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."

Whatever form it takes, if you are perceiving that something outside of you has the power to do something to you, you MUST be afraid.

This fear then is not even optional, because in order to see and thus believe that something has more power than you do, you have to demote your own power and weaken yourself, which is an act of going into fear not love. Fear is a lack of strength, and love is strength.

Seeing yourself AS weak, vulnerable, susceptible, affectable, automatically induces fear. It's not even a question of that you might become afraid or you might not. YOU WILL and YOU MUST.

You cannot experience the perception of being at the effect of the world, no matter who it is or what form it takes or what the situation is, without experiencing fear.

That means, fear is actually a component of the WAY that you are perceiving the world. And it also means, that if you change the way you perceive, you CANNOT be afraid. Not just that you might not be, or occasionally will, but literally CANNOT.

You cannot experience fear at all if you are perceiving that there is no threat, no danger, nothing against you, no separate will, and that you are WHOLE. You cannot experience fear whatsoever when you recognize yourself as everything, and cease attacking yourself. There is no basis for it. Fear simply will stop existing because you're not making it.

So if you feel afraid about something, YOU KNOW, that it means, you HAVE CHOSEN to see yourself as a victim. You HAVE looked at the situation, with you in it, playing the role of "I'm being affected by this". And then you know, that this is you attempting to demonstrate and PROVE that you can be attacked.

Why would you try to prove you can be attacked? And why would you use FEAR to prove this, positioning yourself as though you really are in threat and danger? Especially given you cannot be threatened UNLESS you threaten yourself with your mistaken perception!

All attack is self attack. The world can do nothing to you. If you could fully believe that you would have no fear and be invulnerable. Demonstrate invulnerability to PROVE that you are not at the effect of the world.

Are you guilty? Do you deserve forgiveness? Have you repented of your 'sin'?

If you are guilty of something, the very best thing you can do is to reclaim your innocence as soon as possible. If what you were doing before was incorrect, then returning to a state of correction is the best possible atonement you can offer.

If someone truly had a sane perception of you, they would ask that you stop being guilty and instead hold the light of innocence so that both you and they can be healed. Right? The greatest gift that a victimizer could give is to cease victimizing. Right? So to cease victimizing you have to stop choosing sin or guilt or fear. Which means you must choose innocence.

So while often we want our victimizers to be punished, to pay, to suffer, to be guilty, as though this somehow is 'better' or is justice or is a way of making up for what they did, this really is self defeating.

It is your brothers role to provide salvation and healing to you. He can only do that if he also SHARES in salvation and healing. The unhealed cannot heal. The guilty cannot provide innocence. You can't have it both ways - you can't have your vicitmizer be guilty while at the same time wanting them to 'take back' what they did.

You also can't hold guilt against a victimizer and expect to feel free of guilt yourself. How about that?

Here's the new rule.

Either you are both guilty or you are both innocent, but never one or the other.

If the world ran more according to this truth we would be far better off. An offering of guilt from a victimizer following an attack is nothing more than rubbing salt into the wound. Why would you want them to be guilty on top of having already attacked you? Guilt is an attack. You THINK that the attack of guilt is isolated to the person, and they can be guilty but not you. This is completely false and will totally undermine your sense of safety.

If a person is guilty, the guilt attacks them and you equally. Just as when someone is sick, the sickness is not limited to them - it is a statement of attack AND an attempt to infect everyone else. Not to induce guilt in saying that, but the Course does explain that sickness is an attempt to prove that everyone is sick. And not just bodily sickness - mind sickness, emotional sickness, etc.

The ONLY way for you to truly be happy and peaceful and to receive love and healing and be free of all effects of an attack, is to see the attacker as innocent and to encourage them to be innocent.

So yes, is sounds completely nonsense.... you just attacked me, ok, please revert to being loving and love me instead. Instead of... you just attacked me, you horrible asshole, you're so guilty and I hate you. Well, good luck with that self hate.

And if you are the victimizer, do you really think you're going to be better off or are doing the victim a service by being guilty all the time? Like, how much time is needed for you to be in shame and guilt in order to atone? A lifetime? At what point is it enough? When do you deserve forgiveness. You ALWAYS deserve forgiveness but you HAVE to claim and own it for yourself, because nobody, including the victim, is going to give you that permission of entitlement.

If you've ever made a significant enough mistake you'll know from experience, that people love to use you as a skapegoat and to jump on the bandwagon of unforgiveness. They want you to be guilty, so that you are the one who gets the punishment. What about THEIR sin? They're hardly being an example of love. At some point you have to realize, not only that you are the one who chose to be guilty and ashamed, but also therefore you are the one who has to reclaim innocence. Nobody can do it for you.

