There really is only one problem in all the universe, and it's the sense of God's absence. The separation from God. Fix this one problem and everything is perfect.

"Separation from God is the only lack he really needs to correct." All symptoms of sickness, all forms of suffering, every justification for fear, all reasons for guilt, every form of death, all problems, every war, all unhappiness in all the world, is ENTIRELY and ONLY the result of you not being with God.

Therefore, in the simplest terms, reuniting with God is ALL you need to do. It's not even that you need for God to come along and heal your shit, or fix your problems, or answer your questions, or fix up your life, or make your enemies go away.

It's god HIMSELF that you NEED. A lack of God is precisely and literally the cause of every form of suffering. It was by denying God's reality that you INDUCED all suffering upon yourself.

"Your Father created you Wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it."

What is it that you are constantly doing to yourself? As in the fact that the secret of salvation is. ... that you are doing this all to yourself? You are "separating from God". That's all you are doing that is causing all your suffering.

"If you deny Him" ...... your denying of God, or not allowing God to love you, or trying to live without him, or thinking you can go it alone, or depending on your own strength, or trying to kill him or, or whatever... any form of rejection or attack or unwillingness, is you trying to keep God away from you.

And the only reason you want to keep God away is because if he were allowed to come closer to you, his light and love would dispel all darkness, solve all problems, heal all sickness, undo all death, make you indescribably happy, and give you everything you ever wanted. God would obliterate all sense of separation and you would become aware again of your unlimited attraction to him. An attraction that you had to cover up in order to pretend you could ever want to live apart from him. And if you ever remembered how much you want God, you would leap into his arms and drop the entire world in an instant.

"A Son of God is happy ONLY when he knows he is WITH God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond ANYTHING that he can make."

You've either got God, or you're in a hell of your own making. You're either experiencing God's love, which literally IS happiness, or you are unhappy. All love belongs to God and you cannot find love without including him. You cannot be happy without God himself literally taking up residence in your mind and awareness. God IS the happiness.

Everything you ever wanted - happiness, love, peace, joy, perfection, invulnerability, immortality, holiness, meaning, truth, relationship, etc.... it is what God himself IS. You can't find it or have it without him. And there is no substitute, there is no "other" God or second God or other source for happiness and health. You either get it from God and let God fill all your needs, or you are empty and bereft and withering and weak and dying alone.

Not to suggest in a religious type of way that, if you don't get with God you're going to hell. But it's more like, if you insist on not including God's attributes in your mind and experience, and want nothing to do with the qualities that he freely offers, you have no other choice but to make yourself suffer by lacking everything that is good and worth having. All suffering is a LACK of God, an artificial sense of need and loss and emptiness that comes from trying to make God go away.

God is everything. If you try to make everything go away you will end up with nothing. All you really need is love. In the most literal way possible, love LITERALLY contains happiness and IS happiness. If you will let yourself feel God's love for you even a little bit, you will immediately notice that there is a feeling of happiness that suddenly springs up and you suddenly smile because it feels good. Let God in and you'll be grinning for miles.

Even your very own SELF is a part of God, and without God you cannot have that self. You literally are not being true to yourself or loving yourself unless you also love God and let God love you. Either you love God and include yourself in God and are therefore loved, and have love to share, because YOU ARE LOVE, or you are devoid of love and are alone and feeling like shit.

Love is all you need. God is all you need. Get some God in you and your way will be made straight.

"And God Himself shall wipe away all tears."

"Its love is limitless, with an intensity which holds all things within it in the calm of quiet certainty. Its strength comes not from burning impulses which move the world, but from the boundless Love of God Himself."

"And it is given us to recognize it is a holiness in which we share; it is the Holiness of God Himself."

"This the decision not to be insane, and to accept myself as God Himself, "

"We need but tell our minds, with certainty, "The stillness of the peace of God is mine," and nothing can intrude upon the peace that God Himself has given to His Son."

"This gladness calls to every part of the Sonship to rejoice with them, and let God Himself go out into them and through them."

"It is your task to heal the sense of separation that has made him sick."

"NOTHING can prevail against a Son of God who commends his Spirit into the hands of His Father. By doing this, the mind awakens from its sleep, and the Soul remembers its Creator. All sense of Separation disappears, and level confusion vanishes."

"We have spoken before of the higher or true perception, which is so close to truth that God Himself can flow across the little gap."

"Your new-born purpose is nursed by angels, cherished by the Holy Spirit, and protected by God Himself. It NEEDS not your protection; it is YOURS. For it is deathless, and within it lies the END of death."

"While you are sad the light which God Himself appointed as the means to save the world is dim and lusterless."

"In the presence of my holiness, which I share with God Himself, all idols vanish."

"I am the holy home of God Himself. I am the Heaven where His Love resides. I am His holy Sinlessness Itself, for in my purity abides His own."

"But God Himself has protected EVERYTHING He created BY His laws. Therefore, everything that is not under them does not exist."

"Put all your faith in it, and God Himself will answer you."

"Now has fear made way for love, as God Himself replaces cruelty." "ou do NOT belong in time. Your place is ONLY in eternity, where God Himself placed you forever."

"Into this hopeless situation God sends His teachers. They bring the light of hope from God Himself."

"And as you see him shining in the space of light where God abides within the darkness, you will see that God Himself is where his body is."

