God has created you as an infinite, immortal soul, who is perfectly complete and lacking nothing.
There is nothing that you need to add to yourself to improve yourself or to make yourself in any way better than God created.
You are lacking nothing at all. You are perfect.
God created you as a beautiful soul filled with love and joy and perfectly creative. Fully equipped to exist in Heaven and to extend love forever. You need nothing else.
When Jesus says "There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else." he is talking about the fact that He is simply being ONLY the Self that God created. He has not added anything or taken anything away. He is being his normal, natural God-created self.
This perfect self is hiding underneath every idea of imperfection, lack, separation, limitation and death. God already has created you with perfection, to be perfect, forever. You are flawless.
And since you are created from creativity and from love, you are endowed with creativity and love. You are permanently miraculous. There is nothing that you cannot create with the power of the mind, in accordance with God's will, to increase the Kingdom.
Somewhere inside you, you know this. There is a place in which your soul is already within you, perfectly holy, undefiled, unchanged, unaffected, perfectly sane, happy and at peace. It's already there. God creates only permanent creations which cannot change.
Your soul is divine, forever. "Spirit is in a state of grace forever."
As a child of God, God has placed himself in you, as an extension of his mind, will and power. You don't really "have" anything "of your own", or exclusive to you, because everything God gives is given to everyone equally. But you do nevertheless have everything that God has given to you, just as everyone does. Which mean that you have inherited from him his mind, will and power.
"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."
When this power is interpreted as belonging ONLY to you, then you are trying to have it for your own, excluding others, which cuts you off from God, and disables the power. When it is interpreted as belonging to everyone, and being FROM God, FOR you, and FOR everyone, it is regained and you become all powerful.
"I am not afraid but all powerful."
"The miracle-worker begins by PERCEIVING light, and translates HIS perception into sureness by continually extending it, and ACCEPTING ITS ACKNOWLEDGMENT. Its EFFECTS assure him IT IS THERE. The therapist does not heal; he LETS HEALING BE. HE can point to darkness, but he CANNOT bring light OF HIMSELF, for light is NOT of him. But being FOR him, it MUST be for his patient."
What this means is that in the "arrangement" of how you are "set up" in terms of relationship to God, function, and what you must give, God has placed himself in you, and now you have everything that is OF or from God, as yours, but only so long as you share it. And in order to have it you have to give it, and to share it it must be extended. And so now the love that is given to you from God, is given through you, by YOU participating in its extension, by expressing the love that is yours - which is also his.
So it's kind of like a "pay it forward" kind of thing, where God gives love and power and will and miracles to you, then you in turn pass on and give and share the love and power and miracles to others.
"Miracles are a universal blessing (for all) from God, through me (christ, sonship) to all my brothers."
God loves you. You love your brothers and your creations. Similarly...
"Through prayer love is received. Through miracles love is expressed."
This means fairly simply that you need to "express God" ie to express love. Which is why "Miracles are expressions of love." Or as Jesus often says to me, "shine". Shine the light that is in you, give it, share it, express it, pass it on, so that you acknowlege that you have it. And thus by expressing it, it flows into you.
If you think you don't have love to express, because you don't love enough, or feel lacking or deprived, there is a simple fix. Start loving anyway, try to push the love out, feel it coming out of you, send it to someone, even if it's just a little bit.
You'll find that this "unclogs the pipes" and gets the juices flowing. As you do this, you actually start to RECEIVE more love, heaven comes to help you, and you start to get healed as well. As you give healing you are healed.
"I will heal as I let him teach me to heal."
So in a sense, we are sort of "channels" for God. But being a channel for God doesn't entail strange trance states or going unconscious or having your body be possessed. You can remain fully aware and participatory, shining a light, joined with God, in which both of you shine together. This is part of the arrangement of you being a co-creator with God. You create in parallel, you love in parallel, you heal in parallel.
What is your function? Your function on earth is healing, and in heaven it's creating, and both are very similar. The healing function lines up and mirrors the creative function. You extend God's love and shine your light, a the light of the world, and your mind extends out and unites with other minds to bring about miracles. You share this function with the Holy Spirit while you're on earth, and you hare it with God when you're in heaven.
"As your function in Heaven is creation, so your function on earth is healing. God shares His function with you in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit shares HIS with you on earth."
"The 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."
"Yet here is also a great channel of hope and healing in the Holy Spirit's service."
"Whenever a teacher of God has tried to be a channel for healing he has succeeded."
"About His yearning for His only Son, created as His channel for creation"
"Let us today open God's channels to Him, and let His Will extend through us to Him."
"God created every mind by communicating His Mind to it, thus establishing it forever as a channel for the reception of His Mind and Will. Since only beings of a like order can truly communicate, His Creations naturally communicate WITH Him and communicate LIKE Him."
"The constant GOING OUT of His love is blocked when His Channels are closed, and He IS lonely when the minds He created do not communicate fully with Him."
"And so He has kept this Channel open to receive His communication to you, AND YOURS TO HIM."
"Your minds are not separate, and God has only one channel for healing, because He has but one Son. His remaining communication link with all His Children joins them together, and them to Him. To be aware of this is to heal them, because it is the awareness that no one is separate, and so no one is sick."
"I repeat that I do not choose God's channels wrongly. The Holy One shares my trust and always approves my Atonement decisions, because my will is never out of accord with His."
"I have told you several times that I am in charge of the whole Atonement. This is ONLY because I completed my part in it as a man, and can now complete it through other men. My chosen receiving and sending channels cannot fail, because I will lend them MY strength as long as theirs is wanting."
"Only God's own holy children are worthy to be channels of his beautiful joy, because only they are beautiful enough to hold it by sharing it. It is impossible for a Child of God to love his neighbor EXCEPT as himself. That is why the healer's prayer is, "let me know this brother as I know myself.""
"What God DOES know is that His communication channels are not open to Him, so that He cannot impart His joy and know that His Children are wholly joyous."
"While he is IN the body, however, man can choose between loveless and miraculous channels of creativity. He can create an empty shell (see previous reference), but he DOES NOT create nothing at all. 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."
Yet the ideal outcome is rarely achieved. But psychotherapy begins with the realization that healing is of the mind, and in psychotherapy those have come together who believe this. It may be they will not get much further, for no-one learns beyond his own readiness. Yet levels of readiness change, and when therapist or patient has reached the next one, there will be a relationship held out to them that meets the changing need. Perhaps they will come together again and advance in the same relationship, making it holier. Or perhaps each of them will enter into another commitment. Be assured of this; each will progress. Retrogression is temporary. The overall direction is one of progress toward the truth.
Psychotherapy itself cannot be creative. This is one of the errors which the ego fosters; that it is capable of true change, and therefore of true creativity. When we speak of "the saving illusion" or "the final dream," this is not what we mean, but here is the ego's last defense. "Resistance" is its way of looking at things; its interpretation of "progress" and "growth." These interpretations will be wrong of necessity, because they are delusional. The "changes" the ego seeks to make are not really changes. They are but deeper shadows, or perhaps different cloud patterns. Yet what is made of nothingness cannot be called new or different. Illusions are illusions; truth is truth.
Resistance as defined here can be characteristic of a therapist as well as of a patient. Either way, it sets a limit on psychotherapy because it restricts its aims. Nor can the Holy Spirit fight against the intrusions of the ego on the therapeutic process. But He will wait, and His patience is infinite. His goal is wholly undivided always. Whatever resolutions patient and therapist reach in connection with their own divergent goals, they cannot become completely reconciled as one until they join with His. Only then is all conflict over, for only then can there be certainty.
Ideally, psychotherapy is a series of holy encounters in which brothers meet to bless each other and to receive the peace of God. And this will one day come to pass for every "patient" on the face of this earth, for who except a patient could possibly have come here? The therapist is only a somewhat more specialized Teacher of God. He learns through teaching, and the more advanced he is the more he teaches and the more he learns. But whatever stage he is in, there are patients who need him just that way. They cannot take more than he can give for now. Yet they both will find sanity at last.
The ego produced the idea that when you cause something, it produces an effect, but the effect itself is not CAPABLE of causing something in turn.
This shows up in the relationship between mind and matter or mind and body. The body seems to be an "end result" but of itself it cannot create anything. The ego made the illusion that it can create children but really it is a dead end.
This is because the ego "separated" cause and effect, meaning that mind seemed to become cause and matter became effect, so that mind would seem to STOP being able to CREATE something that in turn can create.
When you think about your self in heaven, you are an effect of God. But in God's world cause and effect are not split apart like this, and an "effect" is NOT a dead end. When God creates something, he give it ALL of his own ability to create, and therefore it ALSO becomes a CAUSE.
You are an effect of God, which means you are still as God created you, but it DOES NOT MEAN that you therefore have to be whatever God forces you to be. You are not like the "body of God" or some kind of projection of Him that cannot think for itself or has no will of its own.
This is a very important point because in terms of the ego's thinking, if you are just an EFFECT, then you cannot CAUSE anything, and that basically means God created death, or created an end to extension.
You are created TO EXTEND, to CO-CREATE, and to CAUSE CREATION. You are an effect of God but you are ALSO FREE to cause of your own free will. If you were not given the freedom to be a cause, you could not be like God or in his likeness, and you would not be able to create like Him.
So God has created you, you are the effect of Him, but you are also a cause. God causes causes. God creates creators. And because you ARE a creator and you can create, you MUST HAVE freedom to WILL freely. Your independent free will was given you BECAUSE IT WAS NECESSARY in order to grant you the ability to create freely.
By God having created creators who can create creators, and IF those creations freely willingly choose to extend or "will like God's will", then creation extends endlessly as a continuous outflowing of creativity. When a creation of God freely chooses to dream and to pretend to oppose God's "intention" and tries to block their own free will, his "communication channels" are blocked and God thus recognizes his son is "sleeping" and creates the Holy Spirit to help him to FREELY CHOOSE whether/when to wake up.
