Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, isn't really optional. It's not something you can choose not to do, and it isn't something to aspire to. But that's how it's often viewed.

There is a metaphysical truth that, at the very least, other people ARE you, so how you are treating them you are treating yourself directly. But I think this leaves open room for error because there are some other parts to this that you may not realize.

First of all, you can only share love. Love IS sharing. It means joining and communing and being equal and being ONE. This is the underlying truth on which this idea is based. You CAN only share love. So this really means, you CAN only "do love" to others, you cannot actually really do anything else to others.

So when it comes to "how should I treat other people", the ONLY option that you can REALLY pursue is to love them. Love will be extended and shared to and with them. If your attitude is NOT love, IT WILL NOT BE SHARED.

So that means you CANNOT do unto others anything other than love.

There is also more to this.

Your mind, when you are believing that YOU are sinful, will become a split mind. It's a mind that believes separation has really happened. And this separation has happened INSIDE YOURSELF. Your own mind has become split. Part of this split will entail that a portion of mind remain in your awareness - conscious awareness - and a portion will be sectioned off and repressed as a place to shove your unconscious guilt. But the splitting off of that second part of mind (which produces a shadow, at war with your conscious persona), is now experienced as "not myself"

And so then you are in a state of disassociation from your whole self. The part of YOU that you think is not you, which you are trying to get rid of like crazy, you will believe you are separate from it - that it's not you. And so when some person comes along you will see them as "not you" also, and will then see IN them your own "not you" part of your own mind. You will relate to your own "not you" mind as though it belongs them them, since it doesn't belong to you. And you will attack that part.

So now you think you are "doing ego" to someone else. That you are treating them with less than love. And that means it now seems optional as to how you treat others. But really you are not even doing anything to them at all. If they were awake they'd know this. You are just attacking your own self indirectly. So you're not ACTUALLY doing anything to others, if it's coming from your ego. You literally ARE only attacking yourself.

So now we have this situation.... either you love both yourself and others, or you go into a private world where you are attacking yourself, but believing everyone else is involved. Nobody else is involved AT ALL.

Thus it's not really a case of having to then figure out how to "do unto others" in a better way. You're NOT doing unto others. The only thing you CAN share with them is LOVE. If you are not in love with yourself, you will do nothing "to" them at all, because unlove is a WITHDRAWAL from sharing.

So now we shift from trying to "do unto others as you'd have them do unto you", to something more like "do unto YOURSELF as you would have YOUR TRUE SELF do unto YOU."

Translated, that means learning to undo your own belief that YOU are sinful, which will result in you becoming aware that you LOVE yourself. You WILL then be able to extend this love to others. So learn to do unto yourself what GOD would do unto you, which is to recognize you are worthy, forgiven and innocent forever. That should be your aim, and don't be so concerned that you even CAN do anything to anyone else.

It's not because of some kind of guilt-ridden ambition to be nice to other people that you're doing this. Since you can't do unto others unless it IS love, you can forget about believing that you're mistreating people. You are only capable of mistreating yourself.

God created you perfect. It's a done deal. You're already complete. You cannot add to yourself or take away. You can't be changed. You are permanently as God created you. He didn't leave anything out or fail to share anything or leave you less than completed. You can't be perfected or improved upon. You're already absolutely divine.

So the one lie is, anything that tells you otherwise. Anything of the ego that suggests, you need to do this or that, go here or there, learn this or that, attain this or that, become this or that. It's much more a case of, sinking into and accepting, owning up to, admitting to, become re-awakened to, what is ALREADY THERE underneath all this bullshit that we've dumped on top to PRETEND we are not immortal.

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

But in truth you are unhurtable, invulnerable, immortal. So all this time spent trying to prove otherwise, is futile. It doesn't change anything, because it's literally impossible to change your soul. All we can do is deny it and pretend it's not divine.

So we have this divine self in us, as us. It's all we can really be. And so what is all this other stuff? All the seeking, the searching, the figuring out, the unraveling, all this work and effort, all the effort of striving to belief, trying to convince ourselves, isn't absolutely all of it completely pointless? The truth about what we are can only be accepted or denied, not changed.

It seems then ultimately the entire thing about awakening to our divine holy self is simply that we stop doing everything ELSE that is taking us AWAY from it. If we would stop weighing ourselves down we'd float right up to the surface. If we'd stop attacking ourselves we'd be perfect already. If we'd stop resisting the truth we'd just melt into being ourselves. If we'd get rid of all this ego stuff, which is the attempt to be something we're not, we'd simply return to being what we really are already.

