In God's Kingdom, each individual being is also all of the other beings. There is a shared oneness. Everyone is everyone.

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds. Such is the truth." "The Sonship is your soul."

Each brother or Son of God actually IS the other brothers, while still being multiple brothers. It is correct to then say, you are the whole sonship. And also, that other person you know, they are also the whole sonship. And everyone in the world, is the whole sonship. And each one of them individually, is each other, as the whole sonship. This is the natural arrangement of the family of God, where every child of God is one with all other children of God.

"We are the Kingdom, WE, the Sons of God."

In the physical world however, bodies were constructed as separation devices. Their purpose was to SPLIT OFF each child of God and prevent them from being one with each other. The body then acts like a prison cell with walls, keeping the whole rest of the sonship out, and locking you inside in isolation. This denies that you share ANYTHING with anyone, and asserts that there is NO oneness.

To enter into the bodily state, you enter into the ego thought system of sin and death. And the body is an expression of the idea of sin and death. "The body is clearly a device for separation"

"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master."

Once you're in a body, or have identified with a body, or see yourself as less than the whole sonship in any way, you confine yourself to a little tiny speck in space and time, wrapped and trapped in a body, kept apart from everyone else.

This makes you feel alone, and also as though you are the only person inhabiting your body. And everyone else's bodies are only their own bodies, and no-one shares bodies. And indeed there are vast distances between bodies, to ensure they never meet. And even when the two bodies meet, the two people are still alone and separate and do not really touch each other, inside-to-inside.

Such was the physical world made and arranged, so that bodies would act as separation devices to keep everyone apart. To exclude and isolate and make everyone seem different and unequal. The body was designed to always be different, unfamiliar, unalike, and unrecognizable. Such that they turn all brothers into seeming strangers.

Essentially bodies are expressions of the idea of having NO RELATIONSHIPS with others, no connection, no sharing, and no communication. You can't be related to something you're different from.

"Everything the ego perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships that imply BEING."

"You cannot enter into REAL relationship with ANY of God's Sons, unless you love them all, and EQUALLY."

"If you single out PART of the Sonship for your love, you are imposing guilt on ALL your relationships, and MAKING them unreal."

You see a body that you don't remember and you think you never met them before, even though all brothers are part of God's original family. And then it seems like you have to "get to know" people, as if you are starting out with no knowledge of them and have no clue who they are. You ask their name and where they are from and what they do, only because you've been estranged from them for so long you don't even know anything about them.

"It is only the awareness of the body that makes love seem limited. For the body IS a limit on love. The belief in limited love was its origin, and it was MADE to limit the UNlimited. Think not that this is merely allegorical; for it was made to limit YOU."

This is incredibly unnatural. This is the opposite of the nature of the sonship and the reality of heaven. Everyone's unity, everyone's shared nature, everyone's oneness, the fact the each son of God is all sons of God and the one son of God is hidden completely by bodies. Bodies pull the sonship apart and confine them in containment and limitation, isolate them away from each other and don't allow them to share anything.

This was the original intended purpose of the body, to produce slavery to the ego, to worship and exalt the very prison that keeps you bound, and to anchor you in spacetime so that you'll die along with it.

"What could the purpose of the body Be BUT specialness? And it is this that makes it frail and helpless in its own defense. It was CONCEIVED to make YOU frail and helpless. The goal of separation is its curse."

If you look at society in general you'll see that this is a prevalent experience. Everywhere you look there are expressions of individuality in the sense that, each person is their body, and is not another body. The law of the land looks to what one body does to another. You are held responsible for your body's actions, but not those of others. And everyone thinks in terms of "only me".

My house, my car, my food, my television shows, my toys, my bed, my kitchen, my toilet, my day, my life, my separate isolated experience, my unique loneliness, my exclusive specialness, my self-interests, my my me me my my me me. This is the selfishness of the ego thought system, physicalized as bodies. Bodies designed to prevent the sons of God from recognizing or sharing with each other.

We can, however, re-purpose the prisons that the we made in the separation, and use them to help us to transcend the prisons. We can use the body to increase communication, and that doesn't mean to increase talking it means to extend the mind beyond the body's limits and beyond limits of "a solitary identity", beyond exclusion and specialness, to a much broader inclusiveness of everyone.

We can use the body for a higher purpose, but note that the body IS STILL a prison no matter how you use it. It will always be a limit on love. It will always confine and separate and have limited senses. It cannot ever see reality through its eyes and it will not ever enter heaven. So we should be careful to think the body can turn into a physicalization of the freedom of spirit, or that it can be truly holy. But it can serve a holier purpose, within the limits of what it is capable of.

To transcend the body is the body's higher purpose. To use the body to learn that you are not a body. To use the body to render the body unnecessary. To use the very device of separation against itself, so that we move past the body's limits. In this view the body actually is recognized as having NO FUNCTION.

"Your brother's body is as little use to you as it is to him. When it is used ONLY as the Holy Spirit teaches, it has no function. For minds NEED not the body to communicate. The sight that SEES the body, has no use which serves the purpose of a holy relationship."

In effect, the body and its limits needs to get out of the way. In fact a holy relationship should be a way of actually relating BEYOND the body, transcending its limits, mind-to-mind, soul-to-soul, and physicality shouldn't even enter into and need not even be a part of the relationship. The mind needs to learn to extend through the body to join with other minds, beyond their bodies. So that we can recognize again our shared oneness. This is why "miracles unite you with your brother."

"Learning must lead BEYOND the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it. This can be accomplished ONLY if the mind EXTENDS to other minds, and does not ARREST ITSELF in its extension. The arrest of the mind's extension is the cause of all illness, because ONLY EXTENSION IS THE MIND's FUNCTION. Block this, and you have blocked health because you have BLOCKED THE MIND's JOY."

Our challenge then is to learn how to ignore the body's imposed limits, transcend its boundaries through transcendental vision, move the mind through and beyond it to join with other minds, overlook all physical objects of spacetime which were designed to keep everyone separate, and rejoin the sonship. Not just to return to being a member of the collective mind, but to learn to recognize YOU ARE EVERYONE, and NOT just this one little tiny body self.

"Nothing the body's eyes seem to see can be anything but a form of temptation, since this was the purpose of the body itself. Yet we have learned that the Holy Spirit has another use for all the illusions you have made, and therefore He sees another purpose in them. To the Holy Spirit, the world is a place where you learn to forgive yourself what you think of as your sins. In this perception, the physical appearance of temptation becomes the spiritual recognition of salvation."

"Yet what makes them God's teachers is their recognition of the proper purpose of the body. As they advance in their profession, they become more and more certain that the body's function is but to let God's Voice speak through it to human ears. And these ears will carry to the mind of the hearer messages which are not of this world, and the mind will understand because of their Source."

"Everyone can use his body best by enlarging man's perception, so he can see the real VISION. THIS VISION is invisible to the physical eye. The ultimate purpose of the body is to render itself unnecessary. Learning to do this is the only real reason for its creation (the only re-purposing of it after it was made)."

"For everyone is seeking to escape from the prison he has made"

"You ARE the Kingdom of Heaven, but you have let the belief in darkness enter your minds, and so you need a new light."

"The Kingdom of Heaven IS you."

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK."

Your mind in its natural healthy state, extends outwards and joins with other minds, connecting to them intimately. Your mind extends past your body, past the body of others, and joins with the holiness in them. It shares itself with them and thus unites with the Holy Spirit in them.

But if your mind is not allowed to fully extend all the way to the other mind, past all physical obstacles, your mind "falls short". It seems to focus on something "in between" you and another. Whether it be that you are focusing on the body of another, or your own body.

This focusing on the obstacle between you, usually bodies, means you actually have dipped down into false perception. And now your mind is blinded by perception of form. And that means you are failing to OVERLOOK or extend or fully move past the obstacles. Your mind basically "stops at" the outside surface of apparent forms and bodies.

This lack of full extension, sort of stopping off along the way to pay attention to form, is a state of mental sickness. It really only occurs due to some kind of "withdrawal" from others, an unwillingness to share, a lack of openness, a lack of joining. Which means that you have pulled back from the relationship and are only going part way towards union with them.

That's a problem, because that means part of your mind is in your brother, and part of it is now "separated off" within yourself, and the two parts are not connecting fully. And this "gap" forms, the separation gap, in which the body exists. And now you perceive obstacles and appearances and bodies "in between" you and the REST of you.

Having done this, you are now sick, and your mind is now starting to TARGET the body. It's becoming blocked by form and "blinded" by sight of form. Your perception is dropping into false perception and you're dipping down into ego. And by doing so, you are now making illusions seem real to you.

Sight of the body now becomes an obstacle, and a target, and a weapon, and something used to SEPARATE you and your brother, or you and the rest of you. And this is the use of body for attack. And by doing this you are kind of holding the body up in-between you and your brother and are pretending it is a picture of your self. And it now becomes a picture of crucifixion.

Since your mind is no longer extending fully all the way to the light in another mind, instead of going OUT, it is not aimed DOWN. And it starts heading into the darkness rather than the light above.

This is going to push the body into states of darkness and distortion, and the body now literally becomes sick. And the mind is now USING the body for attack, by making it real, and focusing on it. And by so doing the body will now turn into the absence of health and healing.

You then enter a state which is familiar to most of us, where you now seem to "have a problem", and the problem seems real. Your body is sick and having issues. And your attention is on it. And it seems real. And you can't seem to get past it. And seeing it frightens you. And now you begin looking for solutions.

The ego solution at this point is to try to ATTACK the BLOCKAGE that you're seeing, ie target the body or the apparent sickness, with weapons of truth, trying to make it go away. You can hurl courseisms at it in the hope that you will undo it. Like you can say ok, this sickness is not real, it's an illusion, it's not really there etc. But this all still depends on believing that it IS THERE. And having failed to overlook it is really the problem in the first place.

So what is the trick to it? This will sound a bit counter intuitive but essentially, in order to heal the body you have to not make it real. You have to stop focusing on it. Stop making it an obstacle coming between you and others. And stop using it as proof that your mind is not REACHING your brother. If it is seen as an obstacle, and in fact if it is seen AT ALL, your mind is not fully extending.

It's really only the mind's choice of whether to fully extend, or partly extend, which produces health or sickness in the body. When it fails to extend fully (to give unconditional love), it falls short and "invents" separation devices in-between itself and others. And this shows up AS A BODY, and proceeds to turn from a healthy body to a sick body. The more you make this obstacle real the worse it gets, until it dies from attacking it.

