If someone is not loving you, and you are trying hard to figure out why they won’t, and you are desperate for them to love you, you’re not going to be happy.
If you have a need for the person to love you, and they fail to do so, you’re going to be totally stuck. It means that you do not have a way to "get" the love that you are lacking.
Someone failing to love you, even refusing to love you, is not something you want to ALLOW, or accept, if for you having them love you seems important.
Having someone love you can only seem important IF you yourself somehow lack love. The absence of love is not actually in that person, it is in YOU.
And because there is a lack of love in you, you will find yourself asking OTHER people, "why don’t you love me?", demanding that they do so. And yet the more needy you become and the more you demand they love you, the more you will be demanding that YOU love you without doing so.
The lack of "being loved" that you see in the other person, is actually the lack of love that YOU have for yourself. You see it projected onto them. And then you demand that THEY love you FOR you. You think that if they love you, somehow this is how you get love into you. But it doesn’t work.
Even if someone loved you unconditionally, if you do not perceive that there is love IN you already, you will experiene lack and neediness. No amount of love coming from the person will ever be enough, and you will even reject or be suspicious of their love.
You can’t have the other person GIVE YOU the love that you refuse to ALLOW to be inside of yourself. You can’t RECEIVE it from them, because you believe you do not HAVE IT.
Just as ACIM teaches, to have all, give all to all, it is also true that.... to receive love, receive love from the all (God). You cannot get other people’s love INTO you until you are willing to have love BE IN YOU. You will not let love be in you if you have beliefs which say, I am no loveable, I don’t deserve love, I can’t be loved, I’m unworthy etc.
So then while on the surface it may seem that we are demanding that other people love us, as if we want to be loved, we’re actually doing this because WE DO NOT want to be loved. Our protests of "please love me" ACTUALLY is based on, "I can’t be loved, don’t love me." Once again the ego is two-faced.
What we would be horrified to entertain, is this idea.... what if we ALLOW someone to not love us?
*HORROR* *SHOCK* *DISMAY*
We don’t want to allow this, because it means that we cannot use the person to get our "need" met. It also means we cannot have any solution to the feeling of the LACK OF LOVE inside ourselves, which WE BELIEVE about ourselves, and which we’re really trying to have SOMEONE ELSE fix for us. No-one else is responsible for whether you are loved or not!
We really don’t want to entertain this possibility of LETTING someone not love us, because then we’re left holding this PAIN, this lack of love, which seems to be in us. And if they’re not going to take it away for us, we have nowhere to turn to ESCAPE it. Therefore we are left facing how crappy we feel about ourselves, which we were trying to get others to rescue us from.
Some people may especially act like an "enemy", someone who shows no recognition or validation or feeling or agreement for anything you do. They seem to be your nemesis. And so you try to get them to love you. Which they won’t do. Which simultaneously guarantees that you continue to NOT BE LOVED because this particular person is NOT going to be the one to do it. Insisting that they SHOULD is actually your attempt to KEEP your unlove, by finding someone to alleviate you of it WHO REFUSES TO DO SO.
To "let" that person "not love you", to allow them to do so, to accept that they do not, AND THEY NEVER WILL, allows you to DROP the entire FICTIONAL FANTASY of being finally loved, accepted and acknowledged by someone other than YOURSELF (and God).
Letting them not love you is a step toward not looking for love WHERE IT DOES NOT EXIST. It means recognizing that love is NOT going to come to you from where you were trying to find it. It is not out there. And you do not lack it to begin with.
Finally admitting that that special person WILL NEVER LOVE YOU, instead of constantly holding onto the WISHFUL THINKING that you can manipulate them into doing so, will let you DROP this fantasy story that you CAN or WILL "someday" get that person to love you. It is better for you to admit that they WILL NOT, so that you will drop the ILLUSION that you’ve been maintaining, that you NEED to get love from someone else.
This can be very hard to admit to. It is very hard to admit that some people are just NEVER going to get you, or love you, to appreciate you, or see things how you see them. You will NOT WIN THEM OVER. You do not NEED TO.
If you can bring yourself to let go of this insane attempt to achieve the impossible, needlessly, then you are now BETTER OFF because you are starting to be WILLING to look at why you even have this NEED FOR LOVE in the first place.
You have a NEED FOR LOVE, because you believe you LACK IT. You believe this, not anyone else. You may have concluded it based on how other people did not love you, believing that this meant you were not lovable. Realize also that your belief that you are not lovable, is a DEFENSE against being loved by God! IT allows you to position yourself as having a reason "why" God would not love you, so that you can REFUSE love. That means refusing to admit that you ARE LOVABLE. And that comes down to your EGO and your authority problem. That you do not WANT to be loved by God because Love is God’s Will.
There is a lot to admit to here. But the truth is, you do not need love, and will not find it in any other person, UNTIL you are willing to RECEIVE it from God. And you will only be willing to do that if you apply FORGIVENESS to yourself, undo your belief in sin being real, and ACCEPT THE ATONEMENT. In the atonement you accept it is true that you MUST be lovable because of what you are in truth. Because you did not sin.
Trying to get someone to love you is actually your attempt to get someone to undo your sin for you, because you are unwilling to forgive yourself. Which means it is just another way of projecting your sin onto other people to disown it and not be responsible for it. Yes, trying to get someone to love you is a way of scapegoating them so that you can blame them for not being the one who is loving.
The only way you will EXPERIENCE LOVE is to undo your belief in its opposite or its absence. Love is HERE FOR YOU NOW. God finds you WORTHY! God loves you unconditionally regardless of what you think you did. You do not NEED love, you HAVE LOVE.
God loves you. You need do nothing.
Seeing yourself as deprived makes you perceive others as taking from you, and that you don't have enough left to give.
For example when I'm having some emotional release/healing, maybe I cried and I'm tired and crabby and feeling vulnerable. Maybe I'm not totally past it all yet and still am feeling whatever the lack is - lack of love, lack of peace, whatever... I'll see myself as being quite 'in need', i.e. needy.
When I see myself this way, I start to perceive everyone else as being needy too. Even if they're not. I'll perceive they're trying to take from me or demand something of me that I can't supply. I'll feel put upon and taxed and offended by the demand I see in them.
And especially if the other person is in a state of need themselves, it'll trigger anger that someone is so insensitively expecting something from me when I apparently don't have anything to give. I see them as trying to 'take take take'.
But what's really happening is I'm seeing myself - the demand in them is ME demanding FROM them. So I'm needy AND demanding, stating that I do not have what I need and someone else needs to give it to me. (Secret side-tip: although I'm saying I am in need and want to GET from others, I secretly do NOT want to get because then I would't be able to see myself as needy).
I'm the one who is actually trying to 'take take take'. I'm trying to GET, in order to make up for the lack that I perceive in myself. I'm accusing other people of trying to take because they're thwarting MY effort to take.
So as I see myself deprived and lacking, it's because I believe I don't have enough love. I believe the love is not in me and that I need to get it from someone else. So if they fail to give it, or if they demand it from ME, then I am left totally empty-handed with no way to resolve my problem, and that produces fear and anger... A sense that 'I can't and I won't... which often is in the form of a lot of reluctance or resistance or, comedically, "I can't take it anymore" (when secretly I am taking big-time).
But the thing is, seeing myself as deprived is actually the CAUSE of my perceiving a sense of lack of love, which led to the feeling of neediness, which led to the drama of being pressured to give what I don't have to needy people.
So an antidote for this... if I'm seeing myself as needy, and realizing it, is simply this:
Give love.
IMMEDIATELY this cancels out and dissolves all trace of a sense of neediness, all trace of not having enough, all trace of anger and reason for fear or resentment.
I'll be honest, I've only remember this a couple of times in real situations. One of them was just now. As soon as I suddenly remembered (after asking Holy Spirit to help) that my neediness is making me try to 'get' because I am seeing myself as deprived, it made me LAUGH. Because it introduces truth at the root of this bullshit and immediately corrected all of the EFFECTS.
I have to learn to remember this more often. When I feel shit and like I am deprived and don't have anything to give and don't want to give..... the way I am feeling is BECAUSE I don't want to give, not the other way around.
I choose to position myself as unloved and in need, which creates feelings of deprivation, which leads to the whole drama. If I choose NOT to see myself unloved by SHARING love (remember giving and receiving are both required, not sacrifice or greed), the whole problem is corrected.
And then, now that I've accepted healing of the actual problem - a lack of love - I can now give love and FULFILL the needs of others, which in fact then disappear, because they were never really needy to begin with. I was just seeing my own neediness projected.
Problem solved.
When you hold a grievance, where you demand that someone else has to change because they are unacceptable to you, you are using the ego's version of forgiveness.
If you claim they are wrong or bad or evil or sinful or guilty in any way, you are saying you need them to change. They should not be the way they are. They are wrong and bad and evil to be the way they are. They should not be this way.
This means really that you want THEM to change so that YOU do not have to change. And it also means that you in fact want to be AFFECTED by them, as a victim, but you want them to affect you in a way that matches your desires.
