1. Everything in reality is miraculous. Miraculousness is the nature of God's thought system. Everything real is permanently miraculous. The omnipresent and holographic nature of God's thought system is literally miraculous, in that it does not adhere to limitations, fears, blocks, constructs, physics, ego laws, space or time. It's a holographic system where the whole is in every part which defies all ego systems of thought.
"You are a miracle"
"Miracles mean life and God is the giver of life"
"Miracles are a universal blessing from God"
"The miraculous nature of the soul"
"Miracles are natural to God, and to the One Who speaks for Him." (holy spirit)
These kind of statements are all aimed at "level 1". Everything in reality/heaven is miraculous, creation is a miraculous act, your "children of your will" are miraculously created by your will alone, and Heaven's laws break all the laws of the ego world. Everything real is ALWAYS miraculous and returning to being ALWAYS miraculous is the goal of the course.
"That is what we meant when we once said that miracles are NATURAL, and when they do NOT occur, something has gone wrong."
"I KNOW that miracles are natural, because they are expressions of love."
2. "The miracle" (singular) refers to God's answer to the separation. It is represented by the Holy Spirit who is the medium of miracles. This is a singular whole miracle which encompasses and includes all the miracles of type 3. In a similar way to how Christ encompasses all the Sons of God in the Sonship. The miracle is the state of atonement, true perception, salvation, right mindedness, forgiveness. THE miracle is hidden underneath all blocks to awareness and egotism. It's how Heaven touches on this world very lightly. Being miracle MINDED allows you to access your miraculous nature, FROM which you can perform miracles (type 3).
"The miracle forgives; the ego damns"
"This terrible mistake about yourself the miracle corrects as gently as a loving mother sings her child to rest."
"The Children of God are very holy. The miracle honors their holiness."
"The miracle, therefore, has a unique function, and is motivated by a unique Teacher, Who brings the laws of another world to this one. The miracle is the one thing you can do that TRANSCENDS order, being based, NOT on differences, but on equality "
"The miracle offers EXACTLY the same response to EVERY call for help."
"The miracle is the act of a Son of God who has laid aside all false gods, and who calls on his brothers to do likewise."
"The miracle ITSELF is but the witness that you HAVE the power of God in you."
"The miracle extends WITHOUT your help, but you ARE needed that it can begin."
"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone."
"There is ONE miracle, as there is ONE reality. And every miracle you do (see #3) contains them all, as every aspect of reality you see blends quietly into the One Reality of God. The only miracle that ever was (on level 1), is God's most holy Son, created in the One Reality that is his Father."
3. "Miracles" (plural) refers to individual expressions of the one miracle, whereby the holographic wholeness of The Miracle EXPRESSES in this world, through the Holy Spirit, as an act of giving and receiving the miraculous nature of love. Miracles break all the laws of the world because they're coming from another world whose laws are totally different. They can override the laws of physics. They can reverse death and restore life. They can heal the body. They can move mountains. They can allow you to walk on water and do everything Jesus did. They are interpersonal acts in which another person benefits from what you give. They fulfill your function of healing in this world and eventually lead to revelation and atonement for yourself and others. Miracles happen mainly on level 2, but you are still miraculous on level 1.
"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures came to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality."
"Miracles are a part of an interlocking chain of forgiveness which, when completed, is the Atonement. "
"Miracles make minds one in God."
"Miracles do not obey the laws of this world. They merely follow from the laws of God."
"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another."
"Miracles are NOT in competition, and the number that you can do is LIMITLESS. They can be simultaneous and legion."
"Your holiness reverses all the laws of the world. It is beyond every restriction of time, space, distance and limits of any kind."
" Miracles are a form of healing. They supply a lack, and are performed by those who have more for those who have less. "
"Miracles are teaching devices for demonstrating that it is more blessed to give than to receive. They simultaneously increase the reserve strength of the giver, and supply the lack of strength in the receiver."
"Like all expressions of love, which are ALWAYS miraculous in the true sense, the exchange reverses the physical laws "
"Miracles make time and tide wait for all men. They can heal the sick and raise the dead because man himself made both death and taxes, and can abolish both."
"Miracles are a form of healing."
"If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind must be STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this."
"Being sane, it heals the body because IT has been healed."
"Thus is the body healed by miracles BECAUSE they show the mind MADE sickness, and employed the body to be victim, or EFFECT of what it made "
And sometimes Jesus speaks on all these levels at once. e.g.
"Miracles are thought-creations. Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities. "
"Miracles are a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers."
Being miraculous is normal and natural and permanent. It's your NATURE to be miraculous. You are miraculous in heaven, where you create miraculously. On Earth, it is your function to rediscover your miraculous nature, by uncovering and restoring a state of miracle mindedness by removing blocks to awareness and becoming forgiving. As denial is removed, your miraculous ability is made accessible and you become MORE miraculous. You continue becoming MORE miraculous until you are unlimited in what you can do. And you will NEVER lose this miracle-working ability.
Jesus asks that we PRACTICE working miracles. "Doing them brings conviction in the ability". Without attempting to TRY to do them, we remain in fear. Miracles can only be performed in love, which is a state of truer perception. ("Wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles.")
Purification must be done first to remove ego blocks so that the light can shine. Once the clouds are parted, love can come through to express miraculous power. It is by EXPRESSING FROM a state of love, that you perform miracles.
