"The sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept the Atonement for himself. This means you recognize that mind is the only creative level, and that its errors are healed by the Atonement. Once you accept this, your mind can only heal. By denying your mind any destructive potential and reinstating its purely constructive powers, you place yourself in a position to undo the level confusion of others." - ACIM

In its fuller context, this appears to be saying that as your mind becomes healed, it becomes capable of healing, and then is in a position to be able to heal "the level confusion" of others. Jesus describes level confusion (confusion of the levels) as the sole foundation of all sickness. So that means, this gives you the power to undo the sickness of others.

What may at first seem like a focus on taking responsibility for your own Atonement, therefore extends to actual miracle working on behalf of others. Many people think that we are to only take responsibility for our own awakening and ignore the shit out of everyone else. That's how an EGO mind thinks, believing there is a separation between giving and receiving.

In the Holy Spirit's thought system what applies to you applies to everyone equally, and what is given is received. This makes the acceptance of Atonement (which is in His Mind) a different meaning - it no longer means you are accepting "exclusive" or "isolated" Atonement for a personal separate self, you're accepting that it applies to the ENTIRE sonship, and therefore that this gives you the power to heal all forms of sickness and suffering in yourself and others.

A rephrasing might be, "the sole responsibility of the person who will work miracles to heal everyone else, is to accept healing for all."

Elsewhere Jesus says "I could not atone for myself alone. Listening to one Voice implies the decision to share It in order to hear It yourself. The Mind that was in me is still irresistibly drawn to every mind created by God, because God's Wholeness is the Wholeness of His Son."

"How simple is salvation! All it says is what was never true is not true now, and never will be. The impossible has NOT occurred, and CAN have no effects. And that is all."

I've found personally that I cannot fully let something go so long as I believe it has any reality at all. If I believe it happened, then I believe it had some reality. That it was an event, in which "something" occurred. This somethingness is precisely what holds it in place in my mind and gives it a seeming existence.

You cannot forgive something when you are making it real. If the world is in fact just a dream, which it is, but if you believe it is not just a dream, you will hold onto it psychologically. This is attachment. It means you believe in it being more than just imaginary, as though it is a reality. It means you have accepted it into your mind as having truth.

The ONLY way to accept atonement, which cures all such sickness, is to fully recognize that what you thought happened did not happen. This isn't merely a matter of saying, someone did something but you're willing to let it go. Nor is it a matter of saying, the events transpired but you're willing to look at it with love. You have to actually get to the point where you recognize IT DID NOT HAPPEN.

The reason that it did not happen, or the recognition of this, requires a change in the PREMISE of the world. If the premise is that separation occurred, producing a dream world, which has some reality, then you CANNOT forgive anything. Once the premise shifts to "there has never been a separation", in which a world opposite to reality does not exist at all, and all events are nothing, only then is your mind in a position to truly let it go.

So long as you believe that anything even occurred at all, that the happenings were NOT a dream, that there were some REAL consequences, and something was AFFECTED, you will not let it go. You won't be able to. It is your belief in it having a power and a causation and a proof of sin, that anchors you to it and fuels it, keeping it going. You cannot fully turn your back on it until you can recognize it as NOTHING. Illusions must be recognized as NOTHING in order to disappear.

Similarly you cannot forgive the world fully until you can recognize that it is absolutely nothing. There cannot be a single bit of belief in it left. It can hold nothing that you want. You have to withdraw all value from it. You have to not accuse it of anything. You have to not believe that it has ever done anything to you or anyone. That it has had no real effect, no consequences, all of its changes are completely substanceless, all of the events are nowhere, and nothing ever happened but a dream.

"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 substanceless, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was."

This seems like a major stretch for most of us to accept. Jesus isn't merely saying that the past happened that you should forgive what happened. He's saying this ENTIRE world, all of human history, the whole history of spacetime, all events, all happenings, all changes, are ALL ENTIRELY FALSE.

All fiction. All hallucinations. All made-up and meaningless. With no real causation and no real effect on anything real. With no threat against reality and having absolutely no real substance. That this is all literally NOTHING, and will completely vanish and be forgotten when you fully awaken to God.

That means that to truly forgive and let something go, you HAVE to recognize that it is absolutely nothing. This is only possible by recognizing this entire realm of experience is UNREAL, ie a dream. And being unreal, none of what appears to happen means anything or causes anything, or has any effect on anything or anyone.