"Your little effort and small determination call on the power of the universe to help you, and God Himself will raise you from darkness into light." "For God Himself created the only relationship that HAS meaning, and that is His relationship with YOU."

"God Himself gave you the perfect correction for everything you have made which is not in accord with His Holy Will."

"By teaching the power of the Kingdom of God Himself, He teaches you that ALL POWER IS YOURS."

"At one with God and with the universe, we go our way rejoicing, with the thought that God Himself goes everywhere with us."

"And God Himself and all the lights of Heaven, will gently lean to you, and hold you up."

"Whenever you question your value, say, "God Himself is incomplete without me."

"God calls on you to save His Son from death by offering the love of Christ to him. This is your need, and God Himself holds out this gift to you."

"Here you are led, that God Himself can take the final step unhindered."

"God Himself orders your thought, because your thought was created BY Him."

"But the function which God Himself GAVE your minds through His you may DENY but you CANNOT prevent."

"There is no world because it is a thought apart from God, and made to separate the Father and the Son, and break away a part of God Himself and thus destroy His wholeness."

"You are mirrors of truth in which God Himself shines in perfect light."

"I will, with God Himself, that none of His Sons should suffer."

When you are in the ego, you will experience various symptoms. You will:

* Feel afraid, confused, indecisive, uncertain, doubtful.

* Be in a state of questioning, trying to find answers.

* Believing there are multiple possible truths, explanations, diagnoses and possibilities outside of you in the world.

* Trying to find "the correct" possibility from all the possibilities, as if to do so will bring salvation and an answer.

* Feel like something in the world might actually be true, and therefore you are afraid, and can't quite trust the truth.

I often find myself in this state. Once I'm in this state, hallmarked by fear and questioning, I will BELIEVE that I am trying really hard to find an answer. BUT, I will be looking in all the wrong places, looking with the ego, using my separate "abilities" such as the intellect or past experiences, and I will just be going around and around frantic to find "the answer".

I will think that if I look hard enough I will find out what the truth is. But it's going to be one of many possible truths, which is confusing in its own right. So then I think that if I can just "figure out" on my own, know on my own, which one of them is the "real answer", then I will find it and can then get salvation. It never works, because the ego's rule is "seek and do not find", which means to seek passionately, to question everything, to reject all real answers, and to just stay in a state of fear.

When I get like this, there IS no truth out there. There IS no answer that I will find, from an "objective world", which will be "the" truth. But I will be perceiving not only that there IS an objective world, which is real, but that it therefore MUST contain the truth. If the world is real, it automatically has truth in it, so I just need to figure out where it is. Trouble is that NEVER works, because the world is NOT really real, it does NOT really contain any truth, and nothing I figure out about it will undo the FEAR.

Fear is produced BECAUSE I've made the world real. "I am upset because I see something which is not there", i.e. I've made an illusion real, am deluded, and MUST now experience fear because it seems like something UNTRUE has taken on a life of its own. Who wouldn't be afraid if imaginary monsters suddenly seemed real?

In this state of egotism, victimhood, fear, confusion and questioning, I am NOT really making any headway towards salvation. I'm not really getting closer to the answer. I'm actually doing the opposite. It is because I have moved AWAY from the answer, that I am even feeling this experience of "questioning" at all. The experience of questioning is really a state of being answerless, lacking in all certainty, knowing nothing, failing to be at peace, a complete loss of clarity, total victimhood, and is terrifying.

When I get like this, Jesus often now prompts me with a single wise word: "decide".

At first, I do not know what what this means or why the heck it is even relevant in the situation. If I'm stuck in the middle of trying to understand HOW or WHY "something has happened", or how or why "something really is this way", it seems to make no sense as to why deciding something would help, or what the decision even is.

But what I gradually come around to is this. The state that I'm in, as a state of victimhood and ego, is only happening BECAUSE I'm believing that stuff can happen to me against my will, that I have no choice, that I have to put up with whatever this external truth is, and that I need to find out what that "external law" is so that I can do something about it. It's not a decisive state at all. It's a loss of decisiveness. A loss of confidence. A loss of clarity and certainty. In other words, it is FEAR.

To get out of fear, and to get out of the entire game of "what if its this" "what if its that"..... which is all entirely terrifying, you have to SHIFT your perspective to something entirely different. A whole different model for what things are and how stuff happens. You've got to get out of victimhood into EMPOWERMENT. That means:

1) Owning up to you being totally responsible for everything

2) Reclaiming your power, in that whatever you choose will happen, nothing will happen unless you choose it, and therefore whatever you choose WILL BE your experience

3) Realize then that you do not need to defend yourself against illusory threats, because NOTHING IS HAPPENING TO YOU against your will

4) You are decisive, confident, powerful, certain and creative. You can CHOOSE AGAIN. And that means

5) You can choose to align yourself with God's truth, and to make a statement of what the truth IS, instead of attempting to "find out" what the truth is. Thus

6) If you choose NOT to create enemies, fears, disasters, problems, sickness, death, monsters, etc... THEY WILL NOT EXIST and will not be able to do anything to you.

*YOU* HAVE THAT POWER! You get what you ask for! There is no such thing as stuff happening that you did not ask for and do not want!!!!

BE THE TRUTH!

If you think that you will become free of a belief if you can figure out why stuff "really happens", or why someone "really does something", or "why evil is evil" or "why people are sick" etc.... you will not only fail to find a peaceful answer, you will also CREATE THOSE THINGS. This is why in your MASTERY of yourself, you have to come to realize that nothing can happen to you against your will, and that the only thing you've really been doing wrong is believing that something can be true WITHOUT YOU CHOOSING IT.