It seems counter intuitive because it's more like retracing your steps and going backwards, going within, returning to, rather than building something new. The whole effort to "become" is an ego effort to DEFINE what you are. Or moreso to redefine it. Which is always a lie because you can't be changed.

So every opinion about ourselves can't be true, unless it aligns with our nature as God created us. "I am still as God created me" states this perfectly. Simply, nothing has happened to you, nothing has changed you, and this whole dream has been an excursion into nothing. We simply need to accept that WE ALREADY ARE perfect in God and stop trying to prove otherwise.

This is why the Atonement is simply a matter of ACCEPTING what is already true about you, and nothing else.

""I am as God created me."

This single thought, held firmly in the mind, would save the world. From time to time we will repeat it, as we reach another stage in learning. It will mean far more to you as you advance. These words are sacred, for they are the words God gave in answer to the world you made. By them it disappears, and all things seen within its misty clouds and vaporous illusions vanish as these words are spoken. For they come from God.

Here is the Word by which the Son became His Father's happiness, His Love, and His completion. Here creation is proclaimed, and honored as it is. There is no dream these words will not dispel; no thought of sin and no illusion that the dream contains that will not fade away before their might. They are the trumpet of awakening that sounds around the world. The dead awake in answer to its call. And those who live and hear this sound will never look on death.

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

It's very easy to believe that we are here in the dream, as a body, as an ego, trying to get to Heaven, which is far off in the distance, and we seem not to be there yet.

But this is only the perspective we've become accustomed to. It's how the ego sees things. It believes that its illusions have actually taken us out of heaven and not merely denied who we are but has literally changed who we are into a different kind of person.

The ego suggests that the light that we once were has been corrupted and blotted out, that it sinned, and it then transformed into a darkened self. That somehow we "fell" from Heaven and became guilty and riddled with problems.

But this is, and always has been, a lie. It's a cover-up. Because the fact is, that we have still not left heaven at all. As the Course says, we are "at home in God yet dreaming of exile." So in terms of where are located, we are NOT actually located outside of Heaven in some world we made, we're still in heaven but have surrounded ourselves with a strange hallucination.

From this side of what appears to be separation, it seems as if we never were in Heaven and that we are lacking Heaven's qualities, therefore we need to gain it or build up to it or find it or add it to ourselves. But there is a fundamental lie behind this, that we are lacking it, and that it is not already in us.

The biggest ego lie of all is the suggestion that we are not still in heaven or still as God created us. Or that somehow who we were before separation has been undone and removed and replaced with something else. It hasn't been replaced, not at all.

In fact, the self that we really are, our soul/spirit, is still very much exactly the same as it has always been, exactly as God intended it, is completely awake and alive and unharmed, totally innocent and holy, having never sinned and still simply going about its business.

"You are a perfect creation."

"There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you."

You also have come from God and are still coming from God, it's just that you've also tried to "add" a bunch of other stuff to change yourself in ways that are impossible, which temporarily BLOCKS awareness that you are STILL as God created you underneath those blocks.

So it's not that you "actually" left home and turned into a murderer, you actually are still at home now, and there's simply some layers of denial and pretense that are covering it up to make it SEEM like it's not there already. Uncovering and removing those layers of hiding will REVEAL what is already present, which is your holy self which has not changed at all.

Since the world does not contain any real causes, and absolutely everything is an affect of the mind on a higher level, this shines some light on what happens when you are attacked or hurt.

If it seems that someone comes along and hits you, and a bruise forms, this is an illusion.

The person hitting and the formation of the bruise are not actually connected by any kind of linear causality. Laws of physics DO NOT EXPLAIN how the bruise gets there.

The bruise does not show up as a result of the attack.

The bruise shows up because your own mind buys into the illusion of linear cause and effect, and USES the opportunity to demonstrate that the other person is the "cause" of your hurt. This is an attempt to demonstrate that you can be hurt, in order to prove your brother is a sinner, so that you can get rid of your sin!

Your own mind puts the bruise in your own body, all by itself. It doesn't get there by the "causal power" of another person. If you believe in the causal power of another person, what your mind is doing is it is actually twisting itself so that it can seem to attack itself from the outside in, through that person, and it is your mind which puts the bruise there.

This works in exactly the same way to how medication works, which is that you pretend that something outside of you will do something to you, your MIND decides whether or not to allow it, and IF it allows it, the MIND ITSELF puts the effects into the body, not the medication. All medication is a placebo. None of it has power to cause anything but illusions.

