When Jesus says that nothing can happen without our consent, and that nobody can die without their own consent, what he's saying seems pretty extreme.

We are so used to living in such a way that we constantly believe things happen by accident, or that something can "go wrong", or that there is unfairness and injustice, or that victims have nothing to do with asking to be victimized, or that war is a haphazard chaos.

Yes these are very common perceptions and this is what we're up against, these beliefs and ways of perceiving which fall for all kinds of illusions and trickery. On the surface it definitely appears that all of these things are true, that nobody wants to be victimized, that bad stuff just happens, that things go wrong, and that we don't want to die.

But that's the challenge, you see. That's the spiritual challenge, because what many do not know is that this entire world is a big trick, a set up, orchestrated by those to whom nothing happens by mistake, and who have such power of creation that if they so choose it, it will happen, and nothing else will happen. I know this sounds like some kind of 'God' pulling the strings. But in truth you are God-like.

So all these beliefs about having not chosen, about not having freedom, about being affected, about stuff happening that we don't want, and about the horrible idea that death is just going to happen to you against your will, ALL of these have to be questioned and undone completely. Because they are all false. They are all lies, that everyone is falling for 24/7. Yet as Jesus says in ACIM, you made sickness and death and you can abolish both.

This is why A Course in Miracles is so radical. The Truth flies in the face of how everything appears in this world. It goes against how everything is set up and how everything was deliberately designed to look like it proved we did not choose this. This entire world is a cover-up in which the Son of God is pretending to hide from a made-up enemy, and He very much is responsible for animating every single character and event in this dream regardless of whether He appears to suffer at His own hand.

Attempting to 'wake up' from the illusion of this world does not seem to be easy. It's a huge mind-fuck. As the Course says, we do not escape this illusion through death, but by TRUTH. Only the real Truth can set you free. And as a certain movie says, "you can't handle the truth".

Well, you can handle it... when you're ready to accept it. Because it's a pretty huge Truth that is not at all like what this world seems to suggest is true. And to go there, to be open to it, seems like a huge journey somewhat 'against' the world. But everyone is making this journey, and sooner or later everyone will come to realize what the Truth really is, and this entire universe will disappear.

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.

He also says nothing can happen without your decision to make it happen, and what you choose to happen must happen, and nothing else can happen. There are no accidents or victims.

This completely flies in the face of the typical experience of most people, whose lives seem filled with cases of apparent victimhood, victimization, unfairness, accidents, things going "wrong", blame for responsibility, and all manner of lies which cannot be true.

But how is it possible that someone chooses death?

Imagine a perfectly happy, sane person who absolutely deliberately wants to die, just for fun. Imagine that this person very carefully orchestrates a plot, which allows them to seem to be killed by someone else, with absolutely no involvement of their own. This person puts on such a powerful "performance", like an actor in a play who pretends to die, that most bystanders believe wholeheartedly that the person died against their will.

But imagine that you know better, and that you know every single part of this person's death was chosen by themselves. That they literally did it to themselves. And there wasn't even the slightest bit of room for error, or mistakes, or other people being involved. And yet, this person very very cleverly painted a picture for the whole world to make it seem like they absolutely did not want this. "Poor me, woe is my, how could you do this, gasp etc".

And so this person puts on a spectacular show, for example entering into tremendous fear, getting down on their knees and begging for their life, when secretly they know exactly what they are doing and absolutely cannot be killed by anyone else. Yet they try to make it look like someone else is doing it to them. They will even hide their own tremendous power, they will shove all of their sense of responsibility under the carpet, trying to create the *illusion* that they are not choosing this at all. And the only part of themselves which they will allow the world to see is a tiny spec of identity represented as an innocent victim, who did not choose this terrible end.

So basically, this is someone faking their own death, or at least the circumstances of how or why they died. It's a huge story they made up, a lie, to cover up the fact that they themselves were the one who dealt the final blow to themselves. And yet, all these other people came to be blamed, all these other people became involved and falsely accused, and absolutely nobody suspected that this person made this happen on their own.

If everyone else involved were awake, they would not for a second buy this story, and would not be participating, and nobody would take this person's melodramatic self-destruction seriously. Nobody would become lost in the story of it, the illusion of it, and nobody would for a second be convinced that this person isn't doing it to themselves. All the facts would be out in the open for everyone to see.

Yet when other people are also asleep, and do not see the whole picture, and do not recognize how the person is making choices, and do not recognize freedom, they too will seem to "participate" in the story and make it seem much more plausible that the person is not the one destroying themselves. They believe that the person is a victim and is suffering death against their will, because THEY TOO believe in being victims who are destroyed against their own will, and do not want their own cover to be blown.

It is a cover-up, with accomplices. And so there are roles to be played and even contracts formed, by the person, to arrange a hitman so that nobody else suspects that they were arranging their own death. And at the last minute the hitman would be blamed and scapegoated and the person would be laughing all the way to the grave.

This is what happens, every single time that someone dies.

Death cannot happen if you do not choose it. But that choice is very extreme, as Jesus says, very absolute. It is not by half measures. Any choice for the ego is a choice for death. Any belief in illusions is a choice for death. And any belief that false lies are the truth, leads to death.

So if you are awake, let's say you are Jesus, looking upon a person who has gone through an extraordinary sequence of 'events' and transformations, to make themselves look like a terrible victim, on purpose, by choice, and yet at the end of this process most people are believing the person is a 'genuine victim',... Jesus would look and he would SEE the whole truth, he would RECOGNIZE the person's absolute freedom, and he would KNOW that every single step of everything that has happened has been by the person's choice. No matter how it seems on the surface. The person has created such an impressive illusion of death and victimhood that everyone falls for it and only the awakened can see through it.

And so if the person were to attempt to "die", or even if they seem to bring about their death, Jesus could be standing there taking none of it seriously, laughing at death, taking it as the con and the joke that it is, the deception and the lie that it is, believing it not even for a second. And then Jesus might say, as he did, "get up and live", or "Lazarus, stop being an idiot and pretending to be dead, come back to life. It's a lot easier".

And then the person would suddenly miraculously 'come back' to life. Or rather, they would own up to the fact they were doing this to themselves, AND that death is not FINAL because death is just denial of life not its removal... and would snap out of their silly mood and perk right up. And everyone would be like, well that's a miracle right there. Jesus raised the dead. Well, death is not permanent, and it is just a performance, underneath which is an immortal spirit pretending to be dead - an eternal unkillable being pretending that it can die. So yeah.

Death is not the end. It is not real. And you cannot seem to go through it unless you choose to. So you literally are faced with a life or death choice. Do you choose to live forever, or pretend to die (again)?

A powerful lesson: ACIM 152 - nobody dies without their own consent... this blows absolutely all victimhood out of the water...

"152: **The power of decision is my own.**

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. And no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is.

You may believe that this position is extreme, and too inclusive to be true. Yet can truth have exceptions? If you have the gift of everything, can loss be real? Can pain be part of peace, or grief of joy? Can fear and sickness enter in a mind where love and perfect holiness abide? Truth must be all-inclusive, if it be the truth at all. Accept no opposites and no exceptions, for to do so is to contradict the truth entirely.

Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true, and nothing else is true."

"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."

This means that your mind is CONSTANTLY CAUSING STUFF TO HAPPEN, AT ALL TIMES, WITHOUT STOPPING.

And that means, regardless of whether you think you have the power to make things happen or not, whether you are very powerful or totally powerless, YOU ARE ALWAYS CAUSING IT WHATEVER STATE YOU ARE IN.

Therefore even if you are in suffering and sickness you MUST BE MAKING IT HAPPEN.

Even if you are dying you MUST BE CHOOSING IT.

Even if you are unhappy because you think someone did something and that you're "held" in this unhappy suffering due to forces outside your control, IT IS NOT TRUE, YOU ARE CHOOSING TO SUFFER.

Your mind never stops causing. It never sleeps. It is always ON. It is always creating or projecting. YOU ARE PERMANENTLY CAUSAL.

Therefore if you can realize this, it means literally that NO MATTER what seems to be happening or what seems to have caused it, YOU CAUSED IT - this is the secret to salvation - and therefore YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR MIND AND CAUSE SOMETHING ELSE. Therefore NOTHING happens outside of your decision, so WHATEVER you are experiencing YOU DID CHOOSE IT!

This is precisely reflected here:

"Decisions CANNOT be difficult. This is obvious if you realize that you must ALREADY have made a decision NOT to be wholly joyous if that is what you feel. Therefore, the first step in the undoing is to recognize that YOU ACTIVELY DECIDED WRONGLY, BUT CAN AS ACTIVELY DECIDE OTHERWISE."

"I must have decided wrongly because I am NOT at peace.

I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise.

I WILL to decide otherwise, because I WANT to be at peace."

This is all about you being 100% FULLY RESPONSIBLE for having DECIDED - CHOSEN - to experience what you are experiencing. If you are afraid, unhappy, sad, grieving, sick, dying, in pain, confused, mentally ill, whatever it is, YOU HAVE CHOSEN IT. You HAVE decided to experience it, and you have ASKED FOR IT. And you have received as you have asked and it has been given you.

This is what the Song of Prayer pamphlet is talking about - that you are ALWAYS ASKING and your prayer is always being answered, and therefore whatever you are receiving YOU DID ASK FOR, and therefore if you want something else you need to "raise your prayer" to a higher happier level - a happier request.

Whenever you think that something is happening that you did not ask for, or that you have no power to stop or change something, or that you are stuck with suffering, or that there is no way to change situations, YOU ARE WRONG. You are mistaken and you are UNCONSCIOUS of the part of your mind that is CHOOSING IT. Therefore you HAVE made a wrong decision. You have to totally own it. And you have to admit that YOU decided it yourself. And then you can also start to realize that you WANT to decide something else, and that IF YOU DO, you WILL EXPERIENCE SOMETHING ELSE, because your decision making has POWER.

This means, in no uncertain terms, that you are NEVER A VICTIM. Victimhood is completely impossible. It is a lie. People who are in a victim state are STILL DOING IT TO THEMSELVES, they just are not aware of it. They are STILL CHOOSING IT AND WANTING IT. Even if it looks like they have absolutely no clue why it's happening to them against their will. They are NOT VICTIMS. They are deliberate choosers who are unconscious of their decision making and who have decided to HURT THEMSELVES.

Jesus affirms that "you cannot be hurt UNLESS YOU HURT YOURSELF" and similarly "those who are sick do not love themselves for if they loved themselves they would heal themselves." He also confirms that "no-one dies without their own consent" because you HAVE TO CHOOSE DEATH in order for it to happen.

This is THE CENTRAL TEACHING of A Course in Miracles, that you have absolute unlimited POWER, EVERYTHING that happens you have chosen, NOTHING happens without your consent, and therefore you ALWAYS are receiving what you are asking for. Therefore if you do not like what you are receiving, CHOOSE AGAIN.

"At least I can decide I do not like what I feel now. " "I want another way to look at this." "Perhaps there is another way to look at this, what can I lose by asking?"

This is Jesus's black and white, absolutely no-exceptions teaching. There is NO SUCH THING as a victim. There is NO SUCH THING as an accident. There is NO SUCH THING as dying against your will. There is NO SUCH THING as "becoming sick" without having decided to be sick. There is NO SUCH THING as unwanted suffering. And there is NO SUCH THING as losing the power of your mind to CAUSE.

"This is a course in CAUSE, not effect". That's what this means. Jesus is trying to get us to see that we ONLY CAUSE. We are NOT AT THE EFFECT OF ANYTHING WHATSOEVER! This is the secret to salvation - that you are just doing this all to yourself. There is NO OTHER WILL. There is no alien will. There are no enemies. There are no external forces. Nothing has power over you. Nothing in the world has the power to make you ill or sick or weak or afraid. Nothing can happen to you against your will.

Therefore if stuff is happening that you seem not to have chosen or do not want, it is ONLY because you DID CHOOSE IT but you are unconscious of that choice. That's why you need to remove the blocks to awareness so that you can BECOME A CONSCIOUS DECISION MAKER. Then you will NOT CHOOSE TO HURT YOURSELF! And this is why it leads to salvation, because literally there IS NO CAUSE OF YOU other than God, and you CANNOT BE CAUSED by anything or anyone else in existence. Therefore if YOU STOP CAUSING YOURSELF HARM, you will be permanently invulnerable! IMMORTAL!!!!

We are simply unconscious day-dreaming lazy choosers who have forgotten our own power and are victims of ourselves and nothing else. This is all we have to own up to and correct. To reclaim our INHERITANCE and our right to freely choose. To claim our freedom from fake stories of external un-asked for victimhood, and to erase ALL trace of believing that there is ANY POWER OVER YOU from anything other than yourself. Not even God goes against your will. Not even Jesus goes against your will.

Your power, shared with God, in holiness, is unlimited. "God is unlimited, there is nothing He cannot do." "There is nothing my holiness cannot do." "There is nothing He (holy spirit) cannot do." UNLIMITED, UNOPPOSED WILL POWER. There is NO ROOM in that for any kind of "it happened because I didn't choose it." or "it was an accident" or "didn't intend it" or "didn't ask for it."

There are no real victims. This is Jesus's message. We are only experiencing the consequences of our OWN DECISIONS. "Heaven is a choice I must make." If you so choose, nothing can go against your will. Your will is as powerful as Jesus's will. It is ALL CHOICE.

To the ego, being powerful means recognizing that there are significant powers outside of you which you have to FIGHT WITH in an attempt to dominate and "over-power" them against their free will. It sees power as a way to FORCE things to happen aggressively. This kind of power is DISEMPOWERING to all involved.

To God, and in the truth of ourselves, REAL POWER means the recognition that THERE IS NO OPPOSITION. There is no OTHER POWER. There is no enemy (thus all are innocent). There is no alien will. There is no hand of oppression or "cause of death" that can come along and choose FOR you when you will suffer and die. Death is always chosen. And so if you do not choose it, you will not die. That's the responsibility you have to own up to.

YOU HAVE THIS POWER NOW. IT IS OPERATING NOW. IT ALWAYS HAS BEEN OPERATING. IT ALWAYS WILL BE. It's just a matter of what you are USING IT to do. And if you are using it to hurt yourself, that's a mistaken decision. "Holy Spirit will undo the consequences of my wrong decision if I will let Him. I choose to let Him by allowing Him to choose for (in favor of) God for me."

You are only ever afraid of yourself. You are your own worst enemy. You are your only victim. You but victimize yourself. You have no opponent. There is no cause outside of you.

You are FREE TO CHOOSE! Choose again. Only by having the POWER TO CHOOSE EVERYTHING do you have the power to choose HEAVEN!

"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."

Recognize in this passage, further confirmation that when the mind is healed, the body CANNOT BE SICK.

Elsewhere Jesus tells us that sickness is merely another form of guilt. If a guiltless mind cannot suffer, it is because without guilt, there cannot be sickness.

Jesus tells us "sickness now is gone, with nothing left to which it can return." ... telling us that it is literally IMPOSSIBLE for sickness to remain or come back, because without guilt, it is impossible. Sickness is MADE OF guilt. It is a thought of sinfulness.

Sickness does mean separation from God. Separation from God does include the mental belief in separation, AND it includes the physical universe and the physical body. All of the content of the ego’s dream of separation is part of "sickness". All of it is governed by this same irrefutable law that when mind is healed, the sickness cannot stay.

This applies to all levels and forms. And it is because of this, that the entire physical universe WILL DISAPPEAR when the entire sonship relinquishes the last ounces of guilt and sin. This is also why when the body is finally recognized as an idea of sin ("the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards"), it too will DISAPPEAR - not die. The dream is left by truth, not death.

This does NOT mean that the mind transcends sickness and the sickness remains, with the mind being all happy and peaceful "in spite of sickness". A broken body PROVES the mind has not been healed, and a healed mind shows it’s PROOF of healing by demonstrating a body free of sickness.

While sickness remains in the body, we are accusing our brothers and the whole world of attacking and causing us to suffer. We are being victims, defending against truth, and are in denial of awakening. We also put sickness into the body in order to PROVE that we can be hurt. Why would we do that, if we are at peace and awake? We not only would not, we could not.

It is easy to say that sick bodies and healthy bodies are all the same. However, this is the experience of the final atonement of the entire sonship, and if it is not being experienced, it remains a concept. To experience your own body with a HOLY mind, causing the body to be free of sickness, is the first step in "personal atonement".

To undo and disappear the body is a major accomplishment. But until ALL BODIES ARE HEALED because ALL MINDS ARE HEALED, only then when *everyone is experiencing holiness* does it matter that all bodies are the same illusion. Only then, as the entire sonship wakes in union, is it experientially true that all bodies are the same illusion, and at that point, there CANNOT BE ANY SICK BODIES.

No one dies without their own consent. No one is sick without their own consent. The secret salvation is that you do it all to yourself. You choose it. Somewhere, somehow, you choose it. Consent to suffer is not awakening. Consent to be sick and die is not peace. If people do not wish to continue to suffer, they must CHOOSE AGAIN. And they have the power to do so.

Everyone has the power to undo ALL of the suffering of the world. Otherwise, how will you be the light and salvation of the world if you are half dead or worse? Suffering is optional, provided you want the conditions that accompany health. Healed mind, healed body.

"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. And no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose." - Lesson 152

This is an extremely black and white level of responsibility. If you give your CONSENT, then sickness and death will occur. If you do NOT give your consent, then sickness and death of the body become IMPOSSIBLE.

Paraphrase: What you use the body for it becomes to you. If you use it to attack it becomes weak and sick and dies. If you use it for love it is healed and sickness is reversed and death becomes *IMPOSSIBLE*. "A sane mind heals the body."

This as Jesus says is a CENTRAL TEACHING of ACIM - that sickness and death of the body are OPTIONS THAT YOU CHOOSE (or not).

The body is not supposed to die or go through the death process. The body is not supposed to get sick. Death is nothing but another more extreme form of sickness, and sickness is just an earlier form of death. It's all the same thing. The ego mind attacks and kills the body as a result of a belief that sin and death are real, in an ARROGANT attempt to symbolically kill the Son of God. If you do not have that belief, you will not attack the body, it will not become sick, and it cannot die.

"Use it (the body) 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."

The mind makes ALL decisions about the body's condition, including whether it is sick, and whether it dies. It CANNOT DIE if the mind does not CONSENT and CHOOSE to kill it. "From the ego came sin and guilt and death" .... "The glitter of guilt you laid upon the body would kill it. For what the ego loves, it kills for its obedience".

The body then becomes a "symbol of immortality" in the dream, as a DEMONSTRATION that your mind truly believes in God's laws over the egos. It is useful purely as a communication device.

"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."

You will then retain the body, which is really nothing, but in this state effectively is invulnerable and cannot be destroyed. This produces a supernatural protection because "a broken body is proof the mind has not been healed" and therefore if the mind IS healed it WILL heal the body. It must.

"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."

When you have ceased attacking the body, "a sane mind heals the body", the body will be restored miraculously to "perfect health" and become "holy", in the dream. It is used to bring God to those who need help, to perform miracles and raise the dead. And then when its usefulness is done, the body is DISAPPEARED, not laid down on the ground to rot and die. The dream of death is not left by death, but by truth.

Anyone whose body dies does so because THEY BELIEVE IN DEATH AND HAVE CONSENTED TO DIE. Death is a choice against God's Will. Death is NEVER a doorway out of dreaming. Death is DENIAL OF GOD.

Jesus describes how he finished dreaming not through death but through the recognition that the body was nothing/illusion and thus made it literally disappear:

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it.. 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... To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. 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 an illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand."

Death of the body is optional and is a FAILURE to live according to the Will of God. Whatever you believe you demonstrate. If you demonstrate death, you MUST believe in death. If you do not believe in death, you CANNOT demonstrate death. We are to demonstrate "immortality" of the body, in the dream, before we can stop dreaming. "There is no death, the Son of God is free" applies ONLY AFTER PROVING IT by making the body free of death, as demonstration of your actual acceptance that you are under no laws but God's.

"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

Look at the pivotal second line. "What you use the body for it will become to you."

So this literally means, the body *exactly matches* what you use it for.

This means, if just a moment ago you were using the body for one purpose, and you change your mind, the body MUST change. If you then change your mind back to how it was before, the body MUST change back as well. There ARE no other causes of the body’s condition besides the mind.

The state of the body directly matches, is tied to, and absolutely has NO SEPARATE WILL OR POWER over the mind’s choice of what it wants to express.

If the mind chooses to express beliefs in sin and death, the body will SHOW UP as a picture of sin and death.

If the mind chooses to express acceptance of atonement, the body will SHOW UP as a picture of perfection and immortality.

The body is a projection from the mind. Mind changes, body changes. Mind is cause, body is effect.

It is ONLY the belief that the body has a mind of its own, a will of its own, that it persists without your input, that it came to exist without your decision, and that it can die *against your will* - - all of which is a belief in MAGIC and VICTIMHOOD, that ever sustains the idea that the body can still be sick when the mind awakens.

There is no loophole in cause and effect. The idea that there are some effects which "escape" the influence of the mind’s causality, somehow caused by "some other power" - alien will - is a belief in *separation* between cause and effect, which is an illusion.

There are no OTHER reasons why the body can sustain sickness "on its own" or "because of the world" or "because of a pre-existing sickness". The body is ONLY ever a picture projected by the mind, REFLECTING its beliefs perfectly. If the mind changes, the body changes.

No-one dies without their own consent. The only way this is POSSIBLE is by mind having ABSOLUTE POWER over the body at all times. Otherwise, death could happen "for some other reason". It would also mean, when the mind wakes up, the body can STILL BE DESTROYED by some "other" will or force. This is impossible if no-one can die without their own consent. Their own consent is THE ONLY CAUSE of sickness.

Therefore, a sick body cannot possibly be maintained at all if the mind is free.

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

We cannot optionally, or technically, demonstrate sickness if we are to awaken fully to the truth. It is metaphysically impossible, meaning it is literally impossible for the body to be sick if the mind is not sick.

"Because it is holy it CANNOT be sick, nor can it die."

"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. For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my Will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them, and Him Who has created me."

and

"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. And no-one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is.

You may believe that this position is extreme, and too inclusive to be true. Yet can truth have exceptions?"

and

"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."

and

"No-one can die unless he chooses death."

"No-one dies without their own consent."

"You cannot die unless you choose to do so."

and

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

"The power of decision is my own." OWN IT!

When we are playing the role of victim, of being at the effect of anything, we are out of touch with the power of decision. We think that stuff is happening against our will. Then we enter into a problem-solving mode, where we ask, "how am I going to deal with this?"

In the victimhood we feel trapped and disempowered, as if we have no choice. We seem forced to deal with whatever is happening, as though it is happening all on its own. We seem to be left with no option but to deal with it, and then we start trying to find ways to make it go away, or to mitigate it and find the least painful way out.

The thing we're then missing is that we actually chose whatever is happening, we are making it happen, and we can choose again. We have a power of decision and we are the rulers of the universe. We do not have things happen to us. We are immortal beings. We act deliberately and intentionally and everything that occurs is consciously chosen.

If we do not like what we are getting, we must have made a wrong decision because we are not at peace. We have to recognize we made that decision and we want to choose otherwise because we want to be happy. So this means owning our power and owning our choice and owning what we have already chosen, so that we can choose something else.

We then have to step into the position of decisiveness, which is fearlessness, in which we exclaim that we have the power to choose and we decide what WILL happen. Instead of dealing with cleaning up problems or trying to fix issues or trying to find ways to build defences against these horrible things that are threatening us, we simply elect to stop making such bullshit and we powerfully choose something else.

I must have chosen whatever is happening, because nothing can happen against my will or without my consent. If I do not like it or feel like it is looming over me or happening without my consent or as if it is random or chaotic or just came out of nowhere, them I am very mistaken and am not being responsible. Spiritual responsibility requires owning the power of God and using it to make a better choice.

Instead of playing with options or trying to mitigate problems, we instead decide what we do want, we completely ignore the problem, we don't bother getting into problem management or problem solving or defences, and instead we simply flip the entire mental conversation to a new path. I choose this, instead of that, and this will be my future, and this is what I want, and I elect that this happen as I have requested. And so it is.

We no longer are in the business of putting up with things, tolerating, making do, putting out fires, diminishing, avoiding, fixing things up, or trying to prevent a bigger disaster. We are now in the business of choosing what we want, and only this can happen, and nothing else can happen. We are not at the effect of the world or anything in it. We are choosers and creators and wielders of God's power.

"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."

"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."

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

This is the law of cause and effect. Where there is cause there must be effects. Where there are effects there must be a cause. There cannot be effects without an ONGOING cause. As soon as cause is taken away, effects must vanish. If something is continuing, so is the causing. When the flashlight switches off, there is no light. Wen the flashlight switches on, there is light. It is entirely fiction that causes are moments in time which trigger something and produce a chain of effects which are completely divorced from the original cause. There are no effects unless the original cause is STILL THERE.

Everything is deliberate. Everything is chosen. This is because you always have free will. This can never be violated. If anything is to occur, you must consent to it. Anything you do not choose simply does not happen. Your mind causes all events and effects. Nothing in the world can change you or affect you or decide for you. The body has no ability to choose anything. It is entirely an effect of your mind.

"Your mind makes this decision as it makes EVERY decision responsible for the condition of the body."

"No-one dies without their own consent."

""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."

If you are unhappy, you chose to be. If you are sick, you chose to be. If you are dead, you chose to be. If you are healing, you chose to be. If you resurrect, you chose to be. If you are not at peace, you chose to be.

"I must have made a wrong decision because I am not at peace. I made the decision myself."

"Heaven is a choice I must make."

"No one comes to the atonement except willingly."

Just as you choose and cause everything that happens, so too you can choose the opposite.

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

"There are no accidents in salvation."

"It is you who has the power to dominate everything you see, merely by recognizing who you are."

The world does not turn without a mind making it turn. Plants do not grow without someone willing it. Bodies do not become sick without a mind using them for attack. Death does not occur without a deliberate intention of suicide. Suffering cannot happen unless you attack yourself.

Literally nothing anywhere eon any level can EVER happen without someone choosing it. Recognize this, take back your power, stop destroying yourself and wake up to freedom.

It's a matter of responsibility. Is death of the body caused solely by your mind and is your mind solely responsible for whether or not it happens? Do you actually have the freedom NOT TO DIE if you so choose? Can you prevent death, and cause the body not to die? Can you reverse death and restore life?

Or, does death only happen through external causes, things outside of you, the environment or other people, weapons and wars, poisoned food and toxic water? Are we at the effect of an alien will and alien power not our own, such that we do not ask for death and do not cause it to happen, seeing it as happening solely against our will?

And if death does seem to happen through causes NOT in our own mind or power or choice, will we simply "write it off" by relegating it to an illusion, describing it as unreal, dismissing it as meaningless and not important, as a way to continue the belief that death - if it happens at all, even in a dream - happens BECAUSE OF the dream happening to us?

Are there actually accidents? Do people fall off cliffs through a mis-step? Do planes crash through some mistaken fault that seems random? Do planets collide just through sheer force of the laws of physics? Are we all fated to be swallowed up in a supernova someday when the sun explodes, with no choice or power to prevent it? Are we powerless beings?

Some people like to relegate all things of this world to a bucket of illusions, slap a label of unreality on it, and toss it under the rug. But we can't be dismissing this and writing it off. Yes only the soul/spirit is real and has eternal life and nothing real can be threatened. Yes bodies are illusions and don't even really exist.

But let's look at it another way, right now you have a body, and it has an illusion of existence. There are billions of them. People's minds inhabit them and walk around in them. And for the most part, most of these bodies are sick and have issues. Some much worse than others. And all of these issues are forms of death - as the course says, sickness is but a little death. So most people have a little death going on, "a form of vengeance not yet total", which later becomes total.

If the body seems to "become sick", is that because something happened OTHER THAN your mind and its power? Because if that is the case, then death does in fact have power over the mind. If mind cannot choose away from it, cannot undo it, and did not cause it to begin with, then mind has NO WAY that it can see itself as not at the effect of the dream.

If death just "happens to you", you are a victim. If there can be causes which are beyond the mind, beyond your power, beyond your control, you are a victim. It doesn't matter that the world is just a dream and real things can't be threatened. At the body level, mind is supposed to have power over everything. Might I remind you that your self is ruler of the universe, and nothing is supposed to happen other than what you decide.

There is NO POWER in the view that we do not have power over death. There is NO POWER in the view that death doesn't matter because bodies aren't real. There is NO POWER in the view that we can have bodies becoming sick "on their own" or staying sick "on their own" WITHOUT our consent. There is NO POWER in having bodies die "against our will". And there is NO POWER in pretending that this is all okay to happen "because it's an illusion."

The only place where there is any power, is where your mind has power OVER these things, is RESPONSIBLE FOR these things, CAUSES these things, and therefore HAS THE POWER to choose otherwise. A Course in Miracles is a course in cause and not effect, it is a course is reclaiming your POWER. And might I remind you that Jesus says that our minds are extremely powerful, capable of creating worlds, of moving mountains, and that we are supposed to reach a state of resurrection which means "the surmounting of death."

There is no surmounting of death by just writing it off as an illusion. If your mind does not have the POWER to prevent it from occurring, and does not have the power to raise the dead as Jesus did, then the mind has not reached a state of resurrection. A Course in Miracles' curriculum ends in the resurrection, in which death is OVERCOME FOREVER. Which means, no more sickness, no more death, and no more reincarnation.

It is NOT ENOUGH to accuse the world of causing sickness and death to happen. It is NOT ENOUGH to shift responsibility for the body's condition onto a dream. It is NOT ENOUGH to claim that someone else caused your body to be sick. It is NOT ENOUGH to suggest that death can continue to happen to the body against your will. It is NOT ENOUGH to take a position of continued POWERLESSNESS over death, in which death remains victor at the end of the day, as it proves again and again that a separate alien will is stronger than your own power of decision.

I will remind you that A Course in Miracles makes this unequivocal statement:

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

DO you see where it says that no-one dies without his own consent? That means that if you DO NOT give consent, through your mind's power and responsibility, death WILL NOT happen. That means having power OVER death, not merely sidestepping it or jumping onto a theological high-horse trying to be holier than thou. This is real responsibility. It is BECAUSE nothing happens without your consent that you HAVE the possibility of salvation.

If sickness or death can ever happen or be maintained or continue in a any way, through any cause or responsibility OTHER THAN your mind and its power and choice, YOU DO NOT have any hope whatsoever of salvation. It means there is a power that has power over you which can keep you in hell and suffering for as long as it wants. It means you cannot return to heaven and can be locked into a hellish experience forever. It means endless reincarnation and never waking up. It means death has power over God.

Jesus is teaching us to be powerful responsible creative beings. To reclaim the power of God, which is not only unlimited, there is nothing it cannot do. It can have power over all forms of sickness be they mental or physical. It can have power over all matter and energy and every force in spacetime. ONLY IF we have consented to and thus chose AND CAUSED sickness and death to occur, are we ever in a position to CHOOSE AGAIN, and choose otherwise, choosing NOT to die.

"Swear not to die, thou holy Son of God! You make a bargain that you cannot keep. The Son of Life cannot BE killed. He is immortal as his Father. What he is cannot be changed. He is the only thing in all the universe that MUST be One."

You are responsible for whether or not sickness happens. You are responsible for whether or not death happens. You are ruler of the universe. Nothing happens against your will.

"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."

EVEN IN THIS WORLD ..... even in the illusion/dream of Earth, you RULE your destiny. You have power to choose what happens, and what does not happen. If sickness happens, YOU CHOSE IT. If death happens, YOU CHOSE IT. YOU MUST CHOOSE NOT TO CAUSE SICKNESS AND DEATH, and it is within your power to do so, because you are 100% responsible for everything that happens.

If you in any way assign responsibility for death to ANYTHING anywhere other than your own mind, you have a victim consciousness and cannot be healed. A mind that believes in BEING AT THE EFFECT OF THE WORLD, is not an awakened mind.

I am gradually learning that there is POWER in making decisions. And I don't just mean some kind of self-help "make more decisions to be productive" kind of thing. I mean, literally it has a supernatural kind of power to it. It's tied into miracle working. It accesses and wields the power of the mind to CAUSE.

Everything in the course points towards becoming more decisive, empowered, certain, clear about what you do or do not want, being responsible for choice, ending victimhood, realizing that nothing can happen to you against your will, and reclaiming the ability to CHOOSE. And in that choosing, you actually CAUSE stuff. And what you do not choose, you do not cause.

Here is what "My self is ruler of the universe" says from Lesson 253:

"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. For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my Will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them, and Him Who has created me."

It is also very clear that being in fear is being in indecision. Fearfulness is an attempt NOT to choose, just as "death is an attempt to make no decisions at all." The opposite of that is to make ALL decisions or to be aware that you choose everything that happens to you. ie nothing happens to you, it happens FROM you.

This is the secret to salvation - that you are doing this to yourself. And the secret to salvation, and forgiveness, and atonement, and miracle working, all recognize that you have a POWER in you to choose. And whatever you DECIDE, you CAUSE TO HAPPEN.

Let's put it this way. YOU ARE ALWAYS CHOOSING.

Everything is a choice. "Heaven is a decision I must make". "No one dies without their own consent."

The problem is that we do not believe we are always choosing. When we say things like "such and such is going to happen to me" as though we are not choosing it, we are actually choosing it. When we lay down and just accept that we're in for stormy weather, we are actually choosing it. "I have no neutral thoughts" - because you are always using thought to choose what you will experience.

The whole thing about perception and projection stems from the fact that you perceive what you CHOOSE to perceive, having put it there yourself through your decision.

"I must have decided wrongly because I am not at peace" - the entire prayer and the text prior to it clarifies that if you are not experiencing joy *YOU* MUST have DECIDED NOT TO. And we are supposed to own up to 100% responsibility for that. And to then reclaim that power of decision, and CHOOSE AGAIN. But if we don't recognize that we are always choosing or have the power TO choose, and that choosing MAKES STUFF HAPPEN, then we will just remain in a state of half-baked victimhood and uncertainty and things just seeming to happen on their own.

Since we've been immersed in fear and uncertainty and victimhood for so long, it has become "normal" to us. We've become used to it. We don't realize that we HAVE a choice in every situation and that the things we are experiencing are precisely what we ASKED FOR. We do not realize that we are, as the song of prayer says, ALWAYS PRAYING and thus always asking AND always being answered in accordance with what it is we are asking for. And if we are asking for suffering, we will make suffering. And if we are asking for joy, we will receive joy.

It's all too easy to be lost in states of fearful-mindedness where it does not seem like you have any say in the matter. That you have no power, are not choosing, stuff is happening outside of your decision, things happen that you do not want, you don't seem to be able to do anything about it, and then you start to believe that you don't even HAVE any kind of "power". Like, if you even DID make a decision, you think that the making of the decision ITSELF - the making up of your mind - has no power to CAUSE anything to occur. But this is not true.

"The mind is very powerful, it is always creating and lever loses its creative ability." The whole thing about rendering the faculties of decision ineffective in an attempt to block the mind's power speaks to this. We do not want to admit that THOUGHT HAS POWER. And in fact, "who would have imagined that thought and belief could combine in a power surge strong enough to literally move mountains." This comes about through DECISIVENESS, certainty, confidence, wholeness, strength, truth, love. The qualities of a healed mind is a POWERFUL mind which chooses and is AWARE that it chooses, and that in making choices CAUSES stuff to occur. Miraculously. Powerfully.

I am still struggling with this myself because all too often I am in the egoic sleeping state of not realizing that I CAN CHOOSE something else. But I've also been finding that when I DO make a decision, it immediately DISPELLS fear. Just last night I was cleaning the bathroom and using chemicals and was getting a bit nauseated from the fumes, and after becoming anxious about it for a few minutes I DECIDED with a firm "I am...." decision... "I am not threatened, I am safe". Instantly a whole cloud of fearful energy around me vanished.

Also not long ago I was seeing signs of a sickness showing up and I got mad about it. I REFUSED that it would be allowed to happen. Jesus said "decide". I decided FIRMLY that THIS WILL SIMPLY NOT HAPPEN. Then I walked away. Next day there was no sign of it. And I had no fear or doubt or second-guessing or wondering about it because of the certainty with which I decided. The firmness or assertiveness and power of making a clear decision.

There is more to this than simply choosing which direction to go on a path. It's not some weak little change of plans. When you become decisive and fearless and certain "I am not doubtful but certain, I am not afraid but all powerful", you become quite POWERFUL and that power actually can CAUSE. It can cause stuff to happen. It can cause stuff to not happen. Just as "my self is ruler of the universe" says. Nothing can come to you unbidden by yourself. You choose it all! No-one dies without their own consent. Nothing happens to you that you do not choose. The world contains no causes, nothing can bring oppression or make you ill or weak or afraid.

We are constantly CHOOSING. We need to step into this power, into this state of "consciously choosing". Being decisive. DECIDING. I had another example just recently where I had some heartburn and was worried about it. Out of the blue, while talking to Holy Spirit, I DECIDED "I am healed." I have no idea where it came from. Instantly Holy Spirit went to work doing some kind of miracle in my body and the heartburn was healed.

Jesus also says that when the PURPOSE of any sickness is recognized as being NOT NEEDED (no defense needed) there is no sickness that will not disappear and be healed instantly. That such healing is automatic. That simply by DECIDING to accept truth without fear and being WILLING to let go of suffering, it can simply vanish. This is the power of our mind. Getting in touch with your WILLINGNESS puts you in touch with the Power of God's Will!

We don't realize how powerful our minds are. We don't recognize it because we're been hanging out in the ego land for too long, drifting from one victimy reaction to the next. Just allowing stuff to happen, going along with it, passively aggressing against ourselves, just laying down and "letting" stuff occur - through our own unconscious choices. It's not that we are not MAKING choices all the time, it's that these choices are being made from an UNCONSCIOUS DEATH WISH and it's causing all kinds of havoc. We need to become AWARE of our decision making moments, our moments of decisiveness and choosing. We can choose what we experience!

I find this choosing to be powerful especially in relation to some kind of statement about myself, termed as "I am..." or "I am not". You don't have to just let stuff carry on "by itself". That's an illusion. Nothing happens "on its own". There isn't any kind of alien will or external causality. You ARE already making everything happen that you experience, you are just doing it outside of awareness. This is part of why we must remove blocks to awareness so that we can stop unconsciously making bad choices that hurt ourselves.

There is power in decision. It is the antithesis of fear and death. YOU CAN CHOOSE NOT TO DIE. And in fact, if you do die, you still chose it. "No-one dies without their own consent." It's just a matter of whether or not you get in touch with that CHOOSING and you USE that power of decision to choose otherwise. You want to choose otherwise because you want to be at peace. You can CHOOSE that. Death is a decision that you make, just as "heaven is a decision I must make." And when you choose Heaven, death becomes IMPOSSIBLE because it cannot happen WITHOUT your consent. If you do not choose it, you are free from it forever.

There is a whole workbook lesson on this as well, Lesson 152 - "The power of decision is my own." Lesson 152. Here's how it starts:

"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. And no-one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is.

You may believe that this position is extreme, and too inclusive to be true. Yet can truth have exceptions? If you have the gift of everything can loss be real? Can pain be part of peace, or grief of joy? Can fear and sickness enter in a mind where love and perfect holiness abide? Truth must be all-inclusive if it be the truth at all. Accept no opposite and no exceptions, for to do so is to contradict the truth entirely.

Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true and nothing else is true."

Sometimes what "the secret of salvation" reveals is not pretty. It very simply means you do everything to yourself. On purpose. Deliberately.

That reveals some sometimes shocking and hard to accept truths.

Such as that, if I am not at peace *I* must have chosen not to be at peace. If I am sick, I must have made myself sick. If I am unhappy, I have deliberately chosen to be unhappy. If I am experiencing something that I don’t think I want to experience, it’s because I CHOSE TO and WANT TO.

These are hard to admit to when you’re in the thick of denial. You’d rather keep believing there is a reason outside your control that caused your suffering.

What Jesus is trying to get us to see, and this is very simple, is that as the dreamer of the dream, and as the ruler of the universe, we MUST be the one who makes everything happen. We PUT IT THERE. We decide what will and will not happen.

This calls for extremely responsibility. It is the total end of all victimhood. And it also means, total freedom. This is why it leads to salvation.

You can be free from ALL suffering, including all states of sickness and death, by simply CHOOSING not to create those states. You can reverse all situations and heal all problems. "The power of decision is my own."

"You cannot die unless you choose to do so." "No-one dies without their own consent." "You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

This is the ONE LESSON that the Holy Spirit teaches. When you have learned this one thing and live it fully, you are done.

There is no room in this for being a victim, OR being victimized against your will. It is YOUR DREAM, so if victimization happens, YOU MUST HAVE MADE IT HAPPEN.

Unless this is true, there is no way out of hell. Unless this is true, someone or something else has the power to end your peace and prevent your awakening. You do not want to ever undermine this truth, or you are giving away the only way to return to God.

Always remind yourself in any situation, I must be doing this myself. I must be choosing this. I must want this. No-one else is doing this to me. If I am not happy, I chose not to be. If I am hurt, I hurt myself. This applies NO MATTER THE FORM of the attack or who seems to be the attacker. Even if it doesn’t look like you did it, you did. And this of course is very radical.

"Heaven is a choice I must make."

*I* MUST have made a WRONG DECISION because I am not at peace.

*I* MADE THE DECISION MYSELF.

Nothing happens without your consent, not even death. You are either choosing life or death. All death is suicide.

This is something that few of us want to look at. I don't like looking at it or talking about it either.

But there is a DEATH WISH in our mind which is literally deadly, and is the cause of all death and suicide. It must be undone if you are to surmount death forever.

The decision to consent to death occurs at the moment you believe sin is real, not later. Anyone who believes sin is real, HAS consented to death. However, this doesn't mean you cannot change your mind.

Believing in real sin means you believe you have attacked God, causing him to change or be at the effect of you. Since God was innocent, your "willing against his will" seemed unjustified, and this therefore JUSTIFIES GOD'S ANGER. You reason that God SHOULD be angry with you, because of what you DID do to Him. It proves and supports your belief in sin having real consequences.

So by believing in real sin, you automatically but into the belief that God's wrath is now going to enact revenge. And this means, you believe that it is GOD's WILL that you be dead. This means God is against you (because you are against Him) and therefore is your enemy.

Believing that you therefore cannot find forgiveness or love from God, and there is no way to return to LIFE, your ONLY OPTION LEFT is to head towards death. And so with a sense of shame and guilt, which keeps the sin intact and builds upon it, you head off alone with your tail between your legs. You reason that you "might as well die". You see NO other option because LIFE and forgiveness are off the cards.

What follows after that is simply years of suffering and sickness and unhappiness only to end in death. Death then seems INEVITABLE, precisely because SIN DEMANDS DEATH. The inevitability or sense of fate stems entirely from that initial belief in sin, that "the wages of sin is death", that sin demands guilt, guilt demands punishment, and punishment brings death.

Jesus speaks of how people come into the world to suffer a while, wither and die. He speaks of how no-one dies without consent. Consent TO DIE is given at the instant you believe in sin, not later. What happens later is merely the "onset" of dying or preparation for dying. Jesus describes also how even children come into this world, only to find that love abandons them, they grow old, become sick, suffer and die, and not ONE of them but believes that God is cruel. They believe God is cruel because they believe it is God's WILL that they suffer and die and could see no other option.

Sadly, although it is not real and really we should laugh, nevertheless billions of people choose to die. Or rather, have chosen to. We are perpetual diers, coming into bodies repeatedly, driven by guilt, trying to escape God, only to enter into suffering and sickness and "inevitable death". This is ALL driven by the death wish - the belief in sin. It is this belief ALONE that is responsible for justifying death.

If you did sin, death is inevitable. If you did not sin, LIFE IS INEVITABLE.

This is when as we are purifying and healing and correcting and forgiving, we MUST make sure that we uproot the belief in real sin. Otherwise we are leaving the roots of death in our mind. We must confront this belief. It can be dark and vicious. It can be terrifying. I can seem completely true. You can experience the death wish itself as a strong desire to die. It is not pretty. But you MUST NOT allow it to be true or to act based on it. It has to be undone and shone away, shown to be FALSE.

When you accept atonement and can recognize that you DID NOT SIN IN REALITY, or against God's will, and God has not been hurt, and therefore you MUST BE INNOCENT, this is an acceptance of your ENTITLEMENT TO LIVE. This is the point at which you UNDO THE DEATH WISH. Only in accepting atonement do you accept RESURRECTION and surmount death. Death is literally made IMPOSSIBLE in the atonement. "Only atonement can be said to cure."

Atonement cures death. This is what we need to choose. If we do not seem to WANT to die, even though underneath we secretly DO WANT TO, then we need to look at this, be very honest and own up to this choice to believe in sin, and CHANGE YOUR MIND, so that you stop believing that you sinned for real. Otherwise you are keeping the death wish. And that death wish will find a way to "make you dead". Eternal life is attained through the complete undoing of ALL DEATH through the undoing of SIN.

When there is no sin, there can be no death. Death comes FROM sin. It is the consequence of sin, the payment for sin, the atonement for sin, and the effect of sin. Without sin, there is no death. You must un-believe sin and accept that you HAVE NOT SINNED, in order to overcome death entirely.

If you are immortal, nothing can victimize you.

In order to see yourself as victimized, you have to pretend to be mortal.

To be mortal, you have to attack your own immortality.

Having attacked your immortality you will perceive yourself as vulnerable and weak.

In weakness you will believe that you are vulnerable to attack and have been attacked.

And having been attacked, and having denied that you set this up yourself, you will accuse someone else of doing it.

Then you will be lost in projection believing you are being affected by the world and the people in it.

But the secret of salvation simply reminds you that your own attack thoughts - death thoughts - are attacking your own invulnerability.

And therefore what you have done to position yourself as mortal, as a victim, is entirely your own doing from the inside out, and what appears to be done from the outside in is absolutely nothing.

You have simply tried to pretend you can die, and then you've blamed it on the world. You're even willing to make the body suffer and die if it means accusing everyone else of sin.

This is all a disguise and a game of death that you play to pretend you can be a weak helpless victim.

In truth you cannot be weak or helpless or a victim. You are immortal and permanent and unchangeable and have the power of God in you.

You can never be a victim unless you victimize yourself. And what God created can never be hurt.

"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. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you."

"Turning the other cheek does NOT mean that you should submit to violence without protest. It means that 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."

"Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way, for that is not God's Will for His Son."

"They were not created to enable you to HURT yourselves through them. They were created to CREATE with you."

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

"Whenever you consent to suffer pain, to be deprived, unfairly treated, or in need of ANYTHING, you but accuse your brother of attack upon God's Son."

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die. I am not a body. I would recognize my reality today."

"His holiness gives life to you, who CANNOT die because his sinlessness is known to God, and can no more be sacrificed by you than can the light in you be blotted out because he sees it not."

"Now do we live, for now we cannot die."

"Yet you CANNOT crucify God's Son, for the Will of God cannot die. His Son HAS BEEN redeemed from his own crucifixion, and you cannot assign to death whom God has given eternal life."

"What He created can sleep, but it CANNOT die. Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF. Yet God's Son cannot will death for himself, because His Father is Life, and HIS SON IS LIKE HIM."

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do."

"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. "

tl;dr ... but it's a forgivable mistake.

Heaven is an environment of spirit, of sharing and openness, of oneness and love. It permits the shared overlapping presence of many created beings. All of spirit PERMEATES each other and PASSES THROUGH each other.

Remember that "nothing real can be threatened." Heaven does not permit any part of the environment to act against any other part. It does not put up boundaries, there are no walls to keep things out or in.

Everything has access to everything at all times. There are no prisons, nothing to imprison, and nothing to attack the prison. There are no objects that are solid, with surfaces that collide, or which can attack or damage other objects.

In heaven, there is nothing acting against the freedom of will. There is nothing to oppose the will of God. There is no way to will against anyone. This produces an environment where there are no COLLISIONS between things, there are no hard surfaces that keep things out, there are no separate wills or forces which can act upon objects and cause them to change or move against their will.

In the separation from God, we introduced an idea of SIN. It's the idea that will can be used against will, that you can attack and affect something without be affected, that one thing can act upon another without its consent, that something can be hurt with no power to stop it. It's an idea of destruction and damage, of sickness and death.

This idea alone produced what we call SPACE TIME, a whole second order of "reality" rooted in the idea that one part can be separate from another, that one thing can act upon another without its consent, and real irreversible effects can be produced. Where one thing can act upon another thing against its will and change it forever.

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

SPACE TIME is an environment, a system of thought in mind, completely dependent on the idea of sin. The idea of attack. That one thing can act against another. That there can be a war, a conflict, and a COLLISION. It is a world of attack on the will of God.

"The world (spacetime) was made as an attack on God."

This is why we have here physical matter, with objects which can act upon other objects without their consent. A rock can fall down a mountain and slam into a tree. The tree didn't ask for this. The tree is changed irreversibly. This is sin. Physical sin. One thing acting upon another without its consent.

It requires that there be solid surfaces. There has to be a resistance that is strong enough to REPEL something. This is why physical matter has atomic forces. The repulsion, a form of unwillingness, PUSHES AGAINST other things. It allows two objects to push against each other, thus affecting each other, moving each other, changing each other. Without solidity, sin is impossible. Without OPPOSING FORCES (wills) solid matter cannot exist and cannot have any properties.

"The world of bodies is the world of sin. For without a body sin is impossible."

A body, a solid material physical object, be it human or animal or a mountain or a planet, is required in order to have sin. There has to be a separation, to keep the things apart. This takes the form of materials which seem to have mass and solidity. These two "separate" things can now act upon each other independently, not sharing a will, not sharing a mind, not sharing interests. They are in CONFLICT with each other constantly.

Conflict and war and murder and attack and sin are BUILT IN TO SPACE TIME. It is its fundamental nature. The entirety of spacetime is an hallucinated image, a PICTURE, of what it would look like if heaven (God's Son) were attacked against its will, complete with forces acting upon each other and opposing each other and conflicting and damaging and destroying.

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

One thing acting upon another thing against its will. That's the root of all of spacetime, the tiny mad idea, the violation of God's will, the attempt to oppose reality. The mere idea of FORCING something to happen TO something OTHER than (separate from) oneself. The idea of sin, of murder, and of death.

Because now if you can use power to cause/will a change in something else, and it changes, and the change is IRREVERSIBLE, that is the idea of sin. If I throw a brick through a glass window and the glass is broken and the brick is chipped, these are effectively PERMANENT changes. The broken window is now THE PROOF OF SIN, and testifies that someone DID throw a brick through the window. So long as the window remains broken, the proof is still there. And the window will never be the same again.

The ability to DAMAGE, to destroy, to attack, to rot and decay, to change anything at all, is the idea of sin. It's sort of like, we've tried to suggest that heaven can be attacked, hurt, changed, destroyed, and mangled into some new form. The entirety of spacetime is testifying to this at all times without end. Even when the objects are not touching. Even when they do. Even when the planets are far apart from each other. They are still at war.

It is an entire system of war, conflict, attack and death. The important thing to realize is that WITHOUT the idea that will can act against will, ALL of this is impossible. You cannot have WALLS, you cannot have OBJECTS, you cannot have BODIES, you cannot have PLANETS, you cannot have attack or murder or destruction, you cannot have MATTER, without the idea of sin.

Heaven is a system of total access. Spacetime is a system of denied access. Heaven is a system of everything being shared. Spacetime is a system of nothing being shared. Heaven is a system of nothing being separate or kept apart of unable to merge or overlap. Spacetime is a system where everything is kept apart and nothing ever joins or shares. They are TOTALLY OPPOSITE to each other in nature.

This also means that you CANNOT take Earth, bodies, space or time, INTO heaven, and keep it. They are absolutely incompatible. One denies the other. Sin is a "lack of love". You cannot take a lack of love INTO love and have it still BE a lack of love. Nothing about its LACK nature can be maintained if there is love. Just as light shines away darkness and REPLACES the darkness. You cannot take the darkness into the light and have it still retain its dark properties.

Earth, human bodies, space and time, are all ideas of sin and darkness and a lack of love. They will NEVER be that which they deny. They cannot be integrated into heaven because they ABSOLUTELY REQUIRE and DEPEND ON a LACK of heaven for their nature. As soon as you introduce the oneness, sharing, lack of walls, lack of hard surfaces, lack of collisions, lack of spatial separations, that is true of heaven's nature, there is nothing left to SUPPORT matter existing at all in ANY way. Earth DISSOLVES in the light and CEASES to exist. It is made of separateness.

You will not be able to "walk on the surface of the earth" in heaven's reality under heaven's laws. There are NO surfaces. There is NO gravity. There is no COLLISION between feet and ground. There is no SEPARATENESS to keep you from sinking into the planet. There is no POSSIBILITY of Earth or bodies whatsoever there.

What you CAN do, is you can adopt heaven's laws and viewpoint and look up the world of sin with forgiveness. It forgives the world BECAUSE of the world's limitations. It recognizes that the world (spacetime/earth) is not REAL sin, it is an ILLUSION of sin. And that really it is just A MISTAKE. Earth is a mistake. Spacetime is a mistake. It is FALSE. Not attacked, not condemned, simply nothing.

This is a key point which people need to really deeply realize. Spacetime is totally opposite to heaven. "Earth, which is heaven's opposite in EVERY way." There are no collideable solid material objects in heaven's reality. The world, earth, space and time, all bodies, must eventually be LET GO AND FORGOTTEN. Because they are nothing. And they cannot exist WITHOUT sin and death.

"Without the idea of death there is no world."

"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."

"And FROM this error does the world of sin and sacrifice arise."

"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."

"From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not."

"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."

"Sit quietly and look upon the world you see, and tell yourself, "The real world is not like this. It has no buildings"

"How long can contradiction stand, when its impossible nature is clearly revealed? What disappears in light is NOT attacked. It merely vanishes, because it is not true."

"The body is NOT attacked, but merely PROPERLY PERCEIVED."

"The world will end in an illusion, as it began. Yet will its ending be an illusion of mercy. The illusion of forgiveness, complete, excluding no-one, limitless in gentleness, will cover it, hiding all evil, concealing all sin and ending guilt forever. So ends the world that guilt had made, for now it has no purpose and is gone."

"The world will end with the benediction of holiness upon it. When not one thought of sin remains, the world is over. It will not be destroyed nor attacked nor even touched. It will merely cease to seem to be."

"The body is the symbol of the world. Leave it behind. It cannot enter Heaven."

"Forgiveness is this world's equivalent of Heaven's justice. It translates the world of sin into a simple world, where justice can be reflected from BEYOND the gate behind which total lack of limits lies."

"Forgiveness turns the world of sin into a world of glory, wonderful to see."

"Let us unite in bringing blessing to the world of sin and death."

"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."

Everything about this world points in the direction of death. "All its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death." It was designed to do so. Our job as beings from another world, is to demonstrate that we are not under any of these laws, all of them can be broken, and that it is possible to reconfigure the body to symbolize eternal life here in the dream. A body that shows health and vitality and life, has no scars, has no damage, is perfectly functioning, rejuvenated by the Holy Spirit, and filled with what we'll call "life". Its condition must be completely under the "control" of the mind, requiring not a single belief that there are any other external separate causes of sickness or death.

To overcome death, death MUST be a choice. And the only way to surmount death must entail the ability to choose not to produce death. To choose not to die physically. It has to be possible for the mind to have power over and be stronger than not only the body but all supposed external worldly causes, otherwise the belief remains that something "out there" can come along with an alien will and decide for you against your will that the body should die. The secret of salvation tells us we do EVERYTHING to ourselves, and therefore have the power, should we so choose, to simply choose NOT TO "do death".

The body has to respond, it has no will of its own, no decision of its own, and is ONLY an effect of the mind, not the world. It must line up and obey and correspond to mental health. The belief that the body has its own choice/mind/power to make itself sick or well, or that the world can do the same, IS the belief in death ie the belief in an external separate power that can choose FOR you (the dream choosing for you) that you shall be affected and powerless to stop it. A child of God could never be in a position to be powerless to stop such an attempted attack. God does not will that we be in a position where something can ever happen that we do not ask for. "My self is ruler of the universe" ... "nothing comes to me unbidden by myself" .... "what I want to happen I receive" .... "what I do not want does not occur" etc.

It's a position of tremendous empowerment and causality. Mastery over the world, the body, sickness and death. A living demonstration of life and holiness - wholeness, which is health. Taking a hold of a body of this world, from a vantage point of another world, with a power not of this world, and using it as a tool, a window, through which the light of heaven can extend and shine with healing and love into this world, causing this bodily figure to be animated like a puppet via supernatural power that breaks and defies all the laws of the world. Spirit is in charge, not the dream world. The primary laws of the Kingdom overthrow the secondary laws of spacetime. All laws of physics can be broken by the Spirit. "There is nothing my holiness cannot do." "What the holy spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world."

Death ultimately is learned to be not even a threat, not even a thing, not even a possibility, to one who recognizes that the only way to die is to choose to do so. "You cannot die unless you choose to do so." "No one dies without their own consent" "You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself." Ultimately the teaching is that we are IMMORTAL, invulnerable, unassailable, invincible, unlimited beings. Any testifying of any other kind can only result when we, ourselves, consent to misuse our free will to weave what must be lies and illusions and fictions, trying to prove that we are not immortal. "Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt." You cannot be hurt if you are immortal.

The body is used by a twisted mind to pretend it is not immortal, to put on a show and to try to convince itself and others that it can die. It cannot. "You are immortal and you cannot die." When we recognize the futility and pointlessness of trying to die when we never can, we'll stop MAKING it happen, and will simply choose to live eternally. The supernatural power of God will protect us and make sickness and death impossible. Nothing can happen against our will. Not even death. There are no "accidents" or "environmental influences" or "acts of nature" or "just old age" creeping in like some kind of unwanted invader. There is only our own mind and what it is doing to itself. When it chooses never again to die, it will make death impossible and raise the dead. "Swear not to die you holy son of God, you've made a bargain that you cannot keep" .... you cannot die, you cannot succeed at it, it does not work, you carry on. You already have eternal life.

If I see myself as "being attacked" by someone, I am attacking.

If I see myself as "being victimized", I am victimizing.

If I see myself as afraid, I am threatening.

If I see myself as lacking, I am stealing.

If I see myself as judged, I am judging.

If I seem sick against my will, I have deliberately made myself sick in order to accuse others of causing it.

If I am dying and don't want to die, it's a great way to discard all of my power and give up on life, as if death is the total opposite of what I want when in fact I'm choosing it.

If I am feeling unsafe, I'm undermining someone.

If I'm trying to rely on myself, I'm trying to be unreliable.

If I see myself as guilty, I must believe it about others as well.

If I see myself as innocent, it can be that I have put my sin onto others and am in denial.

Always the surface appearance hides the exact opposite motive that lies underneath, because the ego is always two faced. Whatever it seeks to accomplish it accomplishes the exact opposite. Whatever it says its intentions are, they are a cover-story for a completely opposite plan.

No-one dies without their own consent. Death is chosen. Death is suicide. And death is an attempt to prove that you have no will or power to choose anything else, while simultaneously using all of your will and power to make death seem to happen in secret.

This is why death is *failing the Course.*

Repeatedly Jesus instructs us in ACIM to demonstrate that you are invulnerable.

He says that we are to show our brother that nothing he has done has had ANY effect on us.

He says that we are to demonstrate that we are innocent and our brother is innocent.

He says we are to show our invulnerability by having no effects of attack.

He says we need to be completely unaffected by the world and "I am not a victim of the world I see". Not a victim AT ALL.

He wants us to basically stand there, while the world and its people are doing absolutely whatever they want to do, and be absolutely unaffected, unchanged, undisturbed. Our peace is meant to be so rock solid that we are not moved by anything.

This really means we're being called to NOT play the game of "I am suffering" or "I've been victimized" or "I'm unfairly treated" or "You did something to me" or "I am this way because of someone else" or "I didn't ask for this" or "I've been changed by the world" or "There are effects in me that I didn't put there".

Jesus repeats this theme when he says that nothing happens to us without our consent, we always get what we ask for and we never get what we do not ask for. He goes on to tell us to make sure never to give any belief or reality to the suggestion that the Son of God has been or can be affected by anything, including having absolutely no belief in sickness or separation.

He asks us to see no blame whatsoever in our brother or ourselves. To see ourselves as completely blameless and guiltless.

Innocence doesn't just mean 'you didn't do anything', its an experiential state of INVULNERABILITY and IMMORTALITY, in which quite literally you recognize nothing can or has happened to you.

But who is the 'you' that nothing happens to? It's not the you that you think you are. It's your real self.

"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. For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them and Him Who has created me. "

Notice it says only what happens is what you desire, and nothing happens that you do not desire. That's pretty black and white right there. That's very powerful.

That means nothing can happen without your consent, not even death. If you so desire it, there will be resurrection.

In this there are no other sources of causality. This is talking about the mind of the One Son of God, which all sons share. There is nothing to oppose this mind.

I love this paragraph because it encapsulates 4 major course topics in one short space.

1) You are not a victim and nothing happens without your will

2) This world does not exist because heaven is somewhere else

3) You have "children of your will" in heaven so not only are you a real son of God in heaven, you also have multiple offspring, which are ALSO sons of God, which are REAL, in heaven

4) Your mind is so powerful it can do anything simply by desiring it and if it so desires it it must happen and if it does not desire it it cannot happen, even death.

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.

It used to seem as though fear was automatic. We were taught it was a natural response, part of how the primitive brain works, understandable given certain threats, and so on.

But gradually I'm seeing more and more the secret to salvation, "you are doing this to yourself", that we in fact have a choice in whether to be afraid or not.

Not only that, but we in fact are the cause of our own fear. The mistaken things that we do with our mind and perception bring about fearful perceptions. They seem as if caused by something outside of us over which we have no control. But the secret is, we in fact are having everything to do with creating this fear.

We do get to choose whether to perceive things in such a way that it produces fear, or not. It hinges entirely around whether it seems true that there is an external cause, power, mind, or will ... a threat, which we ourselves believe is really there, which seems to them loom over us with a magical ability to make us be at its effect without being able to stop it.

The entire basis for all fear lies in this reversal of cause and effect. We are all meant to naturally be the cause of everything, and any effects we produce we recognize as coming from us. But the instant that this is reversed and it *seems* as though the effect out there has some ability to cause, and therefore we are no longer a cause but an effect, this immediately produces fear.

Who would not be afraid if they perceived that there is a separate will, an alien will, which has the power to do something to you, and being separate from your own causal power, can in fact produce effects in you that you do not want?

This is the entire foundation for being "able to die" without your apparent consent, where it seems that a separate will chooses for you the effects you will experience. As if the world, or time, or bodies, or events, or foods, or whatever, have the power to make you dead if they so choose. Yet no-one dies without their own consent, and this is entirely a fear-based belief system, not based in truth or reality.

Just the simple belief that this external power exists *at all* forms the basis of fear. If there IS a separate will, then that automatically means there is something it can do to you which you do not choose yourself. Fear is absolutely guaranteed in that scenario, because now there is a possibility of something happening to you, making you a victim.

The mere perception of this belief system, that causes are outside of you, will make you afraid. And the entire time that you are mis-perceiving this way, you will be in fear.

There will be no escape from this fear no matter what you do, until your perceptual error is fixed. So long as you keep choosing to see yourself as a victim, as being threatened, attacked, caused, affected, by *anything*, you will live in fear.

And this fear will seem completely justified, and will even make sense to you, and seem to have a totally valid basis. You'll agree, that you *should* be afraid, because of what that external cause has the power to do to you. Even if it's not actively doing anything to you at all, your mere belief in its power is a state of fear.

What actually then is it that you are afraid of, is not the things which seem to have the power, it's the mere belief that they have the power at all. And the fact is, it's not even the power belonging to anyone else, or anything in the world. The power only *seems* to be out there, separate from you, because in your own mind you have a split mind - a belief in separation - which has sectioned off YOUR OWN POWER and makes it seem like it is separate from you.

So now the threat you think is outside of you, or the causality, the will, the power, to make stuff happen... its YOUR OWN WILL! It's part of you. Having a split mind splits your will and pits your will against itself. This is what the separation is all about, being at war with yourself. Inner conflict. And all inner conflict produces guaranteed fear.

Fear then, is the experience of what it feels like, to believe in separation. It IS the separation. The entire dream of separation is a dream of fear, and it's also the same thing as death. If there is separation in your mind, your will will be separated from itself, and will seem to act against itself, threatening itself, and thereby threating you. The separation is a belief in self condemnation, that you sinned, and threatening yourself with this sin is what makes you afraid.

You then will experience the "cause" as separate from you, because this split off part of your will has been disassociated from your sense of identity - you think it's not even part of your own mind or self. And then you'll overlay it on top of other people and external circumstances and think that those things are causing the fear. And if they are, if they are truly separate, then there is nothing you can do about it. If the causality belongs to other people or events, it's outside of your ability to do anything about it at all. This produces the classic justified victimhood perception - victim consciousness.

But there is everything you can do about it. All of this stuff is not happening outside of your mind. The threat - the "external will", is not outside of your mind. Ideas leave not their source. You have to recognize the threat is YOU threatening yourself. What you think is a separate cause out there scaring you, is part of yourself. It's your own disowned causal power. You've given your power away. You've separated yourself from your power and will. And now you think it is acting against you.

So the secret to salvation is this, you absolutely are doing ALL of this to yourself. And that means, absolutely every cause of fear is resulting from something YOU are choosing. And the choice you are making is to believe in separation, within your mind, which makes your mind experience itself as split, and produces fear. If you therefore stop choosing to believe separation is real, and stop being divided against yourself, and take back all of your own power recognizing it AS your own and not the possession of someone you tried to make responsible for it, you will have finally absolutely NO basis for being afraid ever again.

There is no cause of fear other than yourself. Therefore you can be free of it.

All sickness and all death are the symptoms of a belief in fear. Fear is the opposite to love. Death is also therefore the opposite to love/life and therefore death is a symptom of fear. And since you made all fear, you can abolish it by healing the separation in your own mind - the separation from yourself.

And as Jesus say, "you made sickness and death and can therefore abolish both". This is literally true. You made the basis for all sickness and death - the dream of fear - the belief in separation - and there is NO OTHER CAUSE. Therefore if you take back that power and re-identify wholly with wholeness and spirit (Holy Spirit), you MUST be free not only of fear, but also of all symptoms of sickness, and also death.

Forever.

Believing that you sinned, is an attack against YOU, not an attack on whom or whatever you think you sinned against. The sin is against yourself, directed inward. It has no power over God.

Believing you are guilty for that sin is an attack on YOU, not a guilt imposed by whoever you thought you sinned against or how they would judge you, but by your own self against yourself. God does not find you guilty.

Believing in fear because of your guilt is also an attack on YOU, by yourself, not a fear induced by who you sinned against, or because they will retaliate, but a fear that you will deserve your own punishment because of the guilt that you believe you deserve. God is not making you afraid.

Believing in punishment because of your fear is once again an attack on YOU, by yourself, and not an attack coming at you from anyone else for any reason. It is your way to pretend to use others as ways to punish yourself, all the while pretending that you are not the one doing any of it. You are afraid of YOU and your self punishment. God has no desire to punish you and you're doing such a good job of doing it to yourself that He doesn't need to.

You sin against you. You make yourself guilty. You are afraid of yourself. You punish yourself. That's how it goes.

Nowhere in this equation is anyone else involved in any direct causal way without your consent whatsoever. Nobody. Because there is only you, doing this to yourself.

Why are you doing this to yourself?

Hmm?

Are you done with self attack yet, or the fake story that it's everyone else who is against you? The only one against you is you, as your own enemy.

What if you were to stop attacking yourself? What if you decided you are forgiven? What if you realized and recognized that you DID NOT SIN? That your sin did nothing to anyone but yourself? That nobody else separate from you was sinned against, caused guilt, induced fear, or dealt out punishment. What if there is only you and your war with yourself?

The war with yourself cannot be 'won', because then you lose.

Is it time for peace?

The secret to salvation is this... that you are but doing this to yourself!

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."

The simple transition which occurs as the result of A Course in Miracles, applying forgiveness correctly, is that you transition from blaming everyone else to becoming responsible.

Auto-pilot for the ego is that everything you experience is caused by everyone and everything else outside of you. When you think about that, it's a pretty strange way to live - only ever experiencing what life throws at you, reacting to it like a passive victim.

As you begin to see that the person you were blaming is not the CAUSE of your problem, that the cause is IN you, not outside of you, and that you are completely responsible for EVERYTHING you experience, you stop seeing others as justified targets for blame.

Now you begin to see that it is not really the person being blamed that has a problem. It's the person doing the blaming.

If a person is upset, it is NOT the person they are upset with that has the problem, its the person who is upset.

If someone seems to have been hurt by someone else, it is NOT that other person's fault, it is the responsibility of the person who was hurt. You cannot BE hurt without the consent of your mind. Your mind is powerful and CREATES the *response* of hurt in your body in cooperation with the attacker, otherwise your body could not possibly show effects.

All of the attention of blame and projection and scapegoating onto others, all finger pointing, all perception of being attacked, all perception that someone or something is causing you positively or negatively, and all ideas of being changed by, affected by, caused by or upset by, anything whatsoever outside of you, has to go out the window. There perceptions are false and they are incompatible with health, happiness and sanity.

Imagine realizing that absolutely nothing outside of you has ever affected you, absolutely nobody has ever done anything to you, absolutely nobody is to blame for anything, there is absolutely no-one worthy of being judged or reacted to, and that YOU are the sole responsible agent for what you are experiencing. And if this is true, then notice how freeing this is, how safe it feels, how deeply peaceful it makes you.

If the world is NOT attacking you, if other people are NOT hurting you, if there ARE no causes outside of you, and if you cannot ever be at the effect of anything in the world... you are SOOOOO safe, so protected, so calm and reassured, and so permanently transcendent of all suffering. Yes please!

The body is a symbol. Being a symbol, it represents something. It represents something beyond itself. That means it does not have its own inherent meaning. It is really nothing. A canvas on which you paint a picture of resurrection or death.

Because it is a symbol, it represents and reflects something which lies beyond itself. It is not an end unto itself. It is not a sign or a thing or a standalone entity. It is the outward projection from an inner condition. It does not author its own identity. It does not decide what it will be or what it will look like. It does not determine its behaviors. You USE IT. You project it. It is SYMBOLIC of the content of your mind.

This is why when the mind is healed the SYMBOL MUST CHANGE. The body CANNOT RESIST changing. When the mind decides to be well and whole, the body must reflect that. When the mind decides to be separate and afraid, the body must reflect that. It is a picture of the mind's condition. It is not a thing in its own right.

Because it is a symbol, when the body is sick, the body ITSELF is not sick. IT does not have its own separate sickness. It is SYMBOLIZING a problem in the mind. This is why when the body is broken or sick, it PROVES the mind cannot be healed, because it is IMPOSSIBLE for the body to make up its own state. It is a reflection of the mind. It has no will. No continuity of its own. Its being projected. So if the body is showing up as broken, the body has nothing really wrong with it, the MIND DOES.

This is why if there is sickness or death happening to the body, the MIND IS DESTROYING ITSELF. And this is proof. No-one dies without their own consent. Healthy mind, healthy body. Sick mind, sick body. There are no exceptions.

"Remember, then, that neither sign nor symbol should be CONFUSED with source, for they must STAND FOR something OTHER than themselves. Their meaning CANNOT lie in them, but must be sought in what they REPRESENT. And they may thus mean everything or nothing, according to the truth or falsity of the IDEA which they reflect."

"The body is the symbol of the ego, as the ego is the symbol of the separation."

"The body is the idea (in the mind) of sin, made flesh, and PROJECTED (by the mind) outward.

Is there a power OTHER than the mind that can cause things to happen to us? What causes sickness? What makes death happen? Do we actually have any control over this world? Do we have a power, to such an extent, that we can actually determine what happens or doesn't happen? Can we actually CHOOSE to cause or not cause sickness and death?

This is an important issue because if we are not the ones orchestrating everything that occurs, everything we experience, then that places us in a rather vulnerable position. If there is a power or cause or law or something that drives stuff to occur, without our consent, without our choosing it, this basically means we are capable of being victims. Stuff can happen to us against our will.

It may seem SUPER radical to suggest that you could be in a position of having so much deliberateness, so much choice, so much power, that you could be orchestrating an entire dream. That the things that happen are what YOU decide will happen. That nothing else happens, because you haven't chosen it. It really then boils down to, are you actually able to choose not to suffer, to not be sick, to not die? Can you choose that events don't occur at all? Do you have the power to CAUSE these to not happen, and do you have the power to cause them TO happen?

This then really becomes a question of RESPONSIBILITY. Who or what is responsible, in every case, for what happens in your life? Do you shift responsibility and therefore "blame" onto others, onto the body or the world itself? For what seems to happen TO you? Who is responsible for whether you are attacked or not? Who is responsible for whether your body becomes sick, or is healed, or just carries on being sick without hope of relief? Because ultimately someone or some "thing" HAS to be the cause. It's either you, or it's something else. There are NO effects without causes.

If you look at the teachings of ACIM closely you will see that there is a huge theme of EMPOWERMENT. This empowerment is saying that you are so powerful that you literally are the dreamer of the dream. It says that you are ruler of the universe. It says that you can be attacked by nothing but your thoughts. It says you cannot die without your own consent. It says that you are not the victim of the world you see. All of these themes point towards you having POWER OVER what happens. YOU CHOOSE!

"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."

"Here again is the paradox often referred to in the course. To say, "Of myself I can do nothing" is to gain all power. And yet it is but a seeming paradox. As God created you, you have all power."

Indeed it leads to what ACIM calls "the secret of salvation". This is quite a radical passage because it basically says that unless you were to go into a kind of unconscious state of denial in which you disown power and see the dream as "happening against your will", NOTHING In the world can do anything to you - no matter how vicious it seems. And in fact, that the secret to being SAVED FROM all forms of suffering, is to realize and own fully that you are "doing it to yourself." That takes great OWNERSHIP of power.

We immediately start to bark with objections about how this can't be true in all situations. But the passage tells us that no matter who is the victim or victimizer, it is true. No matter who seems to do what to whom, or what the apparent severity, it is still true. So it's then telling us that despite any appearances, despite what may look like external causes or separate people acting in certain ways, no matter what it looks like on the surface, it is ALWAYS TRUE that you are doing it to yourself.

And it calls this the "secret of salvation" because it talks of how this is the ONE LESSON the holy spirit is teaching to SAVE YOU from ALL forms of suffering. That the cause of ALL forms of suffering, no matter what form it takes, including physical sickness, is the fact that you are the one doing it to yourself. And because you are doing it yourself, you can change your mind and STOP doing it.

"I must have decided wrongly because I am NOT at peace. I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise."

Because in truth, really, UNLESS you are actually the one with the power to CAUSE anything to happen, you would not be in a position to be able to USE that power to NOT cause it to happen, or to undo it. It is because you DO cause it, that there is IS hope for salvation. There is a way out of hell and suffering and sickness and death BECAUSE you are the one that keeps putting it in place. And if you weren't the one putting it in place, you'd be stuck having to tolerate it, experience it, suffer from it, and go through it, without any hope of relief, ie no salvation.

This is quite a radical teaching and it is extremely central to the entire A Course in Miracles view of cause and effect, of who causes what, and of how POWERFUL you are. It rests on the fact that you are an immortal being, a permanent changeless being, who is always the same and is incapable of change or of being changed. A being that is NOT AFFECTED by the world.

"The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did."

Forgiveness rests on this immortal fact, because obviously if you are immortal nothing can happen to you, so you have no grounds for playing at being a victim, no grounds for believing that something is happening against your will, and no grounds for suffering. If you are immortal then you quite literally are invulnerable to the entire world, and there is not a single thing in all the world that has even the slightest power to cause anything that you do not want. In fact it means you have power OVER DEATH, because you cannot die.

This is what the entire teaching of ACIM is leading to. The total identification with spirit as Christ, the immortal son of God. The total owning of RESPONSIBILITY FOR BEING CAUSAL - a causal CREATOR. The total reclaiming of absolute unlimited POWER, which can do literally anything. The reclaiming of the power to work miracles, to heal sickness and to prevent death, and to change the world if needed. It is asking of you to reclaim a role and position of nothing LESS than TOTAL ABSOLUTE POWER.

By having such a power, a power so great that literally the entire dream is being dreamed up BY your mind, a power that puts the world in place and makes it spin, a power that materializes bodies, a power that causes events to transpire, we're talking about you being extremely DELIBERATE and CHOOSING everything that occurs or is experienced. And this does mean without exception. Not one single thing occurs that you do not choose, and because the power of decision is yours, you CAN CHOOSE not to have the body be sick, or die. YOU make the world go round.

This isn't a course in leaving any room open for some kind of fictional "alien will", a separate power, an external power, some kind of power the "dream" seems to have over you, some victim consciousness, some kind of external causation that can do things to you against your will, some kind of power that puts sickness into your body without your asking for it, or some kind of power other than your choice that seems to make death happen.

These are all the views that the EGO has, in its sense of weakness and powerlessness and vulnerability and fear. It sees itself as utterly at war with a separated-off power not within itself, that does things to it against its desires. And it sees itself as having no control or real power over anything, so instead to uses "force" and "doing" to try to make things happen.

"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."

We are being asked to own up to being immortal beings. Beings who are purely CAUSAL and CREATIVE. Beings who express from love and whose expressions come out as what you want, and as what you create and thus as what happens or exists. Where you are constantly choosing WHAT shows up and what occurs. There is no room in the mind of a creator/co-creator for stuff happening "by some other means", or of your choices being unheard, or of your decisions lacking power, or of your causation lacking effects.

This is a course in TAKING BACK YOUR POWER. And that means and includes the total responsibility and ownership of being THE CAUSE OF all your suffering, in every form it takes, INCLUDING the condition of the body, all of its forms and sickness and suffering, and even over death itself. You even have the power to literally move mountains and to make worlds. Only in this extreme of absolute ownership of the POWER OF GOD, which is your inheritance, is victimhood and vulnerability and pain and misery snuffed out forever. There is no power OTHER THAN the power of God that you share with him.

The question is whether you are willing to go all the way to accept this power, to take on this role and position of being ruler of the universe, whether you are willing to OWN this power and regain access to USE it consciously. Whether you are ready to let go of all victimhood roles and all sense of not choosing or not being the one who makes things happen. It's putting you in the hot-seat. If you are to reach the resurrection and FINISH the curriculum, you MUST gain the absolute power over death, which gives you the ability to cancel and reverse and prevent it EVEN on a physical level.

"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."

If you believe that sickness happens through some other reason, by some other cause, something in the world or body, something environmental, something someone else does to you, if events happen on their own chaotically or randomly, if death chooses for you when you will die, if sickness happens to the body, if sickness can remain within the body against the mind's choice, and if you believe that you do NOT have the power to do anything about this, that IS an egoic position of victimhood and powerlessness. And we are all-too comfortable playing this role.

It means you are "playing the game of death", as an immortal being, PRETENDING that you do NOT have the power of God, and trying to pull off a stunt of making it look AS IF you are not the one causing everything to occur. When it appears you did not choose something, it is an illusion. You are ALWAYS choosing what you experience, what you feel, what happens with the body, what events transpire. NOTHING happens without your consent. This is because you are an infinitely powerful being with an extremely powerful unlimited mind capable of creating entire worlds.

"There are no accidents in salvation."

"Your Father created you Wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

Owning up to this power - the shared Power of God - which is UNLIMITED, and there is NOTHING that this power (thus your holiness) cannot do .... places you in a position of being co-creator with God. For a creator there is nothing that comes IN to you from the outside, there is ONLY an outflowing from the inside outward. An extension so strong it cannot be stopped. The unlimited will of God.

You cannot have things coming at you, attacking you, changing you, affecting you, choosing for you. YOU are the master. You dominate everything. You are the ultimate cause. YOU are in charge of your destiny. You are NEVER a victim, and NOTHING happens without your choosing it and causing it. OWN THIS, and you will be free from suffering and death forever.

"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."

"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."

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

"I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts."

"When you are weary, remember you have hurt yourself. Your Comforter will rest you, but YOU cannot. YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW, for if you did, you could never have grown weary. Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way, for that is not God's Will for His Son. Pain is not of Him, for He knows no attack, and His peace surrounds you silently."

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

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

"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. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you. Yet when you accord it mercy, will its mercy shine on you."

"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."

"Say ONLY this, but MEAN it with NO reservations, for here the power of salvation lies: ... I AM responsible for what I see. I CHOSE the feelings I experience, and I DECIDED ON the goal I would achieve. And everything that SEEMS to happen TO me, I ASKED FOR and received as I had asked. ... Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done TO you. Acknowledge but that YOU have been mistaken, and ALL effects of your mistakes will disappear."

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."

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 power of decision is my own"

"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."

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision."

"No-one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him."

"No-no on can grieve nor fear or thing him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants."

"And no-one dies without his own consent."

"Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose."

"You may believe this position is extreme, and too inclusive to be true. You can truth have exceptions?"

One of the most powerful teachings in ACIM is that you literally are the CHOOSER of everything you experience. Not only this, but your choice has POWER in it. That means, when you decide something, IT HAPPENS. When you do not decide something, it does NOT happen. It means that your thoughts wield REAL POWER. It means that if you REFUSE to be sick, you cannot be sick. It means if you choose NOT to die, you cannot die.

You are so used to it seeming that when you decide something, it has no INFLUENCE. That it doesn't actually CAUSE anything to occur. This is a state of disassociation and disempowerment.

When you decide something, if you are certain about it, IT MAKES IT SO. If you CHOOSE, that you will suffer, you will suffer. If you CHOOSE, that you will not suffer, you will not suffer. If you CHOOSE, that you will not die, you will not die.

This is all inclusive. No exceptions.

If you are unset or unhappy or suffering or not at peace in any way, YOU MUST HAVE WANTED TO BE.

"I must have made a wrong decision !!!!!! ... because I am not at peace." ie, whenever I am not at peace, I CHOSE TO BE.

"I MADE THE DECISION MYSELF, but I can choose otherwise, and I want to choose otherwise because I want to be at peace."

All sickness, all suffering, all unhappiness, all emotional reactions, all upset and hurt, all pain and loss and grief, all of it, is CHOSEN. Even DEATH. All death is suicide.

If you OWN THIS POWER, you become invulnerable and UNABLE TO SUFFER EVER AGAIN.

"My self is ruler of the universe."

"W-pII.253.1. It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. 2 Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. 3 What happens is what I desire. 4 What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. 5 This must I accept. 6 For thus am I led PAST THIS WORLD to my creations, children of my will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them and Him Who has created me."

When your idea of TRUTH is aligned with what God's truth is, you will resurrect. When your idea of TRUTH is aligned with the ego's idea of what truth is (death, opposite of life), it induces death.

Whatever your idea of truth is, you identify with it, think it is your self, will protect it, defend it, want it, believe in it, have faith in it, see it as real and love it above all else. It doesn't matter whether it is actually true or not in the bigger picture.

It's good when your idea of truth matches God's truth because this actually brings you closer to life and to health and happiness.

But when your idea of truth is mistaken and you believe something is true which is not, you will STILL defend it to the death, and take sides against life. This will result in you becoming sick and disconnected from life, and eventually to die.

This happens because you are choosing death (the belief that what is false is true) but are believing you are choosing life, because you are confused about what is true and what is false. The ego always tells you that if you choose its thought system you are choosing the truth. But when you actually listen to it and choose it, you are choosing to believe lies. And this will tempt you away from God and towards death. You will then experience unexpected consequences and suffering, because the ego's advice does not work and results in the opposite of what it claims.

When you are insane and delusional like this, believing that something is true that isn't, you will be heavily in denial and unwilling to accept the real truth. You will become unaware that you are hurting yourself and making yourself suffer with your defense of lies. You'll think you are saving your life by defending yourself against God's truth, which you now perceive as false and opposite and an enemy.

If you want to experience life and not death, you must choose to align your idea of TRUTH with God's truth, in recognition that only the truth is true. It is your choice which voice you listen to. Either you choose life by choosing to believe God's truth, or you choose death by choosing to believe ego's truth. Either way it is CHOSEN.

"No one dies without their own consent." "You cannot die unless you choose to do so." "You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself." Secret of salvation - you're doing this to yourself. There are no limits on mind other than that it cannot serve two masters - you must choose, whether you place your faith in death, or whether to place your faith in life. Faith in God is believing God and trusting God and accepting God's will. This literally resurrects you from the dead (fake death) and restores you to awareness of your immortality. Not even death can prevail against a Son of God who has commended his spirit into God's hands.

You can't be attacked by someone else without attacking them first. You have to believe you are attackable, otherwise you'd be invulnerable. By seeing yourself as attackable, which is an attack on yourself, you are also attacking others. Whatever you believe about you is shared with everyone, and so you believe everyone else is just as attacked. You cannot attack yourself with something and believe it affects only you.

Each sickness is attack on yourself and everyone else. Each injury is an attack on yourself and everyone else. Each bad mood is an attack on yourself and everyone else.

Then, holding a focus on self-attack, you radiate and 'call for' attack, which expresses itself outwardly as a kind of invitation, energetically and mentally, which is sort of like laying a trap and sending an invitation.

It's very easy for people to come along and fall into that trap because it's a temptation. If they are not really clear about who they are and the certainty of their own innocence, they will likely buy into what you're selling and go along with it, proceeding to launch a "counter-attack" ie to give you what you want. You'll think it's not a counter attack but an initial attack because you don't recognize you attacked first. And then you'll blame them for attacking you because you don't want to admit that you attacked yourself before this all happened.

It's especially easy if you are more sensitive to energy/emotion in others ie more empathic, to 'sense' when someone has a certain attitude about themselves. I feel this particularly with many people who are overweight who actually 'call themselves' "fat", on an energetic level. They actively are walking around 'tempting' others to agree with them and to hate WITH them, in hopes of proving that they are worthless. It's really a test, and choosing not to buy into that temptation and to overlook how they see themselves is forgiveness.

We all know that it's very controversial among more dualistically-minded people to suggest that anyone "asks for it", especially when seemingly serious things happen to some people. But Jesus would counter that nothing happens without your consent, and this takes a huge amount of honesty and willingness to look at yet alone admit to.

Without admitting it you truly are powerless because if you did not choose this, you cannot choose against it either. But if you did choose this, yes, it is painful to acknowledge you did this to yourself or wanted it in any way whatsoever, but at the same time, this owning up gives you back power and gives you hope for being able to overcome it. Without this self empowerment there is truly no hope for recovery.

So what are you broadcasting today? Do you have a big sign on your head saying "loser" or "reject me" or "hate me" or "don't love me?". What are you asking for? Or rather, what truth would you have apply to you and everyone else equally?

Being abused is not fun. Being punished or victimized or attacked is not fun. Being hurt by others, or by anything, is not fun. Being in pain and sickness is not fun. All forms of suffering suck bad.

Every episode of being hurt by the world always looks like you being victimized, against your will. You seeming not to choose it, not wanting it, and doing nothing to ask for it, yet alone deserving it. It always appears unsought and unfair.

When you look only at appearances, every abusive situation looks completely awful. Children being abused. Babies born with disabilities. Parents killed in a car crash. Someone being shot. Murder and rape and all manner of horrors.

However, when you read A Course in Miracles, we're told something which may not seem possible, yet alone true - that you are always doing this to yourself. Not matter who seems to be doing what to whom.

"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."

(Urtext T27I10)

In all seemingly un-asked for scenarios of suffering, it always seems that the problem began with attack by another. You were apparently doing nothing and minding your own business. Then along came the horror out of nowhere. You seemed to not even remotely choose it. You did nothing on the physical level to ask for it or to make it happen. You are a genuine victim.

However, such attacks in fact begin long before they ever manifest. And to realize this will take a lot of willingness and healing. Just even getting past the misery could take a lifetime. But hiding behind every experience of punishment is a secret decision, which happened in your mind long before the punishment happened.

Everyone who has believed in separation from God, attacked themselves first. They believed in their own sin and guilt. They tried to crucify themselves. Long before any abuser came along. each of us was responsible for deciding that we deserve to suffer and be punished. We chose to insist on a willingness to allow ourselves to be hurt. We literally wanted to be hurt. Or even worse, to die, because the belief in sin demands death.

"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. No-one can really DO this, but that you can THINK you can, and BELIEVE YOU HAVE, is beyond dispute."

Having decided you are sinful - the original sin, for trying to attack God, you quickly believe you no longer deserve love. Or even to live. You believe you should suffer and die to atone through the ego. To pay the consequences for what you did. And NOW you start to seek out ways to suffer.

Deciding you should suffer, you now attract, choose, hire, coerce, opt for and want, various people, scenarios and problems to bring the penalty to you. You elect freely and seemingly unconsciously to incarnate into defective bodies, broken families, abusive relationships and all manner of tortures. You arrange it all.

As each form of suffering comes to you, as you asked, and looking solely at the physical way by which it happens, it gives no hint that you asked for it. Especially not that you want it. Each blow is enacted by another body. Each attack appears unasked for. Stuff goes wrong seemingly chaotically and at random. Then the world seems to decide it's your time to die. Sucks to be you.

Who would suspect that you asked for this? That you consented to death, no matter how it came? Who would see the secret wish to suffer hidden behind the face of innocence?

"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, and ***no one dies without his own consent***. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

No-one, not even the person suffering, thinks that they started all this. It always seems to begin outside of you, beyond your will. And then you can point fingers of blame and say, you abused me, you hit me, you hurt me, you punished me, you screwed up my life, you did this and I didn't choose it. Its all your fault.

And now the other is a scapegoat. Secretly someone you hired to hurt you on your behalf, they now take the blame for being the one who did it to you, so no-one notices the contract you signed. Ands so long as the projection of blame remains, it completely hides what you are doing to yourself. All power and responsibility is projected onto anyone except you.

You won't want to ever look at the fact you asked for this, so long as you don't see one key fact: You believed you deserved to suffer BEFORE you suffered. Before you were attacked, you attacked yourself. You believed it as soon as you left God. The denial of God was the denial of entitlement to forgiveness, happiness, health and life. You threw it all away and wanted life to suck.