So when Jesus says decide, he means, flip into a state of confidence and DECIDE whether you believe the ego's truth or God's truth. Which one of these realities will you ALIGN yourself with. Which one of these two truths is going to be TRUE for you and are you going to believe in?

See, you think you have a choice beyond the ego and God. You think there is a third choice. You think that somehow there is 1) God, 2) Ego, 3) Your selective ability to pick and choose what the truth is. You do not have that ability really. You ONLY have the ability to decide which thought system you will BE a part of. If you choose to be part of the ego's thought system, you will choose to believe that everything about the ego is REAL for you. If you choose to be part of God's thought system, you will choose to believe that everything about GOD is REAL for you. And believing one, you will disbelieve in the other. And that IS your protection!

So recognize this. Fear that the ego is true, MUST disappear, IF you choose to believe in God's truth, BECAUSE they are opposite and mutually exclusive. They cannot coexist. If you want to be safe from evil, CHOOSE GOD, SO THAT *YOU* do not create your own evil. YOU are the one who empowers it. YOU are the one who give reality to it. YOU are the one who makes yourself vulnerable by trying to become at peace or saved from a "real threat".

If the ego's world of threats and dangers is real for you, there is NO WAY that you will ever find peace. You simply cannot find salvation, truth, a peaceful answer, a resolution, a cure, a magical description, a satisfactory diagnosis, or any kind of convincing TRUTH if you are CHOOSING to believe the ego is real. Because even if you think that you are in a state of questioning and NOT having a choice, you actually ARE choosing the ego. You are never not choosing.

Choose the ego and you'll believe you have no choice and that you don't want to choose what the ego is offering.

Choose God and you will believe you are free to choose but you only want to choose God after all.

So get out of your ego's attempt to intellectually discover the truth in the world, or explain sickness, or figure out why evil happens, or why someone did something. There is NO TRUTH there. Choose instead to reclaim your POWER OF DECISION, get out of the victimy complete lack of confidence, become decisive, be determined you will MAKE A DECISION about what you believe, and MAKE IT!

I CHOOSE THAT GOD'S TRUTH IS TRUE AND NOTHING ELSE IS TRUE!

THAT is your immortal protection against all illusions, all evil, all suffering, and all death. Going back into fear to "check" if evil is gone simply will make more evil. Going back into fear to "prove" that something is true, will just invalidate the truth again. This is why you must TRUST in God's truth, SURRENDER your belief that the ego's world is real, and become fully committed to the REALITY that God has already decided FOR you.

Choosing for yourself, versus accepting God's decision. That's all.

Often our idea of love is special love, which means exclusive or conditional love.

That means, it's relatively commonplace and 'normal' to only feel loving toward things that you approve of, while you spend the rest of your time rejecting everything else. But this isn't unconditional love.

Sometimes it takes some difficult lessons in which to learn to be unconditional toward others. But it also works the other way - if you are going to be yourself at all times and not enter into fake persona identities or putting on a facade when around certain people, you're going to need to learn to be unconditionally yourself, no matter what.

So that's going to take a lot of honesty, to be true to the truth about you at all times.

But as you become more yourself, more loving toward yourself in all situations, you will also become more loving toward others in all situations.

Sometimes the people who you do not like, or who are your enemy, or who offend you or even attack you, are the ones who have come to try to prompt you to love unconditionally.

What they do for you is they push your buttons and give you signals that say they do not love you, so that you will come to confront the limitations and conditions that you've placed on your own response. Will you hate them in return?

You will come face to face with your own inability to love them unconditionally, perhaps your patience wore thin and you lost your cool, or you just can't accept people being that way. But why.... the why is, really, that you can only love conditionally, and you can only therefore love yourself conditionally.

You may then find yourself, in the face of such opposition, realizing and exclaiming that you CANNOT love them. There is some reason, so strong, as to why your love stops and you seemingly refuse to love them. Particularly if you feel justified in resentment or anger or hurt. But then this will bring you face to face with your limitations. WHY can't you love them? Why can't you overlook and forgive them? What is it that you think is 'about them' that you can't love, which REALLY is about YOU that you can't love? Why do you have a limitation of conditionality placed on your ability to love?

Because what that will mean is, if you can't love them, you can't love yourself. But here is the marvelous opportunity.

If you can somehow dig even deeper, put aside your resentments and grievances, and find SOME way to above and beyond to love EVEN MORE, even beyond what you thought you could love, you will be breaking through the barriers of your conditionality - your conditioning - both towards others and towards yourself. Your love will GROW.

And then you will find yourself in situations noticing that you feel stronger and more loving towards all people, even strangers. That you feel more open to them, compassionate toward them, and more understanding of them. You will realize that somewhere somehow you put aside some kind of barriers that you had erected around yourself which always kept people at a distance or made it seem difficult for you to be around anyone that wasn't your special chosen ones.

Your sense of trust and certainty will skyrocket, you will find a renewed confidence and fearlessness due to the removal of a sense of separation, and you will genuinely feel in your heart a feeling of love for people that you never knew was possible.