If the mind decides not to get well, IT WILL REFUSE the illusion of the medication and the medication will NOT WORK. Similarly, among those who refuse to believe in the cause-effect of certain foods, they can eat those foods WITHOUT EFFECT even if they would hurt other people. Mind over matter!

Jesus asks us in the Course to demonstrate that we cannot be hurt, or attacked, or sick, and that our brother is innocent because nothing they try to do us produces ANY EFFECTS.

If we produce sickness in the body after eating the wrong food, or we develop a bruise after being hit, or we walk around with a broken leg due to falling out of a tree, we are ACCUSING everyone else (ie the world) of doing this to us.

This means we are attempting to prove that we CAN BE HURT. This proof demonstrates for all to see, that someone else must be the sinner, because something happened that you *appear* to not want to have happened, against your will. Your demonstration of "being a victim" is actually a show that your mind puts on, for a purpose, to scapegoat the world.

What Jesus is therefore asking is, that we become invulnerable to attack, incapable of being sick, unable to be hurt, and that we refuse to CHOOSE to show up as damaged or broken. This means that when it SEEMS in the illusion that there is a linear causality of someone hitting you, YOU DO NOT develop a bruise. When you fall out of the tree, you DO NOT break your leg. When you eat a certain food, IT DOES NOT poison you.

This means you are supposed to get to where you can SUPERNATURALLY DEMONSTRATE that you cannot be hurt, sick, damaged, or made to suffer, in any way, by any cause in the entire world! At the physical level! He is asking us to show that we are holy by showing that the Son of God CANNOT BE DESTROYED, using the body as a SYMBOL of immortality.

Here is how Jesus puts it:

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. NOTHING EXTERNAL TO YOUR MIND CAN HURT OR INJURE YOU IN ANY WAY. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. NO ONE BUT YOURSELF AFFECTS YOU. There is nothing in the world that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail." !!!!!!!

He also speaks of this here:

"Sickness is an attempt to demonstrate that you can be hurt"

and here:

"A broken body proves the mind has not been healed"

and here:

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use if for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die."

and here:

"(regarding your brother) But every pain you suffer do you see as proof that he is guilty of attack. Thus would you make yourself (your body) to be the sign that he has lost his innocence, and need but look on you (your body) to realize that he has been condemned. And what to you has been unfair will come to him in righteousness. The unjust vengeance that you suffer now belongs to him, and when it rests on him are you set free (you projected your sin). Wish not to make yourself a living symbol of his guilt, for you will not escape the death you made for him."

Here Jesus is basically saying that you must not attempt to put sin and death onto your brother through attack of any kind (sickness also) because if you do, YOU will be attacked. This is the basic law of the one mind, that what you do to your brother you to do yourself. All attack is self attack. You cannot escape the consequences of your attempted attack on another, and they are not required to receive those consequences from you.

This means that if you demonstrate that you are sick or hurt physically IN ANY WAY, you are attacking your brother, trying to SHOW HIM what he must have done to you against your will, and are therefore projecting your sin! If you do this, you will suffer, and your will experience death. This also means YOUR MIND *IS NOT HEALED*, therefore you CANNOT experience peace. A broken body proves your mind is not healed. Your mind is proven to be healed when your body shows up as NOT BROKEN. Therefore, to escape death, you MUST NOT use the body for attack, thus rendering it INCAPABLE of being attacked by you or anyone.

Whenever you attempt to use the body for attack, which means, to fail to extend love through it to your brother, the body itself will become sick. The sickness in your body will directly correlate to your belief that you and your brother are sinners. Your attempt to project your sin will project it onto your body and destroy it. This is the ONLY WAY that bodies become sick. Not through external causes, not through the illusion of cause and effect, not through your brother.

We are therefore REQUIRED, and WILL NOT BE ABLE TO AVOID, to demonstrate that our body is absolutely invulnerable, in order to CANCEL OUT the illusion of cause and effect, to PROVE that the ego's laws mean nothing, to SHOW that our brother is as innocent as we are, and to TEACH that the Son of God cannot be hurt or affected by illusions in any way.

