"If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

You may be wondering how "the separation" was possible, and how we came to seem to be in the situation we're in. There IS an explanation, which Jesus has given in many forms.

The essence of it, is that God gave you TOTAL unlimited freedom when you were created.

"The latter required the endowment of man (Souls) by God with free will, because all loving creation is freely given."

"Free will is the attribute of the mind, NOT the Soul."

This means God gave us all absolutely free will. Our will has TOTAL freedom. Now, here's the interesting part.

Because the will is totally free, it actually has the freedom, or potential, to try to use its own free will against even itself. It can actually try to "will not to will." It actually is free to even use its freedom to try to prevent its own freedom, if it so chooses. Doing so is self-defeating, but you CAN do this.

This is an inherent function of the mind and actually completely natural, because it's part of being totally free. God HAD to give you the freedom to potentially "mis-use" your will, otherwise you could not be free. He couldn't just lock you in to some kind of mandated use of it, you had to be free to use it as you saw fit.

The freedom God has given you INCLUDES the freedom even to deny God if you want to. It includes the freedom to resist him, to deny reality, to try to use free will to stop willing, the ability to try to create nothing, to use the will destructively, and to at least ATTEMPT to separate itself from its source.

Your mind can in fact go into a state of denial. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, in terms of it being "not allowed by God." God had to GIVE YOU this ability in order to give you total freedom. He doesn't necessarily will for you that you USE the will in this way, ie non-constructively, but you CAN if you so choose.

When you do choose to use it in a self-defeating way, you are "mis-creating", in an attempt to use the will against itself. This is really an attempt not to create, or to cause nothing, or to be inept and inert, or to not extend. It's like a kind of resistance, which is also fear. An attempt to be UN-WILLING, or to NOT will what God wills. Indeed, to attempt to will AGAINST him, which is "the authority problem."

"Remember, we have already stated that denial is not a purely negative device; it results in positive miscreation."

There is a fundamental truth that you cannot will against God's will. But, that does not mean you aren't free to TRY to. You are free to attempt it. When you do attempt it, you FAIL to change his will at all, and instead go into denial.

In the denial you BELIEVE that you have succeeded, but you haven't. Also when you are in this denial state, you are denying yourself, denying God, and denying reality. It's very important to realize however that denial does not CHANGE reality. It has no effect on the truth. Denial merely means to believe that something is not true, even though it still is true. It's a kind of rejection or refusal - an unwillingness - to accept what is true.

Your mind, as given by God, DOES HAVE the freedom and ability and power to go into a state of denial. This is BUILT IN to its fundamental freedom. It HAS to be able to potentially use its own freedom even against itself, otherwise it is not free. It is because of this "clause" if you will, that we could potentially elect to "go into the separation", ie to believe that we have become separate, even though we haven't. ie to go into denial.

"The sense is very literal; -- denial of Life perceives its opposite, as ALL forms of denial replace what IS, with what is NOT. No-one can really DO this, but that you can THINK you can, and BELIEVE YOU HAVE, is beyond dispute."

"For the separation is only the DENIAL of union, and, correctly interpreted, attests to your eternal knowledge that union is true."

Mind then is perfectly natural in its ability to try to deny its own creator if it so chooses. God has given it the freedom to use itself against itself. The fact is that it HAS DONE THIS, which is what we call "the separation" or the fall of man. Our minds HAVE elected to deny their own freedom, placing themselves into a state of imprisonment.

When mind uses its own free will to will AGAINST freedom, it induces a state of imprisonment. The will becomes imprisoned and the mind seems to go to sleep, or seems to become unable to will anything.

"That is why the ego IS the denial of free will. It is NEVER God Who coerces you, because He SHARES His Will WITH you."

"If it does not freely elect to do so, it retains this creative ability, but places itself under tyrannous rather than authoritative control. As a result, what it creates is imprisonment, because such are the dictates of tyrants."

This has actually happened, without in any way leaving God or leaving God's laws or operating outside of your inherent nature. There is fundamentally nothing "wrong" with this as such, but it IS out of accord with God's will. It is an attempt to reject his will. All this can produce is a state of denial, because God's will itself cannot be opposed, but you can thus "believe" that you are opposing it. Even if it's just a belief, it DOES alter your mind when you believe it.

"Remember a very early lesson, -- "never underestimate the power of denial." It has no power in ITSELF, but YOU can give it the power of YOUR mind, whose power is without limit of ANY kind."

"God did not ALLOW this to happen. But you DEMANDED that it happen, and therefore believed that it was so."

"God did not blot it out, because to eradicate it would be to attack it."

"It is NEVER God Who coerces you, because He SHARES His Will WITH you."

The main truth is that there is no real benefit to using freedom against freedom. The circular logic becomes obvious. For example, we're saying that it's possible to "will not to will". The more that you will not to will, the more you are using will, and obviously contradicting what you're claiming to accomplish. You therefore cannot will NOTHING, and have to will something. So instead you will a sense of EMPTINESS or a sort of "lack of creation."

"If a mind creates without love, it can create an empty shell. This CAN be possessed by evil."

"We also have observed that man can create an empty shell, but cannot create nothing at all. This emptiness provides the screen for the misuse of projection."

"He can create an empty shell (see previous reference), but he DOES NOT create nothing at all."

So in fact what happened is we used our free will and our freedom of choice to elect to use the mind, mis-creatively, to try to "create nothing", and this produced a sort of empty creation, or a lack of creation - a lack of love's extension. In the mind this produced the hallucinated state of the lack of God, which is space-time and all its contents. Jesus refers to it as an empty screen onto which we then project meanings.

So long as the mind is unwilling and is resisting freedom and therefore is in denial, it is maintaining its belief in something opposite to God. That maintains 'the ego' and the illusion of a meaningless world. The world is meaningless because it is an "empty shell" which has no real content of its own, onto which we project images and meanings either thought false or true perception.

While it is true that mind cannot create a real separation, and you cannot leave God, and you cannot violate his reality or his laws, it is also true that the ability to deny IS within his laws and his reality. It is part of your rights as a created free-willed being.

God actually does not COERCE or shame you or guilt you or punish you for WANTING to use your freedom against itself. You ARE FREE to do so if you so choose. It's just that when you do so, you do bring suffering upon yourself and He does not will that you suffer.

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

So God gently INVITES you to return back to willing constructively with him rather than destructively. You have to FREELY CHOOSE IT, and accept atonement because you want to, not because you are forced to. This is because your mind still has the power to exercise freedom - a power that you have never lost.

So being in the denial of God, is actually a possibility of reality. It is not PREFERRED, but it is possible. It is not what God wills for you, but he HAS given you your own will, so even though he does not make it possible for you to actually separate, he DOES allow you to BELIEVE that you have. And this has taken place. This is why Jesus says "the separation has occurred." We HAVE tried to deny God and we HAVE believed that we've become separate.

The problem then isn't REALLY denial. Denial is NOT a negative functionality. It is not inherently a bad thing. You actually can use denial positively and for protection. The proper use of denial actually denies illusions and supports the truth of reality. It is only the improper use of it which has led us to deny God and accept lies, instead of accepting God and denying lies.

"Because of your Father's love, you can NEVER forget Him. For no one can forget what God Himself placed in his memory. You can DENY it, but you CANNOT LOSE IT."

"You can DENY His knowledge, but you CANNOT change it."

"But denial is a defense, and so it is as capable of being used positively as it is of being used destructively."

We have actually moved into a denial state, in the mind that God gave us, as part of the freedom he gave us, and this has TEMPORARILY produced the 'tiny mad idea' and the 'unholy instant'. It has led to the hallucination of spacetime - a belief in possibilities which aren't actually possible in truth. This has happened. But none of the things which seem to happen WITHIN this denial, have really happened.

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

This ability for the mind try to elect to be what it is not, to assume an alien power it doesn't really have, or to enter a state that it can't really enter, IS the power of denial that all minds are naturally capable of, in reality or otherwise. If you use the mind against itself it attacks itself and produces insanity. And since denial is a rejection of or avoidance/hiding from reality, it is a form of unconsciousness or an attempt "not to know", which induces a sort of sleep, in which we dream of imaginary worlds.

