If you see the world through your filter of darkness, you'll see a darkened world. The world will appear to be unlovable because you do not see love in it. You see darkness in it, and no-one can love what is does appear lovable. Indeed you see it as unlovable because you do not see it WITH love. If you remove your filter of darkness, you'll see a lighter world, and without your condemnation upon it it will appear more lovable. You will then find that this world that you see WITH love is lovable, and so you can love it.

The world as you see it through eyes of fear, which is seeing in an unloving way, is not a lovable world. It is devoid of love because you do not love it, and what you're trying to love is a world disguised in lovelessness. No-one love can such an ugly world - the combination of the world plus your projected darkness, but it only appears ugly because of the lack of love with which you look upon it. Strangely enough, if you choose to look upon it WITH love, the world appears to change and reflect something that is loveable. And now you find yourself able to love it BECAUSE you are loving it. But your love has to come FIRST, and not DEPEND on what it seen, nor be conditionally loving BECAUSE of it.

In effect then, you are confronted with a paradox. When you do not love the world the world will appear not to be lovable. And how that world appears, you cannot love, because it is dark and ugly and cruel, and all its flaws and conflicts are emphasized and increased through your dwelling upon them. But although you cannot love a darkened world, when you decide TO love, to see WITH love, proactively, it changes how you see, and changes how the world appears. And now suddenly the world is lit up with the light that you've GIVEN to it, and a world illuminated with love does appear to be lovable. And yet, you could not love the world when you did not come from love.

"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."

"The world can give you ONLY what you gave it, for being nothing but your own projection, it HAS no meaning apart from what you found in it, and placed your faith in."

It's as if there are two versions of the world, and each "version" seems to be the whole world to you. Which version or interpretation/translation you see depends on what you GIVE TO the world. When you project hate and attack and guilt and sin onto it, having those within yourself and having accused yourself of them, you will see them overlaid on the world. And then the world will appear evil and wrong and attacking. But if you forgive yourself and cease your self attack, you will also project innocence and harmlessness and holiness ONTO the world. And now you will see the world WITHOUT your attack, and only WITH your innocence, and in this light it will appear to lack the dark heavy chains that you saw in it before. And THAT rendition of the world appears to be loved and forgiven.

"Beyond this world there is a world I want."

As ACIM says, the world you see through darkness and despair is NOT the world that God loves. He CANNOT love such a world. Nor can you. This is a metaphysical fact. You cannot love what you do not love, and you cannot see a lovable world when you are not BEING loving. But we're also told that God CAN love "the world" - not the world that is seen when attacking, but the world that is seen only in light when loving.

"The world you see cannot be the world God loves, and yet His Word assures us that He loves the world."

The loving has to come first, it changes how the world looks, a reflection of love is seen IN it, and this makes the world appear to be fit for love. God loves the LOVED VERSION of the world, because THROUGH eyes of love the world appears lovable. Such a world is "the real world", seen with forgiveness and with love, which CAUSES what it seen to be a reflection of heaven. Without seeing FROM love, the world will appear to lack love and reflect fear and hate, and no-one can love such a hell as that.

To love hell, therefore, you have to first switch on the light of love within, SO THAT love is projected out, SO THAT you no longer see hell reflected IN the world. You can't expect the world to be loveable "as it appears to be", while YOU are not in a state of love. You can't just force yourself to love something that, simultaneously, you are causing to appear NOT to be loveable because of your inner state of attack. The inner attack must be gone, first, because it completely influences how you see AND what you see in it. Only when there is a lovability within, can you truly SEE with vision and look WITH forgiveness, and when doing so you will ONLY see a forgiven world that reflects heaven.

Given that you cannot love an unloveable world, the ego would tell you that there is no way for you to love the world. Given that it appears dark and old and lackluster and broken, the ego tells you it can never BE forgiven. Its forms appear to prove sin real and the veil of sin upon it appears to confirm you cannot love it. It reasons then that because you do NOT love it, and because it does NOT appear to reflect something loveable, there is no way for you to ever love it.

This is where it becomes necessary to realize that what you see in it is reflecting what you see in yourself. Where you must realize that HOW you are looking has total influence over WHAT is seen. And this means having to become able to love, before looking upon the world. To forgive is really to fore-give, which mean to give ahead of time, which means to come FROM love and to GIVE love before projecting and making perception. Perception is just the result of what you GIVE. But you can't love an unloved world, because it's reflecting an unloved self. You have to unplug from the unloved world, love YOURSELF, and then look out from that love and peace upon a reflection of a loved self - a forgiven self - a forgiven world.

"Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus KEEPING it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your minds AT ALL, or you will also believe that you must UNDO what you have made, in order to BE forgiven."

"Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego. You need but leave the mirror clean, and clear of all the images of hidden darkness you have drawn upon it. God will shine upon it of Himself. Only the clear reflection OF Himself can BE perceived upon it. Reflections are seen in light. In darkness, they are obscure, and their meaning seems to lie only in shifting interpretations, rather than in themselves."

"God DOES love the real world, and those who perceive its reality CANNOT see the world of death. For death is not OF the real world, in which everything is eternal. God gave you the real world in exchange for the one you made, out of your split mind, and which IS the symbol of death. For if you could REALLY separate yourselves from the Mind of God, you WOULD die. And the world you perceive IS a world of separation."

"This is a question everyone must ask. Certainly peace seems to be impossible here. Yet the Word of God promises other things that seem impossible, as well as this. His Word has promised peace. It has also promised that there is no death; that resurrection must occur, and that rebirth is man's inheritance. The world you see cannot be the world God loves, and yet His Word assures us that He loves the world. God's Word has promised us that peace is possible here, and what He promises can hardly be impossible. But it is true that the world must be looked at differently, if His promises are to be accepted. What the world is, is but a fact. You cannot choose what this should be. But you can choose how you would see it. Indeed, you must choose this."

"Again we come to the question of judgment. This time, ask yourself whether your judgment or the Word of God is more likely to be true. For they say different things about the world, and things so opposite that it is pointless to try to reconcile them. God offers the world salvation; your judgment would condemn it. God says there is no death; your judgment sees but death as the inevitable end of life. God's Word assures you that He loves the world; your judgment says it is unlovable. Who is right? For one of you is wrong. It must be so."

"How is peace possible in this world? In your judgment it is not possible, and can never be possible. But in the Judgment of God what is reflected here is only peace."

"Peace is impossible to those who look on war. Peace is inevitable to those who offer peace. How easily, then, is your judgment of the world escaped. It is not the world which makes peace seem impossible. It is the world you see that is impossible. Yet has God's Judgment on this distorted world redeemed it and made it fit to welcome peace. And peace descends on it in joyous answer. Peace now belongs here, because a Thought of God has entered. What else but a Thought of God turns hell to Heaven merely by being what It is? The earth bows down before Its gracious Presence, and It leans down in answer to raise it up again. Now is the question different. It is no longer, "Can peace be possible in this world?" but instead, "Is it not impossible that peace be absent here?"

You always perceive in people what you CHOOSE to see in them.

If you CHOOSE to be upset and angry, it CHANGES how people look. It makes them SEEM like they are attacking you. And because of this change in YOUR perception - your filtering - YOU think that you are justified in this anger or upset "because of" what they so obviously are doing. But they only APPEAR to be doing this stuff because YOU are looking through a dark filter of unlove. It filters OUT the love and prevents you from seeing love IN the person, or something about them that is loveable.

When you CHOOSE to stop being upset with them, to like them and to love them, which your are perfectly free and capable of doing, this "fog of unlove" is lifted from YOUR mind and you see the person WITH love. This radically changes how they APPEAR to you. Or rather, what you see IN them. Whatever you perceive people as "being like", they only appear to "belike" that because YOU are CHOOSING to see them that way. How you see them and how they appear has NOTHING to do with them or what they’re doing.

If someone is upset with you, angry at you, saying they don’t like you, the only reason they don’t like you is because they are CHOOSING not to like you. Here’s the trick... if they would CHOOSE to like you, THEY WOULD LIKE YOU. This sounds so obvious but it’s true, because per the secret of salvation, anything that person doesn’t like about you is a result of THEM CHOOSING NOT TO. Whatever they think is "wrong" with you, they ONLY SEE because THEY choose to put that there. They think they are locked into this perception with no choice. They don’t realize if they would simply CHOOSE differently, they COULD choose to LIKE YOU, and would instantly warm up to you.

It sounds too obvious to be true, but this is how it works. You are NEVER justified in being angry at someone because that simply means, you are CHOOSING not to love them. The ONLY reason you don’t like someone is because you haven’t decided to like them, for whatever scapegoating mileage you’re getting out of that. YOU have the power to love everyone. YOU have the freedom to choose to love everyone. Because there is NO REASON NOT TO. The only time you find a reason not to, is when YOU have slipped into ego, YOU are attacking, YOU are projecting, an d YOU are accusing your brother of your own sins.

You are never upset for the reason you think. It is NEVER "because of" people, the world, the body, the environment, or anything other than YOU. You using your free will to CHOOSE TO BE UPSET. You are not at the effect of anyone. You are CAUSAL. Whatever you choose, you cause. You are a creator. If you do not LIKE what you are causing, that’s on you. But disassociating ownership for that responsibility is ego.

You don’t like xyz person because you decided not to like them. They now look like enemies because you WANT to see them as enemies. Your desire to hate them MAKES THEM appear to be unlovable. The only reason they appear unlovable is not because of THEM, it’s because of YOU. If you would decide to love them, they would stop looking like monsters. Set them free of your tyranny.

You are annoyed about xyz situation because you have not yet CHOSEN to be happy. You like being unhappy. When you decide to be happy you will love it.

You think you can’t love xyz person because of "what they are like", because YOU are choosing to be an asshole. There is NO REASON to be unloving. All the reasons we have, we make up. Just as there is no reason to be afraid and all fear is made up.

If I don’t like something, is the problem the THING I don’t like, OR ME choosing to be "not likey"? And while I’m busy pointing out the flaws and sins of others, which I ONLY SEE because I PUT THEM THERE through unlove, I might want to look closer to home at why *I* am being sinful towards them. MY problem causes THEM To look like THE problem.

Everyone is holy and innocent and deserves to be loved fully. If I’m not doing that, *I* have a problem. I need to choose again. The only way a sworn enemy becomes a beloved friend is by choosing to LOVE them, sooner or later. You are free to choose when to change your mind.

"The holiest of all the spots on Earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love."

"The power of decision is my own."

"When he said "mind is the builder," he did not realize that it is only what it is building NOW that really creates the future. The past, in itself, does not have the ability to do this. Whenever we move from one instant to the next, the previous one no longer exists."

Here's a little statement which correlates to the idea that your body is not really a continuation from the past, nor does it have its own ongoing "state". It is a NOW-MOMENT-PROJECTION from the mind, and the mind is currently projecting NOW a fresh image NOW of the body, in whatever condition it wants it to appear in NOW. If the body *appears* to "carry over" conditions that seemed to be established in the past it is because the MIND is NOW re-projecting a similar image to the image it projected previously, NOT because the body itself has a "causal past" that makes its current condition predetermined.

The spacetime continuum is an illusion. And this also matches with the fact that in this 2019 moment right now, the mind is projecting this universe, and making it APPEAR to be a picture of a very old universe, even complete with all the details necessary to suggest that its current condition is the causal "result" of a distant past big bang, and yet every single speck of this world is a NOW MOMENT PROJECTION from the mind, designed to make it APPEAR as though this world has been taking a very long time to reach its current condition. The universe is no more than a nanosecond old.

This is reflected in night time dreams also, whereby when you go to sleep, you dream, you imagine an environment, and it seems the environment is very established and would've taken countless millions of years of evolution to arrive at its current condition, and yet it has NO HISTORY, having only just been dreamed at a moment's notice. Even if it seems to have a huge back-story or a sense of time having passed, the entire thing is being made up RIGHT NOW to LOOK AS IF it's very old and as if there is evidence of the processes that it must have undergone to reach this current condition. There is no past! It's all a present-moment projection. You are dreaming this all up right now!

From lesson 261...

"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. Identifying with his safety, he regards himself as what his safety is. How else could he be certain he remains within the body, keeping love outside? "

"The body will not stay. Yet this he sees as double safety. For the Son of God's impermanence is "proof" his fences work, and do the task his mind assigns to them. For if his oneness still remained untouched, who could attack and who could be attacked? Who could be victor? Who could be his prey? Who could be victim? Who the murderer? And if he did not die, what "proof" is there that God's eternal Son can be destroyed?

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"The body is a dream. Like other dreams it sometimes seems to picture happiness, but can quite suddenly revert to fear, where every dream is born. For only love creates in truth, and truth can never fear. Made to be fearful, must the body serve the purpose given it. But we can change the purpose that the body will obey by changing what we think that it is for."

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Changing the purpose of the body DOES NOT mean looking at it as a separate thing and skewing your vision to pretend it looks healthier than it is! It means, LITERALLY, CHANGING THE BODY to DEMONSTRATE that it is not sick!

Some people believe it's our job to change how we perceive the body, that we are to dis-identify from it, and so in a way separate from it. Some also believe we are to focus on healing the mind, not the body. Some also believe the course is not teaching us about healing the body. And some also believe we'll be able to wake up from dreaming without changing the body at all, or healing its sickness, or making it impossible for it to die.

But if this is true, if the body is just some "thing" that exists, that we identify with or not, or make ourselves separate from, or which is not part of our mind, then this raises a question:

WHO PUT THE BODY THERE IF NOT YOUR MIND?

Or additionally, what it is that causes the body to be sick and die if not YOUR MIND?

You have to then answer this question without resorting to jumping to a different level or using an intellectual bypass. The question can only have a couple of possible answers:

1) God made the bodies and we're just changing how we see them, and have to accept them as sick and dead.

2) It was us who made the bodies.

That there are no bodies, bodies are illusions, bodies don't exist, or whatever else along those lines is NOT a valid answer to this question at this point.

Someone HAS to be responsible for the body that is showing up, regardless of whether it's an illusion. SOMEONE is making it appear. SOMEONE is putting it there. Even if it's not really there.

So who is it?

If it's not you who is making the body show up, then it's God's fault. Yet the course says, "Love did not create the body". And God is love, so God didn't put the body there.

And if you are supposed to disconnect yourself from or separate from the body in some way, to go "only into mind", or to IGNORE its sickness or its death, WHO STILL is putting that body there? WHO or WHAT is making it sick? WHO is making it die?

It has no bearing on whether you are at peace or not or what your mind is doing in this scenario. Somehow, someone, or something, must be responsible for making a sick and broken body show up.

We know it's not God. And if you're claiming it's not YOU because you are not a body, you're shifting levels mid-logic. If you are the mind "only" and "not the body", and God didn't make the body, who is CONTINUING to maintain the body? Someone is! Someone is continuing to make the body appear and walk around the planet with sickness showing up in it, and supposedly you're off on cloud9 having a happy time ... so WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?

What you cannot escape here is simple fact, that IT IS YOU who are making the body appear. Even if it's an illusion, it is YOU who are dreaming it. The world is not putting it there. God is not putting it there. There is no other cause in the world because there is NO cause in the world. The body didn't show up on its own. Nor did it show up because of your parents.

Your body right now, with which you are contemplating typing a response, or which you are using to read these words, is being put there BY YOU. And as such, you are 100% responsible for everything it showing up as. No-one else is responsible for it.

That means, in conclusion, SINCE YOU are the one who is making your body appear, YOU HAVE EVERY ABILITY to make an entire body appear! Out of nowhere! With the power of your mind only. You ARE DOING IT right now! You've been doing it for years!

So that means, if you are able to project a body, which appears to have a certain condition or state of health, what's to stop you from projecting a body which is in perfect health, has no sickness, and is not suffering, and cannot die?

YOU are putting the sickness into the body. It's your responsibility. The sickness can ONLY stay in the body IF you keep putting it there. If you are trying to get your mind into a place where it thinks of itself as "I am not the body" but the body is still showing up, what does that tell you? YOU STILL believe you are a body. You're not being honest. The body can only appear IF YOU make it appear. The body can only "stay sick" if YOU keep projecting a sick body (from a sick mind).

So there isn't any way to avoid this. You are the one who made your body. You are the one making it right now. That means your mind is pretty powerful at manifesting a human being. And more besides. So why would this ever mean, that you don't have the ability to make it show up as healed, or that you have to put up with suffering, or that you cannot remove sickness, or that you are supposed to become peaceful "in spite of death"? You will never be able to be at peace in spite of death because if death "happens to you" you will see yourself as a victim.

Healthy mind, healthy body. Sick mind, sick body. That's how it works. No-one else is responsible for your state of being, and nothing in the world causes your body to be sick or keeps it sick. No-one but YOU makes the body appear AT ALL. No-one but YOU has the free will choice to make it show up as a symbol of sinlessness.

No-one has to suffer and no-one has to keep sickness or to try to find ways to "work around it" or "live with it" or "tolerate it" or "transcend it". JUST REMOVE THE SICKNESS!!!

That's what miracles are for!

"If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind must be stronger than the body. Every miracle demonstrates this."

"Projection makes perception."

You look within first, then project out what is within you. What is projected becomes what you perceive.

"Perception is a result not a cause."

Your business therefore should NOT be "changing your perception". That is an EFFECT.

Your business should focus on what is IN your mind that you PROJECT, which results in perceptions.

If there is shit in your mind, you will project the shit and see the shit in other people and in the world. You will make the shit real.

You can try to "forgive other people" or "forgive the world" but this is INDIRECT. And it will take you a long time. The world is very big.

What you need to do in fact is clean out the gunk that is in the PROJECTOR. Which means healing YOUR MIND and changing your beliefs, SO THAT you will not project sin and guilt outward.

"You but accuse your brother of your own sins." Therefore, do not have sin IN YOU in the first place, then you won't ACCUSE anyone. You can't project sin onto the world if you don't have any in you!

If there is no sin or guilt in you, you will not have any TO project. You therefore won't ACCUSE your brother of sin or guilt, and won't have to clean up the mess that results when you do.

Similarly you don't need to really work on forgiving the whole world, even though the forgiven world is what you want to reach and go beyond eventually. If you fix YOUR MIND, you will SEE with love and forgiveness, which is the eyes of Christ, and this will SHOW you the forgiven world.

The world, and your brothers, will appear forgiven you you, AS A RESULT OF, you not having sinful shit in YOUR mind, that you project onto them. Without belief in your own sinfulness, you cannot FIND sin in your brothers or in the world. You do not put it there, because you have none to put there.

This is HOW the world and your brothers become forgiven. They are SEEN and RECOGNIZED as forgiven BECAUSE you find YOURSELF to be forgiven.

You CANNOT forgive other people! Forgive YOUR SELF FIRST, and your way will be made straight. Forgive your OWN self condemnation and the unlove of yourself, and remove the sin from your OWN eye, so that you won't see it in its projected form.

Without even trying to "forgive the world at all", if you work on healing your mind and then return to the world, you will find the world is automatically "more forgiven". It is seen in a more forgiving light because you see YOUR SELF in a more forgiving light.

"Everyone sees what he IS."

Attempting to forgive others is just part of unravelling your confusion as you WHO has accused WHOM and WHO needs forgiveness. It is YOU who has accused YOURSELF and it is YOU that you need to forgive.

"It can be but myself that I crucify."

"Secret of salvation" ... "you are doing this to yourself."

Allow yourself to be loved and healed, and you will allow yourself to SEE with love and healing, and thus EXTEND love and healing to the world and to your brothers.

Perception TAKES CARE OF ITSELF. It is nothing but a result of the changes in your mind. It comes AFTER projection, which comes AFTER your inner content is established. Change your mind ABOUT YOURSELF and the whole world will appear to change, and your perception will appear to shift.

You do not work on perception directly. You work on your value system, your beliefs, your inner relationship with yourself. All the rest comes automatically after that because you project or extend whatever is IN you. Deal with the problem at its SOURCE, not in its projected form.

See yourself with love and you will see your brothers with love. Recognize the christ in you and you will see christ in your brothers. Be aware of the presence of God in you and you will see God in the world.

"God is in everything I see... BECAUSE God is in my mind."

Sometimes people say you should meditate and watch your thoughts go by. They say you should not believe the thoughts or get engaged with them. It seems helpful up to a point to be able to let them go without following them.

Doing this seems to suggest you are not your thoughts, that thoughts are somehow happening but somehow you are detached or separate from them.

But how is it possible that thoughts are happening in your mind if you are not the one thinking them? Who else is allegedly responsible for putting thoughts in everyones' head? Who is the thinker of these thoughts? Someone has to be.

To try to separate yourself from your thoughts could be an act of disassociation, especially if you're trying to deny that you are the one making them happen, or that they "happen on their own".

Some have suggested that the ego thought system is a sort of "thing" in its own right and that you can either be immersed in it and its thoughts, or step outside of it. But either way, that it still sort of exists on its own. The question is, who is making it exist? It can't exist unless someone somewhere is making it or believing in it.

Thoughts will not STOP until the person responsible for making them appear stops making them appear. Disowning them doesn't make them disappear. Not being lost in them is helpful, but at some point you MUST become aware that you are the one who is putting them there, and therefore gain mastery over their origin. It must become possible for you to actually stop thinking entirely, otherwise you will remain a victim of thoughts.

The ego doesn't just happen on its own. Someone has to make it up, believe in it, and create the illusions that it exists. Ego thoughts are a part of that. If there are thoughts coming up "on their own", they MUST be coming from some unconscious part of yourself that is thinking with a will that has been separated from the rest of your will. It means you still have a split mind. And that means there is still forgiveness to be done.

This is a central ACIM teaching, that death is not "normal" or "natural", but rather a choice, and that if you do not make the choice, death does not happen. It literally speaks to the real possibility of immortality, and the impossibility of death.

Think about this. Death cannot happen without you in some way being victimized. Something has to "happen to you". And that means, you are at the effect of the world in some way. That there is some kind of cause outside of you which somehow seemed to have power over you, which overpowered you, and did something against your will.

The only way that this kind of scenario can occur, is if there is something seriously mistaken about your mind. Your mind has to be seeing itself as a victim. It has to be believing it is affected by an illusion. It has to be playing the part of victim and of being attacked. It also has to be using the world, or people in the world, as scapegoats. Without the ability to accuse the world of causing the death against your will, the death cannot happen.

A key part of this is that even when it appears that death is happening against your will, even if you do choose it and play along with the victim role and being affected by something external, even then you are still giving full consent. You are still involved. Your mind is actually participating in laying down life and becoming un-willing to live. This is not passive.

The mind cannot ever be passive. The mind is always active and creating. If the mind chooses to have a sickness, the mind is still choosing the sickness and the mind is still putting the sickness there. The sickness isn't just happening on its own. And when the mind chooses not to put the sickness there the sickness disappears.

Even if it may *appear* at the time as though the sickness is happening outside the scope of your choice, or beyond what you can control, or that you were not even the one who chose it, the truth is that you did choose it, you put it in place yourself, it is you who are maintaining it, and it cannot even continue showing up without your consent.

So you have to realize what death is. Death is only "possible" as a state where our mind has something seriously fucked up about how it is seeing itself. It can only come about by the mind deciding to pretend that it is being seriously affected. Jesus describes it as a vain attempt to make no choice at all - really the disownership of choice or the attempt to be completely irresponsible for your existence.

In the activity or implementation of dying and death, the mind is actively choosing to pretend that it has nothing to do with living, nothing to do with what happens, and nothing to do with the circumstances that are arising. It is faking it. It is going under-cover, putting on a tremendous performance as if everyone and everything else is causal other than itself, and that it is purely an effect.

So what death really is, is an attempt to NOT be causal at all, to have no power, to appear to be making no choice, and to paint this picture of stuff happening seemingly against your will. But it's such an extraordinary lie, such a cover-up, that everyone seems to believe it. All the fingers will point in the direction of "cause of death" or "why they died" to explain how this death came about. But this will only explain the manner in which the death seemed to "happen", it will not in any way implicate the person as having been the author of these events, or of being the one who made it happen to themselves.

Death is a state of extreme lying. It is the most dishonest condition possible. It is a state of not only denying God, denying the unchangeable fact of eternal life, and denying that nothing can happen to you against your will (because that is God's Will and God has given you a will which cannot be affected).

If life seems to be degrading, and diminishing, and slipping away, and the external world seems to be mounting a successful attack, and the body seems to have a mind of its own, and circumstances appear to be transpiring against the person, and it starts to look AS IF it is unfair and unchosen and the person is not doing ANYTHING to contribute to this condition, that's because the illusion is INCREASING and the person is moving further away from truth.

Death is a complete reversal of sanity, a total reversal of the proper functioning of the mind, and a complete reversal of cause and effect. It places all power and will and choice and causality as outside of oneself, making oneself entirely an "effect" of something separate from oneself.

Death actually is an attempt to claim that God is external, that God is separate, that God has a will which opposes your own, that God is to blame for destroying you, that you have no power to stop Him, and that this is all happening to you entirely against your will. In other words, it is an attempt to claim that God is the cause of all death, and not the cause of life.

It then will appear that anyone who dies does not want to die. It will appear as if the person had no say in the matter, as if life just threw them a shit sandwich. It will seem as if they are being dragged kicking and screaming against their will into the firey pits of hell as if having absolutely no power to do anything about it. This is the most grandiose, lying, fabricated, fictional, deceptive, denying, dishonest, irresponsible and bullshit state of being possible. It's an attempt to accuse the entire world of destroying oneself.

Another way to put it is that we are inside this dream which WE are dreaming, and then we turn around and attempt to claim that this dream - which is coming from us - suddenly has the ability to cause us, to decide for us what we are, to make us what we are, that we are born from it and according to its nature, that we inherit from it, that is has power over us, that it decides if we live (are born) or if and when we die, and now we are a completely powerless victim of it. That's the entire illusion of death. The suggestion that a dream that WE MADE UP, is willing against us and has taken over possession of the very mind that dreamed it in the first place.

Another word for this also is "level confusion". Every single aspect of the ego thought system is level confusion. It means that cause and effect have been reversed and what was just an effect seems to be causal and what was always causal is seen to be at its effect. This means that the lower level - the effect - now seems to turn around and inflict a deadly blow against the higher level that made it in the first place, thus reversing the levels and creating an 'upward' direction of causality.

This is actually nothing more than the attempt to say "I cause God". It is the authority problem. Death is the result of the authority problem. It's an attempt to say, I have a will which is stronger than God's and I am successfully willing that God be dead, or that God is at the effect of me, or I can change God, and God is my victim. This is the idea of sin made real, that we can "actually" sin against God and cause Him harm. When we attempt to do this, instead of God dying, WE DIE. Instead of God receiving the effects, WE receive them. And so death in form is actually an expression of the attempt to kill God, and to kill His Son.

And Jesus goes into this in the Course quite a bit. The body is used as a kind of "anchor" to associate the Son of God with a form which can APPEAR to die or go through suffering, so that we can play out a fictional sadistic story of being successful at torturing and killing God's Son. When our sense of identity as God's Son is associated or identified with the body, or bound to the body, this makes us cling to the body and then we appear to become vulnerable. Eventually the body suffers and becomes weak, because we are using it for attacking ourselves, and then the body dies. And what does our ego think is happening when the body dies? It thinks that we are *succeeding* in destroying the Son of God!. Symbolically anyway. So all death is a SACRIFICE of God's Son.

This is also why this universe that we dreamed up, is a "picture of the crucifixion of God's Son". It's an attempt to implement death, to associate God's son with the form of a body or bodies, and to then destroy those forms in order to act out this idea that God and His Son have been murdered. This is of course utter bullshit and a total lie, because God and His Son are IMMORTAL, and cannot be changed or destroyed or harmed in any way.

God has granted ETERNAL LIFE to all souls He Created and it is absolutely impossible for any soul to truly die or suffer or be sick or upset or unhappy in any way. At the core of your being you know that you are already as God created you, you have not changed since God created you, and you cannot change what God created. At the core of your being you have no authority problem and you know that death is absolutely impossible for you. And yet here we are, pretending to be bodies, stuck in an illusion, bad stuff seeming to happen from our unconscious mind making it seem like we didn't ask for it, yet we are doing it ALL to ourselves.

The secret to salvation is that you are but doing ALL of this to yourself. All of the suffering, all the sickness and disease, all the upsets and unhappiness, all the tragic sudden car accident and airplane crashes and food poisoning and wars and all the rest of it. It's all a massive fictional illusion to make it seem like you are not doing it to yourself - that you are not trying to sacrifice yourself or crucify yourself. But you ARE. It's YOU that is doing it. It is YOU that is giving your consent. It not only that, not just that you are saying to someone hey, I give you consent to come along and kill me so that it seems I didn't do it myself, it's that you actually DO IT YOURSELF.

ALL death is suicide. All of it. Every single person buried in the ground was a suicide. Even the people who "died of old age" committed suicide. All of the people who suffered from terminal illnesses committed suicide. Every single still birth, every tragedy of war crimes, every murder, every unexpected accident, absolutely all of it is CHOSEN. And not one single person had anything happen to them which they did not choose and did not participate in causing to happen.

This is the truth of the Course. This is what Jesus is teaching us, to be responsible for the POWER that we have to make anything happen, and to stop denying it and stop pretending to be victims. We are NOT at the effect of the world we see, the world is nothing but an effect. It has no power to make you ill or weak or afraid or upset in any way! You are invulnerable. You are immortal spirit!

So fundamentally, death is IMPOSSIBLE because you are immortal. Period. You cannot die. But you can pretend to die, or as the course says, you can try to associate your identity with things that appear to die. Such as the body, which is an illusion, and a wonderful way to make it appear that you are not choosing.

It is utterly impossible, in all cases, for someone to move towards death, without their mind having made the decision to use death to try to sacrifice themselves. In every single case, if sickness is showing up, if suffering is happening, if there is punishment occurring, if there is unfair victimhood, or you seem unfairly treated, or something is happening that *seems* you have no power over, it is because you have GIVEN it power over you and you have given AWAY your power TO it, to make IT have the power to seem to choose FOR you that you will suffer and die, so that you can keep your power a secret even unto yourself, and pretend that this is all happening against your will.

Death cannot even begin to happen without your participation. It cannot even begin to happen without your consent. It cannot even begin to happen without your mind doing something wrong and unnatural. Death is NOT natural. It is completely unnatural. Anything that dies is filled with lies. Death is not an exit from the dream either. It is a guarantee of reincarnation. It doesn't matter how much of a famous guru you are. If you still go through death, you are still denying God, are still at the effect of the world, are still putting in place a state of victimhood, are still rallying things against you, and are still believing that God's Son can be killed.

So do not think that death is some kind of option or some kind of thing which is acceptable or peaceful or loving or kind or a sign of success or a way out of dreaming or inevitable or something which just happens against your will. IT DOES NOT. It cannot happen AT ALL unless you are making significant mistakes and are trying to bring about a will against your own will, meaning your will is divided against itself, meaning you still have a split mind. The symptoms of all sickness and death cannot show up AT ALL unless there is something going wrong with your mind.

"A broken body is proof the mind has not been healed." This is absolutely 100% literal. If there is some kind of sign of damage or breakage or sickness in the body, it is because the mind is attempting to attack ITSELF. What you use the body for it will become to you - use it for attack and it will become weak and sick and die. Use it to bring the word of God (immortality) to those who have it not and it becomes holy and being holy it CANNOT be sick, NOR CAN IT DIE. This is pure ACIM teaching.

Death is failure. Death is denial. Death is a lie. Death is a mistake. Death is victimhood. Death is self hatred. Death is sacrifice. Death is illusion. Death is suffering. Death is reluctance to accept the truth. Death is a defense against the truth. Death is sickness. Death is level confusion. Death is a reversal of cause and effect. Death is the authority problem. Death is a belief in the justified consequences of real sin. Death is absolutely the OPPOSITE of everything the course is teaching, everything true about God and His creation, and is a total reversal of sanity. Do not see it as normal or natural or an graceful exit.

Jesus is teaching us to stop killing ourselves. To accept immortality. To demonstrate immortality. To show the world that death is impossible. Jesus was crucified (by his own will) and came back and manifested another body to demonstrate that the MIND makes the body and can make another, to prove that the mind is completely NOT at the effect of the body or the world, and therefore has escaped death entirely. It is proof of immortality. Jesus overcame death. He wants us to overcome death, not give in to it. Not anticipate it or fear it or give it power or expect it or make it into a religion or worship it or put it on a pedestal like some kind of salvation.

Only the creations of light are real. Nothing real can be threatened. What is real is immortal. Spirit is is a state of grace forever. Heaven and earth are total opposites. Heaven is a state of eternal life. There is no death in God's Son.

There is no death! The Son of God is free! The Son of God can only be free if it is completely experientially true that nothing can happen against His will. And it IS true. There is no will but God's. Eternal life is GUARANTEED.

This is a central ACIM teaching, that death is not "normal" or "natural", but rather a choice, and that if you do not make the choice, death does not happen. It literally speaks to the real possibility of immortality, and the impossibility of death.

Think about this. Death cannot happen without you in some way being victimized. Something has to "happen to you". And that means, you are at the effect of the world in some way. That there is some kind of cause outside of you which somehow seemed to have power over you, which overpowered you, and did something against your will.

The only way that this kind of scenario can occur, is if there is something seriously mistaken about your mind. Your mind has to be seeing itself as a victim. It has to be believing it is affected by an illusion. It has to be playing the part of victim and of being attacked. It also has to be using the world, or people in the world, as scapegoats. Without the ability to accuse the world of causing the death against your will, the death cannot happen.

A key part of this is that even when it appears that death is happening against your will, even if you do choose it and play along with the victim role and being affected by something external, even then you are still giving full consent. You are still involved. Your mind is actually participating in laying down life and becoming un-willing to live. This is not passive.

The mind cannot ever be passive. The mind is always active and creating. If the mind chooses to have a sickness, the mind is still choosing the sickness and the mind is still putting the sickness there. The sickness isn't just happening on its own. And when the mind chooses not to put the sickness there the sickness disappears.

Even if it may *appear* at the time as though the sickness is happening outside the scope of your choice, or beyond what you can control, or that you were not even the one who chose it, the truth is that you did choose it, you put it in place yourself, it is you who are maintaining it, and it cannot even continue showing up without your consent.

So you have to realize what death is. Death is only "possible" as a state where our mind has something seriously fucked up about how it is seeing itself. It can only come about by the mind deciding to pretend that it is being seriously affected. Jesus describes it as a vain attempt to make no choice at all - really the disownership of choice or the attempt to be completely irresponsible for your existence.

In the activity or implementation of dying and death, the mind is actively choosing to pretend that it has nothing to do with living, nothing to do with what happens, and nothing to do with the circumstances that are arising. It is faking it. It is going under-cover, putting on a tremendous performance as if everyone and everything else is causal other than itself, and that it is purely an effect.

So what death really is, is an attempt to NOT be causal at all, to have no power, to appear to be making no choice, and to paint this picture of stuff happening seemingly against your will. But it's such an extraordinary lie, such a cover-up, that everyone seems to believe it. All the fingers will point in the direction of "cause of death" or "why they died" to explain how this death came about. But this will only explain the manner in which the death seemed to "happen", it will not in any way implicate the person as having been the author of these events, or of being the one who made it happen to themselves.

Death is a state of extreme lying. It is the most dishonest condition possible. It is a state of not only denying God, denying the unchangeable fact of eternal life, and denying that nothing can happen to you against your will (because that is God's Will and God has given you a will which cannot be affected).

If life seems to be degrading, and diminishing, and slipping away, and the external world seems to be mounting a successful attack, and the body seems to have a mind of its own, and circumstances appear to be transpiring against the person, and it starts to look AS IF it is unfair and unchosen and the person is not doing ANYTHING to contribute to this condition, that's because the illusion is INCREASING and the person is moving further away from truth.

Death is a complete reversal of sanity, a total reversal of the proper functioning of the mind, and a complete reversal of cause and effect. It places all power and will and choice and causality as outside of oneself, making oneself entirely an "effect" of something separate from oneself.

Death actually is an attempt to claim that God is external, that God is separate, that God has a will which opposes your own, that God is to blame for destroying you, that you have no power to stop Him, and that this is all happening to you entirely against your will. In other words, it is an attempt to claim that God is the cause of all death, and not the cause of life.

It then will appear that anyone who dies does not want to die. It will appear as if the person had no say in the matter, as if life just threw them a shit sandwich. It will seem as if they are being dragged kicking and screaming against their will into the firey pits of hell as if having absolutely no power to do anything about it. This is the most grandiose, lying, fabricated, fictional, deceptive, denying, dishonest, irresponsible and bullshit state of being possible. It's an attempt to accuse the entire world of destroying oneself.

Another way to put it is that we are inside this dream which WE are dreaming, and then we turn around and attempt to claim that this dream - which is coming from us - suddenly has the ability to cause us, to decide for us what we are, to make us what we are, that we are born from it and according to its nature, that we inherit from it, that is has power over us, that it decides if we live (are born) or if and when we die, and now we are a completely powerless victim of it. That's the entire illusion of death. The suggestion that a dream that WE MADE UP, is willing against us and has taken over possession of the very mind that dreamed it in the first place.

Another word for this also is "level confusion". Every single aspect of the ego thought system is level confusion. It means that cause and effect have been reversed and what was just an effect seems to be causal and what was always causal is seen to be at its effect. This means that the lower level - the effect - now seems to turn around and inflict a deadly blow against the higher level that made it in the first place, thus reversing the levels and creating an 'upward' direction of causality.

This is actually nothing more than the attempt to say "I cause God". It is the authority problem. Death is the result of the authority problem. It's an attempt to say, I have a will which is stronger than God's and I am successfully willing that God be dead, or that God is at the effect of me, or I can change God, and God is my victim. This is the idea of sin made real, that we can "actually" sin against God and cause Him harm. When we attempt to do this, instead of God dying, WE DIE. Instead of God receiving the effects, WE receive them. And so death in form is actually an expression of the attempt to kill God, and to kill His Son.

And Jesus goes into this in the Course quite a bit. The body is used as a kind of "anchor" to associate the Son of God with a form which can APPEAR to die or go through suffering, so that we can play out a fictional sadistic story of being successful at torturing and killing God's Son. When our sense of identity as God's Son is associated or identified with the body, or bound to the body, this makes us cling to the body and then we appear to become vulnerable. Eventually the body suffers and becomes weak, because we are using it for attacking ourselves, and then the body dies. And what does our ego think is happening when the body dies? It thinks that we are *succeeding* in destroying the Son of God!. Symbolically anyway. So all death is a SACRIFICE of God's Son.

This is also why this universe that we dreamed up, is a "picture of the crucifixion of God's Son". It's an attempt to implement death, to associate God's son with the form of a body or bodies, and to then destroy those forms in order to act out this idea that God and His Son have been murdered. This is of course utter bullshit and a total lie, because God and His Son are IMMORTAL, and cannot be changed or destroyed or harmed in any way.

God has granted ETERNAL LIFE to all souls He Created and it is absolutely impossible for any soul to truly die or suffer or be sick or upset or unhappy in any way. At the core of your being you know that you are already as God created you, you have not changed since God created you, and you cannot change what God created. At the core of your being you have no authority problem and you know that death is absolutely impossible for you. And yet here we are, pretending to be bodies, stuck in an illusion, bad stuff seeming to happen from our unconscious mind making it seem like we didn't ask for it, yet we are doing it ALL to ourselves.

The secret to salvation is that you are but doing ALL of this to yourself. All of the suffering, all the sickness and disease, all the upsets and unhappiness, all the tragic sudden car accident and airplane crashes and food poisoning and wars and all the rest of it. It's all a massive fictional illusion to make it seem like you are not doing it to yourself - that you are not trying to sacrifice yourself or crucify yourself. But you ARE. It's YOU that is doing it. It is YOU that is giving your consent. It not only that, not just that you are saying to someone hey, I give you consent to come along and kill me so that it seems I didn't do it myself, it's that you actually DO IT YOURSELF.

ALL death is suicide. All of it. Every single person buried in the ground was a suicide. Even the people who "died of old age" committed suicide. All of the people who suffered from terminal illnesses committed suicide. Every single still birth, every tragedy of war crimes, every murder, every unexpected accident, absolutely all of it is CHOSEN. And not one single person had anything happen to them which they did not choose and did not participate in causing to happen.

This is the truth of the Course. This is what Jesus is teaching us, to be responsible for the POWER that we have to make anything happen, and to stop denying it and stop pretending to be victims. We are NOT at the effect of the world we see, the world is nothing but an effect. It has no power to make you ill or weak or afraid or upset in any way! You are invulnerable. You are immortal spirit!

So fundamentally, death is IMPOSSIBLE because you are immortal. Period. You cannot die. But you can pretend to die, or as the course says, you can try to associate your identity with things that appear to die. Such as the body, which is an illusion, and a wonderful way to make it appear that you are not choosing.

It is utterly impossible, in all cases, for someone to move towards death, without their mind having made the decision to use death to try to sacrifice themselves. In every single case, if sickness is showing up, if suffering is happening, if there is punishment occurring, if there is unfair victimhood, or you seem unfairly treated, or something is happening that *seems* you have no power over, it is because you have GIVEN it power over you and you have given AWAY your power TO it, to make IT have the power to seem to choose FOR you that you will suffer and die, so that you can keep your power a secret even unto yourself, and pretend that this is all happening against your will.

Death cannot even begin to happen without your participation. It cannot even begin to happen without your consent. It cannot even begin to happen without your mind doing something wrong and unnatural. Death is NOT natural. It is completely unnatural. Anything that dies is filled with lies. Death is not an exit from the dream either. It is a guarantee of reincarnation. It doesn't matter how much of a famous guru you are. If you still go through death, you are still denying God, are still at the effect of the world, are still putting in place a state of victimhood, are still rallying things against you, and are still believing that God's Son can be killed.

So do not think that death is some kind of option or some kind of thing which is acceptable or peaceful or loving or kind or a sign of success or a way out of dreaming or inevitable or something which just happens against your will. IT DOES NOT. It cannot happen AT ALL unless you are making significant mistakes and are trying to bring about a will against your own will, meaning your will is divided against itself, meaning you still have a split mind. The symptoms of all sickness and death cannot show up AT ALL unless there is something going wrong with your mind.

"A broken body is proof the mind has not been healed." This is absolutely 100% literal. If there is some kind of sign of damage or breakage or sickness in the body, it is because the mind is attempting to attack ITSELF. What you use the body for it will become to you - use it for attack and it will become weak and sick and die. Use it to bring the word of God (immortality) to those who have it not and it becomes holy and being holy it CANNOT be sick, NOR CAN IT DIE. This is pure ACIM teaching.

Death is failure. Death is denial. Death is a lie. Death is a mistake. Death is victimhood. Death is self hatred. Death is sacrifice. Death is illusion. Death is suffering. Death is reluctance to accept the truth. Death is a defense against the truth. Death is sickness. Death is level confusion. Death is a reversal of cause and effect. Death is the authority problem. Death is a belief in the justified consequences of real sin. Death is absolutely the OPPOSITE of everything the course is teaching, everything true about God and His creation, and is a total reversal of sanity. Do not see it as normal or natural or an graceful exit.

Jesus is teaching us to stop killing ourselves. To accept immortality. To demonstrate immortality. To show the world that death is impossible. Jesus was crucified (by his own will) and came back and manifested another body to demonstrate that the MIND makes the body and can make another, to prove that the mind is completely NOT at the effect of the body or the world, and therefore has escaped death entirely. It is proof of immortality. Jesus overcame death. He wants us to overcome death, not give in to it. Not anticipate it or fear it or give it power or expect it or make it into a religion or worship it or put it on a pedestal like some kind of salvation.

Only the creations of light are real. Nothing real can be threatened. What is real is immortal. Spirit is is a state of grace forever. Heaven and earth are total opposites. Heaven is a state of eternal life. There is no death in God's Son.

There is no death! The Son of God is free! The Son of God can only be free if it is completely experientially true that nothing can happen against His will. And it IS true. There is no will but God's. Eternal life is GUARANTEED.

When you see yourself as lacking in some way, whether it be that you're tired and spent, nothing left to give, stressed out, overwhelmed or whatever, you'll see yourself as "in need".

The world will now start to appear to you as being needy. It will seem other people are being needy and trying to take from you. That they are being selfish. They seem to demand attention and want something from you and you seem not to be able to give it, because you think you don't have it.

And so then you'll become angry and crabby, because why the hell are these insensitive selfish people demanding my energy when I don't have enough for myself?

But people will appear this way only because you're actually seeing yourself this way. By believing you are lacking, YOU are being needy, and woe betide that anyone else be needy at the same time.

Now, in your neediness, you are seeing yourself as needing to TAKE from them in order to fulfill your lack. And if they too are being needy, they are trying to take from you. And this produces a sucking inward on both your parts, which is a withdrawal on both your parts, which is producing a gap of separation between you and increasing the war.

In neediness we'll blame other people easily for seeming to be "so needy right now", so insensitive to your plight and so oblivious to your lack. How could they not recognize that you're the one who needs?

Instead of admitting that you want THEM To fulfill your needs, in an unspoken way, you are now angry that your hidden desire to be served is not being attended to by them. They seem not to be following through in supporting you. And now they're being all "me me me" at the exact wrong time.

Thus your desire to have others fulfill your needs, which is all part of your perception that you are lacking, becomes projected or mapped onto them as if THEY are the ones who are being needy and taking selfishly, and not you. You thus deny your neediness and pretend not to be needy, yet are still upset by their lack of supply.

What needs to happen is YOU need to move into the state where you do not have needs any more. And at first this will appear to mean you need to "get" your needs met. Typically by others or some external salvation or pleasure. But so long as the dynamic of perceiving yourself lacking is maintained, you'll expect that what someone or something else does TO you, for you, is the only way that your needs are going to be met.

This needs to be moved beyond, so that you realize the only reason you think you NEED them at all, is because you are seeing yourself as lacking. Perhaps your own perception of yourself as lacking is the real issue here. And maybe if you would not see yourself as lacking, you'd see yourself as whole and complete, needing nothing, therefore having everything to give.

And so there is the key. When you are needy, it's because you do not want to give. You are in need because you are unwilling to give. You are in need because you don't want to give to others what you yourself need to receive. And yet the only way TO receive it is to give it. The ego says, no, if you give, you're going to lack. Spirit says, if you give, you will be supplied.

And so as you step out in faith to give even more, strangely suddenly you find your needs are being met. Maybe your tiredness suddenly vanishes. Maybe your stress melts. Because you decided to adopt the role of doing God's will and loving instead of attacking yourself.

As you say, hey, I'm going to put Spirit first and act as if I have everything, Heaven comes in to support you and gives you strength. A willingness to put aside your needs in the trust that Spirit will back you up and give you the strength to go on, you might be surprised at the supernatural effect of all your limitations melting away.

A miracle worker is not in need because they recognize God is their supply, His strength is their own, and they cannot be lacking when they are doing His work. Unplugging yourself from Him is the only cause of a sense of lack in the first place. Is it the many forms of needs that you need to meet, such as food or energy or sleep, or is it God that you need?

If all states of neediness are really the absence of God or love, then the presence of God or love will fulfill the lack and remove the need. Or in essence, you cannot exist without God. You need nothing when you have everything. Open up to receive God's support and all your separate little made-up needs fall away. His light is all that's missing. Without it you ARE in lack. But with it you have the power to live forever.

"He seems to be whatever meets the needs you think you have. But He is not deceived when you perceive your self entrapped in needs you do not have."

The ego... what we call ego, is just insanity in our minds. The only reason we keep identifying with/as it and listening to it and trying to be it, is because we do not RECOGNIZE that it is insane. We believe it is the sane truth. We believe in being egotistical, but we don't realize that's what we're doing. We think it's something else, and are deceived.

You cannot fight against the ego because fighting is itself egoic. But you can rise out of it when you simply recognize you no longer WANT IT. And all that requires is that you recognize it for what it is - that it IS insane.

If you do not realize it is insane, you'll believe it makes total sense and will side with it and want to support it. Because everyone always sides with whatever they see as true on any level. But the egos falseness - or rather, the fact that it is part of an insane system, once recognised as insane, reveals how it does NOT make sense, and then you can no longer regard it as true.

To get out of the ego, or dis-identify from it, then, all you really have to do is realize its nature - that it is so contradictory it makes no sense. To see the truth about it, rather than seeing what it says about the truth. Kind of like the hidden facts being revealed, a liar finally shown to be telling lies out in the open, a "culprit" if you will finally unmasked.

You won't support it or be it or side with it or want it or love it or regard it as your SELF, if you can step out of the insanity long enough to be in SANITY, or to "see", in the light, so that the full picture of its nature is revealed. You'll just realize this cannot be true, and it cannot be you, and you'll just drop support for it.

You'll no longer believe it or buy into its lies because you've finally seen the truth, and will never trust the bullshit again. Then it's game over for the ego, which never really existed to begin with. No one can WANT madness if they recognize it AS madness, because everyone ALWAYS wants the truth. It's only when truth is misplaced and misperceived and associated with un-true things that we get into trouble.

"NO-ONE wants madness, nor does anyone cling to his madness if he sees that this is what it IS. What PROTECTS madness is the belief THAT IT IS TRUE. It is the FUNCTION of insanity to TAKE THE PLACE of truth. It must be seen AS truth, to be believed. And, if it IS the truth, then must its opposite, which was the truth before, be madness now. Such a reversal, COMPLETELY turned around, with madness sanity, illusions true, attack a kindness, hatred love, and murder benediction, IS the goal the laws of chaos serve. These are the means by which the laws of God APPEAR to be reversed. Here do the laws of sin APPEAR to hold love captive, and let sin go free." UrT23C15

When considering whether this world is really a fixed objective reality, and whether your mind has any power over anything, it's worth considering the case of people with multiple personality disorders.

97% of people with multiple personalities develop it following extreme abuse or trauma. They develop often several or even hundreds of personalities - minds - seemingly living in the same body, and they switch between them.

The really fascinating part is that when a new personality or mind comes into control of the body, the body changes in dramatic ways that defy all medical science.

While one personality may have diabetes for example, when another personality takes over the body no longer has diabetes. Or while one personality has a severe allergy, another does not. The shape of the face changes as well.

There are even cases where the color of the eyes changes based on the personality, the speech patterns change as though the vocal chords themselves are altered, scars on the skin appear and disappear, chronic conditions appear to switch on and off.

It shows that the mind has tremendous power over the body and influence over its state, conditions, and appearance. As the course says:

"The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions which are responsible for the body's condition."

It becomes apparent that the only reason we seem to not "notice" this happening with most people is because most people's minds are relatively stable - or shall we say, chronic and fixed in their belief patterns. So they continually project almost the same body states all the time. And since these don't often change, it makes it seem like there is no causation from mind to body at all.

We could re-word that to say that, when a person has a long-term ongoing belief or unhealed grievance, they project this onto the body over a long period of time, manifesting as chronic disease and lasting conditions.

It's only when significant changes take place in the mind, or different minds or personalities come through, that you see dramatic changes in the physical form. And this then reveals just how much mind is constantly in a state of projecting and altering the body image. If you could get the average person to switch on and off certain deeply held beliefs or 'identities', you'd be astonished at the changes it has on the body.

It also reveals that if you do change your mind and heal the mind in significant ways, the body will dramatically change as well. Symptoms of disease and sickness can switch off in an instant. We can even go so far as to say that limbs can regrow, body parts can regenerate, and profound miracles can occur. And when you change your mind, the whole world must change.

"If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind MUST BE STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this."

"Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly."

When there is a lack of awareness, ie awareness if blocked in some way, there is an inability to see the whole picture.

This "blindness" leaves a person with only a limited scope of ability to access information.

It does not matter how much information a person has. Everyone believes that they are fully aware of everything even if they are not. And as a result, will use whatever information they can access to decide what things mean or to discern why they are happening.

Not having all the facts leads to false conclusions. That is inevitable.

If you do not see the way that you are choosing, and what you have chosen, and what you have put in place, and why, you will be convinced instead that it must have been some external circumstance outside your power or control that has determined what you are experiencing.

This will automatically lead to the perception that decisions are being made against your will and against your interests. And it will appear that someone or something else is to blame for putting it in place.

This state of perceived powerlessness will render you a victim, in your own eyes, and this will appear to be a completely rational explanation, given the belief that you are aware of everything, even if you are not.

This will then make it seem completely justified to be angry at the apparent fact that someone or something else is limiting you, imprisoning you, choosing for you, or making things happen that you seem not to want consciously.

This anger will come across as frustration and a seemingly sincere, perhaps even innocent desire to not have these bad things happening to you. It will seem as if you have no say in the matter, did not choose them, do not want them, and cannot do anything about them.

All of this behavior is completely understandable given that you simply are not aware of all the information. Anyone who cannot see the whole truth is guaranteed to come to false conclusions, and those conclusions will appear completely justified and make sense to the person.

Anything which challenges those conclusions will appear to be insane or an attack, simply because the person is convinced that they know everything there is to know and have all the information necessary to decide for themselves why things are happening.

And yet, because the mind is unaware of vital information, especially the fact that the person is choosing absolutely everything that happens, the person does not see or accept or recognize that they have done this to themselves. Nor do they see that they have any choice in the matter, that they are contributing to the situation, that there is a freedom of choice, or that there is a possible way out of the suffering.

Instead, they will find blame to pin on some other plausible cause outside of themselves, maintaining their state of victimhood and perpetuating the suffering, yet seemingly with a simultaneous sense of unwillingness that this be happening. They will be in a state of contradiction because they themselves are choosing the suffering while simultaneously claiming not to want it. And while the state of unawareness is maintained, they will remain paralyzed and powerless to do anything to free themselves.

The only way to regain a sense of freedom, hope, power, and ability to cease the suffering and solve the situation, is to increase the level of awareness. The mind must become more aware that it is choosing everything it is experiencing.

It must become aware that it did choose to suffer in every way that suffering came, and that it itself put in place all of the situations and circumstances and relationships and dynamics which seemed to occur. Ultimately the mind must recognize that it did all of this to itself, that there is no external cause of any of its problems, that no-one else is to blame, and that simply because it chose this it can choose again.

The only hope there is lies in the recognition that you do have the power to choose and to be free, simply because it was you who created your own suffering. You can change your mind, and it will change your experience. Hope lies in increasing the awareness, honesty and willingness to accept responsibility, for having created whatever is occurring. Because if you created it, you can create something else. If you did not create it, you are permanently stuck, constantly a victim, and unwilling to accept that you play any part in why you are unhappy.

Those who are "asleep" at the wheel, continue to choose suffering unconsciously, outside of awareness, and are then not aware that they are doing so. They can therefore be forgiven for seeming to act the way they do, or to believe the way they do about external powers, because they simply are not aware of the whole story. Anyone who is asleep is guaranteed to experience the same sense of unwanted suffering, because they do not see that their own will is actually choosing experiences. And so the experiences seem to come out of nowhere, from beyond awareness, and act upon the seemingly conscious self which perceives them as coming from outside of the scope of itself.

Identity is always tied to the scope of awareness. If you are unaware of your whole mind, your sense of self is limited to what you are conscious of. As you lift away the blocks to awareness, your sense of identity will expand automatically. It will become more inclusive of the rest of your mind. Your awareness will increase and eventually you will discover that you are immortal spirit, whole and complete and still as God created you, having never really suffered or separated from God at all.

The only reason a person thinks that the world is out to get them is because they are out to get themselves. The only reason life seems unfair is because they are choosing unconsciously and outside of conscious awareness, therefore seemingly outside of the person's sense of who they are. From beyond the borders of conscious awareness, seemingly disconnected will power seems to force things to happen which the disconnected conscious self does not see itself as choosing. And so victimhood is inevitable.

This is why Jesus teaches to forgive others because they do not know what they are doing. They literally are in a state of mistakenness because they simply do not see or are not aware of the fact that they are causing everything to happen. When they do become aware that they are at cause not at effect, they will simply cease to make those mistakes. This mistakes arise automatically from blocked awareness. And so unblocking awareness is the solution which will end all suffering.

When awareness has no blocks, the mind can be consciously aware of the whole of self, plus the whole of God, plus all causes, and now sees everything in its correct perspective. Everything then makes proper sense, and lines up with truth and reality and the correct order of the levels. In this mind there is no suffering and no choosing against oneself because it then becomes clearly obvious that to do so would directly attack oneself, which is obviously insane. No-one in their right mind would choose against themselves. Those who are choosing against themselves are not in their right mind.

No-one is a victim without being unaware of what they are doing to themselves. All attack is self attack. All suffering is self inflicted. Once we stop attacking ourselves we will realize we were incapable of ever being attacked by any other cause, there is no other cause, and therefore we are free from attack and suffering forever.

At first we believe physical sight is perception. And everything the body's eyes look upon is taken as real. And thus we learn that the world appears to be an inherently bad place. Regardless of trying to be optimistic or positive, bad shit happens frequently. And people seem to die.

Assuming that everything we see is real, we might not realize that there is a flexible component to perception. Our mind gets to actually decide what to "make of" the images that the physical eyes see. It categorizes them, projects meaning onto them, and decide what they are for.

This is because only the mind really sees, and it is looking upon the images the body shows to it of the world, as pictures of reflected photons bouncing off blockages. And the mind can decide what this means and what to project onto them, choosing what to see in them, God or ego.

What this means is the world you initially see is a combination of "the physical world" and the overlaid projected junk in your mind. The dirt on your lens. The baggage and self attack and sense of sin and guilt which you see in the world as if it's outside of you.

What you have to learn, is that what the world is, and the sense of it being a negative hellish place, are two different things. It's easy to hate the world, be angry at it, mistrust it, fear it, and want to escape it.

You can easily get into a mindset that if you will get away from "that bad place" through some spiritual means, you'll be better off. You can judge and demonize the world and decide it is a hell you want nothing to do with. But this isn't escape. It really is just making it real to yourself, which keeps you trapped.

The real solution is to develop true vision, which allows you to look upon whatever the world "is", without your projections of baggage. Without your distortions of meaning. Without your judgements. Without your sin and guilt seen in it.

But to do that, you have to in a way give "the world" the benefit of the doubt, or a kind of second chance. A possibility of redemption. Because somehow you have to be able to get to where you forgive the world, where you shine a light of love towards it, and where it no longer appears to threaten or upset you.

It may have taken a long time to build up resentment towards the world, which bound what the world is to a negative, false perception of the world. And in this confusion you thought the world was inherently a bad place. But now you have to be open to the idea that the world is not inherently bad. That there is another way to see it.

This entails the recognition that if you will change the component of your mind that gives meaning to the world, you actually can redefine what it means to you. Instead of meaning hell, or indicating sin, or proving guilt, or producing fear, the world can be seen in a much different light.

What the world IS, isn't what you see in false perception. That's the unforgiven world. That's Earth with your self hate and belief in sin projected onto it. It actually makes what the world IS appear to be a hellish place.

What the world IS, is nothing more than a simple thin veil of illusions injected in-between you and yourself, or you and Christ and God. Kind of like a wall, or as Jesus calls it "the granite block of sin." It takes on various forms of error, and depicts sin and attack and guilt. But without the meaning of "sinful", "attacking", "guilty" projected onto it, what's left?

The world is really just a thin illusory world, a whisp of smoke, a faint remnant of an idea of separation, and a strange area of nothingness pretending to be something. It does not have any meaning. This is why Jesus tells you that the world you see is a meaningless world which God did not create. It is devoid of meaning, in its false-viewed form, because love is the only real meaning.

As you forgive it, as you lift away guilt from yourself, as you have no sin to project onto it, as you recognize your own innocence, the dark heavy shadow of guilt which makes the world seem SOLID, is lifted away from it. Like a heavy curtain or a thick wall, it thins out and lightens. And eventually without any judgement upon it at all, it is recognized only as a light veil of illusions swirling around.

It is not positive, or negative. It is not alive, or dead. It is not really anything. The world, the veil, being illusions, is nothing at all. It is not loving, it is not holy. It is not even really there. And eventually when Christ Vision is fully accepted it vanishes completely.

Just prior to that, however, you reach "the forgiven world." A forgiven world is always an illusory world, because forgiveness overlooks illusions, not reality. It looks beyond bodies. It looks toward the light. So as you forgive the world you are learning to look past it to the light of the real world. And this causes the world to appear thinner and lighter and less burdened with guilt and the reality of sin.

It should over time look less and less sinful, less and less serious, less and less threatening, less and less solid even. Christ Vision is practically similar to having x-ray vision. It literally bypasses matter, as the spiritual eye can see anywhere and with no regard for distance or obstacles. It is not blinded by perception of form and its sight does not stop at physical surfaces. It is not deceived or blocked by what they appear to be. It sees through them.

As the world becomes forgiven, due to you forgiving yourself, what used to be "world + negativity", becomes "world + holiness". Your holiness or the meaning of love, is projected onto it. It is seen WITH love. This does not make it love, it is still nothing. And in fact this love causes it to disappear even more. But if you do see it still, just short of going home to God, it will appear beautiful and lovely in its sparkling forgiven state.

And so what once seemed like a world of inherent hell, reflecting hell and showing signs of attack and death everywhere, your view or perspective on it changes to one of spiritual love. And from that vantage point of true perception, there is no longer a belief in real sin projected onto it. And being made of sin, it is therefore recognized as fake sin, and not sin at all. The world is simply recognized as false, not sinful. And just as it is about to be seen as a perfect reflection of heaven, it disappears, revealing Christ.

And then you go home.

There is no world.

The entire content of the physical world is happening within the split mind of the ego. It is all happening inside the one mind of the ego, shared collectively by all individuals within it.

Every event that takes place always has some form of separation involved, where there is a cause and a separate effect, a victim and victimizer, some kind of opponents, enemies, conflict.

Every role, every side, every persuasion of someone being for or against or right or wrong, all of them are part of the ego split mind.

The ego mind is a vast mind spanning this entire universe. It includes all planets and stars and galaxies. Every single event that transpires is an expression of self attack.

In self-attack, a single mind is at war with itself. It has divisions within itself which have split it apart and now, what used to be a single will has become multiple wills. And each of these wills is slightly different and has a different focus or goal. And none of them agree with each other, and so all of them are in competition. Chaos is the result (see the laws of chaos in the Course).

This gives rise to all manner of illusions across a vast spectrum throughout the world and throughout all history. In every war there appear to be two sides, the good and the bad, the oppressor and the oppressed, the attacker and the attacked. And yet both of those sides are happening inside the one ego mind. The one ego mind is playing against itself, is at war with itself, and is both its own attacker and its own victim.

When you do not see this and you fall for the illusion that one of the sides is better than the other side, one of the viewpoints is more justified or righteous, one of the parties is better or worse, or somehow there is an inbalance or difference between them, you have become fooled by the ego's illusions. You are misperceiving and are now experiencing the ego.

There is a line in the Course which says literally, "The world IS false perception." It does not say that the world is perceived falsely by individuals. It says there is one mind, the one ego mind, which contains the entire physical universe, within which there is a false perception happening. That means there are illusions appearing, there is misunderstanding, there is division and separation, there are multiple wills, and now there APPEARS to be many different sides all who do not quite agree with each other. And some of those sides now seem to be defending various positions or opinions, and yet ALL of those sides are part of the ego's state of misperception.

The world, the physical world, IS mis-perception taking place within the one ego mind. The world, the illusion of a world appearing, with all of its events and people, is actually a picture in a single large mind, where that mind is hallucinating, and is experiencing self-attack, and is having a major war with itself. This is why the Course says that the world is a "picture of the crucifixion of God's Son" - an envisioning within God's Son of what it would be like if He were destroying himself.

Everything in this physical universe is at war with everything else. For particles of matter to even appear to exist there has to be difference and conflict, to allow there to be a fluctuation of some kind, which creates a localized point in spacetime where something shows up to demonstrate that what is true there is not true elsewhere.

If we are in the business of correcting perception, which the Course very much advocates, then we need to realize that this correction of perception cannot JUST take place within your little ego mind within your little ego body. Your little ego mind is only a TINY part of the entire ego mind. There is vast mis-perception occuring in and AS the entire world itself. THAT MIND, that large mind, which is dreaming the whole world, is mis-perceiving and experiencing self-attack all the time. THAT MIND needs to receive perceptual correction, beyond your own little PIECE of that mind receiving correction.

There is no world, by the way.

When you wake up to the `limits` of your own personal separate ego little mind, confined to a body still and subject still to the laws of the world, such as death and physics and biological processes and so on, and also spacetime itself, you have corrected the perception of a PART of the ego mind, but you have not corrected the grander perception of the entire ego mind, which is still hallucinating a universe-scale war against itself. This is the difference between waking up in the dream and having the war still wage all around you, versus waking up FROM the dream and ENDING THE WAR WITH YOURSELF, which means ENDING THE ILLUSORY UNIVERSE.

If there is a leaf on a tree which is not receiving quite as much sunlight today because there is another leaf above it which is blocking the light, this is a WAR on that leaf and will "cause" it to die off more quickly. If you accelerate what takes place underground as tree roots look for food, you will see that they literally fight with each other and try to fend each other off to secure ownership of food sources. The trees are at war with each other. When there is a cloud in the sky, blocking the sun, that is a war on everything beneath the cloud. I'm not kidding.

This entire universe is a state of war, a state of conflict, a state of self-attack. The one mind is dreaming of what it is like to attack itself and kill itself. It is a dream of dying and death. It's a desert where starved and thirsty creatures come to DIE, having hated a while. Do not glorify one little part of this world over another - that's still part of the ego thought system.

You do not escape this dream of death until you are able to completely transcend all of the laws of this universe and become supernaturally miraculous. You do not escape it by taking a side or seeing one thing as better or worse than another. You do not escape it by falling for the oldest trick in the book, which is that one thing is more spiritual or worthy or special or better or worse or more righteous or more justified or more ego or less ego than something else. EVERYTHING IN THIS WORLD IS AN ILLUSION OF SEPARATION.

This entire world is a mis-perception, an hallucination, happening in the mind of the One Son of God. It is a vast ego delusion, where every single role or side that can be taken "against" another is taken, and all sides and all roles are played simultaneously by that one mind. NO-ONE is more justified than another, and no side that anyone takes is better or more righteous than another. All victims, all victimizers, all opposition, all enemies, those who appear innocent, those who appear guilty, it is ALL part of the same ONE MIND PRETENDING that it is multiple individual selves with different opinions. This is also why no-one's opinion matters to the truth.

Perpetrators of suffering and war and violence and murder and death are just as much a part of the ego dream as those who seem to receive those effects. Both sides are a team. Both of them need each other. Both of them depend on each other to exist. Both of them must exist together in order to exist at all. Look at the whole of the mind - the universal mind - the one mind. Look at what it is doing to itself, within itself. It's beating itself up. It's pretending to put on a performance where one part of itself attacks another part and pretends it doesn't know it's doing it. This is the illusion we need to learn to overlook. This is what forgiveness must teach us to see past and not fall for or be hemmed in by.

There is no world here. it's just one mind's dream of hurting itself. This is the CENTRAL THOUGHT the Course is attempting to teach. That there literally, right in your fucking face literally, IS NO WORLD. This world we seem to live in and on is NOT REALLY THERE. It's a lie. It's a big fat illusion floating in the one mind. It is mis-perception of Self, and mis-perception of God. It's an attempt to destroy who you are. It is the crucifixion of God's Son, of which Jesus's crucifixion on the cross was just a reflection or symbol within a symbol.

There is no world. Can you handle the truth?

"What He (Holy Spirit) enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them."

Heaven's reality is governed by the laws of God. These laws are unlimited and impose no limits. They enable to be possible anything and everything that can happen. And what can happen must happen and has happened. And these laws cannot be broken because they are the will of God.

On Earth, however, the world seems to be governed by a second set of laws, which are laws of limitation and conditionality. Laws which appear to be separated out into many separate laws. Laws of gravity and space and time and forces and quantum energies. Laws which allegedly govern and form the foundation of this whole "reality".

"These are the means by which the laws of God APPEAR to be reversed. Here do the laws of sin APPEAR to hold love captive, and let sin go free." "The laws of chaos govern ALL illusions. Their forms conflict, making it SEEM quite possible to value some above the others."

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

But these laws are completely fictional. They are a layer of lies laid on top of heaven in an attempt to obstruct it and deny it. They are an enforcement of an idea of being separate and of separate things having separate interactions. It leads to the illusion of physical matter and of bodies and worlds. But all of these laws are artificial and secondary to what is real.

What this means is that someone who is in touch with the real laws of God, can break every law of physics. Someone who is in a position prior to the making of the fictional laws of space and time, has access behind-the-scenes to adjusting and manipulating those laws. If the very laws of the world themselves can be adjusted at will, then all physical objects and happenings can be overridden.

When this happens, the world's laws will appear to be "broken", and what seems to be impossible will become possible. The fact is that what seems to be possible in this world, is a very limited range of possibilities. It is not unlimited possibility. One thing has to happen in order for another to happen. Two specific materials have to come together in order for specific reactions to happen. There are fundamental low-level rules which seem more basic but always they are laws of limitation.

Even the basic laws of space and time are laws of limitation. The idea that something has to be located in one place and not another, is a limitation. That two things can't be one thing, or one thing can't be in two places. These are limitations.

We have become very accustomed to living in a realm of limitation and accepting it as the entire scope of freedom and possibility. But in the big picture, this world IS a very limited world, and even space and time and mass and materials are forms of confinement and lack and scarcity and littleness. And all of these limits impose NO limit at all on the infinite unlimited power of God and his children.

"For it is YOUR will to learn aright, and NOTHING can oppose the will of God's Son. His learning is as unlimited as HE is."

There is a suitable analogy for this. In computers now, we have 3D models of environments and worlds. Virtual reality games and so on. The designers of these worlds can make up whatever rules they like, implement whatever limitations they like, and even produce entirely custom forms of physics.

They can decide that gravity moves upwards, they can decide that two objects can overlap, they can even decide that some kind of mysterious force keeps two objects from ever getting close. They have the freedom to do this because they are operating on a higher level than the world they're making. Similarly, you who are of heaven and reality and a world beyond Earth, have the freedom to design worlds in which you implement whatever rules and laws you so choose. And even these laws and limits are artificially added, held in place and maintained by the mind.

You can decide, ok, there's going to be this thing called gravity which sucks things onto surfaces, and this other thing called time which makes everything keep changing, and another thing called space to keep things apart, etc. But these are made-up limits. Somewhere there's a construct in the mind of imposing limitation on what should be utterly unlimited and boundless.

This also means, if you are aware that you are the programmer of the world, that you design it and dream it and implement it, then you also are above and beyond and have power OVER all the laws and limitations that you yourself set in place. Even if you made these laws to limit YOU, you still can transcend them and override them.

And this means you can tinker with the background code, you can adjust the laws, you can bend and break them. You can do things to modify the world which CANNOT happen as a natural result OF the laws, but CAN happen as a result of someone reaching down from OUTSIDE the laws and "forcing" a change. Some would regard such influences as a "glitch in the matrix", where the laws of physics seem to be broken.

And now water turns to wine and bread multiplies out of thin air, and bodies walk on water, and people appear to teleport, and sickness disappears into nowhere, and dead bodies resurrect, and heavy objects are levitated, and mountains are moved into the ocean, and oceans are parted, and those born without eyeballs suddenly can see, and those without legs suddenly can walk.

All such things are possible in God because God is above and beyond the limited world. He is outside the law. He can BREAK the law. He can change and manipulate the law. In fact Jesus in ACIM says that "time and space are under my control" and "I have overcome the world". And that "mind must be stronger than the body, every miracle demonstrates this."

This world of limits is not REALLY a world of limits. It's not even really a world. It's not even really physical. And its laws are not even real laws. And gravity is not gravity, and nuclear forces are made up, and even space and time are fake. If you knew this and were in touch with this, you could manipulate them in ways which, to those who operate WITHIN the laws, would consider impossible. You would appear to be "breaking reality."

This is why undiluted miracles have a potential power to possibly induce fear in some people, because they make possible things which the world considers impossible. We're talking here about physical objects potentially chaing in ways that DEFY all of the laws you have grown accustomed to, believe are the "stable foundation" of your entire reality, and therefore brings into QUESTION whether or not such laws are even true. And witnessing such a miracle could therefore seem to "frighten" those who think their sense of reality has become broken, as if they are losing touch with reality itself. But miracles can do this because they can accomplish "the impossible."

"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."

Miracles, which in A Course in Miracles means the power from ANOTHER WORLD, having power over an ILLUSION OF A WORLD, in which the illusory world's laws are BROKEN, have the power to do this. They can rearrange space and time and move objects and transform one form into another. They can press the pause button on the laws of physics, tinker with what seems to be "reality", and result in a change which the world would say cannot be possible, and yet it has happened.

"The miracle is proof he is not bound by loss or suffering in any form BECAUSE IT CAN SO EASILY BE CHANGED. This demonstrates that it was never real, and COULD not stem from his reality. For that is changeless, and has no effects which anything in Heaven or on earth could ever alter. But appearances are shown to be unreal BECAUSE they change."

Jesus was and is an expert at changing forms, because he has transcended the hierarchy of illusions. He knows there is no order of difficulty in miracles, because he recognizes all physical objects as the same one illusion. He is able to manipulate and influence any and all things because he is in touch with the truth that their limitations are completely fiction, that his mind has made them up, that he is under no laws but God's, and therefore the laws of the world simply do not apply to him.

"There are no laws but God's."

"Here is the perfect statement of my freedom. I am under no laws but God's. I am constantly tempted to make up other laws, and give them power over me. I suffer only because of my belief in them. They have no real effect on me at all. I am perfectly free of the effects of all laws save God's. And His are the laws of freedom."

"I am entitled to miracles because I am under no laws but God's. His laws release me from all grievances, and replace them with miracles. And I would accept the miracles in place of the grievances, which are but illusions that hide the miracles beyond. Now I would accept only what the laws of God entitle me to have, that I may use it on behalf of the function He has given me."

This is not merely a psychological change. The world is in your mind, and by recognizing your mind makes up its rules, your mind can change the rules. You can change the laws of physics. You can override the body. You can erase sickness and death. There is NOTHING your holiness cannot do.

"Heaven and earth are both in your mind." "You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts." "Yet this world is ONLY in the mind of its maker, along with his REAL salvation. Do not believe it is outside of yourself, for only by recognizing WHERE it is, will you gain control over it. For you DO have control over your mind, for the mind is the mechanism of decision." "There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly."

"There is nothing my holiness cannot do because the power of God lies in it."

"My holiness is unlimited in its power to heal, because it is unlimited in its power to save."

"There are no laws except the laws of God. This needs repeating, - over and over until you realize that it applies to everything that you have made in opposition to His Will."

"We will begin the longer practice periods today with a short review of the different kinds of "laws" we have believed we must obey. These would include, for example, the laws of nutrition, of immunization, of medication, and of the body's protection in innumerable ways."

"Miracles do not obey the laws of this world. They merely follow from the laws of God."

"What I seek today transcends all laws of time and things perceived in time."

"You are at home in God, dreaming of exile, but perfectly capable of awakening to Reality. Is it your will to do so? You know, from your own experience, that what you see in dreams you think is real, as long as you are asleep. But the instant you waken, you KNOW that everything that SEEMED to happen DID NOT HAPPEN AT ALL. You do not think this mysterious, even though ALL the laws of what you awake to WERE violated while you slept."

"When I see the world as a place of freedom, I will realize that it reflects the laws of God instead of the rules which I made up for it to obey."

"Your holiness reverses all the laws of the world. It is beyond every restriction of time, space, distance, and limits of any kind. Your holiness is totally unlimited in its power because it establishes you as a Son of God, at one with the Mind of his Creator. Through your holiness the power of God is made manifest. Through your holiness the power of God is made available. And there is nothing the power of God cannot do."

"The mind that serves the Holy Spirit is unlimited forever, in all ways, beyond the laws of time and space, unbound by any preconceptions, and with strength and power to do whatever it is asked."

"Reality observes the laws of God, and NOT the rules you set."

"As you awaken other minds TO Him through HIM, and not yourself, you will understand that you are not obeying the laws of this world, but that the laws you ARE obeying WORK."

"Time can have no sway upon you, nor can any laws of earth have power over you. Your hands will heal, and give the gifts that you accept of me."

"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."

"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."

"I raised the dead by KNOWING that life is an eternal attribute of everything that the living God Created. Why do you believe that it is harder for me to inspire the dis-spirited or to stabilize the unstable? I do not believe that there is an order of difficulty in miracles: YOU do."

"You are not sick and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do." - ACIM

Who we are is an immortal being. Period. That's all that we are. Immortal and safe and eternal and invulnerable and incapable of being sick or suffering or dying whatsoever.

But we CONFUSE ourselves with things that do seem to suffer and die. We confuse ourselves with a body, with an imaginary world, and with all kinds of fictional things.

Even if it seems the body is sick, you are not the body. But you are producing a sick body which indicates you don't quite believe you are not a body.

See, the body only shows up at all if your mind believes it is "made of" an illusion. It therefore expresses its idea of "self" and it shows up. If the mind believes it is a separate ego thing, a body appears. The more it believes this, the more the body that shows up appears to be sick. When it really binds its idea of self to "body", a dead body shows up.

But even a dead body cannot show up at all without a mind to make a dead body show up. Even if the body is lying there on the ground "dead", there MUST be a mind which is putting that body there, still.

This is the distinction that you are NOT the body and are not that which dies.

But this does not mean that it's therefore okay for the body to die. If the body dies it proves that you must believe in death, because you will ONLY create in like kind according to your beliefs.

Those who believe in immortality only create that which is immortal. Those who believe in death create bodies which appear to die.

And having believed death is real, we will make bodies which appear to be dead as though real, because that's what we believe is truth. Believe it and you will create it.

There are some who believe that in the atonement sick bodies and healthy bodies are all the same illusion - which is true - and that therefor (this is level confusion), when you are in the world it does not matter if your body is sick or not.

It does matter.

The body cannot be sick without the mind being sick.

The body cannot seem to die unless the mind believes in death and victimhood.

A sick/broken/dead body is PROOF the mind has NOT been healed.

A slight belief that you are a body, manifests a slightly sick body.

A stronger belief that you are a body manifests a suffering body.

A really extreme belief that you are a body, produces a dead body.

See how the ego always produces the exact opposite of what it says it is going to do. Believing you are a body should surely produce an everlasting body, right? Wrong. It does the opposite.

Believe you are a body and you will NOT succeed in being a body, you'll produce a dead one.

ie it is literally impossible to be a body, for real.

The ego is sneaky about projecting sin and guilt onto others. If someone else is not really doing anything wrong, it is riskier and perhaps more difficult for you to "unfairly" project your own sin and guilt onto them. If you do, it will appear much more obvious that you are the one doing the attacking, and that it is not called for. This is too "overt". Just picking some random innocent target and attacking it would indeed be vicious, but our ego tends not to do this.

Instead, we lay a trap and lay in wait, trying to find a target. A target is someone who, of their apparent own free will, is sinning on their own. Someone who is digging their own grave. Someone who is hurting, attacking, being at fault, choosing poorly, doing something offensive, believing wrongly, saying harmful words, punishing or whatever. So long as the person is, themselves, seeming to be clearly the one who is sinning.

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do. For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt."

Once we see this "proof of sin" in someone else, it becomes a strong temptation. It tempts you to believe it. It almost invites you to agree with it, to see judgement as justified, and to therefore launch an attack which reinforces the person's sinfulness. But this is a slippery slope, even though it's what the ego enjoys as its less overt tactic.

When it's clearly someone else who seems to be wrong, it presents a wonderful opportunity for your own ego. Since all attention is on the other person, and since they appear to be the one who is making things worse for themselves and everyone, your ego takes the "opportunity" to sneak in and USE it for its purposes.

If it can now condemn and accuse the person, based on "what they are doing", it seems completely justified. But the sneaky thing is that you aren't having to "invent" a sin for them to be accused of. They have already provided a nice sin for you to latch onto. All you have to do is "point it out". So now the ego simply seems to be mirroring what the person is already doing, rather than making a "fresh accusation".

By doing this, the attack upon the person becomes disguised. It hides in the darkness of the other person's actions. They were already sinning, so it seems like you're not ADDING anything to them. And so simply by "identifying it" and "pointing it out" and labelling it AS a sin, you appear to be not attacking them at all. But if you step back, you ARE still in fact accusing them of sin still, you are attacking them, you are compounding their own sin, and are being just as judgemental as before.

It's just that, when someone else provides the "material", you seem to not be the one who is "inventing" the sin, so your accusation against them seems invisible. It doesn't stand out from what they are already going. It's like you slip in a little sin of your own hidden by theirs. All the focus is on them, by their own doing, so your ego gets to hide from being the center of attention. It's still attacking but now it seems like you're not doing anything.

This becomes quite risky though, to yourself, because you can become quite blinded by this sleight of hand, even unto yourself as you're doing it. You may not even realize that you have been "tempted" by the sin of another, and that you fell for it, believed in it, and recognized it as a perfect opportunity to condemn without the implication fo yourself. You can then find yourself accusing the other of "doing what they're obviosuly doing", convincing yourself that YOU are not doing anything, and therefore are now are attacking even more unconsciously.

It's one thing to be more aware of your desire to project your own shit onto someone else. It's another to be attacking someone on the basis of what they are seeming to do, and then not even realizing that you're attacking them. When they are the "source" of the sin, you can easily lose sight of how you are contributing to it, or mirroring it. Your own attack becomes invisible to you, and then you believe that you're not even doing anything wrong at all.

Thus you end up in a pattern of not attacking people unless they sin first, and then when they do seem to sin, you take it as an ideal opportunity to scapegoat. Because you think no-one will notice what YOU are doing because they'll be so busy focusing on what THEY are doing. A good decoy goes a long way. Except that you even distract your own attention, and now you much more easily allow your mind to fall into a scapegoating mode.

Overall I personally experience this as "falling for temptation", in that the world is constantly presenting "opportunities" to focus on sin and make it real. It's a constant vigilance to try not to "take a cheap shot", when someone is obviously mistaken in some way. If I don't recognize it as "just a mistake", I will make it real and try to compound it, drawing myself away from myself, trying to displace my own guilt onto someone else. But only if "they started it."

No-one wants to overly be seen as an unjustified attacker, so we wait until someone makes the first move, before we pounce on it. Then the gloves come off and the claws come out, and rightly so, because now the other person has invited us to attack them. They want punishment, and if we agree with that we will give it to them, and benefit from doing so. It's much easier to "fall for" this temptation to "beat someone when they are down" than to look like a total a-hole hurting people for no apparent reason. This is why almost all attacks on others are "justified" as being "called for" based on what we think other people "did wrong first."

Of course, "only the self-accused condemn" and "we but accuse our brother of our own sins."

There are two sort of perspectives relating to perception that we seem to fall into.

1. There is an objective world with our perception OF it, and what we project ONTO it is to do with how we interpret it.

2. There isn't an objective world and we're just dreaming it up and not projecting anything "onto" it because we're projecting IT in the first place.

I am coming to see that neither of these is correct.

There is a third possibility.

3. I am having a dream, which is surrounding me with a fictional environment which is coming from my mind. Without my dreaming of it - my projecting it - there wouldn't be any world here at all. There is NO objective world. There is ONLY a subjective world. My projection makes my perception and makes "the world I see."

The important distinction here is that the world I am projecting/dreaming, is coming from my mind and SEEMS to be an objective world. AND yet at the SAME TIME, this world is being projected BY me. So it seems to be both objective and subjective.

The key is that the objective part does not exist at all, and that's what ACIM means by "there is no world apart from what you wish", and wishes are dreams.

So it's not just to do with hey, I'm projecting something "onto" the objective world. It's that literally I am projecting the world ITSELF - that I think is an objective world - with my dreaming mind. And when my mind dreams of a different world, I project out an entirely different world. The old world doesn't transform because it has no objective reality or continuity of its own. I just project a different dream and stop projecting the old one.

When we go into false perception, however, there is an additional LAYER of projection, which seems to project "onto" the dream. Like, you're filled with anger and hate and so this seems like it projects "onto" the objective world. But the objective world itself is still being projected from your mind at that same time. So in truth, you are not really projecting ONTO the world, you are projecting the world and your "bad projecting" is actually changing the world and making it appear like a bad world to you.

In this way, it would appear that ACIM is never really talking about "projecting onto" anything. It's entirely talking about you projecting the world itself, directly, and your "bad attitude" projects what later is perceived to be a world that you seem to experience in a negative way. You think there is some other objective world that is "not negative" hiding underneath your negativity, but there isn't! You think you're projecting ONTO the world, but in fact you're not. You're projecting the world, period. Projection makes perception. Not "projection makes perception makes projection makes perception."

Just as at night when you dream, your mind forms en entire environment/world filled with buildings and people and stuff, and you seem to show up as a single body person. But your mind is making the world AND your body person. How the body person seems to experience the dream is an illusion because the person is actually MAKING the environment. Any attacker in the dream is you. People in the dream are figments of your own mind. It's the same with "waking life". We are literally dreaming of an entire universe.

Above the physical universe there is another dimension, another universe, operating on an entirely different mindset, and with a clarity about what is real and what is not.

From that universe, everything that is happening on the physical Earth is recognized as completely illusory. The Earth is known to be completely unreal and just a dream. It is known that everything that seems to happen here is made up, not really happening, and not to be taken seriously at all.

It is also known from that higher universe that the physical universe is very good at deceiving you, because it shows you seemingly visible stuff that happens, stuff that goes wrong, people that get hurt, accidents that seem to happen and so on. And from that higher universe everyone knows that when you're in it, unless you've maintained perfect access to the awareness of the higher universe, you will easily be fooled by the Earth's illusions.

The folk up there also know that the physical Earth paints a picture of things happening that aren't happening, and that every single part of physical matter is designed to deceive. And just as Jesus says in ACIM "nothing so blinding as sight of form", they know that the entire physical experience was designed, on purpose, to APPEAR AS IF what happens there is real. But it's not.

So the real challenge you have, as you visit the physical Earth, is that you're going to be totally BOMBARDED with signals from outside of you, perceptions, which seem to show you pictures and forms of things happening, things going wrong, people getting damaged, people dying etc. And these are going to seem really convincing. But you need to remember this one key thing and hold it so firmly to your chest that you never waver from it:

DO NOT BELIEVE ANY OF IT.

There is nothing happening on the Earth, period. Anything that appears to be happening is not real. Anything that appears to happen can be changed and undone. And anything that seems to happen is not permanent. So while you visit Earth and you think, well, it's a lovely place, and stuff just happened, and yes its real, and I believe in it, and here are the effects, and here's the proof, etc..... know you've lost your mind! You've been fooled. You fell for the illusion. And to get out of it you're going to have to re-learn through forgiveness to SEE in an entirely different way, a way that lets you see through the illusion and not believe it at all.

None of the rules of this physical world apply. None of them are real laws. Only God's laws are real. And God's laws defy absolutely every physical law known to man. That's why the application of God's laws appear to be miracles. But really a miraculous existence is entirely natural. The folks up above know this. And we can return to this awareness too as we learn that this physical world doesn't even exist at all.

While persona ego self, within our body, is firm in the belief that our shadow self, projected outside of our body, is 'not me', there is a sense of separation between the two and there is war and conflict.

In this condition, the in-here self will not want to claim ownership of the projected shadow content (guilt etc) because it *appears* unwanted. The persona does not like to accept things that it does not want, it focuses on rejection in order to include selectively.

So while we're in this state, with stuff projected, it will APPEAR to us that what we projected is terrible, bad, unwanted, hated, unforgiveable, evil etc. And because it appears that way, nobody in their 'right mind' would want to claim ownership of it.

However, it ONLY looks that way BECAUSE the persona is trying to reject it, condemn it, judge it, and get rid of it. If the persona in our mind, in our body, was not perceiving our 'self' as being intensely opposed to the projected 'out there' self that is our shadow content (guilt etc), then this IMPRESSION that the shadow is an evil external enemy would not be perceived. But this would also mean the inner persona self would not be able to see itself as a separate limited identity of 'goodness and innocence'. And it doesn't want to give up that facade.

So it's really only because the persona and shadow are kept SEPARATE and (as in a split mind) are war with each other, that it seems they appear to each other as enemies. If they were NOT kept apart, but instead came together as a unified, ONE SELF, the separation would dissolve, the impression of evil enemies would disappear, and we would not see that projected self as evil or attacking us.

In other words, the secret here is.... your enemy only seems to be an enemy while you choose to PERCEIVE them as an enemy, and if you weren't doing that, and you weren't putting walls up between you, and you weren't attacking 'them', you would simultaneously realize that they are no longer seeming to attack you. And this is how the two become one, and the persona and shadow then dissolve into each other and are undone (which means the whole ego is undone, because the ego is a split mind), and what is LEFT is the personality which is your real self.

What seems like a scary monster behind the door only seems that way while the light is off. Turn on the light, the light of truth, the light of awareness that you are BOTH the persona and shadow and that really you cannot be against yourself, and the fear and horror and conflict must melt away. Instead you find peace.

I hope I am clearly conveying what the ego's TRICK is here.... it is only an illusion that your enemy is your enemy.... it's really the separation BETWEEN the two of you that is the problem, and it's making them seem like an enemy. 'They' are really the other half of yourself. The two need to come together and stop being separate and against each other, which means the persona has to stop rejecting and attacking and being conditional, and the shadow has to stop doing the same. Then you are of one mind, a whole mind, which is at peace, realizing it was the war that made everyone look like enemies, and really both sides were innocent all along.

A Course in Miracles would say no. You always get what you ask for. You only get what you ask for. You never get anything you do not ask for.

There are no victims. There are no accidents. Nothing happens unless it is deliberate. There is no randomness or chaos. Someone somewhere is making decisions all the time.

A leaf does not blow in the wind without someone choosing to make the leaf blow in the wind. The leaf doesn't even appear to exist without someone's mind making it appear to exist.

Where is there any room in this for "might not work" or "not sure if" or "got lost in translation" or "God doesn't always answer" ?

The "Song of Prayer" will tell you that you are always praying and you are always getting precisely what you actually did ask for.

If stuff is happening that you believe was not supposed to happen, or you got results that you seemed to not ask for, or stuff happens that you didn't seem to want.... you need to think again. You DID ask for it, you just didn't realize how you asked for it. You MUST have asked for it otherwise it could not have appeared.

This is the level of certainty that Jesus enjoys. This is how it possible to be completely certain that you are not at the effect of anything. This is the end of victim consciousness.

There is absolutely no room for an idea of being victimized if it is true that you always get what you ask for. The entire fiction of being unfairly treated is absolutely 100% a lie.

You are treating yourself exactly how you wish be treated. You are, right now, experiencing exactly, and ONLY, what you actually did ask to experience. There is nothing happening outside of the script you have written or continue to write.

Nothing happens without your say so. This is how it is true that nobody dies without their own consent. This is how is it true that ALL death is suicide. This is how it is POSSIBLE that if you do not choose death, you will not die, and therefore it is POSSIBLE to be immortal.

Nothing is happening to you that you did not want. So if you do not like it, you need to change your decision. i.e. change your mind and heart.

If you got something you did not want, then you did not realize that you asked for it. It's not a matter of you having not asked for it, it's a matter of you being not AWARE that you asked for it.

Learning to discern HOW the asking happens, is the key to salvation. Recognizing that you ONLY do things to yourself, and nobody else EVER does anything against your will, gives you the key to salvation. Salvation - being saved from all suffering - is possible, because of this.

Every single story about how something happened to someone, some disaster struck out of nowhere, something suddenly went wrong, something occurred that nobody liked, the world went down the toilet, war broke out, there were "acts of nature", "it must be God's will", or any other bullshit, is absolutely a total fictional lie by the ego mind.

Absolutely everything in front of your face right now, you put there. And you wanted it. And not a single thing in your day or your month or your life has ever happened against your will. You have never been victimized.

Nobody has ever died against their will. They were choosing it, wanted it, made it happen, and put every single event in place to cause it to occur, even if those events or causes *appeared* to be coming from something over which they had absolutely no control. They DID choose it. It's just not obvious that they chose it, because of the ILLUSION that they did not, which was part of their cover-up story and part of their way of making it happen.

There has not ever been a victim. There has never been anything happening by accident or out of order or against anyone's will. Nobody has ever suffered a single bit without asking to suffer. No-one has ever been afflicted with sickness without having first put that sickness in place themselves.

Nothing has ever even happened in this world AT ALL, without someone choosing it and making it happen, pulling all the strings and animating all the objects and orchestrating all events. If it were not for minds making such decisions, this world would not even appear to exist at all. It is only here doing its thing because someone somewhere is MAKING IT.

Not one single feeling that you have is caused by anyone other than yourself. They are not caused by events or people or situations or stimuli or any other causes that seem to be separate from your own mind. Any feeling you ever have, you CHOOSE to have. You put it in place.

Not one single physical symptom in your body has ever been caused by any person or object or environmental condition or events seeming to happen against your say-so. Not one single "effect" showing up in your body or your emotional reactions has ever really been put there by anyone or anything other than YOU. You even put in place all of the illusory effects which external causes *allegedly* put in place against your will.

When someone kicks you in the leg, which is you kicking yourself in the leg, YOU put the bruise in the leg. The bruise in the leg is not put there by the person who kicked you, or their physical foot, or anything that happened. You instead conveniently orchestrated and used the situation to attack yourself and make it SEEM as though you have a bruise showing up because of someone else, so that you can project blame for your sin onto them, finding them guilty.

No-one outside of you is guilty of ever doing anything to you ever. Not one single person in this world has ever attacked you or created symptoms or effects in you. There has never been side-effects, symptoms, damage, hurt, pain or suffering occurring in your experience that your own mind didn't put there itself.

When events transpire, by your secret design, to seem to cause something to happen to you, you not only orchestrated the events but you also manifested the causes and the effects all at once, putting them into place in the illusion using your thought.

Nobody ever gets sick. People choose to be sick. Nobody is ever hurt by someone else. They hurt themselves. Nobody ever falls victim to abuse. People abuse themselves. Nobody ever dies of some cause they could not prevent.

People create the illusion that they have no say in the cause, in order to paint this very convincing picture that they are not the one making any choice whatsoever. The denial and displacement of your own mind's decision making, making it look like it has nothing to do with it at all, is an act of irresponsibility and disownership of power.

Nobody is ever weak or suffering or lacking or diminished or limited or disabled or afraid or sick or in poverty or at a loss without having chosen to be so, on purpose, so that it can appear as though they are victims, so that they have a tremendous basis for a huge story about how they do not have any power whatsoever, so that they can fake their own death and blame it on everyone other than themselves.

Death is a choice and death is someone choosing to die. Death is the ultimate cover-up story, all death is fake, there is no real death, every death is a massive illusion orchestrated by the mind to make it look like all power, responsibility, ability to choose and all will to Live have been taken away by someone other than yourself. Not even in death has this been made true.

There is nothing happening in this world, as in, stuff that is just occurring on its own. There are not just events that tick over automatically. There are no forces of nature which just do their own thing like they have their own will. There is no wind that blows on its own or life that grows on its own or cycles of weather that just "happen". Someone somewhere is making it happen.

There is no realm of things which are within control and another realm of things which are outside control. There is only deliberate creation. Either you are making up shit or you are not. Either you are inventing lies or you are being the truth. There is no middle ground where things just occur because of external causes, or alien wills, or fate, or bad luck, or good luck, or any kind of unchosen reason.

You have the power to choose again. You are NOT a victim of the world you see. NOTHING is happening on its own. And nothing CAN happen without you making it happen, wanting it to happen, using it for a purpose, having a fictional need for it, and making it occur in illusions. This whole world is your dream, coming from your mind, coming from your decision making. It is not dreaming itself!

Be free to choose again. Make a better decision. No-one can stop you. You are the immortal unlimited Extension of God, in whom nothing happens without His Will. This is the realm of miracles, where whatever you will, is so.

Whatever you will, will be so. It must. This is your power.

"When you forgive the world YOUR guilt, YOU will be free of it. Its innocence does NOT demand your guilt, nor does your guiltlessness rest on ITS sins. This is the obvious, a secret kept from no-one but yourself. And it is this that has maintained you SEPARATE from the world, and kept your brother SEPARATE from you. Now need you but to learn that BOTH of you are innocent OR guilty. The one thing that is impossible is that you be UNLIKE each other; that they BOTH be true. This is the only secret yet to learn. And it will be NO secret you are healed."

If you are innocent, you recognize that everyone is innocent, because your innocence overlooks their guilt and looks to the truth about them. Truth is eternal and unchanging, so their innocence is permanent, as is yours.

If you are guilty, you will see everyone as guilty. Having lost sight of the truth you will not recognize it, and will mistake everyone's innocence for guilt. Seeing the guilt in them results from seeing it in yourself. Seeing them as guilty you will assume this means you are not guilty, which disguises this fact.

It works kind of like wearing either clean or dirty glasses on your eyes. When your own glasses are clean you will see a clean world free of guilt. When your own glasses are dirty you will see a dirty guilty world. And how you see them you see yourself reflected in the mirror.

It is not possible to accurately determine whether someone is innocent or guilty, from the perspective of ego. You are not sitting on a fence being neutral. You have no neutral thoughts. Either you are making everyone appear innocent or you are making everyone appear guilty. You are contributing to what you see.

If you think you can determine that someone is guilty, but you are innocent, you are mistaken. If you think you can call someone innocent while you believe in your own guilt, you are mistaken. You cannot see past what's in you own mind.

The ego counsels that you can find someone guilty and yet you can escape this guilt. This is impossible. Either BOTH you and your brother are guilty, or BOTH you and your brother are innocent.

You actually therefore are blind to whether or not your brother is innocent or guilty, independently. You cannot tell this independently because your brother IS NOT independent of you in a separate, compartmentalized way. You cannot section off his worth from your own.

The Golden Rule, the law of God, is always in effect no matter where you are or what you believe. What you believe is true of you is always believed to be true of others, even if consciously you think there is a difference between the two. You cannot find someone guilty without making yourself guilty first. And you cannot see your brothers innocence if you are not willing to accept your own.

This is how your brother is your savior. He does not actually save you in the sense of doing something for you that you have not done for yourself. He merely is recognized as reflecting back to you either your own innocence or guilt, depending on what you believe is true. If you regard yourself as innocent, you will regard him as innocent also. If you find him guilty, you have condemned yourself.

You do not have the faculty to be able to say, ok, my brother is the guilty one, and I am a passive observer, and I can tell he's guilty because I'm neutral and objective. There is no such thing as objective judgement. All judgementalism is inherently biased and pulls the judger INTO the judgement. Think not you can judge lest ye be judged.

Unfortunately, its not possible to find someone guilty, if you want to find your own innocence. It will drag you down. Maintaining enemies and scapegoats and pointing fingers at people keeps YOU in hell. You HAVE to find everyone to be innocent if you want to find yourself to be innocent. And so long as you find even one person to be guilty, you have relegated yourself to death.

The truth (about you and your brother) is always true, and nothing else is true.

The world is kind of like a "rendering" of a world, a picture or image. It's not really a place with actual bodies and objects. It's pictures of them. Three-dimensional animated pictures. These images are projected by the mind as it "draws" the world.

Since the body and other objects are just pictures, they can be changed by the thing which is projecting the pictures, which is the mind. The mind is unlimited in its power to do this.

Within the "scene" that the pictures produce, such as an environment or a room or place, it may SEEM as though, based just on the pictures alone, that there are certain laws in place. We call it the laws of physics, the seeming rules or behaviors or limited ways in which the pictures in the scene can interact with each other. The limited restrictions which WE as its unlimited authors have placed upon it.

And then we might be convinced by these laws and think of them as what is "running" the environment, governing what happens and what is possible. But these are secondary artificial laws. They are in fact just more images of laws. And they too are being projected and rendered by the mind. By the movie-maker.

What you therefore need to realize is that the world is just an effect and is not really a cause, and the causes or laws of operation within it are not really the laws that produce the world. They are not really what governs what shows up in the world. They only seem to describe some of the inner workings of the picture itself, but they don't define how the picture really gets there.

The mind is actually the dreamer of the world and is responsible for the making of the world. It is projecting the world out using its unlimited power. It is making the planet and the bodies that seem to inhabit it. It is responsible for all the image-making.

When you see the picture of a world and you are deceived by it, because it is in fact an ILLUSION of a world, you will fall for the belief that you are bound by its laws and forced to operate entirely within what it says is possible. But this is deception and is not true at all. You are the CAUSE of the world, not its effect, and it has no power over you.

As a miracle worker, with a miraculous powerful mind, you are actually able to change the world, the body, the objects, by electing what the dream will contain. By choosing what images you will project. You actually override and re-write and modify the dream images with your mind. You can therefore "steer" the dream in any direction you so please, completely ignorant of any laws that the pictures themselves might suggest would limit what's possible.

This means that you are actually OPERATING the dream from outside of the dream itself. You are able to modify it at will. You can take objects out of it, and put objects into it. It will appear to the eyes in the dream world that objects are just "miraculously" appearing and disappearing out of nowhere, in violation of the laws of physics. But the mind can do this.

It's sort of similar to in "The Matrix" movies where, when the agents are tracking down the rebels they make a sudden "adjustment" to the matrix, sort of from outside of the matrix, and it causes what appear to be sudden physical changes in the environment. What once was a door becomes a brick wall. Exits are suddenly closed off and so on. The "black cat" walking past twice, a sign of deja-vu, hints to them that someone has tampered with the matrix itself, as though hacking the world from the outside.

As our minds awaken and become aware that the world is our dream, that we are dreaming it, and therefore our mind is actually producing the PICTURES in the environment, we also then realize that we can put whatever pictures there that we want. We have total power OVER the dream world. Nothing in it can do anything without our consent and anything we decide to cause to happen must happen. This is why you are ruler of the universe.

You are like the hand of God. You are the operator outside of the dream playing with chess pieces, moving things around, shuffling the scenery using back-door access. You have access to the 'code' that writes the images. You can rewrite the planet. You can modify bodies. You can switch objects out. You can transform anything into anything, from the outside. You pull all the strings. You are the puppet master.

This is what you get to when you are being miracle-minded, because miracle-mindedness means you are aware that this is nothing but a dream your mind is producing. You get in touch with what many people avoid, which is the fact that you are VERY POWERFUL. The mind is extremely powerful and can produce entire worlds, so moving a mountain from one place to another is in fact "easy" for such a power.

Jesus demonstrated that he had his hands on the controls and was able to modify the dream from its SOURCE, once removed from the seeming laws of the world. He showed that the law of gravity didn't mean anything to someone who can switch the laws OFF. He showed that objects were not locked into certain forms because the mind that was PICTURING the forms was able to change what it wanted to see. He showed therefore also that what we call sickness and death could easily be reversed and modified by mind-power alone.

To those in the dream, who think that the dream is reality, and who think it has causal power over them, which causes them to believe they are bound by its illusory laws and limitations, such changes are perceived as "miraculous". Quite literally miracles - physical reality distorting/violating miracles. Adjustments to "the matrix" suddenly show up as what they would think of as "impossible" changes. Changes which violate the seeming laws of reality as this world knows it.

"What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them." What you are able to do TO this world, is a result of the recognition that you are not OF this world, OR in it. You are not really a part OF the dream. You are not a body. This is why learning that you are the DREAMER, that you are mind/spirit, is essentially in order to wake up FROM the dream and realize that you are the one making the world.

"Learning must lead BEYOND the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it."

You bring and use the power of God from outside spacetime, the power of heaven. You can get behind the scenes of the physical bubble of illusory laws and break ALL the laws. Walking on water is nothing for such a power. Calming storms, raising the dead, walking through walls, making food appear out of nowhere, preventing wars, erasing wounds, absolutely anything you can imagine to modify the world's pictures you can do it. There is nothing that your holiness cannot do.

You are under no laws but God's. You are under the laws of heaven. You are the dreamer and maker of the world of images. Spacetime is entirely RUN BY YOU. You are the ruler of the universe. "You have the power to dominate everything you see merely by recognizing what you are." You have power OVER DEATH because you can literally rewrite the body.

You can even if you so will cause the body to be unattackable. You can override anything that does seem to attack it by simply producing another body. You are indestructible and you can make the images of your dream appear to symbolize this. You can therefore make the body incapable of being sick or dying because you can maintain it indefinitely with supernatural mind-power. You can force it to remain in a state of showing up as unharmed and undamaged, making it IMPOSSIBLE for sickness or death to change it.

The world itself does not really have ANY POWER to change you or the body, if you do not wish it. It does not have the power to make you sick or to kill you. If you so will, you can hold the body in a state of suspended animation and semi-permanent symbolic perfection for as long as you see fit. You can force it to maintain perfect health even if the world is attempting to sicken it, and nothing will happen to it. What can possibly change an IMAGE which is being constantly RE-PROJECTED by a projector? You can do nothing to it within the projection.

"It is the dream in which the body functions perfectly, having no function except communication."

"Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have It not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die." "The body's health is fully guaranteed because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible."

Realize then that the reason you are SO POWERFUL and SO MIRACULOUS and you have total power OVER everything in spacetime, is because you are not IN it. You are not part of a dream. You are not an EFFECT of dreaming. You are totally causal. God has given you total absolute power over everything. You are unlimited in your power because your power is shared with him and inherited from him. There is literally nothing you cannot do, and moving mountains is MINOR.

All this entails is the proper recognition that you are the cause of the world, and not the opposite. You are not affected BY it whatsoever because YOU are the one who is DOING it. You are putting the world there. Projection makes perception. Perception is a result not a cause. What you project can be changed, producing a different world. By being totally responsible for CAUSATION and not being in any way identified with the EFFECTS you have produced, including the body, you become freed-up to manipulate the dream as much as you wish.

Now, in the big picture of course the point of all this isn't that you just carry on dreaming and stay in the dream playing with your miraculous (not magical) power. The main purpose is to help everyone in the sonship to be restored TO this power so that everyone realizes THEY TOO are dreaming the world. And in this awakening FROM the backwards false perception of the world, they can be restored to sanity and to EMPOWERMENT, returning to their permanently miraculous nature. And when everyone becomes lucid to the fact of dreaming, the dream can be ended.

Meanwhile, in time, and in terms of where the world is at now, we can use this miraculous power to serve God's will and to help others. It can be used to alleviate suffering. It can be used as a demonstration to PROVE to the minds of those willing, that they are NOT bound by the laws of this world. That they are not an effect of the dream, but that it is possible to have power OVER everything they were ever a victim of. This is why "miracles are teaching devices", they are capable of showing people they are under no laws but God's and have the power to set themselves and others free from bondage.

The proper use of miracles in this world is therefore for purposes of helping everyone to wake up, alleviating unnecessary burdens, showing the power of God, teaching people what the real laws of God are, showing them that they are not stuck and limited and small, and producing sometimes spectacular demonstrations of what is really possible as sons of God.

When Jesus performed his miracles sometimes it was to teach a lesson in this regard, and sometimes to simply be compassionate and kind to help those who were in need, starving and lacking, in pain and misery. And sometimes that meant raising the dead and healing the sick. Sometimes it means overriding body states. Sometimes it meant projecting different bodies entirely. And sometimes it meant demonstrating that the mind had total power over the crucifixion and was utterly unaffected by what appeared to be physical destruction.

You have total power over this world because you are not OF this world or bound by it in any way. We are to become teachers of God and masters of the universe. We are unlimited in our power and freedom. And there is literally nothing our holiness cannot do here. You can wipe away all suffering and heal all sickness and correct all minds and forgive all sins. You have the AUTHORITY OF CHRIST with which to command anything, and nothing can prevail against you. You made this world, and now you must unmake it.

"And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

"It is the witness to your state of mind, the OUTSIDE picture of an INWARD condition."

"YOU MADE THIS UP. It is a picture of what you think YOU are; of how you SEE yourself."

"Your picture of the world can only mirror what is within."

"This world IS a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

"It is because the thoughts you think you think appear as images that you do not recognize them as nothing. You think you think them, and so you think you see them. This is how your "seeing" was made. This is the function you have given your body's eyes. It is not seeing. It is image-making. It takes the place of seeing, replacing vision with illusions."

I want to tell you about a way in which I used my persona to destroy myself, and how I am learning to overcome it. This was actually a very very painful long-term lesson, so it is hard to write about.

I grew up as a highly sensitive person, who experienced everything in an intense, overwhelming, overpowering way. In order to try to cope with this, I developed the use of my persona. The persona is the side of the ego split-mind that focuses on specialness, goodness, success, social acceptability, favoritism, pleasantness, etc. So I went very strongly into 'people pleasing'.

What I'd do, quite automatically/unconsciously, was I'd put on this facade, literally a 'false face', where I'd smile a lot, become very quiet, try to appear pleasant, try not to upset anyone, look unthreatening and harmless, as though 'showing this' to people would deflect them and therefore protect me. It was my attempt to be invisible. This included a really intense repression of myself. Basically I was using this to hide my Self.

In any public situation I would put on this persona mask and make it appear that nothing was wrong, that everything was good and normal, nothing to see here, being nice to everyone and don't say a single word, and not get hurt. But there were many times this blew up in my face.

Once I was on a bus heading into town and it stopped at the hospital. A man got on the bus and sat nearby. He said that he had just gotten out of the hospital from his 3rd heart attack. This alone was enough to trigger me to hide myself even more than I already was. So I smiled a lot. He, having just gone through life-changing events, started up a conversation with me, which was horrifying. He saw I was smiling and thought that it meant I was happy, and therefore wanted to know what my 'secret to a happy life' was. This put tremendous extra pressure on me (as I saw it) and I just wanted to get the hell out of there. To do this, I intensified even more this persona of hiding myself, which was an attempt to reject him, smiling even more, being very tight-lipped, and just wanting the ordeal to end. I just became more and more quiet. For some reason I seemed to just do this as an automatic defense that I'd learned.

Once I got off the bus, I was just about ready to hurl. I put so much effort into psychologically rejecting the man, and hiding myself, that I felt literally sick. I reached/retched uncontrollably for several minutes before I could calm down. This put a huge damper on my day and was somewhat traumatic. But this wasn't the only effect of this.

See, when I used my persona to hide my real Self, this wouldn't just mean rejecting the other person, it would mean rejecting me. The more I tried to shut them out, the more I shut myself out. I had no idea I was doing this. But what I did know was how it felt. Absolutely horrible. I would come away from bad experiences like this, which occurred many many times in all kinds of public scenarios, with a feeling of tremendous tension in my head from intense embarrassment/shame/humiliation. I'd get a horrible headache, but even worse, I would feel deeply, deeply, deeply hurt. This hurt was more intense and horrible than ANY other emotion I have ever felt for any reason. Psychologically it was like I had experienced every single form of rejection, abandonment, hurt and pain all at once. The absolute only way to move past this was to have a huge cry.

So, as a result of putting on a persona and pretending to be someone I was not, regardless of whether that fake self seemed to be 'nice' or 'kind' or anything anyone values, the only way I could appear to be literally 'someone else' was to horrendously suppress, deny, reject and abandon myself. I thought I was using separation 'against' other people to separate myself from them in order to protect myself, but this separation did nothing but hurt me.

I also had a huge fear of other people judging me, and a fear of rejection. What I didn't realize was that each time that I tried to put on a persona mask of nice, likable, happy-smiley, quiet or whatever, I was buying into an ego thought system. And by doing that, I was taking a gamble. Either I would 'get' the result I wanted which was that people would be deflected and ignore me and I would pass by 'safely', OR other people would attack me or pressure me in some way and I'd end up suffering. By believing in the potential of being seen to be accepted or liked or pleasing to others, I was also simultaneously believing in the 'potential' that others would judge me. I wanted them to judge me favorably, which would feed my 'goodie goodie' persona, which meant I had to believe in judgement. And because I believed in judgement, I lived in fear of it.