"There is nothing my holiness cannot do."
"What the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world."
"The miracle is an expression of an inner awareness of Christ and acceptance of his Atonement."
"The power to work Miracles BELONGS to you. I will create the right opportunities for you to do them. But you must be ready and willing to do them, since you are already able to. Doing them will bring conviction in the ability. I repeat that you will see Miracles through your hands through MINE. Conviction really comes through accomplishment. Remember that ability is the potential, Achievement is its expression, and Atonement is the Purpose."
"You once said that souls cannot rest until everyone has found salvation. This happens to be true. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive. The Disciples were officially and specifically told to heal others, as Physicians of the Lord. They were also told to heal themselves, and were promised that I would never leave them or forsake them. Atonement is the natural profession of the Children of God, because they have professed Me. "
It's helpful to reframe everything in this world as the ABSENCE of something real, rather than the PRESENCE of something unreal. The world ITSELF is not the PRESENCE of a world, is is only the seeming ABSENCE of heaven.
We are very used to labeling the things of this world as if they EXIST, have reality, are true and happening. So we might refer to someone's sickness as if it is the PRESENCE of a sickness. Or we might refer to a hateful or fearful feeling as the PRESENCE of hate or fear.
But this is a form of being deceived by illusions. Fear is not the presence of something, it's actually just the seeming LACK of love. Anything of the ego does not really exist and is only the ILLUSION of the absence of something real, appearing to be the presence of something unreal.
There is a major difference between the absence of something and the presence of something else. The absence of light seems to produce a dark shadow, but the shadow is the not the PRESENCE of darkness. If you point to it and say "its dark there" you are really mistaken. It's just an area where light is less. You could say, it is partly lit there.
Similarly someone who seems evil, is not evil. They are just lacking some love and sanity. They have a seemingly low level of love and sanity. They are trying to lack love, rather than to have the presence of unlove. The ego has come up with a whole set of terms for the opposites to real things and uses them profusely, but this obscures the fact that the absence of something IS NOT the presence of something else.
The whole world and everything in it is merely the LACK OF the presence of something real. Like a hole. You might say a hole in the ground is the "presence of" a hole, but a hole is nothing. It's a lack of earth. When the earth fills in where the hole was, where is the hole? It simple ceases to exist. Similarly when light illuminates a "dark" area, the area becomes flooded with light and the darkness does not exist.
We should reframe everything in terms of ONLY the seeming ABSENCE of something, rather than the presence of its opposite. Because as soon as you believe that there is a PRESENCE of the opposite of real things, you give reality TO the unreal and you make illusions real and you fall for deceptions.
Giving "life" to things that don't really exist, suggesting they are a "something" when in fact all it is is a lack of a real something, produces EGO. It's a way to suggest that darkness actually can CAUSE light to go away, or that the world has REPLACED heaven, or that bodies don't NEED minds, or that death has power OVER life. As soon as you suggest that anything in the illusory world is a SOMETHING that "exists in its own right", you are deceived by illusions.
Flipping from "its a lack of light" to "its a real darkness that exists on its own", is what makes darkness seem real, and have power, and a will of its own, and its own existence. This is what gives the WORLD a seeming existence in our mind. THIS is ego.
This is the belief that illusions are not illusions, or that a lack of love is ACTUAL sin, or that a lack of life is REAL sickness. As if darkness, and sin and attack and sickness and death are ACTUAL THINGS which have EXISTENCE of their own and ARE THERE, fighting against the truth. That they are ASSERTIONS of evil, expressions of death, and actual PRESENCES of real things opposite to God's creation.
Believing this about ANYTHING in this world is being DECEIVED by it and failing to recognize the world IS NOTHING in and of itself. It is ONLY the illusion of the absence of God. And if God were permitted to be PRESENT, his light would shine away the world, his life would raise the dead, his love would replace all fear, and his Kingdom would replace the planet. Earth is ONLY the illusion of the ABSENCE of the Kingdom.
So let's re-frame the world in much more accurate terms.
The world is not the presence of a world, it's just the seeming absence of God's world.
Sickness is not the presence of a sickness, it' just the seeming absence of health and life.
Hell is not the presence of real hell, it's just the seeming absence of heaven.
Bodies are not the presence of actual bodies, they are just an illusion of the seeming absence of spirit.
Attack is not the presence of an attack, it's just the seeming absence of healing and wholeness.
Fear is not the presence of terror, it's just the seeming lack of love's presence.
Guilt is not really the presence of actual guilt, it's a lack of recognition of innocence.
Sin is not really a real sin, it's just the seeming absence of sinlessness and invulnerability.
Death is not really death or the presence of death, it's nothing more than the illusion of a lack of life.
The important thing to realize is that when the PRESENCE of something REAL is supplied, when the light comes and shines in a dark room, when life is given to the dead, the true things REPLACE the seemingly dark things, the true things CAUSE the dark things to go away, and the illusory things SIMPLY VANISH INTO THIN AIR when the LACK they were based on is filled.
And we must also recognize that the things we say "have an existence" but which really are just the LACK OF the existence of something real, do not have any POWER or WILL or ABILITY to deny, resist, prevent, or overpower, the return of the PRESENCE of real things. When the light comes it DOES shine away all darkness and darkness CANNOT remain. The darkness's presence ENTIRELY DEPENDS on light being absent, and when the light comes, it CANNOT STAY. Because it WAS ONLY the lack of light, NOT the presence of darkness.