Forgiveness of the world is the recognition that THERE IS NO WORLD. Only an illusory world, recognized as truly NOTHING, can BE forgiven. It can be forgiven BECAUSE it is not there. It can be let go BECAUSE there is nothing really there to hold onto. It can be accepted as having never happened BECAUSE it has not really happened at all.

This is merely coming to an acceptance that what you thought you lost was never something to have to begin with, and that you never really had it to lose. It is an acceptance that anything anyone seemed to do to you or anyone, was never done to you or anyone, and nothing real has ever been threatened. It's a willingness to stop using scapegoats and characters and events and groups and so on as reasons to dramatize your engagement with a fictional world, trying to hold on to suffering and victimhood in order to avoid God.

Given that forgiveness truly means to recognize that what you think your brother did DID NOT HAPPEN AT ALL, you have to literally come to recognize that even the events did not really transpire, the things said were not really said, the actions taken were not real actions, the consequences were nothing whatsoever against anything real, and even your memories of it happening are false. Memory of the past is just another body sense mechanism which pretends to make the world seem real.

I forgive [xyz] person/place/happening/event simply because it literally was nothing, did not happen, has not happened in heaven's reality, has affected nothing, has caused nothing, has no power over anything, did nothing, was not a real sin, did not produce real loss, had no effect on me or anyone, and was never really even there. Only God's Kingdom really exists, and only creation is a real event. "Only the creations of light are real."

"Today I will recognize that all this has not occurred."

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in this view are all your sins forgiven."

"If you remain as God created you appearances cannot replace the truth, health cannot turn to sickness, nor can death be substitute for life, or fear for love. All this has not occurred, if you remain as God created you."

"To condemn is thus impossible in truth. What seems to be its influence and its effects have not occurred at all."

"Just as forgiveness overlooks all sins that never were accomplished, healing but removes illusions that have not occurred. Just as the real world will arise to take the place of what has never been at all, healing offers restitution for imagined states and false ideas which dreams embroider into pictures of the truth."

"Instead, it merely asks that you respond appropriately to what is NOT real, by not perceiving what has not occurred."

"Both this world and the real world are illusions because right-mindedness merely overlooks, or forgives, what never happened."

"The instant the idea of separation entered the mind of God's Son, in that same instant was God's Answer given. In time this happened very long ago. In reality it never happened at all."

"Everything God wills is not only possible, but has already happened. And that is WHY the past has gone. It NEVER HAPPENED in reality. Only in your minds, WHICH THOUGHT IT DID, is its undoing needful."

"The childhood of your body and its place of shelter are a memory now so distorted that you merely hold a picture of a past that never happened."

"But the Holy Spirit tells you that even RETURN is unnecessary, because what never happened CANNOT involve ANY problem."

"Nor to its results, as this world sees them; sickness and death and misery and pain. These things have not occurred, because the Holy Spirit sees them not, and gives no power to their seeming source."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACIM lessons 10 through 14:

"10 My thoughts do not mean anything."

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

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

"13 A meaningless world engenders fear."

"14 God did not create a meaningless world."

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

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

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

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

You're dreaming, and only God creates reality!

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

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

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

This I think is a profoundly clear and definitive statement about the Course's core metpahysics. "What is the world?":

"The world is FALSE PERCEPTION. It is BORN OF ERROR, and it has NOT LEFT ITS SOURCE (error/sin). It will REMAIN NO LONGER (must disappear) than the THOUGHT WHICH GAVE IT BIRTH (sin/error) is cherished.

When THE THOUGHT OF SEPARATION has been changed to one of true forgiveness, will the world be SEEN in quite another light (re-interpreted, translated, looked at WITH a different value system, BUT STILL RECOGNIZED AS AN ERROR); and one which leads to truth, where ALL THE WORLD MUST DISAPPEAR and all its errors vanish. Now its source (sin) has gone, and ITS EFFECTS (the world) ARE GONE AS WELL."

Note that it does not say false perception is ABOUT the world. THE WORLD ****IS**** false perception. Falseness is built into it. The world IS a misperception. It is a mistake. The SIN it is made of, was a condemnation and attack on God and His Son. The ATTACK, has to be forgiven, which means the WORLD, has to be LET GO.

Note that it says, the world is BORN OF ERROR. "All forms are forms of error". Which means it was made BY MISTAKE. It is AN ERROR. "The body's eye look upon forms of error and do not see past them."