You CAN deny God, that's not against his law. But when you do, you induce a nightmare of suffering.

"What God did not create can only be in your own mind apart from His."

"What God did not create does not exist. And everything that does exist exists as He created it. The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist."

The world you "made up" does not really exist. It's a dream. The ability TO dream, is not made up. It is part of your natural freedom. God is not stopping you from choosing to go into denial, but he IS inviting you to come out of that denial when you are freely willing to do so, and therefore return to a happier state in alignment with his will. Denial is not an illusion, it PRODUCES illusions when misused.

So basically, "the separation", otherwise called "the attempt to deny the truth" has happened, the mind HAS exercised its free will to repress its own freedom, and this HAS induced a kind of sleep state in which the mind dreams of separation. The dream isn't valid at all. The DREAMING is a mind function and not to be discarded. It is simply something that you can choose or not choose. When you DON'T choose to dream, you instead choose to accept ultimate reality, and use the mind ONLY for constructive creative purposes.

"By denying his mind any destructive potential, and reinstating its purely constructive powers, he has placed himself in a position where he can undo the level confusion of others."

Long story short, mind DOES have the potential and freedom to go into denial, and this is entirely within the laws of God. It's just that when we do this, we are not happy, and it induces fantasies of things that aren't really possible. God does not will that we suffer so he instead calls us to return to him, knowing that it's best to use our free will creatively rather than self-destructively.

"It is for this denial that you need Atonement. Your denial made no change in what you are. But you have split your mind into what knows and does not know the truth."

"Both the power and the strength of man's creative will must be understood, before the real meaning of denial can be appreciated and abolished. Denial is NOT mere negation. It is a positive miscreation."

"Extension cannot be blocked, and it has no voids. It continues forever, however much it is denied. Your DENIAL of its reality arrests it in time, but not in Eternity."

"The Separation HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial." "For fear IS a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied."

"The out of mind is out of sight, because what is denied is THERE, but is not recognized. Christ is still there, although you know Him not. His Being does NOT depend upon your recognition."

"Fear and love are the only emotions of which you are capable. One is false, for it was made out of denial, and denial DEPENDS on the real belief in what is denied for its OWN existence."

Mind is free to deny itself, at any time. It has denied itself. That's why we're dreaming of exile. Its ability to do this is God-given. Its election TO do this is its own free choice. It HAS chosen to do this, and so it IS in a denial state. That is why there arose a NEED for atonement and God had to create the Holy Spirit to maintain a link to his children, guaranteeing that they can return to him when they are willing to do so.

We are not to be in the business of trying to "deny" that the mind can or has done this. It absolutely has done this. But it can choose again. It can choose to stop mis-creating and to instead create only the extension of God. It can choose to stop denying its own freedom and reclaim its inheritance. It can move out of its temporary state of resistance, into acceptance, out of fear into love. And at no point is God sitting there saying "denying me is against the law." He doesn't condone it, but he also doesn't force you not to choose it.

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but ****has the mark of death upon it****. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."

Jesus here tells us that this world, Earth, which comprises homes and cities and roads etc, has the mark of death upon it. That even from the start, even when it was made, it already had death and disappointment infused into it. It was made in an idea of death, being the idea of the opposite to eternal life. This is because "Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem." and so an illusory world is really a dream of death.

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it ****are the laws of death****."

Recognize then that by death he's talking about the fact that everything in spacetime, including spacetime itself, is founded on the idea of an interruption to life, or an attempt to change the eternal into the temporary. Things coming to an end. Things changing over time. Things decaying and rotting and dying. Things becoming sick. Things lacking and sacrificing and losing. Even things growing and transforming. All various forms of limitation. A limit on life and on eternity. A notion of "not forever".

One thing that I've been doing lately is just accepting the fact that this world's laws, the laws of physics, are just automatically set up to fail. Chaos becomes possible because of the way that objects interact with each other seemingly randomly. Your car breaks down. Objects fall on the ground. You bump into things. Stuff breaks. Your new toy has a mark on it. Your clothes wear out. Your food rots. Your house needs repairs. Your kitchen smells bad. And your clothes are all dirty.

We could struggle against such things as if we have an expectation that the world can be perfect or free from defects. And some people try to control the world and twist it into an illusory palace of perfection. But the problem is, it can't be that. It is fundamentally rooted in the idea of death, of interruption and inconsistency and difference and change and transformation. All the royal castles crumble. Always there is the drive to become something it's not now.

If we try to expect that we can make a life where these things are avoided, or you can make a little oasis or illusion of safety and security, you really are in denial. Sooner or later the grim reaper is coming to look for you and yours. Either in terms of bodies dying or in terms of melting your phone or sickening your pets or scorching your grass or breaking your flowers or freezing your toes or puking in your shoes or whatever.

"Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

It's better to recognize this is the way of the world, based on its laws. It's just how it is. It's how this whole system, this whole universe, functions. There's no point in being mad about stuff breaking, or things falling on the floor, or stuff getting trapped in the door, or physical objects doing their quirky strangely annoying things, especailly when you're in a bad mood. They kind of can't help it. They are governed by rules that force them to "behave" this way, like they always will. Even in a forgiven world, the cookies still crumble.

I've been finding a lot more patience and forgiveness in just accepting that this is the functioning of this whole world. It just is broken from the start. The laws of physics are simply "at it again". Gravity is messing with you. Forces and energies are messing with you. And none of it is really "personal" because it's just doing what it does blindly and mindlessly. To expect it to ever not be like this must be some kind of insanity because a separated world cannot help but act this way.

We do need to accept that we did in fact make a fundamentally broken world. A world that does not really function properly according to the laws of God. A world where stuff is pretty much destined to change and break and grow old and die eventually. Where things collide and conflict and seem to attack, and where you can seemingly even be hurt - a notion which is utterly impossible in heaven's reality.

"The world provides no safety. It is rooted in attack, and all its "gifts" of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. It attacks and then attacks again. No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus." "The laws of chaos govern ALL illusions. Their forms conflict, making it SEEM quite possible to value some above the others."

Jesus is clear that you cannot really want this world, because it is not a perfect world. It is not heaven. It was made in a mad idea of rebellion against reality. It is a protest against harmony and peace. It was made to attack God and to attempt to depict the death of his creations.

"The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

"YOU DO NOT WANT THE WORLD. The only thing of value in it is whatever part of it YOU look upon with love."

"Here is the world you do NOT want"

We have to be willing to look at this. The world is not EVER going to satisfy you and make you happy. It is not ever going to give you what you want. It is not ever going to feed your properly. It is not ever going to make you well or heal you or fix your problems. It has a neverending supply of madness and problems and difficulties. ALL its roads are pointed towards change, dissolution and death. Even planets and stars and galaxies die off eventually. And problems are completely built into its chaotic systems.

"You on earth have no conception of limitlessness, for the world you seem to live in IS a world of limits. In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur."

"Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped."

The world does not really give you any real choice, because ALL of its options are rooted in death. This isn't a pessimistic or negative view either. It is an honest and truthful view. The entire system was set up on a basis of separation and attack. Everything about it is aimed towards punishment for original sin, trying to bring about the death of life and the end of God.

"The ego's laws are strict, and breaches are severely punished. Therefore, give no obedience to its laws, for they ARE laws of punishment." "The laws of sin DEMAND a victim. WHO it may be makes little difference. But death MUST be the cost and MUST be paid."

"Sin calls for punishment"

"For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death."

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives. Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped. Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to GAIN that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. All of them will lead to death. On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes."

Can you accept that everything in this world was set up to die, right from the start? That this its inherent NATURE? Because only by looking at that and recognizing "there is no way out", on its terms, can you be willing to seek for a better way.

This is just how the world is set up. There is no point in denying it. There is no point in expecting it to behave differently. The laws of physics work how they work. The only reason we become angry about stuff breaking and things failing and attacks happening and so on is because we have an unrealistic expectation that the world isn't going to be like this. That somehow in the world we can make a little safe corner where the bad things don't happen, to fend off death and keep attack at bay. Good luck with that delusion.