And THEN you masterminded a lifestyle of awful things seeming to happen to you, inducing suffering while trying to achieve an illusion of redemption. You think if you suffer enough you'll pay off the debt. How much is enough? Only permanent suffering and death is an acceptable fee for your ego.

You chose everyone in your life. You hired them to not love you. You wanted to be sick. You wanted to be attacked, hurt and abused. Terrible lack of self love and respect happened before you brought a ton of bricks down upon yourself. You hated yourself.

Every hurt, every punishment, every abuse, every attack, IS in fact the working of your psyche to guarantee that you get what you think you desreve. It always appears that other agents are doing this to you, so that you can hide your death wish. But it is ALWAYS you that is deciding to orchestrate ALL forms of suffering. Your mind makes it happen.

"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."

(Urtext T27I10)

The ONLY WAY to be set free from ALL forms of suffering, is to recognize that in every case, the power of your decision begins the whole process. You decide you deserve to suffer, then you project abusers and punishers and prison guards, all of whome you hate and blame, in order to to hide how YOU feel about yourself.

"If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves."

You can only suffer by choosing to. If you do not choose to, you CANNOT SUFFER OR DIE. Giving away your power to another to be the fall guy to disguise your self hate, is the only cause of ALL your problems. Choose to love yourself, and you will reclaim immortality.

All abusers, attackers, haters, hurters, punishers, terrorists, murderers and enemies must be forgiven. And to forgive them is a recognition that they were NEVER the starting point of any suffering. Spacetime began and ends with your decision. Nothing EVER happens without your consent.

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. ***I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die.*** I am not a body. I would recognize my reality today. I will worship no idols, nor raise my own self-concepts to replace my Self. I am in the likeness of my Creator. Love created me like Itself."

"The emphasis this course has placed on that idea is due to its centrality in our attempts to ***change your mind about yourself***. It is the reason you can heal. It is the cause of healing. It is why you cannot die. Its truth established you as one with God."

"Yet you CANNOT crucify God's Son, for the Will of God cannot die. His Son HAS BEEN redeemed ***from his own crucifixion***, and you cannot assign to death whom God has given eternal life."

So, every feeling you have, every reaction you have, you choose to have, on your own. And it has nothing to do with stimuli or what other people are doing or what happens.

So you're really walking around with a blank slate, happy, having absolutely no reason to be upset, and then you literally are picking something out of the environment and saying, AHA, I think I'm going to claim that I'm triggered by that, I'm going to create a reaction, I'm going to choose to be unhappy.

So then you do.

And it had nothing to do with what happened outside you.

So really, you're this kind of walking talking reacto-machine which just fires random reactions all over the place for no particular reason.

If nothing outside of you is really to blame or really has anything to do with why you are upset, and your upset is just YOUR OWN STUFF which you need to be fully responsible for, then you quite literally are manufacturing every interpretation and every reactive experience that you're experiencing, inside yourself, by yourself.

So once you start to take responsibility for this, then this is breaking the spell. It's breaking the connection between something happening and you then having a reaction and blaming the causality of it on the thing - "it caused me to have an effect" gets broken.

Once that starts to be broken and you stop CONNECTING or JOINING fake external causes/triggers with internal effects, and you realize the cause is IN YOU not out there, now you're in a different scenario. You cause all of the effects you are experiencing, AND you are causing all of what SEEM to be the effects of outside causes. You are causing your own reactions!

So now you can stop having reactions, by choosing not to. Or you can at least own up to being the one who is choosing to have it. And what begins to happen as you begin to 'stop' making the tie between external causes and internal effects, and reclaim the tie between internal causes and internal effects, is you start to realize they are not and don't need to be joined.

So that means, if you wish, on a whim, you could decide NOT to have any reaction whatsoever to something you'd normally react to. And conversely, you could decide to react on purpose to something ridiculous that would not normally call for a reaction (a bit harder to do without the unconscious element).

So as you practice this you grow stronger in the awareness that your reactions aren't actually caused by anything outside you, and that you can - at will - choose not to have them. By owning them you disconnect from the ego and automatically choose Holy Spirit. And by severing the tie between external causes and internal effects you now regain access to your inner causality.

So how about you then learn to simply choose to no longer PRETEND to be at the effect of external causes, and maybe you ADMIT that you cannot BE affected by anything external WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT (including death). And then you find yourself laughing because you realize you're being upset for absolutely no reason and because of no cause, which gives way to laughing for absolutely no reason and with no cause. Because when YOU are the cause, you are aligned with GOD the Cause, which is nothing but joyful.

"The body cannot heal, because it cannot MAKE ITSELF SICK. It NEEDS no healing. Its health or sickness depends ENTIRELY on how the mind perceives it, and the purpose that the mind would use it FOR."

So. The body itself cannot create its own sickness. The belief that it can or has, is level confusion and a belief in magic. It means you see the body as "causing the mind" instead of the mind causing the body.

So the body cannot "get sick" by itself. It cannot become sick as a result of external things happening. It cannot contract sickness from others. It cannot be attacked without your consent. And it cannot die unless your MIND chooses that it die.

"You (as body) cannot die unless you choose to do so."

So the body cannot become sick "on its own", or as the result of anything other than your mind's decision. It also cannot HEAL ITSELF. The idea that the body has an immune system is an ILLUSION. The body does not heal itself, just as it does not make itself sick.

It is up to the mind to decide, whether or not to make the body sick, or to make the body healthy. The mind can ADD sickness to the body at any time, by free will. The mind can REVOKE sickness from the body at any time, by free will.

"You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both."

It does not matter what state the body is in. It does not matter if has been sick for 50 years. It does not matter how severe the sickness is or how it was contracted or developed or all the reasons why it is so unchangeable. If the mind chooses health, the body MUST BE HEALED. And when the mind is healthy in its outlook, it WILL see the body in a healthy way and thus FORCE the body to heal "against its will", because it has no will and no way to resist the mind.

"The mind MUST be stronger than the body. Every miracle DEMONSTRATES this."

So no matter what state the body is in or the "story" behind how it seemed to get that way, which is a LIE, the mind CAN heal it at any time. And when it chooses to do so, NOTHING in all the universe has the power to stop it. Even death can be reversed. And when the mind does elect to heal and be healed, it WILL heal the body without exception. "The mind, being sane, heals the body." Such a healing is a MIRACLE. And such miracles can RAISE THE DEAD and reverse EVERY form of bodily sickness.

This is a Course in MIRACLES.

The happy truth behind every seeming disasterous illusion in this world, is that nothing has gone wrong at all and we are still with God.

The happy truth is also that it is actually possible to be immortal, as spirit, and to even manifest a seemingly incorruptible body if you so choose. Doing so is nothing compared to your real power.

All things that could ever go wrong to hurt you, come from you, and are a choice, and therefore not choosing them renders you invulnerable. If you do not see this clearly it's because you believe the *illusion* that people don't do things to themselves.

Nothing happens to anyone without not only their consent but without them actually literally orchestrating and doing it to themselves. So this myth of vulnerability, that you can be affected, or that death can come along and attack you without having the power to stop it, is a complete lie that has been perpetuated for millennia.

The happy truth is that all the things that you're concerned about, are not true. And nothing is really wrong. And nobody is really getting hurt. Of course that flies in the face of what *appears* to be happening, because that's us falling for the illusion that people aren't choosing.

If we could recognize and see the choices everyone is making and expose the entire back-story of how everyone has deliberately chosen every single thing they have ever experienced, we would not be able to believe for a second that something can happen to us against our will. And our belief in death would be totally blown out of the water.

It's only because the truth seems to be hidden, i.e. your are unaware of it, that it seems plausible that things are happening to you that you did not ask for. And this also means that once you are aware, you will no longer make yourself suffer and die, and lo-and-behold will find that nothing beyond you has the power to make you die either.

As such you are completely protected, perfectly safe, only love is real, and really this is all just a big joke. The Son of God is playing with illusions and toying with death as part of His little fantasy story-telling adventure, and one day we will wake up to experience this truth and know that nothing ever really happened to anyone.

And then we'll remember to laugh

So long as you remain in a position of causation, you are all-powerful. And that means the truth comes out of you, it is given and shared, and reinforces itself. You see it in everything you project it onto, and in your harmlessness you are safe.

Being all-powerful, you are invulnerable. Nothing can happen to you against your will because you are the one doing the happening. Being purely causal and creative, you have tremendous strength and ability. There is nothing your holiness cannot do.

Centered in your power, which you share with God, you know that you are safe and protected. So long as you do not hurt yourself, you cannot be hurt. So long as you do not cause something to happen to you, nothing can happen to you. Your will is as powerful as God's will, and nothing can prevail against it or intrude upon it.

""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."

(Urtext W253L to W253L1)

"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. "

(Urtext W190L5)

It is only when you deny that you are all powerful that you enter into what we call fear. Fear is a seeming absence of love, so if you've denied yourself you've denied love. Seeming to lack power, to be weakened, to see yourself as not the cause, you now see cause and power and strength as separate from you - because you believe you are separate from them.

Cause and will and power and mind are now projected outward and are seen as outside of you, beyond your will, outside the limits of your mind and of your control. They seem therefore to be able to act without your consent, to will on their own. ACIM calls this an "alien will".

Once you see cause or power as outside of you, separate from you, you HAVE to also believe that you are no longer powerful or causal. And this begins the slippery slope toward seeing yourself as being able to be affected. If you are not all powerful, something else has more power. If you are not causal, something else could cause you.

As soon as your mind believes that power and causation are external or separate or disowned, it also sees itself as an EFFECT of that causation. It believes it can BE affected, because it is no longer strong, or safe, or protected by the love of God. Being in uncertainty about its own causation, the mind goes into doubt and fear.

If there is an alien will out there, and if it is separate from your own, then it must be against you without your permission. This is the root of all fear. The belief and perception that the word is transpiring against you, choosing without consulting you, determining your future, deciding whether you will live or die, and generally "happening to you" beyond your ability to stop it.

You can't seem to stop the world attacking, threatening, troubling, upsetting you etc, once you're on this slippery slope into hell. And the only response to that is fear. If you do indeed see power and causation as outside your scope of control, beyond your reach to manage, then stuff can happen to you at any time, without your seeming to choose it. And who wouldn't be afraid of that? It is disturbing to think something can happen that you cannot prevent.

You're afraid because you see yourself as a victim. A victim is a role where somehow, in some way, you seem not to be the one causing or choosing, and you seem to lack the power to stop it, simply because you believe something has power over you. A power that is not yours, a power you do not share in, a power that you cannot wield, and a power that you have lost.

Ultimately then it is in fact YOUR OWN POWER that you have dissociated from and projected. It is YOUR OWN CAUSATION that you have put outside of you, pretending it does not belong to you. It is YOUR OWN MIND that is giving this power away and is trying to associate it with things that do NOT have it. And it is YOUR OWN MIND that positions itself as being "at the effect of" that very same power.

This means of course that you are doing it to yourself. All fear is you attacking yourself from the outside in. All fear is you believing that you are at the effect of a cause that's separate from you. Yet ideas do not leave their source. Your mind houses the idea that cause is separate from you. Your mind houses the causation that it visualizes as outside of it. And your mind houses the effects that it puts into itself to demonstrate what the cause is doing to you.

Really this means that all fear is self-threat, you can only be afraid if you threaten yourself, it is only YOUR OWN POWER that you are afraid of, fear is an attempt to hide from your own power, and being a victim is an attempt to pretend that you are powerless. All sense of fear then comes from the belief that you have no power over "that power" which seems not to be yours, and is an attempt to PRETEND to be powerless. Yet you USE your power to do this.

If in any way you believe that anything in the world has the power to do anything to you at all, you have for a start associated YOUR power with external things. You've GIVEN your power away to things that don't own it. You WANT those things to have your power. Now you see and perceive external things as being powerful over you, causing you, sinning against you, justifying your anger, and making you afraid and upset.

But notice that YOUR MIND also manufacturers all of the sense of "I am at the effect", it visualizes an appropriate "reaction" to the threat, it PUTS THE EFFECTS IN YOU, and literally materializes all the symptoms and consequences that it imagines must come from such a cause. If it for example believes that some other person has power over it, it will not only give that power TO the person, it will also visualize itself as affected BY the person, AND put symptoms into itself to correspond to the "amount of threat" that it has invented.

This is where the hierarchy of illusions comes in, along with orders of difficulty. You may have noticed that when you believe something external is big and serious, important and powerful, authoritative and trusted, or has some sense of capability or truth, you have MORE reaction than when it's something mild, weak, insignificant, unimportant, or that you don't believe in.

If some educated doctor suddenly tells you you have a terminal illness, you will very likely go into into much bigger fear than if someone tells you their opinion about the weather. If there seems to be an external threat to your "life", ie the body seems to be being caused against your will, and you think it is your self, then you will have a huge amount of terror.

But in every case, in every scenario, no matter how it looks, or who seems to have the power over you, or who is doing what to you, or what role they play, it is ALWAYS YOU, always your own mind which is DECIDING to believe in a) the disowning of your own power, b) the projecting of it onto another, c) associating it with another, d) seeing yourself as caused BY that power, and e) therefore changed against your will by that power. And your mind itself will invent AND PUT IN PLACE, all of your symptoms, effects, altered feelings, consequences and results of what you believe that power can do to you.

This is also precisely how the symptoms of sickness come about. And it is also what happens when you project your sin onto others, through the body, which uses the body to accuse another of sin. Your mind sees itself as under attack by an external power - its own power that it has disowned - and to try to prove it, it manifests changes in the body to symbolize the various ways that you are under attack. The body is then held up as a picture of crucifixion to show to another that THEY caused this effect in your body, even though YOU put the effect there.

It's all part of your attempt to FORCE them to have power over you. It's your wish that you would even crucify yourself and make yourself seem to die, to attack the body with terrible afflictions, IF only it can mean that, at the same time, your brother is assigned all your causing, thus all your "doing", is framed for your murder, and can be accused of causing YOU to change.

"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 all simply happens through false perception which is the reversal of cause and effect. Whenever you see cause in the world in any way, you are projecting YOUR power to cause. And you must see yourself as a victim or effect of that. Perception is now backwards because you perceive the world is happening to you instead of you dreaming the world. To see the world causing you is false perception. To see YOU causing the world, is true perception.

"Thus is the body healed by miracles BECAUSE they show the mind MADE sickness, and employed the body to be victim, or EFFECT, of what it made. "

(urtext T28C11)

What this all means is really the secret of salvation, that "you are doing this to yourself". No matter how it looks or who plays the role of victim or victimizer, still this is the truth. Your mind disowns its own power, your mind frames others and the world for having this power, your mind decides to position itself as affectable, your mind puts the effects in place, and your mind uses the effects to accuse others and the world of what YOU did, so that you can keep disowning your power.

Effectively, using the body as a scapegoating mechanism to get rid of your sin. Because sin is very closely aligned with causation. You think that you used your power to cause the death of God, to attack reality, and to change the truth. And now you try to keep projecting your power in order to avoid admitting to this, even though it's not true. If you maintain yourself as powerless, you can claim that you have no power, and therefore cannot have been the one who caused God to change.

But wielding your own power also means therefore that you cannot be hurt, or attacked, or had power over, or caused, or affected, or made vulnerable, or weakened, or made sick, OR CAUSED TO DIE, without your consent, and without YOU making it happen TO yourself. If you so choose to stop attacking yourself WITH YOUR OWN POWER, nothing in the world can have any power over you. If you choose to stop hurting yourself, you cannot be hurt. If you choose to stop making yourself sick, you cannot be sick. And if you choose to stop dying, you cannot die.

You cannot be afraid of anything but your own self-attack. Nothing in the world causes you. Nothing in the world has power over you. No-one has the power to make you anything. You are not affected by anything but your own mind.

"I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts."

(urtext W281L)

"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

(urtext W26L)

"It can be but myself I crucify."

(urtext W196L)

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details"

(urtext W152L1)

"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."

(urtext W190L5)

To summarize simply, only you can make yourself afraid, you can only be afraid of your own power, only you give yourself the symptoms and effects which you think that power would produce, and only you can stop doing that to yourself. Only you threaten yourself, only you choose to be in fear, only you make yourself a victim, and you have the power to NEVER be victimized ever again.

You have the power to live forever, and that makes you utterly invulernerable and incapable of being sick or dying. You have this power because God has shared his with you. And if it be your will, no-one and nothing has any power over you to frighten you. You cannot be afraid unless you choose to do so, any more than you can have any effects of any kind without electing to choose that they be there. You are the one who is scaring yourself, and you can stop.

"I am not weak, but strong."

"I am not helpless, but all powerful."

(urtext W91L8)

"Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one, and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you."

It can be difficult letting people suffer. Although that said, suffering is an illusion. The thing is.... we have lessons to learn and this is a classroom. Merely having an attitude of "take the suffering away" could also remove form someone a "painful lesson" they might need to learn.

If you remove the challenges or the limitations or the form that the lesson has taken, the person might not rise to the occasion. They might not question certain strongly held beliefs, they might not have a breakthrough, they might not learn to see their life differently, they might not change their priorities. Not to say that people should suffer, because God does not will that anyone suffers, but we've placed ourselves in a difficult situation where we believe all kinds of stuff that's mistaken.

And so we need to learn, which means we need scenarios to learn in. So if we were to seek to just "have it easy" all the time and have no seeming stimulation for growth or awakening, we might just linger in a lack of progress for longer. You could say perhaps that since people consent to everything, those who are suffering perhaps have agreed to go through something because they'll in the long run benefit from it.

When the soul knows that the ultimate goal is awakening and reunion with God, they can be prepared to take on tremendous challenges to help them move toward that. A person having a particularly hard life may well be making a lot more progress spiritually than someone who has it easy.

Not that you can't be a "happy learner" who learns without severe suffering but, it seems to be often the case that when people are mistaken about the truth they tend to mis-create some pretty bad-seeming scenarios because they haven't learned, and now the scenario acts as a way to help them learn. Perhaps a repurposing of the suffering they've consented to. The ultimate goal of course is learning that you cannot suffer and choosing not to, which does mean there is a way out when the lesson is learned.

Not long ago I had a dream in which I had to go through an extraordinarily arduous obstacle course, riddled with difficult terrain and hurdles and dangers and all manner of suffering. As I got to the end and emerged into the open, exhausted and strung out and weak, a guide appeared and asked me "What would be so important that you'd be willing to go through all that, if it meant that you could achieve a goal?" The revelation that suddenly came to my awareness was that this was all designed to serve a very big long-term goal of returning to God. No matter what it takes to learn the curriculum.

"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."

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!

Death is the complete and total disowning of yourself and all responsibility for who you are. It is an attempt to say "I am not eternal life", "I am not as God created me", "I am not even who I am".

The only way you can accomplish this disowning of yourself is on purpose, deliberately and intentionally. It is your own self that you have to give away and it is your power you must disown. You have to choose to do this.

This is why the Course teaches that "nobody dies but without his own consent". You literally have to choose to die. What this means is, you literally have to choose not to be what you really are.

But you can't actually stop yourself from being what you really are, because GOD is the one who has established what you are. You cannot go against his Will or change His mind. He created you for an eternity and you can never die.

So the idea that you can not be as God created you, or not be yourself, or be the opposite of Life, or have no Life in you, is merely an act of DENIAL. It is a denial of the truth that you are eternal life and can never die.

And so death is a choice to deny the truth, and is why "sickness is a defense against the truth." But denial of the truth is not the same thing as its removal. You can deny that God exists but this does not destroy God. You can deny you are not who you are or that your life is not your own or that you have no power or that you cannot be responsible for who God created you to be, but that will not change any facts. Denial isn't a fact. Death isn't a fact. It is a cover up.

Nobody has really ever died and nobody ever will. Death doesn't work and you cannot die. You may or may not transition into or out of bodies for whatever purpose, but what you are cannot die.

Since the illusion of death - the *denial* that you are eternal - can only seem to happen by choice, this also means that you can choose otherwise, and therefore you can choose not to experience death. If at some point you decide to 'lay the body down' or exit the physical form, it can be through true peace, power, truth and freedom, rather than some cause you didn't seem to want. And it will have no effect on you because you are eternal.

Truth is the way out of hell.

Taking TOTAL responsibility for EVERYTHING you experience is the ONLY way to find salvation! It is the meaning of forgiveness.

Throughout ACIM there is a simple theme. You are doing this to yourself. You are responsible for everything you experience. Whatever you're feeling, you chose to feel it. Nothing in the world is causing anything that you expeirence at all. And this means you have to own up to full responsibility for choosing all your suffering, in order to stop suffering. It means you have the POWER to make yourself suffer, and to stop the suffering.

This also means that it is impossible for you to be in a victim role, its impossible for the world to hurt you or attack you, no-one is EVER doing anything to you, no one is EVER responsible for causing you to feel anything at all, nothing happens without your consent, you can't even die without your own consent, your own thoughts are the only thing that can attack you, and if you would stop hurting yourself you would never be hurt.

This simple fact of your TOTAL RESPONSIBILITY for everything you experience, is the central truth that all forgiveness is based on. It is really owning up to the fact that YOU ARE IMMORTAL. And because you are immortal and eternal, you never change, you cannot change yourself, and nothing can change you. Any seeming changes you experience YOU must have decided to pretend to have, and nothing OTHER than your own mind can cause these to appear.

If you were to say, there are no other people in the world, you are the only person left in existence, and absolutely nothing happens except what YOU decide, you'd be close to the truth. This is not to say people don't exist, but this is the kind of mindset you need. You can't blame anyone for anything. You are THE CAUSE OF EVERYTHING. And this is described as the Holy Spirit's ONE all-inclusive lesson, which would eradicate ALL forms of suffering.

If you want to know about what forgiveness means, here it is. Forgiveness is simply the total ownership of the power of God, in which you are purely causal, and in which you recognize your immortality and that of everyone. Since we are all immortal, no-one can sin or attack or hurt anyone including themselves. And this means that no-one can be blamed, no one is a victimiser or a victim, and nothing is happening to anyone. In this view, there is no sin, and everyone is innocent and forgiven. It is the recognition that there is nothing TO forgive because nothing real can be changed, and therefore you need do nothing.

It's as simple as the fact that, if you are suffering in ANY way, you ARE the one who is choosing to suffer in this way. As an immortal being, NOTHING can happen to you or change you in any way. Which means no-one can be responsible for ANYTHING you experience, and nothing in the world does anything to you at all. It therefore means that if you seem to be experiencing any kind of suffering, YOU must have chosen it and put it in place yourself. And because you have that power, you can also undo it.

This includes all states of unhappiness, all sense of fear and threat, all sicknesses and pain, all bodily conditions, cancer and disease and death, all forms of attack, all grief and loss, all despair and depression, every kind of victimhood, all roles, all states of stress and upset, every offence, every hurt, YOU MUST have put it in place yourself.

Sometimes it is very hard to RECOGNIZE that this is true, and indeed this is all about recognition. Because without recognition you will not see that you are the cause - that the cause is in your mind. And then you will seek somewhere else, outside of you, in someone else, for the cause of your suffering, to explain how it got there, having disowned responsibility.

Without recognizing what you are doing to yourself, you will just keep doing it to yourself. And this lack of recognition will turn into projection and blame and victimhood and more suffering. If you do not take total responsibility, you will require someone or something else to be responsible. And then you will want someone or something else to change in order for you to be better off, which is the ego's "forgiveness to destroy." You would seek to destroy another in order to make yourself feel better.

This is also why anger is never justified because it's always a reaction to a faulty perception that someone ELSE is responsible, someone ELSE is having the guilt, someone ELSE has the power of causation and has caused you against your will. This is a disowning of YOUR power and making yourself a victim of your own power. Through projection your mind splits and dissociates from your power and puts it outside of you, and then subjects yourself to it, and now you are affecting yourself and at war with yourself, but you will believe that someone else is doing it. This all hides the fact that YOU are responsible for it.

All effects you experience, you put there. All forms of sickness, you chose on purpose. All suffering, you wanted. All guilt you intentionally chose. All fear you subjected yourself to by threatening yourself. All shame you piled upon yourself. All sense of unworthiness you deliberately tried to convince yourself of to keep God and thus power and responsibility away from you. All unhappiness and loss and despair you wanted on purpose to justify why you were powerless and not responsible.

The ego exclaims, someone else did this, not me! I'm not the guilty one, they are! Look at what's wrong with them, look at their sins and errors, I can't be the one at fault, this isn't my doing, I am not the criminal here, other people are accusing me falsely, other people are blaming me, they are all doing it to me, they're out to get me, they're so evil and wrong and guilty, how can they think they are better than me when they are just as bad if not worse, it's not me at all, poor me I am suffering as a victim because of other people and the world, they are all responsible for my happiness, they are all choosing wrongly and choosing unhappiness for me, why won't they just love me and worship me and make me happy against my will?!

That is unforgiveness because it is powerlessness and irresponsible. There is no ownership of CAUSATION in that view. It is false perception. Only by OWNING CAUSE and BEING THE CAUSE can you be free from suffering, reclaim your immortality and eternal life, enter a state of forgiveness, re-identify as the pure Christ being that God created you to be, recognize there is no sin, reclaim innocence, and therefore find SALVATION from suffering and death forever.

YOU ARE DOING THIS TO YOURSELF!!!!!!!!! STOP IT!!!!!!! TAKE YOUR POWER BACK!!!!!!!!! OWN UP TO WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!!!!! LOOK AT WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!!!!!! CHOOSE 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."

"I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts."

"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

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

"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."

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

"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."

"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."

"YOU CAN BUT HURT YOURSELF."

"When you are weary, remember you have hurt yourself."

"Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way, for that is not God's Will for His Son."

"I must have decided wrongly because I am NOT at peace. I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise."

"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."

"You are not the victim of the world you see because you invented it."

"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. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you. Yet when you accord it mercy, will its mercy shine on you."

"There is nothing my holiness cannot do. -- My holiness is unlimited in its power to heal, because it is unlimited in its power to save."

"Say ONLY this, but MEAN it with NO reservations, for here the power of salvation lies: --- I AM responsible for what I see. I CHOSE the feelings I experience, and I DECIDED ON the goal I would achieve. And everything that SEEMS to happen TO me, I ASKED FOR and received as I had asked. --- Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done TO you. Acknowledge but that YOU have been mistaken, and ALL effects of your mistakes will disappear."

"It is impossible the Son of God be merely driven by events OUTSIDE him. It is impossible that the happenings that come to him were NOT his choice. His power of decision is the DETERMINER of every situation in which he seems to FIND himself by chance or accident. No accident or chance is POSSIBLE within the universe as God created it, OUTSIDE of which is nothing. Suffer, and YOU decided sin was your goal. Be happy, and you GAVE the power of decision to Him Who MUST decide for God for you."

What if the world is really a highly malleable dream, not some fixed objective place, and our minds have the power to change it at will? Then this perhaps redefines physical miracles.

If the state of objects, the events that happen, the people that show up, the things that happen, are all chosen and consented and actually put there by the mind, then the mind is in a position of orchestrating, arranging, organizing and putting in place the contents of the dreamworld. Literally projecting physical matter.

This then means that if the mind is changing, its current state is going to project and manipulate and steer the dream in different directions. If it is in fear and war it's going to produce more conflicting nightmarish dreams, and that literally means causing the physical world to have more fights, arguments, conflicts, and so on. Not merely that you're interpreting such events in a more negative way but literally the physical number of problems increases.

Then if the mind is moving into a lighter, higher perspective, it is projecting a broadcast of more tranquil "surroundings", it will outwardly picture its inner condition and make a world in which there literally is less conflict. Less fights, less arguments, less wars, less attacks. Not merely that wars and attacks are now looked up in a more loving way, but that literally the count of them decreases.

This would then mean that someone who is anti-miraculous will be tending to mis-create life scenarios, events, occurrances etc which are generally more conflicted and upsetting. And someone who is more at peace and in line with God will produce life scenarios which are literally, on the physical level, calmer and more cooperative and easier to deal with.

A miracle worker would then be someone of a high mind who literally "manifests" a more healed world. Not merely healed as in, on I'm looking at the same world in a happier way, but that literally a higher world is projected and made. A higher world is hallucinated. Not a projection onto the world, but the ACTUAL world itself is a higher kind of world, with more peace and less problems and less sickness and so on.

For example, Jesus speaks of this:

"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?"

Jesus isn't merely speaking there of interpreting a warzone AS IF it were a beautiful garden. He is saying that literally it transforms INTO a beautiful garden, a physical garden. How else does "all around the signs of life spring up" when miracles fall like drops of healing rain?

We have to now ask ourselves, is Jesus referring here to vision being some kind of just "happier way of looking at the same stuff", in which there are still wars and conflicts and so on but you "read into" them more positively? OR is he LITERALLY saying, that terrifying scenes, harmful arrangements of objects, frightening events, and so on, are literally erased, and replaced with a different kind of "reality" where there is now literally a beautiful garden instead of a warzone? Not a warzone reimagined or reinterpreted, but a warzone REPLACED by a garden?

What if our attempted understanding of perception is totally fucked up, and Jesus is actually NOT saying that you have "perceptions about" a separate world "out there", but instead that there is NO objective world, there is only a wishful-thinking dream projection hallucination of a world, which takes on different literal FORMS, depending on the content of your mind? Because now we're talking about mind literally changing the physical content, the events that transpire, the people that interact, how relationships go, problems that arise etc, and not merely looking at them in a different way.

Perhaps Jesus has thrown out the idea of there being an "objective world" entirely, and is speaking solely to the fact that our minds are literally PROJECTING A WORLD in realtime? That the reflection of hell on earth isn't merely a darkened interpretation of earth, but an actual projection of a warring world? And that vision or true perception or sight of "the real world" may actually be a way to project a heaven-like illusory world where there is no more sickness or death or suffering? Not a heaven ON earth, but a dream of heaven replacing earth?

When you go back and re-read many of Jesus's statements about perception and what you see and so on, perhaps they take on a different light if you consider them as NOT referring to an objectively separate world. Such as when Jesus says "The world IS perception" and "The world is false perception." Perhaps he is literally saying that when the mind is in false perception it projects planet earth, and when it is in true perception it projects the real world which REPLACES ENTIRELY the "actual world"? That perceptions of the world are always SUBJECTIVE hallucinations.

There is no world to really project onto. There is only an outward picturing of your present inner condition. There is no perceptions "about" the world as such. Changing how you feel about the world actually changes the world, itself, into a different form of a world, a different dream.

You see, when Jesus says that your self is ruler of the universe and nothing happens without your consent, he's not giving any exceptions to that. He's telling us that nothing happens unless we consent to it. That means the events, the happenings, the people, the encounters, the relationships, etc are actually orchestrated by the mind. Not merely interpretations of a world. The mind IS the world. "You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts."

So now when you are a miracle worker, turning water into wine, walking on water, raising the dead, these are not merely perceptual reinterpretations of things. Jesus didn't look at lazarus's body in "a happier light". He transformed the FORM of his body from a dead decaying corpse into a living healthy active form of a body. That is direct reality manipulation. That is mind over matter. That is changing the dream world with the mind. That is what we might call a "physical miracle".

I'm really starting to lean more now toward this idea that there is no objective world here, there is only a dream, and it does not exist without our mind dreaming it. Therefore its content is entirely mind driven, mind chosen, mind consented. What happens is what we desire. If the world is going to pot its because we're making a world that's going to pot. If events are improving its because your mind is improving. And this leads to the notion that eventually we will actually orchestrate a world state which is actually somewhat like "heaven on earth", before we ascend. Where things are PHYSICALLY more harmonious.

What if the world is not a mirror or a screen or something to project onto. What if it IS the projection? And what if there is no world without such dreaming? And what if you as the dreamer can dream any kind of world, and have it become physically manifest?

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

"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 no world apart from your ideas because ideas leave not their source, and ***you maintain the world within your mind in thought***."

"***external conditions are produced by the thoughts of many***, not all of whom are pure in heart as yet."

Consider the idea of a script for your life which you fully planned, consented to, and passionately wanted, before you came into this lifetime. Imagine that you organized and orchestrated every single interaction. You created agreements with every single person you would ever meet and you asked them to do to you every single thing they were to do, with which they would comply. Imagine also that only what you planned would happen and nothing else would happen - except you would also forget that you planned it.

ACIM does speak to this, in that it says that nothing happens to you that you have not asked for, and that you get *everything* you ask for, and that you get *nothing* that you did not ask for. It also speaks to this when it says that nobody dies without his own consent. NOBODY DIES WITHOUT THEIR OWN CONSENT.

At some point, somewhere, whether it's in this life or before this life, but somewhere, for ACIM to be TRUE on this matter, you ****MUST**** have consented to every single thing that has ever happened in your life. ABSOLUTELY ALL OF IT. Not only consented to it but created it, asked for it, wanted it, designed it and even set it in motion YOURSELF. Not by any outside force or coercion or ANY amount of victimhood whatsoever. (this is somewhat described in the "song of prayer" pamphlet as well)

Remember the Course also says the key to salvation is this - that you are but doing this to yourself.

IF the Course is telling the truth (and it is), then everything that has ever happened in 'your life' has been exactly designed by and asked for by you. All of it. So this takes quite a lot of 'fessing up', which also means your life must become totally void of victimhood.

If you look now, and you look back at some things that you recognize as having 'happened' in your life, particularly events which involved people where they seemed to influence you in ANY way, and in particular in what *looked like* any kind of negative way, then you need to now reinterpret that. If you can allow yourself to ACCEPT that you planned and asked for every single detail of what occurred, then a few insights must arise:

1) You have to realize there was a REASON WHY you planned what you did, and that reason was FOR YOUR GOOD. Every single thing that you designed must have been for an intended purpose of, ultimately, leading you to a spiritual awakening. Every single 'lesson' or scenario that you put together, MUST have been intended to HELP YOU in some way.

2) With the information that all events are helpful, this must then shed a new light on all of these tragic past experiences, to show you that SOMEHOW, whatever happened, and no matter how it looked at the time, somehow that event and that person were ONLY doing what was in your script and they performed it perfectly. Therefore they weren't REALLY a victimizer. And you weren't REALLY a victim. At the time, yes, you believed you were, but here's the thing. You only believe you are a victim when you are UNAWARE that you are a script-writer.

3) This now gives rise to the insight that every way you've experienced being a victim in the past, was a result of a lack of awareness on your part, in which you experienced something designed to HELP YOU but interpreted it initially as HURTING YOU. This symbolically is the same thing as being loved by God but believing that you're actually being attacked by God. Ie it seemed against you rather than for you. So all of the ways that you STILL hold onto past events with a grievance, thinking of them as 'wrong' or 'unwanted' or 'bad' or 'unpleasant' or whatever, blaming the other person, all of that INTERPRETATION of events came about ONLY because you did not remember that you wrote the script. It looked like you didn't ask for what happened, which, IF it were true, WOULD justify your anger and hurt and offense. And that means, you need to to be more truly forgiving, ultimately accepting the atonement.

4) This now helps you to see that, ultimately, everyone involved is INNOCENT, because nobody has done anything outside of the contract and nobody ELSE is responsible for having done anything TO YOU against your will. Your will is embedded in your script which YOU WROTE, so even if you now find yourself unaware of this and experiencing victimhood, YOU DID STILL WRITE IT. So you can hardly blame the other person. So now you need to go look at all the unhealed grievances that you still haven't let go of, and which you still interpret in a victim consciousness that says "I didn't want this to happen", "this wasn't fair", "they did it to me against my will" etc.... you HAVE to reinterpret that.

5) This now leads us to TAKING RESPONSIBILITY. This might seem like a step which places a shitload of guilt on your shoulders, blaming yourself for what happened, bla bla bla. That's ego. What it really means is actually a doorway to FREEDOM and RELIEF. You see, if you scripted all this, and you asked xyz person to do what they did, and you can admit that and own that fact, then you can let them off the hook. You can realize they did not victimize you. YOU victimized you. You hired them to carry out your wishes. If you are responsible for writing your script (and maybe you had help on the other side to do this gently/realistically etc), then you can no longer blame anyone else for what happens, in the past or in the future. It also means you can no longer view experiences as unwanted, bad, against you, unhelpful, hurtful, something to resist, as an attack, or any other form of victimization. That means, yes, whatever they did, whatever happened, you wanted it and got what you wanted, FOR A REASON, to HELP YOU to wake up.

6) Having now admitted to this responsibility, and started to access the sense of RELIEF and freedom that this gives you... because dropping the whole victim drama is a RELIEF from suffering, you can now enter into GRATITUDE. You cannot be grateful to an attacker while you think you didn't ask them to attack you. But you can be grateful to them when you realize you DID ask them to AND you can turn your mind to look at the situation as helpful/for you. It's like looking for the silver linings. What's happening is NOT a terrible tragedy or a horrible event gone wrong. That's illusion. What's happening is trying to help you to be steered in the right direction or to keep you safe or to help you learn who you are or to guide you to remembering whats true or to learn to love and care etc.. whatever the purposes are in your plan for spiritual "growth."

7) Finally then you have to learn to change the 'direction' or angle from which you look at events. If you're responsible and everything is for your good, then you need to learn to 'take it' that way. Look for the helpfulness. Look for how it is 'positive'. Look for the silver lining, the learning, the opportunity its giving you. Look at how it is making you grow or what you're learning from it. Ultimately then there is only one LESSON, in the form of all lessons. And it's this. You need to overcome the NEED for the lesson by recognizing the truth, owning up to the responsibility of who you really are (owning your innocence), entering into the mindset of the Holy Spirit which shows you that you are never a victim, and reclaiming your FREEDOM from the dramas of the ego. Ultimately this translates to you OVERLOOKING (forgiveness) all of the ways that you get LOST in the 'game' that you set up, so that you literally are no longer CAPABLE of playing the game. Once the truth is revealed, you can never forget it. And so you no longer need to create these dramas ever again.

Remember, nothing happens to you against your will. There are no accidents. Nothing happens that wasn't planned at some point in time BY YOU. Nothing is being forced upon you against your will.

You might find yourself 'inside a lesson' in this lifetime and feeling stuck in it, victmized by it, limited by it. But you might not also remember the benefits of this situation. Maybe it has indirect effects on the spiritual growth of other people. Maybe by suffering a sickness you HELP other people to learn compassion. Maybe by being afraid you give others an opportunity to learn to nurture. We're all this big soup of roleplay and side-effects and responses.

Also let's just finish by saying you're not stuck with a lesson. Holy Spirit WANTS you to learn the lesson. The answer to it is not being hidden from you. Often Holy Spirit tells me, in the midst of some frustration and confusion, "its a lesson". So them I'm like.. hmm... what is this lesson, what am I meant to learn? And it's not like Holy Spirit is withholding the answer, but I need to experientially becoming willing to accept some measure of truth in order to complete the need for the situation. The lesson may not be obvious.

In fact a recent lesson for me was to learn to DROP the idea of miraculously healing a problem with my eye, so that i would let go of false ideas about control and spiritualization of my ego, even though this outcome seemed at the time to be totally the opposite of what I thought I needed to do. Holy Spirit eventually revealed, when I was at the readiness to admit to it, that the whole point was to help me to 'see' the truth - that I was trying to do/be something beyond what is asked of me.

Also I can't begin to tell you how much I have learned compassion and a heart-opening as a result of various challenges that a person close to me has been through. For which I'm grateful, even though it sounds 'sick' to say you're grateful for sickness.

Holy Spirit said to me, "there is a plan". I'm learning to trust that more. And thus learning to take responsibility for my part in that plan, and thus relinquishing all of the support for victim mentality and blame. Even now as I start to look back at past events in 'this new light' I can see that I need to become grateful to people that I thought were against me or who I thought did the wrong thing. They were only helping and they only DID help. I just didn't recognize it.

Ultimately you want to get to where you have no more need for writing scripts, having learned everything they offer. Then you are free from the cycle of reincarnation forever.

"Lesson 253 "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."

We're familiar with the idea of scapegoating. Something that seems separate from you happens, someone does something, and then you become triggered. You use the opportunity to project some guilt onto the person to relieve yourself.

But what if we said that the things that happen, do not happen on their own without your consent? What if we say that you cause things to happen, you coerce people to do things, and you put the events in place? And what if the reason you do this is so that you can position yourself as a victim, prime yourself for being upset about the situation, disown responsibility, and project blame for it onto someone else?

Is it possible that before you even scapegoat, you dream a dream and put the figures there and make them act out for you? What if the ego in you seeks to sabotage everything, find people sinful, and condemn them, long before you even seem to be projecting stuff onto them or reacting to them?

"It is the FIGURES in the dream, and what THEY do that seem to MAKE THE DREAM. You do not realize that ****you are making them act out FOR you****, for if you did, the guilt would not be theirs, and the illusion of satisfaction would be gone."

What if you actively seek to set people up for failure, actively try to cause problems to happen, actively amplify suffering and actively want things to go wrong so that you can have an opportunity TO scapegoat? What if life only sucks because you are CAUSING it to distort towards hell? What if your mind is actually INFLUENCING the dream, orchestrating events, changing behaviors, and is causing you to SET UP unpleasant situations?

Jesus in ACIM says that your self is ruler of the universe, and nothing comes to you unbidden by yourself. Whatever happens is what you desire. And what does not happen you have not chosen. This sure seems to suggest that your mind is a powerful creator, that events don't just happen on their own without your consent, and that you actually have a psychological influence over the world. This is your dream, after all.

What we maybe need to be willing to look at, and this is very deep, is that we don't just have a problem projecting guilt onto people, supposedly justified by "what they do", or the sins they commit, but we actually also orchestrate events and manipulate happenings and sabotage proceedings and cause problems to arise, just so that we can have scenarios in which scapegoating becomes possible. We ARRANGE the world into configurations of suffering.

Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that your mind is actually asking for trouble? Or that you are wanting there to be unsolvable problems? Or that you're making your life a living hell on purpose? Or that your ego wants there to be war? That your mind actually induces problems and holds them as real and maintains and energizes them in order to keep you in a position of victimhood, so that you'll be primed and ready to project crap onto all those involved?

What if it's that you secretly want there to be a problem? What if you secretly want to suffer, have unsolvable issues, be confronted with conflict and see yourself as powerless and hopeless and unable to see a way out? What if your descent into hell and your attempt to push everyone there with you, is actually a choice you're making that demands the dream conform to your wishes? What if your desire to see yourself unfairly treated actually manipulates spacetime and world events and people's health and so on, just so that you can keep the lie of "I didn't choose this" going?

After all, how are you going to scapegoat if no-one is doing anything to bother you? How are you going to project your guilt if no-one is sinning or making mistakes? Maybe you have to trip them up. Maybe you have to put obstacles in place. Maybe you actively seek to destroy your life and your relationships. Maybe you want things to go wrong so that you'll find yourself in an impossible situation, a nightmare of your own making, so that you'll seem imprisoned and powerless and can blame everyone else for making you feel this way?

I really do think that our minds are powerful enough that we actually influence events, manipulate happenings, induce and increase problems, make issues persist through resistance, attract even more suffering through fear, and so on. Our minds influence the dream world. Our focus, especially if it's coming from ego on some subtle level, can actually attempt to sabotage and destroy and tear down and constantly throw things into stressful states. Our egos want this, so that we can have the perfect justification for seeing ourselves unfairly treated.

"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." We are not idle spectators in this world, we are creators, and our minds are powerful and never stop creating. And while we pretend not to create with or like God, we instead mis-create. And our mis-creations become a world that we make and look upon and react to. It may be completely wrong to assume that this physical world is just some objectively solid real fixed thing, there on its own, doing its own thing. Maybe instead it is a fluid dream fabric which our minds are constantly manipulating, causing things to happen, asking for certain people to show up, putting problems there etc. After all, the world IS an hallucination OUR mind is having.

"People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally AFRAID of them."

"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you REALLY understood you made it up?"

I've seen for myself how when I'm in a more egoic mood or angry, more things go wrong than usual. It's not just that I'm annoyed and can't stay patient with everyday things, it's more that there's an actual increase in how many things mess up. If I'm in fear the same thing occurs. Stuff breaks, falls, drops, slips, gets bumped into, goes missing, malfunctions etc, a lot more than usual. As children of God we need to learn to realize and master the fact that we are not just sitting here passively perceiving the world, we are MAKING IT.

Could it be that we actually are far more powerful creators than we realize? Could it be that even in this dream world we are rulers of our destiny and have to learn to create constructively and responsibly, even of dream stuff? Could it be that when we're having one of those days where everything goes wrong it's because we're making it go wrong on purpose?

Could it be that if we master this ability of mind power, mind over matter so to speak, that we could in fact orchestrate what happens, how it happens, who it happens to, and thereby be truly ruler of the universe? And what if when your mind is more peaceful, it INDUCES a life in which events are smoothed out and problems melt and attacks diminish and the so-called physical world actually bends to your will? That "all around the signs of life spring up" as you walk by, simply by the power of your mind to organize and turn chaos into order?

"external conditions are produced by the thoughts of many, not all of whom are pure in heart as yet."

"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."

"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.****"

"The scent of flowers is their gift to you. The waves bow down before you, and the trees extend their arms to shield you from the heat and lay their leaves before you on the ground, that you may walk in softness, while the wind sinks to a whisper 'round your holy head."

To deny God, in attempting to stop Creation/Life, you are choosing death. You want God's Life to die. To deny God is to deny what God IS, which is Life, so is an assertion that God is death.

But God Created YOU as Life, so to deny Creation/Life MUST entail you bringing an end to YOUR life as well. You cannot deny God without denying yourself. Therefore, denial of God is SUICIDE.

Since all choices to end Life are a choice for death, and since you ARE Life, and since death can only happen if you CHOOSE to deny Life, ALL DEATH IS DELIBERATE SUICIDE.

There is no such thing as people dying from 'accidents', or people dying from 'sickness', or people dying from 'attack by others', or people dying from 'acts of nature' or 'old age' or 'time', or people dying from 'unknown causes', or people dying from 'it was their time'. These are just the WAY you chose to die - the FORM of death - it has nothing to do with WHETHER you have to die.

You can ONLY die by committing suicide, which you bring about by REFUSING TO CHOOSE LIFE - which literally means, by CHOOSING DEATH. You refuse to choose Life when you refuse to accept God, and denial of God brings death because God is Life.

Death is never brought about by any other means or for any other reason than to deny God/Life.

Since YOU are the one choosing to deny God, all death is a CHOICE.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DIE.

Death is NOT inevitable.

ACIM lesson 152 - the power of decision is my own - "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. AND NO ONE DIES WITHOUT HIS OWN CONSENT." - Jesus

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DIE.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DIE.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DIE.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DIE.

You can choose God. God is Life. You are Life. It is only when you deny your Eternal Self that you experience an ILLUSION of death, and it is NEVER more than an illusion. Death only appears to happen in a DREAM of death, which is a dream of 'what would be like if God could be denied?' - an impossible fiction.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DIE.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DIE.

YOU CAN CHOOSE TO LIVE.

Denial of Life is NOT its removal - it is a refusal to ACCEPT that LIFE IS THERE. This does not change Life or stop it, but merely HIDES it from you. Thus death is HIDING from Life, and it has no power to STOP Life.

Since you can deny Creation but cannot REMOVE Creation, and since YOU are Creation, YOU *CANNOT* DIE! You can deny yourself but you cannot die. "Death" as we are familiar with it, in the world, is nothing other than a state of denial. It is UNTRUE. It is covering up life, NOT getting rid of it.

YOU CANNOT DIE!

YOU CANNOT DIE!

YOU CANNOT DIE!

God ALREADY chose for you to live forever. All you have to do is fully accept this and remove absolutely all efforts to prevent it. Thus you will return/resurrect to ABSOLUTE LIFE and PERMANENT EXISTENCE, which cannot BE prevented no matter how much you try to deny it. "You can deny reality, but you cannot change it." - Jesus

YOU ARE IMMORTAL SPIRIT, you will live forever.

My note: I love it when everything becomes totally clear and logically consistent and can't be denied

In this world it's becoming increasingly popular to regard "all bodies" as equal. This is a good step towards the recognition of true equality, but right now it's still heavily focused on making bodies real and then trying to equalize them and be more accepting of them. To accept a body as real is to make sin real.

The whole purpose of the body, to the ego, is to create an image of difference. Difference is an attack on the equality of God's children. Bodies show images of how we are not the same, live by different rules, have different values, and are imprisoned by forms.

So you get for example social movements to treat men and women equally. And you get the feminists and whatever the male counterpart of that is. And then you get the people with certain sexual orientations and gender identities having their say. And then it all gradually moves toward attempting to KEEP all of these different bodies, but somehow regard them as equal to each other.

The ideal is to have no racism, no sexism, no gender discrimination, no abuse of people who are different. But the ego wants to keep the differences and find a way to accept the differences. That is insanity and it is impossible, but it does show that on a deeper level, mentally, we're trying to move towards the truth.

What should and will eventually happen, is that we all *recognize* each other as immortal spirit, as beings of light, as completely identical children of God, who have no differences, are equal in *every* possible way, and this will completely ERASE the body which is a separation device. The body only shows up when minds believe in separation and differences.

So the goal shouldn't really be to find ways to "accept other bodies as they are", although that's a good step in the right direction. At least if we try to accept bodies as neutral or indifferent or that form doesn't matter, we're starting to foster the right kind of thinking towards a sane mind.

But at some point we have to admit, bodies come between people, bodies are illusions, you are not a body you are free, and the body is not the person at all. Bodies are nothing, bodies are not important, and if we're TRULY interested in equality then it has to go completely beyond bodies to the recognition of perfect identical christhood in each of us. And that means overlooking the body in a state of forgiveness.

Until then I guess we'll continue to see the stepping stones, the social movements and the mens/womens rights and the appreciation of the minorities and all the rest of it. It's just that, ultimately, that's limited and can only go so far before you realize bodies themselves are the problem.

"Whenever you consent to suffer pain, to be deprived, unfairly treated, or in need of ANYTHING, you but accuse your brother of attack upon God's Son. You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes, that he may see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death, and go before him, closing off the gate, and damning him to hell. Yet this is writ in hell and NOT in Heaven, where you are BEYOND attack, and prove his INNOCENCE. The picture of yourself you offer him you show YOURSELF, and give it all your faith. The Holy Spirit offers you, to give to him, a picture of yourself in which there is NO pain, and NO reproach at all. And what was martyred to his guilt becomes the perfect witness to his innocence."

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.

When your attempt at healing asks "what is wrong with me?" .... you know you're on the wrong track, because you're actually trying to find something wrong with you.

The truth can NEVER be that there is something wrong with you. The truth is that you are always perfect. How can anything be really wrong with you?

Yet this mode of diagnosis is extremely prevalent, where the ego is trying to come up with an explanation for "why" you are sick. To explain why you are sick is to completely assume that you ARE sick. This alone cements the sickness in place regardless of what diagnosis you come up with. By the time you THINK you know what the cause is (which will not be the real cause), the sickness will have been amplified even more.

You can't find health by asking in what ways you are unhealthy. It just makes the sickness real. Once you've made sickness real, that means you've lent it a sense of truth and reality, and having done so, you cannot heal it. What is true is permanent and your belief that the sickness is real KEEPS IT.

God does not need diagnosis. Diagnosis is an ego device for prolonging the story and the drama surrounding the sickness, while PRETENDING to be doing something to deal with it.

What if the sickness were to just disappear, right now, never to return? Would you want it? Would you be willing to drop all of the drama and story and side-benefits that arise from having the sickness? Perhaps in your sickness you actually want to be sick because it's serving a purpose?

Most people who are sick... and this is not an attack... just observing.... most people who are sick, well let's just say ALL people who are sick, WANT to be sick on some level. They must. Jesus tells us so - nothing can happen without your own consent and you only get what you ask for. There are no accidents and no victims. So if you're sick, you chose it somehow, for some purpose.

This is what I'm finding to be a bit of a problem in terms of healing the sick.... on the surface they may very much want to be healed, but somewhere deep down there was a decision to be sick and a they wanted it. So there is always some kind of denial of healing, some kind of resistance to truth, and some kind of unwillingness to be healed.

Yet, if a person could leap from their state of denial and desperation and resistance, to a state of healing where the problem no longer exists... I think most people would simply celebrate and be grateful. The shift in awareness would remove all of the foundation for fighting against health. People think they want to be sick, but *REALLY* they want to be with God. This leap from not wanting healing to being healed, is a DIVINE INTERVENTION, which is why Jesus says in the miracle principles: "miracles intercede for your holiness."

So remember, as you try to perform miracles, or heal anyone, you have to be wary of yourself entering into a diagnosis mode, dwelling on the story of how the person was a victim, or of what ALLEGEDLY caused the problem. The truth is that nothing in the world causes anything because the world is nothing more than an illusory effect. So looking for answers in the world will always turn up empty handed. It's the ego's mechanism for distraction and for seeking but not finding, so that healing will not take place. Trying to diagnose problems simply makes them real, keeps them, and fails to cure them.

So we need to get into this mode of... instant healing, and it being not a spectacle, and simply being done with it and then moving on with enjoying Life. Like it's no big deal. But for most people it's going to seem like a huge deal because the limitations imposed by sickness probably has imprisoned the person for a long time. But sickness is nothing.

God doesn't need to diagnose in order to heal something. God is always in a state of health and radiates healing. God's health is instantaneous. He does not dwell on figuring out the cause, or why something happened, as though that would imply DIFFERENT SOLUTIONS depending on the problem. That would be a CONDITIONAL healing. He heals unconditionally, so doesn't care what the problem is or how difficult it seems. There is no order of difficulty in UNCONDITIONAL MIRACLES. He simply heals. Now.

Problem corrected. Done. Move along. Nothing to see.

Given everything is driven by free-willed cause and effect, nothing is accidental. There are no mistakes. There is nothing happening randomly or by chance. Nothing happens at all without someone choosing it and willing it. There must be a CAUSE, before there is ANY effect.

You might think this is not true based on what appears to be a world or 'nature' that seems to do random stuff and is hard to explain as being anything but chaotic. But the fact is that nothing happens without some kind of "cause" making it happen. Whatever the cause may be. Without a cause there is no effect, so whenever something is 'happening', something caused it.

You then also get the idea that even if you cause something, it seems to have a cascade of completely "unintentional" consequences or side effects. There's seemingly knock-on effects or a whole chain of seemingly chaotic aftershocks. Yet are these things truly random? Are they not simply cause producing effects, which act as causes producing effects, and so on, in a chain of causality?

As the Course says, those who are to meet will meet. So for example, people meet because they choose to do so.

If you also look at My Self is Ruler of the Universe, it explicitly states that nothing happens without your say-so, and anything you choose happens, and nothing else.

The course also describes how teachers of God make all decisions fully consciously, with total awareness of the consequences, meaning, they know exactly what effects they are causing, and cause only those effects, on purpose, deliberately. And it is by choosing only loving choices that they guarantee their safety.

So this world, while it may SEEM like it's a total mess of random chaos and accidents and things happening against your will and victims and mistakes and all these illusions of uncertainty, in actual fact absolutely nothing is happening without a cause. It is all chosen. All deliberate. All instigated by a mind, somewhere.

Nothing moves or animates without mind making it move. Nothing appears or disappears without mind's say-so. Even the laws of nature are being "run" by a mind, somewhere, deliberately choosing what will and will not occur. The entire world would not even show up if it were not for a decision made somewhere.

And just because we think okay, we "set it in motion" and now the chips will fall where they may and a completely automatic random chaos follows, that's simply not true. Causality ensures that the consequences were set up in the causing, not as a result of the effects. Effects do not choose. Effects are not the source of decision. Even if there seems to be an entire cascade of consequences, one thing leading to another, is that not also completely specifically deliberately set in motion by a mind making a choice?

The truth about this world and enviornment then is that nothing happens without your consent, everything that happens is chosen, the world doesn't even spin unless someone spins it, and it is literally impossible for anything to happen if you do not choose it to. You are the author and dreamer.

You are the causer, chooser, instigator, of everything. You are never at the effect of some 'other chooser' choosing against your will, or things happening 'on their own' or as a result of some process or sequence of events that seem totally unrelated. There is no 'un-asked-for' anything. Remember that this entire world didn't even exist until someone explicitly put every piece of it in place, through choice and belief.

So there are no accidents, of any kind, ever. There is no victimhood. There is no mistake or something un-asked for. BUT, it DOES remain possible to make a POOR decision. It's possible to make a wrong decision or a decision for something that brings suffering. It's possible to evaluate situations and set in motion things which later turn out to be harmful. And it's possible to be very deluded as to what you have chosen or why.

The law always holds. Your free will is never violated by anything. If you would simply choose to wake up, you would. "Heaven is a choice I must make". Nothing can keep you imprisoned in hell against your will, other than YOUR choosing. You CAN make a poor choice, producing explicitly selected consequences or conditions, but you cannot make NO choice, and whatever you DO choose WILL happen. No exceptions.

The task then simply becomes one of, making a better choice. "I must have made a wrong decision because I'm not at peace - I made the decision myself but I want to choose otherwise - I want to choose otherwise because I want to be at peace". Choose again, the course says. You are free to choose, but not free from the consequences of choosing. And all consequences are chosen. This is how you create your own hell. And it is how you find salvation.

Complaining is victimhood. And it doesn't work.

Anything that happens, you choose. If you are conscious, you make a conscious choice, with deliberate intent to produce an effect. You cause it, implement it, make it happen and put it in place, because you want to.

"God's teachers choose ... It is a conscious choice.For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences."

Having done so, you now have produced effects, circumstances and results. Since you know that you put these things there, on purpose, and that you had the power to do so, you would also know that if you so chose, you could abolish these effects just as easily by changing your mind.

"You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both."

But when you cause something unconsciously or you cause it and then use denial to pretend you didn't cause it, you set yourself up for the basis of victimhood. It now seems that cause must have come from someone or somewhere else. If that's true, and if you didn't seem to have the power to put this situation in place yourself, then it seems to be up to someone else to change their mind and cause the situation to change.

This then leads to the perfect foundation for complaining. In complaint, you now assert that you do not want the effects you ended up with, BUT, you're not willing to admit that you caused them OR that you have the power to change them. You believe someone else had that power. So you now try to manipulate the surrounding environment and its contributors by making a lot of 'noise' about why you don't want the results that have appeared, and why someone else needs to be stepping up to make the changes.

So complaining is victimhood. It's a state where in truth, you WANT the situation to be the way it is, having chosen it, but you are claiming that you don't want it. And it's where you have no actual intention of changing your OWN mind, or causing the situation to change. So the ego is then making a lot of noise about why the situation sucks, is unwanted, isn't agreeable, should be different etc, while unconsciously continuing to choose it, cause it, make it and put it in place. All the while trying to suggest that someone else needs to take some action.

You DO have the freedom and the ability to correct the situation. It is the lack of OWNERSHIP of the causing of the situation, and the perception of yourself has having NO POWER OVER IT, that is the problem. You CAN change any situation. You can heal anything. You are free.

"The Holy Spirit will undo the consequences of my wrong decision if I will let him."

"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."

"The power of decision is our own. Decide but to accept your rightful place as co-creator of the universe, and all you think you made will disappear."

"This holy relationship has the power to heal all pain, regardless of its form."

"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 God created you, you have all power."

"The will you share with God has all the power of creation in it."

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

"For you have ASKED it be withheld from power to heal all dreams. There is no miracle you cannot have when you DESIRE healing."

"For you HAVE power to save the Son of God because his Father willed that it be so."

"The power of decision is your one remaining freedom as a prisoner of this world."

"he HAS the power to heal and bless all those he looks on"

"The miracle ITSELF is but the witness that you HAVE the power of God in you."

"The power of the Sons of God is operating all the time, because they were created as creators."

"It is you who have the power to dominate all things you see."

"No one can grieve, nor fear, nor think him sick, unless these are the outcomes that he wants. And no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish and nothing is omitted that you choose. "

"There is nothing my holiness cannot do."

"There is a place in you where nothing is impossible. "

For some time I've been confused about freedom.

A term I am often told by spirit is "you're free."

This always felt uncomfortable. It seems to allow me to do absolutely whatever I wanted to do.

It always seemed like spirit was giving me permission to do things, even things that seemed unhealthy. And this is because freedom really is unconditional, regardless of what you use it for.

Often when I would ask about what to do, whether to do something or not, they'd say "you're free". It didn't seem like a helpful response.

But I see now that it seemed to prefer to give me the freedom of choice, and to not impose any sense of one thing being more guilty than another.

Even so, I would often feel a need to then push further to ask for guidance or advice as to what to do - from someone who knows better. Because this freedom would also highlight that maybe what I was considering choosing wasn't in the spirit of freedom, ie was unloving in some way.

I still couldn't quite come to terms with "being free" though. I would ask my wife (in spirit) something for example, something perhaps relating to our relationship or earth life, and she would say "you're free". If it was ever a request about whether some kind of ego-need was 'okay', she's say I'm free.

In some way it almost seemed like a sort of "i'd prefer you don't do that, but do it if you want to" sort of begrudging. But I am sure it's my own mind that couldn't help but project that onto it.

I also struggled with the idea of being free in general, especially as it relates to my wife's passing and trying to move on and get over grief and loss.

She has been reminding me often "you're free". This hasn't always sat well, because it often was interpreted to mean "we're separate". I have since come to see that this is a sense of physical freedom - or a breaking of relationship, as though to say we have no relationship anymore, but that's not what it means.

It's finally sort of sinking in, especially from the huge download I received last night, that all this talk of freedom doesn't really mean what I thought it did.

I suddenly see now that freedom is really something that was given by God in my creation. It's a wholesale unlimited unrevokable freedom. And it has no strings attached, nor is there any suggestion of guilt for choosing one thing or another.

In this freedom is responsibility for choosing, the power to choose, the power to cause and create, and the inability to BE guilty. If we are free, and God has said "have at it", there is no coercion or requirement or pressure or punishment or judgement of any kind.

This has revealed the truth that, by being free I literally am free to come and go, free to choose, free to do one thing or another, with no strings attached anywhere. Strings are not of heaven or of God or spirit. Strings are conditions, part of conditional love. There are no chains or ties, no limits, no imprisonment.

We are all each one of us individually completely 100% free to dream or awaken, stay in hell or move toward heaven, remain suffering or regain our power, act like an effect or a cause, do evil things or good things, whatever. God does not forceable stop anything, but he does will and encourage us through his plan and help to choose a better way - a more loving happier way.

This is why I keep being told "you're free". It's a God-given right. I don't have to do anything I don't want to do. Whatever I want to do comes to pass. I a responsible for everything I experience. I consent to whatever I cause to happen. There is no victimhood, no specialness, no ties and no conditions.

It doesn't matter what I do, coming or going, advancing or retreating. God still loves me and so does all of heaven. I am guided gently forward and gently upward, and so long as I trust and have willingness I will return to God. Not because I have to, but because I want to.

"Forget not that the choice of truth or sin, power or helplessness, IS the choice of whether to attack or HEAL. For healing comes of POWER, and ATTACK of helplessness. Whom you attack, you CANNOT want to heal. And whom you would have healed, MUST be the one you chose to be PROTECTED from attack. And what IS this decision, but the choice whether to see him through the body's eyes, or let him be REVEALED to you through vision? HOW this decision leads to its effects is NOT your problem. But what you WANT to see, MUST be your choice. This is a course in CAUSE, and NOT effect." UrT21H8

I've been having a lot of deep insight lately about cause and effect and taking back my power, so I want to share some more on this. This may be a little lengthy so bear with me.

When we think of a victim we're usually talking about something negative. Someone does something to a person that they do not want. An enemy attacks, someone calls a name, someone judges, something happens to someone seemingly against their will, producing the effect of suffering.

And then we think that the things that don't do this, are not negative, or there's nothing wrong with it. Such as, feeling that a certain person is the love of your life, or having a special friend, or someone makes you happy and makes you laugh, or there's a favourite place you like to go to, or a place you call home because you like it more than other places.

You like these things, enjoy these things, want these things, "love" (conditionally) these things, because they seem to "cause you positively." They do things to you that you seem to prefer. You have needs, you have lacks, you have shortcomings, and these people or things seem to make up for it, they seem to do for you what you can't do etc. You seem to need them. They are the "other half" of you.

But the problem then comes when the person goes away, they die, they fail in some way to give you what you want or need. Or you leave a favourite place, or you break up with a person, or you lose a favourite possession or whatever. Given that your mind has become dependent on these things, it now suffers, and it flips into "special hate".

That is, the ego now sees itself as a NEGATIVE victim, instead of a positive one. The things you depended on are now seeming to turn against you and cause you pain. The people that you loved and cared for are now, in their absence, the seeming source of loss and misery. You might even feel angry at them. Special hate especially comes out AS hate if the person turns from favoured friend to an enemy, and seems to outright attack you.

What I've been realising is that when I attribute CAUSE to something outside of myself, it doesn't matter whether it seems to be positive or negative, wanted or unwanted, if I give it causal POWER OVER ME, to cause me something, I'm on a slippery slope and am now gambling in highly risky ego territory. I'm now striking a deal, doing a bargain, forming a special relationship, in which I prefer to get something out of it that I want or need. I have become dependent on something external, and don't want to let the dependancy go.

When the mind is giving POWER to someone or something to cause you in some way, that's a double-edged sword. If they comply, you might think you are happy, and for a while they seem to "do something to you" that you like. Whether it be making you happy, causing you to laugh, giving you good feelings even, making you love them more, paying your bills, whatever. They are the chosen one. The best person you ever met.

But at the same time there is tremendous risk, and likelihood, that at some point this will stop, and you will suddenly feel deprived and neglected and ignored and lost and very unhappy. Because if they are not there to do what you have become dependent on them to do, you will revert to deprivation and suffering.

I've seen that this reversal of cause and effect, this giving of POWER to someone else or to some thing else, to have power over you in some way - positively OR negatively - results in your mind becoming DEPENDENT on that thing. This dependency, is what some people, buddhists for example, would call "attachment."

It produces a sense of holding on, identifying with, of DEPENDING ON someone or something outside of you, as though you lean on it, you need it, you are hooked into it like it's a part of yourself. Like you plug your mind in, you form cords or bridges of energetic and emotional attachment, you build inroads mentally, which feels literally like being attached and "connected" in some way. In a special way, which passes for "relationship". And indeed this can feel like special love, as much as it can feel like having a nemesis when the power is given to an enemy.

This dependency results from reversing cause and effect, disowning responsibility, claiming that you have no power to choose anything, suppression of your will, projection of cause and will and power and responsibility onto someone or something else. It's then like you've struck a deal, where this person or thing has power OVER you (always with your consent), and the bargain terms entitle them to some kind of "hold over you", like, there's a string attached. A conditional-love relationship.

Somehow they have some rights, some say in it, some POWER, some logical power, which entitles them to have some control over you. And what they say or do goes, and you cannot but be affected by it. And you feel bound and artificially joined and like they own you in some way, like you're a pet on a leash. And so long as you maintain the belief that they have your power, using it over you, even if its in ways that you seem to want or that seem positive and loving, it's still an egoic special relationship because cause and effect are backwards. It's a relationship of false/backwards perceptions.

And it still feeds the role you're playing of being "a victim" - someone who is AFFECTED BY something other than themselves. ie, that you are preferring to live by being AFFECTED BY someone or something, rather than proactively choosing and taking responsibility for what you feel and experience. So long as the thing, the person, the place, the object etc, is regarded as something that you WANT to have the POWER to CAUSE you, in some way, you will see yourself as a victim of them when they eventually fail to follow through. And now sunsets turn into thunderstorms.

If they die, you are up shit creek, because you need them, you want them, you depend on them to be or do something for you, something that you were not doing for yourself. They were responsible for your happiness, they were the cause of your well-being, they were looking after you, making your life better, giving you something that you seemed to be unable to find unless someone outside of you sourced it. You even thought of them as a parent to you in some way, because they were the cause of you.

What i've seen now is that for example when someone you love dies, or you leave a home, or some other big change where something that you had SPECIAL LOVE for stops being there, you're going to experience "loss". Your ego is going to go into a negative victim role, it's going to see itself deprived and hurt and rejected, lost and alone, lacking and in need, and it's going to create a lot of emotional pain and wallow in the misery of powerlessness, and in weakness and sickness. And it's going to feel like there's been a big terrible loss because the external thing that you believe you NEED in order to be happy has gone. And it will feel that even part of your own self is gone.

It's not really loss about the person or thing, or really to do with the fact that they've left. The loss is caused by the continued "relationship" psychologically in which you see them as the cause of you. The same "power" you gave them to cause your happiness, is still being given to them, and that means that when they fail to give the happiness to you, you will be unhappy. And the more power you gave them to do this, the worse it will feel. THAT is the cause of grief - not getting what you want. And the ego will pout and cry and feel like a child that isn't getting what it wants.

The attachment. The dependency. The depending on something external. The seeking for the source of love, or even of your SELF, outside of yourself instead of finding it within. The unwillingness to own the power and the love within, resulting in a projection and disowning of it, such that when the person providing the love leaves, you're left empty handed with your own lack of inner love. And then you are in sorrow because you're empty and miserable without their "help." And you feel lost and don't know who you are anymore because part of your identification has died.

The secret of salvation says that you are doing this to yourself. So yes, it means that you are unhappy because you have given your power away, and are using the relationship to disempower yourself. If you are in this "unholy" relationship with someone or something, where you are "getting" something from it that you believe you lack inside, or NEED from the person, you're not going to be happy long-term. As soon as they leave, you're screwed, because now there's no-one to fill the shoes that you keep handing over to be filled.

When you admit to this and own the power, taking back the power you gave TO these things to cause your happiness, now you are correcting the REAL problem. The real problem isn't the loss or the change in life events, it's the "seeking and not finding" love outside yourself. It's wanting some external person or thing or place to love you, be there for you, reassure you, give something to you. It's essentially you being dependent and irresponsible, and it's you trying to disown your power. You have loss because you think YOU lack something, something you gave away.

When you take that power back, and own the responsibility, and see yourself as CAUSE, no longer regarding the person or thing as the "cause of" what you feel, or what you experience, this then uproots the entire ego thought system and the dynamic that generates the suffering. If you are causal, no one else can CHANGE YOU or influence you or make you feel something or alter your experience. And that is spiritual because it means you are owning up to the powerful being that you really are - a being with NO NEEDS.

You CANNOT be ANY KIND of victim if you are empowered, if you are responsible, if you have owned the CAUSE of your suffering. Because the cause of your suffering is NOT the absence of the person or thing, it's your SELF ATTACK, in which you are giving your power away and using it to hurt yourself. The only way to end the negative consequences of victimhood, is to also end the so-called "positive consequences". You do NOT want your happiness to be depending on anyone or anything other than God who IS ITS SOURCE.

When you take that power and causation back and own it, you are not only undoing the attachment, you are undoing the dependency, you are undoing the neediness and lack, you are undoing both forms of victimhood, and are reclaiming your INDEPENDENCE. Your freedom from suffering is literally a choice. You choose to stop giving your power away to people and things that are not supposed to have power over you. Not even the good people, not even the friends, not even the family, not even the beloved partners, husbands or wives. You can have a far healthier relationship still but without the conditions and dependent needs.

Moving OUT of that specialness, that dependency, that power game, that subtle positive victimhood, that neediness, that irresponsibility, that insecurity, is a movement towards a holy relationship. A holy relationship with yourself and others, in which you no longer are trying to have an egoic specialness as the foundation for "what they mean to you" or "what they do to you." You stop playing the negative victim, AND the positive victim, and stop trying to get your needs met from outside of yourself. God and your reclaiming of the inheritance which God has given you is all you need for that.

I can say that realising this is very freeing, empowering, and does for me seem to be greatly reducing the sense of loss that I've been having for months. I cannot suffer if I do not choose to do so. I am ruler of the universe, master of my destiny. Nothing happens to me without my consent. I cannot suffer or be hurt unless I do it to myself. And the only way I can do something to myself is to disown my power and try to get someone else to do something to me, for me. Do I want to be a slave to someone or something else deciding for me if I am happy, or will I choose to own the power and the happiness that God has given me already?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notice it says NOW IS THE *BODY* HEALED.

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

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

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

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

But this is going to require that you come to accept and live from a very simple truth, which is somewhat 'secret' for most people: the secret to salvation is that you are doing this to yourself.

What this means and implies, is that every single thing that seems to happen here, is completely deliberately chosen by whoever is involved. Not only that, but whatever each person is experiencing, that person has to be deliberately creating that experience within themselves, "doing it to themselves". We are creators, not perceivers.

In this model, it is absolutely impossible to experience anything that you did not choose and ask for AND implement yourself.

Literally, nothing can happen to you against your will. You cannot be harmed. Nobody can change you. Nothing can affect you.

So if you're having some kind of emotional upset, it HAS to mean that you actually are generating that emotional upset yourself, regardless of what the situation is.

It also has to mean that there are absolutely no victims and that victimhood is absolutely impossible. Nobody can be a victim if everyone is 100% choosing what happens, and if nothing unchosen can happen.

You literally get exactly what you ask for, you get ONLY what you ask for, and you do not get anything else. Not that you even 'get' it, because in truth, you CREATE it.

You are 100% responsible.

This of course flies in the face of the ego which is a thought system based on the complete opposite to this reality, which suggests things happen outside your control, that you didn't ask for, life goes off the rails, bad things happen for no good reason, people get victimized, there is unfairness, there is mis-treatment that people don't want, there is undesired suffering, woe is me, and life just generally sucks. That's all ego perspectives based on irresponsibility and blame and shifting of WHO is making the decisions here.

So you may be wondering, how immortality is possible. Well it is only possible if you can accept that ABSOLUTELY NOTHING can happen without your say-so. "Nobody dies without their own consent", Jesus says. It seems a tall claim, but it is truth. Jesus says so and Jesus is the man ;-)

So what this means is, the idea of 'stuff happens that I can do nothing about' is a FICTION, not a fact. It means the idea of victimhood is actually an ILLUSION, not a reality. It means that the idea of being hurt against your will, or having sickness show up in your body without choosing it, or being incapable of doing anything about what happens, is all MADE UP LIES. It is very poor discernment, very poor judgement, unconsciousness, lack of awareness, inability to see the whole picture, dishonesty, and an unwillingness to accept the truth, that leads to this MYTH that things happen to people against their will.

It's not that you need to find a way to be invulnerable against things that happen randomly that you can't control. That's not invulnerability. It's not that you need to become protected from serious dangers through some kind of superhero shield, which is also not invulnerability. It's simply that all of the things that we all believe have this "power to hurt", DO NOT EXIST, and even the illusion of them existing is something we are PRETENDING is happening.

We are invulnerable because there is no ego. We are invulnerable because it is not possible to be hurt. We are invulnerable because victimhood is completely illusory. We are invulnerable because suffering is not reality. We are invulnerable because we are putting in place absolutely everything we are experiencing, and can STOP THAT, and thereby be free of who exactly IS the culprit.

Because this really boils down to, WHO is responsible for making shit happen. WHO is it that has this power to pull the strings and make stuff manifest and cause events and effects. When you believe incorrectly that it is other people, random events, nature, groups, animals, viruses, whatever fake causes, you are greatly MISTAKEN. And in that mistakenness you are actually using your POWER to create illusions of powerlessness, you are using your 100% choice to choose to make an illusion of not having a choice, you are using your total freedom to pretend to be imprisoned, you are using your invulnerability to pretend that you are vulnerable, and you are basically weaving ILLUSIONS that you are not THE ONE WHO IS DOING IT.

Game is up. It's you. We all know it. Admit it. Caught you red handed playing dead.

This is why the dead can be raised, because the person who appears as dead is PRETENDING TO BE DEAD. And they need to snap out of this illusion-making and come back to reality and demonstrate the truth that it is not possible to die.

Death is pretend, death is reversible.

That's how invulnerable you really are. But if you are not AWARE of your responsibility, if you have not OWNED your power, if you not become very honest about who does what to whom, and if you have not seen the secret activities of your mind where you attack yourself and pretend that you don't, which creates the myth that other people have power over you, then you will SEEM to suffer (even though you can't). That's how you disguise yourself in a costume of despair when all the while, underneath it, you are totally joyful.

Nice try.

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.

When we project our sin onto other people, we position ourselves as wanting to be affected by them or by the world. We want them to be the cause of us, and to experience effects against our will.

This literally is an attempt to sacrifice ourselves. It is attempted suicide.

We seem to be willing somehow to trade our life in order for someone else to suffer for our sin.

We want them to be the sinner, so that we can be not the sinner, and will make ourselves their victim in order to prove that we are not the one who sinned.

And in so doing, will willingly sacrifice ourselves, make ourselves victimized, attack ourselves through them, and eventually render ourselves as "unwillingly dead", in order to prove the point.

At least, we reason, we'll go down as innocence and not the guilty one, and the guilty ones will get all the blame for seeming to cause this tragedy. And in death we will seem to be exalted and a hero, worshipped for the persona of goodness that we fooled the whole world into believing, when all we did was succeed at putting all blame onto everything but ourselves.

Projection is an attempt to get away with murder. To accuse and find someone else guilty of wrongdoing, in contrast to our own innocence, in order to prove that we were not the one who sinned against God. The problem is, when we attempt to do this, we murder ourselves, by attacking ourselves indirectly through other people and through our belief in being at the effect of external causes.

So when you want someone else to take the hit for you, rest assured, you will receive the effects. Jesus is explicit about this in the course. Do not think that the effects you prepared for your brother will be received by them and not you, because you can be assured that you will be the one to receive them.

Try to destroy another, and you will destroy yourself.

And as you try to destroy another, to make out that the world causes you to suffer and die, you might well come across as the least likely, least causative, least choosing, least wanting person in the world, as though there was nothing you could do to prevent this attack. And secretly, unconsciously, you will have orchestrated the entire farce to paint this rosy picture of yourself, in order to condemn the entire world and accuse all your brothers of sinning against you.

Everyone who dies goes down in flames and everyone who looks upon them considers it a tragedy and an unwanted victimization. Poor them. Well... they fucking chose every single part of it, and they did so in order to victimize everyone else in the world. No-one who dies does so without some degree of belief that the world has accused them and condemned them and has done this to them, and that therefore they are justified in being dead in order to accuse the world in return and find it to be the cause of them.

There is nothing glorious about dying. It is not a sign of dignity or respectfulness or accomplishment or unfairness. It is a mistaken choice to present the son of God as attackable and to use the body to attack the entire world. There is nothing justified about dying. It is total failure, the completion of the lie of sin, an absolute reversal of God's will, a complete opposition to sanity, and total denial. It is a movement into unconsciousness and suppression of will, a complete disownership of power and a giving up on God.

No-one dies without their own consent. Death is failure to live. Every person who seems to die has succeeded in fooling the entire world into believing that the son of God is bound to a body and is confused with what seems to by destroyable, and is therefore destroyed. It is a crucifixion of the Son of God.

The funeral which sorrowfully "honors" the person fails to mention that they told the biggest lie in the world, that they attempted to attack the entire world with their death, that they have demonstrated the profound belief that God has caused death not life, and that they have completely failed to awaken from their insanity. It is hardly something to celebrate.

There is no death. The son of God is free. He who believes this will demonstrate it by never again choosing to create the circumstances of death, which is firmly rooted in victimhood and self attack. No ascended master would ever demonstrate that they can be destroyed. All sickness is attempt to prove you can be hurt. And every form of suffering is an accusation that the world has caused this to happen and not yourself.

There is no such thing as a responsible sick person. There is no such thing as an innocent person who died. There is no such thing as a justified victim. And there is no such thing as someone dying in order to leave the dream.

All is choice.

There is a common trend towards trying to accept everything in the world. To allow it. To give it permission. To let it be whatever way it is.

There is one part of this which is beneficial. If you resist things, you make them real. If you control things, you make them real. If you judge and attack things, you make them real. It would imply that if you accept them "as they are", you can find some kind of peace, where you're not really attached to outcomes or conditions or situations or people. As if the world will just fluidly flow over your experience without triggering anything or upsetting you. Because you accept it. But this also can be a trap, and a massive justification for keeping suffering and death.

Because the fact is that this world is not real. It's an illusion, and everything in it is a lie. It's not supposed to be happening. It's not natural. Whatever you accept into your mind you make real to you. If you accept the world into your mind, you make it real. If you are in a position of "allowing" it, you are handing over causality and permission and power to it. If you are trying to simply be at peace with whatever happens, you are not owning the fact that you are making everything happen. If you focus on trying to transcend whatever's going on, which can bring a sense of peace, it does not necessarily bring into question whether things are happening or not.

The task at hand is more to do with learning to recognize that this world is NOT happening. There is not anything to really ACCEPT about it because it isn't really doing anything. You don't have to ADJUST TO conditions, or try to persuade yourself to be okay with suffering, sickness, unhappiness and death. You're not supposed to be having any of these things.

The only true acceptance, the only thing you should ever accept, and thus believe in fully, is THE ATONEMENT. God's truth. Reality. This world is not reality. In accepting the atonement you are accepting something that should be accepted. Something which will bring a cure. Something which will instill miracle mindedness and the ability to be invulnerable. Something which puts you in touch with the power of God, to have dominion over this fake world.

There is merit in not being in such a 'fight' with the world, not resisting it or taking sides against it or having this whole ego un-peaceful counter-attack scenario in your mind. Yes, so it's good to accept things on that basis, because it at least includes less conflict mentally. BUT, this also should not be on a basis that "the world is real" and "things are really happening" and "bodies are really sick" and so on. You should not be accepting that these things are true. You should not be "allowing" them as such. Otherwise you become a passive, miracle-less fence sitter with no power to do anything.

Detaching from the world is great. But it must include the *recognition* that the world is not real, it is entirely illusory, you should be not "agreeing with" it, you should not be justifying it, and you should not be confusing acceptance with authorizing death. It may seem paradoxical but accepting the TRUTH should entail the DENIAL OF the world, the rejection of death, and a demonstration of symbolic immortality in the body.

You are not supposed to just find a way to "let the world happen", you're supposed to become aware you are DREAMING IT and MAKING IT happen, and thus regain power OVER it to change it at will. That's a massively different position than merely trying to get comfortable with "real suffering" or "whatever happens that I did not cause." There is no causality in that kind of acceptance, it's a total passivity. Yes you can try to accept that you feel unhappy but you shouldn't be feeling unhappy. You can try to accept your body is sick but it is not supposed to be sick. Are you going to accept your death?

You might think well, if I am so at peace and accepting of what's SEEMING to happen in this illusory world, why would I bother changing it? Because if the body is sick, the mind is STILL sick. The body can't get healthy unless the mind is healthy. And the mind cannot get healthy while the body is being constantly bombarded with mind attack. "A broken body IS PROOF the MIND HAS NOT BEEN HEALED." So the body DOES have to get healed as well, which means the reversal of sickness and death. Death has to get UNDONE, not accepted. Otherwise there is no true resurrection of mind OR body.

ACIM does not teach to "accept everything that happens in a dream world". It teaches there IS no dream world and YOU are the dreamer who makes it be whatever you decide it is. And if you change your mind, THE WHOLE WORLD MUST CHANGE. This is a course in CAUSE, not being passive. "Members of my party are ACTIVE workers." Will you lay down and let death happen against your will, and try to "accept it"? You cannot be at peace with death. Death can only "happen" if you CONSENT to it, which means you CAUSE it, because you have an attacking unhealed mind that's not at peace.

If you want people, you must learn to undo the world and stop dreaming of nightmares. Not because otherwise you'd be at the effect of external causes of un-peace but because being at peace goes hand in hand with HAVING POWER AND BEING THE CAUSE.

Jesus merely asks us to choose again. To keep choosing again until we make the correct choice.

"I must have made a wrong decision because I am not at peace. I made the decision myself but I can choose otherwise."

He tells us that whenever we are not at peace, ie suffering in any form, it is because we have chosen to do so, and this resulted from making a wrong decision. We chose to suffer, and this was a mistake. He now invites us to try again to choose heaven, heaven being a choice I must make.

"Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one, and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you. In every difficulty, all distress, and each perplexity you face, Christ calls to you, and gently says, "My brother, choose again.""

We are exercising our free will at all times, our ability to choose freely. Anything that we experience other than peace and joy and love is because we chose it. We can only attack ourselves and are the only one able to seem to hurt ourselves through a mistaken choice. And we have just as much power to choose otherwise.

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

"Mind is the mechanism of decision."

At all times, we are simply deciding. We are simply choosing. Do I want to accept that I am as God created me still, and therefore accept the whole Atonement principle and return to awareness of my soul, or do I want to continue choosing to suffer in various ways. It is up to me.

"God does not coerce."

"Learn of His happiness, which is yours. But to accomplish this, all your dark lessons MUST be brought willingly to truth, and joyously laid down, by hands open to receive, not closed to take. Every dark lesson that you bring to Him Who teaches light, He will accept FROM you, BECAUSE YOU DO NOT WANT IT. And He will gladly EXCHANGE each one for the bright lesson He has learned FOR you."

Lessons are nothing other than choices. By choosing that you want something, you put yourself into a psychological position. You have taught yourself that something seems to be true which is not, through a mistaken choice. Now the lesson is that you must unlearn this mistaken choice and re-learn or remember what the truth really is.

All lessons have the same outcome of re-accessing God's truth, because the only universal curriculum (which is mandatory) is the same for everyone - learning the single simple truth of God and awakening to acceptance of it.

What seem to be trials are simply present conditions that have been chosen, or scenarios arranged, offering an opportunity to change your mind about what you want, to learn to forgive and overlook rather than to use these mistaken selections to hurt yourself.

Always it is simply a matter of, what do I want. Do I want the world more than I want God? What do I value? What do I accept as true? What am I willing to do and accept? Do I want heaven today or do I want hell? It's up to you, you have the freedom always to come and go as you wish. And God waits patiently for you to freely choose to return Home to Him.

If you are suffering, you chose to. If you are experiencing unlove, you chose not to love yourself. If you are sick, you wanted to be for a reason. If you are happy, you chose only happiness for yourself. If you feel attacked, you decided to feel attacked. If you are in pain, the pain is serving your wishes. Only if this is true is the secret of salvation true without exception, and only if this is true is there any kind of hope for escape from hell by your own choice.

"In every difficulty, all distress, and each perplexity you face, Christ calls to you, and gently says, "My brother, choose again.""

"Be never fearful of temptation, then, but see it as it is; another chance to choose again, and let Christ's strength prevail in every circumstance and every place you raised an image of yourself before. For what appears to hide the Face of Christ is powerless before His Majesty, and disappears before His holy sight."

"For you WILL hear, and you WILL choose again. And in this choice is everyone made free."

"The power of decision is my own. .... 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. And no-one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

"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. For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my Will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them, and Him Who has created me."

Nothing happens without someone's mind deliberately willing it to happen. There are no exceptions to this. Separation did not happen without someone choosing it. Atonement does not happen without someone choosing it. Sickness does not happen without someone choosing it. Healing does not happen without someone choosing it.

Everything thus serves a PURPOSE. Everything is being USED. Everything has a FUNCTION. You make a choice, and if its a poor choice you will produce suffering and negative consequences. "I made the decision myself." You will need to "decide otherwise" if you want the result to be different. Whatever your mind sets up as a PREMISE, produces a logical OUTCOME. This it true all the way from God to the ego.

While there may be an ILLUSION of accidents, chaos, lack of order, unintentional outcomes, slip-ups, mis-haps, things that you did not will, stuff happening that you did not choose, random acts of nature, and all the other bullshit illusions of unintentionality, ALL of this is a lie. There is ALWAYS intention and deliberation and choice behind everything because you have free will. Nothing CAN happen without you willing it. And anything that does not happen is because you did not will it.

You move with utter deliberation. You make a choice and you execute it and it produces the EXACT result you intended. The only time you seem to produce results you did not intent is when you ACTUALLY DID intend it but believed that you were intending something else, because you had a split mind. This ties into the secret of salvation, which is the recognition that whatever you are experiencing you are choosing and there are NO other causes of your suffering, sickness, or death, other than YOUR deliberate decision to make them happen.

Nothing is accidental. Everything is planned. All acts are intentional. Everyone is always deliberate at all levels. What happens is what is being chosen to happen. If you do not like what you get you need to change your mind. Your mind has creative POWER. It causes effects. If you do not like the effects your mind made a wrong decision. Make the right decision and you will have salvation. Creating unconsciously is mis-creation only because you keep using your own toolset against itself, which hurts you, seemingly by mistake, but actually on purpose. If you don't want to hurt, stop hurting yourself.

There ARE no victims or victimizers. There are only choosers and consenters. You are a powerful creative force. Creations or illusions come out of you. Whatever you decide to produce will be produced. If you are producing a shit life it is because you are making shit choices. You HAVE the power to will in line with God's will, to seek first the Kingdom of Heaven, which WILL make the way straight and bring total healing. If you will ONLY to heal, you will ONLY be healed.

This is single-mindedness, the opposite of split mindedness. This is an un-divided will, the opposite of a split will. This is being of one mind, the opposite of being in two minds. Nothing can oppose you because you are free.

Some years ago I had a dream of angels. In a pretty courtyard, a portal of light opened up, a few feet above the ground. There then floated through beautiful white-light angels. They all looked alike. They floated and then stopped, until deciding to move. When they moved they moved entirely deliberately. They floated to a new position and stopped mid-air. When they decided to move again, they moved and then stopped. It was completely intentional. Nothing happened that they did not choose. Every motion and action was on purpose. It was beautiful to behold.

"There are no accidents in salvation."

"You cannot die unless you choose to do so."

"Non one dies without their own consent."

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

"No-one is healed through double messages. If you wish ONLY to be healed, you heal. Your single PURPOSE makes this possible. But if you are AFRAID of healing, then it cannot come through you. The ONLY thing that is required for a healing is a lack of fear. The fearful are NOT healed, and cannot heal."

"Sickness is not an accident" .... "Defenses are not unintentional, nor are they made without awareness. They are secret magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them. In that second, even less, in which the choice is made, you recognize exactly what you would attempt to do, and then proceed to think that it is done."

"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. "

"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."

The only real feelings are those whose nature is in alignment with God's, and which apply to and are shared with everyone equally, openly and freely. These include love, joy, happiness, peace. There are other feelings, which arise in and of the ego, such as guilt, fear, grief, loss, unhappiness, sadness, gratification, loneliness, abandonment, unworthiness, etc.