We can say that the ENTIRE CONTENT of the spacetime continuum, including earth and all galaxies and bodies, all illusions of suffering, are ENTIRELY ONLY the seeming ABSENCE of something real. The absence of GOD. That is all they are. They are illusions of what it looks like when GOD IS MISSING. But they are not the PRESENCE OF an opposite to God. The planet is not a planet, it is the ABSENCE of a world. Death is not death, it is only the ABSENCE of life. When life comes, there is resurrection!
"Miracles supply a lack."
The light comes, darkness vanishes.
When love comes, fear vanishes.
When life comes, death vanishes.
When heaven comes, hell vanishes.
When health comes, sickness vanishes.
When wholeness comes, attack vanishes.
When innocence comes, guilt vanishes.
When immortality comes, sin vanishes.
The world is only an ILLUSION of a world "existing", "happening", "being something", "doing something". It is NOT those things. Believing it IS those things is false perception and it being deceived by illusions. Recognizing it is ONLY THE LACK OF something, taking on an appearance of the "presence of" something different to what is lacking, that you recognize illusions are ONLY illusions. And this sets you on the path to their undoing. In fact Jesus says this is the ONLY way you can correct your mind.
"The ego does not perceive sin as a lack of love. It perceives it as a POSITIVE ACT OF ASSAULT. This is an interpretation which is necessary to its survival, because as soon as YOU regard it as a LACK, you will automatically attempt to remedy the situation. And you will also succeed. The ego regards this as doom, but YOU must learn to regard it as freedom."
"The emptiness engendered by fear should be replaced by love, because love and ***its absence*** (fear) are in the same dimension, and correction cannot be undertaken except WITHIN a dimension. Otherwise, there has been a confusion of levels."
There are two thought systems, and each has its own way of thinking. Each has its own logic and reason.
The ego’s system, which is also the physical world ("the world is false perception"), is based on separation. It completely rejects any kind of sharing. It’s reasoning follows a simple rule, which is at the root of consciousness:
This... is separate from that. Therefore, this is not that.
This is how the entire physicality of the world is mapped. An apple is not an orange. You are either at home or at the mall but never both at once. My body is not your body. I am not you.
Most of the world believes in the world, believes that the way that physical objects are separate is "natural and normal", and learns to think along these lines.
We then think of another as "not myself". We think of one object as separate from another object. We think if we give something we have to physically lose it. We think we are in one location and not another.
Our entire "way of thinking" adapts to the illusory world of false perception and thinks along ego lines. Separate this, separate that. Either this, or that. Not both. Nothing is shared. Everything is kept apart.
Its main thought construct is "either this or that". For example, if you put the apple in the left bucket, the apple is not in the right bucket. Either the apple is in the left bucket, or the right bucket.
This seems natural as a way of thinking because it seems to map to how the world is physically arranged. Objects seem to "prove" that this is how things are, so we think in the same way. We reason logically, based on evidence and physical experience, that "the apple can’t be in both buckets at once."
The thought system of God, is COMPLETELY opposite to this. It BREAKS all of the egos laws, both physically and in terms of reasoning. God’s system is NOT broken out based on separation. It isn’t rooted in something being "not" something else. And there are no differences to keep things apart.
When you want to wake up, to develop spiritually or to approach God, your mind has to actually learn to stop thinking like a physical object, and think like spirit. This is not easy because it’s so completely alien to how the world is set up.
For example, Jesus talks about how if you give away an idea, you keep the idea, and now both you and the other have the idea. And now the idea is strengthened. To the ego this is a violation of its laws.
The ego would say, it is not possible for one thing to be in two places at once. And that it is not possible for two people to have the same thing at the same time. It wants sacrifice. It wants lack. It wants finite limited resources. It wants exclusive ownership.
The ego can’t comprehend the idea of sharing. True sharing doesn’t mean compromise, or that each person gets half. True sharing means two individuals have everything at the same time. This is utterly nonsense to how the ego-minded thinker thinks.
The ego would say, It is utterly impossible for one thing to be two things and still be one thing. But God would say, that’s completely natural and entirely possible. God thus creates many children of God who are each other. Effectively, one son of God, an apple, is in both buckets at once. He is in his own bucket, and in the bucket of his brother. But the ego says this is impossible.
Becoming able to think in terms of sharing, or what is very often called "oneness", you have to drop notions of separation. To comprehend how you and your brother are one, and yet still brothers, you can’t think about it in terms of how the ego thinks about it.
The ego will conclude, either there is one son of God, or many sons of God, not both. To suggest both is true simultaneously seems like utter nonsense. But God’s laws break the ego’s laws. And God’s logic and laws of reason pay no attention to the limitations the ego imposes.
Thinking like and with God is nothing like thinking with the ego. The suggestion that you ARE your brother, and the two of you are joined, transcends the ego’s idea of separation. But until you "love your neighbor as yourself", your mind is not truly in a state of love, or recognizing who you are.
Part of you is in your brother. Your mind is also part of their mind. "One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."
This in no way means that, when the two brothers become "one", there are no longer two brothers. The twoness doesn’t go away. Ego says it has to. God says the ego makes no sense. The two are brothers precicely because they are two in number. And just because they are BOTH each other, doesn’t mean they are not also themselves. This makes TOTAL sense in terms of how GOD thinks.