Note, that it says the world is SEEN **IN** ANOTHER LIGHT, which does not necessarily mean at all that the world STOPS being a form of error, OR a mistake. It merely means you LOOK AT IT IN A DIFFERENT WAY, with a different vantage point, which overlooks the SIN, and recognizes you were JUST MISTAKEN to make this world of sin, and it HASN'T HAPPENED and is forgiven. THE WORLD HASN'T HAPPENED, that is forgiveness. "There is no world", that is ATONEMENT. Only God's creation has ever really happened.

Note that it says, ALL THE WORLD **MUST** DISAPPEAR. This is not talking about your perception or your ego's view of the world. THE WORLD. Itself. Must disappear. Earth, planets, stars, bodies. All must disappear. They are MISTAKES. You can forgive mistakes. You can be loving towards He who was mistaken. You can shine light towards the mistake. But the mistaken HAS TO BE CORRECTED, which means UNDONE.

The Course talks about the development of trust. What is that?

Well, at first you trust the ego and its false truth. You don't trust God, and you don't trust the real truth. You have trust, it's just misplaced.

Trust is the same thing as faith which means, that you learn over time that God's truth is true and the ego's truth is not true. Also you learn that God's truth can be trusted, and you come to learn that the ego that you used to trust is actually not trustworthy.

The ego's trust is based on you being unaware of its motives and the side-effects of believing in it. It wants you to think its your friend. It wants you to think it is cohesive and makes sense and is sane. It doesn't want you to see the ways in which it does stuff which undermines its trustworthiness.

While the ego has the wool pulled over your eyes you will trust it. You'll trust everything about it. You'll trust your senses. You'll trust the idea that you are a physical body. You'll trust your body's senses, your memory, your perceptions. You'll trust that the world is really happening.

But these are in fact forms of mis-trust in God, because to have so-called trust in illusions is to not trust at all.

Learning to trust God means that you become convinced that God's way is the truth, that you can depend on it, that you rely on it, and that you want it. And that HAS to entail you relinquishing your trust in the ego's version of reality.

You have to to unlearn the trust you've placed in the ego in order to reveal the trustworthiness of God.

God can be trusted because God is love and wants only to love and support you. The ego can't be trusted because it is the anti-christ and would like you to cooperate with its plan of death. It's a slight difference.

As you gain trust in God's truth, you begin to seriously question trusting the ego's world. And that means when the ego makes shit happen you have trust in God moreso than the appearance of what's happening. You trust God more than events suggest you should. You ignore what the ego is screaming at you through all your senses, and listen within instead. That's having faith. Faith is trust.

It's safe to trust God.

ACIM reiterates many times that WE ALONE ARE THE CAUSE of our own suffering. We are not ever at the effect of the world. We are the cause of the world, the dream, and everything we feel and think and experience. Nothing happens without our consent, and we cannot even be hurt unless we ourselves hurt ourselves.

When you take this to the extreme, it means that YOU ALONE are responsible for EVERYTHING you experience, and NO ONE ELSE has anything to do with it whatsoever. There are no causes in the world, your brothers NEVER cause you (God is the cause of you), and you cannot suffer unless you choose to.

You can't even die unless you choose to. NOTHING can happen without your decision. And Jesus is completely literal about this. If you do not CHOOSE to suffer, suffering CANNOT happen to you. Sickness cannot happen, nor can death. You have automatic innate power over death and suffering at all times, and ONLY YOU can bring them upon yourself.

"If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it."

This puts 100% of the responsibility on your shoulders. Which means that if you are ever tempted to believe that something is happening for a reason OTHER than your own contribution, you are in a state of being mistaken, and now you need correction. Because it is ONLY your contribution that is causing everything.

This sounds easy enough. You just need to realize and recognize that every time you are unhappy, upset, suffering, in pain, sick, angry etc, it is because you are making it happen. If you would just stop hurting yourself you'd be totally invulnerable and healthy and happy all the time. No joke.

What becomes seemingly difficult is the many ways that we might not recognize what we're doing, or that we're even doing anything at all. We can become so used to blame, and reaction, and emotional triggers, and powerlessness, and believing other people actually do stuff, and that it seems impossible we can be responsible for everything.

In fact it runs very deeply. Every single thought you have, every attitude, every belief, are all part of the confusion that "its not me doing it" and "they are doing it to me." In every way, it is really you, who are an immortal being who can never even be changed at all, becoming confused and believing that something outside of you is changing you against your will. This can NEVER be true.