So if you were to get a person to change and be the way "you want them to be", then supposedly they'd now treat you the way you want them to, and give you what you want. Maybe they'd now "make you happy". But this is still a form of victimhood.
Being caused to be happy by something outside yourself is just as ego as being cauesd to be unhappy by something outside yourself. They are both forms of being at the effect of the world. And when you depend on the world being nice to you, giving you what you want, meeting your standards, or forcing you into preferable states, you're forgiving to destroy.
By demanding that someone change, or be not like they are, which is your projected judgement of them in the first place, you are destroying them with your judgement of them. You evaluate first that they are evil and then ask THEM to be the one to stop being evil. This is not only self destructive, it's an attempt to destroy the world.
It's like accusing someone of being a bad person, even when they're not, and trying to put that onto them, and then demanding that THEY change to get out of the prison that you've put them in, to make you happy. It's like asking someone to do your own dirty work.
So first you try to destroy them, then you demand they stop being the destroyed person, to appease you and for your own gain. Like hurting someone then requiring that they get up and thank you for it. This is how the destroys in order to try to bring about a "forgiven" state where the sin seems to have been removed. In a sense you demand that they "resurrect" from being evil, for your benefit.
If someone undoes the sin you accuse them of, by changing, and complying with your wishes, then the ego now says well, you have indeed forgiven, and now that I see you are not being the evil I accused you of, my perception of you is not seeing evil in you. And that implies that I've done a forgiveness. If you stop being the evil sinner that I hate, then apparently I have forgiven you. But nothing has really changed in my mind, so there has been no real forgiveness at all.
It's like when someone does something you disapprove of, and then you say you are not going to forgive them until they change their ways. They have to repent. And when they change their ways and meet your conditions, you will say yes, very good, you did what I wanted and now I approve of you, and now you are my loyal servant. Then you are temporarily bestowed with an ego blessing of seeming mercy, while still enforcing that if you return to your wicked ways, you'll be punished just as much as before.
This in effect is therefore like some dictating tyrant who wants everything to be their way and wants everyone else to comply. To have power over everyone and control everything. To force the world to stop being the way it is, or the way you judge it to be. If those other motherfuckers would just stop being assholes everything would be great for you and life would be smooth. And so the ego seems for an illusion of peace in the midst of its warring ways.
"The ego's plan for salvation centers around holding grievances. It maintains that if someone else spoke or acted differently, if some external circumstance or event were changed, you would be saved. Thus the source of salvation is constantly perceived as outside yourself. Each grievance you hold is a declaration, and an assertion in which you believe, that says, "If this were different, I would be saved." The change of mind that is necessary for salvation is thus demanded of everyone and everything except yourself."
If someone is not loving you, and you are trying hard to figure out why they won’t, and you are desperate for them to love you, you’re not going to be happy.
If you have a need for the person to love you, and they fail to do so, you’re going to be totally stuck. It means that you do not have a way to "get" the love that you are lacking.
Someone failing to love you, even refusing to love you, is not something you want to ALLOW, or accept, if for you having them love you seems important.
Having someone love you can only seem important IF you yourself somehow lack love. The absence of love is not actually in that person, it is in YOU.
And because there is a lack of love in you, you will find yourself asking OTHER people, "why don’t you love me?", demanding that they do so. And yet the more needy you become and the more you demand they love you, the more you will be demanding that YOU love you without doing so.
The lack of "being loved" that you see in the other person, is actually the lack of love that YOU have for yourself. You see it projected onto them. And then you demand that THEY love you FOR you. You think that if they love you, somehow this is how you get love into you. But it doesn’t work.
Even if someone loved you unconditionally, if you do not perceive that there is love IN you already, you will experiene lack and neediness. No amount of love coming from the person will ever be enough, and you will even reject or be suspicious of their love.
You can’t have the other person GIVE YOU the love that you refuse to ALLOW to be inside of yourself. You can’t RECEIVE it from them, because you believe you do not HAVE IT.
Just as ACIM teaches, to have all, give all to all, it is also true that.... to receive love, receive love from the all (God). You cannot get other people’s love INTO you until you are willing to have love BE IN YOU. You will not let love be in you if you have beliefs which say, I am no loveable, I don’t deserve love, I can’t be loved, I’m unworthy etc.
So then while on the surface it may seem that we are demanding that other people love us, as if we want to be loved, we’re actually doing this because WE DO NOT want to be loved. Our protests of "please love me" ACTUALLY is based on, "I can’t be loved, don’t love me." Once again the ego is two-faced.
What we would be horrified to entertain, is this idea.... what if we ALLOW someone to not love us?
*HORROR* *SHOCK* *DISMAY*
We don’t want to allow this, because it means that we cannot use the person to get our "need" met. It also means we cannot have any solution to the feeling of the LACK OF LOVE inside ourselves, which WE BELIEVE about ourselves, and which we’re really trying to have SOMEONE ELSE fix for us. No-one else is responsible for whether you are loved or not!
We really don’t want to entertain this possibility of LETTING someone not love us, because then we’re left holding this PAIN, this lack of love, which seems to be in us. And if they’re not going to take it away for us, we have nowhere to turn to ESCAPE it. Therefore we are left facing how crappy we feel about ourselves, which we were trying to get others to rescue us from.
Some people may especially act like an "enemy", someone who shows no recognition or validation or feeling or agreement for anything you do. They seem to be your nemesis. And so you try to get them to love you. Which they won’t do. Which simultaneously guarantees that you continue to NOT BE LOVED because this particular person is NOT going to be the one to do it. Insisting that they SHOULD is actually your attempt to KEEP your unlove, by finding someone to alleviate you of it WHO REFUSES TO DO SO.
To "let" that person "not love you", to allow them to do so, to accept that they do not, AND THEY NEVER WILL, allows you to DROP the entire FICTIONAL FANTASY of being finally loved, accepted and acknowledged by someone other than YOURSELF (and God).
Letting them not love you is a step toward not looking for love WHERE IT DOES NOT EXIST. It means recognizing that love is NOT going to come to you from where you were trying to find it. It is not out there. And you do not lack it to begin with.
Finally admitting that that special person WILL NEVER LOVE YOU, instead of constantly holding onto the WISHFUL THINKING that you can manipulate them into doing so, will let you DROP this fantasy story that you CAN or WILL "someday" get that person to love you. It is better for you to admit that they WILL NOT, so that you will drop the ILLUSION that you’ve been maintaining, that you NEED to get love from someone else.
This can be very hard to admit to. It is very hard to admit that some people are just NEVER going to get you, or love you, to appreciate you, or see things how you see them. You will NOT WIN THEM OVER. You do not NEED TO.
If you can bring yourself to let go of this insane attempt to achieve the impossible, needlessly, then you are now BETTER OFF because you are starting to be WILLING to look at why you even have this NEED FOR LOVE in the first place.
You have a NEED FOR LOVE, because you believe you LACK IT. You believe this, not anyone else. You may have concluded it based on how other people did not love you, believing that this meant you were not lovable. Realize also that your belief that you are not lovable, is a DEFENSE against being loved by God! IT allows you to position yourself as having a reason "why" God would not love you, so that you can REFUSE love. That means refusing to admit that you ARE LOVABLE. And that comes down to your EGO and your authority problem. That you do not WANT to be loved by God because Love is God’s Will.
There is a lot to admit to here. But the truth is, you do not need love, and will not find it in any other person, UNTIL you are willing to RECEIVE it from God. And you will only be willing to do that if you apply FORGIVENESS to yourself, undo your belief in sin being real, and ACCEPT THE ATONEMENT. In the atonement you accept it is true that you MUST be lovable because of what you are in truth. Because you did not sin.
Trying to get someone to love you is actually your attempt to get someone to undo your sin for you, because you are unwilling to forgive yourself. Which means it is just another way of projecting your sin onto other people to disown it and not be responsible for it. Yes, trying to get someone to love you is a way of scapegoating them so that you can blame them for not being the one who is loving.
The only way you will EXPERIENCE LOVE is to undo your belief in its opposite or its absence. Love is HERE FOR YOU NOW. God finds you WORTHY! God loves you unconditionally regardless of what you think you did. You do not NEED love, you HAVE LOVE.
God loves you. You need do nothing.
Sometimes I imagine myself being attacked. You'd think this would be a pretty dumb thing to do.
But if I'm perceiving myself as somehow in need, perhaps because I'm tired/underslept or stressed out, I start to imagine someone nearby coming along and interacting with me. And in that interaction I imagine that they are being needy and they put some kind of pressure on me or are demanding something of me, and I start to get cranky and retaliate defensively. Then I'm imagining how I'm having to defend myself and am feeling attacked and all this, and trying to justify myself, as if it's really happening.
When I then catch myself, which happens sooner than before, I realize that I'm actually having this fantasy entirely 'within' my own mind and it's got nothing to do with that person. Somehow I've split my mind and set up part of myself to be against another part of myself. This indicates to me that I'm believing I'm in need and perceiving myself to be lacking, so I need to get that corrected. I have to admit that I'm doing this to myself and stop it, and maybe I need to ask for Holy Spirit's help here, in addition to taking full responsibility for it.
