Surround search terms with " " double quotes for exact matches e,g, "drops of healing rain"

In terms of there being no order of difficulty in miracles, Jesus is clearly stating that we are to NOT BELIEVE that there are any REAL DIFFERENCES between illusions. A small thing is no different to a big thing. Something that has been there a long time is NO DIFFERENT to something that just appeared. All illusions of form, shape, size, behavior, difficulty, hardness, permanence, all of them must be equally regarded as illusory.

You are to NOT BELIEVE that a rotten apple is any more real than a fresh apple. You are to NOT BELIEVE that a slight sickness is any more or less healable than a major disease. The aim is to learn to disbelieve all illusions, to transcend them, to categorize them ALL EQUALLY AS UNREAL, and thereby completely ignore all APPEARANCES that one thing has properties that another does not have.

ALL illusions are the ONE DREAM. And the one answer to the one dream is a miracle. And all miracles are equal and completely IGNORE all suggestions of orders of difficulty. Jesus even goes as far as to say that raising the dead is NO MORE DIFFICULT than healing a slight sickness. Because in the correct light, they are BOTH recognized as the same NOTHINGNESS, and therefore NEITHER of them has any more magnitude or power or reality. Both are AS EASILY dispelled.

Miracle mindedness sees everything in this world as a totally level playing field, all illusions are equal, all illusions are the same, nothing is more or less difficult and there is no difficulty in dispelling or healing them at all. This is the mindset of a miracle worker. One who sees the entire dream and is not deceived by a single appearance, a single suggestion or temptation, and has absolutely no regard for any stories about what can or cannot happen.

THERE IS NO ORDER OF DIFFICULTY. The hierarchy of illusions is just that, a total fiction. Cancer is NO MORE SERIOUS than a headache or a runny nose. It is by recognizing them ALL AS THE SAME that you become able to DISPEL THEM ALL.

Do you see where this is leading? Away from ALL LIMITATIONS towards being TOTALLY UNLIMITED AND ALL POWERFUL.

"You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both."

"There is nothing my holiness cannot do."

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

God is omnipresent. What this means is, the entirety of His being is fully present in every part of His being.

If you could conceive of God as taking up "space", then this means that in one particular location, the WHOLE entirety of God is fully present. And yet, simultaneously, in another location, the WHOLE entirety of God is present. This should give you a sense of how God is SHARING or is "stretched out" between these two locations, as though he completely DEFIES all sense of spatial limitations.

And when God is fully and completely present in one location, this does not detract from His presence in another location. He is able to be everywhere simultaneously and fully. This UTTERLY defies the entire ego's way of thinking and its world of separation, in which nothing can share with anything, an object cannot be in two places at once, and everything shows you a picture of there being some things in one place that are not in another.

For God to be able to be fully in multiple locations at once, defies absolutely all ego laws. God simply is UTTERLY UNLIMITED by any concept or law or structural or spatial construct. Jesus says that ALL of Him is in EVERY PART, fully and equally. And this is why every PART has been expressed as a SOUL, which is an entire WHOLE within itself because God expresses His wholeness in every part of Himself and creates WHOLE BEINGS.

The closest I can come to conceiving of God's nature is some kind of absolutely massive network of connections that share every part of Himself everywhere. Every part of God is EVERYWHERE. In God there IS no space or time. He is instantaneous omni-present and fully present in every speck of existence.

Similarly, God utterly transcends absolutely every limitation or difficulty or restriction or space-time concept that you can ever come up with. He quite literally, is INFINITE and UNLIMITED in every way. This is absolutely ego defying. Totally law-breaking and COMPLETELY OPPOSITE to this world.

This world was made as an attempt to shut out God by presenting a picture of what God is NOT LIKE, a world where nothing is shared, nothing is in multiple locations, there is no omnipresence, every location lacks something or has compromised with others, there is severe finite limitation placed on everything etc. This is totally unlike God.

In our development of trust, we ARE to learn to start TRUSTING and putting FAITH IN God's totally unlimited nature, in defiance of this world's totally LIMITING framework. We are to learn to OVERLOOK the limitations of matter and form, to NOT BELIEVE the sight of form, because "nothing is so blinding as sight of form". Form literally was made by the ego to create an artificial, unnatural "nature" that operates and looks NOTHING like God's nature. We have to learn to NOT BELIEVE IT, look past it, and recognize the sheer POSSIBILITY AND FREEDOM present in God.

This freedom breaks absolutely every law of this universe, because this entire universe is in OPPOSITION to God's nature. And so God's nature completely DEFIES every conceivable limitation. That means we have to learn, literally, to put our FAITH and trust in a God who can DO ANYTHING, a God who IGNORES orders of difficulty, a God who is completely FREE of all limitations and problems, and a God for whom NOTHING is impossible.

That means shifting our allegiance away from the ego, not just in our mind and perception but also in terms of what we think we are "stuck with" or what is "assumed" or "cannot be changed" or " is a given" in this world, including the so-called inevitability and irreversability of death, which is nothing more than one more ego statement that "This has the power to prevent God's will, and kill His Son, and He can do nothing about it." That is the ego's motto, and we've fallen for it.