So in fact when the mind RETURNS TO EXTENDING, which essentially IGNORES the body entirely, overlooking it, looking PAST it to the light, that is what "indirectly" heals the body. It lifts away from the body all of its attack and its use of the body for separation. So by practically forgetting about the body completely and SEEING PAST it to the light in another mind, joining with them, the body moves into INVISIBILITY. And it is this that is miraculous and heals the body.

So the trick is to actually just LOOK PAST the problem, push beyond the obstacle, see THROUGH the physical matter, seek out THE LIGHT beyond, and focus ONLY on that (seeking the Kingdom first), and this automatically heals the body. It heals because the mind is not not an attacking mind, it's a whole mind, a sane mind, and a whole mind has a HEALING EFFECT on the body as it "passes through it."

So there's a knack to it because there's great temptation to make the body REAL and THEN try to heal it, which locks in the sickness. And now you're at war with it which is a double denial. You have to stop being blocked by it, stop focusing on it, expand your mind, focus on the light, and therefore OVERLOOK the body. That is FORGIVENESS. And this UNDOES all of the strange distortions of sickness in the body because now a non-attacking, HEALTHY mind is moving through it.

The Holy Spirit in fact, when using the body solely for communication, communicates ONLY HEALING, and recognizes essentially that the body is NOT important AT ALL. This isn't a spiritualization of the body, it's more like IGNORING IT completely. It is recognized as having NO FUNCTION. And the only thing happening is the mind basically ignoring it and moving PAST it to do its business. This then heals the body because it is not given any reality.

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

"It is still true that the body has no function of itself. This is because it is not an end."

"Your brother's body is as little use to you as it is to him. When it is used only as the Holy Spirit teaches, it has no function. For minds need not the body to communicate. The sight that sees the body, has no use which serves the purpose of a holy relationship. And while you look upon each other thus, the means and end have not been brought in line."

"But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. "

"Learning must lead beyond the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it. This can be accomplished only if the mind EXTENDS to other minds, and does not ARREST ITSELF in its extension. The arrest of the mind's extension is the cause of all illness, because ONLY EXTENSION IS THE MIND'S FUNCTION. Block this, and you have blocked health because you have BLOCKED THE MIND'S JOY."

"To see a body as anything EXCEPT a means of pure extension is to limit your mind and hurt yourself. Health is therefore nothing more than united purpose. If the body is brought under the purpose of the mind, it becomes whole because mind's purpose is one."

"Freedom from illusions lies only in not believing them. THERE IS NOT ATTACK, but there is unlimited communication and therefore unlimited power and wholeness. The power of wholeness is EXTENSION. Do not arrest your thought in this world, and you will open your mind to Creation in God."

"Healing is when two minds recognize their oneness and become glad."

"You have done miracles, but it is QUITE apparent that you have NOT done them alone. You have succeeded whenever you have reached another mind, and joined with it. When two minds join as one, and share one idea equally, the first link in the awareness of the Sonship as one has been made."

"Christ's vision has one law. 2It does not look upon a body, and mistake it for the Son whom God created. It beholds a light beyond the body; an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes, and fearful thoughts of guilt from dreams of sin. It sees no separation. And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees."

"The miracle-worker begins by PERCEIVING light, and translates HIS perception into sureness by continually extending it, and ACCEPTING ITS ACKNOWLEDGMENT. Its EFFECTS assure him IT IS THERE. The therapist does not heal; he LETS HEALING BE. HE can point to darkness, but he CANNOT bring light OF HIMSELF, for light is NOT of him. But being FOR him, it MUST be for his patient.

The Holy Spirit is the ONLY therapist. He makes healing PERFECTLY clear in ANY situation in which He is the Guide. The human therapist can only LET HIM FULFILL HIS FUNCTION. He needs no help for this. He WILL tell you EXACTLY what to do, to help ANYONE He sends to you FOR help, and will speak to him through you, IF YOU DO NOT INTERFERE. Remember that you ARE choosing a guide for helping, and the wrong choice will NOT help. But remember also that THE RIGHT ONE WILL. Trust Him, for help is His function, and He is of God."

"There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach."

Everything in the course culminates with the clear recognition of what is true, and what is false. What is real, and what is unreal. What exists, and what does not.

This includes the recognition that THERE IS NO WORLD. It does not exist. Recognizing this IS forgiveness. This is the mindset in which wrong-mindedness ends, and right-mindedness automatically transitions to one-mindedness.

Jesus tells us that we are to become aware of dreaming. What this means is we become aware that the world IS A DREAM. We recognize it as ONLY a dream. And therefore we are not deceived by it.

"The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are? 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."

"Forgiving dreams are kind to everyone who figures in the dream. And so they bring the dreamer full release from dreams of fear."

Recognizing that the world is a dream, and NOT a reality, ties into the secret of salvation. The secret tells you that provided you do not mistake the dream for reality, you will not react to it. This is the SINGLE LESSON that the Holy Spirit teaches.

"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."

This means that you attain salvation by recognizing that the world is not real and does not exist. By recognizing it IS A DREAM, not a reality, you don't give it any credit, any truth, any reality, or any value. You know that you are dreaming it, but you are not deceived by it. And therefore you are not confused by notions that the dream is doing anything TO YOU, or that events are happening, or that sin is real, or that attack is occurring, or that anyone is really suffering.

The view that there is no world is like a KEY, which unlocks the door to heaven. It is not just information or some fact to learn. It is the atonement. It is forgiveness. It requires you to SEE and EXPERIENCE from a healed-mind vantage point, which sees that the world is only fiction and not real. And this places you OUTSIDE the dream. It puts you in a position of recognizing also:

"Only the truth is true, and nothing else is true."

and "Nothing unreal exists."

It's a clear distinction between what the real truth IS, and what it ISN'T. And therefore it frames the world in the light of truth, SHOWING that it is a false world and really is NOTHINGNESS. That there isn't even REALLY a world there. And in the cancelling of the world, the illusion is seen through, and disappears. And this leaves ONLY HEAVEN.

"Heaven is all that remains."

"Heaven remains your one alternative to the strange world you made."

"There is no life outside of heaven."

That there is no world, is an assertion that there IS ONLY HEAVEN. It is the resurrection because it is the assertion of life. It is sanity because it acknowledges only God's truth is true. And is salvation because in this awareness, you realize that ONLY GOD and His creation exists.

God is at peace because He knows that there is not really a world here. Nothing unreal exists. And since nothing unreal exists, nothing evil, dark, dangerous, harmful, bad, wrong, etc exists either. Thus there is no suffering, no sickness, no death, no guilt or fear or sin, and no space or time. And ALL THAT IS LEFT is the good, the immortal, the true and the holy. And this makes you feel very safe and happy.

Essentially this requires us to realize, fully, and to perceive, that this world we made IS NOTHING. It is made of nothingness, pretending to be something. When we are deceived by its illusion of existing, we are tempted to believe nothing exists. But when we see through it, we remember that nothingness does NOT exist, and so the world of nothingness does not exist.

"...as the world spins into the nothingness from which it came."

"The body is clearly a device for separation and therefore does not exist."

"At no time does the body exist."

The entire message is EXTREMELY PIVOTAL. The reason is to do with uprooting the ENTIRE PREMISE of the ENTIRE ego thought system, and that system IS this universe. All of space and time are the ego's system of thinking.

"Every system of thought must have a starting point. It begins with either a making or a creating, a difference we have already discussed."

God is the logical premise of truth, the original starting point of creation, and the origin from which all extension and expression happens. Creation is the logical outcome of his premise and truth. And everything that comes from Him is based on His nature.

In the separation, we attempted to REPLACE the premise of truth with a FALSE premise. The false premise was the belief that everything STARTS with the OPPOSITE TO GOD. The opposite of reality, eternal life, truth, happiness, love, health, wholeness, unlimitedness, etc. The assertion of the opposite to God is the ego and the world.

"Earth, heaven's opposite in every way."

"And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true."

The world is nothing other than the idea that what IS NOTHING, is something. What DOES NOT exist, exists. What CANNOT HAPPEN, is happening. What is IMPOSSIBLE, is possible. What is NOT alive, is alive. What IS alive, is dead. What IS false, is true. It is the negation of reality and the opposite to God.

Atonement is the clear recognition that the world IS NOT what it claims to be. IT IS false, it is non-existent, it is an illusion, it is not real, it is not happening, and it is entirely fictional. Recognizing this is awareness of dreaming, the clear true perception that nothing in the world is real. Remembering it is just a dream. And therefore having NO reaction TO it, remembering that IT IS NOT THERE.

Seeing this is to OVERLOOK the world, which is forgiveness, and is what shows you the forgiven world. "A world forgiven cannot last". To forgive the world is to NOT SEE IT. Because "forgiveness does not look upon bodies". Christ vision sees PAST and BEYOND the world. The world is a thin veil which becomes transparent and vanishes when reality is acknowledged AS real, and "illusions recognized must disappear."

By changing the PREMISE of this world back to its ACTUAL premise, which is that the world is founded on a FALSE IMPOSSIBLE IDEA, rather than being confused that the world is founded on the truth and reality of God, this REFRAMES everything in the world. Even just remembering "this is just a dream" does this. It completely changes the MEANING of everything that happens. It completely INVALIDATES all notions of this being an ACTUALLY sinful, guilty, bad, wrong, dark, twisted, threatening, dangerous, suffering world. Because what everything IS is completely turned upside down when you realize it IS ONLY HAPPENING IN A DREAM.

There is no world.

There is no body.

There is no solar system.

There are no galaxies.

There is no space.

There is no time.

There is no sin.

There is no guilt.

There is nothing to fear.

There is no sickness.

There is no death.

There is no matter.

There is no universe.

There is no decay.

There is no malfunction.

There is no problem.

There is no attack.

There is no war.

There is no conflict.

There is no disease.

There is no history.

There is no ANYTHING THAT YOU CAN THINK OF THAT'S IN THIS WORLD.

Remembering there is no world, makes you feel instantly happy. This is the PROPER USE OF DENIAL. To deny the denial of the truth. Because there is no world, EVERY SINGLE THREAT that you believe in does not exist. ALL attacks are not happening. EVERY sickness is an illusion and no one is really sick. DEATH doesn't even exist. This SETS YOU FREE. And this is what ACIM is trying to teach us. To become COMPLETELY clear that there IS no world AT ALL, there never was, and only God's Kingdom remains as it always has. The recognition of this is enlightenment, and this is how you awaken to Heaven.