So I thought I had an issue of being afraid of judgement from others. A fear of rejection. And this fear of rejection cycled around in a vicious cycle, compelling me to want to NOT be rejected, and therefore to put on a smiley persona face in order to get other people to not reject or hurt me. But of course that merely put me closer in touch with rejection and judgement, if not by others then much moreso by myself. The amount of rejection I experienced from myself TO myself as a result of self-suppression, was far worse than anything anyone else did. So this strategy really didn't actually work, even though I kept trying to use it, and each time it got worse. Over time I just became more and more uptight and quiet and withdrawn from society, eventually jobless and depressed and deeply unhappy and unable to see a way to be different.

Over time, through various avenues of healing, not least of which was the support by my wife who showed up right when I was at my worst, I gradually have learned about the dynamics of what I do to myself versus what I thought other people were going to do to me. I learned painfully and slowly to see that I only saw other people as 'attacking judging strangers' because *I* had already attacked them first. Through the years of working with A Course in Miracles and various other things I've come to very gradually realize exactly why my use of the persona is completely self-defeating and does not help at all. All the persona does is section off everything I think is wrong with me into a tidy little box and shove it away into the dark recesses of my mind, later to surface as pain and suffering.

Yet, over time I've still held onto a belief that I am mainly afraid of rejection or judgement, rather than realizing that my attempt to use the persona is what actually causes the problem. Every time I try to do what other people would want, or make myself like able, or appease others, or focus on what other people like or would buy, or whether I'd get approval, or showing only the parts of myself that I think are acceptable to others, this AUTOMATICALLY creates a fear of rejection and judgement. Because really, by using the persona (i.e. wanting to feed it by creating a self-image/persona of being pleasing) I am actually already rejecting myself and judging myself. Why would I want to put a facade on myself to cover up my True Self? Why would I want to soften the blow of someone else's attitude by abandoning myself first, so that I then need a defense?

The truth that is starting to reveal itself to me now, is that if I actually just be true to myself, and completely drop all need to use the persona to be 'likable' or 'acceptable to others' or 'what they want' etc, I actually stay in a STRENGTH and a authenticity that empowers me and completely overrides the apparent need, either for a fake persona self, or for a defense against rejection. And so this reveals what really is underneath all this.

If I reject myself FIRST, I will then believe I have to use a false self-image-persona to show other people a version of me that they will like, so that they won't point out how shitty I am. Once i'm in persona mode, I cannot escape the fear of rejection because I've already rejected myself and more will be forthcoming through the projection of it.

So the task in front of me now is, to learn to accept myself fully, to be true to the truth in me, to open up to reveal and expose who I really am, to 'let loose' without any shame or censorship, to stop trying to hide myself for any reason, and to basically 'be myself'. But it also HAS to mean, a willingness to stop putting on a show, to stop presenting myself in a fake way, to stop trying to 'appear' likable, to stop people-pleasing, to stop trying to feed my persona image, to stop trying to get everyone to approve of me, and to just drop that whole pile of horseshit. I only enter into a perception that I need 'protection' when I have already judged myself and have seen myself as vulnerable. I am not vulnerable if I am truth-filled. And I don't need to please anyone.

So the key to FREEDOM in all this, is awakening into Holy Spirit's view of me, in acceptance of the truth of me, and in completely surrendering BOTH the fear of rejection AND the attempt to 'win approval' through the persona. By stopping using a persona this solves every problem that ever arose out of its use. What I thought was helping me was hurting me deeply. And stopping the use of the persona stops the creation of the shadow (pain) as well.

Standing firmly in who I AM, brings all of the certainty, strength, assertiveness, disregard for other's opinions, invulnerability, and empowerment, that seemed to be MISSING when I chose to use the ego. And which could never be fulfilled by using the ego. Because once again, it's a case of seek and do not find. "I don't have to worry about what to say or what to do knowing He goes there with me" - ACIM, i.e. I am in my true self and my true self is completely uninterested in pretense or rejection.

Who knew - trying to please people makes you rejected!!!

Learning to love myself more. Learning to drop the ego more. Learning to be what I am, instead of trying to be something I'm not. And in that, there is no fear.

THIS WORLD DOES NOT CAUSE ANYTHING

The world we seem to live in, which includes planet Earth, does not cause anything to happen. It has no causes in it. And since cause=truth, it has no truth in it. And since truth=reality, it has no reality in it. It however has many many illusions of causes, pretending to be causes.

The world causes nothing. It is nothing but an effect. In order for this to make any sense you'll need to realize that *everything* in this world is being caused from SOMEWHERE ELSE.

In a pantomime, puppets are dangled from strings and made to seem to interact with each other. One can be made to seem to do something, and then it is necessary for the other to be made to do something else, in order to create the illusion that it was affected. There is no causality between them. All of the causality comes from ABOVE, causing what is BELOW.

As it is with miracles. Miracles are expressions from a mind which is ABOVE this world which has CAUSED this world. The world is its effect. That higher mind (the Sonship) has projected this entire universe including the Earth.

Everything that seems to "happen" in it, is not happening because of one thing causing something else. Instead, both the things which seem to cause, and the things which seem to be affected, are simultaneously projected in parallel from another place entirely.

The wind does not blow the trees. The wind blowing and the trees moving are BOTH accomplished at the same time by the same ONE CAUSE, the mind of the dreamer.

Gravity does not cause a ball to roll down a hill.

Eating food does not cause you to make poop.

Throwing a rock at a window does not cause the window to break, unless the higher mind says "ok, I will now break the window", and the breaking of the window is implemented BY THE MIND, not by the rock.

Nothing in this world causes anything at all. We are not made sick by things in the environment. We are not hurt by other people. We are not upset because of things we see. Nothing happens to us, not even death.

Nothing can happen to you, a Son of God, without your say so. Nothing can happen, without your consent. "No-one dies without their own consent". Mind, from a higher level, has to PUT IN PLACE both the apparent causes and apparent effects of EVERYTHING that takes place on planet Earth. EVERYTHING!

The world does not spin because of inertia or gravitational forces or attraction to the sun. It spins because the MIND SPINS IT.

Rain does not fall from a cloud on its own as part of an accumulation of water particles. Rain does not fall unless the mind makes it do so.

This is a world of ANIMATION, it is an animation, like a movie, being projected out and played by a mind that is causing everything in the scene to occur. Everything.

You wouldn't imagine for a second that someone could be sat at the movie theater watching the movie on the screen, and that they could CHANGE the content of the movie by doing something with the screen. If you want the movie to change, you have to get in touch with the folk who MADE the movie, and the mechanism of projecting it, so that the movie appears differently.

Similarly the world can easily be changed by someone who has access to the miraculous mind of the Son of God, who is a miracle worker. This mind has the power to ERASE the world. This mind has the power to CHANGE the world. This mind has the power to do ANYTHING. "There is nothing your holiness cannot do."

The world itself does not DO anything at all. Nothing happens to anything anywhere against any will. Nothing can happen AT ALL unless it is part of the one who is DREAMING IT. Only the dreamer can determine what shows up in the dream. Only the dreamer can make objects appear to interact. Only the dreamer has access to the level of freedom and capability to make the dream appear to do stuff that DEFIES the illusion of linear causality.

If the dreamer decides, hey, when this forest fire rages, which I made rage, I will ensure no harm will come to that house. And so the house will not suffer the fire. And if the dreamer decides, when that rock is thrown at that window, there shall be no damage, so be it.... there will not be a broken window. And if the dreamer decides, this body will have no sickness and show no signs of damage and it will be impossible to destroy it... so be it. The body will be invulnerable.

Miracles appear to defy the LINEAR causality of this world. They prove and demonstrate that the ILLUSION of cause and effect here is FALSE, is fictional, and that it can easily be modified and defied. The mind could easily suppress the effects of an explosion. It could easily levitate a mountain. It could easily cause someone to walk on water. It could easily show that gravity has no effect on the body.

There is an analogy to this freedom and flexibility of writing the rules of what's going to happen in a fictional world, in this world. It's in the area of creating digital worlds. Movies, games, visualizations, 3d objects and so on. In this arena, we get to make entire environments out of nowhere. We can populate them with characters and make stuff happen. But guess what, there are no laws.

Nothing is impossible there. If you want to make a huge ball representing the sun suddenly turn into ice-cream, that's easy enough. And objects in a virtual world have no inherent laws of physics. If you want to make them repel each other or bump into each other and rebound off each other, you have to ADD a whole bunch of extra rules and conditions. But the fact is, YOU add them. And without them, objects would pass right through each other.

This world, this universe, is an illusion. It causes nothing at all and it has no causes inside of it. All causes here are illusions of causes. This is why as a miracle worker you can demonstrate this fact by making something occur which, according to the linear laws, is impossible. It should be impossible to reverse death, it should be impossible to levitate a mountain, it should be impossible to walk on water, and it should be impossible to heal all sickness, but it's not true. There is nothing a holy Son of God cannot do.

Open your mind. Question what you're looking at. Planet Earth isn't a "thing" in its own right functioning according to universal laws. It's nothing but a simultaneous parallel projection from a place UNSEEN. And as a projection, it has no will and no life and no mind of its own. It has no identity. That is why it does not really exist. There is no world. It's imagined.

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way."

"There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you."

"There is nothing in the world that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail."

"The world that you see is what you have put there to see; nothing more and nothing less."

"A miracle of healing proves that separation is without effect."

"Time lasted but an instant in your mind, with no effect upon eternity."

"The world may seem to cause you pain. And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause. As an effect, it cannot make effects. As an illusion, it is what you wish."

God's will is already done.

There is no separation between cause and effect. He has willed what you are, and you share His will with Him. You can therefore will to extend the Kingdom of God and to Create in His likeness.

However, the idea of a separate will is an ego idea. It's really the attempt to STOP the will of God, which means to not have a will at all. It is wishful thinking, because it can't be possible to truly have a separate will.

If you will with God, you will have Life. If you will against God, to have a different will, you will have death. Death is the absence of real will.

Also when you will against God, which is really a withdrawal from willingness, a refusal to will, you will go into the ego split mind in which there will appear to be "your will" and an external "alien will". You'll also believe the body has its own will along with everyone else. Multiple split wills.

Once cause and effect are separated out it's going to appear that everything external has its own will, and that it is willing against you, because you no longer see the connection between cause and effect. So you can't have your "own" will without simultaneously creating an "alien will" that is in opposition to your own. Therefore your separate will is the persona, and the alien will appears to be the shadow. And then everything "you" will separately will be thwarted by the shadow, and you'll be at war - a battle of wills.

As the Course says, there is a metaphysical curriculum of awakening with fundamental truths you need to come to. You cannot change that curriculum because it's the same for everyone (even outside of ACIM), but you can seem to delay learning the truth (the time you take it). You do that by seemingly having your own ego will which goes off busying itself and spinning its wheels and avoiding and denying, which you will then think is free will.

You are free to choose because God's love is not forceful and won't stop you from trying to be separate, but when you are without God's will you will have barely any will at all. That's why you can't perform miracles, which are supposed to be happening all the time. Without God's will miracles are impossible, and Life is impossible.

You will think you have a "life", and that it's your own life, which you control, or have autonomy over, with an authority separate from God, but that's an ego claim. Its a delusion, because in truth your will and God's will are shared, and will only exists when there IS a sharing of real will (God's Will). Will has to be extended, and the ego's will does not extend, it just projects.

Also the ego does not really ever will that you wake up or accept truth or be open to sharing with God or to receive a "cure" that undoes the ego.. It "wills" that you be dead, which is a giving up of the "will" to live. All attempts to have a will separate from God are attempts to relinquish free will and be a victim - the victim who appears to have no will power to actually take action or prevent death. And then the death of the body-identified person is allegedly the death of God's will. The end of Eternal Life.

In a similar vein to that you think you think, but you really only share the thoughts of the thought system you are aligned with, you "think you will", or wish you will, according to the thought system you belong to. Either you are willing "with" the ego, or you are willing with God. And the ego's "will" will be against God's will, because it's just a device for denial. Then whatever the ego wills, which is your death, will become what you're actually choosing and will experience. If you don't want that, you have to align with God's will and accept eternal life. You don't have any other options outside of which of the two thought systems you share in.

You can be of service to God, or of service to the ego. There is no other "separate" will that you have of your 'own' independent of both. Either you're in the "Life Will" or in the "Death Wish".

God's will not my will be done.

You are attacking victims with your false empathy. It's time for some honesty.

When you see someone as a victim, such as that they are sick, diseased, suffering, afraid, being victimized by someone else, are disabled, weak, helpless, vulnerable, at a loss, unhappy etc... you might take the position of caring, wanting to help them, saving them, being their hero, or wanting their suffering to stop.

The desire to want their suffering to stop can become very strong. It seems justified. It seems like you care a lot about what they're going through and want all this stuff to stop happening to them. It seems like you want to take it away and that you would if you could. But this is completely fake.

Every time you perceive someone as anything other than perfect love, it is an ego attack and you are using them as a scapegoat to get rid of your sin.

It can seem like your reaction to their victimhood is justified. It can seem like you really want to help them and take away their pain. However, what you're not admitting is that you have a secret benefit from seeing them this way, and you positioning yourself as their savior is actually a cover-up for how you are using them for your diabolical plan.

Even if you are coming across as caring and wanting them to stop suffering, you actually deep down want them to keep suffering. You want their pain to continue. You want to keep seeing them as a victim, and to keep pretending that you are their savior and not in any way someone who would be hurting them further. You would seem shocked and horrified at the suggestion that you are attacking them with your attempt at salvation.

Secretly, you have a belief that you sinned, and hold a lot of guilt to go along with it. You want to get rid of it and deny it's you who did it. Along comes a nice victim which someone or something else has set up to be in a state of suffering and punishment.

Fortunately for you, they are already appearing to be punished by causes outside of you, so you don't have any need to attack them overtly. You don't need to turn them into a victim because they are already being one. How convenient! Now all you have to do is take the opportunity of their victimhood to keep them being a victim, so that you can use them to scapegoat your sin.

Therefore instead of reacting with justified anger, as though they attacked you and you need to now establish them as the one who is wrong, you've already seen that they appear to be wrong already. So all that's left is to keep them in their suffering while making it look like you are here to save them from it.

Your perception of them as a victim IS an attack, but it seems to be an invisible attack because its effects are already implemented by circumstances. By making their EXISTING victimhood real, you get to appear as though you were not the one who did this to them, even though your AGREEING with it is just as much an attack - a veiled attack, which seems like it isn't even happening. You join in the attack by agreeing that they are a victim. Then you react instead with false empathy, a false attitude of caring and wanting them to be better.

Your desire to want them to be better, while still perceiving that their victimhood is real, is actually a choice to perceive them as wrong for being the way they are. You think they should not be being victimized, they should not be suffering, they should not be sick, that it's unfair that they've been mistreated, and you just want to "help" the poor fuckers get out of their situation.

But you don't. Your belief that they should NOT be being real victims is actually an attack. You're trying to deny them and get rid of them. You can't accept them the way they are. You will position yourself as the innocent hero who comes to save them, while secretly using them to prove that THEY are the one who is a sinner and not you.

Even though you might label a victim in such a way as to frame them as guiltless and sinless, as though innocent and not wanting their situation, by making their victimhood real and reacting to it with false empathy or false compassion, you are actually condemning them.

Your ego really wants them to stay being the one who is sick, to keep suffering, to maintain their diseases and their strife, because if they were to genuinely stop being a victim you wouldn't have a way to get rid of your unconscious sin and guilt.

So long as you can see them as a victim and pretend to care, you can enjoy a secret gladness that they are the one who is worse off and not you. "There but for the grace of God go I" - or rather, "I'm glad those fuckers are suffering because they must be guilty and not me." They are the one who must have sinned, in order to suffer, and you are clearly the one who didn't.

Even if you go to great lengths to help them and want to alleviate their situation, you're really doing so on false grounds. You do not recognize that they have attacked themselves. You do not recognize that they have chosen to suffer. You do not recognize that they want to be a victim. You don't see the ways that they are being vicious and attacking and using their ego illusions of victimhood to accuse others of sin. You do not see this because you do not want to admit to doing the same.

Eventually, someone who becomes very "helpful" in this way is actually an under-cover attacker. A wolf in sheep's clothing. A devil appearing as an angel. Helping disempowers. Helping takes away, it does not give. Becoming a fixer, and becoming addicted to fixing, simply indicates that you want other people to be broken as much as possible so that you can remain in denial about your own brokenness.

If they are the one who needs the help, it's not you. If they are the victim, it's not you. If there is something "wrong with them", then you get to look all innocent and have an illusion of being "loving". Your seemingly sincere wish to take away all their suffering and pain is actually making it real and adding to it.

YOU are causing them to suffer more. That's hard to look at and admit to. Your ego WANTS them to suffer so that you can use them and make yourself look innocent. Every time you move into false empathy and set yourself up with an ego reaction of "oh poor them, they're so sad", you are attacking them and keeping them imprisoned. You're not shining truth onto them or really helping them. Your "help" is actually HURT.

To be truly helpful can only mean that you apply forgiveness. Whatever their victimhood appears to be, IT IS NOT THAT, and something else is going on, both with you and with them. There must be a lot of denial involved and there must be a lot of self attack involved. Victims are not victims. They choose to make themselves appear to have stuff happen to them "unfairly", tragically, awfully, so that their ego can get away with murder. Your belief that their victimhood is justified and unfair is you getting away with murder as well.

Only through a correction of your perception, which is going to require you to own up to what you are using this person for, and admitting to the truth of WHY you want them to suffer, i.e. to keep your own self-attack hidden behind denial, will you then have any hope of helping YOU, OR them. You can release them from their prison by NOT agreeing with their victimhood and NOT seeing them as suffering needlessly and NOT believing the appearance of the story as to how things are happening against their will. Behind every victim is Christ pretending to suffer.

False empathy is deceit. It is not justified. It is an ego reaction. It is a tool to get rid of your own sin. It does not work, because it keeps your own sin intact and creates more. Only forgiveness of yourself will work.

Here is Jesus talking about how as you enter the real world (not heaven), the physical world is now seen as SHADOWS, which SEEMED SOLID, which now appear TRANSPARENT AND FAINT, at times FORGOT.

"Christ's vision is the bridge between the worlds. And in its power can you safely trust to carry you from this world into one made holy by forgiveness. ****Things which seem quite solid here are merely shadows there; transparent, faintly seen, at times forgot, and never able to obscure the light that shines beyond them.**** Holiness has been restored to vision, and the blind can see."

And he goes on elsewhere to speak of how the body is diminisihed in your sight...

"Across the bridge it is so different! For a time the body is still seen, but not exclusively, as it is seen here. The little spark that holds the Great Rays within it is also visible, and this spark cannot be limited long to littleness. Once you have crossed the bridge, ****the value of the body is so diminished in your sight**** that you will see no need at all to magnify it."

And again, the world is regarded as nothing but a thin veil, an illusion of smoke and mirrors, hanging before the face of christ, which can be easily brushed aside.

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as ****nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant.**** It is seen at last for only what it is. And ****now it cannot fail to disappear,**** for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant ****is the world forgot****, with time forever ended as ****the world spins into nothingness from where it came.****" The body becomes a shadow, circling around the good, no longer obscuring sight of the real world.

"By focusing upon the good in him, ***the body grows decreasingly persistent in your sight***, and will at length be seen as ***little more than just a shadow circling round the good.*** And this will be your concept of yourself, when you have reached the world beyond the sight your eyes alone can offer you to see. For you will not interpret what you see without the Aid that God has given you. And in His sight there is another world."

And the veil is brushed aside...

"The fourth obstacle to be surmounted (fear of death) hangs like a heavy veil before the face of Christ. Yet as His face rises beyond it, shining with joy because He is in His Father's Love, ****peace will lightly brush the veil aside**** and run to meet Him, and to join with Him at last. For this dark veil, which seems to make the face of Christ Himself like to a leper's, and the bright Rays of His Father's Love that light His face with glory appear as streams of blood, fades in the blazing light beyond it when the fear of death is gone."

nb: "The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son" Attracted by what is beyond the veil... YOU WILL LEAVE THE WORLD FOREVER!

"It seems to you the world will utterly abandon you if you but raise your eyes. ****Yet all that will occur is you will leave the world forever.**** This is the re-establishment of your will. Look upon it, open-eyed, and you will nevermore believe that you are at the mercy of things beyond you, forces you cannot control, and thoughts that come to you against your will. It is your will to look on this. No mad desire, no trivial impulse to forget again, no stab of fear nor the cold sweat of seeming death can stand against your will. For what attracts you from beyond the veil is also deep within you, unseparated from it and completely one."

In heaven, you and your brother share everything. Not just as two beings who "trade", but as two beings who are one. You overlap, sharing the same space. You are in him and he is in you. He literally is you, while also being himself. The two of you share everything as the Christ mind or One Son/Sonship. Along with everyone else also.

There is therefore a part of your own self, which is in your brother and is your brother. It's like you live inside of each other. His own self is part of your own self. Therefore the wholeness of who and what you are is not just you, it's that you are also him, and you are also part of God.

In the separation, the aspect of you which is hosted inside your brother, and which is one with his mind, was "sectioned off" through the separation device of the body. The body seemed to "fence in" the part of you which seems to be "you alone", and "keep out" the part of you which is literally in your brother "as" your brother.

Part of your mind is now seemingly housed inside the body prison, while the other part of your mind is seemingly housed inside your brother's body. And since the two appear in the form of "being separated by physical distance", it creates the illusion of a "gap" between not only you and your brother, but between you and the rest of you, which is in him and as him.

The initial function of bodies as separation devices was to make it appear that you are not in your brother, you are not one with him, you share nothing with him, you are not equal to him, you are different to him in every way, he is a stranger to you, you do not know him, and you do not recognize him or yourself. And the body paints a picture of an identity which is not in any way what you or your brother are really like.

This egoic view of him confines him to a body, and therefore also denies that he is in you. And so it reduces him and yourself you being less than whole. Bodies isolate the "self" portion of you while rejecting the "shared" portion of you. So now you and your brother find yourself inside prison cells and trapped in brains and kept apart and not communicating.

The body makes it appear that there is NO relationship between you. It demonstrates the proof of sin that separation has occurred. The two bodies being unalike do not share the same truth, and so are in disagreement, and are therefore at war with each other, just by virtue of their different natures. Which in turn, when identified with as your self or as your brother's self, makes it appear that you are fundamentally in perpetual war and competition with everyone. And everyone lacks what everyone else has."There is nothing so blinding as perception of form."

"The first chaotic law is that the truth is different for everyone."

"The second law of chaos, dear indeed to every worshipper of sin, is that each one must sin, and therefore deserves attack and death."

In this state, you are in special relationship. Which we really should call, no relationship. It is a breakdown in communication, it is a lack of sharing, it is a broken interaction. It really is a lack of relating at all. And in this relating, neither party is viewed as a whole being, because wholeness means sharing and the part of you that is seemingly separated off inside your brother is rejected as "him alone". So now you are not your whole self, and he is not his whole self. And neither of you are wholly relating.

"Yet the special relationship which the EGO seeks, does NOT include even ONE whole individual. For the ego WANTS but part of him, and sees ONLY this part, and nothing else."

"An altar is erected IN BETWEEN two separate people, on which each seeks to kill his self, and on his body, raise another self that TAKES HIS POWER FROM HIS DEATH."

"The special relationship is totally meaningless without a body. If you value it, you must also value the body."

When your mindset is one of being only the you that is in your body, as a body, you cannot help but relate to others in a dysfunctional way. And may struggle to relate at all. You may think, "I cannot relate to them because I am not physically like them."

The gap seen between you also produces justification for getting away with murder, a breakdown in cause and effect, and justified selfishness. Any attack you make upon another you do not realize is attacking the part of you which is shared with him. And the more you push him away in a lack of love, the less you accept yourself.

To have holy relationship doesn't merely mean that you love another person a lot. It doesn't mean, that you are still a separate person trapped in a body whose whole self is in that body, and who then relates lovingly with other people. This is still special love. To be truly loving and holy you have to be whole, which means you have to recognize that your identity is shared with your brother. That there is a part of you IN him and a part of him IN you. And that through your oneness you transcend the body boundaries, and therefore ARE NOT bodies.

You can't be all of yourself while isolated to space and time. You can't fully relate to anyone if you don't recognize that they are simultaneously you, and therefore that you see yourself in them and truly have something in common. You cannot treat anyone correctly unless you have a vested interest of treating yourself correctly, having recognized that you are in them, so that what you do to them you do to yourself.

To relate in holiness isn't two separate wholes relating, it is a relationship in which two are one. You are not just loving another, you are loving yourself AS another. And you are loving the self that is in you and the self that is in the other, as yourself. And the two of you as one together share everything.

"Miracles are a way of loving your neighbor (brother) as yourself."This must entail the shared/joined state of mind, which is more than just two minds sitting next to each other sending love vibes from afar. It is two minds FUSED together sharing everything to such a degree you cannot even tell where one begins and the other ends. Where the identity of both individuals is recognized as the same, being one in Christ. Two Christs, who are one Christ. Where what is theirs is yours and what is yours is theirs and both of you have everything simultaneously.

"Forgiveness is the healing of the perception of separation. Correct perception of EACH OTHER is necessary ONLY because minds have willed to see themselves AS separate beings. Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul."

Each soul also knows all other souls completely. And you are part of God. And you are the whole Sonship. And you are the One Son, and Christ, and a Soul. And you are all Souls. And you are all Creations and all of Creation. And you are part of God Himself.

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

"The Kingdom of Heaven IS you."

"The soul is the idea of self fullness."

To relate fully to your self, you have to relate to the whole of yourself. The whole of yourself includes the part you fenced off in your body, AND the part that is in literally in your brother. He has to be recognized as part of your self, in order for you to have shared interests with him. Because by recognizing that you are IN him, you recognize that how you treat him is how you treat yourself. You cannot "see the Christ in Him" without recognize that Christ SPANS the two of you and INCLUDES you both as one identity.

When you do not recognize yourself in your brother, a wall or gap starts to form between you, you lose recognition, you become blinded by form, you start to focus on the body, sickness arises, and you begin to attack. The formation of this "separation gap" in between you and your brother makes the world of bodies and sin. And it is there that you enter into illusions of suffering and death, war and competition, disagreement and hatred and fear.

When you re-embrace your brother AS yourself, recognizing that in actual factual truth this is how God created you - joined with everyone, you are putting aside that gap between you and are overflowing your body. You are now extending PAST the body and past the body of your brother. Because your full self transcends these imprisoning boundaries. You are everywhere. You are everything. And only by relating to yourself as that, can you be fully yourself and fully awake.

Two separate things bumping up against each other is no more relationship than two separate things being at a distance. But when the two separate things realize they are not separate and they fuse together and become one, in which each of them is in the other, like yin and yang, there is now a union and a harmony and an equality. To be equal with something means to BE IT, not just to be like it. a = b means a IS b, no just that a and b are alike.

Bodies present a picture which is a complete lie. It is totally opposite to the nature of reality. It is an attempt to pull deeply relating immersed beings away from each other and lock them up in little isolating prisons in the farthest corners of the earth. Kept apart, they believe they are their prisons, and that they have no relationship. And every way they relate is on a basis of a lack of self, the attempt to get self from the other, and the attempt to lose even more self in doing so through sacrifice and loss and bargaining.

When the body is your identity, and you think that the you that is solely within your body is all of yourself, and you have a "bodily identity" in your mind as a picture of who and what you are, you are cutting yourself off from yourself and from relationship. In order to become spirit identified, you need to identify with the spirit that is both in you AND in your brother. You cannot find yourself without sharing yourself. And you cannot accept atonement without sharing and extending it either. You have to give what you have received.

This is why the body has no part to play in a holy relationship. This is why focusing on the body is a rejection of health, because health comes from wholeness and from extension. When you do not allow your SELF or identity to extend past the body and past your brother's body to the SHARED identity that is the Christ in both of you, you cannot be healthy, because your mind is split BY the body. If you allow the body to separate you off from others, you have a split mind and are choosing death.

When you join with others, which does not mean ego joining or a special relationship joining or bodies joining or two separate selves remaining separate and hooking up, mind extends past limitation and separation. It transcends the gap. And now the two that were on either sides of the gap span across the gap and erase the gap. And there is no gap. And in this view the bodies actually become healed because the mind is healthy. In effect, mind has to adopt a state completely "alien" to the body in order for the body to be healthy, which overrides the body's laws with the laws of God.

Reunion with others is reunion with your self and with God. You are a "whole part" of the hologram of God's creation. What you are is what your brother is. Your minds are one. Your souls are connected. You both overlap with each other. You share the same space. You overflow bodies and transcend their limits. You are everywhere. You are infinite, immortal and unlimited. You are the whole Sonship and the whole Son of God. And you are part of God Himself. And what God has put together no man can put asudner. You are eternally married to all beings forever and ever.

All sickness is merely a lack of love. When love is lacking, life is lacking. There is a diminishing of light, of presence, of strength. In the darkness there begins to be limitation, deterioration, fragmentation, weakness and corruption.

The simple task of miracle-working then becomes to "supply what is lacking". What is lacking is love. This is why "Miracles are expressions of love." "Miracles are a form of healing. They supply a lack, and are performed by those who have more for those who have less."

If you have more of this "life", this light and love, this power, you give it to another. What can that mean other than to simply extend love from God to the person. God is life and to give love is to give life. "Miracles mean life, and God is the giver of life." "Miracles are a universal blessing from God".

Can it be any simpler really? To give life is to resurrect, to strengthen, to encourage, to uplift, to inspire, to rejuvenate, to energize. "Miracles are energizers." A lack of love or life is a lack of "energy", for want of a better word. A seeming withering or weakness, a reduction in the brightness of the spark of life.

Let's simply say that love is life, it is light, it is power, it is strength, it is innocence, it is invulnerability, and it is healing. If someone is seeming to "lack love", remembering that "sin" is merely a seeming absence of lack of love, and the "proof of sin" are merely the outward appearances of the "presence of an absence", then simply supplying the lack corrects the problem.

"Sickness is but another name for sin (a lack of love/life). Healing is but another Name for God. The miracle is thus a call to Him."

Where there was darkness light is given. Where there was a manifestation of a lack of wholeness, wholeness re-establishes life. Where glimpses of death seemed to be showing up, they are merely shadows of the seeming absence of life. Evidence of sin, or of "unforgiveness". Because "forgiveness is an earthly form of LOVE."

Miracles are restorative. They resurrect and raise the dead. They raise the dead in the sense that someone lacking in love is "not fully alive." "No man who lives in fear is really alive." Fear is another name for the absence of love and life, especially since love is safety.

A lack of life is an illusion of a state of death, and "sickness is but a little death". The miraculous power of God that is love, enlivens and renews and undoes the consequences of wrong decisions. It removes the interference to perfection. By infusing the other person with life you are "raising them up", in terms of psychology and energy.

A person with more "life" in their mind and experience will stop manifesting symptoms of death. As the inner spark is ignited and amplified, the outer manifestations of that raised, more enlightened awareness, must give rise to what would outwardly appear to be the disappearance of sickness and death. And thus will the body literally appear to return from death.

Miracle-working is about giving love and life. It is about FUELING another through a flow of energetic healing power from God. People in absent states suffer from "drained batteries" if you will, and need to be recharged. Emphasizing the higher truth of the person, giving love, and extending God to them, must lift their spirits. You have to "pour love into them."

Miracles energize the weak and give them life. Loving expressions support and uplift and empower. What has light has life, and what has life is immortal.

"I raised the dead by KNOWING that life is an eternal attribute of everything that the living God Created. Why do you believe that it is harder for me to inspire the dis-spirited or to stabilize the unstable? I do not believe that there is an order of difficulty in miracles: YOU do."

"Prayer is the medium of miracles. Prayer is the natural communication of the Created with the Creator. Through prayer, love is received, and through miracles love is expressed."

"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."

This is a pretty awesome section of the clarification of terms. Some important key points made here:

1. "In this world, because the mind is split, the Sons of God appear to be separate. 2 Nor do their minds seem to be joined"

2. "The term "soul" is not used except in direct biblical quotations because of its highly controversial nature. 3 It would, however, be an equivalent of "spirit," with the understanding that, being of God, it is eternal and was never born."

3. "This Will is always unified and therefore has no meaning in this world"

4. "Right-mindedness listens to the Holy Spirit, forgives the world, and through Christ's vision sees the real world in its place. 3 This is the final vision, the last perception, the condition in which God takes the final step Himself. 4 Here time and illusions end together."

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

6. "Will is not involved in perception at any level, and has nothing to do with choice."

7. "Consciousness has levels and awareness can shift quite dramatically, but it cannot transcend the perceptual realm."

8. "At its highest it becomes aware of the real world, and can be trained to do so increasingly. 6 Yet the very fact that it has levels and can be trained demonstrates that it cannot reach knowledge."

--&--

C-1.1. The term mind is used to represent the activating agent of spirit, supplying its creative energy. 2 When the term is capitalized it refers to God or Christ (i.e., the Mind of God or the Mind of Christ). 3 Spirit is the Thought of God which He created like Himself. 4 The unified spirit is God's one Son, or Christ.

C-1.2. In this world, because the mind is split, the Sons of God appear to be separate. 2 Nor do their minds seem to be joined. 3 In this illusory state, the concept of an "individual mind" seems to be meaningful. 4 It is therefore described in the course as if it has two parts; spirit and ego.

C-1.3. Spirit is the part that is still in contact with God through the Holy Spirit, Who abides in this part but sees the other part as well. 2 The term "soul" is not used except in direct biblical quotations because of its highly controversial nature. 3 It would, however, be an equivalent of "spirit," with the understanding that, being of God, it is eternal and was never born.

C-1.4. The other part of the mind is entirely illusory and makes only illusions. 2 Spirit retains the potential for creating, but its Will, which is God's, seems to be imprisoned while the mind is not unified. 3 Creation continues unabated because that is the Will of God. 4 This Will is always unified and therefore has no meaning in this world. 5 It has no opposite and no degrees.

C-1.5. The mind can be right or wrong, depending on the voice to which it listens. 2 Right-mindedness listens to the Holy Spirit, forgives the world, and through Christ's vision sees the real world in its place. 3 This is the final vision, the last perception, the condition in which God takes the final step Himself. 4 Here time and illusions end together.

C-1.6. Wrong-mindedness listens to the ego and makes illusions; perceiving sin and justifying anger, and seeing guilt, disease and death as real. 2 Both this world and the real world are illusions because right-mindedness merely overlooks, or forgives, what never happened. 3 Therefore it is not the One-mindedness of the Christ Mind, Whose Will is One with God's.

C-1.7. In this world the only remaining freedom is the freedom of choice; always between two choices or two voices. 2 Will is not involved in perception at any level, and has nothing to do with choice. 3 Consciousness is the receptive mechanism, receiving messages from above or below; from the Holy Spirit or the ego. 4 Consciousness has levels and awareness can shift quite dramatically, but it cannot transcend the perceptual realm. 5 At its highest it becomes aware of the real world, and can be trained to do so increasingly. 6 Yet the very fact that it has levels and can be trained demonstrates that it cannot reach knowledge.

If I am not fully responsible for who I am, I will perceive and find people outside of me and try to make them responsible for who I am.

Another way to describe this mechanism is to realize that you are making yourself dependent on the ego.

Your entire purpose of disowning yourself is to attempt to claim ownership of the ego self, and to make yourself depend on it for everything.

This is of course a substitute for depending on God for everything.

So as you own up to who you are and what you are and being yourself unconditionally, you are also restoring your dependency on God.

You can't be truly responsible for who you are without being aligned with God, therefore. If you are anti-God or don't believe in such a thing, you must and will remain separate, and in doing so you will depend on the ego heavily.

The act of waking up is relinquishing all dependence on the ego, because if you depend on it, you are attached to it. It's an attempt to try to own and possess it, and as it turns out, this causes it to appear to possess you!

When you let go of depending on the ego, this means letting go of depending on anything outside of you for your happiness or peace of mind or the meeting of so-called needs. Artificial needs are only created when you are not being your real self.

Jesus is 100% dependent on God and no longer depends on the ego whatsoever. You can too.

I've been getting hints for a while, that there is a disconnect between inner and outer states, or between how I experience the world and what the world does. That it's possible to remain in a state of happiness or love, in spite of what's happening externally. That my inner condition doesn't depend on the outer condition.

The question came up, what if I could just remain happy regardless of what happens? What if how I feel isn't actually tied to the world or events or people? If I were to be happy while something was happening, I probably wouldn't care so much about it. It isn't an issue of what happens, but of how I experience it internally.

So there's the external happenings, and then there's the internal experience of it. What that also tells me is that who and what I am, isn't part of the physical level. It isn't the body or an emotion or an event or a reaction. It's actually possible to step away from the external stuff and sit above it, out of reach of suffering.

In truth then there aren't actually any causes of suffering in the world. There is nothing outside of me that can bring oppression. It really is only my mind that can affect my experience. And if I so choose, I can in fact elect to be in a state of happiness and safety which the world can do NOTHING about. Just as the course says, the world cannot give you peace, OR take it away.

It's kind of like saying, when you're in a good mood, nothing can bother you. You just float above it and are much less affected. When you are happier and stronger in light and life and love, you laugh in the face of death.

The simple secret of salvation then is that you cannot suffer unless you make yourself suffer. You can't suffer unless you step down from your throne of love, in which you share God's strength and power, and see yourself as a victim in some way. As soon as you choose to go into a fear state, the whole world starts to seem like it is out to get you, unsettling you, topping you off balance, making you lose your center.

So I started thinking about.. well, if I could just remain in a state of inner happiness, love, peace etc, it would not matter what happens outside me. It wouldn't even matter if everything was falling apart and going wrong. I would just remain happy and laugh about it. Whether I am happy or not should not depend at all on the world or other people. It depends entirely on my state of mind. And "the world was made that problems could not be escaped. Seek not escape from problems here", so it's really how I use and see the world that offers me escape from it.

As Jesus says, if we identify with love, we will feel safe, and will enter into the protection of God. If we tune to love, our mind will become whole and happy and healthy and our body will follow suit. Love is the single main ingredient of all miracle working, as expressions of love, which is also the power of God. If you are close to love then what you are literally moves away from the bodily level into the mind/spirit, above the battleground and out of reach of threat. Because you are not of this world.

I think we've been so used to living in fear, being out of touch with safety, that we just assume the whole world is unsafe. Everything is seen as a threat or attack, then we become defensive and try to make ourselves safe. But it doesn't work. And then we're insecure and feeling vulnerable and attackable, weak and victimized, offended and upset. Then we get really lost in this idea that I'm afraid or upset because of the world.

The only reason I am ever afraid or upset is because I've gone into fear in my mind, having rejected love in my mind, and this is an attack upon myself by myself. And now I look out through fearful sight and this taints everything I see. It now seems like because I am unsafe, everything in the world is reminding me of that unsafely. Everything becomes a threat because my mind is in a state of threat. Everyone becomes an enemy because I have become enemy to myself.

The key is that it's not them that's the problem. They're not the cause of my fear or upset. They're not doing anything to me. They're not putting the fear in me, threatening me, attacking me, or victimizing me. I only think they are because I'm confused and am not realizing that I'm doing all that to myself. Either I identify with love and feel totally safe and SEE safety everywhere, or I identify with fear/ego and see reasons to be afraid everywhere I look.

As Jesus says, "you can escape the world you see by giving up attack thoughts", ie "your attack thoughts are attacking your invulnerability." "You can be hurt by nothing but your thoughts." "It can be but myself I crucify" etc. We do stuff to ourselves and then it flavors everything we see. The problem isn't out there, it's in our minds. It's in our minds before we even project and make perceptions. It's in our identification. Either we are identifying with the body and with the idea of a fearful fake self, or we're identifying with spirit and with strength and safety and invulnerability.

As a man thinketh. Here Jesus tells you that if you want the world to not appear to be frightening, you need to change YOUR MIND, so that you PROJECT safety from a loving mind, and then perceive it as a result. This isn't a statement about not changing the world, only that you can only make the world appear to be safe as a side-effect of choosing safety in your mind FIRST, and then projecting it. This will change how you interpret the world that's perceived, once projected from an inner state. The inner state comes first. Choose love and you are safe. And you are safe because you are body and cannot be attacked.

"Projection makes perception; the world you see is what you GAVE it, nothing more than that. But, though it is no MORE than that, it is NOT less. Therefore, to YOU, it IS important. It is the witness to your state of mind, the OUTSIDE picture of an INWARD condition. As a man thinketh, so does he perceive. Therefore, seek not to change the WORLD, but will to change your mind ABOUT the world. Perception is a RESULT, and NOT a cause."

"Destructiveness becomes benign, and sin is turned to blessing under His gentle gaze."

"When you have looked on what seemed terrifying, and SEEN it change to sights of loveliness and peace; when you have looked on scenes of violence and death, and WATCHED them change to quiet views of gardens under open skies, with clear life-giving water running happily beside them in dancing brooks that never waste away; who need PERSUADE you to accept the gift of vision? And AFTER vision, who is there who COULD refuse what MUST come after? Think but an instant just on this. YOU can behold the holiness God gave His Son. And NEVER need you think that there IS something else for you to see."

"There is a light which this world cannot give. Yet YOU can give it, as it was given YOU. And AS you give it, it shines forth to call you FROM the world, and follow it. For this light will attract you as nothing in this world can do. And you will lay aside the world and find another. This other world is bright with love WHICH YOU HAVE GIVEN IT. And here will everything remind you of your Father and his holy Son. Light is unlimited, and spreads across this world in quiet joy. All those you brought WITH you will shine on you, and you will shine on them in gratitude, because they brought you here. Your light will join with theirs, in power so compelling, that it will draw the others out of darkness as you look on them."

"What is the single requisite for this shift in perception? It is simply this; the recognition that sickness is of the mind, and has nothing to do with the body. What does this recognition "cost"? It costs the world we see, for the world will never again appear to rule the mind. For with this recognition is responsibility placed where it belongs; not with the world, but on him who looks on the world and sees it as it is not. He looks on what he chooses to see. No more and no less. The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did. Nor does he do anything to the world, because he was mistaken about what it was. Herein is the release from guilt and sickness both, for they are one. Yet to accept this release, the insignificance of the body must be an acceptable idea."

"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. It enables you to remain unshaken by lack of love from without, and capable, through your own miracles of correcting the external conditions, which proceed from lack of love in others."

Believing that evil is real, is a mistaken perception. It's actually a failure to recognize what the so-called evil is. Only in a total lack of recognition, does it appear to be "real evil" at all. Without forgiveness, it seems to take on a kind of authenticity, as if it's actually a viable opposite to God, or some kind of real threat to what is good. But if you see evil this way, it is because you yourself are unforgiving, which means you are the evil one.

It's interesting to realize that evil is nothing but a way of describing someone who is not in their right mind. No-one in their right mind would ever attack or be harmful or anything other than loving. Evil really is just a term for someone who has lost their right mindedness and is now "not in their right mind", ie is insane. This insanity is simply a state of being confused and mistaken about what is real and true. It's a state of false belief, false perception, false values, and made-up fantasies about reality.

So someone who is in that state isn't really evil. It's not like their minds are in a state of wholeness and health and balance but just happen to believe something negative. To hold the beliefs that they do, their minds cannot be whole, they have lost sight of reason, they are in the darkness, are experiencing self conflicting ideas, must be living in fear, and do not know what is real any more.

Such an "evil" person may indeed seem to "do evil deeds", ie to sin in the world, and indeed they may well be vicious and attacking and harmful to themselves and others. But this isn't because they are "really evil". It's only because they are mistaken, confused, lost, in denial, are blocking the love they are, are unaware God loves them, and are trying to hide in the darkness. They are not really evil at all, they are just opposed to God's reality, experiencing what must be temporary insanity.

No one in their right mind would ever choose to do what an evil person would think is reasonable, justified, valid, worthwhile, functional, truthful, and a form of salvation. Such insane people simply have lost sight of what is true and real and now believe that all kinds of illusory made-up things are more true and real. They are therefore simply making an error, and are in a state of being very mistaken.

We can't then really say that such people are evil. When viewed through the same evil distorted perception they will appear to be truly evil, but this is also an unforgiving perspective, not an enlightened one. When you look at the big picture and what obviously must be true of such people, it becomes clearer that they are not really sinners, and there is no real sin. This isn't too much of a stretch because it's simply a fact.

In truth, sin is not real and evil does not exist. So whatever these people are being or doing isn't real sin and they are not really evil. If we can't recognize that, WE must have some kind of illness of our own that is producing false perceptions and making sin and evil real to us. And now we are scapegoating the "evil ones" to try to get rid of our own sinful beliefs about ourselves. Now we're essentially just as nuts as they are, and have become hypocritical in our claim that they are the evil ones and not us.

Anyone who blames the evil ones is just as insane, and looking to take advantage of what they see as a "really evil person", to justify why it's okay to find fault in them. It seems to be "true" that the evil ones are the evil ones, and not me. And now I've gotten away with murder by pinning the blame for my own sinful outlook onto someone else, just because they appear to me to be the evil one. This reveals a lack of sanity on my own part. I'm hardly justified in pointing a finger when there's a log in my own eye. And why am I casting stones when my own mind supports sin being real?

What we have to learn is that there are no sinners and there are no evil persons. Not in God's reality. His Kingdom is purely good and whole and innocent and there is no evil anywhere. And here in the world, these people are not evil sinners either. They are ONLY mistaken people, in error, whose minds are temporarily insane, and who do not know what they are doing. This is why they are forgivable. You can hardly hold anything against them if truly they are so confused that they do not really know what they are actually doing. And being not in their right minds they certainly are out of touch with reality.

So these evil persons are simply insane persons who have lost their way, and who truly must be afraid and calling for love, and who need healing and forgiveness, not more condemnation. They do not need us to make their sins real. They do not need us to compound and imprison them by holding their own mistaken-ness against them. If we do that, we're just as nuts and unforgiving as they are. We are in false perception the instant that we condemn people for what they are not really doing.

"Forgiveness recognizes that what you think your brother did has not occurred."

Forgiveness does not pardon sins or make them real. It does not mistake what we call evil people for "real evil". It does not look at a "sinner" and blame them for actually sinning. It recognizes what they are doing is not sin or evil. What they are doing is merely hurting themselves through mistaken choices and confusion.

Those who seem evil merely have lost touch with what is really true and think that other things are true which are not. And so they choose the darkness by mistake, believing it is the light. Their navigation system is reporting false positives and steering them towards hell and death and sin under the belief that they are moving towards truth and life and heaven. They are deceived and are deceiving. They are in denial. They believe in something that is not what it is, and so worship false Gods and lies. This doesn't make them evil, it just makes them mistaken.

It is our job to recognize that every so-called evil person is not evil. And that every so-called sinner is not a sinner. Because that is actually the TRUTH. And if no-one is ACTUALLY evil, and no-one has ever REALLY sinned, and if these people are just in need of some correction and healing, then we can open up to being more compassionate towards them.

Just as Jesus would, we now can recognize that even the most "evil" people deserve love and forgiveness. He would ask us to love our "enemies". He would stand up for the well-being and innocence of all people even if the world would judge them as sinners. He would defend even a murderer against those who would accuse the murderer of being disgusting and despicable. Simply because he knows this is not the truth of the person, and they have not really done what they seem to be doing. Would you beat down someone who is mentally ill and who does not know any better?

Only blind people who cannot see would accuse blind people of making accurate choices based on vision. And if every case of so-called "evil" falls within the umbrella of "those who are insane", then there is no-one on the planet who is truly evil. And we must then learn that to accuse anyone of evil is really part of our own evil. In our harmlessness we would not condemn or point a finger or scapegoat or project blame or judge or try to justify attack or enact revenge. Those are all signs of someone who is, themselves, full of shit and in need of correction.

God loves all His children. Everyone is innocent. No-one is evil. There are no sinners. But there are a great many insane people who need psychological healing and help because of their confusion. And every one of them deserves to be loved.

If you can no longer describe people as "really evil", this not only lifts away all sense of threat and danger from such people, it also makes you harmless and sane and puts you back into your right mind. No-one in their right mind would believe that anyone is an evil sinner, because sin and evil and death do not really exist. To accuse is to be accused, and accusation is never truth.

Recognizing no one is really evil is all part of remembering the truth, that we are all completely innocent, there are no enemies, there is no "real evil" plotting to destroy you, evil is just a call for love, and it is your function to forgive them for what they are not really doing. Those who seem evil are innocent children of God. And every single one of them is welcomed Home by God with open arms and unconditional love. Love is justified because they are just experiencing a bad dream. And nothing in dreams is true.

Jesus loves "the devil".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you think this is not true, it is because you do not RECOGNIZE the insanity.

Insanity is actually a state of a LACK of recognition.

So when you are insane, you have even less ability to recognize that you are insane, which is why you are insane to begin with.

Therefore, to return to sanity, there has to be an increase in RECOGNITION of what everything really is.

A lack of recognition also makes you out of touch with reality. It's like you're in a state of hallucination instead of direct cognition.

When the recognition is at its maximum, you transition from being "out of touch", to having "reality contact."

A key requires that you have "a little willingness" to consider that you might be mistaken. That your recognition of what things are is faulty and limited. That there is a truth you do not see or recognize.

By having some willingness to be mistaken, which is humility and honesty, you can open up to a higher truth.

This invites the Holy Spirit to enter to heal your mind and help restore your sanity.

The world does not want to admit to how insane it is, because it's so insane that it doesn't think it is insane.

What is described in ACIM as "the real world" could be said to be simply a view of what's here WITHOUT insanity, a view in which you have full recognition.

And that means that until you reach that state, you are perceiving an UNREAL world. That means you are spending your whole life living in an unreal world, in a dream.

"This IS an insane world, and do not underestimate the actual extent of its insanity. There is no area of your perception that it has not touched, and your dream IS sacred to you."

"As you look with open eyes upon your world, it MUST occur to you that you have withdrawn into insanity. For you see what is not there, and hear what is soundless. Your behavioral MANIFESTATIONS of emotions are the OPPOSITE of what the emotions ARE. You communicate with no-one, and you are as isolated from reality, as if you were ALONE in all the universe. In your madness, you OVERLOOK REALITY COMPLETELY, and you see ONLY YOUR SPLIT MIND everywhere you look. God calls you and you do not hear, for you are preoccupied with your own voice. And the vision of Christ is not in your sight, for you look upon yourself ALONE."

"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? What need have they of sights or sounds or touch? What would they hear or reach to grasp? What would they sense at all? To sense is not to know. And truth can be but filled with knowledge, and with nothing else."

"It is insanity that thinks these things. You call them laws, and put them under different names in a long catalogue of rituals that have no use and serve no purpose. You think you must obey the "laws" of medicine, of economics, and of health. Protect the body and you will be saved. These are not laws, but madness."

"Is it not strange that you believe to think you made the world you see is arrogance? God made it not. Of this you can be sure. What can He know of the ephemeral, the sinful and the guilty, the afraid, the suffering and lonely, and the mind which lives within a body that must die? You but accuse Him of insanity to think He made a world where such things seem to have reality. He is not mad. Yet only madness makes a world like this."

"From the world of bodies, MADE by insanity, insane messages seem to be returned to the mind which made it. And these messages bear witness to this world, pronouncing it as true. For YOU sent forth these messengers, to bring this BACK to you."

"It is the FUNCTION of insanity to TAKE THE PLACE of truth. It must be seen AS truth, to be believed. And, if it IS the truth, then must its opposite, which was the truth before, be madness now. Such a reversal, COMPLETELY turned around, with madness sanity, illusions true, attack a kindness, hatred love, and murder benediction, IS the goal the laws of chaos serve. These are the means by which the laws of God APPEAR to be reversed. Here do the laws of sin APPEAR to hold love captive, and let sin go free."

“The first thing to remember about miracles is that there is no order of difficulty among them. One is not harder or bigger than another. They are all the same.”

Jesus says all miracles are the same. There is no order among them in terms of difficulty, or size, or adjusting proportions in relation to “what the problem is”. Miracle mindedness is a state of equality and evenness. It is flat.

All expressions of love are maximal, which means EVERY miracle expression is at the same level of maximal love. Not wavering or varying in degrees of application. Almost like there is one “button” that you push and it puts out a miracle and this same miracle has the power to do anything, every time. So there is no need for varying degrees of expression.

Similarly there is a hierarchy of illusions, in which all illusions APPEAR to have a total LACK of sameness. That everything is different, all forms are different, there are different degrees and amounts and importance and severity. Different amounts of hardness. “In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur.”

So the scenario we are presented with is a world which seems to show us “there are varying levels of difficulty”. And this is based on form. The form that something takes, is taken to be what it MEANS. We look at the form, the state, the shape, the texture, the color, the composition, the seeming evidence of what’s happened, the “proof of sin”, and we use that to come up with a JUDGEMENT of what “it is”. And this gives rise to what we think it MEANS, or implies. And that results in an entire hierarchy of degrees of difficulty, not to mention varying levels of reaction.

In LESSON 1 of the workbook, Jesus introduces us to this powerful idea, hitting the ground running. That everything in the world, all things we see, all objects, all FORMS, do not MEAN anything. That the form of things is NOT its meaning. And this is based on the simple yet deep idea of “there is no world”. The world is NOTHING, and therefore the things you see are NOT anything, and therefore do NOT MEAN anything.

“Lesson 1 "Nothing I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place) means anything.”

If you can realize how this is basically saying that NOTHING in the world means anything, it is telling you that the forms, physical states, conditions, amounts of stuff, it does not HAVE any meaning. One thing is not bigger than another. One thing is not harder to deal with than another. Even a certain form of body state, whether the body seems alive and healthy, or on its death bed, it is NO DIFFERENT in its meaning.

“They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful.”

We have INVENTED all the meanings we’ve given to everything in the world, including dead bodies. We have DECIDED that a body in a certain state MEANS death, and a body in another state “is better”. This is totally arbitrary, based loosely on the form of what we see, which is an illusion. A body seemingly in a state of death is NOT more dead than any other body.

So what we have to learn is that the physical state of things, regardless of its form, no matter its severity, even if a person is dead, even if they are severely sick, even if there’s a car crash, it should not MEAN that this is a very big serious terrible thing. It should not MEAN that this is more serious or more important or more severe, OR harder to recover from, OR really in any way a more DIFFICULT thing to deal with. It is all equally NOTHING.

“Yet it is when judgment ceases that healing occurs, because only then it can be understood that there is no order of difficulty in healing.”

Nothing I see means ANYTHING. A person seeming to be severely sick, is a judgement based on believing that their FORM is telling us its meaning. That certain states of the body are proof of certain degrees of death. That some things are worse than others. What we have to learn to be miracle minded is that the FORM that something takes, its appearance, no matter what that appearance is, is NOTHING AT ALL, and therefore it does not MEAN anything at all. One form is NOT different to another.

A serious ”bad situation” IS NOT a serious bad situation. It’s an illusion of one, taking the form of one, while simultaneously being absolutely nothing at all. And because it is nothing, it cannot mean anything. It cannot MEAN that it is a horrible nightmare Of awfulness. Because it is nothing, it cannot REALLY be a sickness. Because it is nothing, it is NOT really death, disaster, terror or hell. We can’t look to the form to tell us what anything means. Form is a lie. All physical states and shapes and conditions mean nothing whatsoever.

So the miracle has to overlook the appearance of the situation, completely disregard the evidence, turn away from what every physicality-believing person says, disregard the opinion of everyone who looks upon bodies and consider their states to be real, and do not GIVE any power to death. To not differentiate BETWEEN illusions. “There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal. ”

We are to not believe that a certain “state” is any kind of proof of anything. That it MEANS anything, indicates anything, implies anything, will lead to anything, or tells you a prognosis of even the potential of what might be possible. The form of the world cannot TELL YOU what is real or what anything means. You cannot look to IT to tell you what is true. You should ASK the physical to tell you what is spiritual fact.

We are to DEFY the world of illusions by bringing a power and a light from another world, a power which ignores form and completely overlooks the hierarchy of illusions. That flattens the hierarchy and renders all physical things EQUAL. Which sees all situations as THE SAME. And therefore having ONE response of love and power which deals with this ONE state of illusions, this ONE substrate of deception, and does ONE thing to bringing about a change.

Lesson 5 “Applying the same idea to each of them separately is the first step in ultimately recognizing they are all the same.”

lesson 79 “Everyone in this world seems to have his own special problems. Yet they are all the same, and must be recognized as one if the one solution which solves them all is to be accepted.”

“Accept the holy instant as this year is born, and take your place, so long left unfulfilled, in the Great Awakening. Make this year different, by making it ALL THE SAME.”

When all things in the world are recognized as nothing, they do not MEAN what you thought they meant. You have a clean slate. You have taken away from the world all the meanings it has, which you gave to it, under the belief that IT gave them to you based on its forms.

Its form are deceptions, they do NOT mean what they appear to mean. They ARE not what they seem to be. Do not listen to people telling you that something MEANS something because of its current “state”. This is just feedback from an illusory world where nothing is true.

“Nothing that the world believes is true.” “No one has been sure of anything since.”

ALL illusory forms, all physical objects, all bodies, all states are illusions of differences and appearances of conflicts. As if that means something. As if that’s proof of what is happening. Some things seem terrible and awful while other things seem harmless and nice. But none of this is true. All the things in the world are ONE thing, one equal sameness of nothing. And it is their nothingness that guarantees their healing. Because now if it is nothing, you are not dealing with a “big bad problem”, you’re dealing with an illusion, and illusions recognized as nothing must disappear.

It is the fact that this is all NOTHING, that gives you the power to be free from it, to not fear it, to not endow it with attributes it does not have, to not use it to prove sin is real, and have no effects from it. What is nothing can do nothing and is nothing. There is no world. There is no death. The son of God is free.

“Think how this SEEMS to interfere with the first principle of miracles. For this establishes degrees of TRUTH among illusions, making it appear that some are HARDER to be overcome than others. If it were realized that they are all the same and EQUALLY untrue, it would be easy, then, to understand that miracles apply to ALL of them. Errors of ANY kind can be corrected, BECAUSE they are untrue.”

"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 disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear.”

In the course, we know that Jesus tells us how we project stuff out and then perceive it. Okay, makes sense. But for the most part, it makes sense at the level of you as an individual perceiving "the world out there" in a certain way, that you've got stuff "inside your mind, inside your body", which you're putting onto the world.

And then we think that the course is also telling us to "change our mind about the world", meaning, the world stays as it is, and we need to "see it differently." This is because we apply it at the level of an individual, assuming the world got there through some other means.

BUT HOW ABOUT THIS.......*roll up your sleeves*

The Son of God is dreaming the entire physical universe. He is PROJECTING IT. He is doing so using the power of his mind, which has within it the power to perform miracles.

HE projects and makes the world appear. HE then perceives what he has projected. Therefore, if HE changes HIS MIND, about what he has projected, the projected world WILL LITERALLY CHANGE FORM, PHYSICALLY!

Not your "view of the world". THE WORLD ITSELF WILL CHANGE. A direct power of the mind over matter, a power to make anything appear AT WILL. Not you shifting your little private perspective to "see it differently".... but your mind, actually CAUSING THE WORLD TO CHANGE, by projecting A DIFFERENT WORLD! AT THE PHYSICAL LEVEL!

With this viewpoint in mind, consider, that maybe when you read statements about perception, projection, what you see, the world you see, and what changes or shifts when you change your perception, MAYBE... you read it in a certain context thinking it was about your view OF the world, and didn't realize it was talking about YOU MAKING THE WORLD LITERALLY CHANGE WITH YOUR MIND. And what if we revisit those statements and consider them from this new perspective?

Here we go...

"Projection makes perception. The world that you see is what you have put there to see; nothing more and nothing less and so it is important to you."

---- How about this.... "the world you see" means the physical earth and NOT your interpretation of it.

---- "what you have put there to see" is because YOUR MIND has literally projected PHYSICAL OBJECTS, in order to see them.

"The world that you perceive is the witness to your state of mind, the outward picture of your inward condition."

--- How about this... "witness to your state of mind, and outward picture of your inward condition", literally means, THE PHYSICAL FORMS THAT ARE SHOWING UP, are being put there by your mind! They reflect what's going on inside of you. This relates to YOUR BODY, as well as to objects in the physical environment. Your body shows up as a representation of how your mind is expressing (love or attack), and SO DOES THE ENVIRONMENT. The environment is being projected this way BY THE SON OF GOD who is responsible for putting all of the content into the world, all objects, all forms. You are PROJECTING THE WORLD LITERALLY, not just as a metaphor, nor anything to do with you having a "separate" perception of what is out there.

--- How about.. projection makes perception, actually means, you FIRST PUT OBJECTS INTO THE WORLD, then you perceive them! NOT... that you project mental interpretations ONTO the objects and perceive the interpretations! What if, changing your mind, literally will show up as a DIFFERENT WORLD OF FORM? What if you will project a different earth?!

"As you think so do you perceive. So do not seek to change the world but choose to change your mind about the world's reality. What you perceive is a result, not a cause."

--- How about this... "what you perceive is a result, not a cause", tells us that what we see, in any form of seeing, is not causality, because THERE IS NO CAUSE IN THE WORLD. What we see out there, objects, cars, people, houses, trees, is the RESULT of what we WANT TO BE OUT THERE.

--- How about, our minds are so powerful and strong, and creative, they are capable of, and ARE ALWAYS, projecting images of bodies and trees and houses and other stuff, literally MATERIALIZING MATTER, based on the inner content of our mind!

--- How about, when Jesus tells us to not to seek to change the world, he is ACTUALLY telling us, that there's no point changing the RESULT of what we project, we MIGHT AS WELL JUST PROJECT SOMETHING ELSE. Since we have the ability to PUT objects out there, which we then perceive, we might as well just change our mind about what to PUT THERE, and therefore change the content of the world! Changing your mind "about the world" therefore means to shift what you WANT TO SEE, and so be it, IT WILL APPEAR!

"That is why no miracle is harder than another."

--- How about this... miracles demonstrate that nothing in this world is caused by anything but your mind, and they are only effects, projections, from YOU, and nothing would even be showing up OUT THERE if YOU weren't putting stuff there with your mind right now, as you have been all along. Your body, your world, your environment, are all coming from the miracle-minded son of God. Therefore, just as miracles can EASILY CHANGE what is out there, so too do you have the ability to CHANGE THE WORLD by USING A MIRACLE, and there is no limit to what you can do.

Perhaps then, Jesus isn't so much teaching us here, in this context, about changing "how we view" the world or what ways we're misinterpreting it and so on. How about, if he is actually telling us that what's showing up out there, is COMING FROM US AT ALL TIMES, and we are supposed to be in a position of having this kind of mastery, where we can CHOOSE, whatever it is that is going to show up, BECAUSE we are miraculous and our mind has POWER OVER ALL MATTER?!

We are supernatural. We are not bystanders in a world that someone else made.

Jesus goes onto say similar things in other quotes, which COULD also lend themselves to an entirely new interpretation of how we project the world, rather than talking about how you "interpret" what's there.

For example:

"The world you see is an illusion of a world." (literally the world itself, not HOW you see it)

"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." (literally you invented the physical objects themselves, not HOW you see them)

"Every thought you have makes up some segment of the world you see. It is with your thoughts then, that we must work, if your perception of the world is to be changed." (literally your thought MAKES THE WORLD, the PHYSICAL PLANET, and therefore you need to change your mind in order to SEE something else!)

"There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see and all the world must change accordingly. Ideas leave not their source. " (the physical planet IS NOT THERE UNLESS YOU WISH IT TO BE. Change your mind about WHAT YOU WANT TO SEE, and the world - planet earth - physical matter, WILL CHANGE ACCORDINGLY!)

"The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that." (you literally see only the world that YOU PUT THERE IN FORM, nothing to do with "how you interpret what's there" at all)

"The world you see does not exist." (the world you see means the physical EARTH, and it does not exist. This has NOTHING to do with YOUR INTERPETATIVE PERCEPTION *OF* it)

"Perception selects, and makes the world you see." (you choose what you want to see and project the forms! then you see them)

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt" (because people made mad with guilt have PROJECTED FORMS which symbolize and represent madness, making a dysfunctional planet!)

If we interpret all these kind of statements from a perspective of YOU CAUSING EVERYTHING, and not from a perspective of "the world is out there objectively on its own and I need to change how I interpret it)... it lends an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT meaning to the MIRACLE WORKING which Jesus is trying to teach us to perform!

What if all along, Jesus has been trying to get us to change our mind, SO THAT we project a different world? A happy dream? So that we "cause" a state of peace on earth temporarily? Literally, in manifestation? What if we were never supposed to think of our perceptual changes as "reinterpretations of whats out there" but simply as, undoing our self attack so that we PROJECT a different world?

Is this not what Jesus is teaching when he tells us, that how you use the body, it will become to you? That if you use it for attack, it will SHOW UP WITH SICKNESS? That if you use it for love, IT WILL SHOW UP AS INVULNERABLE? That are we supposed to be DEMONSTRATING IN THE FLESH that we cannot be hurt, because the MATTER that we project can be made incapable of being caused by the world? Because it's coming from our mind? THAT WE LITERALLY, DIRECTLY, ARE DREAMING IT ALL?!

One of the major teachings of A Course in Miracles, also present in Buddhism and Hinduism and many other belief systems, even present in the very first lessons of the Workbook, is that the physical world is a world of illusions. That many different objects only appear to be different, and their differences are meaningless.

In effect, the teaching is that you cannot judge a book by its cover, and you absolutely cannot take the objects of the world at face value. While most of the world believes that the world contains many many different things, different forms, objects, bodies, types, shapes, sizes, configurations, combinations etc, in truth there is actually only one thing here.

At first, to a person who is somewhat "blinded by perception of form", the world appears to be a tremendously complicated place filled with many different things. The differences are identified by how they appear, or what materials it seems to be made of, or how it behaves, or how it's constructed, or what it is used for, or what the symptoms seem to be etc. But these are all disguises.

Such a person will then believe that there really is a major real difference between a hammer and a screwdriver, between a car and a house, between a man and a woman, between a cake and some icecream. Places will all seem to be different and offer different seeming experiences. The next new toy will appear to be something you've never seen before. And everywhere you turn every single object seems to be distinct, separate and unique.

In such a view, uniqueness is valued highly, as though being unique and different sets you apart and identifies you and defines you. As if you stand out and be yourself by being unlike anything else. This merely emphasizes the sense of separateness between things and reinforces the belief that space and time are real.

The more a person thinks that there really are real differences between things, the more they will buy into what we call the "hierarchy of illusions". That is where some things are considered to MEAN something different to others, such as that a death is far "worse" than a mild headache, or that a million dollars is better than 1 dollar, or a burning house is a far worse problem than just that your fingernails need clipping.

For such a person, the world is seen as having the power to cause them, to victimize them, to do things to them. They see the world as both offensive and attractive. Some parts of it they will separate out and label as desirable, wanted, meaningful and valuable. At the same time other things which induce more unpleasant reactions will be relegated to hell and labeled as unwanted.

A person then will be living half a life, separated off, trying to maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff. Always on the run and living in fear, trying to hide from and prevent all the terrible suffering and tragedies that happen, while simultaneously strongly investing in, believing in and wanting to keep, the very same world which induces these things - for its supposed benefits.

This is clearly an insane state of mind, in which a person is in a relationship with a fickle, unpredictable, demanding, controlling, overpowering world, which sometimes throws them a bone and gives them something to seemingly celebrate, while quickly turning around and slapping them in the face the next day with some horrifying problem.

Such a life is a rollercoaster of constantly being thrown around by the waves of whatever's next, with no real peace and no consistency and no true invulnerability. It is a life of fear, wrapped up in an interpretation which frames parts of it as a life that is wanted. A life of judgement, in which some aspects of the world are despised and rejected while others are overly embraced and absorbed into. This is not a spiritual life, it's a life of contradiction and conflict.

What we have to all come to realize, and what a person generally WILL realize given enough time, is that the offerings of the world are not REALLY different things. It may take exposure to a great many things the world seems to separately give, in order to "tire" of the lure of these differences, to transcend them, to see through them, and to realize they are all the same.

This is real spiritual progression, where a person begins to see that the differences between objects are all artificial and meaningless. That having that super precious rare gem is not really that important, versus having a glass of water. Where the extremes of the values of things versus others, flattens out, and a person becomes far less attracted to, or put off by, any particular "temptation" that the world is offering that day.

What this means is that the learning becomes generalized. As a person matures more spiritually they will realize there isn't really a significant difference between things. That in order to retain a sense of integrity, peace, consistency and honesty, the difference forms of things have to be ignored. In order not to be constantly thrown around on the rollercoaster of hell, reacting to everything as if it means something, you have to learn to become more stable and unconditional.

Not changing moods based on conditions, not adapting to what's happening, not allowing the world to do things to you, not seeing yourself as either victimized negatively OR positively, not giving power TO the world to change or define you, not allowing circumstances to dictate what will happen, not giving away power to the extremes of the hierarchy of illusions, and no longer falling for the temptation to believe that the world in certain configurations means hell on earth.

Being deceived by the forms and differences of the world is unconsciousness. It is a state of unawareness and spiritual irresponsibility. It indicates a person who is selfish and wants to get things from the world, but at the same time doesn't want the world to give them the wrong things. It's a person whose relationships are all based on specialness and unholiness, a person who is themselves not whole, who is in denial of wholeness and therefore distanced from God in their "independence."

In order to wake up to reality, a person has to learn that this world isn't really offering anything different. It is really regurgitating the same stuff. It spews out the same illusions in different forms. Masses of materialistic products are made in which everyone now tries to create every single possible variation of a thing. And how many such variations does anyone really need? Their differences are insubstantial and superficial. Their different appearances are regarded as the defining factor as to how valuable they and what price tag they come with. But it's all made of the same lies and untruths.

The real truth is that there IS no difference between anything in the world. All appearances are illusions. All forms and shapes and sizes and amounts and values are utterly deceptive. They are all designed to tempt you to believe, to deceive you into believing, that physical reality is real when it isn't. That there is a world of many things, all of which are unlike the others, offering you constant distractions and side-quests and tempting pathways, all of which lead to the same ultimate end in death.

The truth is that there is not really any choices in the world. ALL of the things the world offers lead to death and destruction. Whether it appears to temporarily give you something you want or to take it away quickly, all forms end in death. They are made of death because they are made of the attempt to separate things out, to attack the other, to be unlike, unequal, in a constant state of war and conflict, incapable of peace and never offering anything consistent.

Fluctuating illusions cannot be reality. If something can change its form and be something one day and something else the next, it has no real permanent identity. A flower goes from a seed to a bloom to a wilted mess and not one of those states is reality. It is all the same thing. Be not deceived by what you see in the world. The world presents a picture of nothing pretending to be something, and it has absolutely no meaning.

The entire drive of A Course in Miracles is to teach us and help us to practice NOT being deceived by physical differences, by appearances, or by any sense of there being any variation in importance or relevance between one object and another. As we look around the room and OVERLOOK any particular reason to categorize things or to say they are more or less applicable to the ONE truth, we are training ourselves to no longer be deceived by the world and its lies.

"The belief in order of difficulties is the basis for the world's perception. It rests on differences; on uneven background and shifting foreground, on unequal heights and diverse sizes, on varying degrees of darkness and light, and thousands of contrasts in which each thing seen competes with every other in order to be recognized. A larger object overshadows a smaller one. A brighter thing draws the attention from another with less intensity of appeal. And a more threatening idea, or one conceived of as more desirable by the world's standards, completely upsets the mental balance. What the body's eyes behold is only conflict. Look not to them for peace and understanding."

"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."

"Appearances deceive BUT CAN BE CHANGED. Reality is changeless. It does not deceive at all. And if you fail to see BEYOND appearances, you ARE deceived. For everything you see will change, and yet you thought it real before, and now you think it real again. Reality is thus reduced to form, and CAPABLE of change. Reality is changeless. It is this that MAKES it real, and KEEPS it separate from all appearances. It MUST transcend all form to be itself. It CANNOT change. The miracle is means to demonstrate that ALL appearances can change BECAUSE they are appearances, and CANNOT have the changelessness reality entails. The miracle attests salvation FROM appearances by SHOWING they can change."

"But appearances are shown to be unreal BECAUSE they change."

"Nothing so blinding as perception of form. For sight of form MEANS understanding HAS BEEN obscured. Only MISTAKES have different forms, and so they CAN deceive. You CAN change form, BECAUSE it is not true. It COULD not be reality, BECAUSE it can be changed. Reason will tell you that, if form is NOT reality, it MUST be an illusion. And is Not THERE to see. And, IF you see it, you MUST be mistaken, for you are seeing what can NOT be real, as if it WERE. What cannot see BEYOND what is not there, MUST be distorted perception. And must perceive illusions AS THE TRUTH. Could it, then, RECOGNIZE the truth?"

"Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. It sees their nothingness, and looks right through the thousand forms in which they may appear. It looks on lies but it is not deceived."

"Applying the same idea to each of them separately is the first step in ultimately recognizing they are all the same."

"Everyone in this world seems to have his own special problems. Yet they are all the same, and must be recognized as one if the one solution which solves them all is to be accepted."

"This world SEEMS to hold out many purposes, each different, and with different values. Yet they are all the same. Again, there is no order, but a SEEMING hierarchy of values."

"The spark of beauty, or the veil of ugliness; the real world, or the world of guilt and fear; truth or illusion; freedom or slavery, - it is all the same. For you can NEVER choose EXCEPT between God and the ego."

There are some parts of the course which suggest that if you will just change HOW you look at the world, or what meaning you GIVE it, suddenly seemingly horrifying scenes are interpreted as healed and lovely.

Obviously this loveliness MUST transcend the FORM of what is happening, because a broken leg is still a broken leg, and an explosion is still an explosion. But somehow, Jesus is saying that just by changing your perception, a world which used to look like hell, can look "like heaven".

"What loveliness we look upon today! What holiness we see surrounding us! And it is given us to recognize it is a holiness in which we share"

"There is no place for hell within a world whose loveliness can yet be so intense and so inclusive it is but a step from there to Heaven."

This seems ridiculous at first. You ask yourself how this is remotely possible, and how it is not just a totally insane idea to suggest that THIS world's horrors can be "smiled upon" or interpreted as "lovely". But this is what true perception and forgiveness is offering.

Somehow, a changed perception projects God's love onto the world, God is seen as a reflection IN the world, and Earth now reflects heaven instead of hell. It still has its same forms, and the same things may be happening physically, but what they MEAN changes. And there becomes a light that you see in and around everything.

Jesus says the Holy Spirit can liberate even the darkest bullshit we made, and make it appear lovely and a blessing. That even a dead body could appear to use like it is sparkling and healed. And this doesn't necessarily mean it is in a form or condition that is physically healed, like a cancerous tumor disappearing, but it is still interpreted as healed.

This SEEMS to suggest that the cancer could remain, physically, while perceiving from an advanced perspective of love and light. It would be seen as "lovely". This however doesn't necessarily imply that the cancer SHOULD remain, because the mind is capable of performing miracles to change matter. And sane minds heal bodies so that even symbolically, even in form, they symbolize eternal life and healing.

"Think of the loveliness that you will see, who walk with Him! And think how beautiful will each of you look to the other!"

"The special ones are all asleep, surrounded by a world of loveliness they do not see."

It is hard to get ones head around how it is possible to see this shitty-ass world as beautiful, light-filled, lovable. But ACIM says that even God loves the world. And that we can see God in everything, when God is in our mind, due to projecting God's meaning ONTO the world. That you can see God IN it, because you mix it WITH His love.

I used to get a sense of this, when I would read the course even years ago, where it sounded like he was saying that just by having a different state of mind, the world would be seen as entirely healed. I wasn't sure this was a correct interpretation, because I wanted to also include miracles. But it does seem to hold without undermining miracles of healing.

The world seen through the eyes of Christ, is a "healed world". It's redeemed. It's "translated into heaven", ACIM says. And then this REFLECTION of heaven, paves the way to knowledge and to the return home to the real thing.

"Miracles are merely the translation of denial into truth."

"The ability to perceive made the body possible, because you must perceive SOMETHING, and WITH something. This is why perception involves an exchange, or a translation, which knowledge does NOT need. The interpretive function of perception, (actually, a distorted form of creation), then permitted man to interpret the body as HIMSELF, which, although depressing, was a way out of the conflict he induced."

"Through Him, YOU stand before God's altar, where He gently translated hell into Heaven. For it is only in Heaven that God would have you be."

"Be not unwilling now, you are too near, and you WILL cross the bridge in perfect safety, translated quietly from war to peace."

"For, once you have accepted it as the ONLY PERCEPTION THAT YOU WANT, it is translated into knowledge, by the part that God Himself plays in the Atonement, for it is the ONLY step in it He understands."

"This is a very simple course. Perhaps you do not feel you need a course which, in the end, teaches that only reality is true. But do you believe it? When you perceive the real world, you will recognize that you did not believe it. Yet the swiftness with which your new and only real perception will be translated into knowledge will leave you but an instant to realize that this alone is true. And then everything you made will be forgotten; the good and the bad, the false and the true. For as Heaven and earth become one, even the real world will vanish from your sight. The end of the world is not its destruction, but its translation into Heaven. 9 The reinterpretation of the world is the transfer of all perception to knowledge."

"Each spot HIS reason touches, grows alive with beauty. And what SEEMED ugly, in the darkness of your LACK of reason, is suddenly released to loveliness. Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release.

All this beauty will rise to bless your sight, as you look upon the world with forgiving eyes. For forgiveness literally TRANSFORMS vision, and lets you see the real world, reaching quietly and gently across chaos, and removing ALL illusions that had twisted your perception, and fixed it on the past. The smallest leaf becomes a thing of wonder, and a blade of grass a sign of God's perfection. From the forgiven world, the Son of God is lifted easily to his home. And there he knows that he has ALWAYS rested there, in peace."

Bodies always express limitation. All bodies are limited. The very fact that a body has a perimeter or surface where it stops, it a limitation. The fact that it has a certain size and shape and color and style, is a limitation. It does not share some of the attributes of other bodies, which is a further limitation.

If bodies goes into states that we call sickness, these really are not a special category - they are just more limitations, or different limitations. Even if the body goes towards a death state, this again is just another arbitrary configuration of physical parts that look a certain way.

Physical sickness and death are only considered to be those things because we make comparisons and slap labels on them. We decided to call it death when a body takes on a configuration of certain functions ceasing and certain decay setting in. This is made up. We decided to call it sickness when certain parts are malfunctioning or damaged, but again this is a made-up category.

All body states are limitations, and there is no real difference between what appear to be what we call healthy states versus more deathly states. Even a seemingly healthy body is still a picture of limitation, which is inherently an idea of being "less than immortal", of attacking the unlimited, and is therefore an idea of death. At best it can appear to be what we decided to call "life", or at worst death.

No matter what the condition or configuration of the body is, it isn't an accurate depiction of who or what you are. In fact nothing about the body is really what you look like in reality. Not even peering into the eyes. The body is a surface shell covering up the mind, designed to be different and unalike and deceptive and a disguise. At best is it a lie, and at its worst an attempt to murder you.

The states of the body do not represent your souls perfection. Your soul is always in a state of absolute immortality and invulnerability, incorruptibility and health. Even if the mind has mangled the body in attempting to pretend to be a body, in attempting to pretend the body as the son of God has been attacked, the soul is unchanged. The body in all its states is a lie because we made it to be a separation device and a way to deceive ourselves. Deception devices don't EVER represent the truth, except perhaps symbolically when they are "more whole."

If you look to the body and are convinced that it is a person, and therefore that something is wrong with the person, you have fallen into the trap. If you regard the body as a person, you have been deceived. The body is made to cover people up and hide their reality, to oppose their unlimited nature. The body is not natural at any time.

"In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning." UrT23C20

"Life and death seem to be opposites because you have decided death ends life." UrM21A5

"Here stands the body, torn between the natural desire to communicate, and the unnatural intent to murder and to die." UrT23D6

"God did not make the body, because it is destructible, and therefore not of the Kingdom. The body is the symbol of WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist." UrT6F8

"The ability to perceive made the body possible, because you must perceive SOMETHING, and WITH something. This is why perception involves an exchange, or a translation, which knowledge does NOT need. The interpretive function of perception, (actually, a distorted form of creation), then permitted man to interpret the body as HIMSELF, which, although depressing, was a way out of the conflict he induced." UrT3F17

"The hope of specialness makes it seem possible God made the body as the prison-house which keeps His Son from Him. For it DEMANDS a special place God cannot enter, and a hiding-place where none is welcome but your tiny self." UrT24C13

"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master. And this unholy instant SEEMS to be life. An instant of despair, a tiny island of dry sand, bereft of water, and set uncertainly upon oblivion. Here does the Son of God stop briefly by, to offer his devotion to death's idols, and then pass on." UrT20G11

"It is only the awareness of the body that makes love seem limited. For the body IS a limit on love. The belief in limited love was its origin, and it was MADE to limit the UNlimited. Think not that this is merely allegorical; for it was made to limit YOU. Can you who see yourselves WITHIN a body, know yourself AS AN IDEA?" UrT18I1

"At no SINGLE instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered or anticipated, but NEVER experienced just now. Only its past and future make it seem real. Time controls it entirely. For sin is never present." UrT18H3

"A mind and body cannot both exist. Make no attempt to reconcile the two, for one denies the other can be real. If you are physical your mind is gone from your self-concept, for it has no place in which it could be really part of you. If you are Spirit, then the body must be meaningless to your reality." UrW96L4

"Sickness is a defense against the truth." - ACIM

Truth is divine perfect health. Truth is love. Truth is God.

When there is an unforgiving attitude, it produces sickness because it is an attack on yourself.

Sickness isn't a "thing". It doesn't have its own identity. It isn't a real thing. It's just a word for what it seems to look like when you are partly disconnected from or in denial of eternal life.

It is completely reversible because it is nothing more than an illusion. We simply need to return to a forgiving attitude by forgiving and undoing our unforgiving attitude.

Sickness must go. It does not have a power of its own. It is not a cause. It is only an effect, a side-effect of temporarily denying who you are.

It has no staying-power or causality. Sickness does not cause further sickness. Problems in the body do not cause sickness. Problems in the environment does not cause sickness. And sickness does not spread or increase on its own.

Sickness can only be an effect, or symptom. All notions of sickness being a 'thing' in its own right, that someone "has" a specific sickness, as though that sickness is a 'thing' that happens to them distinct from other things, that's not true.

And people don't "get sick" or "become sick". People choose not to be divinely healthy on some level.

Since sickness only seems to appear as an illusion when we are in denial of the truth, and since when we are not in denial of the truth sickness cannot exist, sickness does not really exist.

There is no "real sickness". Nobody is "really sick". They are experiencing illusions of sickness.

Sickness is nothing.

Sickness is not even the issue. It is just a symptoms of what it looks like when we defend against truth, which is a defense against ourselves, which is a self-attack. If we stop doing that, we will stop seeming to exhibit signs of sickness.

Only the truth is true.

Some people say heaven is not a place. It’s usually based around the quote "heaven is an awareness of perfect oneness." This is one of those things where you have to look at what other quotes say to build a full picture.

Logically, this world that you think is a place, is not a place, because it is an opposite to God’s creation. Secondly, this world will cease to appear to exist when it disappears into the nothingness it came from. The question then will be, WHERE will you (your soul) be located? It definitely WILL NOT be located in this world.

A further question is, where is Jesus hanging out right now? He’s not in a body - and when the world disappears ("together we will watch the world disappear"), His Home will not be lost. So where is he?

How about "Heaven remains your one alternative to the strange world you made"?

How about over *10* references to "in heaven"?

How about, "Heaven is the sum of all God created" or "Heaven includes all of God’s children and their creations"? Do you think Creation takes place in this world? It does not.

So when Jesus says "Heaven is an awareness of perfect oneness", He is correctly saying that it entails AWARENESS of God and Creation. It IS a "state of mind" in God’s mind. But there is more to Creation than just mind. There is also BEING. And being requires "somewhere" for you to BE. Yes Heaven is suspended in God’s mind.

But let’s also be clear, awareness IS NOT perception. And the the world you made is a world of perception. Being AWARE of Heaven can only take place IN Heaven. PERCEPTION of Heaven (a reflection) can only take place IN perception - in this word.

Let’s also be clear on the other favorite quote, "God is in everything I see because God is in my mind." Fact is, this is talking about PERCEPTION. The entire lesson talks about this. You cannot PERCEIVE God. You can be AWARE of God, and this awareness requires - REQUIRES - the END of perception, which in turn requires you to NOT BE IN A BODY because the body was made SO THAT you had something to perceive with.

When God finally scoops you up and takes you TO HEAVEN, you will regain full *awareness* of perfect oneness, replacing your perception of oneness. And when this world disappears - not forgetting that THERE IS NO WORLD (so the world is NOT a place), "all that remains" is Heaven. It is the "place" where you LIVE, BE, CREATE and EXTEND.

Heaven is not inside of spacetime. It’s not a place as in, a physical location in space. But it is somewhere. It is everywhere. You can BE THERE, without a world. And the course describes it as "a living world."

So yes, Heaven is a place. Heaven is the ONLY place.

Finally Jesus says of heaven, "I can take you there any time."

HEAVEN IS REAL!

HEAVEN IS A PLACE, AND A STATE OF MIND

Some people say heaven is not a place. It’s usually based around the quote "heaven is an awareness of perfect oneness." This is one of those things where you have to look at what other quotes say to build a full picture.

Logically, this world that you think is a place, is not a place, because it is an opposite to God’s creation. Secondly, this world will cease to appear to exist when it disappears into the nothingness it came from. The question then will be, WHERE will you (your soul) be located? It definitely WILL NOT be located in this world.

A further question is, where is Jesus hanging out right now? He’s not in a body - and when the world disappears ("together we will watch the world disappear"), His Home will not be lost. So where is he?

How about "Heaven remains your one alternative to the strange world you made"?

How about over *10* references to "in heaven"?

How about, "Heaven is the sum of all God created" or "Heaven includes all of God’s children and their creations"? Do you think Creation takes place in this world? It does not.

So when Jesus says "Heaven is an awareness of perfect oneness", He is correctly saying that it entails AWARENESS of God and Creation. It IS a "state of mind" in God’s mind. But there is more to Creation than just mind. There is also BEING. And being requires "somewhere" for you to BE. Yes Heaven is suspended in God’s mind.

But let’s also be clear, awareness IS NOT perception. And the the world you made is a world of perception. Being AWARE of Heaven can only take place IN Heaven. PERCEPTION of Heaven (a reflection) can only take place IN perception - in this word.

Let’s also be clear on the other favorite quote, "God is in everything I see because God is in my mind." Fact is, this is talking about PERCEPTION. The entire lesson talks about this. You cannot PERCEIVE God. You can be AWARE of God, and this awareness requires - REQUIRES - the END of perception, which in turn requires you to NOT BE IN A BODY because the body was made SO THAT you had something to perceive with.

When God finally scoops you up and takes you TO HEAVEN, you will regain full *awareness* of perfect oneness, replacing your perception of oneness. And when this world disappears - not forgetting that THERE IS NO WORLD (so the world is NOT a place), "all that remains" is Heaven. It is the "place" where you LIVE, BE, CREATE and EXTEND.

Heaven is not inside of spacetime. It’s not a place as in, a physical location in space. But it is somewhere. It is everywhere. You can BE THERE, without a world. And the course describes it as "a living world."

So yes, Heaven is a place. Heaven is the ONLY place.

Finally Jesus says of heaven, "I can take you there any time."

HEAVEN IS REAL!

When I used to consider "the secret of salvation", which is the idea that you are "doing it to yourself", I could recognize the need for total responsibility. I saw that anything which I thought someone was doing to me, from the outside in, I must be doing to myself. But I didn't entirely realize a key portion of this.

What I see in it now is more. I see that we are immortal beings, who can never be attacked or hurt or damaged or upset in any way against our will. The ownership and identification with this is our true responsibility.

This lays a new foundation. Because now it means that if I am suffering, or seeming to suffer at the hands of another, or because of the world doing something to me, it must mean I have secretly attempted to stop being immortal.

The "what I a doing to myself" isn't so much the appearance of what others are doing, but is in fact the DISTANCE between my immortal self and the mortal victim self I'm portraying myself as. Between the invulnerable self and the ego. It is the traversal of that distance that I am responsible for, and which is my own attack upon myself, placing myself in a state of weakness.

Even if it may appear that the world is seeming to be the cause of something, happening to my body, inducing fear, causing effects in me, it cannot be true. These things are not put in place from the outside in, they're put in place from the inside out.

If I stop recognizing my immortal invulnerable nature, and attack myself first, I will lose track of who I am, question and doubt myself, go into uncertainty and fear, and project the idea of causation outside of myself. Then I will see myself as potentially caused by the world, instead of by God.

That faulty perception of myself, that body identification, that self denial, is something I am doing to myself. And it means I'm putting myself in a position, in a role, where I seem vulnerable and in need of defenses against a cruel and unsafe world. But I can't blame the world for being in this position, when it's me that's putting myself there.

Even more so, the world is my dream, in my mind, coming from me decision. If I dream of my body being attacked surely I have consented, and have attempted to use the body to prove I am not immortal. I have done this to myself. I cannot be attacked if I am permanent and unchangeable. Portraying myself as a victim must mean I'm attempting to destroy myself, and that is my own doing.

The responsibility is not in terms of what others appear to be doing to me from the outside in, but what I have attempted to do to my immortal self, to my unlimited mind, to render is less than whole and lacking and limited. That is an internal attack which merely is disguised behind the outward expression of that deception.

The immortal cannot suffer. The immortal cannot be sick. The immortal cannot die. The immortal cannot be attacked or hurt. The immortal cannot be upset or have their peace disturbed. The immortal are responsible because they know themselves and have owned up to their true christ nature. They no longer deceive themselves with the idea that a fictional alien will can act against them, and so their mind is not split.

The secret of salvation tells us we are responsible for all of our own suffering. It tells us that it doesn't matter what the seeming cause of suffering is, there is only one cause, and it is in our own mind. It tells us that we are doing it to ourselves. And who are we, that this is being done to? We are immortal beings. And so if we seem to suffer, we must have undermined our own invulnerability. Just as "my attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

You are not weak but strong. You are not afraid but all powerful. You are not an illusion but a reality. You are not mortal but immortal. You are not vulnerable but invulnerable. You are not destructible but permanent. You are not guilty but innocent. You are still as God created you.

Imagine you go into a room which is just completely empty, with pure white walls, ceiling and floor. There is nothing in the room.

This room is a holo-deck, or a holographic projection room, in which very believable and real-seeming objects can show up. They can even have physical properties like weight and inertia and can be moved around and interacted with.

So you're standing there in this empty room and suddenly a chair appears out of nowhere. You go over to it and it looks incredibly realistic. You actually believe it's a "real chair". You're like, how did this chair get in here? You touch it and it feels solid, and you pick it up and move it a bit. It makes a slight noise as the legs scrape on the floor, and then you sit on it. It supports you. Very realistic. Very lifelike.

Except that it's just a hologram. It's just an illusion of a chair, being projected there by some kind of "system" that's running unseen. But it's so convincing, you're certain it's a real chair.

Another chair appears out of nowhere and sitting in this chair, there suddenly appears some person. This person must've been there all along, you reason, trying to justify how your perception can have not noticed them before, because they seem real. Their body looks real, it moves and breathes and has a pulse. The person is looking around, fidgeting and wondering what's going on.

The thing is, this other person is someone you know and that person is sick, or they have a disease, or a problem, or some kind of suffering or lack, or maybe they are dying, or are very emotionally upset. You see them, and you're like, wow, that seems so real. It really seems like that person is there, having these issues, and that it's all very tangible and realistic. You're so convinced you don't even remember that they are being projected by the same unseen system.

So then, because you know this person and they are unhappy or unhealthy in some way, you have this reaction, or a whole bunch of reactions about them. You believe their sickness is real, because it looks real, and you can maybe even see and touch it, or can see how it seems to be affecting them. And your reactions compel you to want to help or have sympathy or fix them or do something to make their suffering stop. All of these are reactions to the belief that they really are sitting there, having an unhappy time, and yet all along you don't realize - that person is not even really sitting there. It's a holographic projection of a body, just like an image in a dream. It's coming from somewhere else.

You build up this whole set of reactions and counter-measures and attempts to solve the real-seeming problem, so convinced that it's really happening and there's a real danger or threat to that person. But there isn't. It's just an image. It's not a real sickness, it's a holographic sickness. It's not real damage to their body, it's just a projected image. It's not real suffering, it's just a fictional suffering. Some system somewhere unseen is projecting all of this and making it seem very real and convincing. It's totally made-up.

Suddenly you see in the corner of the room a doorway, outside of which sits a computer, and this computer is actually projecting the images that are in the room. You can see beams of light coming from it, making the person appear, making the chairs appear, and then you notice it even making your own body appear. Your own body is even a holographic image coming from somewhere, and it's not even really there.

Realizing this, you RECOGNIZE that these images are just illusions being projected, and are not REAL. They are made up. The joke was on you. You believed them and fell for it. The other person isn't even really that body that you saw. YOU aren't even the body that you thought you were. The chairs don't even exist. It's all a trick. What you thought was real sickness was just an illusion of sickness, a holographic projection of sickness. It was nothing more than a flickering image like from a movie projector. It had no reality to it, no truth to it. It wasn't doing anything, or causing anything. It could've been switched on or off in an instant, or even removed entirely at the flip of a switch.

A little light lights up on the computer and the image of the other person suddenly disappears. In their place, another body shows up - the same person, but in a state of perfect health. This remains for a moment as you marvel at it, thinking that they are now a "real healthy body", and you have another reaction - a positive reaction but a reaction nonetheless, that the other person has been saved. But this is false as well.

And a second later the computer projects yet another image of the person back to being a sick body again. Your heart sinks, as though the whole terrible nightmare is happening over again. But then 2 seconds later, it flips back to a healthy body again. You suddenly realize again, all of these body images are not reality. None of them are true. None of them are who the person is. And the appearance of sickness is completely fictional and meaningless. If it can be switched on and off at will, there is no victimhood whatsoever.

Seeing where the dream images are coming from, who is projecting them, the falseness of their illusions, and not buying into the deception that they are REALLY THERE, frees the mind to SEE and RECOGNIZE illusions for what they are. That other person you know who you think is really sick, is not sick at all. Their body is part of a dream you are dreaming. Their sickness is not even really a real sickness. It's just a made-up image. It could be switched off in an instant. In fact Jesus tells us in the course that if we were to stop believing the lie, there is not a single sickness which would not be cured instantly.

We need to learn to recognize the nothingness of what IS nothing - this entire dream world and everything in it. It's all just a big dream. We're DREAMING! This is not reality. It is not real at all. Nothing in this world is true. It's all pretend. There is nothing of any more importance than anything else, hence no order of difficulty in miracles, because it's all just "movie" that's being projected. The mind projecting it can chop and change any part of it in an instant. It can flip between images of health and sickness simply because the body is an illusion, and what lies beyond the illusion is free of all sickness.

This is why we need to learn to recognize that sickness/disease/suffering/upset/death etc is not REALLY HAPPENING. And there is nothing about it which is so heavy and fixed and irreversible and seemingly insurmountable, that it can't be just flipped on or off at will. We need to learn to BELIEVE and PERCEIVE that all forms, and as a lesser group, all sick forms, are nothing but temporarily momentary images projected by a mind, and given the appropriate willingness and clarity of perception, those forms can be changed fully and instantly right now. We must overlook the illusions of how these forms of sickness/distortion are difficult or severe or life-threatening. That's all an illusion. Death is no more "difficult" an illusion to change than a pimple on your face. The FREEDOM to do this is what Jesus is teaching us, by helping us to SEE clearly that illusions of difficulty are completely false and don't mean anything.

Nothing I see means anything, because nothing I see in this dream is anything at all. It's all one thing. One dream, one illusion, showing up as illusions of forms and differences and a hierarchy of illusions. The hierarchy is FLAT! There is no real hierarchy. Cancer should be no more difficult to correct than a bloody nose. It should be effortless to change a car into a tree. This world has no power to prevent this capability. But while we believe the illusions that have been projected and are convinced there is such a thing as "real sickness", or "real death" or reasons "why you can't", then we are believing in the ego thought system and have not restored cause and effect to its proper order (your mind causes, the world obeys). And if we can't do this, we still have level confusion, and are sick ourselves.

What if when you become healed, the whole world is transformed in some way and is a little lighter?

This may sound radical, but it does appear to be supported in the course in various ways.

Jesus speaks of how when you are healed, others cannot be omitted from your healing.

Jesus speaks of how if you change your mind the WHOLE world must change. This isn't because its ONLY your world, but because you are joined with everyone.

Jesus speaks of how if you join minds with another person and deny/reject their denial of health, they will become healed, and cannot stay sick unless you support their belief.

Jesus also says that you are your brother's keeper. Meaning that HIS condition is YOUR responsibility.

How is this possible? It seems it is only possible if somehow, you and other people are actually connected together and SHARE something. Some part of your self is their self and vice versa. Meaning that if something applies to you, it also applies to them.

In the biggest picture this is the Golden Rule, that what is true of you is true of others. And this rule is God's law which is always in effect everywhere on all levels at all times, even if we deny it.

Let's frame it this way. Let's say there is a kind of collective consciousness. There's this vast sea of being, in which there are concentrations of self, sufficiently organized as to be "individuals", yet intimately joined to the tapestry of everyone else's existence. Sort of like we're all one big joined entity with multiple heads. A bit like siamese twins.

This is actually a vague and not accurate enough description but just for analogy's sake... this would mean that if someone chooses to rise up, they tend to "drag" others up with them. If someone opens their mind to truth, there is sort of a ripple effect that propagates to ALL others.

What that must mean is, any work you to do heal or love yourself, MUST overflow and affect others.

Jesus similarly talks about how you are the light of the world.

Jesus also talks about how it only takes ONE teacher of God to save the world.

Jesus also talks about how the light into your mind can shine into another mind and enlighten it.

Given the fact that then that there is a SHARING component to all of us, there is some part of us that is ONE, joined, connected, it becomes not only impossible to do anything truly in isolation, but also anything you do DOES affect everyone else.

This would be reflected in statements like "There are no private thoughts" for example.

Now, this might sound radical. In fact it will. But this leads to the conclusion that its possible for you to HEAL ANOTHER PERSON, if you will apply an appropriate attitude. Certainly the person still has free will and can choose to resist, to stay anchored down in the darkness. But you can at the very least offer love.

Love has such healing power it can dislodge even the resistance to truth in another. As Jesus says, "the task of the miracle worker is to deny the denial of truth." And also that there is not really any point in miracles at all unless they are able to affect someone who NEEDS healing, and thus is in a state of resistance. Healing of the person would not be possible otherwise.

For this to be "ok", there must be some aspect of another person that IS LITERALLY YOU. Or that is so intimately shared with you as to be essentially your self. If you love someone "against their will", it can still overthrow their unloving nature and heal them, to the degree it can be accepted.

What's radical is, this means that the condition of the body of another person, is not entirely "up to them". You have an influence as well. For example "Forgiveness is not complete unless it has brought a healing to both your brother and yourself." "He is healed along with you." "Miracles benefit both the giver and the receiver" etc.

There is something about miracles that is based on sharing, and on returning to the state where you SHARE everything with others. That return to sharing is "joining". In a shared state, your brother's health is yours. In fact "YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health."

Jesus even says that when YOU heal your mind and body and it now represents and symbolizes the absence of attack, the presence of innocence and love etc, the state of YOUR healing AFFECTS your brother, exonerates him, lifts sin from his mind, heals him, and thus heals HIS body as well.

At the level of the ego and the physical world, the ego suggests that there is total separation between you and others due to bodies. And thus changes in you have NO effect on anyone. That your mind can change is perceptions of the world WITHOUT changing the world. This is not what Jesus says is possible, because its not true that there is absolute separation. Even the world's separation is slightly joined, as proven by quantum entanglement and the holographic universe theory etc. Even duality is not quite fully duality.

This means that we ARE all ALWAYS at least slightly joined. We are always part of the experience of others. And this reflects our status as co-creators. So if someone has a sickness, this means there IS something I can do about it, because their sickness is not ENTIRELY their own sickness. Moreso, sickness arises from the belief in separation BETWEEN brothers, and is a two-sided sword which attempts to accuse both.

The sense of separation that it is based on cannot be sustained if I choose to acknowledge that we are JOINED and SHARING. If I do not AGREE to the separation-based sickness, and do not uphold my end of keeping the division between us maintained, it cannot be there and the person must be healed.

If I float my mind to a high level of love and light, I also become far more powerful in my ability to "affect" others. Or rather, to extend and share my healed state and the healing agent of spirit WITH the other person, lifting them up also. This is how it becomes possible to raise the dead for example, to GIVE life to others that they seem to lack, because you have it. This is only possible if we truly are joined together in some way, whereby a person fundamentally has "access" to the being and mind of another.

Total unconditional absolute sharing is the natural state of the Kingdom of God, which all of His children (as brothers) share forever. It is completely natural and real. "One mind is all minds, one brother is all brothers, such is the truth." While I have a self, a soul, it is STILL true that I am "one with" all other brothers, and their souls are joined to mine in such intimacy that we literally are FUSED together in some way. And that fused sharing "network" between us is what Jesus calls the Christ Mind.

So truly, we are not separate people. We are in fact totally the opposite. And that means that we can't consider ourselves to be totally incapable of healing others. Whatever we do, however we focus, whatever we feel, it's going to influence everyone in the universe. This is how holographic reality works. Each individual is a whole in and of themselves but shares the whole with all the rest. I am you and you are me and we are brothers eternally.

It then isn't a question of whether you can heal another person or by what mechanism this happens. It's more a fact that you can't AVOID influencing them. You share everything. If you have a bad day you drag everyone down. If you have a good day you are the light of the world and lift everyone up. People are literally lightened and healed when you bring the light. "you ARE your brother's keeper."

This is perhaps why there the "great awakening" happening. It's because there are contributions from an increasing number of awakening individuals whose influence is more powerful than those who sleep. "Teachers of God will take over the world because of their strength." And so the entire world is going through a spiritual transformation.

Each time that you have a loving thought, each time that you recognize joining and sharing, each time that you forgive, you are healing the entire sonship. Because every single child of God shares itself with you. You are part of a vast network of interconnected parts that depend on each other. You are responsible thus for your brother because what you choose either blesses or curses him, either heals him or compounds his sickness.

This ties further into holy relationships, in that when you are holy towards another, and they thus become more holy, the shared state of joined consenting minds transcends their individual contributions. The fact that there are two souls sharing everything is more powerful than any sense of "one in isolation". To be joined is to share and to share is to love and to love is to wield God's miraculous power.

You do have the authority, power, and ability, connections, and access, to heal other people if you so choose. Shining your light of love into their minds cannot help but offer healing. Your prayers of love can lift others up from despair. And through you the Holy Spirit can move mountains.

"HOW MANY TEACHERS OF GOD ARE NEEDED TO SAVE THE WORLD?

The answer to this question is - one.One wholly perfect teacher, whose learning is complete, suffices. This one, sanctified and redeemed, becomes the Self Who is the Son of God.He who was always wholly spirit now no longer sees himself as a body, or even as in a body.Therefore he is limitless.And being limitless, his thoughts are joined with God's forever and ever. His perception of himself is based upon God's Judgment, not his own.Thus does he share God's Will, and bring His thoughts to still deluded minds. He is forever one, because he is as God created him. He has accepted Christ, and he is saved."

---

"God's teachers appear to be many, for that is what is the world's need.Yet being joined in one purpose, and one they share with God, how could they be separate from each other? What does it matter if they then appear in many forms? Their minds are one; their joining is complete. And God works through them now as one, for that is what they are."

"You are NOT limited by the body, and thought CANNOT be made flesh. But mind can be manifested through the body if it goes beyond it and DOES NOT INTERPRET IT AS LIMITATION. Whenever you see another as limited TO or BY the body, you are imposing this limit ON YOURSELF. Are you willing to ACCEPT this, when your whole purpose for learning should be to escape FROM limitations?" UrT8G16

Bodies don't really matter in a relationship. The soul is androgynous and perfect. It isn't male or female. It has no limits and loves unconditionally.

It uses a body temporarily and then moves on. It might've had lifetimes as men and women, children and the elderly, as parents or alone. It could've had a gay body or a straight body, an overweight body or a skinny body. Whatever. Across its experience of so many different types of bodies, it cannot help but generalise the learning and detach from the specifics of each of them. It learns again to love regardless of form.

There could be a lifetime where two souls meet and they have certain types of bodies. They may or may not even be attracted to each other's bodies, or be compatible physically. Perhaps they are man and woman but one of them is gay. Perhaps they are from different cultures or races. It doesn't matter.

The body really is just a kind of tool that the soul uses. The body has its severe limitations and its limited scope of expression, which means that as the soul uses it, it has to work with what it's got. If it wants to talk, the words are likely to come out sounding the way that the body instrument allows to happen. If it wants to have intercourse, it has to work with whatever appendages or holes are available. If it wants to hug it has to deal with its length of arms and its roundness of belly.

If the soul is not heavily body identified, its view of the body is very detached and transcendental. The body doesn't really matter to it, nor does the bodies of others. When the soul is more identified with and lost in its current body, taking it to define itself and to be itself, this narrow perspective will inhibit relationship and make it more conditional. The bodies of others then matter more, relationships have more criteria, and everything has to be acceptable within limits. There is also more hell to pay when the rules are broken.

Ultimately we're meant to learn to love ourselves and everyone equally and fully, regardless of their bodies. We are to use the body as best we can to relate though and beyond, without placing so much emphasis on the body itself of what appear to be very limited categorisations of types.

Jesus suggests in the course for example that everyone should love everyone regardless of specific bodily appendages. A soul-to-soul communication is more important than cutting off a brother because their body is a certain type or style. This even applies to people having disabilities and sicknesses, learning to love them regardless of what their bodies are doing, and looking past the body to the immortal spirit within.

In my marriage for example, I was a male-gendered body person married to a female-gendered body person. She was 18 years older than me, which didn't matter. I had some attractions towards men as well, which didn't matter to her. She was from a different country thousands of miles away, which didn't matter. She grew up in a different culture, which didn't matter either.

Regardless of the sense of specialness and exclusivity in the relationship, there was also a more transcendental and unconditional element. I had some attractions to men for example, which she knew about, and she found it interesting and a curiosity instead of judging against it. She was willing even to encourage me toward it even if it meant her and I possibly not being together. Just as she at times wanted to be with other men.

We still had intimate relations which entailed a biological compatibility, even if in some way we might not have been entirely on the same page. We used what we had and made it work, because it was really more important that we were together and loving each other. A love that transcended the physical. A love between souls that spanned many lifetimes and many bodies. We could've been even more extremely different on the physical level and I think we would still have had a deep soul connection.

Ultimately what this has taught me is that the physicality of the body is not really that important. It is much more important to love a person and be open and honest and trusting. To share deeply and intimately, emotionally and psychologically. This can happen even if the bodies appear to be what the world would consider thoroughly incompatible. We turned heads with our weirdness and our age gap, for example. This can happen for gay or straight people, for people with any kind of body and any kind of persuasion. Every relationship has the potential to be holy.

What I realise now is that for any future relationship, it doesn't really matter if the person is male or female, or looks a certain way. It doesn't have to be a 'mr right' or a 'mrs right', or some kind of ideal model of perfection. The person is more important, the mind-to-mind is more important. If it comes with a certain type of body, and even if that body has certain limitations, it doesn't really matter.

Having a full whole relationship is more important than just some physical sexual hookup that's empty and cold and full of ego. If the person has certain genetalia, or types thereof, what does it matter, really, if the love transcends it? The two souls potentially relating on a higher and more whole level is what's important. This can even take place without any physical interaction or proximity or anything that the world might think of as a relationship. It can happen with strangers. It can happen anywhere, and beyond any type of body.

Looking past the body to the soul/mind is what's really important. The holy spirit's home is in our relationship to the christ in ourselves and others, which overlooks bodies and regards them as nothing but tools. If you still use them to interact then so be it, within the limits and specifics that the body allows. Sex is a limitation just as gender is but you can still use it while the mind is in a higher state. We're supposed to learn to love people as beings, as children of God, regardless of what their bodies are doing. Because ultimately no-one is really a body anyway.

A person has a real self, and temporarily an unreal self. The real self is the soul, and the unreal self is the ego. The ego is nothing more than the attempt to DENY the real self. Denying the real self produces an appearance that the real self is NOT there, and all that's left is the unreal self. As if a person is ONLY an ego.

If you look upon a person through YOUR ego, which is a very narrow exclusive way of seeing, blinded by form and unable to see past the surface of a person (literally their body), you fail to see their real self. If they are ONLY an ego, then their ego is their whole reality, their whole truth, and they REALLY are being egoic. And now anger seems justified.

Then you'll think the person's unreal self is their real self. As if there is nothing else. Denial does this because it hides or blocks awareness of anything more. The soul is hidden by this denial, so if someone is denying their soul by being egoic, they appear to be ONLY an ego. As if they do not have a "higher self". As if their real self doesn't even exist.

The strange thing is that the higher self and the seemingly lower self both exist simultaneously. In truth, the higher self is the only real self and exists forever. But in time, temporarily, the lower ego self seems to exist as well. While the ego is an attempt to destroy the real self, by opposing and denying its existence, denial doesn't actually remove anything. What is being denied is still there.

"Each man makes one ego for himself, although it is subject to enormous variation because of its instability, and one for everyone he perceives, which is equally variable." "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."

"denial DEPENDS on the real belief in what is denied for its OWN existence."

The ego is the denial of God and your real self, which makes it SEEM as if a person is ONLY their ego. And when someone presents this egotism in your relationships, you can easily fall for believing that's all there is to them. If they're being an asshole, you'll think they simply are being an asshole, and nothing else is true of them. You'll hold against them whatever they're doing and all their sins are real.

But at the same time as this "denial of self", masquerading as a second self, made of unreality and lies, the higher self persists and continues uninterrupted. The soul is permanent and immortal and innocent forever. It never sins and never enters the illusion of hell.

"The soul never leaves the sight of God."

"Christ has never slept."

"Your Soul does not need salvation, but your mind needs to learn what salvation IS."

"The ego is part of your belief about yourself."

The situation then is that everyone has temporarily two selves. The lower ego self is false, or "the false self", and is unreal. It seems true, and it seems to blot out the higher self. It HIDES the person FROM the higher self, and when you look upon it you too may be deceived and buy the illusion that the person is ONLY their ego. But this isn't true.

Forgiveness is all about OVERLOOKING the illusion of the ego and looking to and recognizing reality. This means looking to the christ-self in the person BEYOND his ego, and BEYOND his body. The larger self, and the truth of that self. This presents an interesting situation. There seem to be TWO TRUTHS to a person at the same time.

While a person is presenting their insanity to you, and provided you are not blinded by it, there is ALSO some part of them that is sane. While a person is filled with ego and hate and murderous thought, there must still be some part of them that is TRUE. Their ego is ALWAYS wrong, but their real self is ALWAYS right.