Now it is time for a new thought system. A new way of looking at the world, and a new POWER to place our trust in. This is the foundation of all MIRACLE WORKING, which IS SUPERNATURAL, which defies and breaks all ego laws and proves that NOTHING CAN RESIST GOD'S POWER, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE, and therefore show that this world is EASILY changed because it is merely an illusion.

If we are to be miracle workers, we can't be sitting on a fence looking happily upon a dying world. Our task is to demonstrate that to God anything is possible, and therefore that is NOTHING that cannot be healed or reversed, and even death - the consequences of sin, all torment and sickness and disaster and world-wide or even universe-wide problems CAN be reversed. "There is NOTHING my holiness cannot do", not even the most radically extraordinary things you could ever imagine being possible.

The limitations of this world are a total lie. We are to demonstrate this fact by performing miracles which place total faith in GOD'S COMPLETELY UNLIMITED NATURE. If we trust that HE CAN DO ANYTHING, then we too can do anything in cooperation with His Will.

ā€œThe first thing to remember about miracles is that there is no order of difficulty among them. One is not harder or bigger than another. They are all the same.ā€

Jesus says all miracles are the same. There is no order among them in terms of difficulty, or size, or adjusting proportions in relation to ā€œwhat the problem isā€. Miracle mindedness is a state of equality and evenness. It is flat.

All expressions of love are maximal, which means EVERY miracle expression is at the same level of maximal love. Not wavering or varying in degrees of application. Almost like there is one ā€œbuttonā€ that you push and it puts out a miracle and this same miracle has the power to do anything, every time. So there is no need for varying degrees of expression.

Similarly there is a hierarchy of illusions, in which all illusions APPEAR to have a total LACK of sameness. That everything is different, all forms are different, there are different degrees and amounts and importance and severity. Different amounts of hardness. ā€œIn this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur.ā€

So the scenario we are presented with is a world which seems to show us ā€œthere are varying levels of difficultyā€. And this is based on form. The form that something takes, is taken to be what it MEANS. We look at the form, the state, the shape, the texture, the color, the composition, the seeming evidence of what’s happened, the ā€œproof of sinā€, and we use that to come up with a JUDGEMENT of what ā€œit isā€. And this gives rise to what we think it MEANS, or implies. And that results in an entire hierarchy of degrees of difficulty, not to mention varying levels of reaction.

In LESSON 1 of the workbook, Jesus introduces us to this powerful idea, hitting the ground running. That everything in the world, all things we see, all objects, all FORMS, do not MEAN anything. That the form of things is NOT its meaning. And this is based on the simple yet deep idea of ā€œthere is no worldā€. The world is NOTHING, and therefore the things you see are NOT anything, and therefore do NOT MEAN anything.

ā€œLesson 1 "Nothing I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place) means anything.ā€

If you can realize how this is basically saying that NOTHING in the world means anything, it is telling you that the forms, physical states, conditions, amounts of stuff, it does not HAVE any meaning. One thing is not bigger than another. One thing is not harder to deal with than another. Even a certain form of body state, whether the body seems alive and healthy, or on its death bed, it is NO DIFFERENT in its meaning.

ā€œThey recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful.ā€

We have INVENTED all the meanings we’ve given to everything in the world, including dead bodies. We have DECIDED that a body in a certain state MEANS death, and a body in another state ā€œis betterā€. This is totally arbitrary, based loosely on the form of what we see, which is an illusion. A body seemingly in a state of death is NOT more dead than any other body.

So what we have to learn is that the physical state of things, regardless of its form, no matter its severity, even if a person is dead, even if they are severely sick, even if there’s a car crash, it should not MEAN that this is a very big serious terrible thing. It should not MEAN that this is more serious or more important or more severe, OR harder to recover from, OR really in any way a more DIFFICULT thing to deal with. It is all equally NOTHING.

ā€œYet it is when judgment ceases that healing occurs, because only then it can be understood that there is no order of difficulty in healing.ā€

Nothing I see means ANYTHING. A person seeming to be severely sick, is a judgement based on believing that their FORM is telling us its meaning. That certain states of the body are proof of certain degrees of death. That some things are worse than others. What we have to learn to be miracle minded is that the FORM that something takes, its appearance, no matter what that appearance is, is NOTHING AT ALL, and therefore it does not MEAN anything at all. One form is NOT different to another.

A serious ā€bad situationā€ IS NOT a serious bad situation. It’s an illusion of one, taking the form of one, while simultaneously being absolutely nothing at all. And because it is nothing, it cannot mean anything. It cannot MEAN that it is a horrible nightmare Of awfulness. Because it is nothing, it cannot REALLY be a sickness. Because it is nothing, it is NOT really death, disaster, terror or hell. We can’t look to the form to tell us what anything means. Form is a lie. All physical states and shapes and conditions mean nothing whatsoever.

So the miracle has to overlook the appearance of the situation, completely disregard the evidence, turn away from what every physicality-believing person says, disregard the opinion of everyone who looks upon bodies and consider their states to be real, and do not GIVE any power to death. To not differentiate BETWEEN illusions. ā€œThere will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal. ā€

We are to not believe that a certain ā€œstateā€ is any kind of proof of anything. That it MEANS anything, indicates anything, implies anything, will lead to anything, or tells you a prognosis of even the potential of what might be possible. The form of the world cannot TELL YOU what is real or what anything means. You cannot look to IT to tell you what is true. You should ASK the physical to tell you what is spiritual fact.