Now, this is a more obvious example of me having this fantasy of self-attack when nobody is around and it's clearly not triggered by them other than through the suggestion that they even 'exist' nearby (which is enough). But this same mechanic basically plays out regardless of whether I'm provoked or not. Regardless of whether I'm alone or with someone. And when I'm with someone and I'm experiencing this, it seems more obvious to buy into the idea that they're causing it, and to them project blame onto them.
But at all times, this is all happening in my own mind. It's me attacking myself and trying to pass it off as someone else causing it. Silly me. I need to forgive myself and choose peace instead.
For miracles of healing to function, there must be firm belief that healing will occur.
God's will is permanent healing, and miracles extend this, coming from love. So if there is any way that you believe healing will not happen, that means you don't believe God's will, so are actively working against it.
God has certainty and a complete knowing that healing has already occurred. We need to share in this.
This is why when you go to perform a miracle, you also need to believe in what God believes. You need to have this certainty that healing will and has happened. And what that translates to, is that you need to EXPECT MIRACLES TO HAPPEN.
Expectation comes when your belief is so refined and certain, that you are convinced and sure that it will happen. This puts you into a state of expecting, which in a way is a form of demanding/commanding. It is a refusal to accept any other outcome. Complete certainty.
Expectation is a very firm way of not only believing but of actively EXTENDING the certainty of God that "healing is truth". It's like, "of course it will heal!", or even better, "it MUST heal". No doubt. This is where you are extending God's authority over illusions.
Once all doubt and fear are gone, which is a requirement of miracle-mindedness, expectation results as a perception of certainty. It's not a request, it's an enforcement of God's will.
When there is no doubt left that healing must occur, in which you are merely enforcing God's will kind of like a law-enforcement officer, you KNOW the law and you KNOW what God wants and you KNOW that this is not negotiable. As such, what is left but to completely expect, reliability, certainty, trust... that "it is so". Illusions must bend to this because they have no authority over God.
Expect miracles to happen, believe it totally, pray with God and receive.
The ego in you will cleverly point out just how much you are "being ego", in an attempt to compel you to want to "get rid of the ego".
Once you fall for this trick, you will be not only reinforcing the belief that you are not spiritual enough, but will also add to this unspirituality by adding force and attack and sacrifice to your life. You'll "should yourself" and guilt yourself for being guilty.
Feeling bad because you feel bad. Feeling guilty because you feel guilty. Criticizing yourself for being too critical. Attacking yourself for attacking. Demanding you be a better person for not being good enough. These are all ego traps.
The way out is to not believe what the ego is saying is true. Is it true that you are being too guilty, too unworthy, too ego? Is it true that what you are doing is not spiritual? Is it true that you are so behind in your forgiveness? Is it true that you haven't done enough of the workbook today? Is it true that you've been buying into the ego again in a big way? Is it true that you're not where you're supposed to be? Is it true that you are behaving in an ego way and must stop immediately? All ego temptations.
The ego loves to play the role of "spirit in charge" or "teacher of the course" or "spiritual police" or "enforcer of spiritual ways". The ego will always pretend to be separate from itself and to stand apart from itself, so that it can stand in judgement of itself and hand out rules and regulations against itself for how it needs to get into line and conform. It will even do this in the name of being "more spiritual", based on the assertion you are not spiritual already.
It will put on a disguise to pretend it is `not the ego` and then hand down some kind of sentence for how `the rest of the ego` needs to stop being ego. You wouldn't think of this because you're so used to the idea that what one person does to another has no effect on themselves. But the ego's entire mechanism is SELF-ATTACK, and it will happily stand over itself and destroy itself and attack itself in the name of attempting to improve itself. It tells you to get rid of the ego, with vigor, so that you will attack the ego and try to chop it out of your life... all the while enforcing the ego and keeping it.
So when it is telling you to get rid of ego... beware... its a trap, especially if it is making a big deal about just how awful the ego is and how wrong it is to have one.
Start off by believing that something will heal - that God will heal it. Maybe something in yourself that needs healing, or in someone else.
Get a sense of how 'much' you believe this. How much certainty do you have? How much do are you so convinced that you have absolutely unshakeable doubtless certainty and zero fear?
Now, push your sense of belief into a whole other ballpark by transforming it into expectation. Adopt a perception of EXPECTING that healing must occur. Expect as strongly as you can.
You should notice a sense of your belief changing from 'just a belief' tinged with uncertainty, to a very focused, intent, direct, piercingly certain kind of 'demand'. It transforms into power. It transforms into a sense of REQUIRING that the healing occur. Of commanding it to occur. That it MUST occur. Be as convinced of this as you can.
When I do this I feel a sense of some kind of focus or something come down through my upper body down into my belly area. This could be Holy Spirit or your own Spirit.
The closer you can get to absolute certainty the more likely it is that you will start to feel Holy Spirit start to move and flow. The stronger the sense of expectation the better. It's okay to be practically 'demanding'. This is "Authority".
You as a Child of God have authority over all illusions. Another word for this is "dominion" (biblically, we are told we have dominion over the Earth - this is what it means). You extend the Authority of Christ in a kind of 'legal' way. You legally have the right to command illusions. To command sickness to leave. To command ego to be undone.
As such when you enter a state of firm belief and expectation, you are also joining with Christ. Being One with Christ is an important aspect of miracle working, and is also why you need to ask Jesus what miracles to perform and for him to help you perform them. You need alignment with Christ/certainty in order to perform them.
You also need to remain in certainty regardless of what physical appearances seem to suggest, regardless of evidence or lack thereof that healing has occurred, regardless of any kind of illusions or any signals coming from the ego world that suggest anything contrary to this firm conviction. This is why you must believe it in your MIND, in cause, and the illusion/body must follow to demonstrate what the mind believes is true.
Sometimes someone will tell you that they love you, and they want you to know you are loved. But you feel like you can't reciprocate because you see yourself as "in need". You feel like you have a lack, that you're not enough, there isn't enough love in you, because you feel guilty and afraid.
Once you're `in need` you actually are attempting to 'take and get' from others because you think you are lacking, so this is your top priority. When someone loves you it reminds you of how much love you don't have and you feel guilty about this. You see the other person as being needy, because YOU are needy. And because you see them this way, you will think that their love is actually neediness and that it is demanding something from you.
You especially don't want to be demanded from at the moment because you're already in need and don't have enough to give as it is. So your neediness is basically making it seem like suddenly everyone is taking from you and being selfish, and that love is selfishness and not unconditional. So then you might retaliate to this perceived 'attempt to get' that you see coming from another, even though its your own 'attempt to get' reflected back at you.
So sometimes we do not want to be loved. Sometimes we want to get, because we believe we are not loved, and that getting will solve it, but really we still feel unloved. We can't allow and accept love from others if we are not able to first recognize it within ourselves. If we see ourselves as lacking and unworthy and in need, then we will reject love even if its given freely with no strings attached.
So just because you love someone, it doesn't mean they can or will accept it. You can't force them to. They have to love themselves, and somehow their sense of neediness has to not be MET but actually REMOVED, because it is FALSE. The sense of neediness is an illusion that blocks awareness of love's presence.
You are already love. You don't have any needs in love. And love is not taking away the love you have. But you must open to receive and to recognize and appreciate the love that you are otherwise you will see rejection where there is none and won't allow yourself to be supported.
The idea of separation from God MUST ALWAYS lead to a physical universe, bodies which suffer, and death.
Physical matter is the CONSEQUENCE of believing in separation, causing there to be illusions of separation, which gradually intensify and become more extreme and differentiated, to the point where it turns into what WE call physical matter.
Physical matter is the solidification of the idea of separation. It is the idea taken to its extreme, yet completely logical conclusion. If there is separation from God, there is sin. If there is sin, there must be death. Death will be expressed as the pursuit of making the illusions ever more heavy, dense, attacking, unlike each other, at war with each other, and eventually will produce an entire universe of physical matter.
The objects in this physical universe will also not have completed the ego's "thought" of separation, until they have coalesced further to produce physical bodies, which will then be used to bind the Son of God to the body, and to then attack the body to kill it to try to COMPLETELY DESTROY the Life of the Son of God. That was the purpose of the whole idea of separation to begin with, and death - physical death in a physical world - is the completion or enactment of that idea.
A physical universe HAD to arise from the tiny mad idea. Illusions HAD to continue to fight with each other, because the establishment of sin demanded that there be punishment. The conflict produced by the idea of separation was automatically a state of WAR, and this war HAD to play out, and in doing so it led to a huge fragmentation of the mind, a diversification of illusions, and eventually a THOUGHT FORM which we regard as physical matter. The entire physical universe is a NATURAL RESULT of the idea of separation, and is all that COULD come from it.
Physical matter is nothing more than a very strong illusion. It is a "thought form". It is a very BIG thought of separation appearing in the mind of the Son of God. In all its ways, it is designed to cover up awareness of God and to block sight of the truth. Bodies are a specific outcome of the logical conclusion of the ego thought system, demanding a concentrated target to receive punishment in the dream, and their destruction is the "success" or final statement that attempts to make the illusion COMPLETELY REAL. Or more succinctly, it is the nail in the coffin.