When you think about anything to do with God’s Kingdom, creation, sons, sonship, christ, souls, holy spirit, creations, etc... anything pre-separation.... you CANNOT think of it with the ego’s way of thinking. Because God’s system of thought is NOT spacetime. It is not broken out into separate things that share nothing with each other. It isn’t a system of lack or difference or exclusive compartmentalization.
EVERYONE who thinks about these topics using earth-bound separation-based ego reasoning, comes to FALSE conclusions about what ACIM is saying.
We can’t even really understand how it’s possible that you are one with your brother, or how God has more than one son in reality, or how we share minds, or how joined minds are healed, etc.... if you can’t also get your head around how to think TOTALLY OUTSIDE of the ego’s box.
The Golden rule states that what is true of one is true of another. There is one truth applicable equally to everyone. This is because god’s nature is singular and is shared by everyone. This then means that if something is true of your brother it must also be true of you. But the ego will say no, it’s no possible for you and your brother to be IDENTICAL... you have to be different.
Since the Golden Rule is God’s law, ego’s thought system breaks God’s law. It is an attempt to ignore the rule of equality of truth, which results in "the truth is different for everyone" - the first law of chaos. And chaos - total disorder - arises from there. And the ego calls this disorder - nature. Physical nature. As if it is completely natural. Yet it could not be more unnatural.
So if you want to understand the higher truth that ACIM is trying to teach, the dynamics of holy relationship, the sharing of minds, how miracles work, the relationship you have as brothers, the laws of God that you are under, and all the other things which are OUTSIDE of the ego’s way of thinking... you CANNOT USE the ego’s way of thinking to think about them. If you do, you will come to false conclusions, absolutely guaranteed. Because ego thought REJECTS the fundamental basis for God’s thinking, which is that everything is shared.
Sharing vs separation, is the two thought systems. And they DO NOT think alike. And they do not reason alike. And they do not conclude alike. There are TWO WAYS of thinking. One is false, and one is true. This higher way of thinking is everything written in the course talking about anything above "false perception", ego, body, or physical states.
Everything of true perception, christ, God, Sonship, heaven, healing, miracles etc.... is NOT OF THIS WORLD. And you cannot think about it correctly by thinking in the way that this world thinks about itself. You have to learn a NEW way to think, to reason, to perform logic, and to draw conclusions. And it has to break the laws of what you have always thought makes SENSE. The world does NOT make sense because it is a system of insanity and separation. So it’s "sense" is actually nonsense. And what you think is nonsense about God, is true.
God who is love created you lovingly, with love, through love, as love. You are permanently made of immortal love. When you are being true to yourself, you know that the love you are is shared with God, who is your love and who loves you and with you.
God is in you, and you are within you. There is only this inner experience of inclusion. In heaven, given God is everywhere, creation can only increase INTERNALLY through sharing. God shares his INNER being with you and HOSTS you inside of himself. Creation increase inwardly by adding hosts who share that which already is.
In heaven there is no such thing as "outside" or "external" or "excluded" or "separate". When you are everywhere, you encompass everything inside yourself. There, your brothers are not really outside of you surrounding you, they are WITHIN you and share your innermost being. This is the only real way to be intimate - to welcome your brother INSIDE of you psychologically.
"God who encompasses all being..."
The separation, or as I like to think of it more accurately as "the opposition or denial of God/reality", was an attempt to deny that you are inside of God, and to deny that you are host to him. It was an attempt to LEAVE God and go BEYOND the Kingdom, as though stepping OUTSIDE OF reality.
This produced the mad belief in spacetime, which is the idea of being EXILED from heaven, outside and external to the Kingdom, in a place where God could not exist or enter, seemingly separate and a kingdom you rule without him. The opposite to inner reality is obviously outer reality, which produced a kind of EXTERNALIZED idea of existence. The idea of this "world".
Basically, "you are at home in God, dreaming of exile", which means you are imagining that you are not WITHIN, and are WITHOUT. That you are outside of heaven in some other weird dimension (spacetime). It's an illusion of a separate realm outside the Kingdom. And everything in it is focused on the EXTERNAL.
"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death." "Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is NOT in Heaven is not ANYWHERE. Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible, and beyond ALL reason, and yet perceived as an eternal BARRIER to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."
Whereas in heaven, your brother is inside of you, as is God, because everyone shares and hosts the same stuff, "on earth" (in exile) it appears your brothers are OUTSIDE of you. It seems you are the only one allowed to inhabit your little speck of existence inside the body, the body fences you off from the universe, and everyone else is kept at arm's length. "The body is OUTSIDE you, and SEEMS to surround you, shutting you off from others, and keeping you APART from them, and them from you."
"The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built to separate parts of his Self from other parts. It is within this fence he thinks he lives, to die as it decays and crumbles. For within this fence he thinks that he is safe from love."
So now the body experience becomes one of isolation and imprisonment inside a fence, where the fence ("the body is clearly a device for separation") comes BETWEEN you and others. It's designed like a thick wall to keep them out and keep you in, safe from love (joining/sharing).
You then focus entirely OUTWARD towards the external, as if the external world is all of reality. As you'll notice, all the body's senses are directed to the detection and validation of WHAT IS EXTERNAL to you, and not what is inside you. In fact, the inside of you is considered invisible. Yet it is the INNER WORLD that is the only reality. Heaven's reality is IN YOUR MIND, and God is inside your mind.