In every case, all of the ego emotions are two-faced, because they are all happening in a split mind. On the surface they all appear to be something we are familiar with, but there is always an aspect to them which is doing exactly the opposite from what it appears. This is because they are all illusions, and illusions are deceptive.

In fear, we may on the surface experience a sense of "I don't want this", "I wish this would go away", "leave me alone", "I'm not safe and want to be" etc. But if you look more honestly you'll notice these are all attack thoughts. "I want you to go away" is a murderous idea. "I wish this would stop" is an attempt to destroy. "I hope this doesn't happen" is an attempt to withdraw freedom and to imprison through control.

Fear can be particularly slippery and deceptive because it is quite far down the chain of ego delusions, not far short of punishment and death. It can feel like a total powerlessness, a desire not to cause any harm, a kind of innocence and vulnerability. But at the same time, it is all of these things because it's a state of intense attack, picturing others as sinful and powerful, believing in threat and danger, and making attack very real. Fear is an attempt to choose to be hurt, while claiming not to want it or to cause it.

In grief, we will feel heavy emotions of loss and separation. These feel terrible and say things on the surface such as "I wish they weren't gone", "I want them back", "why did they leave", "there has been a real loss". But if you then look more honestly you'll notice, these are all attempts to make a person body identified, to anchor them in the illusory world, to drag them back into hell.

The grief asserts that the person as a body was real, and this real thing was valued, and now this real thing is really lost through separation (death). And how awful that is. Except that its real assertion is to attempt to commit the person to death, body imprisonment, isolation, special relationships and keeping the illusion of real bodies going. Nothing real is ever lost. But grief quite often includes anger at the person for leaving, which is a belief in real separation and an attack idea.

Unworthiness is another lie we may experience. It seems to suggest a sense of not deserving God's love. Of having sinned or committed some crime, proving that you should not be loved or forgiven. But God is always loving unconditionally. So it is not God who is claiming you are unworthy.

Which means you are claiming it, for a reason. And the ego's reason is to keep God's love at arms length. So while on the surface it seems to say "I wish God would love me" "I don't deserve God to love me", it really says "I want God not to love me and will stay in my pity and not accept my worthiness." It's an attempt to push love away, which is vengeance. The victim mentality always feels sorry for itself while secretly being vicious.

Guilt is yet more bullshit. The guilty feel like they are remorseful and regret committing a sin. The guilt feels like a wish that you hadn't done something, that you really did do it, and should be guilty for doing it. But the guilt does not ever question whether or not what you did was a real sin, or that is really happened. It just assumes sin occurred, locks it in, makes sure the belief in sin will never be undone, and that you "should" automatically be guilty.

It's a desire to be unforgivable, which is a self attack. Guilt actually protects the sin and keeps the belief in it going. So those who are guilty claim "I wish I didn't feel guilty" "I'm sorry for doing it", the honest fact is that the guilt asserts "I believe it did happen" "It was real" "I'm glad I sinned and I want to keep its consequences." And so the guilt is really fake guilt, a dishonest state of feeling.

We could go on and list more ego emotions but they are really all the same in their dynamics. All of them are various stages of denial and two-faced victimhood. All of them are deceptive and dishonest. All of them present a surface appearance which seems, consciously, to be "all there is to it", but have a deeper deception which lies beneath.

When you look at them in the bigger picture perspective, it becomes clearer that they are all literally forms of lying to oneself. None of them are genuine because none of them are whole states of mind. All of them are unfounded and unjustified. They represent a divided will, attempting to achieve two outcomes and pretending only to want one thing. They are all forms of attack and deliberately chosen for a purpose. And they all serve to further the descent into hell.

It can be difficult to recognize this and acknowledge it, but we must. We need to become clear about what these illusions are so that we can no longer be deceived by them, or attempt to use them or go into them in efforts to respond to problems. If we tried to kill God through sin and now are feeling guilty, we don't REALLY feel guilty. We wanted to do it and believe in it. We have to own the power of decision and responsibility for choosing otherwise the secret of salvation has exceptions, and that cannot be or we'd be stuck in hell.

We are free willed beings, which means that nothing happens against our will. Even our dreams of hell are chosen. All our suffering is a mistaken choice. All our sickness is a defense with a purpose. Nothing happens without our consent, not even death. No-one else is to blame. We are free to will whatever we want to happen, and nothing else happens without our will.

""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."

God cannot be held accountable for why we feel guilty or shameful or unworthy. All attempts at dismay, grief, horror, upset and disturbance are not the unwanted victim roles that they seem to be. No-one else is causing any of our feelings, and the belief that they are is an ego state of false perception. There is ALWAYS more going on than meets the eye and there is always a use of free will to elect to suffer.

All of these fake feelings, indeed all forms of suffering and sickness and death, are simply expressions of an attempt to keep God away. They are excuses made up out of nowhere. They are asserts of denial.

They attempt to weave stories about "why" we cannot be with God or why we cannot accept atonement and forgiveness. They are attempts to portray our immortal selves as mortal and suffering. Everything about them is a lie. They are totally unfounded.

The fact is that there is no reason to be away from God and nothing keeping you from doing so. There is nothing to be afraid of. There is no sin to be guilty for. There is no real way for an immortal being to suffer because nothing real can be threatened. And therefore there is no REAL reason to feel anything other than the REAL feelings that you share with God.

All forms of ego feeling and thinking are attempts to invent completely made-up validations or justifications or rationalizations for why we aren't with God. And these are all self fulfilling. Our egotism says we are afraid of God, but we're not. There is no reason to be afraid of God. It has to be fake fear, and it's only being held onto to try to pretend we have a valid reason to stay in this state. This entire world is a lie we're telling not to accept the Kingdom.

If we were to admit that there is no sin, guilt, fear, unworthiness, suffering, sickness, death, misery, unhappiness, etc, what would happen? Without these defenses, where would we be and what would we be experiencing?

The attractiveness, loving nature, beauty and gentleness of God would lift us into his light and return us home to reality. The whole purpose of the ego is to try to claim we are not with God and to hold him at arms length, and to do that we need various devices that "prove why" we are not with him.

None of these ego emotions are true. None of them are what they seem to be. And all of them are simply made-up lies attempting to create reasons why we don't want to wake up. And none of these reasons have any real foundation whatsoever. If God does not feel this way, nor should we. If we feel this way, we seem not to be with God. But we want to feel otherwise and so are willing to accept correction.

"All forms of sickness even unto death are physical expressions of the fear of awakening."

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt."

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

"No one dies without their own consent."

"Nothing except your thoughts can attack you. Nothing except your thoughts can make you think you are vulnerable. And nothing except your thoughts can prove to you this is not so."

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in anyway. 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. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are."

God doesn't have an attitude of making you guilty for doing certain things. He isn't up there judging and condemning. He isn't holding grievances or hating you for your choices. Nor does he forcibly stop you from doing whatever you want. Even if it's something that is seemingly hurtful to you and others.

When God created you, he extended his infinite unlimited freedom, giving you total free will. This was like a granting of permission, that you are free to create and do whatever you want. God placed NO LIMITS on your freedom. There are no clauses or exceptions, and no small print. You are completely free. It is because of this giving of total freedom that you are a fully created individual being.

That automatically means God isn't sitting there revoking your freedoms, judging you as guilty for the choices you make, regretting giving you freedom, wanting to enact his wrath because of the sins you commit, aiming to punish you for poor choices, or any other kind of control or coercion or attempts to stop you against your will.

God cannot go against your will because your will is actually shared with his own. To deny your freedom would deny his freedom. He isn't in the business of putting you in chains or binding you to certain rules and regulations.

With God there is always a sense of.... you can come and go as you freely wish. No-one is forcing you. You can choose heaven, you can choose hell. You can choose harmlessness or harm, peace or war, life or death.

One thing you cannot do is alter the laws of God, you cannot undo the golden rule, you cannot influence what reality is, you cannot alter what is ultimately true, and you cannot attack anything real. This is because God wills that reality be perfect and immortal and eternal forever, and reality is his creation, not yours.

You also cannot undo the fact that rejecting God results in illusions of pain and suffering, not because God punishes or makes you suffer for trying to violate his will, but because you choose and induce it upon yourself when you try to deny his nature. You literally assert that you want to suffer rather than be happy.

In granting you total freedom, you were also given the freedom to "mis-use" will, to try to will not to will, to attempt to deny what is still true, to try to use creative power to create nothing, and to attempt to repress and disempower yourself as much as you like.

God did not STOP you from believing that you could be separate from him, even though you can't. He didn't stop you from trying to attack him and his kingdom. He didn't stop you from trying to die, or making war and terror, or trying to enforce sickness, or anything else that ego would consider a sin. He doesn't WILL it for you, but he also doesn't force you not to.

Since you've been given total freedom, nothing that you choose is ever a reason for guilt. If you are free, you have been given permission when you were given freedom. God isn't holding you on a leash or binding you in chains. Nor does love enter where it is not welcome, nor does God demand or control or force anything.

God never says "you shouldn't have done that, you're sinful for breaking the rules". You cannot break the rules because you cannot violate your freedom. There are no rules because there are no limits on your freedom.

You actually are totally free to come and go, live or die, be happy or unhappy, be awake or asleep, whatever you want. But this also means that because you are totally free, you are also totally responsible for your choices. Total freedom IS total responsibility.

When you are willing to take total responsibility for your total freedom, you are also taking responsibility for the power of decision to choose what you want. You are now exercising your will to choose whether to will one thing or another, and whether to go home to heaven. This is why heaven is a choice that you have to make freely and willingly. It cannot be forced upon you.

This also then means that you can never blame anyone else for doing anything to you, because in your freedom you cannot have anything done to you against your freedom. You can attack your own freedom, in illusions, but no one can ever be guilty. Because everyone is always free. And you are always free from attack.

The secret of salvation then comes in, because in total responsibility you are the one who must have denied your own freedom. Attempting to be guilty is an attempt to deny that you are free, accusing self and others of violating God's rules and sinning against his law. But this has to be false because God has granted you the freedom AND POWER to do absolutely anything.

The ramification of this is that you could potentially choose never to go back to him. You could choose to be evil and murderous. You could choose destruction and sickness and death. Just as freely as you could choose healing and love and life. And you have done so - although you can always choose again.

This then reveals that whatever you are getting, you must be choosing, because you are free. And since freedom is power and responsibility, you must be choosing AND CAUSING everything that happens. This includes all forms of suffering, which must be doing to yourself freely. This is why you are master of your own destiny, and why you are ruler of the universe, and why nothing happens without your consent.

The question then is, does God just sit in heaven watching all this, allowing you to suffer for as long as you wish? In a sense, yes, except that God is also loving. God does not will that you suffer, or even believe that you suffer. God wills perfect happiness. God wills eternal life and deathlessness. God wills love not fear.

In his love, God has INVITED you freely to return your awareness to him. God isn't coercing you to go there. God HAS placed an atonement plan in place via the Holy Spirit, to gently orchestrate events and repurpose the world to lead you back to eternal life. And because the Holy Spirit is perfect and powerful, succeeding in doing so is effortless for him.

This doesn't mean you are ever forced to return or to give up your dreams. You STILL have to have a little willingness. You still have to be willing to learn - because the time that you take the curriculum is voluntary. But there is a PLAN in place to ENCOURAGE you to return to God. This plan is gentle and wise.

People are arranged to meet because they have POTENTIAL for a teaching/learning situation - for a holy relationship. There are no chance encounters. Events are organised by the Holy Spirit to be conducive to education and healing. This is why we have 'lessons', which appear as trials, so that we can learn to choose again.

None of this is forced. Before we incarnate we CONSENT to plans and events and encounters based on our current needs and wants. We give free permission for things to occur so that we can learn. We exhibit willingness, to whatever degree, sometimes more than others. And our life in the school unfolds accordingly.

But at NO TIME is there ever force, or requirements, or pressure, or sneering down the nose, or judgement, or reprimand, or punishment, or keeping score, or enforced karmic punishment, or any kind of "you're wrong for doing that".

As best as is GENTLY possible, God through Jesus and the Holy Spirit orchestrates time and space to make its events as conducive to change and spiritual progress as possible. As the therapist, the Holy Spirit knows how to do this expertly and perfectly. He knows how to GUARANTEE that everyone will eventually wake up to reality, and it is only a matter of time before we all do so.

You're still free. You will eventually freely return to God because you want to. Because you see no other alternative. Because you recognize that you gained nothing in leaving and will regain everything in returning. Not because anyone has the whip out. Not because there's hell to pay. Not because there is any kind of bully in the sky waiting to kick you in the ass if you take a step out of line.

It's all very loving and gentle and consenting. This is also why the "script is written" pertains to an OPT-IN free-willed curriculum where there is an outline "plan" for atonement but not a FORCED awakening. Nor are you locked into some kind of rollercoaster you can't get off, or some kind of replay of hell that you have no say in choosing.

This is simply because YOU ARE ALWAYS FREE. Your freedom is permanent. There are no restraints, no special rules or terms and conditions, no requirements, no punishments for your choices, and no judgement from God. God does care about you and wills that you awaken, and you will do so because your will is shared. But WHEN you do is still up to you just as it always has been. And this is why accepting atonement is your sole responsibility, because no-one else can do it for you.

"It is crucial to say first that this is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what to take when. It is just because you are not ready to do what you should elect to do that time exists at all." UrT1A1

"The sole responsibility of God's teacher is to accept the Atonement for himself." UrM19A4

"When you are willing to accept sole responsibility for the ego's existence YOURSELF, you will have laid aside all anger and all attack, because they COME from an attempt to PROJECT RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR OWN ERRORS." UrT7I8

"Your will is as free as mine, and God Himself would not go against it." UrT8E9

"The latter required the endowment of man by God with free will, because all loving creation is freely given" UrT9A9

"The "Princes of this World" are princes only because they are really angels. But they are free to establish their kingdom where they see fit." UrT1B30N

"No one CAN be "taken over" unless he wills to be. However, if he places his mind under tyranny, rather than authority, he intrudes the submission/dominance concept onto free will himself. This produces the obvious contradiction inherent in any formulation that associates free will with imprisonment." UrT2A30

"Your Father created you Wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free." UrT9K9

"Nothing God created can oppose your will, as nothing God created can oppose His. God GAVE your will its power, which I can only acknowledge in honor of His." UrT8E9

"Awaking unto Christ is following the laws of love OF YOUR FREE WILL, and out of quiet recognition of the truth in them. The attraction of light must draw you willingly, and willingness is signified by GIVING." UrT12F12

"Salvation, perfect and complete, asks but a LITTLE wish that what is true be true. A LITTLE willingness to overlook what is not there. A LITTLE sigh that speaks for Heaven as a preference to this world which death and desolation seem to rule." UrT26H9

"Your part is only to offer Him a LITTLE willingness to LET Him remove all fear and hatred, and to BE forgiven." UrT18F2

"Heaven is the decision I must make." UrW138

"Knowledge will be restored when YOU meet its conditions. This is not a bargain made by God, who made no bargains at all. It is merely the result of your misuse of His Laws on behalf of a will that was not His." UrT8A2

"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." UrT2B69

"Perception ALWAYS involves some misuse of will, because it involves the mind in areas of uncertainty. The mind is very active because it has will-power. When it willed the Separation it willed to perceive. Until it chose to do this, it willed only to know. Afterwards, it had to will ambiguously, and the only way out of ambiguity IS clear perception." UrT3F13

"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." UrW135L19

"The acceptance of the Atonement by everyone is only a matter of time. In fact, both TIME and MATTER were created for this purpose. This appears to contradict free will, because of the inevitability of this decision. If you review the idea carefully, you will realize that this is not true. Everything is limited in some way by the manner of its creation. Free will can temporize, and is capable of enormous procrastination. But it cannot depart entirely from its Creator, who set the limits on its ability to miscreate by virtue of its own real purpose." UrT2B68

"The test of EVERYTHING on earth is simply this: "What is it FOR?" The answer makes it what it IS for you. It has NO meaning of itself, yet you can GIVE reality to it, according to the purpose which YOU serve."

What you use the world FOR, what PURPOSE you give it, what it MEANS to you, and the GOAL that you ascribe to it, determines everything about WHY it is there and HOW you see it.

If you give the world a purpose of death, you steer towards false perception and murder and hell. If you give the world a purpose of resurrection, you steer towards true perception and heaven. And which purpose you choose determines how you interpret what you see.

The world isn't just sitting there as a WHAT. It's sitting there as a WHY. The world was made FOR A REASON. It was chosen specifically and deliberately. Its making was intentional and on purpose. It was made to serve a GOAL and to accomplish that goal. It's not just a "thing", it's a DEVICE.

"The concept is really one of space-time BELIEF. The physical world exists only because man can use it to correct his UNBELIEF, which placed him in it originally. As long as man KNEW he did not need anything, the whole device was unnecessary."

"The ego made the world as IT perceives it, but the Holy Spirit, the RE-INTERPRETER of what the ego made, sees it only as a teaching device for bringing you home."

It's not enough to ask "what the world is". Science can study the WHAT as long as it likes, but it's not asking the right question. You can't just look at the nature of the world through analysis of WHAT, to discover the REASON WHY it exists at all. For that, you have to ask WHY it's there at all, what it means, and what purpose it is serving. Then it becomes obvious WHY it is the way it is.

We're also taught in ACIM that everything is deliberate, because there is free will. Anything that happens MUST have your consent. Nothing happens WITHOUT your choosing it. You choose everything ON PURPOSE. You are completely deliberate, intentional, and responsible. Nothing happens at all unless it serves a purpose. And everything must have a purpose.

"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."

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you."

The world did not exist before the separation from God. It was made ON PURPOSE, to serve a goal. The goal was to deny God, to make separation real, to murder God's son, to make possible what is impossible, to bring about death, and to rule a kingdom in which God was absent. That is the original PURPOSE of this world. That is WHY it seems to be here. That is why the "what it is" is the way it is, and why it functions the way it does, and HOW it accomplishes this goal.

Make no mistake here. The world isn't just sitting there happily churning over all innocent and sweet. While the world is actually nothing, we give it belief and try to MAKE it serve the purpose of hell. We made it by rebelling against God, throwing away our inheritance, not WANTING to communicate with God, and by wanting to re-create ourselves in our own images. That's how spacetime came to be made as an opposite to omnipresence and eternity. That's that's why "the world was made as an attack on God."

So if we're just examining what the world is, we're not really looking at the rather extraordinary fact that it is in fact "the hell you made" for the purpose of fighting against heaven and trying to overthrow God's reality. That's WHY it's here. That's WHAT it is FOR. Or at least, that was what it WAS for, in the past, when we made it with our egos. The world functions the way it does simply because that's how its function SERVES the PURPOSE of destruction.

What ACIM is then telling us is that, since the world itself is nothing, and acts like a TOOL, to serve a certain purpose, with a certain USE, we can choose instead to RE-PURPOSE it. To give it a NEW GOAL. A new purpose which can serve a higher goal. We can take what we made, which was originally a weapon for destruction, and turn it into a way to UNDO the weapon. We can take hell, and convert it into a reflection of heaven, so that it will disappear in light. And we can USE it to bring ourselves and others back to God through holy relationship.

"For here, the GOAL of the relationship is abruptly shifted to the EXACT OPPOSITE of what it was."

"For, once the unholy relationship has ACCEPTED the goal of holiness, it can never again be what it was."

This means giving the world a different PURPOSE from the one we originally gave it. And that means it has to have a different GOAL than the one of murder and death that we originally gave it. So now, whatever state of mind you're in, whatever attitude you have, you have to ask yourself what you are USING IT FOR, or what purpose or goal you are trying to accomplish. Are you using it for attack to bring about the goal of death, or are you USING it for resurrection and healing and the goal of atonement, to restore the sonship and bring us back to God?

"Take this from me and look upon it, judging it for me. Let me not see it as a sign of sin and death, nor USE it for destruction.

Teach me how NOT to make of it an OBSTACLE (goal) to peace, but let You USE it FOR me, to FACILITATE its coming (of the higher goal)."

Let's be clear, that the power of the mind and the law of cause and effect determines that nothing can happen without your will, and anything that happens MUST be something you want. And by wanting it you WANT it to SERVE a purpose for you. To fullfill a FUNCTION. And a function is a way of operating that leads to the accomplishment of a goal. Our true function is to create life, and our false function is to destroy. Even YOU have a function that serves the creator of that function, because your function is to serve God for HIS purpose of sharing creation.

""Let me not use this to hide my function from me."

"I would use this as an opportunity to fulfill my function." "Let me not use this to justify a function God did not give to me."

Even all forms of sickness are there to SERVE a function, for a PURPOSE. This is why "sickness is a defense against the truth". It serves the PURPOSE of protecting you from the truth and hiding from it in darkness, by blocking the light/life, which implements forms of death. So long as a person has a USE FOR the sickness, serving a purpose, BENEFITING from it, wanting it, NEEDING it, choosing it, the sickness remains. And sickness is always ONLY there because of the PURPOSE it is serviing for the person. All sickness is intentional and deliberate and providing a function to achieve a GOAL.

"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."

"No one can heal unless he understands what PURPOSE sickness seems to serve. For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning. Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. When this is seen, healing is automatic."

"Who but yourself evaluates a threat, decides escape is necessary, and sets up a series of defenses to reduce the threat that has been judged as real? All this cannot be done unconsciously."

"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. How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth?"

So as ACIM rightly states, we should always ask, WHAT IS IT FOR? What am I using this FOR? What is the goal I am trying to achieve? What is the purpose of this? Am I using this for an ego purpose, and if so, how can I switch to a higher purpose? What was my original purpose in CHOOSING this, for what NEED, to achieve what GOAL? Why do I still believe I need it? Maybe I'm mistaken about my REASON FOR THIS and can choose otherwise?

How can I use this to FACILITATE the coming of peace, or the fulfillment of a higher function? How can I USE the world which I made in hate, to demonstrate the truth and awaken my brothers? What renewed spiritual PURPOSE can I give TO the world, to USE it in such a way, that it brings about the undoing of the world and the restoration of holy relationship and health and happiness? How can I USE the world for the GOAL OF GOD, in which everything in the world is seen with forgiveness so that it only serves the purpose of awakening and atonement?

When the Holy Spirit's PURPOSE for the world is accomplished, when the atonement is complete, the world no longer needs to SERVE this new purpose. And WITHOUT A PURPOSE, it simply now disappears into nothing.

"The ultimate purpose of the body is to render itself unnecessary"

"And, like all the things you made, it can be used to serve ANOTHER purpose, and to be means for something ELSE. It can be used to heal, and NOT to hurt, if you so wish."

"Yet we have learned that the Holy Spirit has another use for all the illusions you have made, and therefore He sees another purpose in them. To the Holy Spirit, the world is a place where you learn to forgive yourself what you think of as your sins. In this perception, the physical appearance of temptation becomes the spiritual recognition of salvation."

"What purpose could it serve? What is it for?"

"In any situation in which YOU are uncertain, the FIRST thing to consider, very simply, is, "What do I want to come of this? What is it FOR?""

"What purpose has an idol, then? What is it FOR?"

"The purpose of the world you see is to obscure your function of forgiveness, and provide you with a justification for forgetting it."

"Let us forget the purpose of the world the past has given it."

"For you must change your mind about the purpose of the world, if you would find escape."

"Since the purpose of the world is not the one I ascribed to it, there must be another way of looking at it."

"If I so choose, I can depart this world entirely. It is not death which makes this possible, but it is change of mind about the purpose of the world."

"When joy has come the purpose of the world has gone. The world will end in peace because it is a place of war. When peace has come, what is the purpose of the world? The world will end in laughter because it is a place of tears. Where there is laughter, who can longer weep? And only complete forgiveness brings all this to bless the world. In blessing it departs, for it will not end as it began."

"The Great Transformer of perception will undertake WITH you the careful searching of the mind that MADE this world, and uncover TO YOU the SEEMING reasons for your making it. In the light of the REAL reason that He brings, as you follow Him, He will SHOW you that there is NO reason here at all. 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."

"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. Corrected error IS the error's end. And thus has God protected still His Son, even in error. There IS another purpose in the world that error made because it has another Maker, Who CAN reconcile its goal with His Creator's Purpose."

"The simple way to let this be achieved is merely this; to let the body have no purpose from the past, when you were sure you KNEW its purpose was to foster guilt. For this insists your crippled picture is a lasting sign of what it represents. This leaves no space in which a DIFFERENT view, ANOTHER purpose, can be given it. You do NOT know its purpose. You but gave ILLUSIONS of a purpose to a thing you made to hide your function from yourself. This thing WITHOUT a purpose CANNOT hide the function that the Holy Spirit gave. Let, then, ITS purpose and YOUR function both be reconciled at last, and seen as one."

"Illusions serve the purpose they were MADE to serve. And FROM their purpose, they derive whatever meaning that they seem to have. God gave to ALL illusions that were made ANOTHER purpose that would justify a miracle, WHATEVER form they took. In every miracle ALL healing lies, for God gave Answer to them all as one."

"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."

ACIM suggests something far more radical than we might fully realise: absolutely everything you experience is chosen, and you can choose what happens and not just your reaction to what happens.

If you start to tell yourself, I am choosing this... I must have chosen this... I wanted this. ... you will step out of the fog of unconsciousness and start to get a sense of the kind of power that this must entail. You'll start to realise how much you DO NOT BELIEVE IT, and how much of your time is spent in a victimhood state of "this is happening to me against my will."

In fact, I think most of us are living in a state somewhere in between total empowerment and total victimhood. We make some decisions and have some influence, but we also tolerate a whole lot of "stuff happening on its own", "happening to me", "didn't choose this", "don't want that".

It especially can take the form of suffering and victimhood which seems like something totally unwanted. Pains, sickness, fear, loss, stress, anger, etc... all suggest "I didn't choose this." As if you not only have no say, but there is NO WAY OUT.

Putting up with shit, tolerating difficulties, going along with sickness like you have no choice in the matter, it's all part of this general trend we have of NOT believing that we CHOOSE everything we experience. And therefore, we can CHOOSE AGAIN.

"I AM responsible for what I see. I CHOSE the feelings I experience, and I DECIDED ON the goal I would achieve. And everything that SEEMS to happen TO me, I ASKED FOR and received as I had asked."

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

Now that might sound interesting to read, but if you consider that it is giving NO EXCEPTIONS, and it really does mean ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING, then you'll start to resize the sheer extent to which we are supposed to own this responsibility.

We are being asked to literally reach a state in which everything we experience is a DELIBERATE CHOICE, where there is absolutely no victimhood or sense of tolerating or reacting, and where you literally stop making yourself suffer permanently. Where you take total ownership of your life and, with the Holy Spirit deciding for you, wield the unlimited power of God.

In general, we actually are living in a very disempowered state, where we have given away power, causation, will, identity, and responsibility. And in this state we really don't think that we could even conceive of having as much "say" in what happens as what the course is suggesting. Maybe some influence yes, but not TOTAL ABSOLUTE POWER.

What do you mean we can choose not to be sick, or choose not to die, or chose to stop having a pain, or choose not to experience loss, or choose not to having a problem today? What do you mean we are so powerful and capable that literally everything that happens every day is BECAUSE OF OUR CHOICE?

But that's what Jesus is claiming. And it's all over the course. The power of decision to choose absolutely everything we experience, reclaiming that power, using that power intentionally, and therefore choosing never again to make any kind of suffering for ourselves. To literally choose never to be sick, nor to die.

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

"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."

"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."

The ego is telling you that you are eating healthy ripe fruit when in fact you are eating putrid decaying rotten flesh.

The ego is telling you that the suffering you're enduring is what it is like to be happy and healthy and that it is perfectly deserved.

The ego is telling you that if you were to die, you would be free from all of God's wrath and saved forever.

The ego is telling you that whatever God says is not true and not to listen to it.

The ego is constantly telling you one thing is the truth, while at the same time using this to cover up a lie. It actually convinces you that you deserve to suffer, should die, that dying is God's will, and that attacking someone is salvation. It tells you all kinds of things and it paints this rosy picture around it to try to tell you that it's perfectly harmless and natural and normal, when in fact it is totally far from healthy or normal.

The ego is selling you one thing and telling you that you're getting something else. This is what it does, every time. It is a deceptive liar. It is two-faced. It covers up hate with special love. It covers up guilt with projection. It covers up death with a glowing shiny light that it says hey.... go ahead and go into this shiny light and be saved from God's wrath forever... only to result in death.

It even tells you that SUICIDE makes total sense and that you should kill yourself because it's completely sensible and rational and sane to do so. Even if that simultaneously totally terrifies you, the ego will keep trying to convince you that it's the best thing you could do for yourself... better than staying alive, better than being with God. And you BELIEVE IT. And that's why almost everyone dies (death is always by consent only).

You really need to understand just how far this deception goes. The ego quite literally will 'frame' death in such a way as to make it seem ATTRACTIVE to you. Something you totally want. And simultaneously it will 'frame' God as something completely repulsive to you, that you totally want nothing to do with. And your mind is quite capable of this astronomical somersault, this total twisting and distorting of perception, that your mind can actually PERCEIVE that this is TRUE. That somehow you can EXPERIENCE how this all makes sense and seems to fit and seems to justify deadly action. You will choose death, as you have for countless lifetimes, solely because you're convinced by the ego's BIG GIANT LIE, that death is LIFE and you want to live, therefore you should die.

Life is life. Death is death. The truth is true. But the ego says, life is death and death is life. All of the merit and trust and faith and hope and happiness and loyalty and allegiance and alignment that you would normally have in GOD .... the ego is taking and trying to make you have that same sense of attraction and reliance and belief in DEATH. It actually wants you to see death as WELCOME and a LIBERATION and as your SALVATION. That it will save you from a fate WORSE than death.... which is God.

How can God who is love and light and purity and healing be worse than death? How can God who cares and loves and knows you and provides for you and shares everything with you and trusts you be worse than death? How can eternal life and unending glory and permanent certainty and endless love be worse than death?

God loves you. He just wants to love you. That's what you really want, and deep down you know this is permanently true in spite of how you are convinced by your own ego complex. You are just confused. You are just a bit mistaken. And you can't really be harmed, nor can you die. The ego can't take your life. You are a child of God, in whom He is well pleased. It's safe to trust Him. But you need to let go of believing the lies. Death is not real and you are immortal, so there's nothing to be afraid of. God's not out to get revenge for something you didn't even really do. There is only love. Only love is real.

Peace.

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.

Besides projecting your guilt onto others, you also project your WILL and your POWER.

You take a chunk of your own power, which is tied to your will, and you give it to someone else. As you shift ownership of the guilt into someone else's hands, you are not just handing over guilt but also "who is the cause" of the guilt. That causality, that power to cause, is your own will. So you simultaneously hand over your own will to the other person.

Then the other person now looks like they have an extra amount of willpower - an "alien will", a separate will. It seems like this will has power to do stuff, sure. But the problem is you now perceive that this will is separated from your own will and that it has power over or against what is left of your will. A split mind has a split will in conflict with itself.

This makes sense, because really you can only do anything to yourself, so YOUR OWN WILL that you put into the other person DOES seem to have the power to do something to you. IF it were really the will that belonged to someone else, it would NOT have the power to do anything to you.

So literally you are then acting against yourself, through someone else, using your own will as your own attacker. So even when you are victimized, it's still you doing it to yourself. Nobody ever does anything to you.

By disowning your will and handing it over, you strip yourself of seeming power, and become weakened or powerless. You have to do that because you can't see yourself as a victim if you are powerful. Nothing can happen to you but by your own will, so you literally have to lay down your own power and 'pretend' that you are weak, vulnerable, at-the-effect of the dream, and susceptible to being easily influenced. None of that is possible for those who are powerful, so you have to disown your power to do so. And since nothing happens without your consent, and BY your own will, you have to GIVE your own will to someone else in order for them to seem to use will against you. Otherwise they have no power over you.

You can't, however, get rid of power. Instead you displace it onto the people that you're projecting the guilt onto. You give it to them. And it is by giving them power over you, at least in your imagination, that you literally give them the 'power to do something to you'. They don't really have this power because it's really just your own will that you are afraid will attack you. But while you project and hallucinate that it is IN someone else, you associate it WITH someone else so that you can disassociate from your guilt, so now you think it is NOT your will that you see out there.

So really you are just afraid of your own will that you projected onto someone else, staring you back in the face and threatening to attack you. You think it's that person attacking you, but its really you. And you're afraid of the sense of power that they have, particularly the more you give it away and the weaker and more vulnerable you see yourself. They seem to loom large over you like there is nothing you can do and nowhere you can go to be safe from it. But it's really YOUR POWER that you're afraid of - the projected power that you need to reclaim.

So on the one hand, taking back that guilt and dropping your false innocence and letting go of victimhood seems like something you don't want to do, especially because it means you would have to own up to being guilty. But on the other hand, when you do take it back you are ALSO TAKING BACK YOUR POWER. You are literally taking back your own will, that you lost and displaced. The other person does not HAVE any power over you and the idea of an alien will was entirely an illusion. Nothing's stopping you from taking your power back. You just have to recognize IT IS YOURS and it is not theirs, because you gave it to them (or tried to).

So now you take back your guilt but also you take back your power, take back your will, and this renders you much less able to be victimized, or to believe that you are victimizable. Your sense of vulnerability will reduce and you will feel 'stronger' and more confident about being able to stand your ground. You won't NEED to stand your ground 'against' the oppressive others, however, because by taking your power back AWAY from them, they now are not artificially empowered and you no longer PERCEIVE that they have 'extra power' to do something to you. And so you are not threatened. And so you can now feel safe.

You are safe when you are in your own power. You are safe when you do not give your own will to other people. You are safe when you do not choose to be a victim. You are safe when there is nothing to be afraid of because the only thing you were afraid of was YOUR OWN WILL. You are only afraid of it when you disown it, and when you reclaim it you are EMPOWERED.

Then, when you take your guilt and you take it to Holy Spirit to let Him decide if you are innocent, and you ACCEPT that you are innocent, you will be even MORE empowered because you won't be weakened by guilt. Innocence needs no defense. True innocence is powerful.

"I am not weak but strong."

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

-ACIM

As we dive deeply into what it means to be an immortal being, something suddenly becomes clear. If we are indeed invulnerable, inpenetrable, eternal, incapable of even being changed, or affected in any way.... then how is it possible that there can be any kind of suffering that is a PART of us?

If we are this PURE LIFE, which is so alive it is completely devoid of all traces of attack and sickness and death, unable to be even modified in any way, completely permanent and absolute, how can it BECOME anything? How can any kind of suffering be something we have in us, or are made of?

Surely this means that if there does seem to be some kind of suffering - an upset feeling, some loss, some guilt, a fear, a sickness, anything at all which is a form of destruction, it cannot be INSIDE of what we are. It can't be modifying the inherent nature and substance of what we are. So it has to be somehow separate or "outside".

If there is for example a feeling of unhappiness, we can't really accurately say "I am unhappy." Because this means I have become unhappiness. I have changed, and so I am not unchangeable, and I have transformed, and I have modified what I am and how I feel - no longer permanently happy, no longer joyful and at peace, but disturbed and upset and defective in some way.

This points to the idea that we IDENTIFY WITH things which cannot be a part of us, and tend to include them in our definition of me, myself, I, what I am, what I have, what I feel, what I experience. As though to say we ARE these things, that they are a part of us. But they can't be.

The ego on the other hand is a sense of confusion in identity, in which our mind has moved away from being PURE LIFE and has gone off the rails. It's believing that there are now qualities and substances and contents to our self that God did not put there. That we have changed and turned into something less than whole, less than pure, less than perfect.

So the ego then has this sort of view of BEING ONE WITH things which are not of God. Being one with illusions, with pain and misery, with sickness and death, with suffering, with the body etc. It regards them as part of itself and tries to wear them - not just like a separate piece of clothing, but like... to be so merged with it that it thinks of it like it is its SELF. That you ARE a body.

The ego view is this smushing together of mind and form, where identity becomes tangled up in the things which are not of God. So now we start to feel like "I feel upset" and "I am in pain" and "I am guilty" and so on. But this can't be true. We cannot BE these things in truth if we are immortal beings. They can't be a PART of our self, included in ourself, part of our nature or condition. They have to be separate things, outside of us, not even "ours" really.

If we then look when ego is flaring up and there is all manner of upset and hurt and emotions and pian coming out, we should do something which seems to most humans would be insane and unhealthy - to separate ourselves from it. To say, I am not suffering, I am not upset, I am not weak, I am not in pain, I am not having this happen to me, I am not these sensations, I am not these thoughts.

Because all of these forms of suffering cannot actually BE - they are not ways of being - they are just illusions and dreams. What we are as immortal beings cannot suffer, cannot have loss, cannot die. What we are cannot even really be unhappy - which is a form of death. We can't have guilt in us because that's like saying there's something wrong with perfection. And we can't in fact really have anything be a part of us that God didn't put there.

So we have to sort out, and be careful, with how we are identifying WITH things that are not of God, even the way we feel and think. As an immortal being you DO NOT have upset feelings. If there seem to be upset feelings, it is ego, and it is driven by a mistaken belief about yourself being not like God. There is no pain in God and none in me. There is no unhappiness in God and none in me.

"Whatever suffers is not part of me." W248

"Whatever suffers is not part of me. What grieves is not myself. What is in pain is but illusion in my mind. What dies was never living in reality, and did but mock the truth about myself. Now I disown self-concepts and deceits and lies about the holy Son of God. Now am I ready to accept him back as God created him, and as he is." UrW248

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is." UrW152

"Father, Your holiness is mine. Your Love created me, and made my sinlessness forever part of You. I have no guilt nor sin in me, for there is none in You." UrW235L2

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die. I am not a body. I would recognize my reality today. I will worship no idols, nor raise my own self-concepts to replace my Self. I am in the likeness of my Creator. Love created me like Itself." UrW84L2 "I am the holy Son of God Himself.

I cannot suffer; cannot be in pain;

I cannot lose, nor can I fail to do

All that salvation asks." UrW191L7

"I cannot suffer any loss or deprivation or pain because of who I am." UrW58L5

"I cannot be guilty because I am a Son of God." UrW46L6

"The "self" that needs protection is not real. The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defense, need merely be perceived as quite apart from you, and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over. Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done?" UrW135L9

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!

"Only the mind AND body need atonement."

So long as the effects of sin remain, there is evidence which proves and teaches that your brother DID COMMIT A SIN, and therefore is NOT exonerated. Only by healing your body and removing the consequences of attack can he be innocent. Your healed body teaches him HIS innocence AND heals HIS body, and thus he is healed along with you. Miracles heal your body AND your brother's body.

Healthy mind, healthy body. Sick mind, sick body. There are no exceptions.

If your brother attacks you, you MUST heal your body and demonstrate HE DID NOT SIN, and is therefore innocent.

**THIS IS REAL FORGIVENESS**

Here are excerpts from the section of A Course in Miracles titled "The Fear of Healing."

"For accusation is a bar to love, and damaged bodies ARE accusers."

"Who has been injured BY his brother, and could love and trust him still? He HAS attacked, and will attack again. Protect him not, because your damaged body shows that you must be protected FROM him."

"He may be PITIED for his guilt, but NOT exonerated."

"The unhealed CANNOT pardon. For they are the witnesses that pardon is unfair. They would retain the CONSEQUENCES of the guilt they overlook. Yet no-one CAN forgive a sin which he believes is real. And what has consequences MUST be real, because what it has DONE is there to see."

"forgiveness does not first ESTABLISH sin, and THEN forgive it. Who can say and MEAN, "My brother, you have injured me, and yet, because I am the BETTER of the two, I pardon you my hurt."

"To witness sin and yet forgive it is a paradox which reason cannot see."

"you grant your brother mercy, but retain the proof he is not REALLY innocent. The sick remain accusers."

"For no-one in whom true forgiveness reigns CAN suffer. He holds not the proof of sin before his brother's eyes. And thus he MUST have overlooked it, and removed it from his own."

"Who forgives IS healed. And in his healing lies the PROOF that he has truly pardoned, and retains no trace of condemnation that he still would hold against himself or any living thing."

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt?"

"Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors."

"LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself. A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."

"What you would prove to him you will believe. The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him."

"Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him."

"So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

"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."

"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."

"How just are miracles! For they bestow an equal gift of full deliverance from guilt upon your brother AND yourself. YOUR healing saves HIM pain, as well as you. And YOU are healed BECAUSE you wished him well."

"And love would prove ALL suffering is but a vain imagining, a foolish wish, with NO effects. Your health is a result of your desire to see your brother with no blood upon his hands, nor guilt upon his heart made heavy with the proof of sin."

"The Holy Spirit knows YOUR healing is the witness UNTO his, and CANNOT be apart from him at all. As long as he consents to suffer, YOU will be unhealed."

"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. And laughter will REPLACE your sighs BECAUSE God's Son remembered that he IS God's Son."

-- See also this passage from "The Picture of Crucifixion" which precedes "the fear of healing"...

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

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

-- Also

"Now is the body healed by miracles."

"The mind must be stronger than the body. Every miracle demonstrates this."

I was doing something and inquired of Holy Spirit, "Is it okay that I'm doing this?". The response was, "You're free."

This is always the response I get when questioning what I'm doing. Regardless of what I'm doing. Regardless of what anyone would think about what I'm doing. And regardless of any moral explanation for whether what I'm doing is right or wrong or good or bad.

You're free.

You're free because God gave you TOTAL freedom and you have free will to use as you see fit.

Where my mind went next was more interesting though. If I am free to do something that my judgement or beliefs might label as "wrong" in some way, and it's NOT wrong, this actually indicates that THERE IS NO SIN.

If you are free, and if everything you do is in total freedom, and everything you choose you are totally free TO choose, then there can never be ANY grounds for sin or guilt. Either you wanted to do it and did it, or you didn't. And you only did what you wanted and intended in full acceptance of it. There is never a scenario where "you shouldn't have chosen that" or "it wasn't okay to do that" or "you should've willed differently".

From God, there is no pressure, no judgement, no coercion, no condemnation, no persuasion, nothing. Because He already set you free in your creation. He does not revoke this freedom or add conditions to it. Which means WHATEVER you choose, you are free to choose. No matter what it is, no matter the consequences.

That includes murder and rape and war and attack of all kinds. If you so choose. Hitler was free to perform genocide. God did not stop him. Did you notice that?

This is not in ANY way to say that you are justified in doing these things, or that its wise, or recommended, or something a loving person would choose. Nor does it in any way suggest God condones murder and war. God's will is still that you, preferably, choose peace love and happiness. But it's still up to you whether you accept His will for you or not. Your free will gives YOU the freedom to decide whether you will accept it or deny it.

"God does not coerce." "Even God would not go against your will."

So beware getting into level confusion with this. But the point I mainly wanted to make is that, since you are completely FREE, there is nothing inherently "wrong with" anything you choose. All meaning is meaning you've given it. People are rapidly choosing death by the thousands on a daily basis, that's their choice. The key is that BECAUSE they are free, it CANNOT be a sin. They might be unwise or mistaken, but their freedom guarantees them sinlessness.

It could only be a sin if, somehow, God placed conditions on your freedom and had a set of rules about what you're "allowed" to do and what you're not. God would have to have lined up a whole segment of activities that are "not ok" or out of bounds compared to those that are sanctioned or ordained.

And if you step out of line, there'd have to be some kind of method by which God implements correction and punishment and slaps your wrists and strikes you down with a lightning bolt to keep you in line. Or worse, you'll live in fear of his judgementalism and wrath and the potential for being sent to hell and damnation for "misusing your freedom in unapproved ways."

God doesn't do that. And all of the belief and fear surrounding the "fear of God" or fearing punishment, is entirely an ego device to SUGGEST that you are NOT free, should not have exercised freedom, should not have made a decision, and have no right to freely choose whatever you want. It's a way for the EGO to keep you in line and treat you like a slave.

You are free. Without limit. Without conditions. You are unconditionally free because God is unconditionally free. He is not a judgement manipulative specially preferential God. He is not a judger or evaluator of what is and is not a sin.

This does however mean that

1) Whatever you DO choose, its your choice, and you will have to accept the consequences.

2)You can choose to live or die and nothing can oppose your decision.

3) Anything you do has NO grounds for guilt and going into guilt is a denial of your free will and ownership of decision.

4) You are responsible for everything you choose when you exercise your will, without exception.

5) You are not responsible for anything you did NOT choose, thus no additional punishment, guilt, sense of sin, unworthiness, shame, blame, or any kind of "shouldn't have willed it."

"The power of decision is my own."

"You cannot die unless you choose to do so."

"There is no sin."

There is no sin because its not possible to will something that "you shouldn't have", its not possible to will "in error", its not possible to cause anything to happen without your full agreement and acceptance of the consequences, and nothing can happen against your will.

"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?"

"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. And no-one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

"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. "

If it's true that you choose everything that happens, making it possible to find salvation by choosing eternal life and denying death, then everything you choose you must WANT.

Wanting, desiring, allowing, accepting, believing in, is all an act of positively electing something, in the belief that it appeals to and attracts you. Meaning you want it.

To accept atonement you have to want it. This is a matter of willingness. If you want to suffer you will suffer because you want to. If you die, you want to die. If you are sick its because you want to be sick. If you are unloved you do not want to be loved.

Look at the world and look at in the light that everyone is a powerful creator or miscreator, creating exactly what they want in every case. See how there are no victims, only willing participants who consent to everything that happens. A world of ameteur creators who have not yet perfected the constructive use of their powers.

Everyone is in fact getting exactly what they want at all times. Each wanting or choice is a prayer, and all prayers are always answered - by you. You always receive what you give.

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

If you want salvation nothing can stop you. If you want God nothing can stand in your way. If you want health it shall be yours. If you want to never die you will live forever. But you cannot be in two minds or in denial.

If you think something is happening that you do not want, you are denying it which is why you think you don't want it. You really secretly do want it, otherwise your single minded decisive power would rid you of it. Complaining about it is a decision NOT to change your mind and to stay in suffering.

Everyone is always getting what they want. The problem really is not one of receiving things you didn't ask for, but of being unmasterful of your asking such that you keep asking for things that don't bring you happiness. You still ask for them because you ask for hate, because you want to hate.

Not recognizing what you actually are choosing is half the problem. It requires a lot of honesty to admit you want to hurt yourself, want to be afraid, want to be sick or want to die, especially when on the surface this induces fear which makes you recoil from what you are choosing. Or to admit you are NOT doing what you think you're doing.

The only reason people seem to not want all the shit they keep wanting, is because they keep wanting to threaten themselves. They keep seeking ways to be punished and hurt, yet recoil at the hurt. This is just the two-faced nature of the ego. We keep choosing in a confused state of mind and end up making a poor choice.

"I must have decided wrongly because I am NOT at peace. I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise."

When you want only health, happiness and wholeness you will have only that, and nothing else will you have. If life sucks, congratulations on getting what you wanted. Then choose again if you want something else.

We simply are immature creators with confused minds who keep causing hell to happen by mistake. On purpose. Because we think its what we want, because we don't recognize what things are, because we're insane. But all you have to do is change your mind about what you want.

"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."

"Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one, and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you."

"He has asked for what will frighten him, and bring him suffering. Let us resolve today to ask for what we really want, and only this, that we may spend this day in fearlessness, without confusing pain with joy, or fear with love."

"You were at peace until you asked for special favor, and God did not give it."

"In peace he needed nothing, and asked for nothing. In war he DEMANDED everything, and FOUND nothing."

"What you have asked for cannot be denied."

"If a magic thought arouses anger in any form, God's teacher can be sure that he is strengthening his own belief in sin and has condemned himself. He can be sure as well that he has asked for depression, pain, fear and disaster to come to him."

"I AM responsible for what I see. I CHOSE the feelings I experience, and I DECIDED ON the goal I would achieve. And everything that SEEMS to happen TO me, I ASKED FOR and received as I had asked."

"For NEITHER will recognize that HE HAS ASKED FOR HELL, and so he will NOT interfere with the ego's ILLUSION of Heaven, which it offered him TO INTERFERE WITH HEAVEN."

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

"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."

"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."

It may seem at first that all events in this world are random, sometimes negative, difficult, cruel and should not be happening. We try to avoid some events and promote others. We want the bad stuff to go away and escape into only the good stuff, to prolong the good stuff as long as possible and have some sense of control.

But one thing that has become glaringly obvious to me in recent weeks of turmoil and trust-development, is that there absolutely is a higher plan whose reach spans everything that happens here, including the timing of meetings between individuals and groups and everything that occurs.

The plan of atonement, or the universal curriculum, orchestrates all events, encounters and occurrences. "Those who are to meet will meet". The Holy Spirit has laid out this plan, and it includes both what seem to be positive and negative events, or rather, the re-purposing of them for awakening.

"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."

We are willing to endure "trials" and "lessons" only because, in the much bigger long-term picture, we know that the outcome of these, when we elect to learn the curriculum of truth, brings us closer to God. No one in their right mind would deliberately choose to endure suffering and difficulty, except if they knew that such things would educate them and eventually persuade them towards a better way.

"***Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn*** presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one, and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you. ***In every difficulty, all distress, and each perplexity you face***, Christ calls to you, and gently says, "My brother, choose again." He would not leave one source of pain unhealed, nor any image left to veil the truth. He would remove all misery from you whom God created alters unto joy. He would not leave you comfortless, alone in dreams of hell, but would release your minds from everything that hides His Face from you."

This world is not a collection of random occurrences. I see it now more as a winding, twisting dream sequence, with threads of stories and encounters and happenings, where designated people are supposed to be exactly where they are, where environments and events transpire on purpose to present lessons, in the hope that we will use these situations with the Holy Spirit towards the goal of awakening rather than as a way to strengthen our belief in hell. The world is just one big school of classrooms in which to unlearn the lies of the ego. And all of this is planned, somewhat like a form of voluntary destiny.

Before our lifetime we consent to various such classrooms. We may agree upon a body, a family, a location, a lifestyle. We may even agree that certain physical problems arise at certain times, seemingly triggered by certain events. But we have to realize that behind these seemingly random events, such as a car-crash for example, there is orchestration. There is purpose. It is meant to happen, because these trials need to be revisited so that certain stimuli will be presented to offer an opportunity for spiritual growth. And we sign on the dotted line to say, ok, I will be willing to go through all this if it will lead me closer home to God.

Sometimes really awful stuff happens. If a person is in a car crash and even perhaps dies for a while, perhaps this is to facilitate that they can visit Heaven, be healed, be restored and enlightened to some degree, so that upon returning they are a new person and live in a new way, making possible new avenues of expression and help. We might think some things happening are horrendous and cruel but when it's part of a much bigger plan, even the most awful of occurrences might well be divinely intended, not to cause suffering but to create circumstances and consequences that are ultimately beneficial spiritually.

In the really big picture, everything that happens here is entirely designed and repurposed as a tool to bring you home. The whole world is one big rescue mission, gently trying to get us to become willing to see sense and let go of our ego toys. God has protected us and is using space and time to present a curriculum that applies to all entities here, using scripts and events to present lessons that we agree to, so that we will gradually learn of the truth and awaken from our sleep.

We would only be willing to go through difficulties if we knew that it was in fact a purposeful lesson, and one which would point us eventually in the direction of love and happiness. Lessons that make us grow and present opportunities for forgiveness. We learn by applying the truth and forgiving what seems to occur, which in turn collapses periods of time and scripts that we no longer need.

The appearance that events and encounters and meetings are entirely at random is complete fiction. The Holy Spirit has control over all of this, with his plan for salvation. As you atune to this plan and trust it rather than fight against events, it becomes more obvious that He speaks through a variety of persons, He works through a variety of happenings, and that regardless of surface chance, some things simply are meant to happen a certain way, and will, by His will.

How else could we develop trust than if it were true that there is a plan to trust in, an ability of the Holy Spirit and God to guide and direct what transpires, and not just some chaotic random mishmash of cruelty and crime that we keep trying to escape. To trust in the plan is to learn the curriculum. To overlook the chaos and see the order is forgiveness. Everything happening here is an intricate symphony of education and opportunities to choose once again. And all of it continually points us towards reunion with God.

There is no evil, only the seeming absence of the good.

There is no sin, only the seeming absence of love.

There is no death, only the seeming absence of life.

There is no darkness, only the seeming absence of light.

To take something and suggest that just because it is ABSENT, must mean it is the PRESENCE of something negative, is an error.

Evil does not ASSERT itself and maintain its own existence. It seeming presence ENTIRELY depends on the absence of the good.

Darkness cannot prevent light from shining it away when the light is present.

Death similarly cannot RESIST life. When life is supplied, the appearance of death MUST change to resurrection. Death is nothing more than the seeming absence of life, a lack of love, and when the love returns there cannot be death.

Sin is not a "positive sin". It isn’t an assertion of real attack. It is literally nothing OTHER than the seeming absence of love. A lack of love is not the same thing as an ASSERTION of sinfulness. You don’t have to FILL the lack of love with fire and brimstone, or REPLACE an absence with some other opposite material.

All things illusory ARE simply the appearance of the ABSENCE of something REAL. They are just lack. A lack of love is not a presence of hate. Hate is an illusion of being unloving. Someone who seems evil is just a little bit loving. They could be more loving, but judging that amount of love as the PRESENCE of evil is a failure to overlook illusions.

Every seeming symptom, effect, sign or symbol of the ego, every form of sickness and death, all darkness and attack and murderousness and sinfulness, is not ACTUALLY what it appears to be. It is only the LACK of something. There is a NEED, and the need is a CALL FOR the supply of that need, such as the call for love.

Attack is not attack. It is a request for the lack of safety to be supplied. It’s a request for a reminder of immortality. It’s a need to be reminded that reality cannot be threatened and no one can sin. It’s not the PRESENCE of evil.

Shadows on a wall do not have their own existence. They can only maintain so long as light SEEMS to be blocked. As soon as the blockage is remove and the light is supplied, it fills that area with light. The supposed darkness simply VANISHES. It has no staying power, no properties of its own, no will or power to remain, and it cannot resist the light. The notion that the darkness can HIDE the light or MAKE the light go away, is insanity and falling for the delusion of illusions.

Similarly sickness and death are ONLY the seeming absence of health and life. And when health and life are GIVEN through extension, when lack is supplied, these things MUST vanish. They do not have reality of their OWN and they have no power or will TO RESIST the healing. There cannot be anything keeping them in place because they DEPEND ENTIRELY on life, health, and love being temporarily lacking. When life is supplied, death MUST BE UNDONE.

Sickness isn’t sickness. It is merely a lack of health. That is not the same thing. The appearance of a lack of health can SEEM LIKE the PRESENCE of a sickness, a damage, an infection, a malfunction, a breakage, a disorder or disease. But these appearances are NOTHING OTHER THAN the seeming LACK or absence of life and love. They are no different to a shadow. And when light comes the shadow cannot stay, just as when the healing power of God’s LIFE is supplied, all forms of sickness and death MUST BE CURED.

A failure to heal, thus, must be because you simply have NOT GIVEN what is lacking. Because if it were given, sickness cannot stay and has no way to resist its undoing. It DEPENDS on life’s absence. Giving life supplies what was missing, and now there is wholeness, with no lack that sickness can be based on. Sickness is guilt, just as it is caused by sin, because sin is the belief in a lack of innocence and guilt is a belief in a lack of deserving love. Supply innocence and love and sickness cannot be there.

Nothing can resist this healing, except for possibly an assertion of free will, whereby someone WANTS to maintain the belief that darkness is real, sickness is its own thing, the body is autonomous and causal, evil exists, or that they are sinful and it cannot be undone. If the person does not show at least some willingness, love does not enter and miracles do not frighten. If someone does not consent, God’s help is held back. Not because it can’t be given but because there is unwillingness to receive it. Those who are sick have to have some faith and willingness, in order to receive help.

Besides this, the law is simple. Either there is the presence of immortality or its seeming absence. And when it seems to be absence, supplying it corrects the absence. And then all sights of mortality must go.

"My Atonement was for the canceling out of all sins (ie., lack of love)"

"The ego does not perceive sin as a lack of love. It perceives it as a POSITIVE ACT OF ASSAULT. This is an interpretation which is necessary to its survival, because as soon as YOU regard it as a LACK, you will automatically attempt to remedy the situation. And you will also succeed. The ego regards this as doom, but YOU must learn to regard it as freedom."

"Remember, I said before that because "nature abhors a vacuum", it does NOT follow that the vacuum is filled with hell fire. The emptiness engendered by fear should be replaced by love, because love and its absence are in the same dimension, and correction cannot be undertaken except WITHIN a dimension. Otherwise, there has been a confusion of levels."

"The second step is inherent in the first, because light cannot tolerate darkness. Light dispels darkness automatically, by definition. EXPLANATORY INSTRUCTIONS: Miracles are associated with fear only because of the fallacy that darkness can hide."

"There is no darkness that the light of love will not dispel, unless it is concealed from love's beneficence. What is kept apart from love cannot share its healing power, because it has been separated off and kept in darkness."

"My purpose, then, is still to overcome the world. 9 I do not attack it, but my light must dispel it because of what it is. 10 Light does not attack darkness, but it does shine it away. 11 If my light goes with you everywhere, you shine it away with me."

Sometimes it *seems* as if something happens to us that we did not choose. Let's say, something physical in the world comes along and hurts your body. Maybe its a car crash. Maybe someone is having a bad day and spills hot coffee on your body. Whatever it is, the question arises, did *I* cause this to happen? Am I a victim?

If ever the answer is that I DID NOT choose it, what are the implications? It means that there must be something that has power over me, I must be a victim, I must have no hope for a cure, I must be vulnerable to external attack, and I must be capable of being made to suffer against my will. This whole belief is especially wrapped up in sickness and death, via perceived external or bodily causes.

There is also the fact that we are co-dreaming this world with others, and that means some other brother, not in his right mind, might elect of his own free will to attack your body. Is this also asked for? Did I CHOOSE to be attacked? Have I harmed myself or used my brother's body in some way, perhaps in agreement with him, a mutual attack? Surely if I did not participate in its choosing, HE is the sinner, and my victimhood and proof of attack in my body accuses him. "Sick bodies are accusers." "Brother at your hand I die."

Jesus says this.

"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."

So EVEN if there is a seemingly completely distinct attacker, some other person who of their own free will seems to be trying to attack your body, EVEN THAT is somehow chosen by you. And if you are pain or are suffering physically or emotionally, it is STILL true that you are causing it. In essence, there are NO EXCEPTIONS to the secret of salvation, and the instant that you believe there are, there is NO WAY TO FIND SALVATION, because now you've ruled out of the possibility of being FREE FROM "unwarranted external powers" or an "alien will."

Jesus goes on to say:

"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."

Here he seems to me to be saying, if you were sitting high up and were dreaming of a world down below you, which YOU populate with figures, and YOU animate, and you make "do things", like a child playing with dolls causing the dolls to pretend to interact or fight, then you'd realize that YOU are not identified with any of these figures and so these things are not happening to YOU. By being spirit-identified, you are not dream/body identified. So any activities in the world - in your dream - which you made do what it does, has no real effect on who and what YOU really are. But this does require a total clarity and atonement-level acceptance of the awareness of dreaming and the fact that you're making the world happen.

Jesus continues:

"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."

So now he's telling us that the form of the issue does not matter. Whether it be a violent person or a car crash or a disease or unhappiness. There is ONE truth about them all, and that truth is that YOU are doing them to yourself, by identifying with the body and dreaming a dream in which you CAUSE the bodies to hurt each other. For this to be true, you as a dreamer has to be a really high-level, powerful position. Can you comprehend the power entailed in dreaming a planet? Can you accept or own that this entire environment is in your mind?

"You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts."

"Both heaven and earth are in your mind."

The issue with your body is a tiny speck of the dream that your mind is supposedly dreaming. Like in your dreams at night, where your mind invents an entire environment and then puts a little body in it, perhaps too it is true of this physical world. We dream up an entire ecosystem of events and activities and people and then make stuff happen and the only way we'd feel that we're vulnerable to any of it, is if we forget we're dreaming it and identify with some part of it, such as believing you are a body. Jesus is practically saying that what you are transcends ALL bodies. Is this too lofty of an interpretation? Too hard to relate to?

Jesus says to let them be as vicious as they may. And that seems to mean, even allowing the body to be attacked and damaged.

""In my defencelessness my safety lies." - You who feel threatened by this changing world, its twists of fortune and its bitter jests, its brief relationships and all the "gifts" it merely lends to take away again, attend this lesson well. 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."

But somehow, if you were conscious enough of being the dreamer and not the dream, you would not be even slightly confused or believe that anything the body is experiencing is anything to do with what you are. That it is having NO EFFECT on you. It's not disturbing your peace of mind or happiness.

The problem with this is, "A guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, it heals the body." So one moment Jesus is saying to let people be vicious, which presumably could mean your body is damagable, which is backed up by his statements about "only bodies can be attacked". And then the next he's saying that the mind should heal the body, and if it doesn't, the mind is not healed. "A damaged body is proof the mind has not been healed." Yet if another person did the damage, does that mean your mind is not healed? Is your mind not healed because YOU dreamed of the other person? Is your mind not healed because you made up another body to attack this body, in your dream, thus literally doing it to your body self?

Jesus seems in some ways to say, you can transcend all worldly happenings, all bodily situations, be fully spirit identified, recognizing you are mind not matter, and be free from every possible dream scenario no matter what happens in the world. BUT, he also seems to teach that a mind in such a position would therefore have the miracle-working power to UNDO or correct or heal, anything that arises. This seems to imply the body can be attacked and is vulnerable, BUT that the mind CAN heal it, and if the mind has not healed it the mind must not be healed simply because it's not sane to allow the damage to remain. "Forgiveness is not real unless it has brought a healing to your brother and yourself." "A miracle of healing proves separation (attack world) is without effect."

A question arises, is it possible to somehow supernaturally cause the body to be INCAPABLE of being attacked? Jesus speaks of a "protection" near the end of "sickness is a defense against the truth". He speaks of the body being unable to be sick, or to die. But if bodies can be attacked, would some other person come along in the dream and still attempt murder? And would it still produce a wound on the body? Does mind wield a power capable of essentially making the body literally immortal and undamagable?

Or would this be simply impossible, given the body is not real and only real things are free from threat? It would suggest the body can still be attacked, but that the mind could heal the attack. And that would seem to line up with Jesus's body being crucified in spite of his profound advanced mental state. If his mind has permanent projective power over the body, it would not have been crucifiable. The spear would not have been able to penetrate the hands and the nails could not be driven into his limbs.

It's true that, nevertheless, "the mind that made the body can make another". So in a sense, if the body is destroyed the mind, which is not the body, could manifest another illusory body, which also has inherent susceptibility. ie bodies fundamentally exist only as illusions, illusions can be attacked (illusions of attack) fundamentally, and so there is no way to render a body immortal or permanent. The mind CAN however heal the body, can project new bodies, and has the power to perhaps supernaturally manipulate events, utilize divine guidance and therefore find a "safe" path through the dream of attack.

One line says, "without the idea of death there is no world." Another says "to see a sinless body is impossible" and "the body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards." Which means, if the body seems to exist at all, it depends on death. It is made of death. And at best, it can symbolize eternal life but cannot BE it. Mind can maintain it and heal it. But there are limits - and short of a supernatural miracle, a body wouldn't survive a direct encounter with a supernova.

We know the body is just an image, an illusion, projected by the mind. It SHOULD, in the "movie projector analogy, mean it's possible possible for the DREAMER to NOT dream attack scenarios. In fact, "my self is ruler of the universe speaks to this."

"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."

How absolute does this sound? It seems to literally mean, as the ruler of the universe, nothing can happen without your consent. No events can occur, without you dreaming them. Wars cannot take place unless you make them happen. Not only does what you desire happen, what you DON'T want to happen does not occur either. ie, you have TOTAL CONTROL over the dream.

And if that is true, does it not mean you could organize that there will NOT BE an attack upon your body? Unless you CHOSE that there be one and made it happen, that perhaps Jesus orchestrated every aspect of his own crucifixion? But does not this also mean that he must've dreamed of the "rest of us" too? Why not just dream of everyone being fully awake and bring an end to the dream entirely? How are we co-dreamers? Through a shared will?

Jesus also speaks of the body disappearing upon awakening. This suggests, in a co-authored dream, when a dreamer wakes up, he stops making a body. The recognition of its NOTHINGNESS cancels its illusions, making it impossible for it to appear to exist at all. A light shines so brightly, the body vanishes. "And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar of the Son of God."

If mind has the power to make a world, it would seem mind could have the power to force the body not to age, be sick or die. That mind would take authority over any occurrences. Mind could supernaturally make it impossible for the body to be attacked. It could "sustain the body indefinitely, BUT within time, where all bodies exist. This would require an ongoing maintenance, a vigilance, in orer to maintain this projection. And this seems to be what is spoken of 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.

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

So Jesus is suggesting a potential for indefinite sustainability of the body's health and state, where mind is overriding any worldly causality. This feasibly could continue for thousands of years. And there are stories of certain masters who have accomplished this longevity. St Germain, Babaji, etc. These advanced teachers of God apparently have the power to reverse, heal, and resurrect the body. At least for as long as it is useful in the atonement plan. The purpose is the plan. And once fulfilled, bodies are no longer needed.

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it.. 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... To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. 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 an illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand."

"Leave it behind. It cannot enter Heaven. But I can take you there any time you choose. Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does. And then - and then - I cannot speak of that. A body cannot stay without illusions, and the last one to be overcome is death."

"This is the message of the crucifixion: there is no order of difficulty in miracles. This is the message of the resurrection. Illusion are illusions. Truth is true. Illusions vanish. Only truth remains."

So what's the conclusion?

Mind has power over everything. Mind is co-dreaming the world with others. All illusions are attackable IF the mind CONSENTS to it. Due to free will, other minds can use their bodies to try to attack your body. This possibly cannot happen at all if you do not consent to it. If it does happen, you have agreed to a mutual attack scenario, and now your brother seems able to attack your body. But now your mind has the power to miraculously heal it, and being sane it would do so. And this the body can be "protected" by the mind indefinitely while useful, eventually to be laid aside ie vanished when no longer useful. You can choose the body cannot be sick, age or die, by protecting it actively, or through miracles of healing. But the time of bodies will come to an end.

"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."

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.

Ego projections boil down to a very, very simple dynamic.

1) I decide what I want to see in someone.

2) I interact with what I now see in them as if I did not put it there.

The way I interact with what I see in others, is quite bizarre. It's really insane. I'm trying to accomplish two opposite goals at once.

1) I want other people to be what I say they are, by projecting my sin and guilt onto them, "convinced" that they really are that way.

2) I then demand that they stop being what I am seeing them being, and that they be the opposite, and that they are the one who has to choose differently. This is "forgiveness to destroy".

So right off the bat, this is a state of conflict. It's me who is seeing other people are doing "something wrong", and then it is me who is insisting that they change their behavior. So now I'm holding it against them when they don't change "for me". And they won't.

I'm literally demanding two separate outcomes simultaneously. I want people to be what I decide they are, and then I want them to not be what I've decided they are, simply because I'm in denial of being the one who has laid down the ground rules to begin with.

So I'm going around basically projecting shit onto people, deciding ok, you are doing this and that wrong and should be doing this and that instead. And then the rest of my "play" is to react to that accusation. It tends to go one of two ways.

1) They are wrong and they shouldn't be doing what they're doing so they are the ones who need to change, not me, and if they don't, I will victimize them. I will hold it against them.

2) They are wrong and they shouldn't be doing what they're doing, but in a hero savior role I will now swoop in and save them from "themselves", those sorry bastards, since they refuse to change themselves and seem 'helpless' and needy.

Each time I react to something being incorrect or unacceptable in another, who exactly is it who has made that person out to be wrong in this way? Are they inherently wrong in this way or have I actually decided to see them this way, and therefore it's my judgement of them? And now that I am responsible for what I'm seeing, having put it there to see, it's now my responsibility to admit that I'm interacting with my own projection.

As Jesus says in the course, generally speaking we will project our own sin outward and try to disown it (disassociate) and then we will attack what we've projected, accusing it of being sinful and bad, in order to create a sense of separation between it and ourselves, so that we can keep it away from our identity.

We will attack our own sin, thinking that we're attacking it in another person, believing that to do so causes them to receive the punishment and not us. Except it doesn't work because the sin never leaves our own mind (ideas leave not their source), it just seems external because we are in denial of it.

So it really all boils down to this. Whatever interaction I seem to be having with "the world", if I don't like it, it's because I'm the one who is deciding on what I am seeing "in" it, and am reacting to it as though it's really out there. And regardless of whether I am liking to do that or am feeling frustrated or upset or whatever about "what they are doing", I am the one who is making them out to be doing that to me. Because I want to. Because it gives me an opportunity to disown some sin.

ie, I love to suffer. I choose suffering on purpose and position myself as a victim on purpose, so that I can seem to be at the effect of the world, so that I can then explain that the world has caused me and therefore the world is the sinner, not me. I might suffer and be sick or afraid or upset as "effects" of what they supposedly did to me (even though I invented those effects in myself, by myself), but I secretly am getting away with murder by "using" the person as an outlet for projecting my own sin. Now they are the sinner and not me, and I'm suffering... poor me, but at least I am not the sinner any more.

So the ego's mantra is, I wish to suffer in order not to suffer. Or rather, I will see the world as attacking me and attack myself with it so that it seems that I'm not attacking myself with it.

We are to demonstrate that we cannot be hurt, or made sick, or caused to die, as a result of this world. And whenever these things seem to be happening, you can be assured that you've positioned yourself as a deliberate victim, in order to pretend that the world is responsible for what you are experiencing. You may be suffering, you may be sick, you may even end up dead, and it will conveniently seem as if the world made this happen against your will, but nothing could be further from the truth.

No-one dies without their own consent. And anyone who dies has secretly arranged to make it appears as if they did not choose it at all. Death is an attempt not to choose, by pretending that you have no choice, by pretending that others have taken all your power away from you, making you an "unwilling" victim, in a state of unwillingness, such that it appears death happens to you against your will. How convenient. It's a total lie.

Death is unwillingness to admit that you are pretending to die and are blaming everything on anyone other than yourself. This is why death is failure, and death is failing to wake up from the dream. Death is impossible for anyone but self-imposed victims. Death is not life. It is not success or graduation. It is the total opposite of life. It cannot happen without being severely against yourself and against the will of God. Therefore it cannot happen "peacefully" nor can it happen AT ALL unless you attack yourself.

Everyone has free will. Which means that all experiences are chosen. And nothing happens to anyone without their consent or choice. If this weren't true, it would be possible that someone's free will could be taken away from them, violated, broken, or completely have no effect. This isn't possible because the free will was given by GOD, and is irrevocably permanent. Everyone has free will at all times.

"The world (heaven), in its original connotation, included both the proper creation of man (souls) by God, AND the proper creation by man (souls) in his Right Mind. The latter required the endowment of man (souls) by God with free will, because all loving creation is freely given."

"It still remains within him to project as God projected his own Spirit to him. In reality, this is his ONLY choice, because his free will was made for his own joy in creating the perfect."

When a person seems incapable of exercising decision making on their own, such as with a baby or a child, a person who you are having to be guardian for due to their disabilities, some group of people that you're supposed to protect, the elderly who have lost their power of thought and seem unable to look after themselves etc, these all create scenarios where someone else seems to have to take "responsibility" for them.

It's interesting first of all that there even is such a scenario where someone could seem to be in a position to be unable to choose for themselves. This alone is the result of ego interfering with freedom. And just because e.g. newborn babies are heavily dependent on their parents for survival and for decision making, this doesn't mean it's natural. To place oneself in a position of having to depend on anyone else to make decisions, for any reason, is an aspect of self denial. Which is what leads to incarnation in the first place. In effect this makes the bodies of babies, a physical "face of innocence", denying responsibility for attacking God.

Beyond that, once you're in a situation where it seems you have "no choice" but to take responsibility for choosing for someone else, there is now a very slippery slope. If you truly are "held accountable" for someone else's well-being, and if anything whatsoever remotely happens to that person, it is now implied that this is "your fault". Whether it be that you are a parent who "has to" look after a young child, or an adult looking after an elderly parent, or an older sibling looking after a younger sibling, the same is true.

If in any way another person seems to lack the power of decision or free will, and you have to "take over responsibility", this is tantamount to forcing you into a state of guilt. Anything that do, anything that happens to them, now effectively happens "to you", because you have now extended the scope of what you are responsible for. Even to the extent that it makes you feel like they are "part of you", and what happens to them even starts to affect you against your will. When they suffer, you suffer, because of this belief that you are bound to them - that you being responsible for them makes them an extension of your self.

It's very difficult to avoid this "double responsibility" in this world. If parents would just ditch babies, the babies would not survive. If we would just let those with dementia or alzheimers or disabilities fend for themselves, they would not last long. The question then is, is it possible psychologically to still maintain a role of "looking after" another person, or seeming to be responsible for them, WITHOUT believing that you are taking over their free will, and without using their suffering as a way to induce guilt in yourself?

It is very difficult to not feel guilty for the suffering of others. If you feel responsible for them it induces guilt and fear. If you feel compelled to protect them from suffering, and something happens, you can potentially go into self blame. If they go through a difficult time, you can possibly feel like it's your fault even if it isn't. And any way in which they suffer, makes you suffer.

If what's happening in your mind is a lack of letting go, a sense of "owning the person" (very prevalent in parenting), efforts to control and coerce, or any other way in which the person's free will is violated, then this will lay the groundwork for your own suffering. Regardless of whether you are acting physically on the level of form to provide for, support, guide, "keep alive" or otherwise be "responsible for" someone else's life, you have to find a way to keep sight of free will. Otherwise you will lose yourself in it and accuse yourself of "irresponsibility", as a result of being overly responsible.

I was guided recently, that "She is God's responsibility, not yours". This was because I kept being overly responsible for the wellbeing of another person. This compels a need to constantly fix and control things. It results in a kind of fear-driven desperation to want things to be different. To try to get someone to make different choices, to avoid certain outcomes. But as soon as we're getting into territory of encroaching on free will, we're going to lose our own peace of mind.

It boils down to the simple fact that you can't retain a sense of freedom if you take over the freedom of others. You become excessively responsible for things you are not responsible for, when you see yourself as "the cause of" what others are experiencing. You move into states of guilt and fear and worry whenever you believe that someone is "not supposed to" or "supposed to" be in a certain state they are not electing to be in. And you cannot retain any sense of peace while you try to coerce anyone in any way.

It's a difficult thing to deal with. You have to continue possibly being physically and emotionally supportive of a person, but without getting lost in it. Without losing sight of your own free will and that of another. It can even seem frightening to entertain the idea of allowing someone to make poor decisions or to degrade or to head towards death. Mainly because this incites reactions of guilt at not preventing it, due to believing it's your fault, based on believing their free will is something for YOU to control.

Always it's about the confusion of who you are, who they are, who is responsible for what freedom, and who is doing what to whom. You have to let people go in order to truly helpful. Otherwise any help is really a combination of help and manipulation. And that can only lead to a special relationship.

Jesus is asking us to be fully responsible for everything we experience.

It means you cannot ever again be a victim in any way.

It means nothing happens to us against our will.

It means if we decide something, it happens. If we don't, it doesn't.

It means the body and its condition are exactly what we asked for and were given.

It means that everything that happens around us is what we explicitly asked for and are given. That all prayers are answered.

It means everything you feel, everything your body is doing, is coming from you. Directly.

It means there is no cause in the world able to do anything to you whatsoever against your will.

It means absolutely everything that you do and experience is 100% deliberate, intentional, on purpose, and there are no flaws, no accidents, no mistakes, and everything is exactly the way you want it.

It means you have freedom of choice, because choosing one thing gives you that one thing, and choosing something else gives that to you also.

It also means that whatever you decide to perceive, you will perceive. Whatever you want to see with your perception, you will project so that you can see it. Literally, projecting objects out of thin air.

It means nothing can attack you and nothing can affect you and you cannot be sick nor can you die and the body can be used to demonstrate this, proving that the Son of God cannot have anything happen to him against his will.

It means you do not ask questions, you express. You create. You create (or make) whatever it is you want to create (with or without God's will). You paint pictures. You do not ask pictures to change, in that they might decide not to. You put there what you want to see. You create what you will experience.

It means projection makes perception because you first project and then you perceive what you have projected. You project whatever you want to see. If you want to see an entire planet you will project an entire planet, "making it" in your dream. But when you are done projecting and perceiving, you will stop doing that, and it will disappear.

It means when you make a decision, the consequences are immediate and permanent, and there is no ifs or buts, no fears or doubts, no uncertainty. God's will BE DONE. What God wills CANNOT BE DENIED.

It means that because you have free will, whatever you ask for you will be given. You will never fail to be given what you ask for. Only what you ask for will be all that is given to you. And nothing that you receive will ever be something you did not ask for.

It also means that the world is not causing you, God is not attacking you, other people are not doing anything to you, no-one can hurt you, you MUST be invulnerable, and you cannot die.

It therefore also means that YOU MADE sickness and death and can therefore ABOLISH both, in yourself and in another IF they are willing to ask for help. This means you do not have to go through death if you do not choose to do so, and you would only choose to do so to attempt to prove you can be hurt against your will, which is a bullshit lie.

It also means other people with free will are 100% responsible for EVERYTHING they experience, there is nothing you can do to them, you cannot hurt them, you cannot attack them, you cannot judge them, you cannot forgive them, and they are absolutely immune to anything you express, other than your sharing of love.

It also means, therefore, that anyone's victimhood or sob story or justifications for revenge or reasons to be right or wrong or ego reactions or upset emotions or pain or suffering or sickness, which are all acts of IRRESPONSIBILITY, are attempts to get rid of ourselves and to disown who we are, denying the ABSOLUTE POWER that we share with God.

It also means, that nothing real can be threatened! Reality could only possibly attempt to threaten itself, and if it does so, it will make only illusions of threat - pretend threat - because reality cannot be threatened, and nothing can happen to it against its will.

Can you sense the absolute explicit deliberateness of this? This is the thought system of a miracle worker. This is the kind of belief about ourselves that we need to have, or rather, to get rid of the belief that things happen for reasons OTHER THAN yourself. This is RIGHT MINDED THINKING.

The secret to salvation is that you are doing this all to yourself. That's because of all of the above. NOTHING can happen to you against your will. No-one can die without choosing to do so. No-one can suffer or be sick without choosing to do so. No-one is a victim of anyone else. No-one can be hurt against their will. No-one can show "effects" caused by anyone or anything else, unless they themselves PUT the effects into their own body to pretend that someone else put them there.

You are not at the effect of the world you see. You are not a victim of the world. No-one can suffer without his own consent. The secret to salvation is that you are doing all of this to yourself, including making your body sick and die, to try to prove you are not doing it to yourself. No-one needs to die. The dream of separation is NOT left by death, only by THIS TRUTH.

Total absolute responsibility for everything makes you IMMORTAL, INNOCENT, INVULNERABLE, and incapable of death.

You are not a body because you are as God created you which is a soul with a mind. Your soul/spirit has no need for a body whatsoever. But your mind is DREAMING of one.

Where did the body come from? Who is responsible for putting it there? It didn't show up on its own or as a result of any other causal power.

"The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards."

That means the mind, which is the realm of ideas, has an idea of sin, and projects it, which PRODUCES the body. This isn't a one-time affair, it doesn't just happen at birth, it is a constant projection all the time, like a movie projector projecting a movie.

"Love did not create the body" means a mind in total sanity does not produce/project a body, but an INSANE MIND does, because "the body is a device for separation."

Thus "The mind is responsible for every condition of the body" because the mind is the MAKER of the body. It determines whether it shows up or not, and in what condition, at all times. If it weren't for the mind making the body *constantly*, the body would vanish.

It seems to suggest the mind can be "free of the body" while the body STILL EXISTS, which is false logic. SOMEONE has to maintain the body or it simply will not show up at all. It does not have its own existence, its own life, or its own reality. The world does not maintain it "on its own". Some mind SOMEWHERE has to be projecting it constantly in order for it to keep showing up at all.

We cannot simply "escape" from sickness of the body by disappearing off into the mind and pretending that WE are not responsible for the body showing up. If it is still showing up, we are still putting it there, and to put a sick body there from a sane state of mind is utterly nonsense. No-one in their right mind would EVER demonstrate that "sickness and suffering are true", because it teaches your brother and communicates to him that he is a sinner.

When the mind is sane, it projects a healthy body. When the mind is sick, it projects a sick body.

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

"A broken body is proof the MIND has not been healed."

Mind is where healing is truly needed. "All sickness is mental illness." But that does NOT mean that if you heal the mind, the mind is completely separate from the body and can be healthy while the body remains sick. That is an ego belief in separation and is disassociation. The mind is always responsible for the body.

Jesus says re resurrection "I came to demonstrate the mind that made the body can make another. They did not understand."

So you can't have "I am not a body I am free and I'll just be sane and healed in my mind and KEEP MAKING a sick body"... a sane mind WOULD NOT produce sickness. Sickness is a defense against the truth. The body MUST be used to demonstrate a symbol of immortality otherwise you teach your brother by example, "brother at your hand I die", because all physical sickness is an attack and an accusation on others. "Sick bodies are accusers." What shows up in your body as being "true of you" is also an attempt to say what is "true of others". The golden rule has no exceptions.

When you are sane and recognize that you are not a body because you are the CAUSE of the body and it is your EFFECT or projection, THEN you will temporarily project a healed body which is a picture of perfection and a symbol of immortality and holiness. Then you will simply choose to STOP PROJECTING IT and it will disappear. This is the ONLY way to leave the dream of death, which can only be left through truth not death. Holy Spirit can help you to materialize a body that is free of sickness on all levels:

"Whenever you consent to suffer pain, to be deprived, unfairly treated, or in need of ANYTHING, you but accuse your brother of attack upon God's Son. You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes (as your sick body), that he may see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death, and go before him, closing off the gate, and damning him to hell. Yet this is writ in hell and NOT in Heaven, where you are BEYOND attack, and prove his INNOCENCE. The picture of yourself you offer him (your body) you show YOURSELF, and give it all your faith. The Holy Spirit offers you, to give to him, a picture of yourself (a healed body) in which there is NO pain, and NO reproach at all (no form of illness, breakage, damage, suffering, disease etc). And what was martyred to his guilt becomes the perfect witness to his innocence."

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

and here is the final stage of resurrection: "Here its peace can come, and perfect healing take the place of death. The body can become a sign of life, a promise of redemption, and a breath of immortality to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death. Let it have healing as its PURPOSE. Then will it send forth the message it received, and BY ITS HEALTH AND LOVELINESS proclaim the truth and value that it represents. Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever unattacked. And to your brother let its message be, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I live."

It is only possible to teach your brother through physical demonstration that he is not a sinner by not accusing him of sin, which means not using the body for attack, which results in the body being fully healed. "What you use the body for it becomes to you".

And Jesus re his resurrection and body disappearing:

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it.. 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... To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. 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 an illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand. "

"Leave it behind. It cannot enter Heaven. But I can take you there any time you choose. Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does. And then-and then-I cannot speak of that. A body cannot stay without illusions, and the last one to be overcome is death."

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."

The entire ego thought system is an attempt to deny and get rid of God, ourselves, and truth. It is an attempt to displace responsibility for who and what we are, what we are experiencing, and how these experiences were chosen, onto someone other than ourselves.

The culmination of this behavior if death, in which we seem to successfully displace/project/disassociate ALL responsibility for living onto some external power, which decides FOR us what our fate will be.

Death is the ultimate statement and attempt to get rid of all will to live, all responsibility for choice, all power, all blame, and all sin. Turning the tables and having something external "cause you to die" can only happen by completely refusing to make a choice, to create an illusion of having no choice, and to then play along with that lie by "letting" something destroy you "against your will."

All victimhood speaks of the disownership and denial of self, the projection of sin onto others, the unwillingness to choose or to admit to anything, and the deliberate placing of all POWER into the hands of anyone other than ourselves. This has been our ego agenda since the beginning of the separation from God, which was an attempt to deny all power, to deny what we are, and to destroy what God has created.

The only tool the ego has, since it cannot change reality or make it truly be destroyed, is to "cover it up" with illusions of denial. This denial attempts to displace away from the present, away from Self, away from God, everything that is HERE to make it be "not here". This is simply an act of DISOWNING RESPONSIBILITY.

The antidote to this, and everything that comes from it, is to TAKE BACK YOUR POWER by taking responsibility for everything that you are experiencing. This requires that you learn that NOTHING can happen to you against your will, EVERYTHING you are experiencing is what you have ASKED FOR, and you HAVE received exactly what you wanted. This also means that you MUST have chosen whatever it is you are experiencing.

This ties in directly to the secret to salvation, which is the realizing that you are DOING THIS TO YOURSELF, which means that you cannot ever be a victim, no-one is EVER the cause of anything you are experiencing or feeling, no-one can attack you, you are invulnerable, and therefore you are SAFE.

It also ties into Jesus saying that "no-one dies without their own consent". This literally means that if you will take full responsibility, you literally CANNOT experience death unless you choose to. And this also means, that literally, nothing outside of you has ANY ability or power to CAUSE you to die, against your will. This is nothing short of immortality.

The benefits to you and your mind by taking full responsibility for everything is profound. It takes some practice, especially since in most ego dramas there is some perception that SOMEONE ELSE is responsible for what you are experiencing. It can seem that your body is sick because of something that happened against your will, or someone called you some names, or they attacked you, or there is something wrong with them etc. These are LIES.

These are ways that you will GIVE POWER to other people, which means DISOWNING that power, which means you will then *experience* a sense of POWERLESSNESS. In that powerlessness you will see yourself as weak, vulnerable and attackable, and justified in being constantly afraid because now you perceive that "a great power" is outside of you, able to do something to you against your will. A power so strong that, in comparison, the "lack of power" you see yourself as having is no match for it.

Being a victim is a deliberate act of giving your power away. It also reveals in *every case* that you MUST have chosen incorrectly, must have asked for what you have experienced, and therefore have done it to yourself. There is no wiggle room here. We're not able to maintain a belief in "justified victimhood" or "being unfairly treated" at the same time as being empowered. Believing in these reasons why anyone is justified in being a victim or projecting blame for it, is nothing less than a continued CHOICE to disown our power.

We may not realize how much power we have attempted to GIVE AWAY, especially if we are in a very afraid state of victimization. We have been so used to being POWERLESS that we think this is normal and natural. However, as you start to take back responsibility for *everything* you are experiencing, taking back all blame and all belief in an external cause, you will be pleasantly surprised as how EMPOWERED you feel, how much it boosts your confidence and certainty, and how much LESS AFRAID you are.

Essentially, by giving away responsibility, we are attempting to make our life the responsibility of someone else. Then we will seek for them to DO TO US how we want them to treat us - which is specialness. If they do not treat us right, and given we believe what we experience is THEIR responsibility, we will then blame them for failing to live up to our expectation. You can see this in almost all parent-child relationships not to mention all other special relationships.

Also, in this act of placing blame for sin onto SOMETHING SEPARATE AND EXTERNAL, we actually attempting to separate *GOD* off, make him be other than one with our identity, to make out that He is the sinner, that He is now an "external, separate cause", that His Will is now acting AGAINST our will, and therefore we are justified in being angry at God. And then when it SEEMS as though an "external cause" is the reason for why we die, against our will, we are literally acting out this accusation that we are dying because IT IS GOD's WILL. Having made our will be against God's we now see Him as acting against us and trying to kill us. This is what happens when we try to kill God.

The truth is, God is NOT separate from us, His Will is NOT opposed to ours (ours is opposed to His), and He is NOT a separate cause out there doing stuff to us against our will. It is OUR authority problem which makes God out to be an attacker. Every death is a statement that we should die because it is God's will, which is a completely unfounded claim against God, trying to make God out to be a sinner and us His innocent victim.

Now, when we are in our ego and we're getting all caught up in some argument or drama with someone else, what happens is our mind forms "connections" to the other person. These are ego connections. They are psychological distortions resulting from false perception, which perceives that what you are experiencing is "caused by" something outside of yourself.

Seeing cause outside of you will ensure you see "effects" inside of you being directly "tied to" that external cause. So long as you keep visualizing that there is an enemy out there, you will not be able to let go of this sense that you "haven't let go" of this. The person will keeping popping up in your mind and you'll keep having FEAR about what they are doing to you. This is because you believe THEY are responsible for what you are experiencing.

This can become quite heightened, because the ego attacks itself and through conflict it attempts to "join" separate pieces together. The more you are being irresponsible by projecting others as the "cause of you", the more you will not be at peace because you can't LET GO of the perceived situation. Your perception needs healing.

Have you experienced how when you are concerned about what someone is doing, you just can't stop thinking about it? It keeps coming back into your mind. This is because you have become ATTACHED to this enemy, which keeps haunting you. Attachment means the ego is holding on tightly to its vision of an external cause. To let go of that attachment requires one thing .... TAKING FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR WHAT YOU ARE EXPERIENCING.

Since all ego dramas and fights and wars and conflict involve this "attaching" process of making YOUR wellbeing dependent on something external, the antidote is to SEVER THE TIES OF CAUSALITY with that other person. This means, making statements or at least having a willingness to admit, that they are NOT THE CAUSE of what you are experiencing, they are NOT responsible for what you are experiencing, the power you see IN them is NOT THEIRS it is your own which you attempted to GIVE to them, and to TAKE BACK YOUR POWER.

Here is an example.

Pick some person who you think of as being an enemy, against you, threatening you, accusing you, attacking you, blaming you, judging you, or in any way somehow acting against your will.

Recognize now what the content of your perception is. Somewhere in your perception you have DISPLACED a sense of power onto the person. You see them as HAVING POWER OVER YOU. And in that same perception, you see yourself as having LOST power to them.

Recognize also that you feel that THEY are responsible for how you feel, what you are experiencing, and what's happening to you. It's their fault. They are the one doing it. Cause is outside of you, and you therefore are being turned into an EFFECT. Note that all emotional reactions from the ego are the result of seeing yourself as AT THE EFFECT of the world. Perceiving a cause outside of you automatically means that YOU have to adjust to "become the effects" that this cause is projecting. These "effects" show up as emotional disturbance and reactions of hurt, fear, anger, etc.

Recognize also that you are attached to this person, they seem to have a way to ACCESS YOU, they are connected to you in some energetic way, and you can't seem to be at peace about them. You feel threatened by them, unsafe, unable to muster enough power or courage to stand up to them, and you feel like you are being victimized.