We all deserve to be innocent. We all deserve love. True `repentance` of sin, IF we REALLY want people to truly atone and repent, MUST mean that we allow them to be our SAVIOR. We can't hold a grudge, and we can't keep demanding their punishment. This only keeps ourselves imprisoned. IF we really want atonement and we really want healing, we HAVE to allow the attacker to be seen as innocent, otherwise there is no hope whatsoever and we're just getting lost in the ego.

Yes it runs against what we're used to. It runs against the ego. It goes against the societal normal. It runs counter to our normal ego emotional reactions. But if we want freedom and we truly want healing rather than suffering, we have to forgive ourselves AND everyone else no matter what. We HAVE to ask for a gift of innocence from all of our enemies, otherwise to hold them imprisoned is just to attack ourselves indirectly.

Love is not guilt. We don't need an offering of guilt or a performance of shame to make up for what someone did to us. We need THEM to heal. We need THEM to return to peace and love. Otherwise, how are we going to be able to get there ourselves?

Love your enemies. We are all one.

This will sound absurd to anyone who is actually upset or offended.

If you are completely clear and certain about what the truth is about yourself, it will be unshakeable and undeniable. You will be so aware of this truth that when something comes along which attempts to contradict it, you will recognize that thing as completely false and untrue.

When you are completely clear about the truth of you, you will also recognize that it is impossible to be attacked or targeted by the egos in other people. The ego in another is a claim that something false is true. It is confusion about what the truth is. Their claim that something is true of "you", is a claim that there is a "false you" within you that is really there, and that it is your identity. It is not.

They will attack a perceived, projected false identity, which they made up, and are attacking that false identity thinking that it is who and what you are. If you are clear about what your true identity is, you will recognize and know that they are not attacking you at all, they're attacking something they are projecting from themselves. They are in fact attacking themselves and not you at all.

It then comes as a relief to know that if you are completely certain about what is true about you, what is your true identity, and you are confident in that awareness and accepted knowledge, then it will always show you that "nothing real can be threatened." The ego never attacks reality because it can't, it only ever attacks itself and its projections of itself.

Curiously, you'll remain perfectly calm and still and see other people spouting off all kinds of attempts at accusation and attack, none of which have anything to do with you whatsoever. You cannot take it personally because it is literally not about you. Being able to see and recognize that it is not about you, because it is clearly false, because you are clear about what the truth us, makes you completely out of reach of all attack and therefore what you are can never be offended or upset.

From this clear perspective you will then see that other people's attacks and blame and accusations and name-calling and all the rest of it, is really their own self-attack all happening inside their own little bubble of reality. It's having no effect on you at all because it's not even really about you.

But if you are mistaken, yourself, and you believe something that's untrue of you is actually true of you, you WILL believe that not only is someone's attack about you, it is attacking your Self and it is actually agreeing with what you believe about yourself. If you believe you are guilty or sinful and someone accuses "that guilty you" of being guilty of something, you will recoil and react with horror and upset and have a flare-up of unconscious guilt, which you'll try to project the cause of onto the other person, but basically you are upset because you agree with them.

If you believe there's something wrong with you and someone says there's something wrong with you, even if that's horrible and hurts and you want to deny it and want to stop them from saying it, you still are the one who is believing it about yourself. It doesn't even matter if they start or stop or continue or not. You are the one who has attacked yourself, and that's the only reason why you are upset.

You are not upset because the other people had the power to put upset into you, or to cause you to be offended. It's not possible for anyone to offend the truth of what you are. Only your ego - which is false and untrue - can become offended. And because it's the ego being offended, it will be in denial about how it is at war with itself, and will use any opportunity it can to find other people guilty or to blame them for being the one who is wrong.

It is not mature in any way to accuse others of being the cause of something you do not like. It is not mature to blame someone for triggering your pre-existing upset. It is not mature to be highly offended by events in the world or what people do to each other or what they try to do to you. These are just cover-ups for your own self attack and self hatred which you are not willing to admit to.

Do you think God is offended by murder? He laughs in the face of it knowing it has no power whatsoever to do anything real to anyone. Do you think God is upset and hurt when someone is attacked? No. God remains happy and loving at all times and cannot be upset. This either makes God a horrible bigoted racist sexist anti-whatever fucker, or .... there's something majorly wrong with how we're seeing the world. I'll wager that God is the sane one here.

For many years I’ve had this strange knowing in the background, that the course is about immortality. But in our society, immortality is laughed upon as something utterly impossible and ridiculous.

I did not see hardly anyone else speaking of the immortality implied in the course. I thought maybe I was wrong about it and that it wasn’t about this. But over time the more I’ve studied it the more I see the ENTIRE course pointing towards our TOTAL invulnerability. Even "forgiveness" is only an aspect of the fact that no-one has even really done anything to you, because you are immortal!

This means immortality, as a spirit-identified person, is not only completely natural, it is the ONLY truth. Mortality is in fact NOT true at all. Yet the world believes everything is mortal, attackable, susceptible, vulnerable, hurtable, destructible. And this is because the world itself is all of these things, being unlike the nature of reality.