We are to DEFY the world of illusions by bringing a power and a light from another world, a power which ignores form and completely overlooks the hierarchy of illusions. That flattens the hierarchy and renders all physical things EQUAL. Which sees all situations as THE SAME. And therefore having ONE response of love and power which deals with this ONE state of illusions, this ONE substrate of deception, and does ONE thing to bringing about a change.

Lesson 5 ā€œApplying the same idea to each of them separately is the first step in ultimately recognizing they are all the same.ā€

lesson 79 ā€œEveryone in this world seems to have his own special problems. Yet they are all the same, and must be recognized as one if the one solution which solves them all is to be accepted.ā€

ā€œAccept the holy instant as this year is born, and take your place, so long left unfulfilled, in the Great Awakening. Make this year different, by making it ALL THE SAME.ā€

When all things in the world are recognized as nothing, they do not MEAN what you thought they meant. You have a clean slate. You have taken away from the world all the meanings it has, which you gave to it, under the belief that IT gave them to you based on its forms.

Its form are deceptions, they do NOT mean what they appear to mean. They ARE not what they seem to be. Do not listen to people telling you that something MEANS something because of its current ā€œstateā€. This is just feedback from an illusory world where nothing is true.

ā€œNothing that the world believes is true.ā€ ā€œNo one has been sure of anything since.ā€

ALL illusory forms, all physical objects, all bodies, all states are illusions of differences and appearances of conflicts. As if that means something. As if that’s proof of what is happening. Some things seem terrible and awful while other things seem harmless and nice. But none of this is true. All the things in the world are ONE thing, one equal sameness of nothing. And it is their nothingness that guarantees their healing. Because now if it is nothing, you are not dealing with a ā€œbig bad problemā€, you’re dealing with an illusion, and illusions recognized as nothing must disappear.

It is the fact that this is all NOTHING, that gives you the power to be free from it, to not fear it, to not endow it with attributes it does not have, to not use it to prove sin is real, and have no effects from it. What is nothing can do nothing and is nothing. There is no world. There is no death. The son of God is free.

ā€œThink how this SEEMS to interfere with the first principle of miracles. For this establishes degrees of TRUTH among illusions, making it appear that some are HARDER to be overcome than others. If it were realized that they are all the same and EQUALLY untrue, it would be easy, then, to understand that miracles apply to ALL of them. Errors of ANY kind can be corrected, BECAUSE they are untrue.ā€

"For this one answer TAKES AWAY the cause of every form of sorrow and of pain. The form affects His answer not at all, for He would teach you but the SINGLE cause of all of them, no matter WHAT their form. And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