All of this is illusion. All of it is thought. It is just an IDEA. It's an idea of being separate, and therefore dead. As dead as death could ever possibly show up or seem to happen in illusions. The most intense, believable, seemingly real death possible. To use it seems very real, but it is not.
This is the metaphysical truth of A Course in Miracles. Separation from God results in the eventual, inevitable "manifestation" of a physical universe, a universe of death and destruction, simply as the most extreme expression of an illusion of being separate possible. Regardless of whether the Course text itself has used the term "physical universe", this is still the truth about this place we inhabit. It is the lower end of the dream of death, and physical matter is a death thought.
And yet, none of it is really happening because separation was never really possible to begin with.
The physical universe is an ILLUSION. God did not create it or make it. OUR idea of separation made it.
A few years ago, my wife was diagnosed with cancer and had to have surgery.
At the time, this seemed like a big threat. This is because I believed in the hierarchy of illusions, and so it seems like a big dangerous threatening problem.
My initial reaction to the news was actually that I almost fainted and had a panic attack. The perception that this was a serious external threat produced a lot of fear.
During the time at the hospital when she was having surgery, I felt very afraid. It took longer than expected which didn't help, and I felt very nervous about whether she was even going to make it through the surgery in one piece.
My mind started to become flooded with ego fear thoughts. I of course tried to "battle" with these and convince myself that they weren't true or that something else was true, like that she was going to be ok. But it was hard. I prayed fervently and raged at God demanding that He make sure she was ok.
The problem was, I couldn't stop having these fearful thoughts, which were coming in thick and fast. I tried to not think them but couldn't. But then something suddenly occurred to me.
In the midst of the ego "revealing" itself in the open, and showing its viciousness, it inadvertently exposed itself a bit too much. It seemed like it was trying to make me upset on purpose, and some part of me saw this as unnecessary. I realized that the hierarchy of illusions was dictating to me "how much reaction" I should have.
Given the cancer seemed like a big serious external threat, it appeared to correspond that I would have a "big reaction" to that perception. The two went hand in hand. Big problem, big reaction. The moment I saw this, it suddenly dawned on me that I was ONLY having this big insurmountable reaction because the problem seemed so big. And moreso, that I was the one perceiving it to be a big serious problem, causing this fear to erupt.
What this taught me is that I don't HAVE to have the level of reaction that the hierarchy of illusions dictates. I don't HAVE to be severely affected by a severe cause. And that really put my mind into a different perspective, above the battlefield as it were. I had an increase in awareness and started to take steps of forgiveness to see through or not believe that this was a big problem, or that its appearance was the truth. This quickly diminished the presence of the fear thoughts/fear-attack, and the ego quieted down a lot.
She made it through the surgery ok and that was the end of that drama. It was an important lesson. Sometimes you need to be shown the full-on rage of the ego's thought system in order to expose it enough to realize how it is self-defeating. We don't HAVE to have big reactions to ILLUSIONS of big problems. And this is a step towards becoming miracle minded.
In the ego's world, having expectations seems to produce stress and upset. We seem to be tasked with dropping all expectations, so that whatever happens, we will be okay with it. It is good not to have attachments to outcomes, or to be trying to control things, or to expect or hope that something is going to turn out a certain way only to have that expectation dashed against the rocks.
But here's what's really going on.
If you have an expectation, with the ego, it is typically a half-arsed wishful thinking, which has no power, and doesn't actually CAUSE anything to occur. Yet the ego believes that its expectations are lining up with how things will be. Then, because of this lack of POWER, when events do not follow the expectation there is anger and frustration and suffering. And so then it seems to be better not to use expectation at all since it always seems to lead to upset. We need to let go of the ego's form of expectation, but we shouldn't throw expectation out of the window altogether because Holy Spirit has his own use of it.
The fact is that you can either be expecting WITH the ego, or you can be expecting WITH Holy Spirit.
Expecting with the ego is what most people are familiar with as expectations. In other words, the ego perception doesn't believe it has any power over anything, since it wants to be a victim, and so makes INSANE expectations which really are a resistance to what is happening. Resistance is the ego's form of magical power, which it thinks it can wield in order to 'make' the world be the way it wants it to be. This is of course denial-based, and a deception, and basically leads to great suffering because it's out of touch with reality. When the ego expects something, it is choosing a wholly SEPARATE version of events than those that will possibly happen, as a form of rebellion, and its degree of belief in things turning out that way is really actually very weak. Resistance is weakness. And so usually it is thwarted and then you end up miserable and angry that things didn't turn out. So yes, it's good not to have ego expectations or ego attachment to outcomes.
HOWEVER ....
Expecting with the Holy Spirit is not like this. Holy Spirit doesn't use resistance, he uses EXTENSION, which is a creative power. Expecting with the Holy Spirit means that you are extending the POWER OF GOD, demanding and requiring that illusions fall into place. Expecting with the Holy Spirit has real authoritative power. Power to heal, power to manifest, power to change the world. Expectation through Holy Spirit means you are lining up with GOD's will, rather than the ego's fictional will, and what God will's MUST occur. It is not a matter of a request that things change, or a desire that things be different. It FORCES them to be different.
God has a constant expectation that there is perfect peace and permanent divine health. If God were to stop 'expecting' this to be true, he would enter into delusions. He is so certain that there will always be immortality, and that no illusion can assail his Kingdom, that he has every right to have ABSOLUTE EXPECTATION. Absolute knowing. Not just like, referring to something and asking it if it might be the way He wants it to be, but CREATION, actually PUTTING INTO EFFECT God's will. Making it so. Creating by His will to produce what he wants to be. There is no room for 'events' turning out any other way in this. There is no room for a conflict between expectation and what is. God's expectation overrides all illusions.
So it is perfectly okay, and encouraged, to expect with God. To expect in alignment with Holy Spirit. To expect that miracles will occur. To expect that there will be an end to death. To expect that a person can live forever. To expect immortality. And that faith isn't misplaced. It's not a delusion. It is law.
Years ago I did a miracle kind of by accident. I didn't even really know how I did this or why, it just kind of happened.
I had this box which had coins in it. I'd used up all the larger-denomination coins and there was only like 1 and 2 pence pieces left (British currency). I knew there was basically nothing in there besides this. I'd sifted through it several times and totally extracted all the good stuff.
But for some reason that day, I needed a couple of `pounds`, and was for some reason in a different state of mind. I kept having this feeling of insisting that there MUST be more money in there somewhere. I turned through the coins with my fingers, looking for it. For probably 30 seconds there was nothing, and I knew from previous checks that I wouldn't find anything. But, something in me was becoming very insistent.
I kept saying to myself, there MUST be some money in here. I built up this kind of ... I don't know if expectation is the word, it wasn't like having a sense of anticipation and then waiting, it was more like, an insistence, or a demand. I demanded that there be money, that this was TRUE, and that it simply must be. For some reason I wasn't paying attention to what my eyes were showing me, I was defying it and insisting there must be something there.
I don't know how I managed to ignore the ego at this point, because normally I would've been like, well, I know there is no higher denominations in there, I would trust my eyes and trust my previous experiences and just stop right there. But this time for some reason I was more miracle minded, and kept on probing the pile of coins insisting that there must be decent money in there.
And then, suddenly, two gold-colored 1-pound coins suddenly appeared out of nowhere. These are in striking contrast to the other coins because the 1 and 2 pence pieces are a dark brown bronze color. The shiny gold-colored coins were suddenly there at my fingertips. They didn't show up because they were hiding, they simply did not exist before. But somehow, they suddenly appeared. They manifested out of thin air.
I think at the time my mindset didn't seem that phased by this, like it seemed kind of natural or something. It didn't shock me. I also did not repeat it, or even attempt to. It didn't seem out of the ordinary, it's just how I was functioning somehow. It seemed to make sense and I just used the money as intended. It hasn't been until looking back on the event that I realized more that this was a miraculous manifestation and that I was doing something with my mind which was not typical.
This really is the tip of the iceberg of what the mind can do. It's going to be fun opening up to more of this.
Some miracle-working basics are embedded in this story....
1) expecting/demanding/insisting/knowing/requiring that the result must happen
2) ignoring all "better judgement" or ego knowledge or even visual evidence
3) being persistent and consistent and not taking no for an answer - you have to kind of resolve to be "done with" tolerating the conditions that are present and resolve to be 100% determined that it MUST change.
Jesus has said in the Course that when the mind is used to focus thought, combined with strong/firm belief, a huge surge of power results which has the power to literally move mountains. Bring it on! This is what miracles really are all about. Ignoring the ego and bringing forth supernatural results.
The idea of your persona is that it rejects everything you don't like, keeping only the good stuff.
If you get really good at using your persona, you will get really brutal at cutting out things which seem even remotely bad.