"Errors ARE the ego, and CORRECTION of errors of ANY kind lies solely in the RELINQUISHMENT of the ego. 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."

So a person is a son of God, which is perfect and "right", but at the same time, in time, temporarily, this perfect being also has an ego in their mind, which is always wrong. If you are in your own ego, your sight narrows to THEIR ego, and this is all you see in them, as real sin. But if your vision WIDENS to incorporate the BIGGER PICTURE, then now you can recognize this person is REALLY a perfect child of God whose egotism is just mistaken (not a sin). What they claim about themselves isn't true, and who they think they are isn't who they really are.

"Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. It sees their nothingness, and looks right through the thousand forms in which they may appear. It looks on lies but it is not deceived. It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt. It looks on them with quiet eyes, and merely says to them, "My brother, what you think is not the truth.""

We need to learn to look past the ego in ourselves and others, to the truth in ourselves and others. So that in light of what that truth is, everything else is put into its proper perspective and RECOGNIZED as false. This clarity is accurate perception or "true" perception. It is sanity. And seeing WITH this sanity allows you to see the sane truth of the other person, BEYOND their insanity.

Seeing this FOR THEM, has miraculous healing properties to correct their insane egotism. It's how you shine YOUR light into THEIR mind to enlighten them. You look to God's truth ABOUT your brother, and accept only this as true, while denying and rejecting everything that is false. Even if the person themselves believes that which is false. You disbelieve it on their behalf. You hold the light and stay in the truth of God. And this joins your mind to theirs through love. And now you are undoing sickness and raising the dead.

If mind becomes split, there are now two causes.

The 2nd cause will seem to will against the first.

The conflict and self-attack will manifest as sickness AS the body.

If mind reclaims the fact that it is fighting its own self, and stops doing so, the split disappears.

When the split disappears, the body MUST stop showing up as sick. All symptoms of attack must disappear.

Sick mind, sick body.

Healthy mind, healthy body.

NEVER is it healthy mind, sick body. EVER.

NEVER is it healthy mind, dead body. EVER.

The only cause of sickness is the belief that you are separate from YOURSELF, are in two minds, and are willing against yourself. Therefore you willing against yourself is SELF ATTACK. And all self attack produces SYMPTOMS OF ATTACK, ie sickness in the body.

Symptoms in the body are not caused at one moment in time and thereafter "linger" with nothing willing them to be there,as though existing on their own, or sustained by time or ego laws. They only appear to linger if the mind is CONTINUOUSLY IN A STATE OF SELF ATTACK.

The same goes for short-term illness and chronic illness. Chronic illness is a long-term belief in being divided against yourself.

There is no belief the mind cannot undo. There is no sense of separation that cannot be reversed. Therefore there is no MANIFESTATION of that belief which cannot be UNDONE COMPLETELY in all its forms and expressions at EVERY LEVEL including the physical.

Physical sickness is you being in two wills willing against yourself as if you have an enemy that is not you, but is you. Stop doing that, be whole, be one mind in love, and THERE CAN BE NO SICKNESS OR DEATH.

"Illusions recognized must disappear."

Let's say there is a monster behind the door. It's dark back there, and there was a strange noise. Something seemed to move. Because of the darkness, there is a lack of ability to see clearly, and things are obscure. You're having to make evaluations based on a lack of clarity and not having all the facts. You can't see the whole context so it seems reasonable to conclude there is some strange dark beast lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce.

However, when you switch on the light, and you move the door aside, you see that in fact there is no monster there. It was a trick, a deception. What you thought was there, is not there. And all you see is some clothing which was hanging on the door which slipped off the door hook and fell down. You suddenly realize this is what made the sound you heard, and are relieved to realize this is "all that it is". You simply see the whole picture clearly, you have all the information, nothing is hidden or obscure, and "in the light" it becomes clearly obvious what is there and what is not. And upon seeing this, the illusion of a monster has disappeared.

This is what it's like to go through a transition from believing that illusions are real, to realizing and recognizing that they are not. Learning to recognize what the situation actually IS, rather than what you thought it was. Learning to SEE clearly, so that you only see things for what they actually ARE, instead of what you were making of them. And once you see the illusion for only what it is without adding to or removing anything, it no longer holds any threat or implication. It only is what it is, nothing more and nothing less, and what it is is false, not something to believe in or be upset about. And seeing it for what it IS, doesn't make it REAL.

A similar thing happens with puzzle solving. Let's say you have some puzzle, perhaps a three dimensional set of object pieces that you're supposed to disconnect but you can't see how to do it. You start out deceived by illusions. Something about the appearance of the puzzle has deceived you, causing you to make assumptions that are false, and so you're starting out with distorted perception OF an illusion. But you believe them, and so you are blind to the "solution" because you can't see past your deluded mis-perceptions and mistaken evaluations.

Eventually after much trying, it suddenly occurs to you that something you were seeing was not actually the case. It seemed to be something, but was actually something else. You suddenly remark "oh" and recognize what's actually happening. You recognize the illusion, see through the illusion, and awareness of a larger context dawns on you. In that greater light or perspective, outside of the illusions, you can suddenly "see" the answer, and WHY the puzzle was deceiving you.

You see through its deception and recognize the mechanisms of deception, and now can solve the puzzle. It is obvious then. And you kick yourself for having not seen something so blatantly obvious all along. Afterwards you can never see the puzzle the same way again or be deceived by it, because you have learned to recognize the truth and would have to deliberately blind yourself.

The same thing also happens with your beliefs, which have an effect on your perception and how things register to your awareness. What you believe is true, will seem real to you. And it will take on properties of power, causality, will, intensity and permanence. And by investing it WITH truth you will take it to be telling you the truth, as though it is factually real. But just because illusions appear to be real, doesn't mean they are. And so if you have illusions ABOUT illusions, you are having false perception.

If you have a belief, let's say, that you are an unworthy person who doesn't deserve love because of something you did 3 years ago, that's going to skew your perception and make it appear that it's TRUE of you that you don't deserve love. And because you believe in that, which ultimately is untrue in the big picture, you are blinded by this belief. You can't see past it or accept the truth about you - that you deserve love. Illusions about you seem to be true, rather than illusions about you being recognized as false.

But then if you work on this "true" belief, you transition from believing it is true, to recognizing and believing it is false. As you make that transition, how that belief "strikes" you or registers with your mind, changes. When you believed it was true it seemed to hold power and truth, to threaten and define you, and upset you, and seemed to be a CAUSE or reason why you are unlovable. It seemed to have truth in it and you were upset by it. But now, as you see it from a different vantage point, you STILL SEE IT, but it registers to your perception in a different way. It now just seems false, you don't feel like you believe in it, it doesn't appear to be true to you, and it doesn't hold any of that seeming "charge" that gave it a sense of power and causality. You now see the belief as nothing, nonsense, totally untrue, and something you are now WILLING to surrender and let go of.

As you work on transitioning from false perception to true perception, this is more or less the same process you will go through. False perception is a state where you are experiencing or presented with illusions but you are having illusions ABOUT those illusions, causing you to BELIEVE THEY ARE REAL. You believe they are true, are blinded by them, deceived by them, tempted by them, and you can't see past their *appearance*. You think they make sense and are valid, because you believe IN them and have placed a sense of trust and truth into them, seeing no reason to question their "reality."

Over time, you will still continue to see these same illusions, BUT, how they APPEAR to you, how they strike you, how they register to your awareness, will transition from that state where they seem to have power and causality and loom over you like they are unquestionable, to where they have lost all their seeming strength, all their power and causality, all their truth and validity, you have WITHDRAWN your belief in them, you see PAST their appearances, you no longer put your belief IN them, and therefore they simply now seem to be UNREAL. They have deflated and collapsed down into nothing. They register to your mind as FALSE. You see a bigger truth, in light of which these smaller lies are OBVIOUSLY false and cannot be believed. You wonder why you ever believed such nonsense in the first place.

Recognize here then that up until you are done perfecting your true perception/christ vision, you are in a state of being surrounded WITH illusions (the physical world), but are learning to RECOGNIZE them for what they REALLY ARE, rather than being deceived by them and believing they are true. And that means you're still going to PERCEIVE them, it's just that HOW you perceive them is going to change, and how they LOOK to you is going to change. What they MEAN to you is going to change. And whether or not you believe they are TRUE is going to change. The world is going to transition from seeming to be REAL, to being clearly UNREAL!

When illusions are seen but NOT recognized for what they are, two things are happening. There is a seemingly external illusion, PLUS you have a distorted vision which can't see past the appearances and takes the illusion to be real. So now there are TWO layers of illusions. When you are learning to OVERLOOK (forgive) the illusion, it is STILL SEEN for a while, BUT the DISTORTED INTERPRETATION *OF AN ILLUSION* changes to an ACCURATE interpretation of the illusion. That which is illusory is not merely your mistaken perception OF something. There are two layers to illusions. The illusion ITSELF (e.g. physical world, bodies), and whether or not you are DECEIVED by it (believe in it). Just because you undo your deception/misperception doesn't mean that you are done undoing the illusion ITSELF. Your misperceptions OF the world, merely reveal to you the truth ABOUT the world, the "reality" of it, which is that IT IS NOT REALITY.

When Christ vision is perfected and you no longer believe in ANY illusions, the illusion DOES disappear. Or shall we say, when you no longer believe that this ILLUSORY WORLD is real, and can RECOGNIZE IT for what it is - a dream - it will disappear. Along the way, as you undo your belief in ANY illusion being real, the illusion "THAT IT IS REAL" disappears, revealing the illusion FOR WHAT IT IS. That it IS an illusion, not a reality. And eventually the view that it is ALL an illusion becomes very clear and obvious, and then the entire thing disappears.

To "see through" the illusion is to OVERLOOK it, which is what forgiving it means. "To forgive is to overlook". By NOT BEING DECEIVED *BY* the illusory world, causes you to forgive the world and therefore produces "the forgiven world". But "a forgiven world cannot last", because IF you forgive it, ie if you recognize it for what is "really is", you WILL recognize that IT IS AN ILLUSION OF A WORLD. NOT a real world. "The real world still is but a dream." And this is why forgiven worlds MUST disappear BECAUSE they don't really exist!

This world, including Earth, is an illusion of a world. It is illusory ITSELF, a fake world made of illusions and deceptions. regardless of whether you RECOGNIZE it as that or not. And if you DON'T recognize it as that, you WILL believe it is REAL. And that is FALSE PERCEPTION. It was made to tempt you and deceive you. If you are still seeing it, you must believe in it to some degree. But as you transition towards Christ vision, you will gradually learn to regard it as FALSE, unreal, and untrue. This means you will be withdrawing your belief in it, withdrawing your faith from it, and learning to register it as false, or in the category of "unreality". You will no longer be deceived BY the illusion, or have illusions ABOUT the illusion.

***Just because your misperceptions become corrected DOES NOT MEAN that you are unveiling reality to yourself. It means you are unveiling the TRUE NATURE OF the ILLUSION!*** And reality is BEYOND IT!!!

Just because you have illusions ABOUT the world, does not mean that the world itself is REAL! Or that by "seeing what is true about it" is to see it AS true. Or to "see the reality of it" means it IS real. IT IS NOT REAL. Just because you misunderstand what the world IS, doesn't automatically mean it IS REAL or true BEHIND your misunderstandings. Your misunderstanding OF the world is that YOU THINK IT IS REAL WHEN IT ISN'T!!!!! It only means that you are not seeing WHATEVER IT IS, correctly. False perception does that. And it does not follow that seeing the world "truly" will show you that it is REAL, only that its "true nature" will be revealed, real OR illusory. It will show you the truth ABOUT the world. It will show you the "reality of" the world. But what the world is, in reality, in truth, IS UNREALITY. The world *ITSELF* is an illusion of a world, which you have been having illusions ABOUT.

***False perception falsely perceives illusions (with more illusions) and believes they are real.***

***True perception CORRECTLY perceives ILLUSIONS and RECOGNIZES them as FALSE.***

Undoing your illusions ABOUT the world therefore isn't going to lead to you realizing that this world is REAL, or reveal to you "its underlying reality". It SHOULD lead to you realizing that this world is UNREAL, and that it couldn't possibly have come from God, only from YOUR DREAMING. It's unreal precisely BECAUSE when you believed it was real, you were MISTAKEN. When you thought IT was true, you were mistaken and having misperceptions of insanity - believing that something illusory HAS REALITY. And so learning the truth ABOUT it, should revel to you that it is NOT REAL, AND NOT WHAT YOU THOUGHT IT WAS. False perception is a state of FALSELY INTERPRETING AN ILLUSORY WORLD. ***It is a state of HAVING ILLUSIONS ABOUT AN ILLUSION.*** Not falsely interpreting reality. True perception is a state of CORRECTLY INTERPRETING AN ILLUSORY WORLD TO BE FALSE, whereby the illusory world is OVERLOOKED (forgiven) and the REAL WORLD (heaven) comes into sight in place of it.

What the course typically calls "the real world" is that state of mind you get into when you solve the puzzle, or realize there is no monster behind the door. It's a state where the world is still briefly SEEN, but NOT BELIEVED. So that means, as you approach the real world, and you are seemingly IN THIS WORLD, in a body still, you SHOULD be realizing AND recognizing and perceiving this world AS. .... nothing but A DREAM, a fiction, UNTRUTH, UNREALITY. Walking around it in the "awareness of dreaming" KNOWING that it IS a dream, NOT a reality. Being aware that this world IS ILLUSION and holds nothing that you want. "It takes great learning to both recognize and accept that this world has nothing to give." And in that state of recognition, you are like dipping your toe into an unreal hell only for the sake of helping others to leave it.

The world should hold NO REALITY FOR YOU!!! NONE. The world IS NOTHING. IT DOES NOT EXIST! THERE IS NO WORLD! "The world will spin into the NOTHINGNESS from which it came."

To be a teacher of God is to be aware of dreaming. That means being aware that you are IN A DREAM WORLD. It is not the END of dreaming. You are still IN the dream, RECOGNIZING that it IS a dream, not a reality. NOT believing it is true or real. NOT believing in it. NOT buying into what you see. NOT buying into sickness. NOT believing bodies are really people. NOT believing that anything you see is TRUE or permanent or irreversible or happening in reality.

Yet still perceiving it, just enough that you can still operate in it temporarily. And eventually your clarity about the truth becomes so complete, there you will see THROUGH the illusory world fully, having NO ILLUSIONS ABOUT THE ILLUSION, such that the illusory world completely disappears, revealing the real world, and then you will transition effortlessly to heaven. Where is the illusory world then? It does not exist, and it never did, because there is no world.

When illusions are fully recognized, THEY DISAPPEAR. The illusory world, Earth, WILL disappear, BECAUSE it is an illusion. The body's eyes can see it BECAUSE the body can ONLY see illusions. The world and the body are both dreams. None of them are real. That is what true perception is supposed to reveal to you, NOT that this world is "actually real" behind your misperceptions of it.

Reality is BEYOND ANY PERCEIVED WORLD. It is beyond the falsely perceived illusory world, and it is beyond the truly perceived illusory world. It is beyond perception ENTIRELY.

"Only salvation can be said to cure."

There is only one problem - the sense of separation from God. God is immortality and permanent health. If you deny God, you are denying life and inducing death. It is ONLY the separation from God which CAUSES ALL SUFFERING, including all forms of sickness and death.

To deny God is to attack your health. Defending yourself against God is an attack thought, attacking your invulnerability. Sickness becomes a defense against the truth (God), made to "protect you from God", but with the actual effect of "protecting you from health." In sickness you are attempting to "save your life" by protecting yourself from life. This is clearly insane and cannot work.

"Allegiance to the denial of God is the ego's religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival."

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt (are mortal)."

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

"The problem of separation, which is really the only problem, has already been solved."

There is no other problem. ALL sickness is caused by separating from God. Denying God induces illness. Your mind is the sole cause of all suffering, even death. The ONLY solution is the atonement, which COMPLETELY erases all sense of separation and accepts God as truth. This makes the denial of health impossible, making sickness and death impossible. Atonement cures wholly because it represents WHOLENESS.

"The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness."

"The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, it heals the body because IT has been healed. The sane mind cannot conceive of illness, because it cannot conceive of attacking anything or anyone."

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

***For sickness now is gone***, with nothing left to which it can return." Atonement is the restoration of your immortality. It makes you utterly invulnerable. You can no longer be sick or die. Nothing can happen against your will. You have no need for defenses because you know you cannot be attacked. Nothing real can be threatened.

"The mind that serves the Spirit is invulnerable."

"Those who accept Atonement, ARE invulnerable."

"You are invulnerable BECAUSE you are guiltless."

"This heals the Separation, and places within man the one defense against all Separation-mind errors which can make him perfectly invulnerable." When you separate from (deny, oppose) God, you block your awareness of the presence of love (life) within you. Seeing lack and being in need, you seek for what is absent, outside of you. This begins "seek and do not find." You will not find it outside because it is inside.

You look for yourself, your love, your life and health, outside of you, where they do not exist. Seeking outside of yourself for this CAUSES sickness and suffering, because it takes you AWAY from God and life, which are WITHIN you. You try to find them where they do not exist, and the more you try the worse you suffer. Seeking for God outside yourself is the avoidance of God within yourself.

"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." Perceiving a lack of love within, you project lack without. This makes a world of lack. Coming from the internal attack on God, it is a projected attack-world. "The world was made as an attack on God." "The world of bodies is the world of sin." "The world is a (projected) picture of the crucifixion of God's son."

This is also a projection of, and a disowning of, causal power. You don't want to admit that YOU CAUSE YOUR OWN SUFFERING - ie you are the one denying health. You imagine that causation is outside of you, and you see yourself as caused BY it. This frames the world as "sinning against you" ie causing you against your will, making you a powerless effect. This sets you up to be a victim, or receiver of the world, which you now "sense" through the body's inputs.

You have given the world, which you are dreaming/hallucinating, all the power it seems to have. You have given YOUR power away in trying to empower it to have power over you. You have given it your causality and will. You think it has your life, and contains your self. And you see it as causing you. It is therefore attacking you. It is your enemy and your savior, because it does things to you.

The world now is seen as a world of sin, in which the world can hurt you. It decides when you will suffer. It decides how you become sick. It decides when you will die and how much pain you will endure. All of this seems to happen against your will from the outside in. Anything the world can do TO you, is against your will, regardless of it seeming to be positive or negative.

You then divide up the world into separate parts to try to "spiritualize" some and "demonize" others. You pick and choose certain aspects of the world to "do things to you" that you prefer. You try to avoid its attacks, while collecting its lovely treasures. You defend against its harsh weather with your little fragile house. You seek for its fancy cars while trying to avoid a crash. You want only the good food not the bad stuff. And so you make a bargain with the world, to try to induce it to "do only good things to you", while avoiding all the bad things. And when it seems to go well, you think you are "living the dream." But you have gained the world, and lost your soul.

"What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

The world is two-faced. The world is self-contradictory. It offers you pain, and offers you salvation from that pain. It hurts you, then offers you healing. It threatens to destroy you, then tries to save you. This is because the world has come from the belief that BOTH heaven and hell exist. That life and death are both possible. And so the world depicts the contradiction of opposites. It seems to partly help, and partly hurt.

As a result, EVERYTHING in the world is not one thing, but two. It is a world of dualities and a double-edged sword. Everything which seems to help, MUST also hurt. Everything which seems to hurt, in some way helps. Snake venom can be a partial medicine. Surgery can kill you. ALL foods have toxicity to them, some worse than others. All medicines exaggerate certain body functions while depressing others. The external manipulation of the body is thus seen as the only sane solution to being externally manipulated.

This is actually inescapable. Anything the world can seem to do to you against your will is MAGIC. All magic is a mixture of attack and defense. To be "affected by the world" is still a state of being victimized and in need, regardless of whether the effects are preferred.

We try to focus ourselves on finding the "least harmful solution" to problems, to minimize the risks, and to skew the picture to make it seem like there are "completely harmless solutions". We have a fictional idea that some things in the world are totally harmless. But the world HAS NO harmless solutions. EVERY one of its solutions is a problem in its own right. Its effects cause more effects.

In fact, the world has a somewhat sinister motive, which can appear to be hidden. It basically wants you dead. Sooner or later. Even if it gives you scraps and hopes and promises, every one of its helping hands is laced with poison. Its every attempt to "make you happy" sets you up for loss and sadness.

Anything it can give to you, it can just as easily take away. Anything you "get" from it, is a deception with a cost. This is because the world was made WITH and FROM the notion of the REJECTION OF LIFE. The world is made of the idea of death, because it came from rejecting immortality. So it cannot actually offer you life. It cannot give you wholeness. And it cannot provide a CURE for anything - or a cure for ITSELF. And being the inducer of death, it will do anything BUT cure death.

"There is a tendency to think the world can offer consolation and escape from problems that its purpose is to keep."

"Without the idea of death there is no world."

"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. ... 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."

Because the world comes from the wish to die, ie the wish to deny God and health, it is driven by a MOTIVE of death. That was the PURPOSE in making it, as an attack upon God and life. Death motivates the world, and everything in the world ultimately drives TOWARD death. It cannot therefore induce immortality, cure you completely, or restore your wholeness. It cannot save you, nor can it give you eternal life. It MUST fail, because it came from the failure to recognize the truth.

"It is not Will for Life, but wish for death, that is the motivation for this world. Its ONLY purpose is TO PROVE GUILT REAL. No worldly thought or act or feeling has a motivation other than this one. These are the witnesses that are called forth to be believed, and lend conviction to the system they speak for and represent."

"Everything in this world is little, because it is a world made out of littleness, in the strange belief that littleness CAN content you. When you strive for anything in the world, WITH THE BELIEF THAT IT WILL BRING YOU PEACE, you are belittling yourself, and blinding yourself to glory." "There is NOTHING in the world to teach him that the logic of the world is totally insane, and leads to nothing."

"There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail."

"There is a light which this world cannot give."

"It means that nothing outside yourself can save you; nothing outside yourself can give you peace. But it also means that nothing outside yourself can hurt you, or disturb your peace, or upset you in any way."

Anything the world "does to you" is magic. Magic is the idea of a cause outside of yourself affecting you against your will. It is the opposite to internally-sourced miracles. This takes the form of anything the world seems to do to harm you, as well as anything the world seems to do to help you.

While you may prefer the "good stuff", having the world "do good things to you" is just as much a state of victimhood. It still focuses on you getting from the outside, what you lack inside, without your insides changing. It's still a state where you WANT the world to do something "to you" against your will, FORCING you to "be happy." This is "forgiveness to destroy", because you seek for the world to be the source of change, rather than yourself.

Since the world attacks and defends, and since its motive is ultimately death, and since it CANNOT induce wholeness or a total cure, ALL of its remedies are AT BEST partial. All of its remedies MUST therefore do the opposite to what they claim to do, as well. They MUST be two-faced and deceptive. If it is to "help you", it MUST also hurt you. There is ALWAYS a price to pay, and it does not help to deny this.

This means that ALL foods have a negative side-effect. There is no such thing as a perfect diet. It means that ALL medicines have harmful side effects. All surgeries have high risks of serious threats to your health. All vaccines INDUCE what they are ultimately trying to avoid. In some cases literally, while in others the form is less obvious.

It may not take the form of a certain vaccine "causing the virus" it was trying to prevent, but the real PURPOSE of a vaccine is to "ward off death", which it CANNOT really do. And in fact it must IN SOME WAY, induce it, to some degree. It MUST induce other symptoms as a result of its "interference". Some of these symptoms may be mild to barely noticeable, while others may be life threatening.

This has nothing to do with the competence of medical workers, or the proficiency of scientists, or the wonders of modern medicine, or the seemingly wonderful "benefits" of an extremely wide range of magical solutions. It would APPEAR that "lives are saved" by such things. Provided you recognize that at the same time, lives were also attacked by such things. There is NEVER a possibility of a perfect total "cure" through ANY magical external means. ONLY atonement can be said to cure completely.

This simply goes back to the fact that the ONLY PROBLEM is the separation from God, which is the sole cause of inducing all sickness, suffering and death. The MIND creates what appear to be viruses and invasions, putting them into the world. The world only then APPEARS to be their source. ONLY by correcting THAT problem, will sickness and death TRULY become impossible. Anything which does not address this ACTUAL problem, will not ultimately ward off death, even if it appears to in the short term.

This is the main problem which ALL magical solutions share. They appear to change the body, BUT NOT the mind. They may make the body seem healthier, but do nothing to fix the dripping tap of death-inducing separation.

There is no pill for "the separation". There is no medication that can induce runion with God. There is no surgery which can cut out the ego. There is no bandaid sufficient enough to heal the wound of the denial of health. And no vaccine can EVER fully guarantee your safety or that of others. It may seem to do SOMETHING, but it cannot do everything.

What that leaves you with is one of two options.

1) Heal the separation from God, accept atonement, receive a complete CURE, and never suffer again. This makes all sickness impossible because you choose to stop causing it, and there is no other cause.

2) Avoid healing the separation, MAINTAIN sickness, choose from a selection of LIMITED and PARTIALLY EFFECTIVE magical treatments which WILL hurt you in some way, and try to live with the consequences.

If you think that you can elect to use magical remedies WITHOUT ill effects, you are in denial. They only seem to do anything BECAUSE of your denial. You might weigh up the seeming risks, look at the manmade "statistics", and decide for yourself (or preferably with God) as to whether to indulge in magic or not. But let's be clear, for your health as well, that any magical solution cannot ONLY heal. It has to also cause some form of harm. It is because you BELIEVE in harm that you think you NEED it in the first place, and this belief works against your health.

Maybe you are willing to accept that, although you cannot honestly be fully at peace about it. No-one who recognizes without denial what magical solutions ARE and WHY they exist and WHAT their motive is, can rest in peace. You can resign yourself to a compromise, willing to suffer in some ways to OFFSET the others. But this is how the world worlds. This is the laws of physics and entropy. You become willing to suffer a seemingly "smaller pain" in exchange for the reduction of a larger one. It's a tradeoff. You buy and sell risk in an effort to minimize cost, while always having a cost.

Do not pretend though that medicines or a vaccine or an injection or a pill or a certain kind of food or drink or even any form of salvation - sex, drugs, rock and roll - can undo the separation in the mind and truly prevent illness. Nothing external can fix the INTERNAL problem. The internal problem has CAUSED the external to appear, as an hallucinated world of suffering. And then you are looking to a made-up death-induced world, to save you from death. It cannot ultimately work.

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

This doesn't mean you shouldn't necessarily USE magic IF you need to, want to, or for whatever reason. Sometimes such thing can seem to alleviate suffering. People wouldn't likely take them if they didn't "seem to help". Some people cannot "live" without external support, major medications, physical apparatus, and various other help. Surgery can seem to save lives. But surgery can also induce complications.

"All material means which man accepts as remedies for bodily ills are simply restatements of magic principles. It was the first level of the error to believe that the body created its own illness. Thereafter, it is a second mis-step to attempt to heal it through non-creative agents. It does not follow, however, that the application of these very weak corrective devices are evil."

Your best bet is seeking spiritual guidance from a higher source - the Holy Spirit - Jesus - Angels etc.... as to what to choose. And if that means you have to "settle" for non-miraculous external help, for a non-whole treatment, due to what you are willing to accept right now, so be it. But then keep working on your forgiveness and moving towards the acceptance of atonement as well. Atonement is the GUARANTEE of health forever.

Please don't misinterpret that this post is telling you what to do or not to do, NOR is it trying to paint vaccines in an unfair or negative light or to "put you off". They are what they are. They can only do what they do. If you're okay with that, so be it. It's your free will choice.

Continuing with the "it's bullshit" theme, let's look at how guilt is also bullshit.

Guilt is not atonement. It is not compensation. It does not make up for doing something wrong. It does not help the person who you hurt. It does not undo what happened. It does absolutely nothing to correct sin. It does not give a gift to the person you attacked. Guilt does not heal anyone.

It doesn't pay for or correlate to the amount of sin that you caused. It does not prove that you did not want to sin. It does not demonstrate that you have "repented". It does not equate to atonement or forgiveness. It does not indicate that you really did not want to do what you did. And it does not raise the overall level of happiness in the world.

Guilt is justified self-attack, resulting from a failure to forgive. But guilt has an even deeper motive.

When you sin, or believe in sin, it is very deliberate. Whatever act it is that you "did", you did it by choosing to do it. Make no mistake that in your ego belief, you wanted to attack, intended to attack, wanted to destroy God, desired to be opposed to God, were being murderous and hateful, wanted the consequences of your attack to be real, desired to overthrow God's will and power, wanted to affect God and make Him dead, and wanted to really believe strongly in sin being "reality" - that you really did bring about real "success" in your attempted separation. Sin is a belief that death is real.

Realize also that at every stage of separation from God, denial is used to try to make whatever is present go unconscious. It is an act of trying to get rid of yourself, because the whole purpose for the dream of death is to destroy yourself. You tried to get rid of yourself by getting rid of God, shutting Him out of awareness, making him unconscious to you. Then you are left staring sin in the face.

But this wasn't enough for you. Just "sinning" did not completely destroy you. So you had to keep on denying yourself, keep on making stuff go unconscious, and keep progressing towards a state of TOTAL DEATH. Sin demands death and will stop at nothing until it is enacted, because only when it is completely implemented will the belief in the permanence and non-reversibility of sin be completed.

So what you did next was make sin go unconscious, denied that sin had happened, and covered it over with another layer of illusion. On purpose. The purpose was to KEEP the sin real, not heal or reverse it, and to add another layer of denial to take you closer to death. You implemented this by INVENTING GUILT.

Guilt, then, is this state of mind in which you start to claim, and make illusions which appear to show, that you DID NOT WANT TO SIN. OOoo.... so ok, first you are believing in murder and death and killing God, and then.... you start to pretend that you did not want to do it, even though you did. Guilt therefore is your attempt to FAKE that you really felt remorseful, guilty, ashamed, that you somehow RECOGNIZED that you did something that you should not have done, and that now you somehow want to "take it back" or "wish that it had no consequences" or "yearn for re-uinion" or whatever else bullshit.

Guilt will position you as APPEARING to claim that you didn't want to sin and "wish" that it hadn't happened, BUT a WISH is not a WILL. The guilt will not actually *do anything* whatsoever to undo the sin. The guilt merely establishes that you believe heavily in the sin, because you think it has reality and truth to it, and you have NO intention whatsoever of undoing that or challenging it. The guilt is a total facade to try to make out that you feel sorry about it or didn't mean it, in a completely powerless, non-active, non-consequence-producing way, which has absolutely no effect on the sin itself or its consequences.

Realize also then that guilt or shame is completely self-serving, and also contains a component of feeling sorry for YOURSELF that, because you sinned, you now are going to lose out or be punished. Guilt is a reaction to sin, the opposite of forgiveness. Forgiveness will say you did not really sin and nothing was hurt and there's no reason to be upset. But guilt goes the other way, and says the sin was so real that you don't deserve forgiveness.

This lack of deserving or worthiness of being forgiven, then starts to establish your belief that you are "not good enough" or you don't deserve to be loved or you are unworthy of God or forgiveness. And this will create a belief in you that God couldn't love you, SHOULD NOT love you, and that you REFUSE to accept that He DOES love you, because really you have NO interest at that point in retracing your steps. The positioning of yourself as unworthy and unlovable, which comes across even to yourself as a kind of sorrowful, pityful, unfairly-treated sort of experience, is actually the total opposite in its purpose. IT IS FAKE. It's nothing less than an attempt to KEEP sin and guilt and do *NOTHING* about them to actually change them in any way.

Just as there is no such thing as real sin, there is no such thing as real guilt. All guilt is fake. A "guilty conscience" is a bullshit conscience. Guilt has been put on a pedestal by the ego to celebrate its success at murdering God, and to pretend that it is innocent. It wants someone else to be *responsible* for it, to accuse someone else of sin (even if that means they kill you), but only so that the "evidence" that YOU were the one who chose to make sin real is completely hidden. No-one would suspect you of murder if you APPEAR to be innocent.

No-one would accuse you of being the one who sins if you come across as having a facade of sweetness and niceness, guiltlessness, weakness, powerlessness, hopelessness, unworthiness, fearfulness, vulnerability, littleness, or ignorance. The ego's entire strategy for IMPLEMENTING DEATH is to first of all set up the belief in death by believing in sin, then enacting every step necessary to bring about death. It does this by attempting to strip you of all responsibility, all power, all will, all mind, and to portray you as a weak helpless VICTIM, who can't POSSIBLY have chosen to sin and who is now being completely unfairly accused by external sources. Those external sources will then come to be the pretend jduge and jury who deal a death sentence and inflict the final blow on your now completely helpless, victim-ridden self, to prove that YOU DID NOT SIN.

Who could suspect you of sin if you were just innocently, inevitably, unfairly attacked and mistreated, in such a way that is destroys you and APPEARS to be against your will? It is a fake death. You are faking your own death by pretending to not believe in sin when you still believe in deep down. People who APPEAR innocent are NOT INNOCENT. They are very filled with sin and guilt. The fake innocence facade is a perfect disguise. Guilt is the 2nd step in implementing it, and the belief in deserving punishment which comes from guilt lays the groundwork for implementing the 3rd step - fear of punishment, which is also 100% bullshit.

So you see, guilt is not genuine. It does not help anyone or correct anything or atone for anything to be guilty. It just keeps all of the consequences of what you did and protects them behind layers of denial. If you were really, really interested in "atoning" for sin, you would actually take action steps which would UNDO THE SIN AND ITS CONSEQUENCES. You wouldn't be like, oh I guess you have to live with the consequences now, nothing I can do about it. Instead, you'd be choosing MIRACLES to correct and undo all of the side-effects of your wrong decision, with Holy Spirit. And that means lifting all of the signs of attack off of yourself and anyone who was involved.

Going into guilt also is usually SUPPORTED by the person that you attacked, whereby they feel justified in proving you are guilty, leaping at the opportunity to condemn you, and failing to forgive entirely. To hold you condemned in guilt for your sin, the other person thinks they are righteous and justified but they are just as much enacting bullshit. It does not help anyone to be guilty. What the attacked person should be doing is finding you INNOCENT, forgiving you, overlooking the belief in sin, PROVING that they cannot be hurt by you by disallowing any effects in their mind or emotions or body, and therefore teaching you that YOU DID NOT attack them and are innocent.

Only when there is "redemption", ie both parties are lifted UP closer to the light, closer to forgiveness, closer to truth, closer to the undoing of sin and guilt, that is the ONLY real form of atonement. If you're not approaching the atonement then you're going into the ego, no matter who you are or what side the victim/victimizer drama you fall on.

Guilt is a lie. A big fat stinking lie. It's just another ego ILLUSION designed to LOOK LIKE you gave a crap about sinning, while doing nothing about it, using it as JUSTIFICATION to attack yourself even more and put yourself down and destroy yourself as a SACRIFICIAL OFFERING to the person you supposedly did this to. Dying is not atonement. Self destruction is not atonement. Guilt is not atonement.

Another way many people fall into this is by believing that if they hurt a loved one, they should be GUILTY in order to show that they are LOVING. They will go into guilt-ridden justifications and compulsions to try to "make it up" to the person. They will do housework out of guilt. They will buy make-up gifts out of guilt. They will "owe" the person something. They will try to do stuff to compensate and "balance out" the offense, to try to win back favor. This is not love! It is so often believed to be what it means to give a shit or to love someone. IT IS ATTACK. It's like rubbing salt in the wound.

All guilt is bullshit. We need to look at this and admit to it and stop using this EGO WEAPON as a disguise to pretend that we didn't want to sin. We did want to sin. Every death celebrates that fact. If we truly give a shit, we will undo guilt, undo sin, undo death, undo ILLUSIONS of consequences that we think we caused, recognize our PERMANENT INNOCENCE, and return to God. Guilt is arrogant. You ARE worthy of love and forgiveness.

When you move away from love, you move away from power. Love is power. God is love. God is power.

Moving away from love you move into fear. Fear is powerlessnses. It's the attempt to have no power. It's the attempt to be overpowered. It's the attempt to give your power away to someone or something else, who would otherwise have no power over you.In fear, you give your power to something in the world, asking it to have YOUR power OVER yourself. You ask it to attack, threaten, hurt, destroy and upset you. You give it the power to do this in your mind by framing it as an attacker. You want to be punished when you are afraid, and are asking the world to hurt you.

Fear seems to be saying that you do not want something to be happening, but it is DOING the opposite. It is requesting that there be suffering. It's a way for someone who is guilty to ask another to agree that they are guilty, deserving of punishment. As if to ask, please confirm that I am worthless and deserve suffering, and please make me suffer for me.

Being in fear is being away from love, and therefore away from life and resurrection. Fear produces death and sickness. "All forms of sickness even unto death are physical expressions of the FEAR of awakening." Suffering therefore arises from powerlessness, in which you appear to have no power to stop it because you believe falsely that you have no power.

Being afraid is a displacement of your total power onto the world. You give it your power and make it have power over you. You demand that it treat you a certain way, and usually in a destructive or threatening way. You fear in order to give your power away and to become powerless. Being powerless feels like weakness, it makes you freeze up, the life drains from you, you become paralyzed and eventually dead.

Death is a total power loss. It's like you are battery and all the life is drained out of you. It represents an unwillingness to live and an unwillingness to have power over the world. Truly you have power over death because nothing can overthrow your power unless you will to be powerless. "No one dies without their own consent."

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No-one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are."

Giving your power away is also murder. It frames another person as an attacker and accuses them of sin. It associates cause with them while also believing in separation, and so they appear to be sinful to you - the cause of your suffering. While fearing them, you are attacking them. While feeling powerless against them, you are using your power to attack them. Seeking to destroy another destroys yourself. Seeking to disempower another strips you of your own power and gives it away. You cannot be powerful when you are taking power away from others - either you are both all-powerful or you are both dead.

To become powerful again you only need recognize that you still have total power to choose not to give your power away. You do it to yourself. No-one ever takes your power from you. No-one has power over your will and freedom. It is you who MUST consent to give your power, and you cannot "lose" it accidentally. Reclaiming entails recognizing the secret of salvation, that it is you who gives it away, and it's not the world that takes it from you.

All of your power is God's power. "To recognize that all power is of God is to gain all power." When you disown power you are disowning God, and are saying that you do not belong to God. It's an attempt to take yourself away from God and give yourself to someone else to be the author of you. Then you believe that the world is your cause. And when you believe that something evil and unlike God is causing you, you regard it as sinning against you.

There are no causes in the world. There is only cause in your mind. The world does not cause any kind of suffering. It does not cause sickness or disease or illness or damage or malfunction or death. Only your mind has the power to cause these things to show up in your dream. And it is in your mind that you have total power to undo and reverse and prevent all of these things. If you do not choose to give your power away, you cannot die. Who could see death who is powered by God?

Watch yourself as you give your power away to the world. Every time you believe it is doing something to you, you have given it power. You have framed it as having YOUR ability to cause. You are then afraid of your own power, seen dissociated and projected onto someone else. You accuse them of using your power against you. To believe that the world can overpower you, is to be afraid of power.

And to be afraid of power is an attempt to reject power. This is why fear feels like you're trying to stop something from happening.You cannot be disempowered unless you alone choose to disempower yourself. When you slip into this choice, you give power to the world and it gains the seeming ability to tempt you. But you gave it this ability by believing it has cause, power, mind, alien will, and ability of its own. It has NONE of its own, beyond what you have lent to it. Since you are disempowering yourself on a daily basis, you need to therefore recognize that you're doing this and stop doing it.

You need to take your power back, not from the world as such because it did not really take it from you. You gave it away freely. But you must freely reclaim it by realizing that in your mind there is an activity, an effort, a mechanism of thought, in which you are actively trying to get rid of your power. Every fear disowns power and assigns it to something else. You are fearing instead of loving, because you are trying to be a suffering victim. You are only ever doing this to yourself, and you can reclaim your power at any time.You have in you the ability to reclaim not only all power, but all power in heaven and earth. And then nothing has any power over you at all. When you are all powerful you are sharing in God's power, and nothing can oppose his will.

"God is seen as outside, fierce and powerful, eager to keep all power for Himself."

"It was only my DECISION that gave me all power in Heaven and earth. My only gift to you is to help you make the same decision FOR YOURSELF."

"All power in Heaven and earth is therefore given him and he will share it with you when you have completed yours."

"My father gives all power unto me."

"you are part of God, Who IS all power."

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

"He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God."

"I am not helpless, but all powerful."

There is a reason why we believe death is inevitable, and why we think there isn't any other choice.

At the beginning of separation from God, we attempted to sin against him. That means we tried to attack God, cause Him, and therefore produce real effects to change Him against His will. This was the Son attempting to be the Father's father.

More simply, we attempted to reverse cause and effect. We who are an effect/creation of God, tried to be the cause of Him, and to make Him the effect of us. This is a simple logical reversal of states. This is level confusion.

Having believed that we accomplished this, which is the belief that sin is real, that we really did it and there are real consequences, we automatically believed that God has been attacked against His will. The automatic logical state for God now is that He is now JUSTIFIED in anger and revenge, because he's been unfairly treated.

Part of the belief in real sin includes this "re-framing" of God as someone who rightly SHOULD be angry at us, should want revenge toward us, whose will is in opposition to ours, and who is an enemy that we've attacked. This frames God as unforgiving, not recognizing our innocence, and not wanting us to live with Him.

By believing in sin, we believed also in the false idea of God, and in the idea that we cannot be forgiven and don't want to be forgiven. We did not want to believe in being forgivable because we wanted to keep the idea of sin real. And real sin would depend on God agreeing with us that we are sinful. We believe he should agree with us because we believe in what we did to hurt Him and his right to seek compensation.

This belief in real sin leads automatically to the belief that God wills that we be dead, which logically produces the fear of God. We appear to then be unwelcome to God, we consider ourselves as exiled, we see our Home as "off limits", and God's unforgiveness seems to cast us out. Believing in our sinfulness makes us believe that it is not possible to BE forgiven, OR to return Home, OR to be innocent, OR to ever share ETERNAL LIFE with God.

This sets us up for the next step in the ego's logical progression of conclusions. That is, that since we can't return to eternal life, life is no longer an OPTION. It is no longer possible for us to return to the Kingdom of eternal life. We've banished ourselves. And on this basis alone, we believe that since life is not possible for us, DEATH is the only possibility that remains.

It seems all we can do is slither away in shame and darkness, hide in a corner, suffer and die. And we believe this is all we rightly deserve, in order to not only comply with God's will that we die, but also to support and KEEP the idea that our sin is irreversible and unforgivable. We demand that we MUST die, in order to "pay for" the sin we firmly believe we committed. And so all death is a chosen suicide.

And so now we "accept" that because "sin is real" to us, death is INEVITABLE. It appears to not even be a choice, because it seems to be the ONLY outcome that's possible. There doesn't appear to be any alternative. And so we seem to come into the world, to "come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

It's almost as if we gave up on eternal life right from the start, threw it away, and left God behind to go and die alone in hell. This "death wish" and its foundation is responsible for EVERY death that happens in this world. Every death is a form of self attack and suicide, no matter how it looks or what happens or who does what to whom. "No-one dies without their own consent."

The good news is that this need not be, nor is it God's will. We need to learn that sin is not real, we did not attack God, we are still innocent, God still loves and welcomes us, we can go Home, we are forgiven, we did not really do anything at all, no consequences came from it, it was nothing but a delusional dream of death, and we can be reunited with love and RE-ACCESS ETERNAL LIFE. We've been MISTAKEN about God and ourselves and what we thought we did, and all is forgiven.

This means that as we progress in our return to sanity and awareness, we'll gradually accept the atonement truth that nothing real was threatened, nothing unreal happened, and all is well. Upon realizing that we did not sin, LIFE becomes an option again. It becomes possible to return to eternal life and to trust that God wants us to live. It becomes possible to not HAVE TO die. There now appears to be a choice, between life and death. And now death is no longer the inevitable single outcome,. Death is merely an "fake alternative" to what God wills for you.

At some point we will fully accept not only that death is unreal and has no consequences, but also that LIFE is all that we choose. We re-invest in the Kingdom, we open up to forgiveness, we allow ourselves to recognize the truth about us and our brother's innocence, that there is no sin, and we prepare to return Home to God - in recognition that we never really left.

Here we decide to side with life so fully that we will not even support notions of death AT ALL on any level or in any way. Not even while in a dream, not even while still having a body. We prepare to exhibit our conviction that we are immortal and eternal, by demonstrating it symbolically through the body's condition. The more we accept our innocence and extend love, the more the body is healed along with us. All the way to the point where even the slightest sign of sickness and death is no longer a part of your physical demonstration.

You then are teaching only life on all levels, mentally and physically, for as long as it is useful. And then the appointed time arrives for the completion of your journey without distance, back to where you never left. A complete awakening from the dream of death, our of bodies an out of the world, into the Kingdom of Heaven, remembering your immortal soul and continuing as a co-creator with God. Forever, and ever, and ever. Permanently alive. Permanently immortal.

In recognition that death is nothing but an illusion, death now becomes the "impossibility". It is now seen as having no effect, no causality, and no consequences. It is surmounted and overcome. It is seen as nothing. And not one single thing in all the world can make it happen to you against your will. When the illusion of death is recognized, it disappears. And now the only outcome truly possible, is the INEVITABILITY OF LIVING FOREVER.

You no longer have a choice, because there IS no death TO choose. Death has ended and is snuffed out. Only Real Life is possible for you now, and now you cannot fail to continue as an immortal being, Created by God to share eternal life with Him Forever. There is no death.

"There is no death, the Son of God is free."

While ACIM, as a book, is a collection fo words, these words are twice removed from reality. They are symbols of symbols.

Jesus, who wrote the material, was not operating on a level of symbols upon symbols, or even a level of symbols. He is operating from a level of total awareness and experience of truth. He is in heaven, and wrote the course material from that perspective.

What you have to realize then is that the words in the book are just expressions from a higher state. They are a sort of translation. So if there is some kind of truth or principle and it's talked about in the book, it may be presented in several different ways, using various words. Because the words aren't the starting point of the truth.

For example Jesus touches on the topic of forgiveness hundreds of times, and many of those statements say practically the same thing. There are even some sentences which are worded almost identically. Yet they appear different in form just because they use different words.

It's important to realize that the words in the book are NOT the highest level of truth, or the origin of that truth. They are expressions OF truth, turned into symbolic form.

For example if Jesus is expert on the topic of forgiveness, he could write literally 1 million books solely on that topic, all using a plethora of words and coming at the same teaching from a variety of angles.

Although he might choose certain words to try to represent the subject matter, that doesn't mean the words chosen are doctrine or some kind of perfect representation. Because you have to remember that they are not only removed from reality, they are part of a strange ego-generated language and is trying to work within their confines so that the people who speak that language will be able to get some measure of coherent meaning from it.

Many of us begin learning the course from the bottom up, starting in the darkness and trying to find our way to the light. We have some pieces of the puzzle but not all, and based on various clues and consistencies we gradually piece together a clearer picture of what it's saying or means. And that can take a long time to sort out what it means without any contradictions or confusion.

Just because the course says something in one passage that doesn't mean that's the whole truth either. Because Jesus may say something in another passage which either clarifies it or seems to contradict it. This is because each set of words are jut one form or expression, and each expression may have nuances or implications or suggestions of meaning which, if taken too out of context or in isolation, may lead to false conclusions.

You can try to think that the words are the meaning, but this isn't always true, and quite often you'll see people quoting isolated passages as if they are the whole story. Since Jesus is coming from a singular whole truth, the course should be considered a kind of holographic projection of that, and that means there is fragmentation and differences and in some cases there may appear to be things which don't seem to add up.

Jesus has gone to great lengths to try to ensure that the course words are as unambiguous and consistent as possible, but the nature of the beast is that words are limiting and sometimes this adds some confusion.

It's important to gradually realize that beyond the words, and prior to the words, there is a state of truth and an entire logical system of metaphysics. For example the idea that the world was made as an opposite to reality. That's a simple metaphysical concept and you could put that into a million words to express it.

As you "see through" the words, read between the lines, and look to the deeper meaning, you're gradually going to find yourself moving beyond the words of the course entirely. Once you SEE the underlying metaphysical basis for what he's saying and why he's saying it, and therefore what his statement MUST mean regardless of their words, then you are really starting to see the "course beyond the course". The higher form of it.

In a way, this means that you have to "forgive the course", you have to overlook its forms and not be deceived by the appearance of its words. Just as much as anything else. It's easy to get hung up on trying to preserve the perfect words or read the earliest edition or whatever but that's all surface fluff. The real meaning behind it is way deeper than any of the words and any of the editions.

This is also why it's important to foster a personal relationship with Jesus and Holy Spirit and to get truth from the horse's mouth rather than getting lost in the book. Logically it makes more sense to speak to the author who is an expert, than to get lot in confusion based solely on some words on a page.

Once you grasp the logical concepts, they transcend the words. And then you can look at the words and you can see where Jesus is expressing FROM and what he's getting at and therefore, logically, what the words must mean. And this can be quite eye opening because then you'll start to compare and contrast the clearly logical meaning of the metaphysics against the English-languge expression or discussion "about" that metaphysics. And this begins to highlight the ways that they can at time be a little different in form. But the higher metaphysics is more accurate than the language-form of it.

One of the problems people have with the course is the sheer mass of words, the holographic scattering of subject matter, the seeming visiting and revisiting of topics, and the difficulty getting through the density of all that language to try to really get a clear view of what's behind it all. And what's behind it is actually very simple and organized and clean. What began as seemingly a huge collection of cryptic statements, few of which were believed or made sense, you end up with a massively stripped down and very simple foundation.

It takes a lot of sifting through the sheer weight of the course material to come to realize just how simple and logical the underlying metaphysics is. It's kind of like a sculpture where you have to continually chisel away at the rough details and the seeming differences until gradually a clear picture forms. And what them emerges is simple and beautiful and clear and well formed.

This is why it's important to learn not to get too hung up on what is written in the book. The form of the words can become a distraction away from the meaning. Some people get really hung up on what it says, taking words and phrases in isolation and thinking that they represent the whole meaning. This is because the ego believes that form IS meaning. The form of the course is not its meaning, however. Its meaning comes from where it CAME FROM, and the form it took in it expression is just a symbolic version of that.

There is a truth beyond words. There are structures and relationships between things that underly their English-language expressions. There is a metaphysics deeper than any page of the text. And as you move closer toward the deeper meaning you also more closer toward experiencing it. This is all part of the purification process. All part of undoing the seemingly elaborate complexities of the ego and replacing them with the sheer simplicity of God's truth.

"You will be made whole as you MAKE whole, for to perceive in sickness the appeal for health, is to recognize in hatred the call for love. And to give a brother what he REALLY wants, is to offer it unto yourself. For your Father wills you to know your brother AS yourself. Answer HIS call for love, and YOURS is answered. Healing is the love of Christ for His Father, and for HIMSELF."

If someone appears to do something wrong, perhaps they're angry and they're attacking, you focusing on this "surface appearance" is what it means to "make sin real." You judge based on the appearance of form and the form of what they do dictates what it seems to mean. You hold their physical behaviors etc against them and accuse them of what they are doing, as if to say that what you see in this judgement is all that there is to see. In this state there is no compassion or deeper insight into why they're behaving this way or any sense of a call for love. Or better yet, a call for help.

When someone is hurting and afraid and so on they tend to lash out and project and blame and attack. But in order to be forgiving, the surface appearance of what they're doing has to be looked past. Essentially this means you have to realize that their outward appearance is an EFFECT, not a cause. And therefore there is a deeper cause behind it. When you focus solely on the appearance of what they're doing, you are believing that the appearance is a CAUSE, and in particular that YOU are at the effect of it.

This means that cause and effect have kind of "shifted". The cause is in them, and their behavior is an effect of it. But now you're believing that their effects are the cause, and the effect has shifted out of them completely and into you. This is a belief that physical form is the only reality, that what the body is seeing is the truth. When the body's senses are trusted, and given the body can only see form and surfaces, this produces a suggestion that the world is primary reality. That it is the starting point of everything, and therefore causal and not an effect. It is necessary to displace the effect onto yourself or others then because this "causal form" cannot be both cause and effect.

This is the unforgiving attitude. That the dream world is real and is the cause of suffering. That surface appearances are true. That sin is real. That death is real. That sickness and suffering are happening and making more things happen in turn. In order to forgive, causation has to be pushed back into the mind or source within the person. Their behavior has to be seen as a facade and as only an effect, something to be pushed past and seen beyond. There has to be something going on with them that's deeper than just the outward expression of their pain.

When you are unforgiving you will accuse them of sin and put up a wall and use the surface appearance as a barricade to separate you off from them. The body will be emphasized and its activities will become the proof of sin. The person will be relegated to being a body only and only what you can see and sense will be given reality. This shuts you off from the person and treats them like an object. It's is a cold-hearted and vicious state of perception.

As you peer beyond this surface veil, beyond what they appear to be doing, and look deeper into the person, you're opening your heart. This is because you necessarily are opening up to a deeper truth, a higher truth. The higher truth is that beyond the layers of suffering, the obstacles to peace, the protest against reality, and their seeming attacks, there is a seemingly wounded frightened person inside longing for help. To see that they are only acting this way "because of" something else is a step in the right direction.

There is always something deeper behind the surface, just as there is another world beyond the surface of this one. To see that someone is in need of help is to shift your vantage point. You begin to see from their perspective, what they are going through and where they are coming from. You see behind the wall of sin, which also means seeing beyond the body, and acknowledge that they need help. This is a much more loving point of view. It's a compassionate point of view. It causes you to side with the person, which is part of becoming one with them. The part of you that is in them, or is them, now is included in who and what you are, and your love for them is now a shared love for yourself.

Not taking anything personally, not using what people appear to do against them, not holding events and happenings against the world, and seeing behind it to the deeper causes, is what forgiveness entails. And beyond all the deeper causes is the light of Christ which is the true nature of each person. No-one is evil and no one in their right mind would ever do anything unloving. People are just confused and mistaken. This is the movement away from making sin real, towards the forgiveness that confirms that people are simply mistaken and lost and in need of help.

Someone isn't sinful for attacking. People attack when they're hurt. Someone isn't evil just because they're being vicious and cruel. They obviously have experienced some major hurt or rejection or abuse or something that has led to this expression. We need to recognize that whenever we think the world, or bodies, or people, or events, are what they are based on the surface appearance, we're forgetting that the world is an effect and not a cause. By making it into a cause you shield the cause and hide it, and now the effect becomes the cause, with a seeming power to put the effects into you.

All of these violent expressions, all attacks and murders, all conflict and arguments, all destruction and viciousness, it all has to be seen as symptoms or side effects of something beyond it. Something in people that is in need of help. A call for love. A state of being lost and alone and frightened and guilty, that needs healing. People act out only as projections of what they have inside of them. What they are lacking is love and what they need is love and compassion. To see this need you must find a way to look deeper than the surface and see where the person is coming from, what's behind this expression, where it started, and get to the root of it. Because at the root of it is the reality of their real worth and innocence.

"That is the ultimate value TO YOU in learning to perceive attack as a call for love."

"For fear IS a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied."

"Perceive in sickness but another call for love, and offer your brother what he believes he cannot offer HIMSELF."

"The only judgment involved at all is in the Holy Spirit's one division into two categories; one of love, and the other, the call for love."

"What calls for punishment, must call for NOTHING. Yet every mistake MUST be a call for love. What, then, is sin? What COULD it be but a mistake you would keep hidden; a call for help that you would keep UNHEARD, and thus UNANSWERED?"

In the separation from God, we introduced an idea of "separateness" into wholeness. We believed it was possible for there to be a lack of wholeness. This produced the idea of "over here" and "over there", each distinct and different and seeming to lack the some part of the whole, setting them apart.

This laid the foundation for both space and time - notions that what is here is not there, or what is there lacks what is here. And so each seeming part of it seems to have a different form, a partial collection of attributes which sets them apart from each other. And neither has everything.

"You who believe that God is fear made but ONE substitution. It has taken many forms, because it was the substitution of fragmentation for wholeness." And then we continued to subdivide and split the mind. We tried to assign certain collections of properties, aspects, characteristics, to some parts, and others to the rest. To break wholeness into seeming isolated chunks of form.

Each part took on a different form and meaning. Various forms or examples or versions of the same one error of separateness. This caused a multitude of differences to seem to appear, each held apart from the rest and separated out as if many things.

This inevitably produced an entire universe of many "forms of error", where each object or body is different to the rest. Each lacks what the others have, rooted in sacrifice and limitation. Not one is whole, and every one is partial.

And so each form appears to comprise different materials, shapes, structures, behaviors, colors, textures and appearances. From these scattered fragments of illusion, entire worlds seemed to arise, each unlike the others and unique in its appearance. Including every human body and every atom.

An illusion is the appearance that something is other than what it actually is - seeming to be something it is not. The single idea of separation, the one problem, shows up as multiple things and multiple problems. It is really one thing, but separateness leads to many forms. And every form is an illusion that the one error is many errors.

Each form says, "look at the ways I am not the same as the rest". And so as one form pulls itself away from sameness, another form does the same. And the two forms try to disguise the fact they are one thing.

And now each form seems to vie for attention. Every form is different, and therefore in conflict and competition. Some are larger, smaller, more or less important, more or less valuable, more or less serious, more or less difficult to deal with.

And now we have an entire hierarchy of illusions, from the gigantic to the tiny, and everything in between. The form that each form takes deceives by distracting you with its claim that it is not like the rest. My car is not a house. My boat is not an airplane. My trousers are not shoes. My ice cream is not a burger.

Every form is designed to assert a deception, a temptation, an illusion, that if its form is real and true, then it IS NOT the other things. This was founded in the simple premise that this world is NOT reality, or the negation of God, and so everything appears to be NOT the rest.

If you believe it, you are deceived. Because every form is a form of deception, an illusion that a singular idea of separation is many things.

One part says, I am not like the other part. Look at how I am different. Look at my different shape, color, size and makeup. Look at what sets me apart. Look at what I have which the other lacks. Look at our differences. Look how we are separate and not the same at all.

And to believe this is to be completely blinded to the the truth. Because if you fall for this and take sides, if you come to prefer one form over another, or think they are truthfully unique and valuable, then you have fallen for the ONE temptation of the world.

Every form is a lie. Every physical object and every body is a lie. Every planet and every star and galaxy is a lie. They are all designed to hide and disguise the one single illusion of separation.

So long as you are caught up in a life where the worshipping of DIFFERENCES prevails, where you prefer some forms over others, where you think that two things are not THE SAME, you are deceived and blinded. There is nothing so blinding as to fixate your vision on the perception of FORM, making the separation real.

The body's eyes look only upon the forms of error. Only the body makes the world seem real. Its fixation on differences, changes, inequalities and comparisons, blinds you to seeing any kind of singular truth. It sees a world of a billion truths, none making any sense or meaning anything at all. The whole message of ACIM is that we need to transition AWAY from a world of differences, towards wholeness. To repair the sense of fragmentation in the mind and restore singular oneness.

This requires seeing THROUGH the deception of form, and not believing it. Not believing that a car and a house are real differences. Not believing that a living body and a dead body are real differences. Not believing that some objects are more important or valuable than others. Realizing that we gave the world of forms ALL the meanings that they have.

To flatten the hierarchy of illusions is to recognize that ALL illusions are one illusion. A single error presents itself to you in every conceivable form of deception. If you buy into it, you think there is an order of difficulty, where some things are harder to deal with or change than others.

To recognize there IS no hierarchy, is to recognize that all forms are the SAME. That every form of suffering is the SAME. That every form of sickness and death and life is the SAME. That there is ONE thing here, not many. That the manyness and the differences are entirely untrue. That one thing is sneakily showing up as a massive multitude to HIDE its true nature of being just one thing.

This is why there is really only one lesson the Holy Spirit teaches, that ALL FORMS of suffering have a SINGLE cause. This is why the workbook lessons have us NOT be selective in which forms we apply things to, so that we will learn that forms are meaningless decoys. This is why we are to recognize there is ONE problem not many. And this is why there is ONE truth and ONE law and ONE atonement.

Every form that the world takes is a lie. Every time it says you should want this form or that form, it is trying to get you to take sides. Every time you take sides there is war. Every difference of form IS conflict. Everything you see with the body IS conflicted, with objects vying for attention, some nearer some further, some louder some quieter, some more "appealing" than others.

All of this is ONE thing, one effort, one scheme, to TEMPT you to believe in the differences so that you will not recognize they are ALL THE SAME. That this whole world is entirely unreal. That not one form is more real or important or valuable than another. That there aren't billions of choices, there is only one choice.

ALL illusory forms are like two characters who act and speak and present themselves differently to try to create the illusion that they are not ONE actor. The mind is ONE actor, taking on the role of multiple simultaneous parts, pitted against each other. So long as you do not recognize that ONE mind is playing ALL the roles, of both victim and victimizer, you will be deceived by form.

In a world of forms, all the forms are untrue. Not one of them IS reality. And none of them show you what is true. To see only physical form is to see nothing but error and sin. True vision will show you that their many appearances are lies, and that there is a singular truth behind them. We are addicted to a world of forms, believing in specialness and made-up values. Made-up worth. Made-up importance. Goals and toys and special jobs and relationships and things you want and things you don't want.

All designed to keep you locked into a hell of form and separation. To keep you tempted that the next big thing will save you. That the next form the illusion takes will be the one you've always wanted. So that you never realize NONE of them are true, NONE of them are real, and NONE of them are what you really want.

That without deception, lies, falsehood and temptation, there is NO WORLD HERE AT ALL. Without form, there is no planet and no body. And behind all forms is the one lie that started it all, which the world of forms was made to hide - that separation is even possibe.

"A problem can appear in MANY forms, and it will do so while the problem lasts."

"It is not a thought which judges an illusion by its size, its seeming gravity, or anything that is related to the form it takes. It merely focuses on what it is, and knows that no illusion can be real."

"For how can one illusion differ from another but in attributes which have no substance, no reality, no core, and nothing that is truly different?"

"Today's idea is another giant stride in the perception of the same as the same, and the different as different. On one side stand all illusions. All truth stands on the other."

"Illusions battle ONLY with themselves. Being fragmented, they fragment."

"Illusions CAN conflict, because their forms ARE different. And they do battle ONLY to establish which FORM is true."

"The meeting of illusions leads to war."

"EVERY illusion is an assault on truth."

"Bodies may battle, but the clash of forms is meaningless."

"The gap is carefully concealed in fog, and misty pictures rise to cover it with vague, uncertain forms and changing shapes, forever unsubstantial and unsure. Yet in the gap is NOTHING."

"The thought of sacrifice gives rise to all the forms that suffering appears to take."

"Sickness takes many forms, and so does unforgiveness. The forms of one but reproduce the forms of the other, for they are the same illusion."

"For time and space are ONE illusion, which takes different forms."

"The dream is but illusion in the mind."

"The forms the broken pieces seem to take mean nothing."

"Your sleeping and waking dreams have different forms, and that is all. THEIR CONTENT IS THE SAME. They are your protest AGAINST reality, and your fixed and insane wish to CHANGE it."

"You are so used to choosing between dreams, you do not see that you have made, at last, the choice between the truth and ALL ILLUSIONS."

"This course attempts to teach no more than that the power of decision cannot lie in choosing different forms of what is still the SAME illusion and the SAME mistake."

"Death is a thought which takes on many forms, often unrecognized."

"Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion."

"Those who are special MUST defend illusions against the truth."

"Guilt ASKS FOR punishment, and its request is granted. NOT in truth, but in the world of shadows and illusions BUILT on sin."

"What is perceived takes many forms, but NONE has meaning. Brought to truth, its senselessness is quite apparent."

"Yet has God given Answer to the world of sickness, Which applies to ALL its forms."

"NO illusion has ANY truth in it. Yet it appears some are MORE true than others, although this clearly makes no sense at all. All that a hierarchy of illusions can show is PREFERENCE, NOT reality."

"What relevance has preference to the truth? Illusions are illusions, and are false."

"Illusions HAVE no witnesses, and no effects. Who looks on them is but deceived."

"The first chaotic law is that the truth is different for everyone. Like all these principles, this one maintains that each is separate, and has a different set of thoughts which SETS HIM OFF from others. This principle evolves from the belief there is a hierarchy of illusions; some are MORE valuable, and THEREFORE true."

"For this establishes degrees of TRUTH among illusions, making it appear that some are HARDER to be overcome than others."

"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."

"The laws of chaos govern ALL illusions. Their forms conflict, making it SEEM quite possible to value some above the others."

"This illusion can take many forms."

"Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. It sees their nothingness, and looks right through the thousand forms in which they may appear. It looks on lies but it is not deceived. It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt. It looks on them with quiet eyes, and merely says to them, "My brother, what you think is not the truth.""

"The strength of pardon is its honesty, which is so uncorrupted that it sees illusions as illusions, not as truth."

"The dreaming of the world takes many forms, because the body seeks in many ways to PROVE it is autonomous and real."

"Though the dream itself takes many forms, and SEEMS to show a great variety of places and events wherein its "hero" finds itself, the dream has but ONE purpose, taught in many ways."

"Bring, then, all forms of suffering to Him Who knows that every one is like the rest. He sees NO differences where none exist, and He will teach you how each one is CAUSED. None has a DIFFERENT cause from all the rest, and ALL of them are easily undone by but a SINGLE lesson truly learned."

"Not once do the advanced teachers of God consider the forms of sickness in which their brother believes."

"The gap that is not there is filled with toys in countless forms."

"The body's eyes see ONLY form. They cannot see BEYOND what they were MADE to see. And they were made to look on error, and NOT see past it. Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see ONLY illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside FORM of nothing. To this distorted form of vision, the OUTSIDE of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true."

"Only MISTAKES have different forms, and so they CAN deceive. You CAN change form, BECAUSE it is not true. It COULD not be reality, BECAUSE it can be changed. Reason will tell you that, if form is NOT reality, it MUST be an illusion. And is Not THERE to see. And, IF you see it, you MUST be mistaken, for you are seeing what can NOT be real, as if it WERE. What cannot see BEYOND what is not there, MUST be distorted perception. And must perceive illusions AS THE TRUTH. Could it, then, RECOGNIZE the truth?"

"You are advancing to love's MEANING, and away from ALL illusions in which you have surrounded it."

"You who believe that God is fear made but ONE substitution. It has taken many forms, because it was the substitution of fragmentation for wholeness. It has become splintered and subdivided and divided again, over and over, that it is now almost impossible to perceive it once was one, and still IS what it was. That ONE error, which brought truth to illusion, infinity to time, and life to death, was all you ever made. Your whole world rests upon it. Everything you see reflects it. And every special relationship you ever made is PART of it."

"Temptation has ONE lesson it would teach, in ALL its forms, WHEREVER it occurs."

"Elusive happiness, or happiness in changing forms that shift with time and place, is an illusion that has no meaning."

"Never foster this illusion in yourself, or encourage it in others. An "object" is incapable of release, because it is a concept which is deprived of creative power."

"What is seen as "reality" is simply what the mind prefers. Its hierarchy of values is projected outward, and it sends the body's eyes to find it."

"All that a hierarchy of illusions can show is PREFERENCE, NOT reality."

"Fear is the emotion of the world. It has but one. Its forms are many - call them what you will - but it is one in content."

"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. ... Nothing so blinding as perception of form. For sight of form MEANS understanding HAS BEEN obscured."

"Before a holy relationship, there IS no sin. The FORM of error is no longer seen."

God's Kingdom is the level of primary reality. We then made a SECOND world, with the power of our minds. When we made the world we also invented all the rules of the world, all of the laws of physics, all of the ways spacetime would function, and populated it with every object and body and planet and galaxy.

What this means is there are now two levels. There is the level of source, actual reality, and then there is the lower level of the world. The lower level is sometimes referred to as a lower-order reality. This lower level was made, well within the confines of what is possible for the higher order to accomplish. It was a limited mis-creation, is filled with limitations, and its rules are completely invented restrictions.

We who live within this lower order world, who take it at face value, might believe that this world is first-hand reality. And we might believe that the very strictly enforced laws of spacetime physics cannot be broken. We accept all kinds of limitations as being "normal" for this universe. There are so many things that seem impossible, so many things which proceed according to certain rules... it's "just the way thing work here".

But what we might not realize is that this world is not primary reality, its laws are not actually the most fundamental lowest-level limitations, all limits are artificial, and every single "impossibility" is an illusion. In science now the holographic theory is starting to point to this, recognizing that this world is NOT primary reality but a secondary by-product, and is therefore once removed from source.

There are a couple of good analogies. The first is that of a movie director. The director is outside of the movie at the level of what we'll think of as actual reality. The director decides to piece together a set, to populate it with characters, to assemble a scene and make it appear as though certain stories are playing out.

The director will even play a bit with the rules/laws, perhaps they will devise some illusory special effects which LOOK as if they are believable when you look through the camera and don't see all the strings being pulled and all the behind-the-scenes stuff that is going on. And the illusion depends on not seeing the secret workings of the scene in order to maintain believability. To the casual observer, the romantic tale playing out in the movie is believable and "happening". Limitations are accepted as normal and not questioned.

But the movie director could decide to do something completely outside the realm of this little illusion. They could decide to suddenly walk onto the set in front of the camera. This would blow the whole illusion of a scene set in the 1950s. They could decide to move the camera to see the set from a certain vantage point that reveals the buildings aren't real buildings. They could "break" the laws that seem to run the world.

Another analogy is that of someone who builds 3D CGI scenes in a computer. At first the scene is empty. The modeler wants to make a scene where a CGI car crashes into a lamp post. They put the car into the scene, then the lamp post. But there are no laws in place to govern any kind of collision. There is no physics. They have to tell the computer what they want to happen.

They have to invent some physics laws and implement them, so that it SEEMS that when the car touches the lamp post the post bends in a way that makes it look AS IF the car caused the damage. And perhaps the front of the car needs to be remodeled to make it appear AS IF it has been dented.

They also have to make the car move, define how fast, and configure every parameter of what happens. It's sort of similar to how a child plays with a toy car and pretends the car crashes and has to make the object it crashes into move as well to pretend it caused something to happen. In truth the car does not cause anything to happen, the lamp post is not at the effect of the car, and there is no "real damage". It's all pieced together to make an illusion. To seem as if it's believable. There is no actual cause and effect here.

It's possible for the modeller to decide to do something to the car which would "break" the normal laws of physics. They could make the car float, they could change its color, they could turn it into an apple. These would be "unbelievable" to someone who bought into the illusion of the scene, and would appear miraculous.

Which is another point. Within this world we're used to living in, we believe there is cause and effect on the horizontal level. That a brick thrown through a window causes the window to break. One thing is a cause, another thing is an effect. And sometimes the thing that caused becomes affected. We buy into this as if it's a closed system. As if the dream that we caused is causing us.

But in truth, the director has VERTICAL causality over the movie scene. The 3D modeller has VERTICAL causality over the entire contents of the what happens. And so too the MAKER of this world has entire power OVER everything that happens in this world.

Since you MADE PHYSICS, you can BREAK it. You can decide, hey, I am under no laws but God's, I am not bound WITHIN the laws of physics, I made the laws, I will transcend them and break them. I will do something OUTSIDE the laws. I will walk on water, breaking the law of gravity. I can ignore gravity because I made gravity myself. Since you are above, beyond, and outside of, the level of the laws, you have the FREEDOM to exercise your will to bend, break, and totally override the rules.

You who made the world are PRIOR to the world. You are able to pull the strings. You can do thing to the laws and the scene that the laws and the scene itself says are impossible. Things which cannot seemingly be undone or reversed, are reversible with miracles. You can control space and time. Your mind has power over matter. You can literally move a mountain. You can reverse death and sickness. There is nothing beyond your ability to rewrite the dream. You're the dreamer, YOU call the shots.

When you break the laws of the world, the effects or "what happens" is seen by the natives as "miraculous". Or "impossible". When you walk on water, breaking gravity, this seems impossible. Such a demonstration shows that because you are DOING IT, the law of gravity must be an illusion. This is why "miracles are teaching devices."

Also since miracles "do the impossible", this is often why many people do not believe in them as being capable, as if such things are just "magic", as a way to try to explain why miracles CANNOT BE supernatural. This is due to a belief that the world is real. Those to have fallen for the illusion of the lower-order scene are convinced by appearances and made-up laws and believe they cannot BE broken.

Demonstrations of your power over the world reveals that all the limitations and laws you thought you were bound by, you are NOT bound by. When a few loaves of bread and some fish are multiplied out of nowhere to feed 5000 people, this seems miraculous. But he who is operating on laws OUTSIDE the laws of this world is merely exercising their freedom. Anything goes when you are literally above the law!

When a dead body is suddenly resurrected to life and the person starts walking around as if nothing happened, this is considered a miracle by the people who anticipate that death cannot be reversed. In total defiance of all the laws of this world, the laws of decay and time and chemical decomposition, can be broken. Even bodies that have been dead for years can be resurrected. Even when the pieces are scattered and decayed and beyond help. This should not be considered "difficult". There is NO order of difficulty.

You are not bound by ANY LAW of this universe. It is all an entire level removed from the level at which you exercise your creative freedom. This world is further down the chain of causality than the starting point, and you at the starting point can therefore change your mind and change the whole world. It doesn't matter how irreversible, solid, permanent or impossible something seems to be, all of that is overridden when you operate from a higher level of causality.

"Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly."

Since you are operating from a level above the world, you are having vertical causality over the world. You even cause the causality of the word. You cause the causes, and the effects. You set up the causes and the effects to PRETEND that the causes caused the effects. You can violate the illusion of causality at any time. You are above the world. This is why the coures says:

"41. The miracle is a learning device which lessens the need for time. The sudden shifts from horizontal to vertical perception which the miracle entails..."

Vertical perception is a state of seeing yourself as prior to the world, above the battlefield, causal over everything below, overriding all horizontal causality, under no laws but God's. Miracle working ENTAILS shifting INTO vertical perception, SO THAT you can be miraculous. What you then perform FROM vertical perception breaks the laws of the world. Miracle mindedness is vertical perception.

Since super" means above, and "natural" is of course to do with the nature of things, super-natural means "above nature". Being above the nature of the world. Beyond and above the laws of the world. This is why miracles are rightfully "supernatural". At least in terms of looking at them from below. In truth they are completely natural and should be happening all the time. Miraculousness is actually the NATURE of God's Kingdom, which has UNLIMITED POWER.

Everything that is of God is supernatural and naturally so. "God's miracles" "You are a miracle" "You are a miracle not of your own making" "Miracles mean life and God is the giver of life" "The miraculous nature of the soul" "Miracles are a universal blessing from God" etc. Being miraculous is natural, being UN-miraculous is UNNATURAL.

Being BOUND by the laws of space time is UN NATURAL. And the NATURE of everything within space time is NOT NATURAL. What we affectionately call "mother nature" is OPPOSITE to the nature of God. "Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way." And "miracles are natural and should be happening all the time. When they aren't, something has gone wong."

So being a miracle worker means being supernatural. Miracles are supernatural acts. They CAN BE spectacular. "A miracle is MISUNDERSTOOD when it is REGARDED as a spectacle". "The use of miracles to INDUCE BELIEF is a misunderstanding of their purpose. They are for and by believers." Nothing wrong with throwing a mountain into the sea. Nothing wrong with materializing objects or turning a snake into a branch. Nothing wrong with multiplying food and walking on water. Nothing wrong with reversing death or sickness and giving eyeballs to those born without them. This is *natural*.

"The miracle is proof he is not bound by loss or suffering in any form, because it can so easily be CHANGED. This demonstrates that it was never real, and could not stem from his reality. For that is changeless, and has no effects which anything in Heaven or on earth could ever alter. But appearances are shown to be unreal BECAUSE they change."

Miracles express from above and outside of the nature of this world. They are supernatural, and what they are capable of IS UNLIMITED.

"Your mind has the power to make worlds."

"There is nothing your holiness cannot do."

"Miracles do not obey the laws of this world."

"Miracles reflect the laws of eternity, not of time."

"I am under no laws but God's."

"one point already tells you that miracles reverse the physical or lower order laws."

"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 Holy Spirit is invisible, but you can see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them. Perceiving His results, you will understand where He must be, and finally KNOW what He is."

"You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both."

The physical world is a world of forms, and forms are blinding and deceptive. All objects appear to be set apart by their differences, and claim they exclude the rest. Exclusion is separation, and all objects are at war.

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do. For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt."

An apple is not an orange. A banana does not agree with a grape. A pear is at war with a peach. But these differences of form is an illusion, disguising the fact that all of these objects are the same illusion of separation.

All physical objects are in a state of transition, transiting between what they were and what they are becoming. They are never permanently anything, lacking any real identity of reality. They are avoidances of the present, and are all forms of the idea of separation, showing up in different appearances and temptations.

If we then move into ego, we divide up the physical world based on these appearances. We categorise and label and we start to put similar things into boxes. Some things go into the life box, and some go into the death box. We think that the form something takes tells us what it means, and how we should respond to it, which is not true.

"Life and death seem to be opposites because you have decided death ends life."

Things which we think symbolise life, such as freshness, newness, youth, cleanliness, order, vitality etc, we put into a life box. The things we think symbolise death, such as decay, damage, sickness, suffering, aging, withering, etc we put into the death box. But these are entirely made-up categories.

"I have given everything I see all the meaning it has for me."

It is us who gives these things these meanings, based on how the forms appear. Things which seem to show more symbols of death, we call death, and things which seem to show more symbols of life we call life. And thus we decide to believe that seemingly living bodies are separated from the dead ones, that living bodies are more alive, and dead bodies are more dead, and we try to keep the two separate.

We end up with a "hierarchy of illusions", an entire collection of boxes and labels, having categorised all forms into one group and not another. But this means we have fallen into the ego's trap and are now perceiving separation everywhere, dividing up a single illusory world into fragmented pieces.

If we believe that the forms of death are different to the forms of life, we will attach all manner of evil, wrongness, badness, guilt, failure etc to death, and try to remove these things from the things we call life. And so we polarise our view of the world and are believing in separation, wearing rose-tinted glasses of denial.

Having failed to recognise that dead bodies are no more dead than living bodies, and that living bodies are no more alive than dead ones, we will start to form a prejudice against death in favour of what we think is life. We will fear the symbols of death, the forms of death, the sickness, and will try to populate our lives with the symbols of life. And when the symbols of death begin to appear, we will go into judgement, fear, resistance, attack and war.

If something we regard as "was once alive" turns into what appears to be "is now dead", such as the seeming death of a living body person, and coupled with a belief that the life and death of illusory forms are separate, we'll go into a grief mode. The grief will testify that something awful has happened, something that was truly alive has died, and death has taken over where life left off.

"The death of an illusion means nothing. It disappears when you awaken and decide to dream no more."

But this of course means that we are in denial of the fact that life was already dead, and death is just another part of the illusion of life. Neither living bodies nor dead bodies are really alive, or dead, or anything. They are in fact nothing at all, being illusions of persons in a dream. The bodies were already dead before they died.

If we are separating out the things of spacetime and calling them death, while separating out other things and calling them life, we are deceiving ourselves. A person's body was not really alive when it seemed to live, anymore than any real difference has taken place now that it appears in a dead form. Death has not increased. The illusion has just shifted its appearance, and this does not mean anything at all.

The deception is that if you believe that physical life and physical death are opposites, you are caught in the belief in separation. The illusion is that they do appear to be different, but the truth is that they are not different at all. Bodies do not live or die. They are not holy or unholy. They are not better off being alive or dead. They are nothing at all because they don't really exist.

"The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."

"To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear."

"To see a SINLESS body is impossible. For holiness is POSITIVE, and the body is merely neutral. It is NOT sinful, but neither is it sinless. As nothing, which it IS, the body cannot meaningfully be invested with attributes of Christ OR of the ego. EITHER must be an error, for both would place the attributes where they cannot BE. And BOTH must be undone, for purposes of truth."

The body is a symbol. It symbolises the state of mind. When the mind is healthy the body will show up as the symbolic forms of what we call life, freshness, newness, vitality, innocence, harmlessness, purity, etc. It will seem to be alive. When the mind is in a state of separation, including perceiving death as separate from life in this world, the body becomes attacked and takes on the symbolic form of death. But physical death is no more death than physical life, in the big picture.

Therefore in this world there are indeed symbols of life and death. It is true that we should aim for the body to show up as healed, in order to teach forgiveness, and to demonstrate resurrection. But at the same time as this "avoidance" of the symbols of death, we have to also recognise that even the healthy body is just as much the same illusion as the dead body.

"Not once do the advanced teachers of God consider the forms of sickness in which their brother believes. To do this is to forget that all of them have the same purpose and therefore are not really different."

"They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful."

All bodies are illusions. "The body is a dream." But healthy bodies can symbolise eternal life, while dead bodies symbolise death. But we must remember this is also a "dream of death", and "without the idea of death there is no world." This means that even a healthy body still contains an idea of death in a dream of death. These are just difference contexts. And just because all bodies are "the same" does not mean we have no reason to move the body towards the symbols of life.

It's possible also that if your perception is separating out the world into opposites of life and death, not recognising death in the life and vice versa (as in yin and yang), you will become averse to the symbols of death, ie dead bodies. That means a fear of death's symbol, which frames the physical symbols of death as something to be afraid of and avoided at all costs. The mind then tries to separate out death and life as a defence, which increase separation, and induces sickness.

It's also then possible to believe that, to be a miracle worker, you must steer the body towards the symbols of life. But not from the perspective that life and death symbols are the same, but as a compulsion based on the fear of death. An attempt to save someone from a fate that you believe in.

To deny death while still making it real. To wage war against the symbols of death, believing that avoiding them is a movement toward resurrection, all the while falling for the deception that all of the death lies in the symbols of death only. Death is hiding in the symbols of life as well.

We have to move beyond the belief that the symbols of death means death, and that the symbols of life means life. They are still just symbols, and all symbols are still illusions. And all illusions are a rejection of reality. Even the symbols of life, on a physical level, have death in them. Even the newest born life forms have death in them. All "life forms" are really "death forms."

"Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death."

"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."

All the things of spacetime have death in them because they are rooted in an idea of opposition to eternal life, and have limitation imposed on them (a lack of immortality). And within that illusion there is a spectrum of symbols, some looking more like life, and others like death. But both are just as equally untrue. Bodies do not really live or die and their states are all telling the same lie.

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In ANY state apart from Heaven (spacetime), life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. "

The world is nothing and does not really exist. Bodies are nothing and do not really exist. If you believe that some forms of objects are more alive or dead than others, you believe in a hierarchy of illusions. And that means you believe in separation. To not believe in separation the entire hierarchy has to be equalised and flattened. All sense of differences has to be erased. All differences have to become meaningless and form has to be completely overlooked (forgiven).

"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."

"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."

"What is meaningless is neither good nor bad. Why, then, should a meaningless world upset you? If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy. But because it is meaningless, you are impelled to write upon it what you would have it be."

When the forms mean nothing, when physical death means nothing more than physical life, when nothing physical defines what anything means, and when there is a singular whole response to all things equally, you have developed an unconditional mind and a state of miracle mindedness. In this view everything is recognised as one thing, one problem, one error, one separation idea. And in that view, there is no order of difficulty in miracles and no hierarchy of illusions.

Do not be deceived by appearances. Life is death and death is life an all of it is not real in this world. The flowers are filled with death before they bloom. The bodies are born from an idea of separation. All the planets are destined to be destroyed. Nothing here will last because it is all a symbol of God's absence.

"It might be worth a little time to think once more about the value of this world. Perhaps you will concede there is no loss in letting go all thought of value here. The world you see is merciless indeed, unstable, cruel, unconcerned with you, quick to avenge and pitiless with hate. It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while. No lasting love is found, for none is here. This is the world of time, where all things end."

"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."

"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."

Lesson 1: "Nothing I see means anything. The reason this is so is that I see nothing, and nothing has no meaning. It is necessary that I recognize this that I may learn to see. What I think I see now is taking the place of vision. I must let it go by realizing that it has no meaning, so that vision may take its place."

The truth can seem quite bizarre in comparison to what you've been used to. Your whole life you've spent having experiences of suffering, being affected, upset, threatened, afraid, guilty, ashamed, having various sicknesses, changes in emotion and mood, all kinds of stresses etc.

What the truth says it that YOU CANNOT BE CHANGED. Hmm.... if this is true, then what's with all these seeming attempts to BE CHANGED by the world? How can any of these forms of suffering be relevant is you are unchangeable?

"You were NOT born to die. You CANNOT change, because your Function HAS been fixed by God." UrT29G4

It's a simple idea at first but it has very deep and far reaching consequences. If you cannot change you cannot be caused by the world in any way, you cannot be made to feel something in particular, you cannot have your self modified, your identity can't change, you can't even be hurt or become sick or have a change in mood.

If you are the unchangeable eternal permanent being that God created, which you are, then ALL of the seeming influences in the world are null and void. Not one single thing in the world has any power over you whatsoever. Not one influence, not one force, not one person, not one place, nothing. It does nothing to you, in the most extreme way.

So what's with this farce, this lie, this total world full of deceptions and untruths, things that claim to be happening to you, changing you, modifying you, defining you, creating and causing you, when in truth they are doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. A dream of nothing, causing nothing, doing nothing, with no effect.

"What does this recognition "cost"? It costs the world we see, for the world will never again appear to rule the mind. For with this recognition is responsibility placed where it belongs; not with the world, but on him who looks on the world and sees it as it is not. He looks on what he chooses to see. No more and no less. The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did." UrM6C3

"Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are." UrW190L5

When you be afraid of something, you are attempting to increase a sense of separation between you and something. You hope that if you can separate yourself from it more, you will feel safer.

It doesn't work. It is the opposite.

The more you try to resist or push away or separate from what you think is the thing you do not want, the more intense it will become, the more threatening it will appear, and the more you will be magnetized to it.

It is as though, as you pull away from it, using a psychological 'force' of withdrawal, you simultaneously create a great 'pull' of equal and opposite effect, which draws that very scary thing to you.

Perhaps you've had a dream, where in the dream you are afraid and are running away from someone who is chasing you. It seems that the more you fight to get away, the more versatile they become at closing in on you. Eventually, however, you might find (if you chose well) that you surrender the fight, and you stop running. What happens when you stop running? The person stops chasing. And not only do they stop chasing, but they stop seeming like they even wanted to catch up to you, and they don't even attack you. How about that? This is the mind symbolizing what is happening in the psyche when you become afraid - what you resist persists, until you stop resisting and then it literally becomes your friend instead of your enemy.

It is hilarious that, therefore, the very thing you are trying to get rid of, you are intensely CAUSING to come after you. The very thing you try to separate yourself from, tries to come closer to you. The very thing you don't want, seems to show up even more as though you want it very much. This is the simple functioning of the mind. You are literally creating your own enemies because intensifying the sense of separation between you and your enemy simultaneously renders them appearing to be an even stronger enemy.

Surrender is the antidote of fear, whereby you stop fighting with yourself and give up the pursuit of freedom from enemies, which causes you to be free from enemies. A paradox it seems, but this is how the mind works. Stop fighting and your enemies stop fighting you back. Stop attacking and your enemies stop being attackers. Stop fearing and things stop seeming so fear-inducing.

Stop.

Say you have some illusions. Something that isn't true. It could be a physical thing, or some belief or whatever.

If your mind is open, it is open to the possibility of being mistaken, the possibility of not knowing, the possibility that the thing could be true or false. The mind isn't locked into some position or defending some viewpoint or prior belief. It's open to considering possibilities.

This openness allows you to "see" all of what is there, without filtering anything out with some kind of bias. It lets you recognize what things are, without distortions and without preferences. It's just sort of a way of saying, "tell me what you are", "what is this really?". it requires honesty and a willingness to be mistaken.

Open mindedness can allow you to see a mistake, recognize it as a mistake, and recognize that it needs correcting. It is a light which is open to everything, so it can see all sides and all angles, all perspectives. Including being able to see from a perspective of wholeness, which holds things in its light and in its true perspective to reveal what things really are.

Open-mindedness could be said to be the same thing as forgiveness. It's a mind that is willing to accept the truth regardless of what the truth is, and is not deceived by appearances. It's open to questioning what it sees and considering that it may or may not be true or real. It's the same thing as true perception - openness to the whole truth.

Sin on the other hand is a state of close-mindedness, which we could call false perception. You could call it narrow-mindedness as well. The mind narrows down and instead of being open to the whole, to everything, it becomes very focused and specific. It shuts out the peripheral vision, so to speak, and focuses only on what things appear to be on the surface.

A closed mind is not open to considering that anything is mistaken, or to questioning the reality or truth of anything at all. It takes everything at face value. Illusions are taken to be reality, lies are considered truth. Whatever seems to happen is believed to be really happening.

A closed mind also narrows down and homes in on specific things, so will focus on "what someone did" to the exclusion of all else. Even if the person has merit or does good dees in addition to their mistakes, sin focuses only on the mistakes and shuts out the good deeds.

Thus a closed mind becomes a darkened mind, focusing only on what people are doing wrong - given that everything in form is basically a mistake it turns everything into a sin. It mistakes illusions for truth and believes that whatever appears to be happening is permanently irreversibly true.

Sin has no openness to correction, to healing, to another viewpoint. It is very rigid and stuck and fixated on nothingness. It will not budge or allow any change to its viewpoint, or any way by which anything can be questioned. It takes everything as gospel and without question at all, accepting illusions into the mind without any sense of real perspective.

A sinful false perception therefore, a closed mind, does not see that there is even a possibility of mistakenness, a possibility of unintentionally, or of a need for gentle correction. It sees only deliberate evil acts, which appear to be utterly unforgivable, and sees that there is no other way to look at anything. It does not allow any openness to consider its position being flawed, or to register any sense of sin itself being a mistaken view.

As such a closed mind is an unforgiving mind, a mind which will not allow forgiveness because it will not question whether or not what happens is really happening. Whether that it sees is really there to see, or the truth at all. It believes it knows everything already, has all of the truth already, cannot be told anything new, and will not listen to reason. It won't consider the possibility of any alternative viewpoint, because to sin there is only one factual truth - you sinned and you should die for it.

As we awaken, we are moving from the viewpoint of sin - or closed-mindedness, and are opening up the mind and expanding our viewpoint so that we are more inclusive, more open, considerate, willing to question, willing to be mistaken, and willing to recognize that other people's choices are mistakes and not sins. This requires broadening the focal point and expanding it out to see the whole picture. To reframe everything in the light of the whole.

In forgiveness, everything false is recognised as false, without judgement. And everything true is recognised as true without distortion. It recognizes that all illusions are just mistakes, and there is no sin, because there is nothing closed off from the light of truth. The whole is recognised, perception is open to wholeness, and the whole informs everything. To forgive, you must open your mind and question illusions and let go of trying to make everything into a sin. There is no sin.

"What is forgiveness, but a willingness that truth be true? What can remain unhealed and broken from a Unity Which holds all things within Itself? There is NO sin. And EVERY miracle is possible the INSTANT that the Son of God perceives his wishes and the Will of God are One." UrT26H9

"Our lessons now are geared specifically to widening horizons, and direct approaches to the special blocks which keep your vision narrow, and too limited to let you see the value of our goal." UrW180 "Only by doing this is it possible to transcend the narrow boundaries the ego would impose upon the self." UrP3C8

"And if I need but stillness and a tranquil, open mind, these are the gifts I will receive of Him." UrW365

"It is therefore essential that you keep a perfectly open mind, unhampered by judgment, in selecting the things to which the idea for the day is to be applied." UrW3L2

"Accept atonement with an open mind which cherishes no lingering belief that you have made a devil of God's Son." UrW101

"Dwell not upon the past today. Keep a completely open mind, washed of all past ideas and clean of every concept you have made." UrW75L5

"An open mind is more honest than this." UrT12D3

"Healing will flash across your open mind as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings." UrW136L16

"The Savior's vision is as innocent of what your brother is as it is free of any judgment made upon yourself. It sees no past in anyone at all. And thus it serves a wholly open mind, unclouded by old concepts and prepared to look on ONLY what the present holds." UrT31G13

"It is to this unsealed and open mind that truth returns, unhindered and unbound. Where concepts of the self have been laid by is truth revealed exactly as it is." UrT31E16

If someone is being completely loving toward you, responding with unconditional love, then they can see who you really are.

If they fail to respond with love, this means they can't really see who you are. So what they're looking at isn't so much 'you' as it is how you might appear in a certain way, based on what the person is hallucinating.

So then every time someone doesn't treat you with love, they're not really treating YOU with unlove, they're treating a projected sinful guilty idea of a person with unlove.

The catch is that it usually looks like the person is making their unlove about YOU, and that they target it at you, even using your name, referring to you, pointing in your direction, getting in your face with it, but it's still not about you.

When you think it's about you, you have also joined with them in illusions and have taken it personally. You've failed to overlook the illusion that the person is actually attacking themselves, and that they're interacting with their own projected sinful self. It's easy to be mistaken about this and to think that they're doing it to you when they're really not.

So long as you are clear about who you are, that you are love, you will realize their call for love is clearly their own call and need for love, and love is the only response. But if you fail to see your own identity and confuse yourself with ego, then you will take their attack personally and will think it's about you.

You will make it be about you, even though it isn't. And as such you will hurt yourself with it. And then you will feel upset, not because they attacked you or because it was about you, but because you used it to attack yourself.

Faith (trust in God) reaches outside of the illusory world and connects to a Source of miracles you may as yet not see or fully understand. But your willingness and openness to even conceive of it, coupled with even a vague belief that it holds truth and reality, is sufficient to establish a psychological "connection" to a higher mind.

Believing there is a possibility beyond the physical laws, or a potential or freedom that transcends appearances, is the same thing as believing a Higher Power and disbelieving that the ego's laws have complete power over what happens.

Even if you can't see God or Jesus, or you are not even sure if they really exist, if you have even a little willingness - which is all the Course asks us to have - this is an invitation to the Holy Spirit. It's not just a little willingness to be mistaken, but a willingness to be open to a source of healing and truth which is more true than how things currently appear.

This works both in the areas of healing your illusory mistaken perceptions, in which your willingness invites Holy Spirit to correct your mind, but also in the grander area of the entire illusion, in which your willingness invites Holy Spirit to perform demonstrations of miracles through you for others.

Your mind has the ability to open itself to connect to a Source of miracles even if the majority of the mind is still in the dark. If there is enough of a "leap of faith", this will create a pipeline across which the Power of God can flow. You are able to them become a conduit for the Holy Spirit to work through you, in spite of you having a large body of delusions of your own that need to as yet be corrected.

Reaching outside the illusory world to join with God is all that it takes. Some measure of belief in the real truth. Many people just don't as yet realize that it is as easy as this, and so don't act in the role of extender of God's love through miracle working. You may not realize that you really only need to have some faith/trust and believe in the truth in order to now be a vessel for Holy Spirit to flow through.

A vast majority of miracles performed in the world today are performed by students of whatever spiritual system, students who are still "in process" of awakening and who are still learning about the truth. They do not need to be completely purified in order for such miracles to work through them, if they have willingess to allow Holy Spirit to "use them" and work with them.

Some trust in God is all it takes, a little willingness to accept that God's truth is true.

The first time that I became able to accept the atonement for myself, undoing a long-standing belief in a "real sin" that I had never been able to completely let go, Jesus said to me "now you will be able to perform miracles".

Notice that the steps I took to get to the atonement and accept it, which was an undoing and correction of fear, guilt, shame, and sin, was not in itself a miracle as such.

By being willing to accept that I was actually innocent in God's eyes because what I thought I had done had not really happened, that meant I was willing to agree that I deserved God's love and that I was, in truth, forgiven.

This meant I was willing and able to now receive love and therefore to love myself. And that means, I was now able to love others. At least a bit. The ability to express love only comes when you have becoming willing to receive it. And you don't have that willingness UNTIL you have accepted that the sin is not real - i.e. accept the atonement.

Miracles are EXPRESSIONS of love. They aren't just you shifting perception or accepting that you are lovable. That process is like opening the door for love to shine through. It is love shining through which has miracle-working power.

Today's lesson 140 says, "only salvation can be said to cure". And from this pertinent lesson:

"Atonement heals with certainty, and cures all sickness. For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take.

Sickness where guilt is absent cannot come, for it is but another form of guilt. Atonement does not heal the sick, for that is not a cure. It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible. And that is cure indeed. For sickness now is gone, with nothing left to which it can return."

Accepting the atonement gives you ACCESS to a state of mind which can CURE. A state of mind which can undo all sickness. A state of mind which has the power to perform miracles, which includes the likes of healing those who appear to be sick, helping your brothers and so on.

Just as Jesus did, you can forgive the so-called sins of others. Jesus said many times "your sins are forgiven". He had the power and authority to bestow that forgiveness on others, not just recognizing their sins were not real but also the ability to undo the symptoms and effects of that sin. He could produce a healing miracle on their behalf as an EXPRESSION of love. This is what you are capable of also.

All you need is love.

When you defend your ego self, you become righteous. And as you do this, you will become angry.

The Course says "anger is never justified", but when we are defending an idea of "why I am right", I AM attempting to justify myself.

I'm trying to say, "I am right because...", and I will use anger and intensification of the ego in order to try to 'rise up against' whatever is saying otherwise. How dare they accuse me!

Ok... so the antidote is simple. I have to be willing, even if I might have grounds in normal worldly terms for being justified, to let go of trying to be right. To let go of defending myself.

A person will only defend themselves if they believe they do NOT have grounds to stand on!

A person who is actually in the honest truth does not need to defend themselves because they don't perceive that something 'false' in them has been truly pointed out. They will stand firm and remain calm and smile.

It's only when a person's ego is activated, that they will start to defend it, because there is some truth to what the other person is then accusing them (their ego) of. And you'll try to defend that ego self because you, yourself, are horrified that 'its true' that your ego is standing on false ground.

So really we then get wound up by someone pointing out our flaws and our ego allegiances. If we didn't have these, we wouldn't be triggered and wouldn't try to defend it.

Defenses then are attempts to add shielding and extra protections to reinforce a FLAWED position - an ego position, which you've taken in error. And because that position is ego, it is vulnerable, and thus needs reinforcement and defense in order to keep bolstering it up, so that you can keep believing it is strong and firm. But it is really a weakness.

Funny that a show of anger is really a show of weakness, trying to appear strong to cover up a believe in a lack of true strength. And what is another word for a weakness or lack of true strength? Fear. Fear is always underneath anger and anger is a reaction to try to cover it up or compensate for it by *pretending* that you are excessively strong.

Choosing not to defend myself, by not believing that I'm 'right', which is an error, because that really means I'm 'wrong', allows me to stay calm and unengaged and detached from provocations.

There's nothing to defend when there is no ego present. And there's no need to then justify and rationalize why the ego is right.

In ACIM the term "solid" or "solidity" obviously refers to what we recognize it to mean..... things which seem solid to us. Physical matter, heavy objects, solid materials, walls, bodies, planets, all things which science would tell us are in a solid state of matter. Hard, tangible, measurable, biological, chemical, physical. Planet earth.

The course goes on to tell us that these things which appear to be solid will eventually be seen as transparent, like a shadow, or a smoke-screen, or a veil of illusions. And that these solid things stand in front of the face of Christ, initially blocking its view entirely but later moving aside and fading away to reveal the true light of the real world. That the "world", ie the solid earth, is nothing but a wall of illusions standing in the way of reality.

Christ vision becomes able to "see through" solid matter, kind of like x-ray vision. This is because it is forgiving, and "to forgive is to overlook." To overlook something is to not see it, which is why what you forgive must disappear. By forgiving the physical material solid world, therefore, you become able to see through and past and beyond it to the light of another world. A world which is not earth and is not the physical solid material plane.

In fact, Jesus says that it is the guilt in our minds which makes the veil of illusions - earth and spacetime - appear to have solidity. It is guilt which drags our mind down into false perceptions, blinded by perception of form, looking through and believing the body's eyesight which is completely incapable of forgiving or looking past the solidity of matter.

It is our belief in guilt and sin and fear and death which locks us in to the prison of solid matter and makes it appear opaque to our minds. It is only because we are not forgiving that the world appears to show up at all as "solid". And once we forgive completely, the whole world must disappear, and that does mean the solid physical world will fade into nothingness, leaving behind only the light of heaven, because the world IS nothing but a veil of illusions we made to cover up reality.

The physical material solid world literally was made as a kind of curtain or screen or wall to come "between" you and yourself, between you and God, to hide God and block out heaven. It is like a layer of dirt covering over what should be bright and obvious, a stain upon the creation of God, a shadow of darkness. Belief in it causes the body to be lit up and made to seem real and solid, emphasizing the rift of the gap of separation which contains the entire separation from God in the split mind.

Christ vision looks past this world to the light. It does not mistake the body for the son of God. It does not fixate on physical forms. It does not believe the world of separate objects is real. It doesn't merely look upon and regard it as unified, it looks fully beyond it entirely. It glances at the disappearing thin veil of nothingness as it leave the mind's awareness and opens up fully to perceiving only the light of reality. Then it is game over for the world, which was nothing to begin with.

This is then the end of solidity, the end of matter, the end of the physical, the end of the world of shadows, the end of darkness, the end of separation, and the end of death. The world is at first forgiven, seen past, overlooked, and ignored, and then ultimately returns to nothing at all which it is. There is no world, and only heaven remains.

"It can indeed be said the ego MADE its world on sin. Only in such a world COULD everything be upside down. This IS the strange illusion which makes the clouds of guilt seem heavy and impenetrable. The solidness this world's foundation SEEMS to have is FOUND in this. For sin HAS changed creation from an Idea of God to an IDEAL the EGO wants; a world IT rules, made up of bodies, mindless, and capable of COMPLETE corruption and decay."

"Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous, solid body, immovable as is a mountain. "

"Sin is impossible, and on this fact forgiveness rests upon a certain base more solid than the shadow world we see."

"And so you stand, here in this holy place, before the veil of sin that hangs between you and the face of Christ. LET it be lifted! Raise it together, for it is but a veil that stands between you. Either alone will see it as a solid block, nor realize how thin the drapery that separates you now."

"Standing BEFORE the veil, it still seems difficult. But hold out your JOINED hands and touch this heavy-seeming block, and you will learn how easily your fingers slip through its nothingness. It is no solid wall. And only an illusion stands between you and the holy Self you share."

"The mechanisms of illusion have been born instead. And now they go to find what has been given them to seek. Their aim is to fulfill the purpose which the world was made to witness and make real. They see in its illusions but a solid base where truth exists, upheld apart from lies. Yet everything which they report is but illusion which is kept apart from truth."

"Sin is a block, set like a heavy gate, locked and WITHOUT a key, across the road to peace. No-one who looks on it without the help of reason, would TRY to pass it. The body's eyes behold it as solid granite, so thick it would be madness to ATTEMPT to pass it. Yet reason sees through it easily BECAUSE it is an error. The FORM it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from REASON's eyes."

"Yet how can sight which stops at nothingness, as if it WERE a solid wall, see truly? It is HELD BACK by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else BUT form will be perceived. These eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see."

"Sickness is isolation. For it seems to keep one self apart from all the rest, to suffer what the others do not feel. It gives the body final power to make separation real and keep the mind in solitary prison, split apart and held in pieces by a solid wall of sickened flesh which it can not surmount."

"For anti-Christ becomes more powerful than Christ to those who dream the world is real. The body seems to be more solid and more stable than the mind. And love becomes a dream, while fear remains the one reality which can be seen and justified and fully understood."

"This heavy-seeming barrier, this artificial floor that looks like rock, is like a bank of low, dark clouds that seem to be a solid wall before the sun. Its impenetrable appearance is WHOLLY an illusion."

"Yet in this cloud bank it is easy to see a whole world rising. A solid mountain range, a lake, a city, all arise in your imagination, and FROM the clouds, the messengers of your perception return to you, assuring you that it is all THERE. Figures stand out and move about, actions seem real, and forms appear and shift from loveliness to the grotesque. And back and forth they go, as long as you would play the game of children's "make believe.""

"Christ's vision is the bridge between the worlds, and in its power can you safely trust to carry you from this world into one made holy by forgiveness. Things which seem quite solid here are merely shadows there, transparent, faintly seen, at times forgot, and never able to obscure the light that shines beyond them. Holiness has been restored to vision, and the blind can see."

"If you are not a body, what are you? You need to be aware of what the Holy Spirit uses to replace the image of a body in your mind. You need to feel something to put your faith in, as you lift it from the body. You need a real experience of something else, something more solid and more sure; more worthy of your faith, and really there."

"The world you see is based on SACRIFICE of oneness. It is a picture of a COMPLETE disunity and total LACK of joining. Around each entity is built a wall so seeming solid that it looks as if what is inside can never reach without, and what is out can never reach and join with what is locked away within the wall."

"The final one, the hardest to believe is nothing, and a seeming obstacle with the appearance of a solid block, impenetrable, fearful and beyond surmounting, is the fear of God Himself."

"You who believe you walk in sanity, with feet on solid ground, and through a world where meaning CAN be found, consider this: These ARE the laws on which your "sanity" appears to rest. These ARE the principles which makes the ground beneath your feet seem solid. And it IS here you look for meaning. These are the laws YOU made for your salvation. They hold in place the substitute for Heaven that you prefer."

"This world is not the Will of God, and so it is not real. Yet those who think it real must still believe there is another will, and one which leads to opposite effects from those He wills. Impossible indeed; but every mind which looks upon the world and judges it as certain, solid, trustworthy and true believes in two creators; or in one, himself alone. But never in One God."

"The actions of the body are perceived as coming from the "baser" part of you, and thus of him as well. By focusing upon the "good" in him, the body grows decreasingly persistent in your sight, and will at length be seen as little more than just a shadow circling round the "good."

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

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

"Beyond the body, beyond the sun and stars, past EVERYTHING you see and yet somehow familiar, is an arc of golden light that stretches, as you look, into a great and shining circle. And all the circle fills with light before your eyes."

"Such is your resurrection, for your life is not a part of anything you see. It stands beyond the body and the world, past every witness for unholiness, within the Holy, holy as Itself."

"Desiring to look upon their brothers in holiness, the power of belief and faith goes far BEYOND the body, SUPPORTING vision, NOT obstructing it."

"Grace is not given to a BODY, but to a MIND. And the mind that RECEIVES it, looks INSTANTLY beyond the body, and sees the holy place where IT was healed."

"And now God's KNOWLEDGE, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its Kingdom. Gone is perception, false and true alike. Gone is forgiveness, for its task is done. And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God. God knows it is His Own, as it is his. And here They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant, and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause. For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

You hear often that 'the world' as a term becomes substituted with terms like "its a dream", "its an illusion", "its not real", "we made it up", "its a projection" etc.

But, this doesn't really grasp what an illusion is. It's not just some word you can replace other words with.

The definition of an illusion is something appearing tobe something it is not, designed to deliberately deceive and block awareness of the truth. It is a device that lies to you and tricks you into believing something that isn't true. But in order to even KNOW that it is an illusion, you have to have enough awareness of what it's like to NOT be deceived by the illusion. You have to be aware of how the illusion works, what it's actually 'doing' to portray an appearance, how it is distracting you, and basically to 'see through it'.

Overlooking illusions is forgiveness. This means being aware of all of the 'tricks' that the illusion attempts to perform, but seeing through them and past them and not being fooled by them. And this is an entirely different state of consciousness and awareness, than to simply stay IN the ego illusion and start labeling it 'illusion'. That's like just switching out the term "planet earth" for "planet illusion". That doesn't really reveal HOW it deceives you.

So the big problem we have is that we do NOT realize how the illusion is an illusion. We do not recognize it AS an illusion. We do not see through it, or past it. We are fooled by it. We are made unconscious by it. It's like being hypnotized or put into an unconscious stupor, in which we take the illusion seriously, at face value, and listen to its appearance as if that is reality. Mistaking an illusion for reality is our only mistake.

Here's an example of an illusion. You are in the dark. The room is unlit. In the room there are objects. One of the objects you touch and it feels really strange and it seems to move as you touch it, and this makes you suddenly afraid that there's maybe a person in the room, and you scream. So you've fallen for the illusion, the impression, that there is something serious and frightening happening. But what happens when you switch the light on, suddenly you have MORE INFORMATION. You are now aware of more parts and pieces that you couldn't even see before, and were not aware of at all. Suddenly you realize that the thing you touched was in fact just a large house plant which you brushed up against, and it's completely safe and not scary at all. You feel relieved, right?

This is what it means to see through the illusion. It means, you have seen the truth, which has revealed to you, by shining a light of increased awareness, ALL of what is present, rather than only a narrow context or portion of what is present. When things are taken out of context they become a nightmare. Meaning becomes distorted. Reality becomes disjointed. We start to hallucinate that things might be happening that aren't really happening. This is how someone experiences insanity - losing touch with the bigger picture and becoming fixated on something whose relationship to real meaning has been distorted and blocked, such that you can no longer tell what anything really is and everything becomes frighteningly animated and motivated by bizarre nonsense forces that you don't understand.

The physical world, in the form that it appears, is an illusion. This does not mean that the physical world of form is being seen 'correctly' and fully, by seeing objects as they are. Or like, you become more aware of how all the objects contain beauty or contain God etc. That isn't seeing through the whole illusion. What you do not realize, because you have forgotten what it means to be NOT DELUDED AT ALL, is that the physical world of forms is, in its entirety, designed to block and distract away from the awareness of the presence of God. Even if you awaken to some 'stage' in which you see God in all things, if you are still seeing forms you are still deluded by the illusion.

"Nothing so blinding as sight of form" - ACIM

"Everything the body's eyes can see is a mistake, an error in perception, a distorted fragment of the whole without the meaning that the whole would give." - ACIM - "T-22.III.4."

Also.. "T-22.III.5. 3 The body's eyes see only form. 4 They cannot see beyond what they were made to see. 5 And they were made to look on error and not see past it. 6 Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see only illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside form of nothing. 7 To this distorted form of vision the outside of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true. 8 Yet how can sight that stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, see truly? 9 It is held back by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but form will be perceived." - ACIM

What you may not realize is, this entire physical universe is a holographic projection, designed SPECIFICALLY and INTENTIONALLY, to distort and block all trace of the nature of God. It is deliberately designed to obfuscate, distort, give an opposite appearance to, and completely make it appear, that God does not exist at all. The form that it takes is DELIBERATELY designed by the ego to show you something that looks nothing like God, has no properties of God, completely diffuses and blocks God's character, and makes you completely BLIND to God. The body's eyes then can only see this form, the appearance of the absence of God, and cannot see past it TO God. The entire physical universe is a DECEPTION!

The way this works is, every 'form', every object, presents to your awareness the idea that all things are different. It presents the idea that all objects are separate from each other, none of them share anything at all including the same space or time, none of them truly are equal or perfectly alike, and all of them are in conflict. Does that sound like a picture of God? No. That's intentional. Form, the form of error, was deliberately made make God not apparent, and to make it seem to your awareness that God does not exist at all anymore. That's the ego's wish. That's why it made this illusion.

So the 'illusion' is, that forms present an image to you which is not the truth, which is extremely deceptive, and which you fall for easily. For example, consider problems. The ego presents to you a specific problem which is usually limited to a handful of forms. It tells you that only these forms are a problem, so you need to solve it. You solve it, but this has no effect on the 50 billion other problems in the world. The ego's solution to problems only seems to apply to a tiny portion of the world, and has no transfer value to other problems.