Now. Here is the good part. SEPARATE YOURSELF FROM THEIR CAUSALITY. Say some things which confirm the truth, that there is NO TIE OF CAUSALITY between that person and you. I am now going to demonstrate an example and if you follow along using a person in your life, you WILL NOTICE how this changes your mind and your feelings.....

I am not being affected by that person. That person is not being affected by me.

I am not being caused by that person. That person is not being caused by me.

Nothing I am experiencing is coming from that person. These experiences are my own. I am choosing all of these experiences. Everything I am feeling I am choosing to feel. They are my own feelings and I put them there. This other person did not put them there.

Nothing the other person is experiencing is coming from me. Whatever they are experiencing is their own choice. They are choosing all of their experiences. Everything they are feeling they are choosing to feel. Those are their own feelings, not mine, and I did not put them there.

My feelings of hurt any upset are not being caused by them. Their feelings of hurt and upset are not being caused by me.

I am not responsible for anything that person is experiencing. They are not responsible for anything I am experiencing.

They have done nothing to me. I have done nothing to them.

I am not at the effect of that person. That person is not at the effect of me.

That person hasn't done anything to me against my will. I have not done anything to that person against their will.

I completely forgive that person because they have not done anything to me at all. That person completely forgives me because I have not done anything to them at all.

Everything I am experiencing is my own choice. I have put these reactions and feelings into my own body. I am the one who did this to myself. They did not do this to me. I must have chosen it.

(this ties directly into..) "I must have decided wrongly, because I am not at peace. I MADE THE DECISION MYSELF,

but I can also decide otherwise. I want to decide otherwise,

because I want to be at peace."

You can go on and on like this for as long as you feel you need to, SEPARATING CAUSALITY from seeming like it is coming from someone other than yourself. Or rather, deprogramming your false perception of an external enemy, and TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR IT so that you realize you are only doing this to yourself.

This puts all POWER back into your own hands. You will REGAIN POWER, you will feel stronger, you will feel less afraid, you will feel like you have LET GO of the other person, you will stop having obsessive thoughts about them, you will not FEAR being victimized by them or what they are going to "do to you", and you will gain a lot more confidence.

Essentially, this is a process of forgiveness, whereby you are admitting the truth and owning up to NOT being a victim, to having simply made a mistaken choice, and that you no longer want to see someone else as attacking you. Blaming anyone else for attack is a lie. All attack is self attack.

It is YOU who needs to stop attacking yourself, not other people. Putting the blame for attack onto others SHIELDS YOU from admitting that you are doing it to yourself, because projection comes from DENIAL. Admitting the truth, taking responsibility, and owning up to WHO YOU ARE, gives you back YOURSELF, and empowers you greatly.

What Jesus is teaching us in the Course is simply that all attack is self attack, we have accused ourselves of sin, and we need to admit that this isn't true. The things we do after accusing ourselves of sin, to deny and project it on others, isn't even the main problem. It's part of a cover up. We need to learn to STOP DISOWNING OURSELVES. Stop giving YOUR power away to external causes that don't exist.

When you take back all of YOUR power, which you share with God, you will not be able to see yourself as powerless, or needing to be afraid, or a victim. Stuff won't bother you. People won't be able to attack you. You will gain STRENGTH in the truth. True innocence is STRONG, not weak and vulnerable. You are truly innocent when you take responsibility for everything because it simply means there is no blame or guilt, just a mistaken choice, which can be undone.

As you take back this responsibility, you will find AT FIRST that it seems to your ego that you are taking "the blame" for everything. This is a hurdle, because you still believe that you really did do something wrong. Not blaming it on someone else simply blames you. This has to be undone through forgiveness. If I say, "I am responsible for this", my ego will take it to mean, "I really am a sinner". This is its defense against the truth. We must go past this to realize that it is possible to BE RESPONSIBLE without being guilty.

Jesus talks about this in the urtext, not sure if FIP etc, but He mentions how as you start to take responsibility, your ego will at first perceive it to "imply" that you are the one who is truly a sinner. And this can feel painful. But gradually, the MORE you take responsibility, the more you take back your POWER, the more you will NOT believe in real sin and will more easily stay in your strength. Your strength will shine a stronger light and will help you to SEE that you are simply taking steps to BE YOURSELF.

Taking 100% responsibility for everything you experience is the key to salvation. It can take you all the way to the atonement. It will give you back so much power you will be surprised how invulnerable you feel, how much less afraid you are, how easily you approach people and are not put off by doubts or anxieties.

Taking full responsibility ultimately also means, YOU CANNOT DIE unless you make it happen to yourself. No-one dies without their own consent. It also means NOTHING CAN HURT YOU against your will. It also means YOU CANNOT BE SICK, and neither can your body, because sickness of the body is all an attempt to BE IRRESPONSIBLE by projecting sin onto others. Sickness accuses your brother of being a sinner. That's not responsibility. Taking responsibility will HEAL YOU AND YOUR BODY.

You could say, if you like you think of miracles as shifts in perception, say that taking responsibility will SHIFT your perception miraculously towards the truth. This isn't the full story of what miracles are (expressions of love, able to do anything) etc... but your holiness CAN do anything if you will OWN UP TO IT. It's kind of like an act of COMING OUT AS CHRIST, admitting that YOU ARE THE SON OF GOD, revealing yourself, stopping hiding, stoping distracting away from whey you are, BECOMING VISIBLE, and therefor becoming INVISIBLE to the ego. The ego cannot attack you when you are responsible and empowered.

The power you will gain and share with God by reclaiming your right to it (miracles are everyone's right, but purification is necessary first), will astound you. You literally are plugging yourself back into the Power of God. And there is nothing you cannot do.

What if you decide that you are not going to die?

Immediately this flies in the face of everything the world's population holds as true and inevitable. It flies in the face of an entire weight of collective thoughts and beliefs about what is normal and natural in this universe.

You wouldn't be the first to accomplish this either. St Germain for example was known to be "in a body", maintaining agelessness, for several centuries. Babaji is known to be hanging around without aging. There are others.

Jesus calls for every A Course in Miracles student to accomplish this also. He asks us to swear not to die. He tells us to choose resurrection, to not attack the body, to not make it sick, and to heal it. He asks us to make it a picture of health not a picture of crucifixion.

He asks us not to make the body age, or decay, or be sick, or die, but instead to maintain it in a state of guaranteed perfect health indefinitely, for as long as this is useful. That could mean thousands of years, or just a few.

You probably have assumed all your life that just because everyone else's bodies grow old and die and no-one can seem to cure death, that this is the only option. That death is inevitability and it's your fate. Particularly that death cannot be reversed, yet alone prevented.

You see the seasons come and go, the leaves die off, the flowers wilt, the animals turn to carcasses, and people are put in the ground. And we think this is normal and natural and unavoidable. Something to be "accepted" and adjusted to and made out to be something you can do "in peace".

But Jesus is asking a much higher calling for us. He wants us to use the body as a symbol of eternal life, a breath of immortality, to those who have grown tired of the fetid scent of death.

He wants us to allow the Holy Spirit to heal and resurrect the body through miracles, to present a picture of total health and loveliness to your brothers so as to teach them there is no sin and no attack.

He wants us to demonstrate, in person, physically, that there is no death, and that we have power over death. And that means that we make it possible for this exact body we have right now to not die. To not decay. To not grow old and withered and look like a prune. And to be incapable of corruption.

Are you willing to take up this challenge? If you're going to take this course the whole way then it is going to require of you at some time to actually commit to not dying. You cannot have a shred of belief in death or experience of death in your mind and being if you are to reach the end of the curriculum, which is resurrection - death's total opposite.

So you might as well decide right now. I am not going to die this time. I am going to move towards health, life, happiness, wholeness, healing, miracles, the power of the mind over the body, and I refuse to simply go the way of the worms along the funeral procession of death and decay.

How about you decide today, that you will not intent to die this time, you will not merely unconsciously accept notions that you will die, and you will not allow the body to die. It is your challenge to become miraculous and to heal the body's ailments and cure its diseases and undo death itself. To demonstrate your immortality using the body as a tool to prove your mind is stronger than death.

Few will rise to the challenge. It seems ridiculous. It seems impossible. It flies in the face of everything. Just stop and think for a minute. What if in this lifetime right now, with this body, you simply are not going to go through death? What if you're going to simply keep this body, heal it, resurrect it, protect it through miracles and the Holy Spirit, and maintain it in perfect functioning? For as long as you like?

Once the body is being healed by a sane mind, it cannot become sick, nor can it die. So now it is not possible to leave it through death. "A dream of death cannot be left through death but by truth". Truth means resurrection and life.

The body becomes a shining symbol of immortality and you can longer leave it through sickness or decay or suffering. The old doorway to darkness is closed. And the only way to then leave is to simply lay it aside, without decay, without attack, without sickness, in which the body does not corrupt or destroy or symbolize hell. And then it disappears.

What if you don't have to die physically? And what if you can resurrect all the way to invulnerability and immortality? And what if you can prevent the body from being attackable? And what if you do not have to keep aging? What if you can fly in the face of everything the world believes and choose not to die?

"You cannot die unless you choose to do so."

"No one dies without their own consent."

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

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

"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."

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you.Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies.Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all."

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

"What you would prove to him you will believe. The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

"Swear not to die, you holy Son of God! You make a bargain that you cannot keep. The Son of Life cannot be killed. He is immortal as his Father. What he is cannot be changed. He is the only thing in all the universe that must be one."

Fear has but one cause, not many. It is not caused by what you think it’s caused by. Every single fear in the world has one cause.

When you tried to sin, you may have believed you succeeded in creating real effects. Real irreversible damage. But you had an option. Either proceed forward to guilt, or go backwards to the reversal of sin. Guilt or forgiveness was the choice. Either sin is real and you are guilty, or sin is not real and you’re innocent.

Choosing not to forgive yourself, and choosing to keep your belief in sin, the only option is to condemn yourself to death. Go towards forgiveness and you’ll choose life, accepting that you deserve to be forgiven. Go towards guilt and you’ll choose death, accepting that you deserve to be punished for what you did.

This is where the core root of all fear comes in. You actually ACCEPT and AGREE that you SHOULD be punished, because you’re guilty. The punishment seems completely justified. Your own belief that you deserve punishment for being guilty then creates fear of that punishment. But it’s not a fear of being punished by others. Here’s the secret cause of all fear:

You are afraid of what you are going to do to yourself.

This fear arises solely because you, yourself, believe you deserve to be punished, in total agreement that you are guilty, and having accepted that "it is true" that you really sinned and are therefore guilty. It is your own belief about yourself. You actually "agree" that it not only makes sense, but is completely justified, and acceptable, that you be punished for this.

This is a big problem, because it is the continued development a death wish. It means you want to hurt yourself and you believe you should be hurt.

This is not only the source of all fear in the world, it is also the source of all victimhood. Because at this point, you actually welcome punishment. You actually position yourself so that you can be attacked. You actually make yourself powerless, and allow yourself to be abused. You actually hire people to come along and hurt you. And you actually make plans for being attacked justifiably.

Ultimately then you become afraid of the fact that YOU have it in for yourself. That YOU want you to be punished and to "atone" for your sin. And ultimately the only punishment you believe is justified and worthy of you, is death.

This is not anything to do with anyone else. It has nothing to do with what other people are going to do to you. It’s not even anything to do with the fear of HOW the punishment will come or of WHO will be the one to inflict it.

Typically however you will make your own death wish unconscious and project it and then obsess over this general anxiety about what "someone else" is going to "do to you" against your will. But while you are busy in conscious awareness making plans to avoid your attackers, unconsciously you are asking to be attacked.

If someone were to seem to then attack you would claim it was completely unjustified, because you have made your self-attack and death wish unconscious. You actually think you don’t want to suffer or be punished, nor deserve it. That’s what the facade of fake innocence is for - it covers up you guilty secret. Then you get to pretend you are justified in being angry when someone hurts you, as if you didn’t want it. But you did ask for it, and you did it yourself.

On the surface, consciously, you will experience this as being a victim, as if you are not asking for and do not want any kind of punishment at all. You’ll even run away from it and try to make yourself safe and avoid people and create an illusion of innocence and security, presenting yourself as harmless and that no-one should suspect you of guilt. But it’s only to cover up the underlying belief that you deserve to suffer and die because you believe you are guilty.

It’s pretty grim isn’t it. This is what every ego plans for its host.

But the fact is, you cannot be free of such suffering until you can admit that it is YOU who is trying to do something to yourself. So long as it *seems* as if someone else is the one punishing you, or its your job, or its the weather, or food you ate, or something environmental, or a group of people, whatever, these projections are designed to KEEP your unconscious self hatred hidden. The more you can disown it and project it and see it coming "from" anyone other than yourself, the more you can play the victim role and pretend you don’t want it.

Make no mistake. NO-ONE dies without their own consent. All attack is self attack. You are 100% responsible for what you are trying to do to yourself. You cannot suffer AT ALL if you do not choose to believe you are guilty or sinful. All of your projected causes of fear, which make it look like you’re afraid of what is going to "happen to you" without your will, it is a DECOY for what you secretly are planning to do to yourself.

You have to get to where you are willing to admit to this, if you want to be free of it. It’s you who believes you deserve to die, not the world, and not anyone else. YOU, need to forgive YOURSELF, for what you have not really done. YOU, need to let go of your belief that you really are guilty and deserve punishment, so that you will stop planning for your own suffering while building fake defenses against it.

No-one is attacking you against your will. The world is not causing you. Death cannot happen to you against your will. Remember that all attack is self attack and it is only your attempt to be at war with yourself that needs to be corrected. A belief in deserving punishment, or of being truly sinful or guilty, IS a belief in death and being deserving of death. It is, literally, a suicidal belief. All death is suicide.

Forgiveness is needed, of yourself, to recognize your innocence and to opt to NOT believe you sinned. You do NOT deserve to die, and you do NOT need to be punishing yourself. You DO deserve the love of God and you ARE innocent. All the rest is a mistaken ego belief.

All fear is the fear of yourself.

Here is how Jesus puts your self attack:

"Lay down your arms, and come without defense into the quiet place where Heaven's peace holds all things still at last. Lay down all thoughts of danger and of fear. Let no attack enter with you. Lay down the cruel sword of judgment that you hold against your throat, and put aside the withering assaults with which you seek to hide your holiness."

Time for a little refresher of the central CORE teaching in the course. It does not matter what your situation is. It does not matter how far gone your body is. It does not matter your state of mental health. It does not matter how terrible your life is or was. It does not matter what the world is doing to you. It does not matter what you think is causing any of this, and it ESPECIALLY does not matter that you believe there is nothing you can do about it.

The secret of salvation is that YOU ARE DOING THIS TO YOURSELF.

This applies in EVERY situation, without exception!!!!

And this is why it is hard to accept. I hear people suffering with sickness and exclaiming that it can’t be true that they have a way to heal it or be free of it. I see people talking about the reasons why it’s okay to die. I read the stories of folks who are adamant that the course isn’t so intensely clear as to the power and freedom you have. Let’s have a re-read of the secret to salvation, and digest the awesome simplicity of A Course in Miracles:

"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."

So whatever form your suffering is taking, be it a sickness or disease or terrible affliction or something you were born with or something you didn’t see to ask for or something there is no cure for or the most horrible victimhood situation or the greatest unfairness in life... ALL OF THESE FORMS..... YOU ARE DOING THIS TO YOURSEL!!!! ALL OF IT.

It doesn’t matter if your supposed enemy is your body, or a person, or a sickness, or the environment, or the government, or the weather, or laws of physics. Whatever you experience, YOU ARE CHOOSING IT. You ARE doing it to yourself. And here is the POWER that Jesus is trying to get you to own up to, to stop playing at being a victim and CLAIM your unlimited capability. "There is nothing your holiness cannot do." Ready....?

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERYTHING YOU EXPERIENCE.

YOU DO IT TO YOURSELF.

YOU CHOOSE ALL OF IT AND YOU DID.

This is further reflected in "My self is ruler of the universe". ... read it slowly and take it in. This is YOUR TICKET TO FREEDOM FROM EVERY FORM OF SUFFERING:

"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. For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my Will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them, and Him Who has created me."

Read the first sentence again. IT IS **IMPOSSIBLE** that anything should come to me unbidden by myself.!!!!

You have 100% ABSOLUTE POWER over everything. You are NOT BOUND BY THE WORLD. You are not bound by your body, or your heritage, or your family, or your circumstances. NOTHING HAS HAPPENED AGAINST YOUR WILL. NOTHING. EVER!!!!!! Not since the beginning of time.

You ARE responsible for what you choose, what you experience, and what happens. ONLY by CLAIMING OWNERSHIP of responsibility for this FREEDOM, this POWER and this AUTHORITY, can you set yourself free from death and all other suffering forever.

Your self is ruler of the universe. NOTHING comes to you that you have not asked for. You DO NOT have stuff in your life that you didn’t put there, even if you had it since birth. No matter what the conditions, IT WAS YOUR CONSENTED CHOICE.

No exceptions, ever.

Only by owning this can you access SALVATION. The SECRET to salvation is that you ARE doing ALL of this to yourself, and if you would stop doing it to yourself, NOTHING ELSE has power over you to do it to you against your will. NOTHING. Listen to Jesus:

"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. "

NOTHING EXTERNAL TO YOUR MIND CAN HURT OR INJURE YOU IN ANY WAY.

NO ONE BUT **YOURSELF** AFFECTS YOU. This applies to *everything in your life*.

You can make a nice long list of objections, denials and protests if you like. Go ahead and list the things you BELIEVE are NOT YOUR FAULT, you didn’t ask for, you can do nothing about, you have no power over, and cannot change. Then at the top of the page put a title: "ALL OF THESE ARE LIES I TELL MYSELF AND NONE OF THEM ARE TRUE."

Do you want salvation or do you want suffering. ? It’s your CHOICE. "The power of decision is my own". It is a black and white decision. No exceptions. You HAVE POWER OVER all things. So if you do not like your experience, "choose again". You must’ve made a wrong decision, if you are not at peace. YOU MADE THE DECISION YOURSELF, but you can choose otherwise.

This is why "you cannot die unless you choose to do so." "No one dies without their own consent." "You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself." And a host of other supportive statements that not many people want to accept.

If you choose never to suffer again, YOU WILL NOT SUFFER EVER AGAIN! If you stop MAKING IT HAPPEN, it will not happen. If you wholeheartedly CHOOSE SANITY, you will heal your body MIRACULOUSLY. "There is nothing your holiness cannot do." You are a frickin’ SUPERNATURAL MIRACLE WORKER!

"This is a course in CAUSE, not effect." You are to be CAUSE ONLY. Cause is IN YOUR MIND, nowhere else.

Hands in the air, and admit the truth. "I DID THIS MYSELF AND I WILL TO CHOOSE OTHERWISE." There are no victims in the truth. We must take FULL RESPONSIBILITY if we are to claim power over death and reach the atonement.

"Swear not to die, holy son of God!"

A selection of quites about the causes of physical sickness, from A Course in Miracles.

THE CAUSES OF BODILY (PHYSICAL) SICKNESS

"Sickness is anger taken out upon the body, so that it will suffer pain."

"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."

"The body cannot create, and the belief that it CAN, a fundamental error responsible for most of the fallacies already referred to, produces all physical symptoms."

"Sickness or "not-right-mindedness" is the result of level confusion"

"Sickness is a defense against the truth."

"Its health or sickness depends ENTIRELY on how the mind perceives it, and the purpose that the mind would use it FOR."

"Sickness is idolatry, because it is the belief that POWER CAN BE TAKEN FROM YOU."

"For sickness is a meaningless attempt to give effects to causelessness, and MAKE it be a cause."

"Sickness is a demand the body be a thing that it is not."

"Sickness is but a "little" death; a form of vengeance not yet total."

"What is a sense of sickness but a sense of limitation? Of a splitting OFF and separating FROM?"

"This heals at all levels, because all sickness comes from confusing the levels."

"The arrest of the mind's extension is the cause of all illness, because ONLY EXTENSION IS THE MIND'S FUNCTION. Block this, and you have blocked health because you have BLOCKED THE MIND'S JOY."

"To believe that a Son of God can be sick is to believe that part of God can suffer."

"When a brother is sick it is because he is not asking for peace, and therefore does not know he has it."

"For sickness is an election; a decision. It is the choice of weakness, in the mistaken conviction that it is strength."

"Sickness is a method, conceived in madness, for placing God's Son on his Father's throne. God is seen as outside, fierce and powerful, eager to keep all power for Himself. Only by His death can He be conquered by His Son."

"If sickness is but a faulty problem-solving approach, it is a decision. And if it is a decision, it is the mind and not the body that makes it."

"Sickness is a retreat from others, and a shutting off of joining. It becomes a door that closes on a separate self, and keeps it isolated and alone."

"Sickness is but another name for sin."

"Perceiving the body AS A SEPARATE ENTITY cannot but foster illness, because it is not true."

"Any form of mental illness can truthfully be described as an expression of viciousness."

"We said before that illness is a form of magic."

"The mind makes this decision as it makes all decisions responsible for the condition of the body."

"A damaged body is proof the mind has not been healed."

"Damaged bodies are accusers."

"Sickness is not an accident. Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception."

"You suffer pain because the body does, and in this pain are you made one with it."

"It will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey."

"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."

"Sickness is a decision. 2 It is not a thing that happens to you, quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. 3 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. 4 Now are you sick, that truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more."

"How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth? 2 Because it proves the body is not separate from you, and so you must be separate from the truth."

"Sickness where guilt is absent cannot come, for it is but another form of guilt."

"Physical illness represents a belief in magic. "

"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."

"Pain demonstrates the body must be real. 2 It is a loud, obscuring voice whose shrieks would silence what the Holy Spirit says, and keep His words from your awareness."

"Pain is a wrong perspective. 2 When it is experienced in any form, it is a proof of self-deception."

"And idols are not wanted there, for guilt is understood as the sole cause of pain in any form."

"And you are free of dreams of pain because you let him be. 6 Unless you help him, you will suffer pain with him because that is your wish"

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. 2 No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. 3 No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. 4 And no one dies without his own consent"

"Let me not try to make another will, for it is senseless and will cause me pain."

"Yet can the mind deny that this is so, believing there are gaps in love where sin can enter, bringing pain instead of joy."

"How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth?"

"When attack in ANY form enters your mind, you are EQUATING YOURSELF WITH A BODY."

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

HOWEVER...

"Atonement heals with certainty, and cures all sickness." ... "It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible. 6 And that is cure indeed." "Peace be to you who have been cured in God"

The message here is CLEAR. The body is NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SICK. Sickness of mind OR body is unnatural and unholy. Even death of the body is not supposed to occur. It demonstrates and proves that the person does not want to be awake and would rather be unconscious. Death is utterly unnatural and against God's will at mental and physical levels. All physical sickness is a demonstration of the presence of a false belief and an attempt to DENY HEALTH by denying God.

A Course in Miracles IS attempting to help us to see that YOU NEED NOT SUFFER IN ANY WAY, not even physically, and any presence of ANY kind of sickness CAN AND MUST be healed by miracles.

The idea is simple. There is only one lesson. This one lesson sets you free from every form of suffering. It's simply this:

Take full responsibility for everything that you are experiencing.

What is this based on? It's based on the fact that you are an immortal being that cannot be changed by anything, because you are the will of God.

This means that nothing in this entire "universe" of spacetime, nothing in the world, can do even the slightest thing to CAUSE you in any way.

You have never changed, you have not changed yourself, God has never changed you, and you will never change. You are always the same and always perfect.

Because of this, it's not POSSIBLE for anyone or anything to do anything to you. This is the basis of forgiveness. Recognizing that sin cannot happen, guilt is impossible, and everything is perfect still.

If you are immortal then the ONLY way by which something can SEEM to happen to you, is YOU using your own mind and free will to put in place what seem to be illusions of suffering.

Because the truth is that you cannot suffer at all. Not even slightly. You yourself have to literally warp your own mind and dream your own dream and invent your own suffering, which is even fake suffering, in order to experience what seems like suffering at all.

It cannot be put in place by anyone else because no-one else has power over your infinite will. It cannot be caused by the world or anyone in it. Nothing that seems to happen can be the reason why you are experiencing what you are experiencing.

So it goes back to the secret of salvation, no matter how it looks, no matter who seems to be the cause, no matter what anyone appears be trying to do to you, no matter what reactions you seemed to have that you thought they caused, it is NEVER true that anyone BUT YOU is the cause of your suffering.

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

"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."

This means you can never pin blame on anyone or anything other than yourself. You can never truly believe that anyone or anything is the cause of you, other than God. God is the ONLY cause of you in all existence. There is NO OTHER POWER that can cause anything at all. Whatever happens is what you desire.

"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."

This is all tied together. You are ruler of the universe because anything that happens is by your will alone. Forgiveness is based on your immortality and the fact nothing can happen against your will. The secret of salvation reminds you that you can be saved only by admitting that YOU are the one willing it. And only by identifying with Christ can you fully claim responsibility for what you really are.

If in any way you are believing that what you are experiencing now, right now, is the result of, something other than yourself in any way, you are mistaken. You are deceived. If you think any person did this to you you are wrong. If you think the world or the body or the emotions or thoughts are doing it to you, you are wrong.

ONLY YOU can make yourself suffer.

"It means that 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."

"I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts."

"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

"Father, Your Son can not be hurt. And if we think we suffer, we but fail to know our one Identity we share with You."

"Truth will correct all errors in my mind. I am mistaken when I think I can Be hurt in any way. I am God's Son, Whose Self rests safely in the Mind of God."

"Do you want a quietness that cannot be disturbed, a gentleness that never can be hurt, a deep, abiding comfort, and a rest so perfect it can never be upset?"

"For once you understand it is impossible that you be hurt except by your own thoughts, the fear of God must disappear."

"The Son of God could NEVER sin, but he CAN wish for what would hurt him. And he HAS the power to think he CAN BE hurt. What could this be EXCEPT a misperception of himself?"

"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."

"If you will listen to His voice, you will know that you cannot either hurt or BE hurt, but that many need your blessing to help them hear this for themselves."

"The Self Which God created cannot sin, and therefore cannot suffer."

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die. I am not a body. I would recognize my reality today."

"Your Name replaces every thought of sin, and who is sinless cannot suffer pain."

"How can he fear or doubt or fail to know he cannot suffer, be endangered, or experience unhappiness, when he belongs to You, beloved and loving, in the safety of Your Fatherly embrace?"

"Herein lies my claim to all good and only good. I am blessed as a Son of God. All good things are mine because God intended them for me. I cannot suffer any loss or deprivation or pain because of who I am."

"The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, it heals the body because IT has been healed."

"Love CANNOT suffer, because it cannot attack."

"Joy is the inevitable result of gentleness. Gentleness means that fear is now impossible, and what could come to interfere with joy? The open hands of gentleness are always filled. The gentle have no pain. They cannot suffer."

"I AM responsible for what I see. I CHOSE the feelings I experience, and I DECIDED ON the goal I would achieve. And everything that SEEMS to happen TO me, I ASKED FOR and received as I had asked."

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

The ego can be pretty sneaky. Usually it is merely suspicious. And usually it will tell you just seemingly 'small lies', just enough to get you a bit upset. This way the ego gets to hide while you're kept under control by little lies.

But then as you get upset, it's willing to start to tell you slightly bigger lies. It hopes to pry you open like a can-opener, gradually reinforcing the lies and getting you to believe in it more and more.

Over time, gradually, if unchecked, you'll start to build up some major conviction that what it's saying is true, or that what it's saying will happen is true. Before you know it, you've gone down a slippery slope into hell.

The ego bargains that if it can keep your awareness from rising up to question it, it can keep pulling you in, deeper and deeper, adding layer upon layer of deceit and lies. It banks on you going along with it, believing it, listening to it, being scared by it etc.

Over time you even start to side with it, because by believing it you begin to develop a false idea of what is true and real. You enter into insanity and everything flips around and you start to really believe that what the ego has said is actually true. You will even start to defend it. And by identifying with it, you'll even feel offended when someone else points out how much it is lying to you.

At that point, it's hard for someone to reach in and show you the truth because you are so 'close' to the ego, in identification, that you think that what it's said about you is who you really are. Seeming to 'attack' the ego then seems to be an attack on YOU, and the ego counts on that, for you to become its defender. It is now your ally.

This can go on for quite some time and in fact can even take you all the way to death. Death can only happen by you giving the ego consent to destroy you, by you just falling into all of its traps and deceptions and coming to side with its conclusions. And the funny thing is, because you're unconscious, you won't even REALIZE that you're falling into a trap, or see it AS a trap, and therefore won't even sense motivation to get out of it. You'll walk right into a death trap thinking it's your salvation.

So as this goes on, the ego is willing to become more vicious and to scream more and to tell you ever increasingly horrifying things, to build up your fear and your allegiance. It counts on you believing it, reacting to it, buying into it, and going along with it, in order for it to tempt you a little bit further into a nightmare of hell. This will continue so long as you keep falling for its tricks.

But this is a risk for the ego, because the more that it exposes its hate and its destruction and its desire to destroy you, it's really risking the possibility of you noticing how ridiculous it is. It will only bring out its 'big guns' when it knows that you are sufficiently cultivated into its deluded ways that you will not be likely to question it - that you don't have enough awareness or discernment left to NOTICE that it's giving you lies.

It will also come out full force when it senses that you are about to abandon it and withdraw your belief in it, because it doesn't want you to undo it.

It needs you to not RECOGNIZE a lie for what it is, but to fail to realize that the ego is even against you. It wants you believing it is your best friend so that it can pull you into unconsciousness.

The risk is great. If the ego turns to viciousness and comes out of hiding and presents its biggest, most vicious attacks, things could go either way. Either you will be so horrified and reactive that you'll just buy right into it, OR, you might suddenly start to notice how utterly ridiculous this all is.

When life goes to SHIT, and things just become really ridiculous, sometimes you'll start to exclaim to yourself, "this can't be happening", "it seems like a dream", "I can't believe it", "this is just so ridiculous" etc... this is you starting to REALIZE that the situation IS ridiculous. The problem is that many of us will continue to side with the seeming reality and seriousness of the situation, instead of realizing that the ABILITY to see the ridiculousness is the WAY OUT, and to focus on that. You're starting to see through the ego's lie, but your belief that 'stuff happening' is real often prevents you TRUSTING your instinct.

If things get so ridiculous that you just can't believe it, you might even start to laugh at how ridiculous it is. This is good. This happens when you've so totally exhausted the purpose of this ego lesson or your use of it, and have run out of a need for it, and now you've come to a place of SURRENDER. Usually, you will only go along with the ego because you think there's a benefit of you getting to control life, or that you need to control life in order to deal with the problem the ego lies about, and it's often not until you SURRENDER that ego position by realizing how FUTILE the separation from God is, that you'll finally WAKE UP to realize that this is all just a ridiculous stupid dream that you can no longer take seriously.

And so the allegiance with the ego then is broken. It exposed itself, it took a risk, it did everything it could to fully and directly confront you with bullshit, and you laughed in its face. Congratulations.

At the very root of the ego thought system is something extremely simple, which is the foundation of the entire thought system. It's even more fundamental than the idea of sin.

In Heaven, God is the cause of you, and you are the effect of Him. But you attempted to REVERSE THIS. This is THE ONLY PROBLEM IN ALL OF EXISTENCE.

Your belief that you are the cause of God, and that he is the effect of you, is the ENTIRE PROBLEM. This is the authority problem. It is the basis of the idea of sin - which is the idea that you caused God and produced effects in him and therefore defined and changed him against His will.

Absolutely EVERY possible dynamic and situation you find yourself in in life, all your encounters with people, all forms of sickness and suffering, and every possible problem or upset you might experience, are ALL ENTIRELY BASED on the reversal of cause and effect. That is their FOUNDATION.

There is one problem.

And this one problem needs only ONE SOLUTION.

It is a single solution, a single lesson, which applies to EVERY situation no matter the form.

This one problem is ALL that you need to correct. Every forgiveness process, if it works at all, MUST accomplish the correction of CAUSE AND EFFECT. If it doesn't, it is not solving the problem. It doesn't matter what words you use or how you go about this, but ultimately you MUST get the levels back into their divine order. You MUST correct the level confusion and restore God to the rightful position of CAUSE, with you as HIS EFFECT.

Because God caused BOTH you and your brothers EQUALLY, you are BOTH caused by God. This means, a fundamental truth: you are NOT the cause of your brother, and your brother is NOT the cause of you.

Now, the entire ego thought system is based on the belief in cause-effect reversal, and that MEANS that you have a belief that YOU ARE THE CAUSE OF YOUR BROTHER, and that HE IS THE CAUSE OF YOU. This is an ILLUSION. It is the illusion of "horizontal causality". That means, it's the idea of two things on the SAME LEVEL, causing and affecting each other. IT IS NOT TRUE. AT ALL. EVER. ***You can't both be the cause of each other!***

The entire ego world was set up to try to prove and make seem true, the idea of HORIZONTAL CAUSALITY, whereby one thing causes another on the same level. This is built into physical matter. It's built into the laws of physics (chaos). It's built into all egoic encounters with people and problems. They all tempt you to believe that GOD IS NOT THE CAUSE. They are all attempts to shut God (mind) out of the picture and associate mind with FORMS and bodies. This is nothing short of believing that YOUR DREAM IS DREAMING YOU.

This perception, which is false perception, automatically puts you in a position of seeing yourself as a victim. A victim of people, a victim of the world, a victim of the environment, a victim of your body, etc. IF ITS TRUE that there is cause SEPARATE from you in this way, other than God, then you automatically MUST enter a state of threat and danger and fear and attack. This is the basis for justifying all anger. This has to be corrected.

So now it comes down to, "how do I apply the course"? Or, "how do I apply forgiveness"? Well, it boils down to the ONE PROBLEM. If you will just correct ALL FALSE CAUSALITY, which is the idea of horizontal causes and effects, if you will totally CANCEL and UNBELIEVE and WITHDRAW all of those perceptual beliefs in horizontal causes, it will put the cause back into your mind where it belongs.

See, at this level, you are the dreamer of the dream. You are the CAUSE OF THE WORLD. When you perceive or believe that anything IN the world is the CAUSE OF YOU, you have backwards perception and are a victim. The secret of salvation is that you are doing this to yourself. You use the world to attack yourself. If you are not aware that you are the CAUSE of it, that you are dreaming it, you will perceive and believe that the world is hurting you against your will.

So the ONLY FORM OF FORGIVENESS that works and that is needed, is to GET THE CAUSALITY RIGHT. To remember that you are the dreamer of the dream, not the other way around. That there is NO CAUSE in the world. That the world is the EFFECT of your dreaming mind. That means your brother in no way causes you whatsoever. And it also means you in no way cause your brother whatsoever. It also includes realizing your body does not cause you against your will. Your mind has power over the whole universe. "My self is ruler of the universe."

It's quite simple really. Just get the levels back into their proper order. This corrects all level confusion, magic, victimhood and even death. You are the cause of this dream. You have to OWN RESPONSIBILITY for being the cause of EVERYTHING you are experiencing and making happen. This is the only way out of hell. The ONLY WAY to escape victimhood and death by realizing that.... if you do not CHOOSE TO DIE, IT CANNOT HAPPEN. "No one dies without their own consent."

This is what "forgiving" is all about. Own the causality. This is a course in cause, not effect. YOU ARE 100% CAUSAL. You are 0% AFFECTED by what you've caused/made. You are the projector of the world. Projection makes perception. Once you own full responsibility for causing/dreaming, the world can do NOTHING to you against your will. This is how you overcome death and reach resurrection. And in that state you cannot be attacked, victimized, hurt, or suffer in any way. It is literally the end of all suffering because it is THE END OF THE WORLD.

If you are not being absolutely immortal, then you are trying to be a victim. Victims are not just those who seem to be overtly attacked by another. Victims are those who believe they can be CHANGED AT ALL BY ANYTHING.

There is a wide range of victimhood, or what you might call "victim consciousness", from mild to extreme. But everyone's doing it. We're all trying to make out that we're something that can be affected. That we can be hurt or suffer, made to feel something, caused against our will, converted and transformed and modified by the world.

The bizarre but factual truth is that the world does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to you. It is not the cause of you, God is. There is not a single speck of anything in the whole of spacetime that has ANY ability to change what you really are at all. You are changeless and eternal and you do not have the ability to change.

"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

We all entered into a grand charade of pretending we can die. Pretending we can be mortal, that we can suffer, that stuff can happen to us, that we can be affected and changed. Even that we can change ourselves against God's will. None of this is true.

"You see yourself as a ridiculous parody on God's creation, weak, vicious, ugly and sinful, miserable and beset with pain. Such is your version of your self; a self divided into many warring parts, separated from God, and tenuously held together by its erratic and capricious maker, to which you pray." UrW95L2

"You see yourself as vulnerable, frail, and easily destroyed. And at the mercy of countless attackers more powerful than you." UrT22G11 You cannot change what is permanently changeless, but you can BELIEVE you can. This belief is a mistake and a lie. Everyone who believes they can be victimised, attacked, hurt, damaged, destroyed, is lying. Anyone who feels they are suffering or weak or threatened or afraid are lying. Anyone who claims that someone did something to them is lying.

"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. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you. Yet when you accord it mercy, will its mercy shine on you." UrW191L9

This can be a harsh truth especially when it seems so real and convincing, especially when some other body comes along and performs a physical abuse or harm upon your body or feelings. Especially when it seems to blatantly obvious that someone "not myself" is wholly responsible for "causing changes in me."

And we've all been through shit. We've all experienced what we call suffering. We've all had pains and hurts, sicknesses. We've all died many times over. We've all gone through every form of misery possible and every form of unhappiness and every kind of horrendous nightmare. And even in spite all of it, NOT ONE SINGLE BIT OF IT IS TRUE.

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do." UrT9K8

We CANNOT be victimised or attacked or hurt or damaged or threatened or changed at all. God who is immortal maintains us forever in his mind by his infinite immortal will to be immortal beings forever. We are absolutely incapable of change or of being change or of changing anything. There is NO CHANGE in reality.

"Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way, for that is not God's Will for His Son. Pain is not of Him, for He knows no attack, and His peace surrounds you silently." UrT10D1

We must remind ourselves frequently when tempted to believe we have BEEN changed, or CAN change, that we HAVE NOT done this. IF we believe we have done this, we will believe we have sinned and are guilty, deserving more fake punishment. We cannot BE punished. We cannot become guilt, or turn into evil, or transform into the anti-christ.

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. " UrW152L1

Beyond all lies and all deception and all fake suffering and all pain and sickness and all death, beyond space and time, we are all absolutely infinite beings that are so absolute and so always the same forever that we have not even BEGUN to change into anything else.

"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

All that's happened is we have gone into DENIAL about our permanent reality, our permanent perfection, our permanent Christhood. And have PRETENDED to be something that changes. We have damaged the body, damaged the emotions, damaged the thinking, but we have not damaged the soul. What we are can never be changed.

"The Son of Life cannot BE killed. He is immortal as his Father. What he is cannot be changed. He is the only thing in all the universe that MUST be One." UrT29G1

All that's required then in awakening to the truth is to ACCEPT THE TRUTH, that nothing has EVER happened to us, nothing CAN happen to us, and there is not even a world that could be accused of doing such in the first place. Attack does not exist. There is no pain or suffering or sickness or death. We are the sons of God and we are free from suffering forever.

"There is no death, and we renounce it now in every form, for their salvation and our own as well. God made not death. Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion. This the stand we take today. And it is given us to look past death and see the life beyond." UrW163L8

"There is no death. The Son of God is free. And in His freedom is the end of fear. UrM29A4

"What COULD you choose between, but life or death, waking or sleeping, war or peace, your dream or your reality?"

There is only one choice in the world. Not a million choices. Not a million scenarios. Not a million conditions to judge and evaluate and decide upon. There is only one choice. You are always choosing either life or death.

Life here means eternal life, immortality, invulnerability, perfect health, wholeness, happiness, love, peace, joy, etc. The attributes of God and His Kingdom of creation.

Death here means the cessation of eternity, an attack on God, a rejection of health and wholeness, a desire for destruction and death, and an attempt to make God non-existent.

The physical world itself is set up such that everything in it tends to lead towards death. It is not in support of God because it was made as an attack on him. This is why everything in it seems to make death inevitable.

But just because the world says all things must die, it doesn't mean you don't have a choice. It doesn't mean you have to go along with it and just give up and drop dead. Nor does it mean you have to find a way to try to accept death and cozy up to it.

What many in the world do not know is that there IS an alternative to death and dying and destruction and degradation. To embrace it requires a recognition of two things.

1) The world is ONLY offering death and there is no hope of life. 2) There is ANOTHER world which is offering only life and no hope of death.

Only if you can recognize that there IS AN ALTERNATIVE to the world's ways, do you even have a real choice. If there is no better world, no God, no eternal life, no miracles, no healing, no resurrection, then you really DON'T have a choice. You are set on a rollercoaster ride to hell and death and will not get off it until you're worm food.

We might think there are choices be made along the way, electing for different states of dying, different kinds of sicknesses, different unhappinesses, trying to trade-off one thing for another to come out on top. But the world has news for you - it is not ever going to let you come out on top in the long run.

So you have no real choice at all, because death is looming and you have no way to stop it. Or do you? Only IF there is another option do you actually have any real choice in life at all. Otherwise you're destined to die. And you cannot be at peace with such a fate because it is utterly insane.

Only if there is another world, another way, another option, and only if you have some kind of power of decision to choose it and make it be your experience, is there any REAL HOPE at all. There is REAL HOPE if you can in fact CHOOSE not to suffer, be sick, or die. And there is REAL HOPE if you have in your mind the POWER to actually make that choice, to choose away from death, and actually CAUSE life and REVERSE death.

Only if you can surmount death and overcome the world, can you be free from the descent into hell. Only if you can resurrect and raise the dead and reverse sickness and perform miracles, can you head in the direction of God who is life. Only if you can demonstrate harmlessness and invulnerability can you prove your commitment to immortality.

The world does not think immortality is possible. It is seen as a silly idea thought by crazy people. It is seen as having had almost zero examples and certainly does not appear to be commonplace. It seems like no-one gets out of here alive. And everyone has just decided to try and accept this fate and "live with it". To then adjust to it and try to "make the most" of the little lot of life we have, begging death for scraps of time and asking for little gifts of nothingness before we're extinguished.

Unless you are open to God and open to immortality and open to resurrection and miracles and healing, you are NOT open to life. You are committed to dying. And that is the only reason it will happen. You are CHOOSING it by not choosing away from it. And you are free to make this choice. If you do not choose God, you are choosing destruction. If you do not choose resurrection and healing, you are choosing to die.

This is your responsibility because you actually have a power in you to decide what you want. You do not HAVE to die or go through sickness or suffering. You CAN in fact elect not to have any of these things happen, and make it so. This is not a fantasy. Your mind is just as capable of causing life as it is of causing death. But to choose eternal life IS going to require you to fly in the face of the entire world, all its supporters, all its believers, and all of its pathways.

Only with help from beyond the world can you be liberated from the world. Only with the Holy Spirit can you find a solution, an answer, a way, which breaks all the laws of physics and violates all the seeming laws of reality. Only with his power can you recover and heal and resurrect even in the face of what the world would say is an impossible irreversible situation.

You have to choose towards God and towards life, away from death and way from destruction, if you want to live. If you want to escape from death and from sickness and hell, you have to choose life. This is really a no-brainer. If you are choosing life you will have life, if you are choosing death you will have death. You are free to choose.

"You who fear salvation are WILLING death. Life and death, light and darkness, knowledge and perception are irreconcilable."

"Either you give each other life or death; either you are each other's Savior or his judge, offering him sanctuary or condemnation."

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

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die."

"Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible."

"The emphasis this course has placed on that idea is due to its centrality in our attempts to change your mind about yourself. It is the reason you can heal. It is the cause of healing. It is why you cannot die. Its truth established you as one with God."

"Now do we live, for now we cannot die. The wish for death is answered, and the sight that looked upon it now has been replaced by vision which perceives that you are not what you pretend to be."

"Even in time you cannot live apart from Him, for sleep is not death. What He created can sleep, but it CANNOT die. Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF. Yet God's Son cannot will death for himself, because His Father is Life, and HIS SON IS LIKE HIM."

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do."

"And BEING loving, they are like the Father, and therefore cannot die."

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

"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."

"It is NEVER God Who coerces you, because He SHARES His Will WITH you." God has given you freedom. This cannot be revoked. You are free to create, or to mis-create. God cannot oppose your will because it is part of his own freedom.

This means that you have to decide to go back to God, of your free will. You can't be forced, coerced, manipulated or made to do anything you don't want to. You have to willingly choose heaven again.

"The attraction of light must draw you willingly, and willingness is signified by GIVING."

"But to accomplish this, all your dark lessons MUST be brought willingly to truth"

"Heaven is a choice I must make."

Does this mean that you can take forever? Does it mean that you can decide NEVER to return to God? Does it mean that you could stay in separation and never wake up?

Given that you have total freedom, it should mean that you can take as long as you please, and even to never return.

The thing is, that while God wills that you be free forever, he also wills that you be one with him forever. And here we have signs of a "natural limit" placed by God.

"Free will does not mean that you establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what to take when. It is just because you are not ready to do what you should elect to do that time exists at all."

"Free will can temporize, and is capable of enormous procrastination. But it cannot depart entirely from its Creator, who set the limits on its ability to miscreate by virtue of its own real purpose."

The way I read this, "will" always has an element of freedom to it, even when will is being USED to try to be unwilling. You cannot escape willingness. You will always have some willingness even if you are highly unwilling, which means that you will eventually will to be back with God.

"He can wait, delay, paralyze himself, reduce his creativity almost to nothing, and even introduce a real developmental arrest or regression. But he CANNOT abolish his creativity. He CAN destroy his medium of communication, but NOT his potential."

God has also placed a limit on spacetime, ie the separation. It has been repurposed as a classroom to learn lessons, which involves consent. And we have all willed freely to participate. In effect, there is a guarantee that we will wake up eventually.

"The Atonement was built into the space-time belief in order to set a limit on the need for the belief, and ultimately to make learning complete."

"For if you could REALLY separate yourselves from the Mind of God, you WOULD die."

Another thing is that trying to be away from God is painful. It is a rejection of happiness and love and ease and joy. A rejection of health and wholeness. It is a state riddled with suffering. And eventually this is intolerable, especially when it becomes extreme.

The more extreme the separation, the more it hurts. The more you try to be evil, the worse your life gets, and the more you become insane. The harder you try not to exist, the more you repress and hate yourself. And it does not feel good. Some people have extreme tolerance levels but not unlimited.

"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."

This is part of the fact that there is a safeguard built into free will. Basically, in order to fully will something, you have to be fully willing. If you become unwilling, ie try to use will to NOT will, you are arresting the will. This causes you to shut off access to your power to create, and you become "weaker".

Effectively, if you oppose God's will, you become powerless. If you deny your freedom, you imprison the will. It all gets automatically shut down because by choosing separation you're literally denying freedom and power.

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

The end result is that you cannot use will to attack will, or to attack or change God. Or to change the truth or anything real. When you try to, there is a lack of will, which shuts it down and causes nothing to happen. You might hallucinate that the nothing is something, but nothing is really created.

Also the Holy Spirit has been created to guarantee holographically that the whole is always in the part, and thus no matter how many times mind tries to split itself the whole of God is still there. You cannot leave eternity or really separate.

"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. Corrected error IS the error's end. And thus has God protected still His Son, even in error."

So God has naturally caused a number of things all which guarantee you are not only protected and safe (immortal) and have not really done anything, but also has the side-effect that when you choose away from him you do not like it, and inevitably choose against it. It's almost like saying the impluse to return is built-into the attempt to leave. And you never did quite leave in the first place.

"I CAN offer you my will to make yours invincible by this sharing, but I CANNOT oppose yours without competing with it and thereby violating God's Will for you. Nothing God created can oppose your will, as nothing God created can oppose His. God GAVE your will its power, which I can only acknowledge in honor of His."

We could say then that, we are always free, and can choose when to return to God, but at the same time staying away from God is fundamentally unpleasant, and eventually you will seek to return.

Another aspect of this is that God is so certain and so powerful, and the Holy Spirit shares his infinite power, such that he CANNOT FAIL in helping us to return. In his repurposing of the world we made, he guarantees that we will return to heaven. There are no loopholes in God's plan for salvation.

The Holy Spirit has effectively already finished the job.

"His task is mighty, but the power of God is with Him. Therefore, to Him, it is so easy, that it was accomplished the instant it was given Him for you."

"God's promises make no exceptions. And He guarantees that only joy can be the final outcome found for everything. Yet it is up to us when this is reached; how long we let an alien will appear to be opposing His."

"God's guarantee will hold against ALL obstacles, for it rests on certainty, and NOT contingency."

"Reality observes the laws of God, and NOT the rules you set. It is His laws which GUARANTEE your safety. All illusions that you believe about yourself obey NO laws."

"The Atonement is the GUARANTEE of the safety of the Kingdom. Nothing good is lost, because it comes from the Holy Spirit, the voice for Creation."

"The world WAS a way of healing the Separation, and the Atonement is the GUARANTEE that the device will ultimately do so."

"No force except your own will is strong enough or worthy enough to guide you. In this you are as free as God, and must remain so forever."

"The truth is still that the attraction of God is irresistible at ALL levels, and the acceptance of this totally unavoidable truth is only a matter of time. But you should consider whether you WANT to wait, because you CAN return now, if you choose."

ACIM reiterates many times that WE ALONE ARE THE CAUSE of our own suffering. We are not ever at the effect of the world. We are the cause of the world, the dream, and everything we feel and think and experience. Nothing happens without our consent, and we cannot even be hurt unless we ourselves hurt ourselves.

When you take this to the extreme, it means that YOU ALONE are responsible for EVERYTHING you experience, and NO ONE ELSE has anything to do with it whatsoever. There are no causes in the world, your brothers NEVER cause you (God is the cause of you), and you cannot suffer unless you choose to.

You can't even die unless you choose to. NOTHING can happen without your decision. And Jesus is completely literal about this. If you do not CHOOSE to suffer, suffering CANNOT happen to you. Sickness cannot happen, nor can death. You have automatic innate power over death and suffering at all times, and ONLY YOU can bring them upon yourself.

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

This puts 100% of the responsibility on your shoulders. Which means that if you are ever tempted to believe that something is happening for a reason OTHER than your own contribution, you are in a state of being mistaken, and now you need correction. Because it is ONLY your contribution that is causing everything.

This sounds easy enough. You just need to realize and recognize that every time you are unhappy, upset, suffering, in pain, sick, angry etc, it is because you are making it happen. If you would just stop hurting yourself you'd be totally invulnerable and healthy and happy all the time. No joke.

What becomes seemingly difficult is the many ways that we might not recognize what we're doing, or that we're even doing anything at all. We can become so used to blame, and reaction, and emotional triggers, and powerlessness, and believing other people actually do stuff, and that it seems impossible we can be responsible for everything.

In fact it runs very deeply. Every single thought you have, every attitude, every belief, are all part of the confusion that "its not me doing it" and "they are doing it to me." In every way, it is really you, who are an immortal being who can never even be changed at all, becoming confused and believing that something outside of you is changing you against your will. This can NEVER be true.

Every time that we lose sight of being THE CAUSE, we fall into temptation. We deny the truth and project causality outside of us. And this is the same as projecting sin. Then we find others or the world to be the cause of us. And this is a defense against the healing God placed in our minds. It's a way to avoid being healed by displacing the problem and its source outside of ourselves.

We talk about teaching others, and helping others, and having relationships, and performing miracles and so on, but the foundation of all this is simply YOU BEING YOU. Are you attacking yourself, or aren't you? If you aren't, you are not under attack. If you are, you are your ONLY worst enemy. This is all due to the suicidal self-destructiveness which comes from believing you are sinful. Are you trying to destroy yourself and others, or are you extending creation?

If you were to temporarily remove the entire planet, and all the people on it, and leave just you floating in space by yourself, whatever is going on in your experience is SOLELY caused by you. There is nothing else to cause it. This really tells you that ALL your forgiveness work is ENTIRELY an inside job. IT has nothing to do with others. It's you versus yourself. Is you trying to master yourself. It's your mind playing tricks on itself. It's you alone affecting yourself insanely.

Weaning off of all the reasons, excuses, explanations, justifications, beliefs, projections, and all other forms of displacement of responsibility, is not easy. We have a lot of habits formed, a lot of assumptions made, and a lot of belief in being vulnerable. We position ourselves as victims on a minute-by-minute basis. We might think it's not even POSSIBLE to question whether these things are happening to us. That things can seem so extreme and lopsided that it seems impossible we can be the one causing it.

But even those things which seem convincing, tempting us, secretly our dissociated choice, we have to dig out ALL of them, to question every single mental activity which is leading you away from your invulnerability. Even the notion that if you are being responsible, other people can still do stuff to you, cannot be true. Even the notion that even if you're doing your best, you will still die, cannot be true. Even death itself CANNOT have power over you if you decide NOT to die. "You are immortal and you cannot die."

The aim here is that you become "strong in the truth". That you stand in your own light. That you know yourself and be true to yourself. That you be so certain of what you ARE, that you don't for a second displace yourself, make a bodily identity, project cause outside of yourself, or believe any temptation that you are threatened by the world. This is how you be the light of the world, by going WITHIN to the light that is in you, so that it can extend.

Ultimately it boils down to one simple thing. You are the one who is making your life hell. It's not anyone else, and its not the world. It's not your neighbors, not your boss, your politicians, your celebrities. It's not certain races or countries or the weather or food or where you live. It's not external activities or events or space or time. It's just YOU. You are the one who is doing it to yourself. Holy fuck!

Salvation has been placed IN YOUR MIND by God because he knows that the PROBLEM is in your mind. And so the solution is in your mind. Your mind is what needs to be corrected, and that is all. This will take care of everything else. You are the one who is against you. You are the one who keeps giving YOUR power away to others. You are the one who keeps losing yourself and confusing yourself with things which are not you. And you are the one who can use the power of your decision to get out of it.

"You are immortal and you cannot die, but you can confuse yourself with things that do.""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 in any way.""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."

"Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way"

"Who could be hurt in such a war, unless he hurts himself?"

"Nothing can hurt you, unless you give it the power to do so."

"If you will listen to His voice, you will know that you cannot either hurt or be hurt"

"You cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness."

"I AM responsible for what I see. I CHOSE the feelings I experience, and I DECIDED ON the goal I would achieve. And everything that SEEMS to happen TO me, I ASKED FOR and received as I had asked."

"It is impossible the Son of God be merely driven by events outside him. It is impossible that the happenings that come to him were not his choice. His power of decision is the determiner of every situation in which he seems to find himself by chance or accident."

"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."

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. 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."

We may not think that people are trying to destroy themselves. People can seem relatively happy, fairly sane, living a seemingly active life, enjoying success in their career, raising families and so on. But the fact of what is happening in the big picture is still there.

God's Kingdom is the realm of creation, of the constructive use of the power of the mind. It is there that life is wholeheartedly supported and sustained eternally. Any degree of suffering or sickness is completely impossible. Everyone enjoys perfection and eternal life and immortality.

But in the separation, all who participated in it did reject the Kingdom, and thus rejected immortality and perfection. This rejection of God was a rejection of life, a rejection of innocence, and a rejection of existence. It thus led to a death wish, or a desire to not create. The opposite of creation is destruction, and it was the destruction of God and Self that was the aim.

"The world was made as an attack on God."

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

"This is a dream of death."

And so we entered into dreaming, in which all dreams are based in the rejection of creation and life. And so all dreams are dreams of death. And the physical universe is a system of death. All its laws are based on death, and all its roads lead to death.

We seem to have a seeming escape for a while, a kind of in-between state where we have a "life", before we die. But this is still essentially a period of dying. And it still leads to the grave, which is something we can deny and avoid but this denial doesn't stop it happening.

Nevertheless, this all only happens as a result of choosing death, ie choosing the opposite of creation. Choosing to not be with God. Which means choosing self destruction.

So if you are willing to look, you'll notice that everyone who is here is in various degrees or stages of self attack and punishment. This is not something pretty to look at. Many people are so riddled with guilt they can't even look you in the eye.

"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."

"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?"

Why does this happen? It happens because each individual person believes they are a sinner. And in whatever way, somewhere in the mind there is a belief that sin is real and true, has happened, has had real irreversible consequences, and that they can never return to God.

But even moreso, we believe we actively deserve to be punished for it. That we want the punishment and want to suffer, because it is expected of us and we agree with it. And so the people inflict self attack upon themselves in all manner of ways and this eventually leads to the death of the body. And all of this is chosen and self inflicted. And if it were not for this, there would be no suffering or sickness or death.

The simple thing to realize then is that this whole world is filled with people who are trying to die. "a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures come to die." Where we come to hate a while, wither and die. Jesus doesn't pull any punches on this stuff, he's very blunt about it.

So you've got a world full of sacrificial lambs, people destroying themselves in various ways, all manner of self attack, and all of it is essentially suicide. "You cannot die unless you choose to do so." "No one dies without their own consent." Which means that all of the sickness, all suffering, all forms of unhappiness, all death, is all a choice made by people who believe they deserve it.

Except that, they don't deserve it. No-one does. No one deserves suffering even if it's an illusion of suffering. No one deserves to be punished in any way. No one deserves to have to go through any kind of psychological hell or experience of pain or disfigurement or disability or disease. These are all forms of self abuse. Every single example is someone trying to hurt themselves.

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt."

We're a world filled with self attacking, self hurting, self abusing, self harming, self destructive, self sabotaging, self denying, self hating, self loathing, self corrupting people, all of whom think they deserve to suffer because they're guilty. But they're not really guilty, and the ENTIRE thing is just one huge mistake.

Sin is not real, or possible. Meaning attack on God is not real or possible. Meaning there is never justification for guilt, meaning there is never a PURPOSE for suffering, to inflict just desserts or due justified punishment. There is never a valid grounds for unhappiness or disease or depression or anything less than God's will that we be happy and healthy. The whole thing is a giant mistake.

So all that's really happening is that everyone is seriously mistaken, confused, lacking recognition, insane, unclear, uncertain, afraid, not sure of anything, and really kind of lost in a nightmare of their own making. All as a result of denial and an unwillingness to look at their own innocence. Which in a way is kind of funny, because if we'd just look at the fact that we could never have sinned, we'd stop trying to kill ourselves over it.

"What if you looked within and saw no sin? This "fearful" question is one the ego never asks. And you who ask it now are threatening the ego's whole defensive system too seriously for it to bother to pretend it is your friend."

Death isn't real, and nothing real can be threatened. But we certainly can go through the motions and try to make it happen, to have the experience of being a corrupt body, feeling pain and sensations, torturing ourselves in our dreams. All of which is unnecessary. All that's needed is the awakening to the truth. The acceptance of the facts. The recognition of what really is real and what is not. Because there really is no sin, in reality. And that means there is no grounds for any kind of self punishment, suicide or death.

No-one needs to be dying. No-one needs to be suffering or sick. No-one needs to be unhappy. We all just need forgiveness - the recognition of sin's impossibility, and the continuance of our absolute immortal endless innocence. And those who are innocent can never suffer, nor do they want to or choose to.

Because if you are just as perfect now as when God created you, and if you have never done anything to anyone, and if nothing you thought you did ever even happened, then all that's left is to thank God that you have been given eternal life.

Very often, Jesus would say to me, "it's fine". And I would be like, "how is this fine?" I would be upset about something, there'd be some physical medical issue to deal with, some seeming tragic loss, something going wrong. How can it be fine? Then my wife died and once again he was like "this is good", "it's fine". And again I was challenged to try to be open to accepting this, somehow.

I see now that the reason that "it's fine", no matter what happens, is because there is a bigger picture. There is a journey that the soul goes through across multiple lifetimes. The soul is immortal and cannot be truly hurt or lost or damaged. It certainly can never die or be sick. So that radically changes the perspective on what physical matters really mean or whether they're fine or not. Souls use bodies for a purpose, and that is all.

Everything is "fine" because nothing can really hurt who we really are, and we're just using this world as a temporary classroom to learn lessons. Sometimes we leave the classroom and then return at another time, in another body, with other people, in another place with another life. It's all fine. It's even fine if the person seems to die. How can it really be wrong or a fault or something bad if it's part of the soul's journey, even what they want, even chosen, and even part of a much bigger plan of salvation? Death doesn't mean anything good or bad, it is meaningless.

Recognizing the sheer reach of the soul on its journey through many lifetimes, its involvement in multiple serious relationships, having multiple bodies, experiencing many locations and families, many sets of parents, many lovers, many children, many conflicts, etc, it's a vast and deep and far-reaching story. Souls come and go many times with many relationships.

The much longer-term purpose is that the soul wants to reunite with God and awaken from the dream permanently, and to that end it will practically be willing to experience anything and everything if it helps toward that goal. No matter what it looks like. That puts a very different perspective on whether the things that happen, the disabilities we have, the limitations, the hardships, are really "wrong" or whether they are for a bigger purpose that we consent to. And we must remember the soul itself can never be hurt.

We only think that something is wrong when we have a special-relationship kind of viewpoint. Our ego becomes invested in this world, in bodies, in physical relations, and identifying as a human body. And then all manner of self-interest arises, attachment to other bodies, wanting to avoid death at all costs, an entire culture built around bodily living etc.

But death really is just an exit from the world as the soul carries on and continues its much, much longer path toward God. In fact death can be a liberating event for many because it represents escape from physical suffering. It is only the "dying" and being trapped in a body while it malfunctions that seems to bring suffering. As the body appears to degrade and suffer and die it seems the person does also, but in truth nothing changes the soul. Only the mind needs changing.

When Jesus tells me enthusiastically that it's "good" that a person has died, or "its fine" that someone has gone through a sickness, or "okay" that someone has had an amputation, I trust it to mean that in the really, really big picture it really is fine. Jesus was telling me it was fine when the doctors wanted to chop half her leg off. I couldn't grasp it whatsoever, but I see now it really was no big deal, as far as the soul is concerned. Who cares about bodies anyway?

Yes it seems like temporary setbacks, as the world judges it. It seems like a horrible suffering and an awful tragedy, as the world judges it. Sometimes it seems completely unfair and horrifying and terrifying, as the world judges it. All revolving around trying to keep people bodily identified and staying in this world for as long as possible. But there is a much higher purpose, a much longer-term goal, and a much deeper willingness at work. And being here for a long time isn't even that important when you're a multi-dimensional, multi-lifetime being.

I once had a dream where I seemed to go through a tremendously long obstacle course. It was fraught with difficulty and cuts and scrapes and bushes and barbed wire and mud and all kinds of upsetting scenarios. It seemed to go on forever. It was like a long and hard struggle, seemingly filled with suffering and difficulty, and by the time it was done I was pretty much exhausted and traumatized.

But then I came out into a clearing, and a guide or angel was there. And I asked, why did I have to go through all that? Because it seemed pointless and cruel and stupid. And the answer was in the form of a question - "what purpose might there be that you would be willing to go through all that, if it meant that you could achieve a goal?" And I thought for a moment and realized, that if the goal were the return to God, and if I needed lessons and challenges to get me there, then I would be willing to go through just about anything in order to attain that ultimate prize, the ultimate reunion with my creator. Even if it meant what the world would think of as horrendous suffering.

That's the perspective of the soul - a willingness to endure hardships and seeming limitations and even sickness and death if it means, potentially, the opportunity for learning, growth, for developing holy relationships, and for ultimately awakening from the whole dream. Nothing happens without a reason or a purpose. And it's all designed to carefully, and consensually, lead us toward the end game of reunion with God.

There is an atonement plan specifically designed by God to get us home efficiently and as gently as possible, but it does mean we're going to have to go through some challenges. There is an entire curriculum at work, many people that have to be encountered, many events which have to transpire. All designed carefully through the Holy Spirit to guide us home as quickly as we are willing. A hard life isn't a wasted life, it's a life used constructively for significant growth towards the final goal. Anything here can be used for the Holy Spirit's purposes.

"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."

"All things are Lessons God would have me learn."

This will be a touchy and controversial subject. But we need to be more honest about death and what exactly is going on when spiritual people keep getting sick.

When someone's body dies, and when people have believed that the body IS the person through body-identification, there is a sense of loss. And this makes sense.

Something "real" seems to have been destroyed. If this were true, it SHOULD induce grief. If a real being has ended, it is definitely grounds for grief. This perceived "real death" can induce horrifyingly intense feelings of loss, massive waves of grieving and anger and hurt and loneliness etc.

All of those experiences and feelings can be extremely difficult to go through. Pangs of grief that come out of nowhere. Constant floods of emotions causing huge amounts of crying. A sense of missing and longing, an unfairness, and a justified anger. All of this accompanies the belief that something real has died.

Because of this, it then becomes very difficult to say ANYTHING about death, about what the person chose, about how the sickness came about, or to QUESTION in any way whether the person themselves had something to do with it. To even suggest that someone wanted to die, caused it to happen, chose it, or used it on purpose, seems like a horrible slander against the central character in the dying.

Indeed, when some body person dies, the dying, as the ego interprets it, appears to be the loss of an innocent victim. Ego beliefs tell you that they did not ask for this, they could not stop it, they did not want it, it could not be avoided, it happened unfairly, it victimized them, the person suffered greatly, it was horrible to watch, it was so sad and such a loss, etc. All of this appears to be true when a person is regarded as a body.

In light of this, when we are framing a person as the face of innocence, an innocent helpless victim of death "happening to them" or of diseases being "acquired" from the world, or the environment hurting someone etc, we make it look like the person is "untouchable" in their innocence. We start talking about them as if they were an angel. We go into a total denial of anything they seemed to do wrong. And no-one then dares to say a single word which might imply the person was anything OTHER than absolutely pure and perfect.

As a result of this behavior and this "falling for" the APPEARANCE that the person died against their will, death itself becomes protected. It becomes shielded by a facade of innocence and victimhood, helplessness and powerlessness. As if the person couldn't lift a single finger to influence anything that happened, and as a result was completely unfairly ripped away by forces beyond their control.

Death itself benefits from this view. By framing "dyers" as innocent victims, it puts up a powerful shield of denial, which seems impenetrable. And because it is framed as innocence, everyone suddenly is watchful of anyone even remotely suggesting that the person was "not innocent" in any way. There is a protectiveness that suddenly comes over people, which then justifies immense anger and projection, if anyone should dare to even HINT at the idea that the death was not how it appeared to be. As if death is an innocent baby that no-one can touch with a bargepole.

To even then question death at all, to suggest a person might've chosen it, that they caused it, or wanted it, or made it happen, or used it to try to kill the Son of God, would be considered a kind of blasphemy. And anyone who speaks out against death then is considered some kind of horrible insensitive accuser, victimizer and attacker, who has come to trample on the very carefully laid picture-frame of death-encrusted jewels that surrounds the tomb. To question death then seems completely off-topic, inappropriate, un-asked for, unwanted, and an act of war. How dare you suggest death is a lie or that all death is suicide?

By doing do, we never really get to question death itself. We keep hiding it behind this shield of illusions. We keep framing people as innocent victims who never wanted what happened. We keep denying that anyone ever chose any of it. And all that revolves around false perceptions, perceptions of a person AS a body, and AS a victim of the world.

It is a fact, however, that A Course in Miracles takes a radically OPPOSITE view of death than this. A view which would actually reveal a lot of activities taking place by the egos of not only those who die, but by those who mourn for them also. Those who are in grief and loss, as horrible as those experiences may be, are revealed to nevertheless be mistaken. Jesus even goes so far as to quite blatantly point out that those who attend funerals and who grieve over dead bodies, are completely going against God's will. He basically calls them death-worshippers.

"But what of those whose dedication it is NOT to live? The black-draped "sinners," the ego's mournful chorus, plodding so heavily AWAY from life, dragging their chains and marching in the slow procession that honors their grim master, lord of death."

"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."

So the way Jesus describes this is that, those who die, AND those who react to the death on the basis of body-identification and ego loss and "something real died", which is a mistaken perception, are death worshippers. They are people who are themselves dead. The walking psychologically dead, who are actually worshippers of death and sickness, who make bodies real, who react to body deaths in horror, but whose egos are secretly celebrating the proof that yet another Son of God has been slain.

These truths are underneath the grief and the loss and the horrible aftershocks of "someone dying", and as such remain buried in the minds of most people. These truths are so opposite to "how terrible it is that someone died" attitudes that it would embarrass and likely induce guilt in someone to whom it were revealed. And that's because people who are circling around death like vultures are trying to perpetuate death and keep it going.

Jesus is very clear in A Course in Miracles that this is a course in life, in living, in resurrection, and in the surmounting of death. We are being asked to "swear not to die", and to be so committed to the goal of LIFE, that we completely blot out and make death IMPOSSIBLE. Even that our bodies should enter a state of completely healthy functioning, not merely devoid of sickness but actually INCAPABLE of becoming sick or dead. Where they are locked into health because the mind is healed.

Jesus once told me personally, that the entire purpose of this life, is "to eradicate death in all its forms."

Such a teaching is obviously completely diametrically opposed to death, to sickness, to suffering, and to any kind of pity party about someone's body seeming to come to an end. We're even told that the Holy Spirit will produce a "picture of you" (a body) which has never been hurt or suffered pain in any way, and therefore symbolizes eternal life and immortality, teaching your brothers who look upon it that they are sinless.

"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."

"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."

There is even an entire radical teaching in ACIM about the fact that when you project sin or use the body for attack in any way, the body itself becomes sick. And the body is thus used as a messenger to try to communicate to those who look upon it that they are the CAUSE of its sickness. Thus, a body which is sick, broken, damaged, diseased, or in any way defective, in fact physically ACCUSES others of being sinful. It is what the course calls "a picture of crucifixion", which you show to your brothers in order to condemn them and be contagious in negatively affecting them.

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

As a result, Jesus is EXTREMELY clear that any amount of sickness in the physical body at all IS PROOF that the mind HAS NOT been healed. That if there is still physical sickness, there has NOT been a forgiveness. The forgiveness is not REAL, unless it has brought a healing to your body and to the body of your brother. That if the body remains broken, it CONTINUES to accuse your brother of sin, and teaches by double messages. That no-one can learn from this contradictory demonstration because a) mind is claiming to be healed and b) body is proving otherwise. No-one will listen to such a hypocritical assertion.

So basically Jesus is saying that we need to put our money where our mouth is, and we need to become genuinely healed in the mind, SO THAT the body is FORCED to be healthy. And by doing so, we make all physical sickness and death IMPOSSIBLE. So much so, that the body can no longer become sick, be made to be sick, be caused to die against your will, or in any way decay. That it cannot even age and grow old, or become decrepit over time, or malfunction as a result of "natural processes."

Jesus wants us to learn that we are NOT at the effect of death. That we have power OVER death. And in fact that we MUST gain power over death if we are to reach atonement and resurrection. If there is any way, any loophole, any exception, in which the body could potentially still be made to be sick WITHOUT your consent, there is still a power in the separation that can KEEP the son of God in hell forever. The notion that there is a force in the world that can MAKE you die, against your will, is nothing more than a fantasy belief in death and an attempt to GIVE it power over you.

"No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants, and no one dies without his own consent."

Whether you are an ACIM person or not, if the body is sick, it is simply because the MIND is sick. And if the mind is sick, it projects its sickness onto the body. And therefore the mind has to be healed. And when the main is healed, the mind DOES ALWAYS heal the body. And the body cannot resist this, it cannot maintain its own sickness, it cannot keep dying on its own, and it cannot stop the mind from forcing it to be well. A guiltless mind HEALS the body and makes sickness and death impossible.

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

THIS ..,. is what everyone is supposed to be achieving...

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

If you do not reach this state, then you have not reached the resurrection, and you have not finished the curriculum of ACIM. The curriculum of ACIM ends in resurrection, NOT death, and resurrection means LIFE, which is the opposite of death. Anyone who produces sickness in the body HAS in truth CAUSED it to be sick on purpose, for the purpose of hatred and attack and murder, in an attempt to prove that the son of God is guilty and deserves to die. Anyone who HAS died as a seeming "effect" of physical sicknesses such as cancer, HAS NOT HEALED THEIR MIND fully.

So to put it simply, people keep dying because they have not reached resurrection. They keep dying because they keep identifying with the body. They keep dying because they have not fully healed their minds. They keep dying because they are not done with the curriculum. A person can become closer to not dying, for sure, and can still cause death while being mostly healed. But until a person is fully healed the body will be attacked. Only in TOTAL RESURRECTION does a person reach a state in which they can be said to be "fully awake" and able to leave the dream permanently. "A dream of death is not left by death but by truth."

In such a state, the body is INCAPABLE of being sick or becoming sick. It cannot rot or decay. It cannot contain cancers or any other malfunctions. In fact, the only way to remove it then is to make it disappear. And this is precisely what Jesus did in his resurrection, causing his body to DISAPPEAR because he recognized it was NOTHING. This happened because recognized that the body IS an illusion of death (separation) and that it was not true. He erased the body and erased the separation in his mind, attaining total resurrection.

We need to drop the idol worship, we need to stop thinking that death is natural and inevitable, we need to stop buying into body identification which is guaranteed to induce grief and loss, we need to stop thinking that death is God's will, we need to stop believing that you OR your body can die as a result of causes outside of your control, we need to question death and recognize it as a lie, and we need to STOP CHOOSING IT. You do NOT have to die!!!

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

"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."

"To witness sin, and yet forgive it, is a paradox which reason cannot see. For it maintains what has been done to you DESERVES no pardon. And, by GIVING it, you grant your brother mercy, but retain the proof (a sick body) he is not REALLY innocent. The sick remain accusers. They cannot forgive their brothers AND themselves as well."

"The power of witness is beyond belief, because it brings conviction in its wake. The witness is believed BECAUSE he points beyond himself, to what he REPRESENTS. A sick and suffering you but represents your brother's guilt; the witness which you send, lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture YOU accept, if only it can serve to punish him. The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."

"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely."

"Here the curriculum ends."

"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."

"What you would prove to him you will believe. The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

Jesus "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."

Sometimes doing ACIM seems very difficult. It boils down to a simple fact. Everything in the world is opposite to the truth. And that means you're going to have to become opposite to everything in the world!

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

This is no easy feat. Everything in the world is totally backwards, inside out, and upside down. It is opposite to heaven's laws and nature in EVERY way.

"...earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

So it's calling for you to totally go against the grain in order to be sane, to deny and defy the whole nature of this entire world and not believe a single thing about it. The world is insane, and you want sanity.

"What does this prove except the world is mad? Why share its madness in the sad belief that what is universal here is true? Nothing the world believes is true. It is a place whose purpose is to be a home where those who claim they do not know themselves can come to question what it is they are."

"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."

"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."

Our position in "false perception" is one where we have reversed or swapped cause and effect. We've also swapped what is true and what is false. Everything is totally back to front. We now believe the world is happening to us, causing us. And yet, we are immortal beings, causers, creators, rulers of the universe, to whom nothing is supposed to be happening.

There are very strong empowerment themes in ACIM to do with you learning to re-adopt the position of having power OVER the world. Over even sickness and death. Over all problems and forms of suffering. In which you are the cause of the dream, and not its effect. Where you are invulnerable and incapable of being hurt. Where you would show and demonstrate to others that you cannot be hurt even physically.

"Show your brother you've had no hurt of him."

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

Whenever our mind believes for a second that cause and effect have been swapped, we see ourselves as at the effect of the world and other people. They're doing it to us. We're being affected. We are now passive victims, suffering against our will, experiencing things we seem to have not chosen or wanted. But then the course is saying, absolutely everything that happens you must have chosen and wanted, and you did it to yourself.

This is reflected in the secret of salvation "you're doing this to yourself." It doesn't even matter what form it takes or who seems to be the victimizer. If you see yourself as an effect of the very thing you made, you are playing a role of victim and are positioning yourself to be hurt by it. And yet you are an immortal being, who cannot be hurt.

"Nothing real can be threatened."

The real meaning of this is that you are an immortal being and you are CAUSAL. You caused this world. You are the dreamer of it. It is nothing but an effect and it cannot do anything to who or what you really are. You've dreamed up dream figures and set them about attacking your body.

"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 does nothing to him. He only thought it did."

"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."

And then Jesus even goes on to say that you cannot suffer or be sick or hurt or killed or anything against your will. That even death is CONSENTED to in all its forms.

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details."

So we've got the world seeming to function backwards, in which it seems capable of causing your body, making it an effect of the world. You've got random chaotic events "happening to it". You've got all manner of inescapable problems, people attacking you, stuff going wrong. And you're supposed to fly in the face of it all exclaim, THIS IS DOING NOTHING TO ME.

That's not easy. You're asked to act like an immortal being in a mortal world. And that means if you are not vigilant, you're going to be constantly drawn into the world's ways, tempted to believe what it shows you, deceived by its illusions and frightened by its images. You have to constantly be on-guard and vigilant in your willingness to take a forgiving attitude instead.

Forgiveness means little more than looking at the world from a point of view of it BEING NOTHING LIKE YOU, and therefore that you are immortal and it is not. Forgiveness symbolizes your immortality and points to your invulnerability. You can accuse no-one of sin if it is impossible for you to be sinned against. If the world can do nothing to you, you cannot be angry at it. You can only be benevolent by recognizing that you cannot be changed.

That's difficult work. Being confronted with a totally backwards world all day every day, and being asked to totally go against it and deny it in every way. That even your body lies to you. Even your planet is a false world. Even the events that sure as hell look like they're happening aren't happening. That even the suggested proof of sin that your body can be crucified is a total deception. The world is COMPLETELY UNNATURAL.

"as it seems to be the most unnatural and difficult for the untrained mind."

"Deny your own identity and you will not escape the madness which induced this weird, unnatural and ghostly thought which mocks creation and which laughs at God."

"The ego wants to teach you that you want to OPPOSE God's Will. This unnatural lesson CANNOT be learned"

"Miracles seem unnatural to the ego"

"To you the miracle CANNOT seem natural, because what you have done to hurt your minds, has made THEM so UNnatural that they do not remember what is natural to them. And when you are TOLD about it, you cannot UNDERSTAND it. The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is PERFECTLY natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you."

"Guilt is a sure sign that your thinking is UNnatural. Perverted thinking will ALWAYS be attended with guilt, because it IS the belief in sin."

For you to become your natural self, you're going to have to stop believing anything the world says or does. That's not exactly easy if your'e used to being in false perceptions where you buy into the entire system and think it's the truth. You're quite literally stuck in hell and trying to get back to heaven. And the only way to get back there is to become heaven-like while you're in the midst of evil.

You're being PULLED in two different directions. The world is trying to pull you into hell and darkness and death. God is trying to pull you into heaven and light and happiness. The two are irreconcilable. They are totally opposite. You will have to abandon the world if you want to go home to God. You will have to turn your back on death and reject sickness and choose away from sin and guilt and fear. And most of all, you will have to learn to see yourself as the RULER of the universe, in no way a victim, and entirely equipped with the power of God.

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.

You are not of this world. This world isn't the only world.

You are of another world, the Kingdom of God, in which you have immortality - eternal life as given by God Himself.

This world is an illusory world. It's kind of like a layer on top of reality. A pretend world, a picture, of a form and nature opposite to reality.

The things in the illusory world can appear to change, shift, grow, die, etc. But it really has no effect at all on the deeper underlying world of God. God's Kingdom is completely permanently unassailable and impenetrable and perfect forever. It is "the living world of light."

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world. But the REAL world HAS the power to touch you even here, BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT."

"Let your Guide teach you their unsubstantial nature as He leads you past them, for beneath them is a world of light whereon they cast no shadows."

What you are, as an immortal spirit, is firmly anchored in Heaven. Nothing can attack you or change you in any way.

"The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky. So high in Heaven is it set that those outside of Heaven know not it is there."

For you as an immortal being, death is not possible. It's not an option. You cannot choose it to happen to your spirit. Your spirit is invulnerable.

So what is it that can ever die, or seem to die? It can't be you. A body is an illusion, part of the illusory dream world of death. Everything in the dream world is made of illusions and all illusions are the idea of the opposite of reality. Since reality is life, all illusions are the idea of death.

"Without the idea of death there is no world."

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem."

So we know that every illusion, whether it appears to show up as a healthy body, or a sick body, or a dead body, or no body, or even just an environment, or a planet, is still essentially made of the idea of death. Even Earth is the idea of an opposite to God's Kingdom.

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

So from the outset, since what you are cannot die whatsoever, the things that can seem to die cannot even be who or what you are. You are spirit, not a body. You exist on an entire other level.

So really you do not need a body, it adds nothing to you, it doesn't improve you, it doesn't allow you to do things that you couldn't do already, and it only essentially was designed as a limit. It can be used in different ways, by an immortal spirit, but the body is not ever what you are.

As spirit, and being on a higher level, you have power over everything on the lower level of the illusory world. All of the world's laws are secondary and once-removed. This world is not primary reality, or the starting point of anything. It is not a cause but an effect of a higher mind's dreaming.

So this means, you on the level of Christ, have power over, total power over, everything in the world. That includes the body, it includes all states of sickness and death, it includes matter and energy, it includes all of the so-called laws of physics and biology, and in effect you have power over everything in this universe.

"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."

""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. "

Since you have power over everything in the universe, "there is nothing my holiness cannot do", "what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world.", you get to dictate what happens to the body. You, from a higher more vertically causal level, get to choose how to USE any aspect of this secondary world.

You can choose to use the body to attack through, which is a toxic idea which affects the body and attacks it. This produces sickness and death of the body on this level. The body then conveys the idea that being dead is the only truth.

You can choose to use the body to heal through, which is a healing idea which affects the body and heals it. This produces a picture of a healed body, an illusion of a healthy body, which then demonstrates the thought/belief that being alive is the only truth.

So your mind gets to decide whether or not the body dies. And this depends entirely on what you use the body FOR. If you use it for attack it will be attacked. If you use it to heal it becomes healed. And in its healed condition, sustained by the mind, sickness death cannot "happen" to the body against your will and your power.

"You cannot die unless you choose to do so."

"No one dies without their own consent"

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

"The mind being sane heals the body."

"Now is the body healed by miracles."

So in effect, you could choose to use the body for healing and to symbolize eternal life, resulting in it being healed. By the power of your mind, the body is not allowed to be in a state of sickness, yet alone physical death.

The body can be sustained indefinitely, at least in time. It can't be eternal because the mind has to constantly maintain it and it is not natural to constantly project bodies. It could stick around for a million years if the mind so chose. Aging can be reversed and halted. But eventually once the purpose of healing is fulfilled in the help of others, there is no longer a need for a body to use to reach those who dream of death. Its purpose of healing is part of the atonement plan.

"Illusions recognized must disappear"

"Eternity will shine away the world."

"A forgiven world cannot last."

"The body cannot remain without illusions."

When the entire idea of death, which the world and body is founded on, is recognized, it must disappear. When it is no longer useful for the atonement plan, and all souls have returned home, there is nothing more to keep the world intact. Nor is there any need or will to maintain it.

"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. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible."

You don't have to automatically go towards physical death. Death is a choice made by an immortal being pretending it can die. You cannot die. "Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt." "Swear not to die, you holy son of God. You've made a bargain that you cannot keep."

"You are immortal and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do."

There is no point choosing to make death happen when you acknowledge that you already have eternal life. What sense would it make? It would be not only futile but a completely pointless waste of time. If you knew you could NEVER die, would you CHOOSE to attempt to make death happen? That's what we do when we cause sickness and death. And if we were to never do that, would sickness or death happen?

No. Because there are no other causes of it. The only cause of death is your mind's power to choose to attack through the body. If you don't do that, the body cannot physically die or become sick.

"Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions responsible for the condition of the body"

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

Freedom of Choice > Responsibility > Power > Causation > Effects.

To simplify, think of cause and effect. You are either the cause, or the effect. If you see yourself as the cause, you cannot be an effect. Your casual outpouring is so strong nothing can come at you. If you see yourself as not the cause, you MUST see yourself as being highly affected and therefore ARE an effect of something.

When you project responsibility outside yourself, onto another or the world, you are disowning and giving away your power. You are giving power TO them. You are framing them in your mind as having the power to CAUSE YOU, and to make you have effects. And it will seem these effects are against your will - something you did not choose.

But you are choosing it, because you are using your power to PRETEND to disown your power, you are still using your power to frame someone as having power over you, and the power that you see IN them acting against you IS YOUR POWER. You just are seeing it as though it belongs to someone else and is not a part of you.

You've separated yourself from your power and now your power is seeming to turn around 180 degrees and come back at you in the form of "an alien will", causing you, changing you, defining you, altering you without your choosing. Or so it seems. Because you ARE choosing this. You are choosing to see your power as against yourself, doing things to you. Even if it seems to be being done "through" others vicariously.

This means you're in a position which is rather strange, where you are FIGHTING YOURSELF. Like literally you are taking your power, moving it away from you, turning it around, and then launching it at yourself in an attack mode, causing you to have effects.

Your mind believes the power is out there against you. Your mind ALSO must believe therefore that since you are NOT having the power, you are NOT the cause, you are NOT responsible, you MUST BE AN EFFECT. The belief in being not the cause and being affected go hand in hand.

This means that your mind is putting in place both the framing of something external as "attacking you", AND it is putting in place the SYMPTOMS, physically mentally or emotionally, that you would expect to occur IF that power were acting upon you. Your mind ITSELF, makes up effects, that correspond to the perceived cause.

This literally means your mind makes symptoms in the body, makes up sickness and disease and even death, makes up wounds and heartache, makes up emotional reactions and loss and sadness and anger and hurt, to correspond to the perceived external cause. Not just imagining it, but actually MAKING IT, producing it, putting it into your experience, changing your feelings, changing your body.

This especially happens when you project guilt, in which you are basically projecting responsibility, which is cause. You are saying, I am not the cause of this, you are, and are pointing a finger and hurling guilt at another to try to make it stick to them. But moreso what you are doing is you are trying to give them power and responsibility and will and freedom and choice and causation to have these things INSTEAD of you.

It's rather bizarre then that we literally give power to people, to frame them as capable of attacking us, threatening us, making us afraid, upsetting us, doing things to us. We effectively WANT THEM TO. Even if on the surface we are claiming to be innocent, even if we are feeling that feeling of "I didn't choose this, I don't want this, I didn't ask for it."

You see, that victim perspective in which you feel like you are being unfairly treated, that's the feeling you get when you are becoming "an effect". It's the recognition that you have indeed projected power, cause, responsibility etc, and so see yourself as NOT responsible, NOT the cause, NOT the one using power to make something happen.

In victimhood (ego) you perceive that you are not the cause of what's happening, and you are in denial of this, and having denied it you are projecting it. So now you see cause as outside of you, in someone else, acting upon you, at the same time as NOT seeing that you are causing anything yourself. The denial acts as a barrier blocking awareness of what YOU are doing, that YOU are using power, that YOU are responsible, that YOU are causing this.

It's understandable then that as the victimhood role strengthens, the denial and disownership of power, causation and responsibility increases. You believe less and less that "it's your fault" (guilt-related). You believe less and less that you chose it, wanted it, made it happen, or had anything to do with it. Almost as if you were just minding your own business doing nothing at all and someone came out of the blue and attacked you for no good reason. As if you were just completely innocent (the face of innocence).

And that's simply because the power has been projected. The power has been given away, disowned, you don't want it, and you WANT the other to have it. So you simultaneously have this experience of "I didn't ask for this, how could you do this to me", and "that person is having power over me and is the cause of me." You can't have one part without the other. Just as you can't have a belief in an external cause WITHOUT a belief in having effects as well. "I want you to have my power, please use it against me, and I will pretend I don't want you to."

So we quite literally use the power of our mind to dissociate from our power, we hand it over to all kinds of things out there that HAVE NO POWER, other than us giving it to it in our minds. And then having given it to them, they seem to loom over us and we now fear them and feel powerless and weak and feeble. Unable to go up against such a power, as though we have no power at all. And now we are tempted to see ourselves as unfairly treated.

What we have to recognize of course is the secret of salvation - that we are doing this to ourselves. We have to recognize and own the power and responsibility. We have to take back the power of decision and use it to choose otherwise with the Holy Spirit. We have to stop believing that ANYTHING outside of us HAS OUR POWER, and indeed need to recognize that the power we THOUGHT was theirs is in fact our own. It only seemed like theirs because we disowned it and didn't want it.

So we take our power back. We claim responsibility for causing everything we are experiencing. We acknowledge, I have caused this thing, I have done this to myself, it is not being done by this other person or something in the body or the world, I am not a victim of this, I am not being affected by them, they have no power over me. I own and take back and reclaim my own power which I gave away, and take full responsibility for it. Which means that I must be CHOOSING what happens, I must be CAUSING what happens, and I MUST have caused all of my own suffering.

All my symptoms I put in place myself. All my upset emotions I put in place myself. All my despair and loss and shame and guilt I did to myself. All sense that I'd been attacked or mistreated or shamed or attacked by anyone else was MY MISTAKE in perceiving this wrongly. I did not recognize that I was using my power to pretend to disown my power, and using it to set up others to attack me for me. I didn't realize I was fighting against myself with a divided will. I have been using my power to try to destroy myself, attacking myself, using others to do my bidding, and then blaming them for it.

Ultimately you need to resume your role and position as ruler of the universe. You are the CAUSE of everything you see and feel and think and experience. You are the co-creator with God with unlimited power. What you say happens, what you do not want does not happen. You articulate reality. You CREATE. You cause what happens and you WANT what happens because you chose it. Everything that happens YOU MUST BE CHOOSING. And by the power of your decision you choose NOT TO SUFFER AND TO STOP ATTACKING YOURSELF LIKE THIS.

Indeed, when you realize that nothing at all has been attacking you OTHER THAN YOURSELF, through your mis-use of your power and will, you can find relief in knowing that if you would just stop hurting your own self, stop giving away your power so that you can be indirectly attacked by yourself, stop disowning responsibility for CAUSING, for CHOOSING, you would stop suffering entirely, and forever. Because NO ONE HAS POWER OVER YOU OTHER THAN YOURSELF! And no-one and nothing can ever cause you to suffer, to be sick, or to die without your consent.