Now, of course if this were the only state of affairs then we would indeed be screwed. But fortunately we are not stuck inside this closed-loop of hell. There is another way. There is another perception and another belief and another reality. This other way, however, isn't a rose-tinted glass of pretending in denial that the world isn't a world of death. Nor is it a form of denial that says it's okay that things die and suffer. Or an attempt to dress up the world or to expect it to be something it's not. The world can't work because it began with an impossible goal.

We can become miraculous, in that we can in fact override the laws of death. We can overcome the laws of physics. We can see past what the world was made to see. We can see with a mechanism of vision that doesn't depend on the physical eyes. We can overlook and not hold the world against itself, or condemn it for its shortcomings. We can recognize that a world made in error cannot help but be mistaken. And we can disregard notions that the world is real in its sin and attack. Indeed we are supposed to do this in order to be forgiving and to be set free from suffering.

For me lately, I have been doing a lot of physical stuff. Rearranging the house, buying and assembling new furniture, throwing out old stuff, cleaning, organizing, moving things around, and to some extent enjoying new stuff. But I've also become aware that all of these things are already fundamentally limited in what they are and can be. I'm not in denial or pretending that they can be perfect.

The furniture with the dents in it, the gaps between the planks of wood, the poorly written instructions, the missing parts, the slightly wrong color, the stuff that doesn't fit, the wrongly shipped item, the misunderstood specs, all the ways that there is shortcomings and failures and forms of death. Lacks of perfection and order.

But I feel mostly unbothered by all these things because I am no longer expecting the world to be capable of better. It is not capable of being perfect, so I now accept that "good enough" or "less than perfect" is the best it can acheive. And then I can let it go instead of trying to find perfection where it is impossible.

We made a broken world. It can't fix itself. And it's not capable of taking on a form of perfection. It will not ever fully satisfy us. And even in forgiveness where it is seen beyond and reflects heaven, even then it still falls short in its forms and its functioning. Ultimately, the world cannot make you happy. It cannot give you peace, or take it away. It cannot be the cause of anything. Nor can it really have any meaning of its own.

At best it can reflect meaning you give to it, and that is all, because by itself it is an empty void. We made a meaningless, chaotic, broken world, and we need to simply recognize this about it. The world is not our home.

"When he is NOT in a state of grace he IS out of his natural environment, and does NOT function well. Everything he does becomes a strain, because he was not created for the environment which he has made. He therefore CANNOT adapt to it, nor can he adapt IT to HIM. There is no point in trying. 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."

The sooner you realize this the better, provided you also realize what CAN make you happy. What makes you happy is to laugh at the fundamental brokenness of the world. To realize the WHOLE THING is limited and false and can't do what you hoped it could do. The whole world is handicapped and disabled, falling short and incapable of eternal life. That's all it can be. And yet there is another world, a world we want, where this need not be.

"You on earth have no conception of limitlessness, for the world you seem to live in IS a world of limits. In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur. The miracle, therefore, has a unique function, and is motivated by a unique Teacher, Who brings the laws of another world to this one."

"But we are thankful, too, the need is done to walk the world of limits, and to reach the Christ in hidden forms and clearly seen at most in lovely flashes. Now we can behold Him without blinders, in the light that we have learned to look upon again."

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it into another world. Yet the REAL world HAS the power to touch you even here BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT. And what you call with love WILL come to you. LOVE ALWAYS ANSWERS, being unable to deny a call for help, or not to hear the cries of pain that rise to it, from every part of this strange world you made, but do not want. The only effort you need make, to give this world away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

"God's teachers can have no regret on giving up the pleasures of the world. Is it a sacrifice to give up pain? Does an adult resent the giving up of children's toys? Does one whose vision has already glimpsed the Face of Christ look back with longing on a slaughter house? No-one who has escaped the world and all its ills looks back on it with condemnation. Yet he must rejoice that he is free of all the sacrifice which its values would demand of him. To them he sacrifices all his freedom. To them he sacrifices all his peace. And to possess them must he sacrifice his hope of Heaven and remembrance of his Father's Love. Who in his sane mind chooses nothing as a substitute for everything?

"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects."

The idea of separation is madness, because what it implies is impossible. It is not possible to be separate from God. But the mad idea was the idea that you CAN be separate from God, even though it is impossible.

To insist it is possible, must be madness, because to believe it you have to deny reality and truth and blind yourself to sanity and sense. This belief makes the mind insane, because it now believes impossible things are possible. This is why the separation from God was an entry into a state of mental illness, ie insanity.

"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."

"The instant that the mad idea of making your relationship with God unholy seemed to be possible, ALL relationships were made meaningless. In that unholy instant time was born, and bodies made to house the mad idea, and give it the ILLUSION of reality."

The mad idea gave rise to a mad world, based on insane notions and crazy laws, devoid of meaning and empty of truth. And into this insane world we projected our insane beliefs, producing a mad and false world to reflect our inner madness. And all who participate in it are mentally ill.

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death."

What we've ended up with then is a fictional world which insane people believe exists. And it is populated with people who have insane beliefs about who and what they are. They do not know themselves, are out of touch with their own reality, and think they are something they're not. This especially is entwined with the belief that they are physical bodies, which their immortal souls could never be. And they see themselves as limited and lacking.

"Sin is insanity. It is the means by which the mind is driven mad, and seeks to let illusions take the place of truth. And being mad, it sees illusions where truth should be, and where it really is. Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold?"

Realize then that the world as we know it is populated by beings who originally were, and in truth still are, wholly immortal, perfect, innocent, loving, healthy, happy and completely invulnerable. Beings who God created to live forever in divine perfection, who lacked nothing and were capable of anything.

In the separation, these beings gave belief to impossible nonsense and thus moved their minds into insane states. This produced the anti-christ or otherwise known as the ego, which is an idea of what you THINK you are, as a kind of wishful thinking or denial of your true nature. Thus each person developed a SECOND self for themselves, which they identified with and as, and thought to be the whole of who they are.

"This is the anti-Christ; ... Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

"The body is the symbol of WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE."

So now you have a world seemingly populated by individual beings who strongly believe they are NOT as God created them. They've added an entire layer of lies on top of themselves, to cover themselves up. They've invented a second self to suit their preferences.

They have profound denial which means they actively resist admitting to the truth about themselves and each other, and instead participate in lies and fantasies about what they are. They want to be a body and they want to suffer and they want to die, and they think this is normal because they think the hell they created is heaven.

"He has come to save me from the evil self I made."

"They DO believe that Heaven is hell, and ARE afraid of love. "

"For your definition of Heaven IS hell and oblivion, and the REAL Heaven is the greatest threat you think you COULD experience."

This has thrown these individuals into states of mind that are distorted and unnatural. They are mentally ill. They believe they are something or someone they are not. They have associated with being a physical object. They think they came into existence with the body. They believe they are limited and lacking and insufficient and defective and broken and sinful and guilty and in need of fear. And they relate to others through specialness and selfishness and mistrust and victimhood.

"the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt."

On the level of the world then it always seems that you're interacting with a whole person, who is egoic, and who has major selfishness issues, and who relates in special ways, and strikes bargains, and wants to get, and sees themselves as limited and lacking and defective. And it seems this is ALL THERE IS to the person. As if they ACTUALLY ARE a limited dysfunctional individual.

You see this appearance as the whole truth about the person, and people seem to really be in states of "becoming", of "growing", of transformation, learning, progression, acquisition and so on. As if they have started out with nothing and are lacking and little and weak and frail. And so the whole world seems to be populated with egoic individuals who are all far less than magnificent and most of whom find themselves to be unworthy of love or life. Which drives them all to self-punishment and suicide.

"...the sense of loneliness and abandonment which all the separated ones experience. Depression is an inevitable consequence of separation. So are anxiety, worry, a deep sense of helplessness, misery, suffering, and intense fear of loss."

"the delusions of the Separated ones."

"All the separated ones have a basic fear of retaliation and abandonment. This is because they BELIEVE in attack and rejection, so this is what they perceive and teach and LEARN. "

It seems then that we're living in a world where people represent varying degrees of ability, accomplishment, skill, confidence, and a very wide range of personalities and potentials. And in all cases no-one is perfect and everyone is lacking in some way. And everyone is trying to improve themselves because they all think they were created broken. And now there is competition and everyone fights to be better than all the other defective ones, while the defective ones lick their wounds and want to die.