The ego absolutely hates the idea of it being possible to solve ALL problems with ONE solution - that is the Holy Spirit's attitude. It does not want that at all. So it keeps you focussed on looking at objects as being very DIFFERENT to each other. A dog is not a cat. A car is not a house. An attack by a coworkers is not an attack by a neighbor. The ego makes it all APPEAR different and separate. THAT is how it deceives you. Because in truth, there is only ONE problem and ONLY solution resolves the entirety of it completely.

The abstraction needed to SEE and to RECOGNIZE that all forms are THE SAME THING, the same illusion, takes some significant forgiveness and awakening. Being able to look at all forms and recognize, every single one of the deceptions and temptations that every one of these forms is trying to SHOW me, to try to convince me that they are TRUE, is the SAME LIE, and they are all using the SAME STRATEGY. Ultimately, the entire world is the same ONE illusion, presented by the ONE ego, using ONE set of seemingly diverse and apparently highly fragmented deceptions. Each time that you fall for one of its deceptions and think, hey, yes, this illusion is real and this problem is separate from others, and this object is not one with other objects, and that person is separate from this person etc... that's you FAILING to see through the illusion. That's you FALLING FOR THE TRICK!

So yes, there is a way of seeing, which doesn't just overlook illusions but which is AWARE ONLY OF GOD. There is a way of recognizing everything that is false for what it is - false. There is a way of no longer believing a single thing that any appearance of object or form or separation or expression of fragmentation/multiplicity suggests to you in any way. There is a way of COMPLETELY IGNORING what the senses are shown via external signals. There is a way of absolutely not listening to a single shred of ego consciousness whatsoever. And there is a way of SEEING GOD DIRECTLY AND FULLY. And guess what? God does not look ANYTHING like how the physical world looks, and they have nothing in common at all.

In revelation, the entire world disappears. The entire illusion disappears. All physical objects disappear and are replaced with brilliant bright light and total awareness of love. That is all. This is reality. This is an experience of no illusions. Compare that to the PURPOSE of the world that the ego made, and recognize that forms looks like forms FOR A REASON, and separate objects appear to be separate FOR A REASON, and separate problems appear to be distinct and unique FOR A REASON, and all temptations and deceptions are designed to distract you and lead you into unconsciousness FOR A REASON.

The ego's use of the world is NOT that it is neutral. The ego's use of the world is to create a 'veil', an illusion, a huge TRICK, a distortion of consciousness, a BLOCK to awareness, over your awareness, so that you can no longer fully experience God or recognize His nature. God is the same everywhere. God is in all parts equally. All of God is in every part of God. When you are presented with objects which appears to only contain distinct separate parts in each part and there is no sign of any sharing or oneness whatsoever, in form, THAT is the illusion that there is no God. You have to learn NOT TO BELIEVE YOUR EYES!

This is what illusion means. You have to get out of the illusion to know that it is an illusion. You have to awaken to a greater reality in which you are aware of how God is everywhere, God shares everything, God is in everything fully, all of God is in all parts of existence, there is no separation, and all appearances are a LIE. Lies are not meant to be paid attention to, you are meant to discern that they are lies and not listen to them and not take what they present to you seriously or as though it is even real. Recognize the entire physical universe was made to SHUT OUT GOD, and not just in terms of you having a separate perception OF the world that has errors in it, but that the world ITSELF is an error and has taken on a multitude of forms to completely deceive your comprehension of 'what is'. We fall for this every single day and every time we believe in any kind of differences whatsoever.

There are no forms in God, not even forms that seem like they have God in them. NO FORMS. Complete formlessness. Forms are separation and separation is not real.

Every time we think one thing is not something else. Every time we think one object is not another object. Every time we experience separate problems and separate solutions. Every time we believe that we are separated from other people by bodies. Every time we don't recognize that there is only ONE problem, and only ONE solution is needed once and for all to solve them all, permanently. Every time we fall for this grand illusion and can't find a vantage point in awareness from which we can see 'the whole', the one, we fall for the ego's deception. Truly this world is not just a 'thing' and not just a 'place', it is a mechanism for reality distortion, consciousness obstruction, enforced unconsciousness, fragmentation of mind, and loss of life. This is what we have to see past and not believe what our senses are saying is out there.

"There is no world. This is the central thought the Course would attempt to teach." - ACIM - think about that deeply, the entire physical world is a magic trick aimed at stopping Creation, stopping awareness, and stopping God.

We are immortal Spirit. We are God's creation. We are infinite and unlimited by form. We are equal everywhere. And we are real. And we have no differences. And we are not separate objects. And we are not limited by space or time.

"I cannot see in darkness but in light" - "I am not an illusion but a reality." - ACIM

"The first chaotic law is that the truth is different for everyone." In the separation from God, we rejected the meaning of divine order and replaced it with meaningless chaos. Through separation and fragmentation, there was no longer a single truth shared by everyone. Instead, everyone believed their own truth, and now everyone was in conflict.

In a state of fundamental disagreement, this gave rise to an entire seeming universe, or system of thought, in which conflict, clashes, wars, disagreement, argument, inequality, domination, submission, tyranny, attack, fighting, selfishness, hoarding, scarcity, and all manner of separation became commonplace.

This also expressed as the world itself, on a physical level, in terms of the seeming laws of physics and of space and time, which are utterly opposed to the divine laws of God. This produced an environment in which every particle of matter is at odds with every other, all things are different, kept apart, and in conflict, and where one thing can seem to destroy another. In a world without divine order, "senseless laws" seem to govern it.

"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."

"The world you made is therefore totally chaotic, governed by arbitrary and senseless "laws," and without meaning of ANY kind. "

"The laws of God work only for your good, and there ARE no other laws beside His. Everything else is merely lawLESS, and therefore chaotic. But God Himself has protected EVERYTHING He created BY His laws. Therefore, everything that is not under them does not exist."

In a chaotic world, the most random-seeming things can happen. They appear to happen without the involvement of any kind of will or mind. Seemingly without the participation or attention of anyone. As if the world is simply on some kind of autopilot, allowing for things to happen which make no sense, for no useful purpose, and producing effects which appear completely random and unintended.

As such "accidents" seem to arise and we enter into a realm of "bad luck", where coincidence seems possible and shit can just seemingly happen "by chance." Physical objects and their interactions seem to trigger a cascading chain of effects, as rocks tumble from a mountain, as people slip on banana peels, as decay sets in, as random wind finally blows the roof off, as meteorites happen to strike a person's body, as the weather happens to be worse, as sick bodies seem to take a turn for the worse, and as you just happened to step on a specific piece of dog shit today.

We think this world is normal and natural but it is completely devoid of divine order and meaning. Utter nonsense can transpire for no good reason. Things can seem to happen, unfortunate events, strange twists of fate, odd unlikelihoods transpire, trees fall on cars, rotten wood crumbles, a person steps on a nail which was left behind 50 years ago, there isn't quite enough energy to keep the phone running to capture that UFO in the sky, and someone's wheel falls off because the bolts on the hub were just slightly loose enough today.

When you look at all the stupid stuff that happens in the world, all the dangers and pitfalls and strange occurrences and injuries and houses falling on people's heads and so on, most of it really boils down to a seemingly lifeless environment, run by chaotic laws. Unfair, mean, cruel laws, where animals starve because they get stuck in a hole between some rocks. Laws which seem to be consistent and make sense, but which are founded on the complete absence of love and belonging and harmlessness and wholeness.

In a way, most of what transpires is "forgiveable" in the sense that, most of it is just the laws of physics playing out, as if it's not "personal". We might yell at the door for slamming on us, but it was just the physics in the hinges and the weight of gravity. We might be annoyed at the handle falling off the saucepan but it was just the rust setting in to corrode the metal. We might stub our toe and swear at the little bump in the sidewalk, but it's just an arrangement of matter sitting there. It isn't transpiring against you, as such, it's just ticking over like a mindless dead program, like some kind of debris that's just left behind from centuries of pointless events.

The world really is kind of like a dead world, a graveyard in which "stuff" just sits around doing next to nothing, until it is disturbed slightly, and seeming forces and energies collude into the mix, resulting in seeming new effects. And now the rock falls on your head and the tree crashes into the car and the tornado throws a random cow through your window.

And then the little stone tumbles off the hill, and bounces off the recently grown leaf, and hits you on the head as you just happen to walk past. All seemingly totally at random. In a world where everything seems to be utterly chaotic, pointless, senseless, meaningless, purposeless, without divine design, orderless and lifeless. Where the dust comprised of the dead corpses of skin cells clog your nose and triggers and chemical reaction.

In heaven there are no such accidents, no things which happen in chain reactions of random collisions. There is no chance or bad luck or probability or likelihoods. There is no unintended consequence, or lifeless discarded piles of trash, or little objects that sit around waiting to be victimized by external forces, or giant "natural disasters" that bring totally arbitrary suffering and completely unpredictable chaos to all concerned. Where who survives and who does not depends on whether a particular piece of wood floats past at the right time.

The world is like an old trash heap where all manner of garbage has just been collected together and piled up, and now the pile is unstable and it topples over, and once in a while just enough gravity affects something to cause a sudden shift, and a landslide begins as particular specific items are involved and others left out, falling and plummeting to their new doom, until they settle and are stifled and end up in a new meaningless ugly formation of rotten stench.

This is the world we made. This is the opposition to heaven and to the divine order. This is how we wanted our life to be - dangerous and victimizing and unfair. And now most of our lives we spend trying to navigate through an obstacle course, barricades on a battlefield, with pokey nails sticking out and nasty sharp corners and little annoying things that just keep breaking and stuff that wears out and even your tangled shoelaces transpire against you.

The entire world has taken shape as an unpleasant and seemingly dangerous, unstable, and untrustworthy torture chamber, just to piss you off on a Monday and to reach out of the blue with its sudden breakdowns. Most of us then spend most of our lives trying to just "manage" to "survive" in such a strange and meaningless environment, angered when the laws of physics dictate that something else random and badly timed happens, trying to keep our frail bodies from being affected, and trying to scrape by unscathed in what effectively is a harsh and unnatural environment.

"There IS no safety in a battleground. You can look down on it in safety from above, and NOT be touched. But, from within it, you can find NO safety. Not one tree left standing still will shelter you. Not one illusion of protection stands against the faith in murder. Here stands the body, torn between the natural desire to communicate, and the unnatural intent to murder and to die."

Battlefields are places for thorns and spikes and bombs and armies. We have to find a way to rise above and out of the chaos if we are to reconnect with order, with peace and with divine order. There is no peace to be found amongst the twisted thorns and sharp corners of a meaningless world. Only the reality of Heaven offers a safe and meaningful home. And no-one can experience a sense of holy protection while standing on a landmine, which may or may not take them with it.

"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."

"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."

"You still could not will against Him, and that is why you have no control over the world you made. It is NOT a world of will, because it is governed by the desire to be unlike Him. And this desire IS NOT WILL. The world you made is therefore totally chaotic, governed by arbitrary and senseless "laws," and without meaning of ANY kind. For it was made out of what you do NOT want, projected FROM your mind, because you were AFRAID of it."

"The first chaotic law is that the truth is different for everyone. Like all these principles, this one maintains that each is separate, and has a different set of thoughts which SETS HIM OFF from others. This principle evolves from the belief there is a hierarchy of illusions; some are MORE valuable, and THEREFORE true. And each establishes this FOR HIMSELF, and MAKES it true by his attack on what another values. This is justified BECAUSE the values differ. And those who hold them SEEM to be unlike, and THEREFORE enemies."

""Laws of chaos" are meaningless, by definition. Creation is perfectly lawful, and the chaotic is without meaning, BECAUSE IT IS WITHOUT GOD. You have given your peace to the gods you made, but they are not there to take it FROM you, and you are NOT able to give it TO them. You are NOT free to give up freedom, but only to DENY it. YOU CANNOT DO WHAT GOD DID NOT INTEND, because what He did not intend DOES NOT HAPPEN. Your gods do not BRING chaos; you are ENDOWING them with chaos, and accepting it OF them."

""I am upset because I see a meaningless world." Insane thoughts are upsetting, and They produce a world in which there is no order anywhere. Only chaos rules a world which represents chaotic thinking, and chaos has no laws. I cannot live in peace in such a world. I am grateful that this world is not real, and that I need not see it at all unless I choose to value it. And I do not choose to value what is totally insane and has no meaning."

"The "laws of chaos" CAN be brought to light, though NEVER understood. Chaotic laws are hardly meaningful, and therefore out of reason's sphere. Yet they APPEAR to constitute an obstacle to reason and to truth. Let us, then, look upon them calmly, that we may look BEYOND them, understanding what they ARE, NOT what they would maintain. It IS essential it be understood what they are FOR, because it is their PURPOSE to make meaningless, and to ATTACK the truth. Here are the laws that rule the world you made. And yet they govern nothing, and need NOT be broken; merely looked upon and gone beyond."

"Dreams are chaotic BECAUSE they are governed by your conflicting wishes. And therefore they have NO concern with what is true."

"This is the characteristic of the ego's judgments. SEPARATELY, they seem to hold, but PUT THEM TOGETHER, and the system of thought which arises from JOINING them, is incoherent and utterly chaotic. For form is not enough for meaning, and the underlying LACK of content, makes a cohesive system impossible."

"For the ego IS chaos, and if it were all of you, no order at all would be possible."

"To think that God made chaos, contradicts His Will, invented opposites to truth, and suffers death to triumph over life, all this is arrogance."

"This is the anti-Christ; the strange idea there is a power PAST omnipotence, a place BEYOND the infinite, a time transcending the eternal. Here the world of idols has been set by the idea this power and place and time are given form, and shape the world where the impossible has happened. 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."

"Except he judges this as does a child, who does not KNOW what hurts and what will heal. And bad things seem to happen, and he is afraid of all the chaos in a world he thinks is governed by the laws he made."

"In the world, not even the body is perceived as whole. Its purpose is seen as fragmented into many functions which bear little or no relationship to each other, so that it appears to be ruled by chaos."

While we talk of non-duality and whether ACIM is non-dualistic, many people also make mention of duality as if knowing what duality is. But duality is not what you think it is.

We very loosly and vaguely describe duality as there being "two or more things". That these things are "separate". This seems to be easy to put into words. But the language isn't accurate enough here. Are they TOTALLY separate things?

When you look at it closer, for example, we could say there are two cars, they are separate from each other in space, and therefore there are two separate objects. But if you look even closer you'll have to admit that they in fact do share something. They both exist in the same realm. They share spacetime.

Then, ask yourself, what would total complete separateness be like? Well, it would have to be the difference between existence and total non-existence. To make something TRULY separate from something else, it could not exist in the same realm. Just as existence and non-existence are TOTALLY separate and complete opposites, and they do NOT SHARE the same realm otherwise they would share something.

So what we have are actually two concepts. One is "absolute separation" and one is "relative separation". For something to be "totally" something, it has to be absolutely that. For an object to be totally separate, it has to be ABSOLUTELY separate. But to be absolutely separate, it cannot share ANYTHING at all with the other, not even existing in the same realm. If one car existed in "existence", another car would have to be in "non-existence" in order for them to be ABSOLUTELY separate. Totally and utterly cut off from each other at all levels.

Since the two cars actually share the same realm, they cannot be absolutely separate. In fact you can easily prove that by the fact you can SEE both of them simultaneously. They can sit next to each other, they can even touch each other. So they are not absolutely separate. You can even crash the two cars and insert some pieces of one car into the other. They are not absolutely separate from each other. You can even melt one of them down and make body parts for the other one. They are not totally kept aprt.

But the cars are relatively separate. There is a degree of seeming separation. The degree also can vary from "none" to "some" or even to what might seem "mostly", but they can never reach "absolutely separate." So they are not really absolutely in a state of "duality", ever. Duality is not, therefore, really a state of absolute separation. Duality really means RELATIVE SEPARATION. Which means, at best, PARTIAL separation. And if something is only partly separate, it is not really separate at all.

This also gives rise to the idea that if they are only RELATIVELY separate, they must be PARTLY connected. They must share something. They do at least share spacetime. And at most, they could share the same materials. But this idea of relative separation indicates both that they are neither TOTALLY joined, OR totally separate. They are partly joined, and partly separate, because all illusions are contradictory. This is also beause spacetime was made as an attempt to believe that BOTH sharing and separation exist in the same place.

Science has also been proving this. Recent quantum theories suggest that an object isn't really anything in its own right, it is only something in relation to something else. Like, objects depend on other objects for their identity. Or rather, what something is, as an illusory object, is inferred or is indirect or "shared with" or implied by something else. That some of its identity is in another thing, because they share a little. And since no object is totally separate, no object has an entire absolute identity of its own. Which makes all objects symbols and not ends in themselves.

This is reflected in ACIM in terms like "at no time does the body really exist" "it is either anticipated for remembered". And "the body is not an end in itself". And "the body is a symbol". Symbols, which are what dreams are made of, ("the body is a dream"), are something which does not get its identity or nature from itself, but rather inherits it from something else that it points to or represents. Just as the body can be a symbol of eternal life, or a symbol of death/picture of crucifixion. And just as "Earth can reflect (symbolize) heaven or hell." It has no inherent absolute properties of its own, which is why we sometimes refer to it as a neutral mirror.

Also courtesy of spacetime science, there is the principle of quantum entanglement. This tells us that it does seem possible here, in this illusory world of relative separation, that one thing can be in two places at once. "Spooky action at a distance" reveals that this world is SORT OF a hologram, or at least is a devolved hologram, where the parts do not contain ALL of the whole, but do contain some of it. And so you cannot easily recognize the wholeness by focusing on the form of the parts. And the wholeness in the parts is so limited that they all appear to be unlike each other and not a hologram at all.

The idea that one particle or photon etc can seem to have entangled, ie shared, influence in total transcendence of spatial distance, tells you that the objects here are not QUITE separate. They DO share something. They ARE all connected in some underlying way. It's just that their connectedness is SO distorted and extremely de-emphasized by the forms of difference, that it seems very un-obvious and hard to recognize. This is part of the temptation of illusions. Quantum entanglement does indicate that duality is not really absolute duality, it's only a state of "relative separation". And if you look deeply enough (e.g. at quantum levels) you start to see a holographic kind of sharing that transcends spatial separation.

People go on to talk about non-duality or the seeming total absolute lack of separateness. As if non-duality is diametrically opposite to duality. In technical terms, absolute non-existence is the diametric opposite of absolute existence. But duality isn't absolute non-existence. It's only relative. ACIM confirms this here:

"The opposite of (eternal) life can only be another form of life (not totally absolute no-life). As such, it can be reconciled with what created it, because it is not (absolutely) opposite in truth. Its form may change; it may appear to be what it is not. Yet mind is mind awake or sleeping. It is **not its opposite** in anything created, nor in what it ***seems to make*** when it believes it sleeps."

This would sound totally cryptic and confusing unless you recognized that duality is not really what people think of as duality. It isn't a state of absolute separation, it's only a state of the illusion of trying to be separate, or of partial/relative separation. It's just a BELIEF IN separation, in a state of the DENIAL that everything is shared. So it is still WITHIN the confines of mind which can NEVER be separate in truth. All it can do is deny (hide, obscure, disguise) unity. And without this disguise (which is death), it is nothing.

"Without the idea of death (denial of unity) there is no world."Which means that duality is still housed within the mind as a mis-creative use of mind, a lower-order reality, and a system of thought within that same mind. Duality is NOT "actually outside of God". Outside of God is total non-existence, and it doesn't exist at all, not even as an illusion. In this world, you are NOT in non-existence. You are still in existence, pretending not to be.

The "dualistic world" is simply a mis-created devolved level of thought within the one mind, which attempts to use mind against itself or freedom against freedom or will against will, to present an illusion of relative separation, symbolizing separation and opposition. It is still something the Son of God is "making" in his mind, dreaming of, inventing, but it is an attempt to reject the sane true nature of the mind. So it results in illusions of separateness, which are not really separateness.

I like to think of this world as a kind of "last truck stop" on the way to leaving God. We never really get outside of God's envelope. But the world is the "last dying breath", as it were, in the effort to absolutely leave God and go outside of God to be "separate from Him". And physical death is just how it appears as you try to "remove all life" from something so that it can be "empty of life" and devoid of God. Trying to leave God, produces death, as a symptom of "the rejection of existence."

If you could be absolutely separate from God you would leave God entirely and enter "non-existence". This is what death of the body symbolizes, the attempt to LEAVE and actually separate from existence. As if you can go to oblivion and finally be totally without God, in absolute separation. Of course, that is impossible because non-existence doesn't exist and God is everywhere.

We never really leave God or get outside of Him, or go beyond the mind, but we do invent illusions of - lies about - symbols of - the idea of not being IN him. Of being exiled from or outside of heaven.

And this world of "duality" that we made is not so much ACTUAL duality, as it is just a state of PARTIAL duality. Of attempted separation, that fails. And of impossibilities believed to be possible while still being impossible.

So duality does not really mean what people usually think it means. It's not just about "separate things" or "a count of two or more". These are based on very loose separations that aren't really total separations. My apple and my orange are not REALLY totally separate, nor are they really part of a duality. They just appear to be separate things based on form and appearances, which are deceptive. The apple and the orange are connected together by the fabric of spacetime.

String theory and the notion that something exists as a "quantum field" which coalesces into a "concentration" of energy showing up as a particle, is just another extension of this. It's just how everything is part of a giant pool of energy, as it were, in this world, in the background, which seems to become more focused as consciousness (mind) interacts with it, producing physical matter. Ultimately everything in the world dwells "unfocused" in the quantum field which is a more shared state. This is also why subatomic particles are not actual "absolute particles", they are "probabilities".

Duality's "partialness" and relativity is also why this is possible:"Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release."

The hidden beauty is in seeing the connectedness of things which would otherwise seem mostly separate. And thus the world, earth, can be seen as a forgiven world which symbolizes heaven, a reflection of heaven, "a sign (symbolic representation) of God's perfection" etc. The forgiven world is what you see when you look beyond the illusions of partial duality and see an underlying singular background... the one dream. The one illusion. The face of christ, seen through perception. Even in supposed separation we are not really outside of God.

"There is another Maker of the world, the simultaneous Corrector of the mad belief that ANYTHING could be established and maintained without ***some link that kept it still within the laws of God***; NOT as the law itself upholds the universe as God created it, but in some form adapted to the need the Son of God believes he has."

We ARE still within God. We ARE still within God's holographic thought system. And we ARE still always creating. And we ARE always still joined together. The physical world is just an attempt to make it SEEM as if that's not true, using the clay of creation to form appearances of the opposite of creation. But creation HAS no opposite, and even what we made or asserted in our mis-creating is still WITHIN our mind and USING its power. Even a sleeping mind is STILL a powerful mind. "The mind is always creating, it never sleeps". Even a dream of death still has a thread of connectivity running through it. This is also why death is not an end and is just pretend death.

When you redefine duality as "attempted partial separation" or "relative separation", it has to acknowledge that even duality is still INSIDE OF the dreaming mind of Sons of God. And that means you are still in heaven. "You are safe in heaven, dreaming of exile, but perfectly capable of waking to reality." This doesn't mean the dualistic world is TRUE REALITY, because its forms are an illusion of opposition to reality, but they are MADE OF mind-stuff.

"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."

Spacetime is the empty shell, an attempt to create nothing, which produces an actual creation of a seeming lack of content, produces form. And then we project illusions into this emptiness or "idea of lack and limitation" (mortality) as we dream. Because even in your dreaming, you are using your mind's power TO dream, TO make illusions, and TO deceive yourself.

Never do you go outside of mind. And never do you leave God or heaven. It's just that this world cannot BE heaven because it symbolizes its absence. Even as a reflection of heaven it only symbolizes heaven. Because it's a perceptual realm and "perception is a separated state." - a state of an illusion of being separate. Illusions of separation ARE NOT absolute separation.

Only God's Kingdom is true absolute permanent reality. Your dream world is temporary and relatively partially created. And what is not absolutely created is not FULLY created at all. And so it remains just a state of temporary instanity, hallucination, wishful thinking and fiction.

"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."

Physical sight is blinded by perception of form. It looks only at the forms of error. It regards form as all that exists. The physical sight is blindness, because it cannot see everywhere, and is easily obscured be meaningless objects.

Form doesn't mean anything. But mind then takes the form and decides that certain forms mean certain things. We make up meanings and project them onto the forms. Now there is a hierarchy of illusions, varying degrees of difficulty, and the form of life seems to mean something different to the form of death.

"Life and death seem to be opposites because you have decided death ends life."

The form of death is not really death, and the form of life is not really life. We decided that death and decay "means" death and decay, and that living forms are "more alive". Who told you this? The myths of the world told you this. People made this up.

The form of death is not really death at all. It's just one configuration of materials. A kind of state. One possible way that form can appear. And when the same form appears more animated or fresh or vital, or capable of giving rise to more forms, then we say it means life. But these forms are neither alive or dead.

"In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning."

We give all forms all the meaning they have. We decide that a broken object means there's something wrong. We decide that a rotten corpse means something is beyond the hope of living. We look at the form of things and use the form to substitute for meaning, as if the form something takes MEANS something.

But all forms are illusions, and death is not death, and life is not life. They are all just equal images, appearances and illusions. All easily changed into other forms by the power of the mind.

"The miracle is means to demonstrate that ALL appearances can change BECAUSE they are appearances, and CANNOT have the changelessness reality entails. The miracle attests salvation FROM appearances by SHOWING they can change."

When no artificial meaning is given to the forms of the world, and the world's inherent meaninglessness is recognized, we end up with a level playing field. And now miracles can operate, disregarding any orders of difficulty or "reasons why" you can or cannot change one thing into another.

And now the seemingly dead bodies can be resurrected to "the living", to symbolize eternal life. And forms of sickness can be undone, to testify to innocence. And now water turns into wine and bread and fish multiply and who cares about the so-called law of gravity.

ACIM says "anger is never justified". This is big news for anyone who is used to feeling justified in being angry about anything.

There is a culture in this world is believing it is 'normal' and 'healthy' to be angry. When various 'bad things' happen, it seems very commonplace to react with anger. You might even be outraged. It may appear to you that you're completely right to feel that way.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Anger may acknowledge what you perceive has happened unfairly, but it betrays the fact your perception is faulty and in need of correction.

It is so widely accepted (by everyone's egos) that anger is a normal, justified reaction, that to say it is anything but justified seems like complete nonsense.

What if we were to say, anger is a state of insanity? What if anger is a mindless attempt to blame someone else for your own self condemnation? What if anger is deception? What if anger has a secret agenda of shoveling your own giult onto other people whenever anything conveniently goes wrong or looks like it could be used to justify being angry at yourself?

When anger is justified, the world is at war. There is no side you can take in anger to be at peace. And then your life will be filled with things which you get angry about. Every angry reaction is another instance of you believing that whatever happened is justified in happening, in spite of the fact that you're attempting to use it to explain why it shouldn't have happened.

It is extremely common to react in anger. It seems so commonplace and so 'normal' that most people accept it as some kind of 'normal psychology' or a 'healthy anger' or a healthy way to process what is wrong with the world. This is far from truth. It's a myth perpetuated by a very deeply ingrained ego thought system which runs through every society on the planet.

The only way anger is justified is IF .... IF.... this world is real. IF what happens is real. IF someone is really hurt. IF someone has actually proved that we are separate from God. IF we actually are not responsible for what happens to us. IF everyone else is guilty except ourselves. Only then would anger be justified. But that doesn't mean it is sane.

We have to lift all of humanity out of the bogmire of unconscious reactions based in the ego, reactions of anger which really are reactions of agreement and victimhood. We need to be more honest with ourselves and own up to and heal the real reason for our anger - that we are angry at ourselves for leaving God. Until this is faced, it will seem like 'normal culture' to get angry and upset about everything in the world.

"Anger is never justified" - ACIM - Anger is never justified because there is never any REASON to be angry because there IS ONLY LOVE.

For the ego, an answer is not an answer that solves a problem. Instead its answers are merely manipulations which describe the problem and compound it.

Sometimes the ego makes it appear that a problem is being 'solved' by, apparently practically, doing some thing to the situation to rearrange the furniture and manipulate objects into a different configuration. But this still keeps the scenery and does not solve any of the OTHER problems which are all kept completely separate.

The ego is not really a problem solver, but a problem inventor and problem keeper.

God is different. God has an answer, but God's answer isn't informational. God's answer doesn't just manipulate forms and try to create a 'picture' of there being an answer.

Instead, God's answer is actually an EXPERIENCE of the problem not existing. God's answer HEALS the situation completely, now. God's answer UNDOES every perception that a problem exists at all. And God's answer applies to EVERYTHING the same, solving all experiences of all problems simultaneously.

God doesn't solve one problem only to keep another. God is the solution to all problems, permanently. And God doesn't solve one problem only to bring back 1000 more problems in different forms later on. God undoes every problem, completely, permanently, and maintains a state of 'problem-less-ness', SO THAT there will be no problems.

God's answer is the only truly practical real answer, because it actually fixes what the real problem is. The ego never fixes the real problem whatsoever. And as you solve the real problem (ego separation), life MUST return to ORDER.

And so as you shift from ego-based problem solving to God-based problem solving, you'll notice that you're not going to just start asking God what the answer is. You're not going to just start asking God to come in and solve a finite form of a problem. You're also not going to be asking God to spend ages and ages describing every intricate detail of the problem at length. This is a trap I fall into, thinking that getting God's longwinded explanation is better than making up one of my own. Do I want diagnosis and a STORY or do I want the problem healed?

Problem-solving with God is immediate, instantaneous, full and completely restorative. It is healing. It is a shift away from 'diagnosis' to 'solution'. It is a shift away from delving into the story and history of the problem, and directly into the removal of it, permanently.

God heals permanently, God is permanently healed.

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.

In attempting to forgive the hell in the world, we might really be trying to make it real and then make it go away. This is an attack. The problem is that we have combined what the world IS (an unreal illusion), with a sense of reality, and now they appear to be one thing. This makes the world seem real.

To forgive or undo it, seems to entail getting rid of it entirely, in order to remove this illusory thing, and the reality gets thrown out with it, because the sense of reality seems tied to the world. As if you can't be free of the world without out also being free of its reality. So you try to throw the whole thing out at once.

But it is not actually the world that's real, and the sense of reality must NOT be thrown away. Instead, focus on allowing the world itself to be UNREAL, and let it "remain" as unreal, yet recognized as unreal, while you lift away from it the sense of reality. Give the realism back to God and let the world just be unreal. Take away the meaning you gave it and allow it to be meaningless world, because meaning belongs to God.

Let the world be an unreal world on its own, separate from the reality, and just reassign the reality to where it belongs. This allows you to not ATTACK the world or to effort to make it go away. It is merely re-framed it in the proper light - as the awareness of dreaming, in the recognition that the world is just a dream.

This awareness paves the way to allowing it to disappear naturally without force. Because when an illusion - an unreal world - is recognized AS an illusion, it must disappear. First take away its reality, then watch it vanish on its own. You must un-bind reality from the unreal world and take back the power you gave to it, first.

Look upon it as unreal, as without reality and without power, and then you are recognizing it for what it is. Recognizing it as unreal, given that you are still lingering in it for now, allows you to be in it but not affected by it. If the whole thing is unreal then it has no power, no will, no mind, no life, no meaning, no cause, no existence and no threat.

"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 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."

The more that you take responsibility for what you are experiencing, and the more you see that your whole experience is not caused by anyone or anything other than yourself, the more you will see this in others as well.

I was at the grocery store and saw this man walking with a cane and an obvious limp from some recent injury. But what struck me was how this 'looked' to me. Instead of the usual ego perception of ... oh, something must've happened to him, he's obviously been unfairly treated, he didn't choose this and he is powerless.... I saw instead, here is someone who has chosen to give themselves this temporary disability, who has done it to themselves, albeit perhaps unconsciously, and this hasn't happened to them against their will. I see the man acting as if he didn't choose this, acting as if he didn't want this, but still somehow it registered with me that he was not a victim and that this 'accident' had come from him. There are no accidents.

As Jesus says, nothing happens to us without our consent, including death. We get everything we ask for. We do not get anything we don't ask for. I don't know what had changed in my mind or how, but somehow my mind was seeing/perceiving differently and the 'meaning' of what I was seeing struck me differently. This man is responsible for what he is experiencing, he's not a victim, and nothing has happened against his will, meaning he has the POWER to recover.

If I see myself as a victim, by not taking responsibility for what I believe and feel, and if I don't recognize that what I feel is NOT caused by anything outside of me, then I also will see other people as victims. I'll have 'sympathy' for other people's unfair treatment, and enter into 'false empathy'. I also won't believe that other people chose what's happening, or that they have the power to heal. Instead I'll see them as condemned and stuck and powerless, because that's how I see myself.

But when I claim who I am and what I am experiencing, with me as its author, I will also see other people as being empowered and capable and free.

It's interesting how perception can change, how the mind can change, and how it can make the world appear different to you. I'm not talking about having certain thoughts, just the immediate way the world 'looks' to you, how it registers, what it means, what is clear and obvious and what you see in it. This somehow gets transformed when we heal and forgive, as if there are hidden changes to a hidden projector in our mind that produces a different experience, without really knowing how that change occurs. Holy Spirit of course knows how healing is accomplished.

The Son of God invented death.

And the Son of God cannot die.

So whenever there seems to be death, the Son of God must be pretending to die, all the while underneath that He is laughing at how everyone (really other parts of Himself) is falling for believing that it's really happening.

The Son of God loves to play with death like a toy, pretending that it's real, make-believing that it can happen. Yet it is just a performance, just for show, inside His own mind, between Him and Himself, acting as though he is both the performer on the stage and the audience watching.

Nobody can really die. So why do we take it so seriously? It's because we keep falling for our own illusion, our belief that how things appear is how they are. We don't see the Son of God playing at pretending to be dead.

How can an immortal being suffer or die? It's impossible. It has to be fake. There can't be such a thing as real death.

Those who seem to go through with it and leave their bodies seemingly never to return.... well, fooled us... they'll be back in some other disguise you may not recognize. Maybe a Japanese farmer, maybe a tribeswoman in Africa, maybe an American psychopath, or a French truffle collector, who knows.

All this play and pretense that death is possible, deceived by illusions and exploring the many ways to pretend that you can die when you can't. It's a tragic-seeming performance, only when you don't recognize who is doing the acting. It's a starring role, Christ Himself giving the best performance of His life.

And at some point this will all be confessed and admitted to and acknowledged, and then nobody will ever believe again that death was ever really possible, or that anyone has ever really died. And then we (the Son of God in His collective wholeness) will remember to laugh.

It is a scene in the mind. It is an imagined scene. A dream.

It is inside of a mind. It is made of thought. It presents images but these images are only there because of imagination.

Physical matter is not fixed and is not separate from the mind that dreams it into being. Bodies, made of this matter, are similarly just images in the mind - the mind that is dreaming the world.

You could liken it, symbolically, to as if we are living inside someone's brain. Inside someone's imagination. The universe is a giant idea. A thought. Even physical matter itself is not really physical or fixed matter, it is just an imagined idea.

It is all mind. And it is all within the mind. There is no such thing as outside the mind, and ideas leave not their source.

Objects, bodies, people, cars, houses, planets, they are all just ideas in the mind. They are being held in suspension and made to seem as though they have their own personal history and a "state" of their own, but this is entirely an illusion.

All forms are being regenerated and reprojected by the mind, within the mind, every quantum of time. Each object is completely forgotten and regenerated.

The only reason that objects appears to maintain their "state" or have a "history" over time, is because the mind that is dreaming them maintains a certain belief over time, and therefore keeps re-generating an almost identical image of form.

You think objects such as your body have a history, but they do not. They are being recreated now by the mind. What they appeared to be a year ago only seems to correlate to how they appear now because the mind that is making them keeps making them in the same way, based on the same beliefs.

Your body does not have a will of its own, or a story of its own, or a history of its own, or a state of its own. It is nothing but an image coming out of a projector. The projector is running a movie and keeps projecting a similar-looking object with similar properties, to create an illusion of consistency over time. Your body now has nothing in common with your body a moment ago, at the bodily level.

This is all happening in the mind. Inside a giant mind. This entire planet and everything happening on it is just a bunch of images in a mind. Imagination. A dream of the Son of God.

When this mind changes its mind, you can bet that the dream it is imagining is going to change as well. When this mind chooses forgiveness, you can bet that the images in the mind are going to out-picture a forgiven state of being as well.

This is why miracles - as expressions of love which CURE - and as expressions of love which DEMONSTRATE that the body has not been harmed, to symbolize the fact that the mind is unharmed, MUST be expressed on the level of "form".

This world is not just some place. It is not just a physical location. It is a place in the MIND. All of the objects in it are THOUGHTS. All of the forms and all of the so-called matter is nothing but a fluidic, liquid state of mind which can change at any moment.

It is not fixed, it is not permanent, and all of its illusions of continuity are just that - an illusion, maintained by a mind which keeps on projecting the same or similar images. That does not mean the mind cannot project different images if it wants to.

Miracles then, as demonstrations that you are healed, will manifest as the so-called "body" being healed, which means that the MIND is healed. And since the body is IN the mind, the undoing of the ILLUSION of a body will make the body change. It has to.

The body is not separate from mind or outside of mind. It is made OF mind. And if the mind chooses to stop dreaming a particular part of the dream, or to dream something different, that dream - physicality - will change.

You are living in a thought-world. It is a thought-form in the mind of the Son of God. Where else could you be but in the mind that you exist in, shared with God? There is nowhere else. There is no separate place to go.

Therefore, miracles, in A Course in Miracles, must be expressed as changes to FORM - which really are changes of MIND - whereby the "personal mind" that hides in the body and the body itself as an extension of that mind, must show up in the same way.

This is why Jesus, when he ascended, saw that his body - an image of a body - was just an illusion, and that it had no real meaning, it disappeared. It disappeared WITHIN the larger mind. The mind that is dreaming the dream. He erased part of the dream, because it was nothing more than illusory images - imagination. Clearly, if a dreaming mind decides to stop dreaming, whatever it was dreaming will cease to exist. And as such the "physical body" will disappear, IN the mind, because it was always in the mind all along.

Realize this. The physical universe is made of MIND! It is made of thoughts and thinking. It is constructed by consciousness. It is entirely within the bounds of the imagination. All of the forms and objects are just images in the mind. That is why when you change your mind, when you forgive, FORM WILL CHANGE. Because mind will change.

World events, tragedies, disasters, wars, attacks, celebrations, weddings, carnivals, shows, sporting events, whatever... all of it is happening in the mind. Its all a MIND-show. Mind events. Mind choosing to create dreams. Absolutely anything is possible. The mind could even create a fantastically perfect-looking world filled with abundance and incredible creatures, if it chooses to.

And people are collectively, worldwide, constantly choosing and creating futures which comprise of all kinds of stuff happening, because they chose to believe in it. We are changing "reality" because we are changing the dream as we go along.

And this is also why certain parties attempt to manipulate global consciousness to bring about a mental manifestation of certain outcomes. (Conspiracy theory alert! lol) - they know that mind creates this world and that mind can be coerced to create preferably futures. It's all part of manipulating the dreamer.

To believe that form will not change is purely the belief that mind is limited to the body and that the body is not inside or made of the mind. And that is a very common misperception, because that's precisely what the ILLUSION shows, if you believe it.

Your car is in your mind. Your house is in your mind. Your body is in your mind. Your job is in your mind. Your family is in your mind. Your entire life is in your mind. Even the physical stuff. It's all mental. Thus, changes of MIND, changes FORM, and that is why supernatural miracles happen.

They are demonstrations of truth, that the mind that is BEHIND the form has chosen something different, defying all of the illusory laws that the IMAGES in the mind appear to follow.

And this is also why the Course's REAL definition of "miracles" is that they are SUPERNATURAL. They defy the natural laws implied by illusions and come from a mind which is dreaming the world, easily capable of changing them and producing "healed" images of bodies.

Ultimately, a completely healed mind will acknowledge that the body does not really exist at all, and that it was just a dream coming from the mind. The mind was just projecting it and making it up. And it showed up in the "world" because the world is in the mind. And then, it will cease to dream the body, and the body will disappear.

A disappeared body is the ultimate body in perfect health, because perfect divine health means freedom from illusions and forms. Thus the perfect body is disappeared into perfection and by perfection, as the ultimate HEALING of the mind that dreamed it.

The body was made to come between the mind and God, and to make it seem like the Son of God was not Himself. It must go. And its ultimate healing is its removal. Its total undoing. This is the final demonstration that you are not a body. And if you want, you could re-manifest one later to demonstrate this, just like Jesus did after the cruxifixction.

The world is just a dream in your mind. Anything goes.

When something causal is denied and made unconscious, its "effects" appear now to be a cause all of their own.

God is the "first cause." We as the creation of God, extension of God, Son of God, are his "effect".

When we deny that God is the cause, which we do through some form of separation/denial, we attempt to shut God out of awareness. We form a block to awareness. The awareness of the presence of love diminishes.

It now seems that the "effect" that we are is not coming from God, and that God is not the cause. Seeing that there is no other cause, it seems logical to conclude that we, as an effect, are actually a cause.

This is the birth of the "authority problem." Cause has been denied and now an effect is having a fantasy about being its own cause.

The effect them takes on the illusion that it can cause other things to happen on its own. A dream, which was once an effect of dreaming, starts to look like it can cause real consequences to take place. A dream figure, who was dreamed up by a dreamer, suddenly seems to take on a life of its own.

But the denial of God as First Cause means that causality itself is denied, and this also must mean that we as God's "effect" will continue to deny that there is cause in us.

In separating ourselves from Cause in God, we also separate ourselves from cause in general, and so put distance between ourselves and causality. This is another way of describing "projection".

We displace causality outside of us as though it is separate from us, just in the same way as God is separate from us. Causality is now on the other side of a gap. And that means that we automatically start to believe that we are once again "not the cause" of this happening, and that some separate "other" is the cause.

This means that while part of us is beleiving we've taken authority away from God and given it to ourself, we simultanoeusly believe that we've given up power and are now at the effect of a separate cause.

We're having a belief in being powerful over God, while at the same time as believing we are being a victim of God. The more that we try to have authority over God, the more of a victim we will become. The more we try to put separation between us and God as cause, the more cause will separate from us and seem to do things to us against our will.

Death is the illusion that a separate cause has been so separate from and against us that it has chosen to destroy us entirely against our will, but has been brought about BY attempting to take God's power away.

Thus the ego's "authority" is really a lack of authority, and is a choice to be a victim, pretending to be God. This is of course arrogant at the same time as futile and self-destructive.

Introductory text prior to lesson 221 in the ACIM workbook - one of the Course's masterpieces on Forgiveness:

"What is Forgiveness?

Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in that view are all your sins forgiven. What is sin, except a false idea about God's Son? Forgiveness merely sees its falsity, and therefore lets it go. What then is free to take its place is now the Will of God.

An unforgiving thought is one which makes a judgment that it will not raise to doubt, although it is not true. The mind is closed, and will not be released. The thought protects projection, tightening its chains, so that distortions are more veiled and more obscure; less easily accessible to doubt, and further kept from reason. What can come between a fixed projection and the aim that it has chosen as its wanted goal?

An unforgiving thought does many things. In frantic action it pursues its goal, twisting and overturning what it sees as interfering with its chosen path. Distortion is its purpose, and the means by which it would accomplish it as well. It sets about its furious attempts to smash reality, without concern for anything that would appear to pose a contradiction to its point of view.

Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing. It offends no aspect of reality, nor seeks to twist it to appearances it likes. It merely looks, and waits, and judges not. He who would not forgive must judge, for he must justify his failure to forgive. But he who would forgive himself must learn to welcome truth exactly as it is.

Do nothing, then, and let forgiveness show you what to do, through Him Who is your Guide, your Savior and Protector, strong in hope, and certain of your ultimate success. He has forgiven you already, for such is His function, given Him by God. 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."

"True healing is the realization you were never sick" - ACIM

The implication of this is that in order to heal or be healed, you do NOT need to find the 'cause of the sickness'. You need to go BEYOND the cause of the sickness to where sickness HAS NO CAUSE. The sickness was produced by a denial or a blockage or an unwillingness to accept that there IS NO SICKNESS AT ALL.

So then if you go looking for the cause, this not only infers that you believe that you are sick and the sickness exists because of a 'real cause', but also that the sickness stems from some kind of 'causal mistake' somewhere in the mind. Like a root or a decision that was wrong. A starting point.

It seems there is something that you 'did' which then produced a bunch of symptoms after it. But even without symptoms coming after it, that initial 'sin' isn't causing sickness to show up somewhere else separate from it - the belief in the sin IS the sickness. It is sickness because THERE IS NO SIN and to believe otherwise IS to be sick/mistaken.

It may appear that these things are the 'cause' of sickness, but really their presence at all is the 'cause' because they are blocking an ACKNOWLEDGEMENT of divine health. They are blocking the atonement, which is that sickness has NOT occurred.

So in order to BE healed, you need to get past all notions of symptoms being real, and past all notions of a cause being real, and REMEMBER that there is no 'real' cause because sickness is not real. You need to remember that YOU ARE NOT SICK. And in that light, in that awareness, the sickness is not believed in, is not seen, and does not exist. Thus any 'manifestation' of it must disappear.

So if you're addressing the sickness, fighting with the sickness, trying to find the cause of the sickness, trying to uproot the sickness, trying to figure out where the sickness came from, or how to fix the sickness, you are barking up the wrong tree and the ego knows it. This only reinforces your belief in it.

The ONLY healing is in surrendering the ego, letting go of the need for the sickness - which ultimately is to block the awareness of NATURAL HEALTH. The only purpose of sickness is as an obstacle to peace and a resistance/defense against the truth. Its only purpose is to choose not to acknowledge that YOU CANNOT BE SICK because you are immortal spirit - Christ!

So let's stop. And let's move into ACCEPTING that we are 100% healthy. Let's move into allowing God's presence to heal. Let's move into recognizing that sickness can never be real, and the belief that it is real IS the sickness. And then let's drop this ego pretense that sickness is happening and admit the truth: As Christ, as God's creation, you are immortal and immune and invulnerable and immaculate. Nothing has happened and nothing can happen to make you sick. You can never be sick because God has created you innocent forever.

So all of this other 'sickness' is just the belief that you are not that, that you are not Christ, innocent, immortal and invulnerable. Your thoughts about the sickness are attack thoughts - "my attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability". But your invulnerability cannot BE attacked. Believing that it can IS an error, and error is sickness. Sickness is not the TRUTH, sickness is a LIE. And ultimately, death is a lie.

Own up to your immortality today.

I will explain now in one sentence, why there is no world, the entire foundation for miracle-working, and the meaning of cause and effect....

*** This universe (world) is once removed from reality. ***

Did you catch that? Read it again if it’s too short. Here’s the breakdown.

This world, including Earth, is not a thing in its own right. It is not direct reality. It is the EFFECT of a cause which is unseen and unmanifest. It is a projection, from a mind which seems invisible.

Being an effect of that mind, this universe itself has no identity of its own, no mind, no will, no causality, no truth, no reality, no purpose, no love, and basically does not exist.

If this world were a direct experience of reality, it would be different. Then it would make sense to believe its illusion that it exists on its own and is a real thing. But it’s not. This world is a by-product of dreaming, and whatever the dreamer decides to dream, shows up as this world.

This world has no will. It cannot decide to make something happen. It has no mind. It cannot think for itself. It has no purpose. It is not alive. It does not even move unless the hidden dreamer decides to move it. Nothing here breathes or seems to live unless a hidden mind somewhere else is causing every single moment of motion. It is absolutely nothing more than a "movie" being projected. It is nothing more than an IDEA that someone, somewhere, is HAVING.

A movie is a lifeless, inert, neutral, illusory nothingness. A movie does not cause anything to happen in reality. A movie is the EFFECT put in place by a mind entirely separate from the movie, who is choosing to make the movie appear one way or another.

Everything in this world, this world itself, this planet, all objects and bodies, all of it is SECOND HAND. It is showing up like a REFLECTION. It’s not really there. And since it has absolutely no life of its own, it can DO nothing without the hidden mind saying so.

The dreamer of this dream is the Son(s) of God. They are invisible to this world. This world is being PROJECTED from their mind. It seems to be outside of them. But this world is not first-hand reality. It is second-hand. Just an effect and nothing else.

Nothing within the world can change the world. Nothing within the world causes the world. Nothing within the world made the world appear. Nothing within the world is alive. Nothing within the world has a mind, or a will, nor does it think for itself. Nothing within the world is the cause of life or death. Nothing within the world makes events happen. There is nothing within the world, because the world is nothing. It does not DO anything. IT does not EXIST.

This correlates to miracles and to cause and effect. The mind which is causing this universe is the mind of the Son(s) of God. Everything that is showing up, the Sonship is putting there. Everything that moves, all chemical processes, all physical interaction, all events, the entire history of the universe, is all being WRITTEN from ANOTHER PLACE that you are not seeing with your eyes.

Cause is not IN THE WORLD. Cause is OUTSIDE THE WORLD. Cause is DREAMING THE WORLD. The cause of this universe is unseen, a mind so vast and powerful that it is able to make anything seem to happen.

Cause is the mind, the world is the EFFECT of its dreaming. Cause, from a holy mind, would normally CREATE. But we’re a little bit confused. Cause from a confused mind MIS-CREATES and MAKES a universe.

This does not mean that the mind literally creates a world that exists on its own with its own will and causality and life! The world NEVER is more than an EFFECT and it can do NOTHING on its own. This world/universe is the result of mis-creation, or dreaming, COMING FROM a LEVEL OF REALITY beyond this entire universe. Mind is cause, this world is effect.

Because of this, recognize that a miracle is what happens when it is REVEALED, that a mind BEYOND this world has the power to CAUSE this world. It only appears that there IS no such separate cause, ONLY beause the dream has not featured miracles very much. For the most part, the dream seems to just tick over, and its FAKE LAWS seem to just keep on applying with very little evidence that there is ANOTHER CAUSE outside of it. So we think this is normal, and believe those fake laws, and take the world to be real.

From within the world, within its illusion, we take it at face value for how it appears. "Nothing so blinding as sight of form". This leads us to believe (in ego) that this world is a thing in its own right, living and breathing and existing. This is NOT TRUE. It is not DOING ANYTHING. It’s like an image being projected onto a wall. It can’t change itself!

Everything happening in this world, and this world itself, is just an effect FROM a hidden, higher level of reality. Mind is causing it. Which means, in order for ANYTHING to seem to show up in this world, indeed for ANYTHING to happen in the world AT ALL, the mind has to put it there. It has to dream it. In order for objects to even MOVE, the MIND has to move them. In order for a river to flow down a hill, the MIND has to move every single particle. NOTHING HAPPENS without the consent of the one who is dreaming it. Not even death. If mind were not dreaming it, there would be nothing here!

This means that the mind which is BEYOND this world, causing it, would have to PRETEND that things WITHIIN it are causing each other. There is, factually, absolutely NOTHIING within this world that causes anything else to happen. Laws of physics are an illusion. Time is an Illusion. Death is an illusion. Something happening to someone against their will is an illusion. There CANNOT BE causes within the world itself, because it is ALL coming from the mind.

Mind MAKES ILLUSIONS that SEEM to appear as though one thing causes another within the world, and all the while the mind is secretly pulling all the strings. Nothing in the world "makes something happen". Nothing in the world "affects something". Nothing can BE affected "by" the world UNLESS the mind CHOOSES to PUT THE EFFECTS THERE. This is why the proper loving use of the body, temporarily, makes it IMPOSSIBLE for it to be sick or die! If mind does not will it, NOTHING happens to it.

So absolutely every so-called "cause" in the world is not real. And the "effects" which those so-called causes produce ARE NOT the result of those causes. That’s linear fiction. Believing that is FAILNG TO RECOGNIZE THE ILLUSION. Believing that something WITHIN this level causes effects WITHIN this lever, is "horizontal" or linear cause-and-effect. There IS no such thing! It’s not real. It’s a totally made-up fictional explanation by SLEEPING IDENTITIES who think this word is first-hand reality. ONLY THE MIND causes anything to seem to happen here. ONLY THE HIDDEN LEVEL of causality produces CHANGES in this world.

The mind is ALREADY CHANGING THE WORLD. The mind is MAKING THE WORLD TURN. The mind is animating the oceans. The mind is dreaming of life and death, things being born and growing and dying. None of this happens without the mind making it happen.

If there seems to be a flower growing, the MIND is growing the flower. If there seems to be a person walking, the MIND is walking the person. If there seems to be a drop of rain falling totally unbeknownst to any human in the middle of nowherer, it is ONLY falling because SOMEWHERE, MIND is making it move.

If there was a pause button to this projection, you would be able to stop and look at objects suspended in mid-air, wondering at how they can even be there, and demonstrating that they do not move by their own will. They are just EFFECTS, and being in touch with CAUSALITY ("this is a course in cause and not effect") gives you MIRACLE WORKING FREEDOM to IGNORE the laws of this world (which cause nothing), demonstrating the TRUTH that mind is the cause of this world.

Miracles occur as EXPRESSIONS from the mind of Love, the hidden mind, which is a DIRECT REALITY. That level of reality expresses and DEMONSTRATES that *this* level of reality, EFFECT, is TOTALLY UNDER ITS CONTROL. The "miraculous" mind has no limits to what it can do nor does it care what is in othe world, nor how big or small it seems to be, or the illusion of how "difficult" it might be to perform a particular miracle. It knows that MIND IS POWERFUL and MIND IS DREAMING THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE!

Any illusion of a fictional linear cause or effect has absolutely NO POWER to prevent the mind from manipulating the dream in any way it chooses. If the mind decides to throw pebbles in the air and turn them into butterflies, THAT WILL HAPPEN. If the mind chooses to freeze-frame a waterfall and to hold a lump of mid-flow water in the hand in suspended animation, that WILL happen. If the mind decides to LITERALLY MOVE A MOUNTAIN from one location to another, completely defying "gravity", SO BE IT!

This is all possible, and more. Nothing happens here AT ALL without the mind’s consent! No-one dies without their consent! No-one is attacked against their will! No-one can be sick unless they attack themselves. Nothing affects the body. Time does not even PASS unless the mind MAKES IT PASS. The cells in your body do not even move or eat or divide or anything unless the dreaming mind MAKES THEM APPEAR TO DO IT. Absolutely NOTHING HAPPENS HERE other than what the mind projects. That’s because there is no world, and this universe DOES NOT EXIST unless we keep dreaming of it.

Realize also that because even those cells in the body are nothing but a projection, even the shift from one "state" to another is ONLY happening because mind is making it happen. Mind is projecting, projecting, projecting, projecting, and over time, that makes it seem like "the object" being projected exist IN ITS OWN RIGHT. It does not. It is NOT ALIVE. It is just a constantly shifting IMAGE that the MIND IS DREAMING. It’s not there. It is NOT a life form.

So when you look at the world, realize this. You’re NOT looking directly at reality. You’re looking at a ONCE-REMOVED side-effect or projection from SOMEWHERE ELSE. All of the DECISION MAKING, all of the CONTROL, all of the choices as to what will show up, is happening somewhere else entirely, out of sight. You’re seeing an EFFECT. A big giant effect, like a huge movie that’s being broadcast from SOMEWHERE ELSE, to create the illusion that there is no projector. The projector is the MIND, not the world. Earth is a fairytale.

This is why "there is nothing my holiness cannot do". The mind of the Son of God who is DREAMING this world, can choose to do whatever he likes with it. HE ALREADY IS. The year 2017 is being projected by Him NOW. If He weren’t projecting this, there would be NOTHING HERE. No planet, no world. He is ALREADY CHANGING THE WORLD, every second of time, every moment, is only seeming to happen beacuse HIS MIND is making it change! Right now!

To be fully in touch with this TRUTH, and to therefore RECOGNIZE that everything in this entire universe is an ILLUSION, with NO real cause-and-effect happening within it, and having NO INHERENT EXISTENCE of its own, and with cause being SOLELY the mind that is dreaming it, will grant you ACCESS to "make changes". Free will.

The ability to make these changes was eloquently demonstrated by Jesus. Walking on water proved gravity is bullshit. HE MADE GRAVITY. Healing the sick proved there was no such thing as sickness and it had no power to resist him. And he also demonstrated that death can be overcome. "You made sickness and death and can therefore abolish both." They’re just DREAMS! WE make them up ourselves and pretend they’re happening against our will.

Everything about the Course makes sense in this simple framework. Cause is in the mind. Mind is projecting the world. The world is nothing but an effect of your mind and doesn’t really exist. You can do anything you want to change it beacuse you already are the one putting it there.

"There is no order of difficulty in miracles" because YOUR MIND is CAUSING EVERYTHING HERE. "Here", this world, this universe, this planet, isn’t doing anything on its own. It has no life, mind, will, or intentions. It causes nothing. All of its causes are ILLUSIONS. All cause is BEYOND this world. There is no world!!!!!!!

If you believe planet earth is real, or created by God, or causing stuff to happen, or has truth in it, or is alive in any way, YOU HAVE FALLEN FOR THE ILLUSION. It means you believe the PROJECTION from the mind IS the mind.

It means you believe Earth is alive and has a will of its own, which will automatically make you a victim of magical causes, suffer and die. It is LEVEL CONFUSION on a grand scale. Higher level mind CAUSES everything! The world causes nothing.

That which cannot cause anything cannot create, and so it cannot extend life, and therefore it is DEAD. This is a dream of death. "There is no life outside of heaven." There is no world here. It does not exist apart from our dreaming it, and no part of it has its "own existence".

There is no world because it is just an effect. Our effect. We are the cause.

If you can "do a forgiveness" and get to where you can accept that the sin was not real, therefore didn't really happen, and that therefore you are still innocent, it will reveal something to you.

It will reveal that God is always loving you, does not believe you're sinful, and sees you as permanently innocent. When this is true, it must mean that God has always been this way, always loving you, always finding you innocent.

That means that God's will is already accomplished. He has already given life. He has already given forgiveness and love. He has already provided healing.

This then gives you a secret piece of the miracle-working puzzle, which is that God has ALREADY healed. His will is ALREADY accomplished.

A nice analogy I heard was that after the World War, even though peace was declared, some Japanese soldiers had not received the news that the war was over. They kept fighting, and going around killing people, for over 30 years. They didn't get the memo!

So it is similar with God. The war is already over. Jesus has already overcome death and has claimed the atonement for everyone. He recognizes nothing has happened, sin is not real, there is no death and no world. That's why He came to tell us this.

And yet, here is this "world", which seems to be a bit lagging behind the news. It hasn't quite got the memo. The people still think there is a war going on. There are still people who believe that sickness and sin and death are real, and are still defending themselves against an enemy that isn't even there.

People are still producing defenses against the truth, people are still creating sickness, people are still at war, and it still *seems* like the war is not over yet. But according to God, the war is definitely over, and never even really began! We just didn't get the memo.

So this applies to how we work miracles. Part of the miracle entails the recognition that God's will is already accomplished, that healing has already been given, that God does not change His mind, that God isn't deciding whether to heal or not, and therefore, we need to focus on and believe that the miracle HAS been accomplished. That it WILL be received. Sooner or later.

All that we're kind of doing now is a cleanup job, tidying up loose ends and bringing the "good news" to people to tell that the war is already over. They can be pretty entrenched! Still believing heavily that the battle is still waging and that it might actually be won or lost, by themselves or the enemy. It's not true.

Miracles bring the news of God's truth into this world, albeit an illusory world, to infuse it with light and help to dispel, heal, and clean-up the mess left by the conflict. As in Heaven so on Earth. This doesn't as such mean the Earth is heaven or that it will remain, just that Heaven will appear to "descend" here as everyone becomes awakened in Christ, and then the whole place will fill with tremendous light and vanish.

So... miracles... the result is already accomplished... this is a key to proper prayer, focusing on the receipt and the knowing that it must be true because God already willed it. You're not making new laws, you're just enforcing the law.

The war is over.

It is difficult to learn that there is not really anything I can do to force healing or awakening onto others. Love isn't forceful.

If I see someone suffering, and if I've become mistaken in believing that this is real or true, then I will try to save them from it. But I've already attacked them by seeing them as less than immortal and buying into the illusion of them having a real problem. So then having attacked them, I also now try to become the hero savior who has come to free them from the very sickness that I have projected onto them.

I can offer love and healing, if there is willingness or readiness to receive. Jesus said to me a while ago "since when was loving someone a crime?". Love can heal. Love can produce miracles. But if the person does not want these things, love doesn't intrude.

In ACIM Jesus speaks of how love does not come where it is not welcome. It doesn't intrude on the alter upon which you placed other idols. It doesn't force change.

If God, unconditional love, forced healing onto us, the entire world would have been dissolved into light instantaneously. So this leaves people asking, why does God 'allow' suffering and death? The short answer is, because He loves us. Yes, God allows death because He loves us. And that's justification for many people as to why God sucks or doesn't exist. BUT... that's the short answer.

The longer answer is, death and suffering are not REAL, and our belief/experience that these things are real is actually our sickness, our mistaken perception, which God's love would want to HEAL, so that we can return to an awareness that we have divine health, that we are immortal, and that we cannot die. That's why God doesn't stop us from destroying ourselves (up to a point) - he knows death is not real and nothing can truly hurt us. All suffering is an illusion of suffering in a state of unconsciousness.

God would awaken us to realize our immortality and invulnerability. He would awaken us to love. So we can't just say God sucks or doesn't exist just because we suffer and die. We have to realize we are the ones who choose to suffer and die. As Jesus explains in ACIM, "no-one dies without their own consent". So let's stop blaming God for that one.

God does love us because death and suffering are not real. Thank God death and suffering are not real. Thank God He has created us eternal regardless of how things appear in the world. And thank God it is still possible to choose love instead of suffering. God wants us to realize that in REALITY we do not suffer or die and nothing has happened. If we're not perceiving and experiencing that reality, it's because we are mistaken and need healing. So we need to choose to receive that healing from God.

Choose again!

I've been starting to read "Life and teaching of the Masters of the far East". It's a collection of books, recounting the stories of travelers who went to the far East and encountered several very spiritually advanced people.

The only other book I've read that's similarly inspiring, or alluding to the potential we have, is Yogananda's autobiography of a Yogi.

In this book, the experiences and explanations that are given are quite eye-opening. If the stories are to be believed, and it's to be expected a lot of people have a hard time accepting it, here is some of what is claimed:

God has a power which He shares fully with us and which we are meant to use, and this power is capable of a) manifesting any object of any kind, b) healing absolutely all sickness, c) overcoming death, d) facilitating the transcendence of space and time for travel, e) being not only immune to but able to control all aspects of events and objects in the physical world, f) being able to materialize and dematerialize the body, g) the instantaneous manifestation of food and money supplied by God meaning you no longer have to rely on any limited resource or sources of objects from others, .... and various other things we'd consider 'miracles'.

Basically, what it's suggesting is, literally, that we are capable of absolutely ANYTHING if/when we join with God. It doesn't just mean that we give up everything and go to God, either, although some people eventually reach such a high position that they never want to leave there, although they can (like Jesus). It means that we can actually 'live forever' joined to an unlimited supply of provision. The people in the book, the masters, are hundreds of years of age, and yet appear to be 30-40 in age, youthful and in perfect health.

These kind of things give me more of a picture of 'whats possible' and clues as to what A Course in Miracles might be saying and meaning.

I realize now that when I read certain things in the Course, even if I THINK I am being absolutely open minded, I am still actually building upon meanings and learning that I had accumulated from before. Even if I think my learning is more open minded than others, it STILL is resting on what I already think I know and that skews the potential meaning. Also I do not know what I don't know... there are things, truths, that I simply am not aware of, and so when I think I am exactly 'getting' what the Course says, maybe I still am not... there could be a context or laws or information outside of my current awareness.

Then when I'm exposed to information like in this series of books, it makes me 'think twice' about what I thought I knew. It's eye opening.

As you look at someone's body, you think this is them. It's not. Look more closely. Notice how the body itself is a kind of externalized appearance of solidity, which blinds you. The person is "inside" the body behind the physical appearance. Look at how their spirit or mind is within the body, and the body covers it up. You cannot seemingly SEE the spirit.

Think also about how you yourself, in your own body, have a difference experience on the "inside" of your body than other people seem to "see" in the outside. And when you look in the mirror there is a disconnect between how the body looks and your sense of identity - particularly if you are not heavily identified with your body. Who you are on the inside can be quite different to how you appear physically.

So then recognize this is true of others as well. Who they are is not the body that you see at first glance. It's far too easy to be blinded by sight of form and to fixate on the physical body of a person thinking that IS the person. The physical body of another was MADE TO BLOCK SIGHT. To prevent you from seeing your brother BEHIND the body's form. Bodies are separation devices, designed to imprison souls in order to identify them as locked up inside images of differences and illusions.

If you can particularly regard someone's "inner self" or "the person" distinct from the body, it is quite interesting what happens to your perception. Not identifying THEIR body "as them", but rather looking past it to the person "behind" or "within" it, and see that inner person, you overlook the body. And suddenly it becomes quite funny how everything you thought was true about the person was actually a statement about the state of their BODY.

So if their body seems to be sick or has problems and you have regarded these things as "part of the person", you have been deceived. When you look past the illusory appearances of physicality, and try to look at the inner person, you may transcend the body and suddenly realize that all of the body's states and characteristics are NOT the person.

Therefore the body is NOT a representative of the person directly, but rather a once-removed picture of their inner condition. Seeing the inner condition allows you to recognize this, and then it becomes quite hilarious, especially if you had bought into their physical differences or disabilities previously. It also shows you the body then in its proper perspective, that it isn' the person but merely an outward picture, and therefore its state or condition DOES NOT MATTER ie has no truth to it, therefore you can easily NOT BELIEVE IN IT and work miracles to heal the person, disregarding the body's appearance as meaning anything at all.

The physical universe is a grand illusion. It was designed on purpose to make it seem like God does not exist. You might think it exists for some other reason or as a natural phenomenon or as creation or whatever, but it's even more extraordinary to realize it was made as a cover-up to block the light, and how it accomplishes this is very remarkable and very much with a purpose.

God has an unusual characteristic which you will not see expressed in any form. All of God can be everywhere at once. Omnipresence. But this is even more interesting than just that God is like - really big.

It's not just that, let's say, the top part of God is in the Arctic and the torso of God is in the atlantic ocean and the arms of God are in Europe and the USA etc. That would mean some parts of God are not the same as the other parts. It would mean God is not the same everywhere. The truth is that ALL of God, and I mean literally ALL of his properties and characteristics and identity, are FULLY PRESENT in every single speck of existence, equally.

It is difficult to imagine this simply because it defies absolutely all ego-thought-system logic. The only way to really know this is to EXPERIENCE it because it transcends the ego. But it IS possible for ALL of God to be in me, while ALL of God is also in you, and ALL of God is in your neighbors. That makes absolutely no sense to the ego which cannot fathom how there would be any God left to be shared, if ALL of Him is in me, or in you. But yes, ALL of God is in all parts of existence. This is WHY the dream/illusion is holographic - the all is in every part, which defies all physics and ego-based rationale.

Now, physical matter itself was made on purpose to make God's omnipresence seem very obscure. When you look at an object, you see differences. You see properties that one object has that another object does not. And so based on physical matter, you conclude that what is in one location, is not in another. No two objects can share the same space without annihilating each other (ie they cancel out and exit this illusory existence). Nothing can overlap. Everything is separated out.

In the atomic world you will also find that particles pretty much never actually touch each other. It's not contact between particles that creates the impression of collision or a solid surface, it's force fields that radiate around the particles that push each other away. In other words, separation. Separation between different particles, which cannot share in any real way, creates the illusion of solidity. Or to put it another way, REJECTION OF ONENESS/GOD makes matter seem solid.

So what you'll find, and you're very familiar with this, is that when you look at objects and forms you notice the ways that they do not really share anything. They are all separated out, they are all different, they all have different identities, properties, characteristics, behaviors, etc. What this tells you is this simple counter-God idea, that what is in one place is NOT in another place, and there is not ANYTHING that is the same everywhere, and there is not ANYTHING that shares anything, and what is in one thing CANNOT be fully, or even partially, within something else.

This idea is the complete opposite of God's nature. When you look at physical matter in this way, you see a picture of the opposite of omnipresence. It is a picture of NO-presence (presence must be shared - God must be extended!). You see separation. You seem forms, which are blinding to your awareness. You do not generally see God, UNLESS you can learn to truly overlook the entire illusion and expand your mind to the point where you can see God IN SPITE of the illusion of form trying to tell you otherwise. This comes from true forgiveness, and with awareness. Without awareness, the illusion of form is very much a solid-seeming wall which shuts out the awareness of God's presence.

It's not really so much the physical matter itself that has any POWER to shut out the awareness of God. It is an attempt to do so. It's sort of like a 'potential trap' which you may or may not fall for depending on whether you are awake or not. But it depends on whether or not in your mind, you believe that it is reality and truth. If you are not aware enough, you WILL perceive physical matter as very strongly withholding an awareness of God from your mind. You will believe objects are all separate. You will believe God doesn't exist because you can't experience his presence.

But let me tell you this, from experience. IF and when you can expand your awareness to a significant enough point, you will begin to overlook the ILLUSION of NO-PRESENCE, which is what physical matter is, and you will start to become aware of God. In this awareness of God you will start to notice that God is not just in one object and not others, but that there is something the SAME in all objects. Beyond the appearance of the object. And you'll start to notice something consistent and the same in all people. And you'll start to experience God's OMNIPRESENCE.

The illusion of matter is there, it's being offered, but you do not HAVE to believe in it, and you CAN awake your awareness so that you can actually OVERLOOK it and see clearly, to the point where you can SEE GOD. You are then seeing God beyond the matter and in spite of the matter. This does NOT mean that the matter is God. The matter is an illusion, designed to try to STOP you from seeing God.

You see God in everything you see because God is also in your mind and therefore you are experiencing Oneness and therefore your mind will overlook form. This can make form and objects and bodies and people SEEM like they are very lovable, acceptable, unconditionally worthy, etc. Even inanimate objects will take on a considerably non-judged experience as though they are absolutely lovable.

You will also experience that because ALL of love is in everything, you do not need to GO ANYWHERE to get to where the love is. It is all where you are, whether you move or not. It's in what you look at, whether you change what you look at or not. But ultimately, it is not the objects and forms and matter and physicality that are God, it's that God is BEYOND these things and they are an illusion. The world can appear to be very lovable at this point because you are looking WITH love, AT love, IN SPITE OF the veil of illusion of the physical world - your OVERLOOKING of the physical is what is allowing you to experience love, while there are traces of this illusion left in your awareness.

Overlooking means overlooking the illusion that physical matter is the truth or that objects really are separations or that there is nothing the same or shared anywhere, which MUST mean looking PAST the form of matter itself, its physical existence, in order to experience or see love as God. This is why the matter ITSELF is not God.

Eventually sight of this "forgiven world", which Jesus describes as being very beautiful-seeming - the 'real world', will give way to a brilliant light of Oneness which completely TRANSCENDS PHYSICAL MATTER. Because if you're really going all the way far to an awareness of God's omnipresence, there are going to be no holds barred - TOTAL IMMERSION IN ONENESS, which is beyond all forms and materials. The true reality of God is not physical, and is not this universe. (When I asked Holy Spirit about this recently, He said God makes the physical universe POSSIBLE (ie via freedom), but it is YOU that makes it appear to exist by mis-creating illusions).

As such, this world, this physical universe, which is entirely composed of the IDEA of separation, based on the notion of 'SPACE-TIME', which is really the suggestion that God does not exist at all times (meaning He doesn't exist ever), and is the suggestion that God does not exist anywhere (meaning He does not exist at all)..... this world is entirely an ILLUSION. Right down to the atoms, right down to the fabric of spacetime itself, right down past the quantum level, beyond the background MIND that even holds it in suspension. This world is nothing but a make-believe attempt to block your awareness from God.

What's going to happen when you become fully aware of God and everyone becomes fully aware of God? What's going to happen when nobody believes in physical matter any more? What's going to happen when nobody is DECEIVED by physical matter any more? We're going to see past physicality entirely, see God entirely, experience God entirely, and GO HOME! And the physical universe.... bleh.... it simply will be recognized as having never existed. "This world holds NOTHING that I want" - ACIM. .. because I want God.

And with that ... poof... it's gone. And all that will be left is the true existence of Heaven - God's real creation, which is not physically oriented at all. Why would Heaven obscure God's omnipresence with ideas of separation and form and materials that differ and keep apart?

Pure Oneness. Peace at last. Home.

When we are introduced to this world, it is through false perception. That means we SEEM to "see it with" the body's eyes, and we believe the body's way of seeing. And the body shows us the world of form, which is cruel and dark and a place of death.

We do not even realize our mind is in any way making, or interpreting, how the world is. We observe. We see its suffering and carnage. And we decide the world is an inherently bad place.

Jesus then tells us:

"The world is false perception".

"The world IS perception."

"There is no world apart from what you wish"

"Projection makes perception."

What this suggests is, when your mind is in a dark attitude, it projects a world which it simultaneously perceives as a dark place. And when the mind is in a light attitude, it projects a world which is simultaneously perceived as a light place.

What it also suggests is, there IS no world, beyond your mind's dreaming and projecting of one. Ie the world is in your mind. And Jesus agrees to that.

"You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts."

"Projection makes perception; the world you see is what you GAVE it, nothing more than that. But, though it is no more than that, it is not less. Therefore, to you, it is important. It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition. As a man thinketh, so does he perceive."

What this tells us is there is not really an objective world. The world doesn't exist without someone dreaming of it, in their mind.

It may appear, conceptually, that there is a neutral, meaningless world, like a mirror, waiting for you to project whatever kind of images you want onto. And it might suggest this neutral world is a receiver of either your dark projections or your light projections. And that you see this darkness or light "in" "it" accordingly.

But He is also telling us that at no time does the body or world exist. That it is an hallucination.

"Perception is a result, not a cause."

"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?"

"Hallucinations serve to meet the goal of madness. They are the means by which the outside world, projected from within, adjusts to sin, and seems to witness to its reality. ***It still is true that nothing is without.*** Yet, upon nothing, are ALL projections made. For it is the PROJECTION which gives the "nothing" all the meaning that it holds. ***What has no meaning, cannot BE perceived.*** And meaning always looks within, to find itself. And THEN looks out. ***All meaning that you give the world outside, must thus reflect the sight you saw within.*** Or better, if you saw at all, or merely judged against."

You look within your mind first, and then you project. And what you see, is only what you have projected, because projection MAKES what you perceive, and perceiving is the RESULT of what you projected.

Therefore you see only "a world" "out there" because you are projecting it inside your mind. It is not really out there at all. It is nothing. There is nothing to project onto. Only what you project AS.

This tells you essentially that the world you see in false perception, when your mind is dark, when you look within and see darkness, and then project it outward for perceiving, is seen ONLY in the dark of mind.

And this tells you that, essentially, there is ANOTHER WORLD, another "version" of a world, unlike what you saw in false perception, which is seen in light. It is seen only by looking within, seeing the light of Christ, and then projecting outward as Christ Vision. That "real world" has no resemblance to the world of false perception.

In fact, because there is no objective world, and you maintain it entirely in your mind, and because your mental attitude "tunes you out" of one world and "into" another, the Holy Spirit's happy dream, seeing one makes you unable to see the other.

"This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS. For each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER."

"Both are not true, yet either one will seem as real to you, as the amount to which you hold it dear. And yet their power is NOT the same, because their real attraction to you IS unequal. You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began."

It's kind of like saying, when you are in a bad mood, you project a hellish version of a planet Earth. When you are in a good mood, you project the real world, which contains no forms, no suffering, no sickness, no death. They are like tuning into different TV stations. Investment in the spiritual eye weakens investment in the physical sight.

"Everything looked upon with vision is healed and holy. Nothing perceived without it means anything. And where there is no meaning, there is chaos."

The world, which we call Earth, seems to exist only so long as we dream of it. A forgiven world, is how Earth appears to be when seen through forgiving eyes. It is not the real world, because in the real world there are no forms. But it may appear close.

Earth is a veil, hanging in front of the real world, and must be seen through to the light. This is what Christ Vision does, overlooking the world. And eventually this veil lifts entirely to reveal the real world/face of Christ in its fullness. And in this Vision, the world - Earth, is completely forgotten, and disappears from sight entirely.

"This world of idols is a veil across the face of Christ, because its purpose is to separate your brother from yourself."

"Forgiveness lets the veil be lifted up that hides the face of Christ from those who look with unforgiving eyes upon the world."

"the veil of sin that hangs between you and the face of Christ."

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible."

The Earth, hell, the forgiven world, the real world even, are all dreams in your mind. The real world offers you an entirely different outlook, vision, and something to look at, beyond the world of bodies and sin.

"This is the shift that true perception brings: What was projected out is seen within, and there forgiveness lets it disappear. "

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all."

"No-one in this distracted world but has not seen some glimpses of the other world about him. But while he still lays value on his own, he will DENY the vision of the other world, maintaining that he loves WHAT HE LOVES NOT, and following not the road that love points out."

"Vision is the means by which the Holy Spirit translates your nightmares into happy dreams; your wild hallucinations, that show you all fearful outcomes of imagined sin, into the calm and reassuring sights with which He would replace them. These gentle sights and sounds are looked on happily, and heard with joy. "

"When you have looked on what seemed terrifying, and seen it change to sights of loveliness and peace; when you have looked on scenes of violence and death, and watched them change to quiet views of gardens under open skies, with clear life-giving water running happily beside them in dancing brooks that never waste away; who need persuade you to accept the gift of vision?"

"Damnation is your judgment on YOURSELF. And this you WILL project upon the world. See it as damned, and all you see is what you did to hurt the Son of God. If you behold disaster and catastrophe, you tried to crucify him. If you see holiness and hope, you joined the Will of God to set him free. There is no choice that lies between these two decisions. And you will see the witness to the choice you made, and learn from this to RECOGNIZE the one you made. The world you see but shows you how much joy YOU have allowed yourself to see in you, and to accept as YOURS. And, if this IS its meaning, then the power to GIVE it joy MUST lie WITHIN you."

"You HAVE been wrong about the world, because you have misjudged YOURSELF. From such a twisted reference point, what COULD you see? All vision starts WITH THE PERCEIVER, who judges what is true and what is false. And what he judges false, HE DOES NOT SEE. You who would JUDGE reality CANNOT see it, for whenever judgment enters, reality has slipped away. 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. He lives within you in the quiet present, and waits for you to leave the past behind, and enter into the world He holds out to you in love."

I've seen recently a new perspective on the healing of self and others.

I noticed that as I was helping a person to realise that they had been hurting themselves, that they were making themselves guilty, and that they deserved love, I also felt a greater love within myself. I was becoming healed as I conveyed to the other person how much they deserved to be healed.

I hadn't experienced this much before, probably because I hadn't focused on how someone else needed help with their own self-attack. The more it became clear to me that they were hurting themselves, and that they deserved better, I felt better myself.

This kind of turned a key in my mind and is now causing me to see people differently. I recognise now that we are all created equal and perfect in Christ, we have temporarily fallen into self destruction, and now we are attempting to return. This means that it can appear someone is evil, sinful, guilty, wrong etc, but this is only a kind of self-denial, a sickness they have in which they are attacking themselves. And it has nothing to do with anyone else, or the world.

I think that to see this clearly you have to not be confused about who is attacking who. When we're in ego and filled with our own guilt, an unhealed healer, we keep getting lost in the projections of others, taking things personally, and don't perceive that they're doing something to themselves. It takes the removal of enough self destruction within oneself, to be able to then recognise that someone else deserves what you've given to yourself. As the course says, you can only give the miracles you have received.

Once we take responsibility for what we're doing to ourselves, as in the secret of salvation, and cease to project guilt, and cease to make ourselves guilty in the first place, it becomes a lot clearer that other people's attacks are not against you but against themselves. Everyone's trying to destroy themselves, and only attack others in an attempt to shift the guilt and pain away from themselves. People can't stand the agony of their self inflicted wounds, so they try to give them to others as a coping strategy.

When you can see that someone's main problem isn't other people, being a victim, or anything outside of them - just as it isn't for you, it becomes more obvious that their whole problem is their own self-attitude. They are crucifying and condemning themselves, making themselves out to be sinful and guilty, believing they deserve punishment, fearing that punishment, and trying to kill themselves off.

The key though is the fact that they don't deserve this guilt anymore than you do. The fact that they are christ, temporarily at war with themselves, and are actually in need of healing. To recognise that their true nature is the healed son of God, an immortal being, correctly frames their suffering or projections as self inflicted lies. They've done this to themselves, they don't love themselves, they want to die.

As a healer, who might be perhaps more healed than the patient, you are then in a position to help them. This has to entail not regarding the surface appearance of their projected guilt as true, looking past it to finding an innocent person inside, a person who deserves love, a person who is their own worst enemy. If you are more healed, you are able to look past the appearance and illusion of their ego and see them as in need of healing. The course calls it "calling out for love". Certainly they are in need of love because they don't love themselves.

Helping someone to recognise that they are doing this to themselves, that they are making themselves guilty, that they are accusing themselves of things they have not done, and assisting them to learn to recognise their innocence and worth, is an act of healing. It moves your mind closer to the lovable being that is inside of them, a lovable being who temporarily denies its value. And as you help point them toward their lovability, you can't help but find that you are pointing yourself toward your own. As such the healing of your brother becomes the healing of yourself, and both of you are healed at the same time.

I think the main difference or shift for me has been to not see people as their surface appearance, their ego, their body, their sickness, and instead to regard them as immortal christ beings who are not loving themselves enough. Their mind is split because they are denying the truth about themselves. They project because they've put themselves into pain. They need to be resurrected and restored to their natural condition of wholeness.

A person's ego condition is nothing more than self attack, and all attack is self attack. The only remedy needed is to stop them from attacking themselves. Helping them to love themselves helps you to love yourself. Shining a light of love into their minds heals your own.

This enlightens me to realise also that people who might on the surface appear to have ego, be evil, sinful, criminal, hateful, murderous etc, are just as much victims of themselves and in need of love. It doesn't even matter how far gone someone is, how twisted and aggressive, how abusive and dark, everyone is deserving of God's love and is in need of healing. Everyone has the potential to transform into a fully integrated christ being, fully loving and fully loved, fully alive and never again to die.

"A miracle is a reversal of the physical order because it brings more love to the giver AND the receiver."

"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 merely the translation of denial into truth. 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. The task of the miracle-worker thus becomes to DENY THE DENIAL OF TRUTH. The sick must heal THEMSELVES, for the truth is IN them. But, having OBSCURED it, the light in ANOTHER mind must shine into theirs, because that light IS theirs."

"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."

What does it mean that you are not the body? It's not what you think.

What you are, is whole, within. Like you are this little orb of light which contains the whole of God.

As a whole self, you increase by extending and creating.

When the separation idea was introduced, it was suggested that there was something separate from you or outside of you, or indeed that you were separate and outside of yourself.

This was the idea of sin, and it ultimately led to the invention of the body through OUTWARD PROJECTION FROM THE MIND. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards."

The body then is sort of this "shell", really an IDEA, which you have surrounded yourself with as a result of this belief that a) you are outside of yourself and b) there is something separate from your inner self.

It has thus formed a picture which seems to surround and enclose you. This is why when there is a body showing up it seems like you are "inside" it.

But it also then simultaneously seems as if you "are" the body and the stuff inside you is invisible and not yourself. This leads you to build a "bodily identity", to be identified with the body. In more extreme cases the outer bodily self seems to be the ONLY self, and the inner self is very hidden. We need to reverse that.

So the part of your mind that you split off and think of as separate from your inner self, forms a fake identity composed of a body image, which you now think is yourself.

So what happens when you stop having a split mind?

What is the purpose of saying "I am not a body I am free"?

The purpose is not to deny the body. It is not to identify yourself as being that which is inside the body while the outer bodily image remains either. It is not to disassociate from the body. It is not to escape the body. And it is not to think of yourself as "only mind and not a body."

The state you are meant to be returning to, is a state in which there is no separation in you, there is no sense of something having been split off as outside of you, and therefore of being whole "within" yourself. When you do that, what is going to happen to the body which was "outside you"? How is it going to even show up if there is no part of you that identifies AS IT because there is no part of you which exists outside of your inner self?

IT IS GOING TO DISAPPEAR.

It was only showing up there because your inner self projected it (the idea of sin projected outward) and it is only showing up because part of you believed that you were outside of yourself.

Your sense of identity formed a "bodily identity" or an identification not just with a body but AS a body. You can also think of it as an "external self". And however the mind is relating to its own identity, that is how it shows up. If the mind is thinking that it has separation in it, ie walls, it will materialize a body! And yet if the mind does not believe it has any walls within itself, the body will disappear because the mind is seeing itself as a WHOLENESS, not a split-off self.

This is also correlates to the creation of sickness. When the mind is more strongly believing that it is separated from itself, split in two and part of itself is outside the inner self, this belief in separation attacks yourself and makes you SICK. And that sickness will now manifest IN, or more accurately, is projected outward AS, a sick-looking body, which is really just a mental image of yourself as sick. The less you believe in separation, therefore, the less your mind is split and the less you believe you ARE an external self, the less your body image will show up as sick, and thus sickness will appear to disappear as well, leaving a "holy" and "immortal" body, just prior to its complete disappearance.

When that externalized identity is returned to your true "inner" identity, the "outer" illusory separate self is not there anymore. It's been integrated into the whole of what you are within. So there is no basis for the body. It has no grounds, no function, no purpose, no reason to be there. SO IT DISAPPEARS. The mind is not seeing itself AS one, it does not believe it has a second identity, so it STOPS PROJECTING THE BODY.

The presence of a body is simply a symptom or side-effect of you believing that you are not pure spirit and therefore you have a separate second identity. Identification "with" the body is nothing more than the strength of your belief that you MUST BE a body, because you must be outside of yourself , having gone "out of your mind."

It's not that the body exists on its own and you happen to "come into it" or incarnate into it or that it was there before you arrived or that it will remain after you leave. If you seem to go through that process of discarding bodies, you will reincarnate, because the discarding process (death) is really an attempt to SEVER yourself from yourself. What that means is, you have tried so hard to DISCONNECT your inner self from the part of you which became "outer", the part which identified with being "a body", and so CUT OFF part of yourself and destroyed it. All death occurs to the "projected self", not the inner self. And all death is just a testimony to how much SEPARATION and therefore false identification there was within you. And that mental state REMAINS, and will CAUSE ANOTHER BODY to be desired and projected.

That's what causes all death. Death is the self-attack of the inner self upon the outer self. Or to put it another way, what we think of as "mind" seems to be the inner self only, and we say that this mind-self attacks the body self, but the body self is actually another PART of your mind which is temporarily identified with being an external illusion. So one part of mind is attacking another part of mind. Mind is not just the part of you that is INNER, and it is not just the part of you which is INSIDE the body.

The body IS WITHIN THE MIND and it is an image being thought of, projected, imagined WITHIN the mind as a whole. One part of mind attacks the other and tries to destroy it, and that results in the illusory sickness and death of that other part of mind, but does not heal the desire to attack, and so the mind "makes" another body (reincarnation) and proceeds to attack it again. This will keep on happening until both parts of mind are rejoined as one so that there is no separation, then there will be no more bodies materializing as ideas of sin.

So then having destroyed part of yourself and yet still believing your identity WAS the outer self, your inner self is still projecting and split and MUST manifest another body. And this forms the basis for reincarnation - that you still believe you are a body and must have a body and so this magnetizes you to a body or causes one to materialize. YOU put your body into your mother's womb and YOU grow it and YOU cause it to show up the way it shows up. Sperm and egg coming together does NOT CAUSE bodies to appear. It is an illusion. Mind causes bodies to appear and arranges FAKE JOINING on an ego level (which must be an illusion of joining) to pretend that you are inherited from the dream.

So death is not a way to leave the dream, or to heal separation. It cannot accomplish this because it means that you simply attacked part of yourself with hatred and tried to destroy it and had identified strongly with "being a body" at least in part. The only way out of the dream is NOT THROUGH DEATH. "The dream is not left by death but by truth."

The dream is only left by truth by re-integrating the part of you which you split off and associated with a body, and returning its identity to be identified with the INNER self which remains hidden behind the body or seemingly trapped inside the body invisibly. You do not withdraw FROM the body, you withdraw the body itself. You withdraw belief in BEING a body. You must not try to "separate yourself from the body"!

If you do that all you're doing is adding denial on top of denial. Denial of the body is an unworthy form of denial - that's what this means. If you believe the body exists ON ITS OWN and HAS ITS OWN WILL and you then try to get away from it to "be only mind", you are SEPARATING YOURSELF MORE. You are trying to separate yourself off from the separate self which you already split off from yourself, adding another whole layer of denial and separation. This will make you more sick. The body in a sense should be embraced but only up to the point where you recognize that you are projecting it and therefore can un-project it through its PROPER UNDOING, by reversing your belief in separation. Without a belief in separation, there is no sin, and therefore sin cannot be made flesh and projected outward. No more body.

You withdraw the PROJECTION of the body through re-owning yourself and identifying with Spirit. This does NOT mean that the body exist at the same time as the spirit. It does NOT mean that the body WILL REMAIN once you have shifted identity to being ONLY spirit. It means the body MUST DISAPPEAR. It is only showing up because it is what you believe about your identity and what you think you are. When your mind is no longer believing that you are a body AT ALL and is completely whole and healed and no longer split or divided or separated off, there is no NEED for a body, no BELIEF in a body, no PROJECTION of a body, and your mind will STOP MAKING ONE.

That is when you are free. Not free of a body that carries on existing. Not free through deathin which the body CONTINUES. Not free because you laid the body down to die and then headed on over to God's party. But simply free of MAKING bodies at all. If you want to be free of reincarnation, and free of DEATH, you MUST STOP BELIEVING YOU ARE SEPARATE FROM YOURSELF, which means you must stop believing you are, or need to be, a body. And thus you will stop making bodies and your body will disappear entirely.

Doing this alleviates all signs of sickness and makes the body temporarily invulnerable and useful only as a communication device. Just prior to the body disappearing completely, it becomes a sign of immortality. Jesus writes about this clearly here:

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

And here...

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. 2 Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. 3 Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. 4 Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. 5 Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. 6 When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. 7 The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions that are responsible for the body's condition."

Note that when he says "laid by" here he is not talking about making it die and laying it on the ground and letting it rot while you whiz off to heaven. He means literally, you stop making it, as evidenced by his statements about how he did exactly that.

Jesus already accomplished and demonstrated this through the PROPER UNDOING OF THE BODY through truth and the DISSOLVING of it through spirit identification, not "escape" from it through death or separation or denial or thinking that it still exist OR making it still exist. We are responsible for making ourselves show up as bodies, WE made the body with our mind and can un-make it! We made all sickness, all death, and the body itself. " "You made sickness and death and can therefore abolish both."

Here is what Jesus has to say about this whole process, which ultimately is the completion of the atonement and the RESURRECTION.... and guess what... not just the disappearing of the body, but the disappearing of THE WORLD (this universe), which is only showing up based on the exact same principle of mind believing in separation, and MUST DISAPPEAR when mind has returned to spirit identification.

""My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it. The last one had gone. It was laid in the tomb, but there was nothing left to bury. It did not disintegrate because the unreal cannot die. It merely became what it always was. And that is what "rolling the stone away" means. The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body’s nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear.

"I did assume a human form with human attributes afterwards, to speak to those who were to prove the body’s worthlessness to the world. This has been much misunderstood. I came to tell them that death is illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand. But now I talk to you and give you the same message. The death of an illusion means nothing. It disappears when you awaken and decide to dream no more. And you still do have the power to make this decision as I did.

"God holds out His hand to His Son to help him rise and return to Him. I can help because the world is illusion, and I have overcome the world. Look past the tomb, the body, the illusion. Have faith in nothing but the spirit and the guidance God gives you. He could not have created the body because it is a limit. He must have created the spirit because it is immortal. Can those who are created like Him be limited? The body is the symbol of the world. Leave it behind. It cannot enter Heaven. But I can take you there any time that you choose. Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does so. And then, and then — I cannot speak of that.

"A body can not stay without illusion and the last one to be overcome is death. This is the message of the crucifixion; There is no order of difficulties in miracles. This is the message of the resurrection: Illusions are illusions. Truth is true. Illusions vanish. Only truth remains.

"These lessons needed to be taught but once, for when the stone of death is rolled away, what can be seen but an empty tomb? And that is what you see who follow me into the sunlight and away from death, past all illusions, on to Heaven’s gate, where God will come Himself to take you home"

"Christ vision" ... "beholds a light beyond the body" ... "looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees."

Christ Vision is an all inclusive way to see. It's as if to say, you are able to see the entire picture without anything being hidden. You are able to look and recognize what is there, seeing everything as it is, without adding anything or denying anything. Nothing is blocked from view. It is perfect, accurate perception, showing you everything exactly as it is. Everything is included, and nothing is left out.

Let's say that the scene contains two rooms, connected by a door. The rooms have no windows and the door is locked. Inside each room there is a person. Neither person knows what is outside the room, because having been isolated they are unaware of the whole picture.

Now let's imagine that the scene depicts one person trying to open the door, and the person in the other room hears noises and starts freaking out. And now they wrestle with the doorhandle, from either side, in a state of fear and panic, imagining an evil enemy is trying to enter the room.

This would seem to be a valid experience for them given that their vision is blocked, they cannot see the whole picture, and they have been kept in the dark. But what if the ceiling of the rooms was suddenly lifted away, revealing the sky. And what if the floor raised up to position the two people above the walls, so that they can see each other. And what if then they look down and see they were both in the same boat, neither of them is an enemy, both are just afraid of each other, and there is no reason to be afraid any more? And then after a moment's shock, they laugh.

It was the exclusion of information from their awareness that resulted in fear and darkness. It was blocks to awareness which prevented them from recognizing that the person in the other room was their beloved brother. It was the inability to see, which resulted in hallucinations of panic and terror as if under attack by an unknown invader.

This is what happens with the body's eyes. This is what happens with body vision. Because the body's sight STOPS at the surface of objects. It shows you what seems to be there, but NOT what is also beyond it. The body's eyes cannot see past or through anything, and so cannot see the whole scene. This produces a narrower context in which everything is taken out of context. And on the basis of the illusions produced by a lack of information, they hallucinate insane conclusions.

Body sight excludes, as part of specialness and the isolation of identifying with the body. It confines, limits, narrows, restricts, blocks, denies, rejects, and does not see, aspects of the scene which NEED to be seen in order to realize things are not what they seem. That appearances are deceptive. That when you don't have the big picture in mind, illusions form, which seem to suggest things which are not true. The illusions seem true and real because the larger truth is unseen and you don't have all the facts.

So in this world, we start out in false perception (ego body perception) by regarding the world ITSELF, which is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son, as though its appearance is true and real. We fall for temptation. We believe in it, and so we see it this way. We believe physical objects really are there. We look upon bodies. We see sins occurring. We witness attack and are threatened.

This kind of perception is only happening because something has been excluded. Some information is blocked and missing. The whole scene is NOT being seen. There is something present which seems invisible, because it is being blocked out of awareness. There is something HERE, which the body is blind to. It cannot see the real world, and it cannot see Christ.

There is a "fuller" way to see, which is Christ Vision. It is aware of the whole picture. It does not arrive at false conclusions and it does not experience hallucinated beliefs that sin is happening. It sees the pictures of the forms, seeming to do what they do, but it is not deceived by them. It sees people seeming to have sick and dead bodies but it does not give them the meaning of "actually sick" or "real death". It doesn't recoil in horror at what is depicted. It has no reactions. It is not upset. The scene is not disturbing its peace.

You could say, the world you made, the physical world, which is a picture of crucifixion, is a lovely beautiful picture of crucifixion. You could say, it is like a painting, articulated beautifully be a professional artist. The brush strokes depicting the dead bodies are masterfully presented. The arrangement of the sick bodies is eloquent and delightful. Because really, seen in the proper light, this IS nothing but a PICTURE. It isn't an ACTUAL place where actual real bodies are actually suffering. It's all just an image. A flat image of a 3d world.

Christ Vision looks upon this world you made without judging it. Without being horrified by it. Without reacting to it. It does not go INTO the image, trying to "experience" what seems to be happening there. It does not IDENTIFY WITH the bodies that are depicted, or lose sight of identity as Christ. It just looks and judges not, and recognizes this FALSE picture, in which nothing is real or true, and is able to be unmoved by it. To even laugh it away.

It sees not only the writhing bodies and the suffering, it sees also the props and the costumes and the performance. Rather than buying that the "show", the pantomime, is actually a real story, it instead sees the actors, the robes, the lights, the audience, the fabricated scenery propped up by wooden beams, recognizing that this is nothing but a staged and entirely fabricated scenario. When the main character seems to die at the end, Christ Vision recognizes the death is fake. The reality of the actor is not dying. Nothing real is occurring.

It is not deceived by what is seeming to occur, because it does not see it in a way that makes it all seem like a giant cess pool of horrible vents. It does not go down into the battlefield, where walls and barriers seem to block your sight, where bodies are strewn and there are screams of suffering. It doesn't believe anything can be attacked or harmed, so it does not EXPERIENCE these things happening, even if the picture seems to show it.

On the battlefield is where the body's eyes are blinded by perceptions of forms, doing their business. There it appears, as a result of illusions, produced by a lack of perspective, that something is true which isn't really true. Where context has been lost, sight of the truth is missing, deception is happening, temptation has occurred, and things as being believed which are a mistake.

The body is noter showing you the whole picture. It claims to see the whole world, but it does not. It does not see the props back-stage. It does not see the real cause of what is happening. It does not see the mind writing the scripts. It does not see the actors electing to play roles to pretend they are suffering, victimizing or victims. It cannot see past the illusion of the end result of all the arranging of space and time as a deliberate attempt to distract, deceive and delude. It takes the final production-ready, carefully filmed movie verbatim at face value, totally deceived and totally delusional, hanging off every act as it it's happening to real people.

This is the same thing that happens when you watch a tv show or movie. If you are sane, you should recognize that there are no people on the screen, nothing is happening. Its just pixels, or projected light. There aren't any people inside the television set.

But as you watch with the body's eyes, and as you begin to "get into" or "get lost in" the show, which is a deliberately deceptive series of illusions, you lose sight of reality. Your mind literally halucinates and believes that real things are happening to real people. That you are LOOKING AT a person. You start having emotional reactions. You become angry at what's happening, then upset, then relieved. Because you are insane, lost inside a fictional story, believing it's happening to something real. Deceived by the television temptation.

A moment may come where you snap out of it and remember, you are sitting in a room just looking at the tv. Or that moment where you pull out of the movie and start looking at the audience and the surroundings. You remember where you are and what is actually happening. It's just a film. It was made to deceive. You bought into it for a while and went on a journey of suffering with it, where the whole room seemed not to exist. And while you forgot where you were, it seemed real and exciting or upsetting.

The return to sanity, the regaining of the ability to SEE what is really there, the recognition of what it IS and what it is NOT, without your delusions, without your believing that it is real, without taking it seriously, restores you to Christ Vision. This vision is forgiving. It overlooks the image. It does not BELIEVE what the image TRIES to depict. It does not fall for the temptation. It is not deceived. It recognizes the picture of the crucifixion of God's son, which is the world you made, Earth, is false. And really, it is nothing.

Having then withdrawn your false imagined meanings from it, it is now neutral. Just a picture. It doesn't mean anything. It is a meaningless world that God did not create. It is not hated. It is not attacked. It is not offensive. It is known not to be showing anything real. It is very strange, but it is not anything to be upset by. It depicts an opposite to heaven. It is an image of hell, but it is not an image of real hell. And in fact, it's a very lovely image of hell.

Seen correctly, this world of hell does not have qualities of drama. It does not have upset. It does not have guilt. The way you EXPERIENCE it is different. The way you perceive it is different. You don't have a body encounter-suit experience of it, like it's some kind of 3d virtual world, full of threats and dangers. The perception of threat is only experienced in the body's eyes as a result of believing that illusions (a lack of information) are showing you the WHOLE information.

Imagine someone in a dark maze of corridors. There is little light to see. Strange sounds come from nowhere. There are movements in the shadows. The person is screaming in fright and running for their life. They imagine there to be dark monsters lurking. Their life seems in danger. They are insane, because they have lost all sense of context, they cannot see, and they have no way to know what's really happening. They think things are what they are not, and hallucinate what they think is there.

But then suddenly the lights switch on. The whole place is illuminated. The darkness is gone. And they suddenly realize where they are. They can now recognize they were in a restaurant, it's a lovely place, with good food and pleasant decor. And the sounds in the shadows was merely the coffee dispenser. Now that they can SEE everything that is present, they laugh hilariously at having believed what seemed to be a nightmare. Now with all the information at hand, there is no call for terror or threat.

All is well. It's just a room.

The world we made, the physical universe, comprising matter and bodies and walls and blocks of sin, was made WITH the Holy Spirit as merely a harmless picture. A simple dream, an illusory world, where nothing real happens. And His influence made it not simply as a picture of hell but as a beautiful, healed, forgiven, sparkling, fresh, lovely picture, which INCLUDES both an IMAGE of THE LIGHT (symbolic reflection), and the dark. Because it is a picture of opposites. Your contribution in its making was ONLY the dark and narrow.

As if to say, the Holy Spirit supplied ALL of the paint colors, but you chose only to use the darkest ones. And you chose to only look at the darkest ones. And you wanted the darkest ones to be worshipped and emphasized, to blot out the rest. You didn't want to see the whole picture, because in the whole picture it's obvious that the dark parts are no different to the light parts. It's all just as illusion and there's nothing special about the dark colors. But you gave them extra meaning, you blew them out of proportion, and you excluded sight of the rest of the picture. And you made the body to fixate only on the darkness and not see the rest, SO THAT it would seem the world is dark.

The twisted VERSION OF, or false perception of, or exclusive ideas about, or excluding way of looking at the world, the world you made, renders it to you as hell. It causes you to misperceive it, to hallucinate and to experience it like a nightmarish hell. But this perception, these visions, this appearance, which takes on the form of error, which is physical matter being believed as real, is the result of NOT seeing everything that is present. And so it is not really seeing at all. Without seeing the light of Christ, something crucial is missing. Facts are obscure.

To move towards true perception ie christ vision, blocks to awareness have to be removed, false beliefs have to be undone, the belief in real sin has to be removed, and illusions have to be seen through. The world has to be NOT believed for how it appears in the dark, and reinterpreted and seen in the light. The temptation for vision to stop at physical matter has to be transcended. Sight has to go BEYOND the world to the light. To the big picture. Beyond bodies. Beyond surface appearances. Beyond form. Otherwise you cannot REALLY see what is here, and everything will appear to be hell.

Only by overlooking the illusory picture, can you SEE the illusory picture correctly. If vision STOPS AT the picture, it is blocked, and it will not see correctly, and will see hell. Only when vision can MOVE PAST the illusions of limitation, to move THROUGH the body, PAST the body, PAST matter, only then can it properly be IN THE LIGHT, and therefore see the whole picture as it really is. By looking beyond the physical world ("the world of bodies is the world of sin"), to INCLUDE the parts of the picture that were NOT seen in false perception, and without being deceived BY the picture, Christ Vision can recognize the picture of crucifixion as a beautiful artistic image of a fantasy world, and nothing more.

If in the picture there was a scene of utter cruelty, which was your intention in its making, it is now clear that because the cruelty is NOT REAL, it is not seen AS cruel. Love looks upon it and does not buy the temptation. It IS still a picture that contains portions which look like cruelty, with bodies suffering, but there is ALSO MORE besides this, and the MORE reveals that the cruelty is not "real cruelty". Because there isn't simply "one hellish world" here, there are two VIEWPOINTS looking at a single illusory IMAGE, and each SHOWS something different.

True perception shows the whole picture, while false perception only wants to see certain out-of-context aspects, which, taken out of context, appear to be horrors. True perception reveals that even the horrors have a touch of holiness to them, a slight sparkle, a tiny fleck of light which could not be entirely eradicated. And once this light becomes brighter, strange illusions of death begin to look like nothing more than "happy sights".

Blades of grass seem to take on a sheen as though reflecting heaven's perfection. Light begins to sparkle around the edges of objects. Hell starts to be transformed into a reflection of heaven as sights of murder are transformed into visions of harmlessness, due to the REVEALING of information previously unseen. Death is now not death, it is merely images surrounded with sparkles, and only loveliness is seen there.

To Christ Vision, a warzone does not appear in the way it would appear to a terrified soldier. The soldier is having a nightmare. Christ Vision does not see the causality in the bodies. It sees no real death. It recognizes there is simply a bunch of images of a fictional scene. And because it is free from all the baggage of ego interpretation, it isn't seeing the "real bodies" "really suffering". It sees just a transparent veil of illusions, seeming to hang in front of the face of christ. Barely there and easily dispelled. Just a light picture of death, sparkling and shining, free from sin and guilt and wholly unreal.

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant."

Christ vision is Christ, looking at Christ, overlooking that which seems to be IN BETWEEN Christ and itself. The veil of matter, the picture of hell, tries to come between Christ and itself. The veil is the gap of separation. If vision stops at the picture it does not see past it, and instead buys into the temptation that hellish things are happening. This makes the picture real. But as it looks beyond the picture, to the light of Itself, Christ Vision has forgiven the picture and does not fall for its temptations, illusions, or suggestions of what is real.

Christ Vision has to look PAST the veil, in order NOT to be deceived. If it buys into anything within the veil, and becomes distracted by it, it loses sight of the light beyond, which loses perspective, and the veil turns into hell, because light is obscure and a picture of harmlessness seems to take on nightmarish qualities. "To forgive is to OVERLOOK". It is by NOT SEEING or not going INTO or being lost in the veil of physical matter, that it is forgiven. Sight MUST see through it and past it, otherwise it is blocked BY it. Christ Vision is like x-ray vision, seeing THROUGH the forms of error (objects), seeing sense, with reason.

In this light, fixated on the light of Christ, with a vision which moves entirely past the world, this bigger context frames the picture correctly. Essentially, and ultimately, the picture is forgiven by NOT seeing it. By looking beyond it to something else. And only by looking beyond it is the mind perfectly clear about what is true and what is false. As soon as you attempt to look AT the world, which means to NOT SEE what lies beyond, temptation has set in, vision is blocked, context is lost, sanity is interrupted, sight has ended, and you will return to seeing the world of sin. And then you will see sinful bodies, which are the only kind of bodies there are.

"To see a sinless body is impossible."

"Forgiveness does not look upon bodies."

"A world forgiven cannot last."

As you see "the real world", which is the world you made without any judgement on it, you overlook it. Your dream world is seen WITH holiness and love. Holiness looks upon it and sees no sin there. Its differences and forms and appearances have so dissolved into nothing that there are no buildings, streets or bodies walking around. The WHOLE PICTURE is recognized as containing NOTHING of the illusions of hell that you made, and all its forms have vanished. The Holy Spirit has shown you that the forgiven world is UNDONE, and has no reality. All that's left are the sparkles of love that you added unto it.

To forgive it is to not see it. To forgive it is to forget it. The veil must part, to reveal the light of Christ. And when the face of Christ is seen at last, the world is FORGOTTEN. The veil is no more. This means you have not interposed ANYTHING in between Christ and Himself. When Christ is recognizing Christ, there is no world. Without a veil, without bodies, without space or time, Earth does not exist. "Only the body makes the world seem real." Nor is there any dream without it.This perfect vision is true perception, and when perfected it has no further purpose. Its purpose was to lead you home, to return to awarness of Christ as yourself. And now you stand at the gates of Heaven, and are ready to enter, to return to where you never left. Bodies cannot come with you, because they were the veil, and do not exist. The world cannot join you because it has no reality beyond the veil that depicts its picture. Space and time have ended. The world spins into the nothingness from which it came, as you awaken into the Kingdom of God, recognizing that noting has ever happened to anything real. You are safe in God, because you were just dreaming of exile.

One of Jesus's big teachings is. ... love your enemies. But I'm finding that a lot of people (largely less spiritual people) have a MAJOR issue with this.

Particularly around issues of abuse, victimhood, trauma, rape, child abuse, torture, those sorts of things. Things where it seems like the victim has been unfairly treated, where there has been violence and trauma and great difficulty. In amongst these unhealed wounds it is very hard to look upon the 'sinner' as sinless.

Jesus' teaching IS clear, that regardless, EVERYONE IS SUPPOSED TO LOVE EVERYONE.

That means loving your enemies, loving criminals, loving hateful people, loving bullies, loving rapists and murderers, loving hitler, loving terrorists, loving serial killers, all of it. Jesus loves all of them and is asking us to do the same. How many people are going to CRINGE at the thought of that?

Just because someone acts out from ego and does something stupid or crazy like hurting another, does not mean they are sinful. It does not mean they aren't calling for love and help. VERY likely the person is themselves a "victim" of some form of "un-love" from themselves and others, which has led to their current state, with which they need help and healing.

MANY people in this world would not say that they are willing to love someone who has done something horrendous. This is a DIFFICULT area for even seasoned forgivers. It's easier to forgiven friends and family and coworkers, much harder to forgive those figures who seem to represent tyranny and murder and horror.

The thing is, if we don't love these people, we are just as bad. What is our alternative, to hate them? But this is what many of us do. We hate the people that we think deserve it because of their crimes and behaviours. We don't want to love them, we think they don't deserve it. We want to see them dead. Well, what does that say about us, murderous hateful vengeful people? Do we want to be that?

It will take a lot to step up and be willing to forgive what appear to be sins and crimes and terrible acts. It will take a lot to forgive them because "they know not what they do", and to RECOGNIZE in them a call for love. To be able to discern, there is far more to the person than just this particular area of behaviour or egotism.

There is some good in everyone. No-one is purely evil. Everyone is welcomed by God. I'm often reminded that God loves ALL the people that I don't love, which is humbling. If God is loving them, why aren't I? I have to be willing to love everyone unconditionally and without reservation otherwise I am NOT BEING LOVING, which places me entirely into a category of a nasty hateful person. I don't want to be that and hopefully you don't either.

Jesus essentially teaches in the cours the difficult truth - that what is not love is murder. If you do not LOVE the murderers, you are murderous yourself. That's a tough pill to swallow because now it renders victims and sufferers as just as much murderous if they don't love their victimisers. A difficult lesson for sure. But we HAVE TO TRY to find a way to love everyone if WE want to experience love.

If you don't love them, you don't love yourself, because they are part of you.

"What is NOT love IS murder. What is not loving MUST be an attack." UrT23E2

"The prayer for enemies thus becomes a prayer for your own freedom." UrS1C5

"And happily your brother will perceive the many friends he thought were enemies." UrT27F6

"Do I DESIRE a world in which I have NO enemies, and CANNOT sin?" UrT21H6

The ego loves to tell you that when such-and-such happens, you MUST have a reaction.

It acts like it's a given. This is because it believes that a 'cause' outside of you has the power to affect you. This so-called cause DEMANDS that you be affected by it.

This is also to do with the hierarchy of illusions, which means that apparently different severities of problems seem to demand different kinds of reactions.

The ego had this set up so that, for example, when you blow your nose you don't have a significant reaction, but when someone tells you you have a disease, you freak out. Or when someone stubs their toe you have a slight response but when they fall on their face and hurt themselves you have a much bigger response.