To accomplish this, therefore, we need our own limtiations to be confronted, we need our own conditionality to be pointed out, we need our own 'reasons' for not being able to love someone - with all our justifications as to why - to be brought into question so that we will put them aside and find a way to love that goes beyond specialness and beyond confinement. This is our gift to others but also is our gift to ourselves, because we deserve to be the love that we really are at all times and this light shouldn't be kept under a rock called specialness.

As Jesus said a long time ago, love your enemies. Otherwise the walls you erect to keep them out keep your love in a prison, and being a prisoner makes you feel unloved as well. Unconditionally loving yourself is a much more deeply satisfying place to be.

Once again, last evening, I asked God what he wanted me to 'do', thinking that there were actions or things to 'do', and His reply to me was:

"Receive."

I realize that my ego mind is SO used to 'seeking', which is kind of like an activity of 'going out' to try to manipulate the world, to find, to fix, to change, to perform actions, to rearrange furniture, etc.

It's like, we have a motor in our mind. The motor wants to keep running. It wants to keep going somewhere. It wants to keep doing something different. Finding something different. Searching for answers. Changing someone. It is all do do do do do do do go go go go go go all the time. This is its ONLY mode of operation.

And all of that is really encapsulated in the word "seeking". The ego mind is just constantly in this activity of seeking. Of thinking that it has to go somewhere or do something in order to 'get' or 'find' what it does not have HERE AND NOW.

So when I go to God and I ask, what should I DO.... really I'm saying, what should i seek for and where should I go to find it and what should I do to change it. And I have the best intentions. I think that this is noble or honest or helpful or holy or spiritual. But really, it is still seeking. It's still ego going away from the here and now, away from acceptance, away from stillness or surrender.

So God's answer to me - "receive" - really DOES actually address what the real problem is. The real problem is that I am addicting to seeking, because I continue to have this ego belief that I DO NOT HAVE GOD. This is what it all boils down to. If I'm absent from God and am not with God now and do not have God in me, then I seem to need to go fill this emptiness somewhere else.

So the remedy is clear and simple. I need to RECEIVE GOD. I need to open up to accept, admit and allow (the 3 A's?), that GOD IS HERE WITH ME NOW.

And this also means I need to SURRENDER the search, surrender the 'going and doing', surrender the 'something has to be done about this', and surrender all of the things I think are needed or have to be done 'because of' the lack of God. If I just accept that I am lacking God, I will be compelled to go find answers somewhere else, in some activity or change or manipulation. And I will think that God has to tell me what to DO in order to ACHIEVE those changes and manipulations, as if that would actually answer and solve them.

I don't realize that all of this compulsion to find - the seeking - satisfying that seeking or completing that seeking by finding outside of myself, WILL NOT bring me peace. AND, I will not be able to find those resolutions anyway because of "seek and do not find". What I think I want, is not there. The answer (God) is not there. The peace and certainty and clarity is not out there. The only thing 'out there' are illusions and distractions and dead ends.

So God knows. God knows what I need. God knows that I need to stop GOING AWAY FROM GOD, in order for this 'problem' to be solved. In order for ALL problems to be solved. Even the ones that I think are important, or every-day living types of problems. For these to be solved, I need to realize where they come from. ALL of these problems arise out of not knowing that God is with me. Of not depending on Him. I need to therefore undo THAT issue, which is by allowing God to be with me, and then the perception of all of these problems even being 'important' in any way, will dissolve.

"Let me recognize that all of my problems have been solved" - ACIM

And so.... I stop...... and I surrender....... and I receive God. And I just receive. And receive some more. And I say, "ok God, go ahead and flood me with more love".... and I receive more.... and I say "ok God, I receive your love, I receive your love, I receive your love". And I feel it. And I receive it. And all of the problems of life melt away. And who cares about fixing any of them anyway? They were all IMAGINARY!

All you need is love. It's being given constantly. You just need to receive it.

Until you learn that what you do to others you do to yourself, and you can be at least a little convinced about this, you will continue to see no point in forgiving. It will have no value to you and you won't want to do it, because you see it only as a way to pardon someone else. If that is what forgiveness means to you - bestowing pardon - it reveals that you don't recognize how forgiveness benefits YOU, or how you are involved in and a recipient of your judgement of others.

You have to keep being reminded that either both of you are innocent or both of you are guilty, a lot, because you have been severely programmed to perceive contrary to this. You think what you do to others has no effect on you, and what they do to you has no effect on them. In this there is injustice and unfairness and mistreatment and victimhood. This way of perceiving has to be gradually eroded and corrected so that you can come to believe and recognize that it simply isn't worth condemning someone because, you know only too well, that your own peace has been lost along with it.

And so this really means that you need to also learn to value peace and love within yourself, toward yourself. Without believing that you are worth loving, you aren't going to see the vested interest in loving others as yourself. You'd maybe rather maintain hate or justified anger for a while because you think the feeling of hating and being angry is actually good for you. You like the rage and the attack and the sense of helplessness, provided someone else is suffering at the same time, so you can convince yourself you're at least not as guilty as they are. But its a losing battle. You have to forgive yourself so that you can learn your worth and value and lovability, otherwise you're not going to want to protect it at all costs.