If you take this at face value, if you think this is normal and natural, then you'll think that the EGOS that you interact with ARE people. That their egotism is NOT a mental illness, but is in fact just some normal psychological structure. A personality trait perhaps. And that it's completely normal for people to hate themselves, to attack others, to be angry, to worship idols, to take from others, and to seek for exclusive relationships. As if this is what completely natural mentally-sane people do. So normal because it's so common.

What we have to realize is that this is NOT sanity. And these ego people, the way they present themselves, is NOT really their self. It's not their real identity. They in fact are pretending to be something they're not. They present themselves as fictional characters, with traits and behaviors that aren't even natural. With beliefs about themselves that are unfounded and false. In denial of their own self and repressive of their own freedom.

"If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves. Therefore, they are asking for the love that would heal them, but which they are DENYING TO THEMSELVES. If they knew the truth about themselves, they could not be sick."

They don't even know who they really are. They don't know where they came from or how they got here. And they certainly don't even suspect that they even have a real self. And even think that maybe they don't exist at all, have no real creator, invented themselves, and maybe aren't even real.

"The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in the minds of man that some people have gone so far as to doubt whether they were ever created at all."

What we're looking at, when we look at the world, is in fact a place where a very large number of mentally ill people are gathered together. And all of their mental illnesses are regarded as largely normal and natural, ie not an illness at all. We don't even recognize insanity when we see it. We think it's normal that people relate the way they do, think of themselves in such unnatural ways, and are completely lost and out of touch with their own reality. On a planet filled with suffering, how can you remember what it's like not to suffer?

If we don't suspect that there is a higher, larger truth about people, then it's going to make it seem like their ego self is REAL, that it is the WHOLE truth of them, and there is nothing more to it. And in that view you will relate to their EGO in terms of special relationship, and with no sense of forgiveness. Anything they do in insanity will be a sin, and you will justify holding it against them. Because you don't recognize they are mentally ill. And all their twisted behaviors are in fact part of their illness.

If you had only ever known someone in an ill condition, and had never known them when they were healthy, you would have great difficulty seeing past their illness. If you had only met them after they became dysfunctional, you'd have a hard time having any notion of what they are REALLY like when they're not sick. And if the whole planet is sick, how can you know what society is supposed to be like, when no-one can even remember a time when there was no suffering at all?

If we have no sense of the actual REALITY of each person, then this is what we're going to do. We're going to BUY INTO their illusions of who and what they are, fall for the same temptations, go into false empathy, join them in suffering, and compound their ego. This keeps them imprisoned and does not offer any kind of healing. And they need healing because they are not sane. Falling for this means YOU are insane, because you've failed to recognize that the illusion of sanity is not sanity, and so think that you are sane when you're not.

Everyone, when sane, is a loving, powerful, supernatural, immortal, eternal being of light, filled with joy and laughter and miracles. Such a person is invulnerable, cannot be sick, cannot die, cannot be upset, has no grievances, doesn't judge or blame anyone, is perfectly innocent and holy, knows God intimately, depends on God for everything, and has no authority problem. This is what EVERY person in the world was like when they were created. This is the kind of self they ARE behind their mental illness. And if their mental illness was cured, this is how they would be. A world of christs!

To not RECOGNIZE that people's egos are not their real self, is to fail to forgive. To forgive requires having in mind an awareness BEYOND THE LIES, of what the person's souls is really like, as created by God. The original self. The real self. The holy self. The higher self. That is their true self. And that self has no limitations or lacks or failures or malfunctions or depressions or sicknesses or lies about themselves or others.

So then we have to realize that we join with the Holy Spirit as therapists in the world, as healers, come to offer SANITY to those who are insane, and to lift them up and resurrect them to truth and light, so that they are restored to their true function and true abilities. To their real identity. To remember who they are, to know themselves and to live out from the love that God put in them.

"Now must you share His function, and forgive whom He has saved, whose sinlessness He sees, and whom He honors as the Son of God."

"your function in this world is healing"

"As your function in Heaven is creation, so your function on earth is healing. God shares His function with you in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit shares HIS with you on earth."

The only way you can forgive someone is to know the real truth about them on a higher level. The bigger picture. Their true nature as established by God. And this truth has to STILL be true, even if it is covered up by their own mind, and obscure and hard to see. Even if they themselves don't know it's there, and even if they themselves deny that it's true of them. Because people are in fact out of touch with their own souls and don't even remember what their real identity is. It is our task to REMEMBER FOR THEM, so that they might remember also and wake up to their true nature.

"Remember for everyone your Father's power, that He has given them"

"He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God. YOU CAN REMEMBER THIS FOR ALL THE SONSHIP. Do not allow your brother not to remember, for his forgetfulness is YOURS. But YOUR remembering is HIS, for God cannot be remembered alone. THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN. To perceive the healing of your brother as the healing of yourself, is thus the way to remember God. For you forgot your brothers WITH Him, and God's answer to your forgetting is but the way to remember."

"Do not allow your brother to be sick, for if he is, have YOU abandoned him to his own dream, by SHARING it with him."

Since the ego is really a smokescreen of lies, it is not true of a person. Even if they are holding it up strongly in front of your face as an obstacle to peace. To forgive is to OVERLOOK it, and see BEYOND it, beyond their body, and beyond their false sense of identity. To recognize who they are in spirit, and to acknowledge the PERMANENT TRUTH about them. To hold them in the light and acknowledge that they ARE in the light.

This means in fact bypassing their illusory ego beliefs, their ego self, and realizing that on a higher level their mind is SANE. Only a small portion of their mind is insane and their soul is still perfect. By tapping into the higher self and truth of the person, you JOIN with them in love. This bypasses the ego and increases the wholeness within the mind, which in turn undoes the false ego identification - the sickness - the mental illness. Because "all sickness is mental illness." This is how miracles are performed.

Don't be deceived. People are not who they say they are. Everyone has an imposter in them. The Holy Spirit knows who we really are, and will awaken this truth in us if we will let him.

"Seek not to make the Son of God ADJUST to his insanity. There IS a stranger in him, who wandered carelessly into the home of Truth, and who will wander off. He came WITHOUT a purpose. But he will not remain before the shining light the Holy Spirit offered, and you accepted. For there the STRANGER is made homeless, and YOU are welcome. Ask not this transient stranger, "who am I?" He is the only thing in all the universe that does not know."

"Forgiveness is the only gift I give because it is the only gift I want, and everything I give I give myself. This is salvation s simple formula."

"Only the self-accused condemn."

"It can be but myself I crucify."

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

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

As I learn that any upset I feel is entirely self created and internal and nothing to do with anything else, I begin to experience a strangely unexpected disconnection between what seems to happen and how I react.

I can see that things happen externally, and perhaps they trigger internal reactions initially, but if I work on those reactions or realize they are just some old unhealed junk surfacing in my awareness, and I heal it, I am then restored to a more peaceful happy state even in spite of the fact that the external situation may still be the same.

And so this shows me that there are kind of two things running simultaneously. There's the external story, the world, showing pictures of things happening. And then there's this internal story or dialog, this inner reactive ego response, which runs alongside it. The ways that I am attacking myself, and then USING the world as a scapegoat.

As I practice ownership of my inner experience and see myself responsible for choosing and causing it, rather than making a false ego causal connection between "what I feel" and "what is happening outside", the two previously merged stories are peeling away from each other. Whereas before I thought that my upset goes hand in hand with a given situation, it is suddenly evidence that the two are not connected.

They no longer completely coincide and I now see myself sometimes moving outward to join with the external story but then flowing back inward again to pull away from it. If I identify with the "what's happening out there" story, I lose myself and react to it. But if I recall that I'm doing this all to myself internally, and ideas leave not their source, and any reaction in me I have chosen to reinvent myself, the whole sense of being "caused by" the world diminishes.

Where there used to be simply a total confusion and distraction and immersion and absorption into the hierarchy of illusions, all of the effects the ego dream would suggest I have, and its entire script for what I "should" be experiencing as a result, there is now an intermittent but increasingly wide divide between "what the dream is doing" and "what I am doing to myself."