"W-pI.132.6. But it is pride that argues you have come into a world quite separate from yourself, impervious to what you think, and quite apart from what you chance to think it is. 2 There is no world! 3 This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. 4 Not everyone is ready to accept it, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. 5 He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again.

W-pI.132.7. But healing is the gift of those who are prepared to learn there is no world, and can accept the lesson now. 2 Their readiness will bring the lesson to them in some form which they can understand and recognize. 3 Some see it suddenly on point of death, and rise to teach it. 4 Others find it in experience that is not of this world, which shows them that the world does not exist because what they behold must be the truth, and yet it clearly contradicts the world.

W-pI.132.8. And some will find it in this course, and in the exercises that we do today. 2 Today's idea is true because the world does not exist. 3 And if it is indeed your own imagining, then you can loose it from all things you ever thought it was by merely changing all the thoughts that gave it these appearances. 4 The sick are healed as you let go all thoughts of sickness, and the dead arise when you let thoughts of life replace all thoughts you ever held of death."

"God made not death. Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion. This the stand we take today. And it is given us to look past death and see the life beyond."

You can say that death is bad, and everything should be moved towards life. That includes healing the body and mind. There should be resurrection happening, a reversal of aging, an undoing of the effects of space and time. A return to life from death.

But this can also be mixed in with an active avoidance of death, a fear of it happening, and a wish to stop a suffering that seems real. If a person's body is real, and it is sick, you'll be motivated to "perform miracles" to heal and rescue them from death. You just want it to all go away.

This attitude of death avoidance can seem like it is in support of miracles, and even can compel and entail attempts at healing. But it's still the behaviour of an unhealed healer - a mixture of trying to resurrect the dead while still believing death is real. If bodies are real, then fixing them becomes a priority.

I went through this whole phase over the course of many years, presented with an endless supply of pictures of my wife being sick and disabled. It was practically an embarrassment to a budding ACIM miracle-worker, the amount of assistive devices we had to use - lifts and wheelchairs and special beds and medicines.

Here I was, trying to stave off death at all costs, keep the body going, undo the sickness, reverse the symptoms, resurrect the dying and make it all better. But this too was driven by a belief that my wife was a body, constantly mixing her spirit and mind with the physical form, where references to "her" always included the body.

I resisted the sickness and the death. I didn't want it to happen. I wanted to keep the body-person around for as long as possible, and couldn't even conceive of any other way of living. Keeping her ticking over was a constant struggle and a daily effort, thwarting wrong diagnoses and fending off stupid medical staff. Trying to keep the death-mongers at bay.

But eventually it got to a point where it was all exhausted, and it occurred to me that I really should just let her die. And that seemed totally against everything I believed. Not that it was up to me anyway, but I had to stop fighting it. I realised I should stop trying to keep her here, and stop trying to prevent all hell breaking loose. She didn't want to really be here any more and we were both quite done with the daily drudgery of bodily upkeep.

It was within a week of that surrendering that she died. Well, I should say, she went to heaven. Her body for sure died, and she for sure did not. Which presented its own confusing challenges to get my head around. But a few things became super clear to me.

My entire attitude about death being "a really bad thing" was totally bullshit. It was fuelled by a belief that the body was the person and must be kept alive. My fear of it and avoidance of it just attracted it. My belief in the sickness just fuelled it. But all of a sudden she was in a state of extreme freedom and happiness, relieved and grateful, totally stunned yet overjoyed.

All the suffering simply switched off. All the daily grind came to an end. All the resistance to it happening was blown out of the water. And it seemed nothing but wonderful for her. I was really thrilled for her to be free at last, which she exclaimed to me "I'm free!" and "I'm happy".

So death really wasn't that bad, after all. In fact, it appeared like a kind of liberation and mercy, given how much she'd suffered for years. I wouldn't wish her for a second to return to that body, and her joy just made me realise more how cruel the world was in not allowing her to leave sooner. The whole idea of keeping someone in a body for as long as possible was shown to be utter bullshit. A multi-lifetime soul doesn't give a shit about it.

It taught me many things all at once. The bullshit of my anti-death pro-miracle deception. My demonising of death and making it out to be a terrible thing. My resistance to the fact that everything in the world dies. It all just popped the bubble. I stopped fighting against it, and that was liberating in its own right. If you try to stop it happening, you make it happen more. But if you stop resisting it, life can take over.

It's another one of those kind of paradoxes. If you make death out to be a bad thing you will choose it. If you don't make it out to be a bad thing, people will think you're anti-miraculous and a death worshipper. But giving it any reality, importance, meaning or value, even if its negative meanings, is just more ego. Death is supposed to be nothing, nothing whatsoever. Meaningless. It's not supposed to be the opposite end of some spiritual warfare between good and evil.

I still recognize and fully believe that death in any form is not supposed to happen. It is not God's nature. Nothing real ever dies. And pretty much everything in the world does. But we also can use the mind to reverse the world's laws and perform miracles, which does still include raising the dead and healing the sick, even to the extent of bodies recovering. In fact Jesus would like for us to demonstrate bodies so healthy and lovely and filled with life that they become symbols of immortality in the dream.

Still, you're not going to get there by opposing death. And when you decide to stop opposing death, that doesn't mean you condone it. It just means you stop fueling it and stop believing in it. Avoiding it just keeps it around. And believing in it while trying not to resist it just condones it. You have to stop believing in it entirely if you want to raise the dead, and believe only in life.

I have perhaps become more truly miracle-minded now that I am no longer fighting against sickness and death. I've stopped making them my enemies. I've stopped resisting them. Well, at least to some extent. My attitude is kind of, "let it all just die", but that too could sound like some murderous idea. The world is hell-bent on dying anyway, so fighting that is bullshit. But at the same time, in that same attitude of letting it go, we can also step into a power that's able to reverse those laws and undo death.

In effect, you bring an end to death by not making it out to be an ending. You withdraw your belief in it being some terrible tragic thing that everyone must avoid at all costs. So shit dies, so what. Fuck it. Who cares. Souls don't care. They just move on and have more lifetimes with fresh healthy new bodies. And being out of the body is fantastic in comparison to coming into one.

This is not in any way to glorify death or sickness, or to suggest to let people keep suffering and not be helpful. But make it real and you die alone with it. Only the living can raise the dead. We are still called to be miracle workers, to raise the dead and heal the sick where possible. To be truly helpful to everyone, to choose not to die ourselves, and to be an example of resurrection. Even to the extent of having our bodies become incapable of death.

But we don't get there by first believing in death and then trying to forgive or undo it. We're the ones that make death have power over us by believing in it. And having made it out to be a power that we can't prevent, which is a projection and disowning of our own power, all we do is end up fighting with ourselves in turmoil. I'm not interested in trying to come off as having some kind of saviour complex, wanting to heal and save everyone from dying.

Most people are going to snuff it in this lifetime because they'r not ready to go all the way. I spent decades trying to heal my wife and reverse her amputations and paralysis and heart disease and brain damage, but bullshit to that because, as it turns out, that was not the plan anyway. The plan was to use the opportunity to learn that making sickness and death real and then resisting it is not the way to be miraculous. To use the sickness as a way to learn to stop believing in it. The plan was never to radically zap her body into a state of perfection. Not in this life.

I totally failed to raise the dead, and it was a great lesson. It almost couldn't have gone any better. In the big picture, this is what I was ready to learn, not that I was some hero that could just zap away death with miracles all over the place. That heroic rescuer bullshit had to die as well. You're far better off letting shit go sometimes. Just as Jesus kept saying to me, "let her."

So some people are not meant to be resurrected in this life. The bigger plan might not call for it and they might not be willing. The Holy Spirit knows what's best and what's possible or appropriate. Some people don't want healing. Some are not ready for an "undiluted miracle." Some want to die too much and aren't ready to forgive themselves. Some are there to play a role for a while and then leave, perhaps to rejoin at a later encounter and carry on. It doesn't all have to happen in one lifetime, and most of the time doesn't.

So I have a much looser attitude now. I recognise the world is just full of disappointment and death so I get much less attached to the bullshit of temptation. I am no longer so mistaken to get all wound up if someone is sick. I'm not feeling like trying to fix and save and stop it happening out of some inability to let it be. Jesus was forever telling me "it's fine" even as my wife's leg was getting chopped off, even as she had a stroke, even as she was in the ICU twice and on her death bed. "It's fine" he said, because ultimately it doesn't matter whatsoever. Nothing real can be threatened. No-one ever dies. Just the body.

This has shown me that from the soul's perspective this world is just here for us to use temporarily. To repurpose. We go through bodies like water. We take on roles and challenges, lessons to learn and people to meet, and we move on. Probably across countless lifetimes. None of the physical shit really matters. It's not important at all. If people are to come and go and die off and leave, so what, you'll see them again. They were never a body in the first place, and the body is worthless anyway. This whole world will be thrown down the toilet and flushed away eventually "as the world spins into the nothingness from which it came."

So yeah. Be miraculous and overcome death by not believing in death and not resisting it. Gotta not resist it if you want there to be any freedom there. If you want to replace it with life you can't be dimming your light with death-believing thoughts of resistances rooted in a fear of loss. This is why we let the dead (in mind/heart) bury the dead (in body). It doesn't matter. Graveyards aren't even real. All of us are spiritual immortal beings who will live forever, and we will never ever be separate or alone.

When we're ready to surmount death and stop dying entirely, we'll resurrect the body and make it disappear. The body then becomes incapable of being sick or dying, so it can only leave by vanishing. The mind overlooks the illusion of death and recognises it as nothing, and away it goes. Then the body is no more, and never was, and you will never again go through death, or birth for that matter. I'm no longer an anti-death spokesperson. Death doesn't exist.

"There is no death. The Son of God is free."

"We call it death, but it is liberty. It does not come in forms that seem to be thrust down in pain upon unwilling flesh, but as a gentle welcome to release. If there has been true healing, this can be the form in which death comes when it is time to rest a while from labor gladly done and gladly ended. Now we go in peace to freer air and gentler climate, where it is not hard to see the gifts we gave were saved for us. For Christ is clearer now; His vision more sustained in us; His Voice, the Word of God, more certainly our own."

What A Course in Miracles calls "the separation", was a rejection of reality. We denied what was real and blocked our awareness of it. We lost touch with reality and forgot what it was like.

"The separation is merely a faulty formulation of reality, WITH NO EFFECT AT ALL."

"For separation IS the source of guilt, and to APPEAL to it for salvation IS TO BELIEVE YOU ARE ALONE."

