This is a central ACIM teaching, that death is not "normal" or "natural", but rather a choice, and that if you do not make the choice, death does not happen. It literally speaks to the real possibility of immortality, and the impossibility of death.

Think about this. Death cannot happen without you in some way being victimized. Something has to "happen to you". And that means, you are at the effect of the world in some way. That there is some kind of cause outside of you which somehow seemed to have power over you, which overpowered you, and did something against your will.

The only way that this kind of scenario can occur, is if there is something seriously mistaken about your mind. Your mind has to be seeing itself as a victim. It has to be believing it is affected by an illusion. It has to be playing the part of victim and of being attacked. It also has to be using the world, or people in the world, as scapegoats. Without the ability to accuse the world of causing the death against your will, the death cannot happen.

A key part of this is that even when it appears that death is happening against your will, even if you do choose it and play along with the victim role and being affected by something external, even then you are still giving full consent. You are still involved. Your mind is actually participating in laying down life and becoming un-willing to live. This is not passive.

The mind cannot ever be passive. The mind is always active and creating. If the mind chooses to have a sickness, the mind is still choosing the sickness and the mind is still putting the sickness there. The sickness isn't just happening on its own. And when the mind chooses not to put the sickness there the sickness disappears.

Even if it may *appear* at the time as though the sickness is happening outside the scope of your choice, or beyond what you can control, or that you were not even the one who chose it, the truth is that you did choose it, you put it in place yourself, it is you who are maintaining it, and it cannot even continue showing up without your consent.

So you have to realize what death is. Death is only "possible" as a state where our mind has something seriously fucked up about how it is seeing itself. It can only come about by the mind deciding to pretend that it is being seriously affected. Jesus describes it as a vain attempt to make no choice at all - really the disownership of choice or the attempt to be completely irresponsible for your existence.

In the activity or implementation of dying and death, the mind is actively choosing to pretend that it has nothing to do with living, nothing to do with what happens, and nothing to do with the circumstances that are arising. It is faking it. It is going under-cover, putting on a tremendous performance as if everyone and everything else is causal other than itself, and that it is purely an effect.

So what death really is, is an attempt to NOT be causal at all, to have no power, to appear to be making no choice, and to paint this picture of stuff happening seemingly against your will. But it's such an extraordinary lie, such a cover-up, that everyone seems to believe it. All the fingers will point in the direction of "cause of death" or "why they died" to explain how this death came about. But this will only explain the manner in which the death seemed to "happen", it will not in any way implicate the person as having been the author of these events, or of being the one who made it happen to themselves.

Death is a state of extreme lying. It is the most dishonest condition possible. It is a state of not only denying God, denying the unchangeable fact of eternal life, and denying that nothing can happen to you against your will (because that is God's Will and God has given you a will which cannot be affected).

If life seems to be degrading, and diminishing, and slipping away, and the external world seems to be mounting a successful attack, and the body seems to have a mind of its own, and circumstances appear to be transpiring against the person, and it starts to look AS IF it is unfair and unchosen and the person is not doing ANYTHING to contribute to this condition, that's because the illusion is INCREASING and the person is moving further away from truth.

Death is a complete reversal of sanity, a total reversal of the proper functioning of the mind, and a complete reversal of cause and effect. It places all power and will and choice and causality as outside of oneself, making oneself entirely an "effect" of something separate from oneself.

Death actually is an attempt to claim that God is external, that God is separate, that God has a will which opposes your own, that God is to blame for destroying you, that you have no power to stop Him, and that this is all happening to you entirely against your will. In other words, it is an attempt to claim that God is the cause of all death, and not the cause of life.

It then will appear that anyone who dies does not want to die. It will appear as if the person had no say in the matter, as if life just threw them a shit sandwich. It will seem as if they are being dragged kicking and screaming against their will into the firey pits of hell as if having absolutely no power to do anything about it. This is the most grandiose, lying, fabricated, fictional, deceptive, denying, dishonest, irresponsible and bullshit state of being possible. It's an attempt to accuse the entire world of destroying oneself.

Another way to put it is that we are inside this dream which WE are dreaming, and then we turn around and attempt to claim that this dream - which is coming from us - suddenly has the ability to cause us, to decide for us what we are, to make us what we are, that we are born from it and according to its nature, that we inherit from it, that is has power over us, that it decides if we live (are born) or if and when we die, and now we are a completely powerless victim of it. That's the entire illusion of death. The suggestion that a dream that WE MADE UP, is willing against us and has taken over possession of the very mind that dreamed it in the first place.

Another word for this also is "level confusion". Every single aspect of the ego thought system is level confusion. It means that cause and effect have been reversed and what was just an effect seems to be causal and what was always causal is seen to be at its effect. This means that the lower level - the effect - now seems to turn around and inflict a deadly blow against the higher level that made it in the first place, thus reversing the levels and creating an 'upward' direction of causality.

This is actually nothing more than the attempt to say "I cause God". It is the authority problem. Death is the result of the authority problem. It's an attempt to say, I have a will which is stronger than God's and I am successfully willing that God be dead, or that God is at the effect of me, or I can change God, and God is my victim. This is the idea of sin made real, that we can "actually" sin against God and cause Him harm. When we attempt to do this, instead of God dying, WE DIE. Instead of God receiving the effects, WE receive them. And so death in form is actually an expression of the attempt to kill God, and to kill His Son.

And Jesus goes into this in the Course quite a bit. The body is used as a kind of "anchor" to associate the Son of God with a form which can APPEAR to die or go through suffering, so that we can play out a fictional sadistic story of being successful at torturing and killing God's Son. When our sense of identity as God's Son is associated or identified with the body, or bound to the body, this makes us cling to the body and then we appear to become vulnerable. Eventually the body suffers and becomes weak, because we are using it for attacking ourselves, and then the body dies. And what does our ego think is happening when the body dies? It thinks that we are *succeeding* in destroying the Son of God!. Symbolically anyway. So all death is a SACRIFICE of God's Son.

This is also why this universe that we dreamed up, is a "picture of the crucifixion of God's Son". It's an attempt to implement death, to associate God's son with the form of a body or bodies, and to then destroy those forms in order to act out this idea that God and His Son have been murdered. This is of course utter bullshit and a total lie, because God and His Son are IMMORTAL, and cannot be changed or destroyed or harmed in any way.

God has granted ETERNAL LIFE to all souls He Created and it is absolutely impossible for any soul to truly die or suffer or be sick or upset or unhappy in any way. At the core of your being you know that you are already as God created you, you have not changed since God created you, and you cannot change what God created. At the core of your being you have no authority problem and you know that death is absolutely impossible for you. And yet here we are, pretending to be bodies, stuck in an illusion, bad stuff seeming to happen from our unconscious mind making it seem like we didn't ask for it, yet we are doing it ALL to ourselves.

The secret to salvation is that you are but doing ALL of this to yourself. All of the suffering, all the sickness and disease, all the upsets and unhappiness, all the tragic sudden car accident and airplane crashes and food poisoning and wars and all the rest of it. It's all a massive fictional illusion to make it seem like you are not doing it to yourself - that you are not trying to sacrifice yourself or crucify yourself. But you ARE. It's YOU that is doing it. It is YOU that is giving your consent. It not only that, not just that you are saying to someone hey, I give you consent to come along and kill me so that it seems I didn't do it myself, it's that you actually DO IT YOURSELF.

ALL death is suicide. All of it. Every single person buried in the ground was a suicide. Even the people who "died of old age" committed suicide. All of the people who suffered from terminal illnesses committed suicide. Every single still birth, every tragedy of war crimes, every murder, every unexpected accident, absolutely all of it is CHOSEN. And not one single person had anything happen to them which they did not choose and did not participate in causing to happen.

This is the truth of the Course. This is what Jesus is teaching us, to be responsible for the POWER that we have to make anything happen, and to stop denying it and stop pretending to be victims. We are NOT at the effect of the world we see, the world is nothing but an effect. It has no power to make you ill or weak or afraid or upset in any way! You are invulnerable. You are immortal spirit!

So fundamentally, death is IMPOSSIBLE because you are immortal. Period. You cannot die. But you can pretend to die, or as the course says, you can try to associate your identity with things that appear to die. Such as the body, which is an illusion, and a wonderful way to make it appear that you are not choosing.

It is utterly impossible, in all cases, for someone to move towards death, without their mind having made the decision to use death to try to sacrifice themselves. In every single case, if sickness is showing up, if suffering is happening, if there is punishment occurring, if there is unfair victimhood, or you seem unfairly treated, or something is happening that *seems* you have no power over, it is because you have GIVEN it power over you and you have given AWAY your power TO it, to make IT have the power to seem to choose FOR you that you will suffer and die, so that you can keep your power a secret even unto yourself, and pretend that this is all happening against your will.

