbage, it is not any of these things. There is no permanent nature to it. It has no continual identity that is unwavering and consistent. And so every state it transitions through is an illusion of appearances.
This ultimately is why there is no world. Everything that shifts and changes is unreal and does not really have any real here-and-now existence. And the body is never really in a state of complete here-and-now. It seems to be here now, but it is transitioning from what it was to what it will be. It has not stopped to be here and now, it will not stay the same for even a nanosecond.
"The body does not really exist."
"At no SINGLE instant does the body exist at all."
"None of this existed before, nor does it actually exist now."
Fully in the holy instant, in the total present, there is no body and there is no world. The world and the body are a little bit removed from here and now. In fact, the world is the past. And the body is either a memory or an anticipation. There is a slight delay between here and where the body and world are. Even in terms of the body's functioning, there is a delay in the perceiving of the world's signals.
A flower is not a flower, because it was a stalk, and was a seed, and will be a bush, and will be dirt. It is not fully anything, and so it is fully nothing.
Space, in general, is really the idea that nothing fully exists anywhere. It was made to oppose God. God exists fully everywhere. Space, and its contents, which includes flowers and bodies and the planet, depicts the idea that God is not fully anywhere, nothing exists everywhere, and therefore God is dead and has been replaced by non-existence. This is why it is an attack on God, an opposition to the nature of the Kingdom.
Time is no better. Time suggests that everything must always be different and nothing can ever be permanent. This too is an attack on eternity. It constantly changes what is into what it was not, and back again, and on it goes, never stopping to be anything truly. And so time is the idea that you never fully exist, and have no identity, and there is nothing true about you.
Space-time is just a belief. It's an ego belief in separation. When the belief is gone, space time is gone. And without space time you cannot have flowers and bodies and planets. There is nothing to keep things separate. Nothing to hold the atoms apart. Nothing to keep time ticking. They just vanish and all their dream contents go with them. Because there is not really a world here. It's an illusion. A world of death does not exist because death is an illusion. And the world is already dead.
"Their death is sure and this alone is certain in their world. It is the ego's world because of this."
"But the world has none to offer. All its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death."
"In this world, there appears to be a state that is life's opposite. You call it death."
"Yet each must fail and crumble and decay, because a form of death cannot be life, and what is sacrificed cannot be whole."
"Leave the world of death behind, and return quietly to Heaven. There is nothing of value here, and everything of value there."
"It is the world of birth and death, founded on the belief in scarcity, loss, separation and death"
"For this world is the opposite of Heaven, being made to be its opposite, and everything here takes a direction exactly opposite of what is true."
"All the world of pain is not His Will"
"The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear (=death). And what is fear except love's absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God (life) could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him."
"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end?"
"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world"
"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."
"Freedom and peace and joy stand there, beside the bier on which they sleep, and call them to come forth and waken from their dream of death."
"He has overcome death because he has accepted life."
"First, the assumption is implicit that what God has Created can be changed by the mind of Man."
So even before having any sense of what you could change God's creation INTO, you started out with the idea that you COULD change God's creation at all. That includes the belief you can change God himself, change yourself, or change anything else real. This must include the 'mad idea' that things which literally are permanent and CANNOT be changed, can be changed. So this represent the first slip into believing something false, believing the impossible is possible, and thus denying reality.
"Second, the concept that what is perfect can be rendered imperfect (or wanting) is intruded."
So now having decided that you can change things that are permanently unchangeable, you start to explore what it can be changed INTO, and thus get this idea that the perfect can be made to be imperfect. That there can be something lacking, needs arising, problems developing, a sense of the absence of God growing.
"Third, the belief that man can distort the Creations of God (including himself) has arisen, and is tolerated."
This now includes the idea that even your own self, which God created to be permanent, is changeable, can be made to be imperfect, taken away from its perfection, converted into something else. And that YOU can be the one to do this, therefore CAUSING your own self to be whatever you decide to change it into.
"Fourth, that since man can create himself, the direction of his own creation is up to him."
So now you set about the belief that because you can change your own self, can make yourself imperfect, and can literally 'redefine' who and what you are "at will", you can determine the "direction of your own creation", ie whether or not you are created at all (life vs death), and that if you do continue to exist, what 'form' you take or what is true of your nature or how you function. You think you now have the power to "create yourself" or re-create yourself, in whatever way you please, which has to automatically deny the Father's role as your Creator.
"These related distortions represent a picture of what actually occurred in the Separation. None of this existed before, nor does it actually exist now."
You become "ego", by having taken on this position of believing you created yourself, God is not your father, God is absent, you have control over yourself, you can define yourself to be whatever you want to be, you are "constantly changing", you can destroy yourself, you have an ability to determine what you are, and that you have the power to redefine what is true and what is real. This is essentially what egotism is. It's this 'logical conclusion' we've come to on the basis of believing the permanent can be changed, and now we find ourselves in a state of constantly denying what's permanently real and trying to constantly change it into something that it's not.