This event - the fall of man, the detour into fear - marked our entry into a "separated state" of mind, which we are still in. The separated state is an entire system of thought in which separation is constantly being perpetuated and chosen.

"Separateness" is a mindset in which we believe in being cut off, we separate ourselves off from each other, we stop sharing and become selfish, we try to be special and different, we withdraw from reality, and we exclude ourselves in isolation and imprisonment. We're still doing this right now and every day.

"The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought that is PERFECTLY real in time, though not in Eternity. All beliefs are real to the believer."

"Separation is only the decision NOT to know yourself. Its whole thought-system is a carefully-contrived learning experience, designed to lead AWAY from truth, and into fantasy."

"The separation IS the notion of rejection. As long as you teach this, YOU still believe it."

Denying reality means we cannot tell what is true and what is false. We cannot tell what is real and what is unreal. This produces tremendous confusion. This confusion is insanity. It means we are now distracted with things which are not true, deceived by things which are impossible, believe in things which cannot be of God, and become lost.

"You HAVE carried the ego's reasoning to its logical conclusion, which is TOTAL CONFUSION ABOUT EVERYTHING."

Being lost in an illusory world and not being able to find the way out is the common symptom of all of us "separated ones". We're like little children who have been told a bunch of lies, we've been deceived, led astray, convinced we're evil when we're not, and have been sent off into the wilderness in exile not knowing where we are, who we are, how we got here, why we're here, what home is, where home is, or how to get there.

The real issue as ACIM says is that there is only one problem, and it is this sense of separation from reality (God). In our denial and self-deception we keep believing things which are not true. We keep being heavily mistaken. We keep pretending to know what we're talking about when we don't, we think all our beliefs are valid, we don't want to admit to being wrong, and we stay committed to lies.

What much of this boils down to is an inability to RECOGNIZE what something is. Whether it is one thing or another. To recognize that we are even really suffering, or that there is fear, or that we are in denial. To recognize that we believe something false, or to even have the humility to recognize we are probably way more mistaken than we realize. We don't even know what we don't know, and we don't even know the ways we are mistaken and confused.

"The intrusion of the ability to perceive, which is inherently judgmental, was introduced only after the Separation. No one has been sure of anything since then."

Not recognizing anything is insanity. This is why the opposite - enlightenment - is a recognition. It is a state in which you recognize clearly what everything is, what is true, what is false, what is real and what is unreal. If you could just get everything straightened out in your mind, and ACT like someone who accepts only God's truth (atonement), you would stop participating in "being separate". You would drop all the defenses and illusions and lies, all the false beliefs and attitudes, all attacking and rejecting and excluding and separating.

As far as heaven is concerned, they look upon us as simply lost lonely little children who are very confused and don't know what they're doing. We're like in a kind of daze, disoriented, wandering around in the dark trying to find something we think we lost without really knowing what it is. We are believing in things which don't exist, and are taking things out of context, and this leads to tremendous distortions of reality. These distortions show up as hallucinations and nightmares and being freaked out by monsters.

We literally see things which are not there, hear things which are not really sounds, touch things which don't exist, and believe everything our bodies tell us. But "only the body makes the world seem real", and without it the world would not seem real. Without it the world would be clearly apparent in its unreality, because it is so opposite to reality. We don't recognize reality because we buy into everything the body says is true. "The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen." It is literally incapable of detecting reality. "You made the body in attempting to deceive yourself." And so the body is a deceiver and everything it tells you is a lie, and the whole world is set up to tempt you to believe things which are not true. To distort your mind and take you away from SANITY, and towards insanity. To bind you to confusion and to the loss of self. Separate from God, hopeless and alone.

What we then experience when our mind is insane, while in this world, is what we call false perception. It's a distorting twisting perception in which we USE the world, which is meaningless in itself, and interpret it as though it is a nightmarish hell. We read into it, attack it, use it for separation, reject it, blame it, condemn it, hate it, all in order to split our minds further and go more insane. What we then experience is an "unreal world."

"The Separation is merely another term for a split mind. It was not an act, but a thought."

Jesus asks us in ACIM to "make the world real unto yourself." This means to see it only for what it really is. This doesn't mean it is ultimate reality, but it means having accurate perception which just looks straight at it and recognizes what is true and false. Recognizing its actual nature, which is an illusion and is nothing. And what you thought was a nightmare turns into a happier dream because you no longer are having a psychological nightmare in relationship to it. This is true perception and shows you a forgiven world.

The "real world" therefore is a view of the world which is closer to "reality". A view in which you are not insane, are not deceived, are not twisted and distorted, are not lost and alone, are not separated off, are not isolated or excluded, or selfish or special. It's a view which stems from being more integrated and whole and healed, without a split mind and without attack or condemnation or dissociation or guilt. Looking upon the world from this view can only show you "the real world", ie what the world "actually is", rather than a filtered and mangled view of it.

Either way, our task then is the return to reality. This entails recognizing that we are not in a state of reality because we do not recognize what is real. It also entails a willingness to admit to being insane, an openness to asking for the Holy Spirit's help, and a desire to move towards sanity. To become sane you have to become very deeply honest in looking at what you are believing and doing that is out of accord with God's will. Out of accord with reality itself. And accepting the atonement is nothing more than accepting reality.

"Perhaps you do not feel that a course which, in the end, teaches nothing more than that only reality is true is necessary. BUT DO YOU BELIEVE IT?"

This is also why Jesus refers to "reality contact", in that we are to move out of a state of being very heavily mistaken, lost, confused, distorting, deceiving, admit to our efforts to attack reality, and move our minds back into a more natural, peaceful, happy and whole state. To heal the split in the mind. As Jesus says all you can do is either separate or join. That means you can either split your mind or undo the split and return to wholeness.

So the whole path of ACIM or any spiritual "awakening" is really nothing more than a movement out of insanity back to sanity, our of unreality back to reality. Just waking up to what is real. To just being real and getting in touch with real existence. Real existence is The Kingdom of God. In order to become sane we're going to have to heal our insanity. And our insanity is driven by a "belief in separation."

Note though that believing in separation isn't about believing that there was a separation event a long time ago, although there was. THE separation DID happen, as a belief in a false thought. But it's now about realizing you are STILL believing in separation, you are still actively separating, you are continually using your mind TO separate, and you keep re-enacting separation over and over again.

Every time that you attack, condemn, accuse, blame, hate, judge, reject, withdraw, fear, become angry at, project guilt, make sinful, try to destroy, push away from, or any other mental act which seems to create a "distance" or gap between you and ANYTHING, you are separating from reality. You are splitting your mind. This is the belief in separation, an actual psychological act in which you are trying to keep the separation going, to deepen the wound, to emphasize the guilt and to split yourself off from being one.

Any attack you make which you think is an attack upon something "not yourself", is a result of dissociation. Dissociation is the same thing as separation, and as exclusion. It means you HAVE separated and have split, and now you think something is not a part of you. It is excluded from you, and you attack it in what seems to be "externally" in order to push it away from you. To distance yourself from you. This distancing is SPACETIME. It means you are MAKING time and space in your mind by rejecting stuff. The gap of separation, the pit of hell, is in your mind. And stuff only appears to be outside your mind because you HAVE separated it off. Ideas leave not their source.

Any time you attack anyone thinking they are not you, and that they are receiving the attack and not you, you are deluded. Your mind is attacking itself and projecting the split and seeing the "other part" outside of what's left "within". It has dissociated the guilty part of mind and hates it. And the more it hates it and wants it dead, the more it is wanting to increase the split and thus increase the insanity. We are doing this every minute of every day.

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

To see "the real world" is literally to simply be in touch with reality and look out from reality and look upon the world we made (the illusion/dream/physical) and see what's there. It is a state of recognition, in which the illusory nature of the world is recognized clearly. In which there is no DECEPTION. In which you are no longer deceived by what you see.

"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."

Awareness of dreaming is sanity. It is as close to ultimate reality as we can be while still slightly separated from it. Because "perception still is a separated state." So the entire course is really just telling us that we've gone nuts and we need help to get back to reality. We've become lost in a fantasy-land and we need to get back to the Kingdom of God. And along the way we need to see the world we made as "the real world", ie the truth about it in reality, and then leave it behind as we move on to actual existence. To our real life in heaven with God.

"There is only one way out of the world's thinking, just as there was only one way INTO it. Understand totally by understanding TOTALITY. Perceive ANY part of the ego's thought system as wholly insane, wholly delusional, and wholly undesirable, and you have CORRECTLY EVALUATED ALL OF IT."

"You are no longer wholly insane, NOR NO LONGER ALONE."

"When the "lies of the serpent" were introduced, they were specifically called lies because they are not true. When man listened, all he heard was untruth. He does not have to continue to believe what is not true, unless he chooses to do so. All of his miscreations can disappear in the well known "twinkling of an eye", because it is a visual misperception."

Most people have an idea of what duality means. Usually a world of many separate things. Separate objects, separate bodies. A count beyond one.

This however isn't a full enough definition. Duality is also a matter of NOT SHARING. It's a state of mind in which you do not want to be joined with, share with, or have relationship with, anything or anyone. It's also a state of selfishness, therefore, because it opposes sharing. It produces isolation and disconnection. The ego thought system - the world of duality - is all about selfishness.

"Selfishness is of the ego" T-7.IX.1:4

If duality really means selfishness, what is the opposite of selfishness? It is sharing. But this requires that there be someone or something to share WITH. It cannot mean that there is only you there, or only God. It also requires that in absolute reality, in God, there must be something other than JUST God, such as your brothers, to share with. For example:

"You dwell in the Mind of God with your brother, for God Himself did not will to be alone." T-11.I.1:6

"Because He did not will to be alone, He created a Son like Himself." T-11.I.5:7

God wanted to share himself. In fact we're also told that SHARING is the natural inherent property of reality.

"Nothing real can be increased except by sharing. ³That is why God created you. ⁴Divine Abstraction takes joy in sharing. ⁵That is what creation means." T-4.VII.5:2-5

We're told in ACIM itself, putting aside all interpretations by other well-meaning teachers and students, in Jesus's words, that God did NOT will to be the "only thing that exists". He did not will to be alone. He willed that there be ANOTHER, and CREATED at the very least one son.

He even goes on to say that God not ONLY willed to create at least one son, this son ALSO has the ability to create its own sons.