Every time that we lose sight of being THE CAUSE, we fall into temptation. We deny the truth and project causality outside of us. And this is the same as projecting sin. Then we find others or the world to be the cause of us. And this is a defense against the healing God placed in our minds. It's a way to avoid being healed by displacing the problem and its source outside of ourselves.

We talk about teaching others, and helping others, and having relationships, and performing miracles and so on, but the foundation of all this is simply YOU BEING YOU. Are you attacking yourself, or aren't you? If you aren't, you are not under attack. If you are, you are your ONLY worst enemy. This is all due to the suicidal self-destructiveness which comes from believing you are sinful. Are you trying to destroy yourself and others, or are you extending creation?

If you were to temporarily remove the entire planet, and all the people on it, and leave just you floating in space by yourself, whatever is going on in your experience is SOLELY caused by you. There is nothing else to cause it. This really tells you that ALL your forgiveness work is ENTIRELY an inside job. IT has nothing to do with others. It's you versus yourself. Is you trying to master yourself. It's your mind playing tricks on itself. It's you alone affecting yourself insanely.

Weaning off of all the reasons, excuses, explanations, justifications, beliefs, projections, and all other forms of displacement of responsibility, is not easy. We have a lot of habits formed, a lot of assumptions made, and a lot of belief in being vulnerable. We position ourselves as victims on a minute-by-minute basis. We might think it's not even POSSIBLE to question whether these things are happening to us. That things can seem so extreme and lopsided that it seems impossible we can be the one causing it.

But even those things which seem convincing, tempting us, secretly our dissociated choice, we have to dig out ALL of them, to question every single mental activity which is leading you away from your invulnerability. Even the notion that if you are being responsible, other people can still do stuff to you, cannot be true. Even the notion that even if you're doing your best, you will still die, cannot be true. Even death itself CANNOT have power over you if you decide NOT to die. "You are immortal and you cannot die."

The aim here is that you become "strong in the truth". That you stand in your own light. That you know yourself and be true to yourself. That you be so certain of what you ARE, that you don't for a second displace yourself, make a bodily identity, project cause outside of yourself, or believe any temptation that you are threatened by the world. This is how you be the light of the world, by going WITHIN to the light that is in you, so that it can extend.

Ultimately it boils down to one simple thing. You are the one who is making your life hell. It's not anyone else, and its not the world. It's not your neighbors, not your boss, your politicians, your celebrities. It's not certain races or countries or the weather or food or where you live. It's not external activities or events or space or time. It's just YOU. You are the one who is doing it to yourself. Holy fuck!

Salvation has been placed IN YOUR MIND by God because he knows that the PROBLEM is in your mind. And so the solution is in your mind. Your mind is what needs to be corrected, and that is all. This will take care of everything else. You are the one who is against you. You are the one who keeps giving YOUR power away to others. You are the one who keeps losing yourself and confusing yourself with things which are not you. And you are the one who can use the power of your decision to get out of it.

"You are immortal and you cannot die, but you can confuse yourself with things that do.""It means that nothing outside yourself can save you; nothing outside yourself can give you peace. But it also means that nothing outside yourself can hurt you, or disturb your peace in any way.""It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen."

"Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way"

"Who could be hurt in such a war, unless he hurts himself?"

"Nothing can hurt you, unless you give it the power to do so."

"If you will listen to His voice, you will know that you cannot either hurt or be hurt"

"You cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness."

"I AM responsible for what I see. I CHOSE the feelings I experience, and I DECIDED ON the goal I would achieve. And everything that SEEMS to happen TO me, I ASKED FOR and received as I had asked."

"It is impossible the Son of God be merely driven by events outside him. It is impossible that the happenings that come to him were not his choice. His power of decision is the determiner of every situation in which he seems to find himself by chance or accident."

"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."

"Sickness is a decision. It is not a thing that happens to you, quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. It is a choice you make, a plan you lay, when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind, and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall. Now are you sick, that truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more."

"How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth? Because it proves the body is not separate from you, and so you must be separate from the truth. You suffer pain because the body does, and in this pain are you made one with it. Thus is your "true" identity preserved, and the strange, haunting thought that you might be something beyond this little pile of dust silenced and stilled. For see, this dust can make you suffer, twist your limbs and stop your heart, commanding you to die and cease to be."