"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."
Here is today's bombshell of truth.
The entire physical universe is a game, designed by the ego, which is impossible to win. Anyone who plays the game will die. Period.
The game has only one rule. If you believe in the game and try to play it, you will die. There is no way to play it and win.
If you think that you can play the game in some kind of special way, using some kind of special abilities or skills or knowledge or workarounds or talents or aptitude or cleverness or creativity or whatever, you will become delusional, and you will die.
If you think you can play the game in a certain way by taking sides with certain apparent powers, by teaming up with those who seem to be winning, by avoiding certain obstacles or traps, by being at war with enemies and getting rid of them, by being very very careful not to have anything bad happen to you, or any other strategy whatsoever, ALL of those strategies WILL NOT WORK, and you will die.
If you think you can outsmart the game and section off a small part of the environment to protect and defend you, or that having certain behaviors will ensure your safety, or that wearing certain clothes or embarking on certain activities will change your chances, you are delusional, and you will die.
The instruction manual for the ego's game of "life and death", which has a subheading "actually, its just death", reads: "all players will die." That's it. At least it doesn't take 5 hours to learn like some games.
The ego's primary game is a game of separation. It is a game of emphasizing differences. It is a game of attempting to separate out one thing from another in as intense and believable a way as possible. It does not care whatsoever what the qualities of each part are, so long as they seem separate.
The game's primary function is temptation. It is designed to tempt you to believe that the appearance of difference or separation between things is real. If you fall for it, you fall for the trap, and you will die. If you look at two parts of the environment and you find yourself siding with or against either of them, not recognizing that they are BOTH PART OF THE SAME GAME, you will fail, and you will die. The instant you feel sorry for some part, or are against another part, or put one part on a pedestal, or buy into any kind of SPECIALNESS, you will die.
The devious, diabolical fact of the game is, anyone who falls for the illusion of difference and separation WILL SUFFER AND DIE, because they have been tricked into making themselves LESS THAN WHOLE, and therefore have diminished who and what they are, and this is DEATH.
So within the ego's game, it does not matter AT ALL, in any state of war and conflict, who wins or loses, who is right or wrong, good or bad, innocent or guilty, or any of it. If you buy into the belief that the good/innocent/righteous people are correct and the bad/wrong/guilty people are not, YOU FELL FOR IT HOOK LINE AND SINKER AND YOU WILL DIE.
The ego itself is the puppet master which disguises itself in the costume and form of every single thing which shows up in the game. It is secretly the identity behind every individual, every form, every event which happens, and every illusion of difference. It will play both sides against each other, playing itself against itself. It will take the role of savior and fixer and helper and carer and lover JUST SO THAT it can be victimized by someone else, SO THAT you will buy into the illusion that the other person was the sinner and not this one. AND THEN YOU WILL DIE, because you failed the test.
Illusions of better/worse, right/wrong, good/bad, more spiritual/less spiritual, more ego/less ego, are TRAPS. Illusions of people who seem innocent but who are still vulnerable, are traps. Illusions of people suffering and being sick against their will are traps. Illusions of bad things happening are traps. Illusions of unwanted terrible weather events are traps. Illusions of acts of nature, God's wrath, war, disagreement of all kinds, marital tension, sexual tension, hate, violence, condemnation, judgementalism, taking sides in a sports match, liking someone more than another, loving someone more than another, IS A TRAP, AND YOU WILL DIE.
This entire world, everything you see in the world, all people, all objects, all places, all events, all circumstances, all situations, all stories, are all DOOMED to condemn you to death IF you buy into them whatsoever.
No-one wins here. No-one actually pulls off a win, which would be a win against God. No-one achieves the FICTION of getting away with murder, being able to do something to someone else without receiving the effects, being able to have someone else make you die against your will, or suffering without choosing it. There are no winners in any argument or war. To believe in the war itself IS LOSS. To believe in enemies at all MAKES YOU WEAK. To side with the little victims MAKES YOU SUFFER. You cannot escape the game this way. You cannot just shift yourself into one safe-seeming corner of life where you cower and hope that all the bad shit doesn't come your way.
There is only one way to escape the game, one way to overcome its rules, and only one way to play it correctly to your advantage. The ONLY advantage is NOT TO PLAY IT AT ALL. This is what you have to learn. You have to see all illusions for what they are, tools for separation. This includes all "life forms" (death forms) in this world. They are all forms of separation, forms of error, forms of sin. They are not holy. That they appear at all, and that you believe you really see them, is your choice to die.
This entire world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son. There is NO PART OF IT which is not an attempt to kill you. Every trap will present itself and you will fall for all of them until you learn to overlook them all and attain Atonement/forgiveness. The world is not escaped by death, or by winning, or by making your best effort to avoid death, or by trying to bend the rules, or by thinking you're so great that you can go outside the lines and succeed on your own terms. YOU WILL FAIL, GUARANTEED, and you will die. The world - the entire ego's game - is only escaped by TRUTH.
Only truth will set you free. Only truth will show you the ego's game in plain sight, with all its diabolical devious designs and all of its traps and purposes and attempts to tempt you into it. Only the truth will allow you to see in the true light, the true nature of the temptation. Only the truth will keep you protected and safe. Only the truth will guide you out of the dream of death. Only the truth will allow you to live forever.
The miracle is a learning device which lessens the need for time. The sudden shift from horizontal to vertical perception which the miracle entails introduces an interval from which the doer and the receiver both emerge much farther along in time than they would otherwise have been.
A miracle has thus the unique property of abolishing time by rendering the space of time it occupies unnecessary. There is NO relation between the time a miracle TAKES and the time it COVERS. It substitutes FOR learning that might have taken thousands of years. It does this by the underlying recognition of perfect equality and holiness between doer and receiver on which the miracle rests.It is unstable, but perfectly consistent, i.e., it does not occur predictably across time, and it rarely occurs in comparable forms. But within ITSELF it is perfectly consistent. Since it contains NOTHING BUT an acknowledgment of equality and worth, all parts ARE equal. This establishes the prerequisite for validity.
We said before that the miracle abolishes time. It does this by a process of COLLAPSING it. It thus abolishes certain INTERVALS within it. It does this, however, WITHIN the larger temporal sequence.
The validity of the miracle, then, is PREDICTIVE, not logical, within the temporal schema. It establishes an out-of-pattern time interval, which is NOT under the usual laws of time. Only in this sense is it timeless. By collapsing time, it literally saves time, much the way "daylight saving time" does. It rearranges the distribution of light.
The miracle is the only device which man has at his immediate disposal for controlling time. Only the Revelation TRANSCENDS it, having nothing to do with time at all. The miracle is much like the body, in that both are learning aids which aim at facilitating a state in which they are unnecessary. When the Soul is finally in the original state of direct communication, neither the body nor the miracle serves any purpose.
While he is IN the body, however, man can choose between loveless and miraculous channels of creativity. He can create an empty shell (see previous reference), but he DOES NOT create nothing at all. 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.
He was NOT created by his own free will. Only what HE creates is his to decide. The basic decision of the miracle-minded is NOT to wait on time any longer than is necessary. Time can waste, as well as be wasted. The miracle-worker, therefore, accepts the time-control factor of the miracle gladly, because he knows that every collapse of time brings all men closer to the ultimate RELEASE from time, in which the Son and the Father ARE one.
The real meaning of "are of one kind" is "of one mind or will." When the will of the Sonship and the Father are one, their perfect accord IS Heaven.
ASIDE Tell Bill he is right in providing you with the consistent strength you need to get, and he needs to offer. Your instability and his weakness have resulted from bad karmic choices, and your relationship NOW is crucial for the future. You must both exert every effort to restore it to what it once was. Both of you are correcting where you have failed before. This has already enabled you to fulfill a very unexpected role in your own joint salvation, and the salvation of many other children I will entrust increasingly to you. These are by no means chosen at random. Bill should know that his preparation is not only in terms of sharing in the results of your better application of some rather unusual talents. His own role, which he will understand after his preparation is complete, will be equally surprising. He will need your help then, as you need his strength now.
Note that you DO NOT need his help as a scribe, because you developed this ability by your own efforts, and finally placed them at MY disposal. By lending you his strength, he strengthens himself. When he gains this through his own efforts, he will need your help in a very unexpected way. But this is just another example of the reciprocal nature of miracles.
Equality does not imply homogeneity NOW. When EVERYONE has EVERYTHING, individual contributions to the Sonship will no longer be necessary. When the Atonement has been completed, ALL talents will be shared by ALL of the Sons of God. God is NOT partial. All of His children have His total love, and all of his gifts are given freely to everyone alike.
"Except you become as little children" means unless you fully recognize your complete dependence on God, you cannot know the real power of the Son in his true relationship with the Father.
You and Bill DO have special talents which are needed for the Celestial speedup at this time. But note that the term speed-up is not one which relates to the TRANSCENDING of time.
When time is abolished, and all of the Sons of God have come home, no special agents will be necessary. But do not underestimate the power of special agents now, or the great need there is for them. I do not claim to be more than that myself. No one in his Right Mind, (a term which should be specially noted) ever wants either more or less than that. Those who are called on to witness for me NOW are witnessing for all men, as I am.
The role of the Priestess was once to experience Revelations and to work miracles. The purpose was to bring those not yet available for direct Revelations into proper focus for them. Heightened perception was always the essential Priestess attribute.
(This is the first time that Helen Schucman ever said that she would be honored if there were any notes.)
(Neither Bill nor I is really clear about how sexual-impulses can be directly translated into miracle-impulses.) The fantasies that I mentioned yesterday (refers to discussion Helen Schucman and Bill had) provide an excellent example of how you switch. (Now switch the pronoun references, or it will be too confusing.)