"God would not have us be alone because _He_ does not will to be alone. ⁷That is why He created His Son, and gave him the power to create with Him. ⁸Our creations are as holy as we are, and we are the Sons of God Himself, as holy as He is." T-8.VI.8:6-8

Note also that it clearly states that God has SONS, not just one.

"The creations of every Son of God are yours, since every creation belongs to everyone, being created for the Sonship as a whole." T-7.IX.5:3

"The Kingdom of God includes all His Sons and their children, who are as like the Sons as they are like the Father. ¹¹Know, then, the Sons of God, and you will know all creation." T-7.XI.7:10-11

It's quite simply stating that God not only created many children, but that even those children in turn go on to create more children. The Sons of God form the sonship, which shares the One Mind of Christ. And collectively as the One Son, we all co-create with God to produce our own creations.

This is in fact why Jesus refers to us as having BROTHERS. The term brother means an equal sibling of the same parent. Because God did not will to be alone, and did not will us to be alone, he created MANY OF US, so that we would have permanent brothers IN heaven forever.

"Return with me to Heaven, walking together with your brother out of this world and through another, to the loveliness and joy the other holds within it." T-18.I.12:4)

"Here stands your brother with the key to Heaven in his hand, held out to you. T-24.II.7:6"

There is also a holy trinity in reality. God the father, the Sonship as the One Son comprising many sons and their creations, and the Holy Spirit. These are not conceptual or ego inventions, they are permanent.

"The Son of God is part of the Holy Trinity" T-3.II.5:4 "Your creations are your gift to the Holy Trinity, created in gratitude for your creation." T-8.VI.5:3)

The Holy Spirit is also a permanent eternal creation who will continue to exist along with the many sons even AFTER the atonement.

"When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed there will be no Call to return. ⁶But what God creates is eternal. ⁷The Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless their creations and keep them in the light of joy." T-5.I.5:5-7

So what we have now is in fact a more fleshed out picture. Heaven, God's reality, comprises God, the Holy Spirit, the Sonshsip, which form the trinity. And the Sonship includes many sons, and many creations of many sons, who are also brothers. By the way there are angels as well, created by God.

Now, such a picture does not sound remotely like "non-duality." Someone came up with non-duality as an antithesis to duality, purely as a conceptual idea. It's an attempt to try to explain what the course is saying. Except that, it doesn't quite fit.

It fits in the sense that it may describe God himself, IF God were alone and willed to be alone. As a LOGICAL DEVICE, opposite to "many" means "one", a count of one. This is what non-duality logically means. There are many flaky and wishywashy definitions out there which have tried to glue toegether pieces of the course to make it fit with this, but the PUREST form of non-duality is that "there is literally only God."

This obviously does not FIT with what ACIM says, because it's told us that God is a creator, that he has created at least one child if not many, and that his child has has its own children. Not to mention also the holy spirit being created, and the trinity existing. All of this is not properly encompassed by the concept of non-duality.

Some people like non-duality ideas because they seem to suggest the antithesis to "separateness". As if it is the opposite of ego, the opposite of separation, and the way to undo all trace of the separation from God. But this is VERY BASIC logic and highly inaccurate in its representation of what JESUS ACTUALLY says.

The purest non-duality does not support God being a creator, or God sharing, or God having relationships, or God having even ONE son, or of God creating the Holy Spirit, or of YOU existing, or of you having any creations. It doesn't even allow for heaven to exist. All it does is reduce God to a singular blob, a very lonely isolated blob, which sits there all by itself doing nothing. That is NOT what God is like according to ACIM itself.

The problem is that many people have latched onto this non-duality "concept" and have tried to FORCE the course to fit into it, because they don't have a better OR more accurate model. And in many cases also because they don't recognize the shortcomings of this concept.

It's easy for anyone to say, well, if I get rid of all the separations which implied "many things", then I will get down to "one thing", and this is oneness, and it must be what reality is like. Except that, it isn't. Not by a long shot.

Not according to what Jesus has said about God ADDING to himself, and SHARING himself, and having REAL relationship with his Son, and HAVING a son, and CO-CREATING with him. Jesus's definition of ONENESS is not what you think it is. It is not the everyday definition. It's more to do with a SHARED WHOLENESS between two beings.

"This may appear to contradict the statement “I and my Father are one,” but there are two parts to the statement in recognition that the Father is greater. T-1.II.4:7

The urtext had a much fuller statement about this:

"This appears to contradict another statement: "I and my Father are one." It doesn't. There are still separate parts in the statement, in recognition of the fact that the Father is GREATER. Actually, the original statement was "are of one KIND."

In fact we are told countless times that God is GREATER than us. We are supposed to have AWE of him, as his son. That God is the FIRST cause, and we are CO-creators as secondary causes. That "I am forever an effect of God". The whole notion of equating yourself with God is nonsense because this is what the whole authority problem is about. You are NOT at the same level or role as he is.

Urtext: "Revelation is NOT reciprocal. It is always FROM God TO man. This is because God and man are NOT equal."

"God’s accomplishments are not yours, but yours are like His. ⁶He created the Sonship and you increase it. ⁷You have the power to add to the Kingdom, though not to add to the Creator of the Kingdom." T-7.I.2:5-7

There are so many aspects of ACIM that fly in the face of pure nonduality, and are contrary to the traditional idea of "oneness". It is NOT CORRECT to claim that ACIM is a non-dualistic teaching. And it is NOT correct to project an idea of "oneness" onto its statements. To be "one with" does not ERASE the fact that there are two things sharing that oneness. Heaven is all about sharing between many things, which is the opposite of many things which don't share.

In fact even individuality is an inherent part of reality. You HAD an individual existence as a soul BEFORE the separation from God ever came along. Individuality isn't even the problem. It's the unwillingness to SHARE that is the problem - selfishness is the problem. Not whether you HAVE a self.

"God, Who encompasses all being, created beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy.T-4.VII.5:1

Here ACIM has explicitly stated that God created a PLURAL OF BEINGS, in reality, who EACH had everything INDIVIDUALLY - as individuals, and who WANT TO SHARE so that THEIR collective joy increases. That is not in any stretch of the imagination a state of non-duality, or of "its all one thing", or "its all God".

What's needed is a much more accurate concept that maps to what ACIM actually says, and which supports and INCLUDES all of what it says, without trying to screen out stuff on the basis of making teh concept MORE right than the text. ACIM is a kind of "trans-duality", in which God has created many things which ARE still one. That the one and the many are coexisting through sharing. And that this is NOT duality, nor ANYTHING to do with the ego.

Heaven is in fact a holographic system. It is how God thinks. His whole creation and thought proceeds along holographic principles - where every part (son/creation) contains and IS the whole. This is NOT the same as duality. You have to open up to the idea that the many AND the one can COEXIST. That

the one IS many, and the many ARE one. This is stated here: "The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part is perfectly natural, for it is the way God thinks, and what is natural to Him is natural to you. T-16.II.3:3

"God has but one Son, knowing them all as One. T-9.VI.3:5 "Every child of God is one in Christ, for his being is in Christ as Christ’s is in God." T-12.VI.6:1

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought, and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. ²All His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other. T-6.II.8:1-2"

Perhaps we can be willing to stop talking about ACIM as if it's some kind of non-duality teaching when it is utterly riddled with statements to the contrary. God is a creator and has a FAMILY in reality. And you are part of that family. And God LOVES YOU personally and EQUALLY.

"You cannot enter into real relationships with any of God’s Sons unless you love them all and equally. ²Love is not special. ³If you single out part of the Sonship for your love, you are imposing guilt on all your relationships and making them unreal." T-13.X.11:1-3

"Ultimately, every member of the family of God must return." T-1.V.4:1)

Btw these are ALL quotes from FIP 3rd edition. Put aside what other well-meaning people have told you and listen to what JESUS is telling you.

God has absolute power. And yet, God shares all of His power with us. And this doesn't mean, in some watered-down version or less capable version, but we actually in our natural divine state are meant to fully share all of God's power, and to extend it. This means, creatively, the ability to do anything. It also gives us an incredible experiential strength, an invulnerability, an immortality, eternal life, and nothing short of the complete inability to be affected by anything. We're talking, beyond superhero status here. Miraculous, complete unwavering certainty and absolute knowing.

Now, this generally isn't the kind of experience that most of us are having day-to-day. Most of the time we're in a state of quite significant dis-empowerment. Somehow we seem to be out of touch with a sense of certainty, we're not confident, we feel vulnerable, we see ourselves as weak victims, easily affected by the world and quite easily losing our peace over stupid little things. We quite literally walk the earth in basically a state of immersion in FEAR, with a sense of dread and foreboding about going anywhere and doing anything. We don't really feel like we're some kind of master of reality or that we're completely impenetrable and invulnerable. So how did we get into this state?

Basically, any way that we use or side with the ego and its thought system, undermines us. It always entails some form of denial, blockage, shutting out, disowning of one's self, self-rejection, censorship, unconsciousness, a projection of the power of 'cause' onto external people and events, seeing oneself as victimized and affected by the world, suffering in the body, things happening that we didn't choose, the list goes on. All of these things, if we believe and involve ourselves with them, cause us to seemingly experience a state of disempowerment. In other words, we've at some point actually chosen to deny and project our power onto others, so that we appear to be weak and afraid. On purpose. So yes, we actually choose to be victims and we live a fearful life thinking this is normal.

So now the question is, how do we get that power back? Well, for starters, we're going to begin by noticing that we currently believe we can't get our power back because a) we don't even recognize that it is OUR power, b) we've locked it up tightly in the hands of other people, c) we don't think we have the power to take it back, d) we think we're going to have to muster some incredible courage to confront some terrible enemy in order to win it back (which we don't have nearly enough of, making the prospect of it seem terrifying). None of these things are true, but this is what we're starting with in our 'forgiveness process'.

So we actually need to question whether these perceptions and beliefs are actually true. Rather than simply react to them or think that we have to go up against them, we need to stop, backtrack, and ask ourselves, is this even true? Is it really someone else's power? Is it really not my own power that I'm afraid of? Is my fear even really 'because of' the power I see projected or is this state of fear maybe a device that CAUSES me to lose my power? Did someone take this power from me or did I actually willingly give it away? Is there really a big reason why I can't take it back?

The truth is, only you have ever tried to give your power away, and only you have ever accomplished the illusion that you can do this, and only you can undo this by changing your mind. Only you have done this to yourself. So taking your power back is going to mean a) being more honest about what you did to yourself, b) being more responsible for everything you are experiencing, c) recognizing the innocence of others because they are not the cause of your disempowerment, d) recognizing with greater clarity that you are afraid of your own power not the power of others, e) discerning that the power you see out there is in fact YOUR power that you disassociated from, and f) taking steps to reclaim ownership rights of that power and g) admitting to who you really are.