ā€œThe body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear.ā€

<p>
"and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."</p><p>
"For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true."</p><p>
Heaven and Earth ARE OPPOSITES. That's a simple fact. Period.</p><p>
In order to return TO heaven, you have to adopt a VIEWPOINT which is OPPOSITE TO EARTH. You have to adopt a way of seeing which is based on heaven's laws and nature.
You have to become able to look upon a world WHICH IS OPPOSITE to heaven, from a perspective that is ALIGNED WITH HEAVEN, so that you can FORGIVE the opposite world. You have to SWITCH SIDES, and side with God's Kingdom/reality INSTEAD OF Earth.</p><p>
The ONLY reason that you need to FORGIVE the world is PRECICELY BECAUSE it IS opposite to heaven. You would NOT need to forgive the world IF IT WAS HEAVEN. You need to forgive it BECAUSE IT IS AN ILLUSION.</p><p>
"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."</p><p>
Only illusory things are forgiven. Forgiveness makes things disappear. It doesn't make INTERPREATATIONS ABOUT the world disappear, it makes THE WORLD DISAPPEAR. You do not want to be in the business of making REALITY disappear. The purpose of forgiveness is to END THE WORLD.</p><p>
"And it is given you to be the means</p><p>
Through which His Voice is heard around the world</p><p>
To close all things of time, to end the sight</p><p>
Of all things visible; and to undo</p><p>
All things that change."</p><p>
In order to adopt a viewpoint which is ALIGNED WITH HEAVEN, as you look up a world which IS OPPOSITE TO HEAVEN, you have to be able to RECOGNIZE that Earth is not like heaven, is not of God, is not real, not true, is impossible, and does not exist.</p><p>
If you cannot adopt this viewpoint you cannot position yourself as EARTH'S OPPOSITE. To align with heaven you have to OPPOSE/DENY Earth. "The world you see must be denied." That means you do NOT believe anything it shows you or does, or that it even exists at all. THERE IS NO WORLD.</p><p>
You cannot have it both ways. You cannot keep Earth and forgive it. If you forgive it you are declaring that the things it does DO NOT APPLY, the things it does HAVE NO POWER, the things it does DO NOT EXIST, and the things it does ARE NOT OF GOD.</p><p>
Forgiving the world does not mean falling in love with it in a SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP in which you want to KEEP it and have your cake while you eat it, while God himself powers the seasons to kill of life only to replace it shortly after.</p><p>
To forgive is to OVERLOOK. To overlook an OPPOSITE WORLD you have to look TO ITS OPPOSITE, to heaven, which is beyond the world. Looking AT heaven will cause you to NOT LOOK AT ITS OPPOSITE, because it's in the OPPOSITE DIRECTION. The world is seen OUTSIDE, heaven is INSIDE. This is why the body's eyes only point outwards.</p><p>
This does not mean you attack the world or hate it or judge it badly or hold it against itself or make it out to be a real sin or any of the rest of those unforgiving attitudes - which are designed to KEEP it. But it does mean that while you are being MORE LOVING, you are ALSO MORE SANE, and are RECOGNIZING that Earth is definitely NOT heaven. God COULD NOT subject his children to this!</p><p>
You in fact believe that Earth is heaven WHEN YOU ARE IN FALSE PERCEPTION. It means you believe that something which is AN ILLUSION, is in fact real. It means you DO NOT RECOGNIZE an illusion, and because of that you think it is total reality. Believing Earth is heaven is EGO and is backwards perception and is unforgiving.</p><p>
When you aligned with Earth's OPPOSITE, heaven, which is God's actual creation, you will nevertheless look out temporarily upon the Earth WITH LOVE, which is not love BECAUSE OF what the world is, but because of where you LOVE FROM. You bring heaven's love and light IN SOME FORM (reflection, image) into the Earth and REPLACE IT.</p><p>
The whole purpose of forgiveness is to REPLACE THE WORLD with heaven, ERASING IT, cancelling it out, and making it disappear. The only purpose of the world when it was made was to BLOT HEAVEN OUT and destroy God's kingdom. This speck of "heaven" has to be cleaned up and the trash has to be thrown out.</p><p>
You will indeed be more loving when you do this. In true perception you will simultaneously RECOGNIZE that EARTH IS OPPOSITE to heaven, while also being very happy and loving. That does not mean you are IN LOVE WITH it. It means you love it IN SPITE OF ITSELF. You extend loving meaning to it BECAUSE IT IS MEANINGLESS.</p><p>
Jesus refers to such an experience of forgiveness as a "happy fiction", or a "happy dream", precisely because Earth IS A FICTION, and not a reality. A happy fiction IS NOT a HAPPY REALITY! You can think of it like a "beautiful mistake" or a "forgiven mis-creation". You temporarily regard it as reflecting heaven (which you project onto it) WHILE ALSO NOT BEING IT. Which means an awareness that it is a FALSE world, which you are smiling upon and laughing as it leaves and takes all its murder and death with it.
"Forgiveness might be called a kind of happy fiction; a way in which the unknowing can bridge the gap between their perception and the truth."</p><p>
You forgive the world because it is NOT real. You forgive the world because it does NOT really exist. You forgive it because it is not really doing any of what it is doing, because it is A DREAM. Forgiveness is not designed to GIVE Earth reality. You already tried to do that in false perception and in the separation from God. The separation from God produced an OPPOSITE WORLD TO HEAVEN.</p><p>
Forgiveness TAKES REALITY AWAY from the Earth. The investment in physical sight is weakened. You give up everything the world is trying to offer. You recognize the Earth holds NOTHING that you want, or need, or could ever benefit from. You recognize it does nothing to you and cannot give you anything. You turn AWAY from Earth TOWARD heaven. You look for the light beyond the darkness, beyond matter, beyond bodies.</p><p>
Just because you're supposed to forgive the world doesn't mean you're forgiving it for what you PROJECTED ONTO it. It means you are forgiving ITS INHERENT NATURE. You are forgiving its murderousness and its brokenness and its failures and its constant dangers and its maliciousness and its cruelty. You are forgiving it because it can't operate any other way because it was MADE TO BE that way. You are forgiving SPACETIME.</p><p>
You are overlooking its shortcomings and limits BECAUSE IT HAS THEM. You are forgiving its deadliness BECAUSE it is deadly, and you're choosing not to hold its deadliness AGAINST it. You are forgiving it FOR BEING deadly. That does no STOP it being deadly. It only changes your approach and viewpoint about its deadliness, until the time comes that forgiveness is so complete that the deadly world STOPS EXISTING ENTIRELY and fades into nothingness.</p><p>
Earth is part of a system of death. "Without the idea of death there is no world." To forgive the system of spacetime is to forgive death. That does not mean that the world stops dying. It means you forgive it FOR having a nature of death. You forgive and love IN SPITE OF its deadly nature. And by doing so you are THINNING IT OUT so that it eventually VANISHES COMPLETELY.</p><p>
You do not want this world. It is not your home. You belong in God.</p>

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

Think about this and what it means.

The mind MUST be stronger than the body. That means, if the body is doing ANYTHING, the mind has MORE POWER than it, and therefore gets to decide EVERYTHING about the body's condition and what it is doing. It gets to override ALL SICKNESS, and ALL DEATH.

Believing that your body has power over your mind is level confusion, and this believe ALONE can "cause" sickness to show up. Believing that your body has a will of its own, a mind of its own, can do stuff you do not want, can make sickness show up, or be caused by the world, or made to die against your will, PRODUCES SICKNESS, because it is FALSE. It's a lie.

Your mind is MORE POWERFUL THAN YOUR BODY.

And, every MIRACLE folks... every fucking *MIRACLE*, demonstrates this.

So if you are not demonstrating this by having a sickness remain, or you go off and die, or you did not overcome death, or you keep having this sickness show up in the body while you THINK that your mind is awake and at peace, then you are IN DENIAL. Plain and simple.