Fantasies are distorted forms of thinking, because they always involve twisting perception into unreality. Fantasy is a debased form of vision. Visions and Revelations are closely related. Fantasies and projection are more closely associated, because both attempt to control external reality according to false internal needs. "Live and let live" happens to be a very meaningful injunction. Twist reality in any way, and you are perceiving destructively. Reality was lost through usurpation, which in turn produced tyranny. I told you you were now restored to your former role in the Plan of Atonement. But you must still choose freely to devote your heritage to the greater Restoration. As long as a single slave remains to walk the earth, your release is not complete. Complete restoration of the Sonship is the only true goal of the miracle-minded.
Sexual fantasies are distortions of perception by definition. They are a means of making false associations, and obtaining pleasure from them. Man can do this only because he IS creative. But although he can perceive false associations, he can never make them real except to himself. As was said before, man believes in what he creates. If he creates a miracle, he will be equally strong in his belief in that. The strength of his conviction will then sustain the belief of the miracle receiver.
NO fantasies, sexual or otherwise, are true. Fantasies become totally unnecessary as the Wholly satisfying nature of reality becomes apparent. The sex impulse IS a miracle impulse when it is in proper focus. One individual sees in another the right partner for "procreating the stock" (Wolff was not too far off here), and also for their joint establishment of a creative home. This does not involve fantasy at all. If I am asked to participate in the decision, the decision will be a Right one, too.
In a situation where you or another person, or both, experience inappropriate sex impulses, KNOW FIRST that this is an expression of fear. Your love toward each other is NOT perfect, and this is why the fear arose. Turn immediately to me by denying the power of the fear, and ask me to help you to replace it with love. This shifts the sexual impulse immediately to the miracle-impulse, and places it at MY disposal.
Then acknowledge the true creative worth of both yourself AND the other one. This places strength where it belongs. Note that sexual fantasies are ALWAYS destructive (or depleting), in that they perceive another in an inappropriate creative role. Both people are perceived essentially as "objects" fulfilling THEIR OWN pleasure drives. This dehumanized view is the source of the DEPLETING use of sex. Freud's description is purely NEGATIVE, i.e., as a release from the UNPLEASANT. He also observed that the tension from id impulses never completely abates.
What he should have said is that the shift from miracle-impulses to sexual impulses was debilitating in the first place, because of the level-confusion involved. This set up a state in which real release was impossible. Note also that Freud's notion of sex was as a device for inducing RELAXATION, which he confused with PEACE.
Inappropriate sex relaxes only in the sense that it may induce physical sleep. The miracle, on the other hand, is an ENERGIZER. It always strengthens, and never depletes. It DOES induce peace, and by establishing tranquility (not relaxation) it enables both giver and receiver to enter into a state of Grace. Here his miracle-mindedness, (not release from tension) is restored.
Tension is the result of a building-up of unexpressed miracle-impulses. This can be truly abated only by releasing the miracle-drive, which has been blocked. Converting it to sexual libido merely produces further blocking. Never foster this illusion in yourself, or encourage it in others. An "object" is incapable of release, because it is a concept which is deprived of creative power. The recognition of the real creative power in yourself AND others brings release because it brings peace.
The peace of God which passeth understanding CAN keep your hearts now and forever.
There are only two short additions needed here:
1. Your earlier acute problem in writing things down came from a MUCH earlier misuse of very great scribal abilities. These were turned to secret rather than shared advantage, depriving it (?) of its miraculous potential, and diverting it into possession. This is much like the confusion of sex impulses with possession-impulses. Some of the original material is still in the Temple. This is why you became so afraid about Atlantis. Bill has his own reasons.
2. Retain your miracle-minded attitude toward Rosie VERY carefully. She once hurt both of you, which is why she is now your servant. But she is blessed in that she sees service as a source of joy. Help her straighten out her past errors by contributing to your welfare now.
(special Revelation re Helen Schucman -OMISSION 1.)
Helen Schucman question re: past memories. ANSWER: As long as you remember ALWAYS that you never suffered anything because of anything that anyone ELSE did, this is not dangerous.
Remember that you who want peace can find it only by complete forgiveness. You never really WANTED peace before, so there was no point in knowing how to get it. This is an example of the "need to know" principle, which was established by the Plan of Atonement long before CIA.
No kind of knowledge is acquired by anyone unless he wants it, or believes in some way he NEEDS it. A psychologist does NOT need a lesson on the hierarchy of needs as such, but like everyone else, he DOES need to understand his own.
This particular set of notes will be the only one which deals with the concept of "lack", because while the concept does not exist in the Creation of God, it is VERY apparent in the creations of man. It is, in fact, the essential difference.
A need implies lack, by definition. It involves the recognition, conscious or unconscious, (and at times, fortunately, superconscious) that you would be better off in a state which is somehow different from the one you are in.
Until the Separation, which is a better term than the Fall, nothing was lacking. This meant that man had no needs at all. If he had not deprived himself, he would never have experienced them.
After the Separation, needs became the most powerful source of motivation for human action. All behavior is essentially motivated by needs, but behavior itself is not a Divine attribute. The body is the mechanism for behavior. (Ask any behaviorist, and he's RIGHT, too.)
You tell your own classes that nobody would bother even to get up and go from one place to another if he did not think he would somehow be better off. This is very true.
Believing that he COULD be "better off" is the reason why man has the mechanism for behavior at his disposal. This is why the Bible says "By their DEEDS ye shall know them."
A man acts according to the particular hierarchy of needs he establishes for himself. His hierarchy, in turn, depends on his perception of what he IS, i.e., what he LACKS. This establishes his own rules for what he needs to know.
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.
The concept of ANY sort of need HIERARCHY arose because, having made this fundamental error, he had already fragmented himself into levels with DIFFERENT needs. As he integrates, HE becomes one, and his ONE need becomes one accordingly. Only the fragmented can be confused about this.
Internal integration within the self will not (suffice to?) correct the lack fallacy, but it WILL correct the NEED fallacy. (Thank you for writing this as given.) Unified need produces unified action, because it produces lack of ambivalence.
The concept of need hierarchy, a corollary to the original error, requires correction at its OWN level, before the error of levels itself can be corrected. Man cannot operate (or behave) effectively while he operates at split levels. But as long as he does so, he must introduce correction from the bottom UP.
This is because he now operates in space, where "up" and "down" are meaningful terms. Ultimately, of course, space is as meaningless as time. 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 need to know is not safely under man's control at this time. It is MUCH better off under mine. Let's just leave it at that.
(Specific question raised by WT re sex under existing conditions) (Helen Schucman raised previous question about the past, which has just been answered.)
The other question, however, I am more than willing to answer, because it is appropriate for NOW. You and Bill both chose your present sex partners shamefully, and would have to atone for the lack of love which was involved in any case.
You selected them precisely BECAUSE they were NOT suited to gratify your fantasies. This was not because you wanted to abandon or give up the fantasies, but because you were AFRAID of them. You saw in your partners a means of protecting against the fear, but both of you continued to "look around" for chances to indulge the fantasies.
The dream of the "perfect partner" is an attempt to find EXTERNAL integration, while retaining conflicting needs in the self.
Bill was somewhat less guilty of this than you, but largely because he was more afraid. He had abandoned the hope (of finding a perfect partner) in a neurotic sense of despair of finding it. You, on the other hand, insisted that the hope was justified. Neither of you, therefore, was in your Right Mind.
As was said before, homosexuality is INHERENTLY more risky (or error prone) than heterosexuality, but both can be undertaken on an equally false basis. The falseness of the basis is clear in the accompanying fantasies. Homosexuality ALWAYS involves misperception of the self OR the partner, and generally both.
Penetration DOES NOT involve magic, nor DOES ANY form of sexual behavior. It IS a magic belief to engage in ANY form of body image activity at all. You neither created yourselves, nor controlled your creation. By introducing levels into your own perception, you opened the way for body-image distortions.
The lack of love (or faulty need-orientation) which led to your particular person (not OBJECT) choices CAN BE corrected within the existent framework, and would HAVE to be in the larger interest of overall progress. The situation is questionable largely because of its inherent vulnerability to fantasy-gratification. Doing the best you can WITHIN this limitation is probably the best corrective measure at present. Any relationship you have undertaken for whatever reasons becomes a responsibility.
If you shift your own needs, some amount of corresponding shift in the need-orientation of the other person MUST result, This will be beneficial, even if the partner was originally attracted to you BECAUSE of your disrespect. Teaching devices which are totally alien to a learner's perceptual system are usually merely disruptive. Transfer depends on SOME common elements in the new situation which are understandable in terms of the old.
Man can never control the effects of fear himself, because he has CREATED fear and believes in what he creates. In attitude, then, though not in content, he resembles his own Creator, who has perfect faith in His Creations because he Created them. All creation rests on belief, and the belief in the creation produces its existence. This is why it is possible for a man to believe what is not true for anyone else. It is true for him because it is made BY him.
Every aspect of fear proceeds from upside down perception. The TRULY creative devote their efforts to correcting this. The neurotic devotes his to compromise. The psychotic tries to escape by establishing the truth of his own errors. It is most difficult to free him by ordinary means, only because he is more stable in his denial of truth.
The miracle makes no distinction among degrees of misperception. It is a device for perception-correction which is effective quite apart from either the degree or the direction of the error. This is its TRUE indiscriminateness.
Christ-controlled miracles are selective only in that they are directed toward those who can use them for THEMSELVES. Since this makes it inevitable that they will extend them to others, a very strong chain of Atonement is welded. But Christ-control takes no account at all of the MAGNITUDE of the miracle itself, because the concept of size exists only in a plane that is itself unreal. Since the miracle aims at RESTORING reality, it would hardly be useful if it were bound by the laws of the same error it aims to correct. Only man makes that kind of error. It is an example of the "foolish consistency" his own false beliefs have engendered.