You are a powerful child of God. Not some weak scared child of God. POWERFUL. Compared to most people who live in a state of fear 24/7, even the ones who fake it by pretending to be confident or arrogant, they too are just as much under the belief that they are victims - they've just become a bit better at being victimizers too as a defense mechanism. It pales in comparison to the sense of certainty, stillness, presence, confidence, knowing and truth, that will reside in you when you actually perform forgiveness properly and reclaim what is rightfully yours.

You must therefore learn to see yourself not as a victim. You must drop the victim role and become more responsible for everything you are experiencing. When you are engaged in ego with someone or having a fight or arguing or are upset by someone etc... those are precisely the times where you need to learn to exercise greater honesty, responsibility and awareness, that no you are NOT upset because of that person, they are NOT the cause, and what you're feeling is YOUR responsibility. You are doing this to yourself. You have to become willing to accept this at all times, in all situations.

What happens if you cannot accept that you are completely responsible for your life? It means that you believe other people are responsible for it. If they're responsible for it, they have the power to determine what happens to you and what you experience. Thus they have power over you. And you will become terrified and weak. You must choose not to see yourself this way. You must remember to take full ownership of who you really are.

The entire purpose of all your projection, all your scapegoating, all your self dis-empowerment and all your efforts to 'get rid of' what is inside you, is basically just another part for your attempted *suicide*, as part of your *death wish*, in which you are trying to stop being the Son of God. Trying to get rid of yourself and give all of yourself away to other people for them to dictate who and what you are, is just a part of you trying to destroy yourself. You must stop this.

And so this means that when you stop doing that, what you're doing now is owning up to who you really are, you're being true to yourself, you're not abandoning yourself, you're reclaiming responsibility for the power that God is sharing with you, you're being restored to a position of being UNAFFECTED by anything external, and thus you are reclaiming your INVULNERABILITY and your IMMORTALITY (not that they could ever be truly lost, lol).

What you WILL find, I promise, and I say this because this is what I am experiencing myself, is that when you keep taking this responsibility and ownership of the truth in you, taking back your power, being true to yourself, being even more honest about the fact that only you can do stuff to yourself and everyone else is NOT the cause, the more EMPOWERED you are going to feel. And this is actually going to feel like you have some kind of ... power, inside you, some kind of invulnerability... some kind of strength of certainty... some kind of sense of joyful knowingness... that seems to just be there naturally without you having to do anything else. You didn't have to build it up, you didn't have to increase it or focus on it or amplify it with affirmations. It's your NATURAL STATE and it simply feels like you are psychologically strong, immoveable, and unaffected by anything.

And if like me, you do this, you will start to be quite surprised at how you have a lot less FEAR when you are out in the world. You will feel more sure of yourself. You will have more confidence to talk to people. You will have this sort of sense of, I can't be attacked - invulnerability - a sense of being SAFE - that allows you to then have the confidence to approach people. And you will also find as I am, that you will approach people from a place of greater love, you will become much more willing to express the truth and say loving things right out in the open, and be far far less concerned about the stupid victimization attitudes such as 'what will they think of me', 'I better not be myself in case I upset someone', 'I better be very controlled in case I make someone hurt me', 'I hope it's safe to go there', etc.... all of those things start to melt away, replaced with a POWER that just beams with a sense of joy and confidence.

The only thing that needs to happen to 'acquire' access to this power is to STOP DISEMPOWERING YOURSELF. Stop going along with the ego. Stop listening to it. Stop using it. Stop being irresponsible. Stop blaming people. Stop believing that people affect you. Stop projecting causes outside yourself. Stop literally 'giving away' all of the power that you have to choose everything that you experience. As soon as you think someone else has control of it or is responsible for it, that's in, you're instantly disempowered and in a victim role, fearing for your life. You don't want to be there. It feels like SHIT to be disempowered. And once you are disempowered you will strongly believe that OTHER PEOPLE have CAUSED YOU to lose your power. That they scared you, did something to you, took it away from you, showed prowess over you, threatened you, or whatever. All of those beliefs are BULLSHIT. Nobody has any power to do anything to you whatsoever unless you GIVE IT TO THEM.

And when you give power to others, you are literally giving it to the EGO. It is the EGO that you are EMPOWERING, when you give your power away. Do you think the ego loses out on the deal, or that it's only you that suffers? Nope. You empower the ego. You make the ego seem like it has control over you. You make the ego seem like it can tell you what to do and scare the living shit out of you. It has no ability to do this. Only you can seem to create the illusion in your own mind that it has this ability, or that it has done so. And then you're literally listening to one part of your mind have power over the other part, pretending that the two are not even associated. This is a split mind.

Take your power back. It's yours. Nobody has any rights to it. Nobody has power over your power. You will be thrilled at how much better it makes you feel to not live like a victim your whole life. It's a strength you never imagined you could experience. And it is the missing piece of the puzzle that you could never seem to find to help you to feel confident around people, or to have enough 'balls' to talk to them the way you want to, or to set boundaries, or to have healthy relationships of any kind. This all comes as a natural side-effect of taking your power back and realizing you have far more true power than you ever thought possible, if you'll just stop disowning it.

And let's finish by acknowledging, this strength is actually not your 'own' strength. It's a strength you SHARE with God. God, as love, gives you this strength, when you love yourself. And he gives you this strength so that you can share it with others to increase the strength within them. And so becoming empowered HAS to also mean, relinquishing control over your life, relinquishing reliance on your separate ego self, on your own separate mind and thoughts and abilities, and instead placing yourself into God's hands. Then you truly become empowered above and beyond anything any ego could ever dream of. The big ego trap of becoming empowered is to suggest that *separate you* can become powerful - thats the spiritual ego. It's bullshit. You don't want that. You want to share the power of God. It's the only way to truly experience eternal life.

"I am not weak but strong. I am not afraid but all powerful" - ACIM

Everything about practicing the Course could be described as moving "backwards". Accustomed to how the ego operates always "forwards" this can at first seem counter-intuitive and a difficult "direction" for the mind to operate in.

Purification and correction are entirely geared towards a backwards motion, such as retracing your steps, seeking inward rather than outward, undoing, reversing, collapsing, deflating ego, re-winding time, digging deeper to find the true inner cause, looking "behind", getting to the core of oneself, going within, taking attention away from illusions, becoming whole, acknowledging what already is, accepting what is already true, receiving what is already given, lifting away layers of false belief, recognizing things for how they are, taking back projections, claiming responsibility for yourself, re-owning yourself, coming back to center, un-ravelling, seeking back through time to when beliefs were formed, reversing the effects of sin, cancelling, deleting, removing, restoring to a former state, moving backward to before any sense of something happening, returning to innocence, becoming aware of love which is already present, listening, receiving, accepting, allowing, reversing sickness and death, resurrection etc.

Notice that all of these procedures take you from being externally focused to focusing within, in the direction of yourself. The truth is inside of you. All of these actions return you to yourself.

Now, the ego is the total opposite of this in every way. The ego wants to always add something, increase denial, hide stuff behind new layers of illusions, implement things, find success, seek outside yourself, lose yourself, forget who you are, move away from yourself and God, project, attack, point a finger of blame away from you, destroy others, fight with an opposing will, acquire, get, consume the external (food etc), implement magical solutions which undo nothing, add lie upon lie, twist and distort things out of recognition, get rid of sin onto others, disassociate from yourself, believe that cause is outside of you, see yourself as an effect of the external, positioning yourself as a victim of something separate, pursuing wild goose chases and dead ends, running away from God, becoming alone and isolated, losing your mind and sanity, fragmentation, making others responsible for your existence, trying to get someone else to choose for you, trying to get someone else to love for you or to wake you up, going to sleep, living in ignorance, becoming unconscious, entering darkness, achieve, strive for goals, develop an image, accumulate and build stuff that never existed, fill the emptiness with idols, idol worship, seeking external salvation, believing that things outside you can save you and solve all problems, being sick as a result of an external cause, dying by someone else's hand, listening to the ego's counsel, making things worse, an eye for an eye, waging war, murder, etc.

Notice that all of these actions are in an outward direction, away from yourself. They are all designed to disconnect you from God and put distance between you and God and therefore between you and yourself. They take you away from yourself and place every attribute of yourself outside of you into someone else's hands.

The main difficulty I find is that having been in the ego mindset for such a long time, my mind has sort of become very used to or unconsciously has formed habits whereby the mind moves in a direction away from myself. It pursues the external and thinks in externalizing ways. It's like there's all these arrows pointing outward and it seems to make the mind "flow" in that direction automatically. Even normal "thinking" processes seem to head in the direction of the external and these are just accepted as automatic or "normal".

So then when we come to the Course, our mind is coming up against a set of truths and techniques which are all INWARD pointing, and basically flowing in totally the OPPOSITE direction to the ego's thought system. They all point towards God, towards your true self, towards what is inside of you already. Even just the simple idea that you need not seek to find love or teach love because that is what you are but that you need to REMOVE the obstacles you've built against it. We are not accustomed to REMOVING anything. We're accustomed to believing that we LACK God and therefore need to go seek for specialness and ADD it to ourselves in order to "become" loving or spiritual. That's totally the ego, KEEPING its belief in sin and hiding it and then pretending to try to find solutions to it externally, where solutions do not exist, and thus building layer upon layer of denial and failure. It's all the authority problem, believing we can add to or change God's creation into something better or more true.

So it's quite difficult to get the mind to even move in the direction of thinking inwards, thinking upwards, thinking IN REVERSE, or thinking towards what ALREADY EXISTS within you. To think in reverse means to go from where your mind is at to what came BEFORE it, rather than going from where your mind is at and proceeding forwards to some kind of next step. It seems alien. It seems unnatural at first. It seems to take steps that bring all of the illusion into question, all assumptions are undermined, and all beliefs have to be examined and exhumed and tossed out, all values are brought into question, every attachment has to be surrendered, all external structures are collapsed, and your whole life is brought into question. And that's not what the ego wants at all, and it's not how we're used to thinking. To question everything, to question sin and sickness and death. To assume nothing, and to believe nothing that even our body's senses are telling us. To travel backwards up the chain of causality to where we came from.