Your mind IS more powerful than your body. Your mind MADE your body. And it is being projected BY the mind, IN the mind. So the mind can do ANYTHING IT WANTS to change the body. if it "can"t.... if you think you do not have that power or ability, you are ASLEEP, and you are in DENIAL, and not aware of the defenses against truth that you have erected.

Sickness in the body MUST therefore be undone, by the mind, in order to PROVE, that the mind is more powerful than the body. IF the mind cannot do this, the mind is NOT more powerful than the body, and you still believe in being a victim of the world, and will at some point go through death.

Its very simple. We are to get to the point where the mind CAN and WILL demonstrate that the body is entirely an effect of it, and so is EVERYTHING In this world. All bodies. All forms. Are effects of the mind. And if the mind gives command that these things shall change, do you think there is any power in all the world which can PREVENT that? There is nothing that can prevent that other than YOUR MIND.

The only thing which stops your mind demonstrating this power, is YOUR MIND, working against ITSELF. Because the secret to salvation is that you are doing this all to yourself. You are willing against yourself. That's what produces sickness and death.

There are no forces in the world, or wills, or minds, capable of stopping your mind from exerting its power over all things. The only obstacle is YOU. Your lack of belief in yourself. Your unawareness of God's power that you share. Your DENIAL. Death is denial. Sickness is denial. You cannot die happily or at peace. If death occurs, you are in denial.

The mind is more powerful than the body. EVERY MIRACLE demonstrates this. So that means, whatever the body state seemed to be, IF IT IS REVERSED and UNDONE by the mind, THIS IS A MIRACLE. A demonstration of PROOF that the ego's laws do not apply and the sickness was put in place by YOU, and therefore because "you made sickness and death and can therefore abolish both"!

Your mind is responsible for the state of your body!

Check this out!!!:

"Defend the body and you have attacked your mind. For you have seen in it the faults, the weaknesses, the limits and the lacks from which you think the body must be saved. You will not see the mind as separate from bodily conditions. And you will impose upon the body all the pain that comes from the conception of the mind as limited and fragile, and apart from other minds and separate from its Source. "

Believing the body is SEPARATE from the mind or that its condition is nothing to do with the mind, IS DENIAL.

Your mind is the cause of everything. You are a powerful creator. And you are to demonstrate WITH MIRACLES that your mind is more powerful than ALL FORMS OF MATTER. Every body, every mountain that you literally move, every storm you calm, every sickness you reverse, every death you undo, and every life you save.

In the course there is a lesson about how God is in everything I see, and later ... because God is in my mind etc. And it talks about seeing God "in" things, like in a waste paper basket. This is often misunderstood to mean that God IS the waste paper basket, when in fact it means you project God's meaning onto it because He is in your mind, not because He is outside your mind. Essentially, if you were to see God, you would not see the basket at all.

"You cannot behold the world and know God."

So there I was, sitting on the toilet. Pondering life's mysteries, like you do. And next to me was sat a wicker basket which we use for the laundry. And so I looked at the basket and wondered in my mind, "is God really in this basket?". Jesus then took the opportunity to immediately show me the truth about this.

I noticed that I could not seem to feel my hands, as if they were barely there. I seemed to be "out" of them as if out of my body or something. This was slightly disorienting, but they felt like they barely existed and weighed nothing. At the same time, I felt what seemed to be "my spirit hand", passing through the basket, and waving around.

As it did this I was aware that the basket was nothing but air, or like a puff of smoke, which was being wafted and displaced by the movement of my spirit-hand. It was very interesting, because it was like the basket didn't even exist. It had no barrier, it was not solid, it put up no resistance, and there was no physical collision with it. Instead it seemed like the lightest, faintest, slightest hint of a whisp of air, dispelled and moved simply by waving. As if just a cloud of particles that could effortlessly be blown away on a breeze.

This ended after a few seconds. But it was enough to reveal to me the quite surprising and "real" truth about the basket. As my physical eyes feasted once again on its solid form, its structure, its shapes and colors, its firmness to the touch, I couldn't help but remark that all of this must be an illusion. In comparison to there being literally NO BASKET, all these seemingly real properties must be some kind of fakery. Without that sense of a boundary, that sense of colliding with it physically, and not being able to pass through it, the basket is nothing but a whisp of smoke. A thin veil.

And so beyond the basket, if God were to be seen, it is recognized that there is no basket at all. It is easily and effortlessly dispelled. Dismissed with the simple waving of a hand, as if it were made of the lightest air, and really nothing at all. Only the spiritual sight could really see this. And clearly spirit is capable of anything, instantly, with no effort at all. Because Jesus showed this to me as if it were the easiest thing in the world. My physical eyes could not see this at all, and my body still reported the solidity of the basket. I wondered then what it would take to recognize this about all the world.

"Nothing so blinding as perception of form."

"There is no world."

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. "

"Raise it together, for it is but a veil that stands between you. Either alone will see it as a solid block, nor realize how thin the drapery that separates you now."

"The body cannot see this, for the body AROSE from this for its protection, which must ALWAYS depend on keeping it NOT seen. The body's eyes will NEVER look on it. Yet they will SEE what it dictates. The body will remain guilt's messenger, and will act as it directs, as long as YOU believe that guilt is real. For the REALITY of guilt is the illusion which seems to make it heavy and opaque, impenetrable, and a REAL foundation for the ego's thought system. Its thinness and transparency are not apparent, until you see the light BEHIND it. And then you see it as a fragile veil, before the light."