Regardless of the seeming profound lack of support for ideas of immortality among other ACIM students, I continually feel drawn to it like a moth to a flame, as a bright light which beckons with truth .. and something about it which is known. A beacon of truth in the midst of all darkness and confusion and the avalanch of opinions.

Becoming identified as a non-body spirit entity, and stopping believing that I am a body, is entirely an act of siding with immortality. Regarding myself as incapable of being attacked by anyone but myself, is an act of aligning with invulnerability. Realizing that the world has no power over me beyond what I give to it, is a restoration of my unlimited power and unopposed will.

Everything in ACIM is pointing towards heaven. Pointing towards reality. Pointing towards the fact that God’s truth and immortal nature are the ONLY truth, and everything else is utterly bullshit."You are immortal and you cannot die, but you can confuse yourself with things that do."

The entire world, all bodies, the entire ego thought system, all attack sickness and death, is a "confusing yourself" with things that are not immortal. Confusing who you ARE. Not knowing yourself as God knows you. Rejecting your true nature. Separation is rejection, and is the opposite of joining with yourself. And when you reject your immortal self you do not love yourself.

Love is immortality because it is endless. It is permanent and unconditonal and unlimited. It is what you are made of. You cannot die, ever. You cannot be hurt in any real way. You cannot be abused or persecuted or offended or attacked or damaged. No-one can do anything to your soul.

You alone are responsible for the confusion you have of believing that these things CAN affect you, which is an act of affecting yourself and blaming it someone else. All you need to learn is this one thing. You can never die. You are PERMANENT. You can never be changed. You can never malfunction. You cannot be sick. Nothing can ever be wrong with you. If you think there is something wrong with you, you MUST be mistaken.

God creates only that which is permanent. You are still as God created you. Not one single speck of the world has ever touched you. Not one single event has ever changed or defined you. Not a single second of a single day has done anything whatsoever to change God’s creative act of creating you perfect. And you WILL NEVER stop being PRECICELY as He wills that you be forever.

Freedom of Choice > Responsibility > Power > Causation > Effects.

To simplify, think of cause and effect. You are either the cause, or the effect. If you see yourself as the cause, you cannot be an effect. Your casual outpouring is so strong nothing can come at you. If you see yourself as not the cause, you MUST see yourself as being highly affected and therefore ARE an effect of something.

When you project responsibility outside yourself, onto another or the world, you are disowning and giving away your power. You are giving power TO them. You are framing them in your mind as having the power to CAUSE YOU, and to make you have effects. And it will seem these effects are against your will - something you did not choose.

But you are choosing it, because you are using your power to PRETEND to disown your power, you are still using your power to frame someone as having power over you, and the power that you see IN them acting against you IS YOUR POWER. You just are seeing it as though it belongs to someone else and is not a part of you.

You've separated yourself from your power and now your power is seeming to turn around 180 degrees and come back at you in the form of "an alien will", causing you, changing you, defining you, altering you without your choosing. Or so it seems. Because you ARE choosing this. You are choosing to see your power as against yourself, doing things to you. Even if it seems to be being done "through" others vicariously.

This means you're in a position which is rather strange, where you are FIGHTING YOURSELF. Like literally you are taking your power, moving it away from you, turning it around, and then launching it at yourself in an attack mode, causing you to have effects.

Your mind believes the power is out there against you. Your mind ALSO must believe therefore that since you are NOT having the power, you are NOT the cause, you are NOT responsible, you MUST BE AN EFFECT. The belief in being not the cause and being affected go hand in hand.

This means that your mind is putting in place both the framing of something external as "attacking you", AND it is putting in place the SYMPTOMS, physically mentally or emotionally, that you would expect to occur IF that power were acting upon you. Your mind ITSELF, makes up effects, that correspond to the perceived cause.

This literally means your mind makes symptoms in the body, makes up sickness and disease and even death, makes up wounds and heartache, makes up emotional reactions and loss and sadness and anger and hurt, to correspond to the perceived external cause. Not just imagining it, but actually MAKING IT, producing it, putting it into your experience, changing your feelings, changing your body.

This especially happens when you project guilt, in which you are basically projecting responsibility, which is cause. You are saying, I am not the cause of this, you are, and are pointing a finger and hurling guilt at another to try to make it stick to them. But moreso what you are doing is you are trying to give them power and responsibility and will and freedom and choice and causation to have these things INSTEAD of you.

It's rather bizarre then that we literally give power to people, to frame them as capable of attacking us, threatening us, making us afraid, upsetting us, doing things to us. We effectively WANT THEM TO. Even if on the surface we are claiming to be innocent, even if we are feeling that feeling of "I didn't choose this, I don't want this, I didn't ask for it."