Eventually you'll be trying to be SO good and perfect, that there will be practically nothing left to relegate to your 'bad' category. Like you hear people saying, "nothing is ever good enough for them" - a sign of a lack of self acceptance.
And if that carries on, there will be nothing left to get rid of, you will cease to exist. Death.
So you can see, the persona, which seems all sweet and nice and special and important, glowing with a false innocence, is in fact the ego's wish to destroy you, piece by piece, by gradually stripping off more and more parts of you and relegating them to hell, in the pursuit of 'being a God'. And along the way it will complement you on how fantastic your 'good bits' are, even though your 'good bits' are soon to come under scrutiny.
The persona attacks everything that is contrary to what it wants to keep. And its eventual mission is the total removal of absolutely everything that could be conceived of as less than absolutely perfect. It thinks that by doing this, what you'll end up with is some kind of totally 'perfect self'. The perfect ego, a shining glory, the jewel in the crown.
It should be clear that the only ambition the ego really has is to get rid of you. The only purpose of the persona is to slice you up and separate you out and throw large chunks in the trash. What it keeps, it temporarily exalts like some kind of hero or savior or idol. But slowly it continues to find flaws in that idol, demanding even more vigorous 'purification' and sacrifice.
It says, well, if you give this up, and give that up, you'll be better off. It tells you you don't need all of what is, you only need the special good bits. But it doesn't tell you what happens if you take that to its ultimate goal. Keep going, and there will be nothing left of you. You'll live in a world where everything and everyone seems like your enemy, you are totally cut off and alone, depressed and frightened and weak, barely recognizing that you even exist, BUT .... drumroll... you'll have your perfect little fake self. Yay. And then you'll die alone.
So you can see... as you dabble even a little bit in being dishonest, inauthentic, not yourself, or trying to manipulate reality to get some kind of special value, special attention, special love... you're basically buying into a death trap. The temptation is you will indeed seem to get some special love, but.... it calls for a sacrifice. You've got to give up an arm and a leg for it. And then it's still not enough.
This is the promise the ego has for you. Go along with its plan for salvation, seem to achieve some kind of fake goal, or seem to find some kind of fake trophy, or seem to present yourself as some kind of ruler of the universe, and, in return, all of the rest of what you really are will be suppressed and attacked and gotten rid of.
Ultimately, the ego's perfectionism guarantees that NOTHING is acceptable. And sooner or later this will become apparent. Until you wake up and realize there has to be a better way.
You don't need a persona. You don't need an ego. You have God.
Yesterday I was somewhat excited about the idea, or maybe the 'clarity', that everything is happening INSIDE of myself.
The whole separation from God is 'self contained'. It doesn't do anything to God, who is 'outside' of it. And it also means there really is no 'other' involved - no other people who are 'out there' doing stuff to me.
I used to think the separation from God was all about an 'attack on God', but God has not been changed. I, however, believe that I have been changed - the Son of God - and that is where all of the problem lies.
In this "war with myself", all of this is happening inside me, and so it must be coming FROM me, and TO me, in every instance.
I feel this is significant because ALL of the ego's distractions including sin, guilt, fear, projection, victimhood, stories, death, etc are based on the idea that the problem is NOT inside of myself, is NOT being done by myself, and that a "separate alien will" has taken over.
If we are to be truly responsible and self-empowered then we have to recognize that, at its very CORE, the separation is entirely an internal scenario, being done by and to myself. I also am still 'inside' of God. But there is a lot to be responsible for.
I am the one who is trying to be separate.
I am the one who finds myself sinful.
I am the one who has decided this means I'm guilty.
I am the one who believes my guilt demands a punishment.
I am the one afraid of that punishment coming from myself.
I am the one who gives that punishment to myself.
In this, there is nobody else involved. It's not about my brother or my neighbor or family member or coworker or stranger. It's not about God. ****God did not participate in the separation****.
The reason that this is so IMPORTANT is that we need to VERY CLEARLY DISCERN exactly who is doing what to whom. And if we are to not be victims and not suffer, we really need to know where this suffering is coming from and who is doing it - REALLY - otherwise we will be stuck and helpless.
So the ego has really taken this and run with it. It has tried to project responsibility for separation and 'sin' onto God. It has tried to project the source of guilt and condemnation onto God and `other people`. It has tried to project the source of fear onto God and other people. It has tried to make out that other people are the source of punishment (or God). It has literally asked other people to seem to provide that punishment (or uncontrollable life circumstances). The ego is ALL about shifting the blame and the responsibility away from YOUR INTERNAL SELF, and `out` onto some `other` skapegoat. And that 'other' is none other than our OWN SELF - a portion of our own self that we have separated off.
If we can bring all of that back within, and take responsibility for all of it, there is a TREMENDOUS POWER here - a potential to reclaim the ability to recognize not only, that you have done this to yourself, but the very CLEAR DISTINCTION that nobody else has EVER, EVER, EVER had anything to do with doing this "to you". It is literally the end of victimhood and the end of suffering and the end of death (which is the ultimate form of skapegoating).
If we can clearly see, that everythinig that we're experiencing is FROM OURSELVES, TO OURSELVES, then we can do something about it. If we cannot see this, then we are totally stuck. It we are not willing to see this, we are totally stuck. We HAVE to be willing to admit to this truth. It is the key to salvation - recognizing that you have done this to yourself.
Perhaps this is ALL that you need to know. If you can clearly discern that you have but done this ALL to yourself, that it's YOU that finds you sinful, that it's YOU that finds you guilty, that it's YOU that is demanding your own punishment, that it's YOU that is making yourself afraid of your own punishment, that it's YOU that is literally punishing yourself, and that it's YOU who has a death wish, THEN ....... then there is hope because there is NOTHING ELSE STOPPING YOU from choosing again and reclaiming total innocence!
There is no separate self. There is no other.
Until you can see this clearly, you will see yourself as a victim who has no power to change anything. Yet, when you do see this clearly, you will realize you are NOT a victim and you have ALL of the power to change it.
This is all about you. Not God. Not other people. Not weird discarnate entities. You. You, from you, to you.
The secret to salvation is this: You are doing this TO YOURSELF. That's why this clarity is so exciting, if you can see it and accept it.
Will you allow you to love yourself? That's the question. Will you acknowledge the love that you already are? Will you let God love you?
Are you guilty? Do you deserve forgiveness? Have you repented of your 'sin'?
If you are guilty of something, the very best thing you can do is to reclaim your innocence as soon as possible. If what you were doing before was incorrect, then returning to a state of correction is the best possible atonement you can offer.
If someone truly had a sane perception of you, they would ask that you stop being guilty and instead hold the light of innocence so that both you and they can be healed. Right? The greatest gift that a victimizer could give is to cease victimizing. Right? So to cease victimizing you have to stop choosing sin or guilt or fear. Which means you must choose innocence.
So while often we want our victimizers to be punished, to pay, to suffer, to be guilty, as though this somehow is 'better' or is justice or is a way of making up for what they did, this really is self defeating.
It is your brothers role to provide salvation and healing to you. He can only do that if he also SHARES in salvation and healing. The unhealed cannot heal. The guilty cannot provide innocence. You can't have it both ways - you can't have your vicitmizer be guilty while at the same time wanting them to 'take back' what they did.
You also can't hold guilt against a victimizer and expect to feel free of guilt yourself. How about that?
Here's the new rule.
Either you are both guilty or you are both innocent, but never one or the other.
If the world ran more according to this truth we would be far better off. An offering of guilt from a victimizer following an attack is nothing more than rubbing salt into the wound. Why would you want them to be guilty on top of having already attacked you? Guilt is an attack. You THINK that the attack of guilt is isolated to the person, and they can be guilty but not you. This is completely false and will totally undermine your sense of safety.
If a person is guilty, the guilt attacks them and you equally. Just as when someone is sick, the sickness is not limited to them - it is a statement of attack AND an attempt to infect everyone else. Not to induce guilt in saying that, but the Course does explain that sickness is an attempt to prove that everyone is sick. And not just bodily sickness - mind sickness, emotional sickness, etc.
The ONLY way for you to truly be happy and peaceful and to receive love and healing and be free of all effects of an attack, is to see the attacker as innocent and to encourage them to be innocent.
So yes, is sounds completely nonsense.... you just attacked me, ok, please revert to being loving and love me instead. Instead of... you just attacked me, you horrible asshole, you're so guilty and I hate you. Well, good luck with that self hate.
And if you are the victimizer, do you really think you're going to be better off or are doing the victim a service by being guilty all the time? Like, how much time is needed for you to be in shame and guilt in order to atone? A lifetime? At what point is it enough? When do you deserve forgiveness. You ALWAYS deserve forgiveness but you HAVE to claim and own it for yourself, because nobody, including the victim, is going to give you that permission of entitlement.
If you've ever made a significant enough mistake you'll know from experience, that people love to use you as a skapegoat and to jump on the bandwagon of unforgiveness. They want you to be guilty, so that you are the one who gets the punishment. What about THEIR sin? They're hardly being an example of love. At some point you have to realize, not only that you are the one who chose to be guilty and ashamed, but also therefore you are the one who has to reclaim innocence. Nobody can do it for you.