Denial itself is a defense, but it can be used positively or negatively. In its negative use it is used to deny God, reality, truth. In its positive use, it is used to deny the denial of truth, to deny ego, to deny illusions and unreality.
The entire separation from God is simple a misuse of denial. Blocks to awareness are denials of what is true in God. The ego is nothing but denial of reality. All sickness and death are denials. The world is the denial of heaven. Bodies are the denial of the soul. The opposite of denial is acceptance - ie the acceptance of the truth and reality of God - the atonement.
Here are some interesting quotes about how we use denial in the wrong way, in support of ego and in denying God, reality, and truth....
"Denial of Life perceives its opposite, as ALL forms of denial replace what IS, with what is NOT. No-one can really DO this, but that you can THINK you can, and BELIEVE YOU HAVE, is beyond dispute."
"It is the DENIAL of the spark that brings depression, and whenever you see your brothers WITHOUT it, you ARE denying God."
"Allegiance to the denial of God is the ego's religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival."
"Arrogance is the denial of love, because love shares and arrogance withholds."
"What makes this world seem real except your own denial of the truth which lies beyond?"
"For the separation is only the DENIAL of union, and, correctly interpreted, attests to your eternal knowledge that union is true."
"Miracles are merely the translation of denial into truth. If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves. Therefore, they are asking for the love that would heal them, but which they are DENYING TO THEMSELVES. If they knew the truth about themselves, they could not be sick. The task of the miracle-worker thus becomes to DENY THE DENIAL OF TRUTH."
"Projection arises out of FALSE DENIAL."
"But in every hurtful thought you hold, wherever you perceive it, lies the denial of God's Fatherhood and your Sonship."
"Your denial made no change in what you are. But you have split your mind into what knows and does not know the truth."
"Accepting His Son as guilty is denial of the Father so complete, that knowledge is swept away from recognition, in the very mind where God Himself has placed it."
"YOUR denial of reality precludes ACCEPTANCE of God's gift, BECAUSE YOU HAVE ACCEPTED SOMETHING ELSE IN ITS PLACE."
"Guilt hides Christ from your sight, for it is the denial of the blamelessness of God's Son."
"Denial of light leads to failure to perceive it. Failure to perceive light is to perceive darkness."
"That is why the ego IS the denial of free will."
"Denial is NOT mere negation. It is a positive miscreation. While the miscreation is NECESSARILY believed in by its own creator, it does not exist at all at the level of true Creation."
"The mind can make the belief in Separation VERY real and VERY fearful. And this belief IS the devil. It is powerful, active, destructive, and clearly in opposition to God, because it literally denies His Fatherhood. Never underestimate the power of this denial. Look at your lives and see what the devil has made."
"Yet this is what denial DOES, for BY it you ACCEPT insanity, believing you can make a private world, AND RULE YOUR OWN PERCEPTION. But FOR this, light MUST be excluded."
"Being made out of the denial of the Father, the ego has no allegiance to its own Maker."
"In the darkness you have obscured the glory God gave you, and the power that He bestowed upon His guiltless Son. All that, lies hidden in every darkened place shrouded in guilt, and in the dark denial of innocence."
"For eternity is NOT regained by still one more denial of the Christ in him."
"And therefore those who look on sin ARE seeing the DENIAL of the real world."
"This is not difficult to realize in some forms which these self-deceptions take, for the denial of reality is very obvious."
"Can the ego teach truly, when it overlooks truth? Can it perceive what it has DENIED? Its witnesses DO attest to its DENIAL, but hardly to WHAT it has denied. The ego looks straight at the Father and does not see Him, for it has denied His Son."
"This is a very primitive solution, and has led to a denial of the spiritual eye, which always depends on light."
"DENIAL of the error results in projection."
We talk a lot about forgiveness and undoing grievances and not projecting guilt etc, but a HUGE elephant in the room is how everyone believes they are their body!
We are quite literally NOT a physical body. We are spirit beings, made of God-stuff. The body is NOT a part of our self.
"The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defense, need merely be perceived as quite apart from you, and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over."
"The body is OUTSIDE you, and SEEMS to surround you, shutting you off from others, and keeping you APART from them, and them from you."
But take a look at the world, look at how everyone is always focused on bodies, regards bodies as people, refers to bodies by name, and how we all seem to be very IDENTIFIED WITH the body.
Even from birth and through childhood, we're told that we are a boy or a girl, or a human being, and that our body is our self. It's drummed into us by a society that HEAVILY believes that we are bodies.