"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 truth of the reality of God's Kingdom is the true nature of your soul. Every property, quality and characteristic of what you are, is given by God. God creates only like himself, and God is immortal.

The result is that you have inherited God's nature and are like God. You have every property and characteristic that God has. This includes immortality, eternal life, permanence, invulnerability, perfection, holiness, innocence, peace, joy, love, happiness, safety, certainty, knowing, power and unlimited existence.

Because this is true of who and what you are, if you are to return to enjoying these qualities, you simply need to open up to accepting that this is the truth of you. The truth of you is BEYOND the ego, beyond space and time, beyond the separation, and was established by God before there ever was a problem to solve.

Forgiveness then, is a REFLECTION of your natural condition in heaven, in which you are as true to your true nature as possible, while being in this dream world. It is a state of mind in which you are accepting what is really true, about you, about others, about God, and about the world. It is clarity, recognition, sanity and accuracy.

"Misperception is a BLOCK to knowledge, while ACCURATE perception is a stepping-stone TOWARDS it."

"The term "right-mindedness" is properly used as the correction for wrong-mindedness, and applies to the state of mind which induces accurate perception."

Accurate perception is also referred to as TRUE perception. And true perception is ALSO referred to as forgiveness, atonement, the miracle, right mindedness, miracle mindedness, salvation, forgiveness, sanity, recognition, the real world, the face of Christ and Christ vision. These are all the same thing - the same state of mind.

"Forgiveness, salvation, Atonement, true perception, all are one. They are the one beginning, with the end to lead to oneness far beyond themselves."This one state of mind, of a corrected mind, which is still dreaming and perceiving but is ALIGNED with the truth within the Kingdom, REFLECTING your true nature as a reflection of heaven on earth, is the state of forgiveness. It simply means that you are being as close to how you are in heaven, just short of being there in person.

Forgiveness then, is really a symbol, because it is a means to an end and a tool for awakening. It really DERIVES its meaning from the reality of the Kingdom that it is BASED ON. It symbolizes or represents, mirrors or reflects, the truth of your reality. It is not an end or thing in itself, FORGIVENESS IS SYMBOLIC!

"Forgiveness is a symbol, too, but as the symbol of His Will alone it cannot be divided."

"Forgiving dreams remind you that you live in safety, and have NOT attacked yourself."

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

"Only forgiving dreams can enter here, for time is almost over. And the forms which enter in the dreams are now perceived as brothers, not in judgment, but in love."

Since forgiveness, atonement, salvation, true perception etc is a SYMBOL, a REFLECTION or once-removed representation of the truth of God, you have to look to what it POINTS TO or represents in order to understand what its qualities must be. Because it derives its qualities FROM the knowledge that it is based on. The question is then, what does forgiveness SYMBOLIZE?"True perception is the BASIS for knowledge, but KNOWING is the affirmation of truth."

So if you look to heaven, look to the qualities of God, to how creation happens, to what souls are like, to the real truth and nature and composition of reality, you will find the BLUEPRINT that forgiving dreams are BASED ON. And this will tell you what forgiveness is and what its qualities should be.

Forgiveness, if based on REALITY, as a reflection of your true nature, should be a state of mind in which you are acknowledging and accepting how you are in heaven. This includes holy relationships which reflect the real relationships in heaven. And it includes the recognition of your immortality, invulnerability, perfection, sinlessness, the incapability of being sick or dying, the assertion of eternal life, and the presence of love.

To be forgiving, is to be heaven-like. It entails complete vigilance for the Kingdom, which means full faith and trust in what is actually true IN the Kingdom, in proper denial of the lies presented by illusions.

Forgiveness should bring with it:

Acknowledgement of your immortality and invulnerability

Love, peace, joy, happiness

Strength and power and the absence of suffering

The end of the victim role and any sense of being affected

Sanity, clarity, accurate perception and right mindedness

Miraculous power to break the laws of space and time

Assertion of life capable of raising the dead and healing the sick

Security, calm, peace-of-mind, certainty, trust and protection

A sense of permanence and the impossibility of death

Knowing that the world has no ability to change you in any way

The absence of pain, suffering, damage or malfunction in the body

Wholeness, innocence, integration, single-mindedness, unified-will

Extension and expression of God's nature

Being plugged into, directed by and healed by spirit

Thinking like God and aligned with God's will

Alignment with the Holy Spirit's thought system

Gratitude and joy that you are still as God created you

Recognition that nothing has ever gone wrong

The complete denial of attack or sin in all its forms

The list goes on. If there is a quality that is true in heaven, then forgiveness should be based on that quality also.

Your brother is innocent not merely because he is not the one who attacked you, but because in heaven you cannot BE attacked. Your suffering is self-made because only you can seem to attack yourself by your free will. And nothing happens without your consent, not even death. Everyone is innocent because you are immortal and cannot be attacked. Forgiveness derives all of its meaning from your heavenly nature.

Forgiveness is the REFLECTION OF HEAVEN. And being a reflection, it gets all of its meaning FROM heaven itself.

"In Heaven, reality is SHARED, and not reflected. By sharing its reflection HERE, its truth becomes the only perception which the Son of God accepts."

"You can REFLECT HEAVEN here. But no reflections of the images of other gods must dim the mirror that would hold God's reflection in it."

"We see the light, and in it we see Heaven's reflection lie across the world."

"Yet forgiveness is the means by which I will recognize my innocence. It is the reflection of God's Love on earth. It will bring me near enough to Heaven that the Love of God can reach down to me and raise me to my home."

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world. But the REAL world HAS the power to touch you even here, BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT.

And what you call with love WILL come to you. Love always answers, being unable to deny a call for help, or not to hear the cries of pain that rise to it, from every part of this strange world you made, and do not want. The only effort you need make, to give this world away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make, is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

"You can REFLECT HEAVEN here. But no reflections of the images of other gods must dim the mirror that would hold God's reflection in it. 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."

"The reflection of God NEEDS no interpretation. IT IS CLEAR. Clear but the mirror, and the message which shines forth from what the mirror holds out for everyone to see, NO-ONE will fail to understand. It is the message that the Holy Spirit is holding to the mirror that is in HIM."

"Could you but realize, for a single instant, the power of healing that the reflection of God, shining in YOU, can bring to all the world, you COULD not wait to make the mirror of your mind clean, to receive the image of the Holiness that heals the world.

The image of holiness that shines in YOUR mind is NOT obscure, and will NOT change. Its meaning, to those who look upon it, is not obscure, for everyone perceives it AS THE SAME. All bring their DIFFERENT problems to its healing light, but ALL their problems are met ONLY with healing there."

"Listening to the ego's voice MEANS that you believe it is possible to attack God. You believe that a part of Him has been torn away by YOU."

"We have repeatedly emphasized that the ego DOES believe it can attack God, and tries to persuade you that YOU have done this."

"But sin, were it possible, WOULD be irreversible."

So you have this part of your mind, which believes in ego ideas of attack, which is the same as sin. The ego in you believes that you CAN attack real things, even though "nothing real can be threatened." It also believes that not only can it attack God, but it HAS attacked God.

It's the part of you that believes, deceives, and is trying to convince yourself, that you are the ego. That you are not as God created you. And therefore that YOU can attack God, and that you have done so.

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

If you believe this, you will believe that you've sinned. This is what the "original sin" is all about. It's the authority problem, the notion you can cause your own cause. That you can cause God against His will, and therefore change him and destroy him.

It is utterly impossible that you're able to do this. God cannot ever be attacked because He is permanent and immortal. You cannot have attacked anything real, at any time. You have never sinned. Not only have you never sinned, sin is actually literally impossible.

The ego however believes that sin IS possible and HAS happened. So you have these two perspectives. The truth in you is asserting that you must still be sinless, but the lies in you are fighting against it and trying to insist you have done something awful. Something totally EXTREMELY awful, as to try to murder God. The ego even thinks it has succeeded.

The belief that you HAVE attacked God, produces a death wish. If you've attacked Him and hurt Him, then he would logically be in a position to be completely justified in revenge. And that now means that God is angry and attacking and threatening. This goes hand in hand with believing that you've attacked and threatened him through anger.

"Death wishes ... DO kill spiritually. ALL destructive thinking is dangerous. Given a death wish, a man has no choice except to ACT upon his thought, or behave CONTRARY TO it. He can thus choose ONLY between homicide and fear."

"And you do not recognize that it is WHAT YOU INVITED IN that would destroy you, and DOES demand total sacrifice of you."

"The ego wants YOU dead"

That being your "new truth", you will then believe that because sin has actually happened, you deserve to be punished. That you are guilty and should die to atone for it. Or that death will allow you to escape from God's wrath. Because now you see God as having vengeance, as having a very good reason to hate you and to want you dead. That your death is God's will.

You will also then see that by believing you attacked God and hurt him, he is not happy with you. That he cannot possibly love you any more. And therefore you find yourself unworthy and unlovable. And even moreso that you cannot go home. That you are expelled from Heaven and are not welcome there, nor do you ever want to go back there.

What this does is it sets you up for the belief in "death as inevitable." Because if you can't go back home to LIFE, then your ONLY choice is to head towards death. It means you can kind of "never live again". And so you crawl away with your tail between your legs, licking your wounds, condemning yourself for what you think you did, and trying to guarantee your own punishment. And to think this is only because you LISTENED to the ego and BELIEVED it's lies about you being sinful.

Thus you become suicidal because now you yourself believe you deserve punishment for sin, that it makes complete sense that you're guilty, that God would never forgive you, and that what you did is irreversible. It's not even that you think others will punish you for this crime, it's that you yourself believe you deserve to be punished, and you yourself begin to actually enact it upon yourself.

This then frightens you because now you are actually against yourself and are entering into self-harm and self-punishment. You are trying to make yourself dead to pay for what you did. So that now means that you've become suicidal. And your only seeming hope to take away from God all power and rights over you, is to head towards death as a doorway out. You reason that if you will die, you will be saved. And now although you fear it, death becomes salvation and is attractive to you as a solution.

This is literally how every single person chooses to CAUSE their own death, and why all death is suicide, and why "no one dies without their own consent." It's all because you don't think you deserve to live. The ego in you believes so strongly that sin exists, you CAN sin, and you HAVE sinned, that a whole cascade of logical conclusions follow on from it, condemning you to death as the ONLY remaining option.

The only way you will get out of this downward spiral into hell and self-destruction, is to move away from the ego's "version" of what is true, and embrace God's version of what is true. That means questioning the belief in sin, that sin is possible or that you're guilty of doing it. This means the undoing of guilt as well, and therefore also fear.

While the ego in you is screaming "I have sinned", the God in you is gently reminding you that "sin is impossible." While the ego is trying to condemn yourself to hell, God is reminding you that you can't attack anything real. While the ego in you believes and is committed to keeping guilt, and to project it, in order to keep the separation going, the Holy Spirit is trying to teach you that you're not guilty because you have never sinned. Because sin is impossible. That everything the ego believes and asserts is a lie.

"You think if anyone could see the truth about you he would be repelled, recoiling from you as if from a poisonous snake."

"Whatever mistakes you made, the truth about you is unchanged."

"You need to hear the truth about yourself as frequently as possible, because your mind is so preoccupied with false self-images."

"The truth about YOU is so lofty that nothing that is unworthy of God is worthy of you."

"The Holy Spirit knows the truth about you. The image you made does not."

"Only what God creates is irreversible and unchangeable."

"You have NOT attacked God, and you DO love Him. Can you change your reality? No-one can will to destroy himself."

The ego's experience of someone dying is horrible. Ego thinks in transactional, finite terms. As if relationship is some commodity amount that you give and lose, and then you lack, and then you need the other to give it back by losing. This is the sacrifice of specialness.

This is the opposite of the golden rule, where the ego says giving and receiving are not one. That what you give you do not give to yourself. And therefore giving is loss. It sees someone's death in rather physical terms, meaning that the form has gone and therefore there has been a one-sided loss, and now they are not giving you what you gave. The thing that was supposed to give you back, albeit separately, has stopped giving, and so you now are in a state of lack because you depended on them.

From this viewpoint the only thing you can feel is loss, which feels horrendous. It's like saying, the person is dead and thats a true fact and there's nothing you can do about it, so you might as well just be in total despair forever. But this ego perception is rooted in victimhood, ingratitude, not recognising, not appreciating, seeing oneself as deprived, unfairly treated, taken from, stolen from, and diminished. And then the ego cries. A lot.

It can reason that there is no other way, and it will have no insight into the opposite of loss, which is gain. But the Holy Spirit gives another view entirely, a totally opposite view in fact. Because as far as He's concerned, there is no loss possible in the golden rule of God. What is given is received by both. What is given is given to yourself forever. There is no room for loss at all, and there is only gain.

The way forgiveness looks at death, it regards it as a gift and a blessing, rather than a curse. It sees that the event has simply purely given to you, by which you have purely gained. You have not been deprived at all, you have only increased. A great gift has been given, and you have received it, and by recognising that you have received it you can enter into justified gratitude. And this is how gratitude becomes part of forgiveness - the recognition of the truth that there is only gain and increase under God's laws.

Gratitude is the total opposite of loss. It acknowledges that you have not lost, that nothing is missing, and that in fact you have received so much that you are overwhelmed with how much you have been given, so much that not a single trace of loss remains. And how can you then feel loss in such a perspective of having been utterly blessed? Loss is literally a lack of gratitude, an unwillingness to receive, and a denial of God's blessing.

Of course, recognising this requires dismantling the ego's interpretation of death, which sees nothing except loss and no gain at all. It sees the situation as utterly hopeless and futile, with no possibility of finding any gain in it at all, dwelling entirely on what seems to be absent, what has been stolen away, and what is no longer there. As if loss is real and permanent and total. And this is the idea of "real death".

But of course this depends on form, because the ego only really registers form "as" content, and does not recognise content at all. If a physical body is gone, yes form is gone, but the love that was in and through the body is not gone. In fact it has been given in a blessing through the person's body to you, and you have received it, and now you are it, and you extend it, and it is alive in you, continuing to be given. And that is because miracles mean endless giving - they continually extend love.

To the ego there is no benefit to you that someone has gone away. It sees only the horrifying and seemingly real deprivation, the taking away of the specialness that you loved, the exclusive source that you thought was the love itself. It sees only a dark and deceitful treachery, that has ripped its beloved treasure away and utterly destroyed it beyond all hope of recovery. And it's never coming back - a stark and horrible fact. Such is the proof of sin and death and dissolution. Then it holds this up as the only reality and truth, as if there is nothing else to it. A total fact. And within this truth, you must simply feel like absolute shit because your whole world has been destroyed forever.

But the ego is utterly blind to the truth, it has no acknowledgement of roles played, of higher purposes, of the way that someone gave transcendent of form, that what was given is still with you and still giving, that loss is impossible, and in a forgiving view you can only possibly be blessed by everything. To forgive is to truly recognise that the world is not doing anything to you, death has no power over you, and therefore it cannot cause something to be taken from you. You cannot lose, you can only win. And if you cannot lose, you must be only gaining. You must be purely receiving, and to receive unconditionally with no strings attached is love. Upon receiving such unending love the only logic response in the mind is gratitude. And gratitude is also a part of giving.

It's similar to what happens when you at first seem to be a victim of someone, and you hate them and fight with them and they seem to deprive and hurt you. But then later you forgive, and you come to realise you hired them, and they played a role that you needed for your spiritual growth, and you gained tremendously from your enemies even if they seemed to be the very people you did not want to be around. You benefited. And then as your perspective grows, you come to more fully understand who did what and why, how you consented, how you used it, and what you did to yourself. And out of that comes a recognition of the innocence of the other and yourself, and the realisation that you have only happily gained from the encounter - that it is not a loss or an attack at all. And then you can be grateful to them for helping you to learn this lesson - to move you closer to God.

Another aspect of this is that if you believe someone else has become lost to you, or that love is lost, then by the golden rule you will also believe that you are lost. And then you will become lost as well, lost in despair and grieving and feelings of loss and hopelessness. And that is because you believe it's true that some other person can be completely lost, and if thats true of them it's true of you. This is why when the loss seems to happen, you feel like you have lost part of yourself. As if it was you that died. And then you stop living. But this is the ego's reasoning as well, because nothing real can die or be lost, and certainly nothing is missing from heaven.

The antidote to loss then is the broader and deeper perspective that you have not lost anything, and have in fact only gained. When you can see that you have only gained, then your response can only be gratitude, because you have been truly blessed and given everything. You've been given freedom and life and opportunity and a future. You've been given room to grow and learn and enjoy further relationships. This isn't a fake positivity either. It's not about just trying to put on a brave face and act as if things are great in denial of loss and feelings. It's a total uprooting of the belief in loss, which is really a lack of recognition. When lessons - and death is a lesson - is correctly perceived, it is recognised as being entirely beneficial. Something that happens only for your highest good.

This also leads into why the Holy Spirit's atonement plan is solely functioning for your highest good, and everything he arranges for you to go through - which you consent to - is leading you to eternal life. If you can see it from the perspective of gratitude and blessing, without the egoic interpretation of "its a loss" or "its difficult" or "i've been deprived" etc - which is a denial of the golden rule, then it is recognised as gentle and helpful and only a blessing. If the ego enters into it, it interprets the lessons as cruel and unwanted and a curse. Something that you want to go away and stop, to fear and resist. When you stop resisting you enter acceptance and presence, and then you also find forgiveness and gratitude. God has only given, he has never taken away.

The big picture truth is simply this: everything that happens is leading you home to God. Everything. Even people seeming to die. Only forms and illusions seem to die, anyway. What is true and real and our identity is permanent and eternal. And you literally are those who seem to move on, who must still be you as well. There is no loss in truth, no loss in God, and no loss in you. There is only a complete willingness to receive God's blessing and be fully grateful for it. Really, the only reason we despair is because we think God isn't loving us anymore, and this can only be a lack of recognition of what is actually true, or an unwillingness to see it. Undoing the belief in death as a block to love brings about a revolution into gratitude and happiness.

"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."

"The laws of God work only for your good, and there ARE no other laws beside His."

"A happy outcome to all things is sure."

When we are greatly distracted by, tempted by, and lost in the world, it is hard to recognize the secret of salvation.

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

But the real key part of this isn't just that you are doing things to yourself, rather than it being others who do it. It's that it can ONLY BE YOU who can hurt yourself.

Jesus describes many times that you have hurt yourself. You have hurt your mind. You have attacked yourself.

"Because you had attacked yourself, and BELIEVED THAT THE ATTACK WAS EFFECTIVE, you behold yourself as weakened."

"Although you have attacked yourself, and very brutally, you will demonstrate that NOTHING HAPPENED. Therefore, by attacking, you have NOT DONE ANYTHING."

"By doing this UNCONSCIOUSLY, you try to keep the fact that you must have attacked yourself FIRST out of awareness, and thus imagine that you have made yourself safe."

"You HAVE attacked him, and you MUST have attacked yourself first."

It is easy to place a lot of focus on other people. On forgiving the world. On healing the body. On world events and problems. It is easy to spend a great deal of time caught up in relationships and dramas. But all of these forms of suffering are really quite far down the line in terms of what came first, and where the real power is.

What comes first happens quickly and so close to home, that it is easy to miss. YOU .... attack yourself....... BEFORE. ... the entire world happens.

"Only the self-accused condemn."

You accuse yourself FIRST. You attack your invulnerability FIRST. You try to undermine your immortality FIRST. You position yourself as afraid FIRST. You make yourself a victim FIRST. You see yourself as lacking FIRST. You condemn yourself FIRST. You accuse yourself of sin FIRST. You do everything to yourself FIRST.

THEN ..... having attacked yourself, the whole thing starts to cascade into projection and blame and dissociation and denial and displacement and various other ways to "disown" responsibility for what you have done to yourself.

"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. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you."

It then becomes possible to become confused as to WHO did this to you. You deny that you did it to you. You pretend that someone else did it to you. You shift the responsibility. You hide from your own self attack. You don't want to look at the fact that YOU are trying to self destruct. All self attack is an attempt to kill God's son - which is YOU - which is suicide. And eventually this results in suffering, sickness, and death, ALL OF WHICH are self inflicted.

"It means that you cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness." "YOU CAN BUT HURT YOURSELF. This has been oft repeated, but is difficult to grasp as yet."

"For you HAVE hurt yourself, and made your Self your enemy. And now you MUST believe you are not you, but something alien to yourself and "something else," a "something" to be feared instead of loved."

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt."

This doesn't have ANYTHING to do with anyone else, or the body, or the world, or spacetime. It's entirely to do with. ... do you love yourself or not? Do you accept and live in your IMMORTAL nature which is given by God, or do you DENY that you are immortal and TRY to make yourself mortal? The only ambition of trying not to be mortal, is that you try to destroy (kill) yourself. But since your immortal self cannot die, you confuse yourself with a body and kill it instead, as a representation of yourself dying.

"If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves"

"Yet you CANNOT crucify God's Son, for the Will of God cannot die"

"What He created can sleep, but it CANNOT die. Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF."

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do."

The attack upon YOURSELF, is all the only problem. You thinking that you attack others, is YOUR problem of being confused, and you are mistaken. You thinking that others attack you, is you being confused, and you are mistaken. NO ONE has ever attacked you against your will. You have never suffered against your will. You have never been sick against your will. You have never died against your will.

"Would you not rather live than choose to die?"

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

Salvation, and the secret of salvation, is simply that ANYTHING you experience other than immortality, YOU are doing to yourself. You are the SOLE cause of it. There are no external causes of suffering. There are no external causes of sickness or death. "There are no accidents in salvation." Nothing in the world can do ANYTHING to you against your will. No one can vioalte you or offend you or hurt you against your will. You CANNOT BE A VICTIM unless you deliberately decide to be one.

So this really has nothing at all to do with anyone else. It is entirely to do with .... are you going to forgive yourself, or not? Are you going to love yourself, or not? There is another subtle part to this though. Your soul and your mind are two different things. Your soul is your self, your identity in christ. But your mind is a medium that your soul uses for expression. Your soul does NOT need salvation because it is permanently immortal. It has never been attacked and never will. But your MIND is confused and HAS tried to hurt itself. It DOES need "healing" or correction.

This means that, even your own self attack, even your mind's efforts to destroy you, even your belief in sin and evil, even your death wish, in truth has NO EFFECT on your immortal soul. Nothing changes about the truth of you. Even your self induced suffering is not REAL suffering. Even your self inflicted pain is not real pain. And as you try to kill yourself off, you as the son of God is totally unaffected.

This means that EVEN IF you attack yourself, you are not REALLY attacking yourself. You have not REALLY ever done anything to yourself. "I am still as God created me."

Recognize first that ALL attack is SELF attack. This is not easy when you have slipped down the slipper slope into projection. It has to all come back to YOU being totally responsible for sin. BUT, you must not stop at being responsible for sin because it is not real. You need swift correction, so that you will recognize you HAVE NOT even sinned against yourself. You must admit that YOU are the ONLY cause of ALL your suffering, and decide to STOP HURTING YOURSELF. And then you can receive healing.

This simple truth, that YOU are the only one hurting yourself, and YOU can decide to love yourself instead. .. is the CORE of A Course in Miracles. Once you love yourself, or. .. seek first the Kingdom of God (which is you) .... your way will be made straight. Everythign else will fall into line naturally, including performing miracles, healing the body, and undoing the world.

"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."

"When you are weary, remember you have hurt yourself. Your Comforter will rest you, but YOU cannot. YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW, for if you did, you could never have grown weary. Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way, for that is not God's Will for His Son."

"It can be but myself I crucify."

All that I do I do unto myself.

If I attack, I suffer. But if I

forgive, salvation will be given me."

"As prayer is always for yourself, so is forgiveness given you. It is impossible to forgive another, for it is only your sins you see in him."

"I repeat again that if you ATTACK error, you will hurt yourself."

"To see a body as anything EXCEPT a means of pure extension is to limit your mind and HURT YOURSELF."

"To you the miracle CANNOT seem natural, because what you have done to hurt your minds, has made THEM so UNnatural that they do not remember what is natural to them."

"I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts."

"When he thinks that he is hurt in any way, it is because he has forgotten who he is, and that he is as You created him." "If ever I am sad or hurt or ill, I have forgotten what You think, and put my little, meaningless ideas in place of where Your Thoughts belong, and where They are. I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts."

"I will not hurt myself today."

"His thoughts can frighten him, but since these thoughts belong to him alone, he has the power to change them, and exchange each fear thought for a happy thought of love. He crucified himself. Yet God has planned that His beloved Son will be redeemed."

"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."

It seems to you that there is a separate power, a separate will, or a separate cause, which is "outside of your mind", which you seem to have no control over.

This power or will seems to show up in the body becoming sick, or stuff happening against your will, or things occurring which you complain about or seem not to want to happen.

But it's not a matter of there actually being a separate power that's acting against you. There is no separate will in the sickness doing its own thing out of control. There is no causality outside of your mind or in the world that can do anything to you without your consent.

So then you have to realize, whatever power, will, reality, force, unchangeability, intention, causality, or any other attribute of power that you see as being "in" that thing, or in the body, or in the sickness, or in the events, it CANNOT BE that these things are separate from your mind.

It is YOUR MIND, out there, separated off, seemingly turned against you, as if it is a separate cause or will or person. So now your body is showing sickness because your mind put the sickness there. And now the part of your mind which put the sickness there is at war with the rest of your mind. And now the rest of your mind sees that it seems to have an enemy who is willing against you.

You do not have an enemy.

Every enemy, every external cause, every illusion that it is "not you doing this", is actually YOU. It's YOUR MIND doing it to itself. This is the secret to salvation.

The sickness in your body is being maintained by YOUR MIND, some part of your mind, which has "turned against yourself" in unlove and denial. And now it seems there are two selves or two minds or two wills operating in conflict.

So then you get all of this impression that "you", the remaining part of your mind, is up against this foe who is "not you", and has a mind of its own. And it seems to have power over you, is causal, has will, is making decisions that you do not want.

There is no such thing. There is only YOUR MIND pretending to be two minds. Your have a split mind. You are divided against yourself. That means you are UNCERTAIN about who and what you are, are not loving yourself WHOLLY, and there is some belief in separation and denial in your mind which is making it SEEM as if a separate mind is attacking you.

So if that sickness is actually something YOU ARE DOING TO YOURSELF, and if that sickness is actually coming from your mind, and that "enemy" that you perceive is actually YOU, because you have regarded yourself as a sinner or attacker or vicious ego or separate sinner, then by you RECLAIMING this part of your mind into your whole self, you are alleviating and taking back and undoing this split in your mind.

So now if there is no split in your mind, this sickness has no mind to drive it. It has no mind to believe in it, because the sickness is just a symptom of SEPARATION, ie the idea that your mind is separate from itself. Or that there are two of you. Or that there are two decisions being made. Or two wills competing against each other. You are simply fighting with yourself.

So then, to the degree that you believe this separate cause/mind is out there and not you, to that degree you will think you have to "fight with it", and rise up against it, or find the power to attack it, having made it real, in order to free yourself from it. But that now means, you are attacking this other part of your mind, attacking your enemy, and thus attacking yourself.

Because that separate "source of will" out there, or in the body, is actually YOU. So to go against it simply reinforces the presence of the "sickness", or the symptoms, because the symptoms are just showing you that there is separation in the mind or you are attacking yourself. To attack the attack is not healing.

So what needs to happen only, is your RECOGNITION that the will and power and mind which you PERCEIVE as being "not in you" and "beyond your control" and "not you" and "I did not choose this" and "I am not causing this", must be TAKEN BACK, and reintegrated into your identity and your whole self, so that you are no longer attacking yourself or at odds with yourself. So that you are WHOLE MINDED, or SINGLE MINDED. That also means, so that you love yourself.

There is no enemy. There is no separate external cause. It's YOU! Take your power back. Nothing has power over you other than the power YOU GIVE IT by putting YOUR SELF INTO IT, by giving yourself away, through disownership, denial, and irresponsibility. You take what is in you - will, power, mind, causality, and push it away from you. Then it shows up as an enemy willing against you. No wonder! So now you need to take that back, reclaim the power, re-own yourself, stop denying yourself and be whole. This wholeness is healing. This wholeness undoes the belief in the SPLIT in your mind, and that split is the sole cause behind all symptoms of sickness.

This therefore means two very important things.

1) The symptoms of sickness can ONLY show up when your mind is split and divided against itself, and it is only by seeing part of your OWN WILL outside of you, against you, that you have level confusion and thus separation beliefs and sickness shows up. Also death. So you are the ONLY CAUSE OF SICKNESS AND DEATH.

2) When your mind is whole and not divided and is not seeing part of itself as outside of itself, THERE CANNOT BE ANY SICKNESS SHOWING UP. It *MUST* disappear. "Illusions recognized must disappear." Once you've taken yourself back and owned up to things and accepted the truth, there CANNOT BE SICKNESS OR DEATH.

Sickness cannot linger around. It's not like, ok, you fucked up and made a mess of things and sickness resulted, and now you get your mind into a happy place, and now you have to "live with" the results or consequences of your mistake. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! No fucking way. This is NOT what the course is teaching at all, and many people believe this IS what the course says - that you must become at peace with whatever shit happens. NO! You must STOP MAKING SHIT HAPPEN.

The condition of your body is a DIRECT REFLECTION of the state of your mind. "A broken body is proof the mind has not been healed." "The mind must be stronger than the body, every miracle demonstrates this". Sickness cannot last when the guilt behind it removed, making sickness impossible to return. A body not used for attack CANNOT BE SICK NOR CAN IT DIE.

It's all about you being the enemy of yourself, you having split-off parts of your mind which are seeming to "will against you", but it's really YOU WILLING AGAINST YOU. That means YOU OWN THE POWER that is causing sickness to happen. And that means YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR MIND and stop making the sickness show up.

"You made sickness and death and can therefore abolish both."

This is LITERAL. A sick body proves the mind is still sick. The body cannot show up as sick or dead if the mind is whole. Period. Anyone who if REALLY FULLY Integrated the whole of their mind fragments will no longer have level confusion and will no longer express a sick body from the mind, thus demonstrating a perfectly healed and healthy body, to PROVE that the mind REALLY IS believing that it is the SINGLE CAUSE of the body, more powerful than the body, and is thus miraculous.

Sickness must go. It is a lie. There is no such thing as real sickness or sickness that should remain while you wake up. If the body is still sick YOU ARE NOT AWAKE. If the body still dies YOU ARE NOT AWAKE. Reclaim all of yourself and you will regain awareness of immortality AND DEMONSTRATE IT.

Your only enemy is yourself. You are the only cause of everything you experience. You are doing this to yourself, and can choose again.

Minds are not separate, they are joined. We are part of a collective, which is connected by the Christ Mind. My mind contains your mind, and your mind contains my mind.

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."

Because our minds are WITHIN each other, what I choose to do with MY mind, IS in fact a PART OF your mind choosing it also. What I seem to choose "for myself", I am choosing for BOTH of us. This reflects the course teaching that "nothing is for yourself alone."

If I choose to recognize the unity of our minds, while you are attempting to see our minds as disconnected/separate, you will not be able to do so because a unified view is stronger than a separating one. Thus I can prevent you from being sick.

If I agree that you are sick because I also want to be sick, then together we both consent to being separate and nothing prevents this separateness, so we both enter into sickness together.

Similarly if we have both entered into a sickness of mind together, we have entered into "vulnerability", and now it will appear that I can negatively influence your mind, but only by reinforcing and playing upon and amplifying what you already believe yourself. It's a kind of consenting to be affected.

It is also true that mind can express the power of God, which has the power to heal and to enlighten. You actually DO have the power to CAUSE mind to change. You can influence the minds of others, and they can influence your mind.

This is why when you are healed in some way, your healing also heals others to some degree, because they are part of you. And when you have healing thoughts, these thoughts go out to the whole sonship and give it healing, just as thoughts of attack attack the whole sonship - or try to.

It's because our minds are joined that there are no private thoughts. We are permanently in a kind of "mind-meld" where we are WITHIN each other's minds. And that means there is this kind of tug-of-war situation, or a link, whereby if I lift my mind up your mind will be dragged up as well.

When Jesus chose the resurrection and returned to heaven and holiness, his awakening INFLUENCED all of us. We are all effectively less insane because Jesus, who is a PART OF US, is now very sane. And his mind is giving our minds strength.

It is because your mind has POWER and IS part of other minds, that the responsible choices you make with YOUR mind is "on behalf of" the whole sonship. And influences everyone.

It is because our minds are joined that we have ACCESS to each other. It is because our minds are joined that we can INFLUENCE each other. It is because our minds are joined that we can HEAL each other, as well as try to reinforce each other's insanity. It is because our minds are joined that we HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY and are our brother's keeper.

While other minds, which are part of US, are not freed from ego, neither are we. This necessarily means that we cannot rest, and have work to do on behalf of the sonship and the atonement plane, which is NOT DONE, until EVERY single mind returns to the sharing of oneness in God.

The easiest analogy is that we are like SIAMESE TWINS, two beings whose brains are joined together for example. We therefore are DEPENDENT on each other, and what either one chooses affects the other. This is because of the law of God that everyone is one and everything is shared.

It is because of this that a MIRACLE can heal others and raise them from death!

"You once said that souls cannot rest until everyone has found salvation. This happens to be true."

"My Atonement was for the canceling out of all sins (i.e., lack of love) which human beings could not otherwise correct."

"YOU CAN REMEMBER THIS FOR ALL THE SONSHIP. Do not allow your brother not to remember, for his forgetfulness is YOURS. But YOUR remembering is HIS, for God cannot be remembered alone."

"I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my seeing."

"I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts."

"The idea for today is obviously the reason why your seeing does not affect you alone."

"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."

"But you are never healed alone. And legions upon legions will receive the gift which you receive when you are healed."

"That is why they need your remembrance of Me and Him who created Me. Through this remembrance you can change THEIR minds about themselves, as I can change YOURS. Your minds are so powerful a light that you can look into theirs and enlighten them, as I can enlighten yours."

"Today we are again emphasizing the fact that minds are joined. This is rarely a wholly welcome idea at first, since it seems to carry with it an enormous sense of responsibility, and may even be regarded as an "invasion of privacy." Yet it is a fact that there are no private thoughts."

"Miracles seem unnatural to the ego, because it does not understand how SEPARATE minds can influence each other. Nor COULD they do so. But minds cannot BE separate. This other self is PERFECTLY aware of this. And thus it recognizes that miracles do NOT affect ANOTHER'S mind, only its OWN. They always change YOUR mind. There IS no other."

"No mind is sick until another mind AGREES that they are separate. And thus, it is their JOINT decision to be sick."

"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."

"People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally AFRAID of them."

"The reason why people are afraid of ESP, and so often react against it, is because they KNOW that thought can hurt them. Their OWN thoughts have made them vulnerable."

"Casting spells" merely means "affirming error", and error is lack of love. When man projects this onto others, he DOES imprison them, but only to the extent that he reinforces errors they have already made. This distortion makes them vulnerable to the curse of others, since they have already cursed themselves. The miracle worker can only bless, and this undoes the curse and frees the soul from prison."

"Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

"By denying his mind any destructive potential, and reinstating its purely constructive powers, he has placed himself in a position where he can undo the level confusion of others. The message which he then gives to others is the truth that THEIR MINDS are really similarly constructive, and that their own miscreations cannot hurt them. By affirming this, the miracle worker releases the mind from over-evaluating its own learning device (the body), and restores the mind to its true position as the learner."

"Healing is an act of thought by which two minds perceive their oneness, and become glad."

"He MUST heal his perception in this respect. He MUST work a miracle on behalf of himself here (See the point about miracles as a perception corrector) before he can effect miracles as creative energizers, which they are."

"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."

"Every decision is made for the WHOLE SONSHIP, directed in and out, and influencing a constellation larger than anything you ever dreamed of."

"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."

"You are more than your brother's keeper."

"I 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."

Most people believe that death occurs when something outside of your control happens to the body. Some external cause, an act of nature, some environmental influence, a contaminated food, some attack by some external thing or person etc.

This belief is very strong because it is none other than the belief in separation, it is the authority problem, it is the belief in magic, it is level confusion, it's what happens when you believe you can go against God's will - you start to perceive there is a separate will (God's) that is working against your will.

The belief in "inevitable death" is the belief in God's wrath and the inevitability of the consequences of SIN! The innocent have no reason to die!

It's fairly simple to explain that YOUR MIND IS RESPONSIBLE for absolutely everything that happens to your body!

"The mind is responsible for every condition of the body."

"The body is the IDEA (in the mind) of sin, made flesh and projected outwards (by the mind)."

The belief that the body is CAUSED BY something ELSE other than the mind... no matter what that cause seems to be, IT IS NOT TRUE.

The body is not COMING FROM the external world. It is coming from WITHIN. The mind within is projecting the body outwards. It is the ONLY CAUSE OF THE BODY.

The entire point of the course is becoming aware that you are 100% responsible, in mind, for every single thing you choose and everything that happens, such that there is absolutely NO wiggle room for some other stray "causes" to influence you, in any way, on any level.

"I am not a victim of the world I see" proves this. "The world is but an effect" proves this. "There is nothing that can bring oppression or make you ill or weak or afraid" proves this.

THERE IS NO EXTERNAL CAUSE OF DEATH. EVER.

That means the mind is 100% responsible for whether or not the body lives or dies. "No-one dies unless he chooses to do so." "No-one dies without their own consent." This is very clear. It's a BLACK AND WHITE decision. Either you choose to MAKE the body die by killing it with YOUR EGO, or you dissolve the ego and love the body and CAUSE IT to be healthy and alive and INCAPABLE of suffering.

Many ACIM people believe that there is some kind of separation between the mind and the body. And many popular teachers have taught that you must transcend the body and that it doesn't matter because it's not who you are. And this has also led people to believe that whatever state the body is in, IT DOESN'T MATTER, and therefore you can be at peace IN SPITE OF (and should) any sickness that is showing up. THIS IS BULLSHIT! Who the fuck put the sickness there?! YOU DID. "You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both"!

This is nothing short of the belief that there is STILL an external cause that can produce effects in you and therefore influence the body AGAINST YOUR WILL, causing the body to BECOME sick and suffer and die. It is none other than the ego belief that the body becomes sick through ANY reason OTHER THAN that YOU CHOSE IT. It is the conviction that sickness and death arise "on their own" through some "natural" bullshit cause "separate from you" ie separate from the reach of your own mind. If that's the case, your mind is STILL IMPRISONED in the body because it has not fully opened to sharing and extending and BEING EVERYWHERE.

This is what we have to own up to. The body's condition is 100% totally UNDER YOUR CONTROL. Your mind projects it, makes it, makes it suffer or well. It has no mind of its own, no will of its own, and no say in the matter. It is JUST A TOOL. It's a teaching device and a communication device. That's all. It does not live or die of its own will. Nor does it get sick by itself or as the result of anything beyond your mind. YOU ARE responsible for whether it is sick or healthy, and whether it is alive or dead. And if you do not OWN that responsibility, you ARE CHOOSING TO DISOWN YOURSELF, and that IS AN ACTIVE DECISION TO DIE. And death will result.

There are no exceptions. The body literally cannot enter into sickness in any form without the mind attacking it or using it for attack. And when you stop using it for attack it becomes healthy. THIS IS GUARANTEED. People believe all too strongly that the body has some kind of permanent existence of its own, its own "history", its own continuation, its own identity, and that therefore it exists independently. IT DOES NOT. It is nothing but a SYMBOL in your mind. It has to OBEY YOU. If it dies, you must have commanded it to die. If it lives, you must have commanded it to live.

The body is a MEDIUM through which you communicate. If you send SHIT through it, it becomes clogged up with shit which interferes with communication and makes the body sick. If you send LOVE through it, the love breaks down and heals the shit and clears it away, restoring clarity. Mind that is extending love IS A HEALER, it heals the body, it doesn't just let it sit there suffering and dying. It ACTIVELY HEALS IT.

THIS HAS TO BE SO. It is the principle of resurrection. God's love HEALS, and restores to life that which HAD BEEN DEAD. In order to do that, love has to have a MIRACULOUS QUALITY of being able to RAISE THE DEAD, ie GIVE LIFE TO that which was dead. YOU, as a son of God, in a dream, could not even get back TO God, having sinned, unless LOVE was able to in some way HEAL YOU and UNDO the symptoms of separation. Love heals. Love shines away darkness and sickness and death are darkness.

LOVE RESURRECTS THE BODY and sustains it in perfect health indefinitely so long as it is useful. "The mind, being sane, heals the body."

So it doesn't matter how much you made the body suffer and be sick and get close to death, THAT CAN BE REVERSED BY LOVE. And this is why the body's condition can therefore be restored to HEALTH (the ego opposes health in every way), and MUST and WILL automatically be restored to health when the mind is healthy.

YOU CANNOT STAY DEAD WHEN YOU APPROACH RESURRECTION!

Resurrection means ONLY LIFE IS REAL and death is an illusion and therefore you demonstrate THERE IS ONLY LIFE IN YOU and no death!

That makes the body a temporarily purified and HOLY device for communicating to your brothers and to bring God's love/word to them, which *guarantees* the body's health.

There is no other power or cause which can interfere with this mechanic. There is no such thing as an external threat or danger. The secret to salvation is that you do EVERYTHING to yourself, and if you do not CHOOSE TO HURT YOURSELF, you cannot be hurt. "You cannot be hurt unless you choose to hurt yourselves."

Therefore NOTHING ELSE besides you can cause your body to be sick or dead. And so if you do not choose sickness or death, THEY DO NOT OCCUR and become impossible.

How else, by making sickness and death impossible, could you ever reach a state of atonement and resurrection where you can NO LONGER DIE and you escape death forever? How do you think that is possible, other than for you to have TOTAL POWER OVER ALL CAUSES OF DEATH? Which means, simply recognizing YOU were the only cause of suffering EVER in your existence, and if you do not hurt yourself you WILL NEVER SUFFER AGAIN and will not hurt the body.

This is what "heaven is a choice I must make" means... you MUST CHOOSE NOT TO DIE by embracing a reality of ONLY LIFE. "Swear not to die you holy son of God!!!!"

And then there is nothing that can take that away from you. This makes the body INCAPABLE OF DYING, and therefore it will remain so long as you find it useful. You cannot make it go away by KILLING it, that is not an option. You cannot make it die in order to drop it! If you think it will just die in time "on its own" you are mistaken. YOU MUST ATTACK IT in order to make it sick or dead, and you WILL NOT attack it if you are sane. So how can it die?

You have to make it DISAPPEAR by shining it away with your mind USING LOVE. This is the loving end of the body and the dream of death is NEVER left by death, only by truth and love.

If you choose to die, that's your choice. It's not because of anyone else or anything else in the world. And it is failure. It is failure to reach resurrection and therefore is failure to reach the COMPLETION of the curriculum. Death is a mistake. It is a WRONG ANSWER to the question of what is the truth. If you come up with this answer, you MUST CARRY ON to learn what the real answer is. Death is never the answer. ONLY LIFE IS REAL.

A collection of A Course in Miracles quotes...

"The body can be made a home like this, BECAUSE it lacks foundation in the truth. And yet, BECAUSE it does, it can be seen as NOT your home, but merely as an aid to help you reach the home where God abides.

With THIS as purpose IS the ***body healed***. It is NOT used to witness to the dream of separation and disease. Nor is it idly blamed for what it did not do. It serves to help the HEALING of God's Son, and, for THIS purpose, it cannot BE sick. It will not join a purpose not your own, and you have chosen that it NOT be sick. All miracles are based upon this choice, and GIVEN you the instant it is made. No forms of sickness are immune, because the choice cannot be MADE in terms of form. The choice of SICKNESS seems to be a form, yet it is one, as is its opposite. And YOU are sick or well, accordingly."

----

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

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

----

"The miracle returns the CAUSE of fear to you who made it. But it ALSO shows that, HAVING no effects it is NOT cause, because the function of causation is to HAVE effects. And where effects are gone, there IS no cause. Thus is the ***body healed*** by miracles BECAUSE they show the mind MADE sickness, and employed the body to be victim, or EFFECT of what it made."

----

"I am as God created me"

"Holy indeed is he who makes these words his own; arising with them in his mind, recalling them throughout the day, at night bringing them with him as he goes to sleep. His dreams are happy and his rest secure; his safety certain and his ***body healed***, because he sleeps and wakens with the truth before him always. He will save the world because he gives the world what he receives each time he practices the words of truth."

----

"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."

----

"A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed."

----

"A gentler dream, in which his suffering was healed, and where his brother was his friend."

----

"Very simply, the resurrection is the overcoming or surmounting of death. It is a reawakening or a rebirth; a change of mind about the meaning of the world. It is the acceptance of the Holy Spirit's interpretation of the world's purpose; the acceptance of the Atonement for oneself. It is the end of dreams of misery, and the glad awareness of the Holy Spirit's final dream. It is the recognition of the gifts of God. It is the dream ***in which the body functions perfectly***, having no function except communication."

----

"Every situation, properly perceived, becomes an opportunity to heal the Son of God. And he is healed BECAUSE you offered faith to him, giving him to the Holy Spirit and RELEASING him from every demand your ego would make of him. Thus do you SEE HIM FREE, and in this vision does the Holy Spirit SHARE. And since He SHARES it He HAS given it, and so He healed THROUGH YOU. It is this JOINING Him in a UNITED purpose that MAKES this purpose real because YOU make it WHOLE. And this IS healing. ***The BODY is healed*** BECAUSE YOU CAME WITHOUT IT and joined the Mind in which all healing rests."

----

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

----

"Health is the witness unto health. As long as it is unattested, it remains without conviction. Only ***when DEMONSTRATED*** has it BEEN proved, and MUST compel belief. No-one is healed through double messages. If you wish ONLY to be healed, you heal. Your single PURPOSE makes this possible."

----

"The body, then, is not the source of its own health. Its condition lies solely in your interpretation of its function."

----

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and ***the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die.*** When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions that are responsible for the body's condition."

----

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

----

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

----

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

----

"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.***"

----

"***Your health*** is a result of your desire to see your brother with no blood upon his hands, nor guilt upon his heart made heavy with the proof of sin. And what you wish is GIVEN you to see."

----

"The body needs NO healing (directly). But the mind that thinks it IS a body is sick indeed! And it is here that Christ sets forth the remedy. His PURPOSE ***folds the body in His light, and fills it with the holiness*** that shines from HIM. And nothing that the body says or does but makes HIM manifest."

----

"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. And ***no-one dies without his own consent***. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

----

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

----

"Sickness is anger taken out upon the body."

----

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt."

----

"A guiltless mind cannot suffer. The mind, being sane, heals the body."

In A Course in Miracles, in the beginning, you are safe in God, happily co-creating with Him. Then along comes the tiny mad idea. The authority problem forms, level confusion begins, you go into the separation and the idea of real sin is given belief.

Believing that sin is possible, has reality, has occurred producing real effects, and is irreversible, is an unforgiving attitude. If you were to be forgiving you'd recognize that sin is impossible and there is no sin - that you remain innocent. But without forgiveness you immediately enter into the belief that sin is real.

At this point, you are already attacking yourself. You have condemned yourself by believing that you really sinned against God. You now have an unwillingness to forgive yourself. This sets up a chain reaction whereby, since you sinned, and you did it, you must be guilty of it. And since you are guilty, you deserve punishment.

This is all a judgement that you are placing on yourself. It has nothing to do with other people. Just the simple belief that you really sinned is enough to condemn yourself to death. Actually death is a completely logical conclusion if sin is real, and until the sin is undone, you will seek to destroy yourself for what you did.

So the mere act of believing sin is real is actually an attack upon yourself, a condemnation. And this automatically is going to lead to you believing that you should be punished. It will even make sense to you that you should be punished. You will agree that punishment is called for, because of your guilty nature.

If you believe in your guilt you're going to continue the process of self attack. You will allow yourself to be hurt, because you will agree with punishment as if it should be happening. You won't resist it or defend yourself against it. You'll welcome suffering and want retribution against yourself. And when you arrange for others to seem to play the part of victimizer, punisher or abuser, you are secretly wanting to be the victim because you think you deserve it.

But the more dangerous aspect here is, it isn't really others or the world or God that are going to enact this vengeance for you and upon you. It's you. Your own belief that you sinned and are guilty will compel you to believe you should be hurt. You are starting to hate yourself and find yourself unworthy of love. And you will start trying to hurt yourself. It will make sense to you that you should suffer and you will actively try to make it happen because it seems justified.

As this develops you are becoming more and more suicidal. What is suicide other than self attack, self punishment, and an attempt to destroy yourself? We should make clear here that the entire ego thought system is an attempt to destroy your identity. It's an attack on God's Son, on His immortality. It's an attempt to deny that you exist and destroy yourself. So the whole ego thought system is suicidal and self-defeating from the beginning.

This essentially is the cause of all death. Every single death, no matter the seeming circumstances or appearances of causes, is solely the result of the belief that sin is real. And all forms of sickness are symptoms of the fear of God's wrath, the desire to suffer, and an attempt to project your sin onto others in a futile effort to deny that you believe you did it.

"The wages of sin is death."

"No one dies wihtout their own consent"

"You cannot die unless you choose to do so."

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

So anyone who believes they really sinned, is suicidal, and is choosing to die. They are consenting to punishment, because they believe they deserve it for what they did. Every single dead body in the history of the human race has been caused by the belief in sin. It's essentially a death wish, a wish for the death of yourself as consequence of your sinfulness.

If you consider the belief that you sinned against God, attacking Him against His will by usurping his power, playing God and having authority over Him, you will now believe that God is entirely justified in vengeance. In essence, you will believe that God wants you dead - that your death is God's will. And this will then lead to the belief that you cannot go home, you are not welcome in Heaven, sin cannot be undone, and there is no choice at all.

Based on this a death wish is formed, producing the sense of the inevitability of death. It's the belief that returning to Eternal Life is no longer an option, so the only thing you can do is suffer and die. This makes death the only path you can seemingly follow. And it's this belief that makes death seem inevitable. The driving force is your own belief that you really sinned, which is already a way to condemn yourself to death.

The good thing is, that in truth you did not really sin, God is unchanged and nothing has really happened. You have only dreamed of all this and there is no real sin at all. Nothing real can be threatened so the idea of sinning against something real is nonsense. This means that if you can recognize your sinlessness, which is accepting the Atonement truth, the belief in sin is uprooted at its core. There is no foundation for sin when innocence is recognized, and this is how the atonement cures you by proving sin doesn't exist.

"Only atonement can be said to cure."

The good thing then is, that if you are willing to forgive yourself and recognize you never sinned, you are not guilty, and you are still loved by God, this opens up to the door to option B. You can now CHOOSE whether or not to go towards death or towards eternal life. Death becomes OPTIONAL. You recognize you don't HAVE to be sick or die, and you actually can choose never to die again. To never commit suicide.

By acknowledging you are welcome to return back Home to God, because you are forgiven and have never sinned, Real Life is on the cards again and you can choose it. Which means you can choose not to die! You can choose to experience eternal life, and never have to die again. To never again torture yourself, make yourself unhappy, suffer or make yourself sick. That you deserve to live and not die, because there is no sin or death and you are free.

"There is no death, the Son of God is free."

"I am still as God created me."

"There is no sin."

The acceptance of the Atonement is the end of suicide because it is the end of death. It is the end of the sense of inevitability or "lack of another option". It's the reclaiming of the power to choose to accept the eternal life you already have. And it therefore signals the end of the need for sickness and death. Those who are innocent have not sinned, are not guilty, do not deserve to die, and thus death has no purpose.

The fact is then, that most of the people on this planet are suicidal. To varying degrees, we're all trying to die. And most believe death is inevitable because they have not forgiven the belief in sin entirely.

"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."

No-one deserves to die, and no-one needs to die. In truth no one CAN die, but we can confuse ourselves with things that seem to.

"You are immortal and you cannot die, but you can confuse yourself with things that do."

Given you cannot die and are permanently innocent, it is pointless to try to make death happen. This is why Jesus is asking you to "swear not to die, you holy Son of God." Only those who are committing suicide want death and thus choose it. Those who are awakening to truth, forgiving themselves and are preparing to go Home to God, MUST relinquish the attraction to and need for death. And this automatically melts away as the guilt and sin disappear. Without sin there is no death. And without death there is no world of sin.

"Without the idea of death there is no world."

If you have not sinned you are not guilty. If you are not guilty you do not need to be punished. If you do not need to be punished you have no basis for hurting yourself. If you stop hurting yourself you never have to suffer or die ever again. This is the secret of salvation.

This is a course in LIFE, in resurrection, and returning to your immortality. It is the end of all suicidal death and the restoration of eternal life. Death is a failure to forgive. And succeeding in forgiveness opens the gates of heaven.

The whole problem with false perception is really just one of confusion about "what is the cause." Or more to the point, who is causing it. We could rephrase that as "I don't know what God (cause) is."

In the separation there was a disassociation from the role of "causer" or chooser (creator), and the ownership and responsibility of this causing was projected onto others. We then ended up in an extremely confused state of not being able to clearly discern, "who is doing what to whom?"

In the ego thought system, cause and effect are completely reversed, things which are true seem false, things which are false seem true. There is a breakdown of the Golden Rule, in which anything that's true is true of both of us.

It's replaced with the ego's idea that what is true for me is not true for you. Which really is another way of saying, cause and effect are separate. I can cause you without being affected. And you can cause me without being affected. I can accuse you of doing something I did not do, and thereby believe I am innocent while you're guilty.

This is the ego's idea of "getting away with murder", because it believes it can cause things to happen and escape the consequences. So when we get into "its you not me", or "you did this to me", any kind of blame or finger-pointing or scapegoating or believing that "cause" is outside of you, you will instantly go into a victim role. And victims are always confused about who is attacking them.

In that confused state of ego reactions, it always seems like it's someone else doing this to us, some external event happened, some unforseen circumstance, some unwanted happening

Usually you'll feel devoid of all responsibility for causing it. ie it'll seem like you didn't choose any of it, and you don't want it. But this is because you have no clue whatsoever what is really causing anything. And so random fingers point at random targets hoping some mud will stick.

As you apply forgiveness, ie you become more honest and less in denial about your contribution, you start to sort out exactly WHO is causing stuff to happen. At first it seems like it's everyone except you, but then gradually each time you see that YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF, or was something you did in fact choose, or that it did have an effect on you, the picture starts to become clearer.

The more you can take responsibility for choosing the more you will discern clearly and recognize that you are the cause of your suffering. You will also start to notice that the ego's breaking of God's laws does not work, and in fact when you do attack or scapegoat another you do NOT escape the consequences. It makes you feel guilty, it frightens you, it upsets and stresses you out.

Eventually, there becomes a clear association between "being a victim" and "attacking yourself". A clear line of causation from what you are choosing and the effect YOU experience as a result. You'll see it's not possible to blame another without feeling blamed. It's not possible to judge without feeling judged. It's not possible to attack without feeling attacked. And it's not possible to accuse someone of being the cause of you without you feeling like a vulnerable victim.

And so then it becomes obvious, that you feel like a victim BECAUSE you positioned yourself as one, seeing yourself in that role, and wanting to do so in order to try and get a payoff of scapegoating. But you no longer can pretend that your attacks on another don't hurt yourself. You can't help but notice that the instant you try to shift guilt to someone else, you will immediately feel that familiar weakness, threat and lack of safety that accompanies a victim mentality.

It then becomes an unavoidable no-brainer. That is, you clearly recognize and distinguish, whenever I attack, I feel attacked. Whenever I want to make someone out to be guilty, I feel like a victim. Whenever I try to be unforgiving, I feel unforgiven. It has a direct correlation, because I AM the cause of everything I experience, NOT the other person.

It then becomes harder to pretend to yourself that your attempted attacks on others have no effect on you. You are affected every time. You simply cannot maintain peace and happiness at the same time as being angry with someone. You can't truly honestly justify anger in any situation because you know that it's bullshit. And it'll become increasingly noticeable that you're bullshitting yourself as you sort out exactly who is causing everything you feel.

So then it becomes quicker and easier to catch yourself. You can see, well, as soon as I went to point a finger at someone and use them as a scapegoat, I felt like a victim under attack. Funny that. I made that happen. I gave myself that experience. And so I can choose again and withdraw that self-attack, that self-positioning of "I'm the victim here!". That demand that I be weak and vulnerable and recognized as a suffering frightened liar.

Since I then see that I do this to myself and it was very obvious that I did this, the entire "appeal" of playing the victim role withers away. There's no point to it when you can more accurately discern that it very much does hurt you. There are consequences. And so the challenge then is to no longer see yourself unfairly treated or as a victim of anyone or anything, recognizing that it's only when you do that you feel that way at all. And you no longer want to feel that way.

Fortunately since it's an inside job where you're the only one causing, and other people are never the cause of you AT ALL, it really boils down to your own willingness to admit to what you're doing to yourself and to want a better way. To prefer not suffering over suffering. To recognize that hurting hurts and attack attacks, rather than believing it does something else. Because in our confusion we don't even realize what the fuck we're doing to ourselves, and we end up killing ourselves in the name of self preservation.

True perception is accurate perception. It is recognition. It is awareness and discernment. It is the ability to SEE, clearly, what the truth of this situation is. What is really going on. Who is really causing and choosing. Where things really originate and what their effects actually are. It's the willingness and ability to not be blinded or confused by the ego temptation to think its one-sidedness can work. It's simply honesty and openness to the truth.

Who would hurt themselves unless they thought they weren't hurting themselves in doing so?

Who would hurt themelves once they recognized that they cannot be hurt unless they do so?

Who would hurt themselves if they recognized that even the slightest attempt to hurt others diminishes your own happiness?

Who would hurt themselves when joy and peace and love are the price?

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

"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. And no-one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

""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."

"This is a course in cause, not effect."

"The power to work miracles belongs to you."

In order to awaken spiritually, we have to take total responsibility for everything we experience. This is based on the core truth that we are immortal beings, and being immortal means nothing outside of you is responsible or capable of causing you. You have total freedom and you hold the reins of destiny. You are only ever an effect of God, and nothing else.

This means that we cannot be attacked, hurt, destroyed, made sick, upset, suffer, be killed off, or altered in any way. Literally there is nothing in the entire universe which can do anything to us whatsoever.

"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 of this, we have to learn to regard the whole world as being not responsible for anything we are experiencing. The world cannot have hurt us, it cannot have attacked, it cannot be guilty or sinful, and it certainly cannot end our eternal life.

In any way that we find ourselves believing that something in the world is responsible for how we feel, what we experience, what happens, or any notion of victimhood, we are lost in a state of irresponsibility. This means we are disowning our divine responsibility to be immortal and are pretending that it's someone else's job to own the power.

Being irresponsible means giving your power away to someone or something else other than yourself, so that you can play the role of being powerless, which means portraying yourself as a victim. The victim role includes all forms of belief in being attacked, hurt, damaged, made to be sick or dead, any upset, any emotional reaction, and any belief in being unworthy of absolute permanence.

Jesus is telling us that our true nature is to be a completely powerful, causal, purely creative being, who exercises the will and power of God to extend and create life. There is no room in this role for the slightest measure of powerlessness or victimhood. It is entirely a position of OUTPUT, of radiance shining outward, of extension without holding back. This outward expression is so strong, it is the strength of the spirit and it makes you utterly invulnerable. It shines outward with such power that nothing can enter to harm you.

"NOTHING can prevail against a Son of God who commends his Spirit into the hands of His Father."

In victimhood, or false perception, we reverse the cause and effect and believe we are at the effect of something external, that we are taking INPUT from the world. This is entirely backwards and false. It is a delusion to believe it, and it is nothing more than a state of insanity and irresponsibility. It means you are not owning your power, and instead are giving it away to the world to try to make yourself a victim. If the world can do anything to you at all, you can be destroyed against God's will, which is impossible.

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

Our true functioning is deliberate and powerful. You look out from a state of innocence and holiness, making absolutely no attack (sin) against the world, knowing that it is nothing but your dream, coming from your mind, and is exactly how you want it. Nothing happens without you choosing it to happen, nothing happens against your will, and everything you decide is completely intentional with guaranteed effects. You are the dreamer of the dream, and you cannot hold it accountable for what you have caused it to do.

"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."

"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."

"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."

"My self is ruler of the universe." This is not a grandiose ego claim or a fantasy. You have power over the whole world, capable of surmounting, reversing and undoing death, of breaking all the laws of physics and defying its whole reality.

"What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it."

Consider for a moment the idea that the world is not responsible for anything you feel. It has done nothing to you. You are not frightened by spiders down the side of the furniture. You are not upset about elections. You are not grieving the loss of an external body. You are not damaged by food or weather. You are not upset about groups of judgemental people. Nothing whatsoever in the world has any power or causation over you whatsoever.

You cannot be hurt by anything in the world because you are not in the world. You are in heaven in God as immortal spirit. You are not a body. The world is your dream which you are putting there on purpose, and it does not exist without your wanting it. You are not upset for any reason that you think. No-one in the world has ever done anything to cause anything you are feeling or experiencing. Your upsets have nothing to do with anyone and solely to do with what you are doing to yourself. This is the secret of salvation.

"Only the self-accused condemn."

"It can be but myself that I crucify."

"I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts."

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die. I am not a body. I would recognize my reality today."

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do."

"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 soon as you begin to believe the world is the cause of you in any way, you are being a victim. You are disowning your power of decision and causation, are projecting it out and accusing something else of causing you. This requires a blocking of access to your power, which makes you feel powerless and weak and afraid as the world looms over you. But it is your own power looming over itself. You have to take back that power.

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt."

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

"If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of suffering."

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

"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." "I am in danger nowhere in the world."

Ultimately our aim of reaching true perception and moving beyond the world entails a complete ownership of who and what we are, a complete identification as Christ, a total relinquishment of every form of victimhood, a total letting go of all attempts to suffer. This includes letting go of all notions of being upset by the world, attacked, threatened, in danger, made to be sick or unhappy, or made to die. This includes ceasing to believe in death and dying and destruction and murder.

The world is not responsible for ANYTHING you are experiencing. No-one is guilty. Nothing is to blame. You're doing this all to yourself and you can stop whenever you like. Whatever you're experiencing you have chosen and you want. Your prayers are constantly being answered and you are always receiving what your giving is asking for. You can end this game of death and victimhood at any time and go home to God. "This is the ONLY thing that you need do for vision, happiness, release from pain, and the COMPLETE escape from sin, ALL to be given you. Say ONLY this, but MEAN it with NO reservations, for here the power of salvation lies:

"I AM responsible for what I see. I CHOSE the feelings I experience, and I DECIDED ON the goal I would achieve. And everything that SEEMS to happen TO me, I ASKED FOR and received as I had asked."

Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done TO you. Acknowledge but that YOU have been mistaken, and ALL effects of your mistakes will disappear."

"There is no death because the Son of God is like his Father. Nothing you can do can change Eternal Love. Forget your dreams of sin and guilt, and come with me instead to share the resurrection of God's Son. And bring with you all those whom He has sent to you to care for as I care for you."

"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. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you. Yet when you accord it mercy, will its mercy shine on you."

If you do not choose to die you will never die, and if you do choose to die it will be fake. There is no death, the son of God is free.

"Swear not to die, thou holy Son of God! You make a bargain that you cannot keep. The Son of Life cannot BE killed. He is immortal as his Father. What he is cannot be changed. He is the only thing in all the universe that MUST be One."

If you're like me, you probably regard your "self", whatever sense of self you have as "me", this self that seems to perceive and have emotions, as being NOT the ego. And you probably regard the ego as something tucked away in a dark corner that surfaces once in a while, something that you don't think of as "being" all the time. Surely your general day-to-day "self", that you refer to as "me", is not the ego?

But what if the entire sense of who you've regarded yourself as this whole time, who you call by your name, including all your emotions and egoic thoughts, all sense of a self that can suffer in any way, IS the ego? And what if that is not real, and your entire sense of being this self that suffers and feels unhappy and can be hurt is not really the real you?

Jesus hints that our personalities are superficial...

"The surface traits of God's teachers are not at all alike. They do not look alike to the body's eyes, they come from vastly different backgrounds, their experiences of the world vary greatly, and their superficial "personalities" are quite distinct."

In truth we're supposed to be experiencing a state of immortality and perfection where we are permanently happy, unaffected, invulnerable, incapable of suffering in any way. Our real self cannot suffer or die, or cannot suffer loss, cannot grieve, cannot be upset, cannot be unhappy or lacking peace in any way.

ACIM tells tells us that "Happiness must be constant" and "God's will for me is perfect happiness" and "Reality is a constant state" and "Immortality is a constant state." If your happiness is meant to be constant, how is it possible that you EVER experience unhappiness? It also tells us that we cannot really suffer, and whatever is experiencing the suffering cannot be my self. As if we have a sort of imposter self, a second self, that we've identified with as who we are, but isn't who we really are.

"The self you made is not the Son of God. Therefore this self does not exist at all. And anything it seems to do and think means nothing."

"The self you made, evil and full of sin, is meaningless. Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God, and light and joy and peace abide in you."

"I am in the likeness of my creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die." Also lesson 248 says "Whatever suffers is not part of me. What grieves is not myself. What is in pain is but illusion in my mind."

Șo if "I" seem to be having upsets of any kind, unhappiness, sadness, loss, grief, guilt, shame, fear, anger, anything that isn't constant permanent joy, that "stuff" cannot really be a part of my real self. My real self cannot suffer and cannot be unhappy. My real self cannot experience any kind of loss or deprivation or guilt or anything less than perfection.

So if that's true, then what is this self that seems to suffer? And I don't mean some remote hidden ego, I mean the very self, out in the open every day, that you think of as "you" this whole time. On a daily basis, going through life reacting to things, having upset emotions, feeling horrible about stuff, being unhappy, perceiving threats, etc. It's way more out in the open and much closer to "you" than you might have realised. You're being it every single day.

This "you" that you're being, this you that suffers and is unhappy and has grief and anger and so on, that experiences any kind of suffering, THAT is ego (being identified with ego). Or more accurately, who you are has identified WITH a "suffering self", and you see yourself AS IT, as a self that suffers. A self that can feel hurt, a self that has pain, a self that grieves losses, a self that can be in fear or guilt. When "you" suffer, ego is suffering, and YOU are believing IT is who and what you are, as if it is YOUR suffering.

Somehow there has been a mixup, where you currently find yourself "constantly" experiencing various problems and reactions and upset feelings, thinking that these feelings are a part of yourself, that it's even POSSIBLE for you to have such feelings.

How can an immortal perfect loving constantly joyful being ever have even the slightest unhappiness as a part of themselves? They can't. So it then begs the question, this "self" that seems to suffer, which is the combination of your mind plus a false identification WITH ego/body/suffering, can it really be who and what you are? Is this suffering self really you? Can YOU really suffer at all?

This you that you've been all your life and think of as normal, that has emotional reactions and instability and fears and guilts. Can this possibly be a part of yourself as God created you? Jesus says that you cannot suffer and you cannot die. He says you cannot be unhappy and you cannot experience loss. How if you are experiencing loss and are unhappy, is that really YOU that is experiencing it? Or are you experiencing a false sense of self identity, bound to some kind of egoic construct, that sees "itself" (yourself) as even capable of suffering?

If I am having grief and loss for example it feels like "I" am grieving, and I have the feelings, and I feel unhappy, and I have the emotions and I have the cries and I am the one who has had a loss. But this can't be true. My mind can't bring an "end" to the loss by trying to "get over it" as an ego-identified self, but it can dis-identify from that which believes in loss, and that indeed will end it.

So if there is a feeling of loss, it has to be false, and it cannot be a part of myself. If I feel like, or experience it like, "I" am the one who IS IN the loss, HAVING the loss, then I have identified with something that can't be a part of myself in truth. My real self cannot ever lose anything, because nothing real can be threatened.

In such a suffering situation it means my so-called "ego" is not tucked away hidden from sight in the background, it's something I am actively BINDING to and see myself as IN, like I'm wearing it, and have identified WITH it, as if I am trying to be ONE WITH IT, living out from it every second of every day.

And that puts it right in front of my face and even closer than that. It's lurking in plain sight in the very sense of false "self", in the sense of "I am suffering". That it's ME that is suffering. That's my identification with something false. God-given mind, believing falsely.

That's pretty eye opening because no longer does it mean that the ego is some background figure that rears its head occasionally. Even if it is, identifying WITH AND AS it, trying to BE an ego, binds me to it and makes me experience life as though I am suffering. I am the one who is feeling, I am the one who is upset. Only ego can be upset, and if I am UNITING with ego I will be upset as though it's my own upset. And that leads to unconsciousness - spiritual sleep.

So if we ask ourselves, who or what am I, and if there is a feeling of upset, can this feeling of upset really be a PART of me? Can it be mine? Can it possibly be me that is really suffering, if it's impossible for my constant divine self to suffer, ever? If who I really am can NEVER suffer in any way, how can I BE something that suffers, and how can the suffering be truly mine?

It then frames your egoic emotion reactions, yours stresses, as not really yours. How can these upset feelings be yours? Yes you are identified and "one with" the ego self that suffers and who sees itself as capable of suffering through its false narrow perception, but this is a false association. IT's suffering cannot be YOUR suffering unless your sense of identity is confused with it. We don't just have a little ego in the back of our minds, we are actively holding onto it and trying to BE it and regard it as us!

So now it brings into question, whether we should be distancing ourselves from, detaching from, whatever seems to be suffering, and from suffering itself. If we have upset feelings in any way, perhaps we need to be telling ourselves, these feelings are NOT a part of me, I cannot suffer, and therefore I cannot be having these feelings. I'm not having these feelings. And we must have chosen to have them if we've put them there.

That seems pretty radical, to just regard all upset emotions and sickness and suffering as impossible and not a part of you.

"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, and no one dies without his own consent."

If we are meant to be fully identified with and as immortal spirit, then we need to shift our identification away from this "suffering self". We can't BE a self that suffers if we are permanently holy. We can't be a self that is vulnerable and attackable, or frightenable, or capable of being guilty, or of experiencing loss and grief. Whoever or whatever is having that stuff, it can't be me or mine. And if it's there and I'm immersed in it so much that I feel like "its mine", I am unconscious and have identified with ego, and have forgotten who I am.

And that really brings into question, who are you really? Perhaps you are being FAR more ego than you thought. Perhaps every single day you are immersed in egotism and suffering and unhappiness. Perhaps your whole sense of identity is lost and wrapped up in living AS an egoic entity, seeing yourself as having emotions that are impossible in reality, as having forms of suffering that cannot affect your soul.

Perhaps you are much more ego-identified than you ever thought possible, and perhaps your whole sense of self, of who and what you are, is much more out of touch with your real self than you thoughts. Perhaps your real self is on some whole other level or dimension, and perhaps this self you're being every day is the self that is the "not me that lurks in the dark corner". To your real self, made of light, your everyday suffering self IS trying to be an ego. Who you have become, is not who you are.

Are we ready to identify fully with spirit, stop seeing ourselves as capable of suffering, bringing into question ALL ego emotions and reactions, and even questioning whether we are the self that we thought we were all this time? What if you are not you, and you are not being yourself right now, and you don't even know who you are?

"There is no statement that the world is more afraid to hear than this: I do not know the thing I am, and THEREFORE do not know what I am doing, where I am, or how to look upon the world and on myself." Yet in this learning is salvation born. And what you are will TELL you of Itself."

This is key to understanding what this world of spacetime is. The mind makes IMAGES of things. Pictures of things. Visual thoughts. They are along similar lines to imagination, or visualization. We produce pictures in the mind. This is also the same process as dreaming, and as hallucination.

We imagine things and imagine their form and appearance and picture them mentally. And as Jesus is saying, this same process was used to make physical bodies, and therefore also the physical universe.

This means that this world we're in, it's not really an "actual existence", or containing any real objects. It's in fact just a 3D thought-driven PICTURE, an image, like a 3d hologram, pictured and maintained in the mind, which LOOKS LIKE a world.

But a world that is merely an image, is imagined. A world which shows up as visual objects, is really just a collection of pictures. It's not at all the same as a real creation, which has substance and existence. It's a manufactured, wishful-thinking, hallucination, dream, projected visualization, taking on the shape of a planet in a galaxy. As a result of wanting to see it, and therefore of "daydreaming" it.

Obviously the things that you daydream don't really exist, although they seem to exist while you are dreaming them. The mind is basically inventing a world, picturing it, imagining what such a world might be like IF it really existed. But this is not the same as causing it TO exist. It's really just a blueprint or photograph of such a world. A "what if". Like if you were to imagine a pink elephant and see it in your mind.

The body was formed to use precisely this kind of seeing, focusing on images and believing them to be real. When in fact it's a form of hallucination. The body forms pictures and presents them like little photographs to the mind. Like a realtime 3d movie feed of an imagined artificial world.

This is how the world is nothing, even though it appears to be something. This is how the body is nothing, even though it seems to show up as a picture of form with a shape. It's not REALLY there, because dreaming of something is nowhere near the same as it actually existing permanently in reality. The whole world is just a mad idea.

"And what you SEE there, YOU will recognize as what it is; a picture of what YOU THOUGHT WAS REAL, and nothing more. For, BEHIND this picture, YOU WILL SEE NOTHING."

"The Holy Spirit offers you, to give to him, a picture of yourself in which there is NO pain and NO reproach at all."

"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."

"The picture of your brother that you see means nothing."

"The picture of your brother that you see is wholly absent, and has never been."

"The world I see is hardly the representation of loving thoughts. It is a picture of attack on everything and by everything."

"Forgiveness paints a picture of a world where suffering is over, loss becomes impossible and anger makes no sense."

"The picture of Heaven and eternity grows MORE convincing, as you look at it. And now, by REAL comparison, a TRANSFORMATION of both pictures can at last occur."

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

"Do you LIKE what you have made? A world of murder and attack, through which you thread your timid way through constant dangers, alone and frightened, hoping at most that death will wait a little longer, before it overtakes you, and you disappear. YOU MADE THIS UP. It is a picture of what you think YOU are; of how you SEE yourself."

"This sickly picture of yourself is carefully preserved by the ego, whose image it IS and which it loves, and placed OUTSIDE you, in the world." "Your picture of the world can only mirror what is within."

"The world you see is based on SACRIFICE of oneness. It is a picture of a COMPLETE disunity and total LACK of joining."

"No-one who makes a picture of himself omits this face, for he has need of it."

"And what are YOU who live within the world, except a picture of the Son of God in broken pieces, each concealed within a separate and uncertain bit of clay?"

"Perception seems to TEACH you what you see. Yet it but witnesses to what YOU taught. It is the outward picture of a wish, an image that you WANTED to be true."

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

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

"A sick and suffering you but represents your brother's guilt; the witness which you send, lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture YOU accept, if only it can serve to punish him."

"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."

"It is my own attack thoughts which give rise to this picture."

"Seen through understanding eyes the holiness of the world is all I see, for I can picture only the thoughts I hold about myself."

"Perception can make whatever picture the mind desires to see."

"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. From insane wishes comes an insane world. From judgment comes a world condemned. And from forgiving thoughts a gentle world comes forth"

"And when you think you see some value in an aspect or an image of the world, refuse to lay this chain upon your mind"

"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 to obscure the sun. The grimness of the symbol is enough to show it cannot co-exist with God. It holds an image of the Son of God in which he is "laid to rest" in devastation's arms, where worms await to greet him and to last a little while by his destruction."

"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."

"An idol is an image of your brother, which you would value MORE than what he IS. Idols are made that HE may be replaced, no matter what their form. "

"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."

"Parents do not create the image of the

ir children, though they may perceive images which they do create." "It is because the thoughts you think you think appear as images that you do not recognize them as nothing."

"My thoughts are images which I have made."

"The images I see reflect my thoughts."

"Let graven images you made to be the Son of God instead of what he is be worshipped not today."

"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."

"Once again, images are perceived, NOT known."

"Images cannot see."

"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. "

"Images are symbolic, and stand for something else."

"The concept of the self stands like a shield, a silent barricade before the truth, and hides it from your sight. All things you see are images because you look on them as through a barrier which dims your sight and warps your vision, so that you behold nothing with clarity."

In this world, it always seems as though we are at the effect of the world. As if the world is dreaming us, causing us, doing things to us, making us feel certain ways, triggering certain reactions.

When the world does something, the "ego" in us seems to react with various kinds of stress, emotions, fears, retaliations etc. Always it’s like being strapped into a ride where you have no say in what you feel or what your state of mind is. As though the world entirely dictates everything you experience.

What does the world have in store for you today? What problems is it going to slap you in the face with? In what way is it going to decide your fate? How it is going to upset you and shit on you and make you feel afraid? This is what it is set up to to do, all day every day.

False perception is a backwards perception. It literally feels like everything you experience is coming at you from the world. Your moods, your emotions, your reactions, your state of mind, whether you are happy or sad, or calm or upset, seems entirely at the whim of an external alien will.

The ego in us, is this part of mind that seems to just sit there and receive punishment. The world has some shit on store for you today? Fuck you. The world wants to crap all over your nice sense of security? Fuck you today. The world wants to decide everything’s just going to hit the fan all at once? Fuck you especially.

This is how it is set up. This is what happens in false perception. This is how we experience life, every day, when we believe that the world is the cause of us. That outside forces are shaping us. External events determine whether the day sucks to hell or whether it’s a "good one".

And so, in your mind, there’s this receiver of experience, the seeming passive and powerless and weak and victimized self, defenseless and vulnerable and completely at the effect of everything. That is the ego. That is a state of mind of false perception, of blindness, of being a victim 24/7. That the world is doing you.

To not question this, is to remain unaware of reality, light, truth, power and peace. To not question it is to simply be victimized all the time. Stuff just continues to go wrong, over and over and over again. Shit happens. Bad stuff goes down. Unexpected things break. There’s sudden emergencies. The world plots against you and wants you dead.

This is what the inner victim believes. And because it is the belief in this, it also plays the role of this. It is the desire to be victimized. It is the attempt to position oneself as at the effect of the world. To suffer. To have the world capable of doing things to you. To allow us to overpower you, upset you, shake you, disturb your peace, and take your freedom and happiness away.

It’s not easy to break out of this because this ego self, this receiver of punishment by the world, this sufferer and victim of an alien will, is practically wired into the world like a totally passive absorber of punishment. It sees the world as happening from the outside in, happening to it, not from it. Nothing is seen as coming out of it or as being caused by it or it being responsible for how anything is. This is the ego in all its selfishness and all its irresponsibility and the face of innocence.

This is how it’s wired. It’s like it’s made to be plugged into the world. The world is set up to send messages to it, and it is set up to receive the messages. And in particular it is set up to seem not to even interpret the messages, but to take them at face value. To believe it them, and to let the world define for itself what its truth is. It’s even set up so that whatever the world says it is doing to you, it does that to you, and you have the appropriate reaction according to the hierarchy of illusions.

If the world decides today to do something severe to you, the ego in you decides to go along with it blindly and suffer in the extreme. If the world decides to seem to give you a break, the ego in you decides you’re somehow being let off and given a break from the barrage of punishment. Only to expect that the next fuck-you is just around the corner.

But there is something very weird about this, because it is in fact very backwards. It’s completely unnatural for it to be backwards. It’s like living in the world in such a way, that you don’t see yourself as having any power to do anything, and only that you are to just lay down and let the world walk all over you. Like you are a piece of carpeting onto which the world can just shit as it pleases.

The outside seems to comes into you, people do stuff to you, others decide who and what you are, and the world dreams of you any way it wishes. You seem even to be made by other dream figures, and modified by them as life goes on. This is so strange and so backwards to experience "life" as though the external world is the cause of everything you are forever.

This is the fundamental, natural, corresponding and automatic arrangement of the nature of this world, and the nature of your ego. This is the special relationship, locked into form and dedicated to suffering and victimhood. Where your every relationship is founded on what you get and take from the world and what it does to you on your behalf.

This is how you are automatically wired, as a body identity, to experience the world as an automaton. To sense it, to have it tell you what is there, to have the world stimulate you from the outside in, and to define what your experience is. It transmits stuff into you from the outside and seems to tell you what there is to see and feel. And never does it attempt to challenge this arrangement or raise doubts about the world’s ability to dominate you.

To overcome this, to move into true perception, which requires not only the reversal of cause and effect in your entire though system, but also the total questioning of every way in which the world seems to do anything at all, you have to be willing to fly in the face of what seems "physically natural". To even go against the standard setup of the body senses. To be confronted with the attempt by the world to cause you, and to be uncaused by it. To disregard all temptations and not fall for the belief that sin is really happening to you. Because really this is a dream coming from you designed to make it look like it’s coming from itself.

This is the work and the challenge and the spiritual way out of hell. This is the forgiveness of the world. To stare the world in the face and recognize it is not coming AT you, but FROM you. To realize you have a say in it, you contribute, you choose, you consent, you cause, you have power, and you cannot be a victim. It is completely unnatural in terms of this world to attempts to do this, which is why it can seem so difficult to do it consistently. The world has no end of temptations and problems to offer you to distract you onto the slippery slopes of hell.

The truth then flies totally in the face of the world and is nothing like the world. The world is false. Truth offers a perspective which comes from the inside and extends outward through love rather than acting like a black hole of suffering. It ignores any suggestion that the world does anything to you or anyone, and is completely unaffected and unmoved by any and all occurrences and suggestions of attack happening. It is to stand in the onslaught of a river barraging you in your face and be solid like a rock, unmoved and unwavered by its endless attempted attack.

What you are is immovable, unchangeable, permanent, fixed, absolute, eternal, immortal, invulnerable, powerful, harmless, unassailable, perfect and causal. Asserting and expressing this at all times is the goal. You are not relative but absolute. You are not finite but infinite. You have power over this world and over all phenomenon, over the body and over space and time and matter and energy. You are real and the world is not. And only if it is not is there hope that you can overcome it.

There is a lot of resistance to this very radical part of ACIM, so let's look at it even more closely.

When you project sin onto others, you are accusing them of your own sins. You do this to dissociate from the sin, deny it and hide from it. You try to associate it WITH someone else, so that they are responsible for it, and you're let off the hook.

If you think of sin as CAUSE, you are trying to disown causal power and put it outside of yourself, making you AT THE EFFECT of it. You believe someone else is CAUSING you, affecting you. and deciding what you are.

However, this doesn't just happen on a mental level. It also happens PHYSICALLY. The body is a symbol, not an end in itself.

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

"The body is the symbol of the world."

"The body is the symbol of the ego, as the ego is the symbol of separation."

It is a communication device. It REPRESENTS the MESSAGE that the mind is transmitting to another. It CHANGES FORM to DEPICT a symbol of the kind of relationship you are having with the person! This is because it is a separation device and takes on the form of "how much separation" there is between you and others. And sickness is a greater degree of separation than health, symbolically.

Images of a healthy, unharmed, pain-free, sickness-free body, SYMBOLIZE ideas of eternal life. It represents innocence and the absence of attack. It symbolizes healing and wholeness and harmlessness. It contains no "proof" that sin has ever happened to it, and there is no evidence that anyone has ever attacked it. Therefore it acts as a SYMBOL OF IMMORTALITY.

However, when the mind is sick, having attack thoughts and belief in sin, which starts the ball rolling with projection and scapegoating, this INFLUENCES the picture of the body. The body actually literally CHANGES FORM to a different symbolic form. Forms of sickness, damage, malfunction, attack, pain, deformity, disability, disease, infection, etc, are all attempts to SHOW your brother that you "think ill of him." The body thus because a SYMBOL OF DEATH. Or as Jesus puts it, a "picture of crucifixion."

"Death is the symbol of the fear of God."

"the one you made, out of your split mind, and which IS the symbol of death."

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

We actually USE the body as a TOOL. It is a communication device. We actually hold it up as a picture for others to look at to REPRESENT what we think and how we relate. When we are in ego, we change the body into forms of sickness. And when we are with the Holy Spirit, we change the body into forms of health. This is because a "healthy body" DOES symbolize life and wholeness and happiness and innocence. Just as sick bodies SYMBOLIZE attack and suffering and pain and death.

Now here's the important part. The reason WHY you make the body sick ON PURPOSE in order to accuse others of sin. When your mind is healthy, cause and effect are in their proper order and you are extending love outward. You see yourself as the cause or dreamer of the dream. However, when you go into ego, your perception becomes backwards, and you start to see cause as OUTSIDE of you, and see yourself as AN EFFECT.

Your own mind does this, and the result is that it starts to "visualize itself" AS an effect. Whatever way it believes someone ELSE is to blame, or someone ELSE is sinful, it also imagines what kind of EFFECTS that would produce in you if it were true. If some person is believed to be attacking you, YOUR mind will DEPICT itself physically as the symbolic image of an ATTACKED body. Your mind implements the EFFECTS within the body, to correspond to its belief in the projected CAUSE that it sees as outside itself.

So now what's happening is, as cause and effect are reversed, your mind starts to attack itself from the outside in, through others. As you go to scapegoat and blame someone for CAUSING you, for sinning against you, you SIMULTANEOUSLY portray yourself as a victim. You do this mentally, BUT it also in turn CHANGES THE BODY. The body PICTURES what you think of yourself and how you see yourself.

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

Whatever you think you are, your body SYMBOLIZES it physically. If you think of yourself with attack and sin, which you later project, your body takes on a symbolic FORM of that attitude. It represents TWO things ... 1) what you think of yourself, and 2) what you think of others. These are actually one thing, because you are one with others.

So as you go to accuse yourself of sin, you ALSO go to accuse your brother of sin. The body COMES BETWEEN you as a separation device. It is now being USED to symbolically visualize the PRESENCE of attack, darkness, walls, blockages, etc. And so the body shifts its physical appearance (it's just an image in the mind), to represent your relationship to yourself and others. "Whenever you consent to suffer pain, to be deprived, unfairly treated, or in need of ANYTHING, ***you but accuse your brother of attack upon God's Son***. ***You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes***, that he may see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death, and go before him, closing off the gate, and damning him to hell. "

"For accusation is a bar to love, ***and damaged bodies ARE accusers***. They stand firmly in the way of trust and peace, ***proclaiming*** that the frail can HAVE no trust, and that the damaged HAVE no grounds for peace. Who has been injured BY his brother, and could love and trust him still? He HAS attacked, and will attack again. Protect him not, because ***your damaged body shows that you must be protected FROM him.***"

Bottom line, when your mind is accusing, your BODY accuses as well. It lines up with the mind's attitude. The body itself does NOT have its OWN state, its own attitude, its own decision, or its own mind. It CANNOT maintain itself. It is maintained by the mind, and the mind has power over it. The mind USES it and TELLS it what to do and HOW to show up. It MAKES the body appear in one form or another. And the PURPOSE of any chosen form is to COMMUNICATE through symbols.

So when you are accusing, which means you are projecting, which means you are splitting your mind, your mind causes the body to be used for separation, and this ATTACKS the body and makes it steer towards a PICTURE of crucifixion and death. The INTENT is that the body is acting to PROVE to your brother the consequences of what you claim HE DID. You cannot scapegoat WITHOUT it changing the body. The body is HELD UP as a picture to SHOW HIM effects, which YOU put there, which you accuse HIM of putting there.

So long as the body remains appearing to be sick in any way, and given the mind is the ONLY cause of it, and given the body can ONLY symbolize because it has no meaning or state of its own, the body HAS TO fall into line with the mind's purpose. If the body remains sick in any way, the mind HAS TO be continuing to use it for attack. The body is still showing a symbol of attack BECAUSE the mind is STILL attacking. There are no exceptions to this. It is so reliable that we can say, if the body is still sick, the mind HAS NOT been healed. And it also means if the body is still sick, IT IS STILL accusing your brother of sin.

"A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed."

"A sick and suffering you but represents your brother's guilt; the witness which you send, lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture YOU accept, if only it can serve to punish him. The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."

It is NOT enough to claim that the mind can be healed WITHOUT healing the body. When the mind is healed, it FORCES the body to symbolize its new condition. The body cannot stay sick or keep sickness or hold onto any given state, because mind is USING IT as a symbolic form of communication. Whatever the mind wants to show a brother, the body HAS TO show. And so the body CHANGES FORM according to the mind.

This works for sickness just as it works for healing. The body cannot stay sick if the mind decides to be truly healthy. No more than it can stay healthy if the mind decides to be sick. Jesus even goes so far as to say that if your mind is truly healed, it WILL heal the body ALWAYS, and this makes it IMPOSSIBLE for the body to become sick. The mind is OVERRIDING any alleged external (projected) causes of sickness, and is TOTALLY OWNING control and power over it. Therefore, it does not CHOOSE to be sick, and so does not MAKE the body show up as sick. This makes sickness of the body IMPOSSIBLE.

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for, it will become to you. Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have It not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die."

"The body's health is fully guaranteed because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible." ... ""Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching."

It can't be stressed enough how extreme and unconditional this is. If you so choose, your mind will use the body for attack, which WILL ALWAYS attack the body and FORCE it to depict proof of sin. And this proof of sin will be held up to others to SHOW them what they did to you (allegedly). EVEN to the extent that you are willing to KILL the body entirely, IF it means that you can be exonerated from sin. And he is in fact saying that we do this.

We think it is even a SMALL PRICE to pay, if it means we can be seen as the innocent one, such that a dead body IS VERY STRONG PROOF that someone OTHER than the person CAUSED The death. You'll notice that whenever there is a physical death, it always looks as though the person DID NOTHING to cause it. This is because their mind has DISOWNED the cause by projecting it EXTREMELY, depicting themselves as POWERLESS AND HELPLESS, as if having no ability to choose at all.

"Death is an attempt to resolve conflict by not willing at all."

"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."

By PRETENDING not to be willing at all, to have no choice and no power and no say in the matter, we attack the body and make it show up as DEAD, in trying to ACCUSE THE WORLD OF SIN, so that WE will seem to be the helpless victim. A person who was "killed" NOT by their own hand. Someone who "died of" ANYTHING other than themselves. Died from cancer, died from starvation, died from a car crash, died from war, whatever. Anything so long as it appears to be NOT THE MIND. So that the person can HIDE the fact that THEY DID IT TO THEMSELVES. This is why death is an extreme LIE.