We've become conditioned by what seems to be 'called for' in different situations, largely based on how things *appear* physically, causing us to develop a conditional response. Situation A calls for response A. Situation B calls for response B. This way we have learned to be conditional and to be reactive and affected by what happens.

We need to BREAK this connection between external causes and given levels of reaction, if we are to become unconditional.

I was talking to Jesus last night and was imagining this scenario where a person might die and how I would feel, and already just with the imagining of it I noticed I felt upset, and Jesus stopped me. I looked at it and realized, I am actually giving energy to this idea and I'm the one who is imagining it. So really, it's nothing to do with the situation happening, I am literally doing it to myself right now. So I stopped, I stopped buying into my own prediction, and laughed.

What this showed me is that we do not HAVE to suffer. Just because something supposedly 'bad' might happen around us, it doesn't HAVE to mean that we have a given reaction. We don't HAVE to have a meltdown. We don't HAVE to completely lose it and become seriously upset.

What we have to learn to see is that it is our own perception that shows us a belief in external causes being real, in being powerless, threatened or victimized. It's our own mind that is CHOOSING to suffer. Suffering is a choice, brought on by a perceptual mistake. We can choose not to have this reaction by choosing not to to see the situation this way.

So this breaks the ego's strangle-hold and the hierarchy of illusions, by breaking the connection between external causes and internal reactions. We do not have to suffer. We do not have to be upset. We do not have to have reactions. We are literally choosing to suffer on our own by how we're using our mind and perception. If something 'bad' happens, if something 'serious' happens, those are judgements by ego, that seem to demand serious reactions. We don't have to play that game. We don't have to lose our peace.

All is choice.

There are multiple levels/dimensions to the overall dream, of which the physical world is just one. The dream is not just the physical world. And awakening from the physical level is only one step in full awakening. For example:

Heaven

Christ consciousness (one son)

Higher Selves (realm of the sonship)

Spirits/souls (astral plane)

Physical (solid form)

Maybe I missed one or two.

Basically, the physical world IS NOT the only realm of the dream. There are higher levels of the dream also.

But also WITHIN the physical level, there are also levels. This is because there's a hierarchy of illusions. And also because there is time.

The levels within the physical realm are to do with where you are on your personal spiritual path/curriculum and what is the 'next' thing for you.

When you try to jump too far ahead of where you're at without genuinely completing the lessons needed, you 'bypass'. Typically this includes denial.

This also happens when a teacher, who is further along the path, comes along and exposes you to a light that is more inclusive than your current awareness.

They've appeared in your dream because you're ready to learn and they are ready to teach. But they might only show up for a short time, or a longer time, or a very long time depending on the relationship (see manual for teachers).

Sometimes you will be exposed to teachers who are way further along the path than you are. This will induce a lot of resistance, threat, unwillingness, guilt/inadequacy, and especially comparing yourself to them and finding yourself lacking.

So you need to be careful that you aren't trying to 'take on' too much before you are ready. So yes, this actually means, sometimes you will try to force yourself to be where a more advanced person is at, before you are ready, end up 'shoulding' yourself to bits, and this will only make you SUFFER.

So in this way, there are 'steps' or levels - sub-levels - within the level of the physical world. So when you try to skip a level/step and jump ahead too fast, you'll just get confused, frustrated and scared.

One step at a time. One foot in front of the next. If you try to skip ahead to future stepping stones, you'll slip and fall in the water.

As much as you are willing and ready to accept, given where you're at. And it's ok if you are slow. And it's okay if you do not get what the advanced teachers are expressing - they're not meant to be your teacher yet.

"Those who are to meet will meet". So let Holy Spirit decide what is the next right thing for you to learn and from whom. And you might also find that you begin to attract the right 'students' as well, who just appear out of nowhere because they're ready for what you're offering. You can help those who are a few steps behind you. But those who are far behind, maybe its okay to let them be taught by someone closer to where they are.

Gently does it.

"The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who are life."

"God did not make the body, because it is destructible, and therefore not of the Kingdom."

"The body is the symbol of what you think you are. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist."

"The death of an illusion means nothing."

"A body cannot stay without illusions, and the last one to be overcome is death."

"What is understood as an illusion must disappear."

When Jesus speaks about how the body cannot live or die, this doesn't necessarily mean that the body hangs around forever in some immortalized state, which is how some people interpret it.

When Jesus says that the body is recognized as an illusion, He is talking from a very high place/level where He is completely outside of the illusion and has no illusions. From that vantage point, He recognized that the body is an illusion as much as the world is, like just an image on a screen. The image can appear to "look like" living, or "look like" death, but really AS an image it cannot be either alive or dead, it is just an image. That's what this means.

Because the body is just an image in the mind, an illusion, which when recognized as an illusion MUST disappear, within this context only can it be properly understood that the body does not really have any 'life' and it also cannot really 'die'. But people take this and then pull their mind back into the context of "illusions are real, bodies exist", and interpret it to mean the body will become permanent or something. Illusions cannot be permanent.

There is also a lot of belief that the body is going to be converted for use as a teaching device, learning device, or a communication device by Holy Spirit, and that therefore the 'ultimate state' of the relationship to the body will be that you go around using it as a Teacher of God to express Heaven on Earth. But.... you're not really going to be able to do that as the ultimate state of being, because as Jesus says, when an illusion is fully recognized as nothing it must disappear. The body is an illusion, and when recognized fully, ie when you are fully awakened as Christ, the body MUST disappear because the body is in the mind and made BY the mind, having no other cause.

The disappearance of the body is the final 'exit' from the illusion of death, because once you can see that body is NOTHING but an image - an illusion, a dream, a fantasy that you made up and used to believe in, and that it is not you whatsoever, it will be recognized as just an illusion in your own mind which will disappear when that illusion disappears. Your mind will stop creating the body image, because the body image blocks awareness of the truth.

While you think the body has any validity at all or any reason to exist, you are believing in death. The body IS the idea of death and separation. It is a thought-form of separation. So while you keep it and exalt it and make it spiritually special, you are maintaining the illusion that God's son is destroyable, and therefore are keeping death, and death will seem to happen to the body in the dream.

So when Jesus says the body cannot die, he is talking way outside the context of the illusion where the body is recognized as nothing but an illusion. You can't mix the levels, otherwise you're in "level confusion."

In this world, the ego has reversed everything. What was visible has become invisible, and what was nothing at all seems to be something.

Similarly, in the world of form, "space" seems to be where nothing exists. And it seems like objects in the world exist within that space, as though they are real things and the space is nothing.

Space is not nothing, as such, it is "no thing". It is the container of things.

In reality, the container of everything is God, and is presence, and is all that is. It is the opposite of nothing. But in the ego's world, with everything back to front, space has come to symbolize nothingness.

So now in the ego world, you look to see where something is, and you look to objects instead of to the space that contains them. You think where objects exists, there something is, and where there are no objects, there is nothing. This is the ego's distraction. It is a device for making it appear that what is, is not, and what is not, is.

The ego has set up the physical universe in this way to always seem to point you in the wrong direction, to make it seem like the very thing that won't help you is what you want, and the very thing that would help you you do not want.

When you are thinking about questioning the ego, it would tell you not to look at your mind because, if you do, you'll discover that there is guilt there. It tells you not to look at the guilt, that you want to get away from it. And it tells you that getting away from it through denial and projection will make things better for you - that you'll become innocent. But this is a lie as well.

If you were to look within and question the guilt and question the idea of sin it's based on, you'd find out there is no sin. The ego doesn't want you to do that. Again it puts guilt in place as a signpost pointing away from itself, so that you'll head in the opposite direction. Similarly fear distracts you away from itself so that you think the problem is someone else.

Also in the ego's world, "change is life" and stagnation is death. Yet, stillness is actually life, and change is death. What we call life - stuff that changes and transformed and is born and dies, is not life at all. It's an illusion of life. Artificial. Backwards. It's a movement into not living. If stillness is life and in the ego's world stillness will kill you (e.g. your breathing stops), you will avoid stillness. See how cleverly it's set up?

Similarly every ego deception takes you away from yourself, takes you away from truth and leads you towards destruction. When you are trying to wake up from this illusion, that's why it seems so difficult. You are going against the grain of the entire world. It tells you to go one way, you need to go another. The ego tempts you to believe something, you need you unbelief it. You fear that someone is causing problems, you need to realize that you are the cause. We literally need to deprogram ourselves from being physically-oriented and deceived by this worlds' rules and all the ways in which things seem to mean something based on appearances of how they work here. This entire world is a grand deception and none of it is truth.

There are no laws but God's.

This world is an illusory opposition to God, and God did not create it.

If you love people based on what they do, who they are, how they appear, what they say, whether you like them, whether you agree with them, their personality, their attitude, then.... there is going to be a natural limit to how loving you can be.

You are loving conditionally, which is very very commonplace in this world. It means you depend heavily on an explicit and specific set of characteristics in order to 'love'. In other words, it takes a 'special' set of characteristics for you to deem that someone is worthy of you loving them. You'll only love them IF they meet the criteria, and only IF they give you what you prefer, and only IF they don't suddenly become like 'all the other fuckers'.

Ok so... fundamentally, there is a shift that I think is happening (for me anyway).... a shift towards .... "how do I love everyone the same?" ie "how can I love UN-conditionally?"

And the ONLY way that this is even POSSIBLE, is that we learn to love IN SPITE OF appearances, REGARDLESS of background, INSTEAD OF reacting to someone's personality or behavior, and OVERLOOKING all ego illusions that the person seems to present or tempt us with. We have to be able to be in a very certain, constant state of truth that is not SWAYED by appearances, is not changed by illusions and is not AFFECTED by people.

It's about choosing to love, simply because it is what God wills. Choosing to love because, if it is conditional, it's really NOT love. Choosing to love because you want REAL LOVE in your life and you want to be open to receiving unconditional love from God. How are you going to receive unconditional love from God if you place so many conditions on love and only accept it under very strict conditions? This is what I ask myself now.

Can I love in spite of the entire illusory world? Can I overlook (forgive) every single temptation to hate, every temptation to react with anger, every temptation to see people as, basically, unloveable? Can I be willing to see myself as loveable? Not just, you know, special-loveable, but, unconditionally loveable?

Unconditional love is the love of God, it's the love of the Sonship, it's the love of Holy Spirit. Conditional love is a tiny little slither of love provided by the ego, a limited, deluded love that isn't even 'full' love.

Wowza. Mind-blowing.

Fear is really resistance to what is. It's an attack on what is. It's a desire to make what is go away. It's the feeling you have when you a refusing to receive something. Per the golden rule, giving and receiving are one. If you refuse to receive, you also refuse to give.

Not giving is hateful and separating and selfish. Fear becomes a repression of self and others, a murderous attempt to destroy. Fear is a desire to separate and hold back and hold extension within and not extend God. It's what it feels like to want to not give anything, in order to try to not get anything, and it results in a sense of emptiness and lack and weakness and frailty, of vulnerability and limitation and eventually paralysis. As if you have nothing left to stand up to anything with and are overpowered (by your projected power).

Fear is the opposite of love because it is what you get when you try to deny the golden rule. If you are not willing to give, you will get a lack of love back, and it will appear as danger and threat and something you do not want. By giving "I don't want to", you receive things that you do not want, and they seem to loom over you as something you don't want. And the more you don't want them the worse it gets.

Fear is the ego's problem solving solution, the way by which it says you are "protected" from what you're getting. But really it's an attempt to be protected from receiving God. Fear is a defence against God and against love. It is an attack on love and is vicious and victimising, which is why it also appears like a victim role. Giving and receiving are one. If you give victimisation you get victimisation. Ego is really a fearful idea and is very afraid.

The antidote to fear is always through trust development and giving love. Love has to be extended in order to be received. Its safety comes to you as you give it away. In the extension of love there is no fear because you are only giving love and so are only receiving love. It is the way out of hell.

Resisting what-is represses your being and your presence. Resistance is fear and what you resist persists, because what you give you receive. When you stop resisting what happens you are saying "yes" to it rather than "no". This yes embraces it with full attention and presence, which actually counter-intuitively makes you feel stronger and more safe. It's how you shine your light, and that light dispels darkness, makes fear go away, and heals.

Strangely enough, what you are afraid of you are not really letting happen. It's the resistance to it that makes it difficult to deal with. And it would seem insane to fully embrace it, because the ego would suggest if you do that you will get more of it and will be consumed by it - why would anyone in their right mind want to go towards the thing they are fearing?

But when you confront it head-on without resisting it and just sit with it and watch it, radiating your fuller presence toward it, it becomes transmuted into love. Because then you are giving love and seeing from love. The thing you are confronting then starts to disappear and is shone away, healed away, by the presence of your mind and the extension of power. Dropping resistance increases exposure and darkness cannot remain in the light.

The ego always has an ulterior motive, a secret agenda, and a hidden plan that it would hide from you while it lies to your face.

Or rather, while you lie to yourself.

When the ego says you are afraid, it makes out that you're not choosing to be afraid, and that someone else is the cause. This isn't true. Secretly it wants to be afraid so that it can scapegoat someone and displace its own guilt onto others.

When the ego says you are guilty, it makes out that someone else has found you guilty and that there's nothing you can do about it. This isn't true. Secretly this belief in guilt is a choice that you're doing to yourself, you're the one who decided to be guilty, and you are doing so that you might keep your plan to be a separate individual.

When the ego says you have sinned, it tries to claim that this is because of something you really did, but this isn't true. Secretly you know that you cannot sin and did not do anything wrong, but are making out that you did, because you want to be sinful, so that you can continue your plan to be separate from God. Even if being sinful seems like a horrible experience, this horrible experience is 'worth it' if it means you can inch closer to death.

Death is your ultimate goal because it's through deaths doorway that you imagine you can finally escape from God's wrath and be born into a new reality where you are completely independent of God and have no need for Him. You hold this in your sights at all times, regardless of what seems to be happening or why, secretly planning on death every step of the way. Even if it means seeming to have to suffer sinfulness, or guilt, or fear, or punishment. Because there is always this secret ego agenda of self-destruction.

These secrets are all a part of denial, which is your attempt to deny that you are deliberately trying to die, or that you deliberately want to be a separate identity. You use denial to disown the choice you keep making for death, and to pretend that you're inching along toward it against your will, and driven by forces outside your control. To suggest you are not doing this to yourself is denial, and you layer denial upon denial upon denial to try to bring about a complete suppression of yourself, so that you can pretend to be someone else.

All along the way, we maintain and keep these special secrets. They are the secret truth that we are really doing this all to ourselves. It's the secret that we don't want to be revealed, because if we were to own up to it and be responsible, the illusions we're making which create the appearance that we're unwillingly being dragged to the grave, would be totally blown. We wouldn't be able to believe our own self-deception if we were to admit that we were the one choosing every single part of this.

And so sin, and guilt, and fear, and punishment, and suffering, and death, are all things we're choosing on purpose, because we see death as the way to achieve independence from God. It's what we've wanted all along, and we constantly pretend that we DON'T want it, SO THAT we can have it. Choosing to appear to have no choice, is a choice to have no choice, which is a choice to choose to die. Choosing to be afraid, choosing to be guilty, choosing to suffer, but claiming and making the illusion that this is absolutely nothing to do with what we want. Bullshit.

Secrets and lies, secrets and lies. How about some honest owning up to being powerful, immortal, invulnerable and not a victim?

It’s not just a matter of something happening physically. It’s not just a matter of what is demonstrated. Since form can be changed EASILY by a miracle worker, sickness can be flipped on and off, and bodies made to appear and disappear in an instant, it is hardly that important to use miracles JUST to show off or to make stuff happen. If these things were second nature, miracles would be like an everyday occurrence, just something natural.

The important thing about miraculous demonstrations is that they PROVE that the ego is false. Even if the demonstration is taking place inside the dream world, witnessed by regular people who may not even be particularly aware spiritually, it is a *teaching device* because it shows in an obvious way that ego beliefs are false. This can have a profound effect on the mind that witnesses them.

If something were to happen according to the ego’s laws, some kind of "accident" perhaps where someone gets hurt, and if suddenly all of the effects and harm are completely undone in front of onlookers, what do you think that will do to their mind?

If you witness a miracle, it can really blow your mind. You might interpret it as a threat, as magic, as voodoo, witchcraft, some kind of demonic posession, or any number of things, because your EGO will not be able to deny it or comprehend it. The miracle will SHOW, demonstrate, that some aspect of your ego belief system is FALSE. Right in front of your eyes.

If you believed that the body is real, bad things happen, wounds can’t be healed, and then suddenly all of that is shown to be FALSE, something profound happens to your awareness. It’s like there is suddenly a LIGHT, you suddenly SEE something which you never saw before.

You see a possibility. You see OUTSIDE of the ego’s laws. Your thought system is thrown into question. Your entire world view is undermined. It’s been blatantly proven to you that the ego’s laws are false, and you can barely believe it, but you can’t deny it. The demonstration of the truth permanently changes your mind! It causes you to have an awakening! Something inside your dream has come to show you that it IS a dream and is not true.

This is the powerful TEACHING DEVICE of the miracle. It is not there to just show off that you can manipulate matter or raise people from the dead. They are used to show that the ego is FALSE, all of its laws are FALSE, laws of physics are FALSE, limitations are FALSE, even death is false. If this were shown to you right in front of your face, you would NEVER again be able to look at life the same way.

When Jesus resurrected and came back and showed up as a body, having just been made dead not so long ago, witnessed by many people, this DEMONSTRATED that death is an illusion, that the body has no power over the mind, and that you are IMMORTAL. If you experienced this first-hand, can you imagine the profound challenge this PROOF would pose to your thought system? All your world view and beliefs about what you thought the world and the body even ARE, as gross assumptions, would be brought into question. You would never be able to think of death or bodies the same way again!

It’s not the "form" the miracle took that is important, but what it TEACHES, by virtue of the mere fact that it is POSSIBLE. IF such things are possible, it renders many other things obviously UNTRUE - ie, the ego. It blows the doors off what you THOUGHT was true, and awakens you. This is how miracles SAVE TIME because they are such powerful learning experiences!

If Jesus could do it, so can you.

Nothing in the world is doing anything to you whatsoever. Not even seeming physical attacks, physical sickness, or death.

All of it must be seen as having NO EFFECT on you as a son of God.

If it has no effect on you, then it cannot be a CAUSE. If it is not a cause, it cannot have SINNED against you. And therefore it must be harmless and forgiven.

Then the world is recognised as NOT DOING ANYTHING, it is recognised as merely a dream - an effect of dreaming, and not a cause of anything at all.

When the world is recognised as CAUSING NOTHING, changing nothing, doing nothing of any real value, all sense of blame and bitterness and hate and rejection are taken away from it.

It is then merely seen as harmless, powerless, guiltless, and not sinful. It is then just a kind of harmless dream, which no real consequences and no inherent properties of any kind. Just a projected image.

Physical death does nothing to anyone real. Nothing real can be threatened. Souls are utterly unaffected by death or by anything in this world.

Similarly the things of this world must be seen and recognised as NOT PEOPLE, the bodies are not who we are, not who anyone is. They are just shells in a strange shape which are formed to look as though they are people with faces. These are not real people.

Nothing real has ever died. No-one real has ever been attacked. Nothing real has ever been sick. No-one real has ever murdered anything. There is no sin anywhere. The world is a dream. The world and body do nothing to you or to anyone. The physical does not rule the mind. Mind is the sole cause.

"This is a course in CAUSE, and NOT effect." UrT21H8

"What is the single requisite for this shift in perception? It is simply this; the recognition that sickness is of the mind, and has nothing to do with the body. What does this recognition "cost"? It costs the world we see, for the world will never again appear to rule the mind. For with this recognition is responsibility placed where it belongs; not with the world, but on him who looks on the world and sees it as it is not. He looks on what he chooses to see. No more and no less. The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did. Nor does he do anything to the world, because he was mistaken about what it was. Herein is the release from guilt and sickness both, for they are one. Yet to accept this release, the insignificance of the body must be an acceptable idea." UrM6C3

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness." UrW190L5

We may think that when ACIM refers to the past it may be talking about 100 years ago, or 1000 years ago.

But when you think about it, the world seems to present a continuous unbroken stream of events. Objects morph from one state to another without any seeming gap in between. It's not like the present is "missing" in this sequence. Actually Jesus refers to it as a continuum, as in the continuum of spacetime.

In this continuum bodies and objects appear to constantly exist from one moment to the next, seamlessly. And yet, we're also told in the course, that at no time does the body really exist in the present. It is always slightly away from presence in the past and the future. We're also told that in holy instants the world may disappear, as happens in revelation also.

So the apparent illusion of a continuum of time in which we seem to think of the past as "a long time ago" and in which there seems to actually BE a present moment, this is not really the nature of time. Time is delay, denial and avoidance. Somehow there is a gap, of space, between the real present moment and everything that appears. And yet everything appears to always be present in this timeline, without a gap.

This MUST mean, that time is more of a vertical "immersion" or sinking down into density, away from true presence, which is above the battlefield. It must be a general sense of distance or avoidance of reality, which results in a more dense experience and a seeming solidity of matter. "The past" must not so much refer to certain measurements of time "ago", but rather to the general sense of how heavily you are in denial, and therefore how "darkened" your mind is.

Jesus describes in the course that with shorter distances we tend to think of it as space, and as distance increases we tend to think of it as time. This means distance from immediacy is spacetime. And without ANY distance there is no spacetime. Total stillness would eradicate it. Slight distance produces an illusion of a world which is slightly "laggy" and seems to gloss over the present with an illusion of a present.

"The continuity of past and future, UNDER ITS (ego) DIRECTION, is the only purpose it perceives in time, and it closes over the present, so that no gap in the EGO's continuity can occur. ITS continuity, then, would KEEP you in time"

So the ego illusion actually produces a sense of past, seamlessly and smoothly transitioning into the present, and continuing on to the future, in a continuous stream. But Jesus is saying this is an illusion. And the "present" in this continuum of time is NOT really the present. In time we're not quite in the real present of eternity because it's always a bit removed from it, and filled with images that make it seem like there is no moment at all.

As such the ego has made time look as though it's a totally closed system and it hides the real eternity beyond it. The real eternity is the real present. It is not a state of change or transition or delay or distance or avoidance or denial. And it does not entail the imaginary images of "right now" that the illusion of spacetime shows to us. If you want to find out what the real present is you have to go to heaven.

Last night, there I was opening up to Jesus and allowing Him to do some healing in me. I was offering up experiences of rejection/abandonment and allowing Him to come in and heal them. Which he did.

It then occurred to me, as I connected with Jesus, a line of thought I'd not had before, about His nature.

When Jesus comes into my awareness, or rather, when I open up my awareness to admit He is with me ;-), I am always struck by his attitude.

If you can picture this... he comes across as though he is someone who is just sitting on a rock nearby. He doesn't appear to have any motivation. He doesn't seem to be in any way stirred. Like, he has absolutely no ambition. He isn't trying to go anywhere or get anything and has no sense of lacking anything at all. Like he absolutely no reason to move from where He is. He doesn't even barely seem interested in anything external to Him. I look for signs of the usual ... being lost in the days events, being driven with judgement or anger to get revenge, or anything like that, and I do not see it at all.

He sits there very quietly almost as though, and perhaps in actuality, like He is just completely finished with absolutely everything and there is no longer anything whatsoever that can interest Him externally. It's like he doesn't have any agenda of any kind, isn't excited about anything in particular, isn't associated with or caught up in anything, isn't distracted in any way. He just sits there. He is just very still and uninvolved. It's like, there is nothing for Him to do, and he isn't bored, he is just 'being'. But it's such a state of absolute ... no-ego-ness, that it always gives me the impression he doesn't give a fuck about anything.

Extreme detachment. Total detachment. He has absolutely no fear, no reason to move, no reason to do anything. It's like he's done with all illusions and is deceived by nothing. So he just sits there. And if I ask Him a question, he will eventually answer. Sometimes he will seem distant or even aloof but it's more like, if I go to Him with a question I'm almost interfering with his peaceful time. Except, he never gets upset whatsoever, and is never disturbed at all. He is just simply DONE with all illusions. And then he'll answer simply and sometimes brilliantly with great depth. And then it's as though, he still has his hands off. He doesn't push me to do anything, he doesn't assert any kind of special plan or motivation or reasoning. He doesn't defend anything and he doesn't have any apparent interest in getting inside of any of my issues. He just sits there, peaceful, calm, still.

What this then brought to mind for me was, and this would be blasphemous to many religious people. .. was a sense that this was the only way in which he and I could be EQUALS. Only by Him allowing me to be completely, and only by Him being Himself completely, were we then effectively BOTH EQUALLY FREE. His will was His own. Mine was my own. And neither will was attempting to control or manipulate or get involved with the other. Just totally hands off detachment. And in that, I felt like, there was absolutely no pretentiousness or arrogance or specialness or judgement or holier-than-thou. Just total equality. And no fear. Just being. Like a rock.

This is possibly the most threatening and mind-blowing teaching in A Course in Miracles. There is in fact NOT a world here! It's not even a matter of who made the world, it's the even higher truth that it DOES NOT EXIST. Earth is in fact NOTHING.

"There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it"

"There is no world because it is a thought apart from God, and made to separate the Father and the Son, and break away a part of God Himself and thus destroy His wholeness. Can a world which comes from this idea be real? Can it be anywhere?"

Everything that happened in the separation from God, involves a belief in something existing which does not exist, something being true which is false, something being real which is unreal.

For example, we made a separate self which seems to have free will to do as it pleases. However, this self is in fact the DENIAL of self, which is why it results in death. But it APPEARS to be the presence of a self. This is why it's an illusion - it seems to be showing you something which is not there, as if it is. It's supposed freedom of will is in fact an imprisoned will, which is not free, but SEEMS free.

Take a look at the body. "The body is the symbol of WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist." The body SEEMS to picture "you", presenting an appearance and form, it seems to positively exist and move and do stuff. But, the body is NOT you, it is a replacement for you, and is only an image of what you THINK you are. What it SEEMS to be, is the opposite of what it actually is. The body is the ABSENCE OF YOU. And you do not look like your body. "What you are cannot be seen nor pictured."

It is the same thing with regards the difference between light and darkness. Darkness is not possible. Where there seems to be an absence of light, there must be an ILLUSION of darkness. If you believe the darkness is real, you are giving it false reality and are claiming it "is a something." But a shadow on a wall is not the PRESENCE of darkness, it is the absence of light. It appears to be a something, but is really the lack of a something.

It is also the same with regards to sin and error. Error or mistakes are just illusions of impossibilities, recognized as false. In their "true form" it is clear they cannot be true. But if you invest belief in them, are deceived and tempted by them, and buy into them, they turn into sin. And now it seems that they assert that something has REALLY happened, and something is REALLY possible, that isn't. So sin is really a lie, depicting stuff happening that CANNOT happen, as though it is really happening. It is deceptive.

The same applies to this world. This world is in fact NOTHING. But by believing in it and investing it with reality, it turns from an illusion of a something to an ACTUAL something. It seems to exist. It seems to host events and happenings. Things in it seem possible. But the world is impossible, and the things which happen are impossible, and sin is not real. The world was made to try to prove that sin and guilt are real.

"Their aim is to fulfill the purpose which the world was made to witness and make real. They see in its illusions but a solid base where truth exists, upheld apart from lies."

"The world of bodies is the world of sin."

So basically, we have a world that SEEMS to be here, which is made of sin, which testifies and proves that impossible things are possible, which hosts the idea of the death and murder of reality, and SEEMS to have real consequences. But it has none. And it does nothing. And it causes nothing. And it has no power. And it isn't really there at all.

"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."

"The world does nothing to him."

"There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail."

The really deep thing to realize is this. The world is in fact, the ABSENCE OF EXISTENCE. It is the antithesis of heaven. It is the LACK OF HEAVEN. It is a HOLE, which we call the spacetime bubble, in which are housed impossibilities and unrealities. It is an hallucinated world, because it seems to be there to see, but isn't. You are projecting it and making it up as you go along.

The idea that there is no world isn't simply that the world "exists" and it has to be "undone". It's really the RECOGNITION that the world you thought was here, does not exist. And this doesn't mean there's a better view of it. It means the WHOLE THING IS GONE. It has no reality at all. No presence. No life.

"There is no life outside of heaven."

"Without the idea of death there is no world."

"He does NOT realize that HE MAKES THIS WORLD, for there IS no world outside him."

Through unwillingness, we resisted God. We failed to create. We wanted not to shine. We tried to end eternal life. We wanted to stop reality. We opposed the Kingdom. We attacked will. We tried to deny our own existence. We blocked awareness. We tried to destroy. And ultimately this is all a matter of TRYING NOT TO EXIST.

In so doing, we seemed to make a world which SEEMS to exist, which is really actually the LACK OF A WORLD. It's like you took a part of heaven and DRAINED IT of all life. Held it back and prevented its extension. As though you could attack heaven and remove its presence. This world, which includes the Earth, is the ANTI-world. It is a mis-creation. It is empty and it is nothing.

We have GIVEN the world, the fake world, all manner of belief in trying to MAKE IT BE SIN, so that it is GIVEN reality, so that we can try to make it exist. It's our attempt to give it life and immortality. But we can't. We tried to make the world be a cause. We tried to make it have power. We gave our power to it to try to animate it. We tried to make it appear to be alive with "life forms", which are illusions of life. We tried to imagine it has a mind and alien will of its own. We tried to make ourselves subject to it and affected by it, to confirm its reality. We made bodies to sense it and to tell us that it is there.

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

"The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen."

Quite simply, this world, this planet, this galaxy, all the stars, all bodies, all animals and "life forms", are NOTHING. They are life's ABSENCE. They are the LACK OF LIFE. They are something that is really NOT there, appearing to be there. Like an hallucination. A lack of light, appearing to be the presence of a real darkness. And to believe in it is to believe that evil is real, asserting that the world has power OVER heaven. That the world CAN CAUSE immortal beings to die. Believing this world is real is level confusion.

Our task in forgiveness, then, is not to find a way to give EXTRA reality to the world, but to recognize ITS UNREALITY, and see finally that it SO NOTHING, that it disappears and fades into nothingness. All it is is a veil of illusions, a block, hanging in front of the face of christ, pretending to exist. Our guilt makes it seem solid. Our fear gives it reality. Our belief in sin anchors it in our minds. But it is not there at all. It is an empty shell.

"Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous, solid body, immovable as is a mountain. Yet, within YOU, there is a force which NO illusions can resist."

"What can the causeless BE but nothingness. The picture of your brother that you see is wholly absent, and has never been."

"Sickness is a demand the body be a thing that it is not. Its NOTHINGNESS is guarantee that it can NOT be sick."

"The body that is asked to be a god WILL be attacked, because its nothingness has not been recognized. "

"Yet its nothingness IS your salvation, from which you would flee."

"His body's nothingness releases yours from sickness and from death."

"For here is nothingness, where neither birth nor death is real"

"The final judgment on ****the world**** contains no condemnation. For it sees the world as totally forgiven, without sin, and wholly purposeless. Without a cause, and now without a function in Christ's sight, ****it merely slips away to nothingness.****"

"Your faith is placed in the most trivial and insane symbols; pills, money, "protective" clothing, "influence," "prestige," being liked, knowing the "right" people, and an endless list of forms of nothingness which you endow with magical powers."

"To recognize this is to recognize nothingness when you think you see it. As such, it is the prerequisite for vision."

"Yet how can sight which stops at nothingness, as if it WERE a solid wall, see truly? It is HELD BACK by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else BUT form will be perceived. These eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see."

"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."

"But if you refuse to worship him, in whatever form he may appear to you, and wherever you think you see him, he will disappear into the nothingness out of which he was made."

"To overlook nothingness is merely to judge it correctly, and because of your ability to evaluate it truly, to LET IT GO."

"The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear."

"The "changes" the ego seeks to make are not really changes. They are but deeper shadows, or perhaps different cloud patterns. Yet what is made of nothingness cannot be called new or different."

"We can but go from nothingness to everything; from hell to Heaven." "What loss can be for you in choosing not to value nothingness? This world holds nothing that you really want, but what you choose instead you want indeed!"

"***The world stands like a block*** before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just ***a fragile veil***, so easily dispelled that it can ***last no longer than an instant***. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it ***cannot fail to disappear***, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant ***is the world forgot***, with time forever ended as ***the world spins into nothingness*** from where it came."

"What is the ego? Nothingness, but in a form that seems like something. In a world of form the ego cannot be denied for it alone seems real. How could God's Son as He created him abide in form or in a world of form?"

"What can correct illusions but the truth? And what are errors but illusions which remain unrecognized for what they are? Where truth has entered errors disappear. They merely vanish, leaving not a trace by which to be remembered. They are gone because without belief they have no life, and so they disappear to nothingness, returning whence they came. From dust to dust they come and go, for only truth remains."

"The bleak little world will vanish into nothingness, and your heart will be so filled with joy that it will leap into Heaven and into the presence of God."

"God wills salvation be received today, and that the intricacies of your dreams no longer hide their nothingness from you."

"Nothingness will become invisible, for you will at last have seen truly." "Like all things in the world its meaning is temporary, and will ultimately fade into the nothingness from which it came when there is no more use for it."

"All that is veiled in shadows must be raised to understanding to be judged again, this time with Heaven's help, and all mistakes in judgment which the mind had made before are open to correction as the truth dismisses them as causeless. Now are they without effects. They cannot be concealed because their nothingness is recognized."

"How can a battle be perceived as nothingness, when you ENGAGE in it?" "There is a silence covering the world that was an ancient dream so long ago no one remembers now. Its time is done, and in the little space it seemed to have is nothingness. The dream has gone, and all its dreams of gifts have disappeared as well."

"Pursuit of the imagined leads to death because it is the search for nothingness, and while you seek for life you ask for death.

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

"The more complicated the results become, the harder it may be to recognize their nothingness, but it is not necessary to examine ALL possible outcomes to which premises give rise to judge the PREMISES truly."

"Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. It sees their nothingness, and looks right through the thousand forms in which they may appear. It looks on lies but it is not deceived. It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt. It looks on them with quiet eyes, and merely says to them, "My brother, what you think is not the truth.""

"EVERY illusion carries pain and suffering in the dark folds of the heavy garments with which it hides its nothingness."

"And so is ALL time past, and everything EXACTLY as it was before the way to nothingness was made. The tiny tick of time, in which the first mistake was made, and ALL of them within that ONE mistake, held also the Correction for that one, and ALL of them that came within the first. And in that tiny instant time was gone, for that was all it ever was. What God gave Answer to IS answered, and IS gone."

"Specialness is the idea of sin MADE REAL. Sin is impossible even to imagine, without this base. For sin rose from it, out of nothingness, an evil flower with no roots at all."

"In the Divine psyche, the Father and the Holy Spirit are not incomplete at all. The Sonship has the unique faculty of believing in error, or incompleteness, if he so elects. However, it is quite apparent that so to elect IS to believe in the existence of nothingness. The correction of this error is the Atonement."

The way Jesus describes the separation from God, there's a huge laundry list of aspects to this "state" that we've entered. The whole entire ego thought system and all its contents, has been given many labels by Jesus. Labels which simultaneously apply to all of it.

He describes the separation as a "detour into fear" for example. He describes that any state where there's even a slight lack of love, as a state of sin. He describes the whole of spacetime as the idea of death, in that "without the idea of death there is no world" - an entire dream of death. He describes that any state less than wholeness will induce sickness and disease.

He also equates sickness with the denial of God. He equates sin with insanity. All forms of unforgiveness ie judgement come into it. All physical sensory states of false perception. Every conceivable form of attack and murder, war and destruction. ALL of it applies to the WHOLE system. Even though it may appear that all these things are *separate things* unrelated to each other.

That means that everything in the ego thought system is a state of fear, death, sickness, judgement, false perception, confusion, insanity, sin, murder, evil, unreality, war, conflict, suffering, denial etc.

What this then tells you about the true nature of fear, is that when you are afraid, you're not just having a small emotion of fear. You're actually "doing the whole system".

You're being entirely ego. And it's a total package deal, in which you are doing all the other aspects of the separation as well. Fear is an attack, fear is denial, fear is conflict, fear is insanity, fear is sin, fear is death, fear is sickness, fear is deception, etc.

If you also consider the split mind, given that Jesus also refers to the separation as a matter of dissociation, going into a dissociated state means one part of your mind is seemingly cut off from the other. This happens in fear. In fear you believe that you are a victim and not a victimizer, that something is happening to you against your will, and you're not the cause of it. It's a state of projection and blame. Fingers are pointed anywhere other than yourself, so that you're totally out of touch with the fact you're threatening yourself.

All special relationships are affected by fear as well. There is mistrust, inequality, and idol worship, all of which inspire a sense of fear that the other person will take away what you lack. Or even the fear that you've given them the right to do something to you. To be special is to be at war, which means to be conflicted, therefore uncertain, therefore afraid. The entire fall of man is a fall into fear - a detour into fear.

(re leaving the garden of eden, being cast out of heaven) "There is, however, considerable clarification of this concept, which must be understood before the real meaning of the "detour into fear" can be fully comprehended. "

We need to understand how and why fear is not just fear on its own, separate from guilt, or separate from death, or separate from sin. We need to RECOGNIZE that ALL the attributes of the ego ALL go together. You can't be participating in one without the other. Fear is actually death. Fear is actually sin. Fear is actually every possible aspect of the ego system rolled into one. Just as death is sin and war is murder and blame is guilt and insanity is judgement.

When you are afraid, you are not "just afraid", helpless and weak and unvinvolved, or cut off from the other ego aspects. You must also be being unloving, attacking, murderous, blameful, judgemental, hurtful, guilty, deceptive, confused, insane, sinful, etc.

Eventually we have to realize that all aspects of the ego system are ONE system, one idea, one problem, one state, calling for one solution. To not be deceived by the idea that you can be participating in only a little part of the system and not the whole thing. All illusions of the separations between these different things are not true. The entire ego, the whole separation idea, is rolled into every part of it. It is all the same.

I was being controlling. I did not want things to be the way they are. i wanted to stop them being the way they are and be different. I could not accept that this was okay or that it should be this way.

But I did not realize the effect that this control has on the world.

When I resist what's happening, I resist by attempting to control and reject what's going on. I try to shut it out, at the same time as trying to put into place some kind of 'alternative' that I think is better or more correct. So there I am in a state of strong rejection, and strong enforcement, simultaneously - which obviously is conflicting and therefore upsetting.

I did not realize that my attempt to resist and control was actually CAUSING the situation I was looking at, to appear to me in the way it was appearing.

The more I did not like what was happening, the more I tried to stop it and control it. But the more I did that, the more the situation seemed to get further from how I wanted it.

The more we control, the more we resist. So now that I am in resistance, that resistance only becomes stronger as I become more passionate about forcing things to be how I think they should be. In fact, it's really impossible for me to HAVE things the way I want them, because to make them be that way takes a tremendous amount of control and manipulation, which means I am in tremendous resistance, which means I am not in a state of acceptance.

There never will be a time when I can both be controlling and enforcing situations while also experiencing acceptance. So in effect, i will never be able to experience that the outcome I wanted has actually occurred and that I am at peace with it. Unless that is I became SO incredibly controlling that I violated boundaries and rights attempting to get others to change. Which would of course be completely inappropriate on many levels.

I did not know that trying to control a situation makes it worse, and takes it further from acceptability. How can anyone ever find the peace of acceptance through being controlling? Good luck.

The more I saw the situation is needing to be controlled because it was 'out of control' and unacceptable, the more the people involved seemed to become even more out of control and unacceptable. Funny that. They reacted to my controlling efforts with their own resistance against my attacks, so no wonder the scenario I was trying to get away from simply became more stuck and rigid. What you resist persists.

My strategy is now shifting. I need to learn to be accepting, not controlling. Allowing, not enforcing. Permitting, not resisting. And that means, or at least seems to mean to my ego, that I cannot have things the way I want them. Which to the ego, seems to suck, right?

My ego wants to have a world where I get to 'control' certain things, even if it's only in the scope of my 'own life' or my 'own body'. I still want to have that control over 'my' life. And so that really means, I am wanting to control MYSELF. How strange is that?

Control isn't the same as free will. And having no control does not mean you don't have freedom. In fact you have more freedom when you are not controlling. How's that for a paradox? Control takes away your freedom instead of giving it to you! Yet another way in which the ego says one thing and does the exact opposite.

So then, to my intellect, it doesn't understand how I can be accepting and uncontrolling and still be in any way 'happy' about what's going on, or how I can have any 'say' in what's going on. It doesn't understand how it's possible to accept what is, and yet have the freedom and power to do something to change something. It sees acceptance as the doorway to powerlessness, to no choice, to passivity and victimhood. Interesting how the ego sees it this way in order to avoid acceptance, because if you become really accepting you become empowered.

Acceptance without powerlessness or passivity. A novel concept.

Nothing real can be threatened. It should not possible to threaten anything, anywhere. Yet here there is seemingly a world, which is filled with things which can seemingly be threatened. Somehow it has been arranged that there are objects which can collide, obstacles to hit, explosions to damage things, and all manner of weapons to attack with.

But how can there be one single ounce of attack if nothing real can be threatened? What can this world be made of that it can seem to be attackable? Surely it must be that the attack is not really attack, and nothing actually is hurt, and it's all just a big illusion made to look like such things are happening? How can any of it be a real attack if attack is not possible?

Jesus says in the course that there is no safety in the world. He also says bodies can clearly attack bodies. He also says problems were made to not be escaped. He also says you are immortal and cannot die but you can confuse yourself with things that do. He also says the world has no safety to offer, everything visible will perish, and everything you built has the mark of death upon it.

So what is this world, where there is no safety, riddled with problems, everything can be attacked, and the seeming impossibility of "attack ability" seems to be rampant?

If you look you'll notice that everything physical in this world seems to be attackable. Nothing is truly protected from anything. Anything can attack anything. The myth of safety on the level of form is everywhere, the desire to avoid physical attack, injury, harm, death, sickness etc. Yet none of these things should even be possible.

If reality cannot be attacked at all, and there is nothing else, if there appears to be something else that is attackable it cannot be real attack ability. It has to be some kind of deception, formed from the very same fabric as the rest of reality, in which strange shapes, appearances, images, concentrations of thoughts, temptations and so on, are made to look "as if" attack is possible.

So one person kicks another person in the leg. Has there been an attack? Not in reality, for sure. So whatever this is, it must be some kind of strange twisting of make-believe images, hallucinations, warped to make it "appear" that not only does something attackable seem to exist, but it has indeed attacked and been attacked. But no matter how it appears, it cannot be true that attack is real, has happened, or that anything is truly harmed.

Any sign of harm MUST be some kind of extraordinary smoke and mirrors deception. Any hint of damage to anything must be an illusion of death pretending to exist. We don't have anything to make the world from other than our thoughts. The same thoughts that we create eternal life with. The same mind. What do we make the world with except our mental processes?

"You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts"

"I can be attacked by nothing but my thoughts"

Therefore you use thought to attack thought, in the form of a giant thought in the shape of a planet. Or a body.

The laws of spacetime, the made-up physics, largely governs the "workings" of this illusory world, what makes it possible for it to seem as if materials can attack materials. It's all set up fundamentally to make it seem as if attack is possible. The world was made to try to prove sin is real. And it was made as an ATTEMPTED (and failed, impossible) attack on God. "It is the world you see that is impossible."

Real attack must be impossible. It simply cannot actually be attack. It must be a lie, a deception, an unreality. It cannot really be there. Nor can it have real consequences. Nor can it be irreversible in its effects. Nothing about it can be permanent. All attack is an illusion in a dream of death. The world is nothing but a disguise over the truth, and nothing about it is true at all.

You can easily escape into concepts, theories, course quotes as defences, in order to avoid something you don't want to admit to.

Instead of being willing to accept something uncomfortable, you go into denial, and start fighting against the thing with dissociation and intellectual "rising above."

There are things about this world that can be quite unpleasant. Someone dying, the loss of a house, wars raging, people being mis-treated and all that.

We become upset about the thing, not really because of what it is, but because we refuse to accept it. We make something of it, and then we start reacting to what we made of it, and going off on a tangent of a whole new kind of suffering which is even worse than the thing we were avoiding.

Yes nasty things seem to occur. These are kind of like hard facts. In space and time, in physical terms, they happen. Spiritually-minded people love to bypass this and start "attacking it away" with spiritual quote fests, favourite phrases, comments about how its not real, how we're not at the effect of it, and all this. But what this then becomes is avoidance.

If we would stay with the thing and admit to it, stare it in the face, confront it head-on, and be willing to actually look at it, we would be remaining in the present. We would be being honest. We would be not going into denial or trying to cover it up or placate it or make it go away because we don't like it.

And, as it turns out, this present confrontation with the thing helps you to retain your sanity, helps you to not avoid or hide, and helps you to accept it. It's the acceptance of it that actually gives you freedom from it, rather than all these efforts to change it into something, to bypass it spiritually, to move into the intellect, or to sprit the fuck out of it to make it not be there.

For all the time I for example have been dealing with loss over the death of my wife, ACIM has offered a lot of high-level clarity about what it really is, what hasn't actually happened, and all this stuff about how its my belief in it that makes me suffer. A whole lot of metaphysical philosophising and trying to rise above it, to transcend it, to forgive it, to find some peace somehow. But in a way, this has all been a way of avoiding looking at it - a form of denial.

Acceptance is needed in order to be able to let something go and move on. You can't find acceptance by wanting something to change, to be different, to have not happened. You also can't find acceptance by not being willing to admit that the thing HAS happened. It's staring you in the face and practically screaming at you that "this has occurred." On a physical level, IT HAS.

If you avoid this fact, you are putting yourself out of touch with reality. Not that the world is real but the attitude towards this world also in turn becomes your attitude about God. If you avoid an illusion, you avoid God. If you can't look at the world, you can't look at your self. If you hide from changes, you can't embrace changelessness.

So it may be true actually that we find more peace and acceptance through allowing the world to be the way it is, accepting what HAS happened even if that seems to be "making sin real", and even if it seems somehow to be giving the ego a whole lot of credit. What's the alternative, hide from the ego and hurl abuse at it from the mountain top? Or should we own what we've done to ourselves?

ACIM on the one hand is saying things like, "its not real, it hasn't happened, it's not true, the world is a dream, it's all an illusion, nothing is wrong, there is no death" etc. But this is higher level truth. On the physical level there is much that is wrong, and there is death, and people are sick.

Jesus refers to avoiding the "facts" of the world as "a particularly unworthy form of denial." Such as trying to deny that bodies exist. Yes ultimately they don't, but that's not your experience right now. Death does appear to happen. If you deny that you will suffer MORE than if you had accepted it. The person that dies is dead, physically at least. And that has to be acknowledged. No amount of running away from it into the mind's fantasies will undo that fact.

While it is not pleasant, we do have to stop being in denial. We have to stop avoiding what's happened or happening. It's not spiritual, it's a bypass. A mis-use of ACIM's teachings has led me and many people to try living on a cloud in avoidance of the battleground, rather than to take a good hard look at the battleground. It takes some deep soul-searching to admit to this.

We can't get to the "forgiven world" without being willing to look at it through the eyes of Christ. And that does mean looking at it, not looking away from it. It means staring it down. Being aware of all the nasty shit that is happening. Looking at it with Christ so that we translate it into a more tolerable interpretation, NOT as a bypass or an avoidance or a defense or an attempt to put some distance between you and the facts.

"Let all things be exactly as they are."

"The fear of healing arises in the end from an unwillingness to accept the unequivocal fact that healing is necessary. The fear arises because of the necessary willingness to look at what man has done to himself."

"The Separation HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial. However, to concentrate on error is merely a further misuse of legitimate psychic mechanisms. The true corrective procedure, which has already been described as the proper use of the spiritual eye (or true vision), is to accept the error temporarily, BUT ONLY as an indication that IMMEDIATE correction is mandatory. This establishes a state of mind in which the Atonement can be accepted without delay."

"Perhaps it will be helpful to remember that no-one can be angry at a fact. It is always an interpretation that gives rise to negative emotions, regardless of their seeming justification by what appear as facts."

"But it is true that the world must be looked at differently, if His promises are to be accepted. What the world is, is but a fact. You cannot choose what this should be. But you can choose how you would see it. Indeed, you must choose this."

"How can a fact be fearful, unless it DISAGREES with what you hold more dear than truth? Reason will tell you that this fact is your RELEASE."

"The body is merely a fact. Its ABILITIES can be, and frequently are, over-evaluated. However, it is almost impossible to deny its existence. Those who do are engaging in a particularly unworthy form of denial."

"What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything which happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life."

Ok let's break down this passage and find out what it's saying.

"A miracle is a correction."

Before the correction, your mind is in a state of confusion, darkness ego. You are on a lower rung of the ladder. The correction corrects your mind and raises you up to a higher rung on the ladder. The false belief, mistaken perception, block to awareness, denial etc is "corrected" ie healed, and your mind opens up to some light. This alters your perception indirectly.

"It does not create, nor really change at all. It merely looks on devastation, and reminds the mind that what it sees is false."

Being "like drops of healing rain", miracles are a little bit like detergent or soap for your mind. The correction actually comes from a higher level, e.g. the eyes of christ or through Jesus or Holy Spirit. The miracle shines or blesses or soaks into the "corrupted thought", the illusion, the false belief, the darkness, and "fixes it". Cleans it up. Gets rid of the blockages and dirt in the mind. To remind your mind that illusions are false, it lifts your awareness up towards forgiveness, into the light, where you have the correct perspective ie the state of forgiveness. They heal you so that you can recognize what is true and false rather than being confused. It doesn't have to add anything to do this (other than love which was lacking - "miracles supply a lack" of love/life).

"It undoes error, but does not attempt to go beyond perception, nor exceed the function of forgiveness. Thus it stays within time's limits."

So this takes place in your mind within the range of perception between false and true perception. You start out perceiving and believing falsely and the miracle drips into your mind and heals the error, undoes the blockage or confused belief, and raises the mind up toward the atonement. It can't lift you up any higher than perception will go ie up towards atonement/forgiveness because all they do is essentially "remove ego."

"Yet it paves the way for the return of timelessness and love's awakening, for fear must slip away under the gentle remedy it gives."

Note that Jesus elsewhere states that "healing is NOT a miracle." Nor are shifts in perception, which are temporary effects. Miracles in fact are like nuggets of light, sparks, impulses, energy, love-power-bubbles, which come down from a higher level and heal the mind, lifting it up and returning it to life ie resurrection. Miracle are the REMEDY, which cause healing and shifting to occur, but miracles are independent of the healing or shifts. They are not the healing itself, they are the "healer" or healing agent. They prepare the mind for being in a state of salvation by gradually erasing all the ego junk and setting you free. They also can be transferred, given, sent, broadcast to others like a little package of life-force, causing resurrection.

"A miracle contains the gift of grace, for it is given and received as one. And thus it illustrates the law of truth the world does not obey, because it fails entirely to understand its ways."

For miracles to occur, or for you to "do them", you have to GIVE them ie to extend love. You cannot give miracles without receiving them also, and you cannot receive them unless you are willing to give them. Giving miracles to others, ie extending christ love, blesses both of you, and lifts you both up, and benefits both the giver and the receiver simultaneously. When you send love to someone, you will feel invigorated and lightened. You can't love without being loved. Nor can you perform miracles unless you are willing to also be healed. This is the opposite to the world's laws which say that you receive without giving or give without receiving, as in the unhealed healer.

"A miracle inverts perception which was upside-down before, and thus it ends the strange distortions that were manifest."

This is an important part about body healing. Perception is upside down or backwards, when what is true is mistaken for what is false and vice versa. Levels become confused, and e.g. the lower level is thought to cause the higher, or body causes mind, or world/dream causes the dreamer. This is corrected because the distorted beliefs are undone (victimhood etc) and the mind is healed, thus perception changes as a RESULT of mind healing. Note that what you perceive comes from what you project FIRST, which comes from what you believe and value as true FIRST. Perception has no causal power in it, it's passive, like reading a book. Note that "perception is a RESULT not a cause".

In addition, the "strange distortions that were manifest" includes THE BODY'S PHYSICAL SICKNESS, because an unforgiving mind FORCES the body into sickness and death. The body becomes "distorted" by the mind through kind of "mind-force fields", which act on the body when coming from unloving attitudes and "hurt" the body, distorting it into forms of sickness, away from the body's "natural" blueprint of healthy functioning. When the mind is having upside-down/backwards beliefs/perceptions, it is believing in sin and attack, is projecting onto the body, and is using the body as a weapon. Thus the body becomes sick. As mind is receiving/giving a miracle, mind is healed, the remedy is provided, perception auto-adjusts as a result, AND the "strange distortions that were MANIFEST (visible)" in the body are also corrected. They simply are reversed and disappear because the mind stops holding the body in a twisted formation and lifts away all attack from it, thus healing it and restoring it. "Now is the body healed by miracles."

So moving upwards towards forgiveness, receiving healing, being corrected, having false beliefs undone, moving into the light and love, heals the mind, fixes perception, and then ALWAYS results in the body being healed. Or rather, "un-attacked".

"For this one answer TAKES AWAY the cause of every form of sorrow and of pain."

"It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible."

"Now in the hands made gentle by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays a picture of a DIFFERENT you. It is a picture of a body still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all."

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

The miracles don't "do" something to the body so much as they CEASE the ego doings that were attacking it and which were BLOCKING love from shining on the body to heal it. And without constant ego distortion the body image "reverts" to its undistorted form. To me it's kind of like the body has a standard healthy form and then mind "twists, bends, distorts it" making it appear differently (as sickness), but if you remove the distorting/force-fields/mind-bending you're simply left with the healthy body showing up.

"Now is perception open to the truth. Now is forgiveness seen as justified."

Once the miracle has done its healing, mind is corrected so perception is in line with truth and forgiveness is seen as the only sane way to see things. Unforgiveness is what has been undone. Remember "the miracle does nothing. It merely takes away..." (which is kind of a doing) and it removes the distortions... it does appear thus to DO something, it does heal the body as well, it's just that it does it by UNDOING the ego influence and cancelling the evil distortions.

"Forgiveness is the home of miracles. The eyes of Christ deliver them to all they look upon in mercy and in love. "

Here Jesus is kind of shifting gears and is no longer talking about how miracles heal and move you up towards forgiveness, but is now talking about where miracle actually COME FROM - from the top down. e.g. "Miracles are a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers." Being IN forgiveness, having RECEIVED a miracle, and your mind now being CORRECT, YOU now "deliver them" to all you look on and miracles become effortless EXPRESSIONS OF LOVE which have miracle-working capabilities, because love heals and undoes error. You can now bestow miracle onto others from a christ-minded state of love and GIVE the miracles you have received.

Note that this raises the question, who does or where does the miracle come from when you personally are in a state of hell? Apparently you are not able to DO them until you are loving enough and close enough to christ. "Miracles are everyone's right but purification is necessary first." WHO bestows miracles on you when YOU are in the dark? Is it a healing that comes from the Holy Spirit? Does Jesus inject healing into your mind, like he says he does? "I inspire all miracles" etc. Certainly your distorted ego is not a miracle worker, nor is any beginner to the course. Yet you are able to find healing through forgiveness and purification work, most of this purification work is I think NOT a miracle.

"Miracles ENTAIL (require, before beginning to do them), a sudden shift into vertical perception." Vertical perception is christ vision. You have to be pretty advanced in your own mentally healed state in order to be able to DO them. In order to receive them you have to be able to GIVE them. So somehow you have to get yourself "high enough" first, and that takes purification work.

... skipping a couple paragraphs...

"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 resurrection devices. They heal the mind and lift it up towards atonement. They literally GIVE LIFE where it was lacking, reversing the signs of death. The natural side effect is the cessation of ego attack, which eliminates the present-moment projection of body distortions and thus immediately heals all sickness and raises the dead. Every miracle increases life. "Miracles mean life, and God is the giver of life". Every miracle is a resurrection. "Miracles raise the level of communication." "Miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead". By giving/receiving loving healing through expression/extension of love, where "miracles are a spark of life", the SPARK or POWER inherent to love is given and blesses and CAN REVERSE DEATH.

The ultimate result of miracles naturally is that there is nothing left TO UNDO, because everything has been healed, and so their PURPOSE comes to an end as the world is undone and all sickness is eliminated and all death cancelled. Before this ending, bodies become healed and now symbolize ONLY LIFE and become incapable of death, because "the mind being sane heal the body." And now the body is used for Christ/Holy Spirit purposes, representing LIFE and HEALING, and is a walking demonstration of miracle mindedness, now able to give the same miracles to others.

"An idol is a false impression, or a false belief; some form of **anti-Christ** which constitutes a gap BETWEEN the Christ and what you see."

So anti-christ or "the world of idols" is some kind of wall that you interpose between you and Christ/face of Christ. And this wall is AGAINST or opposed to and blocking of Christ - the world is the anti-christ.

"An idol is a wish, made tangible and given form, and thus perceived as real, and seen OUTSIDE the mind."

So you have this wishful thinking ie ego belief illusion, which you see as outside the mind, which takes on FORM. ie, these ideas appear as physical objects, and they're seen as being outside the mind/body. They form the world, the form of the physical matter.

"Yet they remain ideas, and CANNOT leave the mind that is their source. Nor is their form apart from the idea it represents."

e.g. the body is a form. Other people's bodies are forms, and you see these as outside your mind, because your mind is having wishful anti-christ thoughts about your brothers. And this wish to see them as not christ shows you a body which blocks your awareness of their Christ nature.

"All forms of anti-Christ oppose the Christ. And fall before His Face like a dark veil which SEEMS to shut you off from Him, alone in darkness."

So now the physical objects, the forms, which are the anti-Christ or against Christ ("the world was made as a picture of the crucifixion of God's son" - ie, a picture of Christ having been attacked). The physical world falls like a dark veil - a solid wall of matter - which shuts you off from Christ. The physical universe is this veil, it is the veil over the face of Christ which blocks your vision, seen as outside of your mind/body and in-between you and Christ.

"Yet the light is there. A cloud does not put out the sun. No more a veil can banish what it seems to separate, nor darken by one whit the Light Itself."

The face of Christ is BEHIND this wall of flesh, bones, bodies, planets, objects, still there, able to be seen with Christ Vision/true perception, but first the VEIL OF MATTER (sin/anti-christ) must be removed or be seen through (overlooked) in order to see PAST it to the Christ. ie the anti-christ has to get out of the way, meaning your beliefs and wishful thinking have to get out of the way, so that you can stop seeing the world of bodies/anti-christ/veil and instead see Christ. "Forgiveness (christ vision) does not look upon bodies."

"I came to tell them that death is an illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion."

Let's say the body is nothing more than an 3D IMAGE which the mind is projecting outward to make "visible." Like a movie projector. The image is shining outward and only shows up while the mind is projecting it.

Now.

Is the image alive?

Would you feed an image? Does it need water?

Would you try to protect an image from the weather?

Would an image be able to age or grow old or die?

Would you be able to attack an image?

Could an image become corrupted or broken or damaged?

Would an image be subject to laws of physics like gravity?

Is there any causal power in all the universe that could do anything to change that image?

If it's just an image, and if the mind is making it appear, and nothing you can do can affect the MIND ie you can't stop the movie projector from projecting, then surely the image of the body is absolutely unchangeable if the mind decides that this be so? And no matter what seems to happen, nothing affects the image because it only comes from the mind? Even if there's a nuclear explosion nearby, the next "frame" of the movie is simply projected in the next instant making the body seem totally unaffected?

The body is just an illusion. It is an image being projected by the mind. It has no real purpose, substance, reality, live, will, mind, causality, nothing. It's just an image. A hologram.

The last time you watched a movie, for the second time, did you get a different movie? Did the movie "age" and become sick? Did the movie need feeding? Or did you see the exact same movie? Because the SOURCE of the movie did not change the OUTPUT, right?

If you do not attack the image with your mind, and you do not make the image BE an image of sickness or death, is it possible for the image to be anything other than what you choose to project?

When you believe or think that the image you are projecting IS WHO YOU ARE, that it is your identity, that is when you have moved into the ego and are now confused and lost. It is in this identification with the image that you lose sight of your true self, become deluded and self-deceiving, and don't realize that nothing can affect YOU who are not a body, and start to fear that the body AS YOU is vulnerable. Yet the only thing that CHANGES the body is your mind - this is the secret of salvation - you do it all to yourself.

What you use the body for it becomes. Let's frame it differently. What intent you have behind projecting a body, determines what kind of body you project. If you want to attack, you create an image of an body with "attack in it", and this attack shows up as a different appearance than if you made a body just to communicate love.

When the body is ONLY showing a representation of Christ/love, it does not show up with any self-made attack or intentions or harm. Then the body seems "lovely", as Jesus refers to it. At least while it is useful to keep showing one. And when you are doing pretending to be a body, you will just stop projecting it, and it will disappear.

When the mind has become fully spirit identified and free from believing it is a body, it is now free from the delusion of form or separation, and yet CAN STILL project a body if it wants to. This is what Jesus demonstrated when he reappeared a body. "The mind that made the body can make another." Yet in the making of it, he is not deceived by it. This is also why you can still call upon the "image" of those who have gone beyond the body. The body simply becomes "optional", and unnecessary, except for teaching purposes.

We have many names for death. Headaches, cancer, diabetes, wounds, heartache, unhappiness, grief, lack, depression, insanity, all of it is really death. According to ACIM anything even slightly less than total immortality - eternal life - is a form of death.

"Death is a thought which takes on many forms, often unrecognized. It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety or doubt; as anger, faithlessness and lack of trust; concern for bodies, envy, and all forms in which the wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you. All such thoughts are but reflections of the worshipping of death as savior and as giver of release."

We have categorized all these sicknesses as if to say there is an entire hierarchy of illusions, some more severe or more dangerous or more total. But they are all one thing, really. Fear of cancer is really fear of death. A cold is a small death. Being sad is death. Anything which moves us away from eternal life is attempted suicide. Any slight lack of absolute joy and worthiness is a sense of having died.

So it's not like, you've just got an issue with a certain kind of sickness, or an inherited specific problem, or a propensity to contract certain issues in certain situations. It's all really one thing. One illusion, all of it is death, and it has only one solution.

"Without the idea of death there is no world."

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end?"

Each time we are unhappy we're moving into death. Each time we're afraid of sicknesss we're moving closer to death. Each time we hold a grievance we want some death. Each time there's a slight twinge of annoyance we're going into death mode.

When we are as God created us, willing to be only that, we are immortal. "You are immortal and you cannot die." And that immortality is accompanied by God's will, joy, love, eternal life, peace, happiness, constant perfection, holiness, creation, etc. These are our natural birthright, given by God. When we move in any way against these things or reject or deny them we are attempting death.

"All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the fear of awakening. They are attempts to reinforce UNCONSCIOUSNESS out of fear of CONSCIOUSNESS. This is a pathetic way of TRYING NOT TO KNOW by rendering the faculties for knowing ineffectual. "Rest in peace" is a blessing for the living, not the dead, because rest comes from waking, not from sleeping. Sleep is withdrawing; waking is JOINING."

Each time we move into unconsciousness in some way, into some kind of life-denying rejection of love and joining, a breakdown in our holy relationship, we are trying to bring about death by making ourselves UNAWARE of the truth. This unawareness, attempted unconsciousness, is attempted death and attempted murder. It's not in our best interests, although ultimately it's just a dream and not a reality. But dreams can be nightmares to those who don't want life.

A Course in Miracles is a course in life. A return to immortality. Resurrection from a state of death. We are literally coming back to life, coming home to eternity, and returning to immortality in God.

"Sickness is but a "little" death; a form of vengeance not yet total. Yet it speaks with certainty for what it represents. The bleak and bitter picture you have sent your brother, YOU have looked upon in grief. And everything that it has shown to him have you believed, BECAUSE it witnessed to the guilt in him, which you perceived and loved. Now in the hands made gentle by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays a picture of a DIFFERENT you. It is a picture of a body still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all. IT witnesses to the eternal truth that you can not BE hurt, and points BEYOND itself to both YOUR innocence and HIS."

"You are immortal and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do."

In the ego's physical world, the form and the function of something are fixed.

You can use a pair of scissors to cut paper, but you can't use a pair of scissors to alleviate your hunger. You can use a screwdriver to screw in a screw, but you can't use it to water your crops. You can use a toilet to flush some poop, but you can't use the toilet to cook your dinner (hopefully).

Physical objects, forms, have a fixed function. This is because the ego is a fixed device. It is something you made with a single FUNCTION, and that function is fixed. Its purpose is specific and limited and unchanging. It was made as a device to oppose God. It was made to "see" God from a completely opposite vantage point and perceive God as though God is false, and that therefore death is true.

It was designed to fulfill that function, and just like any other "tool" that you use, it is just another tool which has one function and one function only. You can't turn it into something else and you can't make it do things it was not designed to do. Because the ego is "this world", forms in this world are fixed in their function also, and can only be used according to their properties or functions.

Your only choice with the ego is whether you pick it up and USE it, or whether you put it down and stop using it. You cannot change it into the truth. You cannot bring it with you into Heaven. You can't transform it to make it more spiritual. You can't convince it that God's truth is true. You can't make it listen or change its ways. It is a fixed-function tool that only does one thing and never will do anything else.

When you are identified with this tool and think it is your SELF, you will attempt to change IT whenever you are attempting to change YOU, and it can't change. It will object and see this as an attack and a threat. It will produce an ego rebound, because it does not want to and cannot wake up, and it cannot see the truth or understand it or accept it. The part of you that is still USING it does not want and cannot accept the truth "through" it, and that part of you will see your attempts to awaken as an attempt to destroy yourself. i.e. to destroy your illusory "function".

The only real choice for "becoming more spiritual" is to drop the ego and stop using it, stop listening to it, stop identifying with it, stop trusting it, stop believing it, stop living through it, stop perceiving with it, and stop trying to make it be real. You cannot keep it. You have to let it go. To surrender everything that it tries to do. And that also means giving up ITS illusory spiritual path which is nothing more than exchanging one set of illusions for another.

To become more aware of the truth about you, you need to bring into question whether the ego you trust is really the truth, discern that it is false, recognize it as false, and decide to accept the real truth as it is without your ego filtering it. The ego plays no part in that, and it's purely your decision to realize that your false identity is not your true self, that you are more than you appear to be, that you are not anything the ego describes or judges, and that your true nature has not been changed by your use of the ego device.

Your awakening then is a shift in IDENTITY, given that who you thought you were is not really who you are, and is not the whole of who you are. You are more than you are aware of. You are more than the ego sees. You are more than your body. You are more than a separate person split off from everyone else and from the universe. And you are more than this universe. You are the Son of God - the singular total full expression of everything God is everywhere.

Lies do not become the truth. Fear does not become reality. Death does not replace life.

The truth is that this world is merely an EFFECT, coming from the mind, and mind is the only cause.

Since the world is only an effect, we are deluded when we believe that it has some kind of causal power. We look at the things that seem to happen and we say, this caused that, and that caused this, but this is not true. Effects are not really causing anything.

To recognize the world is nothing but an EFFECT, is to recognize that its seeming ability to cause things is only an illusion. You as the dreamer of the dream are NOT being caused by the dream. You are cause, the dream is the effect.

This means if the world can't cause anything, it has no power, it can't create, it can't change what you are, it can't act against your will, it can't do anything to you, it can't hurt you, it can't make you sick or suffering or dead.

Effectively, the world IS NOT CAUSING YOU AT ALL. It is literally not doing anything whatsoever.

You are only ever caused by God - forever an effect of God. Gladly what God chooses that you be, is good, and gives you eternal life and happiness. You are caused by God, you are not caused by the world. The world is doing nothing to you at all.

"The world may seem to cause you pain. And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause. As an effect it cannot make effects."

"There is no point in lamenting the world. There is no point in trying to change the world. It is incapable of change because it is merely an effect. But there is indeed a point in changing your thoughts about the world. Here you are changing the cause. The effects will change automatically."

"It costs the world we see, for the world will never again appear to rule the mind. For with this recognition is responsibility placed where it belongs; not with the world, but on him who looks on the world and sees it as it is not. He looks on what he chooses to see. No more and no less. The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did."

"You may cause a dream, but never will you give it real EFFECTS. For that would change its CAUSE, and it is this you CANNOT do."

"The miracle establishes you dream a dream, and that its content is not true. This is a crucial step in dealing with illusions. No-one is AFRAID of them, when he perceives HE MADE THEM UP. The fear was held in place BECAUSE he did not see that he was AUTHOR of the dream, and not a figure IN the dream."

"He CANNOT doubt his dreams' reality BECAUSE he does not see the part he plays in MAKING them, and MAKING them seem real. No-one can waken from a dream the world is dreaming FOR him."

There are two sets of tools. The ego has a set of tools, and the Holy Spirit has a set of tools.

When we are paying attention to the ego, in any given situation where we think something is a problem, we will reach into the ego's toolkit and pull out our favorite tools. We'll use them almost without question. For some reason, we think they will work, even though they usually don't. And we will apply them without even realizing we're doing so.

We might use denial, or rationalization, or justification, or aggression, or conflict, or attack, or projection, or scapegoating, or intellectualizing, or fear, or victimhood, or a guilt trip, or blame, or whatever it is, to try to find 'salvation' - to be saved from the problem.

The trouble is the ego's tools don't really work, and even though they say on the advertising they will solve the problem, they don't. They usually make the problem worse, in the big picture, while making it *seem* like they're working in the little picture. But they're very sneaky because the marketing hype is incredibly convincing and they're never what they appear to be.

We need another set of tools. We need the Holy Spirit's toolbox, and we need to be willing to reach for those tools when things are going to shit. But this might not seem easy. We are accustomed to almost habitually reaching for the ego, to 'use' it, to solve our problems. It's our trusty toolkit, we rely on it, we depend on it, we believe in it, we're attached to it like a favorite, and we don't want to part with it because we think it's valuable.

It's really up to you, do you want to use the ego, or use Holy Spirit?

Which one works?

Which one actually accomplishes a solution that you can live with and feel good about, which restores peace and brings a smile back to your face?

Part of the problem here is that we do not recognize what the tools are. We don't realize what tools we are using, yet alone whether they belong to the ego's toolkit or not, and yet alone knowing that there's a whole other set of tools at our disposal.

This is why we need to a) learn what the ego's tools are and how they operate, b) learn how we use them and why we use them and notice when we use them, c) look at whether they actually work - what the results are and whether we really want those results and why, d) what the Holy Spirit's tools are, e) what the results might be of using Holy Spirit's tools, and then f) actually learning to say no to the ego's tools and reach for the Holy Spirit's tools instead, especially in times of stress and upset.

"The body is the symbol of WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist."

The body is nothing. It's not something. It's not this or that or these states or conditions. It's not really well or sick. It's not alive or dead. It's actually nothing at all. It doesn't have a meaning or its own purpose. It doesn't have mind or will or causality or power. It doesn't really do anything. It's literally not really there.

When we believe that the body IS something, that it has reality, or has a mind or will, or causes things, or is doing something on its own, or has its own power, this is actually a distortion of the body. It's an attempt to force the body to comply with made up delusional rules and to be something it cannot be. This actually attacks the body and makes it sick. The mind is not accepting that the body is nothing, so instead it's really DENYING what the body is (ie nothing), which is a rejection of it, thus an attack.

To get the body to be healthy, the body has to be recognized as absolutely nothing. This is really forgiveness. The recognition of what is true. If the body is given any credit it does not have, in an attempt to defend it or keep it alive or make it be something, this actually destroys it. When its nothingness is recognized this actually takes all attack away and the body is restored to health. Trying to make the body out to be a real body, or a something body, or a working body, or a living body etc, actually brings about death.

The body is not supposed to be loved, OR hated. You're not supposed to have any real relation to it at all, because it's not there. It's not supposed to be given ANY meaning, either positive or negative. You don't hear this much in ACIM circles or spiritual disciplines. The idea that the body is actually nothing, neutral in a sense, and not biased positively OR negatively.

Jesus refers to the body in the course as not being able to BE sick. That's because it is NOTHING. It isn't a something, so it can't have properties of any kind. It's like an empty image of a body. It's the lack of the presence of spirit, shall we say.

It's the absence of God like a shadow on a wall. Its nothingness means it of itself cannot really be sick or healthy. But the mind that believes the body is real MAKES the body appear to be in sickened forms. Believing in bodies attacks them because it's an attempt to make them be something they're not.

We might think that spirituality is about only being positive, or only denying the negative. But Jesus isn't saying the world or body are fundamentally negative. He's saying they are NOTHINGNESS, pretending to be something. And that's very different from being negative. Their nothingness has to be recognized which means ALL attributes, positive OR negative, have to be taken away. That's why the body cannot be really endowed with attributes of Christ OR the ego. It is nothing at all.

"Sickness is a demand the body be a thing that it is not. Its NOTHINGNESS is guarantee that it can NOT be sick. In your demand that it be MORE than this lies the idea of sickness."

"The body that is asked to be a god WILL be attacked, because its nothingness has not been recognized. And so it seems to be a thing with power IN ITSELF. As something, it CAN be perceived, and thought to feel and act, and hold you in its grasp as prisoner to itself. And it CAN fail to be what you demanded it to be."

"As something, is the body asked to be God's enemy, replacing what He is with littleness and limit and despair. It is HIS loss you celebrate when you behold the body as a thing you love, or look upon it as a thing you hate"

"His body's nothingness releases yours from sickness and from death."

"To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear."

"For holiness is POSITIVE, and the body is merely neutral. It is NOT sinful, but neither is it sinless. As nothing, which it IS, the body cannot meaningfully be invested with attributes of Christ OR of the ego. EITHER must be an error, for both would place the attributes where they cannot BE. And BOTH must be undone, for purposes of truth."

One of the difficult things about trusting Holy Spirit is the idea of 'showing up' empty handed and not knowing what the heck to do, and yet things still working out 'in the moment'.

Usually our minds are filled with all kinds of predictive, planning thoughts which try to know, beforehand, what needs to be known in order to do whatever it is that needs to be done, at the time. And we won't budge if we don't know what's going to happen first, because we're afraid.

When Holy Spirit asks me to write my book for example, I hesitate with thoughts like "I don't know what to write" or "what will I write about". And then Holy Spirit will keep on reminding/suggesting, "book, book, book". And I will keep on protesting mentally, "what shall I do". What He really wants me to do is to just stop the mental chatter and sit down and start writing AND THEN in the moment, in the flow, in the spontaneous present, HE IS THERE, and He helps me write.

So then it ends up being, I didn't need to know, by myself, what to do beforehand, because by `just doing it` was an invitation to Spirit to join with me in the PRESENT and support me and help me spontaneously and unrehearsed.

Going to do something when you have to put aside all notion of knowing what it is you will do, and all plans, and all sense of "I can only do this IF I know what will do"... its very exposing. It makes me feel empty-handed and blindfolded and clueless. It doesn't exactly support a concept of ego confidence. It's more like, I have to `just do it` anyway with a tremendous call to have COURAGE and FAITH and TRUST.

So when Holy Spirit is urging you to do something, I think we have to remember to trust that He WILL be there in the moment with us and He WILL be helping us and he WILL be working through us. It's like you have to take the leap first AND THEN the wings appear. You act 'as if' you will have all the support in the world and then it shows up.

This is difficult to learn, because I'm so used to ... hah... being in control. Lol, (thanks HS for that insert). So used to being in the drivers seat and relying on prior learning (the past) and thinking (lol) that I can only do anything if it's been premeditated and planned out. This is an ongoing lesson for me and probably for many people, because the ego is basically the thing that comes between surrender/letting go and being too afraid to make a move when you can't yet see the safety net - a safety net that you don't even really NEED when Holy Spirit goes with you. "If you knew Who walks beside you on the way that you have chosen, fear would be impossible" - ACIM

The ego doesn't understand how to put trust/faith/spirit first and to expect support from outside of itself. It doesn't know how to let itself be abundantly supported or to be included in a bigger plan not of its own making. Holy Spirit has a plan. But it calls for us to step OUT of our own plan and our own controls - letting go of controlling all outcomes - so that we can step into the spontaneous flow of Spirit directing us and moving through us and healing through us. Which reminds me of this wonderful ACIM quote:

"I am here only to be truly helpful.

I am here to represent Him Who sent me.

I do not have to worry about what to say or what to do,

because He Who sent me will direct me.

I am content to be wherever He wishes, knowing He goes there with me.

I will be healed as I let Him teach me to heal." - ACIM

To just show up, ready, willing, available, to be directed and used by Spirit, with no prior agenda, with perfect willingness and readiness, as an agent of God, without necessarily knowing or needing to know who/what/where/why/how ... that's what I/we need to get to. To go around doing God's will, working miracles, healing people, teaching and inspiring people, being moved by Spirit and supported in 'supernatural' ways. We need to learn to trust in Spirit's support and that, if we leap first, then we will find the power to fly.

"The truth is true and nothing else is true"

Here's the facts.

1) God established what is true, forever. It is permanent and cannot be changed by anyone.

2) You have only two options.

a) Accept that it is true and be glad that the truth is loving.

b) Reject the truth and pretend it is not true and suffer.

You have no other choice. Acceptance or denial.

Acceptance aligns you with Life. Denial aligns you with death.

When we reject the truth and go into denial, we simply are not willing to admit that we cannot change the truth. We start believing that we can change it, and that we have. That's the idea of sin and it puts us into ego thinking. It's also the authority problem because now we believe we can change God.

This is a very uncomfortable truth for the ego. It literally means up there on the hill there is a shining light which shines forever, and either you can go there and be part of the light or you can hide away in a cave and pretend it's not there. But nothing you can do can stop it shining.

This means you are POWERLESS OVER GOD. You are powerless over truth. And you are powerless to change reality. "Nothing real can be threatened."

To admit this takes great willingness to surrender all egotism, all opinions, all other viewpoints, all independent efforts to decide what the truth IS, and entails a total letting go of the protest against reality. That means giving up fighting with the truth. It means stopping this insane effort to DENY that it is true and to try to make it go away.

To hide from it and to block it out of awareness produces a state of "un-consciousness" or un-awareness, also known as death. Death is the denial of the truth, the denial of life, and represents an unwillingness to admit or demonstrate that you are immortal.

We have to come out of our dark hiding place and into the light but we will only do that by dropping the ego and being VERY VERY HONEST with ourselves, radically honest, in admitting that WE CANNOT CHANGE THE FACTS. We cannot change the truth. We cannot change what God established. We cannot change what God created us to be. And therefore we MUST still be as God created us to be.

This is why the curriculum ends in the Atonement, which entails TOTAL ACCEPTANCE OF THE TRUTH. The key word there is "acceptance". It means the total surrendering of all denial, the absolute complete letting go of the authority problem, relinquishing all attempts to DENY that the truth is true, and being FULLY willing to simply ALLOW God to be God.

It's almost a moment where you'll say, okay God, I give up, I surrender, you win. Except God isn't a dictator or tyrant. His will for you is perfect happiness. And that means that by surrendering to His will and His truth and His power you SHARE in it and enjoy perfect happiness, eternal life, and peace forever.

We simply do not have the option to ESTABLISH what the truth is. It is already established by God, it is permanent, it never changes, and nothing of the ego can modify it. Either we are squirming all over the place trying to avoid admitting to it, or we are coming to it quietly and gently and accepting it with holiness and willingness. And God welcomes us home.

"Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true and nothing else is true. This you have heard before, but may not yet accept both parts of it. Without the first the second has no meaning, but without the second is the first no longer true. Truth cannot have an opposite. This can not be too often said and thought about. For if what is not true is true as well as what is true, then part of truth is false, and truth has lost its meaning. Nothing but the truth is true, and what is false is false.

This is the simplest of distinctions, yet the most obscure. But not because it is a difficult distinction to perceive. It is concealed behind a vast array of choices which do not appear to be entirely your own. And thus the truth appears to have some aspects that belie consistency, but do not seem to be but contradictions introduced by you."

... "Now do we join in glad acknowledgment that lies are false and only truth is true."

You can create an illusion of being responsible, by positioning yourself as being angry and upset about what other people are doing. You can make yourself seem like you are responsible by standing up for people's rights or agreeing with the ways that certain people are very wrong.

This paints a picture of you as a hero and savior and as someone who does not believe in mis-treatment and so on, but is also hipocritical and irresponsible given it gives you opportunity to accuse and condemn and judge.

You can seem like a very responsible, caring person who is deeply upset by the hurtful things people do, that your fellow man is mis-treated by society or that certain politicians are trying to destroy the world. But this is all a fake responsibility.

You are not responsible unless you are being responsible for yourself and for what you are doing to yourself, for the ways that you are using others by scapegoating them, the ways that you judge and condemn and project your own hidden guilt, and are owning up to being Christ. Owning up to what you have been doing to yourself and passing off as what other people are doing. That's real responsibility.

You don't win any points for finding other people guilty or being outraged or angry or placing the blame somewhere. That's selective judgement. Selective blame. Some set of people get to be very very wrong while other people get to be very very right. It's a huge trap and it's hugely dishonest.

This always happens when you believe the world is real and you want to find a way to be more spiritual or innocent or pure or good or to uphold some high standard or ideal or higher ground. But there is no higher ground in an illusory world, it is all insane. The higher ground is beyond this world and recognizes that this world is not spiritual and it cannot be spiritualized by your ego.

What you may not realize is that your ego is split and by making some aspects of this world good and worthy and acceptable and other parts wrong and bad and unacceptable, you've fallen for the ego's primary trap of believing that SEPARATION is real. Separation between good people and bad people, between the righteous and the unworthy.

It doesn't matter which side you are on. It doesn't matter if you identify mostly with being goodie two-shoes, or some kind of dark evil monster. Both of them are false because they are both states of un-wholeness and exclusivity. They are both a lie from your ego. And those being all "good" and nice and so on are just as "evil" as the evil ones. They believe in separation and segragation, often even more than the rest of the crowd, and yet will constantly spout off about how segragation and conditional love are unfair or unwelcome.

You can't be right by judging judgers, or hating haters, or attacking attackers, or being angry at angry people, or hurting the hurtful. That's the ego's motto of an eye for an eye. There is absolutely no holiness there whatsoever. It's a fake holiness, a holier-than-thou attitude, a pretense that you are innocent when in fact you are just as guilty because you BELIEVE in guilt.

You can believe in guilt and accuse people of being guilty and believe that you're being pure and innocent by finding them guilty, but all this means is you believe strongly in guilt. You try to not appear to be THE ONE who is guilty, but you cannot HAVE a belief in guilt in your mind at the same time as a belief in holiness. And whatever you believe you will BE.

Rules cannot apply to other people separately from how they apply to you. Judgements cannot be given to others without judging yourself. You can't find someone else guilty without you believing that you are guilty. The righteous will go down in their own flames.

"Would you rather be right or happy?" - ACIM

Being happy can only come by not finding ANYONE guilty. Because other people ARE YOU. What applies to them applies to you. This is fundamentally different than seeing yourself as a SEPARATE person. Separation is attack, not holiness. So are you really escaping your own attack?

This includes the kittens and puppies and adorable farm animals and all the wild creatures of the earth, including the human bodies and aliens.

I would like to know if you find it difficult to let go of the idea that these "creatures" are real, that they are "alive", that they were somehow "made by God", or that they even exist, in terms of what the Course says?

For example "there is no world" and "there is no life outside of heaven" and "this is a dream of death" and so on. If this is true, all these things, these forms of matter, these objects which move around as if they are alive, being animated as illusions by the mind, they really do not exist or have "life".

As Jesus says even the human body is not alive. It doesn't really exist, it's not who you are, and it is an illusion. It is made of the idea of separation and death. So really it's more appropriate to say it's a "death form."

So now we have various creatures and plants and trees and so on which at times can appear to be lovely and all that. You can have love for them or be attached to them or want to protect them and save the environment etc. But... it's all an ego trap, right?

Over time my belief that physical objects are "alive" has had to come into question. There's two things being asserted and they can't both be true.

This is a cruel world which God did not create. If you go to youtube and watch some videos of wild animals maming and killing and eating each other, you can see that there is little "love" in that, and God couldn't possibly have created it. So is it life, or are these the creatures of hell?

What God creates lives forever. Is that true of anything in this world in particular? Pretty much nothing. "There is NO LIFE outside of heaven." So this world, which is the idea of being outside of heaven, is not life, right? So what is it? It's an illusion of nothing, depicting an idea of death.

"The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son." The whole world. All the matter, all the particles, all the separate things, all the creatures which feast on each other, all the beings that take away and must attack to continue living, and all the humans who must hunt and kill in order to avoid the ego dynamic of starvation.

Is this LIFE? here? ... this world? Is it ALIVE? really? Or is it simply a dream of death, where everything is MADE OF the idea of death and separation, masquerading as life and pretending to be alive? Is it not "the dry and dusty desert where starved and thirsty creatures come to die"? To "come to hate a while, wither and die"? A cruel world which LIFE could not possibly have created, which is part way between life and total death, and thus barely alive at all?

How about "this world holds NOTHING that I want"? Or "A teacher of God will gladly give up all the pleasures of the world"?

There may be some remaining semblance of life here. We cannot actually fully separate ourselves from God and even the illusions we make cannot be fully "outside the laws of God". Even these illusory forms must come from a mind which is alive enough to project them. They may have a little life left, but it isn't much. And it's nothing compared to heaven.

It's a sorry picture. But this world is really not what LIFE is like. It's not HOW life lives. It is not how life FUNCTIONS. It is run by ego laws of death, competition and destruction. We like to stick a bow on it and wrap the dogs in clothes and make little play houses for the cats but hey... they die, right?

Their bodies can't be real. And the humans... their bodies also can't be real.

Immortality is of the soul, which God created, in heaven. That is where life is. That's real life. Eternal life. Life which cannot be changed or killed or hurt in any way. That's reality. That's where the LIFE is.

Forms, all forms, are "the form of error". They are depictions of separateness. Every single one of them. Are they life forms, or are they LIE forms? What is LIFE really?

When the world is seen with false perception, that is, with the body's eyes being believed and seeing nothing else, blinded by perception of form, the world seems like a dark prison and God is nowhere.

When you lift up and see with Christ Vision, or true perception, which is a spiritual seeing by the mind itself, not dependent on the body's eyes or on photons of light bouncing off surfaces, the world vanishes. The spiritual eye is love looking upon love, Christ looking upon Christ.

However, just before this, in the in-between stages, when you are working on your forgiveness, healing and purification, there is an intermediary "mix" between these two. The spiritual eye is coming online, but the body's sight is still believed to some extent.

What this produces is that the world, which is like a veil of sin hanging in front of Christ's face, becomes more transparent. It's forms are less believed, it's matter is less blocking.

All sense of real sin is being lifted away from its appearances. Guilt is being unprojected. And this makes the world appear to gradually become brighter, lighter, more lovely, more forgiven.

However, it's only possible for this "world in the process of being forgiven" to show up PRIOR to seeing the face of Christ in full. If you were to reach true perception, you wouldn't be able to see the world at all, because the veil lifts at the very top, at the last moment, becoming completely invisible.

In a way, we could say that what appears to be the visible world, the physical world, becomes gradually more invisible. And the seemingly invisible world, the real world, becomes gradually more visible. And as Jesus says, "you cannot see both worlds."

"This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS. For each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER. "

He also says that what you consider to be "false", you do NOT see, and what you consider to be TRUE, you do see. So if the real world is true, and Earth is false, which it is, then seeing the truth of the real world "blinds you" to seeing Earth.

So at the top, when you reach totally purified perception, the veil of physical matter, the granite block of sin, becomes fully transparent and disappears from sight. Like a dream that fades.

That "forgiven veil", is the forgiven world. By forgiving the world, you are shining it away. By forgiving it, you are overlooking it to the light beyond it.

"And it is given us to look past death and see the light beyond."

"And the mind that RECEIVES it, looks INSTANTLY beyond the body, and sees the holy place where IT was healed."

"Right-mindedness listens to the Holy Spirit, forgives the world, and through Christ's vision sees the real world in its place."

"Christ's vision has one law. It does not look upon a body, and mistake it for the Son whom God created. It beholds a light beyond the body."

The more you forgive the world and stop projecting sin onto it, the more forgiven it becomes. BUT ALSO, the more it disappears. It fades because it is not really there. This is why:

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies."

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK."

You cannot forgive something that is REAL. Forgiveness makes stuff disappear. You cannot forgive the world and KEEP it. Things you forgive are ILLUSIONS. "Illusions recognized must disappear." If you are to forgive the world, it MUST be an illusion. And it must disappear.

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

We need to learn to stop treating fear like it's just some kind of natural phenomenon, or a normal response, or some aspect of a biological flight-or-fight mechanism, or something that protects us from danger, or any of the other bullshit explanations for fear.

We actually need to question what fear is doing and why it is doing it, and where it's really coming from. It's all too easy to simply "be afraid", to experience the fear, without any kind of questioning of whether the fear is natural or needed or well founded.

Fear is the opposite of love. You can't be loving when you're afraid. Which would you rather be, loving or afraid? Which one is a more truth-filled experience?

It's one thing to become afraid and to think, well, I'm afraid "because of" a big long random list of outside influences that you think cause the fear. And to then be locked inside that perception with no apparent way out of it, since you believe that you are not the one who is choosing the fear at all.

But we can't do that. We have to bring fear into question, because fear is actually untruth. It is always a lie. There is never any good reason to be afraid. Fear is never justified. And fear is always a deceptive ego mechanism for making your situation worse.

We have to look at our "fearing" and take some responsibility for generating this condition. We have to be willing to admit that we are the ones who have actually created fear. We keep making it. We keep putting it in our experience. We keep choosing it. And we keep using it ON PURPOSE to play the part of victim so that we can get some side-benefits.

Fear allows us to disown responsibility. It allows us to seemingly shield ourselves from guilt. It lets us pretend that someone else is at fault. It allows us to label others as enemies and project guilt onto them. It lets us hide from God. It lets us have a separate identity that God did not create. And it allows us to pursue our 'dream' of being an individual. These are quite significant reasons for fear that we need to look at and own up to if we're to live a life without fear.

Is it possible to live with no fear? To be 100% fearless? Not like, some idiot that is over-confident and reckless and putting on a show of bravado while being secretly insecure... but the complete absence of all fear, and therefore, only the presence of unconditional love at all times? A love that is so certain and so secure that within it there can be no reason for fear? And no desire to choose it. Of course it is possible, as Jesus has demonstrated.

So don't think fear is just some natural biological or human thing. It's not. It's a state of mental illness. It is insanity. And it is a game that we keep playing with ourselves to pretend we're not who we are. There are some very sneaky reasons for having fear, and none of them are honest or truthful.

So when Jesus says "be not afraid", he isn't just saying, don't freak out when I appear out of nowhere, He's saying, stop choosing fear and recognize that love is the only reality. He's not telling us to be brave in the face of danger, he's telling us there IS no danger. And that any efforts we're making to go into fear without questioning it, are really a deception on our part. We don' need to be afraid because only love is real.

It is to clearly recognize when something is an illusion and when it is reality.

It is only because we have become convinced that illusions are real, that they have truth to them, and give them credit, that we are experiencing sleep.

Unconsciousness is denial, which is an attempt to not be aware of the factual truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Instead we have attempted to block the truth, so that we might have an opportunity to believe that something else is the truth, without the real truth distracting us or reminding us of what the truth is.

We had to hide from God, which seems like hiding God, in order to be as close as possible to forgetting the truth. Otherwise we could not possibly give even a moment's attention to illusions which are unreal.

We wouldn't be able to even potentially believe illusions are truth while the real truth was glaringly obvious, but with the real truth out of sight, illusions appear to be plausible.

Unawareness of the real truth makes it "easier" to believe in an illusion of truth. The purpose of the illusion then is to hide the real truth and substitute for it, replacing it with some other form of meaning.

Even though spiritual lessons may show up in a variety of forms and feature different people and problems, they are all still basically the same one lesson. They are all exercises in learning what is true and what is false. Learning to recognize an illusion for what it is, rather than make it real and react to it.

When we believe an illusion has truth to it, we will have a whole cascade of reactions and counter-perceptions which arise out of that fundamental sense of reality. We might think our lesson is to deal with those reactions or overcome them, but ultimately the lesson is only learning to "see through" the illusion.

To overlook the claim of an illusion and not see it as the truth, to not believe in it, and to not fall for its tricks, is simply an act of forgiveness. Forgiveness is therefore the answer to all lessons. To put it even more clearly, forgiveness is the ONLY answer to ALL problems. It is not one of many options, it is the only option.

To remain deluded is unforgiveness, judgement, and attack. To forgive is to learn to see clearly what the truth is, which will put everything into its proper perspective and show the illusion for what it is. When the truth is present, there is so much obvious evidence that the illusion is false, you can't help but recognize it as false. It's obvious, without any particular effort or skill needed to see it as such.

Forgiveness isn't an interpretation of illusions. It's not an attempt to twist your way of looking or to strain or make effort to see in a certain way. Forgiveness is completely effortless and natural. It looks upon illusions in stillness, doing nothing, and simply recognizing them for what they are. They are false. They are untrue. They are not reality.

This is how simple it all comes down to. Every lesson is a lesson in forgiveness. Every lesson presents illusions which you initially believe are true, are dangerous, are able to affect you, or prove that God is dead. Learning to sort out the evidence and become aware of a greater truth is the only way out of the lesson. Learning to discern true from false.

All lessons are learned the same way. Once forgiveness has come to establish a clear perception - true perception - of what the truth really is and what is false, the lesson is over, and the need for the lesson is over. Forgiveness is a permanent correction of sight.

To forgive or not to forgive, that is the question. Forgiveness is the answer.

(...and why a sick body means the mind has NOT been healed)

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use if for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies." - ACIM

Think of the body as a blank canvas, onto which you can paint a picture representing who and what you are.

If you are in the business of believing in sin, you will deny it and attempt to project blame onto someone else. Perceptually you will see them as causing you in some way, and simultaneously your mind MUST implement the "effects" of that causality onto yourself.

You therefore put in place, or paint a picture of, an identity which has been affected by something external. You show yourself as suffering, you position yourself as looking like you are sick, you damage yourself, and you take out this attack upon yourself. You do so in an attempt to show everyone that THEY did this to you.

It's really the insight that we implement the EFFECTS upon ourselves BEFORE we blame the cause of those effects onto something outside of ourselves. This also would tie into the fact that in this case, cause and effect have been reversed. We express effects of sickness, suffering, damage, etc in order to attempt to accuse others of doing this to us. We actually sort of wear the costume of looking like someone who has been hurt, and then walk around trying to find someone to blame for causing it.

Projection makes perception, and denial makes for projection. But how about.... we first believe we are attacked and implement the effects that the attack would produce, and then project the cause outward?

So what we do is, we make ourselves sick, we show ourselves as a picture of suffering, and we do this with the body. The body is our canvas, our "picture" of our Self, our identity. We make the body sick in order to accuse our brother of making us sick. We say, "hah, look at me, you did this to me you fucker. It's your fault."

The fact is, it's not possible to accuse another of doing something to you without YOU experiencing the effects. The ego says, no, if you do something to someone else you can escape the effects. But in truth, the mind does not work that way. Whatever applies to you applies equally everywhere. So in order to accuse someone of attack and sin, YOU must picture yourself as attacked and sinful.

YOUR body is like a picture which YOU hold up in order to show to OTHERS what you believe THEY are! It is not just a picture of yourself, it is a picture of BOTH OF YOU. This is because the body is a device for separation and that is two-sided, the selves on both sides are kept apart and affected equally - as within so without. The body then as a separation device is a picture of YOU AND YOUR BROTHER in a state of attack!

You can't hold up a picture of THEM and say, you're sinful and I'm not. Instead you hold up a picture of your "self" (the body) in an attacked state as if to say to someone else, "this is what you are". You're talking to yourself, accusing yourself, and picturing yourself as suffering.

So you can't accuse without attacking your body, meaning you're trying to USE the body to attack someone and the result is that your body MUST become a picture of attack, showing symptoms of a belief in attack. If it applies to your brother, it applies to you. You try to take them down, and take yourself down in the process. This is why all death is suicide. As Jesus says, use the body for attack like this and it will appear weak and it will die.

The opposite of this is that if you do not attack "through" the body, you do not project sin, you do not accuse yourself of sin, and you see the equal innocence of yourself and another, you will not "picture yourself" as attacked, and thus the body WILL SHOW a picture of you in a non-attacked condition. Your mind will project a body which is "healthy". It must.

When the body is not used for attack, and is used only to express/extend love, the body will appear "lovely", or a symbolic picture of a self which has no attack in it. Thus all signs of sickness and disease must vanish from it, and it will demonstrate what you believe is true. You can't project an image of a body which is sick while being truly in the truth, any more than you can project an image of a healthy body while your mind is attacking.

Essentially, this also leads to the realization that when someone dies, they literally have committed suicide, but they also have attempted to "attack with death". Their attempt to die is an attempt to accuse everyone of being dead, to affect everyone, to make everyone suffer as well, and is an attack on everyone. The body becomes a picture of death to show that the mind is using it for attack. It is like a suicide bomber or a kamikaze attacker who is attempting to throw their own body at their enemy in an attempt to eradicate them.

Death is the ultimate attempt to destroy EVERYONE as well as yourself, except that it is only yourself that ends up suffering. It's like saying, I so hate everyone and so believe in separation, that I am going to completely cut myself off from all Life and therefore shrivel up and be weak and die, because this is what I think of myself and you, and I believe that both of us should not exist. What applies to me applies to you, and if I am dead so you will be as well! But the result is that the person's body itself dies, and other people's do not.

Whatever you attempt to do to God, you do to yourself. If you believe that God should be dead, you will destroy yourself. If you try to kill God, you will kill yourself. If you try to make out that God is sinful, you will become sinful. If you try to assert that God does not exist and you have escaped from God's Life, you will die. God won't, you will. Just as other people will not die when you attempt to kill them with your death, but you will. You will do it to yourself. YOU CANNOT ATTACK WITHOUT HURTING YOURSELF FIRST. All attack is self attack, and all attack will destroy YOU and not your so-called enemy.

This is why this is so ridiculously obvious, that it is in YOUR BEST INTEREST not to find anyone sinful or guilty, because it MUST mean that you are sinful and guilty, and YOU will suffer terribly. What you do to another you do to yourself. What you accuse your brother of you have accused yourself of. And what you would have them experience, you will experience. You cannot escape from the law that what you do unto others you literally are directly doing to yourself. You cannot get away with murder without you dying as well. You should recognize it is in your best SHARED INTEREST to not hurt or accuse anyone else, because doing so directly hurts and accuses you.

If you attempt to hurt someone else without hurting yourself, you are buying into the ego's thought system, which is a lie, and you will still receive the effects of your own attack. It is the ego's grand illusion that something can apply to you without applying to others and vice versa. The truth will always be true, and the law will always be in place, that the only way to attack another is to attack yourself and show your attacked self to them, and they may not even be attacked at all. All attack separates you from the other, which protects them in a way. This is why attack on God did not affect God, but affected you greatly.

Death is a weapon that doesn't work. It is always an attempt to prove that someone other than yourself made you be dead, accusing them of sin. Sin is punishable by death alone, in the ego's thought system. To die is to make a statement that everyone is a sinner, all are evil, and they have caused you to die. No-one dies without being a victim, and no-one dies without accusing the world of doing it to them. This is also why death is futile, because it is self-destruction which has no real effect on anyone else and only makes yourself worse off. To choose it is insanity.

It's fortunate that in the metaphysics of truth, there is a kind of protection against death. The illusion of death cannot assail the kingdom of God. God cannot be affected by what is unreal. Attempted attack or death is actually a movement away from Life and a movement away from existence. It is withdrawal, not attack. All forms of attack or illusions of attack seem to be outward expressions but this is an illusion. All forms of attack are withdrawals away from everything. Death is a collapse away from Life, and therefore confines all of the effects of death to the one who dies, not to who they were attempting to make dead.

God has been completely unaffected by our attempts at using death to hurt him. God cannot be changed whatsoever. This is also why death is merely a state of denial. It is powerlessness, weakness, is completely ineffective, and literally does nothing. It is a state of a lack of all will to live, and therefore all will is absent from it, and as such it is a state of total unwillingness and can produce no real effects at all. It is not a cause at all, being purely a state of being at the effect of everything. How WEAK it is then, this weapon of death which is supposed to be the ego's most extreme form of attack possible... the stronger the attack, the weaker the attack. Death is the most pathetic attack of all, causing nothing real to happen.

We do not need to die. We do not need to be under attack. We do not need to be sick. We do not need to suffer. But if we want to be free of these things, we cannot be accusing ourselves and/or others of sin. We USE OURSELVES to show our brother what we are accusing them of, which turns us into shriveled up sickly prunes with no ability to do anything. We cannot escape our own wrath. Accuse others of causing sickness and you will be sick. Blame them and you will suffer in guilt. Try to get rid of God and you will get rid of yourself. Your body is your picture of your state of mind. All of its sicknesses MUST GO if you are to show that you fully believe in your innocence and invulnerability. To be invulnerable is to not be at the effect of anything in the world, and therefore not to PUT EFFECTS into your body.

You need not attack yourself today.

"You cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness. Show him that he cannot hurt you and hold nothing against him, or you hold it against yourself. This is the meaning of turning the other cheek." - ACIM

"3 Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus keeping it unreal for you."

Forgiveness does not react to problems you think are real and then try to fix them. Forgiveness ensures THERE ARE NO PROBLEMS TO FIX.

Simple isn't it? What forgiveness means, is that you simply are "being forgiving". That you have a forgiving attitude. An attitude in which you see correctly, you do not make illusions, you do not separate, you do not attack, you do not judge, you do not make sin real, and you simply observe clearly that nothing has happened.

This awareness of truth simply shows you the proof that there is no ego, there is nothing to really undo, there is not even really anything to forgive.

Forgiveness should NOT be an attempt to "fix" or "undo" stuff which seems to really exist. The things which seem to exist, as ego stuff, are illusions of things existing. These perceptions have ONLY come about as a result of FAILING to be forgiving.

"He who would not forgive must judge, to justify his failure to forgive."

Forgiveness is fore-giveness. It is a willingness to give love fully, at all times. That is what makes for a forgiving attitude, versus being "unforgiving" ie attacking. By constantly emitting truth and love and light, a forgiving mind simply does not MAKE errors. That means it does not MAKE ego.

It is only when we slip into being unforgiving that we MAKE the ego at all, and then it seems to show up as something that seems real, but still isn't. Through being unforgiving, we weave dreams, fiction and illusions.

It is not really then that you need to DO anything about any of the errors that you make, any of the mistakenness, or anything to do with the ego at all. The ego is not the problem. The problem is that you stopped being forgiving. Or simply, that you tried to be separate from God. That's the only problem. So returning to being with God, to being forgiving, is the solution.

Forgiveness then is not a process as such. It is a permanent attribute of the Son of God. Even after the world disappears and you're back in full awareness of God, you will still be forgiving. God is permanently forgiving. This has absolutely nothing to do with whether there is anything TO forgive as such. God does not "forgiven you because you did stuff". It's not a pardon. He forgives you forever knowing that you cannot sin. And it is the "privilege of the forgiven to forgive" meaning those who are in a state of forgiveness having accepted atonement are PERMANENTLY forgiving.

Forgiveness is not a matter of... well.. something has gone wrong, or someone sinned, and now I have to DO something to clean up the mess. That is not forgiveness. That is "forgiveness to destroy." That has made the problem real and now is fighting with the problem to try to make it go away. And who hasn't attempted to use the Course to make bad stuff go away? Or to "forgive other people for what they did"? It doesn't work because that isn't the real problem.

It's not about tackling the error itself directly. The error is an indirect side-effect of moving away from a forgiving attitude. The problem is not the error. The problem is the sense of separation from love/forgivingness. Returning TO a state of pure forgivingness ie love is the ANSWER which automatically will undo and disappear any of the errors which were manifest. And that is miraculous.

We really need to learn not to fight with illusions, but instead to drop the belief that you NEED to fight with them at all, to recognize that they are not the problem, that they are not even real and do not exist, and thereby return TO a mindset of a forgiving attitude.

A fore-giving mind gives ahead of time to ENSURE that there is no error made, that perception remains true, and therefore that ego simply is not MADE at all. There being no ego and no error, there is nothing TO forgive. But rather, forgiveness MAINTAINS a state of "having nothing to forgive".

Therefore when forgiveness is "complete", it means that all things which seemed to need to be forgiven are now forgiven, and it is really only that you are being forgiving NOW (and peramenently) that those errors appear to not be showing up any more. They are not showing up because you are not MAKING them, rather than that you really tackled "real substance" of ego stuff and manipulated it through some process to transform it.

The ego does not need to be undone, because it does not really exist in the first place. Rather, we need to simply come to RECOGNIZE that it does not exist, by stepping out of judgement (unforgivingness) and back into a forgiving attitude. A forgiving attitude looks and sees that there IS no sin, there is no ego, there is no separation, there is no reality to sickness or death, and literally nothing has happened.

Forgiveness and atonement and salvation are all words for the same thing.

So how do you "DO" forgiveness? You really don't. If you are DOING "forgiveness" (as a process) it is because you believe there is something to forgive, which means you are actually being unforgiving, and therefore your doing of forgiveness is really an attack - an attempt to make a "real problem" change. But what you DO need to, or seem to need to "do", is to become clear that there IS NOT ANYTHING TO FORGIVE, by correctly perceiving, and thus correcting perceptual errors so that you do not see stuff AS real sin.

To get to that place does appear to require a process or a transition, in which you question what it is you think needs to be forgiven, and LEARN WHY IT DOES NOT. ie, to learn to see it correctly and not in a distorted way, so that you can RECOGNIZE it for what it is, realize it was not a real attack, there has not BEEN any real effects, the causes you thought were causes are not causes, and withdraw from it all sense of belief that it even exists or has happened at all, and therefore completely circumvent the ego's insistence that there is a "real problem" to deal with.

The Holy Spirit does not fight the ego because He knows there is no ego. The Holy Spirit reminds us that what we THINK we need to forgive, does not exist, and therefore it IS forgiven.

We do not need to forgive other people, because they have NOT done what we thought they did and they are NOT being the source of OUR unforgiveness. They do not need to change at all. And we ourselves are also not in need of any real change, only recognition. We have not done what we thought we had done. It's an illusion.

We must learn to recognize it is NOT REAL and therefore what we THOUGHT we had to "deal with" or to "forgive" or "overcome" or "prevent" really isn't even there in the first place. We're not seeing correctly because we are in error, and we are in error ONLY because we are not being forgiving. We've bought into some lies. Lies are not solved by attacking the lies, they are solved by TRUTH.

You are already forgiven and you are already purely forgiving. God created you to be permanently forgiving, SO THAT there would never arise any kind of error or thing TO forgive, given that everything was already seen correctly as perfectly innocent. Everything else is "unforgiveness", judgement, attack, and so-called "ego", which does not really exist at all.

"The first chaotic law is that the truth is different for everyone. Like all these principles, this one maintains that each is separate, and has a different set of thoughts which sets him off from others. This principle evolves from the belief there is a hierarchy of illusions; some are more valuable, and therefore true. And each establishes this for himself, and MAKES it true by his attack on what another values. This is justified because the values differ, and those who hold them seem to be unlike, and therefore enemies."

-------

The truth is not something that we make up, decide upon, invent, have to "believe in", or have as a kind of personal preference. The truth does not come in a billion forms. There is only one truth, and that truth is set in stone forever by God. God is the creator of actual reality and no-one else. Not even His creations, his souls/sons, have the ability to change reality or to define what the truth is.

This means that when we are in the business of accepting the truth, we must also be in the business of putting aside personal opinion, a desire for a special or different or exclusive viewpoint, and in fact even the ownership of "this is my view". Beliefs only take you so far and are too personalized.

In this ego world, we are very accustomed to everyone seeming to have their own opinion. This is because everyone with an ego stands like a gatekeeper in between the truth, acting like a filter or go-between or authority, with a need to "approve" of anything being claimed. This is because the false ego authority wants to constantly define the truth, invent it, change it, decide what it is, author it, distort it and basically make-believe whatever it wants to.

As we move towards atonement, what HAS to happen is the relinquishment of this egocentric ownership of opinion making. The truth is true all by itself. We cannot define it, our only options are to either a) accept it or b) deny it. When we deny it we attempt to invent the truth ourselves, to reinforce it through beliefs, and to play at being God. This is egotism. But as we SURRENDER the ego, we are also becoming willing to give up on being the AUTHOR of the truth.

What this then leads to is that you become wiling to "take on" the "off the shelf" truth that God has established, to accept it, to allow it, to align with it, and to integrate it as "your own". Without changing it, we give up trying to fight with reality and instead settle in to accepting it. The reality as God has defined it, that is - the nature of the Kingdom.

This absolutely means that as we become more attuned with the real truth, the entire idea of "having an opinion" is being dissolved. Personalized, "everyone has their own truth" bullshit is dissolved. We become representatives of a truth that we did not invent. We become spokespersons for a truth that isn't an "interpretation". We allow the one truth to function through us and to organize our mind.

That means that over time, as we continue to awaken, the things that we express, the words we use, the statements we make, the documents we write, the various expressions that we perform, cannot be logically attributed to ourselves. When we express something we can no longer say that this is our own opinion. The truth, God's truth, is ONE truth, and it is FACTUAL REALITY. It cannot be argued with, it cannot be changed. As this truth becomes our truth, we stop being the "sole owner" of truth, of a personal opinion, and we instead become a reflection of God's truth.

So we then start to express things which are factually true, which are not an opinion, and which others can also either accept or deny. In many cases people will mistake your expressions for you having an opinion, it being just your beliefs, just your interpretations. They will argue that you are trying to be ego or right just because you have a sense of certainty. But the fact is that when you get with the facts, which HAS to be possible, and you are in accord with God's truth, you ARE CORRECT. Because you have accepted correction.

Some people will not like this especially when they have an ego and especially when they do not understand how any kind of truth could be "impersonal". The truth is something to be shared and joined with, not something to possess and control. As representatives of God, teachers of God act almost in the same way as the Holy Spirit who is the Voice for God. He speaks FOR God because He is "the same" as God and has no "different" opinion of His own. We listen to Him because we trust that the truth for Him matches God's truth. As a corrected individual, we too become voices for God, correctly representative of what is true.

It's important to then realize that because we are surrendering artificial truths, interpretations, opinions, beliefs, playing God, authority problems, false exclusive ownership etc, being spiritual does not remain a "personal" exercise. Moreso it means that you are becoming a salesperson for God, peddling His wares, sharing His contributions, relaying His messages, being His eyes and ears. You take on the eyes of Christ and cease to have "your own" separate viewpoint.

So when we are evaluating whether someone is just having a belief, or whether to listen to them, or whether it's all just opinion, or whether everyone's truth is different, we should remember also that those who DO have alignment with ACTUAL TRUTH, will appear to the ego to be egos claiming total righteousness, when in fact all they are doing is being a medium through which a truth BEYOND themselves is being expressed.

In the factual truth there ARE no opinions. There is no wiggle room. There are no exceptions. There are no loopholes. There is no uncertainty. There is nowhere that some kind of "maybe" comes into it. There's no room for interpretation or opinion. The truth is either true or it's not.

The entire realm of having opinions is founded on the idea that something is open ended and doesn't make sense and is not factual. Which leaves everything open to interpretation. And where there is interpretation, there is hallucination and insanity and a complete breakdown of any kind of factual consistency.