If I am being triggered a lot by some situation that is ongoing, but then I recognize the triggered reaction is a re-emergence of a prior condition of self attack in my mind, my own accusation of myself as sinful, and I work on that and undo it, and it goes away, and the external situation just continues in its normal form but without triggering me, I see that there is a definite difference between me and "it".

It's as if, we don't just become body identified, we become world identified. We believe that *everything* external to the mind, which includes the body, has become the storage place and cause of all the stuff we are experiencing. We bind with it, just as we bind with the body in pain. We fail to separate out what is the dream and who is doing the dreaming. It's like an attempt to be one with the dream, to merge with it, and to fail to recognize it is not dreaming you.

If I think the world is dreaming me and causing me, I'm going to go out of my mind and connect my sense of who and what I am to whatever the world suggests I should be, based on that causality. If I let the dream dictate everything I experience, I am now in a constant victim role. As I continue to believe that I'm at the effect of the world, I cannot separate out what is happening within me versus what is really causing it. Because the world is not really the cause at all, and I'm doing this all to myself from within, to within.

I have to learn to recognize that whatever is going on inside me, whatever feelings or upsets or experiences or beliefs I'm having, not one single one of them is the result of the external dream world. There is not a single cause in the world with the power to do anything to me, as an invulnerable, immortal being. And that means learning to stop having this symbiotic merging of identity with the world, where I plug myself into the external illusion and allow it to trample all over me under the belief that it CAN and IS doing so.

I have to learn that nothing I experience is caused by anything but my innermost self. And if I am upset, I must address what I am doing to myself. And if someone *seems* to trigger me, I have to not accuse them of causing what comes up because they did not put it there, I did. And I would then thank them for bringing it to my attention. And so I must then recognize, if it weren't for me hurting myself, accusing myself, upsetting myself, I would NEVER be hurt, accused, or upset. An in fact as Jesus says, "you cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

It actually isn't really so much a matter of what the world has been doing TO ME. It's more in fact a matter of what I have been doing TO THE WORLD. I have been putting MY self-accused sins ONTO the world and have been attacking it and using it as a scapegoat to blame for causing the very things *I* have been doing to myself! The world has not been guilty at all, it's been innocent the whole time. And it's my own inner conflict that has been playing out projected and disassociated externally, to make it SEEM as if it's not part of me or in my mind or anything to do with me. I then get away with blaming the world for everything I do not like about myself.

MY task now is to step back, out of the drama I am causing, out of the rollercoaster of reactions and suffering that I'm producing based on what I've done to myself and tried to accuse others of, and constantly correct the "spilling over" of my inner wounds onto the world. Indeed I am to take off of the world all of the shite that I have been dumping onto it through my egoic projections of self attack.

All the guilt, sin, fear, unworthiness, shame, whatever.... if I address it as an internal scenario that I am doing to myself, NOT caused by anything or anyone else, and it is addressed honestly and correctly within my mind, then gradually I'm lifting off of the world all of this inner baggage that I was associating or attaching to it. And that means the world itself, the dream, is going to be recognized more as not really the cause of anything.

In this way, gradually the world becomes forgiven, in the sense that it is seen WITHOUT my inner content projections. As I stop seeing inner junk "out there", what was behind the junk - the illusory world onto which I projected more illusions - the illusory world is "revealed" more for simply what it is and not what I was making of it. Without my sins being projected, and without having any sins, I cannot see sin IN it.

The guilty meanings I was projecting onto it, the causality I was accusing it of, the sense of vulnerability and stress and suffering that I thought IT was responsible for causing but which I was doing to myself backwards, are no longer seen as "coming from" the world or from anyone else, but myself. It's all an inside job. And it's really me that needs the forgiveness, having accused myself of things that are untrue of my perfect divine holiness.

If I am wounded, by my self attack, I will project my wounds all over the place, bleeding out onto the world a blackness of self hatred. This will cloud my perception of the world and render it dark. As I heal the inner wounds, within, where the problem really is, in my mind, I can no longer have anything TO leak out onto the world. The world simply becomes automatically "forgiven", not because it did anything, but through simply being able to SEE what is there as the world, through self-forgiven eyes, rather than seeing THROUGH the old lens of sin and guilt.

As such, the world becomes uncovered, released, "saved" from me, from my projected self attack. And without a log in my own eye, I no longer HAVE sin in my mind TO attempt to displace onto external figures. And without this sin blocking my vision, I become more able to simply see the world for what it is, without all of the sin guilt and fear dumped onto it or filtering it. And without this angry dark content, perhaps the world is filled with light.

We're told that as we progress with this, the "real world" will become more visible to us. That is, the world we made, but without judgement, projection, disassociation, displacement, or all the other forms of disowned self attack masking it. Without this content, its forms seem less inherently meaningful. Without putting these dark meanings onto the world, the world IS meaningless. It is also neutral, and in a way pure, because it is nothing.

The world, in its "reality", or rather, seen "as is", is just a picture, without sin or guilt or fear or death projected onto it. It just stands like a thin veil before the face of Christ. It has no meaning of its own, because God only creates meaningful worlds and He did not create this. It is not dark. Or alive. Or dead. Or holy. Or sinful. In fact it can become more seemingly beautiful, as the inner beauty begins to look upon itself and shine outwards, illuminating the picture rather than attacking it. And as such the "real world", the forgiven world, begins to show up in awareness as a reflection of your OWN holiness projected onto a NEUTRAL canvas.

While the world in its physicality and form is "false perception", in which the forms are only focused on as part of seeing falsely and dwelling on separations, guilt and death, as perception rises toward the light within, looking first within and then looking outward, the forms are overlooked. They don't define anything quite so strongly as before. They don't separate off with harsh boundaries and walls. They become less solid, less heavy, less dark. They loom with less weight and seem to have less substance or meaning. As if they are not there, because they aren't, being just illusions.

The world becomes lighter, within, and seen without, as the dream seems to turn to a happier dream, where the unhappiness that was in you is no longer added to it. Where happiness returns to the mind and the world is seen as not containing any real sin or guilt - because the mind has none to project onto it. You can only look upon yourself. If you are love you see love in everything because the world is not real or evil. If you are guilty, you see guilt in everything and the world seems like hell. By forgiving yourself and restoring heaven to your mind, the world can be but a reflection of heaven to you.

The world without your guilt is the forgiven world, shining and sparkly and new. Still an illusion, yes. Still neutral and meaningless, yes. It is still nothing at all. But now the meaningfulness of love - God's will - is projected and seen within it, rather than darkness. This makes the world seem "lovable". Not because it is love or made of love, but because you can see only the love BEYOND it and can do nothing else. And God does love the world we made. This love, seen in it, is its only reality, and in the intensity of this love, all of the forms melt and disappear. Because the love is deeper than the forms and lives between the lines.

When eternity finally shines away the world, all its forms have vanished, everything has fused into oneness, love has erased death and the nothingness of the world of bodies ceases to exist. Without separation there are no forms. In light, there is no darkness. And in love there is no fear. All that remains beyond this disappearing world is heaven. Love looks upon itself. Christ looks upon Himself. And then God is known in completion.

"When you think you are projecting what you do NOT want, it is still because you DO want it. This leads directly to dissociation"

"The power of decision is your one remaining freedom as a prisoner of this world. YOU CAN DECIDE TO SEE IT RIGHT. What you made of it is NOT its reality, for its reality is only what you GAVE it. You cannot really give anything but love to anyone or anything, nor can you really receive anything else from them. If you think you have received anything else, it is because you have looked within, and thought you saw the power to give something else WITHIN YOURSELF. It was only this decision that determined what you found, for it was the decision of what you SOUGHT."

"You are afraid of me because you looked within, and are afraid of what you saw. But you could not have seen reality, for the reality of your mind is the loveliest of God's Creations. Coming only from God, its power and grandeur could only bring you peace, IF YOU REALLY LOOKED UPON IT. If you are afraid, it is because you saw something THAT IS NOT THERE. Yet in this same place you could have looked upon me and all your brothers, in the perfect safety of the Mind that created us. For we are there in the peace of the Father, Who wills to project His peace through YOU."