"Thus is the body stronger than the truth, which asks you live, but cannot overcome your choice to die. And so the body is more powerful than everlasting life, Heaven more frail than hell, and God's design for the salvation of His Son opposed by a decision stronger than His Will. His Son is dust, the Father incomplete, and chaos sits in triumph on His throne."

"Such is your planning for your own defense. And you believe that Heaven quails before such mad attacks as these, with God made blind by your illusions, truth turned into lies, and all the universe made slave to laws which your defenses would impose on it. Yet who believes illusions but the one who made them up? Who else can see them and react to them as if they were the truth?"

...AND ITS REVERSAL...

"God knows not of your plans to change His Will. The universe remains unheeding of the laws by which you thought to govern it. And Heaven has not bowed to hell, nor life to death. You can but choose to think you die, or suffer sickness or distort the truth in any way. What is created is apart from all of this. Defenses are plans to defeat what cannot be attacked. What is unalterable cannot change. And what is wholly sinless cannot sin."

"Healing will flash across your open mind, as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings. There will be no dark corners sickness can conceal, and keep defended from the light of truth. There will be no dim figures from your dreams, nor their obscure and meaningless pursuits with double purposes insanely sought, remaining in your mind. It will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey."

"Now is the body healed, because the source of sickness has been opened to relief. And you will recognize you practiced well by this: The body should not feel at all. If you have been successful, there will be no sense of feeling ill or feeling well, of pain or pleasure. No response at all is in the mind to what the body does. Its usefulness remains and nothing more."

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

ACIM

My note: Note that Jesus specifically refers here to healing the physical BODY, and to his intention that we PRACTICE this in order to then evaluate how well we did based on how meaningless the body is afterwards, as well as making the body invulnerable to and not dependent upon the world.

You may be accustomed to just thinking about "stuff". As if thought is a natural function which you can use however you like. It seems like you can think about anything without any effect. As if every thought is neutral.

But you may also notice that when you think about something unpleasant, you do not feel happy. When you have a fearful thoughts, you do not feel safe. When you have an attacking thought in anger, you do not feel peaceful. And when you have an accusation thoughts, you feel guilty.

The issue then is that just by the mere fact that you are HAVING these thoughts, that is WHY you are not feeling happy and at peace. Just by HAVING the thought, you are producing an upset.

This doesn't mean that, therefore, you should not have thoughts, because thought is life and the mind must think. However, the thoughts of attack and fear and so on are not CONSTRUCTIVE thoughts. They are thoughts of destruction. And when you USE thought to think in such a way, you hurt yourself.

You can play with this idea by simply asking yourself, whenever you are thinking about something and not feeling good, would you have still felt this way if you DID NOT HAVE the thought? If you did not THINK THIS, would you be unhappy? Are you ONLY feeling unhappy because you thought this? And you'll find the answer is yes.

If you had not thought of attack and fear and horrible things, you would NOT be experiencing hell, upset, fear, loss, anger, or any other unpleasant response. Your thoughts are CAUSING your suffering. Your thoughts are CAUSING your emotions. Your thoughts are NOT neutral, and are in fact having an effect on you.

You think you can just use thoughts without any effects, without any responsibility, without causing a change. As if it isn't the fact that you are having an attack thought that's causing you to feel threatened and guilty. As if having the thought is just some neutral observation, passive, that just reflects what's going on.

We might think then that our thoughts are just little mirrors which are interacting with the world and reflecting what's in it, commenting on it and responding to it as if we only have reactionary thoughts. As if thought is all just an EFFECT of the world. But this is not at all true. Thought is CAUSAL.

When thought is causal, HAVING a thought CAUSES things to happen. Thought creates some kind of form. Thought has power. Thought produces effects. Thoughts MAKE YOU sick and unhappy and angry and upset. Thoughts produce death. Thoughts put you in hell. HAVING these negative thoughts is the real problem, and it's in your mind.

However, you need a better thought if you want to be happy. You need to start USING thought constructively, supportively, empoweringly, happily, and with more light and love. Loving thoughts are healing thoughts. Loving thoughts tune to the power of God. Loving thoughts can literally move mountains and raise the dead. Loving thoughts are resurrectors. Thoughts are GIVING.