You see, that victim perspective in which you feel like you are being unfairly treated, that's the feeling you get when you are becoming "an effect". It's the recognition that you have indeed projected power, cause, responsibility etc, and so see yourself as NOT responsible, NOT the cause, NOT the one using power to make something happen.

In victimhood (ego) you perceive that you are not the cause of what's happening, and you are in denial of this, and having denied it you are projecting it. So now you see cause as outside of you, in someone else, acting upon you, at the same time as NOT seeing that you are causing anything yourself. The denial acts as a barrier blocking awareness of what YOU are doing, that YOU are using power, that YOU are responsible, that YOU are causing this.

It's understandable then that as the victimhood role strengthens, the denial and disownership of power, causation and responsibility increases. You believe less and less that "it's your fault" (guilt-related). You believe less and less that you chose it, wanted it, made it happen, or had anything to do with it. Almost as if you were just minding your own business doing nothing at all and someone came out of the blue and attacked you for no good reason. As if you were just completely innocent (the face of innocence).

And that's simply because the power has been projected. The power has been given away, disowned, you don't want it, and you WANT the other to have it. So you simultaneously have this experience of "I didn't ask for this, how could you do this to me", and "that person is having power over me and is the cause of me." You can't have one part without the other. Just as you can't have a belief in an external cause WITHOUT a belief in having effects as well. "I want you to have my power, please use it against me, and I will pretend I don't want you to."

So we quite literally use the power of our mind to dissociate from our power, we hand it over to all kinds of things out there that HAVE NO POWER, other than us giving it to it in our minds. And then having given it to them, they seem to loom over us and we now fear them and feel powerless and weak and feeble. Unable to go up against such a power, as though we have no power at all. And now we are tempted to see ourselves as unfairly treated.

What we have to recognize of course is the secret of salvation - that we are doing this to ourselves. We have to recognize and own the power and responsibility. We have to take back the power of decision and use it to choose otherwise with the Holy Spirit. We have to stop believing that ANYTHING outside of us HAS OUR POWER, and indeed need to recognize that the power we THOUGHT was theirs is in fact our own. It only seemed like theirs because we disowned it and didn't want it.

So we take our power back. We claim responsibility for causing everything we are experiencing. We acknowledge, I have caused this thing, I have done this to myself, it is not being done by this other person or something in the body or the world, I am not a victim of this, I am not being affected by them, they have no power over me. I own and take back and reclaim my own power which I gave away, and take full responsibility for it. Which means that I must be CHOOSING what happens, I must be CAUSING what happens, and I MUST have caused all of my own suffering.

All my symptoms I put in place myself. All my upset emotions I put in place myself. All my despair and loss and shame and guilt I did to myself. All sense that I'd been attacked or mistreated or shamed or attacked by anyone else was MY MISTAKE in perceiving this wrongly. I did not recognize that I was using my power to pretend to disown my power, and using it to set up others to attack me for me. I didn't realize I was fighting against myself with a divided will. I have been using my power to try to destroy myself, attacking myself, using others to do my bidding, and then blaming them for it.

Ultimately you need to resume your role and position as ruler of the universe. You are the CAUSE of everything you see and feel and think and experience. You are the co-creator with God with unlimited power. What you say happens, what you do not want does not happen. You articulate reality. You CREATE. You cause what happens and you WANT what happens because you chose it. Everything that happens YOU MUST BE CHOOSING. And by the power of your decision you choose NOT TO SUFFER AND TO STOP ATTACKING YOURSELF LIKE THIS.

Indeed, when you realize that nothing at all has been attacking you OTHER THAN YOURSELF, through your mis-use of your power and will, you can find relief in knowing that if you would just stop hurting your own self, stop giving away your power so that you can be indirectly attacked by yourself, stop disowning responsibility for CAUSING, for CHOOSING, you would stop suffering entirely, and forever. Because NO ONE HAS POWER OVER YOU OTHER THAN YOURSELF! And no-one and nothing can ever cause you to suffer, to be sick, or to die without your consent.

"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."

Your mind is always obeying the laws which Oneness established for all minds, regardless of whether you are in the ego or not. These laws are permanent and unavoidable.

These laws are fully obvious and correctly obeyed when you have True Perception. These apply to God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. They also apply to the ego even though it will deny it.

The ego will attempt to PRETEND that these laws do not apply or are not operating. (more on that later)

The laws:

1) Whatever applies to you applies to the entire Sonship and all of existence equally, and vice versa. It is not possible for something to apply to you which does not apply to others the same. It is not possible for something to apply to them which does not apply to you. If something applies to you, it applies everywhere instantly. If something applies to another, it applies to you immediately. In other words, THERE ARE NO PRIVATE LAWS.

2) Ideas leave not their source, therefore you can only experience what is INSIDE your mind. You cannot experience attack from outside the mind or outside of your Self. Attack has to be manifest WITHIN your mind, put there by yourself. You can only be aware of the content of your mind, not what is separate from it.