"The changelessness of Heaven is in you, so deep within that nothing in this world but passes by, unnoticed and unseen." "And what attracts you from BEYOND the veil, is also deep WITHIN you, unseparated from it, and COMPLETELY One." "He calls to you from deep within your mind where He abides. Hear Him today."
"Only at the altar of God will you find peace, and this altar is in you, because God put it there."
"For still deeper than the ego's foundation, and MUCH stronger than IT will ever be, is your intense and burning love of God, AND HIS FOR YOU."
God is really not external to you. Nor is heaven. It's not out there in the world. God only temporarily seems to be "in everything you see" ONLY because God is IN YOUR MIND FIRST, not because he is outside of it in the world. You don't look out there WITHOUT him in order to see him, and looking WITHOUT him you WILL NOT see him. This is also why such a large portion of workbook lessons are devoted to you going INSIDE behind your clouds and blocks and denials to try to find the door to heaven. Inside your mind, not outside you.
But when you have blocked access to God, who is inside your mind, your experience is that your "inner world" is lacking love and that the awareness of love's presence is blocked there. Because you seem not to have God IN you, as though you are denying your hosting of His love, you see yourself as deprived. Then you project this outward.
This projection of the seeming absence of love forms a dark hallucinated world, the unforgiven world, in which externals are the primary focus, body identification is emphasized, you cling to the physical, and you see yourself and others as separate objects. The body, external to you, looks on the external aspects of others ie their bodies, and regards this as total reality.
"Only the body makes the world seem real." What that means is that the body is designed to make the idea of "outside the Kingdom" real, to make EXTERNALS real, and to focus on illusions of exile, separation, exclusion, isolation and the absence of love (sin).
"See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning."
Failing to invite, welcome, and experience the love and presence of God INSIDE your mind, you reason that cause and love and presence and God must be OUTSIDE. If you are not the cause, then you are effect, and now you are a victim, at the seeming effect of an external world that you are putting there. Thus you are doing it to yourself. And yet you are convinced the world is externally objectively real, when it is nothing more than an illusion of BEING OUTSIDE the Kingdom.
"Sickness is a method, conceived in madness, for placing God's Son on his Father's throne. God is seen as outside, fierce and powerful, eager to keep all power for Himself." "What is seen outside must lie beyond forgiveness, for it seems to be forever sinful. "
"The good is seen OUTSIDE; the evil, IN."
"An idol is a wish, made tangible and given form, and thus perceived as real, and seen OUTSIDE the mind."
While you may have ideas of God being way out in the far reaches of the universe beyond the stars, I have news for you. God is SO close to you that he is under your skin, behind your body, deeper inside you than even your own split mind and ego, and so close to your soul as to represent the ultimate INNER intimacy. He calls to you FROM WITHIN, not from without. He's not calling to you from the mountain tops or in some external special body or through toys or favorites or any other idols.
This you see is the problem with external salvation. All forms of external searching result in sickness ie mental illness because they take you AWAY FROM where the answer it. The cause and the answer to your problems is INSIDE YOU not outside.
"Peace is an attribute in YOU. You cannot find it outside. All mental illness is some form of EXTERNAL searching. Mental health is INNER peace."
You cannot find peace by looking FOR it outside of yourself, in the bodies of others, in the planet, or in space or time. The truth IS NOT out there. The truth is an INNER truth. And the peace of God dwells ONLY INSIDE you in a shared inner experience.
You see, mind can only really experience INSIDE the confines of itself. It cannot go anywhere or be anywhere or experience anything that is truly beyond its own reach. Everything it sees and experiences has to be INTERNAL. And this is also why "ideas leave not their source." And also why you are an idea IN the mind of God, not outside of it.
When you see yourself as lacking love you WILL reason that it was caused to be lacking, as an effect, or an EXTERNAL cause. And now you will project cause, and see causation happening against your will by others doing it to you. And thus you accuse them of sin. And this is not forgiving. But to forgive them has nothing to do with reframing what they're doing, and everything to do with looking INSIDE YOURSELF for the responsibility of causing your own suffering. Just as also inside yourself you'll find freedom from your self-inflicted harm.
Seeking outside you WILL NOT FIND what you are looking for. Because in fact, the more you seek outside, the FURTHER AWAY you become from the thing you are trying to find. This is the ego's entire mantra of "seek and do not find."
It makes sense to you to seek ELSEWHERE when you fail to acknowledge, or be aware of, or accept or be open to, that which IS WITHIN you (God, light, truth, your soul etc). Because if it's not regarded as within, surely it is somewhere ELSE. And so you look somewhere else, and do not find it, because it is not there.
"...everyone who believes that the ego is salvation is intensely engaged in the SEARCH for love. Yet the ego, though encouraging the search very actively, makes one proviso; - do not FIND it. Its dictates, then, can be summed up simply as, "Seek and do NOT find.""
"Such is the ego's plan for your salvation. Surely you can see how it is in strict accord with the ego's basic doctrine, "Seek but do not find?" For what could more surely guarantee that you will not find salvation than to channelize all your efforts in searching for it where it is not?"
""Seek but do not find" remains this world's stern decree, and no-one who pursues the world's goals can do otherwise." You will not find God outside of you. You will not find God in the world or in a book or in a body or in a planet. You will not find God in this universe. This is the world of EXILE, of EXCLUSION, and of EXTERNALIZATION. It is an hallucination precisely because you DO "project out" what you wanted to see IN PLACE OF what is within you.