Death cannot even begin to happen without your participation. It cannot even begin to happen without your consent. It cannot even begin to happen without your mind doing something wrong and unnatural. Death is NOT natural. It is completely unnatural. Anything that dies is filled with lies. Death is not an exit from the dream either. It is a guarantee of reincarnation. It doesn't matter how much of a famous guru you are. If you still go through death, you are still denying God, are still at the effect of the world, are still putting in place a state of victimhood, are still rallying things against you, and are still believing that God's Son can be killed.

So do not think that death is some kind of option or some kind of thing which is acceptable or peaceful or loving or kind or a sign of success or a way out of dreaming or inevitable or something which just happens against your will. IT DOES NOT. It cannot happen AT ALL unless you are making significant mistakes and are trying to bring about a will against your own will, meaning your will is divided against itself, meaning you still have a split mind. The symptoms of all sickness and death cannot show up AT ALL unless there is something going wrong with your mind.

"A broken body is proof the mind has not been healed." This is absolutely 100% literal. If there is some kind of sign of damage or breakage or sickness in the body, it is because the mind is attempting to attack ITSELF. What you use the body for it will become to you - use it for attack and it will become weak and sick and die. Use it to bring the word of God (immortality) to those who have it not and it becomes holy and being holy it CANNOT be sick, NOR CAN IT DIE. This is pure ACIM teaching.

Death is failure. Death is denial. Death is a lie. Death is a mistake. Death is victimhood. Death is self hatred. Death is sacrifice. Death is illusion. Death is suffering. Death is reluctance to accept the truth. Death is a defense against the truth. Death is sickness. Death is level confusion. Death is a reversal of cause and effect. Death is the authority problem. Death is a belief in the justified consequences of real sin. Death is absolutely the OPPOSITE of everything the course is teaching, everything true about God and His creation, and is a total reversal of sanity. Do not see it as normal or natural or an graceful exit.

Jesus is teaching us to stop killing ourselves. To accept immortality. To demonstrate immortality. To show the world that death is impossible. Jesus was crucified (by his own will) and came back and manifested another body to demonstrate that the MIND makes the body and can make another, to prove that the mind is completely NOT at the effect of the body or the world, and therefore has escaped death entirely. It is proof of immortality. Jesus overcame death. He wants us to overcome death, not give in to it. Not anticipate it or fear it or give it power or expect it or make it into a religion or worship it or put it on a pedestal like some kind of salvation.

Only the creations of light are real. Nothing real can be threatened. What is real is immortal. Spirit is is a state of grace forever. Heaven and earth are total opposites. Heaven is a state of eternal life. There is no death in God's Son.

There is no death! The Son of God is free! The Son of God can only be free if it is completely experientially true that nothing can happen against His will. And it IS true. There is no will but God's. Eternal life is GUARANTEED.

Ego is identification with form. That means, first believing in separation, so that there can be different things, and thus forms. And then attempting to be ONE WITH those things, so that they become associated with what you ARE, as part of you.

This begins with the denial of self, which is also the denial of God. We place within ourselves a belief that we are LACKING self in some way. That we are not enough, that we have been diminished, that we have experienced a loss of self.

We attack and hide from and distort our view of ourselves and thus believe we are a wretched wicked evil monster, sorely lacking and impoverished and powerless and lost.

“Everyone is looking for himself and the power and glory he thinks he has lost.”

The belief that you lack in some way, produces a sense of being “not enough”, and that something is missing. Therefore you Are lacking and “in need.” This in turn produces a compulsion driven by a NEED to get what you are missing. What you are missing is ENOUGH SELF, or wholeness.

But with the belief that you are not enough of a self - or unwholesome/unholy, at the root, this belief is not questioning. Instead we accept it as true, see ourselves as lacking love and identity, become very much “in need”, and then feel compelled to fill those needs. By not knowing who we really are, and seeing ourselves as empty of self - as if nothing at all - we then start to try to DEVELOP a self - to get a self.

This produces DESIRE, which is “wanting to get” what you do not have. The more the ego sees itself as lacking, the more it wants to get, and thus the greater its desire. It’s a kind of psychological mechanism where we’re trying to rectify a problem - a lack of self - by trying to get it from somewhere, to alleviate the feeling of dis-satisfaction, not being enough, not having enough etc. This can become desperation.

This intense wanting turns into seeking. We will seek to find self or identity or value anywhere other than where it really is. It really is buried underneath the belief that we are LACKING in some way - sinful, guilty, diminished. But the ego mindset doesn’t want to question the denial of self, it wants to keep that in place. Effectively, the ego mindset then WANTS to LACK self, AND wants to gain self, at the same time. And thus it can never reach a point of satisfaction.

From the strong drive to “find yourself”, and driven by the sense of lack of self, you feel a compulsion for MORE. You need more, of everything. You need to gain. You need to make up for what you seem to be lacking. You need to fill the gaping hole of emptiness within. And so this produces GREED and SELFISHNESS, because we now seek to get more and more and more to try to satisfy the emptiness. Even though we don’t really want to satisfy because we want to deny self.

The way by which we then attempt to GAIN SELF, or to get MORE SELF, is to IDENTIFY WITH form. To identify with separate things. Things which we think are valuable or important. Things which differentiate and make us unique. Things which, by way of association, rubs off on us favorably and gives us a sense of being MORE than we were. The ego thus identifies WITH OBJECTS, with bodies, with thoughts and feelings, with the mind, in an attempt to increase its sense of existence - of being a self.

We thus literally identify with a country, a culture, a body, a relationship partner, their body, valued treasures, objects and toys, buildings and land and vehicles, money, sex, and all kinds of things. We identify with them by trying to ATTACH SELF to them, to in a sense posses them, by trying to equate the object with our sense of self, to suggest “this thing is the SAME as me” or “I am the same as this thing.” It’s an attempt to find ONENESS WITH FORM, ie oneness with separateness, which is impossible.

Ego is amplified by an increase in a sense of “setting it apart” from the whole, by which it reasons that it if can become a more significant SEPARATE thing, it is more established and exists more and thus has more identity - more self. It in a way wants to be the whole, such as to be the OWNER of the world, but it also thwarts this fundamentally by its belief that it MUST be less than whole in order to seem to “be something.”

Psychological ownership, psychological possession, psychological attachment, identification, trying to be one with form, trying to gain more self, forming a self image, trying to enhance the self, trying to improve the self, trying to make the things that ego is identified with be in themselves better so that it rubs off on us and we can take credit for it, are all the SAME method of trying to BECOME something we are NOT, in an effort to become a real self that “we are.”

Since all temporal things, all different things, all forms, all objects, all thoughts and feelings, are transient and temporary, they fundamentally do not last. The ego knows this in a way, and is constantly in a state of dissatisfaction that it not only never has enough, it aways feels a compulsion to become MORE SELF. This is due to the deep belief in having NO SELF, which it MUST maintain in order to seem to be relevant.

But temporary things come and go, and so the ego then experiences a sense of LOSS. It now loses the things it wants, as those treasured things leave its existence. Whether it be a person’s body that dies, or some family member falls ill, or a possession becomes broken, or some toy is lost, or money is wasted, or whatever, there is a disappointment.

But it’s not simply a matter of feeling that something valuable has gone away, it actually it is much more selfish than that. Loss is driven by the recognition that the things which you were IDENTIFIED WITH have gone away, and therefore PART OF YOUR SELF has gone away. Through the loss of idols and favorites and possessions and things we have owned and become attached to, even things with sentimental value, the ego is not upset about the THING being gone - it’s upset about ITS SELF being gone.

And so loss is really experienced by the ego as a reminder of the loss or lack of self, a reminder of the inner emptiness that was there before the compulsion to ”seek and do not find.” It is a triggering of the sense that you have lost YOUR SELF, and now you are diminished, and now you are lacking, and now you have less, and now you are not enough.

This produces what we call a feeling of loss or grief, but it’s not REALLY a grief over the loss of some valuable thing or person or place, it’s a much more selfish upset that what you wanted from your neediness has been lost and so your very IDENTITY has been lost. And then you are sad because it is YOU that has died again. Ultimately all sense of loss over external things are just reflections of the inner sense of the loss of a real self, driven by self denial.

What needs to take place to undo all of this madness, this impossible seeking for something that does not exist anywhere except underneath the self denial, is to undo the self denial. To stop denying that you are a fully created and WHOLE self, that God created, and that you are still the whole of that self.