"When you have accepted your mission to PROJECT peace, you will FIND it. For by MAKING IT MANIFEST you will SEE it. Its holy witnesses will surround you, because you CALLED upon them, and they will come to you. I have heard your call, and I have answered it, but you will not look upon me, nor hear the answer which you sought. But that is only because you do not yet want ONLY that. Yet as I become more real to you, you will learn that you DO want only that. And you will see me as you look within, and we will look upon the world as God created it together. Through the eyes of Christ, ONLY the real world exists, and can BE seen."

"As you decide, so will you see. And all that you see but witnesses to your decision. When you look within and see me, it will be because you have decided to manifest truth. And as you manifest it, you will see it both without AND within, for you will see it without BECAUSE you saw it first within. Everything you behold without is a judgment of what you beheld within. If it is YOUR judgment, it will be wrong, for judgment is not your function. If it is the judgment of the Holy Spirit, it will be right, for judgment IS His function. You share His function only by judging as HE does, reserving no judgment at all unto yourselves. For you will judge AGAINST yourselves, but He will judge FOR you."

Remember, then, that whenever you look without and react unfavorably to what you see, you have judged yourself unworthy, and have condemned yourself to death. The death penalty is the ego's ultimate goal, for it fully believes that you are a criminal, as deserving of death as God knows you are deserving of life. The death penalty never leaves the ego's mind, for that is what it always reserves for you in the end. Wanting to kill you, as the final expression of its feeling for you, it lets you live but to await death. It will torment you while you live, but its hatred is not satisfied until you die. For your destruction is the one end toward which it works, and the only one with which it will be satisfied."

"To the ego, the goal is death, which IS its end. But to the Holy Spirit, the goal is life, which HAS no end."

If you imagine that heaven is level 1, above, and earth is level 2, below, then imagine there are some giant arrows pointing in a certain direction. ..... the ego points down towards death, and the holy spirit points up towards heaven and eternal life.

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives."

All the world's roads lead to death sooner or later. The ego wants you dead. The world was made as an idea of destruction. Everything in it is designed to die. Its "natural" direction, so to speak, is exactly opposite to heaven and everything here points eventually toward death.

This is because the whole system is set up with a GOAL of death, so everything leads to it. It has a giant arrow pointing DOWN into the grave, while the Holy Spirit has a giant arrow pointing UP toward heaven via resurrection.

"The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily, and as well, as does the ego, except that HIS conclusions are NOT insane. They take a direction EXACTLY opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death."

All the roads, ways, systems, paths, methods, outcomes, likelihoods, consequences, symptoms, effects, conclusions and results of the world all head toward death. The ego in its fear always induces a sense of dread that things are going to get WORSE and end up in death. This is its natural compulsion towards death and its totally unwavering focus on making everything be dead.

"This IS the "natural" condition of the separation. And those who learn that it is NOT natural at all, seem to be the UNnatural ones. For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true."

There is another world, which we're calling the Kingdom of God or Heaven, God's creation, which is totally opposite to this world. There, everything always is looking up and points toward life. It is a system of true "life support" and of eternal permanence. It is a system of health and wholeness and happiness and living. It is a living world of light. The Holy Spirit points us TOWARD that world just as much as the ego tries to emphasize that the ground is our final destination.

"While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life."

While we're in this world of death, which is a dream of death, and "without the idea of death there is no world", we must learn to trust in ANOTHER world, to look UP toward God and move in the direction of resurrection. At first this will seem very unnatural and difficult because you're so conditioned to believe that all the arrows always MUST point downward into the dirt.

What you have to learn is that all of the arrows of the world can be REVERSED through miracles, through expressions of the Holy Spirit and his teaching. By listening to him and learning of him and becoming a healer with him, you now are acting AGAINST the world and running contrary to the grain. That means the world is going to regard you as unnatural, alien, a reject, crazy, out of touch, ignorant, in denial, and lost - precisely because that's what the death-worshippers are themselves like. Death is the single biggest religion of this planet.

Our challenge then is to turn this situation around. To reverse the arrows, and bring about change in the opposite direction, which is an undoing/atonement and also a resurrecting. It restores life where there was death, it asserts life to blot out death, and it has power OVER death to implement life and resurrect. Miracles undo death, reverse sickness, cancel drastic consequences, erase pain, remove all proof of sin and attack, and re-establish the will and reign of God.

God supports only life and never death, and so must we. To be only in support of LIFE, we have to learn that we are undo no laws but God's, and the laws of the world must be broken. The impossible, in the world's terms, must be performed, in order to prove that it is death that is impossible. The Holy Spirit is here to empower us to do this because he has been sent from another world with the Power of God in him, to heal and to save and to resurrect and lead us home into the light.

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt. The ancient Calling of the Father to His Son, and of the Son unto his own, will yet be the last trumpet that the world will ever hear. Brother, there is no death. And this you learn when you but wish to show your brother that you had no hurt of him. He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned. But it is given you to SHOW him, by your healing, that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream."

Yesterday I lay hands on my wife's cramping feet, I commanded the cramps to go, Holy Spirit flowed and the cramps left. There wasn't a whole lot of fanfare. It just happened and it was done.

Miracle.

I noticed afterwards that it had worked seemingly easier than in past attempts. Something about me had changed.

Previously, as I attempted miracles, I still had a strong belief in sickness being real. I saw its removal as "difficult", and felt that I was going up against a formidable opponent.

It reminded me of how when I first started to pray to God, that I would be in much more of a begging mode, much more a victim, and quite powerless. I'd be in tears and pleading and begging but it wouldn't bring about much of a result. This is because I was not orienting myself properly as an extender of God's miracles, but was trying have something done to me. That's victim consciousness, and God will not attack.

ACIM also tells us about the authority problem, which is our attempt to "be God" in separation from God, to overthrow God and to replace Him with a false self. The more that we try to do this, the more we give "power" to the ego, but paradoxically this is also giving AWAY our true power - the power of God. The stronger the ego seems to become, the weaker we become. Taking authority away from God takes real authority away from ourselves.

Similarly, the extent to which we believe that illusions are reality, such as that sickness is real, problems are real, or that we have powerful enemies, reveals just how weakened we are. If we believe that illusions have power over us, that they are the truth (and the truth cannot be changed), then this "disables" us from being effective miracle workers.

I had previously attempted to go up against what I perceived to be a real enemy, a real sickness, a real difficulty, and it was this fundamental belief that produced the wrong kind of perception - a perception which blocks miracles. If I'm perceiving that, let's say, 70% of the truth is in illusions, then I only believe in God's power 30% and see myself as incapable of overcoming the problem. I can rant and scream at it all I want but it won't budge.

I will also keep looking at the problem to see 'if' the miracle worked, I will check it, I will be in a mode of diagnosis (ego), and I will have a lot of doubt. Here I am using perception to receive signals from outside of me to tell me IF something happened, instead of knowing from WITHIN that it MUST happen. With a perception riddled with fear - which means that you believe illusions are real - you are not wielding very much authority over them.

In the past few weeks I've been going through quite a breakthrough in terms of recognizing that ALL sickness is unreal, that the entire physical world is an illusion, and really withdrawing a lot of belief from it. It has reframed everything for me and is putting things in their proper perspective. It was very difficult seeming to decide to not believe in sickness anymore, flying in the face of what the whole world believes.

Following this, however, I noticed as I attempted a miracle that I had a much more miracle-minded attitude. I was not about to take no for an answer, was not checking to see if something happened, I did not pause to decide whether to do it, I told the problem to go and I meant it, and a greater sense of authority expressed itself through me.

As such, when you change your mind and believe more strongly that God's truth is the truth, and that illusions really are NOTHING, you take on and share more of the REAL authority of God once more. You have power OVER illusions because you are much less deceived by them. This makes you more miracle minded because now you are more aligned with Holy Spirit's mindset, are more empowered by the truth, are much less deterred by the illusions of orders of difficulty, and you simply believe far less that the problem/sickness has more power than you do.