3) Cause and effect are NEVER separated. Where there is a cause, there must be an effect. A mind cannot contain a cause without containing an effect, and vice versa. It is not possible for cause outside the mind to put effects inside the mind - the mind has to contain both cause and effect inside itself. You cannot perceive an attacker without inventing an attacker within yourself.

4) You cannot attack without being attacked. All attack is self attack. It is impossible to do something to a separate part of the Sonship without you experiencing absolutely all of the effects. They are you. You are one with them. You cannot judge, attack, hate, condemn, or find sinful, without it applying to you. It's either BOTH of you are sinful, or neither, but never one or the other. This is the meaning of SHARED INTERESTS.

5) You cannot perceive, access, be aware of, or affected by, anything outside of your mind. There IS no outside. You cannot perceive outside of yourself. Anything you perceive or are aware of must be happening WITHIN your own mind. Believing there is a separate will outside your mind will frighten you because of what it can do outside of the scope of your mind's reach, or in other words, it has power over you which you can do nothing to prevent. Such a belief will result in death.

6) Your mind cannot remain neutral and perceive something which is not neutral. There are no neutral thoughts. Your mind does not have the ability to perceive objectively that someone is being sinful, separate from your own sin. If they are seen as sinning, you are seen as sinning. You DO NOT have an ability to perceive neutrally or objectively while seeing sin. Therefore you cannot tell if your brother is sinful or not, because to see sin in them it MUST be in you, and you cannot see past your own sin, so are blind.

There may be some more ways we can talk about the way a mind of oneness operates, but this is enough for now.

Now, the mind is ALWAYS bound by these laws, no matter what, no matter if the ego is getting involved (false perception) or whether you are enlightened The presence of ego (an attempt to defy the law) DOES NOT stop the laws operating.

However, what the ego TRIES to do, is to DENY the law, and PRETEND that these laws are NOT permanently operating. It pretends it's possible to IGNORE these laws, and to operate in a different way, and not receive the consequences of the law. The ego sees itself as rewriting the laws and having power over the laws (law = God's Will).

The thing is, when the ego tries to pretend the laws don't apply, all kinds of shit happens. It will try to convince you there is a separation between cause and effect. It will try to convince you you can get away with murder, can see objectively that someone is sinful and not you, that what applies to you does not apply to others, that you have escaped consequences of sin and someone else is paying for it, and that you can use the body for attack without being attacked.

ACIM quote: "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. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all."

Within the laws of God, this means that the ego tells you that you can see the sins of others "through" your body, without your body being affected. This is denial. It is not true. If you attempt to see your brother as sinful, IT MUST APPLY TO YOU ALSO. This automatically will condemn and attack YOU, and this WILL show up in your body image as symptoms or signs of attack. Another word for that is forms of sickness.

You literally cannot judge or accuse or condemn without being condemned, by yourself. What you are actually doing then, is you're trying to use the body as a weapon. Because there is a direct correlation between your belief in and projection of sin, and sickness showing up, you will make your body SICK, in an attempt to prove that your brother is sinful. This is the ONLY WAY you can attempt to prove it. By proving you can be attacked or hurt, you demonstrate that your brother is the sinner and not you. Or at least that's the ego's interpretation of it. In God's law, you are hurt BY YOUR OWN ATTACK.

People literally are walking around projecting sin and hate through their body, trying to get rid of sin onto someone else to escape the consequences of the law, but are nevertheless finding that it makes their body sick. They cannot escape the law, but they're pretending to. The effects of sickness in the body also then reflect the level confusion, that those outside of yourself are causing you to be hurt.

Trying to prove this is level confusion and will implement sickness. All sickness is a form of magic. Magic is the belief that a lower level can cause and higher level (e.g. body causes mind, others cause you, being a victim etc). This turns you into an EFFECT and your body will demonstrate those effects to correlate to the perceived external cause.

When someone gets to the point where their body is so sick that it seems to die, they are actually attempting to severely prove that they can suffer and die, that it is someone or something else *separate* that has caused it, and therefore the dying body is a weapon. It accuses everyone and everything of sin, being the cause of the death - anything other than yourself.

Death of the body is a fulfillment of a belief in sin, an attempt to kill the Son of God by binding him to form, and demonstrates a lack of forgiveness. A dying body is like a kamikaze weapon, attempting to infect and destroy everything and prove that God and His son are dead. God's death (the purpose of the dream of death) cannot be proven without YOU dying. Death is also completely "contained" as an effect upon YOURSELF, because ideas leave not their source and therefore, God is not affected by it.

This is of course an ego cover-up job, because NO-ONE CAN DIE WITHOUT THEIR OWN CONSENT. Meaning, your body cannot die unless you are believing that everyone else must be dead at some level. Death is symptomatic of huge level confusion, where the lower level (world of effects) has produced a "cause" upon the higher level (mind). The person believing this MUST show death in the body image to represent God's law that what applies to others applies to you. All sickness and death is an ACCUSATION that your brother has sinned against you.