This isn't made any easier by the fact that the body ITSELF makes the world seem very real, and thus makes ITSELF seem very real. It reports on itself using its OWN senses, and reports that the body it senses as existing really exist. Pain and sensations confirm it.
Everyone's looking in mirrors at "how they look". Everyone's talking about what other "people" look like. Everyone's talking about what their body did today. Everyone's taking their body appearance personally, either to their benefit or detriment.
We have a BIG PROBLEM of believing that we are flesh and bones objects walking around on a fake planet.
We are not even 1% body. We are 0% body. Purely spirit. Purely life. Purely made of God-stuff. And yet the world is at like a 99% belief that bodies are true, bodies are life, bodies are our reality.
It is this identification WITH and AS the body that produces EGO, and is a problem of identification. That we literally start experiencing the body as if it is US, and anything it experiences is happening to our SELF. This is mental illness and it is widespread and extremely common.
In fact it is so common that it's taken to be absolutely normal, absolutely natural, the stuff families are made of, the stuff countries are made of. Human since birth, born to be flesh and bones, born to have a brain and a heart, born to bleed and die.
"I am not a body, I am free, for I am still as God created me."
"Temptation has ONE lesson it would teach, in ALL its forms, WHEREVER it occurs. It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what must die, unable to escape its frailty, and bound by what it orders him to feel. It sets the limits on what he can do; its power is the only strength he has; his grasp cannot exceed its tiny reach. Would you BE this, if Christ appeared to you in all His glory, asking you but this, "Choose once again if you would take your place among the Saviors of the world, or would remain in hell, and hold your brothers there." For He HAS come, and He IS asking this."
"In Heaven God's Son is NOT imprisoned in a body, nor is sacrificed in solitude to sin."
"To be without a body is to be in our natural state. To recognize the light of truth in us is to recognize ourselves as we are. To see our Self as separate from the body is to end the attack on God's plan for salvation, and to accept it instead. And wherever it is accepted it is accomplished already."
"The ultimate purpose of the body is to render itself unnecessary."
"The "self" that needs protection is not real. The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defense, need merely be perceived as quite apart from you, and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over. Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done?"
"All these things are your replacements for the Love of God. All these things are cherished to ensure a body identification. They are songs of praise to the ego. Do not put your faith in the worthless. It will not sustain you."
"If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick." "The IDEA of separation PRODUCED the body, and remains connected TO it, MAKING it sick because of its identification WITH it."
"The body is the ego's home by its own election. It is the only identification with which it feels safe, because the body's vulnerability is its own best argument that you CANNOT be of God."
Why is no-one talking about the POWER OF GOD?!
There are some people who have been known as miracle workers. They typically work the same way. They are in close communication with God and the Holy Spirit. They are humble and have humility before God. They recognize that God has all power, and nothing else has power not even themselves. They depend on God for everything and trust the Holy Spirit with strong faith.
They are willing to do God's will, to go where they are sent, and receive a lot of specific guidance. They follow instructions, and do simple things like holding someone's hand, but then the Holy Spirit moves with great power.
There is always POWER involved, the power of God, which by the way is unlimited and immensely strong and capable. I've felt this power ONE time so far and it is totally off the charts absolute and intense. These people recognize that they barely do anything but be open channels for His healing power, and he moves through them and sickness and death are reversed.
This is also what Jesus is teaching us in A Course in Miracles. Not watered down miracles that are just shifts in perception. Not nice safe-sounding joining in love. But an actual application of a real POWER. This power can literally do anything, it is totally thousands of times beyond any notion of power you have ever experienced in this world.
A power which is so strong it is actually capable of building body parts, changing events, altering matter, reversing sickness and death, moving mountains etc. Not some act of forgiveness or some being nice to people. A real power, a very very strong power. A power which we are being trained to allow to operate through us.
You who have tried to keep power for yourselves, have lost it. You still HAVE the power, but you have interposed so much between it and your AWARENESS of it, that you cannot use it. EVERYTHING you have taught yourselves has made your power more and more obscure to you. You know not WHAT it is, nor WHERE. You have made a SEMBLANCE of power, and a SHOW of strength, so pitiful that it MUST fail you.
We are so out of touch with this power that most people don't even conceive of it as existing. But God's power is totally unlimited and so is your holiness - for which there is nothing you cannot do. We're talking totally unlimited miraculous power here. This recognition of the power of God is MISSING from so many people's teachings and the way we talk about miracles as if they're just nicer ways of looking at things.
Jesus is telling us how to be like him, how to break the laws of physics, how to reverse all the laws of the world, and how to utilize the power of God for good. Moses for example parted an entire ocean, which is in fact a SMALL feat for such a power.
"Why is it strange to you that faith can move mountains? This is indeed a little feat for such a power."