Ultimately this will mean that you gain such authority in Christ, such alignment with God, and such certainty that illusions are NOTHING to you, that you literally can brush them away like they meant nothing at all. That is the kind of power that Jesus demonstrated. That's what happens when you have aligned yourself with God's truth and no longer perceive incorrectly that illusions are actually even a formidable opponent. Recognizing them as nothing, not taking them seriously, not believing they are real and not GIVING THEM any power, strips them of all possible defenses and prevents them from preventing the miracle.

As we reclaim our birthright in sharing the True Authority of God, relinquishing our attempt to have ego authority - which is really weakness and powerlessness - and surrendering to the truth, provides us with automatic access to the miracle-minded awareness of God/Holy Spirit, and thereby facilitates miracles. Instead of difficult miracles seeming to become harder, they instead become easier the less you believe the problem is real. Nothing can stand in the way of the Son of God.

You have authority over all illusions because of what you are and because of what the truth is. That authority is POWER, and that power can effortlessly disappear all sickness, death and suffering. It can disappear the body, the world, and the universe. The power of God knows no limits.

Your relationships can turn from hate to holiness, if you will recognize that you have a common enemy.

Your relationship is not just you and the other person.

Your relationship is you, the other person, and the ego.

The two of you may seem to be in conflict, and you believe that there is no one else involved in this conflict. Just the two of you.

But there is always another third party involved in every conflict. The ego.

The ego is like this vicious little monster, sort of like how Christianity refers to the devil, which sits on the sidelines and attempts to COME BETWEEN people.

Its intentions are malicious and it tries to pit people against each other, to instigate fights and wars, and to get people to see each other as separate and different.

Since the ego is more or less invisible, people do not notice that it is part of the relationship. And since they do not realize that THEY have sided with the ego, they do not notice it standing out in contrast to who they are.

If you are in the middle of a fight, argument, conflict, war, tension, drama, toxic relationship etc, the two of you are being PLAYED by the ego.

It is helpful for you to both recognize and learn that you're not really upset with each other. You're upset because THE EGO is trying to make you against each other. IT is influencing you both. IT wants for you to attack each other and find each other guilty. IT wants you to be at war.

So now, in this 3-way relationship, recognize that there is an opportunity. The opportunity is for you and your enemy to decide to TEAM UP, against the ego.

It is only because of your mutual lack of RECOGNITION that the ego is involved at all, that you allow its influence to continue destroying your relationship.

Once you recognize the ego is a third party, now there comes a scenario where you have a new option. You can team up with your supposed enemy - the other person - by recognizing that you BOTH have a common, mutual enemy.

The ego is your common enemy, because it is attacking BOTH of you at the same time, it is pitting you both against each other, it is trying to SEPARATE you more, and is emphasizing all the ways that you are different from each other.

Its strategy is to split you apart and produce hatred. Really, to instigate murder. It wants you both dead, and does not CARE one iota who does it to whom. It would cheer you BOTH on as you attack each other, and would hope that you will destroy EACH OTHER.

This is its secret plan all along. As soon as you have started to fall for the ILLUSION that the ego is not involved, and that you really are an enemy of your brother or sister, you have actually bought into the EGO's TRICK that it wants you BOTH to fall for. You've bought into ITS plan for your mutual destruction.

It takes three to tango! It takes two to buy into the ego's conflict of separation. However, it takes a REUNION and therefore ONE in order to instigate a Holy Relationship.

When one person looks at the situation and realizes that the ego is a third party, and sees its ambitions to create war between you and your brother, you thus recognize the SHARED INTEREST that you and you brother have.

Your shared interest becomes that you are on each other's side and are in support of each other, because you recognize that each other is not really the enemy. The ego is. It is the ego mind that is really the culprit behind the conflict, and it is the ego mind that is trying to increase the flames of war between you.

When one person remembers this and recognizes that the ego is at play, and that you have fallen for its plot of separation, that *IT* is coming between you and your brother/sister, your UNWILLINGNESS to continue playing into ITS hands automatically disarms the conflict. Your perception of your brother changes from them being your "real enemy" to the ego being the "real enemy", and therefore your brother is now on your side.

If you will acknowledge that instead of you being right or the other person being right, you are BOTH losing out because the EGO is winning, and that IT wants you both to be separated, then you can JOIN with your brother and refuse to participate in the ego's game.

When you decide not to play the game, even if the other person is still playing the game, you cannot experience separation. You are having a holy relationship. Even if the other person is not aware of your perception of them as holy. And because it is holy, no real conflict can produce any real effects in the relationship. At least not to you. The other person may still be attacking themselves but your relationship to them is now forgiven.

If you can both join in holiness and return to ONENESS together, that is even more powerful. It is a decision to unite in saying no to the ego and yes to wholeness, yes to God and yes to peace. It is the end of war. It is first the end of the war for individual parts of the sonship and then it is the end of war for the entire sonship.

You don't have a beef with your enemies. The ego is using both of you. IT is the thing that you both need to be questioning together. Stop your fight. It's not about your brother at all.

There is a sequence of cause and effect, in which a higher level causes a lower level.

God causes the Son of God. The Son of God causes his dream of separation. God is cause, the son is effect. The son shares the father's ability to cause, and causes his dream, which is an effect.

Everything in the dream is an effect of the Son's dreaming. Even the things which appear to be causes cannot be causes, they are illusions of causes. The Son of God implemented both the "things that cause" and "the effects of those causes" simultaneously, both as effects.

If he were writing a movie and filming it, it would mean setting up the car to come into the scene at just the right time, and setting up the conditions for the crash, and setting up that which it crashes into, and setting up the way that the crashed-into thing is changed by the crash. All at once. There is no cause or effect on the level of the movie, it's an illusion.

This is perhaps even more easily understood in the behind-the-scenes creation of digital movies where there isn't any cause-and-effect laws of physics to comply with, so if you want there to appear to be "an effect" of something happening, you have to actually literally manually make that effect, ie cause it, otherwise the car will pass right through the wall and everyone would be like "that's not real".

When we mistake the ORDER in which the levels are thus arranged, mistaking an effect for a cause, we're believing a lower order level has power/will/mind/control over a higher order level. This confusion of the levels, or attributing some properties to some levels which they do not have, based on what is true for another level, is level confusion. "All sickness comes from confusing the levels".

Examples:

Believing the world (an effect) is a cause and it's causing you.

Believing you are at the effect of the world or a victim.

Believing something in the world has an alien will with a power to change you against your will.

Believing in death happening to you against your will.

Believing you are sick "because of" something outside of you.

Believing the world has a "magical ability" to make things happen (magic).

Believing God's will is not your will - the authority problem.

Believing your body has power over your mind, and a mind of its own.

Believing your body is coming from the world, not from your mind.

Believing there are causes in the world which produce effects, and effects which can become causes in their own right, which can in turn transform causes into effects.

Believing that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Believing the ego's laws of physics, biology, chemistry, etc.

Believing there are life forms in the world which are actually alive and animated by nature.

Believing the world is natural and God's creation.

Believing in an alien will separate from your own which therefore terrifies you because there is nothing you can do to stop it from affecting you.

Believing you are sick or broken or hurt or upset or afraid or sad because of something that happened in the world or in other people.

Believing that salvation, truth, love, safety, peace, and innocence all exist external from yourself and that you need to seek out there to find it, and that you will find it if you try hard enough.

Believing you are unlovable because love is not in you already where God put it.

Believing God is not your father and that you are the cause of him.

Believing in real sin, with the ability to create real effects in God, to change God, to change reality, to redefine the truth and to make permanent irreversible changes which can never be healed.

Believing in judgement and unforgiveness and anger as being justified due to what happened to you from an external cause against your will.

All of these are level confusion. THE ENTIRE EGO THOUGHT SYSTEM IS LEVEL CONFUSION!

They all entail believing there is a cause within a level of effect. That the "lower" order level of illusions have "become alive" or gained a mind or will of their own. Whatever it was that, in truth, came FROM the causality of your mind, has suddenly because a cause OF your mind. That's confusion!

Miracles place the levels in their correct order. Miracles are expressions of the fact that only mind, TRUE CAUSE, can cause, and everything else is in this world is an EFFECT, including the world (earth) itself. The world does nothing at all, it is only an effect. It has NO CAUSES in it. Nothing is happening to you. No-one is victimizing you. You are not at the effect of the world you see.