This also therefore means that, if you stop accusing your brother of sin, your body CANNOT SHOW SICKNESS. No exceptions. Sickness can ONLY come about through mis-use of the law, where you attempted to perceive your brother as corrupt, sinful, guilty, wrong in some way. YOU will receive the effects of this belief. Your body will show it.

And this also means that if you stop believing in sin, your body MUST show and demonstrate a complete lack of symptoms of sickness. If there was sickness showing up previously due to prior judgement, IT MUST DISAPPEAR. No exceptions. What has no cause cannot remain. If you understand the Course's section on "sickness is a defense against the truth" you will see that we implement sickness only as a form of defense and denial of the truth, and as a form of level confusion. Once this denial and defenses is not needed, it will be dropped, and the sickness MUST DISAPPEAR as a result of having recognized the illusions you were implementing.

You need to also realize that attack can only happen INSIDE your mind. It's not possible to perceive or experience external attack. This means, if there is an "external person" who seems to attack, or is tempting you to believe in sin, the only way you can SEE that attack is if it is INSIDE the scope of your mind. That means, for you to SEE attack, your own mind has to be sectioned off and part of it has to become an attacker. This attacker is part of yourself, and is in ADDITION to the external attacker, projected onto them. Simultaneously, the part that is not seen as the attacker will be sectioned off and seen as a victim of attack. Your mind will now be attacking ITSELF.

Therefore realize, your mind implements both the belief in a CAUSE of sin, AND the effects of sin, simultaneously. This all happens inside yourself, even if it seems like the person attacking it outside of you. You cannot see them as the source of attack. You have to make YOURSELF the attacker. That means, as in the secret to salvation, that you are literally doing this to yourself. Your mind manifests/produces/visualizes and turns into FORM, both the attacker and the attacked, the cause and the effects. You will put effects of sickness into your body and hold it hostage with the part of you that is hallucinating an attacker.

Now here's the trick of healing. You have to recognize you are doing this to yourself. Other people or external causes have NOTHING to do with it. You are the one who invented the cause and the effects of your sickness. You believe in both of them, and your split mind has two identities. You must recognize that illusions of causes are not real causes, you are the one who, within your mind, is attacking yourself and pretending it has something to with others, and YOU put in place ALL of the symptoms/effects of that causality.

As Jesus tells us, "you made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both". Sickness has NO CAUSE other than your mind's decision to make it. Sickness has no reason to remain, other than your NEED to keep it (as a defense against truth).

When you do not need or choose to keep it, and recognize the illusion you made (that cause is unloving and sinful - which is really the belief that God in evil and has attacked you), the symptoms of sickness MUST DISAPPEAR. You DID make your sickness, and you DID make death, and you CAN abolish them. Not only that, because you are bound by the laws of God, you cannot FAIL to abolish them if you stop using your body for attack. Sickness simply must vanish to comply with the law.

There are no loopholes in the law. There are no exceptions. There are no other causes of sickness beyond yourself. Sickness has no mind, will or power of its own. No-one maintains it besides you. It can and must disappear when you return to True Perception. Illusions recognized must disappear. A guiltless mind cannot suffer, because a guiltless mind CANNOT MAINTAIN SICKNESS. Sickness has to disappear.

This is so black and white a law, that Jesus tells us, "a sick body is proof that the mind has not been healed." You literally CANNOT be sick if your mind is healed. If sickness is showing up, or remains, your mind IS NOT healed. You can be in denial of this, as most people are. You can believe that it's possible to be at peace and keep sickness. But you can't. The law confirms that sickness WILL NOT and CANNOT show up at all if the mind is sane and free. Similarly you cannot be at peace with death or dying, because to die is the ULTIMATE expression of a belief in sin.

The dead can be raised and all sickness can be healed, BECAUSE of the law. If this were not true, resurrection would be impossible. You cannot believe in death and make the body die and believe in resurrection. Using the body lovelessly will make it suffer and die. Believing only in eternal life will bring the body to health, since it is not being attacked and twisted and deformed by the mind's attitude. The body is just an image being projected, it can EASILY be changed by the healed mind.

Jesus tells us not to use sickness to attempt to demonstrate that our brother is a sinner. If our body is sick in any way, we ARE using it to prove he is a sinner. He asks us to demonstrate that WE CANNOT BE HURT, which proves that our brother is not sinful and cannot cause death. HIS innocence is proven when YOUR innocence is proven. This DOES play out on the visual, perceptible, illusory dream level of the world, because the world is a symbol in the mind. The body can become a symbol of holiness and innocence, used as a teaching device to prove to your brother that he has not sinned. HE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO ATTACK IT, because YOU will not put symptoms of sickness into it, and HE is not an evil cause of effects!