You are already as God created you, you are already love, you are already perfect, there is NOTHING you can add to God's creation or Kingdom other than to increase what is already in it, which is perfect joy and love and happiness. And you are already WHOLE, already complete, needing nothing, lacking nothing. All of this other stuff that you keep trying to deal with by ADDING or CHANGING layers of illusions, are ego solutions and ways of dealing with this, really attempts to hide it even more.

So like, something happens and your ego steps in with a reaction and says, oh my God, this thing is so externally real, it is really happening, and the future is going to suck, so I better do something about this. I know, I'm going to do this and that... and then comes up with a long list of reactions and plans and solutions which it is going to DO, to tackle what it itself made real, as though something really occurred. It creates this entire "chain of thought" or train of thought, which goes from "here" to way off in the distance down all kinds of twists and turns, taking you away from presence. We need to stop the train before it even leaves the station, get off it, and then look backwards down the tracks to where we CAME FROM and go in THAT direction, undoing, backtracking, reversing and returning, inwardly and upwardly BACK to the truth, BACK to the answer to end all questions, and BACK Home to God.

To think with Holy Spirit is to think BACKWARDS. This requires us to initially STOP and put the pause button on. Freeze-frame things. Freeze the entire scenario and just observe what it contains, from a big perspective. And then start to REVERSE the steps we have already taken, to backtrack, to look at our real hidden motives (secret sins/hates etc), and to UNDO layer upon layer of false beliefs and projections and stuff that we basically tried to ADD to ourselves already, that has led to us witnessing a falsely perceived situation. But this seems awkward and counter-intuitive - or at least counter-ego. It's therefore essentially all about letting go and letting God, relinquishing attachments, surrendering to what is already true, accepting God as God is, returning to yourself, and becoming EMPTY of all the stuff that you "added" to yourself to try to make yourself become something you are not - different to how God created you (and how you still are, buried under the ego lies).

To question... "has this even really happened" - that's a totally backwards step which brings into question any ASSUMPTION that the ego has made, and digs way deeper into what is happening than to react to it and try to fix it or attack it with Course quotes or to deny it with fake positivity or to build a spiritual ego to defend against it (and keep it). To stop and go backwards, to ask, is this even real? Why do I believe this? Where is my perception coming from? Why have I chosen this? How did I put this in place myself? Who am I really underneath this? Is this really true of me? Not ACCEPTING stuff into your mind.

As Jesus says, whatever you accept into your mind, it becomes real to you. The ego automatically is just accepting everything "into" the mind like a black hole sucking the life out of everything. We have to learn to stop that, to think in reverse, and to cancel the ego, to go within, to reverse our thinking processes and develop this new "inward direction" which flows away from illusions and towards the PRE-EXISTING truth and love within us, which is already there and is already perfect. To ACKNOWLEDGE what is already true and accept it, rather than trying to REPLACE it or cover it up or deny it with stuff we MAKE (invent/add) with the ego.

At first this kind of backwards thinking is not at all easy for the mind to do. It seems like the mind has become "wired" to think forwards with the ego, outwardly. But gradually over time as you "practice" this and go through this PURIFICATION process, digging out and releasing old pain, getting to the bottom of things, finding yourself, taking back your power, returning to responsibility, accessing the power of choice, accepting atonement, it becomes easier because there is less of your own ego-aligned will working against you.

It's like you're literally learning how to reverse the direction of flow of a river. The mind has become separated from Spirit and is flowing out all by itself, broadcasting its own ideas and trying to replace God's creation with something of its own. That needs to be totally reversed and undone. We need to go back within and reconnect with God and plug ourselves back into the service of Spirit. It takes time to break out of the unconscious habits of flowing outward with the ego.

And there is a paradox here. Funnily enough, the more you go within and withdraw your projections away from the external and get to the core love that's already in you, THEN that's when love starts to radiate out from you. You don't become loving by trying to give give give without receiving.

You must receive inwards first. It's more like, you become a light bulb, the switch goes on, and you simply stay CENTERED and rooted in your true self, in Spirit, and you RADIATE from there, staying in that center at all times, instead of going away from yourself or abandoning or losing yourself. To the ego giving is a loss of yourself. To Spirit, giving INCREASES and you not only keep/hold onto your inner real self but you also SHARE that and it extends out on its own. Love extends because of what it is, without your help.

So to be more loving, stop dwelling on the external or on trying to sacrifice yourself or martyr yourself. Return inward to access awareness of love's presence and then simply SHINE from within. This is how God creates, by shining and radiating and sharing and extending, remaining true to Himself and still complete and anchored within Himself. He does not lose Himself in the process. This is how the Kingdom is increased. This is what it means to be the light of the world. To shine from within rather than to lose yourself. To become an intensely bright light which goes out from within. You have to BE WITHIN first in order to do that, and stay there. This outward shining is CREATION, and it is the same thing as sharing and extending. It is how God created you to begin with. And in that light you have never stopped being God's innocent child.

"The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him."

When your mind is filled with love, it projects a perfectly healed body, free of pain, symptoms of sickness, suffering, damage of any kind. And it especially does not produce death. This healthy body is a symbol in the dream, pointing towards innocence and representing a sign that attack has not occurred. It teaches anyone who looks upon it that they must be innocent, because the absence of harm of any kind in this body image proves their sins have not produced effects. This weakens your brother's belief in his own sinfulness and facilitates healing.

"Now in the hands made gentle by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays a picture of a DIFFERENT you. It is a picture of a body still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all. IT witnesses to the eternal truth that you can not BE hurt, and points BEYOND itself to both YOUR innocence and HIS."

When your mind is not filled with love, you are unloving towards yourself and towards your brother simultaneously. This attack is an attempt to create a gap of separation that comes between you. The body itself represents this gap and symbolizes the attack. It is the wall that you use to try to demonstrate that you are separate, as a separation device.

Having used the body for attack, the body itself now depicts your attitude towards yourself and others, which is a sick attitude of attack, thus showing up as what the world terms sickness, symptoms, damage and physical suffering. This body image now symbolizes death, and it does not point towards or represent innocence and life any more. It instead points away from it and accuses your brother of having produced effects in you, proving to him that he must be a sinner. This strengthens his belief that he is a sinner and imprisons him further, rather than healing him. It is an attack.

"For accusation is a bar to love, and damaged bodies ARE accusers. They stand firmly in the way of trust and peace, proclaiming that the frail can HAVE no trust, and that the damaged HAVE no grounds for peace. Who has been injured BY his brother, and could love and trust him still? He HAS attacked, and will attack again. Protect him not, because your damaged body shows that you must be protected FROM him. To forgive may be an act of charity, but NOT his due. He may be PITIED for his guilt, but NOT exonerated. And if you forgive him his transgressions, you but ADD to all the guilt that he has really earned."

"Whenever you consent to suffer pain, to be deprived, unfairly treated, or in need of ANYTHING, you but accuse your brother of attack upon God's Son. You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes, that he may see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death, and go before him, closing off the gate, and damning him to hell."

"Sickness is but a "little" death; a form of vengeance not yet total. Yet it speaks with certainty for what it represents. The bleak and bitter picture you have sent your brother, YOU have looked upon in grief. And everything that it has shown to him have you believed, BECAUSE it witnessed to the guilt in him, which you perceived and loved."

"The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."

"The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival."

In order to thereby exonerate both your brother and yourself, and to prove and demonstrate with absolute conviction that forgiveness has truly occurred, in which there is no sin and therefore no effects of attack, the effects themselves must be removed from the body. The body HAS TO BE HEALED. It must be restored to a condition that it was in prior to the attack, and it must only teach and symbolize life and innocence.

If it is kept with conditions of sickness or damage or broken malfunctioning parts, the body remains an accuser. And because the body is proving and teaching and symbolizing sin and attack, it proves that your mind is not TRULY forgiving your brother and yourself. If you were to truly be healed, on the mental level, your body would be healed also.

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

"A broken body is PROOF the mind has NOT been healed."

The fact is that if sickness or damage remain in the body "after forgiveness", the mind DID NOT complete the forgiveness. The forgiveness MUST bring healing to the body image also, so that it can symbolize and teach and depict a representation of, and point towards, innocence, harmlessness, healing and wholeness. If the body stays damaged, it continues to teach your brother of his sinfulness and does not heal him, and therefore proves that you also are not healed.

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself."

"A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."

"Show THIS unto your brother, who will see that every scar is healed, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. And he will look on his forgiveness there, and with healed eyes will look BEYOND it, to the innocence that he beholds in you. Here is the proof that he has NEVER sinned; that NOTHING that his madness bid him do was ever done, or ever had effects of any kind. That NO reproach he laid upon his heart was EVER justified, and NO attack can touch him with the poisoned sting of fear. Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health. BECAUSE it proves illusions were not true."

The final result of forgiveness MUST BE that not only is your brother's mind healed, AND his body is healed of anything you did to him, but also that your mind is healed, AND your body is healed of anything you did to it. Until that occurs, forgiveness has not been completed and the mind is still sick.

"For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

"The Holy Spirit's picture changes not the body into something it is not. It only takes away from it ALL signs of accusation and of blamefulness."

If you do not PROVE that your BELIEVE that health and wholeness and healing and life and harmlessnes are the ONLY TRUTH, and you fail to DEMONSTRATE it with your body, by healing the body of all signs and symptoms of sickness, all disease, all damage, then your belief is UNATTESTED and WITHOUT CONVICTION. You have not put your money where your mouth is and you are lying, because the only way for the body to BE in a state of sickness if for you to MAINTAIN ATTACK, without which the body could not stay sick. The body MUST be healed in order for your mind's healing to be complete, because they are intimately related.

"Health (physical health) is the witness unto health. As long as it is unattested, it remains without conviction. Only when DEMONSTRATED has it BEEN proved, and MUST compel belief."

When the body is healed and is no longer sick, it now COMPELS BELIEF in another that they must be innocent. It has a healing, teaching power. It is a demonstration of miracles. "The mind must be stronger than the body, every miracle demonstrates this."

The signs of accusation and blame are the physical symptoms. They will be taken away by the Holy Spirit, if you will let him. So that he can restore the body to the picture that HE WANTS IT TO SHOW, to teach the healing that HE wants to use it to teach. The picture of innocence. The picture of immortality.

"The body can become a sign of life, a promise of redemption, and a breath of immortality to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death. Let it have healing as its PURPOSE. Then will it send forth the message it received, and by its health and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that it represents. Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever unattacked. And to your brother let its message be, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I live."