In the separation from God, we basically denied God and tried to reject him. We tried to will against his will, reject his fatherhood, block awareness of his love, and hide in the darkness. We did not want God to love us, and wanted to hide our love for him.

This means that now, in our separated ego state, we are actually in a position where we are not allowing ourselves to be aware of God. Or to put it another way, we're trying to shut him out of our mind.

This means ultimately that we're trying NOT to be loved, to block and limit love, and are trying to resist being loved or loveable. We have to suppress our love and lovability in order to shut God out, because God himself IS love.

Before the separation, and in our creation, God gave ALL of himself, all of his immense unlimited unconditional love to us, and loved us with an endless deep love. We received this love and ARE this love. We are created as entirely lovable to God, loved BY God, and we are THE love of God.

In the separation, in the authority problem, we tried to deny this love and therefore also this lovability. But now we find ourselves feeling empty, lacking love, unlovable, unworthy, not good enough, and feeling that we don't love ourselves.

The thing is, that we can't love ourselves WITHOUT including God in that love, and that means that any willingness to love ourselves will have to also be a willingness to LET GOD love us as well. It means being willing to RECEIVE LOVE.

The problem we have is that we basically have stopped letting ourselves RECEIVE, and have placed great emphasis on giving without receiving, which is sacrifice. We don't love ourselves in isolation, and can't love ourselves while trying to be separate from God.

The secret then is that in order to feel loved and loving, you HAVE to let God love you. You have to let God in, into your mind, into your awareness. You have to be willing to allow yourself to RECEIVE LOVE from God, acknowledge that God has already GIVEN total love to you, and have gratitude that it has been given so that you can give it back as well.

You can't feel loved unless you share and flow love. You can't flow love unless God is its source. You can only share the love of God. You can only feel loved if you let God love you and are willing to extend it to others. You can't find love in isolation or exclusion, nor can you find a love in yourself that you can love yourself with that is other than God's love.

This is why when you try to love yourself you fail, because you cannot create love out of nothing. You have to get it from God. There is no love other than God's love, so you have to let God in and let him love you in order to feel love. And when you do... .... you feel loved and safe and happy and strong, and have love to give.

"And I must learn I need do nothing of myself, for I need but accept my Self, my sinlessness, created for me, now already mine, to feel God's Love protecting me from harm, to understand my Father loves His Son; to know I am the Son my Father loves."

"For we will learn today what peace is ours when we forget all things except God's Love."

"Yet forgiveness is the means by which I will recognize my innocence. It is the reflection of God's Love on earth. It will bring me near enough to Heaven that the Love of God can reach down to me and raise me to my home."

"Yet is the world of hatred equally unseen and inconceivable to those who feel God's Love in them. Their world reflects the quietness and peace that shines in them; the gentleness and innocence they see surrounding them; the joy with which they look out from the endless wells of joy within."

"The only part of your mind that has reality, is the part that links you still with God. Would you have ALL of it transformed into a radiant message of God's Love, to share with all the lonely ones, who have denied Him with you? GOD MAKES THIS POSSIBLE. "

"YOU are the work of God, and His Work is wholly loveable and wholly loving. This is how a man MUST think of himself in his heart, because this is what he IS."

"I am sustained by the Love of God."

"Put all your faith in the Love of God within you, eternal, changeless and forever unfailing. This is the answer to whatever confronts you today. Through the Love of God in you, you can resolve all seeming difficulties without effort and in sure confidence."

"I am surrounded by the Love of God."

"I feel the Love of God within me now."

"If you feel the Love of God within you, you look out upon a world of mercy and of love."

"To all who share the love of God the grace is given to be the givers of what they have received."

"You who could give the love of God to everything you see and touch and remember are literally denying Heaven to yourselves."

"I bless you, brother, with the Love of God which I would share with you. For I would learn the joyous lesson that there is no love but God's and yours and mine and everyone's."

"Sacrifice is gone. And in its place, the Love of God can be remembered, and will shine away all memory of sacrifice and loss."

"If you would but let the Holy Spirit tell you of the Love of God for you, and the need that your creations have to be with you forever, you would experience the attraction of the Eternal. For no-one can hear Him speak of this, and long remain willing to linger here. For it IS your will to be in Heaven, where you are complete and quiet, in such sure and loving relationships, that ANY limits are impossible."

"For the special relationship is THE RENUNCIATION OF THE LOVE OF GOD, and the attempt to secure for the self the specialness that He denied."

"But the sane KNOW that only attack COULD produce fear, from which the love of God COMPLETELY protects them."

"The love of God, for a little while, must still be expressed through one body to another."

"You who identify with your egos cannot believe that God loves you. YOU do not love what you have made, and what you have made does not love you. Being made out of the denial of the Father, the ego has no allegiance to its own Maker. You cannot conceive of the real relationship that exists between God and His Souls, because of the hatred you have for the Self you have made."

"You cannot understand how much your Father loves you, for there is no parallel in your experience of the world to help you understand it. There is nothing on earth with which it can compare, and nothing you have ever felt, APART from Him, that resembles it ever so faintly."

