The way existence is set up, you're supposed to be completely provided for by God, you're supposed to be connected to His Mind, you're supposed to receive unlimited Power and Love from Him which you extend all the time, and you are so sustained and empowered by this that you feel totally safe and looked after.

As Jesus says, miracles are everyone's right, but when they don't happen, something has gone wrong.

So if the miracles aren't flowing, and the love's not extending, and you're not being sustained by God, and you're disempowered, and you're alone and afraid and feeling weak and vulnerable, it's basically because you're trying to work against the grain. You're trying not to exist.

There's really no other options in this. There's no alternative that works. The options are either:

a) Join with God and be happy and healthy and fulfilled and abundant and joyful forever, or

b) Go off on your own and rely on your own little self to be terrified in an overpowering world of madness, unhappy and certain of death.

There's no other way to access true happiness, health and abundance without God being involved. You can't have the cake and eat it. The ego wants to suggest you can do perfectly fine all by yourself, thank you very much, but it's not true.

There is suffering. There is weakness. There is fear. There is powerlessness. There is degradation and decay. These are not what God wills for you. This isn't how it's designed to work. But you can't be free of these things and simultaneously stay separate from God. It doesn't work. It's the separation from God that cuts you off from all of these good things.

So either you kind of suffer in isolation and eventually seem to die, or you turn to God and open up to eternal life. Seems like a bit of a no-brainer, but we seem to fight it tooth and nail.

Maybe we've just forgotten how good things could be if we were to fully trust God, and think that we're doing pretty fantastic all by ourselves. There's no comparison. As Jesus iterates many times in ACIM, the ego is offering you next to nothing. You're going to be giving up nothing and gaining everything when you go with God's plan. He just wants you to be happy ;-)

P.S. this is sort of sounding borderline judgementalist christianity attitude where people tell you their belief applies to you whether you want it to or not and that you're going to go to hell if you don't fall in line with 'how things are' .... lol.... yes, parallels, but let's get things straight... we will all return to God eventually and God loves unconditionally. So no worries if we delay. We just might be happier if we don't.

Here is an interesting teaching.

In its natural state, the body is a communication medium. The mind is supposed to flow through it and extend BEYOND it outwards. The body itself is not supposed to be part of the message as such.

But when the mind starts to STOP at the body, or to be blocked by the body, or runs up against the body, it prevents it from extending PAST the body. The communication medium can no longer communicate because the flow is blocked. This is what blocks to love do. They make you fixate on form and be blinded by illusion, which get in the way of seeing Christ.

When there are blocks to love, mind cannot extend through and past and overlook the body, and so fixates ON the body. This causes you to perceive that the body is what is there, in the mind, rather than looking PAST it. The body becomes what you are looking AT, rather than that you are looking at Christ PAST the body.

Making perception stop AT the body and blocking the flow of love, basically cuts that flow off and stops it from moving outward. That means it has become stifled, and now there is a kind of "separation" which has been introduced between the body and the outside. Or a gap, where extension of love was supposed to fill it externally, but is now left empty due to the blocked expression.

This blocking of extension makes the body SICK, because it focuses the mind ON the body and AT the body, instead of PAST the body. The body then becomes attacked by the mind as though "colliding with it" instead of flowing naturally through it and past it and onward in communication. Kind of like a dirty camera lens, or a blocked toilet, or a bunch of boarded up windows made to block the light. Another example would be a "blocked artery", making the blood flow impeded, and resulting in death.

So the blocks to love have to be removed so that the "surface" of the communication medium doesn't turn into the "message" and so that love can flow and extend, which means love is radiated and increased, which means HEALING comes through the body and the body is MADE WHOLE because it is COMMUNICATING WHOLENESS. When the mind is sane and flowing fully and freely THROUGH the body, the body is HEALED as the love passes through it making it essentially immortal, incapable of sickness or death.

Here is how Jesus says it:

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

To use a medium of communication as a medium of ATTACK is an obvious confusion in purpose. To communicate is to join and to attack is to separate. How can you do both simultaneously WITH THE SAME THING, and NOT suffer? Perception of the body can be unified only by ONE PURPOSE. This releases the mind from the temptation to see it in many lights, and gives it over ENTIRELY to the One Light in which it can be really understood at all."