Can you imagine what a miracle it will be to witness someone demonstrating this? That nothing you try to do to them works? That you cannot hurt their body whatsoever? That their body cannot even die no matter how you try to attack it? Their mind will simply project an image of permanent health the whole time, IGNORING anything you try to do to it. And by this will be PROVEN your innocence, because no sin you try to commit WORKS, and therefore you CANNOT believe that you are sinful. Thus are you set free because your attempted sin HAD NO CONSEQUENCES. This is how you set your brother free from his belief that he sinned!

This is one of the most radical teachings in the course, so I understand that many people don't believe this or don't want to. But this is what Jesus has said. If your body is broken in any way, you are teaching vulnerability and suffering and sin. You cannot have sickness in the body and prove that you are innocent, or to be at peace. And you cannot be at peace with death. You cannot have sickness showing up if you want to be awake, and being awake you WILL NOT show sickness to anyone. The body MUST HEAL if the mind heals. And the body will become as immortal as the mind.

Cause and effect at the level of the world is entirely an illusion. THERE IS NO CAUSE in the world. Nothing causes you. Nothing is the reason why you are showing up in any particular form. Nothing has happened to you against your will. Nothing of this world can be found responsible for having power over you, for "making you" be a certain way, for instigating illness, to triggering suffering, or for making your body change in any way at all. Not even the forces of nature or acts of nature or whatever else. NOTHING.

Your body is 100% a projected image from YOUR MIND, and YOU are the one that determines how it is going to show up. Not this world. Not other people. Not food or water or weather or anything else. We are meant to demonstrate that our body is completely invulnerable, completely NOT DEPENDENT on anything of this world, and incapable of being affected by this world. This will demonstrate the the mind of love has power over all illusions and nothing can assail the Kingdom of God.

If we're sick, hurt, in pain, suffering, a victim, abused, damaged, missing something, lacking, attacked, upset, whatever... we are the ones who are putting it there, we are RESPONSIBLE for it, and no-one else has caused it. Only through this willingness to admit honestly to this truth, will you be able to access the SUPERNATURAL PROTECTION which comes from realizing the secret to salvation: "you are doing this to yourself". If you stop doing it to yourself, NOTHING ELSE WILL BE ABLE TO DO ANYTHING TO YOU.

I'll let Jesus finish up with this section from "sickness is a defense against the truth":

"The body should not feel at all. If you have been successful, there will be no sense of feeling ill or feeling well, of pain or pleasure. No response at all is in the mind to what the body does. Its usefulness remains and nothing more.

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

Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. 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."

Another ego trap with forgiveness is believing that you need to be at peace regardless of what's going on in life. While this might ultimately be the goal, meanwhile the things that happen in life are there because they are lessons.

They're not just happening at random. Each of us has a curriculum. That means, whatever point you are at right now in your spiritual path, which is extremely unique to you, and whatever you are experiencing now, there are certain things you are going to have to learn or discover in order to move forward.

And the way that you learn those things is that you have learning experiences, ie lessons. And usually these lessons are things that you seem to NOT WANT. And so a great big steaming SHIT comes along in your life and dumps itself on your foot and you just go about trying to shake it off, but it's really trying to help you wake up.

There is something involved in your interaction with the shit and how you deal with it and look at it and experience it, which is going to bring stuff up for you, trigger you, and cause you to have certain kinds of perceptions and thoughts and ideas. And you might not have had those if it were not for this stimuli. But before you just try to get rid of the shit for coming along to disturb you, realize that this is actually an opportunity to grow and heal and become more awake spiritually.

So you don't necessarily want to be in the business of making life SEEM to be like it doesn't have anything upsetting happening, or that it's just one big smooth ride, because that can be a form of denial, avoidance, and disassociation. And it can keep you stuck. Not saying you have to suffer willingly, but willingly is better than unwillingly, lol

Anyway... so ... forgiveness isn't about avoiding bad stuff. And it isn't just about transcending it and being at peace about it. The bad stuff is there FOR A REASON, because its a lesson in the curriculum, and you not only need it but have asked for it. And that's why it's come. Because you are ready for it. And now you need to learn a lesson from it. And if you don't learn it this time, it will come back again. You don't have a choice in that.

Be aware that the ego, especially the persona part of the ego, wants to get rid of all bad stuff and create an ILLUSION OF BLISS, which really plays into the idea that "ignorance is bliss", because in ignorance ie unconsciousness, you think you don't have any issues because you're in incredible denial. You don't want that. You don't really want a life of total ease and an easy ride, at least not until you genuinely have woken up all the way and don't have any curriculum left. Then it's truly plain sailing.