The main thing we keep doing over and over, is confusing the mind and the body. Similarly, confusing the mind and the physical world.

If we assign to the body/world MENTAL attributes, we are doing what the course calls "level confusion." We're confused about what level something applies to.

An example is believing that you are a physical body. The belief requires you to try to MERGE the mind and the body. And now the physical body is believed to "have a mind" (the brain).

This belief brings with it what Jesus calls "magic", which is part of level-confusion.. .. the belief that physical things now have MENTAL attributes, such as power, will, mind, causation. And therefore the BODY is now CAUSING things to happen.

This confusion of levels is an attempt to narrow the mind down to a physical object. Another word for this is IDENTIFICATION. The mind is expansive and unlimited and whole. The body is separate and small and limited. They are opposites.

If you try to smush the mind into the body you sort of place the mind "under arrest", to use Jesus's term. This arresting of the mind's nature, trying to make the mind function "like a body", makes the mind sick. And this sickness is then taken out on the body, and now the body becomes sick and dies.

The ego is especially keen to merge the mental and physical levels. It wants to eradicate and ignore the mind level, so it tries to turn it into a physical thing. It wants to ignore that you have a real self, so it tries to imprison it in a body. It wants your sense of "self" to be "I am a physical object". Then it can kill the physical object and believe that the son of God has been killed.

The sole problem is the attempt to merge the mind level with the physical level. To merge self, identity, truth, God's properties, with the physical. To give the physical reality, power, causation, eternal life, value, meaning etc. Doing this makes you mentally ill and makes you lost sight of who and what you are. It's how you lose awareness. This is the attempt to be ONE WITH THE PHYSICAL.

The solution then is that we have to positively "separate out", what is mind and what is physical. We look at the various ways that we refer to physical things with MENTAL labels. Such as thinking that a body is guilty. Guilt is mind-content, not physical. Or that "the weather decided to rain". The weather does not make mental decisions. Or that "that person just sinned" - sin is a mental judgment and bodies are not people.

In particular, our sense of identity, our self, who and what we are, needs to be peeled away from the physical. To put it another way, THE EGO needs to be identified as DISTINCT from the physical. We need to recognize the physical as its own sort of layer of images and illusions - a dream. And this dream covers over a prior dream that is purely mental content. The ego thought system, which is hidden below the surface.

When we stop confusing ego stuff with physical stuff, we can see more clearly that the ego stuff is the problem we need to correct. The insanity in the mind is where the problem is. The insanity influences how we see and what we see. The insanity judges the physical and hates it.

To see the physical world and body as forgiven, we have to correct the content of the mind so that a healed mind can look out from its holiness and see the reflection of heaven. To do this the physical has to be NOT confused with mental constructs. It can't be labelled as being inherently mind-stuff, like sinful, guilty, fearful, evil, etc.

All mental qualities such as reality, truth, eternal life, power, etc have to be TAKEN AWAY from the world and the body. They do not have these things. The body/world has to be recognised as being a neutral image, quite apart from your mind, nothing to do with you, nothing to do with anyone.

Physical bodies have to be seen as having absolutely 0% to do with anyone or anything real. Recognised as just material suits which are temporarily utilised then discarded, with no value of their own. When they are confused with minds, souls, people, wills, powers, etc then we are mentally ill and confused and our identification has shifted from spirit to form.

Even physical death has to be seen as not meaning anything. It has to be seen as not causing anything, harming anything, doing anything real, having any effect. The whole world in fact has to be recognised as not CAUSING anything to anyone or anything real. Causation has to be associated with the mind ONLY. Then the world can be recognised as an EFFECT only.

Long story short, all mind-oriented stuff has to be recognised as NOT PHYSICAL and nothing to do with the physical. So then things like blame, hate, attack, guilt, fear, judgement, murderousness, unworthiness, etc... all is lifted away FROM the world and the body and properly identified as a MIND problem. And since the problem is in the mind, it can now be healed IN the mind.

"The INTENTION is in the mind, which tries to USE the body to carry out the means for sin, in which the MIND believes. Thus is the JOINING of mind and body an INESCAPABLE belief of those who value sin." UrT21D10

"..he does NOT accept the ego's confusion of mind and body." UrT7F3

"A mind and body cannot both exist. Make no attempt to reconcile the two, for one denies the other can be real. If you are physical your mind is gone from your self-concept, for it has no place in which it could be really part of you. If you are Spirit, then the body must be meaningless to your reality." UrW96L4

"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?" UrW135L9

"The attempt to unite non-physical content with physical attributes is illustrated by statements like "the thirst for knowledge." UrT1C20

"Mind CANNOT be made physical" UrT8G11

"All physical illness represents a belief in magic. The whole distortion which created magic rested on the belief that there is a creative ability in matter, which can control the mind. This fallacy can work either way; i.e., it can be misbelieved either that the mind can miscreate IN the body, or that the body can miscreate in the mind. If it can be made clear that the mind, which is the only level of creation, cannot create beyond itself, then neither confusion need occur." UrT2C6

"Think a while about what the world calls sacrifice. Power, fame, money, physical pleasure; who is the hero to whom all these things belong? Could they mean anything except to a body? Yet a body cannot evaluate. By seeking after such things the mind associates itself with the body, obscuring its identity and losing sight of what it really is." UrM14A2

"To the ego, THE MIND IS PRIVATE, and only the body CAN be shared." UrT15H8

Whatever you see in something, if you think it is inherently offensive, it is not. The offensiveness is in your own mind, and you put it there.