Once you do establish, to some degree, that you deserve the love of God, and you want it and value it, and your valuing of the truth has been corrected enough, you will start to experience a kind of automatic yet different response to others. Instead of maintaining condemnation at all costs, you'll start to feel that you know better, and that you know that you don't really want to feel like this. You want to feel the peace and love and forgiveness that your own heart deserves. And so even if you get mad at others, the more you forgive and learn your own innocence, the sooner you will feel a kind of growing urge to forgive them sooner. You will lose your taste for the fight and will gradually develop a greater willingness to want to put down your attacks and admit to responsibility and move into truth, simply because it is more valuable to you.

Eventually you will cease to judge, condemn, criticize, attack or project blame or anger onto anyone, solely because you've become very clear that YOU do not deserve any of that. And you also realize that truth is shared and wholeness is equal and you can't access love without sharing it with everyone. There is a oneness to it. The rules that apply to them must apply to you. As you do unto others, you DO do unto yourself. So now you have shared interests. And in your shared interest, it's in your best interest to treat both yourself and others with love and innocence and acceptance and peace. And you'll just decide you no longer want to enter into conflict or separation. And then you'll just remain at peace.

I say some of this because I understand it theoretically makes sense. I am not by any means loving all the time or at peace. But I have begun to notice a growing unwillingness to maintain angst for a long period of time. There is an increasing ... something, in my mind, which nags at me a bit more loudly, a kind of knowing, a surrender, a willingness, that reminds me of a mutual truth. And as I work on surrendering to truth and love and healing this certainty increases and speaks up more loudly. I find myself wanting to forgive sooner, just because I don't want to keep being unhappy. It takes practice. The mind needs to undo all of its ego conditioning of separation and blame and that takes a while. But slowly I see the results of a continually clarifying alignment with Holy Spirit. One forgiveness at a time.

I've seen how when I want to make something go away, I make myself sick.

We attempt to psychologically reject and push something away when we find it threatening, dangerous or undesirable, all of which is a perceptual error. This however immediately implements some form of sickness. Sickness is INDUCED by the attempt to separate from your BROTHER!

"The removal of blocks, then, is the only way to guarantee help and healing. Help and healing are the normal expressions of a mind which is working THROUGH the body but not in it. If the mind believes the body is its goal, it will distort its perception OF the body, and by blocking its own extension BEYOND it, will INDUCE illness by FOSTERING SEPARATION. Perceiving the body AS A SEPARATE ENTITY cannot but foster illness, because it is not true. A medium of communication WILL lose its usefulness if it is used for anything else."

When we perceive a threat or danger, or someone is fear-mongering, or there is "bad news", or some obnoxious person is hanging around, or whatever... if we perceive it as having power to attack and we want it to stop, instead of making it stop or dis-believing in it, we put up defenses. We try to reject and separate ourselves from it. That's a bad move. It attacks our body. "If I defend myself I am attacked."

I gave myself a panic attack yesterday at a medical office when the staff started becoming serious about heart problems that aren't real. Try as I might I couldn't help but try to reject and resist, and thus induced sickness and almost fainted. Later during forgiveness I saw how I'd done that to myself, trying to make it go away, as the result of *perceiving* that there was a real threat or danger.

Previously also I recall a very talkative coworker kept hanging around at my desk trying to chat, and wouldn't go away. And then got into chatting with others nearby. And instead of standing up to tell them to leave I just tolerated and tried to be patient, but wanted them to go away. And this induced a sudden immediate headache. Trying to separate from your brother induces sickness.

I also once gave myself an ear infection in a matter of hours as a result of trying to make Holy Spirit go away, having perceived his lack of "boundaries" as a threat. I suffered for a few days before being able to re-approach him without fear and thus recognize what I'd done to myself, and upon recognizing I did not NEED the defense, all symptoms disappeared within a matter of hours.

Whenever we USE SEPARATION as a tool, which is an ego tool, to try to "deal with" perceived situations, our attempt to put up a defense and withdraw into ourselves cuts us off from life, blocks extension, fosters separation, produces sickness, and eventually death ("sickness is but a little death"). Our attempt to DENY GOD or our brothers (whom God is in) is the only cause of bodily death. This is why all death is suicide - we give our consent through our denial of God's will. IT IS NOT GOD's WILL THAT ANYONE DIE. A dream of death is not left THROUGh death, but through life - truth.

Sickness cannot happen at all when you do not have a belief in separation in any way. When your mind extends to your brothers mind sharing love, it undoes all sense of separation and your minds join. In this joining there is no split and no division and no attack, and nothing for sickness to latch onto. It therefore MUST heal, and as such death is surmounted. This is a miracle, it is resurrection.

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

Now is the body healed because the source of sickness has been opened to relief."

Notice it says NOW IS THE *BODY* HEALED.

"You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible." This is literal. Sickness becomes impossible when your mind is whole and healed.

Atonement makes sickness IMPOSSIBLE. This DOES MEAN BODY SICKNESS as well as mental illness.

"Atonement heals with certainty, and cures all sickness. For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take. Sickness where guilt is absent cannot come, for it is but another form of guilt. Atonement does not heal the sick, for that is not a cure. It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible. And that is cure indeed. For sickness now is gone, with nothing left to which it can return."

So sickness IS A FORM OF GUILT, and if there is no guilt, there can be no sickness or death. Period.

A lesson for me at the moment has two parts to it. One part is realizing that underneath a person there is a completely immortal, invulnerable, innocent being that has absolutely nothing wrong with them and has done nothing wrong. The other part is, connected to this, that therefore I need to learn to 'overlook' the appearance of anything else that they are trying to demonstrate to me as the truth about them and not join with them in it (false empathy).