Correcting level confusion is the only correction needed to reach the atonement. When everything is seen in its correct sequence, you will have mind over matter, power over all illusions, and nothing in the world will be able to withstand the causal Power of God that flows through you. Miracles are supernatural BECAUSE they come from a higher level of causality, demonstrating that the lower level IS an effect and its illusions of cause-effect do not really apply. They come from above the "nature" of the world and PROVE that no cause in the world has any power whatsoever, and therefore its "effects" are easily changed.

A brother is an equal sibling, who shares the same parent as you. Right? Yes.

So in order for there to be brothers, there has to be more than two children coming from the same parent, right? Yes.

When the children exist as brothers, does the parent become obliterated? No, of course not.

Does the fact that there are brothers, overthrow and undermine and attack the parent's existence? Not at all, especially given the parent created the brothers.

Who is the ultimate parent? Is it not God? Right? God is the creator parent of all that is.

If God is your parent, and you have brothers, your brothers are God's EQUAL children, right? Yes of course. If there is more than one son, then God's children are brothers.

If the term "brother" is NOT tied to God, then who is the parent of the brothers? Is it the ego? Is the ego your daddy? That would have to be true, because if God is not the parent God's opposite must be. Which is ridiculous.

How about God's supposed "one son". Are you are CHILD OF the one son? If you were, you and your brother would indeed be brothers. The one son is real, therefore so too are the brothers, because a real parent can only create real children. Just as an illusory parent creates illusory children.

How about we say your parent is the ego, and therefore you and your brother must be egos. This makes "brother" into a synonym for "the ego". And that means when the ego is gone, the brothers cease to exist at all. ie they are imaginary brothers. Or their brotherhood is a temporary illusion. And when undone, BOTH DISAPPEAR, leaving no child at all!

If that is true, then we MUST be claiming that, as ego brothers, who exist only due to "the separation", we have the ego as our creator. The ego must be the parent of whatever the brothers are. And brothers can't be brothers without a shared parent.

Nowhere in ACIM does it EVER say, that brothers are the children of the ego. Never. And it would be ridiculous to do so.

It DOES SAY, many times over, that brothers are children of GOD. And what that has to mean is, that God MUST not only have multiple children, but also that brothers is a term for REAL created beings who are permanent, not children of the ego, and not children of the separation.

So in ACIM, every reference to "your brother", is talking about THE SOULS that God created, who are many in number, necessarily more than ONE, and AT LEAST TWO, so that they can BE brothers, and share the same parent who is God.

And because God is a REAL parent, his children MUST be real as well. Meaning that, ... unless brother means "son of the ego", brother MUST mean REAL CHILDREN in reality, in heaven, with God, many in number. ie God has multiple sons.

This is simple enough accurate reasoning. Either your brother is a child of the devil or he is a child of God along with you. And you'll be very hard pressed to find references in the course to your brother being anything less than holy, innocent, divine, a co-creator with God, and your total equal IN HEAVEN.

"Brother", therefore, in ACIM, refers solely to the SOULS in heaven that have eternal life, ***are many in number***, and who share the same parent - God. And this automatically means God has many sons, not just one in number.

Jesus even states on multiple occasions that your brother is a CO-CREATOR with you and with God. Which is only possible in heaven, therefore making brothers permanent real beings, a heavenly multitude, the sum of which we call "the sonship". Aka. "God's family."

"Will you behold your brother? God is glad to have you look on him."

"Heaven is the home of perfect purity. And God created it for YOU. Look at your holy brother, sinless as yourself, and let him lead you there."

"Perhaps you come in tears, but hear Him say, "My brother, Holy Son of God, behold your idle dream, in which this could occur," and you will leave the holy instant with your laughter and your brother's JOINED with His."

"You could no more know God alone, than He knows YOU without your brother."

"Whenever you heal a brother by recognizing his worth, you are acknowledging his power to create and yours."

"And therein lies your need to see your brother sinless. In him is Heaven."

"It is impossible to over-estimate your brother's value. Only the ego does this."

"The Son of God extends his hand to reach his brother, and to help him walk along the road with him."

"For you will realize that the ONLY value that the body has, is to enable you to bring your brothers TO the bridge WITH you. And to be RELEASED TOGETHER there."

"You will not remember that you are co-creator with God, until you learn that your brother is a co-creator with YOU."

"You do not know YOUR creations, because you do not know your brothers who created them with you."

"When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed, there will be no call to return, but what God creates is eternal. The Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless THEIR creations and keep them in the light of joy."

I'm kind of blown away right now, with this rapidly growing recognition that ALL suffering has ONE cause. That there is really only ONE lesson to learn.

The lesson simply is that,.... if you believe the world is REAL, YOU WILL SUFFER.

And so I look back at all the times I have suffered, all the upsets, all events, and I see that at the time I always thought they were DIFFERENT. And each form of suffering was caused by something specific. Maybe it was the situation, or the person, or the circumstances, or what happened, or the consequences, or the aftermath. Whatever it was, it always seemed specific.

But the truth is, that ALL suffering is caused by ONE problem, with one solution. If you make the world real, you take it seriously, you immediately enter into fear, and now you are suffering. And whatever then seems to happen in the unrecognized dream will be the form the suffering takes. And the ONLY thing that will stop you from suffering, is the RECOGNITION THAT IT IS NOT REAL.

And so either you are in the battlefield, lost and confused in amongst the many many FORMS of suffering, the many deceptions of suffering, OR you rise up out of the battlefield to the light in which you can see the truth, above it, the truth that IT IS JUST A DREAM.

Rising up above into the truth, it does not MATTER what the forms are, it does not matter who is doing what, it does not matter the situation or circumstance, this story, the details. They all become irrelevant. Because EVERYTHING in the world is recognized as EQUALLY UNREAL.

As soon as you change the PREMISE of the ENTIRE thing, which is the atonement, by recognizing ONLY God's truth is true, and only the false is false, it RE-FRAMES the entire world and everything in it. And now no matter what form or appearance the dream has, it does not matter. Because either you are immersed in a REAL dream, or an UNREAL dream. The question of its reality is the ONLY problem.

If the world is real, everything that "really is happening" is CAUSE for suffering. Just the mere suggestion that you see something that is not, hear something that isn't happening, or can sense something that isn't OF GOD, is enough to frighten you. And now you are suffering just by merely making the world real, ie believing that the world IS God. The ONLY solution is to make the world UNREAL, and recognize it is an illusion. There is no other way out, and this recognition of the SANITY of what is really true, IS forgiveness (overlooking illusions) and is atonement (acceptance of the one truth).

So now I look and I see.... a dream world, filled with obstacles, seeming problems, hassles, tortures, suffering, situations, dramas, threats, pain and sickness, and I remind myself... this whole world is not real, it's just a dream. And on this new premise I can base a true perception, that NONE OF IT EXISTS. And ONLY in that truth - "nothing unreal exists", can you be at peace.

And now suddenly I'm feeling not only peace and happiness and joy that there is no world, I'm feeling relieved that I don't HAVE TO be immersed and lost in suffering, in the battlefield, because the only reason I would enter into it is by FORGETTING that it is my own dream. And THIS is the secret of salvation.... the recognition that the dream IS a dream, and NOT a reality.

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

"The Holy Spirit will repeat this **ONE inclusive lesson** of deliverance, until it has been learned, ***REGARDLESS of the form of suffering that brings you pain.*** Whatever hurt you bring to Him, He will make answer with this very simple truth. For this ***one answer TAKES AWAY the cause*** of every form of sorrow and of pain. The form affects His answer not at all, for He would teach you but **the SINGLE cause** of all of them, no matter WHAT their form. And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo.""

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences. 2 But the mind that has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. 3 There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. 4 ****But the healed mind will put them all in one category; they are unreal.**** 5 This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world. 6 And of these two, but one is real. 7 Just as reality is wholly real, apart from size and shape and time and place—for differences cannot exist within it—so too are illusions without distinctions. 8 The one answer to sickness of any kind is healing. 9 The one answer to all illusions is truth."