So 'doing forgiveness' should not be about making bad stuff go away, even though that's what most of us use it for most of the time. It's really to help you learn lessons and to undo what you have taught yourself already, which is mistaken. It is unlearning, which is how lessons are completed - the question is unlearned to reveal the answer. There was no problem until the answer became obscured by the separation, see.

You can be completely sure, or at least convinced that you are, that something is true or 'the case', and still be mistaken.

You can be totally adamant that you're right about this, and still not be right about it.

You can be convinced that what you believe is absolutely THE truth and everyone else is stupid and wrong, and still be believing something that isn't true.

You can even have insanity and be convinced that you're sane and not even suspect that you aren't.

You can trust your senses and believe what your eyes are showing you and still be mistaken about what's happening.

You can have reactions that you think are normal and natural and objective and still be totally out of touch with reality.

You can have circumstantial evidence that seems to all point toward something being true as if it's really clear convincing proof of it, and it still be a completely false conclusion.

You can think you did something or learned something already and it doesn't need to be learned and yet still fall short of knowing how to do it.

You can be sure you've fully dealt with a past hurt or a complaint or a grievance or an old hatred and have let it go and still have a shitload of release work to do (lol, story of my life).

You can be totally sure that your faculties are telling you the truth, that your mind is capable of discerning what something is or isn't, and that you are being totally objective about it, and still be subjectively hallucinating.

You can trust your ego as if you believe it is really your friend and is on your side and is helping you and protecting you and all the while being deceived and led down a dark path by it.

You can be really convinced that getting something that you're missing is going to solve your life and fix your lack and still totally feel empty and hopeless when you get it.

You can think you know what things are for or why they're happening or what the purpose is or why someone is doing something and still be totally clueless as to what the real plan is.

You can think you know what's best for other people and how they need to be fixed or helped and what their problem is and still be projecting all your own problems and unconsciousness and not even recognize it.

You can also believe you know who you are already, and think you are awake, while all the while being asleep and unaware of your real self, convinced that you are some other identity.

You might also have conviction that you really are a body or that you can die and that you're not as God created you, and still not realize that this isn't true and that you are immortal spirit.

The ego's mistakes and deceit and denials and illusions go on and on and on, always convinced of its own prowess and ability to discern the truth, or that it is actually aware of 'what is', and all the while living in a private fantasy world of insanity where nothing is true at all.

A little willingness is needed to consider that you might be mistaken or that there is more going on here than you are aware of.

Jesus is truth-full. He is honest. He is awake. He is aware of everything. He does not lie. He has no reason to hide anything.

Since Jesus IS the Atonement, in order to "accept" the Atonement we are going to have to at some point completely Accept everything Jesus has said as true. ALL of it. Not just some parts, not just the bits we like, all of it.

Our questions should not so much focus on "whether" what the Course says is true. We are supposed to TRUST JESUS, that He is being truthful and that we can rely on His Word. If He says something is true, it simply is true. It is our job to ACCEPT IT.

When we take other parts of the course and pull it apart and bring up the quotes and use them as "evidence" as to some "contrary meaning" or conflicting truth, something has gone wrong. We are using the course against ITSELF, because Jesus is perfectly truthful all the time. When we use one quote to attack another, we are claiming that Jesus Himself is a liar.

What we can't seem to agree on is what Jesus MEANS, and we have all these discussions about what OUR opinion is, instead of putting aside our opinion and simply being open to TRUST AND ACCEPT Jesus's at His word, in a very literal way. We are simply not willing to be honest enough. Honesty is not self-serving.

I sometimes put up a quote of what Jesus has said. It is plain and obvious. And then people start saying either what it does or does not mean, or give other quotes to try to fight it. Even if it's extremely obviously clear and plain.

This is OUR EGO attempting to be some kind of "authority" through whom all decisions and approvals have to be fed in order to accept anything at all. We stand here like some kind of armed guard only allowing through the little parts we like and rejecting the rest. It is really an act of denial and keeping the Truth at arm's length. It's a defense against the atonement.

This very ego ITSELF has to be put aside, and we have to open up to TRUSTING JESUS. Trusting that He is telling us the truth, not deceiving us. Trusting that He is genuine and honest and authentic. Listening to what He has said. And that means, even if it does not make us look good, accepting it ANYWAY. Accept it first, learn how it MUST BE CORRECT later. Otherwise where's the trust? Where's the listening to and accepting of Atonement? Where's the taking Jesus at His word and not fighting with everything He has said?