Being able to overlook the 'obstacle to peace' that other people put in place is a tuff one. But it also means I have to be able to not have obstacles to peace in myself, and that I need to take any kind of 'veil' or 'persona' off of my own mind so that I can see past the personas of other people.

Being able to overlook appearances is forgiveness. When your awareness fixates on looking AT an appearance, AT a body, AT a person's form, this is blinding. "Nothing so blinding as sight of form" - ACIM. This is what happens when the Holy Spirit in you is not allowed to fully extend outward, instead being stopped by the form of another person. But it's not their form that stops your 'vision', it's your belief that it's real - your buying into the illusion of it.

There's sections in the Course that I read not long ago about how the Holy Spirit projects/extends outward PAST your own body and PAST the bodies of other people, to recognize Himself WITHIN the mind of the other person. When your mind is looking past these forms in this way, there is no sickness because the mind isn't getting 'stuck' on form. Fully extending THROUGH and PAST the body is COMMUNICATION, which the Holy Spirit wants to use it for - to join with others beyond their bodies. But if we're fixating on the content of form such as guilt, fear, sin, death, bodies, appearances, etc then this puts a road-block in the way of extension, creating sickness and death. The body then becomes an 'obstacle to peace' - it's in the way we're looking at or past things.

The truth is that the body is never in the way of a truly forgiving mind. The body is not powerful and does not have the ability to prevent the extension of love. The body (mine, or someone else's) also has no ability to snag my mind or get me to pay attention to it. Instead, if my mind is truly forgiving, it will simply see THROUGH and PAST the obstacle recognizing that it is not real and has no ability to prevent extension. Then there will be a recognition of Oneness with your brother.

The issue is that when the mind itself has blocks to awareness, these blocks prevent full extension of Spirit. And that means there's some kind of belief in or attachment to guilt/sin/fear/death/spacetime/bodies etc within the mind. That means, instead of the mind just moving past and extending past everything in form, it instead 'stops' at or becomes fixated on form as though it has some power to block your awareness/sight/vision. You focus on something which is NOT THERE, and you think it is real, and this blocks your awareness. Blocks to awareness manifest as blocks to energy flow and vitality, where ultimately a 'big block' brings about "death".

It's an ongoing challenge to learn not to fixate on form or appearance, especially when you are used to seeing other people as though they ARE the way they appear. So if someone comes along with a sickness or a story about themselves or a really attention-grabbing attitude etc, if I am tempted by that and look AT it and MAKE IT REAL then my mind has become snagged by it, attached to it, and resistant of it, and that will have an affect on my own wellbeing. It will make me sick because I am seeing my brother as sick by failing to overlook sickness. We need to literally see the Christ in ourselves and others in order for our mind to fully extend and to be unhindered and unrestrained. I think in the Course Jesus used a word like "arrested". When the mind is arrested by sight of form we become sick. When the mind is freed from arrest, sickness is loosened up and flow is restored and there is no more death.

It's difficult but I have to learn to look past the ILLUSION that people have something wrong with them, the illusion that people are really sick, the illusion that people are actually able to suffer, the illusion that people really have something to be afraid of etc. And this goes back to the first point.... .underneath all of our shit there is an immortal being that is absolutely unaffected by any illusion and has no faults and is perfectly innocent, invulnerable, powerful and free. If I believe that and know that and experience that and look TO that, then I will overlook all the other illusory bullshit. But if I forget that, or lose sight of that, or fixate on any other DEMONSTRATION as though it is the truth about me or another person, then now I'm into la-la land, hallucinating, suffering, caught up in stories, reacting to appearances and struggling with my own self.

I'm looking forward to absolute certainty. Someday it will appear within and without simultaneously. We are all really free, we just don't recognize it.

(anecdotal. .... People looking down at their iPhones fixated on form, hmm... A great way to make illusions real and to shut out everything else, and they call this a 'communication' device lol it's really an isolation device :-)..depending who you're dialling with ;-)

I had no idea, that I had been spending vast majority of my life attempting to use the ego's persona in order to 'make life better'.

All the times that I people-pleased to try to make bad people go away.

All the times that I tried to fix everything bad that ever seemed to be happening.

All the times that I tried to appear to be innocent and yet was acting like a victim.

All the times that I tried to look pleasing to others so that they would maybe not hurt me.

All the times that I thought I had to give others what they wanted, and that I was not inherently wanted in a loving way - only in terms of what others wanted to take from me.

There was even a time in my life that was especially low where I felt so bad about myself, such low self 'esteem', ie shame and unworthiness, that I believed I did not deserve any love, and that the only people who would 'want me' were those who wanted to use me or take from me or have me be a slave to. It was tremendously disempowering.

Ultimately this was all because I had such a strong belief that my personas (personii?), were actually capable of IMPROVING my life, making things more palatable, protecting me or defending me from what I did not want. I wanted to simply shut out all the bad icky stuff and focus solely on the good stuff.

And I remember actually believing that I was becoming 'very spiritual' by rejecting even the everyday egos of other people, which I relegated and judged and condemned for 'being ego' or 'being selfish' etc. This sort of twisted double-edged idea of spirituality arose out of this in my late teens where I was simultaneously terrified and hounded by scary stuff in my mind, while thinking that I was also having deep spiritual insights. And maybe I was in a way, but it was strongly dualistic, and my mind was very split. There was a 'rift' in my life, a strong sense of separation, and that persona of exalted, lofty specialness, really holier-than thou, simultaneously felt like I was approaching death.