We all deserve to be innocent. We all deserve love. True `repentance` of sin, IF we REALLY want people to truly atone and repent, MUST mean that we allow them to be our SAVIOR. We can't hold a grudge, and we can't keep demanding their punishment. This only keeps ourselves imprisoned. IF we really want atonement and we really want healing, we HAVE to allow the attacker to be seen as innocent, otherwise there is no hope whatsoever and we're just getting lost in the ego.
Yes it runs against what we're used to. It runs against the ego. It goes against the societal normal. It runs counter to our normal ego emotional reactions. But if we want freedom and we truly want healing rather than suffering, we have to forgive ourselves AND everyone else no matter what. We HAVE to ask for a gift of innocence from all of our enemies, otherwise to hold them imprisoned is just to attack ourselves indirectly.
Love is not guilt. We don't need an offering of guilt or a performance of shame to make up for what someone did to us. We need THEM to heal. We need THEM to return to peace and love. Otherwise, how are we going to be able to get there ourselves?
Love your enemies. We are all one.
We're presented with an interesting challenge. Before you seems to be a brother who seems to have a body, seems to have a personality, seems to have a history, seems to believe various things and perceive in various ways.
But then, at the same time, your REAL BROTHER, is actually a spirit being, a soul, who is an absolutely perfect light of Heaven, completely invulnerable and immortal, absolutely awake, totally free from sickness and suffering, perfectly sane, happy, free, and full of love.
So now the question is, when you "relate" or interact with a person, are you going to consider that their bodily limited self is REALLY the person, or are you going to consider that their HOLY self is really the person? And if you acknowledge and relate only with the holy self, does this not show you that the bodily self is NOT WHO HE IS? Does it not frame all of his illusions AS illusions and as lies and falseties about him, that you are not supposed to believe, or see, or confirm, or hold against him?
It becomes now a matter of, are you willing to overlook everything about him that seems to be "here", as a body self, a worldly self, an ego self, and completely IGNORE all of it, and connect and relate ONLY to a REAL SELF, that is hidden by the body, obscured by false perceptions, and lurking in and BEYOND the body as your ACTUAL BROTHER?
Are you willing to realize that all of these body persons are actually not real, all of these forms and differences are illusions, no-one is really a body, no-one is different or unique, everyone is equally a brother and equally lovable? And are you willing therefore to LET GO OF, the belief you've had for thousands of years, that these "people" populating the dream that you thought were "real", they are just shadows of real beings who are temporarily invisible to your body's eyes, and who are absolutely perfect?
At some point we have to become willing to disregard these illusions that are being presented to us, these obstacles to peace, and learn to overlook them. This is literally forgiveness, which changes your perception, awakens your mind and shows you with CHRIST VISION the true nature of the brother that stands before you. And that means learning to question, let go of, ignore, not believe in, not take seriously, and basically disregard, anything and everything about a person that seems "traditionally human", and to instead look PAST THAT, to what can ONLY be the truth about them. That they are still perfectly the Christ as God created them, flawless and immaculate, perfect in every way, unconditional and universal, and free from all suffering, sin, guilt, fear and death.
It's a strange thing to do. Because we've been so used to looking with the body's eyes and seeing "people" and thinking this is all there is to them, looking at bodies and taking them as first-hand reality, looking at behaviors and appearances and differences and thinking this is TRUE of the person, and generally interacting with DREAM CHARACTERS. And these dream characters are NOT REALLY the depiction or representation of your actual brothers. Not unless, perhaps in currently rare cases, your brother is using his body to accurately symbolize his immortality. And even then, he is not his body.
Are you willing to overlook EVERYTHING your body's eyes show you? Are you willing to start interacting with the "higher self" or holy true self of your brothers? Are you willing to stop dwelling on bodies and what bodies do, and start peering deeper into people into their minds and souls? Are you willing to disbelieve anything about your brother that is not given by God, is not in accord with God's laws, and does not represent God's perfection? To recognize that all the rest is NOT TRUE of them or you? And to realize that all of your brothers are your perfect equals AS GOD CREATED US?
This is what it means to forgive your brother. To totally overlook ("to forgive is to overlook") the illusions that hide your brother from you, and learn to SEE the TRUTH of Him, which is absolutely as perfect and permanent as He has always been and forever will be.
"Look at your holy brother, sinless as yourself, and let him lead you there."
"Look, then, BEYOND error, and do not let your perception rest UPON it, for you will believe what your perception HOLDS."
"Forgive him your illusions, and behold how dear a brother he would be to you."
"Your brother has a changelessness in him beyond appearance and deception both."
"And while you see your brother as a body, APART from you and separate in his cell, you are demanding sacrifice of him AND you. "
"And to ACCEPT the limits of a body is to IMPOSE these limits on each brother that you see."
"It must reach out beyond itself, as you reached out beyond the body to LET yourselves be joined."
"Far beyond his dreams is his reality."
"When you attack a brother, you proclaim that he is limited by what you have perceived in him. You do not look beyond his errors. Rather, they are magnified, becoming blocks to your awareness of the Self that lies beyond your own mistakes, and past his seeming sins as well as yours."
When you see yourself as lacking in some way, whether it be that you're tired and spent, nothing left to give, stressed out, overwhelmed or whatever, you'll see yourself as "in need".
The world will now start to appear to you as being needy. It will seem other people are being needy and trying to take from you. That they are being selfish. They seem to demand attention and want something from you and you seem not to be able to give it, because you think you don't have it.
And so then you'll become angry and crabby, because why the hell are these insensitive selfish people demanding my energy when I don't have enough for myself?
But people will appear this way only because you're actually seeing yourself this way. By believing you are lacking, YOU are being needy, and woe betide that anyone else be needy at the same time.
Now, in your neediness, you are seeing yourself as needing to TAKE from them in order to fulfill your lack. And if they too are being needy, they are trying to take from you. And this produces a sucking inward on both your parts, which is a withdrawal on both your parts, which is producing a gap of separation between you and increasing the war.
In neediness we'll blame other people easily for seeming to be "so needy right now", so insensitive to your plight and so oblivious to your lack. How could they not recognize that you're the one who needs?
Instead of admitting that you want THEM To fulfill your needs, in an unspoken way, you are now angry that your hidden desire to be served is not being attended to by them. They seem not to be following through in supporting you. And now they're being all "me me me" at the exact wrong time.
Thus your desire to have others fulfill your needs, which is all part of your perception that you are lacking, becomes projected or mapped onto them as if THEY are the ones who are being needy and taking selfishly, and not you. You thus deny your neediness and pretend not to be needy, yet are still upset by their lack of supply.
What needs to happen is YOU need to move into the state where you do not have needs any more. And at first this will appear to mean you need to "get" your needs met. Typically by others or some external salvation or pleasure. But so long as the dynamic of perceiving yourself lacking is maintained, you'll expect that what someone or something else does TO you, for you, is the only way that your needs are going to be met.
This needs to be moved beyond, so that you realize the only reason you think you NEED them at all, is because you are seeing yourself as lacking. Perhaps your own perception of yourself as lacking is the real issue here. And maybe if you would not see yourself as lacking, you'd see yourself as whole and complete, needing nothing, therefore having everything to give.
And so there is the key. When you are needy, it's because you do not want to give. You are in need because you are unwilling to give. You are in need because you don't want to give to others what you yourself need to receive. And yet the only way TO receive it is to give it. The ego says, no, if you give, you're going to lack. Spirit says, if you give, you will be supplied.
And so as you step out in faith to give even more, strangely suddenly you find your needs are being met. Maybe your tiredness suddenly vanishes. Maybe your stress melts. Because you decided to adopt the role of doing God's will and loving instead of attacking yourself.
As you say, hey, I'm going to put Spirit first and act as if I have everything, Heaven comes in to support you and gives you strength. A willingness to put aside your needs in the trust that Spirit will back you up and give you the strength to go on, you might be surprised at the supernatural effect of all your limitations melting away.
A miracle worker is not in need because they recognize God is their supply, His strength is their own, and they cannot be lacking when they are doing His work. Unplugging yourself from Him is the only cause of a sense of lack in the first place. Is it the many forms of needs that you need to meet, such as food or energy or sleep, or is it God that you need?
If all states of neediness are really the absence of God or love, then the presence of God or love will fulfill the lack and remove the need. Or in essence, you cannot exist without God. You need nothing when you have everything. Open up to receive God's support and all your separate little made-up needs fall away. His light is all that's missing. Without it you ARE in lack. But with it you have the power to live forever.
"He seems to be whatever meets the needs you think you have. But He is not deceived when you perceive your self entrapped in needs you do not have."
Ego projections boil down to a very, very simple dynamic.
1) I decide what I want to see in someone.
2) I interact with what I now see in them as if I did not put it there.
The way I interact with what I see in others, is quite bizarre. It's really insane. I'm trying to accomplish two opposite goals at once.
1) I want other people to be what I say they are, by projecting my sin and guilt onto them, "convinced" that they really are that way.