There is no room for having a different viewpoint in God's Kingdom. We are to accept the truth that God has GIVEN and to make it our own, and to then express that same truth without distortion. This erases the ego and leaves no doors through which it can mangle and distort and personalize the facts. In God's logical system of thought there is no error and everyone is in perfect agreement. There is one truth, and we are to accept the Holy Spirit's message, in accord with it, without question.

It is obvious that in this world there is very little agreement. Everyone sees to still have an ego and an opinion. We can barely agree to what the course says and means. Each person has their own interpretation and viewpoint. There is a tremendous amount of mistakenness. Yet Jesus states that teachers of God truly should all share ONE truth and agree on EVERYTHING. There should be a single reflection coming through all such persons which is the same in all of them, not thousands of different versions. One truth, one voice.

"God's teachers appear to be many, for that is what is the world's need.Yet being joined in one purpose, and one they share with God, how could they be separate from each other? "

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

In the physical world, the ego has cleverly set things up so that cause and effect seem separate.

It is even a "law" of physics that each action has an equal and opposite reaction. Or that if you put some energy in, some energy comes out. Or that if you cause some object to move, it will have to move.

This whole world is set up to show you a picture of causes having effects.

Object A moves and hits object B and therefore object B now gains some energy and moves.

And to your perception, this looks as though some parts of the world are causes and some parts of the world are effects.

And this is pretty malleable because in any given situation something which was causing an effect on something else can, itself, become the effect of something else.

So this world, in how it appears, as physical matter that moves through time and space, is MEANT to show you a picture of cause and effect being separate.

And that means, if cause is separate from effect, YOU can be caused by this world and affected by it.

It also seems to mean that you can do stuff to this world which does not affect you. This is how you get away with murder.

The illusion that something "made something happen" here, shows your mind a very convincing picture which seems to train it to believe e.g. the body is sick because it was attacked by the wrong food, or the body is sick because the weather changed, or the body is sick because someone just cut your leg off.

Well, that's a pretty darn convincing illusion right there, portraying and "proving" that your leg is powerless over a chainsaw and it is now laying on the floor in a bloody mess.

Except that..... ... you, as immortal spirit, and not a body, and not a part of this world, DO have the power to overcome even this convincing illusion.

You could, if you so chose, manifest an entirely new body. You could undo all of the effects of the dismembered leg.

You could make the illusion appear as though nothing happened.

You could even in fact become so invulnerable "in" your body that it is impossible even for your body to be moved or hurt or damaged in any way at all, even if someone lets off a nuclear bomb in your vicinity!

What God creates is permanent. Therefore it is invulnerable. And therefore it cannot be hurt. And therefore it is immortal. And that is what you are. So ....

All of this world with its ILLUSION that there are causes and powers and wills outside of you that can do something to you or make accidents happen or harm you in any way, IT IS NOT REAL and IT CAN BE OVERCOME.

And when you overcome it, this will be thought of as miraculous. Because it is, in a certain context. But miracles are natural. They are everyone's birthright. And when they're not happening something has gone wrong.

You cannot be hurt by a dream that isn't really there.

Miracle principle 11 says "A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously."

If you believe and perceive that your neighbor is not yourself, that they are a separate person, and you are not one, you will find yourself unwilling to give to them.

There is a very simple reason for this. If the two of you are separate, then logically when you give something to them, you are excluded from receiving it. What is theirs is not yours.

This leads to the quite sensible conclusion that, since your brother seems separate from you, you should NOT give to them, because if you do, you will stand to lose everything that you give.

It makes perfect sense because if the premise is that the two of you are separated, then it also makes sense to say that what belongs to you does not belong to them, and vice versa.

Believing that the two of you are separate, you will therefore find yourself "naturally" unwilling to give to others. You will not want to perform any miracles. You will not want to share yourself or give love.

Giving love across a divide, to a separate person, who is cut off from you, can only seem to entail a sense of loss. You believe quite logically that whatever you give you will lose, and giving will be a sacrifice.

This is rooted in the fundamental dynamic that giving and receiving are not one. If you and your brother are separated, then giving and receiving are also separated. Who you give to will appear to exclude your self, and so you will see yourself as not the receiver. If you do not stand to receive, then you will not want to give away, because it will seem detrimental to you.

In a sense, you could say that this appears to be selfish. However, the person is really just doing what seems logical based on the premise that they are separate. A person is unwilling to give because they want to keep what they give. They want to be included in the receipt of it. But because they see themselves as not included in the "list of receivers", they conclude that hoarding is a better strategy. This is entirely sensible and logical.

What this means then is that if you see yourself as separate from another, and you think you have something they lack, or you see yourself as a healer or giver, but do not see yourself as one with the other person, you will not want to give to them. You will be unwilling to perform a miracle of union on the grounds that giving so fully will deprive you of everything. And no-one is going to argue that this makes no sense.

If your brother is indeed separate from you, then by all means you should not give anything to him, because what he stands to gain you stand to lose. And so the ego will counsel that it's important to recognize the separation, make it real, and therefore stay within your private prison. And that it is in your best interests not to even try to give, or to perform a miracle of love, because this runs against your best interests.

So long as this separateness is maintained, you will of course maintain separate interests. What is in your own best interests is not the same as what is in the interests of another. If the two of you are not actually one, then there is no way for you to really receive or keep what you're giving. Only IF the two of you are one, can your interests be mutual, and therefore shared.

Only through shared interests, recognizing that you are one with the other person, they are a part of your self, and therefore it IS in your best interest to give to the part of you that you share with them, can you be naturally and logically willing to perform a miracle.

The ego will suggest this is impossible because it claims that you are currently separate. And if you are separate, there is no logical basis for saying that giving is going to help your situation. In fact giving will appear to deprive you, so long as you remain separate. And it's clue here is that if you give love, in an attempt to heal, the healing will have no effect on YOU, and therefore there is no way to bridge the gap anyway.

The interesting thing, however, is that regardless of how separated you are right now, when you TRY to give, you will find that the giving of love actually heals you along with it. You cannot heal without being healed. The love that you try to squeeze through to share with another is actually received by you as well. It includes you in it. And this inclusiveness of love actually unifies your minds and lifts your spirits.

If you can recognize therefore, however dimly, that your brother is yourself, and is part of you, and therefore you are not losing by giving, then you will become willing to give. Giving is sharing and inclusion, not loss If you believe that giving is going to deprive you, then you have to recognize you currently see yourself as separate. It's actually then a necessity to be willing to try to overcome this sense of separateness, in order for you to be okay with giving.

Indeed the course suggests that "miracles are taken first on faith", because you may be in a position where you do NOT really recognize your oneness with another, and you do not see them as part of yourself. They still seem separate to you. Which means that you're going to have to "take it on faith" that IF you give love and attempt to join, to heal the isolation that keeps you apart, then the love will do its job and make it clearer to you that you are in fact NOT separate, AND that you stand to gain from the giving.

"A miracle is a reversal of the physical order because it brings more love to the giver AND the receiver."

Your willingness to try to share, join, be one with, see yourself as, with others, brings a healing love to you, to heal the gap in your own mind, and to lift you up in addition to lifting another up. You actually receive the love that you give. When you try to heal another, therefore, you should find that you yourself become healed as well. Both of you are recipients of love's benefit because it is inclusive.

So if you assess how much you see another as separate from you, you'll also find that this correlates to how much of an "unhealed healer" you are. If you regard yourself as having something others lack, you are seeing yourself as separate. And then you will feel that you can expend effort and therefore become taxed by trying to give healing.

This sense of limitation or that "healing is a sacrifice", is all part of the unhealed healer's thought process. To overcome this the healer has to be included in the healing and thus receive what is given. If I feel that I cannot perform miracles because it would be too much effort, would require me to give a lot, and I'm not willing to lose a lot in order to do so - because I'm selfish, then obviously I need to learn that by giving I will receive and the sense of separation and sacrifice is unfounded.

By learning to give to another AS yourself, you can actually take that all the way, and through such equality of giving and receving you will find God.

"Atonement is for all, because it is the way to UNDO the belief that ANYTHING is for you ALONE."

"It is impossible for a Child of God to love his neighbor EXCEPT as himself. That is why the healer's prayer is, "let me know this brother as I know myself."

"The unforgiving mind does not believe that giving and receiving are the same."

"The interval you think lies in between the giving and receiving of the gift SEEMS to be one in which you sacrifice, and suffer loss."

"Yet it is always God Who calls to you, and he who asks your help is but yourself. Who is the giver and the receiver then? Who asks the gift and who is given it?"

"Each miracle is an example of what justice can accomplish, when it is offered to everyone alike. It is received and GIVEN equally. It IS awareness that giving and receiving ARE the same."

""Father, I must return Your Love for me. For giving and receiving are the same, and You have given all Your Love to me. I must return It, for I want It mine in full awareness, blazing in my mind, and keeping it within Its kindly light, inviolate, beloved, with fear behind and only peace ahead. How still the way Your loving Son is led along to You!""

"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."

Sin is really an attempt to make out that God is evil. It’s an attempt to turn a "loving cause" into "an evil cause".

When you are projecting your belief in sin outwards onto other people, what you’re really doing is trying to push God away by projecting ideas of evil onto Him, pushing Him out away from yourself, and to see Him as an external cause who is acting "against your will."

Really, sin is YOUR attempt to act against God’s will. The result of that is that you PERCEIVE that God is against your will.

When you see sin in a brother, you are really seeing your idea that God is a sinner. You see "cause" in the person, but you also combine that idea of cause with the idea of evil. So you see it as an "evil cause" or a "cause of evil". That’s the exact same thing as seeing someone as sinning against you, being against you in any way, being an enemy, etc.

You think it’s just your projection of your idea that you sinned, but it’s really the projection of your attempt to turn God into something unloving. You see this unloving cause outside of you because you think God is an unloving cause who is separate from you and acting against you.

When you choose to die, if you do, and given that all death is chosen on purpose, a state arises where you perceive that an "external deadly cause" comes along and finally manages to INFLICT ITS WRATH upon you, "causing you to die". In this act, it’s really your attempt to prove or play out your belief that God wants you dead, God is an evil hateful vengeful attacker who is causing you to die, and that therefore God does not cause creations of Eternal Life, but that God instead creates death.

So it is actually God who we believe destroys us every time that we die. We see it as this separated off, externalizations, rejected, hated enemy who is evil and vengeful who wants us dead. Even if we don’t acknowledge that consciously, EVERY DEATH occurs on this same basis of belief. This is the ego thought system playing out. Every death will appear to be caused by anyone OTHER than you, because you still see yourself as the "effect of God", and God has been mis-identified as causing death.

So when you try to die, you are actually trying to prove that God is a murderer. That it is God’s will that you be dead. This is why in your death wish, you actually believe that God WANTS you dead because you sinned. Or rather, you are attempting to prove that GOD is the sinner and that He is sinning against your innocence. You lay down and "allow" his wrath to happen to you to attempt to prove that you are not the one who sinned against God, but that HE Is the one who is murderous. When you prove this through death, you are trying to say that you do not believe in death at all - that He is the one who has rejected you, abandoned you, and who wants to punish you.

This is so twisted and backwards. God could not possibly want you dead. When you believe in real sin, your own sin, you WILL believe that God is the sinner and that you are innocent. You WILL see that God is outside of you plotting to kill you. And you will experience yourself as though "cause" is outside of you acting against your will. God’s will could never be against your will, if YOUR will were not trying to be DIFFERENT to His. Your opposition to His Will is what makes it seem as though His Will is acting against yours.

You will see this played out in all your relationships, because ultimately, your ONLY relationship is with God. So those people you think are your enemies, that’s really your mis-perception of God. You are not recognizing God, and instead see IN Him a false God of death. The real God is love, Life, and would never want to attack you. The real God is never against your will, although you can be against His and think that you are at war.

Sin is not real. You. Did not sin. God is not your enemy.

In order to perform healing miracles for others, you do not necessarily need to be what's thought of as a 'miracle worker', ie someone who has attained a high level of advancement.

The fact is, it is not you, in isolation, that can heal. Of yourself you can do nothing. You do not have a special healing power and you are not a healer.

The fact is, God is the healer. God is love and love heals. And it is also not necessary for you to be in perfect alignment with God's will in order for healing to occur.

If we were required to be enlightened in order to facilitate healing, nobody would be able to receive healing and there'd be no hope for the sick.

The fact is, Holy Spirit has been given to us as the answer to the ego and to undo every aspect of the entire ego illusion. He is capable of functioning to heal us FROM the dream, even when we're in the dream, and even when we're still dreaming. If he did not have this ability, we'd never wake up.

Nor are you required to be free from all sin or ego thoughts. Nor do you need to have a perfect relationship with Christ.

All that God needs in order for a healing to take place, is for you to have enough belief that it is TRUE that God can heal, that God will heal, that God HAS healed, that God wants to heal, and that God IS healing.

And all you then need is enough acceptance of this to step out of the way and to act as a channel, medium, conduit or bridge through which God's healing can flow. That can take the form of you simply being open to RECEIVING and BELIEVING God's providence of healing, which you then are infused with and radiate, or it may come in the form of you laying on your physical hands to someone else, or by you using words which are spoken in a God-aligned way.

Since God's nature is absolute, not relative, God doesn't do things by half measures. God is certain. God is consistent. God is completion and wholeness. So if there are aspects of incompleteness or waiting for the future or uncertainty, in how you approach someone (ie forms of fear), that will block God's flow.

But if you take on an 'absolute' attitude which has no question in it, no uncertainty in it, and it is resolute and firm and truth-filled, you now are forming a bridge for God to flow across. This can come in the form of words which you speak, and these words really don't matter. As you speak, words are energy conduits which allow Holy Spirit to transfer.

And as you speak, you speak TO the problem, directly, and you tell it what to do. You don't talk about the problem. You don't ask God about the problem. You don't ask God to do something about the problem. God has already provided healing. It is your job now to extend it, to share it. And you don't ask the problem to go. You don't request that it go. You don't sidestep around it. You get VERY DIRECT. God is very direct. Immediate. Direct in terms of you directly confronting the exact thing (e.g. pain, sickness), and immediate in terms of time (ie this will be fully healed NOW).

You must expect the result to be immediate and complete, not partial or off in the future. You must also have an expectation that healing definitely will occur, that you could bet your life on it. Certainty. That you will walk away having commanded it to heal and it WILL be healed. And you can't waver from that or go into doubt based on how things appear to be. That's losing faith.

For example, you put your hand on someone, maybe in the area of sickness, and you COMMAND IT TO GO. You tell it what you want it to do. "pain, leave right now, GO!" "tooth, be whole, right now" "brain, return to normal functioning right now" etc.. You have to be firm and assertive. This is how God is. God knows what is true. God doesn't waver. God doesn't listen to the ego's illusions that try to distract you. You have AUTHORITY over the ego.

This takes some practice. It's good to experiment.

1) Join with Holy Spirit/Jesus/God. Feel love.

2) Place hand on person

3) Believe and expect total healing, not taking no for an answer

4) Command it to leave. Repeat if necessary.

5) Allow Holy Spirit to flow through you. You don't need to do anything else.

You can do this whether you're awake or not because this is what God has set up to be possible. It does take some amount of certainty and belief and conviction in God's truth, so the more you have of that the better, but you don't need to be an ascended master to get some results.

If ACIM is to be believed, and interpreted correctly, it is literally saying that this world is the OPPOSITE of what's real. And therefore it is completely unlike the nature of God's Kingdom. Indeed, unlike your real self.

"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."

"earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

"This is the world of time, where all things end."

"Without the idea of death there is no world."

This presents a major challenge, because if the world is completely opposite to reality, truth, nature and eternal life, then every single thing in it is going to be doing things which are completely against who and what you are, against God's nature and will.

The Holy Spirit is now a spokesperson for the true nature of God's reality, and our own, and is here with us to help us to become heaven-like instead of earth-like. All of his motivation points towards eternal life rather than towards the world of mortality.

"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" "Nothing the world believes is true."

But if you'll think on this it's pretty crazy the contrast. Here we are in a world which seems very tangible and immense, and yet Jesus is saying that every single thing in it is opposite, upside-down, and backwards, from what is true. And that the body was made to deceive us into believing it is real. "The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

"The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen."

It would be much seemingly easier to just live a life in this world acting the way bodies act, interacting with objects, not questioning anything. Just taking everything to be verbatim as-it-is and not deceptive at all. Believing everything you see and hear.

Jesus's message is far more radical though, because if what he says is true, then fundamentally the entirety of space and time and all their contents, including all planets and galaxies, are completely false, unreal and untrue. "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."

So now on a daily basis, you have this task of literally questioning everything in the world, trying to recognize the world is an illusion, trying not to be deceived by everything the body shows you, trying not to identify with the body as your self, and basically denying and rejecting everything in spacetime.

That can seem very unnatural perhaps, to suggest you have to deny that the world is of God, and then deny everything about it, but Jesus does appear to be telling us to do this. That the only way out of suffering, sickness, misery and death, is to cancel out the entire seeming universe and believe none of it. That's a pretty tall order.

"This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."

Nevertheless, it's clear that this is what Jesus is instructing us to do. To exchange the belief that this world is founded on reality, for a recognition that it is nothing but a dream. A fiction of a world which is hallucinated and not really there at all. Nor does it comprise anything real or permanent or of God.

"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?"

The world is nothing. Not something, but nothing at all. It's not there. It's a pretend world, hiding the Kingdom of God. And there is nothing in the world worth keeping as a substitute for the real thing.

"Yet its nothingness IS your salvation"

"The world can ADD nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons, but it CAN blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it. You cannot behold the world and know God. Only one is true."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. 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."

I have a number of reactions regarding those who are sick.

All of these reactions entail me feeling sorry for the person, or wishing they were well, or being sad that this has happened to them.

I have reactions of guilt that somehow I caused it, and reactions of fear that somehow it will worsen.

And I also have reactions of compassion and understanding.

But all of these reactions are actually responses to perceptions which are not true.

Ego reactions always occur after having perceived something wrongly, and unless you are coming from love your reaction is founded in victimhood.

It can seem like I am caring or wanting a person to be healed, because I am upset about them being sick. It can seem like I am wishing for their best. It can seem as though I want the sickness to go away and that this is a good attitude to have, or shows a sign of caring or compassion.

But the truth is, these reactions are all founded on DOING NOTHING ABOUT IT.

They are not attitudes of correction, or healing, or forgiveness, or undoing. They are responses founded on the belief that the sickness is real, that it is happening, that the person is suffering, that "someone" needs to swoop in and save the person - anyone other than me.

If you really look at this in yourself, you may well be a very sympathetic, empathetic, compassionate, caring-seeming person, but the fact is that a lot of these responses are born in a state of inability to help. A state of disempowerment. A state of passivity. A state where you believe that there is nothing you can actually DO to correct it, even though you may be filled with wishful thinking about how you would do something if you could.

YOU CAN!

These attitudes are actually a cover-up for miracle mindedness and an excuse for not forgiving. They are an ego response that looks as though you are deeply concerned about someone, while at the same time strongly believing that they really do have a problem.

What we have to come to learn is the art of correction, which is more to do with an active undoing of the problem rather than an agreement that it exists. Corrective measures. And we DO have the ability to do this, not alone but as a result of our union wth Holy Spirit and God.

I've been in states of sorrow and despair plenty of times in which I've "begged" God to help and sometimes there is some help and sometimes not, but in general each time that I find myself thinking of asking someone ELSE to help, someone who "has the power", I am either nudged or have an innate knowing that doing so is basically shirking an obligation.

God has empowered us to extend His love and healing, and to do so through the mechanism of forgiveness, in which we cancel out, undo, correct and make vanish, all signs and symptoms of artificial causes, demonstrating that separation has not occurred, that problems are not real, that sickness is an illusion and that even death can be reversed.

It is one thing to be terribly upset and guilt-ridden. You feel guilty and responsible for causing someone's suffering, even if you did not appear to directly cause it, because you feel as though you are supposed to be able to take it away but are failing to do so. So in a sense, your mind knows this and actually will experience guilt when you are not performing miracles. When you are in support of sickness and are believing in problems and are making it real instead of correcting it actively, your mind will know that you're actually using this as a way to avoid your ROLE as "the light of the world", and this produces guilt.

So you will feel guilty when you are not helping others to heal, and you will feel guilty when you are failing to forgive. It's not your fault, but either you are choosing health as truth or you are choosing sickness as truth. Being upset that someone is sick does not mean that you are a believer in health and wellbeing. It means you believe sickness cannot be undone, which is a strong belief that sickness is the truth.

This we have to become honest about and weed out of ourselves, to become the miracle workers that we are meant to be. Forgiveness is the way to bring about miracles, through the correction and undoing of what is false. Not through the ego's victimy reactions of guilt, powerlessness, well-wishes and the like. Those are like saying, sorry you are sick, but I believe in sickness and therefore I think you should be sick.

We need to learn to make the universe disappear and all sickness along with it. The end of death, sickness, the body, and the world.

Being afraid and perceiving that someone or something separate from you is attacking you, can ONLY happen if YOU are being an attacker.

Fear is self attack.

You position yourself as the one who is being attacked, as if to suggest, you do not believe in attack at all and want there not to be attack.

But at the same time, you have projected attack outside of yourself, see it in another, make it real, believe in it strongly, and then freak out about what you're showing yourself.

The only reason the state of fear does not seem to show obviously that you're doing this to yourself, or that a fearful person is an attacker, is because of the separation or lack of awareness in-between that which is "attacked" and that which is "attacking."

Both the attacker and the attackee are within your own mind. They always accompany each other. One seems like an external cause, one seems like an internal effect. But they are both inside of you. It is your mind at war with itself.

You cannot be afraid without believing in attack, which makes you an attacker. You cannot be afraid without therefore perceiving someone or something as an attacker, which means you've made attack real, believe attack is the truth, and WANT attack.

The state of denial present in fear is such that it seems as though you DO NOT WANT IT whatsoever. You want it to end, want to get away from it, want to be safe and so on. But this is not what your mind is actually doing. It is in denial. It has disassociated its own belief in sin, from itself, has projected it outwards, and now is being threatened by it as if it is something external and separate.

If you are terrified, you are a terrorist. If you are horrified, you peddle horror. If you are sick, you are attempting to infect everyone else. If you are hurt or damaged, you are trying to prove you can be hurt so that your brother stands accused.

This may sound like I'm saying things which are absolutely insane. Except that it is actually sanity to see this. The EGO is insane, and its use of the mind to attack itself is utterly nuts. Its disguises of what fear is and its use of fear as a TOOL and a WEAPON are things it does not want you to ever realize or look at.

There is NO victimhood in a victim. It is all deliberately chosen, it is all serving a purpose and has a very deliberate motive behind it. There are no accidents. Nothing is happening by mistake. It is all chosen. The ego uses disownership and denial and projection and irresponsibility in order to KEEP its belief in sin, deny that it is in you, and to project it outward, pretending that this gets it OUTSIDE of your mind. It doesn't. You are still attacking yourself.

We must be willing to question the appearances and ILLUSIONS which the ego presents to us. Fear is a huge lie. It is a total distraction mechanism, a decoy, designed solely to make someone who is a vicious attacker LOOK LIKE they are the one who is not attacking at all. The more helpless the ego positions you as, the more it can find everyone ELSE guilty. The more innocent you APPEAR to be, the more it's everyone else who is the sinner.

Make no mistake that appearing to be innocent, helpless, a victim, a sufferer, sick, wounded, hurt, upset, or any of these other EGO DISGUISES, is the *exact opposite* of what is really happening. It will take a lot of radical honesty to admit to this.

The benefit of admitting to this is that you STOP attacking yourself, stop USING the ego's tools and weapons, stop believing that you are powerless, stop hurting YOURSELF, and stop making out that you are not the Son of God. The benefits to your mind are immense. The benefits to your confidence and empowerment are immense. You cannot afford to let the ego run the show and make you out to be a victim when - in all truth and reality - you are IMMORTAL SPIRIT which cannot suffer or die whatsoever.

Remember always that you are immortal spirit. Everyone is immortal spirit. Immortal spirit cannot be hurt, cannot be a victim, cannot suffer, cannot die, cannot be sick, cannot lose, cannot be upset or unhappy, and cannot be separate from God. Anything else that is seeming to happen, or anything else that seems to apply to someone, IS A LIE. It is an immortal spirit PRETENDING to be mortal, PRETENDING to be hurt, and PRETENDING it can be dead.

It's BULL SHIT!

False perception is exclusive vision. It sees only a small part of what there is to see, excluding the rest. It is blinded by form and appearance and cannot see past the surface of an illusory world. It has covered the world in labels and categories and fragmented boxes.

True perception is an inclusive vision. It can see the small parts of the illusory world but only as a thin transparency overlaid upon a unifying light. It sees through and beyond the physical realm. The compartmentalizing of the world is removed and all things are placed in a single box.

As such, by being inclusive, vision sees wholly and sees the whole. It has one singular response of love to everything. It is unmoved by form and unchanged by conditions. It doesn't adjust or waver or fluctuate based on circumstances or upon what it seen. It is constant.

It brings a steady light to everything that is seen, such that everything is seen in the same way and with the same judgement of innocence. The steady innocence anchored within is projected outward, seen reflected in everything regardless of its form.

We are therefore transitioning from an exclusive, separating, partial way of seeing, to an inclusive whole-oriented way of seeing. To see everything in the same way. To judge everything as a single whole. To have no favoritism or special interests. To not pick out some parts as ugly and some parts as beautiful. But to bring a higher beauty, detached from form, which is seen in all parts at once.

A forgiven world is then a world of form, which might to unforgiving eyes appear to be separated out by that form. But seen anew with unifying eyes, which ignores the form, forgiving eyes regard everything in the same light and with a singular meaning.

Nothing is rejected or attacked or split off or segregated. Everything, all forms and appearances, are recognized as equally unreal. Simultaneously, the properties of unity, which includes innocence and holiness and love, are seen across all such forms, because these are what are being used for seeing. Thus Earth comes to reflect heaven and is forgiven of its attempt to be a symbol of separation.

Now that the mind is open to seeing wholly, it is open to the whole, and therefore now sees the whole beyond the partial world. It recognizes the world is not even a whole world, and sees the unity beyond the dream. Now is it ready for heaven, to enter into that which is truly one.

"The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness."

"They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeing and yet surely theirs."

The Spiritual eye is the mechanism of miracles, because what the Spiritual eye perceives IS truth. The Spiritual eye perceives both the Creations of God AND the creations of man. Among the creations of man, it can also separate the true from the false by its ability to perceive totally rather than selectively. It thus becomes the proper instrument for reality testing, which always involves the necessary distinction between the true and the false.

The body is the idea of sin. It is an extension of the idea of being separate. The body cannot become sinless in and of itself, although it can be used for a holy purpose.

"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh and then projected outward." - ACIM

"At no single instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered or anticipated, but never experienced just now. Only its past and future make it seem real. Time controls it entirely, for sin is never present. " - ACIM

"Christ's vision has one law. It does not look upon a body, and mistake it for the Son whom God created. " - ACIM

The body is always a symbol of being separate from God. It must be imperfect and it must be an illusion. Otherwise, if it were not, it would be possible for the body to have power over the mind and could prevent the Son of God from awakening or healing.

The body itself, in its fullness, must be fundamentally an illusion of separation, and therefore sin. IT MUST BE FALSE. It can't be a truth and it can't have any truth to it. If truth were associated with the body, we'd be totally stuck in the dream.

To say that the body is inherently holy or perfect or anything other than a symbol of sin is to say that God, who is holiness and perfection, is a body. That is a way the ego wants to make God be a body so that it can kill God, just as it makes the Son of God a body in order to kill him.

"Any thought system that confuses God and the body must be insane." - ACIM

At its core, metaphysically, the body is an illusion of sin. It cannot be the central truth of who or what you are. It cannot be holiness. It cannot be wholeness. It cannot be innocence. It can only exist inside of the dream of separation. It cannot enter heaven. It is never present. And it never really exists at all.

We need to learn to recognize that the body is the idea of sin, and then undo it. If we are to undo sin, the body must disappear, being an illusion that we believe is really there as a real sin. You can perceive the body with love or use it with love to give it a holier purpose, in which it can appear to be free from sickness and so on, but it is still a body. It is still an idea and representation of sin, and so long as it remains, the mind cannot be 100% free. This is why Jesus had to disappear his body in order to completely remove its blockage to the awareness of God's presence.

The body is never present. It cannot exist in the now. It does not live. It is always a memory or an idea of the future, with an artificial history and a fabricated illusion of continuation. The body IS the symbol of sin. It is false. It does not exist. It not who or what you are. You do not need it. You are immortal spirit.

"Miracles reawaken the awareness that the spirit, not the body, is the altar of truth. This is the recognition that leads to the healing power of the miracle." - ACIM

It may appear there are many problems, all of which are different and seem to call for very specific solutions. The form of each problem tempts you with its appearance, to believe it is unique and unlike anything else, calling for a response that must be dictated by the form of the problem. This suggests to you the only solution is the one that matches the problem, and that nothing else will work.

But what if love is like a skeleton key, able to unlock every problem, able to solve every situation, and able to heal all difficulties? What if there is one simple answer to all scenarios, requiring you to trust that love can solve all problems and answer all issues now? What if your "go to" is to become just one tool, miraculous love, which enables you to accomplish the impossible?

"Every problem is the SAME to Him, because each one is solved in just the SAME respect, and through the SAME approach"

"In quietness are all things answered, and is every problem quietly resolved."

"There is NO problem, in ANY situation, that faith will not solve"

"Today I would remember the simplicity of salvation by reinforcing the lesson that there is one problem and one solution."

"Yet they are all the same, and must be recognized as one if the one solution which solves them all is to be accepted."

"Everyone in this world seems to have his own special problems. Yet they are all the same, and must be recognized as one if the one solution which solves them all is to be accepted."

"No-one could solve all the problems the world appears to hold. They seem to be on so many levels, in such varying forms and with such varied content, that they confront you with an impossible situation. Dismay and depression are inevitable as you regard them. Some spring up unexpectedly, just as you think you have resolved the previous ones. Others remain unsolved under a cloud of denial, and rise to haunt you from time to time, only to be hidden again but still unsolved.

All this complexity is but a desperate attempt not to recognize the problem, and therefore not to let it be resolved. If you could recognize that your only problem is separation, no matter what form it takes, you could accept the answer because you would see its relevance. Perceiving the underlying constancy in all the problems which confront you, you would understand that you have the means to solve them all. And you would use the means because you recognize the problem."

"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." "

"And thus they see in you their holiness, saluting you as savior and as God."

Sometimes we like to think that we are God. But then we start to feel that this tempts the ego and is arrogant and wrong. Sometimes we like to think that we are not God, which makes us separate from God and non-existent, which also tempts the ego and is arrogant.

It can seem grandiose to suggest you are God. But ACIM's teaching on this is a kind of "yes and no".

You are God, because God created you by sharing and extending himself. You have God in you, God goes with you everywhere, you are part of him forever. There really is no way for you to exist or live without being a functioning aspect of himself.

Since God shares all of himself with you, and thus is one with you, you are in this sense every bit as much "Godly" as God is. But at the same time, you are a creation of God's, an effect of His, which he has produced by his causal power. He created you by sharing himself, and by retaining you within himself. This has caused you to exist as though an independent being, but nevertheless you are still one with him.

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought, and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. All His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other."

What becomes arrogant and mistaken is when you start to go into the either/or thinking process of... either I am entirely God alone, or I am not God at all. Neither of those conclusions is correct. ACIM is not non-duality, or duality. God has created many beings, but they are still part of him and cannot exist without him. You are 100% God, and 100% yourself.

So the truth is that yes you are God, but you are also God's creation. God existed and was complete before he created you. He added you to himself, using himself, made of himself, as and within himself. But he is also himself, first-cause, prime creator, and origin of all that exists.

You do not cause him or create him, so your role is different being a kind of second-order co-creator. But being "a separate being", while granting you total freedom, also doesn't separate you off from him in the sense of being divorced from him or orphaned. You are still a part of him and every part of you is a part of him. You both exist, but you are both one. I and my father, as two, are one. "This may appear to contradict the statement “I and my Father are one,” but there are two parts to the statement in recognition that the Father is greater."

So yes you are God, entirely and fully, but you also are a created individual with a mind and soul and freedom. It's not grandiose to claim to be God, therefore, so long as you are not claiming to be exclusively God and nothing else. You have to still acknowledge that you are his effect, inheriting everything from him, in awe of him, because God IS in and of himself greater than you. He encompasses a great many beings and creations besides you, in the sonship, spanning beyond your own self.

You are as much God as God is, but God is also greater. I know that sounds contradictory but only to the ego's either/or logic. To claim your authority, power and natural state of being part of God is accepting atonement and regaining your inheritance. You can't be anything without being part of him, and you live in him forever.

It is also true to say that the Holy Spirit, while being the voice for God, and a standalone creation, is also still God. One with God, fixed on God, and wholly God, yet himself. Just like you, and part of you also. Anything that exists is you, and you are also yourself. "the Holy Spirit is part of you. Created by God, He left neither God nor His creation. He is both God and you, as you are God and Him together."

Arriving at work I encountered my first truck load of live pigs on their way to the sausage factory across the street. It was a double-decker piggy wagon complete with air holes and little pink piggy bits poking out and wiggling around. As I realized what it was, and that it was about to pull into the bacon death machine, I had a reaction.

The reaction felt like sadness coupled with anger. The anger felt like wanting to go stop it, and the sadness felt like the pigs didn't know what was about to happen to them - that they were going to be victimized. Regardless of what was happening, I was having a reaction so now I have to do a fricking forgiveness.

Ok.

So obviously my perception is mistaken, otherwise I wouldn't be upset. It's impossible to be upset about the truth. My perception was showing me that the pigs were helpless victims with no power and seemingly innocent. A voice in my mind, perhaps Jesus, said

"they know what's going to happen". But this didn't necessarily stop me reacting. Truth is though, on some higher level they do know because nothing happens but by choice, and it was really me that was having a dark experience.

So... by seeing the pigs as `innocent victims` with `nasty ego power` being wielded over them against their will, it was a strong contrast showing me where I believe certain things. And it's not about the piggies, because both the pigs and the sausage makers are part of the same ego thought system. The pigs only appear to be victims because I don't see that they chose this, and the sausage folk only seem like victimizers because I think they do something to the pigs they didn't ask for.

And what's this got to do with me? Always it's something to do with me and nothing really to do with them. I'm not upset because of the pigs. I'm not upset because of the bacon fest. I'm upset because it's showing me that I already have something in me, in my mind, which believes in something incorrect, and it's triggering it off. It's not about them, it's about me. I have to withdraw all blame from the pig mongers and also withdraw all projection of victimhood from the piggies.

The piggies are not victims. The farmers are not victimizers. The greasy sausage folk are innocent. They don't even really exist. They're not really out there. It's a dream. I'm dreaming it. So....

That means I made up this whole scenario. I made pigs. I made sausages. I made bacon factories. So secretly this reminds me that I actually made up this whole thing myself which would mean I am guilty. So the guilt I see in them is my own guilt. Hmm.

Hmm. Ok. I am flashed a memory of a time in childhood when I used to hunt butterflies, ... and kill them. I used to swat them with a tennis racket, or capture them and keep them a while but then they died because I didn't feed them etc. Or even perhaps would stick a pin in them. Vicious! ooo.. juicy pool of guilt there. I didn't know what I was doing, so it's forgivable.

So even though I made that mistake and I secretly covet bacon and sausages and want to stick a pin in the pigs, its only because I have lost touch with the truth of who I am. I forgot I am love. I forgot I am holy and innocent and have no needs. I forgot God loves me. So.. .I'm just mistaken about being guilty. Even if I did nasty things to innocent creatures, I'm still innocent because I am not in my right mind. So I'm making mistakes and not realizing it. I'm not to blame. The butterflies forgive me. I forgive me. I am forgiven not for what I have done but because... I have not really done it.

This is a dream, it hasn't happened. I'm with God. I am guiltless and sinless. I haven't done anything to anyone. God is not harmed. Real immortal life has not been changed. I have not stopped being perfect love. I am absolutely forgivable and innocent and free. God loves me 100% because he knows that pigs and butterflies are just parts of a dream that has no meaning and I gave it all the meaning it had. I used the pigs and pig farmers as skapegoats to project my own guilt so that I would have a reason to justify being guilty, which would help me to stay away from God. I wanted to be away from God so I could keep my ego and not be loved.

So... do I want to keep suffering? Am I willing to let this go? Can I let go and surrender this need to prove I am guilty? Yes.. I willingly surrender this guilt and recognize I am forgiven, I claim and own up to being innocent because none of this really happened. God loves me. Nothing has gone wrong. Nothing has died. Death isn't real. Everyone is equally innocent and holy. Only love is real.

Holy Spirit, please heal my mind and correct my thinking and remove all of this guilt and help me to remember my true innocent and that of all concerned. I let it go. I accept your truth.

Amen.

There is only one trap. The ego has only one tool. Do you know what it is?

Separation. The ego wants to come between you and God, between you and yourself, between you and others.

It has one devious way of doing this, which in all its forms is exactly the same trap.

As soon as you believe in separation, you perceive a difference between you and God, between you and your real self, or between you and others, you have fallen for it.

As soon as you see difference, you will see a different meaning for each party, and will award each of them a different label. One will be more good, one more bad. Or one will be more right, one more wrong. Or one is better looking, or one is more spiritual, or one is more mature, or one is a better friend, or whatever. Conditionality.

To put it even more simply:

The ego wants you to TAKE SIDES.

By taking sides, it gets you to believe that one of the two SEPARATE CHOICES are better than the other in some way, more preferable, more desirable, more true, more credible or worthy or real.

The instant you do this, you COME BETWEEN yourself and God, yourself and your real self, and yourself and others.

Let's be clear about the ego's motives.

The ego does not give a shit who wins the war.

The ego does not give a shit who is better or worse.

The ego does not give a shit who is good or bad.

The ego does not give a shit who is more evil or holy.

The ego does not give a shit who is right or wrong.

The ego does not give a shit who is winning.

ALL it wants to do is SEPARATE what once was one, into separate parts, to distinguish what it is that keeps those parts separate, and to emphasize that difference as much as possible.

IT DOES NOT MATTER which side you take, where you fall, who you align with, or what you think is a better option. If you are choosing darkness and evil, you are just as much falling for the trap as if you are choosing to try to make out your are "good" and well behaved. If you are the winner of the war or the one that gets destroyed, it doesn't matter. The ego doesn't give a shit. All it wants to do is COME BETWEEN, to keep apart, to separate out and to stop there being unity or oneness or wholeness.

So don't fall for the primary trap, the only trap, of believing that you are escaping the ego by going into one of two sides or one of two possibilities. Or that you're more spiritual by siding with appearances of spirituality (the spiritual ego). Or that you're less spiritual if you're siding with appearances of darkness and rebellion.

BOTH the dark (the shadow self) and the `light` (the persona) are parts of the EGO SPLIT MIND. And both of them are dependent on each other. And both of them are attacked by each other. And both of them are doing things which are mistaken. They both uphold the separation.

It doesn't matter what side you pick. IF you pick a side, that is what matters. IF you go along with the illusion that one party is better than another, or one choice is better than another, you are fucked.

The ego's major weapon with illusions is to get you to be convinced that how something APPEARS tells you what IT IS, and therefore its FORM tells you of its inherent qualities. This is totally deceptive. It makes it APPEAR as though some things in the world are innocent victims and other things are victimizers. Some things are good/light, some things are dark/bad. And then if you start to defend the good stuff against the bad stuff, or feel sorry for the victims, or go along with this whole charade of separate enemies, YOU HAVE fallen for the ego.

BOTH sides of every argument lose. BOTH victimizer and victim lose. BOTH sides of every war lose. As soon as you enter into separation and conflict you're losing yourself, losing God, and losing your brother. You cannot fight and win and be free of this fact. The ego's lie is that you CAN fight and win and be free of this fact - that you can get away with it, or one side can actually conquer the other, or that someone can "win" at this game of life.

THERE ARE NO WINNERS IN THE EGO'S DREAM OF DEATH!

Anyone who plays the game LOSES. Anyone who plays the game or goes along with the game comes to believe in separation, and DIES. The only way out is not to play the game at all.

There are two types of prayer. One works miracles, the other doesn't.

1) Pray for someone because you believe they need praying for.

2) Pray for someone to acknowledge that they don't need praying for.

The first kind is very common and it's because our ego first of all shows us that something is wrong with someone. This means we have made the problem seem real. The person could have a serious disease or disability, some financial crisis, just lost a job, is having relationship issues, or whatever. Particularly if this so-called "problem" can be seen visually, we especially believe in it.

But the problem is, just the mere act of believing that someone is ACTUALLY having a problem, that they "really are" sick, that something is happening that's "bad", or something has gone wrong... . just that basic assumption that this is REALITY, or truth, is actually an attack on that person.

This is what ACIM calls false empathy. It means you've actually entered into believing in and are agreeing with what seems to be happening, as though it is true and real. You take this for granted, because you are so incredibly accustomed to perceiving with the ego this way. You have been extremely fooled by appearances and keep buying into them like they are facts. In this world there is temptation and trickery EVERYWHERE.

If someone breaks a leg, you immediately just accept that their leg is broken. If something goes wrong, you immediately accept that it really has gone wrong. If someone becomes sick, you totally believe that the person has become sick. And whatever it is, if it seems to be 'happening', you just assume that it has to be this way.

Then you get stuck in what basically is a belief in SIN, which is the idea that something has really happened already, there's been a real serious consequence, and it cannot be undone. Sin is the idea of irreversability of separation, so as you just idly accept that stuff has gone wrong and nobody can really do anything about it, you're really buying into the illusion and have fallen for its trickery.

So then having made the problem seem real to you, and maybe even you yourself have become upset about it, maybe even afraid about what will happen to the person, you will then feel COMPELLED to try to do something about it. And then you will turn to God and you will pray. And you'll do this because you are making mistakes. It is a mistake to believe that God has not already given you the answer to all problems. It is a mistake to believe that this person has a real problem at all. And it is a mistake to think that you need to get God to do something about this real-seeming problem.

But you'll do it anyway. This is then praying with the ego.

You might say something like... dear God, Holy Father, please send lots of love and light to this person, help them to overcome their fear/sickness/problem, give them strength and courage and help them to not have this problem. Thanks.

Well.... there is some amount of recognition of truth in that, in that you're at least attempting to connect to a higher love and send that love and focus on a possible outcome or state of being which is less problematic, less corrupted. But you're also confused because you're only asking for this because you think the person has a dire problem. And in fact, the worse you believe in the person's problem, the more compelled you will be to think you have to pray extra extra much, because this really big problem calls for you to pull out all the stops and do a really great big prayer. Well.... thanks for attacking the person with everything that's already happening to them, right along with your prayer.

There is another kind of prayer which is a prayer of forgiveness which doesn't seek to DO something to or about the problem, but instead seeks to UNDO your faulty perception about the problem and the person's faulty perception about the problem. This is a prayer that you do WITH Holy Spirit, instead of with the ego. When I did one of these prayers last night, Holy Spirit said to me "it's about time!", lol

So what you need to do, is realize that everything in front of your face, every body that you see, every problem that you think someone has, no matter how much it appears to be true and real, no matter how serious it is... ITS AN ILLUSION. And it is your job in your forgiveness prayer to completely IGNORE that illusion. You should not even be addressing or giving energy to all the reasons why the person has a problem, or making it more real, or reacting to it out of fear or desperation or seriousness.

Instead, you need to be acknowledging, recognizing, remembering and affirming, all the ways in which the person DOES NOT HAVE THIS PROBLEM. You don't go saying, well this person has xyz problem, please fix it. You need to instead say, this person DOES NOT HAVE this problem, this person IS NOT SICK, this person DOES NOT have reason to be afraid, this person is HOLY AND INNOCENT, this person HAS NOT SINNED, this person is CHRIST, this person is a picture of TOTAL HEALTH, this person IS NOT REALLY DISEASED, this person CANNOT be guilty, etc.

You need to focus on who the person REALLY IS in Christ, as Christ. You need to affirm and see and clarify the REAL TRUTH about the person, not the fake truths which masquerade as things that you see or sense with your body's senses. And this means, that as you do this prayer/forgiveness, you need to OVERLOOK ALL APPEARANCES, not take them seriously, and make statements which fly in the face of what *seems* to be happening. This is how you cancel out the problem. This is how you make the problem NOT EXIST.

This is where it can be a real challenge, because in the ego we are really really used to seeing the world in such a way that we constantly are making problems real, are believing appearances, totally buying into illusions that victims are really victims and not willing participants, etc. We keep falling for these illusions and each time we do, it PREVENTS us from looking to the real truth.

What you need to learn to do, and this WILL take lots of time, is that no matter how things seem or appear to be, or what seems to be happening, no matter how serious it seems to be, YOU IGNORE THAT, and you FIXATE your vision only on the absolute TRUTH about the person/situation. You hold fast to a single, core truth, aligned with God's will. You affirm what HE has created and its absolute purity and innocence.

You believe strongly in what He has provided and the FACT that He has already created perfection. And therefore, no matter how it seems, and no matter how stubborn the symptoms are, and no matter how many people are telling you to give up, and no matter how much you are telling you to stop trying to kid yourself, you keep on ignoring all appearances and continue to affirm the single one truth. You HOLD YOUR GROUND.

This is one of the vital steps in miracle working. You must believe what is true of God, and not what is true of the ego/illusion/dream, and DO NOT WAVER. If you waver, if you go into fear, if you start buying into how things look, if you go along with appearances, or are fooled by the appearance of failure or "its not working" or "I might as well give up" or "this can't be healed" or whatever... its bullshit. It's ego. You will have to learn to ignore all of that. You have to learn to OVERLOOK/forgive every single appearance of every piece of this entire world. Because it's going to keep trying to convince you that God's will is false and irrelevant. God DOES want permanent healing and he IS READY to provide it right now AND ALREADY HAS.

If you waver from that, especially if the situation seems really serious or even if the person DIES, and if you think well... it looks like we failed and we might as well give up forgiving and stop praying or affirming the truth, then yes, that person will STAY DEAD. But what happens if EVEN in the face of death, you continue to affirm the truth of eternal life? What if you IGNORE appearances and do not take no for an answer and you get really certain and firm that this problem is NOT reality, it is NOT the truth, and the truth is with God? Maybe then with determination and persistence, that person is going to raise from the dead.

So this is how miracles work. Four fairly straightforward steps:

1) Believe in God's truth, and do not be tempted by illusions to waver or fear or doubt or be deceived by how things currently appear.

2) Bring in Holy Spirit and express and extend His Power, his consistency, his absoluteness, such that you are filled with God and are extending only love, not beliefs in attack.

3) Recognize the oneness between you and your brother, He is you, therefore you must recognize you are both One, are both Christ, and all other appearances are illusions that aren't real. Acknowledge only the absolute truth about the person.

4) Command authoritatively and assertively, even aggressively, for the problem to leave right now. Speak directly to it, not about it. Do not ask God about what to do. Do not ask God to do it. God has already set you up with a perfect connection to Him to funnel his power. It's just waiting on you to give the command and extend the authority of His Truth.

You are a miracle worker.

A classical definition of sin might be that it's some kind of attack you perform which is "against the rules." Some breaking of the law or some unholy evil act which is disallowed and undermines everything that is good. In A Course in Miracles, the definition of sin is a lot broader than this. For example:

"The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible."

This suggests that the whole world is made of sin. And this isn't just a speculation, because ACIM goes on to say that physical matter is in fact a "granite block of sin" masquerading as something solid.

"The body's eyes see ONLY form. They cannot see BEYOND what they were MADE to see. And they were made to look on error, and NOT see past it. Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see ONLY illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside FORM of nothing. To this distorted form of vision, the OUTSIDE of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true."

Here we're told that the body's physical sight can only see error and not see past it. An error which is not "overlooked", is not forgiven, and so it is regarded as sin, demanding punishment. Everything that the physical sight sees is an illusion, therefore, because the physical sight is completely unforgiving and cannot transcend the illusion to reach the truth. These illusions - really a reference to anything the body can see - therefore all things physical - is called "the granite block of sin." Jesus uses the term "granite" symbolically because this is a very hard form of physical material.

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

So now the physical body, which is part of the physical environment, is made by projecting the idea of sin outward and turning it into flesh, which symbolizes sin. Effectively everything that we regard as physical is made of the idea of sin, projected as physical matter. Physical matter comprises "outside surfaces" which you cannot see past with the physical eyes, and is really "nothing" pretending to be a solid block.

"Sin is the proclamation that attack is real, and guilt is JUSTIFIED."

Sin is also the idea of attack. If attack is real, then the world is real, because "the world was made as an attack on God." Being "the world of sin", the world of bodies was made as an attack on God. Its forms testify that God's son has been attacked. That is, "the world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son." So now all physical forms are a form of attack, or attempted attack, upon God and his son. And this is sin, because indeed if attack were possible, the world would be sinful.

"Sickness is but another name for sin."

Here Jesus goes further to include that any form of sickness is also the same thing as sin. Whether it be a headache or a broken body or a heart attack or a wound or severe death. These are all signs and proofs that sin is real. In fact, we even make the body sick to try to prove that our brother has sinned against us, per "brother at your hand I die", and the willingness to use the body as "a picture of crucifixion" to demonstrate that our brother is the one who caused our suffering.

"Sin is insanity."

Sin and insanity are also the same thing. Which means, the entire ego thought system, all mental illness, and all its physical expressions, is sin. Any belief in an opposite to God, any attack thought or grievance, all forms of sickness, all unforgiveness, it is all sin. This include all false perceptions, all physical perceptions, all body identification, all fixating on what things appear to be physically, and all blindness by perception of form, all testifies that sin is real. These are the beliefs of an insane mind which lacks vision and is unconscious.

This also ties in with the fact that sin is death, because "without the idea of death (sin) there is no world." "Sickness is but a little death", and since sickness is another form of sin, sin is death. This relates closely also to the fact that "the wages of sin is death", ie if you are in sin it logically follows that sin demands punishment and therefore you as a body must suffer and die in order to atone for your sin.

"They do not realize that, to deny God, is to deny their own identity, and in this sense, the wages of sin IS death. The sense is very literal; -- denial of Life perceives its opposite, as ALL forms of denial replace what IS, with what is NOT."

The denial of life perceives death, which is the opposite of life. Sin is the denial of life, and therefore induces death. All forms of death are forms of sin.

"If sin is real then punishment is just, and cannot be escaped."

"If sin is real, salvation must be pain."

"Pain is the cost of sin, and suffering can never be escaped if sin is real."

"If sin is real Its offering is death, and meted out in cruel form to match the vicious wishes in which sin is born."

Essentially, anything other than the truth of God, is the idea of sin. Just as it is also the idea of fear, and the idea of guilt, and the idea of sickness, and the idea of death. It is all the same single system of darkness, delusion and insanity. And WITHIN this system of insanity lives "the world", the unforgiven world, in which only the physical is regarded as real because "only the body makes the world seem real."

"The world is false perception."

When your vision is narrowed to see and focus only on the physical world or what the physical senses testify to, you are blinded by perception of form. And now you see only sin. Which means seeing any body, any physical sickness, any symptoms, any problems, any kind of suffering or unhappiness, any breakdowns or breakages, and dangers, any reasons to be afraid, this all means you've entered into a sinful perception and are now making sin real.

And this is the stuff of nightmares, because once you have closed your mind to the openness of innocence, you've decided only sin exists and cannot be escaped. When the mind is shutting out the light of truth and is becoming unforgiving, which means it is attacking and separating, other people will appear to be "only bodies", as if they are purely physical, with no component to them that is anything but physical. This is an imprisonment of yourself and them anchoring you both into the level of form and inescapable problems.

"For bodies cannot forgive."

To be in sin is to be insane, to perceive falsely, to give reality to physicality, to be unforgiving, to be in fear, to feel horrified and terrified in a nightmare, to regard problems as utterly unsolvable, to feel imprisoned and locked in with no hope, to believe all sickness is real and permanent, to forget to laugh, and to hate yourself.

There HAS to be more than the physical in order for there to be innocence. There HAS to be more than bodies, more than physical suffering, more than physical problems, and more than a physical world. There HAS to be a transcendence of all things physical if there is to be forgiveness, because to forgive is to overlook and NOT see illusions. Illusions not recognized are a false perception which is horribly blinding and upsetting. Illusions recognized dispels them and disregards the physical as nothing real at all.

"There is no sin", in ultimate truth, because "nothing real can be threatened." The immortal cannot be sick or suffer or die. God's creations are permanently perfect. There cannot be an attack and nothing can be in danger. Therefore, there cannot be a physical world, bodies cannot be real, and suffering cannot be true. Problems cannot really exist, and you cannot be alone.

Given that the world of bodies is the world of unforgiveness and sin, in which sin is not recognized as a mistake, recognizing the world as a mistake also recognizes that it is false. Mistakes can be undone and corrected. Forgiving the world is its undoing. First the veil of sin is lifted away so that we can recognize it is nothing but an illusion, we see through and past its illusion of being real and solid and physical, and see beyond it to the light of the real world. And in this light, the physical world, seen only in false perception, is gone forever.

Do you need to be fully awake in Christ in order to perform miracles? NO!!!!!!!!!

ACIM says of the miracle, "The miracle is taken first on faith, because to ask for it implies the mind has been made ready to conceive of what it cannot see and does not understand. Yet faith will bring its witnesses to show that what it rested on is really there. And thus the miracle will justify your faith in it, and show it rested on a world more real than what you saw before; a world redeemed from what you thought was there."

I think this is telling us that there are sort of two 'modes' in which miracles can occur.

1) You have a degree of "faith" in the truth being true, which means believing in God, and disbelieving illusions, to at least some degree. And as a result of this, you TRUST a higher source of miracles to provide them. Jesus is the source of said miracles, and Holy Spirit is the mechanism. They come through you and around you, but you DO play a certain facilitating role in being a "conduit" for them. aka laying on of hands, speaking truth etc.

2) Eventually the faith that you had that God's truth was true, which was used to 'bridge the gap' between where you were and where God's truth was, is no longer "needed" as such because you have moved yourself into the Kingdom, into the Holy Spirit's mindset, and you are now in the position to actually perform the miracles directly.

In the paragraph, Jesus explains that the miracle is FIRST taken on faith, and you may not be able to see or understand its origins. This means it's still happening (the witnesses to faith still show up), and it's still a miracle, just that it's coming from a place you presently cannot see and you don't fully understand. But you're open enough to CONCEIVE of it, and that is enough to get you "access" to be part of the miracle process. You're willing to believe in it even if you don't FULLY trust it yet, and this is enough, because miracles depend on God's love, not on YOUR personal strength.

This initial faith will produce miracles and it will provide "proof" to your perception that there must really BE a God, there must really BE a source of miracles beyond what you currently can perceive. And then as your faith grows stronger or you become more awakened (same thing), as you gain trust in the truth, you will become aware of the "world" which the miracles were coming from (Heaven). You are then the Christ, sharing in the source of miracles, and having a fully miraculous mind (miracle readiness).

I think from this metaphysical structure, we can see that most miracles being performed today are in the first category, are based on faith, STILL PRODUCE RESULTS, and demonstrate that God's world is real.

However, there are FEW, if any, who are in the world right now, who are performing miracles as a result of being fully awakened to the Christ mind.

When you look at pretty much all of the Bible-based miracle workers, because they quite strongly believe that Jesus is the only Son of God (most of them anyway), this in a way puts a cap on their ability to "become Christ". Therefore almost the entirety of the miracles they perform appear to be based in a faith in the miracle-working power of Jesus, though unseen, and strengthen through faith. These miracles are impressive, but there is EVEN MORE beyond this that Christ is capable of in those who have fully mastered the illusion. That level of functioning is the final goal, as demonstrated by Jesus.

So yes you can perform miracles, or at least participate in the miracle process, even while you are "not yet Christ". While you are not fully awakened, they can still occur through you and around you and produce significant results. This type of miracle working can even raise the dead. There is no real distinguishing as to what is possible. You can share and extend Jesus' miraculous authority over illusions to produce supernatural results. But if you want to REALLY go all the way, able to demonstrate such things as walking on water, changing one object to another, flying, teleporting, dematerializing, multiplying food, manifesting stuff out of thin air, etc.. the FULL POTENTIAL of miracles, then you need to get yourself all the way to the Christ mind.

The passage also tells us that it is normal and natural as part of our awakening "process" to develop faith first, to have trust in the real truth, to some degree, and that this trust is ENOUGH to bring forth "signs" which demonstrate that miracles are occurring. You yourself are not as yet ONE with their Source, or even aware of their source directly, but you're still able to like... cast a fishing rod into the invisible ocean and pull out a miracle. Later, as you advance, you will become more "directly" positioned in the role of miracle worker.

Gotta start somewhere!

This passage by the way is followed by one of Jesus's beautiful paragraphs, which speaks again to our IMMORTALITY:

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures come 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."

(signs of Life as in signs of Eternal Life as in Miracles).

Quotes from workbook, p. 463; W-pII.13

Reality, Heaven, the Kingdom of God, God's mind and thought system, real existence, Creation, your Divine Home, the Sonship, and the dwelling place of all the Creations of Light, is "structured" as a perfect hologram.

If you don't know how a hologram works, I'll try to simplify it. First of all we're not talking here about a projected 3D image like you see in the movies. Those are not holograms. They are just regular projected images.

First consider a photograph. A photograph contains a surface which has a number of locations on it. At each location there is a drop of color. When you view the entire surface you see a picture. But there is only one drop of color at each location. So when you move the 2D image in 3D, the image is still the same. Each part only contains part of the image.

Holograms are not like this. The difference is, a hologram stores an ENTIRE set of information, ir the whole picture, AT EACH location on the surface. So all of the picture is encoded in one tiny area, and another tiny area, and another. The entire surface is covered with "copies" of the entire image. The WHOLE image, is in each part of the image.

What this allows, in terms of images, is that you can encode "multiple viewpoints" of a 3D object, onto a single 2D surface. When you then move and tilt the surface, you actually see a DIFFERENT viewpoint. It's as if there are thousands of images all stored within one image, all at different angles, making the hologram appear to move in 3D.

This is based on the holographic principle that "the whole is in every part. and every part is whole".

The whole of whatever was the source object, is represented FULLY in EACH part of the second object. This also produces an interesting scenario in which, you can cut that surface in half with scissors and you don't actually LOSE any information, because the WHOLE of the image is stored in the remaining parts. And you can still see the "other sides" of the object as you move the surface, even if previously they were in the part of the image that was cut off. (But that's not really relevant to what we're talking about here.)

Now. In heaven, God is whole. God is everything, everywhere, unlimited. So God's fundamental nature is wholeness. He is the WHOLE of everything. All of it.

Then, God is a creator. "God did not will to be alone". "Divine abstraction takes joy in application". "God is first cause." Therefore, God creates by extending himself. This form of creation takes whatever is IN God, AS God, and places it into "another". God creates a second being, or what we call a Son of God, or soul.

Since God is whole, God can only create "wholly", and when He creates He FULLY creates (wholly), and gives EVERYTHING of Himself to his creation. The WHOLE of God is extended to the Son. This results in a situation where the SON is WHOLLY created, is FULLY created, is WHOLE in and of himself, HAS wholeness, AND shares the whole of God with God. The Son is a "standalone" entity but the Son is NOT CUT OFF from God - it is FUSED with God and SHARES what God has directly.

"The soul has not only been created perfect, it has been FULLY created. There is no lack in it."

This relationship between God and His Son, is what we call INHERITANCE. The son, inherits everything he is, from God. In fact, God is IN the son. "You are forever host to God." The son is also given God's freedom, and given TOTAL freedom, and so this establishes the son as "free". Bound to God, in terms of oneness, but FREE "from God" in its own right, as an individual being. And since God is the WHOLE of being, God HOSTS this Son WITHIN himself by SHARING his wholeness with His Son. The Son is "separate", but ALSO joined.

"All loving creation is freely given."

"God who encompasses all being (the whole) nevertheless created separate beings (free whole beings) who have everything individually (shared with God) and want to share it (like whole beings do) to increase their joy."Now, SHARING becomes the fundamental attribute of all things in heaven, because God creates via a process of SHARING himself. "Nothing real can be increased, except by sharing." God hosts us within His being. So we SHARE what God HAS. e.g. "To recognize that all power is of God is to gain all power."

A son of God, who is a PART of God, and is also a WHOLE, SHARES all of itself with God, INHERITS everything from God, and therefore hosts the whole of God. Being a fully created free-willed being, this son of God is now established in a position of CO-CREATOR. This is because God is a creator, and the Son INHERITS fatherhood/creatorship/authorship. So the Son can now "do" what the Father did.

"God created the Sonship. You were created to add to the Sonship."

"It is this Thought by which the Father gave creation to the Son, establishing the Son as co-creator with Himself."

God does NOT stop at "only creating one child." "God did not will to be alone, and did not will that you be alone." Other Sons of God are also co-creators with God, and WITH YOU, and as such you AND God AND your REAL PERMANENT BROTHERS co-create together, because you SHARE EVERYTHING with each other as unified wholes.

"You will never know that you are co-creator with God, until you learn that your brother is a co-creator with YOU."

"Decide but to accept your rightful place as co-

If you are not really clear that there is NO TRUTH in the world, because the entire world is an illusion, you will become quite confused.

You'll mistakenly keep searching for answers in forms, situations, explanations, authorities, rational deductions, conclusions, diagnosis, analysis etc.

You'll keep falling for every single illusion which says to you that such-and-such happened because of such-and-such.

You'll keep buying into the idea that you need to have a certain kind of special experience - the right food, the right sleep and water, the right environment, the right people - in order to be correct or healthy or happy.

You'll keep depending on stuff outside of you, and when that stuff is taken away you will be unhappy and desperate.

This all comes from believing that this world is REAL.

It all comes from LISTENING TO things that this world says, and things that the people in this world say, about why stuff happens, or what stuff is.

It takes many many occasions of stuff going WRONG and trying to figure out WHY and failing to come up with a really satisfying answer, to begin to realize that there ARE no real answers in the world. Every single one of them, every explanation possible, is STILL not the complete answer.

When stuff happens which nobody can explain, and defies all logic, and has never been seen before, and is completely insane, then you get a glimpse into just how obscure and nonsensical the world is. It is UTTERLY RIDICULOUS.

There can be no truth to it because it is an illusion. If it were real, sure, certain things would seem to make sense. There are various laws of physics and stuff which *seem* to hold true most of the time, except for when it breaks down, which it must, because the world is an unstable dream of chaos.

You can search and search and try to FIND answers and solutions and explanations here, in form, in events, in circumstances, in analyzing "what happened", and you will not ever find satisfactory answers. There aren't any. This is the ego's "seek and do not find".

If you THINK that you need to find an answer it is because you already believe there is a problem. If you believe there is a problem, you are MAKING a problem and have blinded yourself to the truth that there are no problems. So now you are on a hunt for nothing, trying to find out why nothing happened, thinking something happened. And you will FAIL. And that's a good thing, because maybe with enough failure you will learn WHY you failed. You failed because the world is not the truth and never will be.

God's truth is the only truth. "Only the truth is true" means that God's truth/reality is TRUE, and the world is FALSE.

Do not be deceived by sources of authority and explanation and proof and evidence that appear before your eyes in the world. Even if it makes sense. Even if it seems clear and obvious and totally convincing. Even if event A caused result B. Even that is not truth. Even if it can be proven in a court of law, that is not truth. It is not God's truth.

God's truth is that none of this happened at all, the world does not exist, there is no sickness or death, there are no problems, separation hasn't happened, the world is nothing, and you are immortal. If the world you are interacting with does not demonstrate that to you, it cannot POSSIBLY be real.

This is the only way that there can be miracles.... demonstration that what we think is "natural" is in fact unnatural, that what we think "happened" has not happened, and that what we think is "true" is completely false and does not exist.

It's quite common for us to say that the ego does this and it does that. The Course is filled with explanations about how the ego operates, and there is a lot of discussion outside the book about how the ego is responsible for stuff.

It gets to the point where you think of the ego like it is a 'thing' that has vicious vengeance in mind, and we refer to it in the third person. We make out indeed that the ego is like a separate entity almost, that it wants 'you' dead and it is sucking the life out of 'you' and all this.

We need to be clear that the ego is not only an illusion and doesn't exist, but also that YOU are the one who created it. It doesn't do anything on its own. It's not autonomous, it has no will, and it has no power. It's nothing more than a puff of smoke.

But we are the ones who invented this puff of smoke. We are the ones who USE it. We are the ones who choose it and choose to seem to be victims of it. We are the ones who go into it and make it seem real, and we also make it seem to do stuff to us against our will.

It's a major part of our role of pretending to be a victim, to have a sense of separation between us and other, and then because of this we section off a part of ourselves as this 'other' and call it the ego. We particularly like to project all the negative, wrong, bad stuff onto this ego, but in fact that's just one half of the ego. Who is it doing the projecting? It's also the ego. It's the ego trying to appear "good", making the other part of itself bad, because the ego is a state of inner conflict.

But even then it's not the ego doing this. It's you. You're the one choosing it, empowering it, putting 'life' into it, making it seem like it has a will of its own, and conveniently treating it like it's to blame for everything that's gone wrong, including death. A vast majority of the writing I've seen about the ego frames it like it's a separate thing. It is not ANYTHING, yet alone separate.

It is you who invented death. The ego didn't. You merely use what we call ego - a collection of illusions and deceptions - to try to pretend that death can happen and to act it out. All the while we pretend that we're not the one choosing this, and just as we make God a skapegoat we also make the ego the skapegoat like it did this to us. No it didn't. You will not experience any freedom or power while you continue to believe that the ego is responsible for anything that's happening "to you". It's all about you doing it to yourself.

"Ego" is nothing more than a label for all the ways that you deliberately and intentionally play with illusions. We talk about having a false self and about how the ego is trying to destroy you and all this - but it's you - you are trying to destroy you. Other words for ego are unconsciousness, sleep, dreaming, illusions, denial, self repression, separation etc. All the same thing. And it's all you that is choosing and making it. And you have the sole responsibility to stop making it. Just as Jesus says, "YOU made sickness and death and you can abolish both."

There is no ego really. It's just illusions. And there is no death.

A good question to ask is, it is any of my god-dam business?

In various ACIM groups, a majority of statements made are attempts to evaluate what someone else is doing and to judge whether or not they are supposed to be doing it.

It's kind of like the behavior police, making it one's own business to require that other people be a certain way in order to be acceptable.

What I think it really stems from is this issue of irresponsibility for our own choices. Or rather, trying to make someone else responsible for your happiness, and thereby being justified in anger at them when they're not being the way we need them to be, in order to choose what we want on our behalf.

There is this "forgiveness to destroy" all over these groups.

If I am responsible for my own choice and what I experience and I am not responsible for anyone else's mistaken decisions, then what anyone else is or is not doing should really be of no concern to me.

If I can access anything I need and any experience I desire through responsibility for my own choice, then I should have no need for anyone else to be a certain way, say certain things, have certain behaviors, or comply to some kind of guilt-laden course ideal. If I'm finger-pointing as to how others are falling short, it must prove that I am falling short and I'm the one who needs to own it.

What I came away with from spending time in the groups is, getting back to this self-study practice, for myself. No-one else can choose the atonement for me, or deny it for me. It's not anyone else's choice to make on my behalf. So I ask myself now whether there is really any significant merit in participating in these "discussion groups" where 90% of what's written is about the ways that other people are wrong.

Why are so many people talking about the way that OTHER people are doing the course and judging them for it?

I don't think we're supposed to be even getting into other people's business. Like, if someone is doing the course a certain way for them, that's their choice. It may not be the way I do it or what I believe the course says. But as soon as my ego starts to compare and judge the person now I'm getting involved in their business, interfering with their choices, trying to control them, and then rejecting them when they fail to comply.

We need to mind of own fucking business a bit more. Or as Jesus puts it more eloquently.... be passer by. Observe.

Forgiveness looks and is still and quiet and judges not. Where is the entanglement of opinions and getting into whether other people are right or wrong, in that?

All the debate and trying to coerce others to be like oneself, is an indirect ego attempt to avoid making one's own choice for atonement. It's a failure to forgive, actually, resulting in justified judgement. "He who would not forgive must judge, to justify his failure to forgive." We aren't going to get to heaven by having someone else choose to go there for us.

So what does it matter what anyone else is doing? What does it matter whether other people are getting it or not? What does it matter who said what to whom and who was an asshole and who is passive aggressive and who is spewing lies about the truth 24/7?

I'm just thinking... I need to do the course myself, for me, and let go of trying to change other people when they're not ready or willing. Those who are to meet will meet. When students are ready, teachers appear. There are no accidents in salvation. God has a plan.

Well actually yes you do. Here's why.

Evaluations of 'good and bad' are both ego. In your ego, there are two parts.

A) The persona self, which is what the ego 'keeps' of your identity, and is only a part of the whole. It rejects everything it considers bad, through judgement about what's good and bad, and relegates all of the bad stuff to the shadow. Therefore, this good-seeking persona, which you think is all of your conscious self, is actually responsible for creating bad stuff - the very bad stuff that it seeks to get rid of.

B) The shadow self, houses the bad stuff that the persona judged as not good enough. This bad stuff is all the things your persona believes are dark and evil and not acceptable as part of the 'self'. Whatever the ego keeps as the persona, it gets rid of as the shadow. The shadow still stays as part of your mind, the unconscious mind, which houses all the repressed murderous through of the persona. The persona is murderous because it tries to get rid of all bad stuff, in order to make itself look good. Surprise!

Okay so, most people who do forgiveness, focus on getting rid of bad stuff. And this is because you are so conditioned by the ego to always keep the persona, and attack something else. This is the ego's survival mechanism - throw out a decoy, attack the decoy even though it's made of ego, and pretend that what's doing the judging is not ego. Therefore, you accidentally keep the ego in the name of getting rid of it. The ego is quite sneaky. And we fell for it big time.

So we're spending most of our time in the persona, thinking this conscious self is all of ourself. And our hidden shadow self is usually unconscious, unless it rears its ugly head at which point it hurls attack at the persona (which is sort of a good thing, cus the persona is a big liar and needs to be dismantled), but this also can manifest as sickness and death.

The problem is, we think that all of the 'bad stuff' that bothers us, that we don't like, that we are upset by, we think it is all the fault of our shadow (which we project onto others). So we get busy forgiving that stuff... we forgive the enemies, we forgive what seems 'bad', BUT, really the only way truly forgive what seems bad is to stop the 'good-loving' persona from doing its nasty work. We have to become willing to recognize the 'good' persona is actually just as much the problem.

The good persona is the victim in most scenarios, victimized by the shadow, and desiring to protect itself from destruction. If you were to protect it, you'd keep the ego. Yet if you don't protect it, you still keep the ego because it will be attacked. Lose lose. The only way to win, is to see that you are playing both parts, you're focusing on only keeping good stuff and this is creating more bad stuff.

So really your GOOD judgements are what creates bad stuff. Your special love. Your special idol worship. Your favoritism. Your people pleasing. Your trying to appear successful and happy. Your spiritual seeking. All this stuff is creating the shadow.

So we need to be careful we're not just trying to undo the shadow. Working ON the shadow, as our 'enemy', actually is a decoy and deceives us into not noticing the behavior of the persona, which is where the ego houses all of its bullshit and lies. The persona needs to be undone, in order to get rid of the shadow, but the persona wants to keep manufacturing the shadow in order to 'get rid of it'. Getting rid of shadow makes more shadow. Fail.

I guess my longwinded point is, don't just think you have to forgive the bad stuff. If you believe in bad stuff it MUST mean you believe in good stuff, which is still a dualistic judgement from the ego persona, trying to pretend not to be evil. It is still separation. There is still a war going on. Its this separation between good and bad that is the problem, not just the bad stuff. Both parts are actually innocent, not just the bad stuff. But until you see that, recognize both parts are the cause of guilt, not just the 'bad stuff'.

Forgive the good and the bad, undo the separation of duality that creates them both, and return to wholeness. That's forgiveness.

You might think that, you only need to perform a forgiveness when something seems upsetting, something goes wrong, someone is attacking, or there's a problem.

In particular the ego in us might seem "partly committed" to forgiveness, willing to forgive "part time", only when things are extreme, or when we can find enough willingness. We might only "do it" when we want something, to get a selfish need met, to make the bad stuff go away so we can carry on as an ego. We might only forgive when pushed, or when things become unbearable.

So you might think that some person walking along a street that you don't know, doesn't need you to "forgive" them. That you don't need to forgive the sunsets and the puppies. That you only forgive when something is wrong, or you're not at peace. And if that person on the street doesn't appear to be attacking, hurting, acting viciously or demonstrating ego traits, what reason is there to forgive?

What we need to realize though is that even the states and activities that we think are normal, commonplace, everyday kinds of behaviors, etc, or aspects of the false world which we seem to like, are in fact still unnatural. Someone seeming to coast along in a body having a life is still not living in the mind and spirit of God as God intended. And the world is always an illusion.

A person can seem relatively harmless and not presenting any problems, but that doesn't mean that aren't separating from God. It doesn't mean they're sane or healed or healthy. They very likely have identified with their body, their mind is likely split and confused, they probably believe in separation and have all kinds of ego stuff going on.

What that means is that pretty much anyone in the world in any state is, to some degree, in a state of suffering, a state of despair, a state of confusion and insanity, a state of mistaken identity, a state of separation and a state of attack. Pretty much everyone in the world is in a state of lack and fear.

Because of this, if someone is essentially still in a body and distanced from God, then yes indeed they need to be forgiven. Because that is an attack and also because they are suffering. And not because they're doing anything to you overtly or obviously, but because they themselves are not in a state of love. Anyone not in a state of love is calling out for help.

So then what it comes down to is that you have to start recognizing whether a person is totally living by God's will, being as God created them, identified with spirit, and completely sane, or are they distanced from that? And if they are distanced, then they need healing and help and love and miracles.

It also then becomes clear that forgiveness isn't merely some process that you do "part time". It's not something you switch on and off, which you apply to a situation and step away from. It isn't a temporary action or some procedure that you perform as a one-off. It should be ongoing and permanent.

Forgiveness is in fact a constant state that you are trying to enter and maintain continuously. That means being constantly "on" as a healer. Being in a state of continuous love and power. This is what Jesus calls "miracle readiness", ie being in a state where you are "ready, willing and able." Poised to work miracles ALL the time. And where you recognize and are willing to be loving towards, thus forgiving, everyone you meet.

Essentially, while anyone is left walking the face of the earth in any state short of total enlightenment, you have miracle-working to do. Miracles are EXPRESSIONS FROM a state of miracle mindedness, and are "miracle-doing". They are the process which heals and restores and uplifts, and you perform them from a CONSTANT state, if possible, of "being a forgiving person." Of being a healer.

"Those who are healed become instruments of healing."

A forgiving person isn't a person that "does forgivenesses" now and then. It's someone who has a forgiving attitude, a forgiving state of mind, sane and miraculous, having already healed and received atonement. And now that person is a walking-talking healing machine. And everyone they meet they give the love of God to. Including the random strangers on the street who seem at first to not be calling out for love at all.

"The distinction has also been made here between "miracle-mindedness" as a STATE, and "miracle-doing" as its expression.

The former needs YOUR careful protection, because it is a state of miracle-READINESS. This is what the Bible means in the many references to "Hold yourself ready" and other similar injunctions. Readiness here means keep your perception right side up, (or valid), so you will ALWAYS be ready, willing, and able. These are the essentials for "listen, learn, and do." You must be

READY to listen

WILLING to learn

and ABLE to do

Only the last is involuntary, because it is the APPLICATION of miracles which must be Christ-controlled. But the other two, which are the voluntary aspects of miracle-mindedness, ARE up to you."

"Miracles are natural. When they do NOT occur something has gone wrong."

"That is what we meant when we once said that miracles are NATURAL, and when they do NOT occur, something has gone wrong."

"It is because the thoughts you think you think ****appear as images**** that you do not recognize them as nothing. You think you think them, and so you think you see them. This is how your "seeing" was made. ****This is the function you have given your body's eyes.**** It is not seeing. It is image-making. It takes the place of seeing, replacing vision with illusions."

Consider a photograph. A photograph appears to be an image of something. Maybe it's an image of a city, which you took while on vacation. As you look at the photograph it appears to you to be a city, and you think there is a city there. Just as when you look at people on the TV you think you're seeing people, and even react as if they were real sometimes. This is because the images are very convincing and lifelike.

However, consider the difference between the photograph and the actual place. The photograph is not really a city, it just looks like one. And the real city is somewhere else. Well, how about we suggest that this physical world, planet Earth etc, is in fact not a real world, but is in fact like a photograph of a world? It LOOKS LIKE a world, but isn't an ACTUAL world. It's an IMAGE OF a world, or what a world would LOOK LIKE, but isn't one.

A tree that you look at, isn't actually a tree. It is a three-dimensional "hologram" of a tree. It sure looks like one, feels like one, moves like one. It even seems alive. But it is still just an image of a tree. A kind of 3D animated picture. Like a movie clip. As it plays out, it sees to sway in the wind and drop its leaves and sprout new ones, but all the while it's not an ACTUAL tree. It's just a picture of one.

This is because everything in this world is not actually a world. It's an IMAGE of a world. A collection of pictures. The body is a picture. The trees and houses and cars are just images. The planet is in fact just a PROJECTED IMAGE from the mind, which has tried to depict what such things would look like if they existed. It is a representation or symbol of such things, but is not really those things.

The body's eyes were designed to "see images" of a world made of images. To reflect back those images into the mind, to form some kind of "sight". And so now you look upon images. And the body can only see images, it cannot see real actual places.

Recognizing that this world is really just a collection of pictures, imagining a world, visualizing forms that don't really exist, you can better understand why this world is a dream or hallucination. The mind is "seeing" what it thinks it wants to see. It is picturing a world of bodies. And these images are made to block true vision. You look upon them thinking you are surrounded by an ACTUAL world, when all you are surrounded by is a hollow empty picture.

"The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen."

"You see the world which you have made, but you do not see yourself as the ****image-maker****. You cannot be saved from the world, but you can escape from its cause. This is what salvation means, for where is the world you see when its cause is gone? Vision already holds a replacement for everything you think you see now. Loveliness can ****light your images****, and so transform them that you will love them even though they were made of hate. For you will not be making them alone."

"What I see reflects a process in my mind, which starts with my idea of what I want. From there, the mind makes up an image of the thing the mind desires, judges valuable, and therefore seeks to find. These images are then projected outward, looked upon, esteemed as real, and guarded as one's own."

"All the images His Son appears to make have no effect on what he is. They blow across his mind like wind-swept leaves that form a patterning an instant, break apart to group again, and scamper off. Or like mirages seen above a desert, rising from the dust."

"These images, with no reality in truth, bear witness to the fear of God, forgetting being Love. He must be joy."

"You ARE as God created you, and so is every living thing you look upon, REGARDLESS of the images you see."

"That is because you surround yourself with the environment you want. And you want it to protect the image of yourself which you have made. The image is part of it. What you see while you believe you are in it is seen through the eyes of the image. It is not vision. Images cannot see."

"To be told that what you do not see is there sounds like insanity. It is very difficult to become convinced that it is insanity not to see what is there, and to see what is not there instead. You do not doubt that the body's eyes can see. You do not doubt the images they show you are reality. Your faith lies in the darkness, not the light."

It makes sense that if you keep seeing people as being able to affect you, as being the cause of your problems, as being to blame, as being an enemy, or having power over you, you will simply have to experience fear. Fear will be present in the mind because the mind is now split and has diminished its perception of itself.

Now that you are 'suppressed', you will sense that you have much less power, and that this power has been displaced outward to other people who now have power over you. You will see enemies all over the place and will not feel safe, but rather will be afraid all the time.

Fear isn't just a reaction. Fear is a state of mind in which you are perceiving enemies. Fear is what it is like when the mind is experiencing itself being at war with itself, where its inner conflict is overlaid on top of the world, filtering out the beauty and peace and causing you to only see part of what's there, which then looks harrowing and insane and a threat.

Fear is a reversal of cause and effect, and fear is also the mechanism of perceptual distortion that forces you to see enemies where there are none.

You'll also find that once you're in a victim consciousness like this, you will feel afraid all the time and not even imagine that it's possible to be less afraid. And more importantly, you won't realize that you feel afraid because of some attitude you have, OR that it's really got anything to do with how other people are behaving.

You will think your fear is just your separate problem, and that other people probably aren't this afraid and there's something wrong with just you. You'll notice everyone else seems to be more confident and you can't figure out why you're the scared one.

You imagine ways you might stand up to the intensity and terror of everyone you meet, by bolstering yourself up or talking yourself into being tougher, but it doesn't work. You still feel insecure, until you realize what part you play in doing this to yourself.

Something marvelous happens when you start to change your perception. What you need to do is to take back your power, by realizing how your way of perceiving is attacking you. You have to realize that people look like enemies to you because of how much you are attacking yourself and them. And you have to see in your mind the processes that go into trying to separate you from yourself.

You can't feel strong and safe when you're perceiving yourself in a split way, which means there is a strong contrast between what applies to you and what applies to others. So long as you imagine that other people have taken something away from you, that they are the cause of you feeling afraid, that they are doing this to you, you are going to experience fear. But you have to realize, that's just how YOU are choosing to perceive. It's got nothing to do with other people, and you're not really seeing them correctly.

When your mind is split, you will project your shadow mind onto other people and see it in them, and will be threatened by it. This makes other people seem like an enemy, like they are powerful and dark and evil and scary. They're not. But you will see this in them because it's in your mind like a filter. And within your mind, that dark evil stuff is at war with the part of you that you think is you - the positive-seeking goodie-goodie self that people pleases and wants to be adored. Both of these are within your own mind, having a war between them, and that's entirely down to the fact your perception is broken.

That also tells you that if you would heal the separation between these two parts of yourself, undoing all of that attack content, you would not see people AS threatening because you would not have this negativity in your perception, and therefore would not HAVE grounds for feeling afraid.

This healing will lead to a feeling of continually increasing strength and empowerment. It will make you literally less afraid. You will marvel at how you feel stronger, brighter, more energetic, more expressive. You will be surprised at how less anxious you are around others. You will feel more aware and awake and will be happier more often. And you'll be quite surprised at how you don't feel terrorized like you used to. Because you've stopped doing it to yourself.

And as such the forgiven world starts to rise up before your perception instead of a world of hate and vengeance. As you forgive yourself, the world will appear to be a happier place. It will seem like it doesn't contain the threats and guilts that it once did. And it will be like unveiling a beautiful world that was right in front of your face all along but you didn't see it because it was all covered up with your blocks to awareness.

And eventually too this will mean, you will come to realize that God is right here in front of you and with you and inside you, and that you can experience Him. For real! And how joyful that will be.

You have made a secret agreement with all your victimizers and attackers.

1) Their half of the bargain entails they must appear to be responsible for all the guilt you do not want to own in yourself, which you thought was true of you. They must carry the burden of it and be condemned by it, by you. You get to blame it all on them and to displace it away from yourself, rendering you seemingly innocent and them guilty. You get to claim they are the cause of all problems and that you did nothing at all.

2) Your half of the bargain entails you must allow them to attack and victimize you, in direct relation to how much guilt they are carrying for you. The more guilt you put onto them, the more you will experience them as an enemy, and the more you hate them the more they will hate you. You give them a permit to punish you, in exchange for their service.

3) You will suffer because of them, and you will not want it, and you will be terrified of it, and you will create tremendous drama about how you did not ask for it due to your newfound 'innocence', BUT deep down you KNOW that you gave them every permission to do this to you, and as such you AGREE with it (oh the horror!).

4) You secretly PREFER that they victimize you compared to having to carry the responsibility of the GUILT that was yours to begin with. You think its a bargain, because you experience yourself as 'innocent' while experiencing them as 'guilty'. It's just unfortunate that, in this innocence, you also MUST be an 'innocent victim'. That is the price you have to pay.

This whole agreement is set up to defend you against your own guilt. You hire everyone who provides this service for you and does this to you, and you are grateful that it creates an illusion of innocence for you. You would rather tolerate this than to actually obtain REAL innocence, which you DO NOT BELIEVE IN, because you DO believe it is true that you are sinful and guilty and deserve to die.

Nothing heavy.

You do, however, have a clause in the contract. You are permitted to break the agreement. However, breaking the agreement has TERMS. The terms are:

1) You must take back the guilt that you projected onto them and find them innocent. You must stop blaming them or scapegoating them or accusing them in ANY way of being the cause of ANYTHING you are experiencing.

2) You must ADMIT that you were the one who wanted this agreement, you are the one who agreed to it, and you were the one who ACCEPTED the consequences, even if you did not like how it felt.

3) You must be willing to take back all of the guilt, which undoes your own perception of yourself as innocent (and that alone is terrifying), and which places responsibility for ALL of it back in your own lap. You may not want this. And if you stay in this perception for long you will suffer. That suffering is why you wanted to make the agreement in the first place.

4) You must admit that you were only ever a WILLING victim, a willing participant, that you wanted every single attack, and were willing to LAY DOWN AND DIE if it would mean you are seen as innocent again. Nobody dies without their own consent.

5) You must admit that, now, because these people are NO LONGER in the contract with you, that they are wholly innocent, and this means they ARE NOT victimizing you and you HAVE NOT BEEN victimized by them. All blame for any past experiences must be lifted from them and you must be willing to see them as forgiven. You MUST also be willing to THANK them for their cooperation, service, perfect role-play, and for carrying out your contract to perfection, recognizing they did ONLY what you wanted them to and they did it well.

Having taken full responsibility for arranging this agreement, you are holding the guilt, but you have an exit option. The option states you are permitted to either re-enter the victimhood agreement with more people, and continue seeking for artificial innocence, OR, you can seek for real innocence, by appealing to an AUTHORITY ON TRUTH, such as the Holy Spirit. You have to be willing to go before Him, take your guilt with you, expose it TO Him, allow Him to be aware of all of it WITH you, look upon it from HIS perspective (in the light), and be willing to be SHOWN the truth about it. You must agree to accept His verdict, whether it is that you are innocent or guilty (and btw it will always be that you are truly innocent).

If you take the exit option, you must be willing to surrender the guilt that you placed on yourself and own up to the deeper truth that you are TRULY INNOCENT, HAVE DONE THING WRONG, and you must accept God's love again. Too much to ask? Choose again? You could always choose to be a victim some more.

Some time ago, I did not even remotely recognize that I was choosing to be a victim. If I was afraid, attacked, threatened, hurt in any way, I would see it as the other person was entirely responsible.

Over time, as I've tried to apply forgiveness principles and the secret of salvation, taking responsibility for what I'm doing to myself and for choosing all feelings, my victimhood role has changed in appearance.

Now I see that when I "go into victimhood", this entails me deliberately trying to position myself as "at the effect" of others, trying to pull off a stunt of projection and blame, weakening myself, choosing to be upset, and generally being the cause of what I'm feeling.

As I practice this more and more, becoming "victimy" is recognized much more clearly as me descending into a funky state of "being affected", where I'm attacking myself and trying to pass it off as someone else's fault. I start to notice attacks coming out of me in an attempt to hurl it towards someone else. And I start to feel the typical feelings of fear and hurt that accompany this "role-play".

But I more quickly catch myself and take responsibility, to admit this stress and upset and suffering that I'm experiencing is solely because I've slipped down the slope into dishonesty, into projecting and blaming and trying to force myself to be affected by something. It's a way that I use other people to try to hurt myself. And I can no longer wholly accuse them of being the reason why I feel this way.

So the challenge now seems easier, to get myself out of this role and to stop "playing the victim", in recognition that I not only have the power of decision and responsibility to do so, I can do so and, when I do, no-one else can stop me doing so. It's up to me to decide that I want to feel better and to change my mind so that I do. This is especially much easier once you can see clearly and squarely that it's you doing this to yourself when trying to put forth the "lie" that it's not.

I now recognize much more clearly the component of self-caused suffering mixed in with what used to appear to be just the effects of attack. The unconsciousness of believing it was always coming from someone else is lifting. It's getting to the point where even if I do try to attack, project, hurt or blame, I simultaneously am aware of feeling that I am hurting myself, attacking myself, and am fully included in all the suffering I'm trying to get rid of.

I am seeing that this position of victim simply does not work, and I cannot escape what's happening inside my mind because "ideas leave not their source" even when I'm split minded and believing it's someone else who did this. I have "re-framed" the lie of fear enough to recognize that its entirely bullshit to claim I am afraid "because of" anyone or anything. In my fear is simply a dishonest attempt on my own part to disguise myself and portray myself as suffering, to try to gain the "reward" of passing off causation onto someone else through an accusation of sin.

As you become clearer and more recognizing exactly what it is you are doing, in your mind and attitude and choosing, versus what you thought you were doing when it was on auto-pilot, it simply becomes very obvious that you cannot move into egotism without feeling like shit, and you cannot escape the consequences of your choosing, nor can you blame without being blamed, or try to make suffer without suffering yourself.

The next step then is of course, in admitting to this charade, and recognizing its utter futility, simply stopping this "behavior" and lifting out of it, now that you "know better" and cannot pretend to hide from the simply truth that "you cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself." I am ceasing to play the role of victim and to instead step back into the shoes of Christ, personally empowered and stronger in the light of truth.

The victim role is not what it appears to be. It's not even remotely to do with what other people are causing or doing to you. It's entirely a fake postulating of yourself in trying to pull of a representation of you as "a sick and suffering you", so that you get the payoff of trying to blame someone else for it. Always always always you are doing it to yourself, and being in DENIAL of this fact is really the only problem.

Once you admit to it enough you can no longer put the cat back in the bag. And it's then impossible to even try to attack others when you're aware that doing so makes you hurt. If they are to suffer, you will suffer. The only way out is to stop hurting yourself. And when you choose your immortality and invulnerability, nothing can ever hurt you again.

"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."

On the level of the ego mind, let's call it "level 1", cause and effect are separate. This is entirely based on the notion that the Son of God (who is the effect of God) is separate from cause (from God). Everything about the ego's thought system is based on this foundation.

The ego mind perceives that causes produce completely separate effects. Whoever causes something is separate from the effects they produce. All kinds of ego bullshit comes from this:

- You can do something to someone else without it affecting yourself

- Other people can do something to you without affecting themselves

- You can be hurt or have something happen to you without you willing it yourself

- You can hurt or do something to other people or objects against their will

- Events happen seemingly against your will at all times with no power to stop them

- You can get away with murder

It is a thought system in which cause seems to be power but effect seems to be powerless. This is because the Son of God (effect) has be disconnected from Power (God).

Even the properties of the physical world are based on this principle. Object A seems to do something to Object B, causing Object B to be affected in some way, but the effects on Object B are not the same as Object A. Object A may appear to be completely unaffected (e.g. using hard diamonds to cut metal).

Every interaction of physical objects/forms in the physical universe follows this principle of separation of cause and effect. The entire physical universe itself IS an expression of this idea of the Son being separate from the Father, and therefore is that He is "disconnected" from God by being in a body.

It's also a way for us to disown sin and go into denial. There has to be denial present in order for Object B to be "affected" by Object A in any way whatsoever, without those effects applying also to object A. Physical matter itself is therefore an expression of the denial of God, and every separation between every particle of matter or energy is also an expression of denial of God.

The physical world is really a state of denial and once there is no longer denial, there can be no more physical world! Separation is a state of differences - different forms - all of which are illusions of differences and do not really exist but in a state of denial of the truth.

The Holy Spirit's thought system, which we could call "level 2", is a thought system of total oneness, wholeness, sharing and equality. In it, what applies to oneself must apply both in its cause and its effects. It's a mindset where the Son of God is One with the Father. In it there is no separation, and therefore the One Mind shares equally in cause and effect. This leads to perceptions such as:

- What I do unto others I literally am directly doing to myself

- It is impossible to hurt anyone else without it hurting yourself, which is a profound incentive to never hurt anyone

- What applies to you applies to the entire Sonship equally

- If it is true for you, it is true for everyone everywhere

- In an all-or-nothing way, since what applies to you applies everywhere, either you and your brother are both guilty or you and your brother are both innocent.

- You cannot get away with murder because your attempt to bring about death (of God) destroys your own self. You cannot have God be affected by your sin but not yourself. Your belief in attack attacks yourself, and all attack is therefore self-attack.

- It is absolutely 100% impossible to be a victim or a victimizer.

So in the right mind or One Mind, cause and effect are reunited and therefore all of the laws of God come into effect. This includes ideas like "to have all, give all to all", or "give and receiving are one", or "who but myself can I crucify" etc. There are thoughts of oneness and universal equality.

This also means that in Holy Spirit's thought system, openness to this mindset of equality means you are able to now receive love as well as extend it, you are able to have shared interests, you're able to love others as yourself literally etc.

But it also means, that mind is capable of undoing, erasing, correcting, and repairing (healing) the mind of separation between cause and effect. That means this mind is able to overthrow and override all of the apparent physical laws such as the ways that one object seems to inflict "separate effects" on another, the way that disease and sickness unfolds as a state of victimhood, etc.

All of these things are healed and corrected by the mind of truth. This is why Holy Spirit's mind is miraculous, why absolutely nothing physical has power over it, and why absolutely ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. And by that I mean in the EXTREME, the most extremely unlikely unimaginable extraordinary supernatural fantastic fucking amazing things are possible, because anything is possible when you have holiness (wholeness of mind).

The unified mind which both gives and receives is far more powerful and empowered than the separated mind. In separation, cause is power and effect is powerless. In unity, cause is power and effect is power also. This means having power over all effects, and really realizing that all physical effects are actually states of powerlessness, and therefore should be EASY to manipulate by someone who is empowered with love.

"The world you see (with ANY kind of perception) 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."

This is talking about THIS world, Earth, its physical nature, its inherent cruelty. Jesus goes on to say something which COMPLETELY bypasses any idea of having thoughts ABOUT the world, it being merely an emotional statement, or something to do with perceptual states...

"***Children are born into it*** through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. ***Their minds are trapped in their brain***, and its power declines if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And ***their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground***, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel. "

"If this were the real world, God WOULD be cruel. For no father could subject his children to this as the price of salvation, and be loving."

Notice here the profoundly obvious references to things happening on a PHYSICAL level, within an environment He is referring to as "the world". He isn't speaking in metaphors or poetry or internal interpretative states. He's referring to this PLANET.

He mentions children being born "into it". This has absolutely nothing to do with your perception or attitude about the world. He's talking about child birth. The PHYSICAL birthing of human babies.

He mentions minds being trapped in brains. This CLEARLY distinguishes that the MIND, which might be the realm where you claim to have an attitude "about the world", is completely distinct from "the brain". And I think we all know that the brain is NOT a reference to an ATTITUDE. It's talking of the physical blob of brain tissue in the physical head of the physical body. And these bodies, which house these brains, are part of the physical world that is being referred to as THE WORLD THAT IS CRUEL.

Further He mentions about how the bodies become frail, wither, suffer and die, and are laid in the ground. Unless you have a graveyard IN YOUR HEAD, this is again a direct reference to MULTIPLE bodies (not just yours) being laid in the PHYSICAL SOIL of the ground. As an aspect of this WORLD that he is making reference to as CRUEL.

All of these references are clearly speaking of a world, the PHYSICAL world, where children are born through human child birth, people's minds seem trapped in their physical human brains, and their physical bodies grow old and die and are buried in the physical soil of the ground. None of this is metaphorical, poetry, fluffly language or indirect. It is totally literal and plain as day.

THAT WORLD, where all this stuff happens, is being referred to as CRUEL, and NOT a world that God would create. For God to create a world where children are BORN, where minds are stuck in BRAINS, and physical bodies become sick and die and are buried in the GROUND, God would have to be a CRUEL FATHER. Because all of this IS cruel. At the PHYSICAL level. This has nothing whatsoever to do with perception or attitude or meanings you give to things.

"If this were the real world, God WOULD be cruel."

This is fortunately NOT THE REAL WORLD. It is not reality, God is NOT cruel, God does NOT subject His children to this madness, and REALITY is nothing like this hellish world. The dream of death is not God's will. It was made to oppose His will. "The world was made as an attack on God." IT IS madness to think of life as being born, suffering, and dying in the end. It is completely unnatural.

This world is not the Kingdom of Heaven. Regardless of how you look at it, perceive it, think of it, interpret it, project onto it, or have attitudes or meanings given to it, it STILL remains what it IS, which is an unnatural artificial world of cruelty. Even teachers of God look upon it and RECOGNIZE THIS, and are NOT DECEIVED BY IT'S LIES.

"God's teachers choose to look on dreams a while. It is a conscious choice.For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences.The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are?Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die.Yet they are not deceived by what they see."

Why are they not deceived? Because they RECOGNIZE that the world MUST BE A LIE, is NOT showing them reality, and does NOT contain the truth. They look upon THE DREAM (this world) and recognize it is FALSE. It is the ego's world of cruelty and hell. And even when forgiven it remains nothing but an ILLUSION of a world.

"Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."

"The world you see (in any way) is an ILLUSION of a world. ***God did not create it***, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. 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.***"

Lately I've been noticing that .... my state of mind, has something to do with what happens. I know that sounds a bit far fetched to many people. But we are after all told that this world is a dream, and that our minds are dreaming it.

I see how sometimes events and the appearance of certain people seem to correlate to certain attitudes or modes that I'm in. Sometimes a freer happier mode seems to produce the appearance of certain types of people, while unhappier or angrier modes seem to produce other types.

One of the ways that I've noticed this manifesting is with the idea that "what you resist persists". For example if you are driving a car and some slow person is in front of you, and you resist them being there, they seem to linger more than if you let them be there. When you let them go and don't make them an obstacle, they seem to leave sooner. In a sense, the showing up of a roadblock or "reason to slow down" shows up when you are "pushing too hard" or rushing. It influences what happens.

I've seen also times where, if I am doing a healing and saying things which are truthful, such as a few times in the hospital recently, following those times I noticed how other people seemed to lighten up a lot and laugh more. The whole sort of "atmosphere" of the place changed, the people changed and their moods changed and the events became more supportive.

For sure I also find that if I am upset or angry or frustrated, I start producing things going wrong. More and more things seem to fall on the floor, break, slip out of reach, get in the way, or generally just become "more reasons to be annoyed." I don't think that this is merely a matter of being annoyed and interpreting them as annoying. I think there is actually an increase in the number of things that happen, which don't appear to happen in such a condensed way at other times. Mind mind is literally influencing what happens.

Sometimes I get a sense that there is a kind of "psychic weather", in which, let's say.... it seems like maybe there are some minds that are contributing to external conditions - to dream content. Certain events seem to transpire as though "put there" by the minds of certain people. It seems at times as if there is a kind of psychological war playing out, literally orchestrating changes in events and what objects or people show up, in a subtle but noticeable way.

"This is not safe, because ***external conditions are produced by the thoughts of many***, not all of whom are pure in heart as yet."

Overall, I sense and notice more often, that the world in fact does appear to be a malleable dream. Not just some fixed physics-driven state of objective reality, but really a much more malleable fluid sort of "mix" of contributions and influences. It even appears to be possible that stuff which seems like it would've taken a long time to "plan" or "make possible", becomes possible complete with backstory, just to "fit" into place. As if the whole world just "changed" to line up with expectations.

There are some days when I wake up and I feel like everything has changed, in a subtle but noticeable way. Almost like as if you had jumped to a different "dimension" or "version" of the world, in which everyone and everything is subtly different in the same way.

I wouldn't be the first to claim this either, because there is plenty of evidence and stories out there about buildings appearing out of nowhere, strange correlations, sudden appearances or disappearances of things which couldn't seem possible, etc. Again suggesting that this world is not a fixed predictable place but rather a "mind-driven" realtime mixture of effects coming from the minds of people.

I think that in some way, the more that I become responsible for causation, as per the secret of salvation, and less of a victim, and perhaps stronger spiritually, I'm seeing more "influence" happening. Perhaps in the early stages of this development, but it does seem that my mind and focus and mood often influences the environment around me. Not merely in a subtle way as suggested in the heisenberg principle of quantum physics, but at even a much more "macrocosmic" level.

I feel this also points to having to also be more responsible and vigilant for thought, for more carefully managing my projections and my ego activities. After all, Jesus in ACIM also says that we need a healthy respect for the power of the mind....

"All miracle-workers HAVE to be trained that way. I have to be able to count on them. This means that I cannot allow them to leave their mind unguarded, or they will not be able to help me. ***Miracle-working entails a full realization of the power of thought, and real avoidance of miscreation.*** Otherwise, the miracle will be necessary to set the mind ITSELF straight, a circular process which would hardly foster the time-collapse for which the miracle was intended. Nor would it induce the ***healthy respect that every miracle-worker must have for true cause and effect.***"

Notice here that Jesus says that mind is very powerful and we need to be careful about mis-creating. If we are indeed powerful creators, and we have power of mind over matter, and mind is stronger than bodies, etc... and mind knows its dreaming, then obviously mind is going to start being able to "control" what dream content there is, what happens, and what does not happen.

"Yet this world is ONLY in the mind of its maker, along with his REAL salvation. Do not believe it is outside of yourself, for only by recognizing WHERE it is, ***will you gain control over it***. For you DO have control over your mind, for the mind is the mechanism of decision."

This suggests to me that in fact the workbook lesson "my self is ruler of the universe" where "what happens is what i desire" is not merely suggesting that we live in an objective world where we are "okay with" whatever happens, but that in fact LITERALLY we actually CAUSE EVENTS TO HAPPEN. That we begin to orchestrate the dream, consciously. Perhaps we can call it "lucid dreaming" in a sense. Indeed the mind certainly seems to have an INFLUENCE.

What this suggests then is this quite profound idea.... As you awaken more, your mind becomes more powerful. It becomes more causal, or more focused or "in control" of more DELIBERATELY CHOOSING. And this results in actual effects. It causes the dream to change. Your mind actually dreams of a different world. Not simply that you dream of the same world in a different way, or interpret the world differently, but that you PRODUCE a different world. The so-called "physical world" literally turns into a different configuration.

This would mean that the mind actually has the power to change the dream world directly, to manipulate events, to cause objects to show up and disappear, to have power OVER matter, to quite literally manipulate the world through direct effects. This would mean that, for example, for a person of enough power, they do not merely walk "the world", they walk whichever kind of world they want to emanate.

They literally can cause events, and prevent events. Nothing happens without their consent. They begin to have control over the dream world, over objects, over what transpires and what doesn't. And perhaps they can even literally force death and attack not to happen. They can cause events to steer away from destruction and death. Just as ACIM states that the Holy Spirit can clear a path for you so that you are free from obstacles...

"He will go before you, making straight your path, and leaving in your way no stones to trip on, and no obstacles to bar your way. NOTHING you need will be denied you. ***Not one seeming difficulty but will melt away BEFORE you reach it.*** You need take thought for nothing, careless of everything except the only purpose that you would fulfill. As THAT was given you, so will its fulfillment be. God's guarantee will hold against ALL obstacles, for it rests on certainty, and NOT contingency. IT RESTS ON YOU. And what can be more certain than the Son of God?"

That is quite a radical interpretation of the course because it suggests we don't just "re-perceive" the world in a better way, but that in fact the world literally is OUR DREAM, our mind is literally THE CAUSE of it, and we literally can dream of something else, CAUSING literal physical-seeming things to change. Why would this NOT be the case, when the mind has the power to actually cause bodies to heal, and the dead to resurrect, and mountains to move, and storms to calm? Such a mind can, let's say, ALTER REALITY. And that's quite exciting and interesting. And it means MIRACLES CAN MODIFY DREAM CONTENT DIRECTLY.

Obviously someone would need to become very vigilant about heir mind, very careful NOT to mis-create, very careful not to deliberately cause "bad situations", very careful not to CHOOSE events in which there is suffering etc, and to only induce dream environments which are conducive to healing etc. But this doesn't mean they can't choose anything they want. Imagine that Jesus could manifest any object he wanted out of thin air. Imagine that Jesus could make things multiply out of nowhere, he could turn bodies into other bodies, and could make things disappear. Why not, when he was "ruler of the universe"?

Not a mere passive traveler in a foreign land, but an ACTIVE DREAMER. Indeed, a "miracle worker", someone who can literally transform ANY APPEARANCE into any other, manipulating space and time and matter as if it's something to play with. In which the laws of reality as the world knows it are violated, any there is NOTHING your holiness cannot do.

"There is no world apart from your ideas because ideas leave not their source, and you maintain the world within your mind in thought."

"But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. "

"The idea for today is a beginning step in dispelling the belief that your thoughts have no effect. Everything you see is the result of your thoughts. There is no exception to this fact."

"There is no point in lamenting the world. There is no point in trying to change the world. It is incapable of change because it is merely an effect. But there is indeed a point in changing your thoughts about the world. Here you are changing the cause. The effects will change automatically."

"Neutral thoughts are impossible because all thoughts have power. They will either make a false world or lead me to the real one. But thoughts cannot be without effects. As the world I see arises from my thinking errors, so will the real world rise before my eyes as I let my errors be corrected."

"Learning must lead BEYOND the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it."

"I demonstrated both the powerlessness of the body AND the power of the mind, by uniting MY will with that of my Creator, which naturally remembered the Soul and its own real purpose."

"Very few people appreciate the real power of the mind. Nobody remains fully aware of it all the time. This is inevitable in this world, because the human being has many things he must do, and cannot engage in constant thought-watching. However, if he hopes to spare himself from fear, there are some things he must realize, and realize them fully, at least some of the time."

"The mind is a very powerful creator, and it never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating, and ALWAYS as you will."

"It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains.

It appears at first glance that to believe such power about yourself is merely arrogant, but that is not the real reason why you don't believe it.

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

"My Self is ruler of the universe. ... It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept."

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do."

"For true perception is a remedy with many names. Forgiveness, salvation, Atonement, true perception, all are one."

True perception, aka Christ Vision, means seeing with forgiveness, ie seeing with a forgiving attitude. This is a mind that does not believe in sin and does not see sin.

False perception, aka the body's vision, means NOT seeing with forgiveness, ie seeing with an unforgiving attitude. This is a mind that believes in sin and sees sin.

What you SEE, when you have false perception, you ONLY see BECAUSE your perception is unforgiving. And what you see with false perception (yes, the world, bodies) ONLY EXIST WITHIN your false perception, NOT beyond it.

What you SEE, when you have true perception, CANNOT BE SEEN when you have false perception. And false perception is DENIAL OF REALITY.

The way to perceive with Christ Vision is to NOT USE anything that exists in the realm of false perception. That means THE BODY, because the body is FALSE and a denial of reality.

The body has permanent false perception. "These eyes made not to see will never see." You CANNOT use the body's eyes to see reality. "The body sees ONLY ILLUSIONS."

To see reality you must use the spiritual eye, aka christ vision, which DOES NOT USE the body's eyes or depend on them in any way, because THEY are made of false perception.

Using the body's eyes disables the use of the spiritual eye because they DENY forgiveness. The body's eyes DO NOT OVERLOOK, and therefore what they SEE they only see because they FAIL to see PAST what they see.

When they look AT surfaces of objects, it is because they are UNFORGIVING. If they were forgiving, they would OVERLOOK ALL WALLS. A sight that is BLOCKED BY WALLS is false perception.

Given that christ vision means to be forgiving, because it is true perception, christ vision MUST OVERLOOK and NOT SEE whatever the BODY sees. Therefore Christ Vision DOES NOT SEE WALLS, BODIES, OR THE WORLD.

The body sees only other sinful bodies. That is false perception.

"FORGIVENESS DOES NOT LOOK UPON BODIES."

"TO SEE A SINLESS BODY IS IMPOSSIBLE."

You cannot look AT a body WITHOUT using false perception. Which means you believe in sin, and as a result are then SEEING sinful things in a sinful way. If you want to look at a body WITHOUT sin, it is IMPOSSIBLE!!! You must overlook the body and NOT SEE IT, in order to BE in a state of mind of innocence. The innocent ONLY LOOK UPON GOD and his creation. The innocent DO NOT HAVE, AND DO NOT SEE BODIES. There are no bodies in reality. "Gone are bodies."

Seeing the face of Christ causes you to CEASE USING the body's eyes. The world which the body is made of, exists within, is seen within, and symbolizes, DISAPPEARS from your sight when you see the face of Christ. Because to see the face of Christ requires TOTAL true perception, which does not see bodies OR the world of bodies AT ALL. In fact the world vanishes and is FORGOTTEN when you see the face of christ.

"Accept the one illusion which proclaims there is no condemnation in God's Son, and Heaven is remembered instantly; ***the world forgotten***, all its weird beliefs forgotten with it, as the Face of Christ appears unveiled at last in this one dream. "

When the face of Christ is UNVEILED, it is because THE VEIL has disappeared. And the physical world IS THE VEIL which the body's vision is blinded by.

The "body's eyes" is ANY state of egotism. ANY state of confusion as to what is true and false. ANY state of a belief in sin. ANY state of death or suffering or fear. And the fact is, that this STATE, is what has CAUSED the physical human body to appear. The human body ONLY EXISTS WITHIN that state. It is the state of false perception. If you perceive the false as true, you will make false things real, and materialize an illusory FORM OF ERROR - a body.

The BODY, has ONLY false perception. It is only seen WITH false perception. It sees other bodies ONLY WITH false perception. You CANNOT SEE bodies with forgiveness. To see a sinless body is IMPOSSIBLE. To "Forgive bodies" has to mean to OVERLOOK THEM AND NOT SEE THEM.

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences. 2 But the mind that has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them." "...the healed mind will put them all in one category; they are unreal."

False perception includes therefore the state of mind in which Heaven is denied, and ALSO therefore the ENTIRE WORLD that comes from it, which includes the physical body itself AND ITS PHYSICAL EYEBALLS. "These eyes made not to see will never see" is referring to the BODY'S EYES, its seeing mechanism, its eyeballs, its reliance on external photons of light which are DENIED by the forms of error (matter), and its interpretation of those sensory signals which were MADE TO BLOCK KNOWLEDGE.

"The body sees only illusions." Literally. ONLY illusions. "The world you see is an illusion of a world, God did not create it." The body can ONLY SEE what GOD DID NOT CREATE.

Here is the fact of the body PHYSICALLY seeing ONLY the world of forms and illusions, which is physical matter, flesh and bones, other bodies, and the planet:

"The body's eyes see only form. They cannot see beyond what they were made to see. And they were made to look on error and not see past it. Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see only illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside surface of nothing. To this distorted form of vision the outside of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true."

Do the body's eyeballs see only forms? YES.

Do the body's eyeballs fail to see PAST forms? YES.

Do the body's eyeballs see only the outside surfaces of objects? YES

Are physical objects therefore the "Granite block of sin"? YES.

Is the PLANET literally a PHYSICAL WALL that stands between you and reality? YES.

"The world of bodies is the world of sin". PLURAL bodies, not just your body, not just your body's eyes. The world where MULTIPLE BODIES exist, the container of the location of bodies, is the WORLD OF SIN. OUTSIDE the bodies. The ENVIRONMENT in which bodies appear to exist, is THE WORLD OF SIN! The entire world including all physical objects and bodies is MADE OF SIN AND DEATH.

"Without the idea of DEATH there is no world."