It requires a shift in IDENTIFICATION, in which your sense of “what am I” stops being attached to and possessing of things like the body and thoughts and feelings and objects, and instead recognizes self to be one with the spirit - the soul, the Christ holy self. But not only that, but the identification with and as the WHOLE KINGDOM OF GOD, in which identity is SHARED and whole and one, because it is NOT based on separation or lack.

And this will require what will seem to be the dismantling of the false sense of self, rooted deeply in lack and imperfection and the absence of identity - an insecure and impossibly unhappy and deprived self. This self is BASED ON self denial, so the denial has to be lifted and the mind has to re-identify with spirit. Fundamentally this requires the recognition that your real self is NOT lost, nothing has happened to it, it can never be changed, and you are still as God created you to be forever. You are Christ, not anti-Christ.

When there is no self-denial, there is no lack of self, and so there is no neediness, and thus no wanting, and thus no desire, and thus no seeking externally, and thus no drive to get or to attach or own or possess, and thus no attempt to ADD MORE SELF to yourself in an effort to BUILD a self to overcome the shortcomings of the one you hate.

Self hate and self denial and self attack and self destruction all have to end, as you open up to accept and recognize the real self that you really are. Without the belief in being anything other than God created you to be - and which in truth you STILL ARE, there is no basis for the ego whatsoever, and so it cannot exist. This ends with the return to simply knowing yourself as you really are in reality - the whole of yourself which needs nothing.

I used to strongly believe that when a body dies, that is "death". And this is a bad thing. It's something to avoid at all costs. Because the body has to be kept in its "alive" state for as long as possible. And that's based on the belief that a valuable real person IS a body and the body's end IS the end of them, and a great loss to be avoided.

But for all the fighting against death and wishing it wouldn't happen, it happened. And I was so done with fighting against it that I pretty much surrendered and let it happen. This was a good thing actually. Actually as I look back and see all the efforts I made to fight against it, I see now that the whole situation was designed to exhaust my attempt to use "fear of death" as a way to reinforce sickness and separation.

What this giving-up did was it uprooted my belief that death is bad, especially given that when the person died they were liberated from a lot of limitations and suffering. For them it was actually quite a helpful thing.

In fact it was so good for them to be out of the body and back in a state of freedom and happiness, that it made the whole idea of keeping the body going seem nonsense. And with that, the whole idea of defending the body against death seemed nonsense.

Before I knew it, my whole attitude about death being the opposite of life was being broken down. Especially when my wife came visiting from the other side several times, in ways that were unavoidable proof that she still existed.

This in turn demonstrated strongly that physical death is not really death, because even if the person's body was dead the person was not. Eternal life carries on. So the death of the body is meaningless. As Jesus says:

"The death of an illusion means nothing."

So there I was faced with the pretty strong fact of the illusion of physical death, which was in fact a total lie, contrasted strongly against the ongoing presence and life of my partner. And this couldn't help but uproot and bring into serious question the idea that physical death and physical life mean anything different at all.

In fact, the way I see it now, I'm recognizing more and more that the whole world is an illusion. None of it has any meaning. It is not right or wrong, good or bad. It is not life, and it is not death. As Jesus states:

"There is no life outside of heaven" ... " Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible, and beyond ALL reason, and yet perceived as an eternal BARRIER to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."

"To see a SINLESS body is impossible. For holiness is POSITIVE, and the body is merely neutral. It is NOT sinful, but neither is it sinless. As nothing, which it IS, the body cannot meaningfully be invested with attributes of Christ OR of the ego. EITHER must be an error, for both would place the attributes where they cannot BE. And BOTH must be undone, for purposes of truth."

The body, the world, it is neutral. It is not alive, and it is not dead. It does not have any inherent meaning at all. We've given it all the meaning it has. We've placed labels on it to pick out parts and separate things off and say ... this thing is good, this thing is bad, keep more of this, avoid more of that.

Death is relegated to being seen as the label we give to things that symbolise death, like dead bodies, dead leaves, decay and rot etc. Life is a label reserved for the things that move around, that seem to grow and be born and new. But THAT is precisely what the illusion of the world is, and why the world is an illusion.

The world is an illusion that certain states of matter are different to other states, that certain bodies are more alive than others, that certain forms are more dead than others, that there is hierarchy in the illusions and separate categories for things. That is all illusion. It is all one thing. One big illusion.

It's like a giant smokescreen which sometimes takes on the form of what looks like life, and sometimes it takes on the form of what looks like death, but it is never really either of those things. It is nothing. As Jesus states:

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning."

Living moving bodies are not life. Stationary decaying bodies are not death. We made up these labels for aspects of one thing that seems like two things. The illusion that it is two things is the problem here. We believe that the form that things takes tells us what it means. That is the bullshit lie. Nothing here means anything. "Nothing I see means anything."

"The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."

Our task then is to learn to stop separating off some parts of the world and giving it special labels, which are in opposition to the labels we give to other parts. Pitting these labelled parts against each other and making them more SEPARATE, is the problem. All this does is keep the ego and the separation from God going.

War and peace in the world, at the world level, are not different. They are two sides of the same coin. One is not better than the other. They are both meaningless. Activity or lack of activity is the same thing.

This means that it actually does not matter if bodies are living or dying because they are not really living or dying. A body in one form is no different than in another. Being deceived or horrified by the appearance of a body in a disabled or broken or damaged form is entirely a temptation of the ego to regard some parts of this world as worse than others. Death is not worse than life, and life is not better than death. They are equally nothing here. One dream of illusions pretending to show up as many separate things.

Our entire shift is a transition away from believing that the world - or our mind - is split up into many compartments in which some compartments are different and better or worse than others .... to a state of wholeness in which there is only one truth that applies to all of them. It is a shift away from a separate victim and victimiser, to a total ownership of all power and causation. A shift away from being a mere character in a dream, to being the one who dreams the entire dream environment and all things that happen to all parts of it at once.

The great illusion and deception of the world is that the form of life is preferable to the form of death. Or that one is better, or one is more alive, or one is more dead, or one is more to be avoided. If you play that game you will be lost and you will fear death and think that you live, while not really living. Living in a belief that death is a specific separate thing is a belief in not living at all. To really live you must claim eternal life, in which there are no such shiftings and changes and transitions between appearances.

All beliefs in how different parts of the world are different, how they are not alike, how they are conflicted and at war, how some are better than others, how some are more holy or more evil, more wanted or more unwanted, all of these inequalities have to be completely ironed out. The whole world has to be regarded as equally one thing, with no separate truths or multiple levels or categories or labels. All of it is nothing. And none of it is of God.

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There 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."

"This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world. And of these two but one is real. Just as reality is wholly real, apart from size and shape and time and place, for differences cannot exist within it, so too are illusions without distinctions."

"Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeing and yet surely theirs."

A Course in Miracles would say no. You always get what you ask for. You only get what you ask for. You never get anything you do not ask for.

There are no victims. There are no accidents. Nothing happens unless it is deliberate. There is no randomness or chaos. Someone somewhere is making decisions all the time.

A leaf does not blow in the wind without someone choosing to make the leaf blow in the wind. The leaf doesn't even appear to exist without someone's mind making it appear to exist.

Where is there any room in this for "might not work" or "not sure if" or "got lost in translation" or "God doesn't always answer" ?

The "Song of Prayer" will tell you that you are always praying and you are always getting precisely what you actually did ask for.

If stuff is happening that you believe was not supposed to happen, or you got results that you seemed to not ask for, or stuff happens that you didn't seem to want.... you need to think again. You DID ask for it, you just didn't realize how you asked for it. You MUST have asked for it otherwise it could not have appeared.

This is the level of certainty that Jesus enjoys. This is how it possible to be completely certain that you are not at the effect of anything. This is the end of victim consciousness.

There is absolutely no room for an idea of being victimized if it is true that you always get what you ask for. The entire fiction of being unfairly treated is absolutely 100% a lie.

You are treating yourself exactly how you wish be treated. You are, right now, experiencing exactly, and ONLY, what you actually did ask to experience. There is nothing happening outside of the script you have written or continue to write.

Nothing happens without your say so. This is how it is true that nobody dies without their own consent. This is how is it true that ALL death is suicide. This is how it is POSSIBLE that if you do not choose death, you will not die, and therefore it is POSSIBLE to be immortal.

Nothing is happening to you that you did not want. So if you do not like it, you need to change your decision. i.e. change your mind and heart.

If you got something you did not want, then you did not realize that you asked for it. It's not a matter of you having not asked for it, it's a matter of you being not AWARE that you asked for it.

Learning to discern HOW the asking happens, is the key to salvation. Recognizing that you ONLY do things to yourself, and nobody else EVER does anything against your will, gives you the key to salvation. Salvation - being saved from all suffering - is possible, because of this.