You must understand the law. The law applies to you. You cannot escape it. But you can be in denial and pretend it does not apply. And then you will suffer and die. Choose the equal innocence of the entire Sonship and Live.

If someone tries to attack you, they have a problem. They are not sane. They are attacking themselves, but they're doing it in such a way that they think they are attacking someone else. Whatever they accuse you of, they are accusing themselves of.

Anyone who attacks is not in their right mind. No one in their right mind would attack, because they'd recognize that part of themself is in the other, and to attack them is to attack themselves. This is the law of God, the Golden Rule. Also the right minded are not split minded, and do not act against themselves or other.

If someone is attacking you, or it seems like they are, they are not really attacking who you are, they are attacking an image in their mind of what they think you are. And this image is really an image of what they think they are.

They target your body because they are being unforgiving toward themselves, and in this unforgiveness they can't help but focus on the form of objects. This mean they are not really seeing you, your spirit, or your real identity. The target of their attack is themselves, driven by guilt.

It can look like the attack is upon you, because in their dissociated state they separate off the part of their mind that attacks itself and see it as "outside themselves". They attack "it", to try to maintain the split minded state. And in dissociating from it, they tend to associate it with someone other than themselves. And that may seem to be you.

Even if they call your name, even if they speak of you and what you've done to them, even if they hurl abuse at "you", it is really nothing to do with you. Not even remotely.

"You but accuse your brother of your own sins."

"It can be but myself I crucify."

"I can be attacked by nothing but my thoughts."

So in no way has this attack got anything to do with you at all. It might seem to play out that way, or it might even seem that they physically attack your body as if that really is an attack upon you, but it is still themselves they are trying to attack.

"Let them be as vicious and hateful as they may. They could have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is your dream."When you yourself are not in your right mind, you will attack yourself. You'll accuse yourself of sin and judge yourself harshly. This means you believe it's true that you are guilty.

When this is happening, and if it is happening at the same time as another insane person fighting with their own shadows, you will fail to recognize that their attack is entirely a self attack. You will fail to realize they are calling out for love, and you will think that their hallucinated "attack on you", which is really on themselves, is actually about you.

Since what they accuse you of taps into what you have accused yourself of, you won't be able to discern between the two. This will create a kind of blind-spot in your mind. A block to awareness. And because of the block, you will be deceived. And being deceived you'll "read into" what they're doing, failing to see all of what they are doing to themselves. And due to this lack of recognition, you'll think that some of what they are doing, they are doing to you, and that it's really about you.

Because of your own self attack, you see yourself as vulnerable and affect-able. And you'll see yourself as being able to be accessed by the cause-effect relationships that seem to play out physically. And you will have confused yourself with your body, and now it may seem that because it can be attacked, you can be attacked. And so you're going to take their attempted attack personally as a threat to your identity and existence.

That means you're failing to remember it's your dream, and have entered into dreaming, or a state of greater unconsciousness. And in this state you'll think that someone else "is attacking you" and is "having an effect on you". It's really you having an effect on you, but you confuse it for them being the cause. So you blame them for it.

It can seem as if, what they do triggers pain in you. And its really your own pain that you put there, being raised to awareness. Because it resonates with what they are expressing and agrees with it. And then you'll think they caused the pain in you because it arose when they attacked, but its really your own self inflicted wound that is unhealed, resurfacing in resonance with their insane behavior.

You then are in the position of having to apply forgiveness processes to sort out "what is yours" and "what is theirs". And ultimately this has to lead to the undoing of the self attack, otherwise you won't be able to recognize that the other person was not the cause of your upset. And their innocence can only be recognized if you can see how they are solely attacking themselves.

The blinds spots and blocks to awareness in your own mind have to be removed, otherwise you cannot see the full picture. And without the full picture you can't tell whether what someone is doing is really about you or not. You can't tell your sin apart from theirs. You have to find your own innocence in order to recognize the innocence of others.

Once you do, what seemed like a call for attack, or seemed like an obvious selfish attack upon you, is now recognized as a call for love. It's calling for love because the person is solely interacting with themselves, within their mind, in a private world. And they are attacking themselves, believing it is not coming from them. And they seem to falsely accuse you of it, which you must not buy into, for your sake and theirs.

In recognizing the secret of salvation that people can only attack themselves, and no one ever really attacks anyone else, you take responsibility for your own choices and give them back responsibility for theirs.

Everything they are experiencing they are doing to themselves. Everything you are experiencing you are doing to yourself. And never the two shall meet. People are asking for love, in an attacking way, because they are denying their own love. The only thing that can truly be shared or communicated between you, is love.

Love is joining in peace and recognition. It facilitates sharing and communication and transfer. Without love, the breakdown of communication and separation of mind and relationship ensures that all attack is self contained. Just as trying to will against God disables all will and is an attempt to will nothing, trying to attack places you in a prison in your mind and stops any transfer to others. Attack is always separation between others and self. This happens because God does not will that attack between beings be possible.