When He says over 250 times that God directly created multiple children and also gave them free will, we listen to that, and we ACCEPT IT. We don't get into nonsense arguments of denial that have one goal and one goal only - to NOT accept it at its word. When He says plainly that God would not create a world like this, we have to ACCEPT IT, not get into "whether" it is true or not. When He says God creates Angels directly, we have to ACCEPT it. When he says miracles can heal the sick and raise the dead, we have to ACCEPT IT. When he says you can LITERALLY move a mountain with your faith, we have to ACCEPT IT. We have to stop fighting with Jesus all the time and TRUST HIM.

In ACIM Jesus says the ego made the body as a way to focus away from the mind and to make the mind seem to be 'private'. The body is like a wall around the mind which creates the illusion and perception that the mind does not communicate. In other words, the mind seems to be shut off from all other equally-separate minds, and there is no sharing on any level of awareness.

The result of this is that the body is now exalted as a means of communication, in which the ego wants bodies to become physically intimate to 'represent' communication happening. Even the spoken word is then considered communication, but really it is a complete substitute for real, direct communication, and typically is a communication failure.

True Communication isn't telepathy as such, the idea of telepathy means separate people with separate minds sending messages. The truth is that our minds are NOT separate, and the belief in a separation between minds is the cause of all sickness, all mental illness, and death. And this is why the body dies - because the mind has been kept from true communication and locked in a prison. Or to put it another way, the body HAS to die if the mind remains unaware of its true function, because the body IS the idea of death.

Jesus talks about how the ego will do anything it can to ignore the mind, and will even let the mind have activity and thoughts because it thinks of it as serving the body and allowing the body to tell the mind what to do. Then the body uses the mind only so that the body can get what it wants, such as property, clothing, sex, food, physical contact, etc. You can see this reflected in the scientific/medical model which says that the 'brain' is the cause of consciousness or is the 'source' of thinking, which is completely the opposite of the truth.

This heavy focus on the physical, as well as this reversal of who is in charge - i.e. that the body is in charge of the mind, is a "confusion of the levels", which Jesus also explains as the cause of all sickness. "All sickness comes from confusing the levels" ... and that miracles correct this 'order' and place the levels in their proper order - i.e., restoring the mind as CAUSE and the body as EFFECT.

The body did not exist at all until the ego made it as a way to enslave the mind, to make you unaware that you even have a mind, to shut out awareness, to cut you off from everyone else, to make you isolated and lonely, and to disempower you. This was the PURPOSE of the body. This is the body's entire reason for existing. It is not some lovely creature that God created and that we should bow down and worship. It is an ego device for separation and for splitting the One Shared Mind into many many small imprisoned minds.

I had an experience of God a few years ago and in this experience my mind became very expanded, and I became very very aware. I thought I was fully awake when I woke up in the morning but it was absolutely nothing in comparison to how awake and aware I was in this experience. I became quite close to leaving my body because I was becoming very aware of God and the attraction to Him was so strong, that I wanted to leave absolutely everything behind and go to Him. It was like a scared child running to their parent after some nightmarish thing just happened and finally realizing that they can run to safety.

However, this didn't last very long and my expanded awareness and unification of mind started to come back into my body. I was extremely ungrounded for some time and gradually my awareness collapsed back down and reinserted itself into my body. This took a few weeks. As it progressed, I felt and perceived that it was like undergoing some kind of brain damage - as though coming into the body was taking on a tremendous dumbing down, suppressing, 'disabling', stunting of my consciousness, such that I could only liken it to having some kind of terrible brain damage that was blocking out and shutting out the beautiful awareness I'd experienced.

Towards the end of this process of 'returning' to the ego, which was very upsetting because once you taste God you don't want to leave... my awareness gradually entered into my physical senses more fully and this was like putting on a dark costume where, once you get inside it enough, the door behind you closes, your sense of connection to God gets almost completely shut off, your awareness of anything bigger is totally shut down, and you are sort of 'locked in'. Then, it seems that the only thing you can be aware of is what the body's senses show you - there is information coming into the eyes, tastes, smells, sounds etc, but very little awareness, no connection, no expansion, no real communication, and no God.

It's sort of like some creepy thing like, entering "The Matrix", or getting plugged into a virtual reality suit where, once you go into it, all of real reality gets shut out and you can ONLY fixate on what the 'encounter-suit' shows you. This is because the body forces you to focus on form, on what's outside of you, and what's separate from you. It totally shuts out your connection to the whole and makes you feel like some kind of tiny little, strapped-in prisoner, who can barely move or perceive anything, with blinders on, forced to stare at a make-believe world and not allowed to look at any thing else. This was really upsetting to go through 're-entry' but it showed me clearly just how much the body blocks awareness and shuts down the mind.