Every single story about how something happened to someone, some disaster struck out of nowhere, something suddenly went wrong, something occurred that nobody liked, the world went down the toilet, war broke out, there were "acts of nature", "it must be God's will", or any other bullshit, is absolutely a total fictional lie by the ego mind.

Absolutely everything in front of your face right now, you put there. And you wanted it. And not a single thing in your day or your month or your life has ever happened against your will. You have never been victimized.

Nobody has ever died against their will. They were choosing it, wanted it, made it happen, and put every single event in place to cause it to occur, even if those events or causes *appeared* to be coming from something over which they had absolutely no control. They DID choose it. It's just not obvious that they chose it, because of the ILLUSION that they did not, which was part of their cover-up story and part of their way of making it happen.

There has not ever been a victim. There has never been anything happening by accident or out of order or against anyone's will. Nobody has ever suffered a single bit without asking to suffer. No-one has ever been afflicted with sickness without having first put that sickness in place themselves.

Nothing has ever even happened in this world AT ALL, without someone choosing it and making it happen, pulling all the strings and animating all the objects and orchestrating all events. If it were not for minds making such decisions, this world would not even appear to exist at all. It is only here doing its thing because someone somewhere is MAKING IT.

Not one single feeling that you have is caused by anyone other than yourself. They are not caused by events or people or situations or stimuli or any other causes that seem to be separate from your own mind. Any feeling you ever have, you CHOOSE to have. You put it in place.

Not one single physical symptom in your body has ever been caused by any person or object or environmental condition or events seeming to happen against your say-so. Not one single "effect" showing up in your body or your emotional reactions has ever really been put there by anyone or anything other than YOU. You even put in place all of the illusory effects which external causes *allegedly* put in place against your will.

When someone kicks you in the leg, which is you kicking yourself in the leg, YOU put the bruise in the leg. The bruise in the leg is not put there by the person who kicked you, or their physical foot, or anything that happened. You instead conveniently orchestrated and used the situation to attack yourself and make it SEEM as though you have a bruise showing up because of someone else, so that you can project blame for your sin onto them, finding them guilty.

No-one outside of you is guilty of ever doing anything to you ever. Not one single person in this world has ever attacked you or created symptoms or effects in you. There has never been side-effects, symptoms, damage, hurt, pain or suffering occurring in your experience that your own mind didn't put there itself.

When events transpire, by your secret design, to seem to cause something to happen to you, you not only orchestrated the events but you also manifested the causes and the effects all at once, putting them into place in the illusion using your thought.

Nobody ever gets sick. People choose to be sick. Nobody is ever hurt by someone else. They hurt themselves. Nobody ever falls victim to abuse. People abuse themselves. Nobody ever dies of some cause they could not prevent.

People create the illusion that they have no say in the cause, in order to paint this very convincing picture that they are not the one making any choice whatsoever. The denial and displacement of your own mind's decision making, making it look like it has nothing to do with it at all, is an act of irresponsibility and disownership of power.

Nobody is ever weak or suffering or lacking or diminished or limited or disabled or afraid or sick or in poverty or at a loss without having chosen to be so, on purpose, so that it can appear as though they are victims, so that they have a tremendous basis for a huge story about how they do not have any power whatsoever, so that they can fake their own death and blame it on everyone other than themselves.

Death is a choice and death is someone choosing to die. Death is the ultimate cover-up story, all death is fake, there is no real death, every death is a massive illusion orchestrated by the mind to make it look like all power, responsibility, ability to choose and all will to Live have been taken away by someone other than yourself. Not even in death has this been made true.

There is nothing happening in this world, as in, stuff that is just occurring on its own. There are not just events that tick over automatically. There are no forces of nature which just do their own thing like they have their own will. There is no wind that blows on its own or life that grows on its own or cycles of weather that just "happen". Someone somewhere is making it happen.

There is no realm of things which are within control and another realm of things which are outside control. There is only deliberate creation. Either you are making up shit or you are not. Either you are inventing lies or you are being the truth. There is no middle ground where things just occur because of external causes, or alien wills, or fate, or bad luck, or good luck, or any kind of unchosen reason.

You have the power to choose again. You are NOT a victim of the world you see. NOTHING is happening on its own. And nothing CAN happen without you making it happen, wanting it to happen, using it for a purpose, having a fictional need for it, and making it occur in illusions. This whole world is your dream, coming from your mind, coming from your decision making. It is not dreaming itself!

Be free to choose again. Make a better decision. No-one can stop you. You are the immortal unlimited Extension of God, in whom nothing happens without His Will. This is the realm of miracles, where whatever you will, is so.

Whatever you will, will be so. It must. This is your power.

Sometimes, although we don't want anyone to suffer, and God does not will anyone suffer, ... .sometimes someone going through a "thing", a hardship, a suffering, is actually consentual and beneficial to the person.

There can be a great compulsion to stop it, solve it, take it away, make it better, avoid it, etc.... we are VERY avoidant of any threat to us. But in the big picture, these "trials" as they say are actually "lessons", which we've sort of agreed to go through in order to grow spiritually.

If we are in the business of just taking away everyone's troubles all the time, we might actually be denying them a tremendous opportunity for advancement.

How do we know that, perhaps a person becoming an alcoholic and hitting rock bottom could actually lead to them becoming a powerful advocate for healthy living and helping others to escape from it?

Or that, someone going through a horrible nightmarish experience of sickness might actually lead to new perspectives and opportunities and maybe even a new future career that ends up helping a lot of people? We have to be careful not to think always in such short-term aims, and look instead to what the purpose is in the LONG TERM plan of atonement.

Very often the things you go through give you a lot of wisdom and insight and personal experience, which "equips you" in a sense with perspectives and abilities and compassion for others who might go through something similar. And then you might find yourself using that to be helpful to them down the line.

You might for example have elected to be a really great therapist or something and, in order to do so, wanted to first-hand go through some horrible abuse situation which you had to experience and work through and heal, in order to find a way out, in order to become able to help others to find a way out. And without that, you might not have been able to be useful in that way, for the higher purposes of the atonement plan.

On an earthly level we often interpret any bad thing as bad and wrong and to make it stop. We insulate ourselves from problems and sufferings. We label all unpleasant things as unwanted. We try to make an idyllic life, comfortable and controlled, to shut out the chaos.

But in the big picture of the soul we come here to learn lessons, to grow, to advance towards God. The importance of returning to God in the long term, across even lifetimes, may be so significant that we would be willing to even go through hell and back if it meant we would find a way to rise above it when pushed to our limits.

A person might actually on a higher level be willing to go through tremendously difficult lessons because, in the big picture, they know what it is leading to. The potential for major spiritual growth. An opportunity to see the other side of a situation. The purpose of finding a different way to relate to others etc.

It's not like, God is there saying, you must suffer and I want you to go have a horrible disfigurement just so that you can learn, or some kind of cruel karmic punishment scenario. But because we have chosen to go away from God and into ego, we "need" lessons to help us to return to him. And that means we have beliefs that need undoing, and attitudes that need correction.

So we then find that the atonement plan is set up to use our "faults" and our unwillingness and our biases and blind spots and so on, as "lessons", which may appear at first like horrible trials and difficult challenges, in order to try to find a "better way". To find a way to make a better choice in that scenario so that in future we don't need to go through something like that. Or rather, that we stop making those kinds of forms of suffering because we've learned that they are ultimately not in our best interests.

So in general we can't be quick to judge whether something is a good thing or not. The most horrible looking through could well be very much consensual and very much asked for. If the soul knows that there is the POTENTIAL for massive growth and learning, it may in fact be WILLING on a deep level to suffer the most horrendous difficult challenges, because it knows that the payoff may be really really worth it.

So hats off to all you people who are and have gone through horrible states of hell and nightmares and abuses and victimhood and all manner of pain and misery. Because it may well indicate not that it was just some thing that "was not meant to happen" but rather, something that you consented to and were WILLING to experience because it would potentially have tremendous spiritual benefits.

No sane person in their right mind would want to choose any such trial or difficulty, but it's because we're NOT in our right minds that we DO choose these things, and the holy spirit REPURPOSES these things, in an effort to use them productively and constructively, to help us to make the best of it, so that it isn't all for nothing and a waste of time.

This is a more FORGIVING view of suffering, because it reframes it as potentially beneficial when used for a higher purpose. Instead of focusing on the thing itself through false perception, labelling it a dark and wrong and unwanted. We can USE anything for the purpose of becoming closer to God, and that's what all these "trials" are all about.