The world of sin, which is the world of bodies, is the world that the body is BLINDED BY and CANNOT SEE PAST, because the body CANNOT OVERLOOK ERRORS, and physical objects are the FORMS OF ERROR that the body cannot see past. The body has permanent false perception.

"These eyes, made not to see, will never see. For the idea they represent left not its maker, and it is their maker that sees through them. What was its maker's goal but not to see. For this the body's eyes are perfect means, but not for seeing. 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. Nothing so blinding as perception of form. For sight of form means understanding has been obscured."

Are the body's eyeballs SEEN THROUGH by their maker? YES.

Do the body's eyes REST ON EXTERNALS? YES.

Does their vision stop at the surface of nothing unable to see past it because it is an UNFORGIVING false perception that does not overlook FORMS OF ERROR? YES.

Are the body's eyes BLINDED by perceiving FORMS? YES. When you SEE FORMS - **OBJECTS** - BODIES. ... you are BLINDED. Because the forms are the outside surface of NOTHING, they are not real, and they do not really exist! And seeing them PREVENTS YOU FROM SEEING REALITY. They block your vision. This is why the body's eyes cannot see reality EVER. You cannot USE the body see reality EVER.

This is why you have to forget the body and develop the SPIRITUAL EYE, because it's a way of SEEING that bypasses THE BODY totally and OVERLOOKS EVERYTHING THE BODY SEES, meaning it is NOT blocked by the surface of objects, it is NOT blinded by perceiving forms, it does NOT fail to overlook the granite block of SIN that the world is made of, it DOES NOT SEE BODIES, and it CAN LOOK AT REALITY. Reality is BEYOND the physical.

"Your brother's reality is beyond his body."

"Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."

The dream is the PHYSICAL WORLD. It's the world you made. The world of sin and death that the BODY LIVES IN and CANNOT SEE PAST. Reality is BEYOND THE PHYSICAL WORLD. And you can only see it by OVERLOOKING, literally seeing THROUGH, the physical world. Because the world IS THE VEIL OF SIN over the face of christ.

"And so you and your brother stand ... before the veil of sin that hangs between you and the face of Christ. "

"This world of idols is a veil across the face of Christ, because its purpose is to separate your brother from yourself."

"Forgiveness lets the veil be lifted up that hides the face of Christ from those who look with unforgiving eyes upon the world. It lets you recognize the Son of God"

"Let not your eyes be blinded by the veil of specialness that hides the face of Christ from him, and you as well. "

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face."

A PHYSICAL BLOCK. WHICH THE BODY IS BLINDED BY. A WALL OF SIN.

"But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear"

The PHYSICAL MATERIAL VEIL WILL DISAPPEAR, revealing the face of Christ which is BEYOND IT.

"Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the **world forgot**, with time forever ended as ***the world spins into nothingness from where it came."*** - because THE WORLD, the PLANET, EARTH, where BODIES exist, the WORLD OF SIN, is a world of NOTHINGNESS - it is a THIN VEIL over the face of christ BLOCKING REALITY. Physical matter is a block to awareness and is IN the mind because your mind is BIGGER than this world.

"You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts" "Both heaven (formless eternity) and EARTH (physical planet) are in your mind."

"A world forgiven cannot last. 2 It was the home of bodies."

Even a forgiven world was WHER BODIES EXIST. The world of SIN. Which is turned into the forgiven world. BUT>....

But forgiveness looks past bodies. 4 This is its holiness; this is how it heals. 5 The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible. 6 From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. 7 And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? 8 For place has gone as well, along with time. 9 Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. 10 Forgiveness proves it is impossible ****because it sees it not****. 11 And what you then will overlook will not be understandable to you, just as its presence once had been your certainty."

"C-4.1. The world you see is an illusion of a world. 2 God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. 3 Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. 4 Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. 5 But the time will come when all things visible will have an end.

C-4.2. The body's eyes are therefore ***not the means by which the real world can be seen***, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. 2 And so they do. 3 For ****everything they see not only will not last****, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt. 4 While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt."

This is very clearly spelled out in the course. If you're seeing THIS WORLD, you are USING THE BODY. The world of bodies is the world of sin. Forgiveness DOES NOT look upon bodies. It sees unity BEYOND bodies, BEYOND the physical veil of matter, BEYOND this world. ANOTHER WORLD. Heaven and earth are totally opposite.

You cannot look at physical bodies in a forgiving way. They CANNOT BE SEEN by forgiveness.

You cannot look at the physical planet in a forgiving way. A FORGIVEN WORLD CANNOT LAST.

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK", not to look AT.

There is no body. There is no world. They exist only WITHIN states of mind that are false. They are hallucinations by insane individuals.

"The world is the INSANE THOUGHT SYSTEM of those DRIVEN MAD by guilt." "The world IS FALSE PERCEPTION".

They are seen only WITH false perception because they exist INSIDE OF false perceiving. And you cannot see them if you are innocent. There is no Earth in Heaven.

"Only the creations of light are real." "The living world of Light" is God's Kingdom, not the world of sin or bodies or forms or planets.

There is no world here.

Real vision means unlimited seeing. The ability to see anywhere at anytime, without limits. That means being able to see across the universe even, ignoring the laws of physics.

"Perception can reach EVERYWHERE under His guidance, for the vision of Christ beholds EVERYTHING in light."

"This can occur REGARDLESS of the physical distance that SEEMS to be between you and what you join; of your respective positions in space; and of your differences in size and seeming quality. Time is not relevant; it can occur with something past, present, or anticipated."

When we made the separate world, we also invented obstacles to sight. PHYSICAL OBJECTS ARE BLOCKS TO AWARENESS. Physical matter became seemingly solid walls, which Jesus refers to as "the granite block of sin." All physical matter is made of the idea of sin. "The world of bodies is the world of sin." This sin takes on many different forms, and each forms an image that seems to stand between you and reality.

"The body's eyes see ONLY form. They cannot see BEYOND what they were MADE to see. And they were made to look on error, and NOT see past it. Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see ONLY illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside FORM of nothing. To this distorted form of vision, the OUTSIDE of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true."

Physical sight falls short of unlimited seeing. It relies on photons to rebound off "the outer surface of nothing" (objects) in order to see at all. It depends on laws of physics, which are illusions. It cannot see past or through solid walls because the walls repel light. This is also symbolic (IMO) of the repulsion of heaven that the granite blocks of sin represent.

"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."

"And Christ is invisible to you BECAUSE OF WHAT YOU HAVE MADE VISIBLE TO YOURSELVES."

In effect your physical sight stops whenever it is presented with a physical object, and so is actually "blinded", in terms of the big picture idea of unlimited vision. You seem to "see" what is physically there, but by seeing it, you actually are BLINDED TO seeing what is BEYOND it. You can't seem to see THROUGH it like x-ray vision because its physical form stands in the way. This is because the world was made like a veil to hang BETWEEN you and Christ.

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant"

"That was the first projection of error outward. The world arose to hide it, and became the screen on which it was projected, and drawn between you and truth."

By seeing physical objects, such as human bodies, you are in effect blinded by form. Form is not meaning. Form is sin, or correctly reinterpreted is "error", which calls for correction. Everything the body sees is the forms of error. "The body's eyes see ONLY form. They cannot see BEYOND what they were MADE to see. And they were made to look on error, and NOT see past it."

So Jesus is literally telling you that we made the body's physical sight mechanism ON PURPOSE to BLIND US to seeing reality. It was made to FIXATE on the form of error (world of sin), a world which seems to depict things happening that cannot happen in reality. A world of impossibilities and blasphemies and pictures of evil and death, all of which violate the truth of God.

"The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen."

"Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold? What need have they of sights or sounds or touch? What would they hear or reach to grasp? What would they sense at all? To sense is not to know."

So now we have a kind of prison world, a closed-in box, with solid interior walls, in which you find yourself imprisoned, standing in a prison body, seeming to walk around in freedom but only because the prison is so large (all of spacetime). And everything the body sees is a prison wall which it cannot see past. And it will never see past. And so its eyes cannot be used to see reality - you need a different kind of vision. Which is why:

"This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."

In effect, when your MIND uses the body and believes what the body shows to it, given only the mind actually sees, it is blinded by perception of form. Physical matter presents false images of imaginary things which don't exist. If you believe what you're shown by the body's eyes then you are blinded. Which is interesting given the eyes are supposed to give you the ability TO SEE - they do the exact opposite.

"Man believes that what he cannot see does not exist, and his physical eyes cannot see in the dark. This is a very primitive solution, and has led to a denial of the spiritual eye, which always depends on light."

It also goes further that when you look at FORM, you are blinded to MEANING. Because "reality is meaning." God is meaningful. When reality is obscured by physical matter, it shuts out all meaning. Again this is why the physical world is a meaningless world. It has NO meaning of its own. "The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real."

"Nothing so blinding as perception of form. For sight of form MEANS understanding HAS BEEN obscured. Only MISTAKES have different forms, and so they CAN deceive. You CAN change form, BECAUSE it is not true. It COULD not be reality, BECAUSE it can be changed. Reason will tell you that, if form is NOT reality, it MUST be an illusion. And is Not THERE to see. And, IF you see it, you MUST be mistaken, for you are seeing what can NOT be real, as if it WERE. What cannot see BEYOND what is not there, MUST be distorted perception. And must perceive illusions AS THE TRUTH. Could it, then, RECOGNIZE the truth?"

Certain shapes, colors, sizes, arrangements, conditions, states, now appear to dictate, potentially as a temptation, what something MEANS. Because being void of meaning, you have to decide what it means. The ego would make its FORMS reality, and therefore construct a hierarchy of illusions, where certain forms MEAN certain things. Where forms of sickness appear to be real and important. And now in false perception, physical form BLINDS you and DICTATES what everything is, as if meaning IS the form and there is no other meaning.

This can become especially upsetting because you can for example be faced with an image of a physical body that seems to be malfunctioning. And just seeing this at all is an assertion of the proof of sin, of possibilities that cannot happen in God's reality. Yet it's there, staring you in the face, forcing you to look at it, such that you can hardly deny it. Yet you MUST deny it, otherwise you will believe it is TRUE. And then you will derive MEANING from it, and will start to react to it as if it's really there.

If you look upon a meaningless world, through the body's physical sight, and you believe the FORM of what you see, as if it is reality, then you are in "false perception". Your mind is believing an illusion of opposite things to God, opposite to possibility, as if they are real. It is deceived. "The world is false perception."

Then, because the world's physicality means NOTHING, the mind actually tries to GIVE it meaning. Either it projects ego meaning onto it or it projects God's meaning onto it. "Recognition of meaninglessness arouses intense anxiety in all the separated ones. It represents a situation in which God and the ego "challenge" each other as to whose meaning is to be written in the empty space which meaninglessness provides. The ego rushes in frantically to establish its own "ideas" there, fearful that the void may otherwise be used to demonstrate its own unreality."

"If you are fearful, it is certain that you will endow the world with attributes which it does not possess, and crowd it with images that do not exist."

Since real meaning is BEYOND the physical, BEHIND the prison walls, BEYOND space and time, and the body cannot see it, you need a spiritual sight to see it. And in order to see it, you have to SEE PAST the physical. This means you have to overlook it.

This is why forgiveness OVERLOOKS the physical world of matter and looks TOWARDS the light. "To forgive is to OVERLOOK." It's like ignoring the physical form and looking straight through it, NOT blocked by appearances and NOT limited in how far your sight can reach.

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

This is like seeing THROUGH the veil as if the veil is thin and light and transparent, as if physical matter no longer HIDES the face of Christ. As if you an see God "in" everything you see. Because christ vision pierces the PHYSICAL VEIL OF SIN, and allows you to see reality BEYOND what the body can see.

"By focusing upon the "good" in him, the body grows decreasingly persistent in your sight, and will at length be seen as little more than just a shadow circling round the "good."

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is (a meaningless illusion of a physical world). And now it cannot fail to disappear, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

In terms of possibility, and impossibility, heaven is the only possibility. God has made it possible, because God is possible. God's freedom is all possibility, and the one possibility or outcome is the creation of the Kingdom.

In the separation from God, we imagined an opposite to possibility. We tried to be unwilling to do what is possible. We placed limitations on ourselves and hid behind denial. This produced what seems to be a world. And this world seems to make possible what is utterly impossible in heaven. But what seems possible here is in fact an impossibilities disguised as a possibility - an illusion of a possibility.

In heaven it is not possible to die. In this world, however, death seems so common and possible that it's even considered inevitable. Some kind of a given that death is certain. But if in heaven's reality death is impossible, death cannot actually be possible. Which means whatever this death thing is, it's something utterly impossible and must be at best pretending to be possible. This means death must be an illusion of death because real death is impossible.

In terms of miracles, we say that the things of this world are possible. We see sickness and regard it as possible. We see things breaking and destroyed and regard it as possible. We see death happening and attack and murder and think these things are possible. But they cannot be possible in heaven's reality and so they cannot really be possible.

The things then that we consider to be possible in this world, are actually impossibilities. They appear to be possible because they are illusions. They are lies. They are deception. They are wishful thinking and a belief in things which are false. They simply cannot be possible and are utterly impossible. Yet to the everyday person we would say all these things are possibilities. They are so possible that everyone believes they're totally normal and natural.

In light of this, and not recognizing that we live in a world of such limitation that we have in fact limited possibility heavily, we would regard certain things as "impossible". We'd say, it is impossible to reverse death. It is impossible to break the laws of physics. It is impossible to heal a sickness in a split second. It's impossible to be in two places at once. It's impossible to turn water into wine or cause bread to multiply out of thin air.

We think these things are impossible because they ignore and break all the rules that we've made up as to what is possible in this world. But what we think of as possibilities here are lies at best, and fiction at worse. They are not really possibilities at all.

They are attempts to do something that is NOT possible, but disgused as something SO possible that it seems to be PROVEN that it is happening. You can see and touch and taste and so on to sample the evidence. Because "only the body makes the world seem real." But in truth all the things of this world are impossibilities, masquerading as ALL that is possible, while shutting out everything that is REALLY possible. And we think this is reality.

Someone being sick in any way is not possible in reality. Someone dying is utterly nonense. These things cannot happen in reality. We say they represent the natural scope of what "can happen" in the world, but they aren't even remotely possible AT ALL. Except in some kind of tiny mad dream of hell.

Miracles then recognize that this is a world in which seemingly impossible things present themselves as possibilities. Miracles reverse all the things the world says are possible, by recognizing they are in fact not possible. Sickness and death are recognized as NOT possible.

Miracles then enable you to do things which the world would consider or label as impossible, because these things not only cancel all notion that the things of this world are even possible, they reverse and undo all things the world says can NEVER be undone.

Essentially, to be miraculous is to assert life, which is the assertion that only heaven is real. It is the assertion that what the world calls impossible is the ONLY possibility, and the things the world claims are the ONLY possibility are in fact IMPOSSIBLE. This is a complete reversal of what the world thinks can happen, and it results in things being able to happen which defy the world, break its laws, undo its consequences, and cancel the world entirely.

Only the laws of God are possible. Only the truth is true. Only the kingdom is real. Only miracles can happen. Everything else is impossible. Miracle workers are NOT BOUND by the laws of this world. They operate based on the laws of God, laws which this world would judge as IMPOSSIBLE. And yet God's laws are the ONLY POSSIBILITY, rendering the impossible fictions of this world as truly imposible. It is by recognizing their impossibility that they vanish.

"All power is of God. What is not of him has no power to do anything."

"miracles reverse the physical or lower order laws"

"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 MIRACLE DOES NOTHING. All it does is to UNdo. And thus it cancels out the interference to what HAS BEEN done. It does not add, but merely takes away."

"The miracle but shows the past is gone, and what has truly gone HAS no effects."

"The miracle does nothing but to show him that HE has done nothing."

"Your holiness reverses all the laws of the world. It is beyond every restriction of time, space, distance, and limits of any kind."

"Today we practice making free our minds of all the laws you think you must obey; of all the limits under which you live, and all the changes which you think are part of human destiny."

"The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you CAN see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them. Perceiving His RESULTS, you will understand where He MUST be, and finally KNOW what He is."

"My oneness with the Christ establishes me as Your Son, beyond the reach of time, and wholly free of every law but Yours."

"For fifteen minutes twice today escape from every law in which you now believe."

"A miracle is a reversal of the physical order"

"Miracles are a kind of exchange. Like all expressions of love, which are ALWAYS miraculous in the true sense, the exchange reverses the physical laws."

"Christ inspires all miracles, which are essentially intercessions. They intercede for man's holiness, and make him holy. They place man beyond the physical laws, and raise him into the sphere of celestial order. In this order, man IS perfect."

"The mind that serves the Holy Spirit is unlimited forever, in all ways, beyond the laws of time and space, unbound by any preconceptions, and with strength and power to do whatever it is asked."

"time and space are under My control"

"The ego may ask, "How did the impossible occur?", "To what did the impossible happen?", and may ask in many forms."

"Pain is impossible."

"In fact, it is impossible. But you must remember that when you put yourselves in an impossible situation, you believed that the impossible WAS possible."

"You are in an impossible situation only because you thought it was possible to be in one."

"You CAN wish for the impossible, but you can only WILL with God."

"It is the world you see that is impossible."

"Fear is deception. It attests that you have seen yourself as you could never be, and therefore look upon a world which is impossible. Not one thing in this world is true. It does not matter what the form in which it may appear. It witnesses but to your own illusions of yourself. Let us not be deceived today."

"The laws of this world cease to hold any meaning at all."

"There are no laws except the laws of God."

"Magic imprisons, but the laws of God set free. The light has come because there are no laws but His."

"Healing is also a science because it obeys the laws of God, whose laws are true."

"Miracles do not obey the laws of this world. They merely follow from the laws of God."

"What I seek today transcends all laws of time and things perceived in time."

"Reality observes the laws of God, and NOT the rules you set."

"As you awaken other minds TO Him through HIM, and not yourself, you will understand that you are not obeying the laws of this world, but that the laws you ARE obeying WORK."

"Time can have no sway upon you, nor can any laws of earth have power over you. Your hands will heal, and give the gifts that you accept of me."

"The miracle, therefore, has a unique function, and is motivated by a unique Teacher, Who brings the laws of another world to this one."

"When you feel guilty, KNOW that your ego has indeed violated the laws of God, but YOU have not. Leave the sins of the ego to me. That is what the Atonement is for."

"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."

"But you can show him his suffering is purposeless and wholly without cause. Show him YOUR healing, and he will consent no more to suffer. For his innocence HAS BEEN established in your sight AND his."

"Show him that he CANNOT hurt you, and hold nothing against him, or you hold it against yourself."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps one of the key features about the ego which many people do not realize, is that it is constantly attacking itself.

The ego IS the idea of self attack. It is the idea of you, attacking you. It is self destructive, which is why it leads to sabotage and suicide. It is just another word for your own will to will against your own will.

It would perhaps seem too insane to consider that the ego actually attacks itself on purpose, and this alone might deter you from even considering it. But the ego is not sane.

The ego is not like the kinds of people that you think are normal people. You think that due to separation, what one person does to another they do not do to themselves. You think that you can attack without consequences, or be attacked by another without them receiving the attack.

The ego's main plot here is the idea that, because you are separate from your brother, what applies to him does not apply to you. This allows both parties to get away with murder. Or appear to. And this creates an illusion in this world, as though it is "ego" to attack someone and get away with it.

But beware. This is a decoy!

If you fixate on this idea that one person does something to someone else, causing effects in them, without receiving the effects - which certainly APPEARS to be the case almost all the time due to separation, then you will not notice the ego's underlying insanity. You'll think that it makes total sense that something can apply to one person and not another, or that you can cause effects which you do not receive - ie giving and receiving at not one.

The ego's secret insanity is that it deliberately attacks itself, and it is NOT escaping the effects of the attacks it tries to cause, nor does it want to. It is both its own attacker and its own victim. It deliberately wants to hurt itself. It also seems to simultaneously want to get away from that hurt. It should be fairly obvious that it is completely insane, to the highest degree, for someone to want to intentionally harm themselves, consciously and deliberately, and to simultaneously enjoy and suffer doing so.

Anyone in their right mind would recognize that they are one with all brothers, and share a mind of oneness, and therefore what applies to you applies to everyone equally. In this mind of oneness it is impossible to cause or do anything without receiving the effects. It is therefore in your vested interest to share only love, that you will receive only love. But when you enter into the ego and attempt to give without receiving (which is attack), you can be sure you will experience attack.

The ego is clever at making cause and effect unconscious. It makes it SEEM as if attacking another will not attack yourself. But the ego is fundamentally insane. It IS the idea of self attack, and so attacks itself on purpose. It would sacrifice itself in the name of saving itself. It is constantly two-faced. You think that normal people have "one face" or one personality or one side to them.

The insane ego is never one-sided, it is always contradictory, hipocritical, self denying, a liar, a cheat, manipulative, and it is even capable of showing up as "good cop" and "bad cop" simultaneously.

I had a dream once where some creepy man was trying to get to me, and so I ran to escape and I did escape, and met another man on a hill who appeared at first to be helpful and welcoming. It seemed like he would help me to be safe. But what quickly became apparent, was that in fact this man was the same "person" as the other man - as if he was the same man in disguise. He was both of them. And so the ego's two-faced secret was revealed, that it is perfectly capable of playing the part of victim and victimizer, attacker and savior, enemy and hero, or any other polarities which makes it SEEM as if they are two completely unrelated separate things.

The ego's illusions are ALWAYS geared towards getting you to believe that one kind of illusion is better than another. That one way of behaving or less evil than another. That something will actually help you without hurting you. That a solution will work without any side effects. It's always bullshit. The ego is fundamentally insane and so always has in its back pocket some kind of "clause" or excuse or secret that disguises the fact that it has NO intention of making its solutions work, and it has NO interest in being truly helpful, because ALL of its sides and solutions take you away from wholeness.

We have to be careful to discern and listen and recognize, that both positive and negative are part of the ego thought system. Both good and bad, right and wrong, all opposites. The ego plays both sides of every argument and does not care who sins. It will happily fund every war and conflict on both sides just for the sake of increasing the conflict. It is fundamentally existing in a state of self conflict and being divided against itself, thwarting its own moves, willing against its own will etc.

This is why we have to learn that "this world holds nothing that I want"... because everything it offers, the "good" and the "bad", are both ego deceptions designed to get you to take a side and fall for one of two of its traps. It does not care one shit about which side you take or whether you go light or dark or right or wrong, so long as you fall for the trap of believing that one of two choices is better than the other and will save you. There is no salvation in the ego. All of its roads lead to hell.

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt."

Notice that it says THOSE, meaning the world is made by multiple individuals.

"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. Children are born into it through pain and in pain."

Notice that it talks about children being born INTO the "world" that is being referenced. AND that as they are born they are born IN pain THROUGH pain. And I think we all know that this is talking about planet earth, with physical bodies, women giving birth to babies, and is nothing to do with internal perceptions or interpretations.

"Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death."

Notice again that it confirms the world being referenced is the one where bodies die. That's the physical world.

"Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its power declines if their bodies are hurt."

Notice this is also true of anyone who has a BODY, a physical human organic organism, with a BRAIN, and therefore is definitely talking about the physical body of flesh and bones, living in the world that is outside of it - planet Earth. The container of the bodies.

"They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more."

Yes where do these once-children's bodies get laid in the ground, the physical soil? On planet earth, at a physical level. Also notice that he says basically that bodies withering and gasping and dying in the ground IS CRUEL. It's not something natural or something that God would want for you. And IF that happens to your body, you MUST be believing that God is cruel because if death happens THAT IS CRUELTY.

"Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel."

If this were the real world, God WOULD be cruel. For no father could subject his children to this as the price of salvation, and be loving."

Notice that therefore in this reference, where Jesus has CLEARLY set up the fact that he's talking about the physical planet where human bodies are born, suffer and die, the same bodies that have brains and which grow old.... THAT WORLD.... would have to be coming from a CRUEL God, IF God were to be the creator of it. Because only through such a cruel creatorship and intention could such cruel things come about.

It would be thoroughly unloving for God to create a world where you lose things, you wither, your brain is attacked and diminishes, the body grows old and weak and sick, or where death happens at all. God simply WOULD NOT create such an environment. Such an environment IS cruel and not even remotely divine and holy. Not even slightly the hallmark of a totally loving God.

Also notice that it states IF this was the real world, ... meaning IT IS NOT the real world, and reality is ANOTHER WORLD that is NOT planet earth. NOT physical. With NO bodies and no death.

"LOVE DOES NOT KILL TO SAVE. For if it did, attack WOULD be salvation, and this is the ego's interpretation, not God's. Only the world of guilt could demand this, for only the guilty could CONCEIVE of it."

Notice that it also refers to this physical planet as "the world of guilt", just as it also refers to it elsewhere as "the world of sin" and "the world of death". And God would NOT create a world of guilt, sin, or death.

"This world..."

(which we now know is referring to the very physical earth world of human bodies)

..."IS a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

So now the physical world, is a picture of crucifixion. A PHYSICAL picture. The crucifixion is BUILT INTO MATTER. That has nothing to do with "how you are perceiving". It is purely to do with the form of the physical planet itself. It's a picture of crucifixion, not a picture of heaven.

"And until you realize that God's Son cannot be crucified, this is the world you will see."

Notice that this states if you believe God's Son can be crucified, ie believe in attack and sin at all, YOU WILL be forced to SEE this physical world THAT YOU MADE. And this confirms further that God DID NOT create this physical planet. And this also implies that if you DO NOT believe in the crucifixion of God's Son you will STOP seeing this world THAT YOU MADE. You made the physical world and everything in it.

"But you will not realize this, until you accept the eternal fact that God's Son is NOT GUILTY. He DESERVES only love, because he has GIVEN only love. He cannot be condemned, because he has never condemned."

Recognition of immortality, holiness and innocence is the key to NOT SEEING THIS WORLD and instead seeing the Son of God in its holy home.

"The Atonement is the final lesson he need learn, for it teaches him that, never having sinned, he has no NEED of salvation."

Ahhhh.. "Dreams of death are not left by death, but by truth."

The world you made, which God did not create, which is the world of bodies, which is also the world of sin guilt and fear and death, is NOT GOD's world, because it IS a cruel world and it would be cruel to ACCUSE God of creating such a place.

The Kingdom of God is your home. It is not like this world at all. "God does not will that you suffer" or die.

"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. Children are born into it through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its powers decline if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel."

This is one of those 'clincher' statements about the world which make it SO clear that he's talking about the physical world, and NOT some kind of interpretation of the world.

Children are PHYSICALLY BORN into it, through physical pain and in physical pain.

The children's PHYSICAL bodies grow and suffer.

Their minds are trapped in the PHYSICAL brain.

Their PHYSICAL bodies become hurt.

Their PHYSICAL bodies wither and die.

These are not perceptions. These are physical states.

And because of this, because of these things happening, PHYSICALLY, with actual physical matter going through these things, people would believe that God is cruel.

This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with having false perceptionr OR true perception ABOUT the world. It is merely a statement of facts about the PHYSICAL. Physicality, ITSELF, is cruel, and if it were real, God would be its creator, which would make God cruel. And everyone who DOES BELIEVE that the physical world is reality, MUST believe that God is cruel.

Either the world is reality and God IS cruel. OR, the world is NOT reality and God is loving. Since the world IS PHYSICALLY cruel, regardless of anyone having any perceptions or meanings of projections or interpretations or judgements of it, PHYSICAL DEATH IS A CRUELTY, if such things are real then God must be cruel.

And this is why so many people legitimately recognize that because the physical world IS fundamentally, INHERENTLY cruel, a loving God CANNOT have created it. If God had created it, God MUST be cruel, because the world is physically cruel.

And this is why many people become disillusioned with God existing, because they reason that since the world IS cruel, God must either exist AS a cruel creator - which we rightly would want nothing to do with, and would be justifiably angry at, OR God does not exist at all.

But of course the alternative option which many overlook, is that God DOES exist, and IS NOT cruel, and HAS NOT created this world, because the physical world IS NOT reality. The assumption that it is real has to be questioned in order to arrive at any sense of what can possibly be NOT cruel - a loving experience, a loving God.

When you attune to the loving God, your interpretation of or use of this cruel physical world changes, and you RECOGNIZE it as cruel, and not of God, while simultaneously being in a greater state of love WITHIN yourself. The world then appears to take on what we might call a less harmful registering with the mind. But it is still always PHYSICALLY cruel even if it is interpreted as not psychologically cruel. It is then a STRANGE combination, like a "beautiful tragedy", or a "happy dream of death".

And who wants a world that is a contradiction anyway. A world that a loving God creates cannot even entertain the merest POSSIBILITY of cruel things occurring, such as damages or breakages or loss or getting stuck or attack or harm or decay or weapons or war or forms of sickness or pain or misery or death. These things cannot even be CONCEIVED OF by a loving God, yet alone exist.

If God is loving, there can BE no real explosion, no real wars, no real sicknesses, no real missing limbs, no real deaths, no real losses, no real attacks or lacks or limitations of any kind, no physical plane crashes, no broken bodies or bodies at all. And that means there can be NO PHYSICAL WORLD. Because physicality itself is literally a state of separation and sin. And without the idea of death, spacetime would vanish completely along with all its contents.

Earth IS NOT heaven. At best it can reflect heaven when you look at it lovingly, but in and of itself it is nothing but an illusion of a system of death and destruction. And it will end. Just as space and time will end. Nothing unreal lasts forever.

In the ego's world, causes are victimizers, and effects are victims

This applies everywhere in the ego's world. Every single "cause" is the idea of victimization. Every single "effect" is the idea of being a victim. What possibly can there even be LEFT when this classifies EVERY phenomenal event in history?

When the wind blows leaves on a tree, the wind is now the victimizer, the tree its helpless victim whom it has power over against its will.

Also in the ego's world, causes turn into effects and back again, because really, both causes and effects in this world are THE SAME ILLUSION.

In truth, both causes and effects in this world, both victims and victimizers, are THE SAME ILLUSION, which shifts and changes based on the circumstances.

They are both EFFECTS. Neither of them are causes.

They are effects of DREAMING from an entirely separate level of causality.

If something in this world is a cause one moment, for example someone kicking a ball, where the ball is the effect, how is it possible that the ball bounces off a wall and hits the person on the head? That person is now victimized by the ball.

How is it possible for the cause to TRULY be a cause, a permanent cause, if it is actually able to be affected?

And so, in this world, causes are AFFECTED, and effects can CAUSE. Meaning, victimizers are also victims, and victims are also victimizers.

And since causes can be changed into effects, which is an attempt to prove that GOD (cause) CAN BE AFFECTED by your sin, they are not REALLY causes. Both causes and effects in this world are FAKE.

Everything in this world is equally an EFFECT OF DREAMING. An effect of the ONLY cause which is in the MIND. The mind is cause, the entire world is the effect.

The body is an effect, all sickness is an effect, all death is an effect, and resurrection is an effect. Mind has power over all matter. Mind is the ONLY CAUSE of what happens here.

This world SEEMS to have many causes in it. The wind SEEMS to blow the tree. The leaves SEEM to be "blown". This is an illusion! The wind blowing, and the leaves moving, HAPPENS TOGETHER as a SIMULTANEOUS PROJECTION from a dreaming mind.

Similarly, if an "accident" happens which hurts someone and their body becomes damaged, the accident itself AND the damage in the body were BOTH MANIFESTED AT THE SAME TIME BY THE SAME MIND. By the same cause.

Therefore it is NOT TRUE that the accident caused the body to be damaged! The accident happening and the body showing damage is a DECEPTION by the mind to make it APPEAR, in linear time, that there are causes in the world which terrorize other parts of the world, producing effects against their will.

Buying into this view of horizontal cause and effect, will make you buy into the illusion that YOU ARE A VICTIM, because you will not be able to help but believe that stuff "happens to you" by worldly external causes, and that symptoms show up "as effects" against your will. It is an ILLUSION.

If your body becomes hurt by an incident, caused by something external, YOU ARE PUTTING THE HURT IN YOUR BODY in an attempt to make it seem true that you are at the effect of the world! YOUR MIND puts your sickness in your body to CORRELATE to the heirarchy of illusions - the belief that a separate cause caused this. It's a cover-up. It's pretend. It's fake.

You as spirit, joined with God's mind, cannot be at the effect of the world, because the world is at the effect of YOU. This means the world HAS NO CAUSAL POWER of its own. ZERO! Absolutely no ability whatsoever to make anything happen. Jesus's own words:

""It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail.""

"The world you see does nothing. It has no effects at all. "

The world DOES NOTHING. It is not a cause. Everything in the world is the EFFECT of YOUR MIND.

This is why you have power over the whole world. This is why "my self is ruler of the universe". This is why whatever your mind chooses to see, it will PUT INTO THE WORLD in form, manifestationally!

"There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see and all the world must change accordingly."

ie the world "out there" is what your mind PUTS THERE. Change your mind and that outward picture MUST CHANGE. The world will change, "physically"!

"T-1.III.2. "Heaven and earth shall pass away" means that they will not continue to exist as separate states. 2 My word, which is the resurrection and the life, shall not pass away because life is eternal."

What this says in words is slightly deceptive in terms of what it MEANS. We must stay 100% compliant with the consistency of the truth.

1) It is impossible for there to be TWO REAL STATES.

2) It is impossible for there to be TWO REALITIES.

3) It is impossible for those realities to be UNLIKE each other in every way and BE REAL.

4) God does not create TWO DIFFERENT REALITIES or states.

5) Only what God creates is real. ONLY ONE of the two states is real. The other one MUST NOT BE REAL.

6) Therefore, if there SEEMS to be two states right now, THIS MUST BE AN ILLUSION.

7) Being an illusion of two separate states, it is the ILLUSION OF THERE BEING TWO STATES that will pass away when the truth comes.

8) Since only one of the two states is REALITY, And God only created Heaven, Heaven is the only REAL state, and Earth MUST BE an unreal state.

9) Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Therefore, the state which is UNREAL, the illusion of a state of "earth", DOES NOT EXIST.

10) What does not exist, does not exist now, never existed, and never will exist.

11) The Earth as an illusion of a separate state, DOES NOT EXIST NOW and it is made of NOTHING.

12) The *ILLUSION* of there being two simultaneous real states - "heaven and earth", will pass away. This DOES NOT MEAN that Heaven will pass away. It means only that the ILLUSORY STATE, which WAS NEVER THERE, Earth, will CEASE TO APPEAR AS THOUGH IT EXISTS. Because it does not exist.

13) Therefore Earth will be RECOGNIZED AS AN ILLUSION, and illusions when recognized MUST DISAPPEAR.

14) The Earth will disappear because IT NEVER REALLY EXISTED IN THE FIRST PLACE, being 100% an illusory "2nd reality" that is impossible. "It is the world you see that is IMPOSSIBLE."

15) The idea of there being two states MUST refer to the level at which the illusion SEEMS to exist, and cannot therefore be a comparison between heaven being REAL and earth being REAL. It is an ILLUSION of a comparison. Therefore the quote is NOT speaking about the END OF HEAVEN. Only the end of the OPPOSITE of haven.

16) The FICTIONAL ILLUSION of the two separate states will end, because THE TRUTH is that ONLY THE TRUTH WILL REMAIN. The truth is HEAVEN. Earth is NOT the truth, because it is an ILLUSORY STATE. There cannot be two real states. Earth is an illusion!

17) "My world, which is the resurrection and the life, shall not pass away because it is eternal." is PURELY a post-undoing-of-illusion statement (actually true always), that HEAVEN, God's world, God's ONLY WORLD, will not pass away because it is eternal. This is a confirmation and reassurance that God's world will ALWAYS be there (heaven), therefore heaven ITSELF did not "pass away" when "the two states" passed away, and therefore THE OTHER WORLD - Earth, which was a fictional second reality, DID pass away. It never existed in the first place.

A clarifying REWORDING of Jesus's intention can be done as follows, completely 100% in line with the metaphysical logic:

---------

"Heaven and earth shall pass away" means that Earth never existed as an opposite to Heaven, and therefore Earth has never existed and will pass away when dreaming ends. The only thing which remains will be Heaven which God created as Eternal and never passes away, and Earth will have been recognized as having never existed.

---------

You can deny this if you want to. Or you can accept it is true. There is no logical fallacy in this black and white metaphysical logic. I challenge anyone to find a hole in it. You will not.

Any hole you find, MUST BE FICTIONAL and a rationalization by the ego to attempt to DENY that this is true. This being true has nothing to do with whether you will ACCEPT IT, and a even if it IS true and even if you can see it is true, you STILL can deny it if you want to.

Classic denial #1: they both become one so now we have a combined sum total of the parts. Bullshit.

Classic denial #3: heaven and earth both pass away leaving some other state. Heaven never passes away, so that's bullshit.

Classic denial #3: earth will be "translated into" heaven. Bullshit. There is NO EARTH TO TRANSLATE, because a 2nd state of "something real" cannot exist at all. Earth cannot exist. THE WORLD YOU SEE IS IMPOSSIBLE.

There is no world. There is no earth. Earth is not real. Heaven is the only reality. Heaven is your home.

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies."

"The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible."

"And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God."

"For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

"Bodies now are useless, and will therefore fade away, because the Son of God is limitless."

"From the world of bodies, MADE by insanity, insane messages seem to be returned to the mind which made it."

"Sins are in bodies. They are not perceived in minds. They are not seen as purposes, but ACTIONS. Bodies act, and minds do not."

"It takes the central place in every dream, which tells the story of how it was made by OTHER bodies, born into the world OUTSIDE the body, lives a little while, and dies, to be united in the dust with other bodies, dying like itself."

"In the brief time allotted it to live, it seeks for other bodies as its friends and enemies."

"It hires OTHER bodies, that they may protect it, and collect more senseless things that it can call its own."

"It looks about for special bodies which can SHARE its dream. Sometimes it dreams it is a conqueror of bodies weaker than itself. But in some phases of the dream, it is the slave of bodies which would hurt and torture it."

"Is healing frightening? To many, yes. For accusation is a bar to love, and damaged bodies ARE accusers."

"For all the hurt that war has sought to bring; the broken bodies and the shattered limbs, the screaming dying and the silent dead, are gently lifted up and comforted. There IS no sadness, where a miracle has come to heal."

"YOU SEE THE WORLD YOU VALUE. On this side of the bridge, you see the world of separate bodies, seeking to join each other in SEPARATE UNIONS, and to become one BY LOSING. When two INDIVIDUALS seek to become ONE, they are trying to DECREASE their magnitude. Each would DENY his power, for the SEPARATE union EXCLUDES THE UNIVERSE. Far more is LEFT OUTSIDE than would be taken in."

"Within the dream of bodies and of death, is yet one theme of truth; no more, perhaps, than just a tiny spark, a space of light created in the dark, where God shines still."

"Homeless, the ego seeks as many bodies as it can collect, to place its idols in, and so establish them as temples to itself."

"The Holy Spirit's purpose lies safe in your relationship, and not your bodies. You have ESCAPED the body. Where you are now, the body cannot enter, for the Holy Spirit has set HIS temple there."

"The unholy instant IS the time of bodies."

"You have a fear of broken bodies, because your ego cannot tolerate them."

"Those who call upon the Name of God can not mistake the nameless for the Name, nor sin for grace, nor bodies for the holy Son of God."

"And sight of bodies becomes the sign that sacrifice IS limited, and something still remains for you alone."

"A mind within a body, and a world of other bodies, each with SEPARATE minds"

"Some idea of bodies MUST have entered, for minds can NOT attack."

"The thought of bodies IS a sign of faithlessness, for bodies CANNOT solve anything. And it is their INTRUSION on the relationship, an error in YOUR thoughts ABOUT the situation, that then became the JUSTIFICATION for your lack of faith."

"You do not perceive your brothers as the Holy Spirit does because you do not interpret their bodies AND YOURS solely as a means of JOINING THEIR MINDS and uniting them with yours and mine."

"But if you use it ONLY to reach the minds of those who believe they ARE bodies and teach them THROUGH the body that THIS IS NOT SO, you will begin to understand the power of the mind that is in both of you."

"For only bodies can be separate, and therefore unreal. The home of madness cannot be the home of reason."

"It sees NOT through the body's eyes, nor looks to bodies for its justification."

"Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its power declines if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel."

"And if God created bodies, death would indeed be real. But God would not be loving."

The Course talks about how special love covers up special hate.

I always thought of this as though special love is our special relationships, isolated friendships, marriages, etc. ... and that the special hate was 'somewhere else' in some unconscious realm or whatever.

But both the special love and the special hate live within ourselves, simultaneously, as sort of different compartments of the ego mind.

The only reason the special hate seems hidden or unconscious, while the special loves seems to be out in the open, is because special love equates to the persona, and special hate to the shadow.

As you choose to use the "persona & shadow" - a package deal, ie the ego, you highlight and emphasize the stuff in the persona and attempts to condemn and hate the stuff in the shadow. The persona represses and denies what it doesn't approve of, so it 'seems' the special hate is hidden

But especially when the 'terms' of the special love/persona are not met, it being just a part of the ego, the persona facade of is often 'taken off', and instead the underlying hatred is revealed. The shadow.

In the shadow, there isn't a facade of covering things up or hiding things or so much in terms of denial and rejection. In fact, it seems that the shadow is quite 'raw'. In a sense, it is in some ways more honest than the persona. It doesn't pretend to like something - but it does retain a hateful attitude which ultimately is also dishonest.

This is what they mean when they say the ego can go from suspicious to vicious. In the persona the ego is suspicious. If the persona is violated, it goes away and the claws come out.

But the claws are really just the 'hurt' parts of the total self that were attacked, when you chose the persona. So it's like, you put parts of yourself into a 'good box' and put other parts of yourself into a 'bad box'. It seems that the 'bad box' is the parts of you which are now attacked, wounded, unconscious, denied and hated. So that part of you is not getting a whole lot of love in that way.

But also, the persona, while appearing to be the opposite of that, is also really an attack on the total Self. The persona may 'appear' innocent, a hero, someone's savior (in an ego way), a fixer, a people-pleaser or whatever, someone you would not be suspicious OF ... but it too is really not your authentic self.

It is a protective, defensive, rejective, deflective shield, that covers up your real Self. And using it also strips you of power. You become weakened through it, because the idea of focusing on only certain aspects of Self is an attack, an attempt at separation. It attacks your wholeness, which is where your strength is.

Your real strength is in being whole. Being all of yourself without judgement or condemnation. Being who and what you are, without putting on a fake show or being dishonest in any way. Just representing your real self. Representing God. That Self doesn't need any help.

That Self is not interested in or in NEED of any of the 'services' that the persona seems to suggest it's going to give you. Again, what the ego tempts you to believe it will do 'in your favor' (the persona), actually ultimately attacks you and leads you in totally the opposite direction (pain/shadow).

So it's not so much, that you need to bolster up your persona so that you are stronger and can be more confident. It's that you need to stop using personas altogether, so that you can return to being your natural, full, consistent, honest self, which is FAR more powerful and fearless and does not suffer from any of the neediness or suspiciousness or defensiveness or viciousness that comes with using the ego.

So it all eventually boils down to.... do you use the ego, or do you unmask yourself and be real.

The Course uses the term "Sons" 82 times.

The Course uses the term "children" to refer to the "children of God" 42 times.

The term "Sonship" is used 104 times.

The course also uses the term "parts", "minds", "aspects", "extensions", "channels", "brothers", "God's thoughts", "souls", and more, on multiple occasions.

All of these are plural. There are HUNDREDS of references to the fact that God created MANY SONS. Many extensions, many minds, many souls, many parts/aspects of the sonship.

The sonship having multiple parts does NOT mean the parts are separate, or separated by bodies, or estranged from each other by illusions of ego, or illusions of multiplicity, or any other form of separation that we would recognize as separation.

The sonship, in Heaven, in its entirety, experienced all simultaneously by God, is often referred to as "THE Son of God" or the "One Son". This does NOT erase or cancel out the fact that God created MANY Sons. It is simply talking about how ALL of the Sons are capable of SHARING equally, how they experience a Oneness with all parts of God's creation.

Oneness does not mean... one big blob. If it did, God would not have ANY SONS. Not even ONE. If God is oneness, then there is not even a Son of God. Clearly that would be severely against the Course's teaching. It does not teach that there is "no son". In fact, it teaches that because of what it is, LOVE MUST EXTEND and be shared, and it must CREATE, and the natural result of that is the creation of AT LEAST one Son. And the Course has explained that there are MANY, MANY, MANY Sons, many minds, many souls, which GOD CREATED, and which are whole in and of themselves.

The problem our ego minds have, is that we can't get our head around this idea:

There are many sons, who are simultaneously ONE, and who experience oneness, and are each a whole, and yet also are part of a combined whole, yet each is still an individual will free will. .... The ego has NO WAY to understand how that makes sense or is possible, especially when it considers any HINT of "separation" or "multiple" to mean... some kind of ego concept.

That we can't understand logically HOW this makes sense, or how it is possible, or what it means, does not mean it is lying to us. The Course is not lying to us. This is simply one area that the ego cannot easily get its head around. The ego cannot understand oneness. So to dismiss is on grounds of EGO LOGIC, which arrives at a false conclusion here, is a mistake.

"But how can God have multiple Sons if Oneness is a single thing" ..... this is the same question as, "How could the tiny mad idea happen". The ego is asking. The ego wants to figure it out. The ego thinks that it is capable of seeing WITHOUT separation, and that when it LOOKS AT the Sonship - the multiple Sons of God one with each other, it is CAPABLE of seeing the truth. It can't. When the ego looks at Oneness, ALL IT SEES IS SEPARATION. It will never be able to SEE the oneness of the sonship at the same time as recognizing that God created MANY SONS WITH FREE WILL.

To then base an entire theological understanding of what the Course says and means, on the idea that there are NOT multiple sons, and none of them have free will, and any way that they are distinct is "separation" and therefore illusion, WILL RESULT IN a very warped interpretation of the Course's metaphysics.

When there is no room in the ego's grasp of the Course to accept multiple sons, there is no way to explain properly how perception works or how minds work or what illusions are or how people have free will or who is dreaming what or who is responsible for what sickness or who is making what body appear. It ALL becomes confused in one big blur.

When you chose to believe in being separate from God, you chose to make a thought system and world opposite to God.

That world did not have any choice of ITS OWN to determine its nature or functioning. You wanted it to be opposite to heaven, and so it is.

It therefore MUST function according to laws which appear opposite to God's laws, of an imperfect nature, and completely unilke heaven in EVERY way imaginable.

"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."

"The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear. And what is fear except love's absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him."

We chose that the world would function UNLIKE heaven, and therefore its foundation of separation and exclusion and lack and limitation is deeply embedded into its entire nature. That is why it devours and destroys, that is why it is limitation and scarcity, that is why it is cruel and dangerous, that is why everything in it dies.

Even right down to the subatomic particles, the illusory laws of physics, space and time themselves, all DEPEND entirely on the separation idea - the idea of opposition to God.

The world therefore CANNOT FUNCTION ANY OTHER WAY.

Its whole nature, its materials, its objects, its gravity and forces, its distances and delays, are all part of how the system MUST FUNCTION in order to be opposite to God's system.

The system itself is not choosing this. It has no choice. It cannot opt to work well, to be perfect, to stop being destructive, to be whole, to give you love or eternal life, to last forever, or to stop having problems.

It was meant to BE a problem, it was meant to OPPOSE God, it was meant to LACK, it was meant to NOT WORK, it was meant to ATTACK, it was meant to DESTROY, it was meant to facilitate SUFFERING AND DEATH.

That's ALL it can do. That's all it has to offer. It cannot change its mind, it cannot function as heaven, it cannot adopt God's laws, it cannot suddenly be free from murder and death, it can't stop having sicknesses, it can't be perfect, it can't last, and it won't ever stop having problems.

It's important to look at this honestly and recognize it. When you DON'T look at this, you will be delusional and in denial. You will believe that the world CAN be like heaven, it can somehow be manipulated to function well, things can last, suffering can be ended physically, accidents can stop happening, and all problems can be permenently solved.

All of this wishful thinking runs COMPLETELY OPPOSITE to the nature and functioning of the world, and if you try to implement it you will be RESISTING (fearing) the world, and causing tension and friction and suffering. It means you're trying to turn the machinery of separation into something that seems to function like oneness, and it's NOT possible. Not at a physical level.

If you can be willing to look at this fact hard in the face, you can drop the pretense and false hopes and silly dreams of making it work, and can ACCEPT that it is not going to ever work. And then you can recognize it for what it is. And you can also then recognize it is MEANT TO DIE. And problems are not meant to be ever solved here.

Once you recognize that, you can actually look for salvation WHERE IT IS, which is in heaven with God. You can then see that the OPPOSITE of this world is the only place where things can work the way you're hoping they could. The only place where there is no suffering, no sickness, no problems, and no death.

And in recognizing that this world HAS NO CHOICE in how it functions, you can forgive it, because thus you can recognize it is not trying to be a problem on purpose. It has no choice in it. It is a machine we made to be problematic intentionally, and that's it's nature. If you can accept that is its ONLY possible nature, then you can stop trying to STOP IT from being the way it is. And then you can accept it and find some peace, and let it go.

Basically everyone is trying to turn this world into heaven SO THAT they do not have to go home to heaven with God. We're looking in the wrong place for salvation and for a solution to the separation. The world cannot be solved or saved in this way, it can only be forgiven for being the way it is. And in your forgiveness you can set your mind free, because you are NOT part of this system, nor do you function like it. You are not of this world.

Jesus says NOT to try to escape all problems here. The world is MEANT to be problematic all the time and it wilL NEVER stop. You don't escape the world by fixing those problems, but by transcending them. Problems are DECEPTIONS that something is wrong that you need to attend to. YOU DO NOT.

"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."

"You do not realize how much you hate each other. You will not get rid of this until you DO realize it, for UNTIL then, you will think you want to get rid of EACH OTHER and KEEP THE HATRED."

In the past couple of weeks, I've been having some hatred coming out for release. It's from deep in the past. But I did not recognize it as hatred. I was too "in it", feeling it. I had no idea what it was, only that everyone seemed responsible for it.

I kept flip-flopping between what it felt like and how it was making me perceive, and what was more of my "current" way of perceiving. But it was hard to maintain this. I kept falling back into it.

It felt like an intense form of separation, and of accusation. It seemed sharper and stronger than just anger. It felt vicious and hurt and blameful. It took several days of going through it before Jesus clued me in that it was even hate, because I couldn't tell what it was.

When you're angry at some person you're trying to make them guilty, yet there's some form of desiring that they stop being "wrong" mixed in with that. Hatred on the other hand is a bit more like just pure despising. It's almost like the reason why you were angry gets buried and all you're left with is a concentrated hatred of a person. It's almost like sin's reflection.

Each time that waves of this stuff came up, I would feel extremely scapegoaty. Just really convinced that the person was just evil and wrong and bad. Just like a passive observation, but quite strong in actively condemning them. This then started to overflow into how I was relating to everyone. There was just this constant forceful pushing of blame all the time regardless of who I was relating with.

You might have noticed that I made several posts recently where I was sounding fed up with people, accusing people, tired of people, resentful of idiots, annoyed at people not being willing to listen or learn, angry at their fixed nature and stubbornness etc. This isn't really like me, but I couldn't help but keep moving into blame because the feeling of hate coming up was so accusatory. It was making me see everyone as wrong.

The hate was seemingly based on what I saw as what someone did to me, seeming to inspire revenge or a justification for "why" I should hate them. A viciousness that seemed to make sense. It felt like an extreme form of dissociation and ego and specialness, as well. It was driven by unhealed "hurt" and a definite "you did this to me" kind of mentality of victimhood.

I'm glad to say that now that this is mostly cleared out, my perceptions and evaluations are returning to a much more forgiving place. But it was a pretty deep dip in the road. Jesus talks in the course about just how intense our "hidden hates" really are, how much we blame and accuse. What we don't realize is that it's really ourselves that we're hating, at the same time. I certainly found it extremely difficult to feel loving or forgiving while feeling hate. It is just not possible to remain in a peaceful or happy state of mind with such things going on.

"No-one who hates but is afraid of love, and therefore MUST he be afraid of God."

"Let me not think that I can find the way to God if I have hatred in my heart."

"Your hatred is not real, But it is real to you. IT HIDES WHAT YOU REALLY WANT."

"If hatred finds a place within your heart, you will perceive a fearful world, held cruelly in death's sharp-pointed, bony fingers."

"It is in the special relationship, born of the hidden wish for special love from God, that the ego's hatred triumphs. "Look once again upon your enemy, the one you chose to hate instead of love. For thus was hatred born into the world, and thus the rule of fear established here."

"When hatred rests upon a thing, it calls for death as surely as God's Voice proclaims there is no death."

"It fears and it attacks and hates itself, and darkness covers everything it sees, leaving it dreams as fearful as itself. No miracles are here, but only hate. It separates itself from what it sees, while light and strength perceive themselves as one."

"And thus will all the vestiges of hell, the secret sins and hidden hates be gone, and all the loveliness which they concealed appear like lawns of Heaven to our sight, to lift us high above the thorny roads we travelled on before the Christ appeared."

"This level cannot be attained until there is no hatred in your heart, and no desire to attack the Son of God."

"The holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love."

"What hatred has released to love becomes the brightest light in Heaven's radiance."

"Do not let your hatred stand in the way of love, for NOTHING can withstand the love of Christ for His Father, or His Father's love for Him."

"You have projected outward what IS antagonistic to what is inward, and therefore you would HAVE to perceive it this way. That is why you MUST realize that your hatred IS in your mind, and NOT OUTSIDE IT, before you can get rid of it. And why you MUST get rid of it, BEFORE you can perceive the world as it really is."

I had an 'aha' moment today about being a teacher, i.e. being helpful in this world, which probably applies to everyone.

ACIM says that "those who temporarily have more" give to "those who temporarily have less". This is the relationship of teachers to students.

But let's look at what this means.

The teacher has to be someone who temporarily appears to be more aware of truth than the student. And that means if the student can learn anything from them, the student has to be temporarily less aware.

Being temporarily less aware means you must be more insane, and you must believe in less truth, and you must therefore see truth as the enemy.

So this means that, potentially, the student will reject the teacher, i.e. the teachING, at least at first, because there is a clash of belief systems. The student comes to the teacher IN ERROR, seeking CORRECTION.

What this means for the teacher, is that the teacher will very likely experience REJECTION, conflict, attack, misunderstanding, etc. i.e. a lot of confusion and interference, at the beginning, moreso than potentially at the end AFTER teaching has been accomplished.

So here's the problem for the teacher or anyone who wants to be a teacher. And this also applies to anyone who wants to express themselves more fully, anyone who wants to express something that other people may not be able to accept, anyone doing art or creative pursuits, and anyone trying to say anything that might actually HELP or contribute to the awakening of humanity.

The problem is, that there will be a fear of rejection, a fear of judgement, a fear of abandonment, BY the student, i.e. by the audience. And you hear this a lot like people who are artists being afraid of the 'pressure' to have their art be liked, or a writer who gets a block because they are too worried about the audience's reaction. Or a teacher who wants to share and uplift others but is afraid that the teaching will be ridiculed.

The insight I had, about this, which is very freeing, is this. IF you want to in any way help, uplift, inspire, teach, awaken, guide, educate, or cause people to experience something or enjoy something that you created, there absolutely WILL be rejection. At least at first. There HAS to be rejection by the student otherwise the student wouldn't NEED the teaching. The art critic MUST 'not get' the art, at least at first, otherwise the art really has no transformative

power.

In other words, if you as a teacher/artist/creative etc can ACCEPT, that there is rejection built in whenever you step outside the box or attempt to open people's minds, that THEY will not understand because they CANNOT understand, at first, you can perhaps see that it is not PERSONAL. It is not that they are personally attacking you, it's that their .. 'ignorance'... is resisting exposure to what you are offering. And that only means, that they are not as aware, and they have come to you BECAUSE they are ripe for increasing their awareness. "Those who are to meet will meet" - ACIM .... When the student is ready, the teacher will appear (I forget if that's ACIM or not).

So those who have a potential to learn, at least will find the teachers, or the artists, or whoever is offering the expanded mind. The teacher/artist/expresser should EXPECT that there HAS to be rejection, because the student's mind has not yet opened up to the teaching/offering. And so it's not that the teaching is crap, or the art is crap, or the creation is crap... it's that the viewer hasn't yet opened up to it - and that's because of THEIR mind and THEIR unconsciousness and THEIR resistance. It's nothing to do with what you're offering. And really it should be the PURPOSE of the art or teaching, to help that student transform and awaken out of their resistance/rejection, into acceptance and understanding.

So I guess my insight is, which helps me immensely, is.... that instead of being afraid of rejection, and thus hiding from 'coming out' as 'a teacher', I need to recognize that there will be rejection and why, and realize that it will not actually have anything to do with me. Those who are ready and willing to open up will do so, and those who are not will not do so. I need to DETACH from the ego effort to 'force' or 'coerce' others into accepting what I say, therefore indirectly accepting ME. I need to take the ME out of it. Just put it out there for "those who have ears to listen", and just accept that everyone else will fall into the 'rejection' camp. And this is normal. And it's not personal. And it's nothing to do with me.

Expecting that rejection and welcoming it and knowing that it is because of a person's un-readiness or inappropriateness to be a student, takes the burden off the 'false' expectation that *EVERYONE* MUST ACCEPT YOU. You don't need *everyone's* acceptance. Not everyone is ready. Not everyone is meant to meet you. That's not how the plan works. We each have an appointed function. Talents. Gifts. etc. Or as some people say, "just do you".

I guess in a way this means being unconditional in how you express yourself. Being true to yourself and expressing who you are and what YOUR message is, in the knowing that SOMEONE is meant to receive it, and that everyone else is irrelevant. Which means there is absolutely no reason NOT to express yourself exactly how you want to. With freedom. And not with dependency. So what is 90% of people hate your stuff. Let them. Help the rest.

"The world is false perception. It is born of error, and it has not left its source. It will remain no longer than the thought that gave it birth is cherished. When the thought of separation has been changed to one of true forgiveness, will the world be seen in quite another light; and one which leads to truth, where all the world must disappear and all its errors vanish. Now its source has gone, and its effects are gone as well.

The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear. And what is fear except love's absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him."

...This section of the Course is interesting. It clearly says that "the world IS false perception", having not left the mind. In other words, the world is inside the mind, is made of mind-stuff/images/illusions, and is not physically real or objectively real. But notice it says the world *IS* false perception, not just that you are misperceiving a world.

Notice also it doesn't say the world is 'out there' and you PERCEIVE IT falsely. The world ITSELF IS perception. Your perceiving hallucinates a world, because "projection makes perception". Projection making perception does NOT mean that you are just projecting ONTO the world and perceiving things that are not there, it means that you are projecting THE WORLD ITSELF and are then perceiving it. Your interpretations of what you then PERCEIVE is just another LAYER of projection on top of the projected world. You are projecting the world in your mind and THEN you perceive it with the body.

This is an important distinction because so many Course folks are thinking that you just need to fix your perception OF something that exists kind of on its own, and that if you can get the right perception of it then you'll be in reality. That's not how it works. The world seeming to exist AT ALL is because of perception, which is false.

When the thought of separation (which hallucinated the world) is seen in another light (ie right-minded perception), you may see the forgiven world (which is lovely), BUT only as a stepping stone to LEAD TO the truth, "where all the world must disappear".

"WHERE ALL THE WORLD MUST DISAPPEAR". Because it's not real to begin with. It's just a great big IDEA of separation in the mind.

"Now its source has gone, and its effects are gone as well". Its source is the idea of separation, and the effect of that idea was the hallucination of a world existing. Not just a hallucination ABOUT a pre-existing world or on TOP of a world, but THE world itself.

I think one of the main reasons a lot of people think they just need to "change their mind about the world" is because that IS a stepping stone toward the truth - but is not the final goal. It's just a way to get to where you stop protecting the illusion and are ready to dissolve the underlying thought of separation/attack-on-God which caused it to appear. And since the Course does speak to taking those steps toward undoing distorted perception, people get caught up thinking that's all they need to do, and that after that the 'real world' will be kept - the physical world. That's not what it means. There are steps after that where the world disappears because it as only ever an illusion in the mind.

I think also this has a lot to do with how people perceive themselves as a separate body. That's what we come to the course with. I'm separate from 'the world out there'. I have a mind 'in here' in my body which is separate from the world 'out there' so this is the only part of reality that I have control over. I can change 'my mind' in here to see what's 'out there' differently. But that's NOT the point.

The point is, the very IDEA that your mind is separate from the world is what has to be undone - the whole idea of 'I have a separate mind' that is separate from the world. Because if you don't see that, you'll just want to keep the world and stay in a body and remain a separate ego identity having its own perception. And the truth is, you can't HAVE correct perception if you are still separate because as the mind is HEALED it is healed by union and undoing separation and joining and sharing, which means you have to realize that the world is IN your mind and it/your body are just mind-stuff. And as mind-stuff, they are just illusions, not reality. So the whole world ITSELF is not real. This is a very fundamental Course concept.

Again "The world is false perception. It is born of error, and it has not left its source. It will remain no longer than the thought that gave it birth is cherished." - Jesus

Once we stop cherishing the thought (separation) which gave 'birth' to ERROR, which is the world (the form of error), it will REMAIN NO LONGER and will disappear. Forgiveness is meant to OVERLOOK error, ie overlook the world, to get to where perception is purified so that it can see the world for 'what it is', and what it is is an illusion. Forgiveness must look PAST the illusion otherwise it is not forgiveness. It overlooks the world and recognizes it is NOT really there, because it's just a figment of the imagination. In all its physical-ness and energy-ness and all of its 'life forms' and everything - it's all unreal. It is not reality at all. This is why the idea of "there is no world" is so threatening to ALL Course students (me too) - it implies the total non-existence of the ego self that they think they are.

So what's left, if there is no world and the world disappears?

God's Creation! God's Creation was hidden BY the world, and that was the world's only purpose. Once removed, we will be AWARE of God's Creation again - not conscious of it, not perceiving it, but AWARE of being it.

The world is just a giant mind-game.

In this world, which is 100% the effect of dreaming, there is an ILLUSION of cause and effect.

To recognize how it is an illusion, consider how children play "make-believe" with toys.

1) There is an empty scene.

2) The child grabs his toy car, imagining that it is a real car.

3) He makes car sounds appear, "broom broom" to try to add life to the car

4) He moves the car along to pretend that it is driving by itself

5) He wants to increase the fun so puts a plastic tree in the scene

6) He drives the car toward the tree and just at the point where it's supposed to hit the tree, he grabs the tree and whisks it away up in the air, to simulate being hit by the car

He moved the car, he "gave life" to the car, animated it, controlled it. He moved the tree, "gave life" to the tree, animated it, controlled it. He made the ILLUSION that the car bumped the tree up into the air.

If viewed from within the fantasy, it SEEMS as if a real car causes a real tree to be damaged.

Viewed from outside the fantasy, we see that ONE CAUSE (the child/son of God), is responsible for everything that happens. He is responsible for the car and the tree and everything that both of them show.

The car could not move on its own. The tree could not move on its own. The care DOES NOT cause the tree to move! HIS MIND caused them to seem to produce effects. HIS MIND *pretended* that the car was "a cause" and that the tree was "at the effect" of the car.

We see this stuff happen from inside the dream, inside the fantasy play of the Son of God, and we think, that car really "caused" that damage to the tree, or, that food I ate caused my upset stomach, or, that person hitting me caused a bruise, or, throwing the ball at the window caused the window to break.

ITS NOT TRUE. This is an illusion. An illusion of simultaneous effects pretending to be causes.

When we are in touch with who the dreamer is, who the CAUSE is, the ILLUSION of cause and effect inside the fantasy can be shown to be an illusion. Miracles DEMONSTRATE this.

Miracles are acts by the ONE CAUSE of the entire dream content, to rearrange or change the effects in the dream, ie the objects or people or whatever else is showing up. Because IT is responsible for everything that moves, all side-effects, all consequences, how everything SEEMS to be affected by everything else, when it decides to BREAK the illusion of cause and effect, demonstrating that IT is the only cause and all cause and effects are actually EFFECTS, that's how the miracle defies the laws of the ego.

If the Son of God decides, hey, when that car hits that tree, nothing is going to happen, and the tree shall not have any damage put into it, then SO BE IT... the car will not damage the tree.

If the Son of God decides, hey, when I put that poison into the body, I will not put an effect of sickness into the body, then SO BE IT, the body will not be sick.

If the Son of God decides, hey, when I make that one body throw that one ball towards that window, I will not allow that window to break, SO BE IT, the window will not break.

Those witnessing these things will be probably astonished to see that the "laws" of cause-effect, the EGO's illusory laws, HAVE NOT WORKED. They did not apply. Something OVERRODE THEM. Some higher power somehow managed to manipulate THE LAWS THEMSELVES, to produce a result which "shouldn't be possible".

Illusions of "causes" in this world are entirely that, illusions. The world has NO causes in it, and it does nothing. That's because it is NOT ALIVE. And that's also because it is only an EFFECT of dreaming. All "life forms" here are NOT ALIVE. They are illusions of separate causes. All bodies are fictional. All objects are make-believe. The way they all interact is PRETEND.

Miracles completely bypass the illusion of horizontal/linear cause and effect. They demonstrate that these laws are NOT TRUE, and this is profoundly educational if you witness such a miracle. It PROVES that what you thought was true of this world, IS NOT TRUE. No longer will you be able to believe that "this causes that", because it was clearly demonstrated that this is NOT THE CASE.

Therefore, anything which you think has been caused by something happening in the world, can easily be reversed, changed, undone, or kept, entirely at the will of the mind. There is nothing that cannot be undone. There is nothing that cannot be reversed or healed. There is no sickness nor death which can prevent this higher-level mind from PROVING that it can be EASILY UNDONE. And Jesus demonstrated this at the resurrection.

Death has NO POWER OVER YOU because you literally cannot and will not MAKE DEATH HAPPEN unless you choose to do so, and if you choose that, you will be doing it to yourself, and NOT BECAUSE of any causes in the world whatsoever. You will be pulling all the strings, manipulating all the circumstances, putting all the sickness into your body, adding all the effects, and faking your own death, all deliberately and intentionally. Nothing happens to you against your will!

This is why death is optional and is always a choice. No-one dies without their own consent. No-one needs to die or suffer or be sick or upset or afraid or damaged or hurt in any way.

USE THE MIRACLES!

"The world you see does nothing. It has no effects at all. "

"The world you see has nothing to do with reality. "

"The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that. " ... This is NOT a statement about how you perceive what's out there.... it's telling you, YOU PUT THE STUFF OUT THERE with your mind. You put that car there. You put that house there. You put those effects there! It Is WHAT YOU GAVE!

"There is nothing in the world that has the power to make you ill or sad. "

"On confusion has this world been based, and there is nothing else it rests upon. "

"Projection makes perception. The world that you see is what you have put there to see; nothing more and nothing less and so it is important to you." ...... !!!!! This actually means that YOU PUT THE WORLD OUT THERE PHYSICALLY! You projected it from your higher-level mind! This is a statement about the Son of God, projecting the universe, literally, it is NOT to do with "how you look at the world"!! You MADE IT, and it can be CHANGED BY YOUR WILL!

I haven't been focusing on miracles for a while, but kind of accidentally lately I've been finding myself exposed to some statements about miracles. I seem to be seeing them in a different light. Which is funny because "seeing in the light" is a big part of it.

There is one thing ACIM says fairly clearly and it's that miracles are ONLY seen in light. It also says miracles and vision are completely connected to each other. At times it also suggests miracles are so high in terms of states of consciousness, as to be right up at the christ level. Such as that the eyes of christ deliver them to all they look upon.

It also tells us that miracles, seen in light, are all over the place. A miracle stands next to what seemed to be a false perception, and these miracles are even there when we don't see them. We can block awareness of the miracles but that doesn't mean they're not there. And that suggests they are "ways of seeing."

I also found in experience recently that in one instance where I was driving behind a car and was about to scapegoat and then chose not to, kind of "holding back" the projection of guilt, Jesus called it a miracle. So then that got me thinking, what is a miracle really? We're also told that miracles and grievances are opposites. Also that ego-projection and miracles are opposites. So that tells us a bit about the state of mind or the activities of mind.

We're also told that miracles don't "do" anything, although we're also told they UNDO the interference that the ego was DOING. They "correct" the mind and sort of straighten out perceptions. They're also described as the translation of denial into truth. Also that miracles merely remind the mind of who the dreamer is, ie putting your awareness back in touch with you being causal and not seeing yourself as a victim or as in a position to scapegoat.

Miracles appear to be tied into true perceptions, as though they are glimpses of an accurate perception of something. But we're also told that they are thought creations, that they can energize others, that they can supply a lack. And that they are expressions of love. In prayer love is received, and in miracles love is expressed.

The impression I'm getting is that the love is coming down from a higher level ie heaven, and we are the open door who has to extend them. This is a sort of cause-effect chain, where God gives us the miracles and then we transfer them to others. As in "Miracles are a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers."

If we are in a state of christ mind where we're fully open to the truth, then we are fully able to extend and pass on these miracles, these parcels of love. It's almost like they reflect the idea of creations, in which we are co-creating with God, extending God and paying forward what we've received. This is why you can only give the miracles you've received.

On the one hand it seems that a miracle is like a gift of love, a form of healing, which corrects the mind and lifts it up out of false perceptions into true perception. As stated in terms of miracles "entailing" a sudden shift into vertical perception. At the same time this gift of love has power and healing in it, as all love does, and so while it corrects your sight and you "see with the miracle" or through the miracle-sight, you also extend that love and power and it can cause things to happen.

Jesus also refers to them as examples of right thinking. Right thinking is sanity and true perception. Accuracy of thought and mind. These moments of clarity and non-attack and non-judgement and non-projection, recognize sinlessness ie as in forgiveness, and broadcast that wholeness of mind to the whole sonship. They are thus also expressions of holy relationship ie total unconditional relationship.

Since Jesus refers to them as thought-creations, and that thoughts can create higher or lower realities, these miracles are clearly a function of mind and thought, which includes power and love, as kind of acts of "higher dreaming". These miracles lift up the mind and heal it, as in "interceding for your holiness". And as a result you see correctly, and your correct seeing has corrective properties which can shine light into other minds and correct them.

Thinking of someone like Jesus in a state of christ-mind, or near to it, he was so sided with heaven's laws that he could constantly radiate and pass on that miraculousness at will. He could use the mind, in combination of thought and belief, and with the power of God behind it, to cause things to happen. And each of these were love-based expressions. Including raising the dead and healing the sick and moving mountains. The mind is just naturally miraculous and powerful when it's in its healed state.

So miracles are definitely tied to mind, and to seeing, and to light, and to forgiveness, and to giving and receiving, and to extension of God and love. They are acts, performances, expressions, doings, which emit out of the mind and are given and shared, as part of the natural outgoing of love and its unlimitedness. Someone miraculous has the light of God in their eyes and just sees everything with sparkling light and can effortlessly bestow blessings of supernatural transformation everywhere they go.

"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."

If a miracle can be as simple as a right-minded non-attacking non-scapegoating non-projecting opposite to a grievance, where you "look and wait and judge not", in which you are being closer in alignment to how the Holy Spirit sees, then we're asked to basically get our mind-seeing into the light where it can bestow miracles all the time. Seeing forgiveness given to everything. Meeting all things with heavenly blessing.

Or something like that.

The book, is an expression FROM truth, attempting to point to truth. It contains SYMBOLS of truth, twice removed from reality.

Because truth expressed the book, the symbols in the book are not necessarily all possible expressions from truth. Truth could conceivably express a million books, all from the same source or mind. They could all appear to take on different forms and use different words, yet essentially say the same thing.

The form of the book, the words used, the sentences, the sections/chapters, is only one collection of symbols, all coming from the same source.

It is entirely possible for that source of truth to continue to express itself in many, many more forms. It is possible that the Course could in fact be 1000 times larger, or a million. There is basically no limit to how many "forms" it could take, provided those forms express or symbolize a consistent source.

This is why it is then important to recognize that, of all the FORMS in the book, all of the words, you are not necessarily getting ALL words that can ever be said about truth, and you're not necessarily hearing every possible clarification.

For example, in the main Course itself Jesus doesn't really explicitly talk about making his body disappear. Yet, in the notes given to Helen later, from the same source/truth, he clarified further by adding extra information. That information is clarifying as to the meaning of various other parts of the Course, especially surrounding resurrection and how we might leave the dream without death being involved.

There are also times when Jesus says one little phrase somewhere in the Course and doesn't really expand upon it, and yet it's a very key phrase which puts many other things into perspective.

There are also times when I really wish Jesus would've gone into much more detail about certain things, especially miracles and some of the aspects of the end of the universe. In other words, if Jesus were present, there would be a lot of questions we could ask Him which would clarify many things. This is why it is VITAL to get in touch with Jesus/Holy Spirit and develop a relationship with them, so that you can learn from them DIRECTLY.

It's important then not to get too hung up on the specific exact WORDS which Jesus expressed, thinking that the FORM of those words is the truth. The form is not the truth, it's just one of MANY possible symbols and expressions. Further additional forms might possibly change your perception of those words and what they really mean.

If for example you will only accept something as correct if it has an explicit quote in the Course that you can point your finger at, then you are getting bogged down in form and are not seeing the metaphysics.

The form of the words of the Course are twice removed from reality. Once removed from reality is the metaphysics, and/or the symbols in the dream. For example, outer space, filled with seemingly nothing but emptiness, is symbolic for the ego's attempt to make God as absent as possible. Bodies are symbols of having an identity God did not create. etc.

When you look at the words and learn from the words, you should learn, or be able to infer/imply, what the metaphysics of the truth is. Stuff like the structure of the dream, the levels, what certain things mean, where they fit, etc... is not always necessarily 100% spelled out in words. You have to look deeper. As you "generalize the teaching", you will gradually build a clearer picture for yourself about how everything fits together.

Some of those clarifications will bring you insight into how, sometimes, Jesus uses words in certain specific contexts which, if taken verbatim, might imply or infer something which is incorrect. Also sometimes He speaks at certain "levels" and confusing those levels produces a lot of confused metaphysics. Some things apply at certain levels and not others.

Also sometimes Jesus uses words which He seemed to have build up quite a specific definition of elsewhere, but uses them quite loosely in "general conversation" in such a way that people then take this and think it's some kind of metaphysical fact. Sometimes Jesus is just simply talking casually and using normal language, how most people would, and not necessarily teaching doctrine in every word.

With enough exposure and learning you should be able to transcend the Course's words and get more in touch with the "core metaphysics" which is kind of hiding somewhat behind the words. The structure of the dream, the proper location of certain levels and their meaning etc, becomes more apparent when you go deeper into it, and Jesus hasn't necessarily "spelled it all out" directly.

We have to be careful not to get hung up on "where does it say that in the course" kind of approaches. Not everything IS said in the course. And yet, some things are true/logically consistent which may never have been expressed.

We also have to beware of thinking that only what is said in the Course is coming from Jesus's authority and therefore no-one else can say anything that Jesus hasn't said. As you transcend the words and get more of the metaphysics you'll be able to extrapolate it and come to conclusions which are completely consistent with Jesus's teachings.

That makes it possible to write additional content, additional words/symbols, based on the same metaphysical foundation, in order to be consistent with Jesus and not contradict his intentions. You don't need to be in his mind of authority to do this, you only need to grasp the basic logical structure of the separation.

There is a lot of material in the Course and it can become quite blinding through its sheer volume and seeming complexity. But we need to learn, in a sense, to forgive it, by learning to overlook its appearance and look deeper to see a closer or more accurate truth. The truth is simple, not complicated, but the ego has a field day with getting caught up in the form of things.

"Death is the symbol of the fear of God. His Love is blotted out in the idea, which holds it from awareness like a shield held up to obscure the sun."

"It holds an image of the Son of God in which he is "laid to rest" in devastation's arms"

"All forms of sickness even unto death are physical expressions of the fear of awakening."

"One thing is sure; God, Who created neither sin nor death, wills not that you be bound by them. He knows of neither sin NOR its result."

"The shrouded figures in the funeral procession march not in honor of their Creator, Whose Will it is they LIVE. They are not FOLLOWING it; they are OPPOSING it."

"And what is the black-draped body they would bury? A body THEY dedicated to death, a symbol of corruption, a sacrifice to sin, OFFERED to sin to feed upon, and keep ITSELF alive. A thing condemned, damned by its maker, and lamented by every mourner who looks upon it as himself."

"You who believe you can condemn the Son of God to this ARE arrogant."

"The arrogance of sin, the pride of guilt, the sepulchre of separation, all are part of your unrecognized dedication to death. The glitter of guilt you laid upon the body would KILL it. For what the ego loves, it kills for its obedience."

"Death, were it true, would be the final and complete disruption of communication, which IS the ego's goal."

"Those who fear death see not how often and how loudly they CALL to it, and bid it come to SAVE them from communication. "

"For death is seen as SAFETY, the great dark savior from the light of truth, the answer to the Answer, the silencer of the Voice that speaks for God."

"Yet the retreat to death is NOT the end of conflict. Only God's Answer is its end."

"My brothers, children of our Father, this is a DREAM of death."

"In its exaltation (the body), you COMMANDED it to die, for only death COULD conquer life. And what but insanity could look upon the defeat of God, and think it REAL? "

"Let me not see it as a sign of sin and death, nor use it for destruction."

"What seems to be FEAR of death, is really its ATTRACTION."

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do. Remember, though, that to do this IS blasphemy"

"Death is the thought that you are separate from your Creator."

"You cannot die unless you choose to do so."

"No-one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No-one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No-one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. No one dies without their own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose."

"Would you not rather live than choose to die? Living is joy, but death can only weep. You see in death escape from what you made. But this you do not see; that you made death, and it is but illusion of an end. "

"Death is a thought which takes on many forms, often unrecognized. It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety or doubt; as anger, faithlessness and lack of trust; concern for bodies, envy, and all forms in which the wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you."

"Here is the Will of Father and of Son defeated finally, and laid to rest beneath the headstone death has placed upon the body of the holy Son of God."

"Unholy in defeat, he has become what death would have him be. His epitaph, which death itself has written, gives no name to him, for he has passed to dust. It says but this: "Here lies a witness God is dead." And this it writes again and still again, while all the while its worshippers agree, and kneeling down with foreheads to the ground, they whisper fearfully that it is so."

"The idea of the death of God is so preposterous that even the insane have difficulty in believing it. For it implies that God was once alive and somehow perished, killed, apparently, by those who did not want him to survive. Their stronger will could triumph over His, and so eternal life gave way to death. And with the Father died the Son as well."

"There is no death, for death is not Your Will."

"But if he chooses death himself, his weakness is his strength."

"For death is not of the real world, in which everything is eternal."

"How can some forms of murder NOT mean death? Can an attack in ANY form be love? What FORM of condemnation is a blessing?"

"Men are afraid of blasphemy, but they do not know what it means. They do not realize that, to deny God, is to deny their own identity, and in this sense, the wages of sin IS death. The sense is very literal; - denial of Life perceives its opposite, as ALL forms of denial replace what IS, with what is NOT."

"Sickness and death entered the mind of God's Son against His Will."

"If the intent is death, what matter the form it takes? Is death in any form, however lovely and charitable it may seem to be, a blessing and a sign the Voice for God speaks through you to your brother?"

"Here stands the body, torn between the natural desire to communicate, and the unnatural intent to murder and to die. "

"For the wages of sin is death, and how can the immortal die?"

"Death is a human affirmation of a belief in fate."

"You but choose whether to go TOWARDS Heaven, or away to nowhere."

"Death cannot be escape"

"A dream of death is not left by death but by truth."

Lesson 136, "Sickness is a defense against the truth", contains statements by Jesus which are hard to accept. They seem like extraordinary claims about what sickness is, how it is undone, and the impossibility of a healthy mind producing a sick body. It speaks of immortality, even at a bodily level.

In ACIM, sickness means a belief in separation from God. This applies to the level of the mind and it is in the mind that it is healed. However, the body is being projected by the mind and is "within" the mind, and reflects the mind’s condition. It is an out-picturing of the inward condition.

Every "form" of sickness which shows up in bodies is included in the scope of sickness applying to the mind.

Sickness projects a sick body. Bodies which have forms of sickness, suffering, damage, something broken or missing etc, are expressions of the belief in separation. These things can ONLY show up IF the mind maintains that belief.

Interesting stuff happens to bodies when the mind is healed. Sickness does not stick around on its own, nor is it sustained by the body or by the world. It is solely MAINTAINED by the mind, and so if it is showing up in the body, the mind IS maintaining it, thus believes in separation, thus is not healed. A broken/sick/dead body is PROOF that the mind has not been healed. When the mind IS healed, the body MUST therefore NOT PROVE that sickness is real, and therefore all signs and symptoms of sickness MUST disappear.

Let’s see what Jesus says which is so radical (my emphasis):

— "(Sickness) 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."

So right off the bat, Jesus teaches us that all forms and expressions of sickness (including cancer, stroke, heart problems, broken limbs etc, and death), MUST DISAPPEAR when the purpose of the sickness is recogized. Later Jesus tells us that we make sickness in order to DEFEND ourselves against the truth. But we only keep the sickness so long as it serves this purpose, and when the purpose or "need" for the defense is gone, the sickness MUST disappear.

—"Sickness is not an accident. Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception. And like all the rest, its purpose is to hide reality, attack it, change it, render it inept, distort it, twist it, or reduce it to a little pile of unassembled parts. The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole."

Clearly then, sickness attacks and defends us against the truth. This includes all physical symtoms which is how the mind’s sickness shows up. If the mind is attacking the truth, it is also going to attack the body. The body will then become weak and sick. Since sickness is an attack on the truth, it is NOT POSSIBLE for there to be sickness if there is not attack, and it is NOT POSSIBLE to wake up to welcoming the truth without putting the sickness aside. Doing so must make it disappear, otherwise if it remains in any way, it continues to prove the mind is not healed.

Notice also how Jesus describes the mind as trying to twist, distort, make inept, and reduce to split-off parts. This act of the mind is HOW SICKNESS IS MADE. If the mind is TWISTING REALITY, it TWISTS THE BODY. If the mind is distorting reality, it distorts the body as well. Holy Spirit showed me this happening in a sudden vision not long ago, where the mind was literally "twisting" and distorting, like applying a psychic force, towards the body, making the body sick.

Our attempt to attack and change reality, attacks and changes our projected body image as well. We can’t hold a belief in attack in the mind AND keep a picture of a healthy body in the mind at the same time. The body WILL suffer if we attack reality, and if we DO NOT attack reality, the body MUST BE HEALED for the same reason - the mind cannot hold a picture of a sick body in the mind at the same time as believing in health/wholeness/truth.

Here is how ALL SICKNESS AND DEATH is implemented:

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

So yes, Jesus is literally saying, we can ONLY be sick if we DECIDE TO BE SICK. We can only be sick when we misperceive the truth and believe it is attacking us, and that we NEED A DEFENSE to keep us "safe" from it. We will then use separation as a device for trying to put distance, or a gap, between us and God. This puts a gap between us and LIFE. The result is that we cut ourselves off from LIFE. And that means, we just chose to be sick and to die.

Jesus also tells us here that sickness DOES NOT HAPPEN TO US against our will. This mean ALL sickness. And death. Neither sickness nor death can appear AT ALL unless YOU decide to make them appear. That’s quite some responsibility that you have! You MAKE sickness from guilt, as an attack, to make the truth go away, so that you can have an illusion of your EGO being safe. Since sickness does not happen against your will, neither does it HAVE any will of its own, and therefore CANNOT STAY if you will to accept God’s truth.

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

Here Jesus is telling us that we attempt to BIND OURSELVES to the body in order to DEFEND ourselves against God/Life. By equating/identifying yourself with the body, you align yourself with the physical and attempt to SHUT OUT the mind. If you can identify yourself with the body, and if the body will then be sick and dead, this is HOW the ego attempts to kill the Son of God.

He also tells us that believing this distortion, which is also a belief in magic, and is also the authority problem, has the capability of bringing about DEATH. All death is a choice. Suicide. There is no accidental death. No-one dies without their own consent. He continues:

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

"Your choice to die". Hmm. Yes. We CHOOSE it. Which means, it CANNOT HAPPEN if we do not choose it. Death is not caused by ANYTHING except your own mind. Sickness is not caused by ANYTHING except your own mind. Furthermore, sickness and death (which you made, and can abolish), does not continue when you decide NOT to be sick or die. When you decide NOT to be sick or die, SICKNESS AND DEATH CANNOT HAPPEN.

—"You can but choose to think you die, or suffer sickness or distort the truth in any way. What is created is apart from all of this. Defenses are plans to defeat what cannot be attacked. What is unalterable cannot change. And what is wholly sinless cannot sin."

So you can pretend to die, if you want. You can pretend to be sick, if you want. But sickness and death are both a dream, not real, and what you really are cannot die. God does NOT SUPPORT SICKNESS AND DEATH in any way. He does not create them, he does not view them in a special way, he does not include them, he does not believe in them. God is ONLY LIFE, not life and death.

Here’s a clincher:

—"Truth has a power far beyond defense, for no illusions can remain where truth has been allowed to enter. And it comes to any mind that would lay down its arms, and cease to play with folly"

Read this and read it again. Sickness (illusions) cannot remain where truth has been allowed to enter. This means, ALL SICKNESS AND DEATH cannot *REMAIN* if the mind chooses to accept the truth. Accepting the atonement, or any act of forgiveness or miracles, MUST undo sickness and death in some way. And that includes at the body level.

Read it again. Truth has a POWER stronger than defenses (sickness, death). When truth’s POWER has entered the mind, sickness and death CANNOT REMAIN. Neither in the mind, nor in the body. NOWHERE. Because truth knows that sickness and death DO NOT EXIST at any level. If you STOP ATTACKING YOURSELF with sickness and death, you will STOP BEING SICK AND DEAD.

—"Healing will flash across your open mind, as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings."

Peace an truth TAKES THE PLACE of the vain imaginings that were "sickness and death". All sickness is imagined, made by the MIND. Stop dreaming it and it will cease to be.

Does the undoing of sickness affect the body? ABSOLUTELY!

—"It (mind) will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey. Now is the body healed, because the source of sickness has been opened to relief."

NOW IS THE BODY HEALED. When the mind heals its belief in sickness, the body MUST HEAL. The SOURCE of the sickness has received relief, and therefore the sickness must "clear up". It must disappear in a MIRACLE.

Now let’s break out the big one.... the IMMORTALITY OF THE BODY:

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

Wowza! The body‘s health is guaranteed, ie it is IMPOSSIBLE for the body to be sick or die. In a state of truth in the mind, SICKNESS IS IMPOSSIBLE. It cannot exist, it cannot stay, it MUST be healed, 100%! You cannot have a sick body and a healthy mind at the same time!!!! This is also supported when Jesus says elsewhere:

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for IT WILL BECOME to you. Use if for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will SEE IT as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes HOLY. Because it is holy it CANNOT BE SICK, NOR CAN IT DIE. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all."

So as Jesus has said here, the state of the body is ALWAYS a direct reflection or correlation to the state of the mind. If mind SEES it as sinful, it becomes SICK, and dies. This accounts for the sole cause of ALL SICKNESS in the entire world. And all death. BUT... IF you SEE IT AS HOLY, it becomes whole, it becomes INVULNERABLE TO ATTACK, it becomes INCAPABLE OF BEING SICK, and IT CANNOT DIE! Another word for that is, IMMORTALITY!

Let’s be clear here, before the controversy takes root, that Jesus also says that at some point this "invulnerable, deathless body", which doesn’t even need food or water (!), will likely at some point be laid aside. When it is not longer USEFUL it will disappear. But this does not mean it will be put down on the ground and made to rot. THAT IS DEATH! The holy body can only be "ended" by DISAPPEARING IT by the power of the mind. Nothing else can end it, and it CANNOT be ended by attack. Attack will merely KEEP it and create more sickness and reincarnation.

So yes, at some point the body can become incapable of being attacked in any way. Sustained by the power of God supernaturally. Eventually we will RECOGNIZE that we are not a body at all, and it has no usefulness, so our TRANSPARENT MIND will extend only transparency (total honesty). This will mean it STOPS PROJECTING A BODY. The body thus disappears into the nothingness from which it came. This is how the dream is left! It is the only exit. Leaving via DEATH is the TOTAL OPPOSITE OF CHOOSING LIFE.

Jesus concludes with a reminder:

—"Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick."

Note here that Jesus says we make a body identity which, separately, attacks the body. This gives a different meaning to body identification.

If we believe we are separate from God we will see ourselves as being an illusion, which will show up as an IMAGE - a body. He warns us here to be careful of MAKING OURSELVES SICK, beause our mind literally does have this power over matter/form. Every miracle demonstrates that the mind must be more powerful than the body. Therefore the mind has power over ALL matter.

Hoepfully it is clear from this chapter alone, that we do not NEED to be sick, sickness CANNOT STAY unless we want to KEEP mental illness along with it, when we choose the TRUTH it is *GUARANTEED* that all sickness and death must be UNDONE COMPLETELY, and it is God’s will that we be perfectly happy and healthy even in a body.

No-one needs to suffer. No-one needs to die. The body cannot be sick unless you make it so, and doing so will keep you from God. But choose again, and sickness will vanish before your eyes. All sickness can be reversed. All death can be reversed. There is nothing your holiness cannot do.

You'll often hear talk of how "my ego this" and how "the ego" that. A lot of clout and blame is pinned on "the ego" now. It's used to describe all kinds of stuff in the world and in life.

People have even turned it into a kind of enemy that they fight with and blame and try to accuse for doing stuff. The label is thrown around like there actually is an ego, and then you'll hear explanations for why it doesn't "really" exist except in a dream.

There are widely common interpretations that Jesus is describing "the ego" in the course and therefore "the ego" is a thing or an entity or a something, that is responsible for some bad stuff. And this sets up a whole premise of being at war with it.

This is all confusion. Jesus is NOT trying to suggest that the ego exists AT ALL, not even fictionally in a dream. So let's put aside any belief that there is such a thing as "the ego", and we'll start from scratch.

God's world, heaven, reality, has various qualities, characteristics, properties etc. It has a nature. For example it's immortal, alive, permanent, perfect, whole, innocent, etc.

"Ego", is nothing more than, a CONCEPT OF, the "opposite to all that is".

Someone had a thought in their mind, like, "What if the opposite to God's Kingdom is true?" And so began the tiny mad idea.

This is ENTIRELY conceptual. It's someone sitting there just wondering, imagining, theorizing. Asking themselves, "what is the opposite of all this?" Or indeed, "what if I OPPOSE all of this?"

We simply tried to use our free will to oppose free will, or to "create" (will) that there be an outcome OPPOSITE to what God wills. A "mis-creation" or a "mis-use" of will. That is all.

This was a silly idea, ridiculous in fact. To try to use will, to make yourself NOT will, is obviously circular logic and makes no sense. It's impossible to will to be unwilling. But this is what you tried to do. You tried to put your will to sleep, to disempower your creative powers, and to strip yourself of what you are. To oppose yourself.

So ego is just this idea of opposition. What would it be like if there was an opposite to everything real? The opposite to life would be death. The opposite to permanence would be impermanence. The opposite to happiness would be unhappiness. The opposite to existence would be non-existence (death).

Now it's important to also put BELIEF on hold because I'm not even talking about BELIEVING IN this concept yet. At this point we're happily sitting in heaven just theorizing. Asking a question. "What?" Questioning everything, which is an attempt to oppose it.

What you come up with conceptually is, the idea of "non-existent impossibility." This non-existence, by definition, DOES NOT EXIST. It's not some real place you can go and visit. You can't live there. You cannot be its nature. It's ENTIRELY theoretical. Non-existence DOES NOT EXIST. It's the idea of being OUTSIDE of and completely SEPARATE from, existence. And existence is God.

So we started out with just a conceptual notion, an idea of an opposite to God's nature. An idea of NOT existing. And fundamentally we could never actually DO that. We could not LEAVE God and go where God is not. We couldn't get outside of God to go to that "non-existent" place. It's impossible. Literally totally impossible.

For example God is infinite and is everywhere. So you cannot go be somewhere and expect him not to be there also. Everywhere you go, God is there. He is omnipresent. So this idea is an idea of, what if you could go and be somewhere that God is not? Which is obviously a totally ridiculous idea, and no sane person would give two seconds of thought before laughing at being outside of infinite unlimited boundaryless reality.

So first we came up with this theoretical notion of "an opposite to what is". This was prior to believing in it. And at this point we were still sane. What made it a MAD idea, or turned us mad, was that we then attempted to CLAIM or assert, that you actually CAN go where God is not, you actually CAN be opposite to his nature, you actually CAN be unwilling.

You BELIEVED IN IT by denying its obvious impossibility, thus making you unable to RECOGNIZE it for what it is, and thus losing sight of the fact that it IS impossible. You became confused and lost.

This obviously was a form of denial and confusion and being totally mistaken. The logic shows that its impossible, but you insisted anyway. To insist that something is possible that is patently impossible, is essentially "nuts". BELIEVING IT in spite of its ridiculousness, became the only problem.

It was only when you forgot to laugh at the ridiculous notion of not existing, that you took it seriously. And you became deceived, tempted, and you "fell" into delusions, denial, hallucination, confusion, mistakenness, and all manner of fantasy nightmares. You lost track of WHAT IS TRUE AND REAL, and so went insane.

What were you trying to do? You were trying to MAKE non-existence be TRUE of you. Whatever you believe is true of you, you regard as your IDENTITY. Your truth describes you, defines you, establishes WHAT you are. And originally this was God's truth about you. But now you were attempting to assert that some OPPOSITE truth was true of you. And so your sense of WHAT I AM, your identity, became CONFUSED WITH, or caught up in, identified WITH or "matching" this notion of being opposite to what you are.

You did not actually make an ego as such. You did not accomplish the making of a non-existent self, because it is impossible. You did not ACTUALLY get outside of God's existence. You did not reach non-existence. You did not cease to exist. BUT, you BELIEVED YOU COULD. And so you DREAMED OF "the ego". A dream of the ego concept is NOT the same thing as ACTUALLY being it or bringing it into existence.

So when you believe that "the ego concept" (impossible non-existence) is POSSIBLE, your sense of IDENTITY shifts to align with it, to reflect it, to mirror it. You try to BE LIKE it. To be one with it. To merge with it and make it true of you, thus redefining your whole sense of what you are. And so by putting belief in "opposites to reality", your sense of WHAT IS TRUE changed, and thus your sense of WHO I AM changed.

Your sense of identity shifted from your soul, to an IMAGINED idea of what ego might be like. This did not actually make "the ego". You never created a "real ego". You just BELIEVE what is BEYOND your dream on the other side of oblivion. You believed in not existing. You believed in impossibilities. You believed in being opposite to what you are. That is all.

So there is no EGO doing anything whatsoever. There is no EGO taking responsibility for making ANYTHING happen. There is no ego to pin stuff on. There is no ego to say "the ego did this". There is no ego PERIOD. So every time there's someone teaching that "acim says" there is an ego, they are mistaken.

NON EXISTENCE DOES NOT EXIST. THE EGO DOES NOT EXIST.

Not even in dreaming do you go there. Not even in your wildest fantasies can you ever CREATE an ego. You never have. All you've done is TRIED to exchange God's reality for UNREALITY. Which means, taking everything true about God and trying to make it false. And taking everything untrue about God and trying to make it true. This results in CONFUSION (insanity) and that is all.

If you believe something is possible which isn't, you are not sane. If you believe you are IN the non-existent realm outside of God, you are insane. If you think you DID become separate and thus are OUTSIDE God, you are insane. But that IS what you believe, and that BELIEF is the tiny mad idea. The notion that the ego concept is OPPOSITE to what the ego concept IS.

Earth is just a neutral fantasy ABOUT non-existent realms, an attempt to REFLECT hell/ego/impossibility, as an "image" in the mind IMAGINING what having no imagination is like. Thinking about what having NO thought is like. Being unwilling to will anything real.

Let's put this another way. If the ego concept is non-existence, impossibility, death, nowhere-ness, lovelessness, emptiness, etc... in your BELIEF in it, you have tried to assign it the attributes of heaven, reality, truth, and God. You've tried to BRING IT TO LIFE. You've tried to turn hell into heaven, you've tried to claim that non-existence exists, you've tried to assert that immortality can be killed, etc. You've produced an entire hallucinated world based on this attempt to oppose life and make NOT LIFE appear to "live."

The body is nothing. The world is nothing. But in our BELIEVING (spacetime), we have TRIED to make it APPEAR AS IF bodies live, worlds evolve, there are "life forms" etc. it is NOT LIFE. It is an illusion. it is nothingness pretending to be something.

"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. Yet both are judgments on what is not life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusion 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."

So there literally is no ego. We need to stop blaming "the ego" for stuff. EGO IS NON-EXISTENCE. It does not exist even in dreaming. There is no ego anywhere. Evil is not real. An absolute opposite to everything does not exist.

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

"By steadily and consistently cancelling out ALL its effects, EVERYWHERE AND IN ALL RESPECTS, He teaches that the ego does not exist, and PROVES IT."

So what does happen? What does happen is OUR MIND keeps on trying to turn itself into "the ego". It keeps trying to get CLOSER TO the CONCEPTUAL idea of "being ego", which is non-existence and impossibility and total limitation and death and a void and emptiness and lack and darkness and lovelessness. We keep trying to BECOME it, as if reaching through the outskirts of God's being to another world. But we can't. And we NEVER will. So it's all wasted effort. We might as well just accept the truth.

This is why the secret of salvation tells us that we MUST recognize that WE are doing this ALL to ourselves. Not the ego, not the world, it's us. We do the shit, we must undo it. It is NOT the ego, ever. It's part of our own mind running rogue and opposing the rest of our mind. It's us TRYING TO BE opposite. Working against ourselves. We are the dreamer. Miracles reflect the idea that it's this thing I have done and it is this I would undo. ME. My mind. Not "the ego".

You cannot give your power to the ego either. EVER. All you can do is BELIEVE that you are giving your power to "it". And thus YOUR MIND now goes into a distortion, against ITSELF, pretending to be opposed, pretending to BECOME an ego, and acts ego-LIKE, and now you blame "the ego" for stuff, but its PART OF YOU doing stuff to yourself. So now you are disassociated and projecting and trying to make your ideas leave your mind. That is all. Take responsibility for that. Never blame ego for anything. It does not exist whatsoever.

And when I say that I don't even mean, ok, this is a dream, so ego doesn't REALLY exist, cus none of this really happened, but it seems to, and so in the dream it does exist. IT DOES NOT. Ego doesn't even exist IN the dream. It's ENTIRELY just a theoretical concept and label for "absolute opposition". It's BEYOND God completely and even this dream is not THERE. It not here, it's not anywhere, and you can never make contact with it. This is why the Holy Spirit and "the ego" never communicate.

If you could actually leave God completely, and go to where existence is NOT, you've meet "the ego". But you can't and you never will. And all your dream life is about is imagining that you ARE or HAVE or CAN, when you AREN'T and HAVEN'T and CANNOT. It's wishful thinking at best. Ego is nothing but a theory. Which is why when it's gone, it's recognized as nothing.

Replace "the ego" with "I". Your mind is either whole or split. There is nothing else.

"The ego's opposite in every way, in origin, effect and consequence, we call a miracle. And here we find all that is not the ego in this world. Here is the ego's opposite and here alone we look on what the ego was, for here we see all that it seemed to do, and cause and its effects must still be one.

Where there was darkness now we see the light. What is the ego? What the darkness was. Where is the ego? Where the darkness was. What is it now and where can it be found? Nothing and nowhere. Now the light has come: Its opposite has gone without a trace. Where evil was there now is holiness. What is the ego? What the evil was. Where is the ego? In an evil dream that but seemed real while you were dreaming it. Where there was crucifixion stands God's Son. What is the ego? Who has need to ask? Where is the ego? Who has need to seek for an illusion now that dreams are gone?"

What if our mind has the power to modify the world, given we are the dreamer and it is a dream - our effect? What if by mental intention you can cause events to proceed differently? What if you can steer outcomes? What if you can change physical matter? What if the world is really NOT the seemingly fixed, closed, solid, permanent-seeming thing that we think it is, and that's all an illusion?

This is the next area of exploration for me having recently focused very much on how the world is very locked into its nature. By realizing the world is stuck being the way it is, I had to then naturally ask myself, how does one go about escaping its impossible ways, forgiving it, and being free of it? How can it be overridden? And this is now leading to me to the simple progression of QUESTIONING the world, what it is, and what our minds can do to CHANGE IT DIRECTLY. And the fact that IT IS THE EFFECT OF MY DREAMING.

Jesus says in ACIM that if you change your mind about the world, ALL THE WORLD MUST CHANGE. He also says the world is an effect, and therefore, that if you change the CAUSE in your mind the world MUST change. Like LITERALLY PHYSICALLY change. He also tells us we are the dreamer of the dream. To me what he is actually getting at is that our minds are powerful, thought exerts real influence, the physical is not really physical but dream-stuff, and we have the POWER to modify it.

I've seen some evidence for this INFLUENCE of mind over the "physical world". so I'll tell you some stories.

At my job, I deal with computer stuff, as a sort of IT-department fix-it person at times. But it would turn out that very often the problems people came up with would seem to "fix themselves" when I showed up. They definitely had the problem beforehand, but then suddenly it seemed like something "in the world" just happened out of the blue to changed the course of events. The problem became seemingly "magically" (miraculously really) solved. It usually took the form of someone realizing something, a change of mind, some fact that was overlooked comes to light, or even literally physical devices which were not working suddenly work and no-one could explain why.

Over time some people called me "the computer whisperer" because it literally seemed uncanny that when I came along to help them the problem just melted into "not a problem any more". And I mean on a physical level. Something kept transpiring in terms of the FORM of how it seemed to change, something tangible or what you might call what APPEAR to be natural changes in circumstances, environmental factors, whatever, but although it LOOKED LIKE just normal "reasons why" stuff got fixed, it was actually due to something in my mind that caused a change.

There are also some times where in my mind I am not interested in playing into a problem or having to deal with an issue. So my mental attitude is one of "I do not agree with this", not like in an annoyed wanting it to go away sense, but like I don't believe in this - not buying it. I hold firm somehow to another truth, or perhaps to another intent or desire, and somehow this has a power in it. And this power seems to alter the course of events and cause problems to go away.

A boss approaches with some issue and then I mentally reject it or want nothing to do with it and suddenly he seems to realize something or changes his mind or things just suddenly resolve themselves. And I can't tell you how man times when I've needed some "time to myself" he just seems to have somewhere else to be. What I'm literally saying here is along the lines of .... when you walk through a dying forest flowers start springing up around your feet out of nowhere. That would be a very vivid example and I'm not at that level but it seems like that is possible.

"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."

Mind can have such power and influence that it can actually produce real changes in what we call "physical stuff". In effect, your mind can "dream" a different dream and have power over what the dream contains. And as I read about how the physical world/earth IS A DREAM, and see Jesus's references to us dreaming of worldly events and how he calls it a dream, it seems to make so much sense that our mind ACTUALLY IS dreaming and producing the environment in realtime, AND it can change the environment to another form at will. And behind material happenings there are "mind forces" at play, including the atonement plan.

"But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life."

Some years ago some people were walking down a path and it was spring, so the blossom petals on a tree were falling across the path. The couple walked under it and the petals fell onto them and for some reason this was a happy thing to me. I watched this from inside a room with a closed window, from probably a couple-hundred feet away. I had a sudden feeling of joy in my mind out of nowhere, and suddenly literal blossom petals materialized in front of my face, inside the closed window in the room with me.

Another time I was looking for money in a coin box, in which there was no "pound coins". There were only 1p a 2p bronze coins left (british). I rifled through insisting that there must be higher value money there. I did this for some time maybe even a minute, and somehow in my mind I was convinced and insistent that there MUST be some higher currency in there. Suddenly in front of my eyes as if they had been there all along, yet out of nowhere, two pound coins appeared on the top of the pile. There was no magical effect of anything to them being there, they were just not there one moment and the next they were there. And they were definitely not in the coin box hidden before.

There have also been other times where if I am fairly centered in my mind and in what I believe is true, or perhaps what Jesus calls "being strong in the truth" or at least clear about when someone is bullshitting, if I mentally stand my ground and do not buy into someone projecting or scapegoating me, it actually has an influence on them. Something changes in their mind and they suddenly become self-aware of what they're doing as if they adopted my view of them, and will suddenly realize there's something about what they said which isn't true. And then they will take it back and reconsider what their position is, because somehow the truth-focus in MY mind influenced theirs.

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

"The mind is a very powerful creator, and it never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating, and ALWAYS as you will."

I've had to pick up subtle clues and nuances to come to realize this and this is definitely still new territory, but it seems clear that this world we're calling a physical solid world IS NOT THAT. It is in truth actually just a bunch of dream images. And our minds are not just inert little observers, they are powerful and quite capable of CAUSING the dream to change. And by dream I am NOT talking about projected meanings and interpretations of perception, I'm talking about the PHYSICAL MATERIAL WORLD. It can be changed by the mind. Mind literally has power over matter. It can steer events, cause objects to materialize, can manipulate weather, and can do all kinds of stuff - including healing sickness and reversing death and decay.

My wife has a strong will also and she has this ability too. In the past we would joke about having power to control the weather, which has proven a number of times. If I ask her to pray for me for example, my whole inner experience lights up and becomes far more happy and light and energized. She is quite capable of having a powerful influence, even at a distance. One time that we went to visit the UK for example usually the weather is crap and very consistently cloudy, but for like 3 days solid as soon as we arrived it became very clear and sunny non-stop which was very unusual. Also I know I've had influence in calming storms a couple times that I've tried to do that.

I am also convinced from some stories other people have shared that our minds influence each other including each other's bodies. Such as that for example a person was in fear and this fear was affecting the other person they were with and causing a medical condition. And then as this was pointed out the fear lifted and the medical condition just went away quickly. How is that possible unless mind has the power to influence the minds and bodies of others? That it can actually cause a different dream to just emerge out of nowhere?

Are we to really believe that the world is literally this kind of paper-thin fragile tentative sort of "material only" existence, in which everything is just the laws of physics holding it together and there's nothing else to it besides solid form? Because that's just how it APPEARS to be. The world is not actually that, because it's a dream, and it is an illusion, and it presents an illusion of a world, and this illusion CAN BE CHANGED BY THE MIND.

"Appearances deceive BUT CAN BE CHANGED."

"Yet nothing in the world of dreams remains without the hope of change and betterment, for here is NOT where changelessness is found."

"You CAN change form, BECAUSE it is not true. It COULD not be reality, BECAUSE it can be changed."

We are being asked to become aware that the world is an EFFECT of our mind. Jesus literally says "You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts" and "Both heaven and earth are in your mind." The whole planet, the whole dream, is a mental construct. It's a fairytale of imagination in the mind, and the mind is literally projecting an imaginary world complete with all its "physical" details. And even though it LOOKS physical and as if it has laws that govern it and reasons why it cannot BE changed, that's all illusions, because it can EASILY be changed by a mind that knows it is dreaming.

"But hold out your JOINED hands and touch this heavy-seeming block, and you will learn how easily your fingers slip through its nothingness. It is no solid wall. And only an illusion stands between you and the holy Self you share."

So imagine the physical world is in fact like a LUCID DREAM. A dream in which you are awake and aware that IT IS a dream. And then you are aware that even though it appears solid and fixed, it is in fact your dream, and you CAN DO ANYTHING. "There is nothing my holiness cannot do." You can literally put your hands through physical matter, you can materialize objects, you can fly if you want to. You can change one thing into another. This is all a totally malleable dream environment, NOT really a hard solid fixed physical reality.

Do not be deceived by its illusion of hardness, solidity and so on. "What He (Holy Spirit) enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them."

And as MIRACLE WORKERS we are being trained and asked to adopt a position as the "dreamers of the dream", where we recognize it IS coming from us, and WE CAN CHANGE IT in any way we see fit at any time, just by the power of the mind. The Holy Spirit is capable of manipulating the atoms of the world, just as Jesus also says that space and time are under his control.

"If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind MUST BE STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this."

Jesus was masterful at this "dream manipulation". His mind was in touch with being THE CAUSE (the dreamer), and knew the world was HIS EFFECT. Therefore he was not a victim of it in any way, and had power OVER IT. He recognized he was not affected BY IT in any way because he was DREAMING it - putting it there. This is what resurrection is about, the SURMOUNTING of death - the ability to have POWER OVER DEATH. Which includes the ability to reverse "physical death" and to manipulate bodies by the mind, into any state, and any form.

He was able to give body parts that were missing, he could walk on water, calm storms, change outcomes, turn objects into other objects, multiply and materialize objects out of nowhere, appear in different body forms, could likely levitate and fly if he so willed it, and pretty much NO LIMIT to what he could do. The examples of his USE OF his power only paints a limited picture of the fact that he was able to do literally anything. And so can you, because this world is NOT a fixed solid world, it's totally at your whim and under your power!

We have barely begun to realize the sheer power of our minds, the influence our minds have on the world, the ability of our minds to change matter, the ability of our minds to heal both mind AND body, and the influence we have on ALL THE WORLD when we change our mind. Our healing literally heals the world. Our focus on truth literally awakens our brothers. And our broadcast signal of love literally transforms the dream in unlimited ways.

Miracles as expressions of love are expressions of love from a powerful mind. I think in ACIM terms perhaps miracles are actually a SUBSET of what the mind can do. When mind is aware and expresses, which must also be a loving state, it has tremendous power, and this can CHANGE THE DREAM. It can cause literal physical transformations, impossible changes, violation of laws, breaking of space and time and distance and possibility. It can heal the sick and raise the dead, produce and change objects, and even move entire mountains.

This is not even a difficult feat for such a power, but so many people are afraid and skeptical and not even suspecting that such a power of POSSIBLE, yet alone that it is in their own minds. "While expressions like "think big" give some recognition to the power of thought, they still come nowhere near the truth. You do not expect to grow when you say it, because you don't really believe it. It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains."

"Why is it strange to you that faith can move mountains? This is indeed a little feat for such a power."

"Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus KEEPING it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your minds AT ALL, or you will also believe that you must UNDO what you have made, in order to BE forgiven."

Here Jesus again outlines the simplicity of "forgiveness". He says that if you will overlook error - which means the entire illusory unreal dream world - then you will KEEP IT UNREAL. If you keep it unreal, you do not even enter INTO a state where you become confused about what it is, nor do you give reality to its content. If you do not MAKE it real, you won't have to "atone" to fix this error.

You must not turn the world's forms into realities, you must not give strength to its attacks, you must not give power to its lies, and you must not give truth to its sufferings. You overlook it and effectively ignore it and look beyond it to the face of Christ. To the light of truth where it really is.

If you KEEP THE WORLD UNREAL, then you do not go INTO false judgements or evaluations of what the world is. You simply recognize it as an illusion. An illusion, totally DEVOID of any sense of reality, seriousness, weight, validity, or truth, is no more powerful or threatening or causal than a thin veil of nothingness. But if you fail to stay IN THE STATE of forgiveness, you enter into judgement.

"He who would not forgive must judge, to justify his failure to forgive."

If you FAIL to stay forgiving, you go INTO the state of GIVING REALITY to the unreal world. You go into attack, into confusion, you confuse reality with unreality, you GIVE reality to the illusory world, and now the world SEEMS real.