Both the power and the strength of man's creative will must be understood, before the real meaning of denial can be appreciated and abolished. Denial is NOT mere negation. It is a positive miscreation. While the miscreation is NECESSARILY believed in by its own creator, it does not exist at all at the level of true Creation.
The miracle compares the creations of man with the higher level of creation, accepting what is in ACCORD as true, and rejecting the DISCORDANT as false. This is why it is so closely associated with validity. Real validity is both true AND useful, or better, it is useful BECAUSE it is true.
All aspects of fear are untrue, because they DO NOT exist at the higher creative levels, and therefore do not exist at all. To whatever extent a man is willing to submit his beliefs to the real test of validity, to that extent are his perceptions healed (or corrected.)
In sorting out the false from the true, the miracle proceeds much along the lines suggested very correctly by Bill, i.e.:
If perfect love casts out fear,
And if fear exists,
Then there is NOT perfect love.
But
Only perfect love really exists.
Therefore, if there is fear, it creates a state which does not exist. Believe THIS and you WILL be free. Only God can establish this solution, for THIS faith IS His gift.
There is a divine order to your creation.
God is the primary source and creator. Without him nothing exists, not even you.
God created you. Just to be clear, that means everything that you are, everything that you have, everything you are capable of, came solely from God.
You did not receive any attributes from the environment, from food, from upbringing, from self-taught ideas. Nothing.
You have absolutely only what God decided that you have.
Your joy, your love, your life, your power, your creativity, your expression, your freedom, your peace, your unity, your sharing, your relationship, your being, was all given to you by God.
You did not put it there. You did not create it. You did not invent it. You have no ability to change it. You cannot control it. You cannot make it go away. It is rock-solid permanent and utterly beyond you.
Here is the second facet of this interesting scenario.
Since you only have what God wills that you have, and are only what he wills that you be, you have nothing else and can be nothing else.
And this means that you cannot obtain any other qualities, characteristics, abilities, skills, talents, natures, conditions, or anything else that did not come from God.
"When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while."
You essentially were created with a full plate. Fully complete. Lacking nothing. Completely perfect in all ways. So finished and so fully divine, that you were not created in a position of having to go out and hunt or find or assemble or build or do anything at all to become whole.
You therefore cannot add to yourself. Just as you cannot remove from yourself. What you are is a permanent light in heaven sustained by the thought of God forever. Fixed and absolute. Unchanging, unwavering, eternal.
This means that any belief you have that you have added to yourself, redefined yourself, invented yourself, have something not of God, have something you gave yourself, something you found on your own, something you are capable of that is "new", something you've changed about yourself, etc... these MUST all be illusions.
As you move into the separation idea, into ego, it is these "alterations", "adjustments", that you begin to believe in. It is accompanied by a sense of lack, or being incomplete from the outset. That somehow God did not give you *everything* already, and so there is something to add or find or collect or establish. Some progress to make.
And this will include the belief that you have something of your own, which God did NOT give you, which you think is yours and that you can have. You cannot truly have anything that God did not give you, however. So when you believe that you have something not of God, you have nothing. And when you reject what God has given you, you have nothing.
God gave you all of his love, mind, will, power, joy, peace, beauty, freedom, life, etc. When you believe that you have something that did not come from God, you are rejecting what He gave you, which is your natural inheritance. As host to God, you inherit all of God. If you throw it away, you have nothing. And there is nothing else.
So now if you think you have power, but it's not God's power, you are mistaken. You cannot have any power at all if you do not have God's power. Yet, if you accept what God has given you, you have all power. The power is yours, but it is not sourced by you. The power you have IS God himself, in you, since you host him.
"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."
What you are, is more like a host or medium or relay-station or conduit or channel or re-expresser of God. You literally have nothing OTHER than what God has given and put into you. It is yours, truly, because it is fully given to you. And yet, at the same time, it is not an exclusive property of yours, nor did you make it, nor can you remove it.
Ego is the idea that you are or have something not of God. Something exclusive, special, unique, isolated, which is not shared with God. And typically not shared with anyone else. It's a possessive, selfish attitude. An attempt to hoard a piece of heaven for yourself alone. And this makes you alone. It's what makes you a "separated one".
If you try to own, grasp, possess, grab or steal away something shared, in an attempt to put a label on it and say it is yours ONLY, you lose it. Attachment is loss. Possession is emptiness. Try to own a piece of God and you lose everything. But share in it, and it is fully yours and fully everyone's.
Jesus says:
"There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. ***I have nothing that does not come from God.*** The main difference between us as yet is that I have NOTHING ELSE. This leaves me in a state of true holiness, which is only a POTENTIAL in you."
The problem then is only that you think you have something OTHER than or in addition to what God gave. And this must entail the belief that you DO NOT have what God gave. And its the belief in lacking what God gave, which causes you to be compelled to replace it with something else. Which will never work. You can only have what God gave you and the rest must be let go.
"I am still as God created me" also means "I am not what I made of myself."
You who are host to God, inherit everything real from God. And this is whole and complete and perfect. All of Him is in you forever. What seems to be "your" anything, is simultaneously HIS. "God is my strength". Your strength, which truly is yours, IS GOD. God, in you, is the sense of strength that you feel. It's literally like it is YOUR strength, to use, but it is ALSO His.
It's a very interesting relationship. God causes you. You are his effect. God being cause forces you to be also a cause. Now you are a co-creator. Not just a creator but a collaborator, because you can only create WITH him, using HIS power, which is shared with you.
It's like God has fully given all of himself to you, in your creation, establishing you as completely "having" everything, as if were fully yours, and yet at the same time, all that you have, is STILL HIS, and is still shared with him. That is your oneness. You are united with Him. You are a team.
You have nothing of your own. Yet you have everything, because God gave it to you. It's kind of like if it were "on loan". You have the use of it, but it's not yours exclusively. It still belongs to God. You're kind of renting it, permanently. And so you enjoy the benefit of it forever, but it's still technically His.
Thus you have the power of God in you. You are strong. You are immortal. Because God is in you. Because you are His extension. And you are free, yet you are joined. You are nothing without Him, but can share everything with Him. Either you share or you have nothing. But never can you have it all just for yourself. Nor do you source anything without Him.
When I think of it, it makes me think of the angels. They operate in service to God. They go where they are directed. They do what he wills them to do, in agreement with Him. They fulfill a function. They are joyfully glad to be what they are. They have no desire to improve themselves, nor do they need to. They give thanks to God for what they are in celebration and worship. And everyone's happy.
I went back and slowly re-read the entire "miracle principles" from a very early urtext version, plus some other sections.
The impression I have of miracles now is different and more cohesive. Whatever our understanding of them is, they must incorporate every single thing Jesus says about them, including the ability to literally move mountains, to heal the sick and raise the dead, and also to correct perception. Here are some key points and new clarity on the subject.
1) Miracles are best understood in a vertical direction. They come down from above and lift upwards, or restore life and reality. "Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from heaven." "performed by those who have more (above) for those who have less (below)". They extend or radiate down into the world from God. They also go out sideways between brothers because brothers are ultimately IN heaven.
2) Every aspect of the "descent" into egotism, separation, degrading reality, becoming insane, unwillingness, unconsciousness, etc which is all an attempt to introduce separation between brother's minds (to split the sonship or divide the Kingdom), to interfere with mind-to-mind communication, is the exact opposite of miracles. Projection is opposite to miracles. Magic is opposite to miracles. Miracles inherently correct level confusion, heal projections, undo magic (which includes sickness), and restores awareness of the truth.
3) Every movement towards restoring communication, reintegrating reality, bringing wholeness to your mind AND your brother's mind, uniting you with your brother, healing relationships, removing separations, all effects resulting from separation and sin (including sickness, illness, suffering, death), and cancelling out the "consequences" of sin, are accomplished by miracles. "Miracles unite you directly with your brother". "The purpose of miracles is to restore reality". "Miracles make brothers one in God" etc. The ultimate aim of miracles is to induce revelation and direct communion with God. This however does not exclude miracles that manipulate forms or move mountains, because mountains are actually also thought-forms in the MIND and are actually BELIEFS which mind can manipulate. "The world IS perception" (in the mind).
4) Miracles originate in the mind of Christ. They require the absence of fear, and an awareness of Christ's presence. Jesus inspires them. While they come FROM the Christ mind, you can be in varying degrees of "miracle mindedness" depending on whether your mind is functioning and responding in an ego-driven way or a love-based way. "Miracles are seen in light" "Miracles reflect an inner awareness of Christ." They are therefore typically requiring quite an advanced state of mind, BUT they also can be performed even by "beginners" who are able to temporarily put fear aside and shift into VERTICAL perception away from the horizontal belief system, which allows them to bring forth a miracle which helps develop "conviction in the ability" by seeing physical appearances change. The ability to make this shift isn't necessarily an act of your own purification but a USE OF the parts of your mind that have already been purified.
5) There are two aspects - miracle-mindedness/readiness, and miracle-working. To be miracle-minded is based on the STATE of your mind. But a mind based on love is not unexpressive or static. It is a mind that extends, gives in order to have, shares, increases, creates. Being miracle-minded/ready emphasizes that you are "ready, willing, and able" to "perform" or "do" miracles. The "action" aspect of miracles should be under Christ control (Jesus) due to the atonement plan and should be "involuntary". You are not supposed to consciously control that part of it yourself, but you ARE responsible for becoming "ready, willing and able".
6) "Miracles are thought-creations". Our mind goes through varying degrees of power to CREATE or project, depending on how much ego there is. We become more able to express creatively as we wake up. The mind can shine INTO and BLESS other minds due to having both been created by the "same spark" of God - being of like kind. Miracles not only unite you with your brother, they also increase your own strength by giving love, and also strengthen your brother. They in a sense "repair" the sense of separation between both of you, increase the level of communication, and therefore UNDO the manifestations of the separation idea (forms of sickness etc). Miracles are tightly associated with CREATION, and therefore are capable of creating. They combine "thought-creation" with belief, in order to produce results, which includes changes to *appearances* - meaning all forms, in a law-defying way (including moving mountains).