Searching to find love's SOURCE, will turn up empty handed, when you look to the idea of EXILE FROM the source, which has manifested as EXTERNAL "reality". What is outside the body is not there. Even the body itself is outside of you. It's constructed from the idea of the avoidance of your soul. This is why you can either identify with the body or with spirit - which really is a question of whether the EXTERNAL is real to you, or whether the INTERNAL is real to you.
You will not get love from external people. You do not want to. If you were to succeed in doing so you would no longer look within to find God and would be without him. This is the ego's promise and deception. Real love is not out there. You have to FIRST find it within, if you want to be IN it, enough to be able to EXTEND it, so that you can then RESULT in perceiving it. Remember that "perception is a RESULT not a cause". PROJECTION is the cause. And you project from what you have WITHIN. You can only seem to see God in the world IF you FIRST look within and find God, before projecting his love.
"It also shows some glimmering of sight into perception's law that what you see reflects the state of the PERCEIVER's mind."
"You see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you WANT it there. Perception HAS no other law than this."
Realize then that you first must look INSIDE, and your INNER state of mind is all important. This is also why you have to become miracle minded in order to GIVE miracles. You cannot give what you do not have. "I can only give the miracles I have received." This is also why Jesus says you should look within and find out "there is no sin". You are supposed to find the love INSIDE YOU, which is where love IS. It is not separated off and made external.
When you are IN that INNER love, you are in God. You are IN the light. You are IN the heavenly experience. Then you can EXPRESS that love miraculously. You can SHARE it, but you have to be plugged into it. You cannot go looking for the end result outside of you and then hope this will trigger off the cause.
God is NOT in the world, the world is the idea of existing without him. But if God is IN YOUR MIND, then you will look inside and see God, and project God's love outward, and look upon the LOVE that you have projected, which you put there TO see. It it will reflect God. Not because an illusory world is made of God, but because God REPLACES the illusion of exile with presence.
It is so easy to be deceived by the dangling carrot of spacetime. The great TEMPATATION to draw you AWAY from yourself, to suck you OUT of your mind, to hurl you INTO the world, and to make you FIXATE on bodies. To draw you into hell and away from the heaven of your mind. But what if we simply say, THERE IS NO EXTERNAL WORLD?
"You are not the victim of the world you see because you invented it. You can give it up as easily as you made it up. You will see it or not see it, as you wish. While you want it you will see it; when you no longer want it, it will not be there for you to see."
"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you REALLY understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who SEEM to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are WHOLLY unreal? Could you have FAITH in what you see, if you ACCEPTED this? AND WOULD YOU SEE IT? "
There is no life OUTSIDE of heaven. Outside of heaven life is an ILLUSION of life at best, at worst death. Outside of heaven is a sensless, lawless place, of space and time, governed by laws of death. Because God is not there. The "out there" is NOT OUT THERE. The "in here" IS IN HERE. You must go WITHIN, turn away from the world of distractions, find what you have BURIED deep in your mind, welcome Got back into your awareness, and open up the deep inner doorway to heaven. God is waiting for you INSIDE YOU. He always has been. He did not go anywhere. It's you who wandered off into exile. Turn around and go back to where you came from.
"At last the gate of Heaven (within you) opens and God's Son is free to enter in the home that stands ready to welcome him, and was prepared before time was and still but waits for him."
Moving out of victimhood towards empowerment requires a radical shift in perspective. The victim mindset always involves a sense of separation from others. In this mode, your mind assigns certain things to them, and not to you. They're the one that's guilty, they're the attacker, they're the one doing something wrong. But in order to get out of this, we have to realise that everything "about" this situation is YOU doing it TO YOU.
That means that even when you think of someone like "that person is being evil", that is not actually a separate thought about a separate person. That is your mind attacking itself. Your mind splits off and invents a character to represent the other role, projects that character onto the other person, imagines that character being sinful and attacking, and then believes that the guilt belongs to them and not you. But this is YOUR mind forming a split personality, identifying with one part and not another, being at war with itself, and attacking itself from the outside in a kind of indirect way.
It is NOT TRUE that you can use your mind to just think casually about anyone and anything, with no effect on you. Even if you think you are describing what someone "is like", even if it seems based on their physical appearance, their behavior, or anything else that you think belongs to them, it requires you to still judge and attack in order to assign these labels to them. And when you do that, it's really your mind attacking itself. You cannot just sit there on a kind of fence having objective observations of condemnation and pretend that you're not hurting yourself by doing so.
It's kind of like a misuse of the equipment, like you don't know how to use your mind. You think that your mind is capable of operating in a mode where you can remain separate from others and cast judgements at them, label them, describe them, evaluate them. As if these perceptions have no effect. But what you don't realise is this is a totally incorrect way to use the mind. Mind cannot have these thoughts, labels, judgements, even if they map accurately to someone in form, without them being a form of attack. If I say "you did something wrong", I am literally telling myself that I'm wrong, I am split minded, have a case of dissociation, and am pretending to be a victim.
The major shift of believing that the problem is separate from you "out there", to recognizing that "you are doing it to yourself", requires a complete ownership of your thoughts, your judgements, your attitude. It's a total responsibility. It's a recognition that anything you perceive you have projected, because projection makes perception. Any labels you give to things are not neutral, they are a way that your mind is setting up an enemy within and as itself, to attack itself. It's your mind using the world vicariously to imagine that the world is doing something to you, when in fact this visualising is your mind doing something to itself.