I used the persona to get rid of and attack everything that I was against, believing that what I 'kept' was all good and acceptable and allowed. BUT, the more that I got rid of... and believe me I included a LOT of stuff in the list of what I rejected, way above and beyond normal classifications (ie most of the world), the more what I had LEFT OVER got smaller and smaller. The more I found myself in a hole of isolation and loneliness. And the more I became depressed. I felt like this impending sense of everything coming to an 'end'. My whole reality just felt like it was saturated with a sense of impending doom, with no way out. Because I was hiding in the persona and not being authentic at all, even though I felt justified by my pain.

I was repressing so much and rejecting so much, perhaps in attempt to heal myself of strong wounds, which I had projected onto everyone else, that I was perhaps trying to find a way to get away from it all and at least 'fake' that I was healing, as a starting point. Very much fortunately, things gradually started to turn around at that point, massively fuelled by my meeting my beloved wife who came into the darkness like an angel of light. Then the healing commenced.

Now, looking back, I can see how my entire time was spent choosing the persona, putting on a fake image, trying to give people what they wanted, trying to please, trying not to upset anyone, trying to maintain status quo or 'peace' by never asserting myself or standing out, etc. It was a rough lesson! And all of that resisting, all of that... rejecting of life... merely diminished my own. Now I am learning that using the persona at all is an attack on myself. It is a way to buy into the belief that I need to cover myself up because there's something wrong with me. As self-love increases - genuine honest God-shared love - so too does the need for these masks diminish.

I am seeing clearer and clearer that all of the confidence, all of the fearlessness, all of the certainty, all of the clarity and strength, that I thought I was going to find by using rejection, separation, persona denial, etc... are actually already IN ME... it was being denied BY the use of the persona. I just needed to learn WHERE the truth is, what WHAT the truth is. I was looking in the wrong place for my whole life - outside of me, and was rejecting myself the entire time.

Now I see that if you stand with yourself in your truth and don't reject yourself, you don't even NEED any of the persona masks, because you already HAVE what God has given you, you already ARE powerful and safe and strong. You don't need to hide from people, because you are unconditionally loving yourself. You're saying, I'm going to ALWAYS be real, true and honest, in all situations and with all people. I am ALWAYS going to come from unconditional love no matter what. And in that, you not only drop all of the efforts to 'get rid of bad stuff', you also drop all of the efforts to 'choose only the good stuff'. And along with that goes all sense of depending on, or caring about, what anyone else thinks of you or what you do. It is a freedom. In a sense, an independence - being set free from the energy-sucking vampire that the ego is and being AVAILABLE now to God, to allow Him to live through you.

It wasn't getting rid of bad stuff that made my life better. Trying to do that made it worse. Accepting myself fully is the goal.

It's not where I thought life would go. But this is where it is heading for all of us. Back to our true selves. Back to love.

If you are going to pray for someone, you’ll need to first discern what the problem really is.

The problem is NOT what is happening to the person, what they perceive as happening to them, or what your own ego says is the problem.

This means you need to forgive first, come to your senses, and *recognize* what the illusions are.

It’s actually always an ILLUSION that anyone is under attack by anyone other than themselves!

So in this sense, it is then pointless to pray e.g. that someone receives money, or that someone stop being hurt by someone, or someone gets along with their boss, or whatever.

The only meaningful prayer, perhaps, is one which aligns itself with God’s Will. That means, the prayer ACKNOWLEDGES the TRUTH about the person, not what is FALSE about them!

Just as forgiveness does not "make errors real" and THEN attempts to undo them, which cannot work, our prayers should also be forgiving. They should not fall for the ego’s tricks or make us believe the victim’s own interpretation of what is happening.

If someone asks you to pray for them, and then gives the reasons "why", which will entail all the perceived justifications for why they are in danger or under attack or suffering "against their will", take their prayer request and by all means pray, but do not pray for what the person believes is the problem.

Just as when you forgive, you need to learn to UNDO the belief that problems are real at all, withdraw belief that sin is real, and NOT believe that sickness and suffering are real, so too this needs to be incorporated into praying.

If you pray "with forgiveness", then you are praying with the power of God, and this CAN produce results because you’re now speaking God’s language of TRUTH. But if you fall for the ego traps and dramas and then use that as the reason to pray, praying for those "real" dramas to stop, it will not work.

Your prayers must ASCEND above the battlefield, above the ego’s lies, above even the illusion that someone is being attacked by a will OTHER than their own.

All attack is SELF ATTACK. The person needing praying for needs to stop attacking themselves! The prayer then should be in support of what is TRUE about the person, acknowledging and being thankful for that, as a way to diffuse the ego’s bullshit about the situation, and then to pray that the person themselves are lifted up into TRUTH, to join in truth, so that THEY stop attacking themselves.

It is therefore helpful to pray that a person stop believing they are vulnerable, to help them to recognize how loved they are, to ask that their mind be clarified, to ask for healing and to remind the person how loved and safe they are. It is helpful to ask for the person to be uplifted and awakened and made conscious and come back to their senses - to truth. It is helpful to send them love. And it is helpful to ask that they be helped by God to RECOGNIZE their own invulnerability, strength, power, certainty and fearlessness.