No-one is ever affected by anyone else. No-one else is the cause of you. You have not caused anyone else, other than your own creations. And God is the only cause of you and your equal siblings. There has never been an attack on you, by anyone but yourself. And anyone who believes otherwise is not in their right mind.

"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." .... ie the mind IS separate from bodily conditions. And since "if I defend myself I am attacked", if you try to DIRECTLY defend the body you will attack it and keep it sick.

However...

"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."

Therefore, by recognizing that the mind is distinct from the body and NOT at the effect of the body, the mind assumes a position of healing, which HEALS the body. By focusing first on the healing of the mind, the healed mind HEALS the body.

"The mind, being sane, heals the body."

These statements are not saying that you can just focus on mind and ignore the body's condition. Or that by recognizing mind is SEPARATE from the body - thus not affected BY it - that the mind would still maintain or allow the body's sickened state.

Instead, Jesus is saying that once you DO see that your mind IS NOT your body, THIS state of mind will CAUSE the body to heal.

"Now is the body healed by miracles."

Then the body will become "a healthy serviceable instrument."

It is made healthy due to the removal of the level confusion that's inherent to the belief that the mind IS the body, or that the identity is the body/ego. Once you become clearer about WHAT YOU ARE, and what mind is, the mind adopts its natural HEALING function and cures all sickness.

This teaching has nothing to do with just escaping the body and being only identified with spirit - which IS a goal - but the EFFECT of this goal is that mind regains its POWER, and can now CAUSE healing and life to be restored.

In other words, you heal the body INDIRECTLY by DIRECTLY healing the mind so that IT IN TURN heals the body. But if you swap this around and try to heal the body first without healing the mind, you won't get a lasting healing.

"Whenever you attempt to reach a goal in which the body's betterment is cast as major beneficiary, you try to bring about your death."

While it's true that if you FOCUS ON the body first and foremost, you are really reinforcing it as real and really sick and separate. And this attacks it and keeps it sick. In that state of mind you are NOT really in a position to "heal it".

So it seems like a PARADOX... or counter intuitive. .. but you in fact are being instructed that if you DO want the body to heal, you GO ABOUT IT BY healing the mind/identity, SO THAT this leads to the mind mind indirectly healing the body.

By focusing on the body first you are trying to really bring about death in the NAME of healing. But if you focus on healing the mind first you are attempting to bring about LIFE, and this RAISES THE BODY FROM DEATH.

"A pure mind knows the truth, and this IS its strength. It cannot attack the body, because it knows EXACTLY what the body IS. This is what "a sane mind in a sane body" really means."

"If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind MUST BE STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this."

It is difficult to learn that there is not really anything I can do to force healing or awakening onto others. Love isn't forceful.

If I see someone suffering, and if I've become mistaken in believing that this is real or true, then I will try to save them from it. But I've already attacked them by seeing them as less than immortal and buying into the illusion of them having a real problem. So then having attacked them, I also now try to become the hero savior who has come to free them from the very sickness that I have projected onto them.

I can offer love and healing, if there is willingness or readiness to receive. Jesus said to me a while ago "since when was loving someone a crime?". Love can heal. Love can produce miracles. But if the person does not want these things, love doesn't intrude.

In ACIM Jesus speaks of how love does not come where it is not welcome. It doesn't intrude on the alter upon which you placed other idols. It doesn't force change.

If God, unconditional love, forced healing onto us, the entire world would have been dissolved into light instantaneously. So this leaves people asking, why does God 'allow' suffering and death? The short answer is, because He loves us. Yes, God allows death because He loves us. And that's justification for many people as to why God sucks or doesn't exist. BUT... that's the short answer.

The longer answer is, death and suffering are not REAL, and our belief/experience that these things are real is actually our sickness, our mistaken perception, which God's love would want to HEAL, so that we can return to an awareness that we have divine health, that we are immortal, and that we cannot die. That's why God doesn't stop us from destroying ourselves (up to a point) - he knows death is not real and nothing can truly hurt us. All suffering is an illusion of suffering in a state of unconsciousness.

God would awaken us to realize our immortality and invulnerability. He would awaken us to love. So we can't just say God sucks or doesn't exist just because we suffer and die. We have to realize we are the ones who choose to suffer and die. As Jesus explains in ACIM, "no-one dies without their own consent". So let's stop blaming God for that one.

God does love us because death and suffering are not real. Thank God death and suffering are not real. Thank God He has created us eternal regardless of how things appear in the world. And thank God it is still possible to choose love instead of suffering. God wants us to realize that in REALITY we do not suffer or die and nothing has happened. If we're not perceiving and experiencing that reality, it's because we are mistaken and need healing. So we need to choose to receive that healing from God.

Choose again!