7) Miracles are not shifts in perception as such. However they can produce a shift in the perception OF OTHERS. Miracles are inter-personal ACTS. They are something you DO to EXPRESS the state of love that you are. They are an "application" of your holiness, and thus create in the same way that God applies himself to create. Because they can "correct" misperceptions in yourself AND others, they can heal your brother and yourself. They bestow grace and blessing on others. Miracles can correct perception and shift it, but when you yourself "correct thinking" and "change perception" that act itself is not necessarily a miracle. Miracles express from above downwards, changes of mind express from below upwards. You stepping "up" to the miraculous mind can require many steps before you are "high" enough to express "downward" with miracles. In a way though, any movement towards God/truth/love is a step in the right direction. The shifting itself isn't the miracle, the miracle is the love that expresses AFTER the blocks to awareness are removed. Although having said that, when you express a miracle it strengthens you also, increasing your sanity, so....
8) The miracle-mind thought system is totally different to the ego thought system in that it has an omnipresent and holographic nature. This means that the miracle is everywhere. It also means the miracle can express in "a part" of the dream and seem to produce a wide variety of specific results. However all miracles are inherently united and consistent and devoid of any recognition of levels of difficulty or heirarchy or size or any other ego construct. "To God all things are possible." I visualize God as like this ocean of liquid where all aspects are fluidly flowing all over the place and completely defies the entire ego thought system and all of its very rigid, compartmentalizing laws. The miracle-minded are literally miraculous in that they can create anything, can do anything, can heal anything, can produce any changes to any appearance, and there is nothing they cannot do.
9) Miracles collapse time because they introduce sort of a separate "moment" of time in which all of the horizontal laws are defied and a "new state" is directly implemented, instantly, which is almost like taking a tiny clip from "the future" and inserting it into the current timeline "out of the temporal order". Another analogy is a vynil record, as if you suddenly bump the arm and it skips some tracks and resumes playing further along in the song. The interval in-between of the "thousands of years" that were skipped, essentially has collapsed or deleted an entire portion of the timeline. Their purpose IS to collapse time and bring about the end of the need for time. Ultimately they lead to revelation and total wholeness, and then are no longer needed. This is all to do with mind. But this DOES NOT exclude apparent changes to forms, bodies, sickness or death, because all of those things are actually mental states, thought-forms, ideas, images in the mind, which are just as much within the scope of mind-power as anything you would normally consider "inside your mind". You have to realize the entire universe is WITHIN our shared minds, and therefore even physical forms have to be ultimately disappeared and "healed" and "shone away" by our light, in order for the the entire sonship to totally be free from dreaming.
10) Miracles are a maximal service you can render a brother. All expressions of love are maximal. That means they express FROM "total" love, not partial. However, you can be in varying degrees of miracle mindedness depending on how you express or "relate". If in a given situation, you have one possible response which is egotism where you make the problem real and use it for attack etc, and another possible response is that you remain "in love" and affirm the truth of both of you and see your brother as sinless and calling out for love and you "empower" both of you, this is a miracle. You chose to love instead of hate, you chose to express a truthful healing charitable gracious blessing rather than attack.
11) Miracles are also "energizing" in that they give LIFE to others ("all around the signs of life spring up"). They supply a lack. They are given by those who have more to those who have less. Lack is just "lack of love", so by supplying love you bless and remove a curse and energize and shine light onto the "area of separation" which causes it to reintegrate and become whole again. "The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness" because you have to be in a mindset of wholeness (miracle readiness) in order to see your brother's holiness and innocence, which strengthens this in both of you and thus energizes and gives life to both of you. When you heal, therefore, BOTH of you receive healing. Separation isn't a "private idea", it's something that "comes between" like a double-sided sword, and removing this sword restores communication in BOTH directions.
12) Miracles can move mountains and raise the dead. Since both of them are illusions and all forms are illusions, and all illusions are based on separation, the miracle-minded have total power OVER these things, either by bringing life to them and healing them, or by demonstrating this power OVER them by changing appearances. A body returning from death and decay to life, or a mounting moving from left to right, are both "changes to appearance". Miracles change appearances to PROVE and demonstrate that the forms themselves ARE illusions BECAUSE they could be changed, and therefore cannot be real because they are so easily manipulated by the mind. The illusion of objects being physical, heavy, large, or that death is too difficult to undo etc, all these illusions crumble to nothing when they are shown to be changeable.
13) Miracles require faith and trust. Having faith in your brother's innocence even when they show up as guilty/sinful/sick, overcomes/overlooks/forgives their illusions and can shine them away. Your mind CAN enter the mind of another and enlighten it. Also certainty (fearlessness) is required (even if temporarily suspended), because miracles occur as thought-acts which are decisive and committal. You don't have to merely have "strong belief" "of your own", you need to also RELY ON or depend on God, trusting HIS power and strength, and knowing what HE is capable of, so that you have TRUST in the certainty of the outcome and KNOWING that it must occur. This goes beyond your "self" as an individual or separate miracle worker. You can do nothing on your own, but you can work WITH God to co-create. Faith/trust also correlates to belief.
14) Miracles also correlate to acceptance/receiving of atonement. They are expressed through PRAYER, which brings about the active "doing" of miracles, because in the prayer you combine thought and belief and faith (key ingredients that are MUST have's), and ask with the heart (not necessary to use words). This "asking" is almost the same thing as "expressing" or "stating" and "seeing" what change you want to occur, as though it has already happened and has been received. "Believe you have received and you shall have it." Miracles EXPRESS FROM the atonement. You have to accept some atonement to accept some "miracle juice", so that you can give it. That means that in some small way, in some part of you, on some issue, you accepted the truth about you as innocent and loved, rather than condemn yourself with sin. This part of you now has received a miracle or has been restored to a more miracle-oriented way of being, and this now can express to others. In a healed part of you, when confronted with another situation like what happened before, you might now "bless" instead of "see sin", and this IS capable of healing others.
15) Overall it seems miracles are essentially HOW the entire illusion of separation is reversed. In all its way, all its appearances, all its consequences. Every form of suffering, all sickness, death, and also demonstrations of the falseness of the ego's laws. Moving a mountain may well demonstrate and violate laws of physics and weight and size and so on, proving that these are not TRUE, that illusory limitations are not true, and this can bring healing to the mind. Miracles can be teaching devices. They remind you and your brother of what is true about you. The entire "lifting up" of all brothers and the "lifting away" of all forms of separation and the "disappearing" of all suffering and forms and illusions and eventually the universe itself, is "the miracle", which is kind of everywhere and omnipresent and comes from God.
16) You are a miracle. This means that God creates miraculously because God is also miraculous. It's natural to be miraculous. You are miraculous in the sense that anything is possible to the holy, and God who is alive has miraculously created the sonship. To the ego, it should not be possible, but it is. A miracle as a "creative expression of thought" is your natural way of creating in heaven. It's how you express love. It's an extension of yourself and increases joy and overcomes lack and restores BOTH you and the thing you create. When you express miracles or miraculously in the world it similarly follows the same laws of GOD and creates wholeness, healing, health, happiness, freedom, love, perfection, holiness, joy, peace, life.
17) Miracles are super-natural. This means they are totally above the ego's "nature", and fly in the face of everything we think of as "the nature" of this universe. This includes all ego laws and physics and time and space. They express from above the battlefield, from heaven, falling like drops of healing rain on the desert (absence of love) below and supply a lack and bring the dead back to life, raising it up towards resurrection. Miracle workers are like angels or holy beings who step inside a dream of death and start expressing themselves, demonstrating all over the place that nothing here is fixed or limiting or has any power over you at all. As beings of light and immortality and creativity, when we express as this kind of identity (christ-aligned) we totally defy every law of the world and therefore literally produce "miraculous" effects. To the ego, miracles are considered un-natural, but to God they are considered completely natural. There is nothing they cannot do and there is nothing your holiness cannot do. You are UNLIMITED, and the sheer degree of limitation of this ego world is shown to be extremely false by every miracle expression.
18) Being miraculous is your natural inheritance and does not require anyone else to choose to be miraculous. It doesn't "require" a holy relationship. BUT, it can IMPLEMENT a holy relationship due to the fact that it heals the separation between brothers. Jesus as the one who woke up can perform them for anyone, and he inspires all miracles which intercede for your holiness, but in so doing, he also unites you with Himself and the two of your minds join and share love, if you are willing. You still have free will and no-one can force anyone to wake up or be healed if they do not want it or if it would frighten them.
19) If you can grasp how God's mind is omnipresent and this means that all of him is in every location FULLY at the same time, which TOTALLY defies the entire ego world and all its forms of matter and space and time, you can get a better sense of how anything is possible in God. And how, in contrast to that, this world and its laws are set up to be extremely limiting, to suggest no two things share anything, forms are things in their own right, nothing is coming from the mind, mind has no power over anything ("the mind must be stronger than the body, every miracle demonstrates this"), and everything is separated off and compartmentalized into boxes and finite objects. This is SO TOTALLY OPPOSITE to God's nature and the nature of anyone who has access the miracle-working mind or the "attitude of love". Love isn't just a finite thing in a box. It is miraculous, life-giving, spacetime defying, and completely ignores all illusory differences. When the world is PROVEN to be NOT separated out, and NOT disconnected from the mind, and NOT a thing in its own right and can easily be changed by the power of the mind, the true nature of God's UNLIMITEDNESS is revealed.