2) I then demand that they stop being what I am seeing them being, and that they be the opposite, and that they are the one who has to choose differently. This is "forgiveness to destroy".
So right off the bat, this is a state of conflict. It's me who is seeing other people are doing "something wrong", and then it is me who is insisting that they change their behavior. So now I'm holding it against them when they don't change "for me". And they won't.
I'm literally demanding two separate outcomes simultaneously. I want people to be what I decide they are, and then I want them to not be what I've decided they are, simply because I'm in denial of being the one who has laid down the ground rules to begin with.
So I'm going around basically projecting shit onto people, deciding ok, you are doing this and that wrong and should be doing this and that instead. And then the rest of my "play" is to react to that accusation. It tends to go one of two ways.
1) They are wrong and they shouldn't be doing what they're doing so they are the ones who need to change, not me, and if they don't, I will victimize them. I will hold it against them.
2) They are wrong and they shouldn't be doing what they're doing, but in a hero savior role I will now swoop in and save them from "themselves", those sorry bastards, since they refuse to change themselves and seem 'helpless' and needy.
Each time I react to something being incorrect or unacceptable in another, who exactly is it who has made that person out to be wrong in this way? Are they inherently wrong in this way or have I actually decided to see them this way, and therefore it's my judgement of them? And now that I am responsible for what I'm seeing, having put it there to see, it's now my responsibility to admit that I'm interacting with my own projection.
As Jesus says in the course, generally speaking we will project our own sin outward and try to disown it (disassociate) and then we will attack what we've projected, accusing it of being sinful and bad, in order to create a sense of separation between it and ourselves, so that we can keep it away from our identity.
We will attack our own sin, thinking that we're attacking it in another person, believing that to do so causes them to receive the punishment and not us. Except it doesn't work because the sin never leaves our own mind (ideas leave not their source), it just seems external because we are in denial of it.
So it really all boils down to this. Whatever interaction I seem to be having with "the world", if I don't like it, it's because I'm the one who is deciding on what I am seeing "in" it, and am reacting to it as though it's really out there. And regardless of whether I am liking to do that or am feeling frustrated or upset or whatever about "what they are doing", I am the one who is making them out to be doing that to me. Because I want to. Because it gives me an opportunity to disown some sin.
ie, I love to suffer. I choose suffering on purpose and position myself as a victim on purpose, so that I can seem to be at the effect of the world, so that I can then explain that the world has caused me and therefore the world is the sinner, not me. I might suffer and be sick or afraid or upset as "effects" of what they supposedly did to me (even though I invented those effects in myself, by myself), but I secretly am getting away with murder by "using" the person as an outlet for projecting my own sin. Now they are the sinner and not me, and I'm suffering... poor me, but at least I am not the sinner any more.
So the ego's mantra is, I wish to suffer in order not to suffer. Or rather, I will see the world as attacking me and attack myself with it so that it seems that I'm not attacking myself with it.
We are to demonstrate that we cannot be hurt, or made sick, or caused to die, as a result of this world. And whenever these things seem to be happening, you can be assured that you've positioned yourself as a deliberate victim, in order to pretend that the world is responsible for what you are experiencing. You may be suffering, you may be sick, you may even end up dead, and it will conveniently seem as if the world made this happen against your will, but nothing could be further from the truth.
No-one dies without their own consent. And anyone who dies has secretly arranged to make it appears as if they did not choose it at all. Death is an attempt not to choose, by pretending that you have no choice, by pretending that others have taken all your power away from you, making you an "unwilling" victim, in a state of unwillingness, such that it appears death happens to you against your will. How convenient. It's a total lie.
Death is unwillingness to admit that you are pretending to die and are blaming everything on anyone other than yourself. This is why death is failure, and death is failing to wake up from the dream. Death is impossible for anyone but self-imposed victims. Death is not life. It is not success or graduation. It is the total opposite of life. It cannot happen without being severely against yourself and against the will of God. Therefore it cannot happen "peacefully" nor can it happen AT ALL unless you attack yourself.
Either you own what is happening inside you, or you claim that someone else owns it.
Either your identity is your own, or you believe that it is someone else's.
It's quite bizarre to recognize that we actually put our responsibility, our ownership and even our own sense of self into the hands of other people. All confusionabout who is who and who is responsible for what comes from this blurring of boundaries and it happens through what we call 'projection'.
You are responsible for all of your own reactions and perceptions. But sometimes you come to believe that someone else has caused or created these reactions, that someone else made them, that someone else put them there, and that they really belong to someone else. And then you actually believe that this stuff, which is happening inside of you, is someone else's responsibility and that they are supposed to deal with it or do something about it. And instead of doing something about it yourself you'll just stand there on the sidelines demanding that they correct it for you.
Doesn't that sound kind of crazy? That you're asking someone else to carry the burden of your own inner experiences? You want someone else to be the one to manage aspects of your own self. It's dis-ownership of your identity and a dis-empowerment of yourself.
Whenever we blame someone else or are finding someone else guilty, we start getting into this whole way of looking at the situation as though they actually are meant to clean up YOUR mess. They are meant to deal with your reaction, they are meant to change or fix your upset, and they are meant to be the ones that correct the problem. This is nothing but irresponsible. This is you shoveling your own shit onto someone else's plate and wanting them to take care of it for you so that you don't have to.
It's not anyone else's job to be responsible for your own stuff, or to own your own upsets, or to manage or fix your own dramas, or to tell you what you really are, or to correct you on your own behalf, or to set you straight, or to be you for you. You quite literally are shifting your own identity into someone else's hands when you fail to take responsibility. It's like saying, I'm not going to be myself, you be me for me and I'll just sit back and wait for you to be me for me so that I don't have to deal with myself.
This is also why people are all up in each other's business like they have some kind of a say or input to what other people's responsibilities are. When people come along and give all their opinions and tell you what you should be doing or wearing or looking like or behaving like, etc, it's all to do with violating these basic boundaries and trying to fix you, change you, or be the one who is responsible for you. When you are not being responsible for yourself you will attract this, but also when you are not being responsible for yourself you will enter into this behavior and start launching into fixing other people on their behalf. My own sense of `having to be burdened with being responsible for others` has led only to attempts to fix and change and correct and feel pressured (by myself) to make other people be what they are - all a cover-up for me not claiming full ownership of my own stuff - of myself.
Deal with your own shit and shut the fuck up about everyone else's lives!
This is why everyone that meddles in your life or the life of those who have they no business even commenting on, go to great lengths to control or prevent those people from having the freedom to be themselves (e.g. people against homosexuals or other kinds of bigotry, people who think other people are not allowed to do certain things, etc). It's none of their dam business, and is evidence that they are not being responsible for their own shit and so they actually fear that other people have an influence over them and threaten them with the power to have responsibility for them, which they themselves have granted.
No matter how the situation seems, if you are in any way placing responsibility, burden, ownership, blame, cause or power for what you are experiencing or feeling or reacting, into someone else's hands, then you are stepping across healthy boundaries and are lacking responsibility. You are basically saying that you refuse to be corrected, you refuse to own what you think you did, you refuse to acknowledge who you are and you refuse God's love. So then you want someone else to come along and clean up your mess for you or fix you or change on your behalf. And woe-betide if they refuse to play along.
Your problems aren't anyone else's problems. Your upsets are your own. Your reactions are your reactions. Your beliefs are your beliefs. Your ideas leave not your own mind. Your are choosing all the time and everything you are experiencing you have chosen and everything that's happening you asked for and nothing else is happening. Nobody else is doing anything against your will and you are not a victim. You can't be a victim and you can't be insane if you are really really clear about the fact that all of your responsibility is in your own hands and all of who and what you are is in your own hands, in God's hands.
How can you be yourself if you are someone else's fault?
YOU NEED TO FIX OTHERS BECAUSE YOU ARE BROKEN
This has been a major eye opener for me.
If you have a belief in your mind that you have sinned, then you'll believe that you are responsible for some kind of attack. And because you attacked, you will feel guilty. This means that your mind is now sick because it believes something untrue about itself. And your mind now needs healing.
But chances are that you'll deny this in order to try to resolve it the ego way, and this will then project onto someone else. You'll see someone else as in need of healing. You'll see that there is something dire and wrong with them. That they are seriously suffering or in trouble. It can turn into what appears to be a nightmare where you are constantly upset that there seems to be no way to solve the problem.
The problem is that you feel you are responsible for causing the guilt, the brokenness, the unhealed-nature, that you're seeing in someone else. You'll believe you caused them to suffer, to be sick, to be upset, etc. You'll seem to feel guilty for this as though your own sin has led to someone else suffering. And this puts you into a bind.
Since you now feel guilty, and you think you're guilty for making someone else suffer, you'll become compelled to want to fix them. You'll develop a strong need to change them, control them, manage them, coerce there, or get them to do something, or to make something happen, in order to make the suffering go away. You'll even feel upset that they are suffering and that you want it to end any way possible.