"What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything which happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life." UrW139L19

"Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one, and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you." UrT31H2

"The misuse of will engenders a situation which, in the extreme, becomes altogether intolerable. Pain thresholds can be high, but they are not limitless. Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point." UrT2B69

"In every difficulty, all distress, and each perplexity you face Christ calls to you, and gently says, "My brother, choose again." He would not leave one source of pain unhealed, nor any image left to veil the truth. He would remove all misery from you whom God created altars unto joy. He would not leave you comfortless, alone in dreams of hell, but would release your minds from everything that hides His Face from you. His holiness is yours because He is the ONLY power that is real in you. His strength is yours because He is the Self that God created as His ONLY Son. The images you make can not prevail against what God Himself would have you be." UrT31H3

"Some of your greatest advances YOU have judged as failures, and some of your deepest retreats YOU have evaluated as success." UrT18F1

"There IS no choice where every end is sure. Perhaps you would prefer to try them all, before you REALLY learn they are but one. The roads this world can offer seem to be quite large in number, but the time must come when everyone begins to see how like they are to one another. Men have died on seeing this, because they saw no way EXCEPT the pathways offered by the world. And, learning THEY led nowhere, lost their hope. And yet this was the time they COULD have learned their greatest lesson. All must reach this point, and go BEYOND it. It is true indeed there is no choice at all within the world. But this is NOT the lesson in itself. The lesson has a PURPOSE, and in THIS you come to understand what it is FOR." UrT31D3

Various things seem to happen in the world. Sometimes seemingly happy things, sometimes tragic. Sometimes things seem to be going well, sometimes they fuck up. There are dramas. There's emotion. People seem to be well, others seem to be dying. There is a whole lot of "material" to react to, respond to, deal with, manage, etc.

It all seems plausible and true. It seems to have reality. It seems like it's something to be taken seriously. We seem to have to care about certain outcomes. It seems like there's real problems and real solutions. But this is all within the context of "the world is real".

IF the world is real, it makes sense that we should be taking things seriously. We should be caring, paying attention, reacting, dealing with issues, trying to control things, etc. This all seems "valid". It seems justified. It even seems to make sense. If someone is struggling with something it seems like there are certain courses of action. If there is a problem that seems serious, it seems you should be quite upset about it.

But here is the thing. This is all based on the assumption that the world is real. And that's a big assumption. It's a framework or a basis. A logical premise. It's a starting point on which to derive all these conclusions, evaluations, judgements, strategies etc. But what if the world isn't real?

What if the the world is in fact just a dream? You see, if the world is a dream, this changes the ENTIRE context of everything that seems to be happening. If it's a dream, nothing is really happening here. If it's a dream, even if it seems like some person just died, they didn't really die. If it's a dream, sickness is also an illusion and is completely fake. If it's a dream, everything that occurs is just some made up fantasy.

"What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substance-less, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was."

In a dream world, it's as though there are just scenarios, situations, scenes, fictions and stories, which come and go fairly randomly. They don't actually have any particular rhyme or reason or meaning. Over here is the scene of a person at work. Over there is the scene of a person battling with disease. Over here is another person waking up in the morning. Over there is another person tying their shoes on a subway train. Just strange little vignettes of activity, drama and story.

If it's a dream, none of these things are really happening. The dream reframes the entire and every episode as not being what it seems to be. Are we to keep taking it seriously when something shows up that seems serious? Or should we laugh at yet another strange episode of dreaming in which we seem to be experiencing strange events and people?

Yes, if its real, then we probably should react to it. But if it is ONLY a dream, this lifts away ALL of the reasons and rationale for taking it seriously, believing it means anything, reacting to it as if it's posing real threats, buying into its illusions. And don't think the illusions aren't extraordinarily creative and well made. They are designed to deceive and tempt you and distract you and disarm you. But even a scenario of a person standing there trying to destroy you, it laughable in the context that it's ONLY a scene within a dream and you are not the body nor can you be attacked.

If you could observe the world, from outside of it, from outside the dream, it would be a radical change in perspective. What you once thought was being really threatened is now recognized as nothing but some illusion pretending to threaten an illusion. Nothing REAL can be threatened. You'd know that the whole world is one big fake fairytale. There aren't really any bodies, there's no real sickness, no real death, on real war, no tears or upsets or problems. It's all made up.

And changing your frame of reference, your point of perspective on this world, is how you forgive and develop true perception. Learning to see from a vantage point of the truth about the world, that it IS a dream, rather than the perspective that it's really happening and worth being alarmed about. False perception shows you the world as if it's NOT a dream, but a terribly real-seeming nightmare with tragic events and threat and danger. In such a world there is no safety, if you have identified with the dream figure.

This is why it's very vital to dis-identify from the body. Not just because bodies are distracting and act as anchors to bring down the Son of God, but because they are INSIDE the dream. They are part of it. They are just characters and costumes. So you, who are dreaming the world from OUTSIDE of the world, if you start to believe you are one of the characters in the dream, a body, you're going to lose sight of yourself, lose track of the truth, and believe that the world is happening to YOU because YOU are now believing you're a body. "What you are cannot be seen nor pictured".

Becoming spirit identified merely means the same thing as recognizing this is just a dream. It means remembering who and what you are, which is, that you are the dreamer of the dream, NOT the contents of the dream. You are not the body or the house or the family or the children or the job or the role-play. You are outside the dream bubble. Outside of spacetime, in heaven. In the awake world, the reality of the Kingdom. Attaching your "self" to "world stuff" just makes you believe you're under attack from a dangerous world where everything is chaotic and destructive.

Jesus's approach to the world is to learn to recognize that it IS only a dream. And being a dream, it should not be taken seriously. It should not be afforded any kind of reality or truth. Any kind of "it's really occurring". Any kind of artificial meaning or implication. In fact, he tells us that this is the secret of salvation. If we would recognize it's JUST a dream, we should be laughing at every part of it, realizing that it's complete fiction. Like some movie on a screen.

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF. No matter what the form of the attack, this STILL is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, STILL is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is STILL true. For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, ****they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream.**** This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes.

The Holy Spirit will repeat this ONE inclusive lesson of deliverance, until it has been learned, REGARDLESS of the form of suffering that brings you pain. Whatever hurt you bring to Him, He will make answer with this very simple truth. 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.""

The ego's experience of someone dying is horrible. Ego thinks in transactional, finite terms. As if relationship is some commodity amount that you give and lose, and then you lack, and then you need the other to give it back by losing. This is the sacrifice of specialness.

This is the opposite of the golden rule, where the ego says giving and receiving are not one. That what you give you do not give to yourself. And therefore giving is loss. It sees someone's death in rather physical terms, meaning that the form has gone and therefore there has been a one-sided loss, and now they are not giving you what you gave. The thing that was supposed to give you back, albeit separately, has stopped giving, and so you now are in a state of lack because you depended on them.

From this viewpoint the only thing you can feel is loss, which feels horrendous. It's like saying, the person is dead and thats a true fact and there's nothing you can do about it, so you might as well just be in total despair forever. But this ego perception is rooted in victimhood, ingratitude, not recognising, not appreciating, seeing oneself as deprived, unfairly treated, taken from, stolen from, and diminished. And then the ego cries. A lot.

It can reason that there is no other way, and it will have no insight into the opposite of loss, which is gain. But the Holy Spirit gives another view entirely, a totally opposite view in fact. Because as far as He's concerned, there is no loss possible in the golden rule of God. What is given is received by both. What is given is given to yourself forever. There is no room for loss at all, and there is only gain.

The way forgiveness looks at death, it regards it as a gift and a blessing, rather than a curse. It sees that the event has simply purely given to you, by which you have purely gained. You have not been deprived at all, you have only increased. A great gift has been given, and you have received it, and by recognising that you have received it you can enter into justified gratitude. And this is how gratitude becomes part of forgiveness - the recognition of the truth that there is only gain and increase under God's laws.

Gratitude is the total opposite of loss. It acknowledges that you have not lost, that nothing is missing, and that in fact you have received so much that you are overwhelmed with how much you have been given, so much that not a single trace of loss remains. And how can you then feel loss in such a perspective of having been utterly blessed? Loss is literally a lack of gratitude, an unwillingness to receive, and a denial of God's blessing.

Of course, recognising this requires dismantling the ego's interpretation of death, which sees nothing except loss and no gain at all. It sees the situation as utterly hopeless and futile, with no possibility of finding any gain in it at all, dwelling entirely on what seems to be absent, what has been stolen away, and what is no longer there. As if loss is real and permanent and total. And this is the idea of "real death".