So basically we have to go from believing that the stuff out there is not inside us, to realising that "ideas leave not their source". That any idea you have "about" anyone is about yourself. That you are included in everything. That you never escape any consequences, you are never separate from any judgement you make, what you do to others you are doing to yourself, and you are still bound by God's law of the golden rule. It's a shift away from a mind which is in two halves with two wills and two characters, to a mind which is single and whole and undivided against itself.
I find that a lot of ACIM students read the book too fast and sloppily and then approximate what they think they read and think it's saying something it's not.
For example I hear quite often cropping up people saying that the idea of "miracles are spectacles" is a bad thing and therefore, miracles cannot be things like walking on water or raising the dead because that would be a spectacle.
That's a GROSS misunderstanding of what it ACTUALLY says in the book, and it's even grosser when people USE it as a way to AVOID any reason to perform a spectacular miracle:
"A miracle is a reversal of the physical order because it brings more love to the giver AND the receiver. (A miracle is misunderstood when it is regarded as a spectacle.)"
Here it is clearly stating that if you think that a miracle is MERELY a spectacle, BECAUSE it is spectacular, then you have MISUNDERSTOOD IT. Largely because you're probably focusing on the changes in FORM and physicality and are taking it to be spectacular and impressive and such.
It literally actually says that if you think miracles are spectacles, or that a spectacular miracle has to be AVOIDED, you have MISUNDERSTOOD. This does NOT mean that miracles cannot BE spectacular.
Secondly...
"The use of miracles as a spectacle to INDUCE belief is wrong. They are really used for and by believers."
Here it clearly specifically says that if you USE a miracle to try to INDUCE BELIEF. .... then you are making a mistake. It goes on to clarify that miracles are supposed to be used BY believers, FOR believers. In other words, the issue here isn't that miracles are wrong for being spectacular, it's that if you USE them as party tricks without the proper purpose of healing/teaching and they are just some empty "spectacle" for show, you're probably trying to INDUCE BELIEF in someone ie persuade and impress them to COERCE them into believing something, which is really against their will.
So all it's doing in both counts is warning you about a couple of MISINTERPRETATIONS of miracles and their use. It NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER SAYS that miracles must not be spectacular, or that all miracles that seem spectacular are wrong, or that you should never perform a spectacular miracle.
All it says is 1) if you are dwelling on how spectacular IT IS, you are missing the point. And 2) You shouldn't ABUSE miracles by trying to use them to manipulate people. Jesus is giving these warnings because he knows that miracles CAN DO SPECTACULAR THINGS, which COULD be a) misinterpreted by some people and b) abused by others. He knows that precisely because miracles CAN BE SPECTACULAR, he needs to make sure you are performing spectacular miracles for the RIGHT REASONS.
Never does it say in ANY WAY WHATSOEVER that you should not perform spectacular miracles.
This is another example of how people do not read carefully, skim over the words, get an impression and then ignore what it actually said and meant. So now you hear people pulling up this quote as a defense against miracles because they THINK that it said something like "spectacular miracles are wrong" and "miracles should not be spectacles so they shouldn't be spectacular."
It's a gross distortion of what it says, the purpose of Jesus saying it, the meaning of what he said, and what point he is making. We need to pay much more careful close attention to what ACIM ACTUALLY SAYS instead of listening to loosely interpreted second-hand impressions. Especially from people who are anti-miraculous and who want to keep pushing an agenda of never performing a miracle for anyone for any reason.
I was thinking for a while that maybe certain people were inept. Maybe it was certain groups of people. Maybe it was medical people. And maybe it was the body. Maybe it was just some portion of things. But the more I look at it the more I realize that the ENTIRE WORLD, the whole SYSTEM of thought of this lower-order reality of spacetime, is fundamentally broken. It is an impossible system, based on laws of failure and lack and insufficiency.
The whole thing functions in a ridiculously faulty way. Every motion, every action, every doing, every impulse, causes a disruption and changes and side effects. You cannot do anything physical without it potentially leading to more problems. Everything you do to fix something gives rise to new problems. Every use of materials degrades the material. Every aspect of this entire cosmos is fundamentally stupid as fuck and ridiculously backwards.
The whole thing simultaneously gives one thing and takes away another, in a two-faced self-contradicting self-denying expression of incapability and limitation. Nothing in the world has any ability ever to truly do anything unconditionally or perfectly. There is no unlimited giving, no flawless correction, no ultimate solution, no perfect response, no clear answer, and no magical salvation.
There is literally no salvation in the world which produces a state of utter hopelessness. This is the stupidity of the world at large, and the whole thing is one big giant fuckup. There is no escape from it. The only way out of this hell is through transcendence and forgiveness, recognizing it is NOT REAL, and therefore thankfully there ARE no unsolvable problems. Such is the miracle's ability to reverse everything the world says can never be undone.
The world is an ILLUSION. An illusion that presents itself as being one thing when in fact it is its opposite. Everything it tries to do it does the opposite. Every way it helps it hurts. Every pleasure leads to pain. Every solution becomes broken. It cannot go towards God because everything if offers ALWAYS points towards death and destruction. Even its so-called "life" has death in it.