If you think of LIFE, then you are CAUSING LIFE. If you think of HEALTH, then you are causing health. If you think about how HAPPY someone is, you are helping them to be happy. If you having a true optimism, which is a proper use of denial, then you are rejecting suffering and sickness and death. True thoughts empower you just as much as false thoughts bring your own suffering. And NOTHING other than your thoughts cause you to be happy or unhappy, sick or well.

"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. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness."

"Neutral thoughts are impossible because all thoughts have power. They will either make a false world or lead me to the real one. But thoughts cannot be without effects. As the world I see arises from my thinking errors, so will the real world rise before my eyes as I let my errors be corrected. My thoughts cannot be neither true nor false. They must be one or the other. What I see shows me which they are."

"The sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept Atonement himself. This means that he knows that mind is the only creative level, and that its errors ARE healed by the Atonement. Once he accepts this, HIS mind can only heal. By denying his mind any destructive potential, and reinstating its purely constructive powers, he has placed himself in a position where he can undo the level confusion of others. The message which he then gives to others is the truth that THEIR MINDS are really similarly constructive, and that their own miscreations cannot hurt them. By affirming this, the miracle worker releases the mind from over-evaluating its own learning device (the body), and restores the mind to its true position as the learner."

"I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts."

"People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally AFRAID of them."

Your job is to look within and simply FIND AND SEE and be aware of what is ALREADY THERE. Your job is not to INVENT what is there, or what you are.

God created you as a perfect being. A being which has no needs, no flaws, no damage. This perfect being lives forever and is always present. It is hidden underneath layers of denial.

When you denied that you are a perfect being, you closed your eyes and pretended not to see. You formed "blocks to the awareness of love's presence."

In a state of being unaware that God created you perfect, you felt lacking, and started seeking for a perfect self. This included drives to CREATE a perfect self, to make yourself perfect, to transform yourself into a perfect self, to redefine yourself as perfect, and various other means of PRODUCING a perfect self.

This is not necessary whatsoever. You would end up making a supposedly perfect self only to discover GOD ALREADY MADE ONE and now there are two. This is not what is asked of you.

What is asked of you is to UNCOVER the perfect self that God already accomplished and finished and perfected. To simply GO TO WHERE IT IS AND BE AWARE OF IT. To locate it, find it, see it, be aware of it, realize it is YOU, and be it.

Where is it located? It is within your mind. It is not outside you or in the world or the body. It's deep within. God himself is deep within. The kingdom of heaven is deep within. Your soul is deep within. You have to go within and find what is there.

Deep within you there is already a perfect self which is immortal and pure and holy. This perfect self has been put there by God. It is waiting for you to find it and own it. You don't need to keep trying to construct it, make it, grow it, transform into it, or in any other way be the CAUSE OF IT. You are not the cause of your perfect self.

Your job is to AWAKEN TO the perfect Christ self that you are. Your job is NOT to reinvent the wheel or to try to turn your miserable suffering self into a perfect self. You don't really have a miserable suffering self, it's not you. You are only that which God says you are.

"Deep within you is everything that is perfect, ready to radiate through you and out into the whole world. " UrW41L3

"As I share the peace of the world with my brothers, I begin to understand that this peace comes from deep within myself." UrW57L5

"Your Father wills you hear His Word today. He calls to you from deep within your mind where He abides. Hear Him today." UrW125L1

"Look deep within you, undismayed by all the little thoughts and foolish goals you pass as you ascend to meet the Christ in you. He will be there. And you can reach Him now." UrW100L8

"The changelessness of Heaven is in you, so deep within that nothing in this world but passes by, unnoticed and unseen. The still infinity of endless peace surrounds you gently in its soft embrace, so strong and quiet, tranquil in the might of its Creator, nothing can intrude upon the sacred Son of God within. Here is the role the Holy Spirit gives to you who wait upon the Son of God, and would behold him waken and be glad: He is a part of you, and you of him, BECAUSE he is his Father's Son, and not for ANY purpose you may see in him. Nothing is asked of you but to ACCEPT the Changeless and Eternal that abide in him, for YOUR Identity is there." UrT29F2

"Forgiving dreams have little need to last. They are not made to separate the mind from what it thinks. They do not seek to prove the dream is being dreamed by someone ELSE. And in these dreams a melody is heard which everyone remembers, though he has not heard it since before all time began. Forgiveness, once complete, brings timelessness so close the song of Heaven can be heard, not with the ears, but with the holiness that never left the altar which abides forever deep within the Son of God. " UrT29J8