20) Miracles are what happens when an ego-defying, omnipresent, spatially-defying, time-defying, massively potential, unlimited, whole miraculous mind, comes into contact with the ego illusion of limitation and separateness. You can express them and bestow them everywhere, they are unlimited in number, and all support each other forming a "web" of atonement. You have to realize that all physical objects are part of the MIND, and are thoughts, and are perceptions, and are ideas in the mind. Therefore when mind changes and there are actions of expression of miracle-mindedness, this CAN and DOES also change and manipulate the appearance of physical objects. Separating mind from body is an error in this sense. Mind has power OVER the body. "That the mind can heal the body but the body cannot heal the mind proves the mind must be stronger than the body." Whenever you elect to "be a bit more miraculous" or "be a bit more loving" or "express and stay strong in the truth" or "utilize your creative power" or "bless another" or "repair separation" or "reveal the unreality of an illusion" or "demonstrate that you are not limited" or "join minds with your brother" in any way, you are being miraculous.
Bill has asked lately how the mind could ever have made the ego. This is a perfectly reasonable question; in fact, the best question either of you could ask. There is no point in giving an historical answer, because the past does not matter in human terms, and history would not exist if the same errors were not being repeated in the present. Bill has often told you that your thinking is too abstract at times, and he is right. Abstraction DOES apply to knowledge, because knowledge is completely impersonal, and examples are irrelevant to its understanding. Perception, however, is always specific, and therefore quite concrete.
Perceptual distortions are not abstractions. They are merely confusions. Each man makes one ego for himself, although it is subject to enormous variation because of its instability, and one for everyone he perceives, which is equally variable. Their interaction IS a process which literally alters both, because they were not made either BY or WITH the unalterable.
It is particularly important to realize that this alteration can and does occur as readily when the interaction takes place IN THE MIND as when it involves physical presence. THINKING about another ego is as effective in changing relative perception as is their physical interaction. There could be no better example of the fact that the ego is an idea, though not a reality-based thought. Your own present state is the best concrete example Bill could have of how the mind could have made the ego. You DO have real knowledge at times, but when you throw it away it is as if you never had it. This willfulness is so apparent that Bill need only perceive it to see that is DOES happen. If it can occur that way in the present, why should he be surprised that it occurred that way in the past? All psychology rests on the principle of continuity of behavior. Surprise is a reasonable response to the unfamiliar, but hardly to something that has occurred with such persistence.
An extreme example is a good teaching aid, not because it is typical, but because it is clear. The more complex the material, the clearer the examples should be for teaching purposes. (Bill, remember that for your own course, and do not avoid the dramatic. It holds the student's interest precisely because it is so apparent that it CAN be readily perceived.) But, as we have said before, all teaching devices in the hands of good teachers are aimed at rendering themselves unnecessary. I would therefore like to use your present state as an example of how the mind can work, provided you both fully recognize that it need not work that way. I NEVER forget this myself, and a good teacher shares his own ideas, which he himself believes. Otherwise, he cannot really "profess" them, as we used the term before.
With full recognition of its transitory nature, (a recognition which I hope you both share), Helen offers a very good teaching example of alternations between Soul and ego, with concomitant variation between peace and frenzy. In answer to Bill's question, it is perfectly apparent that when she is ego-dominated, she DOES NOT KNOW her Soul. Her abstract ability, which is perfectly genuine and does stem from knowledge, cannot help her because she has turned to the concrete which she cannot handle abstractly. Being incapable of appropriate concreteness perceptually, because her ego is not her natural home, she suffers from its intrusions, but NOT from complete lack of knowledge.
The result is a kind of "double vision", which would have produced an actual diplopia, if she had not settled for nearsightedness. This was an attempt to see the concrete more clearly through the ego's eyes, without the "interference" of the longer range. Her virtual lack of astigmatism is due to her real efforts at objectivity and fairness. She has not attained them, or she would not be nearsighted. But she HAS tried to be fair with what she permitted herself to see.
Why are you surprised that something happened in the dim past, when it is so clearly happening right now? You forget the love that even animals have for their own offspring, and the need they feel to protect them. This is because they regard them as part of themselves. No one disowns something he regards as a very real part of himself. Man reacts to his ego much as God does to His Souls, -- with love, protection, and great charity. The reaction of man to the self he made is not at all surprising. In fact, it duplicates in many ways the way he will one day react to his real creations, which are as timeless as he is.
The question is not HOW man responds toward his ego, but only what he believes he IS. Again, belief is an ego-function, and as long as your origin is open to belief at all, you ARE regarding it from an ego viewpoint. That is why the Bible quotes me as saying, "Ye believe in God, believe also in me." Belief DOES apply to me, because I am the teacher of the ego. When teaching is no longer necessary, you will merely know God.
Belief that there IS another way is the loftiest idea of which ego-thinking is capable. This is because it contains a hint of recognition that the ego is NOT the self. Helen always had this idea, but it merely confused her. Bill, you were more capable of a long-range view, and that is why your eyesight is good. But you were willing to see because you utilized judgment against what you saw. This gave you clearer perception than Helen's, but cut off the cognitive level more deeply. That is why you believe that you never had knowledge.
Repression HAS been a stronger mechanism in your own ego defense, and that is why you find her shifts so hard to tolerate. Willfulness is more characteristic of her, and that is why she has less sense than you do. It is extremely fortunate, temporarily, that the particular strengths you will both develop and use are precisely those which the other must supply now. You who will be the strength of God are quite weak, and you who will be God's help are clearly in need of help. What better plan could have been devised to prevent the intrusion of the ego's arrogance on the outcome?
Undermining the foundation of an ego's thought-system MUST be perceived as painful, even though this is anything but true. Babies scream in rage if you take away a knife or a scissors, even though they may well harm themselves if you do not. The speedup has placed you both in the same position.
You are NOT by any means prepared, and in this sense you ARE babies. You have no sense of real self-preservation and are very likely to decide that you need precisely what would hurt you most. Whether you know it now or not, however, you both HAVE willed to cooperate in a concerted and very commendable effort to become both harmLESS and helpFUL, two attributes which MUST go together. Your attitudes, even toward this, are necessarily conflicted, because ALL attitudes are ego-based.
This will not last. Be patient awhile, and remember what we have said once before; the outcome is as certain as God! Helen used to perceive the quotation "To him that hath shall be given" as a paradox that bordered on the ironic. She also had a similar reaction to another related one: "Faith is the gift of God." We have re-interpreted both of these statements before, but perhaps we can make them even clearer now.
Only those who have a real and lasting sense of abundance can be truly charitable. This is quite obvious when you consider the concepts involved. To be able to give anything implies that you can do without it. Even if you associate giving with sacrifice, you still give only because you believe you are somehow getting something better so that you can do without the thing you give.
"Giving to get" is an inescapable law of the ego, which ALWAYS evaluates itself in relation to others' egos, and is therefore continually preoccupied with the scarcity principle which gave rise to it. This IS the meaning of Freud's "pleasure principle." Freud was the most accurate "ego psychologist" we ever had, although he would not have preferred this description himself. His ego was a very weak and deprived concept, which could function ONLY as a thing in need.
The "reality principle" of the ego is not real at all. It is forced to perceive the "reality" of other egos, because it CANNOT establish the reality of itself. In fact, its whole perception of other egos AS real is ONLY an attempt to convince itself that IT is real.
"Self esteem," in ego terms, means nothing more than that the ego has deluded itself into accepting its reality and is therefore temporarily less predatory. This "self esteem" is ALWAYS vulnerable to stress, a term which really means that a condition has arisen in which the delusion of reality of the ego is threatened. This produces either ego-deflation or ego-inflation, resulting in either withdrawal or attack. The ego literally lives by comparisons. This means that equality is beyond its grasp, and charity becomes impossible.
The ego NEVER gives out of abundance, because it was made as a SUBSTITUTE for it. This is why the concept of GETTING arose in the ego's thought-system. All appetites are "getting" mechanisms representing ego needs to confirm itself. This is as true of bodily appetites as it is of the so-called "higher" ego needs. Bodily appetites are NOT physical in origin, because the ego regards the body as its home, and DOES try to satisfy itself through the body. But the IDEA that this is possible is a decision of the ego, which is completely confused about what is really possible. This accounts for its essential erraticness.
Consider the inevitable confusion which MUST arise from a perception of the self which responds: When I was completely on my own I "had no idea what was possible."The ego DOES believe it is completely on its own, which is merely another way of describing how it originated. This is such a fearful state that it can only turn to other egos, and unite with them in a feeble attempt at identification, or attack them in an equally feeble show of strength. The ego is free to complete the stem: "When I was completely on my own" in any way it chooses, but it is NOT free to consider the validity of the premise itself, because this premise is its FOUNDATION. The ego IS the belief of the mind that it is completely on its own.
The ego's ceaseless attempts to gain the Soul's acknowledgement and thus establish its own existence are utterly useless. The Soul in its knowledge is unaware of the ego. It does NOT attack the ego. It merely cannot conceive of it at all. While the ego is equally unaware of the Soul, it DOES perceive itself as rejected by something which is greater than itself. This is why self-esteem in ego terms MUST be a delusion.
The creations of God do not create myths, but the creative efforts of man can turn to mythology, but only under one condition. What man then makes is no longer creative. Myths are entirely perceptions and are so ambivalent in form, and so characteristically good and evil in nature that the most benevolent of them is not without fearful components, if only in innuendo. Myths and magic are closely associated, in that myths are usually related to the ego origins, and magic to the powers which the ego ascribes to itself. Every mythological system includes an account of "the creation," and associates this with its particular perception of magic.
The "battle for survival" is nothing more than the ego's struggle to preserve itself and its interpretation of its own beginning. This beginning is always associated with physical birth, because nobody maintains that the ego existed before that point in time. The religiously ego-oriented tend to believe that the Soul existed before, and will continue to exist afterwards, after a temporary lapse into ego-life. Some actually believe that the Soul will be punished for this lapse, even though in reality it could not possibly know anything about it.