"The power of witness is beyond belief, because it brings conviction in its wake. The witness is believed BECAUSE he points beyond himself, to what he REPRESENTS. (the body is a symbol) A sick and suffering you (physically) but ***represents your brother's guilt***; the witness which you send (communicate physically), lest he forget the injuries (physical) he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture (of your body) YOU accept, if ***only it can serve to punish him***. The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. ******Death seems an easy price*****, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."

So in death, you are using your body to try to PROVE that your BROTHER IS A SINNER. This is the EGO's use of the body. This is what happens when you use the body for attack. It destroys the body. It makes the body show up as sick and suffering and a victim, so that someone or something is framed for sin. That is the ONLY reason this happens. And the mind makes this decision alone.

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

The alternative is that if you move towards RESURRECTION, towards life and wholeness and happiness and holiness, this TOO has an "influence on" the body. It has a healing influence, we could say. It causes the mind to DEPICT itself as a symbol of immortality. A symbol of having NOT been attacked, a symbol of being free from suffering, a symbol of eternal life. A symbol of invulnerability and harmlessness and the IMPOSSIBILITY of being sick or hurt.

As such "the mind, being sane, heals the body" and "now is the body healed by miracles." Again the body has NO SAY in this. It is just a symbol. It gets its FORM from the mind's relationship to others. It SYMBOLIZES the communication. As the mind heals the body CANNOT REMAIN SICK. It cannot maintain sickness or keep it, nor is there ANY OTHER CAUSE of physical sickness. Mind has TOTAL control over it.

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

The mind is STRONGER than the body and the body can only go along with the mind's wishes. If the mind heals, the mind overrides the body image and projects an image of a HEALTHY body. A body which is free from any symbols or signs of attack, harm, damage, breakage, scars, wounds, or anything else which might symbolize the OPPOSITE of eternal life.

Furthermore, when your mind forces your body to heal, because you WANT to SHOW your brothers that you LOVE him, and think HARMLESSLY of him, HE now looks upon your physical body as a MESSAGE. Its physical form PROVES what you THINK of yourself and him. In its healed form, it says "I have never been hurt and you have never hurt me." It PROVES he is innocent. It even proves this BEYOND anything HE tries to do to you.

Even if he thinks he HAS attacked you, YOUR miracle of healing proves to him that HE HAS NOT. And therefor he can no longer BELIEVE that he is a sinner, because you've USED the body to show him, symbolically, that anything he THOUGHT he did had NO effects. This triggers a HEALING IN HIS MIND, because your BODY no longer supports or TEMPTS him to believe that he is sinful. Therefore your body now is used as a HEALING DEVICE and IS SYMBOL OF THE INNOCENCE OF YOUR BROTHER.

"What you would **prove to him** you will believe. The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but ***testifies to what you teach to him***. ***Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him.*** And ********in its healing****** can it *******offer him mute testimony to his innocence*******. It is THIS testimony that can speak ****with power greater than a thousand tongues****. For here is *******his forgiveness PROVED to him*******. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing (physically) show your mind is (also) healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, ****and healed along with you****."

"Health (physically) is the witness unto health. As long as it is unattested, it remains without conviction. ****Only when DEMONSTRATED has it BEEN proved, and MUST compel belief*****. No-one is healed through double messages."

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

So literally, the healing of your mind, without exception forces the healing of your body, which in turn HEALS YOUR BROTHER. Your healing becomes HIS healing. "When I am healed I am not healed alone." And UNLESS this occurs, forgiveness IS NOT complete. Again...

"*****Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself*****. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt?"

If your brother is sinless, psychologically, he CANNOT have done anything to you PHYSICALLY, and therefore the physical is now REPURPOSED as a way to PROVE to him, psychologically, that he HAS NOT sinned. His sins had NO EFFECT on you OR your body. Your miracles REMOVED the evidence. And he can no longer SEE proof that he sinned. Which PHYSICALLY EXONERATES HIM. And this testifies that HE CANNOT have sinned, and now his MIND is healed because your physical body has played a part in weakening HIS belief in his own sinfulness. Something it could NOT do if it remains sick. In fact if it remains sick, your mind IS still accusing him of sin, and he knows it.

Some ACIM students think that there is no validity or importance whatsoever to changing the physical body, healing it, or for any reason. But Jesus is saying something totally opposite. He is literally saying you MUST heal it, otherwise it DOES continue to PROVE that your mind IS NOT healed. And any time physical sickness of any kind is showing up, something in YOUR mind is not healed. Physical sicknesses of different kinds in fact symbolize different mental attitudes.

"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." Different unforgivenesses (grievances, special relationships etc) produce different PHYSICAL FORMS of sickness.

"So closely is one translated into the other, that a careful study of the form a sickness takes will point quite clearly to the form of unforgiveness that it represents."

So here he is even saying you can DIAGNOSE what UNFORGIVENESS is present in the mind, based on the physical FORM of the sickness in the body. Because the body is always symbolic and the forms of sickness are symbolic. This is why you get backaches when you are carrying to much mental load, and your eyes develop problems when you don't want to see something, and someone "gives you a headache" when you don't like them, and your blood pressure "boils" when you get angry.

Physical sickness IS HOW you project your sin! If your mind cannot CONCEIVE of attack, it overpowers the body and forces it to show up AS HEALED. A mind that is TRULY devoid of attack produces a LOVELY BODY, devoid of any signs or symbols of attack of any kind. Not only does the body heal by miracles, it now becomes a SYMBOL OF ETERNAL LIFE. And symbolizing immortality, it is DEVOID OF HARM and CANNOT be sick, NOR can it die! It is now impossible for the body to die and decay, it can ONLY be left by TRUTH, by DISAPPEARING IT! "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."

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

"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."

A radical teaching in the Course which not many are willing to accept, is that the condition of your body is still subject to the Golden Rule. That means that what applies to you applies to others equally. So when your body is sick, it IS attempting to attack both you AND your brother. It is not sick in isolation, it is a double-edged sword. And while your body is sick, it IS accusing your brother of sin, attempting to show to Him HIS sinfulness, attempting to attack Him and make Him dead.

Therefore the ONLY way to exonerate Him and to PROVE to Him in an undeniable way, that He must be innocent, is to demonstrate a body which has no signs of sickness or attack. YOUR health is HIS health. The body must become a symbol and representation of immortality, a sign of life, so that when your brother looks upon its loveliness He recognizes HE must be innocent because YOUR body shows no signs of effects, and therefore He cannot have attacked you. This is not merely wishful thinking. It requires a supernatural state of protection in which it becomes IMPOSSIBLE for your body to be attacked, sick, or dead.

This is also very clearly and radically spelled out in Chapter 27, section 2... "the picture of crucifixion", in which Jesus states we are to stop demonstrating sickness TO others, in order to teach only life and innocence. He even goes on to say that the Holy Spirit has prepared an alternative BODY, which is free from all signs of attack, and we are to show it to others to prove "brother, at your hand I live", defying all attempts by others to find signs of the effects of their attempted attacks, thus exonerating them.

There are few sections of the course less understood and more denied than this one.

Additionally, in Chapter 27 section 3 "the fear of healing" (!!) which follows on, Jesus opens with this statement, building upon this:

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

So what he is saying here is that a damaged body (sick, ill, diseased, broken, in pain etc) is ACTIVELY ACCUSING. In order to BE in states of sickness the mind has to entertain level confusion, has to project causality outside itself, sees itself as at the effect of external causes, and thus sees brothers as the CAUSE of the sickness, thus accusing anything other than yourself of causing the suffering. And then the body SHOWS a representation of this mindset, accusing your brother through PHYSICAL EVIDENCE, that HE must be the sinner who caused this. "Brother at your hand I die".

And so when you are making your body show up as sick, demonstrating self-attack, you attack both you and your brother, because separation comes BETWEEN you. The physical form of sickness is a weapon of accusation against both of you. Therefore... and this should be obvious unless you are into justifications and level confusions and denial, that the ONLY WAY to EXONERATE your brother, while you still have a body, is to NOT SHOW HIM any signs of sickness or damage in your body. If your body is still in a state of sickness, you ARE still accusing him, and therefore your mind CANNOT be healed. This is why, without exception, "a broken body is proof the mind has not been healed." There is no escape from this. You cannot have a sick body and a healthy mind.

This is a Course in miracles and it is a course in LIFE. It is not a course in being sick, which is a little death. It is a course in HEALTH. It is a course in healing. It is a course in removing ALL signs of attack and separation in the body PRIOR to being in a mental state capable of resurrection. The course ends in resurrection, not death. You MUST NOT SHOW SICKNESS OR DEATH TO THE WORLD!

Jesus goes on to say "Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt?"

And so when your brother attempts to accuse or attack your body, you must DEMONSTRATE (which means to show physically), that his efforts produced no EFFCTS, your body HAS no effects of sickness or damage, your body could not BE attacked, and you are a picture of invulnerability. "Sickness is a defense against the truth" speaks of this protection, which is SUPERNATURAL and defies all ego laws and laws of physics:

"The body's health is fully guaranteed because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible. Yet THIS PROTECTION needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgement or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick. "

And let us also remember from the manual for teachers:

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies.

Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. THE MIND MAKES THIS DECISION, AS IT MAKES ALL DECISIONS THAT ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE BODY'S CONDITION. ...Sickness is now impossible to him. ....Oneness and sickness cannot coexist."

In this there are no exceptions. The condition of the body REFLECTS the condition of the mind, and the mind is the ONLY CAUSE of the body's condition. There are NO outside powers that bring oppression or suffering, including death. You are supposed to DEMONSTRATE LIVE that nothing can hurt you or your body. Not even your brothers attacks. And even as he attempts to attack you, it has NO EFFECT, proving IN FORM in undeniable evidence, that he MUST NOT have sinned because it had no consequences, and therefore He is innocent. His innocence is proved to him through your miraculous demonstration. "The mind must be stronger than the body, every miracle DEMONSTRATES this."

To suggest you can have sane healthy mind while the body remains sick is DENIAL, it is a split mind, and impossible. It is your responsibility to SHOW that nothing happens to you against your will, you cannot be attacked unless you attack yourself, and "no one dies unless they choose to do so" - which means NO ONE ELSE can make you die if you do not choose it. The message given by the mind and the message given by the BODY MUST BE ONE, otherwise you are giving double messages and are a LIAR.

So yes, this DOES MEAN, that the state of your PHYSICAL BODY is actually important while you have it, it is part of the MIND's experience, it is not exempt from your demonstration of sanity, it is supposed to be USED to communicate health and healing, and therefore YOU MUST STOP MAKING IT SICK OR DEAD in order to complete the Course! The course ends in resurrection, not death. No-one escapes a dream of death through death. You HAVE to make the body healthy and healed and whole and free from sickness of every kind BEFORE your mind can be ready to overcome death entirely. And that means there is a supernatural POWER that you must demonstrate to others. This is why "Miracles are teaching devices."

All those who would say the body doesn't matter, or it isn't able to be sick, or it doesn't exist, or mind is separate from body, or sickness isn't real, or whatever other DENIAL BULLSHIT, I suggest you reconsider and read what Jesus has actually said. HE says the body must be used as evidence of immortality and innocence, and you can't do that if it's still in a state of corruption. I suggest you look at Chapter 19 - obstacles to peace - the INCORRUPTIBLE BODY. Here is the opening paragraphs:

"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. But you who would RELEASE him are but honoring the Will of his Creator. 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. But what obeys it not, it CANNOT kill. You have ANOTHER dedication which would keep the body incorruptible and perfect as long as it is useful for your holy purpose."

It's time to start raising the dead and showing that you cannot be hurt in any way, on any level, even in form.

We are not supposed to be moving TOWARDS death, in any way. Not even physically.

From Chapter 19 section 9 - "the attraction of death":

"And so it is with death. Made by the ego, its dark shadow falls across all living things, because the ego is the "enemy" of life.

And yet, a shadow cannot kill. What is a shadow to the living? They but walk past, and it is gone. But what of those whose dedication it is NOT to live? The black-draped "sinners," the ego's mournful chorus, plodding so heavily AWAY from life, dragging their chains and marching in the slow procession that honors their grim master, lord of death? Touch any one of them with the gentle hand of forgiveness, and watch the chains fall away, along with YOURS. See him throw aside the black robe he was wearing to his funeral, and hear him laugh at death. The sentence sin would lay upon him, he can escape with your forgiveness.

This is NOT arrogance. It is the Will of God. What is impossible to you who choose His Will as yours? What is death to you? Your dedication is NOT to death, nor to its master."

CLEARLY, if you are moving toward death, you are moving away from LIFE, and God's Will is that YOU LIVE. "It is not God's will that you suffer". You MUST NOT MAKE YOUR BODY DIE otherwise you are NOT DOING GOD'S WILL. This IS what the Course is teaching. STOP DYING!

Even if the body is not real, even if it is an illusion, you CANNOT continue having it be sick or dead while maintaining the you are awake and spiritual. You MUST use it to demonstrate immortality, health, happiness and holiness. You MUST use it to bring healing to others. You MUST use it as a communication medium through which miracles are performed for others. And you must use it to EXONERATE your brother of all sin. If you are moving into physical sickness, you HAVE defenses against the truth. If you are moving toward death, YOU DO WORSHIP IT.

You are supposed to become CAPABLE of overcoming death entirely, making death impossible for you, PROVING it is impossible for you, and not ALLOWING OR CHOOSING death to "happen to" the body against your will. "No one dies without his own consent." You CANNOT have a sane mind without a healthy body. "The mind, being sane, heals the body." "Those who are sick do not love themselves for if they loved themselves they would heal themselves".

It is all simple and clear. This is a Course in the LIVING and a moving closer TO LIFE, which is God. You cannot approach God, who is life, and have sickness and death be maintained on any level. The body MUST RESURRECT and become holy. Failure to do so is failing the course.

---

Below is the full quote from the course about how you use the body to teach the innocence or sinfulness of another:

"Whenever you consent to suffer pain, to be deprived, unfairly treated, or in need of ANYTHING, you but accuse your brother of attack upon God's Son. You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes, that he may see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death, and go before him, closing off the gate, and damning him to hell. Yet this is writ in hell and NOT in Heaven, where you are BEYOND attack, and prove his INNOCENCE. The picture of yourself you offer him you show YOURSELF, and give it all your faith. The Holy Spirit offers you, to give to him, a picture of yourself in which there is NO pain, and NO reproach at all. And what was martyred to his guilt becomes the perfect witness to his innocence.

The power of witness is beyond belief, because it brings conviction in its wake. The witness is believed BECAUSE he points beyond himself, to what he REPRESENTS. A sick and suffering you but represents your brother's guilt; the witness which you send, lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture YOU accept, if only it can serve to punish him. The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins.

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.

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

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. And each has many voices, speaking to your brother and yourself in different tongues. And yet to both the message is the same. Adornment of the body seeks to show how lovely are the witnesses for guilt. Concerns about the body demonstrate how frail and vulnerable is your life; how easily destroyed is what you love. Depression speaks of death and vanity of real concern with anything at all.

The strongest witness to futility, which bolsters all the rest and helps them paint the picture in which sin is justified, is sickness in whatever form it takes. The sick have reason for each one of their unnatural desires and strange needs. For who could live a life so soon cut short, and NOT esteem the worth of passing joys? What pleasures COULD there be that will endure? Are not the frail ENTITLED to believe that every stolen scrap of pleasure is their righteous payment for their little lives? Their death will pay the price for all of them, if they enjoy their benefits or not. The end of life must come, whatever way that life be spent. And so take pleasure in the quickly passing and ephemeral.

These are NOT sins, but witnesses unto the strange belief that sin and death are real, and innocence and sin will end alike, within the termination of the grave. If this were true, there WOULD be reason to remain content to seek for passing joys, and cherish little pleasures where you can. But in this picture is the body NOT perceived as neutral and WITHOUT a goal inherent in itself. For it becomes the symbol of reproach, the sign of guilt whose consequences still are there to see, so that the cause can NEVER be denied. Your function is to PROVE to him that sin can HAVE no cause. How futile MUST it be to see yourself a picture of the proof that what your function IS can never be.

The Holy Spirit's picture changes not the body into something it is not. It only takes away from it ALL signs of accusation and of blamefulness. Pictured WITHOUT a purpose, it is seen as neither sick nor well, nor bad nor good. No grounds are offered that it may be judged in ANY way at all. It has no life, but neither is it dead. It stands apart from ALL experience of fear OR love. For now it witnesses to NOTHING yet, its purpose being open, and the mind made free again to choose what it is FOR. Now is it not condemned, but waiting for a purpose to be GIVEN, that it may fulfill the function that it will receive.

Into this empty space, from which the GOAL of sin has been removed, is Heaven free to be remembered. Here its peace can come, and perfect healing take the place of death. The body can become a sign of life, a promise of redemption, and a breath of immortality to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death. Let it have healing as its PURPOSE. Then will it send forth the message it received, and by its health and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that it represents. Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever unattacked. And to your brother let its message be, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I live."

The simple way to let this be achieved is merely this; to let the body have no purpose from the past, when you were sure you KNEW its purpose was to foster guilt. For this insists your crippled picture is a lasting sign of what it represents. This leaves no space in which a DIFFERENT view, ANOTHER purpose, can be given it. You do NOT know its purpose. You but gave ILLUSIONS of a purpose to a thing you made to hide your function from yourself. This thing WITHOUT a purpose CANNOT hide the function that the Holy Spirit gave. Let, then, ITS purpose and YOUR function be both reconciled at last, and seen as one."

What if everything that's happening in the world is exactly what is supposed to be happening, per everyone's agreement and decision? And there are no accidents or mistakes and nothing is going wrong? And I don't mean, that "bad things" aren't happening, just that they're not happening accidentally or without consent.

On the surface, the world looks like hell. And it's hard to consider that everything is happening according to agreement. But there's more to life than meets the eye.

What if everything that happens can only happen because you agree to it? What if you have to put some kind of contract in place which has to be agreed to by everyone involved, in order for anything to happen? What if everything that happens is completely deliberate, and every single event in the world is deliberately orchestrated and chosen by everyone, on purpose?

What could this purpose be, but to assist you in spiritual awakening?

Before you incarnate, you make agreements with people that they will help you with your spiritual growth by playing certain roles for you. You ask them to do this and they agree freely. A contract is made. The terms of the contract state exactly what the person is to do and that they are to do nothing else. They do not add to the workload or take away from it. They are to play their part faithfully.

This includes contracts that you make with your own ego. You chose, on purpose, to make your ego, so that it would function according to your design and your rules. You wanted it to do certain things for you, to adjust your perception in certain ways, to change your values and beliefs in certain ways, and to fulfill a purpose that you wanted. You wanted the ego to function as a loyal and trustworthy device that would enable you to go through various struggles so that you could awaken spiritually. This is its only purpose.

A lot is said about how the ego is devious and vicious and all of this, pointing the finger at it and making it out to be a horrible enemy. But what role are you playing in that scenario? You are the victim. And this is the lesson. Lessons are there for your benefit to help you to wake up. The ego can be seen as a device for facilitating what's needed in order to awaken, if you perceive it correctly and use it correctly.

A spiritual lesson occurs when there is some part of you which is asleep, or at least that believes it is. This part of you, you put to sleep in the first place. And now it seems to be unaware of some aspect of truth. In its unconsciousness, in certain situations and scenarios with certain people you will suffer and struggle because you do not see the truth. This part of you will act exactly according to how you designed it. The purpose of the lesson is awakening and the solution to the lesson is always to wake up to the truth.

All lessons point to the truth and the outcome of learning a lesson must always be that you come to see the metaphysics or structure or mechanism of the lesson clearly. To step out of the lesson, out of your unawareness into awareness, and out of lies into the truth.

The ego, just like your bodily ailments, just like your relationship woes, just like your enemies, just like your financial struggles, and everything else, is only a device acting under contract to fulfill what you told it to do. It can hardly be to blame for anything when you are the one that made it. And you made it with great intricacy and intelligence, and you could say that it is a beautiful creation. It does for you according to what you wanted it to do for you.

Jesus tells us in the Course not to play down the magnificence of your mind's creative power, or to tell yourself that you are stupid for having created a monster. You must acknowledge and access that your mind is a very powerful creator and that it has been used to create your ego. Regardless of whether the ego is real or not, it is still very impressive - this whole universe is very impressive. You made it.

Also recognize that every person that you encounter, no matter what they do, they are doing because it's part of a lesson in which you asked them, under contract, to come along and treat you this way. Even if they seem to be an enemy, someone that hates you or abuses you or attacks you or even tries to end your life, they are still under contract. There is a spiritual purpose. They are trying to help you. That sounds absurd doesn't it, at least to the unawakened mind. But everyone is in your life because they are playing the roles that you hired them to play. You asked for it. You wanted it.

You wanted it because you wanted to awaken back to God and you need their assistance. You need them to trigger you, to get you to engage with your own ego, to get you to look at your own beliefs, to get you to heal, to get you to learn to forgive, etc. These are valuable lessons. Even the person you hate the most is completely acting under contract with you in agreement with you and according to your will.

Even if you are engaging with them in such a way that it makes it seem you totally do not want them to do what they are doing. Your unwillingness to accept their help is actually the lesson you need to learn. You need to find a way to see them as helpful, as innocent, as serving your highest good, as servicing your spiritual growth, and as being loyal and faithful servants according to everything you wanted.

Initially, asleep, you will react to these contractors with resistance and rebellion, because in your ego state you won't see how they are helping you. And this is what you need to learn... So you need to then transition from your initial reaction, which is blindness and forgetfulness, to becoming aware of a bigger truth, a bigger picture, in which you can see clearly. In that clarity you come to realize how they are doing what you asked, how you are not a victim, how you wanted this, how you contracted it yourself, and how you have been dutifully served.

At some point, when your lesson has been learned, and you have come to recognize the truth, you will see all of the ways that a person who once was seen as your enemy was in fact your best friend trying to help you wake up. You will see clearly, without having to add anything to the situation, that it's actually true that you asked them to do what they did. You will also see clearly that everything they did helped you, that you grew from it, that you gained awakening from it. You will see how it benefited you in the bigger picture of your life.

At this point, with clarity and truth and recognition and having therefore transcended the lesson, you will be perfectly poised to enter into genuine gratitude. This does not mean artificially forced gratitude or people-pleasing gratitude or trying to be positive gratitude. It is a gratitude that involves an appreciation - an understanding - a recognition - of what has really happened. It's the ability to see. It's the ability to recognize that this person has served you selflessly and faithfully according to what you wanted and the only possible genuine response to that is genuine gratitude.

And so you will look at this person recognizing their innocence, because they obviously can't be to blame for doing to you what you asked them to do to you. And you will see their help as welcome. And you will recognize the great benefit it has given you. And you wI'll appreciate their help. And in this moment there is a kind of reverence and sacredness or recognition. It's like the two of you will bow before each other, the fight is over, and you are both in full acknowledgement of a job well done. Services rendered. Contract completed to perfection. No loose ends, no resentments, no ties, no desire to get rid of the person or end their involvement prematurely, no grief or sense of loss of harm, just total appreciation.

And then it's as if you both bow in divine brotherhood and see each other as being absolutely the best of friends and for each other, and set each other free. And it is in this moment of freedom and love that you are finally set free of the contract. This is the only way that you can complete a lesson and be free of a contract. This is what al lessons are leading to - a recognition of your freedom and innocence and truth and equality with all your brothers. No victims. No enemies.

So with any problem you have, be it a person or a body sickness or a financial struggle or a noisy neighbor or whatever it is, while you see the problem as unnecessary, unwanted, uncalled for, inappropriate, unjustified, un-asked-for, or in any way happening outside of your will, you will be lost in the ego. And you will therefore be in the midst of a lesson and will need to learn a thing or two about the truth. You can fight with your helpers all you want, that won't help. You can struggle with your contractors, that won't help. You can try to get rid of the problem, that won't help either. You got what you asked for and nothing else. You put this thing into place, on your own, and nobody put it there for you. So at least admit to that and stop attacking what you made.

So how to do you find freedom when you're in a lesson? Forgiveness. Undoing the ego perspectives. Shifting your perception away from attack and toward welcome. Shifting your way of looking at things as happening for you, not to you. Using it as an opportunity to be triggered so that you can look at and heal what you do not want to look at. Allowing the problem to attack you so that you can see how you believe you are attackable, so that you can learn not to attack. Ultimately the purpose is for you to sort out what is really true from what is apparently false and to receive love in everything that happens.

So if you can shift your viewpoint this way and learn your lesson, you will find that you are in a moment of mutual recognition with the thing you made - the contract you created - the person you hired - the sickness you put in place - the lack you chose etc... where you can acknowledge full responsibility for what has occurred, claim the full benefits of the lesson, recognize the innocence and compliance of everyone involved, and set both you and that problem free in a moment of gratitude and welcome.

What you made cannot leave your presence until you can set it free in gratitude and recognition. Any measure of seeing it as your enemy or unwanted attaches you to it and keeps it hounding you, because then you have not learned your lesson. If you want to be free of something, you have to see how you made it yourself and why you wanted it and what you gained from it. What are the benefits? How did it serve you? Where is the silver lining? What function did you give to it? It's simply a matter of whether you truly want to continue with the need for the functionality of this self-made device or not.

And if your ultimate, very long-term goal is to awaken to God's love, then you'll be perfectly happy to keep your devices and not get rid of them, simply because you know that you still need them until you can learn your lesson. Your priority above all else is to learn to awakening to the truth, to return to God, which is more valuable to you and important to you than anything else. So given that, why would you want to keep getting rid of the very lessons that are helping you to wake up? Not that you must suffer... only if it helps you awakening and only for so long as is needed to learn the lesson. You need not suffer at all.

"What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything that happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? (W-135.13)" - ACIM

It's all for the best.

A Course in miracles does not mention the phrase "unconscious guilt". However, Jesus does teach about it. In fact, the whole course is about removing the BLOCKS TO AWARENESS. A blocked awareness is indicative of UNCONSCIOUSNESS - not being consciously aware of love.

Here for example he refers to "veiling in shadows", things which must be "raised to understanding" (brought back into conscious awareness), in order to make the choice for heaven consciously:

"Heaven is chosen consciously. The choice cannot be made until alternatives are accurately seen and understood. 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 judgement 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."

Anything which is a hidden hate, a secret sin, something concealed, any form of denial, all illusions, all forms of sin guilt fear sickness and death, are forms of unconsciousness.

The entire idea of "awakening" is of returning to full conscious awareness, out of a state of semi-consciousness or, in the case of death, unconsciousness. It is also the same thing as the idea of "forgetting".

Here are for example paragraphs from 5 separate chapters talking about unconsciousness...

"These mad beliefs can gain UNCONSCIOUS hold of great intensity, and grip the mind with terror and anxiety so strong that it will not relinquish its ideas about its own protection."

"Defenses are not unintentional, nor are they made without awareness. They are secret magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. They seem to be UNCONSCIOUS but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them."

"Like to a dream of punishment, in which the dreamer is UNCONSCIOUS of what brought on the attack against himself, he sees himself attacked unjustly, and by something NOT himself."

"He is merely making every possible effort, within the limits you impose upon Him, to re-establish your own will in your consciousness. You have imprisoned it in your UNCONSCIOUS, where it remains available, but cannot help you."

"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."

So you can see our unconscious states are quite well discussed in the course and this is only the tip of the iceberg.

There is one test by which you can find out if you have "unconscious stuff". First of all, realize that even if you have some amount of conscious awareness, it does not mean that you do not have an unconscious. When something is unconscious, you LITERALLY are NOT AWARE of it. There can be huge sections of your mind which have been walled off and kept hidden in the dark, which you do not even know are there.

It is the assumption of just about everyone that because you have conscious awareness, you are aware of EVERY part of your mind. This is usually far from the case. The test to determine whether you have an unconscious mind is simple:

If you perceive there is a cause affecting you which has not come from yourself, you have an unconscious mind.

This must be true because the only way you could perceive that something is happening against your will, is by being unaware of the way that you do everything to yourself. The secret to salvation is realizing you do everything to yourself. Therefore, if you are not directly confronted with AWARENESS of the way in which you are CAUSING everything you are experiencing, no matter what form it takes or how it is projected, YOU DO have a part of your mind which is unconscious. And yes, that means pretty much most of us.

It is valuable to realize you have unconsciousness, because you DO need to bring those parts of your mind back into conscious awareness in order for your mind to be FULLY AWARE OF LOVE’S PRESENCE, and to be able to consciously choose heaven. You cannot enter heaven while part of your mind is unconscious.

Typically, most people walking around this planet, believe that they are FULLY aware. When they wake up in the morning, they believe they have woken up fully. They believe that everything they are aware of comprises the sum total of all things that exist. And therefore, whenever they are trying to make sense out of what caused something to happen, they will reference everything they are aware of, trying to make sense out of how this could happen. And since they believe they are fully aware (but are not), they HAVE to find an explanation for what causes thing, usually by blaming it on someone else.

If you are blaming others or the world for causing ANYTHING, it is proof that you do not recognize that YOU are the cause, you did not SEE yourself cause it, and you seem to have asked for something without realizing it. So recognize this, if you are a victim in any way, you are unconscious.

That means there is a whole bunch of information, facts, truth, and content, which has been BLOCKED from your conscious awareness. These are nothing less than blocks to the awareness of love’s presence. These blocks, these barriers of denial which make the mind unconscious, is precicely what we are REQUIRED to UNDO, in order to restore our awareness of God.

But if you are walking the world thinking, you know everything there is to know, and are aware of everything there is to be aware of, and yet stuff is happening to you seemingly against your will, in any way, then YOU ARE IN DENIAL. And that means, you have a portion of mind which is currently NOT CONSCIOUS, which you are not aware you even have. It is tucked away, out of sight, and you don’t even SUSPECT that you have it.

It is vital to uncover these portions of mind and to heal their content. Too many people think that "forgiving" only means taking back projections. This is beause they have no idea that they have unconscious stuff in their mind. They think that they only need to deal with what they are consciously aware of, ie what someone seems to be doing, and to take back that projection.

That’s a fine stepping stone, but if it does not lead to a) removing the denial that made guilt go unconscious (fear), b) removing the denial which made sin go unconscious (guilt), c) removing the denial that made God go unconscious (sin), by bringing all of those into conscious awareness and undoing them, and accepting Atonement, then this is NOT complete forgiveness. It’s scratching the surface, and many people are NOT forgiving fully.

These hidden dark secrets are hidden behind shadows and illusions and layers of denial. Fear for example is made entirely to make guilt unconscious. Fear defends against guilt and protects the guilt. It causes you to fixate on what the fear is being caused by, anywhere other than within, so that you will not look within to see where the fear is really coming from.

All fear has its source in your unconscious belief that you are GUILTY. It has absolutely no other cause. But while you remain unconscious/unaware of that guilt, you will keep trying to make sense of why you are afraid by blaming the cause on something outside of you. And since that is never the cause, it will not provide you with a solution.

Fear has to be recognized as a decoy, an illusion that is nothing more than an effect, not a cause. It is the effect of guilt. Fear is not causing anything because it is only guilt that can cause it. When you can recognize fear as an effect of guilt, the implication as to what caused it automatically will start to give you some breadcrumbs which will bring that guilt back into conscious awareness. Then you can work on undoing the guilt.

Guilt also is a problem because, guilt is not the problem. Guilt actually is another decoy like fear, designed to block and keep sin unconscious. It’s sole purpose is to pretend you did not sin and did not want to sin. It disowns the sin and disassociates from it, projecting blame for it on something or something outside of you. So long as you are feeling sorrowful and guilty and allegedly unworthy of forgiveness, this will block the dishonest fact that YOU DID WANT TO SIN, and that you yourself believe in it. Guilt keeps sin real and prevents you from looking at it. It keeps it out of conscious awareness.

Guilt has to be then recognized as just an effect of sin, and not a cause of anything. It’s bullshit lies of "didn’t mean to do it" has to be seen through. Guilt is fake. It is there solely to stop you from bringing your unconscious belief in sin into awareness. When you can see that guilt is just an effect, and all guilt is caused by a belief in sin, that will help you to bring the sin into conscious awareness. It will resurface as soon as you make the connection of causality that sin caused guilt, therefore behind guilt there is sin lurking there.

Once the belief is sin is in your awareness, it is not going to be pretty. Always look at this stuff with Holy Spirit, because there is some really dark murderous death-wish kind of beliefs tucked way in the unconscious mind. But these beliefs like all the rest are fake. You have to realize then that sin actually is yet another block to awareness. It keeps something out of conscious awareness. Can you guess what it is?

God.

The belief in sin makes God unconscious. Not only is it a belief that God is dead and IS unconscious hisemself, it also shuts awareness of God out of the mind. It can only do this through denial and unwillingness to accept the truth. It is just another block to let go. You must recognize sin is not a cause of anything. Sin is just an effect of a mistaken idea of separation. It has not caused anything, and therefore has not happened. Undoing this will REVEAL GOD to you, consciously.

So you see, we have a LOT of shit that’s just sitting there in the unconscious areas of mind, and yet not exactly inert or inactive. Unconscious self-hate will project outwards and cause all manner of SHIT stuff to "happen to you", and it will seem to come out of nowhere, because you will not see that you asked for it. And so you will think you are just an innocent victim.

This is the big problem. Believing you are "innocent" just because you are not AWARE of the fact that you attacked yourself, is the entire foundation for projecting blame outside of yourself for everything you experience. You won’t be able to ACCEPT that you have done this to yourself, until you can consciously own up to it and actually SEE that you have in fact been the one who did it. To recognize that YOU PUT THERE all of the suffering you are experiencing, including all of your sickness. Until you can own it, you cannot let it go.

Just because you THINK you are innocent right now, on the basis of not being fully aware of your whole mind, is FAKE INNOCENCE. And it is this fake innocence which leads many people to not even suspect that they have unconscious shit to undo. It also leads many to believe they DID NOT CAUSE the shit that happens, which actually is an act of profound irresponsibility. It is this irresponsibility, the disownership of self, that produces all suffering.

Remember that the secret to salvation is that you have done this ALL to yourself. This is a course in CAUSE, not effect. You are to learn you are the CAUSE of everything in the world, not the effect of it. And you can only do that by becoming AWARE consciously that you in fact DO cause things. That means removing the blocks to AWARENESS, which are simply forms of denial which have made you partly UNCONSCIOUS. And extreme denial produces all denial of life, which leads to sickness and death as total unconsciousness.

If you want life, you must become willing to bring this unconscious stuff back into awareness for healing and release. And that’s going to have to mean, taking full responsibility for everything you are experiencing. Otherwise, guaranteed, you will suffer at your own hand without even realizing it. No-one dies without their own consent!!!

"Maybe I am causing this" "I must be responsible for this" "I am doing this to myself" "I am the cause of this" "I must have some unconscious stuff to heal if I seem to be suffering against my will" "There must be something I am not aware of where I am attacking myself" "I need to undo my belief that I sinned by bringing it back into awareness and letting it go."

Remember, "heaven is a choice I must make" - a conscious choice. You cannot have stuff lurking in unconsciousness, otherwise you are in denial, and the beliefs you are denying will make you unwilling to accept the atonement. A healed mind is a wholly conscious mind.

If you are immortal, you cannot suffer. You cannot be hurt, damaged, offended, upset, sad, unhappy, depressed, lacking joy, unloved, abused, made sick, killed, harmed, bruised, wounded, angered, nothing. You can only be immortal.

So what does that mean, in light of what seems to be "you suffering"? Even "your suffering" cannot be truly happening to you. YOU cannot be suffering. Your immortal self CANNOT be experiencing suffering. You cannot suffer. So who is suffering?

"Spirit is in a state of grace forever."

So when you seem to be suffering, let's say you feel hurt because someone called you a "stinky fart face", can it really be that you ACTUALLY are hurt? And if you FEEL hurt by this, is this "you feeling hurt" actually really happening? Even if you feel it, even if it seems "it applies to me", even if it seems it was targeted "at you", even if its "highly personal and reminds me of the time I kept farting in church", CAN IT BE POSSIBLE that YOUR IMMORTAL SELF is actually experiencing this or believing it?

It must be that even when under attack, "you" that feels attacked is some kind of fictional construct. It can't REALLY be your immortal self that is attacked. Your immortal self cannot be sad or upset or feeling betrayed or victimized. It's impossible for your real self to feel anything but joy and love and happiness. So when you have an "I feel hurt" moment, even if it involves HEAVY emotions, and terrible pain, and totally seems to be all about YOU and how you feel... CAN IT BE?

It cannot ever be really your true identity that is suffering. Even if you seem to "hurt yourself", you are not hurting yourself. You can't BE hurt. So who or what are you hurting? If you even decide to kill yourself, YOU cannot be killed. So what is dying?

"You are immortal and you cannot die."

WHO or what is being killed? Sure enough it is the body that is involved. But in addition, how is it that there seems to be a sensation that it's YOU that is going down with the ship? WHO or what is under attack? Is this taking place IN YOUR MIND?

Is it possible, that when there is a sensation of hurt or upset feeling or guilt etc, that the feeling ITSELF brings with it a kind of illusion or "sense of" "self"? Could it be that when you are feeling guilty, and you feel like a target, and it feels like everyone can see you and knows you are there, and you are "self conscious" in public, and you want to hide from everyone because you feel like they KNOW your inner guilty secret.... is it perhaps that the guilt ITSELF brings a sense of "centric identity"? Is not anything other than love, a sense of selfishness, and thus a sense of ego?

Some years ago some stuff happened and I had a large amount of guilt because of it. And because of this guilt, I felt ashamed and took it with me everywhere I went. And I felt constantly threatened. Anywhere especially in public, which I avoided, it felt like I had a target on my back, that EVERYONE knew that I was guilty, and they could see this guilty self, and MY experience of this guilty self was a feeling of being very "self conscious". Nervous about what I AM. Feeling like I am "evil" or "bad". Feeling certain that I AM THE GUILT. And that everyone was pointing a finger at me.

It would then happen that if people would attack me, or call me names, or accuse me or whatever, I would feel like "this guilty self" is vulnerable AND attackable. If they would accuse me of something, they were accusing THIS guilty self of it, and IT was self conscious, and IT felt attackable and vulnerable, and IT believed that it deserved punishment and that IT was the ACTUAL target of what people were putting out there. So when they called me by name, and then hurled an abuse, this "guilty self" felt like it was ABOUT IT, personally, and that they were directly addressing this guilty self.

But then after a time and much healing, this guilt was gone. And then I noticed that when these same people were being the same way they seemed to be before, it clearly did not appear to be ABOUT ME, and it was not targeting "that self", that guilty self, that was in me before. And that guilty self and its sense of being "self conscious" ie in fear, was not there to "receive" the attack. It did not exist, so they could not AIM their attack AT it. And so "I", my identity, which was no longer bound up with the guilt, saw myself as NOT being the target of their expressions. And so I felt invulnerable and could now recognize that they were attacking themselves. What happened to the sense of SELF that was present IN THE GUILT?

See, whatever you make TRUE of you you will believe is WHAT YOU ARE, and in effect WHO you are. So if you believe of yourself, "I am guilty", you will believe this DEFINES you. And now you ARE guilt. And this guilt has components of ego in it. And ego is selfish. Ego is a kind of "self centeredness", a self-important self-interest.

If the absence of separation means that there is pervasive light everywhere throughout the universe, then ego is a massive CONDENSING of that, down to a point, such as a star, so that all you are now left with is masses of darkness and a tiny CENTER of a point of light. And this "all that's left" little concentration of "self" now seems to be separated off and small and weak and vulnerable. That littleness is the sense of EGO, and it is experienced like a focus on yourself alone, in isolation.

Everything about ego is about becoming small, little, contracted, compressed, diminished, weakened, self-focused, self-centered, selfish, self-attacking, self-important, self aggrandizing, delusions of grandeur, etc. This condensing produces a kind of "sense" of "me", distinguished from the rest, broken off and separate. This sense of self is "self conscious" ie made of CONCERN for self and FEAR of its own weakness and littleness. The "self conscious" self is in fear and looks out frightened of the world that threatens it. The more EGO you have, the more ego stuff you have, baggage, dark feelings, guilts and hurts, the MORE you feel self centered and like this stuff "is a self". A sense of "separated me", cut off from the rest and not sharing.

It brings with it a kind of "focal point", a contracted little fearful corner of the mind, and the more this little corner withdraws and hides and tries to be even smaller and weaker, the MORE the sense of artificial "self" increases. Because the amount of selfishness is going up, the amount of self importance is going up, the amount of superiority/inferiority complex is going up, and this all produces what SEEMS LIKE a sense of "there is something here", "I am something", "I am all these feelings", "I am these thoughts". You become identified with FORM.

The whole egotism, the attitude, inherently has this bunching up, crunching together, condensing, tightening, contracting kind of thing about it, and this SENSE of this happening FEELS like the formation of a hot-spot in the mind that seems like "where something is, moreso than the rest", or "self interest". A sense of an island within the mind. A "self".

When the guilt goes, when the self attack goes, when the sin is gone, the egotism is gone, and all this tightened contracted littleness "dissipates" and stops being so focused, and without the focus on a tiny little huddled-in-a-corner-hiding sense of identity and truth, that sense of being "separated off" and "a separate identity" goes with it. It just disappears. But that isn't the end of YOU, because your sense of self EXPANDS and moves towards the UNLIMITED, universal, endless holy christ self that you really are.

So who is it that suffers? Who is it that can BE hurt and FEEL vulnerable? It is not your immortal christ self. It is not the real you. But it can seem to be a SENSE of "you" because part of your mind gets caught up in the contraction and withdrawal into "a center", into a little prison, a bodily identity, an identification with locality in space-time. And the more ego-stuff you have in your mind, the more intensely that your mind forms into a huddle of tightly-held-onto stuff, creating an IMPRESSION of you being kind of snagged or caught up on this collection of ego material. And being localized around a "point" it makes you feel like you are this little separated off dot of identity.

It is kind of like.... the suffering, ITSELF, suffers. Just as how fear is self-fulfilling. The guilt ITSELF brings with it a feeling of separate self. Any ego emotions, be it anger or sadness or grief or loss or lack or abandonment or unworthiness or sinfulness or fear or whatever, all brings with it SELFISHNESS, which is isolation and contraction and that attempt to GET AWAY FROM everything else, producing an increasing sense that you are "this something" in the middle of the ocean of mind. And this "sense of self" always feels vulnerable and threatened and unsafe. But this sense of self is PART OF the ego material that's in the mind, and without it your mind DOES NOT experience being a target.

Without the guilt, you cannot feel this. Without the unworthiness or loathing, you cannot feel this. Your mind is elastic and sort of snaps-back into its expanded, non-localized state, spread out evenly and smoothly instead of tightened and restricted and limited. When the guilt goes, YOU stop feeling like "you" are susceptible and attackable. You stop feeling like YOU are guilty. And that sense of "contracted self" goes.

Your sense of identity stops being "caught up in" the "truth" that the guilt expresses. Because if you believe "I AM guilty" then this will set you up to experience that you AND the guilt ARE ONE. And now you ARE guilt. And in the guilt is your "self", your identity. And you will not want to let it go if you believe that letting it go will be the loss of who and what you are. So there is a kind of addiction to the ego materials and an unwillingness to see YOUR SELF as being something NOT associated with, or identified with, the ego materials. e.g. with the guilt. "I am guilty" will feel like you are MADE OF guilt. That it is fundamentally your nature.

So who is suffering? Who is hurt? Who is it that is having loss? Who is sad? Who is unworthy? Who is afraid? THOSE THINGS, combined with your mind, produce a sense of identity, or identification WITH those things, that makes YOU feel and perceive that it is YOU that is those things. That they APPLY to you. Because you think they are PART of your makeup. But it is those things themselves that bring with them the sense of artificial SELF, that is the ego, the selfish self-centered self, the hoarding possessing self, the playing small self. And without YOUR CONSENT, without your BELIEF, that these things are true of you, that sense of little self cannot remain. Because true self is expansive and infinite.

You seem to suffer because you identify WITH and AS ego stuff. Which temporarily makes you believe YOU are being attacked and YOU are the guilty one suffering. But it is really "the ego", the non-existent fictional self, the selfishenss, that is the guilty one. IT feels like IT is guilty, made of guilt. And when you WITHDRAW your allegiance from THE GUILT, that sense of "its about me" goes with it. And then you recognize that your REAL self, your immortal self, was NEVER guilty. It CANNOT BE guilty. And your immortal self doesn't have that sense of self-consciousness, self-concern, self-importance and selfishness.

You can think you are suffering, but you aren't. In a way, it is the ego that is suffering. Ego = suffering. You can think you are "the little self that suffers", but it is NOT really you. Your mind can get CAUGHT IN the trap of the ego viewpoints, which bring with them a sense of self-focus and self-worship and vulnerability, but you are not ever really those things. It is the ego that suffers because the ego IS suffering. It is the ego that has guilt because the ego IS guilt. Without guilt there is no ego. Without a bodily identity there is no body. Without sin there is no world of sin. And without death there is no world.

"Without the idea of death there is no world."

So when you feel like "I am guilty" or "I am anything" other than as God created you, know that you are lost in the ego and are feeling ego stuff and ego stuff feels this way and the sense of artificial "me", self importance, being self-absorbed, selfish, comes with that territory. And it is that vulnerable, sensitive false self that seems to be the target of the suffering, NOT your immortal self. And once you dis-identify from that EGOTISM, the whole ego thought system, you let go of these false accusations and the falsely accused goes with it. And all that is left is your immortal spirit. Your true identity in God which can never be attacked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Only the mind and body need atonement."

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

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

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

Oneness and sickness cannot coexist."

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

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

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

(And why the idea of only one son, one dreamer, one perceiver, no individuals, non-duality, etc are bullshit)

"Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what you want to take at a given time."

(This means God's will is not forced upon YOUR will, you CAN choose when to take the curriculum, or to delay it as long as you like, it's YOUR CHOICE. People have used this statement to justify a sense of "having no choice" and no freedom, as if the curriculum is handed down like a commandment from God. It should be obvious that your "freedom to elect" IS a use of FREE WILL. Even "the script is written" does not prove you don't have free will, because you have to CONSENT to it and are FREE to ignore it.)

"However, if he places his mind under tyranny, rather than Authority, he intrudes the submission/dominance onto free will himself. This produces the obvious contradiction inherent in any formulation that associates free will with imprisonment."

(Having free will does not mean you are an ego, but when you attempt to imprison your will, that's when you produce ego. In other words, by trying to have a will which wills differently to your natural will, you create the illusion of there being an alternative "real choice" but simultaneously puts your will into a prison of UNWILLINGNESS. Yet, you are FREE to be un-willing - that is a USE of will).

"It is not your will to be imprisoned, because your will is free. That is why the ego IS the denial of free will. It is never God Who coerces you, because He shares His Will WITH you."

(See, the ego is the attempt to repress your personal freedom, not to establish personal freedom, but it makes an illusion of personal freedom to cover it over. Also notice, VERY IMPORTANT, "It is never God who coerces you." - meaning that YOUR WILL is not enforced by God, because you are free and independent!)

"Free will MUST lead to freedom."

(This also means freedom from a tyrannical ruler. God is not a tyrannical ruler, he loves you, and has given you a gift of freedom to choose for yourself to willingly want to will like Him, in unison, co-creatively).

"Awaking unto Christ is following the laws of love OF YOUR FREE WILL, and out of quiet recognition of the truth in them. The attraction of light must draw you willingly, and willingness is signified by GIVING."

(Willingness is required in order to want to be with God. It is the EGO that lacks willingness and lacks freedom and lacks true independence. Ego means imprisonment and loss of self, not gaining of self. It is an illusion of gaining self while simultaneously losing it. It is also an illusion of willing independently while isolating your will. You can only be with God WILLINGLY, which means freely, which means no coercion and not being forced by God. Love does not enter where it is not welcome) .

"In reality, this is his ONLY choice, because his free will was made for his own joy in creating the perfect."

(YOUR free will was given you by God for YOUR own joy in creating the perfect.)

"You will never know that you are co-creator with God, until you learn that your brother is a co-creator with YOU."

(Ok so now not only do you have the position of co-creating with God, which means you COLLABORATE WILLINGLY AND FREELY AND INDEPENDENTLY, but also you co-create with your brother. Guess what happened when you co-created with your brother in an egoic way? You CO-DREAMED the dream!)

"It is this Thought by which the Father gave creation to the Son, establishing the Son as co-creator with Himself."

(God Himself has established you and others as co-creators with Him. That means it's not just God creating everything on His own, or that the son is just an effect of Him, or that the son is forced to do God's will like some kind of robot. We participate joyfully in sharing God's will, sharing the same interest, sharing the same desire to create.)

"And it is the AGREEMENT of their Thought that makes the Son a co-creator with the Mind Whose Thought created him."

(See, what makes you a co-creator and what makes you "do God's will" isn't that His will forces you, it's that you AGREE WITH HIS WILL FREELY. Doing God's will is VOLUNTARY.)

"A co-creator with the Father must have a Son. Yet must this Son have been created like Himself. A perfect Being, all-encompassing and all-encompassed, nothing to add and nothing taken FROM; not born of size nor weight nor time, nor held to limits or uncertainties of ANY kind."

(I think this is talking about YOUR creations. Note that it also says that the creation you create is a PERFECT BEING, and since it is LIKE YOU, you also are a perfect being.)

"Think not He wills to bind you, Who has made you co-creator of the universe along with Him. He would but keep your will forever and forever limitless."

(This is clear. God's will DOES NOT BIND YOU. He created you as a WILLING, FREE-WILLED INDIVIDUAL, who is capable of desiring to and agreeing freely to will WITH God and in alignment with what God wants to create. He will keep YOUR WILL forever limitless, meaning that even Himself and His own will does not impose limits on your will.)

"Your will is as free as mine, and God Himself would not go against it."

(See. Now, if God will not go against YOUR will AT ALL, ever, not even a tiny bit, this MUST MEAN, that you are effectively a SEPARATE INDIVIDUAL in heaven! It MUST also mean that your own will is FREE to choose WHETHER to will the same thing as God wills or not. Because it's only possible that you MIGHT do something God would oppose, by virtue of you being ABLE to will something ELSE. You can will to "try" to make something UNLIKE God's will would create, which is what produced the separation. And God does not OPPOSE your will to do that, although He offers help and guidance for you to return to Him and will like Him, freely. If God does not go against your will, YOU MUST HAVE INDIVIDUALITY. Note Jesus also says YOUR WILL is as free as HIS... meaning that THERE IS NOT JUST ONE SON, and you cannot oppose His will anymore than He can oppose yours, because you RESPECT each other's individual freedom!)

"Would God let this be real, if He did not will to be alone Himself?"

(God did not will to be alone! So He CREATED YOU! This is because nothing real can be real unless it is given, because it has to be given in order to have HAD it to give, so God automatically creates YOU!)

"They remind you that you are the co-creator of all things that live."

(Remembering that "there is no life outside of heaven", you have co-created WITH God, freely, all things that LIVE, because everything in heaven is alive, including your soul.)

"God, who encompasses ALL Being, nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy. Nothing that is real can be increased EXCEPT by sharing it. That is why God Himself created you. Divine Abstraction takes joy in application, and that is what creation MEANS."

(There you have it plainly and simply, God created "separate" distinct beings who have everything "individually", have their own free will, and WANT to share what they have in order to increase THEIR joy. Note is also says that nothing real can increase except through sharing - sharing means extension or creation, and also making sort of "room for" something ADDITIONAL, which is why God ADDED you to creation, increasing it, and He did this because it brings him joy to apply what He is - to create.)

"God does not need revelation returned to Him, which would clearly be impossible, but He DOES want revelation brought to others. This cannot be done with the actual revelation, because its content cannot be expressed, and it is intensely personal to the mind which receives it. But it can still be returned BY that mind through its attitudes to other minds which the knowledge from the revelation brings."

(Information about revelations helps us to see that God communicates directly to individual PERSONAL selves, he does not and cannot communicate directly with an EGO, so it must be to the SOUL, and yet is personal, because there are OTHERS. Many sons, many brothers, many souls, many minds. "God is praised whenever any mind learns to be wholly helpful.")

"The truly helpful are God’s miracle-workers, whom I direct until we are all united in the joy of the kingdom."

(God has MANY miracle workers!)

Clearly there is SIGNIFICANT PROOF here that God created many individuals who are independent and HAVE THEIR OWN FREE WILL.

This leads to having to re-evaluate many other beliefs and conclusions that people have FALSELY come to, such as that there is only one dreamer of the dream, that other people are literally you, that you are responsible for other people's choices, that your perception's correction makes it impossible to see other people's poor choices, that your acceptance of atonement undoes the entire dream for everyone, etc... these are ALL false conclusions based on the DENIAL OF FREE WILL and the DENIAL OF INDIVIDUALITY IN HEAVEN.

Let's talk a bit about this notion that all you have to do is transcend "what's happening" in order to be at peace.

The major assumption here is that stuff is happening "on its own". The world is ticking over, events are occurring out of nowhere, no-one is necessarily responsible for making anything happen, attack thoughts pop into the mind seemingly out of nowhere, shit just happens, suffering happens, sickness happens, death happens. Seemingly all on its own with no input from you. So then you try to escape it.

This assumption is only possible if you perceive yourself as having NOTHING whatsoever to do with "causing" the world to be this way, causing sickness, causing suffering or death. The viewpoint is one of total powerlessness, in which the world seems to be the CAUSE OF YOU, the dream decides your fate, things happen to you against your will, and you are entirely at the effect of the world. It's a position of victimhood.

But this for everyone is usually the kind of mindset that you start out with, in the ego, identified with a limited body, perceiving the world as a huge objective reality that does stuff on its own. And then you come to the course and start trying to digest its teachings WITHIN that kind of viewpoint without questioning it. Without questioning the assumption that the world is running on autopilot, or that the body gets sick because of outside influences, or that death will "happen to you" when it decides to.

Finding yourself in a world that's attacking you (causing you, making you affected), you seek for SALVATION or ESCAPE, and you think that you will find it by some kind of AVOIDANCE of what's happening. That if you could crawl into a hole and hide and get away from the causes, you would find some kind of peace. This is entirely an ego strategy. It keeps the attacking world real, maintains external causes, and keeps you at the effect of everything, but then persuades you that if you will step back and sit on the fence just enough maybe you'll be beyond the reach of its influence. That it's totally normal for a hideous disease to be ripping the body apart so long as you're smiling, or that somehow it's natural to still get angry but "observe" the anger from a detached viewpoint. Split mind anyone?

This leads many people along the EGO path of seeking for salvation by some kind of "transcending" of what is happening. That is, firmly believing that what happens is entirely permanently outside your control, you have no power over it, it will STILL continue to do what it does, and there is nothing you can really to do STOP IT. And that therefore your only solution is to "change your mind about it" or try to "see it in a different way" so that, perhaps, you can WELCOME IT, or not interpret it as an attack, or position yourself beyond it somehow.

And so then the entire effort to progress spiritually becomes about a kind of withdrawal from the world, an attempt to transcend it, an attempt to bypass it, an attempt to KEEP THE WORLD functioning the way it does, keep the attacks, keep the wars, keep the sickness, keep the suffering, and keep the death, but find some way to "be at peace with it". Or to be happy "in spite of it".

The thing is, there is SOME truth to this, because the world is in fact not real, it's a dream, and taking it seriously makes you unhappier. Believing in its illusions and temptations produces stress. Reacting to it increases suffering. etc. So you reason that you will find more peace if you will sort of calm yourself down, become tranquil, try not to be upset by it and thus reach some kind of peaceful state. While the world keeps being murderous against your will. And then along comes death, and what can you do to stop it? Hold up a peace sign? Throw some vitamin water at it?

What happens here is that people find a kind of escape from suffering through avoidance and "re-framing". It's perfectly legitimate to reframe the world because the world is a dream and not to be taken seriously. But at the same time, while people will take "causality" away from the world as if to say, you are no longer "at the effect of" the world, they still won't go so far as to OWN THE CAUSALITY. They won't admit to having power over the world, nor admit to DREAMING IT. It's like becoming a passive dreamer who is still unconscious of the fact that the world is coming from their own mind.

They see no purpose or power or ability to actually INFLUENCE it in any way. And this is a result of the ASSUMPTION that the state of major limitation you find yourself in is "normal" and natural. In this state there has been no transcendence of the order of difficulty in miracles. The hierarchy of illusions has not been dismantled or flattened. The power of the mind has not been admitted to or owned or mastered. Miracles are not being performed. Healing is missing. In effect, every way in which you would be THE CAUSE OF WHAT HAPPENS, is completely ignored.

So what happens is, we still believe the world is the cause of everything, the world still spins on its own, events still happen outside your control, people still attack, the environment still causes your body to be sick, the death still decides when your time is up. But supposedly you are happy and at peace. And yet you are powerless. Passive. An "observer". A fence-sitter. Sitting there on a cloud doing basically nothing to engage with the world, heal sickness, cast out death or overcome the LAWS that you made up to govern you.

If you are under no laws but God's, why are you pinned down by gravity? Why are you restricted by space and time? Why do you depend on air and food? Why when "sickness happens" do you not realise you PUT IT THERE? Why when death seems to loom are you not seeing that you HAVE POWER OVER SICKNESS AND DEATH BECAUSE YOU MADE THEM UP AND CAN ABOLISH THEM BOTH?

Being "not at the effect of the world" does NOT mean "I don't let the world affect me". It means YOU STOP HURTING YOURSELF. It means YOU take responsibility for CAUSING everything, and you choose to stop attacking yourself. It means you stop believing there even IS an outside cause or power or will or mind that can affect you against your will. It means you stop believing that the body EVER "gets sick" through any process other than YOUR MIND ATTACKING IT. And it also requires the recognition that even death has NO POWER OVER YOU, and therefore you DO NOT MAKE IT HAPPEN, and there is NO cause anywhere to make it happen against your will. Jesus: "SWEAR NOT TO DIE!"

This is the part of ACIM that so many poeple do not want to see or admit to or own up to. That the world is not simply "not causing you" to be upset, but that YOU ARE CAUSING IT. SOMEONE is responsible for EVERYTHING that happens. Nothing happens without a MIND CAUSING IT. The planet does not even EXIST without a mind dreaming it. Sickness does not happen unless a MIND decides to make sickness. Death does not occur unless some MIND CHOOSES to make death appear to happen.

It is not anywhere near enough to simply seek out being "at peace" in a kind of escape from "a real world that does stuff to me on its own". That is not mastery. That is not transcendence, it's avoidance. There is no power in that. It's a state of passivity and really not much different than laying down and allowing death to happen "on its own". Being not "affected by" something does not mean it still HAPPENS and you are "okay with it". You have to look at WHY does it even HAPPEN AT ALL? It happens because YOU are responsible for making it happen. That's a whole different ballgame.

It's not merely about what the world does and how you respond to it, it's about YOU ARE THE DREAMER WHO IS MAKING IT ALL HAPPEN. And therefore you can choose to NOT making it happen, or to undo anything you have made. It is a position of POWER. It is a position of being able to HEAL whatever occurs. It is a position of miracle working and supernatural power. It's not a state of contemplating your navel and becoming mostly peaceful then having the body "become sick and die" in a total display of victimhood.

You are to not be affected by the world. That does not mean the world still does stuff "on its own" to you against your will. It means realizing the world DOES NOT do stuff on its own, YOU DO IT, and then deciding to STOP DOING IT. So that the world CANNOT DO ANYTHING without your consent. Because you do it all to yourself. This is the secret of salvation. This is why there is no power or cause in the world capable of bringing oppression, making you suffer, sick, sad or afraid. The world is the EFFECT OF YOU. Which means you, in your unlimited nature, should be able to CHANGE IT any way you see fit. Because you are the dreamer.

It's also not enough to meditate and "watch thoughts come and go". WHO MAKES THE THOUGHTS? You do. Stopping making the thoughts is correcting the problem at its CAUSE, rather than allowing the thought-generation to continue and to then try to BYPASS it. That is not peace. A healed mind should not be GENERATING attack thoughts. There should be no need to "observe" thought processes, given that those troublesome thought processes should not even be HAPPENING in the first place. It's not your job to let attack thoughts keep occurring by try to sidestep or ignore them (actually a form of disassociation). It's your job to uproot those motherfuckers at their source and stop making them.

The course says not to seek to change the world, but to change your mind about the world. A lot of people SOTP THERE. But it goes on to say, that if you change your mind about the world, THE WHOLE WORLD WILL CHANGE. Because your mind has the power to CHANGE THE DREAM. That is a VASTLY different standpoint than one of "only" changing your mind "about it". You never really change your mind ABOUT the dream anyway.... as you change your mind, the dream changes. There is no "about", unless you believe that the world is a SEPARATE THING FROM YOUR MIND.

"You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both."

"You made the world."

"You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts."

If your focus is to try to LET STUFF STILL HAPPEN and "just observe it", you are turning yourself into a fence-sitting inert powerless action-less miracle-less passive recipient of death.

Jesus states that "members of my party are ACTIVE WORKERS."

There is miracle mindedness, that is one thing. It's a state of true perception and readiness to perform miracles. But then there is MIRACLE DOING, or working, which is an ACT of CAUSING illusions to change or disappear. Miracle DOING is the part that so many are afraid of and do not want anything to do with. Because that means having power over the world and not just seeking out an escape from it.

"Your function on earth is healing." "You share the Holy Spirit's function on earth."

If you want to be a miracle WORKER, not just "miracle minded" or "transcendent", it has to go WAY beyond passivity or trying to meditate or trying to let stuff keep happening without any ABILITY to do anything about it. Faith without works is dead. You must EXTEND LOVE, CAUSE HEALING, and REVERSE DEATH. This is not a spectator sport UNTIL the entire sonship is awakened.

Sometimes I become interested in something external, and excited about doing it. I seem to feel good about it at the time, and it seems as if the thing itself causes me to feel good about it. And I take that to mean that I should do this thing, because it feels good to do it. As if to say, doing this thing "makes me" feel happier.

But then, my mood changes, and with it my perception changes. The whole way that the thing is framed to my mind changes. It doesn't hold the appeal that it had before. It seems to lack the excitement and I've lost interest. I wonder to myself why I became disillusioned and whether it was the right thing to be doing after all, and how it was that I was seemingly so into it not so long ago and now I feel nothing about it.

And then perhaps I am encouraged and the excitement comes back and my perception changes and once again the thing seems appealing, as if it has once again taken on the magical sparkle. It again looks like it's something I'm into and enjoying and therefore, that must mean, that the thing itself is causing me to enjoy it, and so I should be doing it because it makes me feel good. Follow your bliss and all that.

But then the feeling state changes again, and once again the perception of the thing is different, and my whole interest in it melts into nothing as if I can't tell why I was ever interested in it to begin with. And then I look at it and it seems empty and cold.

This constant flip-flopping back and forth is really based on a mistaken idea that the thing outside of me is the cause of how I'm feeling. As if it's important in life to find things which "make you happy." And the things out there in the world, hobbies, projects, activities, whatever, have some inherent causal power of their own to do stuff to you that you "like" more than other things.

When you're in the good mood place you perceive the thing differently than when you're not in a good mood. I have wondered to myself if it is only the times that I don't feel so happy that I also lose interest in things. But I'm not sure it's just about happiness or not, it seems to shift all over the place.

The issue is that that I believe the thing itself is not neutral, and is able to cause me to feel something, that I should become able to "like it", and want to do more of it. Like your favourite ice cream flavour or candy bar which you prefer more than others. Because apparently I'm getting something from it. It's feeding me, doing something to me, changing me, defining me, forcing me to feel a certain way. As a kind of "positive victimhood."

But when my feeling state changes and my perception changes it's like the whole thing just went down the toilet. I can't seem to maintain a consistent steady mental attitude for a long time. Perhaps for a week or two, but then it shifts. Then I'm flip-flopping constantly wondering, should I be doing this thing, or not? Should I do this project, or not? Should I pursue this more, or not? And there's always this greener grass and something else to flip to.

And I then can't decide because I just seem to keep going back and forth on this rollercoaster of being at the effect of something external, seemingly... when in fact it's really the internal state that is the determiner of how I feel and perceive. By not recognising that the inner state comes first, I look to the outer state for evidence of whether a certain thing is something i want or not, on the basis of what it seems to "make me feel."

But it's always that how I feel internally is the determiner of whether or not I seem to be enjoying what is external. It comes from within, not without. I've gone back and forth on some things so many times with fleeting periods of interest and disinterest and never quite knowing whether I want to do the thing or not. Sometimes it's appealing and sometimes it's not.

What occurs to me simply is that this is all because my mind seems to look externally for validation and for figuring out whether something is something I want or not, whether I am getting something from it, and whether I like what I'm getting. But this ignores that I am always projecting, and then perceiving. It ignores that I am choosing how I feel first, and then am projecting that out and seeing it reflected in the thing I'm doing. I'm literally "making up" what it means to me as I go along.

Sometimes my projections make certain things look rosier and more interesting. Sometimes my projections make them look lacklustre and having no appeal at all. But I think if I stay "addicted" to getting stuff from outside of myself in this way, I will just keep flopping all over the place wondering whether or not something is "the chosen one". Trying to figure out what to do iin life, what I want, what to get, what to enjoy, on the basis of what it does to me, is a constant state of confusion.

It's possible based on personality or beliefs or interests or aptitudes that, yes, there could be some activities that seem to align more with one's nature, and those might seem to more easily induce feelings of attraction and happiness. But if all happiness comes from God, it can't really come from without. And if I am immortal and changeless, it can't be that even my feelings are forced upon me by external stimulation.

I think that the more I realize that all happiness belongs to God and that you can only be happy when you are with God, the more I'm questioning whether anything external can "make me happy" at all. Or whether all I've been doing all these years is just making stuff up as I go along and not realising it, not realising that I've been projecting completely random attitudes onto the world and then believing that what they show me is what things really mean, or what their value is.

ACIM would say that nothing in the world can bring oppression or make you ill or sad or weak or frail or die. And similarly that nothing in the world can bring you peace, or take your peace away. And it would probably also say that nothing in the world can force you to be happy, or give you what you want, or in fact give you anything whatsoever, or do anything to you, or stop you doing anything. Because the world does nothing at all, and all the rest of the make-believe story bullshit about whether it's the right or good thing or not is a totally subjective projection.

It's strange to realize that it's not the stuff I'm doing or the activities or the external things that are determiners of what I feel or whether I want to do them or not. It starts within with my inner state and my connection to God, or lack thereof. And then I project out from that state and perceive the world, giving it flavours, assigning meanings, dressing some things up as more worthy and more appealing while dressing other things down. And then it shifts and changes and is completely unstable. "What it means to me" is total fiction.

I guess the moral of the story is that, I have to learn not to depend on the world or specific forms of things to cause me to feel certain ways. To stop trying to find happiness from outside of myself. To realize that it's got nothing to do with whether a certain thing is right or wrong or interesting or boring or a "good fit for me."

It's just wholly a matter of... what will I align myself with within, first, and what will I bring to the world or extend out into it or project upon it. And maybe there's a way to be happy in spite of what is external, even in the presence of unconventional things which might before have "caused" unhappiness.

The final truth really is that the world is meaningless and neutral and nothing, and none of its forms mean anything more than others, and none of it does anything different to anything else, and none of it has any more potential to make us happier or sadder or anything whatsoever. Because we are no longer trying to "get" from the world... .when we know the only place we can get anything worth having, is from God within.

"It is impossible the Son of God be merely driven by events OUTSIDE him. It is impossible that the happenings that come to him were NOT his choice. His power of decision is the DETERMINER of every situation in which he seems to FIND himself by chance or accident. No accident or chance is POSSIBLE within the universe as God created it, OUTSIDE of which is nothing. Suffer, and YOU decided sin was your goal. Be happy, and you GAVE the power of decision to Him Who MUST decide for God for you. This is the little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit, and even this He gave to you to give yourself. For, BY this gift, is given you the power to release your Savior, that HE may give salvation unto YOU."

"It takes great learning both to realize and to accept the fact that the world has nothing to give."

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

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."

Your mind is always obeying the laws which Oneness established for all minds, regardless of whether you are in the ego or not. These laws are permanent and unavoidable.

These laws are fully obvious and correctly obeyed when you have True Perception. These apply to God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. They also apply to the ego even though it will deny it.

The ego will attempt to PRETEND that these laws do not apply or are not operating. (more on that later)

The laws:

1) Whatever applies to you applies to the entire Sonship and all of existence equally, and vice versa. It is not possible for something to apply to you which does not apply to others the same. It is not possible for something to apply to them which does not apply to you. If something applies to you, it applies everywhere instantly. If something applies to another, it applies to you immediately. In other words, THERE ARE NO PRIVATE LAWS.

2) Ideas leave not their source, therefore you can only experience what is INSIDE your mind. You cannot experience attack from outside the mind or outside of your Self. Attack has to be manifest WITHIN your mind, put there by yourself. You can only be aware of the content of your mind, not what is separate from it.

3) Cause and effect are NEVER separated. Where there is a cause, there must be an effect. A mind cannot contain a cause without containing an effect, and vice versa. It is not possible for cause outside the mind to put effects inside the mind - the mind has to contain both cause and effect inside itself. You cannot perceive an attacker without inventing an attacker within yourself.

4) You cannot attack without being attacked. All attack is self attack. It is impossible to do something to a separate part of the Sonship without you experiencing absolutely all of the effects. They are you. You are one with them. You cannot judge, attack, hate, condemn, or find sinful, without it applying to you. It's either BOTH of you are sinful, or neither, but never one or the other. This is the meaning of SHARED INTERESTS.

5) You cannot perceive, access, be aware of, or affected by, anything outside of your mind. There IS no outside. You cannot perceive outside of yourself. Anything you perceive or are aware of must be happening WITHIN your own mind. Believing there is a separate will outside your mind will frighten you because of what it can do outside of the scope of your mind's reach, or in other words, it has power over you which you can do nothing to prevent. Such a belief will result in death.

6) Your mind cannot remain neutral and perceive something which is not neutral. There are no neutral thoughts. Your mind does not have the ability to perceive objectively that someone is being sinful, separate from your own sin. If they are seen as sinning, you are seen as sinning. You DO NOT have an ability to perceive neutrally or objectively while seeing sin. Therefore you cannot tell if your brother is sinful or not, because to see sin in them it MUST be in you, and you cannot see past your own sin, so are blind.

There may be some more ways we can talk about the way a mind of oneness operates, but this is enough for now.

Now, the mind is ALWAYS bound by these laws, no matter what, no matter if the ego is getting involved (false perception) or whether you are enlightened The presence of ego (an attempt to defy the law) DOES NOT stop the laws operating.

However, what the ego TRIES to do, is to DENY the law, and PRETEND that these laws are NOT permanently operating. It pretends it's possible to IGNORE these laws, and to operate in a different way, and not receive the consequences of the law. The ego sees itself as rewriting the laws and having power over the laws (law = God's Will).

The thing is, when the ego tries to pretend the laws don't apply, all kinds of shit happens. It will try to convince you there is a separation between cause and effect. It will try to convince you you can get away with murder, can see objectively that someone is sinful and not you, that what applies to you does not apply to others, that you have escaped consequences of sin and someone else is paying for it, and that you can use the body for attack without being attacked.

ACIM 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."

Within the laws of God, this means that the ego tells you that you can see the sins of others "through" your body, without your body being affected. This is denial. It is not true. If you attempt to see your brother as sinful, IT MUST APPLY TO YOU ALSO. This automatically will condemn and attack YOU, and this WILL show up in your body image as symptoms or signs of attack. Another word for that is forms of sickness.

You literally cannot judge or accuse or condemn without being condemned, by yourself. What you are actually doing then, is you're trying to use the body as a weapon. Because there is a direct correlation between your belief in and projection of sin, and sickness showing up, you will make your body SICK, in an attempt to prove that your brother is sinful. This is the ONLY WAY you can attempt to prove it. By proving you can be attacked or hurt, you demonstrate that your brother is the sinner and not you. Or at least that's the ego's interpretation of it. In God's law, you are hurt BY YOUR OWN ATTACK.

People literally are walking around projecting sin and hate through their body, trying to get rid of sin onto someone else to escape the consequences of the law, but are nevertheless finding that it makes their body sick. They cannot escape the law, but they're pretending to. The effects of sickness in the body also then reflect the level confusion, that those outside of yourself are causing you to be hurt.

Trying to prove this is level confusion and will implement sickness. All sickness is a form of magic. Magic is the belief that a lower level can cause and higher level (e.g. body causes mind, others cause you, being a victim etc). This turns you into an EFFECT and your body will demonstrate those effects to correlate to the perceived external cause.

When someone gets to the point where their body is so sick that it seems to die, they are actually attempting to severely prove that they can suffer and die, that it is someone or something else *separate* that has caused it, and therefore the dying body is a weapon. It accuses everyone and everything of sin, being the cause of the death - anything other than yourself.

Death of the body is a fulfillment of a belief in sin, an attempt to kill the Son of God by binding him to form, and demonstrates a lack of forgiveness. A dying body is like a kamikaze weapon, attempting to infect and destroy everything and prove that God and His son are dead. God's death (the purpose of the dream of death) cannot be proven without YOU dying. Death is also completely "contained" as an effect upon YOURSELF, because ideas leave not their source and therefore, God is not affected by it.

This is of course an ego cover-up job, because NO-ONE CAN DIE WITHOUT THEIR OWN CONSENT. Meaning, your body cannot die unless you are believing that everyone else must be dead at some level. Death is symptomatic of huge level confusion, where the lower level (world of effects) has produced a "cause" upon the higher level (mind). The person believing this MUST show death in the body image to represent God's law that what applies to others applies to you. All sickness and death is an ACCUSATION that your brother has sinned against you.

This also therefore means that, if you stop accusing your brother of sin, your body CANNOT SHOW SICKNESS. No exceptions. Sickness can ONLY come about through mis-use of the law, where you attempted to perceive your brother as corrupt, sinful, guilty, wrong in some way. YOU will receive the effects of this belief. Your body will show it.

And this also means that if you stop believing in sin, your body MUST show and demonstrate a complete lack of symptoms of sickness. If there was sickness showing up previously due to prior judgement, IT MUST DISAPPEAR. No exceptions. What has no cause cannot remain. If you understand the Course's section on "sickness is a defense against the truth" you will see that we implement sickness only as a form of defense and denial of the truth, and as a form of level confusion. Once this denial and defenses is not needed, it will be dropped, and the sickness MUST DISAPPEAR as a result of having recognized the illusions you were implementing.

You need to also realize that attack can only happen INSIDE your mind. It's not possible to perceive or experience external attack. This means, if there is an "external person" who seems to attack, or is tempting you to believe in sin, the only way you can SEE that attack is if it is INSIDE the scope of your mind. That means, for you to SEE attack, your own mind has to be sectioned off and part of it has to become an attacker. This attacker is part of yourself, and is in ADDITION to the external attacker, projected onto them. Simultaneously, the part that is not seen as the attacker will be sectioned off and seen as a victim of attack. Your mind will now be attacking ITSELF.

Therefore realize, your mind implements both the belief in a CAUSE of sin, AND the effects of sin, simultaneously. This all happens inside yourself, even if it seems like the person attacking it outside of you. You cannot see them as the source of attack. You have to make YOURSELF the attacker. That means, as in the secret to salvation, that you are literally doing this to yourself. Your mind manifests/produces/visualizes and turns into FORM, both the attacker and the attacked, the cause and the effects. You will put effects of sickness into your body and hold it hostage with the part of you that is hallucinating an attacker.

Now here's the trick of healing. You have to recognize you are doing this to yourself. Other people or external causes have NOTHING to do with it. You are the one who invented the cause and the effects of your sickness. You believe in both of them, and your split mind has two identities. You must recognize that illusions of causes are not real causes, you are the one who, within your mind, is attacking yourself and pretending it has something to with others, and YOU put in place ALL of the symptoms/effects of that causality.

As Jesus tells us, "you made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both". Sickness has NO CAUSE other than your mind's decision to make it. Sickness has no reason to remain, other than your NEED to keep it (as a defense against truth).

When you do not need or choose to keep it, and recognize the illusion you made (that cause is unloving and sinful - which is really the belief that God in evil and has attacked you), the symptoms of sickness MUST DISAPPEAR. You DID make your sickness, and you DID make death, and you CAN abolish them. Not only that, because you are bound by the laws of God, you cannot FAIL to abolish them if you stop using your body for attack. Sickness simply must vanish to comply with the law.

There are no loopholes in the law. There are no exceptions. There are no other causes of sickness beyond yourself. Sickness has no mind, will or power of its own. No-one maintains it besides you. It can and must disappear when you return to True Perception. Illusions recognized must disappear. A guiltless mind cannot suffer, because a guiltless mind CANNOT MAINTAIN SICKNESS. Sickness has to disappear.

This is so black and white a law, that Jesus tells us, "a sick body is proof that the mind has not been healed." You literally CANNOT be sick if your mind is healed. If sickness is showing up, or remains, your mind IS NOT healed. You can be in denial of this, as most people are. You can believe that it's possible to be at peace and keep sickness. But you can't. The law confirms that sickness WILL NOT and CANNOT show up at all if the mind is sane and free. Similarly you cannot be at peace with death or dying, because to die is the ULTIMATE expression of a belief in sin.

The dead can be raised and all sickness can be healed, BECAUSE of the law. If this were not true, resurrection would be impossible. You cannot believe in death and make the body die and believe in resurrection. Using the body lovelessly will make it suffer and die. Believing only in eternal life will bring the body to health, since it is not being attacked and twisted and deformed by the mind's attitude. The body is just an image being projected, it can EASILY be changed by the healed mind.

Jesus tells us not to use sickness to attempt to demonstrate that our brother is a sinner. If our body is sick in any way, we ARE using it to prove he is a sinner. He asks us to demonstrate that WE CANNOT BE HURT, which proves that our brother is not sinful and cannot cause death. HIS innocence is proven when YOUR innocence is proven. This DOES play out on the visual, perceptible, illusory dream level of the world, because the world is a symbol in the mind. The body can become a symbol of holiness and innocence, used as a teaching device to prove to your brother that he has not sinned. HE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO ATTACK IT, because YOU will not put symptoms of sickness into it, and HE is not an evil cause of effects!

You must understand the law. The law applies to you. You cannot escape it. But you can be in denial and pretend it does not apply. And then you will suffer and die. Choose the equal innocence of the entire Sonship and Live.

"Sick bodies are accusers." "Behold, brother, at your hand I die."

Ok now, this is a lesson in cause and effect and what happens when it is reversed.

When your mind is sane, it knows it is "cause". It causes, it creates, it extends love. It knows that what it causes is its "effect".

As mind starts to deceive itself and go insane, it begins to reverse cause and effect. It sees itself as "at the effect of" something, and places "the cause" (sinner) seemingly outside of itself (its a split mind with victim and victimizer in it).

If you can imagine little arrows coming out of the mind pointing in the direction of causality, when cause-effect is reversed, the arrows start pointing AT your mind as if from outside of it. This is self attack. The mind starts producing "effects", which correspond to what it *perceives* are the kind of effects that the "outside cause" is causing.

So as the mind goes into perception and starts perceiving "backwards", it sees itself as under attack from outside of itself, even though the split part of the mind is what's attacking the other part from the outside in.

At the same time, placing causality outside of your mind or "separate from me" or "not part of me" (the split involves disassociation), you "project" ownership of that causality onto "others". You see your sin in them, and see them as causing you.

If you are an effect of an external cause, that external cause is "to blame" for putting the effects in you. They are the ones who are launching the arrows in your direction. So as your perception reverses and you now have level confusion and belief in magic and an authority problem, your mind is now attacking itself "through" what it sees as others - brothers.

This is a state of mental illness. It is sickness. And because the mind, your mind, is attacking itself in a split state, IT is putting the "effects" into you which IT is also causing from an external vantage point. A vital element to a flipped perception is that you actually perceive as if the "cause" is outside you, or that you are perceiving yourself through the eyes of others. If they are the ones causing your "effects", so you claim, you are *accusing* them of causality, or sin.

Simultaneously, the "effects" which you are visualizing as coming from elsewhere, YOU put in place, and so you actually implement sickness in FORM. This sickness shows up as your body becoming sick! If you can visualize this, it's kind of like you dress yourself in an appearance of suffering and show this to your brother, and hold this "picture of crucifixion" up in front of his face, and say "behold brother, at YOUR hand I die", as an attempt to PROVE that HE is the cause of your effects.

So on the one hand, your body starts to manifest symptoms of sickness because your mind is sick/split and is attacking itself, and on the other hand you are simultaneously condemning your brother for being the one to cause it. You've displaced causality onto brothers and now hold them accountable for your suffering. This is why "sick bodies are accusers".

Now, here is the key central teaching, which many people don't get or don't want to accept. While it's true that bodies are not real and don't matter etc, while you have one, it is PART OF the way in which you are attempting to accuse your brother of sin. While the attack is really happening on a mental level, your body IS REPRESENTING a picture of your mind's attitude about itself. And its self attitude is the SAME as its attitude about others, due to the Golden Rule.

So now, that means, the only way that you are going to stop accusing your brother of sin, is that two things need to happen. 1) Your mind needs to have its perception corrected so that it's not backwards, and so that your mind does not perceive itself as "being affected by" a separate external cause (brother), and 2) Your body needs and MUST reflect that attitude through its FORM, in order NOT to show a picture of crucifixion to your brother.

Now, some people might say that it doesn't matter what form your body is taking or whether it "looks sick" or has some disease etc, that this has no bearing on your brother because bodies don't really exist anyway. This is true at this level. BUT... the body can only get into that state of sickness when the MIND has USED IT FOR ATTACK, meaning that it is only IN that state BECAUSE the mind is attacking your brother (by accusing him of causing your suffering). So while the body is "secondary" or a "symptom of" the mind's condition, the body does tell us what state your mind is in.

Jesus goes on to be quite clear that the only way that you can absolutely PROVE to your brother that he is not a sinner, is not merely by your mind being free from a reversed cause-effect, but also that your BODY DEMONSTRATES a picture of innocence - a body which has no flaws, no damage, no disease, no death, no harm and no breakage, in order to SHOW HIM something which is SO CONVINCING, and so irrefutable, filled with "conviction", that he will not be able to deny his own innocence when he looks upon it.

When he looks at your sick body, it stands there accusing him of sin. If he is not in his right mind, he will take this as proof of his sinfulness. He can "opt out" of that by choosing the light for himself, but if he does not, he IS CURSED by your body and mind. Jesus speaks of how those who are sane cannot be cursed, but those who believe in separation CAN be negatively affected by others, because it compounds what they already believe. This is how you "imprison" your brother.

In order to set your brother free AND YOU AS WELL, your mind has to have its perception corrected, which means that you see yourself as ONLY CAUSE, with no effects happening to you. And when your mind does that, it will USE the body to SHOW a picture of "having no effects". If your body has no effects or attack in it, and is a picture of invulnerability and harmlessness, it comes across as lovely and pure and holy. There is no "temptation" in it to suggest to your brother that there are effects in it, and therefore no PROOF that he can have done anything TO IT in sin or attack. This EXONERATES HIM. "Miracles are teaching devices."

So while the body itself may be a secondary symptom or illusion, the state or picture of what it presents to others still correlates to the state of mind. If the mind is sick the mind WILL see the "self" as attacked, and having identified itself with the body, will attack the body, and perceive the body as attacked, resulting in the body BEING attacked by the mind. Sickness will then show up in the body, proving your brother's sinfulness. Even if you think your brother had nothing to do with your sickness, your sickness IS an attempt to come between BOTH OF YOU, because separation is a two-edged sword. Dead bodies are ego weapons.

When your mind is sane, it WILL heal the body, because it will no longer be visualizing "effects happening to me". Thus no effects will show up. The mind HAS power OVER the body at all times because it is the CAUSE of the body. The mind is on a higher level than the body, and trumps all of the body's states. "The mind is responsible for EVERY condition of the body." - whether it looks like sickness or health. And a sane mind will ONLY SHOW A HEALTHY BODY, otherwise it is demonstrating condemnation! And what the body shows up, is a TEACHING DEVICE, and will teach others they are sinners if shows up as sick!

So when your teaching becomes unified, and you "teach only love for that is what you are", your body will be healed by the mind ("the mind, being sane, heals the body"), and will ONLY show to your brother a lovely HEALED body, which has been healed through miracles of love. "The mind must be stronger than the body, EVERY miracle DEMONSTRATES this", because miracles correct perception and heal the mind and restore the order of the levels, which REVERSES THE EFFECTS. "You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both."

Once you demonstrate to your brother a healthy body, you are showing him "brother, by your hand I LIVE." This cancels out sin and proves he must be innocent, because he cannot find the "effects of sin" in your appearance. Your healthy body exonerates him and teaches him he CANNOT have sinned, and so must be innocent, merely by looking upon it. This is why, IF YOU HAVE A BODY, it MUST reach a state of only life, only health, and only healing, and SURMOUNT DEATH, in order to reach the state of "resurrection."

Resurrection is the opposite of death. It is a state in which your mind is sane and ONLY WILLS TO SHOW LOVE, and therefore refuses (and cannot) show a body that appears to be attacked. It teaches only love by using the body as a SYMBOL OF IMMORTALITY. It is still only a symbol, and is limited, but it does represent the eternal life of Christ. It is in resurrection that the curriculum ends. And it is in resurrection that you overcome death entirely, SWEARING NOT TO DIE, and choosing to NEVER CHOOSE DEATH AGAIN.

You choose never to die by simply choosing to only represent life and to only unite with your brother in recognition of your mutual perfect union and innocence forever. "You cannot die unless you choose to do so." "No one dies without their own consent". All death is suicide. This is a course in the living, in life, in restoration of life, in raising the dead, and expressing live-giving miracles. When the conditions of sickness are removed from the mind (guilt) there is nothing for it to return to. Love heals the body. Love heals the mind. Love shines away the body. And all that is left is love.

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."

(and you must!)

The "sickness is a defense against the truth" section says a lot about how we make sickness AND reverse it.

Basically, sickness doesn’t just mean bodily sickness it means any kind of belief that separation is real. That belief is in the mind. The mind is projecting the body currently, because the mind sees itself as an illusion not a reality. When the mind sees itself as being "made of" something ego, it manifests the very thing it sees itself as, like a body.

Sickness is "made" or put in place, by the mind, by using the body without love, or rather, by using it for attack. That means you’re believing that you really did sin against God, are really separate, and are now trying to get rid of that sin by denying and projecting it. That means you’ll try to project it through, and onto, the body, or rather you’ll project a body which appears sick, which makes the body show up with sickness. When you attempt to therefore get rid of the sin by accusing someone else of being the one to sin, instead of them receiving the consequences or effects, you do. You do it to yourself.

This is because there is a law of the mind, to do with how a mind of oneness and wholeness works. That law is, that what you do to another, you directly do to yourself. It sort of along the lines of "do unto others as you’d have them do unto you" except that version does not work because it leaves open the possibility that someone else might not reciprocate. Instead, the law says, a mind that is one with another mind, WILL experience directly the effects of its causes. So if you were to attack that other mind, you WILL attack your own, because your are one with them. You therefore have a vested interest in ONLY loving your brother and yourself, otherwise you will make yourself suffer. This is the meaning of having SHARED INTERESTS.

When we then get into the ego, that law STILL applies at all times, but the ego goes into denial about it. Then it believes it can get away with murder by being able to attack/cause another person without experiencing the effects/consequences. So the ego will then attack trying to get rid of sin, but the law kicks in, and all the effects/consequences you have attempted to "give" to the other person, you DIRECTLY give them to yourself. So suddenly your body will become sick because you have attacked yourself. This is the secret to salvation, that you are the one who is giving yourself ALL the sickness and suffering and death that you imagine is caused by other sinful people or things in the world.

Sickness, as a belief in separation from God, and thus a belief that sin is real, is basically DENIAL. It is a way of trying to defend against God, to block God, to shut off access to Life. Obviously if you shut yourself off from that which gives Life, you will suffer and become weak and sick and die. So denial is the ego’s device for pretending that the truth is not true. Denial causes projection because it puts you into a state of mind where it seems *possible* to get rid of your sin without having to deal with the consequences. All death is suicide and no one dies without their own consent.

That means that if there is any sickness showing up in the body at all, or the person dies, it is PROOF, that the person believed in sin and separation somewhere in their mind. Their mind was not healed. This is absolutely rock solid bullet-proof cause and effect. Anyone who believes in separation will become sick in some way and they will attack their body and it will become sick and eventually die. And that will be a CHOICE. AND it will be implemented entirely personally BY that person who believes that. Hence "a broken body is PROOF the mind has not been healed."

Jesus describes it in that section about defenses against truth, that basically in the ego, having sided with it, we misperceive through it, we look at the truth and believe that the truth is not the truth. We see in it something false that we put there - sin. And make it out to be an attacker. This seems to "logically" then make sense that we need to DEFEND our life against this perceived attacker, and the seemingly sensible thing to do is to put up a defense against it. This defense is implemented by increasing the sense of separation between you and God/attacker, in your mind, psychologically. You put illusions of walls and defenses in place.

The problem is, that by doing that you inadvertently attack yourself, separate yourself from life, make yourself go unconscious, believe you have been attacked by God, believe that it’s God’s will that you die, and so SICKNESS or symptoms of sickness start to show up in your body. The ego’s advice, or its solution to the problem it perceives, always SEEMS like it will make things better for you, but actually makes it worse. So in an act of what seems like "self defense", you end up actually attacking yourself and hurting yourself. Then you get sick, then you die, and you did it to yourself. There IS no other CAUSE of sickness in the entire world.

Once you know this, you’ll realize as Jesus says, that there is a PURPOSE to your sickness. It was put there to deny God and defend your EGO-identified self against what it thinks is an attack. The key then, is recognizing that you only thought you NEEDED the defense, because you mis-perceive what the truth IMPLIED, because you were interpreting its meaning with the EGO, and the ego had a REACTION based on a false perception.

You can then become WILLING, to recognize that what you thought was some kind of sin or evil "IN" the truth, or in God, or some kind of malicious intent, WAS NOT THERE, that the truth really DID NOT mean you were going to stop existing, you had a misperception as a result of seeing the truth through the ego, the truth is NOT trying to hurt you, and therefore you do not NEED "protection". ALL sickness is an attempt to PROTECT yourself, and so it’s paradoxically hilarious that doing so REMOVES the natural protection that love would offer you. The ego’s protection is attack!