All the things which happen in it which are utterly strange and unnatural, now APPEAR to be VERY REAL to you. And this makes them threatening and upsetting, dangerous and powerful, able to hurt you and destroy your peace. But it is only the sense of REALITY that gives it this apparent power.

Having MADE the world real, you will now believe that there ARE actually real problems, real attacks, real dangers, real impossible situations, real threats, real murders, real deaths and real sickness. And now you will be in suffering and hell having a nightmare because now a dream of death will have become REAL to you, threatening you at every turn and promising to destroy you. You cannot ESCAPE from this while you believe it is real.

So if you make the world real you will believe you now have to DO SOMETHING in order to fix the problem. But having bound reality to illusions, you will now think the source of the problem is the "real things" you see, and so to solve the problem you have to do something about those things. But this won't really work.

The only way to move back OUT of unforgiveness into forgiveness, is to TAKE BACK THE REALITY that you yourself gave TO the illusory world, SEPARATE THE WORLD FROM REALITY, give reality back to God, and recognize the false world is unreal again. Get your mind back into the "world is not real at all" mode, which overlooks it and doesn't GIVE it any power.

"If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God."

To "take back" the projections of REALITY that you gave to the unreal world, is to take back the POWER that you mis-placed and gave away to EMpower illusions against you. Dis-empowering illusions gives back power to God, and to your shared self. When the world has no power of its own, which it doesn't, the ego and the world and the body have NO POWER OVER YOU. This is a return to the STATE of forgiveness.

Ideally we should aim for a state in which we do not LEAVE forgiveness, or step OUT OF a state of power, so that we do not MAKE ERRORS. If we do not make errors, ie do not give reality to errors, then we will not have to do a purification or correction process to undo what we have done. But if we DO slip and fall into judgement, then a miracle is needed to RESTORE us to the state of forgiveness.

"Do not let any belief in its realness enter your minds AT ALL, or you will also believe that you must UNDO what you have made."

"And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

Forgiveness then is simply the recognition that only God's reality is real, only his truth is true, nothing in the world you made has any truth or reality, and therefore your entire attention is fixed upon The Kingdom.

When someone becomes afraid, they also become resistant to being helped. The fear and victimhood is really a choice to deny and resist the truth, and so they do not want the truth. This can make the situation very difficult if you're trying to help someone because they literally do not want to be helped, even if in the victimhood they are complaining and saying that they want things to not be this way.

In the Course for example Jesus talks about "requests for healing" whereby someone may seem to be asking for help, through complaint or even direct asking, but because they would be scared by a miracle, which would remove the very thing they themselves put in place, they could become afraid if this "treasure" were suddenly taken from them. In this case, it's not a real request for healing, it's just the form of a request, but really a denial and wish to not be helped.

One of the hardest things to deal with is when other people do not want to really be helped. And by that I don't mean people who actually are ready or willing to be helped, but those who say they are but are not. Those who are steeped in fear and resistance, and so are resistant also to anything that would help them. Resistant to ideas, suggestions, healing, advice, simply on the basis that their backwards perception makes it seem like "help" is actually "danger".

This happens when the thought system goes into egotism because what is true and false become reversed. Defenses are erected against the misinterpreted truth, which seems false, so understandably you'd not want it. Then the person will defend and side with the very thing that's hurting them, because they believe it's the truth. Whatever we think is true we will value and want to keep and protect. So when we're in the ego with this backwards perception, we'll actively fight against help and healing, believing it's not actually help but a form of attack. The ego thinks of the Holy Spirit as an attacker.

What can you then do but let go and let the person continue to suffer. I mean, that sounds awful but sometimes people simply want to carry on suffering, even if on the other hand some part of them is not liking it. It's really difficult to "allow" someone to make choices against themselves or against life and happiness, especially when you know that there are options and possibilities.

Perhaps at that point all that you can do is appeal to a higher power, pray for them, send them love or happy energy, try to lift them up by being a light around them, or be an example or demonstration of a better way. It's hard to let go of control and the desire to fix or save those who are destroying themselves, or at least who appear to be. Because we also have to remember that even those people are not really doing anything at all. Nothing real can be threatened, and every postulation of suffering is fake and illusion. Even if the person finds it to be terrifyingly real.

You can't force anyone because everyone has free will. Jesus even says in the Course that "your will is as strong as mine" and this is why he is not able to simply overthrow your errors or force you into awakening. You have to choose it willingly. No one comes to the atonement without being willing. It takes total willingness, not just a little willingness. "Heaven is a choice I must make". So if someone is hell bent on not choosing it, what can you do but choose it for yourself and try to extend it to them in any way they can accept? Even if all that is is you being kind or gentle or listening or whatever.

Everyone has free will. Everyone has power. Everyone is choosing everything that's happening. Everyone even those suffering are expertly manifesting whatever they want. Everyone is putting everything in place. And nothing is happening anywhere to anyone without their consent. Even in situations where it seems like they are not giving any consent, they are giving it 100%. Even when it is producing suffering or sickness, again they are literally electing for it to occur and are putting it in place. And they have that exact same freedom and power to do that, just as much as using that same freedom and power with a non-self-destructive choice.

Jesus is telling us we are free and we are choosers and we are responsible for everything. Even if we're practically dead, we are choosing to be, and no-one is going to take that away from anyone against their will. Some people want to be dead. Some people want to be sick. Some people want to scapegoat the world. Some people want to be in terrible fear all the time. And every person does not believe they have the power to do anything to change it, which is part of the deciding not to.

Keep praying for the lost souls. No-one is lost. Everyone is just finding their way. And sometimes that may mean that it takes a long time and a lot of struggle and mistakes to get there.

In the ego mind, the mind is split, and so is your will. You have willed against yourself. So now your mind has more than one will in it, seeming to act in contradiction. You are at war with yourself.

So what happens now is, your will attempts to still "cause", but then this other opposing will also attempts to "cause", and the two of them are opposite each other in every way so this "cancels out" all of the possible effects.

It's like being constipated, or a stalemate. We literally basically STOP ourselves from willing anything at all. This is why we do not produce and EFFECTS. This is also why, in a split mind, it seems like we cannot have any power over the world or use the mind's power to make anything happen directly. We're stuck in a body that seems to be cut off from the environment and our mind seems totally powerless.

When the will is reunited as whole and is not divided against itself (no ego), the mind no longer has opposition. It is able to now be single minded and to will consistently in one direction. This unopposed will has the Power of God, to CAUSE, AND to produce effects. This unleashes the power of the mind to manifest. It was in this state that we originally made the universe appear.

This is also a key in miracle working. Miracles don't work in a spirit of fear, and fear comes from separation, meaning that if you are afraid that "the miracle wont work" or "the symptoms aren't going away" or "I don't trust this power" or "I don't think I can do this etc"... the perceived "things that would oppose success" are actually other aspects of YOUR OWN WILL in your own mind, in conflict with what you're trying to achieve.

This is why when the mind and will are split, there are no miracles happening. Something has gone wrong. The mind is literally believing in an opposing will which it thinks is "out there" or is alien to it or external to it. It is not. It's inside your mind. So when you are "against yourself", you are literally stopping your will, against your will. And so you cancel out the effects of what you try to make happen.

A mind which is whole does not even regard the current state of the world, appearances, how severe a problem seems, how big the challenge, whether it's healing a headache or moving a mountain. When the mind is clearly aware that it has ONE WILL, and there is no opposing will (because nothing happens against your will, therefore everything happens BY your will).... it is more like... an artist painting new brushstrokes. The canvas does not resist the paint. There is nothing stopping an entirely new projection from happening. What was there before has NO POWER to stop the effects from showing up.

This is why in miracle working you do not "ask" stuff to go away or be healed. That is evidence that you believe there is a will opposing yours (physical matter? sickness? causes?) which has the power to stop you, therefore you have to "ask permission" for it to change. That's not how miracles happen.

Also you will find it's useful to "command" that something change. If you are certain and authoritative and whole-minded/loving enough, it must comply. But the fact is, you're ultimately not even commanding a "separate thing" to change. In your truest nature, you simply EXPRESS. You CREATE. Stuff just comes out of you joyfully and, if that means making forms, then the forms just instantly show up and materialize. Not because you asked them to, but because you simply created them.

To work miracles we must UNDO all belief that there is any cause in the world, any power over you, any alien will, any separate strength or reason or order of difficult that suggests "it might not work because" or "thats too big a challenge" or "it appears to much a problem."

I'm reminded of star wars, where Luke is being taught by Yoda, and believes he cannot lift the spaceship from the swamp because "its too big". That's the hierarchy of illusions. Yoda then demonstrated that size does not matter. Effectively he was demonstrating the miracle-working power of the mind.

It may be easier to understand the differences in perception, when you consider inanimate objects. Objects which appear to just sit there and do nothing at all.

A good example is a rock. It just sits there. It has no will or mind and isn't particularly alive. At the subatomic level maybe it wiggles around but over time it generally does nothing but vegetate. It cannot move itself, it cannot articulate an attack, it cannot think, it cannot cause of its own will. It has no power and is just a lump of stuff, inert and unmoving.

If you a walking by and you stub your toe on the rock, you might yell at the rock for seeming to attack you. In pain your anger projects and you find the rock to be an enemy. This is your perception of the rock. In your mind, you are giving meaning to the rock. You now believe the rock is a sinful enemy, a guilty attacker. And as you look at it with hate you see it as real and threatening.

But the rock is just sitting there. And if you come to your senses you have to admit that really the rock didn't do anything at all. It was all you. Your own movement caused you to stub your toe. The rock just sat uninvolved and uncausing. So is it really the rock's fault? No. It's something you did to yourself.

So then you admit ok, I am only thinking the rock is an evil sinner because I am choosing to project guilt and sin onto it. I'm framing it as sinful and believing it is an attacker. That's happening in my own mind. I'm projecting stuff onto it and it's making me perceive it as hated and unwanted.

Then you have to realize that since the rock isn't really the cause of the upset, that you are the one who actually attacked the rock with your toe, it's really your own doing. And now you take back your accusation. The rock isn't a person, so there's no point yelling at it and calling it names. It can't hear your swear-words.

You shift "your perception" from false to true. You decide to believe that the rock is innocent and harmless, not an attacker or an evil sinner. You recognize the rock as incapable of hurting you against your will. You realize it has no will or mind or power to do anything on its own. So it cannot have wanted to hurt you. It must be innocent. So now you're willing to believe the rock is not sinful, or guilty, or an attacker. The inverse of which is a belief that it is innocent, loveable, beautiful even.

Your mind is able to decide what it sees in the rock, ie what meaning it projects onto it. When the mind is deciding to project from love, it sees the rock in a loving way, which makes it appear as though the rock is lovable rather than hatable. And so now you love the rock, because you are projecting love, in spite of the rock's own nature.

But the rock isn't changing. The rock isnt inherently sinful, nor is it sinless. It doesn't really have its own meaning. In a way it's kind of like a neutral mirror. You actually see yourself in it. Whatever you think is true you visualize in it. You see refleted back to you what you put there to see. So the rock is doing its own thing, and you are having varying types of beliefs about it, seemingly independent of it.

It's possible to project a mental state of hell onto the world of rocks, just as it is possible to project a mental state of heaven's reflection onto the rocks. True perception can be very close to heaven's nature. You reach within and find love and peace and joy and light and shine it outward and light up the world with it. What appeared to be a harmful rock is now a healing rock. What used to be an attacking rock is an innocent rock.

This is the translation, in your mind, of earth into heaven's reflection. A translation is an interpretative process which evaluates the meaning of something. It gives meaning to it, based on what you believe or WANT it to mean. This is in spite of any seemingly inherent properties that the thing has. Because it has none.

Earth, the world, the galaxies, space time, rocks and plants and animals, human bodies, cities and forests etc, is all essentially a neutral mirror. It's a veil of images which the mind is making and inventing. It holds pictures of forms and illusions of life and death. And yet it is a meaningless world. And so it only has the meaning that you GIVE to it. "The world is what you gave it, nothing more." "There is no world apart from what you wish." "Projection makes perception and makes the world you see."

So on the one hand, we made a world in an attack on God, which was made to be completely opposite to heaven, and which is therefore hell. Or at least, we came up with it in a state of false perception, ie misperception. In that state it appears to be hell because we see it in a hellish way. So we project hell and fragmentation and separation and attack and guilt onto it. And so it appears to be a hellish world. But this view of it (this projected world) only exists while you are having false perception (false projection).

What the course is saying is that you can change your vantage point. But the change in vantage point is huge. It's a 180-degree total opposition to false perception. It's a way of seeing totally alien to the world and to how the body functions. It flies in the face of every seeming law of physics and reality, and completely denies the apparently separated world. It's a lofty, heaven-based perception, which does not buy into anything the world appears to be.

It is in fact difficult for minds to comprehend how it's possible to see the world through loving eyes. The mind has trouble breaking through its own defenses against love. It can't sense or feel or experience what it is like to see from the vantage point of the Holy Spirit, without a whole lot of purificaiton and correction. And so most of the time, it seems impossible to love the world. Or indeed it seems as if the world is inherently sinful and wrong and bad.

The hell seen in false perception motivates a person to not want to love the world. Indeed the course says that such a world "cannot be the world God loves". Yet also that "God does love the world". He does not love the world seen in false perception, where rocks are separated and death seems real and attack seems commonplace. He does not love that world. No one can love such a thing and still behold it. No one can love death. "You cannot behold the world and know God."

But God does love the "real" world. The real world is a world seen in true perception, in which reality's love is projected onto it. And it does not show you separations of forms, or illusions of meaning. It is an accurate view of what the world IS, and the world is nothing but a flat image. It is a neutral inert meaningless lifeless powerless willless uncausal incapable valueluess veil of illusions. It has nothing of its own because it is nothing, and so at best it is symbolic. It can symbolize heaven or hell, but it cannot ever really be either.

If you look upon war you see war and you hate it. But if you see war as war, it is because you are giving war. If you give love and peace and extend and express these higher vantage points, then what you see comes from what you GIVE, not from what is THERE. You project the real world and see it as forgiven and holy because that's what you're projecting, and so it's all that you can see because you can ONLY see what you project.

You give love to the image of a world and the image reflects the love you are giving, and now you see the reflection of love in it. But this reflection also completely ignores anything the image itself possesses as its own properties. It overlooks forms, ignores shapes and sizes and distance or delay, and sees no orders of hierarchy anywhere. It doesn't distinguish individual bodies or places or times. And it sees no orders of difficulty.

If you extend love toward the world, it makes you blind to the world seen in false perception. It causes the dark twisted world to not be seen, and for this layer of interpretation to be lifted from what the world is. In a sense, the world of false perception is a world of specifics, and the world of true perception is abstract and transcendental. This doesn't necessarily mean the world stops having the form of attack. In fact it cannot ever have anything BUT forms. And it is this the body's eyes always and only see.

Even as the mind is healed and views love from love, the forms of the world remain much unchanged. The dogs still bark, the trees still lose their leaves, murderers still kill, and the graveyards are still populated. But they are translated, re-interpreted, overlooked, ignored, and do not stand out as different. All the differences are ignored, all properties of appearances are ignored, all ways that the objects could compete with one another for attention are ignored. The world becomes flattened and regarded as a singular unreal image. A veil of illusions, in which none of it is true.

As the veil is seen with love, in which its own nature is recognized as false, and yet which simultaneously acts like a mirror for your own meaning to be clearly projected, the veil is also losing its solidity. It becomes transparent before the light. And ultimately the reflection of God is seen. But to see God's reflection you cannot see bodies and spacetime, vying for attention. When "God is in everything I see because God is in my mind", God becomes ALL that you see, and you see nothing else. "A world forgiven cannot last." "Forgiveness sees it not."

And so the veil of a world lifts from sight, as all differences become ignored. And the face of Christ is revealed as heaven's reflection reaching across what still remains as a world of chaos. And all forms and differences are no longer seen. And to such an extent is the mind in the holy instant, fully present, that things of past and future such as bodies cannot be seen at all. The world is forgotten, and disappears. It is as though it has become so deflated and equalized and transcended that it does not exist at all. And all that remains is the face of Christ, which once seen leads to the immediate return to heaven. And "heaven is all that remains."

This is the title of ACIM lesson 125. The essence here is to realize that everything you give, you receive, because giving and receiving are one. Per the golden rule, whatever you "do to another", you literally and directly and personally do to yourself. Anything at all that comes out of you, goes back into you.

This is the law of God, and it is inescapable. But it seems to be very difficult to recognize this law is in effect. It seems possible that you do something to another and experience none of the consequences. That somehow there is a separation between what applies to the giver and the receiver.

The body in particular makes it seem possible to do something to another while escaping the effects. One body can seem to hurt another, and yet come away with no apparent harm. This violates the law of God and seems to suggest the golden rule does not apply. But the laws of God always apply.

If you were aware that anything you do is done to BOTH yourself and others, you would be very careful in choosing what to do. If when you poked another's body, you felt a poke of your own body, you would hesitate to poke them. If you attacked their body and immediately felt the hurt and impact and effects of the attack, you would instantly recoil and reconsider your actions.

If it were impossible for you to do something to another without it also being done instantly to you, you would realize that you cannot do anything harmful without hurting yourself. You would literally find it insane to suggest that you WON'T be hurt when you hurt someone else. You would know this is not true, and that you are guaranteed to suffer when you inflict suffering.

The motivation this gives you then is the clear sanity that, in order to be happy and loved, your only option is to give happiness and love to others. If for an instant you choose to give hurt or to make guilty, you know that you will instantly feel awful and would be quick to stop yourself. If the very dagger with which you attempt to pierce the heart of a brother literally sticks into your own body, you would stop in your tracks.

In truth, when you are more aware of reality, you actually are in touch with this law. It may not appear to apply at the physical level, but it does apply at the level of mind. Any seeming psychological state of attack which you think you project onto another, you do not escape. Any angry attempt to make another guilty reinforces your guilt. Any desire to be murderous and hurtful threatens you and instills fear.

v There IS no escape from the golden rule. The ego counsels that you can easily escape it, even that you can commit the most horrendous attack and come away without remorse or damage. That you can get away with murder. But the only way you would seem to convince yourself that you've done this, is to be in denial.

It requires you to separate yourself off, dis-associate from your brother, form a separate identity which is different and at war, believe that your brother is in no way part of yourself, isolate and imprison yourself in the body, and then perhaps be convinced that your actions won't hurt you. Only by severing yourself from the sonship could you possibly convince yourself that this would work, but at the cost of making you imprisoned and alone.

In truth, your real nature is that you are one with all others. That we are all joined together in sharing as a single family of equality. I am you and you are me and we are each other.

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."

Everyone is everyone. We are each individually the whole sonship. Everyone else is a part of your self. Not one single thing can occur against a single individual without it happening to the whole. When one suffers, the whole suffers, because the whole is in every part. We have a holographic relationship and this is the will of God.

The fact is then that if we fall into the ego delusion that we are separate from each other, we will then automatically believe that we can indeed attack without being attacked. And so begins the spiral down the slippery slope to hell in which you believe and then perceive that you are justified in murder, capable of revenge, and can get away with it unaffected. This state of mind itself is mental illness, suffering, self-attack, self-abuse, and self-destructive.

The simple truth then is that everything you give, you are included in the receipt of. Anything you do, you do to yourself. Anything you give or radiate or share or express, is being expressed toward you as well. It may seem on the physical level that something has to leave and travel and be sacrificed and lost, in order to be given or done to another, but in truth you always keep what you

give, because sharing is reality and not separation. To receive what you give is the golden rule and the inescapable law of God. It is functioning even when you don't believe it is functioning. It is functioning when you believe you are getting away with separating yourself off from receiving. It is also the secret of salvation, in the recognition that if you are suffering, you must have done this to yourself. You must have given suffering and then received it, believing that you would escape the receipt.

If you are suffering, you have attempted to attack the sonship. Not just yourself, but everyone. But just as every attack thought, and attitude, angry guilt-mongering, or outright violence, is always an attempt to give yourself death. It makes you unhappy to make others unhappy. It hurts you to hurt them. You cannot escape this. Anything you do to attempt to destroy a son of God will have self-inflicted repercussions. And as such, if you are not at peace, you must have made a wrong decision.

To find salvation therefore we have to learn the simplicity of lesson 125 - that at all times, what I am giving I am receiving. If I do not like what I am experiencing, I must recognize I have chosen it and have given it, and have therefore received it. And I have done this to myself. I must be mistaken if I have given myself suffering, and I made the decision myself, but I want to choose otherwise because I want to be at peace.

This is all tied together. It is the one law of God that everything is always shared, everyone is always included, and you will never escape the consequences of your giving. If want to stop suffering, learn to stop making others suffer. If you want to be happy, give happiness. If you want to feel loved, learn to love. You will heal as you let the Holy Spirit teach you to heal. And you will find God in your brother as you learn that your brother is a part of your shared identity in Christ.

"Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."

In A Course in Miracles, we are taught in many ways that we are all one. By this we mean, that God created an entire family, a sonship, comprising many individual beings, who simultaneously are individual and one. Each Son of God is all the Sons of God, as the One Son. "One brother is all brothers."

This means we have a kind of collective consciousness or "hive mind". The Christ Mind is this shared mind, which each individual mind created by God is merged and identified with. This means that anything in one mind, is also in another. Any form of healing is experienced by everyone. And everything you give or do affects everyone.

It also means you are not really an isolated, separated off stranger, who stands alone and has private personal experiences. This is why there are no private thoughts. The body is the idea that you are disconnected from everyone. But relationship re-establishes that you share and are joined, with the whole sonship. In fact you ARE the whole sonship. Part of you is in EVERY child of God.

In truth then, it is not possible for you to do or think or feel anything without it in some way influencing or being shared by THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. Every attitude you have affects everyone. Every thought is heard by all. We are all plugged into a giant psychological web, sort of like a holographic internet. And everyone has access all the time to everything.

When Jesus accomplished the resurrection and ascension, he DID IN fact accomplish it for and with ALL of us. We could not be excluded from it, and all of us are a part of it. The atonement IS about sharing and is a collective relationship between an individual and THE WHOLE.

"The Atonement is a lesson in sharing, which is given you because YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW TO DO IT. The Holy Spirit merely reminds you of what is your NATURAL ability."

When Jesus resurrected and ascended, a "part of" all of us MUST have done this as well. The part of Jesus that is IN you, which IS you, accomplished this. Jesus had to basically plug into and accept the parts of him that are in all of us, shared with and one with us, knowing us AS himself, in order to accept atonement fully. Therefore his awakening did in fact wake all of us up, to some degree. He plugged us ALL back into God.

Each individual mind in the collective has its own will. So what does that mean when someone chooses to rise into the light? It means everyone else must be pulled upward at least a little, even if they themselves are pulling the whole sonship down. Some light MUST enter their minds, because the light in Jesus's mind is in ALL minds.

When Jesus accomplished this, we were ALL illuminated and enlightened to some degree, and some part of us knows this. And each time YOU heal or resurrect or think well of yourself and others, you ARE resurrecting the whole sonship. Part of you IS Jesus, and IS already awake in heaven. And as each person chooses the atonement, it is being chosen on behalf of everyone.

"You WERE in darkness until God's Will was done completely by ANY part of the Sonship. When it was, it was perfectly accomplished by ALL. How else could it BE perfectly accomplished? My mission was simply to UNITE the Will of the Sonship WITH the Will of the Father by being aware of the Father's Will myself. This is the awareness I came to give YOU, and YOUR problem in accepting it IS the problem of this world. Dispelling it is salvation, and in this sense I AM the salvation of the world."

"Then turn to one who laid all limits by, and went beyond the farthest reach of learning. He will take you with him, for he did not go alone. And you were with him then, as you are now."

"I ask for your forgiveness, for if YOU are guilty, so must I be. And if I surmounted guilt and overcame the world, you were WITH me."

"A miracle is never lost. It touches many people you may not even know, and sometimes produces undreamed of changes in forces of which you are not even aware."

"I am alone in nothing. Everything I think or say or do touches all the universe. A Son of God cannot think or speak or act in vain. He cannot be alone in anything. It is therefore in my power to change every mind along with mine, for mine is the power of God."

"To heal, or to make joyous, is therefore the same as to integrate and MAKE ONE. That is why it makes no difference TO what part or BY what part of the Sonship the healing is done. EVERY part benefits, and benefits equally. YOU are being blessed by every beneficent thought of any of your brothers anywhere. You should want to bless them in return, out of gratitude."

"When I am healed I am not healed alone.

And I would share my healing with the world"

"I am in charge of the process of Atonement, which I undertook to begin. My Atonement was for the canceling out of all sins (i.e., lack of love) which human beings could not otherwise correct. That is what the Biblical statement "underneath are the Everlasting Arms" means. (Helen Schucman explanation: This means that He will backstop whenever human miracles will not suffice for atonement purposes. However, it is perfectly clear that when a person can atone by miracles, both giver and receiver are atoning. It is better to atone this way because of the mutual benefits involved.)"Inasmuch as you do it unto the least of these, my children" really ends with "you do it unto yourself and ME." The reason why YOU come before me is because I do not need miracles for my own Atonement, but I stand at the end in case YOU fail temporarily."

"It is impossible that anyone be healed alone. In sickness must he be apart and separate. But healing is his own decision to be one again, and to accept his Self with all its parts intact and unassailed. In sickness does his Self appear to be dismembered and without the unity which gives It life. But healing is accomplished as he sees the body has no power to attack the universal Oneness of God's Son."

"And as you let yourself be healed, you see all those around you, or who cross your mind, or whom you touch, or those who seem to have no contact with you, healed along with you. Perhaps you will not recognize them all, nor realize how great your offering to all the world, when you let healing come to you. But you are never healed alone. And legions upon legions will receive the gift which you receive when you are healed."

"No-one is healed alone. This is the joyous song salvation sings to all who hear its Voice."

"I can help because the world is illusion, and I have overcome the world. Look past the tomb, the body, the illusion. Have faith in nothing but the spirit and the guidance God gives you. He could not have created the body because it is a limit. He must have created the spirit because it is immortal."

Here is today's bombshell of truth.

The entire physical universe is a game, designed by the ego, which is impossible to win. Anyone who plays the game will die. Period.

The game has only one rule. If you believe in the game and try to play it, you will die. There is no way to play it and win.

If you think that you can play the game in some kind of special way, using some kind of special abilities or skills or knowledge or workarounds or talents or aptitude or cleverness or creativity or whatever, you will become delusional, and you will die.

If you think you can play the game in a certain way by taking sides with certain apparent powers, by teaming up with those who seem to be winning, by avoiding certain obstacles or traps, by being at war with enemies and getting rid of them, by being very very careful not to have anything bad happen to you, or any other strategy whatsoever, ALL of those strategies WILL NOT WORK, and you will die.

If you think you can outsmart the game and section off a small part of the environment to protect and defend you, or that having certain behaviors will ensure your safety, or that wearing certain clothes or embarking on certain activities will change your chances, you are delusional, and you will die.

The instruction manual for the ego's game of "life and death", which has a subheading "actually, its just death", reads: "all players will die." That's it. At least it doesn't take 5 hours to learn like some games.

The ego's primary game is a game of separation. It is a game of emphasizing differences. It is a game of attempting to separate out one thing from another in as intense and believable a way as possible. It does not care whatsoever what the qualities of each part are, so long as they seem separate.

The game's primary function is temptation. It is designed to tempt you to believe that the appearance of difference or separation between things is real. If you fall for it, you fall for the trap, and you will die. If you look at two parts of the environment and you find yourself siding with or against either of them, not recognizing that they are BOTH PART OF THE SAME GAME, you will fail, and you will die. The instant you feel sorry for some part, or are against another part, or put one part on a pedestal, or buy into any kind of SPECIALNESS, you will die.

The devious, diabolical fact of the game is, anyone who falls for the illusion of difference and separation WILL SUFFER AND DIE, because they have been tricked into making themselves LESS THAN WHOLE, and therefore have diminished who and what they are, and this is DEATH.

So within the ego's game, it does not matter AT ALL, in any state of war and conflict, who wins or loses, who is right or wrong, good or bad, innocent or guilty, or any of it. If you buy into the belief that the good/innocent/righteous people are correct and the bad/wrong/guilty people are not, YOU FELL FOR IT HOOK LINE AND SINKER AND YOU WILL DIE.

The ego itself is the puppet master which disguises itself in the costume and form of every single thing which shows up in the game. It is secretly the identity behind every individual, every form, every event which happens, and every illusion of difference. It will play both sides against each other, playing itself against itself. It will take the role of savior and fixer and helper and carer and lover JUST SO THAT it can be victimized by someone else, SO THAT you will buy into the illusion that the other person was the sinner and not this one. AND THEN YOU WILL DIE, because you failed the test.

Illusions of better/worse, right/wrong, good/bad, more spiritual/less spiritual, more ego/less ego, are TRAPS. Illusions of people who seem innocent but who are still vulnerable, are traps. Illusions of people suffering and being sick against their will are traps. Illusions of bad things happening are traps. Illusions of unwanted terrible weather events are traps. Illusions of acts of nature, God's wrath, war, disagreement of all kinds, marital tension, sexual tension, hate, violence, condemnation, judgementalism, taking sides in a sports match, liking someone more than another, loving someone more than another, IS A TRAP, AND YOU WILL DIE.

This entire world, everything you see in the world, all people, all objects, all places, all events, all circumstances, all situations, all stories, are all DOOMED to condemn you to death IF you buy into them whatsoever.

No-one wins here. No-one actually pulls off a win, which would be a win against God. No-one achieves the FICTION of getting away with murder, being able to do something to someone else without receiving the effects, being able to have someone else make you die against your will, or suffering without choosing it. There are no winners in any argument or war. To believe in the war itself IS LOSS. To believe in enemies at all MAKES YOU WEAK. To side with the little victims MAKES YOU SUFFER. You cannot escape the game this way. You cannot just shift yourself into one safe-seeming corner of life where you cower and hope that all the bad shit doesn't come your way.

There is only one way to escape the game, one way to overcome its rules, and only one way to play it correctly to your advantage. The ONLY advantage is NOT TO PLAY IT AT ALL. This is what you have to learn. You have to see all illusions for what they are, tools for separation. This includes all "life forms" (death forms) in this world. They are all forms of separation, forms of error, forms of sin. They are not holy. That they appear at all, and that you believe you really see them, is your choice to die.

This entire world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son. There is NO PART OF IT which is not an attempt to kill you. Every trap will present itself and you will fall for all of them until you learn to overlook them all and attain Atonement/forgiveness. The world is not escaped by death, or by winning, or by making your best effort to avoid death, or by trying to bend the rules, or by thinking you're so great that you can go outside the lines and succeed on your own terms. YOU WILL FAIL, GUARANTEED, and you will die. The world - the entire ego's game - is only escaped by TRUTH.

Only truth will set you free. Only truth will show you the ego's game in plain sight, with all its diabolical devious designs and all of its traps and purposes and attempts to tempt you into it. Only the truth will allow you to see in the true light, the true nature of the temptation. Only the truth will keep you protected and safe. Only the truth will guide you out of the dream of death. Only the truth will allow you to live forever.

The realisation that you need do nothing, is really the realisation of ENLIGHTENMENT. It's something that suddenly becomes very clear to you, as you reach the final goal.

The truth is that in the separation from God, there was NOT a loss of perfection, and NOTHING real changed at all. The only thing that happened was we entered a state of denial, in which we blocked AWARENESS OF that perfection, and believed in the presence of imperfection.

"The separation was not a loss of perfection, but a failure in COMMUNICATION."

That means that there really is still a perfect state, a perfect heaven, you are still exactly as God created you, nothing has really changed at all. But to our egoic insane minds, we believe that's not true, and we think we've become evil monsters.

So as you forgive and return to the state of enlightenment, in which you RECOGNIZE everything as is it is, you'll be suddenly realising that ... hey... oh shit. .. there's actually nothing wrong with me ..... nothing's actually gone wrong ..... I'm still perfect.

You'll look upon yourself and everyone and everything and it'll suddenly seem totally obvious that there is nothing wrong whatsoever, and all of the sense that anything was ever wrong was nothing but a dream. Some delusion that you had, some mistaken perception, some false belief, some fantasy or wishful thinking where you thought and hoped you could pull off the impossible.

Because the truth is that "underneath" what seems to be your corrupted state, your confusion and insanity, your ego and your false beliefs, there remains still a PERFECT state of heaven, your actual real self which is still 100% intact and perfect, and all of creation which has not been even remotely affected or changed.

"Why wait for Heaven? Those who seek the light are merely covering their eyes. The light is in them now. Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all."

So as you get to that final state and you wake up, it's not actually going to be a CHANGE at all. You're not going to suddenly change into something. Rather, you'll simply just suddenly recognize the TRUTH about you and everything, that everything real is absolutely UNCHANGED. There never was really anything wrong, there has never really been a disaster or tragedy, there's never really been a death or a sickness or a suffering. It was all a lie. Some nightmare that you had when you were nuts for a while.

So that then means that in your recognition that NOTHING IS WRONG AT ALL, it's the recognition that you do not "need to do anything", to fix anything, to make anything better, because everything IS ALREADY PERFECT. That's the true meaning of "I need do nothing". It's not really anything to do with doings or happenings or whether you're busy or being of service or not, it's to do with the recognition of the fact that everything real is completely perfect and unchanged. That there is no real need.

It still remains that there does appear to be a NEED for those who are NOT YET AWARE of their perfection, and who therefore believe in and dream of being mortal and corrupt and powerless and victims. THEY have an illusion of a need, and while they have that illusion they do need help. But what they need is help to realize that they do not have any needs, because there not broken. And to that end, you can DO THINGS to help them with that temporary sense of need, to move them towards the state where they realize also that "I need do nothing - because I'm already perfect."

This relates also to forgiveness because true forgiveness it the recognition that THERE IS NO SIN, and therefore nothing TO forgive. The recognition of no sin is the ability to see that there is no lack, nothing is broken, nothing has gone wrong, and so there is no need for any correction. No-one has done anything wrong in reality. Perfection is still perfect. There is only permanent innocence - a sinlessness guaranteed by God.

Long story short, there basically is nothing really wrong with anyone anywhere whatsoever. There is no separation, and no sin, but there is a BELIEF IN THEM, and that belief needs to be corrected in order to recognize that nothing ever really went wrong with God's creation. Or as God told me one time, "There's nothing wrong, it's all an illusion."

So we're not really, really actually sort of healing something that has "happened", we're trying to heal from the belief that something needs healing. We're not really trying to change the mind as such, we're trying to get the mind to change its belief that it HAS BEEN changed, and to therefore recognize that change is NOT POSSIBLE.

"This in no way contradicts the changelessness of mind as GOD created it. But YOU think that you HAVE changed it, as long as you learn through the ego. This DOES place you in a position of needing to learn a lesson which SEEMS contradictory: you must learn to change your mind ABOUT your mind. Only by this can you learn that it IS changeless."

Or to put it another way - hey, GOOD NEWS ... You and God and everyone are still absolutely perfect and unchanged RIGHT NOW and there's nothing that you need to do whatsoever to establish or correct its condition. God has already done the work of willing that it be perfect forever, and so it is. All you need to is ACCEPT IT, RECOGNIZE IT, KNOW IT, EXPERIENCE AWARENESS OF IT.

You're perfect right now, and you don't even know how perfect you are! lol

Here is Jesus mentioning this realisation that happens as you awaken, at the end goal...

"When peace comes at last to those who wrestle with temptation, and fight against giving in to sin; when the light comes at last into the mind given to contemplation, or when the goal is finally achieved by anyone, it ALWAYS comes with just ONE happy realization, -- "I need do nothing." Here is the ultimate release that everyone will one day find in his own way, at his own time."

And further that as you reach THE END OF TIME and escape from time, you will realize that you need do nothing further for your salvation...

"And, if you recognize you NEED do nothing, you HAVE withdrawn the body's value from your mind. Here is the quick and open door through which you slip past centuries of effort, and ESCAPE from time. This is the way in which sin loses ALL attraction RIGHT NOW. For here is time denied, and past and future gone. Who need do nothing has no need for time. To do nothing is to rest, and make a place within you where the activity of the body ceases to demand attention. Into this place the Holy Spirit comes, and there abides."

Focusing on this simple formula some more...

"If he senses even the faintest hint of irritation in himself as he responds to anyone, let him instantly realize that he has made an interpretation which is not true. Then let him turn within to his Eternal Guide, and let Him Judge what the response should be."

1) Jesus seems to be saying that we should watch ourselves for any signs of upset, irritation, annoyance, anger, grief, unhappiness, etc any of the ego emotions or reactions, any kind of un-peace or lack of happiness and love.

2) This means having a very high standard for what we should normally strive for - totally peaceful, happy, joyful, loving, strong, certain, all the time. Free from suffering, free from sickness, free from death. That if we are not totally immortal and powerful and whole right now, we notice something must have gone wrong.

3) Jesus is then suggesting that this entirely boils down to an INTERPRETATION. What he's really talking about here is perception and meaning. Perception is an INTERPRETATION of what's there. A translation. We give everything all the meaning it has by INTERPRETING it. We interpret it one way ie with ego, we move into hell and false perceptions and insanity/sin. We interpret it another way with Holy Spirit and we move into the real world and true perception ie forgiveness.

4) He then goes on to say that instead of trying to sort of fix this yourself, once you recognize that you "must have made a wrong decision because you're not at peace", you now turn to the Holy Spirit and "he will undo all the consequences of my wrong decision if I let him. I choose to let him....". So now we're asking okay Holy Spirit, please SHOW ME how YOU see this and help me to see this through your eyes/eyes of Christ.

5) So now you open to receive his healing and to join with him, to merge with his mind, to be open to his awareness and his light, allowing him to correct and heal you. This means being willing to receive correction ie to be given healing, to be shown a different approach or interpretation of the world and the body and everything. To adopt HIS approach to it, as your own, as part of you resuming the will of God.

Essentially this means that while we have perception and a body, we are spending ALL our time INTERPRETING, and thus translating, and thus GIVING everything whatever meaning we want it to have. And that means we need to change HOW we have interpreted something, if we're finding that the intepretation is producing some kind of dis-ease or suffering in any way.

We MUST have interpreted it negatively with the ego if it led to a negative reaction, so now we become willing to reinterpret it a different way with the Holy Spirit, so that we can see it from a more forgiving and HAPPY vantage point. And we just keep doing this over and over and over until all our interpretations are THE SAME ONE INTERPRETATION of the Holy Spirit, which does not fluctuate or waver or change with conditions. An interpretation which reflects unconditional constant love and peace.

"You but mistake interpretation for the truth. And you are wrong. But a mistake is not a sin, nor has reality been taken from its throne by your mistakes. God reigns forever, and His laws alone prevail upon you and upon the world. His Love remains the only thing there is. Fear is illusion, for you are like Him."

"Would God have left the meaning of the world to YOUR interpretation? If He had, it HAS no meaning. For it cannot be that meaning changes constantly, and yet is true."

"A common purpose is the ONLY means whereby perception can be stabilized, and ONE interpretation given to the world and all experiences here. In this shared purpose is one meaning shared by everyone and everything you see. You do not have to judge, for you have learned one meaning has been GIVEN everything, and you are GLAD to see it everywhere."

"It is but your INTERPRETATIONS which are lacking in stability. And they are NOT in line with what you really are."

"Correction of a lasting nature, - and only this is true correction, - cannot be made until the teacher of God has ceased to confuse interpretation with fact, or illusion with truth."

"Your interpretations of your brother's need is your interpretation of YOURS."

"By applying the Holy Spirit's interpretation of the reactions of others more and more consistently, you will gain an increasing awareness that HIS criteria are equally applicable to YOU."

"Perhaps it will be helpful to remember that no-one can be angry at a fact. It is always an interpretation that gives rise to negative emotions, regardless of their seeming justification by what appear as facts."

"If anger comes from an interpretation and not a fact, it is never justified. Once this is even dimly grasped, the Way is open. Now it is possible to take the next step. The interpretation can be changed at last."

"Now is escape impossible until you see you have responded to your own interpretation, which you have projected on an outside world. Let this grim sword be taken from you now. There is no death."

"Yet you cannot BE aware without interpretation, and what you perceive IS your interpretation."

"The body, then, is not the source of its own health. Its condition lies solely in your interpretation of its function."

"Do not allow the body to be a mirror of a split mind. Do not let it be an image of your own perception of littleness. Do not let it reflect your will to attack. Health is the natural state of anything whose interpretation is left to the Holy Spirit, who perceives no attack on anything."

"What you do not understand is that the two voices speak for different interpretations of the same thing simultaneously, or almost simultaneously, for the ego always speaks first."

"Every interpretation you would lay upon a brother is senseless. Let the Holy Spirit SHOW HIM TO YOU, and teach you both his love and NEED for love."

"Joining with Him in seeing, is the way in which you learn to share with Him the interpretation of perception that leads to knowledge."

"The Holy Spirit's interpretation of fear DOES dispel it, for the AWARENESS of truth cannot BE denied."

"Knowing is not open to interpretation, because its meaning is its own. It is possible to interpret meaning, but this is always open to error because it involves the perception of meaning."

Real Love, is not like anything else in this world. Love, to be experienced, must be shared by all.

Love is a presence that exists everywhere and extends everywhere. It radiates. It flows. It overcomes all separations. It does not and cannot belong to any one individual without simultaneously belonging to everyone. Nobody can put a wall around it and deny it to everyone else.

So if you want to experience love, you can't do it by locking love in a box. You can't do it by being absent of love yourself and expecting someone else to give their portion to you. Love it not limited and finite, or lacking or scarce. It's not like some kind of substance or material or object or commodity that someone exchanges for something else. It's not money used to buy a favor.

The ego believes that if you give something, you will lose it. It thinks that giving produces sacrifice. That you're going to be worse off, and have less, if you give. And especially if you share, there is no way to share with anyone without loss.

To the ego, sharing doesn't exist. It doesn't see how you can share, in any way, without diminishing what you have. And it's enacted this belief in the way that all physical 'forms' appear to behave.

If you want to share your apple, you're going to have to cut it in half and give half away - sacrificing half, and now you will only have half an apple. And you will experience that in the ego as loss, and unworthiness of having the whole. You might think you are sharing the half in kindness or generosity, but to the ego you a secretly jealous and bitter at having 'taken a hit' for the sake of someone else.

And then, to the ego, this form of sacrificing becomes equated with giving. It says, if I give half of this apple, and I do it in spite of the fact that I believe it is a sacrifice, then I am doing some kind of 'good for others'. This then leads to guilt that you are not giving ALL of what you have to others, and that even more sacrifice is called for. Ultimately it would have you give all of your apple to others, and having nothing for yourself.

That is the culmination of its belief system - that you are left with nothing, in total sacrifice and loss. Such is martyrdom. Such is what we commonly think of as 'giving selflessly' when in fact it usually is the ego sacrificing. To the ego, you should just give everything you have to others in order to be 'good' so that you'll meet God's graces, which is bullshit. It is a death wish. If you still have an ego and you are giving in this way without giving equally to yourself (receiving), that's not being a saint, it's being a martyr and an idiot. And it's also not what giving means.

Where in the ego's form of giving is there anything other than sacrifice? How in the ego's world is there anything even remotely similar to real sharing, other than loss? How can the ego give without losing what it has? It can't. Because the ego's idea of what it HAS is an illusion, a false value, and its idea of sharing it is the same thing as NOT sharing it. To the ego, sharing means posession and a transfer of ownership.

Real love is not like this. Real love does not diminish when it is shared or given. Real love doesn't call for sacrifice. Real love doesn't give give give, endlessly from your ego self, in the guise of some kind of 'atoning' or being 'selfless'. Real love cannot be owned by you exclusively, and you cannot give it away without you keeping it. Real love can't exchange hands and be in one place and not in another place at the same time. Real love doesn't leave you empty and lifeless. Real love doesn't ask you to be a martyr or to please everyone else except yourself.

Real love is like a giant vast ocean of love. Love's rule is that you can share in it by opening up to it and allowing it to be in you, but you cannot possess it or own it exclusively. You can participate in it and enjoy it and experience it, but this does NOT prevent others from doing the same. And there is an infinite supply, so there is no way you can have it all to 'yourself' and deny it to others, nor is there a need to get it FROM others because they too have their own access directly from God.

So unlike the ego, where you must 'get' love from others, because you think you lack it, you can't actually experience it even if you could get it, because you're trying to deny it to the other person. You want them to love you, sacrificially, by giving you what they have so that they don't have any left. That bleeds them dry, just as you trying to be an ego saint bleeds you dry. The only way you can experience love, is to get in line with how God has arranged things.

Simply, as ACIM says, "to have all, give all to all". Which means, to experience love fully, fully GIVE LOVE to everyone unconditionally, by EXTENDING what God has given you (unlimited love). In this you receive love from God in unlimited supply, and you extend it to others. But notice this key point:

If you do not extend the love to others, YOU cannot have it either. If you do not radiate the love to others, YOU cannot feel its radiance. If you do not SHARE love with others, YOU cannot share IN it either. Love has to be shared to be experienced, otherwise it is stationary. It needs to be extended and amplified to be what it is, like a radiant shining light. It has to shine outward. So you need to shine it outward, not from a limited supply of your own, but from God. Extend God's love. Extend God's healing miracles.

Simply...

God... help me to love [person's name]. Help me to extend your love to them and see them as lovable.

You will then feel love in your heart, for the other person, and you will feel the love and share in the love. It is the privilege of the loved to be loving.

The ego is simply a state of self-attack, taking place within a mind which has become divided against itself.

In this state, part of the mind has disassociated from the other part. There now appear to be two identities.

One identity is consciously identified with as "me" and the other as "not me".

The "not me" self, is very often equated with "the ego". It appears to be the self that we're always blaming and scapegoating, attacking and accusing, thinking of as other people etc.

But the trap there is not realizing who is doing the perceiving of an enemy. The person who sees enemies, AND the enemies themselves, are both two parts of ONE delusional thought system. They are both you.

The ego is not so much "that enemy" or the thing which is against you or your problems etc. It is the attacker and that which is attacked. It is both sides of every war. It is the state of *separation* taking place within yourself, between who you are and this illusion of who you are not.

Separating yourself from God was also an attempt to separate yourself from yourself. This could only create a condition in your mind where your original self remained, and a second self was added. You now think that only the second self is the "bad self", and label it the ego, but it is no more or less the ego than the self which describes it, because your real self was placed with a "persona" that pretends to be who you really are. It is the separation BETWEEN the two fake identities that is the ego.

So basically, if no-one else existed and there was just you and your mind, the entire separation from God would have to be taking place inside of yourself. And any conditions of conflict in which there seems to be wars or threats or enemies, those things MUST be also included inside your own mind. They're not outside of you.

So this is the key - the secret to salvation, that you are doing this to yourself. You have to realize that this so-called "not me", aka "my enemy", actually IS you. It's you who are against yourself, not other people. It's you who are at war with your own self. You do not have any enemies beyond yourself. That "not me" self is just part of your mind and will which you're kind of pretending not to have any control over, as if it's running on autopilot.

You have to therefore learn to recognize, that whatever it is which seems to loom over you with power and a separate will and a sense of threat or causality, making "you" at its effect, is actually your own self doing this to yourself. In other words, it's one disassociated part of your mind attacking the part which you're still associated with. You think it is not you and is attacking you - that's just part of you that thinks you are not you, attacking part of you that thinks it is you.

Truth is, you are not EITHER of these two fake identities. You are not the attacker or the attacked. You are not the victim or the victimizer. You are also not the self who looks upon the "bad enemy" and condemns them. That self is the other half of the ego, and the ego is always attacking itself. You are not the persona who rejects the shadow, and you are not the innocent victim who believes the perpetrator is not their self.

If you could see, that every pain and suffering, every attack, every torture, was actually being administered by a split-off part of your own mind, which you had disowned and disconnected from your sense of "conscious control", or your sense of the scope of your power or the reach of your influence, and if you can learn to recognize it and see yourself actually working "through" it to do things to yourself, then you will realize... you can stop doing that.

You can stop attacking yourself. You can stop hurting yourself. But even moreso, since the self being hurt is not you either, you can realize that you are no longer going to play EITHER role of victim or victimizer, and are going to give up the sense of identity that you were trying to protect from a fake enemy, transcend both of them, heal the *SEPARATION* that was creating them both, and return to a mind of wholeness and oneness.

if you could but see that you do everything to yourself, and get in touch with that choosing and doing, then you would simply realize how futile that is and stop it.

Sometimes you'll find in the day that a song is playing in your mind. It seems to be on autopilot. It can play for hours without you even noticing. And then maybe you notice and can't get it out of your head. But the thing is, it's actually being played by a part of your own mind, a part which is mostly unconscious, and you are just "allowing" it subtly to keep going. When you reclaim that power and recognize, it's YOU who is making this song keep playing in your mind, you reclaim the ability to stop it from playing. And it will stop. Because no-one else was playing that song. It was you.

It's the same thing with any aspect of the ego. You think it's outside of your control, beyond your choosing, disconnected from your influence, outside your power, and separated from "you". Reclaiming and owning that is the key to salvation. Taking back responsibility for everything you are experiencing.

No-one and nothing can happen to you against your will. No-one dies without their own consent. If you do not choose to attack yourself, you will be in capable of experiencing attack. No-one else has the power to go against your will. Your will is as powerful as the Son of God. There is nothing that can cause you other than God. You cannot be at the effect of anything but God (and that's a good thing). It guarantees that you are immortal and invulnerable forever, if you will just stop doing stuff to yourself unconsciously.

It can be very difficult to forgive abuse. Typically in abusive situations, both persons are identified with their bodies. One person does something to the other person's body, which is taken very personally and hurtfully.

It seems that one person has power to affect the other, to do something to them against their will. And the whole scenario seems to paint a very closed picture of unfair treatment, unwilling participation, obvious fault on the part of the abuser, and total helplessness on the part of the victim.

If you look solely at what is happening at the physical level, and if this is believed to be reality, then all of this makes sense. The abuser physically does do something. The victim physically or emotionally or mentally does seem to receive the fallout of the abuse. The separation between the bodies and wills seems to portray the victim as "not wanting it" etc. At a purely surface-appearance level, this is all very real and threatening and traumatic. As if the is the whole story.

But viewing the situation purely in terms of surface appearance, is actually an unforgiving perception. It means the form of what happened was blinding. It means you were identified with your body, such that anything happening from the outside in seemed to affect your actual self. There is no recognition that "its just a dream." And there certainly doesn't appear to be any hope of escape from the hellish nightmare.

The difficult part comes when you start to explore how to heal this, forgive it, undo the consequences, or to become free from the aftereffects, some of which can be debilitating and even life threatening. But at some point, there has to be a willingness to entertain the possibility that there was "more happening" than met the eye, and that there might be a different way of looking at it. It is this unwillingness to remain in pain, that inspires the beginning of opening up to spirit.

"The misuse of will engenders a situation which, in the extreme, becomes altogether intolerable. Pain thresholds can be high, but they are not limitless. Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point. This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight."

Even if you are left with pain and scars, emotional hurt, physical damage, psychological wounds or forms of insanity, carrying this baggage around forever becomes intolerable. Pain is not pleasant. Constant fear is a nightmare. The sheer weight of suffering can potentially inspire a person to try to find a way out of hell, unless they become so distraught that it leads to suicide.

For those who do find at least "a little willingness", there becomes a glimmer of openness to at least the possibility that, just maybe, there is some way to heal and be free of this. That maybe if you look at it from a different vantage point you might find out some hidden facts, previously unrecognized influences, or even some ways that you might have caused it. Of course, for abused people, leaping to "I did this to myself" is a pretty huge leap, when everything the physical reports testifies to "they did everything to me and I did nothing."

It can even seem horrendously offensive to a person who is very heavily believing in "what appeared to happen" as the only reality. When pain backs it up, when suffering seemed to come from it, and when the person didn't seem to want any of it, there is tremendous resistance to healing and forgiveness. It is in fact, part of the pyschological blindness that placed their mind in an unforgiving experience to begin with, and this denial may even have been increased through the abusive experiences.

This is why it can take time, a lot of willingness and gradual transformation, to work through the ins-and-outs of everything that happened, all the pain it entailed, to be able to purge and purify the suffering, to even get to a point where you might be open to another way of looking at it. But if there is to be another way of looking at it, it can't be at the physical level. It can't be just another attempt to frame the situation in terms of "it was real, but the person had their reasons."

True forgiveness has to entail moving away from the sheer physcality of the abusive situation, away from appearances and forms, and away from the illusion of causality. It has to rise above the "he did this to me" and the "she did that to me". And it has to go into the "Maybe I had something to do with this." Given how intense and horrifying abuse can be, and the seeming unhealable wounds it leaves behind, even being open to that suggestion can be a seemingly insurmountable stretch.

The key factor which lifts a person out of perception of abuse, is becoming identified with spirit instead of the body. And that all by itself is a journey. And it also requires that you recognize that you can be free from suffering, even if people seem to be vicious and hurtful. As the Course says:

"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."

To allow there to be a maximum amount of viciousness and attack by others, yet to be in such a state of mind in which this has NO effect on you, seems like a very tall order. But it is not impossible. It entails the recognition that this world is a dream, and not a reality. Yes it will seem like the abuse was VERY real, with disturbing memories and wounds to show for it, but in the really big picture it nevertheless was still part of a dream.

Jesus suggests that if we can approach the awareness and recognition that this IS a dream world, and not a reality, we will become more identified as spirit, or as the dreamer of the dream. We are the mind/soul that is beyond the dream which houses it within ourselves.

With willingness, it's going to become apparent that the events in dreams are something WE are contributing to. This produces a profound shift in how we look at what the other person "did to us", because now we're starting to question not only whether it really happened in reality at all, but also who was really causing what.

It can seem to be a bitter pill to swallow, that we would be hurtful to ourselves, that we ourselves might've agreed to or arranged or produced suffering, that in effect we wanted to be abused for some other purpose of scapegoating. It's especially heinous to many people to suggest that someone in a victim role is not entirely faultless, that they in fact are using the opportunity to position themselves as victim in order to be ABLE to find the abuser guilty. And as the course says, this has a tremendous payoff in allowing us to position ourselves as innocent, as a way to asuage our OWN guilt for our own sense of sin.

Could it be then, quite a shocking but deep truth, that we may well not only consent to abuse but even encourage it and bring it upon ourselves, because of the benefit to us psychologically - that we can convince ourselves that if the other person is especially evil, it portrays us as especially good. And given that we are loaded with uhealed guilt over the separation from God, it provides a wonderful opportunity to exonerate ourselves by finding someone else to be especially sinful. We may in fact be using the abuser as a fall-guy for our own sin.

This then completely turns the tables on the situation, and is the secret hidden truth that the abusive situation seems to reject. While the situation said, "they did this to me, I did nothing", in truth the fact is "I did this to me and used them to make myself look better." That is not something that is easy to admit to, but it has to be admitted to if you want freedom.

Here is Jesus saying that we are even willing to BE KILLED, if it means the payoff that we can find someone ELSE to be the sinner and to exonerate ourselves. And that we may even welcome being highly severly abused, attacked, afflicted, murdered and destroyed, as a tremendously opportunistic bargain, if it means we can be found guiltless. Even that what WE get out of it is even MORE than they get out of it - a great deal!

"Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."

This isn't simply a teaching about sickness and how we use the body to try to show proof that our brother caused us to be sick, so that we'll be exonerated of sin. It's a general teaching that in many ways, abuse included, we try to position ourselves as victims in order to get a great payoff. That we're even willing to enter into highly abusive, detrimental, suffering situations, with terrible power loss and mistreatment, if it means that secretly this causes the OTHER person to seem like the sinner. What did abuse turn you into, if not someone justified in anger and blame?

Jesus doesn't hold back, in that he is even saying that we are WILLING TO DIE, if it will provide us with an opportunity to point a finger at the CAUSE of death, other than ourselves, and say "look there, that's where the sin is". And thus to say, "Look at me, I didn't do anything at all." We even lay down in death in a kind of passive way, totally hands-off, making ourselves appear to be COMPLETELY at the effect of something outside our control, so that it paints a very vivid picture of unfair destruction, un-asked for killing, and unwanted torment. In which we appear innocent.

The driving force behind all of this is the guilt that WE feel in OUR mind, over a situation which doesn't even have anything to do with these abusers. It's the fact that we are bringing some very heavy shit, TO the situation, from our past. And we're causing and involving ourselves in relationships and situations which afford us opportunities to PROJECT, dissociate from, and disown this hidden secret suffering, in order to try to deal with it.

What could be so big and deep and hidden and painful that we would want to go so far as to ALLOW ourselves to seem to be destroyed by another, if it would mean escaping it? What possible severity of sin could we have possibly either committed tor accused ourselves of, that we would ENCOURAGE sickness in an attempt to be seen with pity and favor? What kind of hideous act did we commit which could possibly require death as the only "solution", in which by accusing anyone OTHER than ourselves of TERRIBLE mistreatment, we can try to make a dent in it and be seen as the innocent one?

Don't doubt for a second that the ego's entire drive is to use denial to its full extent. It denies who you are, it denies God through sin, it denies sin through guilt, it denies guilt through the face of innocence, and it denies the face of innocence by destroying the body through "a will of punishment not my own." Denial upon denial upon denial are used to gradually remove you from existence and to disown everything. Even in abuse we are disowning the way in which we are abusing ourselves.

All of this is really based on our secret sins and hidden hates, the self accusation, the condenation upon yourself BY yourself, the belief in the reality of sin, the authority problem and desire to overthrow God, and indeed the belief that you HAVE attacked God against His will. It is really the original sin, the belief that you opposed the entire Kingdom of God through evil, that you are running and hiding from. And it is the unforgiven guilt for that perceived sin that you try to push onto others when you form abusive relationships.

Those who feel particularly guilty are apt to not only cause physical sickness, they are also apt to be vicious and very accusatory. They project heavily because trying to dissociate that unconscious guilt from their minds seems like the only way to hide from it. By putting it onto someone else and framing them as an abuser or attacker, it SEEMS to make it look like they are more evil than you, thus you are partly exonerated for your belief in sin against God. And those who are especially OPEN to being a victim, unfairly treated, abused, in fact are the most deceptive and blameful. He who has "been destroyed against his will" has gotten away with the crime of the century.

So now as the tables turn, we find out that a person who on the surface seemed to be the innocent party in the abuse, who was purely victimized, who asked for nothing and who made no contribution to it at all, actually turns out to be the ONLY one who was really doing anything at all, who did it all to themselves, and EVEN went so far as to USE the "abuser" for their own aims. What more benefit could a guilty person find than to position themselves as helplesly suffering, if it would create the illusion that SOMEONE ELSE is guilty? And how sick is it that we would actively WANT to do this, even if it meant we had to suffer to pull it off?

You can see why the truth of these situations is so hard to accept. It litearlly suggests that "the abused" are abusers, that victims are in fact victimizers, that those who are afraid are vicious, and that this is all a secret plot to GAIN from suffering. Even that we would happily die if it meant someone else would pay for what we've done to God.

"We said before that those who are afraid are apt to be vicious. " On the surface, the world being so back to front, it always seems at first glance that those who are suffering are NOT the ones doing the attacking. And that those who are seeming to be the cause of the suffering, are NOT the victims. But this is literally what Jesus is telling us. And it is this complete "180" that our minds have to go through in order to heal this psychological conditioning. And that's not easy.

If I was abused, even if the abuse and the emotional pain tells me that it happened, it was unfair, I did not ask for it, the abusers were evil monsters, and they ought to receive a death sentence, my act to MAINTAIN this position is in fact driven by a motive of wanting to keep BENEFITING from it. And that is not an easy thing to admit to. Yet alone to look at the fact that I was the one doing the abuse to myself and to the abusers. That I was USING them as a scapegoat, and WANTED to be abused in order to get away with FRAMING THEM for my own murder.

It's even harder to admit to any of this if the victim is a helpless innocent young child who appears, at the face of it, to be utterly devoid of sin and guilt, and who has no power or ability to stop anything happening. This all sets up the perfect scenario for the ego to manipulate the situation and USE it to its advantage. Not o much to cause the child to suffer cruelly, but to cause the child to WANT to suffer in order to develop a wonderful collection of scapegoats. Of course, saying something like this is NOT going to be popular with most of society.

Admitting to all this is, nevertheless, the eventual place our mind has to get to if we truly want to be free from pain and suffering. We have to approach the secret of salvation. We have to be willing to admit to what we are doing and the part we play. And we certainly have to completely let the abusers off the hook, otherwise we cannot experience psycholgoical repair. So long as we are looking to project and get rid of our own inner guilt onto these people, we keep ourselves in a prison of denial and suffering. And we can't feel happy while we're AVOIDING the original guilt that we were using the abuser to try to get rid of.

It begs the question, far more importantly, not "why did they do that to me"... but "why did I do this to me?". That's the really deeper issue. Why did you accuse yourself of sin FIRST, before you arranged for someone to sin against you? Why did you believe in sin, at all, before inviting others to seem to sin against you? Why did you fall into the authority problem, prior to ever needing an external authority to pretend to have power over you? Why did you attack yourself first? Why were you overtly vicious against yourself and God, before portraying yourself as a helpless victim? That's the bigger deal to heal.

"I but accuse my brother of my own sins."

"It can be but myself I crucify."

"I can be attacked by nothing but my thoughts."

"You are doing this to yourself."

"There is no sin."

Self destruction and self attack and self victimization and self punishment, are far more the problem and death-inducing than the two-times removed scapegoats that we find externally. The abuser isn't even the beginning of the process, they're a device that we use later down the line to try to deal with what we've done to oursevles. And the ultimate freedom can only come when you find YOURSELF to be innocent, having never sinned in reality, forming the basis for the total lack of NEED to have an "abuser" take on the burden for you.

These external influencers are not even the cause of anything. They're scapegoats that we use to project sin and disown responsibility. And until this power is taken back and reclaimed, a "victim" cannot feel empowered or free of victimization. It's kind of a two-way street. You can't be secretly victimizing, which all victims do, if you want to be free of being victimized. If you believe in victimization you become a victimizer and pretend you are the opposite. Obviously that's not a sane position to take.

There is hope for healing and true release from all suffering, all abuse, all symptoms and effects, all baggage and all pain. But it does require that you take full responsibility for your choices and your participation on making happen what you thought happened against your will. You cannot see yourself as being an unwilling participant if you want to find the power of the wil. And the only way to be truly free is to accept the atonement truth that you never sinned in the first place, such that you don't need anyone to exonerate you through suffering.

Who is the abuser who really needs your forgiveness? It's you.

Let’s take a closer look at this.

"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. Children are born into it through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its power declines if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel."

"If this were the real world, God WOULD be cruel. For no father could subject his children to this as the price of salvation, and be loving. LOVE DOES NOT KILL TO SAVE. For if it did, attack WOULD be salvation, and this is the ego's interpretation, not God's."

Now. THINK about this for a moment. Jesus is describing a world in which children are born. These children are born in pain. They grow. They have bodies. They have brains. Their minds are trapped in their brains. They wither and suffer. And they go through bodily death.

Now, WHICH world is that talking about? What world is it WHERE THIS HAPPENS? It should be PLAIN AND SIMPLE. It is obvious! This is talking about planet Earth. In common parlance, "THE WORLD." Earth, the physical planet. "The world" that pretty much anyone would refer to as the world. The world where children are born, have brains, grow old, and die. It is THAT WORLD that is being referenced. The world where YOU WERE BORN, into the body of a child, with your mind trapped in your brain. THAT WORLD. **THIS WORLD**. Earth. Not an interpretation OF it. THIS WORLD. ITSELF. The planet.

And THAT WORLD..... THIS WORLD....is very very clearlly being described by Jesus, as a CRUEL WORLD. He is also clearly talking about that world, where children are born, as being the kind of world that God COULD NOT HAVE CREATED. Otherwise, if He would have created such a world, HE WOULD BE CRUEL. Creating a world where children are born as bodies with brains who grow old and die, IS A CRUEL WORLD, the likes of which a LOVING FATHER would NEVER EVER EVER CREATE. Never. God would NEVER create a world where ANYTHING is born, where ANYTHING has its mind trapped in a brain, and where ANYTHING grows or dies. God does not create such cruelty!

"This world IS a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

"If this were the real world, God WOULD be cruel."

THIS WORLD, EARTH, IS NOT REAL!!!!!!

This is not in any way talking about a world of ego perception. It is not talking about dream interpretations of Earth. It is not talking about your projections onto the world. It is not talking about any kind of perception. It is not talking about an internal private world that you project onto the "Real world of earth". Earth is NOT THE REAL WORLD. It is NOT created by God.

If you assign Earth to God’s creation, you are claiming literally that God is CRUEL because a world where CHILDREN ARE BORN, GROW OLD, AND DIE, IS A FUCKING CRUEL WORLD!!!! If you then attempt to NOT claim he is cruel while assigning the world to him, you are in DOUBLE DENIAL, wearing rose tinted glasses and glossing over the sheer cruelty and suffering that is INHERENT to this entire universe. When was the last time you saw a living dinosaur? Never. Why? Massive cruelty. Massive death. It’s not cruel merely because "ego interprets it as cruel". It is fundamentally cruel. To say it is not cruel and "love it" is UTTERLY INSANE. You cannot love death and it is insane to do so.

God did not, would not, can never, will not, has not and does not desire to, create a world where CHILDREN ARE BORN AND DIE. At all. In any way. God does not create babies! God does not create ANY KIND OF BODY. Not humans, not animals, not insects, not planets. "God did not create the body." God did not create ANY children’s bodies. Not one. Not even yours. God does not create a WORLD where children are born and die, where creatures have brains, or where there are bodies of ANY KIND. God does not create cruel planets with mass extinctions and being snuffed out in a supernova!!

Some people really seem to defend against this. But if you think the world IS NOT CRUEL, in an attempt to make it OKAY WITH GOD, and to justify that God MUST have created it because YOU think it is heaven on earth, there is a really profound level of denial happening. The world is *exremely* cruel. And I do not say this as a judgement or an unforgiveness. It simply is not heaven. Or heaven like. Not even remotely. The world is made of the idea of death. "Without the idea of death there is no world." Even true perception will ONLY reveal the TRUTH ABOUT this world, which is that it is FALSE, UNREAL, DOES NOT EXIST, IS NOT GOD’S NATURE, AND IS NOT LIFE.

God’s world is Heaven. It is not Earth. It is another realm unlike this universe. Nothing there but shines and shines forever. If you think God made the Earth, you have NO IDEA what God is like. A loving father could never create such mayhem and conflict and mindless destruction.

Our main problem in separating from God is simply not recognizing what is true. "Enlightenment is but a recognition".

If we were to recognize accurately what is true, and what is false, without any distortion, we would attain enlightenment. This recognition is the pure sanity of our right mindedness.

A mind which is so correct in its recognition of truth, practically KNOWS it, which is how true perception paves the way for knowledge. Our problem then is that we DON'T recognize what is true, or how it is opposite to what is false. In the separation we simply swapped the true and the false. We gave all manner of true properties to that which is false, and all manner of false properties to that which is true. This produced immense confusion.

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

In a state of confusion, you do NOT recognize reality or truth. You believe that things which are true are not true, and things which are false are true. You give reality to illusions, believe in lies, and mistake hell for heaven.

This reversal is so great that it leads to the belief that death is life, hell is heaven, suffering is healing, punishment is atonement, and God is evil.

Everyone naturally gravitates towards whatever they believe is true, and tries to avoid what they believe is false. In fact Jesus in the course says that you cannot SEE what you believe is false, and you can only see what you believe in a true.

"All vision starts WITH THE PERCEIVER, who judges what is true and what is false. And what he judges false, HE DOES NOT SEE. You who would judge reality CANNOT see it, for whenever judgment enters, reality has slipped away. The out of mind is out of sight, because what is denied is THERE, but is not recognized."

This presents a problem, because it means you end up choosing something which is NOT what it appear to be. You think it will save you, but it hurts you. This manifests particularly in using sickness as a defense against the truth.

We first fail to recognize that God's truth is true. We believe it is false and evil and wrong. We don't want it. Then we believe that its opposite will save and protect us. That we want whatever IS true, even though the things we think are true are false.

Then we choose false things, to move away from true things, but believing they're helping us. Sickness is an attempt to defend your life and perpetuate your truth, to save you from the attack of "what is false" - God - but what is false has been mis-identified.

So you end up choosing suffering, under the belief that it is helping you. You choose sickness in an attempt to save your life.

This happens only because you do not RECOGNIZE what is really true and what is false. You are confused, and so you make a poor decision. You then end up hurting yourself because you are confused.

"I must have decided wrongly because I am not at peace. I made the decision myself"

What the course then tells us is we have to sort out and correctly identify things which are true, and things which are false. To identify what is OF GOD, and what is not. What is real, and what is unreal. This includes sorting out what is really life, and what is death, and what is health and what is suffering.

"If you obscure the Kingdom, you are perceiving WHAT IS NOT OF GOD."

"Whatever is revealed to Him that is not of God, is gone."

"It denies the ability of anything which is not of God to effect you in any way."

"True denial is a very powerful protective device. You can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you. This kind of denial is NOT a concealment device, but a correction device. The "Right Mind" of the mentally healthy DEPENDS on it."

We actually don't recognize that suffering IS suffering. We don't realize we are feeling guilty and afraid. We can even be angry without actually recognizing it as anger. In denial, we'll even believe that our sickness is saving us, and so we want to keep it.

Our task is to become clear about what IS true and what IS false. To properly "categorize" stuff. To put the things of God into the "true and real" category, and the stuff of this world of ego and death into the "untrue and not real" category. The illusions of Earth belong in the not-real category.

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal."

In true perception then, which is close to enlightenent, we are doing two things. We are correctly recognizing that illusions ARE illusions and death is NOT real and there is no real sin and Earth doesn't really exist. AND, we are recognizing heaven and the face of christ and the real world and reality, shining beyond the illusory world.

Once we actually can distinguish that suffering IS suffering, and attack IS attack, and death IS death, rather than confusing them for something else, we will recognize not to choose them. Anything we associate with what is false, we will choose away from. Whatever we associate with truth, we will gravitate towards.

In order to choose heaven and not hell, we have to first learn that hell IS hell, and not heaven. We have to stop confusing Earth for heaven, or mistaking an unreal world for a real one. We have to deprogram ourselves and become clear about what really is true and what isn't.

"the necessary distinction between the true and the false."

"But HIS function is to distinguish ONLY between the false and the true, REPLACING the false WITH the true."

"His Voice WILL teach you how to distinguish between pain and joy, and lead you out of the confusion YOU have made."

"Therefore, if you learn the tests by which you can distinguish everything from nothing, you will make the better choice."

"Only by learning what fear IS, can you finally learn to distinguish the possible from the impossible, and the false from the true."

"This is because of the miracle's inherent avoidance of within-error distinctions. Its SOLE concern is to distinguish between truth, on the one hand, and ALL kinds of error, on the other."

"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."

Miracles, then, are states of mind in which the real truth is recognized as the ONLY truth, and nothing ELSE is believed to be true. All errors are correctly identified as false, untrue, unreal, and nothing. All reality is acknowledged and welcomes as ACTUALLY real and true and meaningful.

When all truth is "separated out" from what is false, you will cease to make confused mistaken choice, will stop choosing death and sickness and suffering, and will be ready to choose heaven.

The false world (Earth) is false and does not exist. The true world (Heaven) is true and is all that exists. Truth is everything, the false is nothing. Correctly recognizing God allows you to recognize who you are. In remembering your true nature, you are ready to identify with your soul, and as Christ.

Please forgive me if this message isn't well formed because I think I am going to express something that is sort of 'new' to me and I am not well into it yet.

Love has been coming to me... the possibility of love... the possibility of being loving toward other people in general. Its a change in my attitude about others. Part of this seems to involve realizing that I've been doing all this healing and forgiveness work on 'myself' with... lets be honest... a somewhat selfish intention. I mean, even though it's a spiritual path and all that, it's always been about me healing myself, me forgiving for my own benefit, me applying the Course to get myself to feel better, etc. And now... this 'me' part doesn't seem as much the focus, or as important. And instead, I'm starting to let real LOVE come through me, and its starting to become about - sharing that love.

I'll also be honest in telling you that I generally have not really felt loving towards most people for a long time. Whether its a remnant of childhood suffering or a personality thing or whatever I've accepted, or maybe I've just been pretty normal/typical all this time and nobody could really expect more. ... but I'm finding now, there IS more. There is the possibility of not just being another one of many strangers that pass each other and barely acknowledge each other, but rather of actually LOVING PEOPLE.

Now, this is where it gets really fascinating for me at the moment. I've been finding that.. experimenting with. .. the idea that, if I attempt to be loving toward people instead of how I normally would be around them, it is significantly changing my perception. And I'm not talking about some lofty aim like 'see the christ in everyone' and I'm like 'what the fuck is christ?'... it's simply.. .just fricking love them.

Normally around most people, especially strangers, I will become guarded and shy and quiet really quickly. Its a defense mechanism thing, usually triggered by the slightest observation that there is something about the person that is unsafe/unloving. What I did not know, however, all this time, is that the unsafely and unloivingness that I see in people - the triggers - is actually the result of ME not looking at them WITH love. I've always been looking at people with... well, the ego... and seeing the ego reflected back. And now this idea is popping in, why not try instead to extend love and be loving toward them, and see how that feels

Well... when I decide to do this, which is usually after I notice that I just lapsed into zombie mode, something really unexpected happens. I don't feel afraid. It's like, all of the basis for my 'social anxiety' is because I perceive without love and therefore see a lack of love and I see it as an attack. So... if I CHOOSE to see WITH love, then I actually see ONLY love, and I don't even see any reason not to love. It's like, all of the 'reasons' for fear are just not even there. I can't detect them, they don't appear, they don't register. Somehow the love makes me feel safe and prevents me from even perceiving that I can be attacked. If I'm looking WITH love, then it shows me love. If I look with attack, I see attack. And I didn't realize how used I've become to seeing 'with attack' all of the time, such that I thought it was normal, and that people out there 'really are' threatening... when in fact, there is another way to experience it.

I always struggled with this. You have no idea. I mean, really high levels of anxiety around strangers, fear of judgement, unsafely, becoming 'spacey' and losing all focus, becoming avoidant, wanting to get the hell out of there, etc. It has taken a LOOOOOONG time to gradually sift through this all to realize that it is ME and MY attitude which SHOWS ME exactly what is IN ME, and I then think it is in the other people, and then I think that this proves WHY I should feel the way I feel. It JUSTIFIES it. Sure, I should be afraid because that person is judging me, or I should be anxious because that person is threatening me, etc... when instead, it was always that I'd projected MY self-attack onto them and was seeing it there.

And now, along comes love. And I mean... not special love of romantic love or whatever... like, real LOVE... love from GOD. Unconditional love. Spiritual love. And if I allow myself to stand in love and to choose to see other people WITH that love, what do I experience? Well... I feel completely safe. The anxiety has no foundation. And even if I'm feeling afraid or anxious, if I choose love, it instantly disappears. And even if people still are behaving in odd ways or looking at me funny or appearing to be rejective or whatever, if I am in a loving place, then I feel completely invulnerable to that, like, I know it can't do anything to me.

The big lesson here is this... and I'm still exploring this and only just STARTING to experiment with this in real situations.... the big lesson is that... when you extend God's love fully to your brother, and just choose to love them instead of any other attitude, ALL you will see is love and lovability and there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON TO BE AFRAID. So... this is the TRUTH! In truth, there is no reason for fear because in truth, in love, there is perfect safety. There simple IS no attack. There IS no cause for alarm. There IS no threat.

So this is my 'opening up'... the next phase... realizing that the theology and the thoughts and the figuring out and the Course processes etc are... themselves... just tools to open up the heart to love, and that it is THE LOVE that is actually what we need to BE and express. To love it. To be it. To extend it. To share it. Experientially. Actively. For real. Taking the love to the people. Taking the love and letting it love through me. Letting healing come through me. Letting life come through me. But not for some silly selfish 'oh this is my special spiritual path, don't mind me I'm just over here forgiving myself dutifully and staying separate from everyone'.

Love erases all fear. And of course.. the opposite of love is fear... without love, fear HAS to show up. Once love shows up, love is the LIGHT, and fear HAS to disappear. And it does. It does every time!

Reason to celebrate. Only love is real! And the truth isn't just facts and information and thinking... the truth is FELT.

And what's really surprising to me about God's love is... that... it is being freely offered to me right now without me having to really do anything to earn it... almost as though, I'm jumping right from being in the middle of a long drawn out spiritual path, to the end goal. Like. God loves me NOW... I can be loved NOW... It's very surprising. And it's got nothing to do with thinking about love. It's ACTUAL love. God is love. Not just an idea. Love love love love love love love.

I love learning about miracles.

There are kind of two levels or layers of mind. The higher level is filled with love. It is a mind at-one with others and filled with God’s Will. It has no ego, has let go of its separate will (the authority problem), and is free to perform miracles. This mind is naturally miraculous. It shares the Power of God, which is unlimited. This mind is so holy and so powerful, there is literally nothing it cannot do.

The second layer is accessed via a kind of "descent into hell", aka the separation from God. This lower level is like going into darkness, into separation, into isolation and suffering, into sickness and death. It is here that all of the beliefs in sin, guilt and fear seem to exist. It is here that people choose to die. It is here that all suffering seems to occur.

A miracle, is a HEALING ACT, where a higher-level mind "lifts away" (undoes) the darkness. It’s like the hand of God reaching down into the darkness and lifting up the souls who find themselves trapped there. It brings them back towards God. It restores and heightens communication, because communication means sharing the mind of oneness - the undoing of separation and darkness.

A miracle is an EXPRESSION OF LOVE, which shines with a healing power onto the "starved and thirsty creatures", blessing them with beautiful healing softness and restoration, undoing all signs and symptoms of separation. These signs include all sickness, suffering, pain and death, as well as all emotional states and states of mental illness. All of these are healed because the mind is LIFTED UP towards the light, which dissolves the darkness and causes the symptoms/expressions of a lack of love to disappear.

The miracle lifts away layers of separation which have come between the Son of God and God. All forms of sickness are symptomatic of this belief in separation, and therefore all forms of sickness can be healed by the miracle.

The higher-level loving mind is able to lift away layer upon layer of separation and denial. The result is a *supernatural*, ego-law-defying, sin-reversing, death-reversing, separation-reversing, uplifting demonstration that the mind of love has power over all forms of separation.

The miracle heals from the top down. It is a light which shines upon the darkness and dispels it. This doesn’t just mean, but does include, the healing of the mind, the removal of blocks to awareness, the undoing of false beliefs, and the correction of perception. Yet since all suffering stems from false perception, and all forms of sickness and death stem from it also, all such things are simultaneously dissolved (undone).

"The miracle does nothing - all it does is undo." This doesn’t really mean that miracles have no power and do not cause anything to change. What it really means is, because the ego is entirely a state of "doing stuff", and all illusions take effort to maintain, and all sickness is an act of force, the CESSATION of that effort which comes about through "doing nothing" actually COLLAPSES AND UNDOES what the ego WAS doing, including all of its illusory symptoms and signs and effects. They simply vanish. That vanishing is perceivable and tangible!

The ultimate aim of miracles is therefore the lifting up of the mind to wholeness, the restoration of communication and union, and the healing of all separation. That IS going to entail the un-doing of all the things the ego is doing, and therefore WILL INCLUDE the reversal of all forms of death.

If death means separation or distance from God, as a descent into darkness and hellish nightmares, then the UNDOING of death results in RESURRECTION. This resurrection is not just going to take place "in the mind" and not the body and not the world. ALL of these things are equally parts of the ego thought yssystem. Mental death, emotional death, physical death, all of them can be lifted away and reversed by the miracle worker.

This does also mean that miracles therefore can literally reverse physical death, can literally undo all sickness such as cancer, blindness, damaged or missing limbs, mental disorders, etc. There is NOTHING your holiness cannot do.

Your holiness is also able to do things which you might think do not appear to be useful miracles. IF it were beneficial in raising awareness and increasing knowledge of the fact that the ego’s dream is a LIE, ie would be useful to *literally* move a mountain. If it taught a lesson, showed that the ego’s laws are false, or healed false perceptions in some way, it would be valuable.

When Jesus walked on water, it was not to show off. It was an act to demonstrate, and prove, that the laws of physics have no bearing on the miracle worker. It was a teaching act. When Jesus multiplied food for thousands of hungry people, it wasn’t to show off. It was to demonstrate and use the miracle-working power of the mind, to manifest food out of nowhere, to prove that hunger is unnecessary and people need not suffer. It was educational. Miracles are teaching devices.

Wherever there is suffering, there is bondage to the ego. This means the person is attempting to be far from God. All sickness is a defense against the truth. Everything about the ego and suffering and death is about trying to put more distance between yourself and God. The miracle CLOSES THE GAP and heals the separation, causing miraculous results.

This is also a maximal service that you can render to another person, giving them the love they are lacking, supplying a need from above, from those who temporarily have more to those who temporarily have less. Think of this as all happening on a VERTICAL axis. This is why the course says that miracles are a shift in perception from horizontal to vertical perception. A movement UPWARDS towards God heals and undoes the manifestations of the ego.

Miracles lift you and your brothers up towards Heaven. They loosen the chains, release you of the darkness, and allow you to express and shine a light. That light is a Life Giving force. It has the power to REVERSE DEATH. And it is only by this power that YOU can resurrect back to life, away from the lower state of death in which you find yourself.

Miracles lift you UP from a lower level, at first by having faith in a higher level power (Holy Spirit). Later, you will be up AT the higher level, more able to then RAISE OTHERS UP out of their darkness. Your expressions of love toward them can heal them, undo all of their suffering, reverse all states of suffering and even bring them back from the dead.

Love heals. Love is powerful. Love is ALIVE and gives Life, even to the dead. There is nothing that love cannot do, and there is nothing that cannot be undone. If love could not reverse death, it would be powerless and unmiraculous, and have no ability to return you to Heaven. A belief in death is a belief in the end of miracles. A belief in Life is a belief and a trust in UNLIMITED RESURRECTION and Eternal Life.

The seeming battle going on is really between what is true and what is false.

What is true is Holy Spirit's reality. It is all based on truth. Truth means, it is actually real. Factual reality. Perfect honesty and clarity. A truth that is so permanent and absolute that nobody can change it, because God put it in place.

Down below this, in the battlefield, aka 'level 1' or the ego world or the physical universe, it's all about not-truth. Another word for that is 'false'.

In falsety, there is no actual reality, no facts, and nothing is really happening. In falsety, there is only lies, deception, illusion, deceit and distraction away from truth. This 'level' of the ego is a withdrawal away from God and away from truth, attempting to be its opposite.

So down here in the ego's world we're commonly dealing with illusions, lies and deceptions. We're lost in separation, duality, unreality. Things seem to happen which aren't really happening. Problems seem to appear out of nowhere which aren't even really problems. Our vision becomes fixated on form/matter - "the form of error", since all of it is error - untruth, falsety.

So now really your entire 'spiritual path' can be summarized quite succinctly by saying, it is the transition from false to true. It is your movement away from what is false, which means everything ego, and toward truth, which is everything Holy Spirit/God.

The truth shall set you free, as in, if you access the truth you are accessing a plane of freedom. Truth is an experiential freedom. A state of being. You do not so much need to learn to accept what is false, but only to accept that it IS false, and therefore accept that "only the truth is true".

And so this takes a lot of 'sorting out' of what is actually true and what is not true. You do not get to decide what is true. This is what the Course means by "you cannot establish the curriculum". The curriculum is the subject of truth which you need to learn. You do not get to define what the truth is, that's God's job. You only get to learn it, or to decide "when you take it".

And as you're sorting out, you're mostly going to be dealing with the ego in terms of its mess and its idea of how to wake up, which is to shift around between different forms of falsety masquerading as 'more true'. It will try to become spiritual. It will try to wake up. It will try to access the truth. But it cannot. Ego cannot be truth. Ego = that which is not true. So the problem is that we are attached to the ego mindset - to the false, and we want to KEEP it by holding onto it, and take it into a state where truth exists. It cannot go there. It does not exist anywhere in truth. There is no falsety in the truth.

So it's not that we need to change - ie the ego cannot truly change from being ego. That which is false is always false. Sorry ego, you are not allowed in Heaven. But that means, YOU, what you really are, which is not the ego, but the 'decision maker', needs to decide whether to stay with the ego in ego-land, or leave the ego and go to the 'Holy Land' (in your mind, sorry Isreal but you're just a lump of dirt).

So when 'we' are trying to access the truth or wake up to the truth, to reality, 'we' think that 'we' are going to be able to take whatever it is that 'we' think 'we' are, to the truth. But this 'we' comprises the real you PLUS the ego you. Two identities, not one, but pretending to be one. And this is the main mistake we all make, trying to drag the ego along for the ride. Its sole purpose as 'the false' is to drag us away from truth, and that is all it can ever do. We need to 'separate from it' and change hands, and go be with Holy Spirit instead.

It's good to attach to and identify with Holy Spirit. Notice though that 'you' don't really get to have a separate existence. Either you're immersed in the ego's thought system or you are immersed in Holy Spirit's thought system. And each thought system has its own thoughts. Holy Spirit's thoughts come from God. So that means, either you are going to be filled with ego thoughts or God's thoughts. There are no thoughts that are 'yours' separately - that's an ego lie.

Anyway, rambling on a bit. Wake up to truth ;-) It's good for you.

For Jesus, miracles were natural. We'd call them supernatural because our idea of natural is less than natural.

Each time He performed a miracle, it wasn't that He was shifting his awareness from illusions to truth. He wasn't doing some kind of correction of Himself in His own mind.

He performed miracles BECAUSE He had already gone through a purification process, not in order TO purify himself.

He was doing miracles all the time. Every single day, every hour, every minute He was miraculous.

This idea that a miracle (in A Course in Miracles) means the process of correcting your own illusions, clearly does not hold up against the evidence. Jesus would have run out of illusions a long time prior.

When he raised the dead, multiplied food, walked on water, turned objects into other objects, restored sight to the blind etc, he wasn't in a mode of "waking up". He was able to do these things BECAUSE He had woken up.

All of His miracles were inspired by, came from, and were powered by God's love. His simple willingness to love unconditionally was miraculous. That love was possible because of the removal of the blocks to love's awareness, for Himself, which He had more or less finished already.

If miracles come from love and require love, and if blocks to awareness shut love out, then you could believe that lifting away the block to awareness is a miracle. In a sense, you go from being less miraculous to more miraculous, because you go from less love to more love.

But it isn't the transition from darkness to light that is miraculous. It isn't the process of going from illusions to truth that is miraculous. It isn't the waking up process over time that is miraculous. Miraculous is what you naturally ARE once those processes are complete.

And yet, even without their completion, all that it takes is enough willingness and faith in an unseen truth to be able to bring forth demonstrations that that truth is true. Expressions of love, not just concepts of love.

"The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness" means that miracles occur when the mind is whole. If the mind is very far from whole and there is a lot to be undone yet, you can hardly call the undoing of a thin layer of illusion miraculous. That isn't wholeness.

Just as claiming the atonement once and for all is miraculous, and just as COMPLETE forgiveness is a state of having nothing left to forgive, so too is the miracle an expression of that state of mind. This is why the Holy Spirit, who is in the "right mind", is the mechanism of miracles, because He sees with whole perception. WHOLE perception, not partial.

As we are transitioning from partial perception toward whole perception, let's be honest. Those steps are worthwhile and they bring correction and it is easy to use various course quotes to justify calling this a miracle, but it's not. Miracles become POSSIBLE because of this process.

This is why it was natural for Jesus to perform miracles all the time, and why when miracles are not happening all the time, something has gone wrong. When something has gone wrong, you're in the ego illusion and need some purification, correction, but that is only to bring you BACK to the miraculous mind.

Having faith, from a standpoint of being still filled with illusions, creates a kind of bridge between where you're at and the mind of Holy Spirit. He is still able to be miraculous on your behalf because from His vantage point, He sees with wholeness. He is in a state of CORRECTNESS, which is capable of correcting, except that this correctness also knows that there is not really a NEED for correction.

He can help to correct by showing you only that, in truth, all is forgiven already and nothing need be corrected. That this is the truth. Correction does NOT mean "real correction" as in a change within an illusion which you believe is true. It is the UN-doing of illusions, and it not really a change at all.

You are miraculous because of what you ARE. You are miraculous because you are of God. You are love. And to the unnatural, who believe they are natural, this will appear to be supernatural. Awakened, purified, perfected, in perfect forgiveness, and having claimed the atonement COMPLETELY, you will not STOP doing miracles.

If miracles were just shifts in perception and you had no perceptions left to shift, does that mean you will stop being miraculous? No. The Course is telling just the complete opposite. When you are done shifting your perception to truth, or even as you take steps towards this, miracles will become your RIGHT, and you will share the Will of God to perform them. They will be second nature, happening all the time.

Being miraculous is the way of God's children.

When the mind dreams, it is capable of projecting any kind of image at will. It does not require time in order for anything to "evolve" within the mind's projected images.

The mind doesn't have to wait for time to pass, for its projected images to develop certain states or conditions. It is able to project NOW, absolutely any image.

It can project NOW an image of sickness, an image of a body which seemed to have aged, an image of a baby which was just born, an image of a body in great condition, or any kind of body at any point in "time", with absolutely NO NEED FOR TIME TO PASS in order for that body to ARRIVE AT that condition. It is projected in its "whatever state", RIGHT NOW.

You can easily see this at work when you dream at night. When your dream BEGINS, an entire environment can show up complete with what appears to be qualities and properties which, in time, would have to have taken many many years to establish.

That environment isn't "brand new" looking. It isn't the beginning of evolving an environment. It isn't the start of civilization. It isn't the beginning of the universe. Instead, the mind projects NOW images of bodies already in a state of decay, environments which must allegedly have been "built" by people over time, trees which must have "grown" in order to become as large as they seem, and events which allegedly could only come about through an entire sequences of prior events.

The mind puts all of this in place NOW. It does not take for you to dream for 100,000 years in order to have a dream of a planet Earth in which you are walking around. The dreaming mind INSTANTLY projects what APPEARS to be forms at a certain point in time, with a certain condition. It therefore instantly also invents HISTORY, all of the prior events which SEEM like they must have happened in order to lead to THIS moment. And yet, you only started sleeping an hour ago, and here you are dreaming of a world which has been around for a billion years.

With this in mind, realize this about your current mind also, in your waking states. As Jesus says, your waking dreams and nighttime dreams differ ONLY IN THEIR FORM. The mind that you have now is dreaming NOW, it is projecting an entire universe NOW, it is making images of stuff which "must have taken a very long time to arrive at" NOW, without having to go through ANY of that time.

Therefore, realize this. Whatever is showing up NOW, is an ILLUSION of something which took a very long time to evolve. ANY state of existing in form can be projected INSTANTLY. Any environment, any body state, any experience, any condition, any sickness, any objects, any condition of objects which allegedly have developed wear and decay and weathering can all be projected NOW, afresh, to LOOK LIKE they have been around for a million years. It makes you wonder, if history really exists, doesn't it?

And guess what.... your mind is projecting YOUR BODY in exactly the same way. The way that your body is showing up NOW, HAS NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THE PAST. And the key to understanding this is to understand what a decision is.

The ego's illusion is that, at some point in time, you make a decision. You make this momentary decision and something happens. This decision is then "locked into" in the past and cannot be changed. This is the idea of irreversible sin which you can do nothing to undo, and have to just suffer the consequences going forward. The consequences of this decision then seem to carry over into the future, over a long period of time. For example, it may SEEM as if, in time, you hurt your leg, and thereafter, your body had "leg problems", which seemed to sustain over time, and was "because of" this event which happened in the past. THIS IS NOT HOW DECISIONS WORK.

When you decide something, it means that you are typically choosing a new BELIEF. You are, essentially, making a change of "direction". Like turning corner. You establish a belief in your mind, which you have made be your "new truth", and then you KEEP THAT BELIEF. Because that belief is kept in your mind, it is CONSTANTLY REPROJECTING whatever that belief would produce.

So if a situation comes around where you choose and create an illusion of your leg being hurt, and you then put in place a belief that your leg is hurt, that there were "real consequences", you will KEEP THE BELIEF OVER TIME. Your mind will then continually REPROJECT a damaged body over, and over, and over, and over again.

At any given moment, the body has no existence of its own. At any given moment, the mind is projecting a BRAND NEW IMAGE, an out picturing of an inward condition. At any given moment, the body you had "just now" has DISAPPEARED, and it has been REPLACED with an entirely NEW PROJECTION.

An analogy to this is a digital movie. Movies are comprised of "frames", which are still images. Each frame is a snapshot of a given state of images. The projector (mind) SHOWS one image at a time. It shows a picture of a body in a certain state, then the frame ends, and is removed, and then the NEXT FRAME REPROJECTS an entirely *separate image*, nothing whatsoever to do with the previous image, showing a DIFFERENT PICTURE of a body.

Since this happens very very quickly, at every quantum of time, this creates an ILLUSION OF ANIMATION. Also, and this is the really key point... if the mind keeps projecting a very SIMILAR IMAGE across multiple frames or moments, it creates ****AN ILLUSION**** that there is something "consistent" or "continuous" present "over time".

This ILLUSION leads you to believe that there is some object, some form, which exists "through time". And because it seems to exists through time, YOU start to believe that IT HAS A LONG-TERM EXISTENCE OF ITS OWN. That somehow it is a "thing", an "object", a discrete ENTITY, that somehow continues on existing ON ITS OWN. *This is entirely an illusion*!

The course tells us that at NO point in time does the body really exist, being either an anticipation of the future, or a memory of the past. This is the illusion I am talking of. The *appearance* that some "thing" continues over time and therefore, is a consistent "thing" IN TIME, being maintained OVER TIME, that has ITS OWN EXISTENCE. The body does not have its own existence. It is a temporary IMAGE, which is SWITCHED OUT constantly, BY THE MIND, and replaced with a new image, every tiny instant of time.

Now. Realize then, that when you make a decision, forming a belief, you KEEP that belief in place OVER a long period of time. You keep it in the mind. The mind is a projector of the body "image", and the presence of a false belief in the mind will project an image of that false belief. It is not projected ONTO the body. It is projected AS the body. The body is not a discreet thing in its own right. Therefore, the mind DISTORTS its perception and PROJECTS a distorted, malformed, corrupted, disabled, limited, damaged picture. It therefore shows up as a picture of a BROKEN BODY, proving that the mind has not been healed because the mind believes separation is truth.

IF YOU KEEP that belief "over time", your mind will keep continually REPROJECTING body IMAGES (yes plural, over time, billions of them), which will create the ILLUSION that there is a "long term sickness". It will also create the illusion that the "cause" of the sickness was way in the past, at some single moment in time. IT WAS NOT. This is the ego's attempt to pretend that sin is in the distant past, you can never go back to the past to change your momentary decision, and therefore you are stuck with the consequences FOREVER. This is a bullshit lie, because this is not how decisions work and you can CHOOSE AGAIN AT ANY TIME.

The cause of the sickness is the content of the mind *NOW*. The mind NOW has a belief in sickness and NOW it is projecting a sick body. And the mind is perfectly capable of creating ANY ILLUSIONS OR IMAGES necessary in order to make it seem consistent, justified, believable, obeying "ego laws", even showing seeming evidence from "the past", or changes "over time", because the mind - just as when you DREAM at night, is perfectly capable of creating an ENTIRE UNIVERSE RIGHT NOW as an INSTANTANEOUS PROJECTION. Th year 2017 IS NOT the result of all previous years of "evolution", it is being projected NOW, including every sign and "evidence" that it SEEMS like it took billions of years to evolve to this point. That's an ILLUSION. The dream is being dreamed IN THE PRESENT and automatically INVENTS pictures of "there must have been a past" AT THE SAME TIME.

So, in terms of miracles of healing, what needs to happen is that the mind is healed of ITS BELIEF in some lie, some false ego belief. This false ego belief had been MAINTAINING LONG TERM SICKNESS showing up AS a sick body, because the MIND was "sick" for a long time. It had nothing to do with moments in time or one-off decisions. Decisions ARE CONSTANT. You change your mind by changing which ROAD you start walking down, and a you KEEP walking down that road ENDLESSLY until you change your mind and take a different direction. That's how decisions really work.

So if you seem to have "long term sickness", it has absolutely nothing to do with the body itself, it has nothing to do with the past, it has nothing to do with anything that happened outwardly over time, it has nothing to do with the world, it WAS NOT CAUSED BY ANYTHING EXTERNAL, it is ONLY being caused "now" by the beliefs that you are holding onto NOW, REPROJECTING that body image to look "similar to before", because the BELIEF is still similar to before. If the belief has not changed, what is projected is not going to change either. And that creates the illusion that the body is a "thing" in its own right which gets "its own sickness" and "has a mind of its own".

This ILLUSION of long-term sustained bodily conditions is responsible for deluding people into the belief that the sickness exists ON ITS OWN, or that the body ITSELF gets sick, or that something happens TO the body, or that the body is happening TO the mind. It is also entirely the reason why people who believe THE ILLUSION of continuation of the body, also believe that the body's condition WILL CONTINUE TO BE SICK, when the mind wakes up. This is EGO BULLSHIT! It is not true whatsoever. It's entirely an illusion.

There is NO REASON why the body should stay sick if the mind is healed. The ONLY REASON the body is even appearing WHATSOEVER, is because the mind is projecting it. The body is not showing up as a result of you "being born in the world." Your parents did NOT create your body. Your MIND put YOUR BODY into your mother's womb and manifested its form entirely ON ITS OWN, without any "real" processes occurring on the part of the mother. Everything to do with "having babies" is part of the ego's ILLUSION that what you are is born FROM THE WORLD, and not from your mind.

Since your mind is PROJECTING your body image RIGHT NOW, afresh, every moment, a complete new projection, complete with all the "stored beliefs" and "kept self-attack" which the mind is holding onto, causing the body to SEEM to show up again and again and again in roughly the same "form".... there is absolutely NO REASON WHY your mind could not project a COMPLETELY PERFECTLY HEALED BODY RIGHT NOW. This is what miracles are capable of showing!

That the mind can heal the body but the body cannot heal the mind, proves the mind MUST be stronger than the body. Every miracle demonstrates this!

The mind PROJECTS the body. Every instant. Every moment. As an outward picturing of what the mind believes IN THAT MOMENT. The body does not show up FOR ANY OTHER REASON or as an effect of ANY OTHER CAUSE. The body is not caused by the world, or by matter, or by forms, or by anything external. Mind makes the body.

So guess what happens when you change your beliefs in your mind? Guess what happens when you undo your belief in separation from God? Guess what happens when you stop believing in attack? The body will CONTINUE to SHOW UP AS a projection of the content of your mind, but because your content has changed, the body that shows up WILL BE DIFFERENT!

It is entirely possible, therefore, for ANY AND EVERY alleged form of sickness, TO BE HEALED INSTANTLY! Jesus says this himself: "The patient could merely rise up without their aid and say, "I have no use for this." There is no form of sickness that would not be cured at once." Realizing that your mind's projections are occurring IN THE PRESENT, and that the past DOES NOT EXIST and has no influence over the present, should show you (if you get this), that when your mind changes, your body image MUST CHANGE. Your mind WILL project a different image, to reflect the change in beliefs.

The body CANNOT STAY SICK if your mind changes its beliefs. It cannot stay sick because IT HAS NO LIFE OF ITS OWN and it is purely a mental projection. Nothing else can make the sickness stay. Nothing else in the world or in time can cause the sickness to stay. THERE ARE NO CAUSES outside of the mind. The body is a results of YOUR DREAMING IT!

This should tell you that there is absolutely no grounds whatsoever for believing that sickness in the body will "stick around on its own" when you wake up, that somehow you will become "at peace with sickness", that you can be "happy about dying", that "sickness will stay" when the mind is healed, that you need to learn how to be at peace "in spite of sickness", or that it's even the teaching of the course that sickness is real and will CONTINUE ON ITS OWN when the mind is in a state of enlightenment. ABSOLUTE LIES! Makes no sense whatsoever, is absolutely untrue. This is NOT what happens. This is not how the mind works. Believing any of this bullshit demonstrates that your mind HAS NOT BEEN HEALED, because it means you believe in a reversal of cause and effect, your mind is continuing to maintain defenses against truth, and therefore the mind CANNOT BE AWAKE.

The state of the body is a DIRECT REFLECTION of what the mind PUTS OUT THERE, based on ITS BELIEF SYSTEM and the content of its sense of SELF. The body is a depiction of "this is what I think of myself". ALWAYS. It never deviates from that, it has no will or mind or power of its own to choose otherwise, NOTHING can make it change against the mind's will, and there are NO CAUSES external from the mind that can influence it's condition. NONE. Mind is cause, body is effect. Period.

THIS HAS TO MEAN, that when the mind TRULY and genuinely overcomes its obstacles to peace, is TRULY genuinely healed of beliefs in separation, uses of the body for attack, defenses against truth, long-term false beliefs and so on... the body that "shows up" being projected out from the mind's inner condition, MUST, *ABSOLUTELY MUST* show up as in PERFECT UNDISTORTED HEALTH!

I quote:

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use if for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all." - ACIM

Key term here.... "CANNOT BE SICK" when the mind is holy. CANNOT. Will not maintain sickness, has no sickness, literally is IMPOSSIBLE TO BE SICK PHYSICALLY if the mind is healed. I know many people have resistance to this idea and think it's either not important or an incorrect focus or not what atonement is for. But atonement WILL BRING HEALING TO THE BODY because the mind that is holy will only project a holy image, i.e. an image of wholeness - a body which is not lacking or limited or broken in any way. If the body continues to show up as sick, something IS WRONG WITH THE MIND. Or to put it more accurately, the mind will STOP PROJECTING A SICK BODY and will only project a healthy body. Healing doesn't happen TO the body, it happens to the mind and the mind projects the body form to match.

This is law. This is how mind functions. The body is the mind's projection, it's dream. It ALWAYS CORRELATES to the state of the mind. Healed mind MUST only project a healed body, a sick mind MUST only project a sick body. This is also why Jesus teaches that we are meant to DEMONSTRATE THAT WE CANNOT BE HURT BY OUR BROTHER, by only ever showing him a HEALED BODY, proving that whatever he did or even tried to do, HAS NO EFFECT on your body because it has no effect on your mind, and your mind is totally in charge of what kind of image it projects. This therefore proves, if you are holy in mind, showing only a holy body, that your brother IS INNOCENT, through PROOF, because his attack DID NOT CAUSE YOU OR YOUR BODY TO CHANGE!

For miracles, there are no orders of difficulty, there is no hierarchy of illusions, and there is no PAST that has power over the present. Bodily states have nothing to do with time, and nothing to do with history, and nothing to do with the body seeming to be a "discrete thing" that someone can point to over time and say, that's a consistent object in its own right. It is not. It is a freshly projected DREAM, right now, this instant. When the instant is being projected from a mind of holiness - the miracle of the mind will completely dissolve and NOT PROJECT an image of sickness.

When the miracle occurs therefore, which is a movement towards God and an undoing of separation beliefs in the MIND, the body MUST SHOW THE CHANGE in some way. It can't refuse it, it can't block it, it can't prevent the projection of the mind's healed condition. The body has NO POWER over the mind whatsoever. It has to OBEY. And so this means it is ENTIRELY POSSIBLE, as Jesus said above, that if there is an instant of a miracle, shifting to a vertical perception and undoing the illusion of separation, which means letting go of a long-term belief, the mind CAN be healed INSTANTLY, and therefore it CAN project an image of the body having been healed *INSTANTLY*. One moment there was terrible sickness and suffering, the next moment it was simply not there. One moment the body seemed practically DEAD as a picture of the mind's belief in death, the next moment it was showing up as "alive", to represent the fact the mind is now ALIVE.

Instantaneous! No delay whatsoever. Miracles in this way produce a skipping of TIME, they completely ignore ego laws, pay no attention to the past, have no regard for illusions of difficulty or severity or importance, and create an interval of time in which there is a shift towards God, into invisibility, which is why they heal THE MIND, which then projects a healed body IMAGE. This can happen absolutely instantly. One instant there was terrible sickness, the next, gone. Healed. Boom!

The illusion of a continuous body with continuous sickness is entirely within the LEVEL of the ego's dream. Miracles and the power of the MIND OVER MATTER, extends from an entirely higher LEVEL where the mind is the CAUSE of everything that shows up AS THE DREAM. Bodies that move, mountains that move, planets that move, is all being DREAMED by the mind. It has no will of its own. It has no effects of its own. There is literally nothing that your HOLINESS cannot do. There is nothing your MIND cannot do. Mind NEVER LOSES its creative power, even IF it is mis-creating images of false bodies on false planets in a false universe. Even IF it is creating an illusion of time, history, the past, a future, or anything other than realizing WE ARE PROJECTING ALL OF THIS ENTIRE UNIVERSE THIS INSTANT. It did not come from the past. It is happening in this illusion NOW.

Just as in our dreams at night, which differ only in their form, the waking world, planet earth, and all the people in it, are being projected NOW, in whatever condition they seem to be in, because the mind projecting them has false beliefs NOW, which MIGHT be similar to beliefs it had "just a moment ago", creating an ILLUSION of things being maintained over time. Nothing is being maintained over time but a KEPT BELEIF which has not been let go of. Time is an illusion. There is nothing keeping us asleep and nothing keeping planets in motion other than the mind CHOOSING TO DO SO OVER TIME.

There is no reason whatsoever in all the universe why you cannot be completely healed and whole in physical form and mind, RIGHT NOW. If you were to choose this, it would happen for you, right now. If you are showing sickness, and if you've had sickness for 30 years, it is because you are believing in sickness RIGHT NOW. It's got nothing to do with the past or anything that came before. NOTHING. You create your "reality" by creating your DREAM of what you want to be true RIGHT NOW. History has no power over the present - that's an ego illusion.

At no point in time does the body really EXIST, because it is only ever a projection in the NOW, not in time, and it does not even really exist in the now. A mind which has BELIEFS IN SEPARATION, will project a picture of a self WHO IS SEPARATE. This is what we call "the body". It's not a body. It's the MIND showing up with "body-formed" CONTENT, AS its BELIEF in being a separate individual. Such thoughts take "form". The body APPEARS because the mind is regarding ITSELF (spirit) as limited and separate in some way. It has false beliefs and a false sense of identity. This is what MAKES THE BODY.

To put this even more clearly, how you think of yourself is how you will SHOW UP. If you regard yourself as sinful and guilty, you will show up with a FORM OF SIN AND GUILT. As the course says, "the body is the idea of sin made real then projected outwards"!.... Literally this is what I've been saying in this post. if your mind believes "you" are "made of sin"... YOUR MIND will manifest an "image" of a "sinful self", which will "appear" as what people call "a body". That image is not really who you are. But it's what you think you are. Whatever you think you are, you will show up AS! If you think you are AN ILLUSION, you will show up AS AN ILLUSION. That's what makes the body appear. If you do not believe you are an illusion AT ALL, you will show up as - HAVING NO ILLUSORY BODY AT ALL - pure spirit.

WHEN the mind no longer has *ANY* false ideas about its identity, has no beliefs whatsoever, is aware of God, and does not believe in ANY form of victimhood, reversal of cause and effect, that the world is ANYTHING but your OWN DREAM, and that it is ALL coming from YOUR MIND, THEN.... what happens to the body? IT DISAPPEARS COMPLETELY!

A mind which is being entirely true to spirit, true to the true nature of YOURSELF, will show up as. .... TRANSPARENT! Transparency means total honesty. Total willingness to be aware of and ACCEPT WHAT IS, as it is, which means, no distortions, no illusions, no thoughts to the contrary, no limitations placed on SELF, and therefore the mind PROJECTS ETERNITY, projects LOVE, projects abstract God, projects LIGHT, projects absolute total lack of "forms of error", and therefore, STOPS PROJECTING A BODY. To those in the world, this will appear as though the body DISAPPEARS ENTIRELY. To the mind that is disappearing the body, IT IS NOW AWARE that the body WAS ALWAYS based on false beliefs, and has NO REALITY of its own, and NEVER EXISTED, and HAS NO TRUTH, and is not being KEPT by the PAST or the WORLD or any other cause outside of the mind. Therefore the mind stops supporting it, stops MAKING IT, and it stops showing up at all!

This is how Jesus made his body DISAPPEAR, as given in the "extra notes to Helen" after the course, where he stated that he finally recognized the last illusion - that death was not real, and therefore, had no further need for the body, and therefore, caused it to DISAPPEAR, because all that was TRUE, all that could REMAIN, was pure spirit at one with its mind, fused with God, in absolute eternal truth and atonement. This is how YOU LEAVE THE DREAM. Through truth, not through death, not through sickness, not through suffering, not through the body going through a death process. Through making it VANISH, because the mind HAS NO ILLUSORY CONTENT IN IT, and therefore STOPS PROJECTING THE BODY!

There is no body. There is no world. There is no sickness. There is no death. There is no sin. There is no guilt. There is no fear. There is no separation. There is no time. There is no space. There are no forms. There is no planet earth or physical universe. There is no consistency over time in the world. There are no sicknesses which last on their own. There is no life or power or will or mind in the body or in the world. The world has no effect and is not the cause or the birthplace of anything.

You do not need a body to exist because you are IMMORTAL SPIRIT. You are as God created you, AS SPIRIT, not as an ILLUSORY BODY IMAGE. You are not a projection of a sick mind. You are ONLY IMMORTAL SPIRIT. This is the only truth about you. Everything to do with the body is a lie.

The body will and MUST become "healthy" BEFORE you awaken. It cannot stay sick if the mind is to be healthy. A healthy mind WILL project a healthy body. The body must go through "becoming healthier" "over time" as the mind gradually is healed. Sicknesses must fall away "over time". A sick body is proof that the mind IS FURTHER REMOVED from God than a healthy body. "A broken body is proof the mind has not been healed." This is why, before awakening, bodies WILL and MUST become healthier, and therefore health will be enjoyed more, and healthy bodies feature in HAPPIER DREAMS, which precede awakening.

Making the body healthier per-se is not the ULTIMATE goal, because the body ITSELF is a picture of separation and sickness. But before that ultimate goal is reached, the body WILL BE HEALED and sickness WILL be undone and the dead WILL BE RAISED and all forms of "things which cannot be undone" will be undone.

I quote:

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given unto you in Earth and Heaven. There is nothing you cannot do."

Miracles CAN DO ANYTHING, CAN HEAL ANYTHING, CAN REVERSE ANYTHING, even death. If miracles could not undo death, we would be STUCK HERE FOREVER. There is NOTHING your holiness cannot do. You are the Son of God! You are not at the effect of the world and you are IMMORTAL.

Looking for God outside? He's inside you. In fact, you have to look inside first, find God there, then look out with God, in order to see God.

When I had an experience of God this wasn't clear to me. I saw God seemingly in everything external, in addition to my tremendous inner awareness of him, but then it faded. And then I sought to reconnect externally because that's where I'd seen him. But God wasn't first found outside and taken in, he was inside my mind and awareness and extended out. I found him inside because I went within and above, not because I sought outward. In fact all sickness is a form of external searching. Seeking out there for God will take you away from where he is.

God is in everything you see when awareness of love's presence is in your mind. Not because God is out there, but because you are shining his light from inside of you. You look first within and project out what is in you, then you see it. You can't find God "out there" in the world. There is no world out there. Everything external is artificial and unreal.