This is what you must USE the body for, within this dream, WHILE you have one, before you disappear off to awareness of Heaven. When you are a teacher of God, fulfilling a function of "awareness of dreaming", and using the body only for communication (which is healing), the body must be healed and it must not show any sign of damage or attack or effects or consequences of sin or guilt in any way. To do so is an attempt to teach two things at once: 1) healing is true, 2) attack is true. And through such a demonstration no-one can learn anything because it is contradictory. The body is now showing a different PROOF than the person is CLAIMING.

"No-one is healed through double messages. If you wish ONLY to be healed, you heal. Your single PURPOSE makes this possible."

Jesus is black and white about this. Either you heal TOTALLY on ALL LEVELS - mind, emotions, body, OR the healing is not complete.

Sick bodies and dead bodies are not part of the aim of A Course in Miracles and are not something that Teachers of God are supposed to teach or demonstrate to others, or themselves. You are only to demonstrate symbols of LIFE and immortality through the body, so that it can become a sign of life and a witness and testimony to healing and harmlessness. Sickness and death of the body are a failure to accomplish this, and a dream of death cannot be left by death only by truth, which is first approached through mental and physical health. The happy dream must entail a healed body as well as a healed mind, not merely a state of mental "transcendence" of sickness that keeps the body sick and continues to teach death.

"Only the mind and body need atonement."

"We said before that the purpose of the Resurrection was to "demonstrate that no amount of misperception has any influence at all on a Son of God." This demonstration EXONERATES those who misperceive, by establishing beyond doubt that they have NOT hurt anyone."

Summarized in this classic statement - the CENTRAL LESSON, from the manual for teachers:

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you.Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies.Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions that are responsible for the body's condition. Yet the teacher of God does not make this decision alone. To do that would be to give the body another purpose from the one that keeps it holy.God's Voice will tell him when he has fulfilled his role, just as It tells him what his function is.He does not suffer either in going or remaining. Sickness is now impossible to him.

Oneness and sickness cannot coexist."

And this classic from "sickness is a defense against the truth":

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

Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgement or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick. Give instant remedy, should this occur, by not allowing your defensiveness to hurt you longer."

The Golden Rule states that whatever is true of one Son of God is true of another. Because all of God's children are perfect equals. This means that anything true of you is true of the entire sonship. You are created in the likeness of God and so what is true of God is true of you and all brothers and all creations. This rule, really a law, is always in effect regardless of how awake you are.

What this means is that in this world, when you believe you are guilty, you MUST also believe that everyone else is guilty. This rule is a LAW of God. It cannot be broken. But you can be deceived in believing it is not applying.

We talk a lot about projecting your stuff and then taking it back, as if to say, there is something confined to myself that I am ONLY doing to myself. We talk about being responsible for this self-attack, that all attack is self-made and we're not really attacking anyone else. We also talk about how I am the one who needs forgiveness and so on.

But there is something happening as a result of the Golden Rule. IF I attack myself, I AM attempting to also attack my brother. If I see myself as guilty, I MUST believe the whole sonship is guilty. If I find myself unworthy of love, I will believe everyone is unworthy of love. Whatever I see in my brother is a reflection of my own attitude about myself. Which means if I have attacked myself, I MUST also be attacking them.

This extends also to sickness, because while many believe that "only I am sick" or "the sickness is only in my body", as if separated off from others, the fact is that sickness is a two-sided affair. It arises because you accuse your brother of sin, which is an attack on him. Using the body to attack through, your body becomes sick. Your mind therefore HAS to believe that BOTH you and your brother are sick.

This also plays out on the level of relationship because when you are regarding your brother as being as holy as you are, you are in a holy relationship with them, seeing your own holiness in them. When you separate off, by ceasing to extend your mind to them, a gap forms in between you both, coming between you. It doesn't just separate you off from them, it also separates them off from you. It's a two-sided wall. What applies to you applies to them.

So what we have to realize is, while it's definitely beneficial to look at what we are doing "only to ourselves", we have to remember nothing ever really applies only to ourselves. Which means that if we are indeed in any kind of ego state, having any kind of guilt or sin belief, some aspect of that belief IS directed at our brothers. If we are attacking "only ourselves", we ALSO are attacking others.

This is part of the unhealed healer as well. If I have not received love, and therefore cannot give it, and therefore am unhealed, because I have guilt in me, I am going to have to see that guilt in everyone. And seeing it there, I will perhaps disassociate and think it's someone else's problem that I need to save them from. That blindness, that separation thought, where you think something applies to you and not them, or applies to them and not you, that is always ego. And there is temptation in the whole "it's all my own stuff" approach to not realize that it's not JUST about you as a "separate" mind.

Shifting blame from someone else back onto yourself does not heal it. It's a step in the right direction because it's sort of "coming from you", but WHERE are you? You think you are in a body, separated off from others. Assuming this is true, you will think your attitudes and your self attack are contained within the confines of your body/mind. That its inside you, not outside, and not in another. This is actually a false premise based on the belief that you fundamentally are a separated-off isolated mind-container.

Your mind is not really, ultimately, isolated to your body. That's part of the illusion. Your mind is shared with others, it is IN your brother, and it is everywhere. Your nature is to be an omnipresent spirit, like God. So when you are thinking in terms of, its mine, or its in me, or I am doing it only to myself, that still has isolation and separation in it. It doesn't mean that the problem is confined to the insides of your mind-body association.

It would actually be more accurate to say, the mind that is mine, which is united with my brothers and is everywhere and in all people, is temporarily believing that the entire sonship is under attack. I am temporarily coming between myself and everyone. My attack thoughts are against myself and them. Separation is coming between me and everyone. I am trying to apply unlove to the whole sonship to bring us all down together. My attack is upon the whole Kingdom. I am still thinking the same of everyone else that I think of myself.

So in this we start to realize, that while it's important I own what I'm doing to myself, I have to also realize that included in "what I'm doing" is actually an attempted attack on others as well. "You but accuse your brothers of your own sin" and "it can be but myself I crucify" are helpful in realizing that you are included in what's being attacked, and in fact that you ARE only really doing this to yourself (because your brother cannot be attacked because he's real). But as you crucify yourself, YOU DO attempt to crucify everyone.

This leads to the uncovering of the "second kind of scapegoating". Which is, the aspect of "what I am doing to others". Most often we are reacting to and trying to overcome "what they are doing to me". To blame them for attacking us. But let's say that this form of scapegoating is actually a disguise. It's a way to pretend that YOU are not doing anything TO THEM. That you are not the attacker. While yes, you are actually attacking only yourself, in truth, you ARE trying to attack everyone if you believe in sin. Including God.

And to project this and disown it is an attempt to cover this up and make out that someone else is the attacker and not you. To take back the projected sin means taking back the identification of WHO is doing the attacking, and this attacking is an "act" that comes out of someone and goes toward another. It's not just some lump of sin that sits there idly. It's not a commodity that you shuffle around or displace like "some guilt". We are either actively attacking others or believing they are actively attacking us.

So if we get honest, we're going to find out, that all our attack thoughts are kind of a form of murderousness, toward everything - me, my brothers, the world, and God. If I am projecting guilt in the first place, I am actually trying to attack. When I do not see the real world, I am attacking it. As Jesus says: "You attack the real world every day and every hour and every minute, and yet you are surprised that you cannot see it." and "God offers the world salvation; your judgment would condemn it. and "Peace is impossible to those who look on war. Peace is inevitable to those who offer peace."

So if you look at what sin is all about, it basically is "attack" or attempted attack. Attack thoughts. Judgement. The attempt to separate, push away, deny, reject, unlove, to cause irreversible damage to something in an effort to make it go away, to destroy it. It's part of the ego's murderous thought system. "What is not love is murder" says the same thing. And actually makes it very clear. If we are not being loving, which means to ourselves AND others, per the Golden Rule, we ARE attempting to be murderous towards ourselves AND others.

This is uncomfortable to look at because it reveals that we cannot have ego beliefs in "self attack" going on in our minds WITHOUT believing they also apply to everyone else. Whatever I see in myself I will see in everyone. As I enter into any sin or guilt, I am trying to separate, which means I am attacking both myself and others. As an unhealed healer, I will attempt to heal by attacking, by trying to give what I do not have, and by therefore giving attack as a remedy. And of course this cannot heal. Those who are not healed cannot heal.

So we have to get in touch with this. Look at it. What I'm doing to myself, I am trying to also do to others. What I think applies to me, I also think applies to everyone. Even if in my state of denial and unconsciousness, I am not aware that I think this. Because the ego's states of mind are always an imbalance where you think it applies to me not them, or them not me. That's part of the disassociation, which is the separation idea.

The ego is the denial of the Golden Rule, but denial does not overthrow the law. The law still applies at all times even as the ego does its thing. Everything always applies to everyone. When I think it does not apply to me, it does, but this also doesn't mean that because it applies to me, it doesn't apply to others. Ego is always the temptation to believe something is special or true of me that isn't applying to everyone. And "special forgiveness" of "only myself" is not forgiveness of the sonship.

Transitioning from ego thinking to Holy Spirit thinking entails shifting from the whole "me vs them" to "all of us". Wrong mindedness means I think things do not apply to everyone equally. Right mindedness means I recognize everything applies equally to everyone. So to get to right mindedness I'm going to have to admit along the way that I am actually trying to attack BOTH myself and others. What I'm trying to do to them I am doing to myself. We BOTH need forgiveness. We BOTH need to be recognized as innocent. And I need to learn to stop attacking BOTH of us.

Thinking that you only attack yourself can be a trap. It can disguise and hide the fact that you also think poorly of others. Or that you are secretly attacking them while trying to save them. It can cover up the fact that if you are attacking at all, you are also attacking everyone. Yet recognizing you are attacking everyone can also be a trap, because it can induce more guilt. You shouldn't be trying to "not attack" on the basis that you would feel guilty for doing so. And you don't need to.

All we really need is awareness. In awareness, you know that you are in your brother. There is an automatic vested interest in not attacking them, IF you are aware that you literally cannot do it without attacking yourself. It's the unawareness that you are included in the attack that makes you believe murder is justified and that you can get away with it without experiencing any effects. If you were aware of and not in denial of the Golden Rule, it would leave absolutely no room for attack of any kind, because to attack when you know it's yourself you attack would be insane.

If I am believing in attack I will attack myself and all of creation.

If I am only loving I will love myself and all of creation.

Father let me not attack myself or my brothers today and let us all be joined in complete holiness and unified will that you may resurrect us into your light and heal the entire sonship as one.

"One brother is all brothers. One mind is all minds. Such is the truth."