That can be hard to accept because it means that you've been used to this idea of an objective reality outside of yourself all this time. A reality which has its own inherent qualities and which reports them to you as though they are distinct from your perception.

What it implies now is that what you're experiencing as reality, is in fact a hallucination that's part of your own mind's malfunctioning, that you literally are inventing everything that bothers you, that you are doing all that to yourself.

This implies also that there is no fixed reality out in the world, and therefore there is no inherent truth based on form. You literally give everything the meaning that it has for you.

ACIM lesson #2, right at the start: "I have given everything I see…all the meaning that it has for me."

This means that you are basically inventing every single justification that you think is truth, or that you think is based on objective facts outside of you. It means that, if you want to, and when it suits you, you MAKE UP everything that you think is true.

If you are in favor of something, you will make up reasons why it is a good idea, to support it and lend weight to your conviction that it is somehow inherently right. And if you are against something, you will make up reasons why it is a bad idea, in order to continue to support your belief that the reality outside of you is fixed and has nothing to do with your experience of it.

It can be perhaps alarming to discover that you are literally making everything up as you go along, and that all the things you thought were factual or true are really just your rationalizations. You decide what stuff means. You lend it credibility and pretend that this credibility comes from outside of you.

You think that other people's opinions, authority, certifications, education, experience, or even physical evidence, are all ways in which the world has an inherent truth. You have come to depend on this notion that you are not experiencing the results of your own made up subjective fantasy, but that everything that's going on is happening "on its own" without your input. And because you do not see the ways that you contribute to it or indeed create it, you do not accept that IT HAS NO TRUTH.

This leaves you in a kind of limbo like state where you're kind of just hanging there with no sense of what the truth outside you is anymore. If you're making up all the meaning, and quite literally the entirety of humanity is totally making up the meaning of everything in society as it goes along, then really there IS no inherent meaning outside of your mind.

This means the world is basically either neutral or insane, and that, based on the ego, it CANNOT make sense. There cannot be truth to it, and since it is a mental hallucination, it is nothing better than a chaotic illusion. Trying to "understand it" is an attempt to discover that it has an inherent meaning of its own, separate from your mind. We are very addicted and conditioned to continually look for meaning outside of ourselves, in the world, in order to disown true meaning (God/Self).

This is what happens when you try to figure things out, diagnose sickness, analyze situations, look for what is really happening, try to find proof, explain the background of something, try to identify causes, look for rational explanations or depend on the opinions of other people's authority. This is you attempting to turn an illusion into a reality, trying to convince yourself that you are NOT the one who has given it all the meaning it has, or that it is not just some blank canvas onto which you've projected an entirely fantastical world.

What this means for your mind and your sense of reality is that you cannot continue to claim that there is an objective world out there, and nor does that world have its own meaning at all. It is in fact a meaningless world, and this meaningless world cannot be understood unless you transcend it.

ACIM lessons 10 through 14:

"10 My thoughts do not mean anything."

"11 My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world."

"12 I am upset because I see a meaningless world.

"13 A meaningless world engenders fear."

"14 God did not create a meaningless world."

If the world is meaningless, and God did not create it (thus it is not objective reality), then this shows you that every meaning you see in it is made up but your thoughts, which are themselves meaningless and contain "pretend meanings". These pretend meanings attempt to give meaning to a world which has none.

What you may be afraid to admit is that it is not possible to find truth in any way shape or form in the world, because the world is not real. And that means your mind, your sense of reality, has been believing that it's had nothing to do with what you perceive all this time. When in fact it is the sole inventor of all the meanings that you think the world has.

Everything supposedly "out there" is neutral and therefore if you think something is good or bad or right or wrong or acceptable or unacceptable it is ONLY because you're making up a truth which you try to turn into reality and try to justify to yourself as being objective. It is not. It is subjective hallucination. So if there's no truth out there, it leaves you sort of hanging as to how to deal with reality.

It is as though you create your own reality, which is a popular new-age concept, which also leads on to manipulating the world. But this really is denying the fact that you do not create reality. You are creating UNREALITY. But it's a step closer to realizing that what you are experiencing is coming from you, and therefore what you perceive is not necessarily objectively real.

You're dreaming, and only God creates reality!

This is why in your awakening journey you then have to go through the process of recognizing the part that your mind plays in inventing meaning, how it distorts perception, how you contribute to what shows up outside of you, how you use it, how completely subjective you're being, and how everything that you thought was objectively real is in fact not real at all.

As you do this you will gradually realize more and more that there IS an objective reality, it's just not "out there" as a physical world, and instead it is within, in your Oneness with God. Formless, timeless, spaceless, ageless. The ONE and only meaning. A meaning that has not been fragmented into a billion conflicts. A meaning which hasn't been artificially attributed to an illusion. A meaning which ACTUALLY IS MEANINGFUL to you - that you can feel in your heart, in your very being.

God is true meaning. God is the one and only meaning. All else is meaningless.

A Course in Miracles - Urtext material - reproduced with permission from the Foundation for Inner Peace (acim.org), and the Foundation for A Course in Miracles (facim.org).
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