I felt this power one time when I was attempting a healing for my wife. She said she had this pain in her hand. It was probably nerve pain due to paralysis from her stroke years ago. I was trying to heal it with my hands on hers, sending energy etc. At some point and for a reason I have absolutely no idea about, there was suddenly a feeling of IMMENSE POWER present next to me.
This power felt so strong and so absolute it felt like it could've moved the whole planet without effort. I have never felt anything remotely as strong in any way in physical form. This power was still and deliberate and loving yet super-capable of anything. The mere presence of this power seems to cause a miracle, because all of a sudden not only was the pain gone from her hand, but also her mind was healed, and she was oblivious as to anything having happened, and even had forgotten that there was ever a pain there, as if it had never existed.
I have not felt that power before or since, but I hope to connect with it more. It is the power of God, and when you realize that this power exists, you know that miracles are far more than some "change of mind", or even something that you do at all. Quite honestly this power is SO strong that you might be frightened by it, and yet at the same time is not threatening in and of itself. And in a way, its strength is reassuring. This is why the course says that the Holy Spirit does SO MUCH in comparison to your tiny little contribution.
"All power in Heaven and earth is therefore given him and he will share it with you when you have completed yours."
Here's an example of how I gave myself a sickness.
I was thinking about Holy Spirit one day and about the fact that I thought of Him as separate from me. In my mind I had this sudden idea, what if He is not separate from me? And in that idea I saw there being no wall separating us, nothing coming between us, which immediately suggested I was "exposed" to Him and that He had direct access to me.
This is when my EGO reacted. My ego still believed in being a separate individual, which is a delusion, and so quickly saw in this Oneness an "attack". Holy Spirit definitely was not attacking, but to the ego, the idea of having no separation to block the truth was seen as a major threat to its existence. If I am One with Holy Spirit, there can be no ego!
Seeing this therefore quite shocked me, and I was a bit horrified. Almost immediately, in order to "defend myself" against what I saw as a threat, I attempted to shut out the Holy Spirit. I did this almost automatically like I already knew how to and just created a kind of "blocking force" within myself, emphasizing separation from Him, like trying to get away from Him or push Him away.
I did this using my mind by putting up a strong resistance, literally trying to push Him away, and to simultaneously withdraw into the body. I felt like I was cowering and shrinking. And I felt afraid because of the idea of no separation. I was making myself "little" to create a sensation of distance between us.
Within hours, I started to lose my hearing.
My ears very rapidly started to block up, they started to ring with a high-pitched ringing, my head became congested and they ached.
Basically, I did not want to LISTEN to the idea of there being no separation. I wanted to shut it out. And that meant shutting down my mind, shutting down awareness, which manifests itself in/as the body in the "form" of a reduction in sensory perception.
At first I didn't know where this sudden sickness came from or why it was happening, and started to react to it and to even seem to seek out remedies/magic. I acted as if I hadn't chosen it and didn't want it, as if it was happening to me against my will and I didn't like it. But I HAD chosen it. I had put it in place myself. And I had done so very quickly and quite automatically.
It took a day or two of "suffering" for me to become willing to look at why this had happened. At first I didn't want to admit that I'd created it. I couldn't see that. But I did start to realize that I was at least AFRAID. And as I looked into that, I became honest and admitted this fear to Holy Spirit, which took courage. I had to admit and realize I'd become afraid of the "truth" that I'd seen a couple of days before.... not so much afraid of it because of what it means, but because of how my ego mis-interpreted its meaning.
My ego thought that if Holy Spirit and I were One, that would have to mean that I - ego separate self - must not exist. In other words, that Holy Spirit had come to destroy me and that I was under threat of death. I therefore believed in death, and so manifested sickness - which is a step toward death.
As I began to "admit the truth", which is, to start to trust and allow this truth to sink in, and started to do some "forgiveness process" about it, the symptoms started to lift. In fact within about 24 hours the whole thing had almost completely cleared up. All symptoms disappeared without a trace.
By looking and admitting to how I'd defended myself against the truth, and that this was the PURPOSE of the sickness, and owning up to the decision I made to do this, and seeing that I'd done it to myself, set me free. Holy Spirit also helped to remove some of the "consequences of my wrong decision", as I became willing to let Him and to move past the self-made fear delusion.
Sometimes the truth frightens us because we mis-perceive it and don't understand what it really means. Our identification with the ego seems to threaten our "self" when the ego mis-perceives truth as a threat. Dis-identifying with the ego/body and recognizing what we've done to ourselves is the key to salvation.
It turns out this episode was actually a lesson in which I learned a good example of how sickness is created, and its undoing. All sickness is psychosomatic, chosen, and on purpose.
"Sickness is a defense against the truth". - ACIM