We can ascend our awareness to a heavenly place, I mean, when I was having my experience I was still in my body, just about, but such an expanded state of being really urges for total release from the body, it's so expansive that the body cannot contain it. At some point, as I see it, when we really thoroughly wake up not just to the Higher Self (sonship) but also beyond to Christ and to Heaven, it would become extremely, extremely difficult to maintain a body at all, and more than likely the mind would have to completely leave bodies entirely and then only return in the form of a kind of apparition or temporary image, which the mind is not at all imprisoned by.

So you see, the body is not an idol. It is not God's greatest creation. It is not something to worship. it is not what people are. It's not what you are. It is a very heavy, very isolating, very imprisoning suit of armor, deliberately made as a device for blocking awareness and diminishing the mind. It is the manifestation of an attempt to be separate from God. It is an illusion of minds no longer being joined. And when minds become joined and the mind becomes miraculous, the body has to heal, up to a point, but then the mind will stop creating a body.

How can a mind that knows of absolute oneness have any use for the body at all? Yes Holy Spirit can use it for TRUE communication, which means the MIND communicated with other minds directly - or rather, "shares". But the body itself is nothing but a temporary tool in a temporary dream, which we do not NEED in order to exist and therefore is not an inherent part of life. When Jesus was done with His body he saw no further truth in it and it DISAPPEARED. But he remained, because He is immortal spirit. And so are you.

P.S. "virtual reality" devices are now a metaphor for this... you strap on an artificial body, all of your visual senses are completely imprisoned and shut out from perceiving the 'real room', you go inside a fantasy world that doesn't exist, and you see only what this artificial body wants you to see. Your mind and awareness of the room outside is completely shut off, and you are immersed in a dream that you think is real. All the while real characters go about their business in the same room knowing, from the outside, that you are asleep inside a fake body looking at a fake world. So it is with the human body. And the body will eventually have to be 'taken off' from the mind to allow awareness to be fully aware of what is real.

"I cannot seen in darkness but in light."

Instead of thinking of the ego, think of two thought systems or two minds. Jesus refers in ACIM to us having a higher mind and a lower mind. A portion of mind became 'lower' in the separation from God, and focuses on being separate.

"The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought"

"I AM working with your higher mind whether you are asleep or awake, (just as your ego does with your lower mind.."

"Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities. This is the basic distinction between intellectualization and thinking. One creates the physical, and the other the spiritual, and we believe in what we create."

When you are in the higher mind, you are in the light and you can see. You recognize what everything is, nothing is hidden, and you are not deceived.

When you are in the lower mind, you cannot see, you cannot recognize, and you are deceived. It's like being unconscious. You cannot tell that you are in the lower mind because it is a place of darkness.

When you are in the lower mind you lose perspective and lose sight of where you are, lost in the woods. You may not even realize you are in the lower mind at all, and think everything is normal, and may forget completely that there even is a higher way to see.

This is because the lower mind is the realm of egotism, separation, darkness and confusion, narrowness and closed-ness and limitation. It's a mind level that perceives falsely, makes illusions real and believes in the physical world. It is where you are deceived and distracted and reacting as a victim.

So really when you are in the "ego-mind" (thought system) you have a kind of loss of awareness that makes it much much harder to recognize that you are in the ego. The whole thought system of that mindset is like being in a dark prison cell, lost and alone, and not even remembering that there even is a light outside.

When you get back out into the higher mind, into the light, you can see again, you can recognize things, and you can tell where you are. You also, when in the higher mind, suddenly have the perspective that recognises where and what the lower mind is, and that there even is a lower mind within you.

This allows you to realize that you WERE in the lower mind, because you know that it was a state of ego. From the perspective of being in the higher mind, you have a sense that you have a kind of "lower self" within you that is very primal and basic and victim-oriented and fearful.

This is the "self you made", the ego-oriented thought system. Like a child that throws temper tantrums and screams at the universe. It's a whole system of thinking and perceiving.

If you slip out of the higher mind you lose sight of even HAVING a "lower self" within you, that you need to be vigilant against, and you fall back into it. Then you lose sight of the big picture and it seems like the lower self is all that exists and all that you are. Then it's a scramble trying to get yourself back out of it into the light.