But of course this depends on form, because the ego only really registers form "as" content, and does not recognise content at all. If a physical body is gone, yes form is gone, but the love that was in and through the body is not gone. In fact it has been given in a blessing through the person's body to you, and you have received it, and now you are it, and you extend it, and it is alive in you, continuing to be given. And that is because miracles mean endless giving - they continually extend love.

To the ego there is no benefit to you that someone has gone away. It sees only the horrifying and seemingly real deprivation, the taking away of the specialness that you loved, the exclusive source that you thought was the love itself. It sees only a dark and deceitful treachery, that has ripped its beloved treasure away and utterly destroyed it beyond all hope of recovery. And it's never coming back - a stark and horrible fact. Such is the proof of sin and death and dissolution. Then it holds this up as the only reality and truth, as if there is nothing else to it. A total fact. And within this truth, you must simply feel like absolute shit because your whole world has been destroyed forever.

But the ego is utterly blind to the truth, it has no acknowledgement of roles played, of higher purposes, of the way that someone gave transcendent of form, that what was given is still with you and still giving, that loss is impossible, and in a forgiving view you can only possibly be blessed by everything. To forgive is to truly recognise that the world is not doing anything to you, death has no power over you, and therefore it cannot cause something to be taken from you. You cannot lose, you can only win. And if you cannot lose, you must be only gaining. You must be purely receiving, and to receive unconditionally with no strings attached is love. Upon receiving such unending love the only logic response in the mind is gratitude. And gratitude is also a part of giving.

It's similar to what happens when you at first seem to be a victim of someone, and you hate them and fight with them and they seem to deprive and hurt you. But then later you forgive, and you come to realise you hired them, and they played a role that you needed for your spiritual growth, and you gained tremendously from your enemies even if they seemed to be the very people you did not want to be around. You benefited. And then as your perspective grows, you come to more fully understand who did what and why, how you consented, how you used it, and what you did to yourself. And out of that comes a recognition of the innocence of the other and yourself, and the realisation that you have only happily gained from the encounter - that it is not a loss or an attack at all. And then you can be grateful to them for helping you to learn this lesson - to move you closer to God.

Another aspect of this is that if you believe someone else has become lost to you, or that love is lost, then by the golden rule you will also believe that you are lost. And then you will become lost as well, lost in despair and grieving and feelings of loss and hopelessness. And that is because you believe it's true that some other person can be completely lost, and if thats true of them it's true of you. This is why when the loss seems to happen, you feel like you have lost part of yourself. As if it was you that died. And then you stop living. But this is the ego's reasoning as well, because nothing real can die or be lost, and certainly nothing is missing from heaven.

The antidote to loss then is the broader and deeper perspective that you have not lost anything, and have in fact only gained. When you can see that you have only gained, then your response can only be gratitude, because you have been truly blessed and given everything. You've been given freedom and life and opportunity and a future. You've been given room to grow and learn and enjoy further relationships. This isn't a fake positivity either. It's not about just trying to put on a brave face and act as if things are great in denial of loss and feelings. It's a total uprooting of the belief in loss, which is really a lack of recognition. When lessons - and death is a lesson - is correctly perceived, it is recognised as being entirely beneficial. Something that happens only for your highest good.

This also leads into why the Holy Spirit's atonement plan is solely functioning for your highest good, and everything he arranges for you to go through - which you consent to - is leading you to eternal life. If you can see it from the perspective of gratitude and blessing, without the egoic interpretation of "its a loss" or "its difficult" or "i've been deprived" etc - which is a denial of the golden rule, then it is recognised as gentle and helpful and only a blessing. If the ego enters into it, it interprets the lessons as cruel and unwanted and a curse. Something that you want to go away and stop, to fear and resist. When you stop resisting you enter acceptance and presence, and then you also find forgiveness and gratitude. God has only given, he has never taken away.

The big picture truth is simply this: everything that happens is leading you home to God. Everything. Even people seeming to die. Only forms and illusions seem to die, anyway. What is true and real and our identity is permanent and eternal. And you literally are those who seem to move on, who must still be you as well. There is no loss in truth, no loss in God, and no loss in you. There is only a complete willingness to receive God's blessing and be fully grateful for it. Really, the only reason we despair is because we think God isn't loving us anymore, and this can only be a lack of recognition of what is actually true, or an unwillingness to see it. Undoing the belief in death as a block to love brings about a revolution into gratitude and happiness.

"What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything which happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life."

"The laws of God work only for your good, and there ARE no other laws beside His."

"A happy outcome to all things is sure."

When we are greatly distracted by, tempted by, and lost in the world, it is hard to recognize the secret of salvation.

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF."

But the real key part of this isn't just that you are doing things to yourself, rather than it being others who do it. It's that it can ONLY BE YOU who can hurt yourself.

Jesus describes many times that you have hurt yourself. You have hurt your mind. You have attacked yourself.

"Because you had attacked yourself, and BELIEVED THAT THE ATTACK WAS EFFECTIVE, you behold yourself as weakened."

"Although you have attacked yourself, and very brutally, you will demonstrate that NOTHING HAPPENED. Therefore, by attacking, you have NOT DONE ANYTHING."

"By doing this UNCONSCIOUSLY, you try to keep the fact that you must have attacked yourself FIRST out of awareness, and thus imagine that you have made yourself safe."

"You HAVE attacked him, and you MUST have attacked yourself first."

It is easy to place a lot of focus on other people. On forgiving the world. On healing the body. On world events and problems. It is easy to spend a great deal of time caught up in relationships and dramas. But all of these forms of suffering are really quite far down the line in terms of what came first, and where the real power is.

What comes first happens quickly and so close to home, that it is easy to miss. YOU .... attack yourself....... BEFORE. ... the entire world happens.

"Only the self-accused condemn."

You accuse yourself FIRST. You attack your invulnerability FIRST. You try to undermine your immortality FIRST. You position yourself as afraid FIRST. You make yourself a victim FIRST. You see yourself as lacking FIRST. You condemn yourself FIRST. You accuse yourself of sin FIRST. You do everything to yourself FIRST.

THEN ..... having attacked yourself, the whole thing starts to cascade into projection and blame and dissociation and denial and displacement and various other ways to "disown" responsibility for what you have done to yourself.

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you."

It then becomes possible to become confused as to WHO did this to you. You deny that you did it to you. You pretend that someone else did it to you. You shift the responsibility. You hide from your own self attack. You don't want to look at the fact that YOU are trying to self destruct. All self attack is an attempt to kill God's son - which is YOU - which is suicide. And eventually this results in suffering, sickness, and death, ALL OF WHICH are self inflicted.

"It means that you cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness." "YOU CAN BUT HURT YOURSELF. This has been oft repeated, but is difficult to grasp as yet."

"For you HAVE hurt yourself, and made your Self your enemy. And now you MUST believe you are not you, but something alien to yourself and "something else," a "something" to be feared instead of loved."

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

This doesn't have ANYTHING to do with anyone else, or the body, or the world, or spacetime. It's entirely to do with. ... do you love yourself or not? Do you accept and live in your IMMORTAL nature which is given by God, or do you DENY that you are immortal and TRY to make yourself mortal? The only ambition of trying not to be mortal, is that you try to destroy (kill) yourself. But since your immortal self cannot die, you confuse yourself with a body and kill it instead, as a representation of yourself dying.

"If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves"

"Yet you CANNOT crucify God's Son, for the Will of God cannot die"

"What He created can sleep, but it CANNOT die. Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF."

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do."

The attack upon YOURSELF, is all the only problem. You thinking that you attack others, is YOUR problem of being confused, and you are mistaken. You thinking that others attack you, is you being confused, and you are mistaken. NO ONE has ever attacked you against your will. You have never suffered against your will. You have never been sick against your will. You have never died against your will.

"Would you not rather live than choose to die?"

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

Salvation, and the secret of salvation, is simply that ANYTHING you experience other than immortality, YOU are doing to yourself. You are the SOLE cause of it. There are no external causes of suffering. There are no external causes of sickness or death. "There are no accidents in salvation." Nothing in the world can do ANYTHING to you against your will. No one can vioalte you or offend you or hurt you against your will. You CANNOT BE A VICTIM unless you deliberately decide to be one.

So this really has nothing at all to do with anyone else. It is entirely to do with .... are you going to forgive yourself, or not? Are you going to love yourself, or not? There is another subtle part to this though. Your soul and your mind are two different things. Your soul is your self, your identity in christ. But your mind is a medium that your soul uses for expression. Your soul does NOT need salvation because it is permanently immortal. It has never been attacked and never will. But your MIND is confused and HAS tried to hurt itself. It DOES need "healing" or correction.