When you can realize you had this PURPOSE for your sickness, your defenses, and that you do not NEED them, because you can see clearly (with corrected perception) that the truth is actually supporting you, loving you, is on your side, and it was your alignment with EGO that was hurting you.... you are correctly RECOGNIZING the ego‘s illusory conclusions for what they are. You recognize the truth as TRUE, and you recognize the false as FALSE.

This makes it really OBVIOUS to you that you have no need for the defense whatsoever, and that KEEPING it would only mean that you are continuing to believe the truth is attacking you. You recognize how pointless that is, how meaningless and useless, and so you no longer have a NEED or a PURPOSE for the sickness. The sickness itself then will simply be DROPPED by you, you will stop USING it, you will stop attacking yourself with it, you will recognize it is futile and absolutely not working, is only making things worse for you, and that you have no further use for it.

You will also recognize that the ONLY reason it is there, the only CAUSE of it, IS YOU! It is only there because you WANT it to be, you put it there, you made it, it HAS no other cause keeping it in place, and if you do not WANT it, IT CANNOT STAY. Once you do this, you are withdrawing your belief from it, and IT WILL DISAPPEAR!!!!!! "Illusions recognized must disappear." It disappears because you SEE THROUGH the illusion, you no longer believe there is truth in the sickness, you recognize it was never real, you don’t believe in it, you know you made it up and it is a fantasy, and then it is EFFORTLESS to let it go. Recognizing it is ALREADY GONE, and WAS NEVER REALLY THERE, makes it vanish!!! Belief that God is truth, puts truth where it belongs and vanishes untruth. Belief that ego is truth, puts truth where it doesn’t belong and turns sickness and death into reality.

The sickness was ONLY there because your mind was maintaining it and thinking it needed it. That’s the ONLY cause of any sickness ever. It’s not caused by the environment or the body or other people or food or liquids or events or objects or anything outside of your mind whatsoever. It is cause solely by YOUR misperception of the truth through the ego. And since you MADE the sickness, you therefore can UNMAKE IT. "You made sickness and death and therefore can ABOLISH both". Jesus is absolutely 100% literally meaning that..... there is no sickness that will not disappear INSTANTLY if you no longer have a purpose for it and do not believe in it as being the truth.

This is also why a broken body proves the mind CANNOT be healed. And this is also why, when a healed body shows up, IT IS PROOF that the mind HAS been healed. Sickness, if it’s showing up In the body, always confirms that the mind MUST be believing it needs a defense against truth. And that means it is NOT in acceptance of the atonement. It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for the mind to accept the atonement and for the body to remain sick. The body HAS TO show up as healed, because the mind no longer has the guilt in it that the sickness was MADE OF. It also no longer has defenses against the truth, so simply those "defenses", which project as PHYSICAL DEFENSES, are GONE from the mind and therefore from the body also.

When you stop using the body for attack and stop believing in sin and stop misperceiving truth, the body BECOMES INVULNERABLE, because the mind no longer believes in attack or defense. IT needs no defense. Therefore it does not MAKE or support any, and so they do not show up. Recognize the mind is re-projecting an entirely fresh IMAGE of a body every instant. The "past body" has not properties of its own or ability to keep sickness in place. It has no will or power or conitnuity whatsoever. If the mind accepts the truth, it WILL project instantly a healed body which is not only "holy" it CANNOT BE SICK, and IT CANNOT DIE.

There IS absolutely a direct correlation between the mind’s belief and how the body appears. And there is no other cause for how the body appears. Healed mind, healed body. Sick mind, sick body. Cause and effect. Absolute mind over matter. You cannot be at peace and be sick. You cannot be at peace and die. Death is the opposite of a belief in God. There is no form of sickness that cannot be reversed if the mind accepts the truth and becomes clear about what is true and what is false.

We are supposed to not only demonstrate that there is NO CAUSE outside of us that justifies keeping the body in sickness or damaged or broken, that our brother HAS NOT attacked us, that we CANNOT be hurt, that we are NOT at the effect of the world, that MIND has power over the body (which every miracle demonstrates), and that the Son of God CANNOT BE KILLED. And we are supposed to demonstrate that IN THE FLESH. To use the body as a symbol of IMMORTALITY. For as long as it is useful to do so. Then we lay it aside by making it disappear entirely.

The body itself was a form of sickness. It was made from a belief in sin. "The body is the belief in sin made flesh and projected outwards." When we finally let go of ALL needs to defend against God, we will DISAPPEAR THE BODY - it will vanish, and then we will be entirely Spirit-identified.

The secret to salvation is.... you are doing this all to yourself. So if you don’t like what shit you made for yourself, STOP MAKING IT.

This is why you have to be 100% responsible for every single thing you experience and put in place. YOU HAVE THE POWER TO REVERSE DEATH AND TO MAKE DEATH IMPOSSIBLE. No-one needs to find a way to tolerate sickness, to put up with it, to suffer justifiably, to make do, to live in pain and fear, to suffer, or to die. No-one is supposed to be DYING ever! Use the body with love and, while it shows up, it cannot die. It will become a sign of immortality.

When ACIM talks about the secret of salvation, it goes on to talk about how there is a singular lesson the Holy Spirit teaches, transcendent of all forms of suffering:

"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 ("That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF"). 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."

So what he's saying here is, YOU CAUSE all of your own suffering and pain and sickness and death. YOU are the SINGLE CAUSE of all suffering.

So if we are then to approach healing something that you are seeming to suffer from, even a physical sickness, we need to be at least acknowledging this fact that you have to ADMIT... that you DID THIS, and you now become willing to UNDO it.

"miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo." "

This means there has to be a willingness to admit and accept that if there is any suffering of any kind, it is because YOU CHOSE IT. This has nothing at all to do with inducing guilt either.

"I must have made a wrong decision because I am not at peace" "I made the decision myself..."

This tells you the same thing. You can't get anywhere so long as you are tangled up in beliefs about someone OTHER THAN yourself, or some EXTERNAL CAUSE, being responsible for putting this suffering in place.

You have to be willing to look at the fact that you PUT IT IN PLACE, through a decision you made, a deliberate choice, FOR a reason to fulfill a PURPOSE, to achieve a GOAL, based on a perceived NEED to do so.

"No-one can heal unless he understands what ***purpose*** sickness seems to serve. For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning. Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. ***When this is seen, healing is automatic.*** It dispels this meaningless illusion by the same approach that carries all of them to truth, and merely leaves them there to disappear."

Jesus again confirms that without a PURPOSE, or a NEED FOR the suffering, due to some belief that you WANT IT in order to accomplish something, there would be no way for the sickness to remain.

"Special agents seem to be ministering to him, yet they but give form to his own choice. He chooses them in order to bring tangible form to his desires. And it is this they do, and nothing else. They are not actually needed at all. 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."

You can see that Jesus is being very clear about the RESPONSIBILITY and the POWER that you have, the FREE WILL which you are at all times exercising, which results in either supportive or destructive effects. If anything is happening, it is ONLY because you have chosen it. And therefore you have every power NOT TO. To reverse and undo whatever it is that YOU put into place.

""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."

So nothing AT ALL, no sickness, suffering, experiences, effects, reactions, perceptions, NOTHING can come to you unbidden (un-chosen) by yourself. YOU CHOOSE whether or not you suffer. Which exactly ties into "no one dies without their own consent."

We are free willed beings, which means that absolutely NOTHING happens against your will. You yourself have to ELECT to experience whatever it is you experience. EVERYTHING you experience is chosen freely and willingly. NOTHING happens without YOU willing it to happen. This is responsibility.

This also means there are NO VICTIMS. There is no-one else to blame. No-one else is responsible for changing you or fixing you. No-one is the CAUSE of anything you experience. You are NEVER trapped and stuck in any situation regardless of the symptoms or severity. EVERYTHING can be reversed if you TRULY, genuinely, honestly choose it.

"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."

Read it again. "No-one but yourself affects you."

NOTHING in the world has any power to make you ill or sad or weak or frail. NOTHING in the world causes you to be sick. NOTHING in the world can make you die.

If you are suffering, and without adding any guilt or BLAME, which is an ego interpretation of responsibility, YOU HAVE THE POWER to choose again and be free from it. Because you have GIVEN IT to yourself, and you can take it away.

"I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

So at the very least, as we're looking at the "consequences of our wrong decision", which "The holy spirit will undo" ... "if I will LET Him". .... we need to at least be willing to accept the BASIC rule, that whatever it is... WE MUST HAVE CHOSEN IT.

So you admit to yourself, I chose this. I wanted this. I put this in place. I made this happen. I put it there. I did this on purpose. I did it intentionally. I was trying to ACHIEVE something. I had a PURPOSE for it. I NEEDED to do it.

As you think along these lines, you might be surprised that the RATIONALE for WHY you did this, what you were TRYING TO DO, is much more likely to come to mind. I did this with a physical problem for example and quickly what shows up in my mind was a feeling of hate and anger and a desire to attack, and this hate was clearly directed towards myself. And it was coupled with a desire to position myself as suffering so that I could try to blame someone for something. That's why I induced sickness. And sickness is ALWAYS CHOSEN CONSCIOUSLY.

"***Sickness is not an accident.*** Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception."

"Defenses are not unintentional, ***nor are they made without awareness.*** They are secret magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them. In that second, even less, in which ***the choice is made***, you recognize exactly what you would attempt to do, and then proceed to think that it is done."

There is also a whole "piece" to the course's metaphysics to do with projection and accusation. That is, when you use the body for attack, which attacks the body, such as when you are trying to project your sin and guilt onto your brother, you DELIBERATELY make your body sick in order to PORTRAY "your self" as suffering, SO THAT you can create EFFECTS in the body, which act as PROOF. And these physical effects, which form as part of PROJECTION OF SIN, act as ACCUSATIONS.

"Sick bodies remain accusers"

And once the body is showing as sick, tied into the projection of RESPONSIBILITY and CAUSE onto another person, in which you see yourself as NOT RESPONSIBLE and NOT THE CAUSE and NOT THE CHOOSER, you are accusing your brother of being these things. And your effects seem to correlate to HIS causing you. And now he stands accused, by your suffering, of being the REASON FOR your suffering. And you will now happily have the body suffer and die if it means you can be exonerated from sin by finding your brother to be the RESPONSIBLE party. And now "brother by your hand I die."

So what's happening here is we try to DISOWN the fact that we ALWAYS CHOOSE THE SUFFERING, and that WE PUT IT IN PLACE, and we try to FRAME someone else as the cause of it, by externalizing the choice and try to pin it on someone else. And we use this as a DEVICE, to try to escape RESPONSIBILITY. Because in our mind in which are know we ARE responsible for everything we experience, we also experience GUILT for sins we believe in, and to the ego that makes us feel like we are responsible for being guilty sinners. And we can't stand that so we try to DISSOCIATE from it.

To do that, we have to reverse perception and project causation and make it seem like someone else or something external is the cause of it, we materialize the effects in the body through SELF ATTACK, and then blame our brother for it. So now sickness has a PURPOSE of trying to disown your responsibility and GET RID OF the guilt out of your mind (and of course ideas do not leave their source). And the NEED for the sickness is to escape from RESPONSIBILITY for the guilt. So we try to throw the responsibility out with the guilt.

So while you have a NEED to escape from sin and guilt in your own mind, which YOU CHOSE TO BELIEVE WERE TRUE OF YOU, you have all kinds of reasons why you can BENEFIT from sickness and from portraying yourself as suffering. So that you can DEFEND against the truth. So that you can INDUCE illness. And so that you can try to render yourself SAFER and more INNOCENT. By finding someone else to blame for the beliefs YOU are responsible for, you create a false sense of security. Which at the same time undermines your security.

This is still stuff that we are RESPONSIBLE for doing. But the ego has a really tough time accepting any kind of responsibility because it believes sin and guilt are real. So whenever we're asked to be responsible for choice, for power, for SELF INDUCED SUFFERING, the ego recoils at it, interpreting it as meaning WE REALLY ARE GUILTY if we "own up to having sinned." To admit to "being the sinner" in an effort to be more HONEST, is interpreted through ego as confessing to a crime, and you avoid this at all costs because it induces guilt.

This is why RESPONSIBILITY has to be separated out from ego, sin and guilt, and recognized as SALVATION, rather than as a guarantee of condemnation. Being fully responsible for CHOOSING everything is not in any way an indication of being guilty, or to compound it, or make you feel bad about yourself. It's not a way of pointing a finger of blame or shifting blame to yourself. You are supposed to ADMIT that you did this to yourself, SO THAT you can tap back into the POWER you have to DO THIS, so that you can UNDO IT.

"When you are willing to accept ***sole responsibility*** for the ego's existence YOURSELF, you will have laid aside all anger and all attack""Anger ALWAYS involves PROJECTION OF SEPARATION, which must ultimately be accepted as entirely one's own responsibility."

In general, you will make far more progress towards healing if you are willing to look at your suffering from a vantage point of being its SOURCE. Consider yourself as PRE-SUFFERING, and in a position of being PRIOR to having CHOSEN it. And now recognize from this perspective that you MUST HAVE CHOSEN IT, wanted it, put it there, USED it, desired it, had a purpose for it, needed it, for a reason. And ADMITTING this, will prevent your mind from making up projections and disowning the causation of it. And this will very quickly bring to mind WHAT you did to yourself, and WHY.

You can't become aware of the PURPOSE of your suffering if you are not willing to be responsible for causing or needing it. And only when to recognize what it was FOR, can you see what USE or need you had for it, and may still have for it. But once you can see WHY you did this to yourself, you are then in a far better position to CHANGE YOUR MIND, and therefore UNDO what you have done.

When sickness is correctly recognized as NO LONGER NEEDED, BY YOU, for any reason, and you clearly now have no use for it, having addressed the source underlying reasons why you put it there in the first place, you will LET IT GO. And it will simply disappear automatically because your MIND no longer supports it. And then there is healing.

You can set yourself free. You can find salvation. The secret of salvation is that you are doing it to yourself.

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.

Ego always wants what it doesn't want, and doesn't want what it wants, because it is a contradictory though system that makes no sense. It may say it does not want death, and does not want people to be dead, but it does.

So while it says it does not want death, does not want people (bodies) to die, does not want sickness etc, it simultaneously is believing in and wanting those things. It is simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by everything, which is part of the uncertainty of fear as well. Insanity is two-faced like this, it can't commit to any one thing fully.

So in our egos, in our false perceptions, our insane split minds, our belief in separation, we literally believe both that a) we do not want death to happen and b) we totally want it to happen. This has to be looked at and recognized. It does mean that if we "don't want death", we DO want it.

Adopting any attitude based on "it really happens" is wanting it, having already given it reality and truth and value. If you value it you make it real. If you value it you want it to happen and try to make it happen. To believe in death, which is not love, is murderous.

Making death unreal is the only way to not play the game and get out of the flip-flopping confusion of wanting it and not wanting it. It's like being addicted to something that hurts you. You hate it and love it at the same time, in a twisted sort of way.

While you might try to take a side, and side with the angle that you do NOT want a person to have died (a body identified person), the mere belief that they are a body and HAVE died IS a decision to join in false empathy and to therefore value death and WANT it to be real. This is why for example in ACIM Jesus says that we try to keep people in their bodies, held there by guilt.

"As long as you believe that, to be with a body, is companionship, you will be COMPELLED to attempt to keep your brother IN his body, HELD THERE BY GUILT." UrT15H12

Our world-driven body-based perspective that bodies are real people, and we do not want them leaving "this world" because that seems like an end from our point of view, is totally blind to the fact that we belong in another world, and coming HERE is death. Birth is death. And even coming into this world took place BECAUSE we wanted to believe in death and keep it.

Prisoners have gone into a prison and are so insane that they believe the prison in their home and they don't want to leave, and are kicking and screaming to stay in the prison, because they think that outside the prison walls is a prison, and that they are free right now in their cell. They have no idea how backwards their thinking is and do not even recognize a prison when they see one.v

So yes if you are "upset by" some body person dying, it does mean that you believe it is real, want it, are choosing it, are reinforcing it, are being murderous, and are participating in trying to keep the person in a state of death. You'd rather they be suffering and dying than alive in God. Whether your ego likes to hear this or not is another matter, but we have to be honest and willing to look at it if we want salvation.

Being in grief, the grief simultaneously is a reaction that seems to say "I care greatly about this person and now they've been destroyed and I feel bad about that because I don't want it" .... at the same time as ..... "I totally want to believe they're dead and I'll happily bargain that they come back into their body and stay in a body forever in my little prison world and die along with me."

So then you discover that the grief is not just "pure grief" or purely justified or purely innocent or purely anything. It's not a whole story. It's a tainted mix of ego reaction and a sort of fake remorse masquerading as caring and feeling a loss, much like what we do in guilt. The loss is a lie because if the mind believes there is a loss it is choosing it and wants it. All emotions are caused by the mind choosing to feel what it wants.

"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, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is." UrW152L1

We do have secret ulterior and selfish motives. We want them back because WE feel deprived. Our egos want to keep people in bodies forever and keep destroying them forever. A living death, followed by the death of non-life. Just recycling around over and over again, but never waking up from it. We can even say that yes it is selfish to grieve, it's always about a sense of what we want, what we have lost, how we feel hurt by what someone has done, anger at someone's leaving, as if their death attacked us. It's not easy to admit to how unforgiving this viewpoint is.

Remember that nothing real can be threatened. If something seems to have been threatened it cannot have been real. We believe it was real, which is a mistake. Believing a person is a body and that the body and world are real is a mistake. When the body, like a chunk of reality, goes away, we are forced into an experience of having lost a part of reality itself, as if part of God is dead. That MUST cause a sense of loss. It's not based on a real truth, but it's based on a perceived truth, and can produce horrendously deep despair.

But the despair is a lie. It's fake. It seems justified and understandable and common ("normal") and so on, but it is not really natural under God's laws. If nothing real can ever die, which is true, then there can BE no reason for despair. And the despair must be a smokescreen to hide a wish for death to be real, and for God's truth to not be true.

Grief isn't just grief, it's a mask used to cover up attack. Just as the "face of innocence", which sees itself as unfairly treated and unwillingly caused to lose something it values, secretly hides a vicious special hatred and a desire to attack and destroy. The victimy little "poor me" of the suffering grieving self is essentially an attempt to enter into the perceived death and join with it and be one with it, such as to become dead also.

This is why in grieving we are not really living, and people have a really hard time returning to life. I might feel grief still but at the same time that means I am believing in death and not life. It means I'm trying to join with the death and die along with it. That's not living. Eventually the sympathetic "part of me has died" game has to be given up and we have to RESURRECT back to a firm commitment to immortality and eternal life. God does not will that we suffer.

Yes it is very very very hard and deep and horrible to go through grief, but grief is not grief. Nor is the only way out to "go through it". It is deception. And no matter how long it takes or how quickly, we are asked to rise up out of it (the battlefield) into the light where loss is impossible and we can be only happy. We do not escape death by dying, we escape it through the light of truth.

The end of grief is the end of death. How much suffering is enough before we will choose again for a better way?

"Loss is not loss when properly perceived. Pain is impossible. There is no grief with any cause at all and suffering of any kind is nothing but a dream. Such is the truth, at first to be but said, and then repeated many times, and next to be accepted as but partly true, with many reservations, then to be considered seriously more and more, and finally accepted as the truth. I can elect to change all thoughts that hurt. And I would go beyond the words today, go past all reservations, and arrive at full acceptance of the truth in them." W248

"For what would be the use of pain to me; what purpose would my suffering fulfill; and how would grief and loss avail me, if insanity departs from me today, and I accept my holiness instead?" W285 "Who could despair when perfect joy is yours, available to all as remedy for grief and misery, all sense of loss, and for complete escape from sin and guilt?" UrW165L5

"Forgiveness IS your peace, for herein lies the end of separation, and the dream of danger and destruction, sin and death; of madness and of murder, grief and loss." UrT29G1

"He laughs as well at pain and loss, at sickness and at grief, at poverty, starvation and at death. He recognizes sacrifice remains the one idea that stands behind them all, and in his gentle laughter are they healed." UrW187:6

"The way is not hard, but it IS very different. Yours is the way of pain, of which God knows nothing. THAT way is hard indeed, and very lonely. Fear and grief are your guests, and they go with you, and abide with you on the way. But the dark journey is not the way of God's Son. " UrT10D4

"Release the future. For the past is gone, and what is present, freed from its bequest of grief and misery, of pain and loss, becomes the instant in which time escapes the bondage of illusions where it runs its pitiless, inevitable course." UrW195L5

"Unshaken does the Holy Spirit look on what you see; on sin and pain and death, on grief and separation and on loss. Yet does He know one thing must still be true; God still is Love, and this is not His Will." UrW95L5 "If you have the gift of everything can loss be real? Can pain be part of peace, or grief of joy? UrW155L2

"Through this, he learns that where he anticipated grief, he finds a happy light-heartedness instead; where he thought something was asked of him he finds a gift bestowed on him." UrM5B5

"The gentle have no pain. They cannot suffer. Why would they not be joyous? They are sure they are beloved and must be safe. Joy goes with gentleness as surely as grief attends attack. God's teachers trust in Him. And they are sure His Teacher goes before them, making sure no harm can come to them. UrM5F1

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do."

"You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you."

"Swear not to die, thou holy Son of God! You make a bargain that you cannot keep. The Son of Life cannot BE killed. He is immortal as his Father. What he is cannot be changed. He is the only thing in all the universe that MUST be One."

Ok. It's time to get honest and stop pretending to be dead!

You are an immortal being, created by God to live forever. You cannot change or be changed, and nothing can EVER happen to you. This is a FACT.

This means you cannot be hurt, damaged, attacked, broken, malfunctioning, decay, degrade, have a dis-ease, be sick, suffer, transform, change, be modified, grow old, or in any way be altered. You are PERMANENT AND ABSOLUTE This is a FACT.

Therefore you must still be exactly the same ORIGINAL SELF that God created, exactly as you were when he created you, and you must not have changed WHATSOEVER. You are STILL as God created you, immortal and unchanged and invulnerable. You have never turned into anything else. This is a FACT.

So what the fuck is this "sickness"? Anything which seems to be so-called "sick" CANNOT BE TRUE. It cannot even exist. How can it be true that you are immortal, and at the same time have it be true that you are a suffering dying self? How can they both be true of you? How can you die if you are immortal? How can you ever be sick? The sickness cannot be true and must be an illusion and a deception. This is a FACT.

"There can be no order of difficulty in healing merely because all sickness is illusion."

"So healing, never needed by the truth, must demonstrate that sickness is not real."

Jesus is stating in ACIM that you are an immortal eternal being with eternal life, endless and unassailable, PRETENDING THAT YOU CAN DIE. You are playing a game of pretending that you are mortal in a suffering body, to cover up who and what you are. To hide the TRUTH! YOU ARE FAKING YOUR DEATH. You are literally using the body as a DISGUISE to make it look like you are dying when you're not. All the while underneath you are totally powerful and perfect still.

"Did God create the mortal and corruptible? What use has God's beloved Son for what must die?"

You use the body as a decoy, to cover up who you are and hide your true nature as the Perfect Christ. You attack the body with your mind and make it show up as suffering, as a victim. And then you use this to accuse others and the world of causing you to suffer against your will, hiding the fact you put it there on purpose. You are literally trying to fake your own death and to make it look like someone else made it happen. So that it can seem that "you died" for reasons beyond your control.

"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."

"The sick remain accusers."

"A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed."

"For vengeance is not part of love, and fear, denying love and using pain to prove that God is dead, has shown that death is victor over life. The body is the Son of God, corruptible in death, as mortal as the Father he has slain."

So when you are sick, you are lying. When you are sick, you are deceiving yourself and others. It means you are insane and do not know who you are, so you're trying to be something you're not. When you are sick, you are pretending that you are fallible, weak, vulnerable, capable of suffering, diminished, threatenable, hurt, broken, having lost your peace, unfairly treated, victimized, abused and destroyed by anyone or anything EXCEPT yourself. It is a form of irresponsibility, in which you try to claim that death HAPPENS TO YOU AGAINST YOUR WILL.

YOU CHOOSE to make yourself and your body seem to be sick. So that you can DENY that you are NOT SICK. The sickness is a deception and a lie, and cannot be true. Therefore it MUST be an illusion - something appearing to be something it is not. It cannot BE a real sickness, it must be fake. Because you cannot really BE sick ever. The sickness is your attempt to DENY that you are immortal. Death is you being IN DENIAL that you STILL have eternal life. This is a FACT.

"Sickness is a defense against the truth."

"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"

"For sickness is an election; a decision. It is the choice of weakness"

"If sickness is but a faulty problem-solving approach, it is a decision. And if it is a decision, it is the mind and not the body that makes it."

"Sickness is idolatry, because it is the belief that POWER CAN BE TAKEN FROM YOU."

"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, and no one dies without his own consent."

What are you doing? Why are you going into states of sickness and suffering? Why are you holding up the body as an attacked picture of crucifixion, trying to demonstrate first of all that you "are" the body, and that secondly you have been attacked? Why are you using the body as a picture held up to your brother to accuse THEM of causing it? Or to accuse the world of causing it? When all along YOUR OWN MIND puts the effects into the body and then shifts the blame to someone else?

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

You are FAKING BEING SICK. You are faking that you can even be CAPABLE of suffering. That you can even CHANGE or be changed. You are not even changeable. You are so permanent and endless and will live forever, such that you couldn't even really be sick if you wanted to. It cannot be "who you are" that is sick. Even if your mind becomes sick and takes it out on the body, pretending it is a body, and that the body is dying, your soul is STILL not sick.

"But the mind that thinks it IS a body is sick indeed!"

"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."

"Sickness is anger taken out upon the body, so that IT will suffer pain."

"Thus is the body healed by miracles BECAUSE they show the mind MADE sickness, and employed the body to be victim, or EFFECT, of what it made."

YOU CAN NEVER BE SICK. YOU CAN NEVER DIE. YOU ARE NOT A BODY. YOU ARE IMMORTAL.

So what's with this fake game of "poor-me I'm dying"? Why are you playing this game and putting on this fake show? Who are you trying to convince? Why are you making yourself out to be a punished victim, weakened and tormented, disabled and disfigured, diseased and decayed, ripe for the picking and ready to die? Who are you trying to FOOL? Why are you so convinced not only that you ARE a body, but that you deserve to be sentenced to death?

You cannot be guilty because the fact is that you cannot even sin. Sin is the idea that something REAL can be attacked. But "nothing real can be threatened". Reality is NOT attackable. Reality is PERMANENT AND CHANGELESS. "Reality is changeless. It does not deceive at all."

"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."

Nothing real can ever change. YOU are real and can never change. GOD is real and can never change. Your brothers are real and can never change. Nothing real EVER changes because it is ABSOLUTELY FIXED. So you cannot sin against or attack or destroy anything real. That means you cannot be sinned against, nor can you sin, or become sinful. You cannot stop being innocent because "my sinlessness is guaranteed by God." You are PERMANENTLY INNOCENT.

So the idea that you have become evil, have attacked God, are unworthy of love, have committed a crime, cannot be forgiven, deserve to be punished, should suffer, are guilty, should be destroyed etc, is completely unfounded. It's all based on a lie that you even CAN DO these things. You can't. You can never attack or hurt or damage anything real. And anything which SEEMS like it can be attacked or hurt or damaged CANNOT BE REAL.

Bodies show up with their seeming "proof of sin", with their images blasted in your face, with their testimony to your senses, showing you pictures of destruction and crucifixion, to try to tempt you to believe that this is a FACT. That sickness is TRUE. That it's HAPPENING NOW. But this cannot be true at the same time as you being immortal. You cannot be immortal and mortal at the same time. How can the sickness be real? How can the body even be real? How can a person ever actually BE anything less than perfect?

Either you are immortal and you cannot die, or you have NEVER been immortal and you are ALWAYS dead. You either have eternal life and are permanent and absolute, or you are merely some relative dream fiction temporary body story that begins and ends, which is not life and is a dream of death.

"Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible."

YOU CANNOT DIE. So why are you pretending that you ARE?

This is the whole issue of the separation from God. Immortal endless beings trying to force themselves to be mortal. Trying to DENY that they are STILL immortal. Pretending they have brought an end to the immortality and that life has been stopped. That you have CHANGED what God created to last forever, and have thus overthrown his will. That you are more powerful than God and have been able to destroy the indestructible.

Let's stop today playing this game of death, playing at dying, playing at suffering and being sick, playing at being guilty and unworthy, playing small and little and weak and helpless, playing at being victimized and paralyzed and struck down and attacked and helpless. We are POWERFUL BEINGS. We can NEVER DIE. When will the game of dying end? When will we bring an end to the illusion of death and proclaim that THERE IS ONLY ETERNAL LIFE?

"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely."

"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. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you."

"These are specifically first that the body is for attack, and also that you ARE a body. Without this, sickness is completely inconceivable. Sickness is a way of demonstrating that YOU CAN BE HURT. It is a witness to your frailty, your vulnerability, and your extreme need to depend on external guidance."

"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."

"Do not look to the god of sickness for healing, but only to the God of love, for healing is the acknowledgment of Him. When you acknowledge Him, you will KNOW that He has never ceased to acknowledge you, and that in His acknowledgment OF you lies your Being. You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do."

"These testimonies which the senses bring have but one purpose; to justify attack and thus keep unforgiveness unrecognized for what it is. Seen undisguised it is intolerable. Without protection it could not endure. Here is all sickness cherished, but without the recognition that this is so. For when an unforgiveness is not recognized, the form it takes seems to be something else. And now it is the "something else" that seems to terrify. But it is not the "something else" that can be healed. It is not sick, and needs no remedy. To concentrate your healing efforts here is but futility. Who can cure what cannot be sick and make it well?"

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die. I am not a body. I would recognize my reality today. I will worship no idols, nor raise my own self-concepts to replace my Self. I am in the likeness of my Creator. Love created me like Itself." "I will awaken from the dream that I

Am mortal, fallible, and full of sin,

And know I am the perfect Son of God."

"The body can be healed as an effect of true forgiveness. Only that can give remembrance of immortality, which is the gift of holiness and love. "

"You are God's Son. In immortality you live forever. Would you not return your mind to this?"

"Yet what is it except a game you play in which identity can be denied? You are as God created you. All else but this one thing is folly to believe. In this one thought is everything set free. In this one truth are all illusions gone. In this one fact is sinlessness proclaimed to be forever part of everything; the central core of its existence and its guarantee of immortality."

"The body does not change. It represents the larger dream that change is POSSIBLE. To change is to attain a state unlike the one in which you found yourself before. There IS no change in immortality, and Heaven knows it not."

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

"In your brother is the light of God's eternal promise of YOUR immortality." "Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF. Yet God's Son cannot will death for himself, because His Father is Life, and HIS SON IS LIKE HIM."

"The miracle of creation has never ceased, having the holy stamp of immortality upon it."

"Immortality is a constant state. It is as true now as it ever was or will be, because it implies NO CHANGE AT ALL."

I wasn't intending for this post to be elaborate but I LOVE how this analogy unfolded to explain the body, sickness, death, miracles, and awakening.....I think that I might even write a whole book based on this analogy alone, it's so clear and exact.... Thanks to Holy Spirit for the nudges and corrections.

...

Computers are strangely similar in their following of rules as we are in our responsibility for choice. And similarly, our bodies do exactly what we tell them to and nothing else.

A computer doesn't do anything whatsoever without a decision being made. When a decision is made, when the computer is told what you want, it produces exactly that result. The language used to tell it what to do is absolutely specific. And it only produces the exact result that was asked for. It is almost annoyingly specific in its requirement for precise instruction.

The computer doesn't really decide on its own to do anything else. It is very true to the programmer's instructions. If it seems to be doing something else, some illusion of a higher-level functioning has arisen. It's really still just processing binary data, 1's and 0s', yet produces what looks to be much more sophisticated results. Images on a screen, objects moving around, sounds happening, it's all an ILLUSION.

When the computer seems to do something it was not supposed to do, this is actually impossible. If there is a bug in the software, the computer still does what the bug tells it to do. It doesn't decide not to do bugs, and it doesn't decide to do bugs on its own. It faithfully follows instructions. That's all it can do. It has no real intelligence. It is just a machine. You get out what you put in.

The body is similar in that it is your faithful machine, and it literally only does what your mind tells it to do. It does not have a will of its own. It does not invent bugs on its own. It doesn't malfunction on its own. It only follows the program that is given to it. It is always 100% correct in carrying out orders. It does not complain or have an opinion or make judgement about rightness or wrongness of the program. It just EXECUTES.

It is a device, that you use for various purposes. Some of those purposes are malicious and as a result, they lead to the body seeming to produce malicious states of being. But regardless of these states looking like a high-level sophisticated problem, it is still just the body following orders. In this way, the body (like a computer) is completely neutral. It is your servant and you are the one operating it.

This is also exactly the same as the fact that, as Jesus tells us in the Course, you always get exactly what you ask for, you only ever get what you ask for, and you never get anything that you do not ask for. Therefore what you get and what happens is 100% your responsibility. If the body seems to go wrong or do bad things, it is because the programmer told it to.

Just as it is the responsibility of a computer programmer to give it the exact-right specific instructions for behavior, so too do you give your body exact instructions for behavior. This is why as Jesus says, if the body is exhibiting signs of sickness or disease, it must mean that the mind has given it a program where you've asked it to be sick and diseased. It is just following your request, to the letter. A sick body is a sign of a sick mind, because the programmer of the body has to be sick in order for sickness to show in the body.

This also shows us the way out of the illusion of stuff happening that allegedly shouldn't be happening. There is not ANYTHING happening in the entire world that has not been asked for by a mind. There is nothing happening in your body that you have not asked for in your mind. You put it there yourself through your instructions - your creative power and freedom. And you have received exactly what you asked for. It is a TOTALLY reliable system.

"Ask and you shall recieve" does not mean that sometimes you ask and sometimes you receive, it means you are always asking and you are always receiving and it is not even possible to not receive what you've asked for. There also therefore is never a situation where you might not receive what you've asked for, where you are in doubt, or thinking that you have asked the wrong question or don't know how to ask etc. You ask nevertheless, and everything you are experiencing right this very second, you have asked for. You can't blame the RESULTS for being something you do not want. YOU need to find out how and why you are programming the system to produce an output of suffering.

If stuff seems to be happening in the body which you don't prefer, you cannot blame the body for it, and you cannot look to outside causes to find out where the symptoms came from. There is only one program and you wrote it. Symptoms are just correct outputs, based on the program you have given the body and the request you have made.

Sickness is a correct output! Death is a correct output! If you ask for it, you shall receive it. If you say, body, you will die, it will die. If you say body you will live, it will live. This is why the illusion of things being right or wrong is 100% bullshit delusion, because there is nothing BROKEN about this system. You are giving it instructions unconsciously to produce HELL, and if that's not what you want, you need to program something else.

As explained in the Song of Prayer, you are constantly praying, constantly asking, and constantly receiving what you are asking for. Therefore, learn to pray a higher prayer. Prayer is PROGRAMMING! As Jesus says, prayer is the medium of miracles, because prayer is the act of CHANGING THE SOFTWARE! This also means that in the prayer you do not beg or request or have fear about what you are asking, you CHOOSE the results you would receive with total certainty that the system MUST produce what you have requested, and therefore you believe 100% that you MUST receive it, and YOU SHALL RECEIVE THE MIRACLE!

This also explains why really nothing has gone wrong and nothing is really happening at all. If the computer is just faithfully doing what you TOLD IT TO, nothing has gone wrong, even if what you told it to do (express a world of separation) was a pretty wacky idea for a program. This also shows why you have not gone off the path, plus there is no reason to be afraid that you cannot get back Home, because it is ALWAYS true that you are receiving what you're asking for and you can always choose again. Therefore, by choosing God's "program", you need not produce programs of suffering and death. NOTHING CAN STOP YOU FROM CHOOSING NOT TO PROGRAM DEATH! All death is a choice. All death is suicide.

This is why there is never anything out of place, there are no accidents, nobody dies without their own consent, and nothing happens without you making it happen. You are causal. You cause things. You produce. You direct. It is all extremely specific, 100% specific. Every single thing that seems to happen in illusions is put there on purpose. There are absolutely no victims whatsoever. Every notion of victimization, accidents, right/wrong, good/bad, should have happened or not, things unwanted, events you resist, etc.. it's all an effort by an unconscious programmer to fix the program by fighting with the output, instead of changing the program!

You have dominion over the body and over the Earth. You have power over all sickness and death because you MADE THEM with your programming, and you can UNMAKE them just as easily. If stuff is happening which, when you look at the results, you do not want, then you need to change your programming. You need to erase the instructions that you keep giving (false beliefs, delusions, ego), and replace it with a higher, more orderly program (Holy Spirit's mind, right-mindedness, sanity, truth).

Your body does not have bugs. Your programming of the body has bugs. Your life does not have bugs. Your programming of your life has bugs. You need to go fix your errors, your mistakes in thinking, which are producing exactly the correct output given the input. If you don't like the output, change the input, don't fight with the output like some victim that has no power to choose again.

You cannot keep looking at the output and saying, this output is not supposed to be happening, this output is wrong, this output is not what I asked for. That's a victim, which is a mind who has forgotten that they are the instructor and the INPUT to the system, and they are the ones who are causing the OUTPUT from the system, but they've forgotten that they're doing this. It's like they fed in a program (the script), walked away from the control system/terminal, and looked at the screen to see what results were coming out, saw something crazy coming out, and then having forgotten that they ASKED FOR IT, start freaking out and blaming the problem on 50 billion other reasons why the output is wrong.

The output is ALWAYS CORRECT based on the input, even if its an output of death. So who is really RESPONSIBLE for writing dodgy programs?! You are.

What you put in, you get out. If your mind is feeding input to your body and your life with unloving, unforgiving intentions, then you are going to be writing scripts which are filled with chosen suffering. You're going to be writing scripts, programs, which contain outputs that are unpleasant. You're going to even write scripts which create illusions that you're not the script-writer and that you did not ask for the output. You can even produce outputs which disguise the fact that there was ever a programmer!

So once you start getting SHIT come out of your printer, you probably can tell that shit was fed INTO the printer and you need to correct that. It's not the printer's fault. It's not the body-computer's fault. It's not other people's fault or life's fault or the environments fault or food's fault or anything's fault.

This is just a simple cause-and-effect system. It functions like a computer. There are decisions being made, there are inputs being given to the system, and it is producing exactly the output that was requested. There is not even a single interference with that. There is no corruption on the disk drive, there are no viruses infecting things, it's all running perfectly. EVERY prayer is being answered. EVERY request is being granted. You just keep making stupid-ass requests!

This is why if you really want to change the output, i.e. change the world or the body or any other effects, the ONLY real way to do that is to get back to the mind - to the programmer, get the programmer's mind corrected so they're not writing ridiculous programs, and then feed a new program into the system. A more truthful, orderly program. And this MUST (not sometimes, not maybe, but MUST) produce a corrected OUTPUT in the form of the "symptoms" or "effects" seen as the body. Remember Jesus's principle, "If miracles are not happening, something has gone wrong" - meaning, there is NEVER a wrong output given the input, so if you are not seeing a miracle, YOU CORRECTLY ASKED FOR SOMETHING OTHER THAN WHAT YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE ASKING FOR! And you WILL receive it.

Even in the bible it says that if you ask, and believe that you have received it, you will receive it. This suggests it's possible to not receive if you do not believe enough, which is not true. The correction for this is to realize, YOU MUST and ARE receiving exactly what you actually are asking for, so if it "looks like" you are not receiving what you want, you MUST be the one who is out of touch with what you want, and you're asking for stuff unconsciously that your conscious mind is in denial of.

Attempting to mess with what output you got, or what your body state is, or what your life looks like, from the end of the system that is the output of instructions, you are hitting your head against a wall and are attempting to perform magic. Magic means that you are believing that the output came from a non-obvious source, that the system is broken, and that you need to "patch it up" with some kind of bypass that messes with the output and mangles it to make it look like what you thought should have come out. That, however, does not fix the faulty PROGRAM, or the programmer that's nuts who is writing the faulty program, and so it will likely still keep producing the same output eventually. You can actually remove the effects of "sin" but if the person continues to "sin", i.e. write programs of separation, they will keep reproducing the same effects and symptoms.

A miracle, is simply the mind choosing to cause a different output. Writing a different program. Fixing bugs in its own software. When these changes show up in the output, it's amazing, like someone just rewrote all the rules, all of the old rules were broken, and the design of the whole system has been overridden. We call this miraculous. Some "super-natural" power from outside of the entire "matrix" of the system has just flipped some switches and changed the INPUT, and therefor the output has to fall into line.

Another way this can show up as miracles is that the programmer of the system can decide to rearrange space or time, can insert and remove objects from the scenery, can manipulate any piece of 'data' in the system, can modify absolutely anything in the system, and can convert anything into anything else. These are the powers that Jesus has demonstrated through miracles. He got in touch with the programmer's chair, sat down and started rewriting the programs. Everyone has the freedom to do this, we just have to get back into the chair and write programs from love!

We are not getting anything out of this system that wasn't put in, or that wasn't asked for. The computer is not broken. The hardware is not broken. We have a software problem. We keep writing faulty software. Software is PERCEPTION. The content of spacetime is DATA. Software operates on the data. True perception means seeing the program clearly and being able to do anything to modify it at will, producing different data - a different output.

We need, therefore, to tap into the assistance of a superior software writer, aka Holy Spirit, Jesus, God, who are capable of not only writing or changing portions of our program for us (collapsing time, rearranging space, etc), but can also guide and assist us with "correction" of our programming expressions. Thus we gradually can write a happier dream, leading up to a final climax.

The ultimate release from this whole CLOSED SYSTEM (it's closed because it's all happening inside of God and there are no hidden rules or secret wills and everything is very exact), is when you decide to ERASE ALL PROGRAMS. A complete reboot. A total fresh start. A renewing of everything. Not just a correction of all software bugs, but a complete realignment of the state of the system with God's truth. When this happens, basically the hard drive (body) is erased, the memory (ego) is erased, and all that is left is the hardware.

Then, the only thing running is the operating system - GOD, who has programmed Christ - the perfect program, to produce the perfect output - Heaven.

Somewhere in your mind, before all the consequences and side-effects that cascade, spiraling down into hell, there is a FIRST STEP. There's an initial "something" that you do, which leads to all the rest. It's the CAUSE of every aspect of your life, of all the ways you suffer, all the ways you relate to others and the world. It is even the cause of the world itself.

We need to dig deep and find out where this whole mess is STARTING, if we want to truly be free of the problem. Things which happen later are not actually the problem. Consequences and effects, projections and blame, perceptions and false identities, these are all things that arise later. They are not where the problem starts.

The course has a ton of material discussing many aspects of things that happen AFTER the initial problem begins. And this can be distracting. The world is a projection, so it's not the starting point. Your special relationships stem from your mental attitude, so they are not the cause. Even your holy relationships are just ways of relating FROM a certain state of mind, and arise from that state. Even miracles are really EXPRESSIONS from a certain mental state, so are not the starting point.

What is it that comes FIRST? Where does it START? What is the fist step on the staircase leading to hell? What is it that we keep doing, that is so fundamental and so primary, so deep within us and so causal, that it LEADS TO all this other stuff - our body issues, our life dramas, our relationships, our world, our perceptions, all stemming from it. What is the very core tiny little thing that we FIRST do that has a side-effect of producing the illusion of spacetime? We do know this:

"Separation from God is the only lack he really needs to correct. But his Separation would never have occurred if he had not distorted his perception of truth, and thus perceived himself as lacking."

Here Jesus suggests that a sense of separation is the only problem to correct. As it says elsewhere, we seem to have ONE PROBLEM, requiring ONE SOLUTION. But he also goes on to say that your mind went into a distorted sense of "what is true", and by doing this, PRODUCED "the fall of man" (THE separation). So even the sense of being separate from God is in a way further down the line from the initial act that causes it.

We know at least the problem we have IS NOT other people. Our relationships with them, issues with them, the things they seem to do to us, the things we do to them, that is all just an arena of effects and consequences, further removed from the actual issue. We're also told that the real problem is IN OUR OWN MIND, not out there in the world.

"Some of them are shared illusions, and others are part of your personal hell. It does not matter. What God did not create can only be in your own mind apart from His."

"Guilt is ALWAYS in yourOWN mind, WHICH HAS CONDEMNED ITSELF."

"I am the means by which God's Son is saved, because salvation's purpose is to find the sinlessness which God has placed in me."

What this is now telling us it that at some point, we condemned ourselves. Individually. I at some point attacked myself. And this is backed up with:

"It can be but myself I crucify."

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain." "Nothing in the world can bring oppression."

"I can be attacked by nothing but my thoughts."

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

"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

"Only the self-accused condemn."

"You cannot die unless you choose to do so." "No one dies without their own consent"

"What has been FORGOTTEN then appears to be fearful, but ONLY because the dissociation was an ATTACK ON TRUTH."

"Because you had attacked yourself, and BELIEVED THAT THE ATTACK WAS EFFECTIVE, you behold yourself as weakened."

"Although you have attacked yourself, and very brutally"

"You HAVE attacked him, and you MUST have attacked yourself first."

"Your Father created you Wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

So now Jesus is saying essentially that our INITIAL PROBLEM involved the denial of creation, which was an attack and a dissociation from the truth - a disowning of yourself. That includes the denial of God (the ego's religion), and the denial of your real self - your soul. The rejection of your truth and your identity. That was in fact a SELF ATTACK.

And as evidenced by the rest of the quotes, if you were not to "do it to yourself", if you were not attack yourself with YOUR OWN THOUGHTS, you would not have any problem or suffering of any kind. And here is the final clarification:

"Attack in ANY form has placed your foot upon the twisted stairway that leads FROM Heaven."

We also know that "sin is attack". We also know "sin is insanity". We also know we have an authority problem of trying to deny God's authority and authorship. We also know we tried to sin against his will by trying to attack him. We also know we made a world as an attack on God. So you attacking is where this all BEGINS.

"Listening to the ego's voice MEANS that you believe it is possible to attack God. You believe that a part of Him has been torn away by YOU."

"We have repeatedly emphasized that the ego DOES believe it can attack God, and tries to persuade you that YOU have done this."

Now, is it that other people attack you? No. Is it that the world attacks you? No. Is it your relationships attacking you? No. Is it your perceptions? No. "Perception is a result not a cause". "Projection makes perception" What you PROJECT comes before what you PERCEIVE, because perception is the RESULT of what you want to see. You look first WITHIN and then project it out and then perceive it. It's more to do with how YOU are attacking.

"What is projected OUT, and seems to be EXTERNAL to the mind, is NOT outside at all, but an effect of what is in, and has NOT left its source."

"It is the witness to your state of mind, the OUTSIDE picture of an INWARD condition. As a manthinketh, so does he perceive."

So not only is perception not the issue, but also even projection is not the issue. You projecting is not the problem. Where you project FROM, or WHAT IS IN YOU TO PROJECT is the problem. The content in your mind is the problem. And even if you DIDN'T ever project anything, you'd STILL have the same problem. Because the problem comes BEFORE PROJECTION. Projection is just the mental mechanism by which you GIVE what you HAVE.

So nothing that you project, or project onto, any blame of sin where you are projecting YOUR OWN SIN onto others, anything to do with making the world or interpreting it or having perceptions about it, NONE of that is the real issue. That's all side-effects further down the line of cause and effect, stuff that happens as you keep mis-stepping on the descent into hell. We want to know what is the PRIMARY CAUSE OF ALL HELL.

This is why Jesus talks about how you have to realize AT LEAST that the problem is in your own mind, not outside of you. That your ideas didn't leave their source. That your projections are deceiving you, and what you perceive is just a manifestation of your inner wishes. That the problem is really IN YOUR MIND, and it's there that you have to look for the solution that God put there - the Holy Spirit in you.

"That is because I do not yet realize that God has placed the answer together with the problem, so that they cannot be separated by time."

"But bring the problem to the only place which holds the answer lovingly FOR you."

"Problem and answer lie together here, and having met at last the choice is clear."

"The miracle forgives; the ego damns."

What it boils down to is that YOU HAVE CONDEMNED YOURSELF TO HELL. Other people didn't do this to you. The world didn't do this to you. Your body isn't doing it to you. Even God didn't do this to you. YOU are the one responsible for having chosen to suffer. YOU are the one who is pretending the Son of God can die. YOU are the one with the death wish. YOU are the one attacking yourself. YOU are the one who is taking a step onto the stairway to hell. And YOU are the one who has to CHANGE YOUR MIND in order to stop doing this.

"But until you change your mind about those your ego has hurt, the Atonement cannot release you."

"And then change your minds to THINK WITH GOD's."

"will to change your mind ABOUT the world"

"Now the source of thought has shifted, for to change your mind means you have changed the source of all ideas you think or ever thought or yet will think."

"It is not pride that tells you that you made the world you see, and that it changes as you change your mind."

"To free the world from every kind of pain is but to change your mind about yourself."

"But you can NOT remove the Power to change your mind"

"For you must change your mind about the purpose of the world, if you would find escape."

"And it will change entirely as you elect to change your mind, and choose the joy of God as what you really want."

"You must change your MIND, not your behavior, and this IS a matter of will."

"The emphasis this course has placed on that idea is due to its centrality in our attempts to change your mind about yourself."

"you must learn to change your mind ABOUT your mind. Only by this can you learn that it IS changeless."

"you MUST change your mind and help others change theirs"

As you can see, Jesus is quite clear that the ONLY problem is IN our own individual mind, the only problem is that we have CHANGED our mind ABOUT OUR MIND, in a wrong direction. And the only solution is to CHANGE YOUR MIND ABOUT YOURSELF in the direction of God. That is where is all STARTS. It starts with YOU. With your relationship with YOURSELF.

That's because ultimately the separation is about ONE THING. Your attack upon YOURSELF. Your effort to LACK LOVE about yourself. Your attempt to DESTROY yourself. Your self attack, your self destruction, your suicidal thought system of egotism that leads to self-induced death, and your effort to NOT BE IMMORTAL.

So for all its words and all its topics, all the things we might spend time dealing with, trying to clean up the mess and consequences, it really boils down to the CORE issue WITHIN you.... which has nothing to do with other people AT ALL, and nothing to do with the world AT ALL.

One thing which, if you change, if it's corrected, LEADS TO everything else AUTOMATICALLY correcting itself as an EFFECT and consequence. And since heaven is in you, seeking FIRST the kingdom of God (seeing yourself as holy and sinless) DOES make your way straight. Because all other CONSEQUENCES follow on from that, from your inner content. If you are the Kingdom, then ONLY GOOD can come from you and to you.

"What if you looked within, and saw NO sin?"

"And as we look within, we see the purity of Heaven shine in our reflection of our Father's Love."

You need to learn to love yourself again, to accept you are still as God created you. And that is all. Your one responsibility of accepting the atonement for yourself, which ONLY YOU CAN DO. because ONLY YOU are your only enemy.

And that means embracing your lovability. And that is only possible if you think you DESERVE love. And you can only deserve love if you are not GUILTY. And to be not guilty you have to recognize you HAVE NEVER SINNED. And therefore you remain as God created you, INNOCENT AND SINLESS FOREVER. You must embrace your TOTAL SINLESSNESS if you are to stop attacking yourself. Attack of ANY kind has to be purged from your whole mind. This is the process of PURIFICATION.

"The state of sinlessness is merely this: The WHOLE desire to attack is gone, and so there is no reason to perceive the Son of God as other than he is."

"My sinlessness ensures me perfect peace, eternal safety, everlasting love, freedom forever from all thought of loss; complete deliverance from suffering."

"Let us not, then, attack our sinlessness. For it contains the Word of God to us, and in its kind reflection we are saved."

"Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God. Over and over this must be repeated until it is accepted."

"Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God. You are and will forever be exactly as you were created."

"In this one fact is sinlessness proclaimed to be forever part of everything; the central core of its existence and its guarantee of immortality."

This is all an inside job. The secret of salvation simply states it - you are doing it to yourself. No-one else, nor the world, is doing anything to you. You simply need to stop doing it to yourself, and you will be free!

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.

All physical forms, all appearances, all physical conditions, all sicknesses, every illness, all disease, even physical death, ..... are all al lie. A MASSIVE lie.

To be a miracle worker requires that you stop believing in sickness. In yourself, in others, in the world. Physical sickness is TEMPTATION. If we for a second believe it is real or true, we are lost and powerless. Seeing this AND believing it is real, is a state of false perception.

In truth, in reality, no one is sick. Everyone is IMMORTAL. SICKNESS IS IMPOSSIBLE.

When something we call sickness "shows up", and our physical eyes show it to us as if it's there, we are blinded by it. Don't underestimate this for a second. Believing it even a little bit is blindness and deception. The sickness is not really THERE.

How can an IMMORTAL BEING be sick? Ever?!!

In order to be a HEALING FORCE, your mind has to get to the point where it ASSERTS LIFE. This is what resurrection means. The assertion of life. You ASSERT LIFE towards everyone. Which means you denounce sickness, death, damage, malfunction, disease, and death. You shine it away. You push past it. You ignore it. It's all a lie.

"The resurrection is the denial of death, being ***the assertion of life***. Thus is ***all the thinking of the world reversed entirely***. Life is now recognized as salvation, and pain and misery of any kind perceived as hell. Love is no longer feared, but gladly welcomed. Idols have disappeared, and the remembrance of God shines unimpeded across the world. Christ's face is seen in every living thing, and nothing is held in darkness, apart from the light of forgiveness. There is no sorrow still upon the earth. The joy of Heaven has come upon it."

Imagine if you will what it will be like to approach everyone from a TRULY FORGIVING attitude which does not see ANY TRUTH in sickness. Which looks beyond all physical forms, all appearances, all matter, no matter what form it takes, how severe it looks, what people think of it, what seemed to cause it, or any other justification for its seriousness.

Imagine what it will be like to be so SURE and CERTAIN that only life is true, that you laugh in the face of even the NOTION that sickness even EXISTS. You laugh in the face of death. You take nothing physical seriously. And you utterly recognize the complete LIE that all sickness represents.

You don't buy into it for a second. You don't believe ANYONE that claims to be sick. And you completely disagree with ALL assertions supporting the idea that sickness is EVEN THERE, yet alone an explanation of what it is or how it came about.

THERE IS NO SICKNESS. This is what our attitude has to be IN ORDER TO HEAL. Healing obliterates sickness. It's a LIGHT, which shines away darkness. Light says to the darkness, YOU ARE NOT THERE. And it SHINES it away.

It removes it. Sickness, in all its forms, all its behaviors, even the concept of sickness, has to be DENIED correctly. This denial doesn't mean turning a blind eye, it means giving absolutely no support to it, no belief in it, giving it no power, and stripping it of every illusion. Rejecting sickness completely as utter bullshit!

This I am sure is how JESUS saw people. He looked completely past all physical forms. He looked beyond bodies. He was joyously loving and certain of the truth that nothing real can be threatened. He laughed in the face of death. He cancelled every manifestation of illness. Even in the face of the death of another he didn't believe for a SECOND that death was occurring.

And this ultimately leads to an attitude of THERE IS NO DEATH. Because death is sickness. And death and sickness are absolute lies. There is no death because ONLY LIFE is real. And asserting, enforcing, powerfully expressing, that THERE IS ONLY LIFE, completely obliterates and undoes and reverses and heals all sickness and all death. This is how the dead are raised. This is how the sick are healed.

The resurrection is the assertion of life. The recognition that life is real and true. The recognition that anything that IS NOT LIFE, which is all forms, all bodies, all galaxies, all illusions of matter, is exactly that - NOT ANYTHING. Nothing at all. It holds no truth. Not one single ATOM has any truth to it. Not one single quantum flux is even remotely real. Even space and time are fictional beliefs!

To heal others, one must adopt this completely "stern", powerful attitude. This utter REFUSAL to ACCEPT that sickness is real. Because what you accept you will accept into YOUR MIND, and this will make your mind sick and dream of real sickness. Sickness has to BE DENIED. This is the whole thing with false perception and the seeing of two worlds.

"The world you see must be denied for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."

"You cannot see both worlds." "Sight of one denies the other."

When you are in false perception you are dreaming of hell and suffering and sickness and death in a dark nightmare of despair. This is a failure to overlook illusions. It's falling for temptation. What is the opposite? The opposite is not believing a SINGLE THING your body says is really happening, not believing it's true that ANY appearance of sickness has ANY validity. Recognizing clearly that illusions of sickness hold NO TRUTH AND NO POWER TO RESIST HEALING. And looking PAST all forms to the light of Christ.

As miracle workers we are to BRUSH OFF sickness and all notions that there EVEN IS such a thing as sickness. We are to UTTERLY DENY it in every way. The entire system of magical solutions. The entire institution of "treatment". The entire thought system of suffering. The entire IDEA, the tiny mad idea, that impossible sickness is possible. Immortal beings can never be sick or die. So what is a sick body trying to claim, that sickness and death CAN happen because you are NOT immortal? It's a LIE.

Completely withdrawing ALL BELIEF in sickness similarly entails the TOTAL RELINQUISHMENT of all temptation to believe that ANYONE is truly sick. You cannot heal someone by believing they are sick! You are useless to them when you join in false empathy and make their dreams of sin real. You have to actually NOT CONSENT to join them in their suffering.

Otherwise you are NOT supporting them, you are weakening them AND contributing to their sickness through attack. Believing someone is sick is a DESIRE TO SEE THEM SICK. Believing in real sickness and real death is an attack thought. It's an attempt to MAKE TRUE and make real, that your brother is LESS THAN HOLY. It's an attack on his health.

You compound his own sickness and ADD TO it, holding him in a psychological PRISON, by AGREEING with him that he is not immortal in any way. That he is affected, suffering, weakened and vulnerable, able to be threatened by death. Not only does he suffer by his own self attack and pretend sickness, but he suffers even further because you won't ACKNOWLEDGE the immortality and safety and wholeness that is true of him.

Seeing your brother AS whole, and recognizing his wholeness, is required to HEAL him. You have to see WITH wholeness, which means NOT seeing or believing sickness, attack, suffering or death.

"Wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles."

This requires that you not even believe what your physical senses are showing you, because they are lies. "To sense is not to know". The body's senses were designed as LIE AGREEMENT DEVICES, to MAKE the world seem real. "Only the body makes the world seem real." And yet "the body is a dream." So even if you SEE physical sickness, even if you HEAR the pain, even if you FEEL the wound, even if you SMELL the rotting flesh, these are all LIES posed by the ego to TEMPT YOU TO BELIEVE THAT HELL IS REAL.

The correct attitude of a miracle worker is the perspective that THERE IS NO DEATH. There is no sickness or suffering. There is no sin or guilt. There is no fear. There is no attack or damage. None of this is happening. The miracle worker recognizes THE TRUTH, God's truth, as THE ONLY TRUTH, and NOTHING ELSE IS TRUE. Meaning that anything which even HINTS at suggesting something else is true, MUST be completely denied, rejected, disbelieved, not invested in, not trusted, not had faith in, not wanted, not desired, and not fallen for.

The miracle worker approaches another with TOTAL CORRECTED PERCEPTION. This perception frames ALL physical illusions AS FALSE. Utterly false. 100% false. Not a single shred of truth to them. Illusions cannot be real BECAUSE they can be changed. They can be made to appear sick, or well, and so they CAN be "healed", and can be changed. Miracles prove this.

"That the mind can heal the body but the body cannot heal the mind shows the mind must be STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this."

Our attitude towards "the sick" should be. ... well... YOU believe you are sick, I DO NOT. I do NOT join you in sickness. I will not validate it. I will not add to it. I will not give it any reality. You are deceived in believing you are sick. You are MISTAKEN. You cannot be sick and you are not sick. This supposed sickness is totally illusion and IS NO THERE. It's a bullshit lie. There is no sickness IN YOU. Get up and walk motherfucker!!! Of course, in a loving way.

By seeing only life in another, they are resurrected. You give life to them through miracles.

"Miracles mean LIFE and God is the giver of life."

You can only GIVE life to another by NOT giving death to them. If you ASSIGN "that's death" or "that's sickness" to someone, you are GIVING them death. You are giving them a diagnosis. You are making it real. In fact you are CURSING them.

"Curse God and die, but not by Him Who made not death, but only in the dreams."

""Casting spells" merely means "affirming error", and error is lack of love. When man ***projects this onto others, he DOES imprison them***, but only ****to the extent that he reinforces errors they have already made.**** This distortion ***makes them vulnerable to the curse of others***, since ****they have already cursed themselves****. ********The miracle worker can only bless********, and this undoes the curse and frees the soul from prison."

When someone curses themselves, it accuses themselves of sin in some way, becoming guilty and IN NEED OF punishment, they set up a psycho-energetic state of seeming vulnerability in which they ACCEPT make-believe "laws of causality", forms of victimhood, in which they weaken themselves and become "sensitive to" or susceptible to certain forms of external causes. And thus they "allow" or rather, do not resist, and in fact AGREE WITH, the seeming external attacks of others. So when someone else tries to "curse them" (any kind of attack), they RECEIVE it and take it upon themselves, using their self-attack as a weapon to INCREASE their own suffering. They use others to hurt themselves more by trying to GET punishment from other people's expressions.

NOT cursing, but rather setting your brother free and UNDOING their curse, is miracle working. If we make someone's sickness real and BELIEVE IN SICKNESS AT ALL, we are directly CURSING people. We are MAKING THEM sick. We are CAUSING sickness. We are projecting sickness. If someone has made themselves sick through their own mistake and judgement, this makes them BELIEVE the are vulnerable. And this now OPENS them to forms of attack which SEEM capable of attacking that vulnerability. ie, that someone can COMPOUND their self attack by ADDING TO their sickness. Amplifying it.

Your fear about another's sickness is murderous. It is an attack. Anything that is not loving is an attack and fear is the opposite of, or lack of love. Either you heal, or you hurt. Either you love or you hate. You are doing one or the other at all times. If you teach love you will heal others and UNDO THEIR CURSE! If you teach cursing, you will HARM others and imprison them in their cursed state and make it WORSE. Feeling bad about someone being sick MAKES them sicker.

Ultimately we have to weed out all the reasons and beliefs as to why we believe sickness is real, bodies are real, suffering is real, guilt is real. This includes NOT BELIEVING a dam thing that the world seems to contain. ALL BODIES ARE ILLUSIONS. And everything the BODY sees is an illusion. "The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen." The body is LITERALLY incapable of seeing reality. It does not look at a REAL world, it looks at A WORLD OF LIES. And to lie is to sin.

"The world of bodies is the world of sin (lies)."

And then we become purified, prepared, to be able to SEE ONLY LOVE, GIVE ONLY LIFE, TEACH ONLY RESURRECTION, and completely OVERRIDE all manifestations of sickness and death. We have to flat out REFUSE to participate in anyone's belief OR proof that they are sick.

Even if they are CONVINCED. Even if they have 100 medical records and have seen 50 doctors. Even if they were at the emergency room or in the ICU. Even if they almost died. It is ALL AL LIE. And if we BUY INTO IT, FALL FOR IT, ARE DECEIVED BY IT, we will be of NO use in helping or healing, left only to commiserate and sympathize in weakness and mutual sadness.

We have to purge ourselves of ALL belief in death in ALL its forms. And "Sickness is but a little death." Even UNHAPPINESS is a form of death. Anything short of TOTAL JOY AND LOVE is a form of death. And all of it has to be REJECTED AS FALSE.

You do not know anyone who is really sick.

You have never met a sick person.

All hospitals are filled with liars.

No-one can ever die.

THERE IS NO SICKNESS AND THERE IS NO DEATH! That is what you must teach! That is how you HEAL!

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

"Some illusions are shared, and some are part of your personal hell."

In this world, there are circumstances, events, happenings, situations, scenarios, some of which seem tolerable, and some of which are a nightmare. And rest assured that the world is set up in such a way that problems are endless and inescapable, all roads lead to death, and it is only a matter of time before things go wrong. It's built into spacetime itself. And according to the world's laws, everything is dead as soon as it is born.

But what makes it hell, isn't so much "what happens" or the current configuration of the external world. It's more to do with how you experience it. Whether you experience it like a happy dream, or like a horrifying nightmare, depends entirely on what's going on in your mind.

Regardless of whether you are in a good place mentally, or a bad place, the world will still keep functioning according to its nature. Animals die. Trees burn. Houses crumble. Cars break. Food rots. And planets are consumed by supernovae. This is built into spacetime. This is the rules of physics by which the world seems to be governed.

"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."

The question is, what meaning, purpose, use, attitude and way of perceiving you are going to have, while this stuff is happening. And what you make of it is going to determine whether or not you experience happiness or unhappiness, invulnerability or suffering, health or death. And you do in fact have it within your power to experience this script of the world, in a way that entails NO negative reaction at all.

Reactions to the world are ENTIRELY based on a belief that you are at the effect of the world. That the world is the cause of you. If you believe this in a way, in any situation, your mind will inflict imagined states of suffering upon itself. It will perceive itself as victimized, demoralized, attacked, hurt, threatened, abused and upset. And all of this is ONLY in response to how the mind is perceiving and using the situation. These experiences don't depend on what is "happening" in the world, it only depends on your use of them. Or the meaning you give them.

When you are lost in the ego, in specialness and self interest and attachment and arrogance, confused and blinded and lost and afraid, you likely will feel like you are ONE WITH the world. In this experience, there is no distinction between what the world seems to be doing, and what you seem to be experiencing. There is no "positive separation" between you and events. And when they happen, they seem to happen directly to you, causing you to suffer, upsetting you, threatening you and making you hurt. And you can see no seeming way to stop them.

But when you step back and remember that you have responsibility for your thoughts, your perception, your attitude, your beliefs, etc... you are in fact CONTRIBUTING to how you experience what is happening. If you suffer and are upset when something "bad" seems to happening, it is not really because of what happens, but because of your beliefs about it.

Let's say, you value human bodies and believe bodies are really people. You have some favorite bodies and you want to keep them around. You are attached to them and value them, and use them for self interests. And then one of these bodies is attacked and dies. And now you will experience what seems like real loss and terrible grief, will be sad and in despair. And it will seem cruel and unfair and you will feel victimized by it, angry at the person for leaving and abandoning you. But this is ONLY because of your mind's attitude about the body, about the events that transpired, and what it means to you. And you could just as easily laugh about it.

What happens, is not why you suffer. The world does not cause the suffering. Events don't have any power to do anything to you. No-one can cause you. Nothing in the world can oppress you or make you sick or dead. There is no causal power, no will, no mind in the world, capable of influencing you in any way at all. At least, not if you are in your right mind. Not if you are recognizing that the world is FICTION. And not if your beliefs are fully lined up with the truth. No one who recognizes that the world is a dream could possible take it seriously.

"You would not react at all to figures in a dream that you knew you were dreaming."

So it isn't the state of the world, or what happens, or who does what to whom, that makes you suffer in any way. It's not the reason why you are unhappy or upset or afraid. Any "re-actions" you have are EFFECTS that your mind is inventing to correspond to and are consequences of the CAUSES that your same mind is believing exist, happening against you from the outside in.

Your mind, attacks itself, and believes it is hurt by these attacks. And it believes the cause of these attacks is not itself, but something external to itself. This is because your mind disassociates from itself and is split. Two parts of mind at war with each other. And this split minded state is the only way your mind can experience suffering, at its own hand, and disowned.

I went through hellish experiences a little over a year ago. I managed to try to stay strong through some of it, as much as I could muster, but I was still beaten down, tempted, torn apart by it, terribly upset, stressed, like going through the worst living nightmare possible. But time has passed, and healing has occurred, and forgiveness has been applied. And I now look back and can ask myself, what is it that made it seem like hell at the time?

The answer is always that it only seemed like hell because I took it seriously, I forgot to laugh, I thought it was real, I believed in bodies, I believed in external threats, I saw others as enemies, I decided what things meant, I read into it, I feared for possible futures, and basically MADE the whole thing a nightmare. Internally. I allowed it INTO my mind, by my belief in it being real.

"Whatever you accept INTO your mind has reality for you."

I accepted it into my mind, through belief in external causes, which was really MY mind causing itself against itself, perceptions of hell and nightmarish threatening situations. It wasn't merely that the situations were there to make me stronger at the ego level, but they were there for me to rise above my own self attack. The lesson was not to suffer and become stronger because of it, but to become stronger in rejection of the suffering. Realizing I was doing it to myself, making it worse, inflating it, reading into it, giving it meaning.

At the time, yes, I was not ready or able to stop myself from doing this. I was not far enough along in my clarification of what I was doing to not make it worse for myself. I didn't know the many ways I believed bodies were real and hospitals were threats and all the rest of it. I "did my best at the time", certainly. But I still made it hell for myself, within, in spite of that. And that is where the real lesson is.

It is not what happens, it's what you make of it. And if you believe the world is real, you will suffer. And if you believe that other people are bodies, you will fear for their lives. And if you believe the world can attack someone and make them sick against their will, you will suffer along with them. And in all this false empathy you will feel victimized as much as the person you think has been victimized. And this is all an inside job.

I could-a should-a would-a laughed through the whole thing and not taken it remotely seriously and simply resurrected and healed and brushed it off as nonsense. But I wasn't ready to be able to do that at the time, so I suffered. But I suffered because of my beliefs, my attachments, my valuing of unreal things. And in every way, all of my suffering was really INSIDE myself, not really anything that anyone was actually doing outside of me. It was my inner experience that became hellish. It was my inner feelings and reactions that were my suffering, and it was all ultimately self inflicted. I chose it through believing in it.

Many people would say it's completely understandable that I would feel so upset given what was happening. And many would say that anyone would feel that way. And that when such things happen everyone is stricken with fear. And that this is all completely normal and natural. But it IS NOT. It is mental illness, and it is extremely widespread. Because we're not willing to look deeply and honestly enough at what is really happening in our minds, and what and HOW we are doing it to ourselves. No one is supposed to be unhappy, or suffering, or sick or dead, ever.

For a time I could not see my involvement in it, and just kept having these upsetting flashbacks of how "it was hell" and how upsetting and ridiculous it was. Because I could not "positively separate out" the what from the meaning. And emotional memories of ego experiences are always from a victim vantage point - the "one with the suffering" viewpoint.

I couldn't realize how I DID have a choice and I WAS choosing and the way I suffered was actually my own choice, albeit somewhat unconscious at the time. I didn't realize I could believe otherwise because I believed too heavily in the body and the world being reality. So the suffering was somewhat inevitable. And it was not the world's fault. It was my mistaken mindset. I had to learn that bodies aren't real and the loss of body parts has no effect on the spirit.

I used to also have a fear that it was going to repeat and something just as bad would happen again. But this too is melting because I can't fear that "hell will happen again" if I am realizing that I am the one who caused it to seem like hell. In choosing not to do that to myself again, I can render myself invulnerable. No matter what seems to transpire. A happy dream is an empowered dream, in which I am cause, not effect.

The only benefit perhaps to such trials, such suffering experiences, isn't so much that you learn skills or abilities to get through it and survive, but more that you learn the part you play in making it seem to be what it is. In taking responsibility for sight. In owning your power of decision to choose differently. To use it as an opportunity to forgive, and not as an opportunity to attack yourself. Because at the end of the day we really are just using the world to try to prove that we are weak and vulnerable and must die in guilt, which none of us really deserve or need.

You can set yourself free from hell, but it does require that you learn the beliefs you hold about the world are false. The valuing of bodies and the fear of sickness and death has to go. The indentifying with a body, and others with theirs, has to go. Otherwise you are going to suffer sooner or later, by your own choice. The secret of salvation tells you this. Nothing happens without your own consent. And all the ways that you experience any situation is you doing it to yourself, no matter whether it seems like you are the victim or the victimizer or who seems to play what role, in what is essentially a non-existent illusion of happenings.

You can't get out of hell by talking yourself into it, justifying why the world is real and why it's okay that there is suffering, by telling yourself that it's okay that bodies are dying, or trying to adjust to hell. You cannot find peace through making the world real and then trying to make yourself at peace with its real hell. The only way to escape it is to not believe in it at all, otherwise you do hell to yourself long before the world becomes hell to you.

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."

There is a simple law about health that you need to know about, as described here:

"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."

If you do not regard yourself as an illusion in any way ("I am not an illusion but a reality"), you do not see YOURSELF as an illusion, and therefore you do not SHOW UP AS an illusion. Instead, you show up as INVISIBLE. As if you have no body. You do not need a body, and the body would not be an accurate identification of what you think of yourself.

The body is always coming from your mind, as an outward picture of an inward condition. Always. It is always being projected outward. It never has its own condition or its own state of being or its own mind or will or power or thoughts or anything else. It’s purely a projected mental image. It is YOUR mental image about what you think your identity is. Or, what you are made of. Or, what you think is true of you.

If you think it is true of you that you are less than as God created you, pure spirit, wholeness, having no form or need for form, you WILL materialize - ie mis-create - what appears to be a body out of nowhere. The mind makes the body. And the mind can make as many bodies as it likes. As Jesus said in the special notes to Helen, here are his exact words where he describes exactly what I’ve just said:

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it.. 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... To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. 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 an illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand."

His body disappeared because He had no illusions about himself, his identity. He did not identify himself as dead, or made of separation, and so He stopped showing up as that. He stopped imagining himself as that.

Note he also says, the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. The mind MAKES the body. And it constantly is projecting a body when it sees itself as limited. It is projecting the body at every moment to sustain an illusion of a constant self. But the body is always an effect, never a cause of anything. So if the mind wants to believe something else, the body MUST change. It has no will to stop the mind.

Now, a very important thing to realize is, the state of the body, being a mental picture of "self", directly corresponds ALWAYS to how a person’s mind is seeing itself. What it believes it is. So if it believes it is sinful or guilty, the mind will attack itself, thus attack its own image of itself which will show up as a body infected by or attacked by guilt and sin. This will make the body appear, ie be projected as though, it seems to be "sick". It does not "have" a sickness, it IS a sickness.

It will REMAIN showing up as sick for as long as the MIND decides to be sick. It will have no ability to heal itself. Bodies DO NOT heal themselves. The immune system is a bullshit ego concept. It is an illusion. Bodies does not heal anything. They do nothing. Only the mind orchestrates stuff happening.

When the mind says jump, the body jumps. Literally. When the mind says, I am sick and separate, a body will be projected which shows signs of sickness and separation. When the mind says, now is the time that I am well and joined with God, the body MUST show up as a picture of a body that is in perfect health.

You have to realize, the body has NO ABILITY to counter the choice of the mind as to how it wants to identify itself. It IS the mind’s attempt to identify itself as an illusion. There also IS NO OTHER CAUSE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD that can do anything to the body. It cannot be made sick, or hurt, or damaged in any way, unless the mind is believing it is damaged. And then the MIND puts the damage into the body, not the world. As Jesus says here clearly:

"Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself ... 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."

That means there is NO CAUSE outside of you, at all. Ever. The body CANNOT be caused against YOUR will. Ever. However it shows up, is how you are MAKING IT show up.

There is nothing in the world that makes your body do or feel or adjust or change in any way at all. Any appearance to the contrary is some illusion the mind is putting in place to pretend it is irresponsible. Sickness IS irresponsibility. The mind however is ALWAYS in charge even if it makes an illusion of death. Death cannot happen to the body unless the mind destroys the body itself. "No-one dies without their own consent".

This also means, that if the body is showing up as sick, SOMETHING IS WRONG with the mind. Guaranteed. 100%. If the body is sick, the mind HAS NOT been healed. This is metaphysical law with zero exceptions. There can be states of mind reached which seem like awakening, but where the body remains sick. In such states, the mind HAS NOT awoken from the dream of death, as proved by the fact that the body still seems to die, because the mind STILL BELIEVES it does not deserve eternal life, and so accepts death - an illusion of giving up all will and causality. An attempt not to choose at all.

Rather than see this as some kind of condemnation or guilt-inducing statement that, if you are sick, it’s your fault, which the ego would love to indulge, instead see it as perhaps shocking or upsetting at first, to have to admit that YOU are responsible for making your sickness. This is not always welcome news, often producing ego reactions of guilt and fear and so on. But it is also revealing to you a POWER that you have. A power and a CHOICE, a FREEDOM, a HOPE, in which IF YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND, you NEED NOT SUFFER.

This does not EVER mean, that if you change your mind, you will transcend sickness and death and not care that it "happens to you". This is 100% missing the point and a total bastardization of the teaching. No-one can be at peace with death because peace is evidence you do not believe in Eternal Life. Sickness and death DO NOT happen to you. YOU HAPPEN. Sickness only happens in your body beacuse it’s a picture of YOUR MIND’s sickness. Death only happens in your body because YOU DESTROY YOURSELF. This has to be owned up to before you can claim the right, and power, and freedom, to EXERCISE your FREE WILL choice to NEVER SUFFER AGAIN.

It does mean, on the one hand, you HAVE to admit to being responsible for causing ALL of the suffering you have experienced, it was ALL you doing it to yourself, and no-one and nothing-else EVER caused anything you’ve experienced. That can be a big chunk of crap to swallow. BUT.... it also opens the door to the POSSIBILITY, that you still have this power, and can CHOOSE AGAIN and therefore produce a state of NO SUFFERING.

You MUST demonstrate a body that is invulnerable, cannot be hurt, cannot be damaged, has no sickness, does not show any signs of attack, and PROVES that your brother and the whole world has done NOTHING to affect the Son of God. OTHERWISE... you WILL attack yourself, and you will suffer, by your own hand. No-one else will be doing it to you but yourself. This is the SECRET TO SALVATION! YOU ARE DOING THIS ALL TO YOURSELF. And because you are - if you OWN IT - you can choose simply to NEVER AGAIN be sick or dead or suffer in any way. Claim your IMMORTALITY!

There is no power in all the world that does anything to you against your will, other than YOU. There is no cause in the world whatsoever to produce effects in you or your body that YOU do not put there yourself. Worldly causes are cover-up jobs for your mind to pretend its irresponsibility is someone else’s fault.

There is no form of sickness, even DEATH, that cannot be reversed, if the MIND decides to no longer believe in it. Whatever you believe about yourself, IT WILL SHOW UP. It must. Mind is cause. Form is the effect of believing in illusions. Your mind has power over ALL MATTER. "My self is ruler of the universe".

So realize this. While you have a body, your body ALWAYS EQUALS your state of mind. So long as you THINK you are a body, YOU WILL MAKE ONE. So long as you think you are separate from God, you will PRESENT A PICTURE of what you believe for all to see. "Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt"!! But there can also be a totally transparent depiction of what’s going on inside of you, if you fully accept atonement.

If the body is showing up as sick, your mind *IS* sick. You ARE responsible for it. No-one else is. The world is not. The body is not. Having mastery over form REQUIRES extreme, absolute ownership and responsibility for EVERYTHING you are experiencing, down to the atoms that make up the body. YOU are putting them there. If the body is not doing well, it’s because you keep attacking yourself. Period. Don’t let this induce guilt or worthlessness. Instead forgive yourself and choose again.

If you can recognize this correlation between mind and body, you will realize that *IF* you change your mind, THE BODY HAS TO FOLLOW. It is guaranteed. It is a depiction of your "Self" as you see yourself. This is why when you shift into a miracle, you temporarily move into INVISIBILITY. "Miracles are temporary shifts into invisibility, that is why they heal." Invisibility (of form) correlates to having a mind which is CLEAR and FREE OF SEPARATIONS. You can see through it because it has become transparent and UNBLOCKED. This movement into formlessness heals the mind and thus the body MUST follow.

This also means, as Jesus has said, *IF* you get your mind into a state of perfect clarity and truth, and given that you are temporarily still projecting a body, the body BECOMES INVULNERABLE because YOU ARE, it cannot BE sick for ANY reason, because you are not sick, and IT CANNOT DIE because you see yourself as immortal spirit. Or at least a glimpse of that. Jesus assures us there is a divine protection that the body will experience IF we will be purely vigilant for the truth. Your body CAN be indestructible, free of aging, weather, the need for food and water, and so on. "I am sustained by the love of God all through the day", goes to the extreme!

And He literally means this..... IT CANNOT be sick. Sickness is IMPOSSIBLE where guilt has been removed. Sickness CANNOT RETURN where guilt has been removed. A guiltless mind cannot produce a suffering body. And why would it. A suffering body is an attack on your brother and yourself, due to a belief the world is causing you. Sickness is NONSENSE. It is a portrayal of a victim who believes they are sinful. But everyone is free to choose. You can choose whatever you want, but you cannot escape the consequences of your decisions.

You are cause. This is a course in cause, not effect. Choose health by choosing to heal the mind of its misperception of itself, and it will automatically take care of projecting a healthy body in the short term. This is the same as saying to seek first the kingdom of God and your way will be made straight.

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.

Unconditionality, means that something applies the same way to many things. In a sense this is impersonal, in that it does not treat a given person differently from others. At the same time, if the treatment is TOTAL all inclusive love, then EACH person can be FULLY loved, provided that it means this love does not EXCLUDE ANYONE.

This means that you literally cannot unconditionally love only one other person. Nor can you unconditoinally love a million people. You can ONLY unconditionally love the ENTIRE WHOLE of creation. There cannot be any exceptions or conditions, otherwise it is not unconditional.

We might say well, I unconditionally love my kids or my parents etc, but this isn't really true. Because the same maximal love is not felt in relationship to EVERYONE. So it isn't unconditional in the broader sense. It may seen unconditional in that, the child or parent is loved quite fully or that they're loved regardless of what they do or say or believe or how they live. That's a form of unconditionality. But it isn't TOTAL unconditionality.

Total unconditionality requires that the entirety of existence be loved as one, and equally. You have to love EVERY person the same if you want to claim unconditional love. Similarly, you cannot claim holiness until you do this because conditions mean a lack of wholeness.

Holiness means wholeness. It recognizes that you are whole. It recognizes that other people are whole. But it also recognizes that the whole of you is the whole of them in truth. It is a holographic principle.

To be holy, ie whole, in and of yourself, you cannot be in need of anyone. It sounds like a paradox but to to love anyone in a holy way you have be whole in and of yourself so that you have wholeness to share with them. And by being whole, you do not NEED them. Moreso it means you HAVE them because you ARE them. All of them.

Holiness, and unconditoinal love, have to go hand in hand with a complete lack of limits or confinement of any kind. It can't just apply to you, or to your closest partner, or to only your friends and family. It has to be the same everywhere. To be whole is to be the whole of creation. You have to be the entire Kingdom of God to be holy. Which means you cannot have a holy relationship without EVERYONE being included.

No one can claim to unconditionally love only A PART of the totality. This is partial love. That love is not unconditional. It may be approaching it but so long as it remains applying ONLY to certain individuals it is NOT unconditional love.

Unconditional love is universal love. It has to apply to EVERYONE equally and all at the same time. Nor can it apply only to some person that is temporarily "nearby" while applying later to someone else who happens to be "nearby." It has to transcend time and space as well. It is unlimited in every way.

This means that a real holy relationship is one where you are whole in your soul, and you know intimately that EVERYONE is included in you. And therefore you love EVERYONE simultaneously. This is the only way for it to be holy, and the only way to be whole. There is no other unconditional love that is as fully unconditional as this.

What that means is, you cannot have a truly holy relationship which its just between TWO people. That is too confining. Any sense of walls, barriers, exclusiveness, limits of any kind, any way that it is not FULLY SHARED, is a limit on holiness and on love. The love has to totally transcend ALL FORMS of relationship. Like how Jesus loves everyone the same.

When a special relationship, which is really a lack of relationship, is taken and repurposed for a holy purpose, it is used as a framework to develop wholeness. Holiness is the goal so wholeness is the goal. To be whole, EACH person, as a soul, must individually attain THEIR OWN wholeness. And their wholeness cannot be held back by each other. To be whole, EACH individual has to be open to loving EVERYONE equally. And if I am whole, I am recognizing that I AM THE WHOLE OF YOU as well, so you cannot limit me.

At the highest level, this means that the specialness which began as "two" for practical or collaborative learning purposes, is transcended. Even if there are still seeming to be two bodies in proximity, or a marriage, or a friendship, or any other FORM of a relationship that seems to isolate individuals, even for those two people "relationship" has to transcend the boundaries of that container.

If it does not transcend the boundaries, it cannot be whole. It is ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE for a confined pair of individuals to be holy together while NOT being holy in relationship to EVERYONE. However, if they ARE holy towards everyone, they CAN be holy in relation to each other.

We need to perhaps then SEPARATE OUT, the difference between an arrangement of bodies, versus psychological relationship. If you decouple the two, it becomes more obvious how it works. In the atonement plan, TWO OR MORE individuals (tied to bodies) are orchestrated to meet and form a special connection. A time spent seemingly in proximity. This is not a relationship. This is just being near to each other for the sake of working on THEMSELVES in the company of each other and with each other's support. To learn to fully share themselves with everyone. They cannot fully share themselves with EACH OTHER because this excudes everyone else - UNTIL they can share with everyone.

While the two are together, they EACH may be becoming more unconditionally loving, which melts the specialness or form that holds the two of them in proximity. But at some point a threshold has to be reached, in which they cannot increase the love any further if the love is thought to have to be LIMITED to the two of them, or that it excludes anyone, or is switched off in certain encounters.

In order for the love to become IMPERSONALLY PERSONAL, which means total full love given in FULL to EACH of ALL individuals at once (this is ominpresence), the sense of two-ness has to be dissolved completely, BEFORE even getting close to total holiness. The twoness is just there as a repurposing of the device of physical closeness. It has nothing to do with relationship or holiness. It's just a way to focus on a project.

To go beyond this ceiling, EITHER of them has to decide to transcend their 'relationship' and love OTHERS in the same way. The only way TO love unconditionally and ALL the time, is to love everyone the same way all the time, no matter who they are, and no matter where they are. That means you are IN love, at all times, regardless of location. This has nothing then to do with whether you are with a particular person's body/mind or not.

At its absolute maximal expression, then, a holy relationship has gone BEYOND the necessity of two people, and now applies simultaneously to ONESELF, and to ALL SELVES. And ALL holy relationships MERGE INTO ONE. It is then not a question of whether a holy relationship requires ONE person OR TWO... which is an either/or reasoning, but actually in a holographic manner, it applies to ONE AND INFINITE.

Therefore I, as an individual soul, who God created in full love and completion, who is also sharing everything with all other souls, who in turn love EVERYONE, have the task of individually accepting atonement for MYSELF, so that it is SHARED, so that it is given to EVERYONE. THIS is holy relationship. It is one soul sharing all of itself wholly and fully in holiness with the entire sonship at once. This reflects this logical statement:

"You cannot enter into real relationship with any of God's Sons unless you are willing to love them all, AND equally."

Total real relationship, in heaven, which a holy relationship is based on or becomes a reflection of, requires YOU to love everyone. It does NOT require everyone to be aware of loving you. In reality, yes, all souls love all souls. In the dream, where minds are blocked, it does not entail all minds being AWARE of that oneness. But ideally, everyone should eventually love everyone. This allows the ENTIRE sonship to unite in a single relationship of co-creation with God.

"Everyone should love everyone".

While it is possible for example for me to be in total love which means unconditionally loving the entire universe - universal love, this is because I am a free soul. I am in freedom and therefore NOT TIED to anyone in the sense of, no one can impede my freedom or require me to do anything in order to be FULLY myself. God established me perfect from the start. And that means i can go into holiness/wholeness and unconditionally love everyone, EVEN IF they do not reciprocate. Nor can their lack of love hold me in hell against my will. I am free to choose to love. "Heaven is a choice I must make."

If another person happens to also be in a very unconditional state of mind, then it is possible, that that person can connect with you and be AWARE OF sharing everything with you. BUT, this is NOT JUST personal. It is personal and impersonal. Everything is shared with YOU, BUT at the same time, it is also being shared with everyone. It is not exclusive to you. It is completely open. It is fully given to you, AND fully given to everyone equally. Such a person can fully love you, but ONLY because they are unconditionally loving the whole sonship at the same time. You receive the PERSONAL love, while the IMPERSONAL aspect is personally loving all the others. It's almost like, two people just happening to 'bump into each other'.

When two people consent to FULLY LOVE, the "each other" part does not enter into it. They happen to fully love EVERYONE. Two people, who fully love everyone, and who are in intimate relationship with EVERY SOUL as their own wholeness, "meet", and experience their mutual position of unconditional love. They fully embrace and express their shared nature in TOTAL holy relationship. But IT DOES NOT EXCLUDE ANYONE ELSE. It is not exclusive to them. An analogy might be one parent who equally loves all their children. They don't stop loving the OTHER kids just because they love you.

"Healing is when two minds recognize their oneness and become glad."The only requirement for you to enter heaven, is that you reflect heaven's relationship status. That is, I am in a relationship with EVERYONE EQUALLY. You "enter into real relationship" with ALL of God's children. And thus you "enter into reality" itself. This is the only requirement for entry to heaven by ANY INDIVIDUAL SOUL. That is, all you have to do is accept and love all of yourself which IS all of the sonship, loving every son of God equally.

No one can keep you from this. No partner can hold you back. No duo or pair or special relationship or repurposed relationship has a quality that causes any REQUIREMENT that TWO such people are doing this at the same time. The two-ness is part of specialness and it will always be. Two-ness has to be TOTALLY TRANSCENDED in order to have ANY holiness. EVERY person has to be loved equally otherwise NONE OF THEM ARE TRULY LOVED AT ALL.

To meet another person who is fully in christ, is a pleasure. And it is a total relationship with that person AND with everyone else. But it doesn't mean that you need that person's love, or that they are imprisoning you. You are completely free to come and go. You are the free willed soul that God created one with him. You have no needs and are not bound by any special rules other than God's law. You are under no laws but God's and God himself established you as holy forever.

In essence, first there is JUST ME. Then there is JUST ME AND YOU. Then there is US trying to transcend JUST US (a "holy relationship couple"). And then there is EVERYONE. That is the progression of relationship towards holiness. And anyone can go there WITHOUT a partner.

So really the requirement of having to have another "special person" to have a holy relationship with, is false. A repurposed special relationship goes THROUGH a purpose or goal of holiness, and DISSOLVES away, leaving only unconditional love for everyone. The two are no longer two, they are THE ENTIRE KINGDOM. Or maybe one of them went there and is the entire kingdom, and the other lagged behind still. Everyone is free to come and go.