It's like, you need the light of the higher mind in order to be able to tell that you're in the lower mind, but when you're in the lower mind you don't have that light so you get lost and stuck in it easily. Trying to get yourself out of the darkness into the light is the best thing you can do to give you perspective and help you to recognize where you are and what you're doing.

The aim is to be in the higher mind as much as possible so that the lower mind is ultimately dissolved. Or rather, that that portion of mind is freed from its egoic focus and its belief in separation so that that mind can be reintegrated as part of the higher mind.

Also note that the lower mind includes the intellect, which is a seemingly 'higher' function within the lower mind that uses separation to split things up and analyse and judge. Jesus says in ACIM that this intellectual lower mind actually produces the physical world of space and time. The higher mind rises above the battlefield and transcends it.

"Miracles are the absence of the body. They are sudden shifts into invisibility, away from lower order reality. That is why they heal."

"Your sleeping and waking dreams have different forms, and that is all. THEIR CONTENT IS THE SAME. They are your protest AGAINST reality, and your fixed and insane wish to CHANGE it."

We are in a state of denial where we are attacking reality. We are blocking truth, we do not want to see what is really there to see, we're trying to hide from God, we don't want to own up to being who we really are, we're trying to bind ourselves to something we're not, and we see ourselves as separate from what is real.

When Jesus talks about vision, he's talking about your willingness to see reality. When we say "above all else I want to see", we're saying that above all else, we're willing to pierce through illusions and walls and denials and take a good hard look at what is actually there. This is also what the course calls "reality contact" .Physical sight cannot see it, so we need to open the mind.

"Miracles are examples of right thinking. Reality contact at all levels becomes strong and accurate, thus permitting correct delineation of intra- and interpersonal boundaries. As a result, the doer sees the truth as God created it."

For example, God right now knows you exactly as you really are. He is aware of your perfect permanent innocence. But you are not. You are blocking your awareness of the truth about yourself. You do not know yourself as you really are, because you do not want to. You think things about yourself which you prefer, but which are not true. God therefore knows you better than you know yourself right now, and your job is to come to know what is really true of you again.

Similarly the acceptance of the atonement is really the acceptance of what is actually true. It's a willingness to see everything as it is, to recognize what it is, and therefore to no longer be deceived. It means no longer being in denial and no longer resisting the truth. We quite literally are hiding from reality, trying to identify with bodies in order to keep ourselves away from God.

It's like we're protesting against reality. We're fighting with it, we don't want it, we constantly attack it, and want to be separate from it. So we're out of touch with reality, which means we are confused and lost. It means we do not recognize what is real or not real, true or false, and are mistaken. This also means we are temporarily insane.

The desire to SEE, is the desire to KNOW, and the desire to BE. To see the real world is to be open and inclusive enough that you want to directly experience what actually is real. You can only experience this by not attacking reality, not separating from God, and not denying your soul. We basically are part of a rebellion, which began in the fall of man, and is ongoing. An ancient war against the truth.

If we are "the resistance" against the truth, which is also sickness and death, then we have to lay down our arms and put away our sharp-edged toys and be willing to be exposed to God again. To be open to sharing, to union and to oneness. If we want to be awake we're going to have to be willing to take the blindfold off and open the spiritual eye.

To see closer to reality will show us the real world, and the unreal world of Earth will be forgiven. In "reality" it will only be seen for what it is, before it fades away into nothingness. The closer we come to intimate contact with reality, the more we will see the light of the real world, and see God's reflection in the Earth.

Full reality exposure will reveal God to you, and your true self as Christ will reveal itself as Christ's face finally appears. And then you are ready to penetrate through the gates of heaven into total immersion and communion with all that is. To be in reality is to be in heaven.

"Every adjustment is therefore a DISTORTION, and calls upon defenses to uphold it AGAINST reality."

"For what could house this mad idea AGAINST reality, but for an instant?"

"WILLING AGAINST reality, though impossible, can be MADE into a very persistent goal, EVEN THOUGH YOU DO NOT WANT IT. But consider the result of this strange decision. You are DEVOTING your mind to what you DO NOT WANT. How real can this devotion be?"

"To be alone IS to be guilty. For to experience yourself AS alone, is to deny the Oneness of the Father and His Son, and thus to ATTACK REALITY. You cannot love PARTS of reality, and understand what love MEANS."

"You ATTACK the real world every day and every hour and every minute, and yet you are surprised that you cannot SEE it."