Contemplating this fact of the world's bullshittery made me laugh so much.
"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."
"It takes great learning both to realize and to accept the fact that the world has nothing to give."
"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."
"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."
"When you CORRECT a brother, you are telling him that he is WRONG. He may be making no sense at the time, and it is certain that if he is speaking from the ego, he WILL be making no sense, but your task is still to tell him HE IS RIGHT. You do not tell him this verbally if he is SPEAKING foolishly, because he needs correction AT ANOTHER LEVEL, since his error IS at another level. HE is still right, because he is a Son of God. His ego is ALWAYS wrong, no matter WHAT it says or does."
When you see a person acting egoically, you will think this is all they are. Whatever they say and do, you point your finger at "that" and consider it the whole person. This is why its incredibly easy to judge and condemn people for their egoic behaviors. As if what you see them doing is what thy are in truth.
But what this really means is you are blinded by perception of form and lack vision, so you are not seeing THROUGH and BEYOND their ego. The fact is that the person simultaneously is a perfect soul, and yet they also have egoic beliefs in their mind. Kind of like having two selves.
If you only see the ego in them and do no look past it ("to forgive is to overlook"), you become blinded by it and do not see their real self. You then hold their ego against them as if that is all they are. In effect, there is more to people than meets the eye.
Jesus is saying we should try not to be deceived by people's mistakes, and recognize it as a call for love. To look past appearances to the holy child of God that everyone is in truth. If you could see past their ego to their holiness, you would recognize their ego as just mistaken, instead of sinful.
Remember everyone here has two selves so when you take everything people say at face value you're not being forgiving. You have to look deeper past the surface. Give your brother due credit and love or still being a perfect soul. Recognize his mistakes as only that, and hold nothing not of God against him. To fixate on a person's ego is to be believe the forms of error.
"To forgive is to OVERLOOK. Look, then, BEYOND error, and do not let your perception rest UPON it, for you will believe what your perception HOLDS. Accept as true only what your brother IS, if you would know yourself. Perceive what he is NOT, and you CANNOT know what you are, BECAUSE you see HIM falsely. Remember always that your identity is shared, and that its sharing IS its reality."
"See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning."
"Before a holy relationship, there IS no sin. The FORM of error is no longer seen. And reason, joined with love, looks quietly on ALL confusion, observing merely, "this was a mistake." And then the same Atonement YOU accepted in YOUR relationship, CORRECTS the error, and lays a part of Heaven in its place. How blessed are you, who let this gift be given! Each part of Heaven that you bring, is given YOU. And every empty place in Heaven that you fill again with the Eternal Light YOU bring, shines now on YOU. The means of sinlessness can know no fear, because they carry ONLY love with them."
From "Sickness is a defense against the truth", Lesson 136:
"No one can heal unless he understands what purpose sickness seems to serve. For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning. Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. When this is seen, healing is automatic. It dispels this meaningless illusion by the same approach that carries all of them to truth, and merely leaves them there to disappear."
...
Here Jesus tells us simply that if we can clearly recognize a sickness for what it IS - an illusion, it will disappear automatically.
When we look at sickness we think it has a variety of causes. None of them are true. We also think it has a valuable purpose. The purpose is supposedly to defend our ego identity against truth. That's because we're mistaken about the truth and think that it will destroy us, so we "naturally" defend against it. Defense (denial) manifests reasons to believe that illusions are more real than God.
It is because we have a multitude of beliefs that tell us that sickness is real, that we have the sickness at all. It is sustained by those beliefs and created by them. It seems the sickness has no purpose and is a victimization, but really it does have a secret purpose. Its purpose was to block reality by demonstrating that illusions are real. Therefore we 'manifest' illusions that seem real, to try to prove that this is true. Manifesting illusions and making them real invents sickness.
We need to become willing to see instead that the purpose of sickness was to block the truth, not to make something true. It's purpose wasn't to affirm reality, it was to lend reality to something that is unreal. It's purpose wasn't to confirm how real the body is, but to deny how real the truth is. And finally we need to become able and willing to RECOGNIZE that sickness is an illusion, NOT a reality.
This is the defining principle. Sickness is the illusion that illusions are real. It is a denial of the truth - an attempt to hide the truth from awareness. This denial of truth causes sickness because it is your attempt to make God sick and dead. Your attempt to destroy God destroys you. Your belief that God (reality) is sick, produces sickness in your reality.
Your challenge in undoing sickness is to shift your sense of reality away from the sickness and place it on the real truth - God. If the sickness is true and real, God cannot be. And because your sickness is a choice to believe illusions are more real than reality, they are choices to believe that God is not real. They therefore block God, which is the giver of Life, and blocking life manifests as sickness (and death).
To undo sickness you must be willing to admit and recognize that sickness is not REAL, it is an illusion. It can't be real because of the ways in which God is real. God has to be more real than the sickness otherwise you will keep the sickness and continue to believe in its reality. Your belief in its reality is what puts it into your experience, because you are mis-creating.
You need to un-believe that the sickness is real in all its respects, in every way. There is nothing about sickness that can be "true" for you. Otherwise you will value it and keep it. When you can see that it LITERALLY is NOTHING, i.e. its an illusion that isn't real at all, you will cause it to disappear, because you will cease to GIVE it reality.
That's a miracle, an acknowledgement of God's truth and its equal meaningfulness to everyone.