Only then, when ONE PERSON has attained a state of unconditional universal love and equality, can that ONE person enter heaven. It does not require anyone else to do this. It's just that, in this world, the holy spirit is repurposing what we MADE (specialness) for a holy PURPOSE, so that it can be USED like a device or tool, to help us to move towards unconditionality. But this cannot mean that you ONLY learn to love another single person unconditionally. If you ONLY love them unconditionally you are NOT LOVING UNCONDITIONALLY. Walls cannot remain if it is to be universally applied and extended. Unconditional love MUST be impersonal as well as personal.

Therefore, any single person/soul CAN enter heaven WITHOUT the need for particular encounters, relations, conversations, physical proximities, lengths of time, or any other "requirement". They may in fact have enjoyed MULTIPLE relationships to get to that point. They may have had many partners, even simultaneously. They may have even had NO ONE ELSE. They might've even been sitting in a cave in a mountain and seeing no one since 50 years ago. It doesn't matter. If any one person attains holographic love, they are done and out of here, entering real relationship with the ENTIRE sonship.

God finds you WORTHY of love, right now!

God loves you completely, right now!

God has absolutely no judgement about you being sinful and holds no grievance against you, right now!

God sees your PERMANENT INNOCENCE, right now!

God knows you cannot really sin and have not really sinned, and so are STILL as He created you, right now!

There is nothing you can do to change His mind about you. There is nothing so bad that it can't be forgiven. There is no mistake so real or certain that it is irreversible.

The problem you seem to have is NOT a problem of whether or not God loves you, whether He would love you, whether He forgives you, whether you've been good enough, or whether He's given you permission to be part of His Kingdom. The problem is, you keep rejecting God.

You keep saying to God... well, thanks for the offer, but.... I'm not worthy, I'm not good enough, I don't deserve that, you just go give that love to someone else and leave me alone.

That's what we say to God every time we believe that we have done something wrong, been bad, evil, corrupt, sinful, guilty, made poor choices, caused hurt, or have been hurt. Every time, it's a statement AGAINST what God is already offering to us. We just keep saying, no thanks, I'm not eligible, I don't agree, I'm not worthy.

This unworthiness, a core belief, is fundamentally based SOLELY on the fact, that you believe that sin is reality. You think that you are in a real body, on a real planet, where real things are happening, that you did a real thing, that you really produced real consequences, that these consequences produced real damage or harm, and therefore you REALLY have sinned. And because of this belief that all of this is REAL, you automatically MUST, absolutely MUST, therefore be in agreement that you are UNWORTHY of love because you are no longer innocent.

If sin is real, innocence is not real.

If sin is real, there is NO WAY that you can be forgiven.

If sin is real, you have NO HOPE of ever being innocent again.

If you mess up and REALLY SIN, you MUST be going to hell, death, and damnation. No second chances. Just one tiny slip and you're fucked!

That's why you believe and experience a sense of unworthiness, unlovability, unforgivability. Your belief that you really did something, that something actually has gone wrong, has produced this side-effect of the rejection of love. You think that your sin has automatically forfeited your eligibility and permission to RECEIVE the love of God. You think God therefore is WRONG to love you, because of what you've done. Even if He is trying to love you unconditionally 100% you STILL will insist that He cannot, and you turn away from Him in shame and regret, yet CONVINCED that nevertheless you do not deserve love and that you're right not to.

As I sit here right now, I feel this. I feel my head wanting to hang low, because in some way, I feel ashamed of something. I believe that there's something I have actually done, something that I think is REALITY, which proves, demonstrates, confirms and agrees that I CANNOT be innocent any more. This stain, this tarnish, this defilement, this corruption, this error and mistake, SEEMS to scream that I am guilty, because I'm sinful. And that makes me feel as though God couldn't POSSIBLY love me now... that there's just no way that God could overlook this, and therefore, God MUST be ashamed of me.

It is MY false belief that I am a sinner that has produced a corrupted view of what God's opinion of me is. I can't ACCEPT that He can love me, if my sin is real. My real sin automatically MUST reject love, and MUST insist that I CANNOT be loved. It implies and enforces the idea that God simply WILL NOT, CANNOT and WON'T forgive me. Even if there is evidence to the contrary, even if everyone is saying, hey, Paul, wake the fuck up, God is unconditional love. The sin will say, noooo.. you're all wrong, God is not someone who loves unconditionally. God CANNOT love unconditionally, I'll claim, because my sinfulness proves it.

I will claim that BECAUSE I was able to "really sin", that PROVES that innocence is not forever, that God CANNOT be unconditionally loving, and that I have SUCCEEDED in proving that separation is real. Therefore, I HAVE separated from God, I HAVE sinned, and therefore God has been attacked, I am guilty, and there is no way to undo this because it's REAL. Permanent damage is the hallmark of sin. This all arises solely by believing that "I really did something". And a BELIEF in "permanent damage" (sin) shows up sooner or later as sickness and death.

So if you believe you have really sinned in God's eyes, or in your own eyes, you will be incapable of accepting that God is unconditionally loving. And that means you being loved is off the table. You'll just reject it and refuse it left and right. You won't even want it. You'll think you DESERVE PUNISHMENT.

You'll think, because you really did sin, it is TRUE that you are a sinner and it's TRUE that you fucked up, so that MEANS that you SHOULD be punished. As ACIM says, "sin demands punishment". It is automatically logically consistent that if you did really sin, you MUST be punished, and then you will feel guilty and afraid of this punishment being forthcoming, AND you will believe that it's going to come from God Himself.

So now, because sin is real, God is not only - in your view - DISABLED from loving you, INCAPABLE of loving you, God now is also going to PUNISH you for this sin, and that's just going to make you ashamed that you didn't obey God's laws or that you did something unforgivable and should go to hell. Suffering, damnation, condemnation, judgement, torture. It all becomes WELCOMED by you because you believe sin is real. You believe God is justified in condemning you, that you deserve it, and that you even WANT it!

If you really sinned, you will believe you SHOULD be punished, and that you SHOULD die. And you will believe it is God's will, because God cannot possibly love you. You are using sin in order to attempt to change God, to convert God into an unloving God, who wants you dead. And you actually AGREE with such an unloving God, that you should die and be punished and suffer and be unloved, because you really believe you "did it".

As such, if you do not CORRECT and seek healing for this MISTAKEN PERCEPTION that you "really sinned", YOU WILL CHOOSE DEATH. You will look to suicide as the automatic, God-approved, perfectly logical outcome, based solely on your belief that sin is real. If sin is real, YOU MUST DIE. And you will not fight it. You won't even put up a resistance. You will reside yourself to believing it's RIGHT, it's what you deserve, it's meant to happen, it's what God wants, and its what everyone including you wants. You'll not even particularly feel horrified about it, because you'll see it as being JUSTIFIED - that you are WORTHY of dying, because you are UNWORTHY of life. You'll offer yourself up to death and make it EASY for death, because of your belief in sin. You will AGREE with it!

This cannot be what God wants for you.

You must reconsider your belief. You HAVE TO. If you do not, it will lead you to continue to reject God, to reject life, and ultimately it will be a WISH on your part to die - a death wish. This is not a joke. "People" in "real bodies" really do choose to die because they believe in real sin. And that's the only reason. Death proves you deserve not to be forgiven because your sin (of separation) was real. Everyone who dies GIVES THEIR OWN CONSENT for it to occur, purely based on this. Somewhere inside there is a dark twisted belief, that you think is actually TRUTH, that says, well, I did that thing so.... I should die. That's how you choose it!

Belief in sin produces death. Belief in sin is suicide!

This is why YOU need forgiveness. You need forgiveness to undo the belief that sin is real, not just to pardon the sin. If you continue to believe sin is reality, you CANNOT forgive it. This is simply metaphysical logic. If sin is reality, death is truth and life is a lie. Therefore forgiveness is impossible because God would be lying. If sin is real, your innocence has ACTUALLY been defiled, and that PROVES that you are not innocent, and therefore forgiveness has NO SAY in claiming that you are forgiven.

So if sin is real, you cannot be forgiven. If sin is real, there is no such thing as innocence. If sin is real, God CANNOT love you. If sin is real, you will choose death.

So how do you overcome this? The only thing that you really need to do, is to realize, that sin is NOT REALITY!!!!!

Sin is not real! There is no real sin!

Whatever you did, you did not really do it. I don't care if you think it was reality, or that you think the people were real people, and there were real consequences, and someone got really hurt, and bodies were really damaged, and you had to pay a real price, and now you have real memories, and everyone really hated you, and you really hated yourself, and your life went to shit because of it. IF that's REALITY, there is no hope for you.

The only way out of hell, then, which is based on sin being real, is that you MUST question whether sin is real. And if sin is NOT real, that completely brings into question ALL of your life, the world, bodies, people, events, places, circumstances, consequences, ALL of that has to be NOT REAL. It all goes together in a total package.

If sin is not real, the things your body did it DID NOT REALLY DO. If sin is not real, the consequences of your actions DID NOT REALLY OCCUR. If sin is not real, and you point and you say, well, that person still doesn't have a leg because I cut it off with a chainsaw.... well, then you are still believing in real sin and there is no hope for you.

And that's because, in your belief that sin is real, you have DENIED MIRACLES, and therefore you have prevented that person from receiving a NEW LEG, and you have failed to DEMONSTRATE that NOTHING HAPPENED by literally undoing all of the effects of what you said was real. Atonement requires that you demonstrate and PROVE that you and your brother are innocent, because sin DID NOT HAPPEN and had no real effects.

Your failure to recognize your innocence and your brother's innocence has caused miracles to be BLOCKED, and has resulted in you and your brother KEEPING the effects of sin. And now you look to the presence of those effects, which you chose not to undo, and claim that this means you really did do something. NO! The effects are there BECAUSE you claim that you did something and you have not become open to corrective miracles.

The ONLY way you are going to be able to experience being innocence, if you think you've sinned, is for you to STOP BELIEVING YOU SINNED. You cannot transition to a belief that you are innocent while you are still holding onto a belief that you sinned. You have to let that go! And you WILL NOT let that go if you believe there is any REALITY to it, any truth to it whatsoever.

So in the forgiveness, which leads to the atonement, you must question the idea that there is REALITY AND TRUTH to what you think you did. Is it True and Real in God's reality? NO! Therefore is cannot have been true and real. Forgiveness does not look upon sin and MAKE IT REAL. Which means, you cannot forgive real sin, but forgiveness is meant to remind you that sin is NOT REAL. It takes reality AWAY from sin. It removes its sense of reality or really occurring. Forgiveness does not PUT reality into sin and then try to pardon it. It recognizes that THERE IS NO REAL SIN, and that in that view - in that truth and perception, YOU MUST BE FORGIVEN ALREADY.

This is absolutely the only way that you can ever be innocent again. It HAS to be true for you that you did not really sin. You did not really do what you thought you did. It did not really produce the consequences you thought it produced. And the only way that is POSSIBLE is because the entire "world" that you thought this all occurred within was JUST A FUCKING DREAM! Dreams are not real dreams, they are not reality, and nothing REAL gets affected. Everything in a dream is NOT REAL. So when "sin" happens in a dream, it is not REAL sin, it is make-believe sin. That's why you're still innocent.

And what this must reveal to you, is that as you accept this truth, which is the atonement, i.e. nothing REAL happened... you will become aware that God has actually not changed. God has not even once considered you sinful. God has not even begun to agree with you that you really sinned. He laughs at your belief that separation is real or has real consequences. He is AMUSED by your belief that your DREAM is reality.

God is like, still up there, being totally joyful, totally happy and peaceful, totally loving you 100%, totally seeing your 100% innocence, totally oblivious to any possibility of you EVER being sinful. GOD DOES NOT BELIEVE IN SIN. He ALREADY sees you with TOTAL FORGIVENESS. He already recognizes that you MUST BE innocent still because He created you to be permenantly, REALLY innocent, and you CANNOT do anything to change that, and you HAVE NOT.

God still loves you!!!!!!!!!!

GOD STILL LOVES YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you can accept that - your belief that you sinned was TOTALLY MISTAKEN - and if you can accept that God still loves you 100% - YOU ARE INNOCENT FOREVER - then you will experience relief, joy, release, and celebration, because the good news will have come to you that not a single thing about Heaven has been defiled, God has not been harmed, nothing real has been threatened or damaged, and EVERYTHING IS STILL OKAY!

You did not do what you think you did. And because of that, YOU ARE FORGIVEN. Permanently.

Thank fucking God for that!!!!

And do you know what that means? It means you are still innocent therefore YOU ARE WORTHY OF LOVE. You DO deserve to be loved. You CAN be loved. You ALLOW love. You ACCEPT love as truth. You stop rejecting God. You allow God in. And that means, you are no longer CHOOSING death. It means instead, in your choice to accept the atonement, that you are choosing ETERNAL LIFE.

Not as if you can un-choose eternal life anyway because death is just an illusion in a dream that you make-believe is real, lol ... but now you can FULLY EXPERIENCE eternal life because you have claimed your innocence. You've accepted that you did not sin. And that means, there is NO REASON why you cannot be immortally innocent forever and ever.

Amen.

P.S. The sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept the atonement for themselves, SO THAT they will believe in love and eternal life and will be able to GIVE MIRACLES to everyone else, helping them to accept the atonement also.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO DIE!

In this world, death is inevitable. This is a scientific and metaphysical fact. Entropy guarantees the end of the universe. It's all going to die.

"Without the idea of death there is no world."

Meanwhile, since it seems that the dying is long and drawn out, this can create the impression that there is some life to be lived. There are even what we call new births, growths, things to see and do, entertainment and short-term goals. Do it all - while you still can. The clock is ticking.

This however doesn't mean that even these new things won't die. All the flowers that ever bloomed are dead now. All the babies that were born are dead in the ground. And there's only a handful left to populate the Earth, seeming to live, standing in line, waiting to die.

All that remains of what we call "alive" is a thin surface, a small collection of those things that temporarily aren't fully dead yet. And it's a vey small amount compared to what has come and gone. Life is a small slither of the dying, and billions of years have already come and gone.

The fact is that the world does not GIVE you a choice in this matter. It is set up to guarantee death. It can appear that there is life temporarily, but it is also certain that it will not last. What appears to be life, such as a seed growing into a plant, producing a flower and then dying off, is all living on borrowed time. The flower was destined to die as soon as it was sown.

All the world's roads lead to death. Sometimes there are roads which don't seem like they're so bad, and are tolerable, and sometimes even seemingly enjoyable. These are diversions and detours. They present an illusion of what seems like it's not dying. They might even look like growth and building and construction and birth. But not one of these things will escape death.

There is not one single city that has been built that hasn't crumbled. There is not one house that hasn't been reduced to a pile of rubble. There is not one body that hasn't been laid in the ground, if there was anything left to bury. There is not one food that hasn't rotten. There is not one place that hasn't deteriorated. And there is not one meaningful civilized movement that hasn't come to an end.

Why is that? Because death is built into the system. Space and time MEAN death. Delay, which is time, is an avoidance of being present, an attack on permanence, and an attempt to overthrow eternity. Time means death and time guarantees death. All the things in spacetime end up dead because time itself forces them to change, to stop being what they are, and to stop existing.

"This is the world of time, where all things end."

There is a seeming regurgitation of death, appearing to turn into new life, such as when trees in a forest are feasting on the corpses of their ancestors. New flowers seem to bloom as so-called "nature" attempts to find a way to perpetuate itself. Only to continually be met with an onslaught of destruction. Yet while the "new" stuff seems to perpetuate an illusion of a life, the rest of it just withers and dies. And even the new stuff will end someday.

This dire situation is simply the state of the world. It is hopeless. Anything you begin will end. Anything you build will crumble. Anything you think you've achieved will come tumbling down. Everything you've tried to create will be destroyed. Not one thing you've ever made will withstand the laws of physics. And time will sweep your whole life under the carpet.

Given that death is inevitable then, logically speaking it really means there is no point in living. After all, what's the point in putting in so much effort to do and achieve and accomplish when it's all just going to be destroyed anyway? At some point the sun is going to go supernova and blow your hopes and dreams to smithereens, and there will be not one trace left of everything you worked for.

Civilization rests on the idea that somehow you will leave a legacy and pass on the relay baton to the next runners who, like you, will also have to pass it on to the future generations because they too will die before the finish line. And so mankind pretends to live as screaming corpses toss the temporary illusion of life to the newcomers and ask them to do the same when their time comes to die. And we call this a sustaining of life against all the odds.

This is what spacetime has in store for you. And because of this, there really is no point doing anything. There can only be seeming short-term rewards, temporary advantages, momentary gains and short-lived enjoyment, all guaranteed to come crashing down and be trampled on by the universe. Have you not realized this yet, that the whole world is set up to try to kill you off? It was MADE as an attack on God and as an attempt to destroy you.

The truth is then that even though there sometimes seems to be a reprieve or temporary ceasefire, ALL the worlds roads and paths and choices eventually lead to death. All its roads do NOT lead to God. They all lead to destruction and despair and suffering. This is the way of the world. If you attempt to deny this you are mentally ill, and out of touch with reality. Death has plans for you that it will never give up.

So the truth is that, really, in the big picture, you do not HAVE a choice in life. You are not really choosing between life and death. You are choosing between death now or death later. You are choosing only to some extent when it will happen, and certainly not IF it will happen. And for the most part, it is going to choose for you. A sudden tragedy, a spontaneous seeming sickness, an accident, an act of nature, whatever it is that comes knocking to give you a really bad day.

You don't have a choice, if this world of spacetime is all that exists. If this is all there is, you are bound to death. If this world is the only reality, you will never escape death and it is your destiny to die. That means you are bound by fate and there is nothing you can do about it. Therefore you are not free. You are prisoner in a prison world, doing time, and waiting to die.

The only way, logically speaking, for you to have an ACTUAL CHOICE, is if there is some kind of way of existing that is not bound by the laws of spacetime. The only way you can have an alternative TO choose from, is if there IS actually a real alternative. There has to be an alternative to spacetime, otherwise you have no choice at all.

And don't be deceived in thinking that you have a lot of choices in life, to decide how you can make your life better, to choose something you prefer over something you don't, to choose which compromise appeals to you more. For everything you gain you will lose something else, and will not come out on top overall. Life will give you little scraps and will then take them away again. It will award you and please you and delight you and then shit in your face.

And you'll think it was unfair and unnatural and just some exception that things went to hell. But then it will happen again. And again and again and again. And you won't seem to be getting the message that this is how the whole system is set up. There is NO ESCAPE from the problems of the world. The world was made so that problems would be endless and no escape is possible. There's plenty more in store for you if you stick around. The world has an unlimited supply of hands to slap your face with.

You might believe that problems are only temporary. You might be delighted with your ability to fix things and problem solve. You might think that you're able to create a little oasis in the desert where you seem to be relatively safe and life is good. But that means you're living in denial. You are not prepared for what could happen, and it will happen, and you will be shocked and upset because you thought it could never happen. And then you will exclaim it is unfair and try to move on and look for the next lull in the storm, ever lurching onwards towards the grave like a half-living zombie.

Unless there is another world beyond space and time, out of reach of death and destruction, you have no hope. Unless there is an actual reality where you can live and have life and experience, out of the reach of death's clutches, there is no hope. Unless there is GOD, heaven, creation, God's Kingdom, you do not have any hope. Unless there's an actual real alternative to this world, you are not going to surmount death or overcome the world or find a way to live forever.

It is quite insane to suggest that being born, living for a while, and then dying, is natural. It is commonplace yes, but that doesn't mean it's natural. All the things of "nature" seem to do it, but that also doesn't mean it's natural. It is completely insane to suggest that there could be a life which is given, but you only have a short time, and then it's going to be ripped away unfairly before you're done. That you could live for only a short period and then stop. It makes no sense at all to think that people could just be destroyed endlessly.

Due to death seeming to be so inevitable, people think they do not have a choice. That there is nothing else to choose. In fact they don't even think they have a choice at all, not really. Even though they pretend to choose things all the time, they are just choosing different roads to death that temporary look appealing. And none of them offer any REAL choice because none of them lead to permanent life. There is no alternative when the only option is death, and that means you have no choice to choose with.

If there were to be another option, you actually would have a valid choice. This would mean two things. Firstly that you can choose something else, and secondly that if you choose it you will have it. It has to be true then that death is actually a decision, and that you somehow have it within your power to choose what you want and to make it happen. Otherwise, if permanent life were an option and you chose it, death could still take it away from you. It has to be that somehow in you there is a power of decision which overthrows what happens and determines your own destiny.

This means ultimately that, even while death disguises the fact that you are free to choose, death itself must be chosen in order to happen. This same power in your mind that can choose eternal life can also choose the illusion of death in space and time. If there really is an alternative, and you can choose it, and by choosing it it becomes yours, you must have the power to NOT choose death, to not consent to it, and to therefore PREVENT it. Even to reverse it, undo it, cancel it, and make it impossible.

The only real alternative therefore to this world of eventual death is a world of permanent life, in which death is impossible, and life is inevitable. Where there is a power capable of keeping death at bay, of guaranteeing immortality, of ensuring invulnerability, of making certain that nothing can be attacked or harmed or destroyed in any way. It must be a world of creation and not destruction, rooted in laws of permanence and protection, of safety and of love, of harmlessness and order.

To entertain that there is a valid alternative to the world requires you to believe in God. To have faith in heaven. To trust and be open to the possibility that such a place actually exists, that you can go there and merge with it and live there forever, out of harm's way. To do this is the only way to step out of the downhill slide towards destruction. You have to believe in a movement towards life, and life is God. Going towards life resurrects you and restores your life, while going away from God takes you into the world and towards death.

If you want to live forever, you will have to turn your back on death and on the world. You will have to overthrow the laws of physics. You will have to violate every seeming natural consequence of the world. You will have to become able to demonstrate through miracles that you are under the laws of God and not the laws of death. You will have to be able to raise the dead, resurrect to life, and restore order. Only by surmounting death and preventing sickness and reversing decay can you prove that you really mean business in your commitment to living.

Accepting sickness is not a commitment to living. Sickness is a form of death. Tolerating suffering is not full living. Putting up with dying is not living. Only the sustained continuation of life endlessly is real life. And if you are not in favor of that, are not actively choosing that, are not causing that to happen, then you are choosing death. It's not a difficult thing to consider. You either choose to live or die, and it's on you. Living doesn't mean living for 80+ years. It means living forever.

Since everything in the world points toward death, even in its forms of life and its new births and so on, you will have to fly in the face of the entirety of spacetime in order to overcome death. You will have to believe in laws that are not of this world, you will have to side with God, and you will have to reject every belief in sickness and death. All forms of suffering will have to by uprooted and every denial that you use to pretend you're going to live has to be questioned.

There IS a real alternative to death, and it's not of this world. Life is of God who is eternally alive. If you want to live you will have to side with God. You will have to choose to resume your natural station of being like God. If you do not choose this, you are choosing to be unlike life, and therefore dead. And that is what you will receive. If you do not want to receive it, you will have to choose immortality. And the only way to choose it is to stop choosing anything the world says must happen.

You're going to have to go against the grain, run contrary to the worlds beliefs, defy the opinions of everyone, stand up for the real truth, stop supporting the number-one religion of death-worship, have faith and trust in God's power to correct all problems, and become a medium through which resurrection can occur. The ONLY way out of this is through miracles. The ONLY way to end death and guarantee life, is through the expression of life and the giving of life. And through miracles you will return to an endless life in God.

"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." "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."

"Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to GAIN that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them."

"All of them will lead to death. On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes."

"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? We have asked this question before, but now we need to consider it still more carefully. It is the one fixed, unchangeable belief of the world that all things in it are born only to die. This is regarded as "the way of nature," not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the "natural" law of life. The cyclical, the changing and unsure; the undependable and the unsteady, waxing and waning in a certain way upon a certain path, - all this is taken as the Will of God. And no-one asks if a benign Creator could will this."

I asked Jesus last night fairly bluntly about death, whether a person's body can die without any problems in the mind, and whether a person can be fully awake/enlightened and still go through the death process.

His answer was short and sweet and cut to the chase:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Demonstrate death and you must believe in death."

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Just to make sure you grasp what this means, recognize the ACIM ideas that "to teach is to learn" and also "all teaching is demonstration" and "you will demonstrate what you believe is true" and "you are always demonstrating even while you sleep".

So that means, whatever you are expressing, whatever you are showing up "as", whatever state your body is in, whatever is coming through you, however you are using the body, whatever you are trying to communicate to others on all levels including the physical, whatever "message" you are giving through the state of your body which reflects the state of your mind, that is your DEMONSTRATION. Which means, it correlates exactly to what you BELIEVE IS TRUE.

This is proven out in this quote, which tells us that whatever you use the body to DEMONSTRATE, it will BECOME THAT, so if you use the body to demonstrate sickness or death, it becomes sick and dead, because you BELIEVE IN DEATH. The mind makes ALL DECISIONS about the body's condition, including whether it lives or dies:

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions that are responsible for the body’s condition. "

So when you are believing in true health, you will demonstrate true health. When you believe in attack you will demonstrate attack. When you believe in sickness you will demonstrate a sickness. When you believe in death, you will demonstrate death!

What Jesus is saying is, in order to demonstrate death - "to die" as we like to refer to it, where the body goes through a death process, that is ONLY POSSIBLE when you BELIEVE that DEATH IS TRUE AND REAL. And it is because you believe in death being true, that you demonstrate that this is your truth.

It also means therefore, that if you DO NOT BELIEVE in death, YOUR BODY CANNOT DIE. Literally ****CANNOT****. Impossible for it to die, no matter what. If that is your 100% perfect belief in absolutely no attack, the body MUST become a symbol of immortality, to remain in perfect AGELESS HEALTH, as long as it is needed. Not even affected by weather or food or time.

Long story short..... DEATH CAN ONLY HAPPEN IF YOU BELIEVE IN IT!

And that also means... TO COMPLETE THE CURRICULUM AND FULLY WAKE UP, YOU MUST NOT BELIEVE IN DEATH, AND YOU MUST DEMONSTRATE IMMORTALITY.

So everyone is constantly demonstrating, teaching, communicating, what it is they believe the truth is, putting on a "show" which exhibits for everyone to see, exactly what it is you believe in.

Jesus also teaches simply that if you REALLY believe that something is true, you WILL be ABLE to demonstrate its truth. Not just a sort of powerless wishful thinking, but that if it is your actual experience that something is true, you will wholeheartedly be willing to demonstrate it to PROVE that you believe it. Nothing will hold you back from demonstrating it. Being fully convinced of its truth, it becomes REAL for you, and that gives you the POWER to demonstrate it.

"Miracles demonstrate that learning has occurred under the right guidance, for learning is invisible and what has been learned can be recognized ONLY BY ITS RESULTS. Its generalisation is DEMONSTRATED as you use it in more and more situations. You will recognize that you have learned there is no order of difficulty in miracles when you apply them to all situations. There is NO SITUATION (including sickness and death) to which miracles do not apply, and by applying them to ALL situations you will gain the real world."

So what this boils down to is this simple fact.

If your body becomes sick, or if you die, YOU MUST HAVE CHOSEN IT, BECAUSE YOU BELIEVE IN DEATH.

There is no exception to this. If you "demonstrate death" for all to see, you are PROVING that death is something you believe in, and that is why you are TEACHING DEATH to everyone through your EXAMPLE. You're saying, look everyone, look at how death is real, look at how death is happening, look at how death is my truth, and LOOK AT HOW YOU DID THIS TO ME!

When you look at all the passages in the course which talk about "demonstration" this is clearly revealed, that when you demonstrate something it "applies" your belief to others. And therefore when you make your body sick, you are attacking others because you are demonstrating your belief that you have been "made sick" by someone other than yourself. And when you are attacking others, YOUR BODY will be attacked, and will become sick, to DEMONSTRATE that you are believing in attack. And this is nothing other than the attempt to PROVE that your brother must be a sinner because EFFECTS are showing up in you which he MUST have caused.

And even further, when you CEASE believing in death and sickness, you EXONERATE your brother, because you are no longer believing that he is the cause of your state of being, or the world. Jesus used His own resurrection - the re-materialization of a body which was NOT DEAD, proving He had NOT been killed by crucifixion, to DEMONSTRATE that death is not real. Here:

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

He refers to misperception because in a prior paragraph he spoke of how the misperception of others was the justification for their attempted attack on his life. He resurrected to PROVE that they were EXONERATED, through physical demonstration, because of his BELIEF that there is no death, and therefore showed that they were no longer ACCUSED of having caused the death. Simply, by showing up as "not dead", it immediately cancelled and proved false any belief that anyone had killed him, thus rendering all onlookers INNOCENT. He thus TAUGHT THEIR INNOCENCE through this miracle demonstration, because miracles are teaching devices.

The demonstration of what you believe is important. It is all over the course. When we are making ourselves sick, we are accusing our brother of sin. And yes THIS DOES MEAN AT THE PHYSICAL LEVEL. It is only at the physical level that you can see the RESULTS of miracles and the results of the mind's belief system. And this physical level is used as a COMMUNICATION device to make statements about WHAT IS TRUE OF BOTH YOU AND YOUR BROTHER. Your sickness attacks BOTH of you. Your death attacks BOTH of you. With death you are saying, "you killed me, and I killed you, and both of us are dead". This is spelled out in black and white, that "your sickness" is an attack on others and an attempt to accuse your brother of sin. Your body *MUST* be part of your awakening process and part of your view of yourself and part of what it is you believe in.

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

Here Jesus is not talking figuratively or metaphorically about death. He's talking plainly about a person's body dying as an attempt to accuse your brother of sin. Anyone who is sick, anyone who dies, is accusing the whole sonship, and the world, and God, of "causing it", and therefore claiming that we are all sinners. Sickness and death OF THE PHYSICAL BODY are WEAPONS OF ATTACK. The body is an IMAGE you are showing your brother to say hey, this is what I think of you, and this is what is true of us both. This is why the body is an integral part of your MIND and an integral part of your entire process of spiritual enlightenment. IT MUST SHOW WHAT YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE.

You can't it be that the body just sits there like a separate "thing" having absolutely no input from your mind and not reflecting your inner condition whatsoever, with you blissing out in some corner of your mind pretending to be awake while the body is still showing everyone that you believe death is real. You can't just be like, oh I'm not a body I am free, I'll just sit here and not be a body, while my body is sick and dies, and I don't care if its sick or dead cus it's an illusion. THAT'S DENIAL. THAT'S A LIE. THAT'S DISHONEST. THAT'S BULLSHIT!!!!!!!

I know that many people cannot accept this and many deny it. But Jesus in A Course in Miracles, and supported by everything He has said in his own words, is telling us to STOP BEING SICK and STOP DYING. That sickness and death are the total OPPOSITE of God's Will, and that we are to DEMONSTRATE AN UNWILLINGNESS TO DIE, in order to PROVE that we really truly believe that death is not real.

It is not enough to sit on a fence and say, ok, I don't believe in death. And to then die. That is a lie. It is dishonest to say you do not believe in sickness and to then demonstrate being sick. Or to claim you are not dying and to then die. Or to say it's not my mind that's dying, it's just my body, which is not me. That's an intellectualization because THE BODY CAN ONLY DIE IF YOU ATTACK IT. It is a lie. The mind IS believing in death and is making the body sick. A SANE MIND heals the body!

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

"The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, the mind HEALS THE BODY (making sickness and death IMPOSSIBLE) because it has been healed. The sane mind cannot conceive of illness because it cannot conceive of attacking anyone or anything."

If your mind is sane, YOUR BODY CANNOT DIE. If your body dies, YOUR MIND IS NOT SANE.

Whatever you demonstrate, whatever you express, whatever you show, it is coming from your inner condition as an outward picture. It is a demonstration of your thought system and what you REALLY believe. If you go through death, YOU DO BELIEVE IN DEATH. No exceptions. If you do NOT believe in death, YOU WILL NOT DEMONSTRATE IT.

You do not get to wake up from being a body in the dream and then go through death. You do not get to wake up from being a body and believe intellectually that you're not the body and to then have the body be sick and die. Where is the correlation of proof that your mind makes your body? Where is the consistent honesty? This is deception. You can't be demonstrating one thing and believing another.

Jesus is literally teaching us to OVERCOME DEATH. "You made sickness and death and can abolish both". This is not an OPTIONAL course teaching. This is not just some side-thread which you can elect whether to participate in. This is a CENTRAL TEACHING. It is inherent to healing. It is inherent to being right minded. It is inherent to miracles. It is inherent in all of the Course's metaphysics, and it is GOD's WILL that you not demonstrate death. Death is an attempt to kill God's Son, no matter what anyone claims about their supposed state of mind. Death is humanity's belief in hatred made manifest. Period.

Anyone who shows that they die in this world, is demonstrating and proving that they believe in death. That's all there is to it. It doesn't matter how much of a guru you are, how enlightened you seem to be, how many miracles you performed, how many yogic skills you have, how many followers you accumulated, how many people adore you, nothing. The proof is in the pudding. If you die, you did not overcome death.

"A dream of death is not left by death but by truth."

It's plain and simple. All the arguments about "oh this is just a dream and death isn't real so it doesn't matter if you die"... it's a logical ERROR, it's level confusion. All the arguments about "well I don't have the power to stop my own death", is also bullshit. It is UNWILLINGNESS TO LIVE. All the arguments about "death is natural" - absolutely false. All the arguments about death is inevitable - absolutely false. All the arguments about "everything dies" or "everyone dies"... how SORRY IS THAT?

That 99.99% of the human race is FAILING TO BELIEVE IN LIFE. That 99.99% of the human race is suicidal. "A dry and dusty world where starved and thirsty creatures come to die." And world where we come "to hate a while, whither and die".

This is not God's will.

It is God's will that you believe in life, you demonstrate that you believe in life, you ABOLISH DEATH, you undo ALL sickness, and you SHOW and PROVE that you cannot be killed, nothing can affect you in any way, and that the body can be overcome. You leave the dream through TRUTH, not through death. And truth brings light to illusions and disappears them.

This is the new frontier of A Course in Miracles. This is the true message Jesus is teaching. That you DO NOT NEED TO DIE and YOU SHOULD NOT DIE if you are to believe in everlasting life.

Again "demonstrate death and you must believe in death".

Death is what you are teaching. Death is what you believe in. If you are overpowered by disease and forces in the ego world, which you made, you have not undone your own self-attack. If your body is wracked with sickness, which are defenses you yourself put in place, and you have not removed those defenses, then you are still blocking God's Will.

No-one dies without their own consent. All death is suicide. Death is the opposite of God's Will.

"Sickness and death seemed to enter the mind of God's Son against His Will. 2 The "attack on God" made His Son think he was Fatherless, and out of his depression he made the god of depression."

"4 Many are afraid of blasphemy, but they do not understand what it means. 5 They do not realize that to deny God is to deny their own Identity, and in this sense the wages of sin is death. 6 The sense is very literal; denial of life perceives its opposite, as all forms of denial replace what is with what is not. 7 No one can really do this, but that you can think you can and believe you have is beyond dispute."

"T-10.V.2. Do not forget, however, that to deny God will inevitably result in projection, and you will believe that others and not yourself have done this to you."

"From the ego came sin and guilt and death, in opposition to life and innocence and to the Will of God Himself. Where can such opposition lie but in the sick minds of the insane, dedicated to madness and set against the peace of Heaven. 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 results. 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.

81 And what is the black-draped body they would bury? A body which 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 have condemned the Son of God to this are arrogant."

If you REALLY believe in God's Will and that God is eternal life, you WILL DEMONSTRATE IT IN THIS WORLD by proving you cannot be affected by the world IN ANY WAY, not even death can happen to you, and you are IMMORTAL. If you are not doing that, it is because you do not believe it, it means you do not fully want to do God's Will, and MUST still have mental illness. If you die, you are NOT awake. Death is a symbol of sleep within sleep. It is the total opposite of progress, the total opposite of awakening, and the total opposite of truth.

"There is no death, the Son of God is free" is true ONLY IF you can PROVE IT, by being INCAPABLE of dying, not merely as a mind, but in any way that you show up. If you are in a body, you MUST SHOW IT by showing you CANNOT DIE PHYSICALLY EITHER.

Do you really think if Jesus showed up in the world, projecting a body from His mind, that anything in the world could make that body dead? That you could hurt it in any way or make it sick against Jesus's will? THAT would be arrogant, and that is the arrogance of the ego. "There is no death, the Son of God is free" WHEN HE FULLY BELIEVES IN THE END OF DEATH and has the balls to show it to the world.

Sickness in your own body is an attempt to accuse others of sin. It is part of the process of projection. "You but accuse your brother of your own sins" "Sick bodies are accusers".

This is entirely to do with cause and effect. In your natural state you are purely causal. You are not at the effect of anything external. But when you believe in your own sinfulness, you go into denial and disown the sin, projecting it outwards.

In other words, you take the causality from within yourself and hand it over to something outside of you. You now see cause as outside you, and effects as inside of you. Your mind believes both, that someone else is the cause of you, and you are being affected by them. That you have effects in you.

Due to believing in being affected, your mind powerfully manufacture signs and symptoms in your body as a reflection of your own belief, that you are having effects. It puts them through THROUGH its belief in the CAUSES that it sees itself as subject to. This is entirely based on the belief that there is a cause outside of you with power over you, dictating what you are, changing you against your will, and thus that there SHOULD BE effects in you correlating to the hierarchy of illusions.

Your mind itself creates the effects in you, and through believing that you are affected, invents weakness, suffering, sickness and death in the body. This manifests in the body as a symbolic representation of this attitude and thus the body becomes sick. The sickness of the body is entirely a PART OF the process of the projection of sin onto others. As you project mentally, the body communicates the attack by taking on the form of the message.

By using the body to accuse rather than to extend love, the body BECOMES accused, depicts accusation, turns into a form of attack, and is distorted by the mind's belief in its own affectedness. Essentially, "toxic harmful messages" passing through it affect it negatively. The body out-pictures the mind's sick attitude about itself and its brothers. The body now shows what the mind is believing and being used for, as symptoms of sickness and malfunction materialize by the power of the mind.

So there is this thing happening on a mental level where the mind is believing in sin and projecting it outward onto others. Your brother is being accused of sin and is being attacked by your mind. This belief simultaneously affects your PERCEPTION, which is now backwards (false perception), whereby you now see your brother as sinning against you and is the cause of your suffering. He is made into the real sinner who has power over you, as a false perception.

Then at the same time, on the physical level, the body is entirely caught up in this psychological process, is swept up in the attack and is distorted at the level of form to depict the attacking attitude. It becomes a "picture of crucifixion" which testifies and shows PROOF to your brother that HE must have been the CAUSE of you, and here are the EFFECTS to prove it. You show him the effects as part of your accusation and projection, to try to convince him of its wrongfulness. This all happens at once, mentally and physically.

So now the body becomes a physical accuser, demonstrating that there must have been a sin against you, because the body is under attack against your will (so it seem), and symptoms are providing fake evidence to show for it. As your brother looks upon this sick body, even if he has absolutely nothing to actually do with the situation, if he beholds your accusatory body he does not see his forgiveness there. And instead seems himself standing condemned, which weakens his mind.

Unless he is able to forgive himself, and thus completely overlook your demonstration of blame, which would allow him to be unaffected, his own belief in his own sinfulness will be compounded by your demonstration. If he can overlook it and not buy it, he can potentially offer healing to you. If he fails to overlook it, he will merely add to your sickness and compound it, taking the opportunity to rebel and project his own sin onto you in a joint ego encounter of mutual unconsciousness.

Your sick body does nothing at all to help him heal and is an attempt to infect him. It shows this on physical levels such as through infection and disease and contagion. Such sickness show up AS contagious because the mind TRYING to transfer sin to the other person.. I'm not sharing this to make anyone feel guilty. This is just something that we need to look honestly at if we are to move towards healing. But beware that Jesus holds absolutely nothing back when he presents this idea

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

So Jesus is saying here, YOUR sickness, even your physical sickness, is part of an attempt by your ego's belief in sin, to project or give away the sin to others through accusation and projection. And as your body becomes sick, through your OWN indirect causality, as part of your sinful USE of the body, you get to show everyone why someone ELSE caused it.

It even goes as far as to say, that if you cause your body to DIE, in physical death, you are WILLING to do so because it assuages your guilt, portrays you as the innocent helpless victim, allows everyone else to be accused of causing it (external causes of death), and is thus the ego's attempt to exonerate you. This is why we have a belief that people die "against their will", "unchosen", "unfairly", and feel sorry for the whole episode. It's all part of the ego's worship of death as salvation.

This means you would be literally **willing to die**, to pay the price of death, IF it means you can be considered innocent and not the cause of sin. If the world can be considered the cause of it, YOU get off as the innocent party. And so death "saves you" from having sinned. This is what happens upon EVERY death. This is the CAUSE of every single physical death. "No one dies without their own consent". And this is why death of the body PROVES a complete failure to choose against sin and accusation. Death is a state of total disownership of self, life, will, power and responsibility and is an attempt to destroy the Son of God.

So it kind of boils down to this. When your mind believes in sin, it will project that sin onto others, see cause as external, experience backwards/false perception, and induce deliberate illness in the body to correspond to "what effects likely wold be produced" by such a cause. The body then shows proof that your brother is sinful because effects remain in the body. And as you literally SHOW him this sick body, you remain accusing him. And you will not REMOVE the effects from your body, because you want to CONTINUE accusing him.

"For it becomes the symbol of reproach, the sign of guilt whose consequences still are there to see, so that the cause can NEVER be denied."

"A sick and suffering you but represents your brother's guilt; the witness which you send, lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape."

"The unhealed CANNOT pardon. For they are the witnesses that pardon is unfair. They would retain the CONSEQUENCES of the guilt they overlook. Yet no-one CAN forgive a sin which he believes is real. And what has consequences MUST be real, because what it has DONE is there to see."

The important thing is, there is a flip side. What happens when you choose NOT to believe in sin? What happens when your mind decides to be holy and healed and loving towards others? With no sin to project, the entire projective process stops. That means the mind stops believing causality is external. It takes causality off the shoulders of your brother. It stops seeing itself as a victim at the effect of anyone else. Perception reverses along with cause and effect, such that you now see yourself as the cause, not the effect. And thus all "effects" in you, and in the body, literally disappear. Because without an externalized cause, they cannot remain.

The result of this is that your body is not USED to accuse, or to attack, but to HEAL. Because the mind MADE the symptoms as "effects" in the body as fake evidence to accuse your brother with, the mind ALSO has the power to UNDO those symptoms. "You made sickness and death and can therefore abolish both." By TAKING BACK YOUR POWER from externally projected "cause", you reclaim causality internally and stop seeing yourself as "having effects". The effects cannot stay WITHOUT projected causality, because you now see yourself as ONLY CAUSAL. "I am not at the effect of the world I see" is healing.

By extending love and healing through the body, the body DEPICTS harmlessness, holiness, innocence and the ABSENCE of sin. Just as the mind invented the symptoms of sickness due to its belief in "being affected", it also UN-INVENTS the symptoms as a result of believing "I am NOT at the effect of the world." Through believing "my brother is NOT the cause of me", the body is healed. By NOT using the body to communicate attack or blame, the body stops SHOWING symbolic signs of attack or blame. All sickness is lifted away from it BY the mind and it is healed through mind power Because you are the CAUSE of all of this. Sickness and death is a CHOICE.

There are NO exceptions or loopholes to this dynamic. When the mind is healed, it heals the body and forces the body to NOT show any signs of attack. "The mind, being sane, heals the body." "Now is the body healed by miracles." When the mind is in a state of sin, it attacks the body and makes it sick. "Sickness is anger taken out upon the body." "Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt (by others)." The body SHOWS what the mind's attitude towards itself and its brothers is. "A broken body SHOWS the mind HAS NOT been healed." Always.

It boils down to, healthy mind, healthy body. Sick mind, sick body. Sin and projection, body depicts attack. Forgiveness and healing, body depicts the absence of attack. Loving shows up as a divinely healed lovely body devoid of all signs of suffering, and symbolizes Christ and eternal life.

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

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you.Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies.Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions that are responsible for the body's condition. ... He does not suffer either in going or remaining. Sickness is now impossible to him."

Jesus is absolutely NOT saying that the body "sometimes" heals. He is not saying "it might, it might not." He is saying IT HAS TO symbolize the mind at all times. The body is an EFFECT, not a cause. The body is not AT the effect of the world. It does not "become sick" through external causes. Those are fake. It becomes sick only if the mind approves of the sickness for its purposes of projection. The body is being USED, it does hot have a say in it. Effects do not cause anything.

Nor is there such a thing as "death happens against my will." This is entirely a fictional ego belief. Death happens when your mind chooses to attack your brother. Your attempted murder of him, kills your body. When you love and forgive all people, your body CANNOT BE SICK OR DIE. Sickness and death literally become impossible. And this is the resurrection, in which death is surmounted and has NO POWER over you.

Giving and receiving are one. If you give ONLY LIFE, you will receive only life. If you give sin and death, you will receive sin and death. This is also the golden rule. If you believe you brother is sinful and you attack him for it with your body image, you WILL attack yourself and believe you are sinful. This will make you sick, mentally and physically. If you give him healing, you will be healed. "I will heal as I let him teach me to heal."

This is A Course in Miracles. A central teaching. The Holy Spirit has a perfectly healed body and mind to offer you to use in the world as a teaching device. But it is only accessible by not sinning against yourself and others. It IS possible to REVERSE, UNDO, and HEAL, all forms of sickness and death. Not only in yourself, but also in others. This is what it mean to be miraculous.

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

"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."

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

Such a healed body HEALS YOUR BROTHER through its example.

"Correction IS the function given both, but neither one alone. And when it is fulfilled as SHARED, it MUST correct mistakes in both of you. It CANNOT leave mistakes in one unhealed, and make the other free. THAT is DIVIDED purpose, which cannot BE shared, and so it CANNOT be the function which the Holy Spirit sees as His."

"What you would prove to him you will believe. The power of witness COMES from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

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

How just are miracles! For they bestow an equal gift of full deliverance from guilt upon your brother AND yourself. YOUR healing saves HIM pain, as well as you. And YOU are healed BECAUSE you wished him well. This is the law the miracle obeys"

----TL;DR: Changing your perception OF a sick body, isn't enough to change what you are projecting. You are projecting your body and the symptoms.----

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

Recognize that projection COMES FIRST, then perception happens SECOND.

"The world you see" (perceive) "is what you have put there to see" (what you projected first).

"The world you perceive" (second) "is witness to your state of mind" - your perception "witnesses", perceives, and reflects back to you, your state of mind, because your state of mind PROJECTED what it is that you are now PERCEIVING.

These are two different processes. The act of having a certain state of mind, which you then project FROM, puts stuff "out there", which you THEN perceive as a secondary process.

Even the body itself is a projection. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards". The body then PERCEIVES, AFTER having been projected.

Jesus talks about how this is a circular logic for us, a trap, whereby we believe what we want to see, we project it because we believe in it, we "make it appear" (manifest it), then we "perceive" ie let the body tell us what it is we projected.

Perception then, is distinct from projection. It is a secondary act. Without projecting, there would be nothing TO perceive.

So here's what you need to realize about perceptions of sickness.

The mind, in whatever state it is in, has beliefs in it, thoughts, which then project. These projections MANIFEST the body and many other forms and objects. The mind for example projects the body ITSELF.

If the mind has a belief in separation, it will project a body which shows up with signs and symptoms of sickness, because it is a PICTURE of your inward condition, and your inward condition is one of "I am under attack". So the body SHOWS it. it is a WITNESS ie corresponds to your state of mind. This is why "a broken body is proof the mind has not been healed." The body literally only shows up as the mind's manifestational projection. It's an image being projected by the mind.

Jesus speaks to this in his "special notes to helen"....

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it.. It merely became what it always was. ... The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond... To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness.

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 an illusion, and THE MIND THAT MADE THE BODY CAN MAKE ANOTHER SINCE FORM ITSELF IS AN ILLUSION. They did not understand."

So here we can see, the MIND, MAKES the body. Your mind is projecting your body, and everything about it, right now. However it is showing up, witnesses to your mental content and your belief system. If it is showing up as sick, it is therefore directly correlated, it is PROOF, that your mind is not healed.

This also means, that when the mind IS healed, or close to, and it is still projecting a body, it MUST project a body which appears without signs or symptoms of sickness. This is because the body COMES FROM the mind, mind is its source, and a healthy mind WILL ONLY project a healthy-appearing body image.

Now. There is a problem here in how many people are interpreting the correction of perception.

Remember perception happens to look upon WHAT YOU PROJECTED, after you projected it. The body's eyes receive little photons of light to tell it, oh look, there's a body there. That's part of perception. The illusion that the very thing YOU PROJECTED, is now telling you what IT IS, completely forgetting that you put it there in the first place.

So now perception, is ONCE REMOVED from the direct expression or projection of the mind. Perception therefore is a secondary experience.

So now, let's say that you have projected a body with a broken leg. The broken leg was not caused by anything in the world. It was ONLY projected from the mind. The mind did not project a broken leg ONTO the body. The mind directly projected ONLY an image of a body with a broken leg. The body does not EXIST as a separate object, or a "thing", or something as an end in itself. If you do not project it, nothing shows up! If you do not project it, there is no body!

So now, that you projected an image of a body with a broken leg, you now will perceive. Perception can be in a state of correctness/clarity or in a state of false perception/distortion. Since your MIND has a belief in sickness in it, and has made a sick-appearing body image materialize, it also now believes sickness is real. Perception is now going to take place, and that same mind which PROJECTED the "sick body", is also going to see that same belief in sickness IN the body that was projected.

This means perception is now going to show you a hallucination of "sickness is real", "something is wrong", "sin and guilt" etc, as though it is *IN* the body. It is not in the body, it's in the mind. Thus the idea of sickness, which made the body to begin with, is now SECONDARILY projected ON TOP OF the body that you projected.

Then you will have various ego reactions to what you are misperceiving, and will start to seek a resolution. But your planned strategy here isn't typically anything to do with fixing your PROJECTION, it's always to do with fixing your PERCEPTION. And that means, something very obvious is about to happen.

If all you do, is fix your perception OF what you projected, you might be able to seem to "be at peace" with what is showing up. You might seem to become less upset or resistant or less fighting with, your broken leg. You'll tell yourself, if your perception OF the body is healed, you will be TOTALLY DONE. But this leaves you with a problem, and a state of denial.

Fact is, even if your so-called "perception" is perceiving your broken leg as "lovely and wonderful", oh how lovely that death looks.... your leg is STILL BROKEN. And that's a problem. Because now you are demonstrating that you can be hurt, you are attacking the entire world by claiming that something OTHER THAN YOU put the break there, you are holding this broken leg up for everyone to see to make them guilty and accuse them of sin, and you are attempting to demonstrate that God's Son can be killed.

It also means that since ALL sickness manifests as a DEFENSE against the truth, in the mind, which then projects a "defending body", which shows up as attacked, you CANNOT accept full and total peace while still maintaining that defense. It is impossible. The defense has to go, which means the belief in separation has to go, which MUST produce a projected body which shows up as HEALED.

Nothing happens to the body that was sick that you projected previously. It does not exist. You just RE-PROJECT A NEW ONE, every moment. Sickness in the body can only show up if the mind is defending against truth, and sickness can only show up in the body if the mind has GUILT. "Sickness is but another form of guilt". Therefore, if the mind does not have guilt and defenses, the body WILL ONLY show up as healed, as PROOF, that the mind is healed. The mind will PROJECT a healed-appearing body to testify to ITS inner condition.

So while that broken leg persists, you are in denial. You may be owning up to the fact that you have some control over your PERCEPTION. But you are not admitting that you have the power to PROJECT what you are even looking at.

This is a fundamental difference and there is a pretty big divide in the ACIM community based around this one distinction. Many people believe all they need to do is fix their perception OF the world, or what's showing up, and then they are done. In this belief system, it becomes justified that you can still have sickness show up and have a "healthy mind", that you can still DIE and be innocent, you can welcome death, you can keep your sickness and be totally happy, etc.

Yes, to a degree, as a preparatory step, you can come to be "relatively peaceful" about these things through changing your perception. What you are INDIRECTLY doing there, is that it's not actually your perception that you're fixing, is the content of your mind that PROJECTS the body in the first place. Attempting to change your perception is a second-hand roundabout way of trying to address the content in your mind, which is "showing you" a belief in sin and sickness "in" the broken leg. But at some point.... you're going to hit a wall.

The wall will simply be, that in order for you to really thoroughly change your perception so that you do not believe in sickness, and have no sickness in your mind, you're going to have to also ADMIT, that your mind is projecting the FORM OF SICKNESS *AS* the body, in the first place, regardless of your perception OF it.

So many people are onto this "change my mind about the world" kick, which changes perception OF the world. But they do not realize, at some point, if you are not going to perceive sickness, your mind has to be emptied of all belief in sickness, AND THIS MUST result in the PROJECTION changing. It has to. The mind can't retain some small amount of belief in separation and have *perception* be a state of peace.

If that broken leg is still showing up, but you are relatively "ok with it", you are IN DENIAL. That broken leg is NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SHOWING UP AT ALL. A sick body is PROOF the mind HAS NOT been healed.

There is this second camp of ACIM folk then who see this, and acknowledge, that the mind projects the body. Jesus Himself said it in that quote above. The mind that projects the body can make another. And if the mind can project the ENTIRE BODY, then IT is 100% responsible for making the body show up with ANY sign of sickness or death. This is how no-one can die without his own consent! If your mind does not put it there, it cannot be.

So if you just stop at.... I'm going to just be okay with this sickness, I'm going to perceive this sickness differently, I'm going to perceive this BODY differently, I'm going to look at this body in a more loving way etc.... that's a step TOWARDS healing the mind's content. But if that body is still showing up as BROKEN, you are NOT DONE.

This is where there comes to be a lot of denial, because not only is it often difficult to see that you projected the sickness AS the body (it can happen really fast and then go unconscious), there is also a lot of FEAR about this idea that your mind is THAT POWERFUL, that it can not only make sickness and death happen to you BY your will, but that the mind can also reverse that. Yet Jesus teaches:

"You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both." ABOLISH means, to TOTALLY REMOVE. That means, the reversal of ALL forms and signs and symptoms of sickness in the body AND mind, and EVEN DEATH. It Literally means, the ability to reverse death, to raise the dead, and to completely restore life. It is the ability to REWIND SIN and UNDO ALL OF THE CONSEQUENCES (effects) of your wrong decision.

Your mind is cause. Your body is your effect. The body is NOT CAUSED by the world in any way whatsoever. Ever. Your sickness is NOT PUT THERE by any cause outside of your mind, EVER. You are responsible for what you have chosen. And because you are, you can CHANGE YOUR MIND and it MUST CHANGE THE PROJECTION.

So yes it's one thing to work on changing your perception, but your perception has arisen from what you have projected. And that means, if you are GENUINELY undoing the sinful content in your mind, are taking full ownership of your power, are NOT believing that anything in the world has the power to affect you or your body, and are NOT attempting to demonstrate that the Son of God can be hurt and killed THROUGH the symbol of the body (the body can become a sign of immortality), then YOU WILL STOP PROJECTING SICKNESS AND DEATH.

You do not project it ONTO the body. You project it AS the body. No-one else put the body there. Your parents did not put the body there. Biology did not put the body there. Chemical reactions and physical interactions did not put the body there. The world, the dream, other people, did not put the body there. ONLY YOU DID.

So that means, if you're to go all the way with this.... this is where you get into MIRACLE WORKING. Because it means, you are willing to DEMONSTRATE, to live by example, that it is possible to reverse all sickness and death in yourself, AND IN OTHERS.

You first reverse it in yourself by accepting atonement. This allows you to receive miracles. Then you are able to express those miracles to and for others. If they are willing to accept it.

We are not supposed to be walking around with limbs hanging off and body parts failing and organs malfunctioning and eyesight going bad and developing a limp and a having cancers and diseases and various other forms of SIN.

Death is an attempt to demonstrate that the Son of God can be killed. Pain is an attempt to bind the son to the body to fixate him on and identify with being a real body. Sickness is an attempt to prove the Son can be hurt. Sickness is an attack on your brother. Sickness is the result of seeking outside of yourself, and demonstrates level confusion. None of this is God's will. It is a demonstration of the OPPOSITE OF GOD'S WILL for you.

No-one is supposed to be dying. Bodies are not supposed to be decaying and dying. There is NOT supposed to be 7 billion people planning their own death, who will very likely die in the next 100 years, putting 7 billion corpses in the ground, just because they did not want God's healing and love. That's their choice. It does not have to be yours.

If we are to demonstrate that we are immortal and invulnerable, we ARE supposed to demonstrate here, in the flesh, that the body cannot be hurt, BECAUSE, the body is ONLY coming from the mind, and therefore if you project a healthy body it will STAY HEALTHY at all times. And nothing can attack it. It is IMPOSSIBLE for it to be sick. NOR CAN IT DIE.

"Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as IT MAKES ALL DECISIONS THAT ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE BODY'S CONDITION."

Later, when it's done being useful, it is simply DISAPPEARED. Just as Jesus did:

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it.. 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... To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. "

It was not a matter of it disappearing from his perception OF it. The body ITSELF disappeared because HE STOPPED PROJECTING IT.

THIS is our natural inheritance, this ability to work miracles, to reverse all sickness and death, to not only correct perception but to CORRECT PROJECTION. To UNDO everything we have PROJECTED. AND that ultimately includes your body, everyone else's body, all sickness, all death, all forms of separation, all objects, all planets, and this entire ILLUSORY UNIVERSE which is a PROJECTION coming from the mind.

So don't stop at "I will just change how I see the world." "Seek not to change the world, seek to change your mind about the world. Perception is a RESULT (effect of projecting) and not a cause (the body that shows up is not alive!). "And that is why order of difficulty in miracles is meaningless." ie... change your MIND, your body and the world MUST CHANGE to reflect the content of your mind. Without exception.

There are people who wake up in this world. There are people who are awake in the dream. There are people who have purified perception to such an extent that they seem to be seeing the real world or something close to it. They recognize that they were contributing sin to what is here, projecting it "onto" the body and world. But what they usually do not realize is, THEY are projecting the body and the world. And therefore, typically, they age, and they die. And then they reincarnate and make another body. Why? Because they did not get to the level where they woke up FROM dreaming, and FROM perceiving.

To wake up FROM the dream, you have to get in touch with the fact that you are the DREAMER of it, the one who is PROJECTING IT, and you are the one who is PUTTING ALL OF ITS OBJECTS OUT THERE. This puts you in touch with miracle working because now you are able to enact VERTICAL PERCEPTION, cause and effect are now vertical not linear, and you recognize the power of YOUR MIND to manifest absolutely anything in this dream, or change it, at will. Because you will realize, you have been DOING THAT all along. Your body was coming from YOUR MIND, and your mind only.

To wake up from the dream requires the undoing of dreaming, which overrides ALL perception, deals with separation at ITS CAUSE, and therefore DISAPPEARS THE DREAM UNIVERSE. That means, the disappearance of the physical universe, including precious "planet earth", which was never anything but a mental projection. All that is then left, is God's creation, which is Heaven.

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.

God has given you free will. Anything you choose is yours to choose. No-one else has any say in what your choices are. No-one has any right to decide for you what your choices are, to make commentary about your choices, to judge your choices, or to accuse you of making the wrong choice. It is none of their business.

Each person is solely responsible for their own personal freedom, which means that anything that a person experiences is entirely chosen, and not induced by anyone or anything else. God is the only cause of anyone. "I am forever an effect of God." One brother does not cause or create another brother. All brothers are equals as siblings precisely because they are not the cause of each other. No one else has EVER been the cause of anything you have experienced. If you believe otherwise you are confused.

You do not have the power to cause anyone else. No one else has the power to cause you. Being entirely responsible for your own freedom can only arise when you grant everyone else total responsibility for their own freedom. If you attempt to control, manipulate, judge, coerce, persuade, condemn, or otherwise alter other people's freedoms, you are denying your own and imprisoning yourself. It will not help you.

When you are entirely responsible for your own perfect freedom, which is a gift from God, you will recognize that absolutely nothing happens against your will. Not suffering, not sickness, not even death. "The power of decision is my own." Your sole responsibility is acceptance of atonement for yourself, so that you can offer it to others. But it is not for you to shove it down their throats, nor can you force anyone to be at peace, or to be loving, or to choose what you think they should.

When a person begins to lose sight of their own freedom, they lose touch with responsibility for the power of choice. And they begin to believe that causation and power are outside of them. They disempower themselves by blaming others. And then they automatically begin to try to make sense of why things are happening seemingly outside of their choosing, and it starts to make sense that someone else is choosing for you. And now you have assigned responsibility for your freedom to someone else.

When you think that someone else is responsible for your freedom, you are being irresponsible, and you will now depend on them making decisions that you approve of. You will encourage them to choose for you, provided it's the right choice that you indirectly want. If they do not choose what you want, for you, you will attack them for failing to give you what you want.

This then becomes the ego's mandate of "forgiveness to destroy", in which responsibility for freedom and for change is assigned to someone other than yourself, instead of you taking the responsibility to make your own decisions. You also cannot claim total responsibility for your own decision-making, while simultaneously believing that other persons are responsible for your decisions. Which means you have to allow other people to be entirely responsible for whatever decisions they make.

When you enter into coercion, control, blame, judgement, accusation, condemnation, taking sides, demanding that people comply with your beliefs, trying to force people to act a certain way, requiring people to make certain choices that you think are the right choices (for any reason), or have expectations or "needs" relating to what they do to or for you, you are entering into insanity, a special relationship, and false perception.

"God does not coerce".

"Your will is lost to you in this strange bartering, in which guilt is traded back and forth, and grievances increase with each exchange."

"Your will is free, and nothing can prevail against it."

You can easily spot when someone is moving into ego. Instead of being responsible ONLY for their own free will choice, they begin to displace responsibility onto other people. Causation is placed outside of them. They then begin trying to manipulate or "guilt-trip" others into acting certain ways, to comply indirectly with their wishes. The seeming "boundary" of freedom between them and others is disrupted, they trespass on the sacred territory of another, and the invasion of war begins.

When people are arguing about whether they should or should not do something, or what is the right thing to do, or who did what to whom, or who is responsible for causing other people to be sick, or who is putting who in danger, or any other dynamic where one person is accused of being responsible for another, the ego is involved. The two people are becoming tangled in a special relationship, anchored at the body level of insane illusions and fictional causes.

Interestingly, when someone is doing this, which always involves projection and anger, which is an attempt to make someone guilty, the person is claiming to be acting in the interests of freedom and the good of all, but are simultaneously rejecting their own freedom by trying to control the freedom of others. Or rather, they place their own freedom into the hands of other people and then try to accuse them of mis-handling it, meaning you don't really believe that other people are free to use YOUR freedom as they see fit.

To make a long story short, what other people choose to do is absolutely none of your business. This is why Jesus asks you to "be passerby". You are only free when you recognize that your brother is free. You cannot recognize his freedom if you are trying to control him, trying to get him to side with you, are waging a war and trying to win allies, or when you're accusing him of inappropriate choices (sin).

If you reject the freedom of others you are in fact shutting down your own freedom, but you do this in the name of trying to uphold your freedom, which is insane. You clearly cannot increase your freedom, or secure your rights, by taking freedom and rights away from other people. If other people are making poor decisions, then the consequences of those decisions are their responsibility only. You cannot be affected by them, unless you yourself personally make a poor choice as well. You cannot be cursed unless you curse yourself first, and other people's poor decisions DO NOT affect you against your will.

"Casting spells" merely means "affirming error", and error is lack of love. When man projects this onto others, he DOES imprison them, but only to the extent that he reinforces errors they have already made. This distortion makes them vulnerable to the curse of others, since they have already cursed themselves. The miracle worker can only bless, and this undoes the curse and frees the soul from prison."

When you move into an area of believing that other people greatly affect you, can destroy your life, can interfere with your health, can threaten your family, or can in any way do anything to you by their free choosing, you yourself have a mental health problem. You are denying your own freedom to such an extent that you think other people are the owners of your freedom. You have given them the power to do this to and for you, meaning also that you do not love yourself. And yet you accuse them of acting against your love.

You in fact want other people to be responsible for you, and in fact you want them to do things to you against your will, so that you can maintain that you are not free. You therefore use your enemies as devices to keep yourself imprisoned, and the more you hate them the more you succeed in imprisoning yourself. The only way to be free yourself is to grant freedom to everyone. Blaming people for imprisoning you or violating your rights is a great way to violate your own rights.

You might think that if you were to do this there would be anarchy, you would be vulnerable, idiots would run the country, fools would steal your possessions, stupid nutjobs would try to hurt your family, and the broken would try to infect you with their diseases. But these are actually part of your own attempt to reject health, reject life, reject protection, reject invulnerability, and reject safety. None of this can happen without your psychological consent.

You can't have it both ways. You can't be in the business of disempowering yourself and disowning your supernatural power of immortality, while at the same time claiming that other people are responsible for your wellbeing and are able to hurt you. You do in fact have a mind-over-matter power innate to all children of God, capable of rendering you immune and invulnerable to all the things of the world. You have an automatic God-given miraculous ability to heal anything and overcome anything. And nothing can prevail against you.

"Today it is the ego which stands powerless before your will. Your will is free, and nothing can prevail against it."

"Nothing can prevail against our united wills, because nothing can prevail against God's."

"NOTHING can prevail against a Son of God who commends his Spirit into the hands of His Father."

When you are in the business of making other people's business your business, you are not in business. You are out of business, which is why you are trying to get the business of others by being involved in their business. You busy yourself with their business because you have no business doing so. And by doing so, you have no business at all.

The people who are having an utter shit fit about whether or not to vaccinate need to pay attention to sanity and reason. You are immortal and you cannot die. No-one and nothing can happen against your will. So who are you accusing of being responsible for things happening to you? It is in fact you who is disempowering yourself and setting yourself up as a victim, and you want to have victimizers in your life who you believe oppose you, to pretend that you don't want their opposition, so that you can keep being a victim about it.

All forms of sickness are illusions produced by an insane mind, acted out upon a body. This is something that you do to yourself. "The mind makes this decision as it makes all decisions responsible for the condition of the body." Your mind has the power to decide whether or not to live or die, to be sick or well, to be happy or unhappy. No one has the right or the responsibility to take this power or freedom away from you. And no-one can. Only you can give it away, disown it, or try to lose it, by your own free will. That's your choice.

If you fear that you can be infected by another's contagion, or by some random environmental evil, then your mind is already sick and needs help. If you are not willing to receive the help, then you are in a bind. It means you do not want to be healthy and you want to die. And yet in this condition you will claim that you want to be healthy and not be sick. But you cannot be even believe that you can be sick while simultaneously bringing about the ONLY decision capable of making you suffer. Nor can you be blaming the cause of your suffering on a speck of particles, or a car crash, or any kind of external causation.

"No-one can die, unless he chooses death. What seems to be the FEAR of death, is really its ATTRACTION."

The real deeper issue behind all this covid panick, is the fear of death and "how to be safe". However...

"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."

"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."

"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 we are body identified, we place ourselves on the battlefield and accuse ourselves of weakness. Then we set ourselves up for being subject to a warzone and threaten ourselves with causes on the same level. We then try to escape this threat with magical means and silly maneuvers which are supposed to somehow make you invulnerable and safe, as if this solves the problem. The problem is not whether or not you are susceptible to a disease, the problem is that you are choosing to believe in disease in the first place, therefore threatening yourself with inducing it.

It then does not matter whatsoever whether you choose to get a vaccine or not. Getting one is insane. Not getting one is insane. Both are insane because they are based on a false premise. If the premise is "sickness is real and I am vulnerable to death against my will", then you are already insane. And making the decision to be vaccined OR not vaccinnated are both equally insane outcomes based on a lie.

"The world was made that problems could not be escaped." You cannot go either way and claim to be making a sane decision.

You cannot escape from or have external salvation from sickness, while looking for external solutions to an externalized problem. If the world does not exist, who is doing this to you? Who is deciding that you are weak and vulnerable and attackable and destroyable? This is nothing other than your resposnibility and your belief. "I can be attacked by nothing but my thoughts." ...

"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."

If you are not able to accept total responsibility, which is atonement, then you are in a predicament. You say you want salvation but you don't. You say you want life but you keep choosing death. You say you want health but you believe in sickness and then panick in fear trying to scramble to find ways to defend agaisnt it, knowing it cannot work. What are you going to do? If you are not willing to entertain a miracle, then you are left with no other option. If you are not willing to forgive and rise above the battlefield, you have no other option.

The only remedy you are then left with is a solution which can at best seem to partially work, and at worst destroy you. This is true of any vaccine as much as it is true of ANY magical solution. No magical solution will ever induce wholeness, nor will it make you invulnerable, nor cause you to be what you are. Magic will not correct your mind, it will likely have no effect on your insane beliefs, and it will not ultimately save you from death. It is your thoughts alone that decide whether or not you are choosing to die, and this overrides all magic, and the world.

So you are then in a predicament because you cannot possibly choose a remedy that truly works, all the remedies are broken, the only action you can take is incomplete, and nothing external can truly cause you to be peaceful. "salvation comes from nothing outside of you."

"THERE IS NOTHING OUTSIDE YOU. That is what you must ultimately learn, for it is in that realization that the Kingdom of Heaven is restored to you."

A vaccine is, at best, an illusion of a solution. It might seem to work for some people and not for others. It may seem to work to a degree, but not totally. It absolutely MUST attack the body in some way as all magic does. It will not stop any virus from entering your body and beginning to take hold.

It will not prevent your body from being vulnerable. It will not ward off death nor will it cause you to feel safe. It might, potentially, seem to manipulate the body so that it might, perhaps, if your mind consents, avoid contagion or transmission of a disease some of the time. But it will not bring peace to your soul. God doesn't live in a syringe. Nor does God need booster shots.

If all you can choose is a senseless insane choice, a partial choice, a choice which you know cannot truly work, which can at best produce an illusion of health, and which may in fact hurt you, what are you to do? This is where you need to ideally be willing to turn to someone who knows better than you. Ask the Holy Spirit. Ask Jesus. Ask your angels. Get some guidance from a higher perspective. If you are not willing or ready to go there yourself, get their input. Let them decide for you.

And this again is where we must acknowledge the freedom of your will. No divine being is ever going to mandate a vaccination, nor are they necessarily going to always advise against it in a given situation. What is right for YOU, is dependent upon every speck of your mental state and what is appropriate, not only for you, but in the atonement plan and in the script for your life.

There may be a reason for you to elect temporary sickness. There may be a reason for you to meet certain people. There may be a good reason for YOU in particular NOT to choose a vaccine. There may be a cascade of outcomes that are only possible if you do, or do not, get medicated. There may be a good reason why you SHOULD, just as there may be a good reason you shouldn't. And it has absolutely NOTHING to do with anyone else, solely because the curriculum is individualized.

The Holy Spirit knows what is best for you given YOUR situation, where you are at and what you are ready for. He knows where your trust is. He knows what you are capable of and will accept. Turn to his advice rather than that of fear or the ego. And especially beware of the egos of other well-meaning people especially the ones who are religious about the "reasons why" you should or should not make a certain choice. EVERY reason on this level is fiction.

If you cannot or will not turn to the advice of a wiser counsel, and if you refuse health, and if you actively are choosing sickness, and if you are living therefore in fear of contagion, then your options are limited. Love does not enter where it is not welcome. You can be prayed for. You can be loved. But you may reject all support. You may have a death wish. You may want to die. It might be "your time", based on your plan. Who knows. I do not know and no-one else likely knows either. Matters are far deeper than some "statics" about viruses or medicines.

Long story short, if you made it this far. .... you are always absolutely free to make any choice you want to make, and it has absolutely nothing to do with anyone else. If anyone is trying to control your decision for ANY reason at all, they are denying their own freedom and are trying to make you responsible for them. They are like children looking for a parent to depend on, to decide everything for them.

This is because they have become undependeable and irresponsible. It's up to YOU to decide how to discern where they are at, and to be responsible yourself for your own choice. And whatever you choose, God loves you.

At the end of the day all you can do is make your own choice in freedom, and free from guilt, and do so decisively and with conviction. But not a conviction that turns into tyranny, or the attempt to recruit others to your cause. Let people be where they are at. Let them make their own decisions. Let them be mistaken and recognize that they are.

Not because they don't do what you want them to do, but because they are free of you. You have no business trying to coerce people to agree with YOUR fearful belief in laws that are not of God.

What I decide to do is none of your business, or anyone's. What guidance I receive regarding my own choices, is none of your business either. What I decide to do or not do has nothing to do with you either. And if you think that my choice affects you, you are deliberately disempowering yourself, because nothing happens to you against your will. This is not supposed to be a selfish free-for-all, or a war, where people are opposing each other and digging in their heels thinking they know what's true. Nothing in this world is true, it's just a dream.

Go within, and go above. That's the only place where there is any sanity.

Let's have a closer look at what the course says about the world and whether it is God's creation. This is going to be a long post so bear with me or pick and choose which quotes you want to look at. I put a comment after each one.

To me, the way that all of these statements sound paints a clear picture that the "physical world" i.e. the physical universe - planet Earth, is NOT God's creation whatsoever in any way shape or form.

It also says to me and that every time Jesus refers to the world as something we do not want, he is not referring to some "misperception of it" that we don't want - some imagined version of the world, which he talks about in other passages - but rather, literally "the world" - planet Earth. It is an illusion not created by God, and it does not exist, and it is not our home.

Confusion comes in because at times, Jesus IS speaking about our false perceptions and the need for the correction of perception. But at other times, he is speaking at a higher "level" either at the level of someone with true perception, or even higher at a level of the One Son of God who made this universe. Not having a clear distinguish about WHICH level he is talking at in any given quote leads many people to a lot of confusing and false conclusions. Let's take a look at some quotes....

"You do not want the world." (who would want a world God didn't create?)

"The world provides no safety." (because it is an attack on God)

"This world was over long ago." (because it never happened)

"Nothing the world believes is true." (because the world itself is fundamentally a lie)

"Love was never in the world of dreams." (because God cannot be in the world or of the world nor can He create the world. The world of dreams is not your dreamy interpretation of planet Earth, it IS planet Earth, a dream which you are inside of right now, sleeping - look around you! "Your sleeping and your waking dreams have different forms, and that is all." - tells us that when we wake up in the morning to eat breakfast, WE ARE INSIDE A DREAM, not a world that God created.)

"There are no satisfactions in the world." (because the world was made by us as a substitute for God's universe)

"It is the world you see that is impossible." (because the world we see - literally planet earth, not your interpretation of planet earth - is impossible. It cannot exist because God did not create it.)

"Miracles do not obey the laws of this world." (because this world is entirely an EFFECT and it has no power to do anything)

"The world is not left by death but by truth." (because the world ITSELF is death, and truth is its undoing)

"Without the idea of death there is no world." (see .. the world is MADE OF DEATH and it will not ever be made of Life or given life or resurrected or turned into something living or God-created).

"All the "pleasures" of the world are nothing." (because they are illusions, and substitutes for God's love. This means the world can NEVER be a satisfying replacement for God's Creation).

"Perception selects, and makes the world you see." (Many many people think this means, that you have misperception OF the world, peeking out from a separate body, looking incorrectly at planet earth which somehow objectively came to exist "on its own" or created by God. What this really means is, YOUR perception, as the One Son of God, MADE THE ENTIRE WORLD, and the world *itself* IS a state of mind containing images. Trees, houses, people, it's all part of perception. Not perception OF trees and houses and people, but literally the things themselves. Those objects, your body, planet earth, are misperceptions.)

"The world you see is but a judgment on yourself." (because you are the One Son of God and the ENTIRE WORLD is a judgement against you. It's an attempt to deny who you are, to turn you into a form which dies, to picture what it would be like to be dead, and to completely obscure the light of Christ. The world itself IS judgement. Judgements OF or ABOUT the world are an entirely additional LAYER of bullshit that you added as a separate human, and is a SECOND LAYER of sleeping you added on top of dreaming the world.)

"The world you see has nothing to do with reality." (Again, this is one which many people think means, the world your little separate body-located self sees... thus your private perception. No. It's the world your eyes see. You see trees. You can call the trees good trees or bad trees, hated trees or loved trees, you still see trees. The trees you SEE - trees AT ALL - are nothing to do with reality. God did not create trees.)

"If this were the real world, God would be cruel." (This SHOULD be an obvious one. Given all the suffering and terror and death in the world, which is inherent to the world's nature, should NOT be possible if God created it. And claiming that it's really love or life if viewed correctly, is a complete distortion, again based in one person's body-identified personal opinion about the world. God does not create worlds where there are forms or bodies or things which die, NOR does he create worlds where even if those things are all part of one lovely "whole", they are possible either. God only creates HEAVEN, which is formless and has absolutely nothing to do with planet Earth in any way.)

"The bleak little world will vanish into nothingness." (Yes, planet Earth, is a bleak little world, and it will vanish into nothingness, because God did not create it. This does not mean your personal misperception of the world will vanish (though it will also) - the world ITSELF will vanish, because it is a lie).

"The world was made that problems could not be escaped." (the purpose for this self-made world was to create problems that are inescapable, such as sickness and death. These problems however have no power over miracles which can undo them all BECAUSE God did not create a world of problems.)

"This world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son." (I like this one because it says it like it is. The entire world, the entire physical universe, is a "picture" in the MIND of the Son of God, who is absolutely vast and unlimited, who is dreaming this ENTIRE physical universe and everything in it, and it was designed by him as the crucifixion of himself. Its depiction of things which have beginnings and ends, stars which are born and die, flowers which wilt, people who die of disease, planets that die, etc... is a picture of CRUCIFIXION not a picture of "God is very loving." While you can come to perceive it in a more forgiving way, that does not make or prove it is God's creation either, because if you recognize it for the illusion/lie it is, it MUST disappear.)

"The world you see does nothing. It has no effects at all." (This is because the world is an effect of dreaming. What appears in it as "causes" are illusions of causes put in place by the dreamer. The world has no consequences. Anything God creates MUST have the power to CAUSE, and since the world cannot cause anything, it cannot be a creation of God.)

"The unreal world is a thing of despair, for it can never be." (There can only be joy and love and peace in what CAN be, i.e. God's creation, heaven, the kingdom, but outside of that there is no life and nothing can be joyful or loving or peaceful. The world is inherently a depiction of what peace is NOT like. Separation in all its forms is played out here, and every single particle of matter is at war with all the rest.)

"Salvation is no more than a reminder this world is not your home." (This world is not your home... literally, planet Earth is not your home. This entire physical universe is not your home. But some people interpret this to mean, well, this imaginary interpretation of the world is not my home - the world I'm putting on top of the world is not my home. Bullshit. "The world" is simply planet earth. Planet earth is not your home. Surely you FEEL this? Surely you recognize that you feel like an alien here, and that the more you wake up the more you recognize that you do not belong in this illusory place? I know I do.)

"There is a place in you where this whole world has been forgotten."(Thank God, because this world is not something God would ever create. God is suddenly the author of duality and sickness and death? God sees sickness and death as lovely and precious? I think not.).

"The world has never been at all. Eternity remains a constant state." (Planet Earth has never existed at all. This is hard to accept I know. There is no world. This is the one core teaching in ACIM which many people refuse to entertain. This is because we believe the world is REAL and cannot conceive of how it would not be. Especially if you come to the course with a background in beliefs which say God made the world in some way, that's hard to put down. This isn't referring to a privately perceived interpretation of the world. Again, it's just simply... this world, planet earth, has never existed. We can deny and fight this all we want.)

"In the world of scarcity, love has no meaning and peace is impossible." (Would you say planet earth is a world of scarcity? I sure would. That's not a judgement or an inability to see its pure loveliness. Yes there's a forgiven world, which is the recognition that this world is an illusion and is nothing, but I think most would agree this is a world of lack and rarity. Just look at how empty outer space is and how distant civilizations or inhabitable planets are. Extreme scarcity.)

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt." (So here again you could say, well, this means my perception is nuts and I'm not seeing the world correctly. Ok. That's one LAYER of the problem. Once you undo that false perception you're going to find out, that the world is STILL a delusional system. Inherently, the mountains, trees, planets, forests, oceans, it's all a state of DELUSION, and that's not going to change when you get over your personal misinterpretations of it. See, the problem is, we think that when we overcome "my" personal misperceptions, that's going to be the end of the story. It's not. You have to not only get over your personal interpretations (which is ONE level of awakening), AND then go beyond the definition of "my self" to incorporate ALL SELVES into one single Son of God - as Christ. And in that view, there is an entirely second level of awakening which leads to God, and the acceptance that the One Son of God MADE this world out of insanity and guilt. Guilt, denied, became unconscious, and projected out as the physical universe, in which we are now hiding from it by pretending to be innocent. Hmmm)

"The Holy Spirit sees the world as a teaching device for bringing you home." (because the world ITSELF is not your home. It's just a way Holy Spirit can USE it to help you to ESCAPE from it through truth - because it doesn't exist)

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it." (Plain and simple. Normal language. The world you see, with your eyes, regardless of your mental interpretations or labelling or judgements, is an illusion of a world. God did NOT create it. Many people want this mean, my personal interpretation of the world is not the world God created, and once I am free of my personal interpretation, God is going to reveal that this world - planet Earth - is his lovely creation. Good luck with that. Planet Earth does not exist. It is an illusion. The course even tells us the "real world" is an illusion and will disappear.)

"There is no world! This is the central thought the Course attempts to teach." (AHA!.. .. If you can GET this one and accept it, you've made a huge leap away from the ILLUSION that this world dis real, or that God could have created it whatsoever, to the awareness that this world can NEVER be real because to believe that requires a belief in sin and death. There is no world. Yes, planet Earth. There is no planet earth, neither as a separate planet nor as part of some seamless "soup" of God-stuff. Pretty threatening to the ego which is why it fights it tooth and nail.)

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never be undone." (Miracles can UNDO the world itself, and everything the world says cannot be undone (itself), BECAUSE the world CAN be undone, proving that it is NOT REAL. What is real cannot be undone. If miracles can undo the world, they can bring about RESURRECTION - the undoing of death in ALL its forms, including physical and mental death. Eventually the entire physical universes is going to be UNDONE, because it does not exist. Only God's kingdom will remain.)

"This is an insane world, and do not underestimate the extent of its insanity." (Obviously, but this actually does not just mean that the people in the world are nuts (and most are, me included), it means the world ITSELF, the very fabric of spacetime, is insanity. It is impossible to be separate from God and this universe attempts to prove otherwise.)

"On confusion has this world been based, and there is nothing else it rests upon." (here, we're told the world RESTS UPON confusion. The world itself. Now, if this means your perception, sure, that'd seem to make sense. You can be confused, and become unconfused. Sure, makes sense. But this statement isn't speaking about you or your personal world. In fact, most of the course is not speaking to or about anyone's EGO SELF, and yet 90%+ of ACIM students THINK that the Course is talking about THEIR PERSONAL EGO, which leads to a ton of confusion. The world ITSELF is based on confusion because it's an expression of a belief that separation from God is possible, which is a confused state of mind.)

"It is not will for life but wish for death that is the motivation for this world." (And this never changes. The world is BASED ON death, made of death, and is ALWAYS DEAD. There is no life here. There is no life outside of heaven. All forms of "life" in the world, all bodies, animals, plants etc, the sun and stars, it is all part of a DREAM OF DEATH, and not one part of it has eternal life. Death was the motivation that MADE THIS WORLD. This world was MADE BY A DEATH WISH, not by God. That's quite extremely opposite to the folk who believe God created this world somehow).

"The world is only in the mind of its maker. Do not believe it is outside of yourself." (When this says "yourself" note that it does not just mean "you in a body and not other people." Most people take it that way because they have an ego. Statements about you making the world or the world being in your mind, is not about it being in your SEPARATE MIND. It's about it being in THE ONE MIND of the son of God. The ONE son of God is the maker of this entire world. It is not outside of THAT SELF. You are busy focusing on how to get your LITTLE SELF to a state of awakening of maximal naturalness, but there is more beyond that - realizing that you are the entire sonship and more. You are Christ, not just one Son.)

"What profiteth it a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own Soul?" (Who wants the crappy world anyway? It's full of shit.)

"You are not the victim of the world you see because you invented it. You can give it up as easily as you made it up." (You can believe you are victimized when you believe the world itself is a CAUSE and you are its EFFECT. But when this is reversed (this is a course in cause not effect), YOU become the cause and the world is recognized as an EFFECT. It has no power over you because it is an EFFECT of YOUR dreaming it (as the One Son). This is how you are not a victim of it. Otherwise, the world can still kill you against your will. No-one dies without their own consent.)

"Holy are you, eternal, free and whole, at peace forever in the Heart of God. Where is the world, and where is sorrow now?" (Apparently Jesus is clear that the world is not a place of peace or freedom or holiness. So God cannot have created it.)

"What is seen in dreams seems to be very real. Yet the Bible says that a deep sleep fell upon Adam, and nowhere is there reference to his waking up. The world has not yet experienced any comprehensive reawakening or rebirth." (Yes dreams seem very real. What if i told you right now that you are actually INSIDE A HUGE DREAM? Right now... this room you are in or whatever, the people you are near, it's part of a DREAM. This is not what God created because it is a DREAM, not a reality. God does not dream or make worlds of dreams, or dreams of death. God did not create a dream world. You're dreaming, and you need to wake up FROM this dream, not TO it.)

"Forgive the world, and you will understand that every thing that God created cannot have an end, and nothing He did not create is real." (Objects in this world have ends and beginnings. Every particle begins and ends. Every flower is sown and grows and blooms and dies. Beginnings and endings. It's not just a matter of not seeing them correctly or not realizing that "God is making them grow" or some BS, it's simply that, ALL FORMS ARE FORMS OF DEATH, and they all end, and that is why they are NOT eternal, and God did not create them.

"Temptation has one lesson it would teach in all its forms wherever it occurs. It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what must die, unable to escape its frailty and bound by what it orders him to feel." (Exactly, and elsewhere Jesus tells us that love (God) did not make the body. God does not create forms, or planets, or a physical universe).

"The tiny instant you would keep and make eternal, passed away in Heaven too soon for anything to notice it had come. What disappeared too quickly to affect the simple knowledge of the Son of God can hardly still be there, for you to choose to be your teacher." (The entire world and all things in it were MADE by us to be NOT ETERNAL, which is WHY it passed away, because it could not last. Nothing God creates can die or end or transform or change, no matter what words you use to try to make out that it wouldn't be seen "as change" when you're awake.)

"Everything in this world is little because it is a world made out of littleness." (I like this quote also because it locks in the form of the world as being evidence of a mistake. Everything in the world, bodies, objects, even the planet, are "little". All little particles and atoms. All little tiny little creatures walking around thinking they are big. Go up in an airplane and you'll see how little it all is. Every FORM in this world is little, as an idea of not being unlimited or infinite, because it's an idea of contraction AWAY from God. This is not God's creation or God's will, and God would not maintain this for an instant.)

"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. (mind over matter)" (Again this is another one which people can and do use to try to prove that references to the world are all about "your personal misperception", and that you need to fix how you see in order to see it properly, and that afterwards, you'll keep the world and stay in it because it's real. No. Your WISHES have MADE A PLANET. The wishes of the one son of God, has made an entire physical universe. These are wishes to die. Wishes to be crucified. Wishes to sin. Wishes against God's will. God did not make this. What you want to see, changes, IN FORM, as mind-over-matter, because your mind is THAT POWERFUL. It doesn't just mean you change your perception OF stuff, when your perception properly changes, the world ITSELF must change form, and so must the body.)

"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. The world that you perceive is the witness to your state of mind, the outward picture of your inward condition." (You put it there (forms, bodies, trees, buildings) because you WANT TO. Do you think you don't have that much power? The mind is very powerful. The world must match the outward picture of the inward condition of the mind of the ONE SON. The One Son is attempting to destroy himself BY fragmenting himself into many many individuals and forms scattered across many worlds. What shows up as objects and bodies is what the Son of God wants to see there. It IS his perception. The course says literally "the world IS PERCEPTION", which does not mean that your little human "perception" contains the illusory world, it means the ENTIRE WORLD OF EARTH is inside the perception of a vast mind - it is that mind's IMAGINATION. Meaning, physical objects, are actually a part of SEEING, the mechanism of trying to VISUALIZE STUFF, which brings it into appearance as fake images i.e. objects and forms and bodies. When the mind is free of all this, the physical world - yes - planet earth in all its ways - MUST DISSAPPEAR.)

"Forget not the Kingdom of God for anything the world has to offer. 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." (I would rather have what the Kingdom of God offers than what this world offers. This world is not my home. It does not contain the truth. It is not real. And God did not create it. It HAS blinded the sons to the father, which was its purpose. You cannot behold (see in any way) the world (physical planet earth) and behold the kingdom. Only one of them is true and real. Planet earth does not exist, was not created by god, is an illusion, and if you're still SEEING IT in any way, with any mind whatsoever, you are not in the Kingdom. To suggest you can BE in God, in his kingdom, while the world continues to appear or move or change or have form, you are in denial.)

"O my brothers, if you only knew the peace that will envelop you and hold you safe and pure and lovely in the Mind of God, you could but rush to meet Him where His altar is. Hallowed your Name and His, for they are joined here in this holy place. Here He leans down to lift you up to Him, out of illusions into holiness; out of the world and to eternity; out of all fear and given back to love." (Looking forward to this! Finally a relief from this world of nightmares and death and suffering. THERE IS ANOTHER WORLD BEYOND THIS which God did create - his kingdom, heaven, filled with joy and life and peace and celebration. It is HOME. It is where you really want to be. Do not let the world, planet earth, bodies, objects, forms, people, places, idols, or anything else, KEEP YOU FROM going there and accepting it as your true home where your true nature is free at last. The world offers nothing in comparison. Pleasure is not love. Specialness is not love. Forms are not love. Sunsets and kittens are not love. "Never was love in the world."

There is no world. The people who do not believe this will continue to not believe this, and will object to this post and everything it says. They are free to do so, but they are not free of the confusion that is going to accompany those beliefs, or the fear that will be induced upon being confronted with this truth. I would hope people will change their mind and see what the course is really telling us. Then we have real hope.