This means that, even your own self attack, even your mind's efforts to destroy you, even your belief in sin and evil, even your death wish, in truth has NO EFFECT on your immortal soul. Nothing changes about the truth of you. Even your self induced suffering is not REAL suffering. Even your self inflicted pain is not real pain. And as you try to kill yourself off, you as the son of God is totally unaffected.

This means that EVEN IF you attack yourself, you are not REALLY attacking yourself. You have not REALLY ever done anything to yourself. "I am still as God created me."

Recognize first that ALL attack is SELF attack. This is not easy when you have slipped down the slipper slope into projection. It has to all come back to YOU being totally responsible for sin. BUT, you must not stop at being responsible for sin because it is not real. You need swift correction, so that you will recognize you HAVE NOT even sinned against yourself. You must admit that YOU are the ONLY cause of ALL your suffering, and decide to STOP HURTING YOURSELF. And then you can receive healing.

This simple truth, that YOU are the only one hurting yourself, and YOU can decide to love yourself instead. .. is the CORE of A Course in Miracles. Once you love yourself, or. .. seek first the Kingdom of God (which is you) .... your way will be made straight. Everythign else will fall into line naturally, including performing miracles, healing the body, and undoing the world.

"The Separation HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial. However, to concentrate on error is merely a further misuse of legitimate psychic mechanisms. The true corrective procedure, which has already been described as the proper use of the spiritual eye (or true vision), is to accept the error temporarily, BUT ONLY as an indication that IMMEDIATE correction is mandatory. This establishes a state of mind in which the Atonement can be accepted without delay."

"When you are weary, remember you have hurt yourself. Your Comforter will rest you, but YOU cannot. YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW, for if you did, you could never have grown weary. Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way, for that is not God's Will for His Son."

"It can be but myself I crucify."

All that I do I do unto myself.

If I attack, I suffer. But if I

forgive, salvation will be given me."

"As prayer is always for yourself, so is forgiveness given you. It is impossible to forgive another, for it is only your sins you see in him."

"I repeat again that if you ATTACK error, you will hurt yourself."

"To see a body as anything EXCEPT a means of pure extension is to limit your mind and HURT YOURSELF."

"To you the miracle CANNOT seem natural, because what you have done to hurt your minds, has made THEM so UNnatural that they do not remember what is natural to them."

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

"When he thinks that he is hurt in any way, it is because he has forgotten who he is, and that he is as You created him." "If ever I am sad or hurt or ill, I have forgotten what You think, and put my little, meaningless ideas in place of where Your Thoughts belong, and where They are. I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts."

"I will not hurt myself today."

"His thoughts can frighten him, but since these thoughts belong to him alone, he has the power to change them, and exchange each fear thought for a happy thought of love. He crucified himself. Yet God has planned that His beloved Son will be redeemed."

"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 which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail."

Can you accept the atonement?

For the ego, atonement means that you really did something wrong, and now you have to pay for it. This is the idea that you must make up for the losses you caused, because of your guilt. It calls for you to make a sacrifice, to have some portion of yourself or what you value taken from you, to make up for what you stole when you sinned. It suggests that if you "do your time" and suffer enough, MAYBE... just maybe, there might be a forgiveness or a pardon.

MAYBE those with authority and justification and righteousness to judge you guilty might decide to pardon you and let you off the hook. Except that, these judgemental accusers are never really satisfied, and there is no amount of atoning you can do to make up for your sin. Once a criminal, always a criminal. And all crimes are considered punishable by death. Even little ones.

If you believe that this is the truth of what atonement means, you will not want to accept the atonement, or understand it.

Similarly, it is believed by many that when Jesus allegedly died on the cross, he was suffering and in pain. And that this tremendous suffering, having to undergo death, somehow "carried the weight" or "paid for" or "took on the sacrifice for" or "suffered for" everyone else's sins, so that everyone else could be considered forgiven thereafter. It's even said that God, in all his loving ways, condemned His beloved son to death, in order for this atoning to occur, so that everyone else could be let off the hook.

Nevertheless, it's quite obvious that in spite of this alleged atoning and suffering, pretty much everyone is still riddled with sin and guilt and fear and murder and death. So it didn't exact "work", according to the evidence. And the fact that this explanation is evidently false is covered up with further theological justifications which are all unfounded band-aids trying to patch up a broken fundamental misunderstanding of what atonement is.

Jesus's atonement was misunderstood. He did not suffer on the cross. He was a profound miracle worker, had no guilt in his mind (the guiltless mind cannot suffer), did not believe in death at all, had already raised the dead, had power and authority over all illusions, and was an embodiment of the power of Christ. Nothing could happen to him against his will. He was not a body at all, and anything seeming to happen to his body did not happen to him. He was truly beyond it, beyond all suffering and death and sin.

He was not a victim in any way at all. It is claimed that Jesus was "sacrificed" for us. How can sacrifice be in any way associated with Jesus, who does not believe in the sacrificial thought system of the ego, and its belief in egoic atonement through loss? Jesus was not asked to sacrifice and he was NOT a sacrifice. He was a demonstration that sacrifice was an illusion and was not POSSIBLE, because sin was not real, and He had not done anything wrong. And he knew that we hadn't either, so sacrifice was never even called for.

His act of being on the cross showed that in spite of the fact that he was supposed to die, he could not die, and could not feel pain, to DEMONSTRATE the miraculous truth that you are not a body and you are invulnerable. And upon returning in a brand new manifested body later, He further demonstrated and proved that bodies are not who you are, that you cannot die, and that you are immortal spirit.

Jesus knew this because He knew what the atonement really was. He knew that it meant that, in truth, nothing real can be threatened because the entire world, bodies, and death, are all illusions. He did not believe in them. AND he did not believe in SIN. Not one bit. He had no sin in him because He did not believe in it. In that view, HE knew that everyone else's "alleged" sinfulness was forgiven, because nobody had really sinned at all. And all of the ways that people believed they were sinful, HE knew that those were not "real sins" in the eyes of God, and that all sin WAS undone because it had not really occurred. That's the true meaning of the atonement and most people did not get the memo.

That also demonstrates why, in spite of the fact that Jesus knew and perceived and experienced the atonement principle, that nobody was sinful or guilty at all, claiming it for himself and thus for everyone, this didn't prevent everyone else from STILL BELIEVING IN SIN. In fact, most onlookers believed in sin so much that they thought that his death was real and did not "get" the teaching of his demonstration that the body is not real at all. And it was precisely the people who DID believe in sin and death and bodies, who MADE UP the interpretation of Jesus being "really sacrificed" and "really suffering for us", which has been an ongoing ego myth for 2000+ years. The ego rejoices that so many people believe that Christ could suffer and be sacrificed. It's satanic!

And so people have carried on believing in real sin and in BEING in sin, because they still believe that sin is real. That's why Jesus's atonement did not instantaneously lift the belief in sin from everyone's mind, which it should have done if what is claimed about the crucifixion were true, ie that Jesus took the hit for us. If he did that, why are we still believing in sin and death? Jesus's awakening should've removed all sin from everyone. In HIS eyes, this was done, but in OUR eyes, it was not done, because WE still freely chose to continue believing in real sin and real death. And plenty of people have demonstrated this by DYING ever since.

Jesus IS the atonement in that Jesus has united with the Holy Spirit in a mind of pure innocence, in which God recognizes the truth that we HAVE NOT SINNED, and that sin is not reality. Jesus knows this is true of us, but WE have not woke up to this reality yet. And so we DO continue to still do "real sins" because we still believe in real sin. That keeps us bound to sin and death. We CAN be liberated from this if WE will accept the atonement, but WE do have to willingly do that ourselves. Jesus can't force it on us. He knows we have not sinned but we don't believe him. Not really.

So all these false definitions of atonement have to be thrown out. The atonement means that literally nothing "real" has actually happened, and that all the things that you thought were "real" were just imagined, just a dream, a vast illusion, masquerading as a real world with real bodies doing real bad stuff. Its UNREALITY is the proof of innocence. You cannot have become less than innocent if you did not achieve a REAL sin. Make-believe sins do not count! You cannot REALLY sin and you have not really sinned. But while you believe that you HAVE, that's a problem. That's keeping you from the truth and keeping you from ACCEPTING Jesus's demonstration of the atonement.

The world is not reality. It is an illusion. And you have not really done anything wrong here, because everything you've ever supposedly "done" has ONLY ever been a portion of a made-up dream that isn't really real. It sure as heck can seem real, but ONLY because you believe that dreams are reality. Look around you at all the people who have set up camp in this dream, believing it's the real world, believing it is real life, prepared to hang out here and just die and not wake up to the truth. There is more than this.