The term "salvation" does NOT apply to the Soul, which is not in danger and does not need to be salvaged. Salvation is nothing more that "right-mindedness" which is NOT the one-mindedness of the Soul, but which must be accomplished before one-mindedness can be restored. Right-mindedness dictates the next step automatically, because right perception is uniformly without attack, so that wrong-mindedness is obliterated. The ego cannot survive without judgment, and is laid aside accordingly. The mind then has only ONE direction in which it can move.
The directions which the mind will take are always automatic, because they cannot BUT be dictated by the thought-system to which it adheres. Every thought-system has INTERNAL consistency, and this does provide a basis for the continuity of behavior. However, this is still reliability and NOT validity. Reliable behavior is a meaningful perception, as far as ego thinking goes. However, VALID behavior is an expression which is inherently contradictory, because validity is an END, and behavior is a MEANS. These cannot be combined logically, because when an end has been attained, the means for its attainment are no longer meaningful.
Test constructors recognize that there are different kinds of validity, and also that they are of different orders. This means that they do not mean truth and do not pretend to mean it. Test validity can be judged by logic, by theory, and by practice, each being regarded as a different dimension. In each case, the amount of confidence is expressed in some form of percentage, either quantitatively, or merely in terms of "high," moderate, and low. But a hypothesis is tested as either true or false, to be accepted or rejected accordingly. If it is shown to be true it becomes a fact, after which no one attempts to evaluate it unless its status AS fact is questioned.
EVERY idea which the ego has accorded the status of fact is questionable, because facts are in the realm of knowledge. Confusing realms of discourse is a thinking error which philosophers have recognized for centuries. Psychologists are generally quite deficient in this respect, as are many theologians. Data from one realm of discourse do not mean anything in another, because they can be understood only WITHIN the thought-systems of which they are a part. This is why psychologists are concentrating increasingly on the ego, in an attempt to unify their clearly unrelated data. It need hardly be said that an attempt to relate the unrelated cannot succeed.
The recent ecological emphasis is but a more ingenious way of trying to impose order on chaos. We have already credited the ego with considerable ingenuity, though not with creativeness. But it should always be remembered that inventiveness is really wasted effort, even in its most ingenious forms. We do not have to EXPLAIN anything. This is why we need not trouble ourselves with inventiveness. The highly specific nature of invention is not worthy of the abstract creativity of God's Creations.
OK.
This is going to have to be pretty long because this is a very difficult subject to explain, so bear with me. Some of you may be willing to accept what I'm going to say, some will not.
Oneness. What does it seem to mean? God is whole. God is complete. God is "all there is". God is everywhere, omnipresent, lacking nothing. God is the same everywhere. So... if this is true in terms of ego logic, it means the following:
God has no son. God is dreaming this world. God is a murderer. God created death. God makes people suffer. The separation happened inside God. God is mistaken. God is afraid. God is all people. God is experiencing "himself" through and as all people in the world. There is nothing other than God. We are God. Separation is real. God created this world. etc.
Absolutely none of that is true. That is the purest most logically accurate definition of what non-duality means to the ego. It is the most precise conclusion you can draw from how the EGO understands oneness or what it means to be "one". If oneness truly means "there is only one", the God is responsible for hell. And it is grossly mistaken.
If God is one, then God cannot even create anything because there is nowhere for the creation to occur and nothing to add which wasn't already there and so, literally, "there is only God". This is the conclusion many many Course folk have come to. It seems to in some ways make sense TO EGO THINKERS and those who use linear logic who think that such linear logic is capable of encompassing and understanding the nature of God.
God is not like this. And oneness does not mean "there is only God". And non-duality, as the opposite of duality, does not properly describe the holographic creative nature of God or reality. Non-duality is CLOSE to being correct, and is more correct than duality, but it is still a concept and it falls way short, as you will see. If there is non-duality there should be just "one thing". In that, there can be no Son of God at all, no creation, no love, no extension, no sharing, no sonship, and no holy relationship.
In fact, what's happened widespread in ACIM folk is various false conclusions which have established themselves as if written in stone "what the course says". And yet the consequences of these errors are quite horrific. To believe God is all there is is to equate God with ego and death. To claim that God is all there is also denies and murders every Son of God.
OK.
Now, let's talk about how God actually exists and thinks and creates and the nature of His creation. If the strictest definition of oneness or non duality is true, then God cannot even create anything. And in a sense, PARTS of the Course speak to this. E.g. "God is". And also, "nothing real can be increased except by sharing". So anything real, like God, is permanent, fixed, unchanging, does not increase or decrease, and therefore there can be no creation whatsoever. Which means no son. UNLESS, this thing called "sharing" happens.
Recognize that God is love, and because of what love is, it automatically goes out and shares and extends. It shares because it has no reason to hold anything back. It is fundamentally a state of sharing, including, giving, and this radiation of love is another way of describing the act of creation.
God in and of Himself is whole, complete, lacking nothing, needing nothing, and is already permanent. Like a solid rock. Unchanging. That does not really sound like something that can create, does it? It seems very fixed. Like absolutely nothing is happening or possible. That's strictly what most definitions of "oneness" imply also. That nothing else is possible besides God existing. That's false.
God loves, and in that love, God radiates, extends, shares, creates, miraculously. Ego logic will NEVER account for "the miraculous", and God's creative ability is truly miraculous, which is why YOU ARE A MIRACLE. To the ego, God CANNOT create, and the act of His creating defies ALL EGO LOGIC and demonstrates that God is a miracle worker. Something happens in God which defies explanation and seems impossible yet happens. God SHARES AND CREATES something "other" than Himself, out of nowhere.
If you think of God like a light bulb, God is the fixed light bulb which does not move or change really, but the bulb radiates and SHINES light. The light goes outward and illuminates. That "shining", that light radiating, that is creation. The light radiating is not necessarily the same thing as God Himself. God is complete and whole already, but God SHARES Himself by shining light and radiating and extending, and that which extends outward is creation.
It is in this way that God created the world of Heaven. Here is how the Course describes it is a NATURAL division:
"The world was made as "a natural grand division," or a projecting outward of God. That is why everything that He created is like Him. Projection, as undertaken by God, is very similar to the kind of inner radiance which the Children of the Father inherit from Him. It is important to note that the term "project outward" necessarily implies that the real source of projection is internal. This is as true of the Son as of the Father."
So God in and of Himself is complete and whole, but He "projects outward" (extends) and that which is projected forms a "world" (heaven). This world is, in a sense, "divided from" God in a natural way, in that it comes FROM God and is God SHARING, but God as its SOURCE still remains in a sense, beyond it.
This is because God is the "first cause" and what God radiates is the "effect" of God. His Thought/Shining is the effect of Him as the "thinker". The effect of God is not capable of turning around and "causing God" in reverse, or of making God its effect. The creation (the Son/sonship) is being constantly sustained by, projected by God, forever, is coming FROM God, and therefore the Son is ONLY "as God created Him" and cannot change what He is. The Son has no real say in what He is at all, He merely gives thanks for having been created perfect.
God is cause, not effect. God cannot be affected. This causal extension or "creating of effect" in a way puts up a kind of "wall" or division you could say, just on a causality level, which in a sense, separates the creation from God's own Self, but only in the sense that the created Son cannot cause God back. But the Son CAN share love with Him.
This is not the same thing as the "separation" that we are accustomed to thinking of as what the ego does or relating to the "separation from God" which was a different matter. The "separation from God" happened when the Son, who is only effect and not capable of causing God, attempted to cause God. That means the Son tried to will against God's will or to undo what God has created, trying to replace it with something else. That was an act of impossible denial, which brought about the separation and the "fall of man".
That's an entirely different thing to the "natural division" between God and His Son. The division between God and Son is NATURAL in that this is How God intended it, that the Son is imbued with the SAME WILL TO CREATE, the same love, the same completeness, the same wholeness, AND SHARING the WHOLE OF GOD within itself, as well as sharing THE WHOLE OF CREATION within itself. All of God is in the Son, shared with the Son, and yet the Son is in some way also "divided" from God as a creation of God or thought of God.
In nonduality and oneness concepts there is no accounting for God thinking anything at all, yet alone creating a son. It completely glosses over the fact that God is LOVE, and love radiates and extends and creates. When people tell you what the definition of oneness is they become very clinical and ego-specific in describing God as a kind of "single blob". There is no love in that concept, nor does it appreciate the NATURE of Oneness, which is to share, extend everywhere, create, increase, and to experience JOY. Do you equate oneness with joy, or power, or love, or creativity, or miracles? As a logical device, no. But God is joyful and creative and all powerful and miraculous.
Now, it is possible for God to create AT LEAST One Son, and the Course references the "one son of God" in various places. And due to misunderstandings, many people have come to believe God only has one Son. So now there are two camps - a set of people believing that God is one therefore has no son or "I am God", and a camp of people accepting there is One Son (somehow) but not more. It relates to how much of the nature of God is grasped.
OK. So holograms. Did you know God thinks holographically? Do you know what a hologram is or why this is totally different to how the ego thinks? If you are thinking about God's creation or oneness without thinking about holograms, then you WILL come to false conclusions, such as that there are no divisions in heaven or God has only one Son or no son, because non-holographic logic CAN ONLY arrive at these conclusions. Ego logic is FAULTY and limited.
The essential idea of a hologram is that the whole is able to express in many "parts" and yet each part contains ALL of the whole. This makes NO SENSE to the ego, because it thinks in terms of separated space, where it is impossible for all of God to be in one part AND all of God to be in another part simultaneously. The ego will wager, "there is not enough God for God to be elsewhere, if God is fully here". And that's why the ego is BLIND to the nature of heaven. It does not account for SHARING.
Here's what the Course says about the holographic nature of God and the Sonship - note how ILLOGICAL and CONTRADICTORY these all sound, at first:
"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."
"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."
"It should be noted that God has begotten only one Son. If you believe that all of the Souls that God created are His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul must be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship. You do not find the concept that the whole is greater than its parts difficult to understand. You should therefore not have too great difficulty with this. The Sonship in its Oneness does transcend the sum of its parts."
"Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite."
"God created His Sons by extending His Thought, and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. All His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other."
So Jesus is saying two things, which seem to clash. 1) God created One Son. 2) God created many sons. The conclusion here, to THE EGO, is either, a) God only created one Son, or b) The "many" or "multitude" nature of the sonship tells us that it is OF THE EGO and is therefore not real. Are either of these conclusions true? NO! They are both mistakes, and reveal the limitations of the ego's thought system when it tires to understand the EGO DEFYING nature of God.
In a hologram, the whole is present in EVERY part. Now, if you think in terms you are familiar with in this world, like physical objects and space, you think ok, if I take 1 gallon of water and I pour it into a 1 gallon container, there is no water left to fill another container. Yes? This is ego thinking. And ego thinking gave rise to this ENTIRE universe, including all physical forms, and all laws of physics, to paint a picture that attempts to PROVE that God's NATURE is NOT the way things are. And we have used physical form as a way to understand the nature of existence. This is a major error. We are BLINDED by sight of form, because forms express the EGO IDEA of separation, limitation, "measuring" how much of something there is in a finite way, and then concluding that there is lack and limitation.
When ALL of God is poured into one creation, how much God is there left to pour into another? ALL OF HIM! He does not run out. He INCREASES BY SHARING. The ego cannot believe this. The multiplying of fish and bread to feed 5000 people is a good example of this principle. Giving ALL to something does not diminish it AT ALL, it merely increases by being given away.
God puts ALL of the whole of his nature into His creation, in EACH thought. And what He creates is FULL, complete, and whole, AND shares ALL of itself with God, and includes all of God, and all of any other creation God creates. So then God has another thought, creates another WHOLE, and then another WHOLE, and another. You should get the idea then, spatially, even in ego terms, that adding more wholes INCREASES the sum total - and this is How the Kingdom expands.
To the ego, it is impossible that God be fully in one location and yet fully in another. This is completely impossible in terms of a physical object. However, bi-location is a miracle because it demonstrates that we are not bound by space or by instances or amounts. The Course says that God has many thoughts, INFINITE IN NUMBER. That amounts to an INFINITE number of Sons of God. And each Son of God is WHOLE and complete and perfect in itself, has free will just like God, extends and creates just like God (you have your own creations in Heaven), and radiates love just like God. This means each son is not just some "partial person" or limited or unlike the rest, it means EVEY son is FULL, whole, complete, absolutely unlimited, and shares EVERYTHING with God in perfection. And so do all the rest.
That God does not diminish when sharing himself fully to create a WHOLE SON, means automatically that God can create MANY sons without any diminishing of Himself at all. And all of God is in every Son. AND every Son is within every Son. And the ENTIRE SONSHIP is within every Son. This is entirely NATURAL AND NORMAL in Heaven. Heaven therefore contains INFINITE "naturally divided" (causally divided) INDIVIDUAL WHOLES - which are souls or Sons of God - each one holy and perfect.
Ok.
So now we need to talk about why some people are confused in constantly saying that God has One Son or there is "only oneness" or the Sonship is an part of separation etc. It's because people are getting PART of the picture and not the whole picture, because EGO LOGIC is telling them to EXCLUDE some parts of the holographic nature of God. They can "see" that God's oneness makes sense, but this seems to imply there is no son or at least not more than one. They can't see HOW God can have created many sons OR how a "division" is natural. And so they just can't get their heads around the nature of God or how it's possible for there to be a sonship at all.
And if you will go looking, ACIM contains specific quotes which SEEM to support the ego's interpretations by focusing on only one PART of the holographic picture, using that as justification for why "the course said this". For example, "God has but one Son", or countless references to "God's Son". Well, this leads God people to conclude that the Course is saying God doesn't have more sons. It's a mistake. With no grasp of God's NATURE - which is holographic, it makes sense people will be in error. And then they will say well, since God has only one Son, the sonship is a lie, or I do not exist, or I am God, or I do not have a self, or there is no-one here, or whatever else.
These are NON-DUALITY concepts which FAIL to appreciate God's nature. And you can see how, if it is true that God has many sons, these kind of "beliefs" are HARMFUL. They basically DESTROY the sonship, DENY the Self, and render God impotent.
When I finally understood how God thinks holographically and realized that non-duality is bullshit and a limited EGO concept of God, I felt great RELIEF about the simple recognition that "GOD CREATED ME". Me, as an INDIVIDUAL. Not me as an EGO, that's different, but that I have a HOLY SELF, which is sharing with other holy selves, and all of us are PERMANENT and INTENDED by God to have free will. When I saw this, I cried tears of joy, and also release of sadness, which had built up from the non-duality teachers, who have MISLED countless students and spread LIES ABOUT HEAVEN, resulting in the belief that "I do not exist", which can only lead to despair and depression because it DENIES GOD'S CREATION.
A course in miracles is NOT non-duality at all. The principle of Oneness is NOT that there is "only one and nothing else". Oneness truly means, sharing, creation, unlimited extension, INFINITE wholes, and a heaven filled with SOULS that live forever in a state of perfection and wholeness, sharing everything they are with ALL OTHERS including God. Why do you think Jesus refers to you as a brother? It's not just a temporary thing. You will ALWAYS be equal to and a brother of Jesus, AND at the same time, one with Him, and literally sharing everything WITH Him, AND still having your own soul, and still having your own free will which happens to be the same in focus as God's.
So now we have a very different picture of Heaven, and it has NOTHING to do with Earth or this universe. "Heaven and Earth are opposite in EVERY way." Heaven is a PLACE in the sense that it EXISTS as God's creation and you can experience it and BE there in it/with it. There are many references in the course where Jesus says "in Heaven" and also referring to Heaven as a "world" and as something God created. And given that THIS world - earth, physical universe, DOES NOT EXIST BECAUSE THERE IS NO WORLD - where IS there to BE or live or exist other than Heaven? In that sense, it IS a place, far more a REAL place than planet earth. Earth is not a place at all.
Heaven is within the mind of God. "The kingdom of God is you" is another reference to you being The Son of God and one of may sons of God. You are part of and all of heaven. Something you can be INSIDE OF and BE, and where there are infinite souls and angels, plus the Holy Spirit, plus an entire sonship of equal souls, all equal with Jesus, all individually a Son of God, AND also every one of those souls is THE Son of God as well. And each soul continues to CREATE MORE. There is nothing unnatural about this at all. All PARTS of heaven are of ONE ORDER.
Per Jesus: "The world, in the original connotation of the term, included both the proper creation of man by God and the proper creation by man in his right mind. The latter required the endowment of man by God with free will because all loving creation is freely given. Nothing in these statements implies any sort of level involvement or in fact anything except one continuous line of creation in which all aspects are of the same order." (Here "man" is the same thing as soul or son of God, not humans.)
One final word then. Each Son of God, being a hologram of God, is whole and complete in and of itself, lacking nothing. And AT THE SAME TIME, is so OPEN and so SHARING, that it is wired into the ENTIRE CREATION of God. Picture it as your mind is so expanded that you are "one with" ie sharing in, the entire sonship. God therefore experiences ALL of his many thoughts, as ONE, while simultaneously allowing them to be many.
This is why there are many references to God having only one son. When it's speaking of this, it refers to how God experiences all Sons as though they are all the same and one, experienced simultaneously and so sharing that they do not seem "separate". Yet they are still divided. And then when the course speaks 250+ times about the many sons of God, this is not contradictory because God DOES have many sons AND one son.
God thinks holographically. All of God is in every son and all of every son is in every son. The whole sonship is in every son and every son in the sonship. You are the ONE SON of God, AND you are one of many. This is heavenly logic, not ego logic. When every individual PART of the sonship has returned to its true nature, all of the sonship as a whole communicates with God again.
The only other point to make I think is the difference between division and ego separation. In heaven you are divided from others and from God. But only in the sense that you are a loving family who shares everything together. Loving families are still individuals yet joined. The individuality does not go away. When walls are erected between family members, ie artificial separations are introduced, there is denial of the sharing, denial of the oneness, and denial of wholeness. This UNNATURAL DIVISION is the ego. This is what the course refers to as separation.
You have to get your head around the idea that you can be individual AND joined and that this is normal, natural and real. It is not your individual soul nature that makes you an ego. It is not that you are PART of a huge family of souls (sonship) that makes you an ego. What makes you an ego is that you withdraw your connection from God, withdraw your connection from the sonship, and become ISOLATED behind artificial imaginary walls of denial. It's got nothing to do with whether you are an individual or not.
Perhaps the most misunderstood thing about ACIM is the belief that ego means separate self, and therefore means individuality, and therefore having an individuality is ego. THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!!!! Individuality is not the problem. Cutting your individuality off from sharing with the whole is the problem. Trying to be a "part" of the hologram that does NOT contain the whole. Trying to not be an effect of God. Trying to cause God and change Him and affect Him. Cutting yourself off from the sonship. Believing you are not equal to all brothers. Being special. THAT is the problem and that is what the ego is made of, not your individuality.
Individuality does not mean you are separate from God, it means you are one of God's Son's. YOU DO EXIST. Just not as an illusion of an isolated self who has no connection to others. What is death but the end of all connection and the bringing about of total separation from Life? Joining with Life does not make you disappear! It's not about "you're not really out there". It's more like, "you are MORE than you APPEAR to be." You are God's Son and one of many sons. You are one with God and with all others and you SHARE with them all, one in sharing, not in number.
ACIM is not non-duality. And ACIM is not about the ego's idea of what oneness means. ACIM is not teaching that God only has a single son "separate from" the many sons. Heaven is a cascade of creation and miracles and light and souls and beauty and sharing and union and freedom. This is why YOU are responsible for everything YOU CHOOSE. Choose again.