It is really self-attack that people need prayers about. Their failure to recognize the truth about themselves IS causing them to make theirown life a mess. Their unconsciousness is producing projected attacks. Their resistance against truth is causing problems and dramas.

No-one especially needs to be "saved" from apparently completely separate unfair attackers who come out of the blue for no reason. No one dies without their own consent! The problem is that a person has CONSENTED TO SUFFERING. THEY need help with learning to STOP ATTACKING THEMSELVES. TO stop believing things are true of them which are not true. To remember who they really are.

WE as "prayers" must learn not to be deceived by the ego’s illusions first, including those presented by "those in need". The reason for the prayer must not be an ego reason OR a reaction to an ego way of looking at a situation. If we’re making the problem real, but are saying "prayer words", WE now have a "split mind" and a "split will" and a "split allegiance", and that means we are not going to actually WILL anything with God.

I’ve been trying to remember this myself and to practice it by praying only for the person’s awakening to truth, the recognition of their perfection as Christ, and for them to be healed of the NEED to be prayed for for illusory reasons.

Instead, our prayer is not so much a request about something which needs changing, but moreso an EXTENSION OF GOD, an affirmation of recognition of what is already true, a denial of what is false, and to simply ask that God’s Will (the way that things should be if people weren’t interfering) be expressed. That’s not so much a "new request" as it is a CONTINUATION OF THE TRUTH.

Think about how the person’s HIGHER SELF is. What is true of their higher self, in the highest possible reality of God, THAT is the truth about the person and NOT how they appear. Their body symtoms, their life dramas, etc, are NOT true of them. Affirming what IS true of them, "speaking truth into the situation", is powerful and miraculous. Spoken prayers only posess POWER if they are speaking of what is TRUE IN GOD.

Speak about how God sees the person. Speak about what is only true of them in the most loving way - total innocence, perfect awareness, fearlessness, trust, confidence, happiness, joy, love, worthiness, etc... expressing that is an extension of love, and love heals. You don’t even really need to address the ego junk that is currently showing up. God’s Will is all that needs to be done, ie, you only need affirm and recognize and express what God has already created as TRUTH about the person.

Prayer and forgiveness go hand in hand. To pray with love must be to pray forgivingly. To pray WITH GOD, instead of "to God", is far more powerful than reacting pleadingly to illusions of suffering. Seeing and acknowledging the highest reality of a person is very uplifting.

Practiced a little bit of `miracle working` this morning ... the 'change the dream' and 'reverse cause and effect' kind. I am reporting this just because I'm still experimenting/learning/discovering what is possible and maybe it is useful.

I had back pain from a couple days ago, was annoying. Could not sleep on my side last night. Woke up with a sore shoulder bla bla bla. Uncomfortable, predicting that the day would be awkward and painful again. But then, decided to ask Jesus for help. It goes something like this:

1) Place your hand on the affected area

2) Join with Jesus, acknowledging that you BELIEVE/have faith that HE knows how to heal anything (healing comes from the Christ mind and you yourself (your ego self) are not capable of it) - your Christ self is.

3) Get yourself out of the way, your attitude of being forceful, your attitude of having power, your attitude of making something happen yourself, being the fixer, being a healer. NO. It's NOT YOU that is going to do the healing (this is profoundly difficult if you are accustomed to being `a healer` or fixer or savior).

4) Join with Jesus and feel his presence and stand with him in your mind, and stay there. Don't be separate. Stand alongside him and in his power and strength.

5) Now you can say words directly specifically at the problem, COMMANDING them to leave and never return, in Jesus's name (or words to this effect, ie within/using/extending Jesus's power)

6) e.g. "In Jesus's name (in my belief that Jesus can heal this FOR me), I command you pain to leave this body right now and do not return. (Notice if you start doubting and try looking for results or checking for changes or claiming credit for what's happening - this is all ego interference). (Notice also if you start believing YOU have to summon amazing amounts of magical power yourself in order to force the thing to leave... no force necessary whatsoever, you have to LET JESUS DO IT).

7) Notice if you are trying to force it or are trying to use `your own` power or strength or aggression to make the thing go away... that doesn't work. It's interference by the ego. You don't even need to ask in a forceful way. IF I can get myself out of the way then when I say the words it seems like I am barely saying anything, like reciting something without any intensity - because I'm letting Jesus have the power

8) If this does not work... and often it does nothing to begin with... do it again. Do it a few times. For me, after about 3 or 4 times, I felt my hand begin to vibrate and 'energize' and for there to be a presence in my back area and a sensation of buzzing or something happening.

9) Keep doing it because each time you are clear and pure about Jesus doing the healing it opens up your mind more and strengthens the connection - sometimes you have lots of clouds of ego to get past and it can take some determination/repetition to make your point clear enough and to extend enough 'authority' and certainty to command the 'dream' to change.

10) Hopefully if you did this well you will see some results. It takes practice.

For me, I was surprised that after 4 or 5 rounds (patiently applied) .. the pain in my back and shoulder had SIGNIFICANTLY subsided, probably like 60-70% improved. It left me smiling. It left me surprised and a bit amazed that it actually felt a lot better. Thank you Jesus! Hallelujah, or something.

I don't see that this is hard to do, but getting your ego out of the way can seem difficult. Jesus/Holy Spirit are the healers (God is). Its a matter of getting out of the way, trusting, believing in their power, putting aside fear, joining in their authority and extending their truth.