Undo all of your beliefs that the physical world is reality. It is not. Jesus proved it, IF you will believe it from His vantage point. He knew that there was no real sin, and saw that everyone's sins ALREADY were forgiven before He even came to that awareness. God does not condemn. God does not judge. God knows your innocence is still pure and holy. And God knows that you cannot POSSIBLY "actually" separate from Him other than in a dream-like illusion of separation. Your innocence is guaranteed. It is ALREADY the truth, even while you believe that you have really sinned.

The truth of the atonement ALREADY WAS TRUE before Jesus became the first to claim it for Himself and for all. It was ALREADY TRUE that God had not condemned us and had not believed that we really sinned. It was ALREADY TRUE that God's unconditional love had not wavered for a second, and that He KNEW that it was IMPOSSIBLE to actually separate from him. Real Sin is impossible. Jesus came to ACCEPT that the atonement is true, He did not CREATE the atonement. The truth of the atonement is God's truth, and has always been true and always will be.

It's a done deal. Nothing happened. Wake up.

If a child were playing make-believe and pretending that things were happening, would you believe it? If you knew better, if you knew that the toy car is just a toy, not a real car, but the child was whizzing it around making car sounds and saying "beep beep", would you believe there really was a car there?

Of course not. And the reason is, you know without any doubt, and have a clear awareness, that the toy is just a toy, not a car, that it isn't a "real car", and that the child is just pretending. You know that the car is only moving because the child is moving it. You know that the car is only making "beep beep" sounds because the child is making those sounds appear. So you see everything, you are aware of the whole scene, and so you smile and laugh at the gentle play that the child is performing, knowing it is completely unreal.

The thing is, in this big physical world, we do not realize that everything in it is also a toy. It is a toy that is being played with by the Son of God. And the Son of God is having a great old time making things move around, making sound effects, pretending that He is a multitude of difference characters. He is really versatile and clever. He even pretends to be multiple characters at once, and they even interact with each other and seem to do things to each other. And from the point of view within that pretence it sort of seems like certain characters seem to not know that this is all just a big made up fairytale that the Child of God is playing out. And even that not knowing is part of the play!

And the other thing is, the Son of God is so powerfully creative and expressive, and so intelligent, and so sophisticated at weaving pretend illusions to make things seem like they're really happening. He animates snowflakes falling from the sky. He causes trees to seem to grow. He makes the birds flap their wings. And he creates war. And he creates death and suffering too. Yes the Son of God made death (and can abolish it).

But even as He is make-believing these things, from His vantage point He knows that none of these are real. He is just playing, just pretending. He's having fun and laughing to Himself about how He is playing 'within' His own being, dreaming up fantasies and pretending to make them real. He even is capable of pitting one of His many personalities against another. And He is even capable of manifesting sickness and death, as though these are really happening, and yet all a long He is absolutely unaffected by these and they do not change Him at all. How could they when He is immortal? How could they when He, like the child playing with toys, knows all along that He is just making this all up?

The Son of God knows He cannot die. He knows he is immortal. He knows there cannot be a separation from God. He knows there is nowhere to go where God is not. He knows sin is not possible or real. He knows He is forever innocent. He knows all is forgiven because there is nothing to forgive, because nothing has REALLY happened. And so He is just playing with this 'tiny mad idea' of 'what if separation is possible'. It's just a toy. It's a mind toy. And nothing has really gone wrong. And even as he dreams about this extreme separation from God, and even as it seems to be a horrible nightmare, even the horrible nightmare He is making up on purpose, willingly, wanting it to happen, as part of His great pantomime that He is orchestrating every part of from a higher perspective. And it seems like 'we' are here on the receiving end of this 'chid' playing with illusions, making our lives hell, but 'we are Him and we chose this too. See how creative and imaginative we are, to invent a life of hell on purpose just to see what it's like?

If a child were playing and acting and pretending that they are some character, and if the child is at war with some other child, in this character, and this other child's character comes along with his mighty sword and attacks the child and the child pretend to fall down dead, do you believe it? Of course you don't. You know they are pretending. You know the child is not really dying. And you know this because you know who the child really is. You know their true identity. You see their real self. And so for you, you see their illusions from the outside, and recognize that they are not real or true, and not for a second would you take them seriously or think they are actually doing anything to the child.

But what SEEMS to be happening to 'us', as little Earth people in little bodies, is that us, as characters in Christ's dream, seem to be acting a role in which we seem unaware of who the dreamer even is. It seems like the Son of God has, somehow, even though this is IMPOSSIBLE, has somehow forgotten that He is just pretending, and has lost sight of His true identity, and has become unaware that everything that moves in this fantasy world is because He chooses to make it move. This absolutely cannot be true, but it can SEEM very much the case, and we SEEM to be finding ourselves in this situation, this role, where it SEEMS like we 'really' have gone and fricking done it this time.. where we've *actually* separated from God, where we're *actually* not the Son of God anymore, and where the stuff that seems to be happening really seems like we're not choosing it whatsoever.

This is the extreme prowess of the Son of God, that He is actually capable of making it seem, to Himself, that He is not even Himself anymore, that He doesn't even recognize that He is making up His own pretend dream, and that He is not the author of any of it. He is actually capable of creating WITHIN Himself, what appears to be the almost complete negation of Himself, to the point where He seems to 'die', even though some part of Him must still be existing in order to project this fantasy of 'death', and so He is not all the way dead and still continues to pretend. And even as He seems to experience what it is like to be an actor who has forgotten He is an actor, EVEN NOW He is still Himself and, very very subtly, STILL has not really lost touch with reality, or with the fact that He is STILL the author of this entire dream, even a dream of death. He is STILL the Son of God and He is STILL the one who is choosing and dreaming all this. The subtlety with which He has pretended to not be Himself is so extremely subtle that it is very easily overlooked and unrecognized.

So then the Son of God (you) then seem to even die. And you seem to experience this extreme state of stuff happening that you do not choose or want, like you have absolutely no power to choose otherwise or to stop death. And then it happens, and this SEEMS to prove that you are not the author of this dream. You have given an absolutely tremendous PERFORMANCE, you have totally fooled everyone even yourself (it seems, but not totally), that you have actually died. Once again, if there were an audience who knew better, they would erupt with rapturous applause at just how prolifically brilliant your performance of 'dying' was, and you would then stand up in costume yet identified now as an actor, at the end of the play, and take a bow.

Becoming aware of how this make-believe fantasy world has been turned into something that SEEMS like it is REAL, is the simple act of "waking up" from the dream. It's not that we're not the dreamer, it just that we're pretending not to be the dreamer, and doing a very good job of it. We cannot disconnect ourselves from God. And here's the good news.

Everything that we thought was really happening in this world, all the bad things, all the terrible things, the wars and tragedies, the sickness and death, all of it... every single horror, the absolutely hilarious news is... that all of this IS, absolutely, JUST a pretend play that the Child of God is pretending to enact, as part of an innocent play with toys, and the Child of God - which is who you really are - IS absolutely unharmed, undisturbed, untangled, undead, in your divine comedy of play and pretend. All of what you thought has gone wrong, is not really true. All of the things you thought could attack you, were coming from yourself. All of the things that upset you, you deliberately chose to be upset by. All of the things you thought were capable of keeping you from God, they never were - you just kept pretending they could.

And so ultimately, the gentle happy good news is, when you can come to realize it and see it, that everything is absolutely alright. Everyone is okay. Nobody has been hurt. The Son of God has not been defiled. There has been no real upset. Nothing real can be threatened, and nothing unreal exists. All of the elaborate pantomime of 'planet earth' is a hoax. All of the stories that have been told about who did what to whom, it was all part of childs-play. All of the supposed tragedies, terrors, horrors, disasters and upsets, were all being deliberately chosen and performed by a full cast of Sons of God. And we're all completely safe in Heaven with God right now in total joy and bliss and happiness, laughing our heads off at how much fun it was to invent such a wacky world of wonders.

If we can just realize this and just tap into this truth, that nothing has really gone wrong and that we're just fooled by the illusion of appearances and by our own role play and acting, we would stand up and laugh and feel so completely free. And we'd be free of the terror of fear, the ugly weight of guilt, and any belief at all that everything has truly gone wrong. We'd be free from the constant anxiety that we've gone off the rails, that life is unfair, that we're in danger, that there are threads and things that upset us, thats there is reason to be unhappy, that we're justified in being unhappy, and we'd be free from our own faked dying forever. The end of fear, the end of suffering, the end of death.

This is all just a SHOW! It's not a real world. It's not a real history. These bodies are not real people. There is nothing real happening here. The kids are just playing in the sandbox. It's make-believe. Don't buy into it or think it's real, remember they're the innocent Children of God to whom nothing can happen. And they're just having fun.

Only love is real.