You then find yourself in a position where you believe you are responsible for causing someone to suffer, they need to change in order to not suffer, you need to force them to change, and you'll try anything you can to "fix it". But a problem arises, because they will now start to resist your efforts to control and dominate them. They'll see your attempts to fix and help as actual attempts to attack them. Because now you are not accepting them or allowing them freedom.
This is all driven by a need that you have developed. By seeing yourself as sinful and guilty you have entered into a needy state where you lack love and health. So you now see that if you can get the person you projected it onto to be restored to health and happiness, this will "solve" your need for healing.
But this is a big dependency and it comes with a major pitfall. If the other person does not comply, if they do not want your help, if they resist your constant attempts to fix them, and if they refuse to play along, you will not be able to get your artificial needs met. And being left in a situation where you see yourself as needing something but are denied it, the ego now goes into its dark hateful vengeful angry mode because it has no other options.
You will then start to turn to anger and force and more aggressive control in an effort to push the person into doing what you think you need them to do, in order for you to be relieved of suffering. You'll also start to believe that the reason you are now suffering is because of them. Their suffering, and their seeming inability to be healed, and their seeming unwillingness to make choices towards healing, is taken like a slap in the face.
You can't find peace because you are making peace depend entirely on whether or not the other person is free from suffering. All their suffering ties into yours and it now seems their suffering is causing you to suffer. And if only you could get them to stop suffering, you'll supposedly be happy and overjoyed.
As you make efforts or suggestions for what they must do, need to do, its very serious to do that, must comply, etc demanding they follow along, and as they fail to comply, you will just become more and more lost and exasperated and upset and stressed.
Because no matter what you try, it seems you keep hitting a dead end and nothing is working, it seems hopeless and, according to you, if these resolutions are not adopted, the person is going to be in far worse condition. You develop a progressively stronger need to fix them the more you believe they are the one with the problem. This is disassociation.
What's happening here isn't really so much to do with the other person, what their condition is, their willingness, or anything to do with whether or not they are actually in need of fixing. The real problem is that you've entered into a dynamic of believing in your own guilt, you feel responsible for causing the suffering, this is exacerbated every time they seem to refuse your efforts, and how dare they not be healed the way you need them to be healed. Why do you even need them to be healed in the first place? What's it to you?
What this means is you're trying to resolve a sense of "something is wrong", by trying to address it outside of yourself where you THINK it is, in another person, as if that's where the problem is. Not realizing you are even projecting anything at all. In fact the more you focus on the problems of the other person the more you will go into denial and unconsciousness as to it being you who needs healing. It will seem as if they are the one who clearly has all the problems, all the suffering, and not you, and all you're doing is trying to "help", trying to offer suggestions, trying to make their life better. But this really all has nothing to do with them.
This is really not much different from when you are just generally scapegoating someone due to them seeming to attack you. You blaming people for doing stuff to you. You finding them to be guilty. You judging them. The need to fix is based on the exact same dynamic except that it doesn't seem like scapegoating, because it seems like whole whole intention and desire is for the person to actually get BETTER and improve and be healed and happy.
It seems you want the best for them, but this is an illusion of healing and still a major ego trap, based in denial of your own guilt, that promises salvation in an external form rather than where it's needed. It's an illusion of a desire to truly heal, and is really an attack in disguise. You think all you're doing is wanting the person to heal, but all you're doing is seeing them as more and more in need, which means the ego is seeing more and more distance between the problem and the solution. The more you deny your own sickness the more you want to heal the supposed sickness of others.
The real issue is that you yourself feel guilty, and in an effort to get away from this guilt, you are instead seeing brokenness in another person instead of fixing yourself. The "need" to fix is still there because you believe you need fixing, but the approach to resolving it isn't working. Trying to get another person to heal in order for you to be healed, is not going to work. Trying to get another person to follow the rules or play along with the prescription or do the steps you come up with for how they must behave and act, is not going to make even a dent in how or why you feel so guilty about their condition.
It all goes back to causality, and the sense that you actually believe, deep down, that you cause other people to suffer. And this is based on the belief that you caused sin to happen. You think you actually are making someone sick. You think it's your fault that other people have issues, or are unhappy, or are sick and suffering. That because they are not loving themselves, and therefore are not loving you, there must be something wrong with you. And your wrongfulness must be the reason for their upset. This kind of stuff even goes back into childhood beliefs and wrongful conclusions.
What you really need, is a clear and definite sense of what the real cause of the situation is. And this means forgiveness clearly needs to be applied, to dismantle all sense of artificial cause and effect on the horizontal level. All sense that you are the cause of their suffering, or that their suffering is the cause of you. Because this really has nothing to do with the other person at all.
You have your own belief that you are sinful and guilty. Before the other person even becomes involved. You think you are lacking and unworthy of love. And this in turn is a state of need or lack. And this neediness will now project onto someone else as though they are the one who is lacking and in need. The more in need they seem to be the more likely they are to "map onto" your projection and be a perfect fit for you to target. You'll then be able to use them to try to fulfill your ego ambition, which is to fix something, so long as its not the real problem or where the problem really is.
Within your own mind there is a problem. It's a belief in sin and guilt. And this is based on a skewed sense of causality. Somehow you believe you are the cause of suffering in others, because you think you succeeded in sinning against God. You also believe you have caused yourself to suffer. Unresolved guilt you have about the false illusion that you caused the sickness or suffering of someone else (which does go back to the separation idea) can easily project onto another target. That you even seem to EXIST on a physical level "suggests" that you are part of sin, because the world of bodies is the world of sin.
You have to learn to become clear about the fact that you are not causing other people to suffer. The only reason you get so caught up and lost in trying to "help them" and "fix them" and "save them" is so that you won't keep feeling guilty. If you COULD save them, you think you'll be delighted. That all you want for them is to be happy. All you want for them is to be healthy and well and living life. But is this all you really want? Because behind this desire for their highest good there is really a NEED, a desire to elevate them SO THAT you can keep your guilt and continue to hide from it, because you think you are guilty for what THEY are experiencing.
If they do indeed become saved somehow, healed, healthier, holier, happier, that's all well and good and will seem to lift the burden of the sense that you need them to be this way. You might feel temporarily, fictionally better about yourself, as if you achieved something. As if they are now better "because of you", and you get to be the hero.
When they go along with your wishes, as if going along with your agenda, you'll feel your ego float in pride and success as if you won a victory and managed to coerce someone into doing what you wanted. Your ego becomes a tyrant in this, incessantly demanding conformity and compliance. So if they comply, suddenly the ego is all happy and elated. But it's fake. It's a facade of gloating and being pleased with yourself that you seemed to "cause" someone else to be in a better position, even against their will. How dare they not be happy when you need them to not be sad. How dare they be sad when you need to be made happy.
The egoic dependency on another always ends up this way. Terribly unhappy when they aren't complying, unnaturally inflated when they are finally doing what you want. But never simply at peace or calmly happy. Or detached. You have to let go of the person and honor their free will. But you'll only do that when you can realize that you've been using them to try to resolve your own issues. Otherwise if you keep intending to use them to meet your own fake needs, you won't allow them to be free of your tyrannical rule.
Recognizing you did not cause the suffering of another, gives you freedom. It's what you really need to realize. YOU DID NOT SIN. You did not cause suffering. If in particular you can pinpoint what the cause of their suffering is, and realize it is not you, that can help as well, even if on a superficial level of fake cause and effect. But mainly you need to get to the point where you admit that you are the one who needs healing and realize that this is all to do with your attempt to at "self healing" which you're trying to accomplish outside of yourself instead of within.
You have guilt in you, which shouldn't be there. It's based on beliefs that are false. Guilt is always a lie. It's based on some sense of sin - something you did or did not do, which was not what should or should not have been done. Sin is always a lie because there is no sin in reality. But there is something you have accused yourself of. Something you think you are responsible for. Something you think you caused but didn't. This is where you need forgiveness. And that's what your entire "need to fix" is coming from.
If you are not sinful or guilty, and did not cause your brother to experience anything at all, then you are not in need. You are not lacking love for yourself. And so you do not project the guilt onto another person. And so you do not see them as lacking. And so you do not see a need to fix "what's wrong". And so you do not start trying to control them. And so you do not become upset at their lack of willingness or the inability to heal the terrible problems that have now turned into a nightmare in your perception of the situation. Stuff that, if it doesn't get fixed, you think will lead to death.
Thinking you are responsible for not only making someone suffer but for also reversing the suffering, is a terribly slippery slope. This doesn't mean you can't offer miracles or that the Holy Spirit cannot heal the person and their body. But you have to get yourself healed of this distorted form of healing first. This attempt at healing is not true healing. It's the ego's form of healing. And just like "forgiveness to destroy", it is "healing to destroy."
Your ambition is not really to heal, in this condition, it's to create an illusion of healing in another person so that your own sickness remains hidden in your mind and thought to have nothing to do with you. If they get fixed, you reason that this will fix your life. But it won't. Because you yourself need healing as well and don't realize it.
The need to fix another becomes a trap and a prison, because the only way out is the way you came in, within yourself. Free yourself of the insane belief that you are the cause of suffering, an attacker, a sinner, guilty, ashamed, unworthy, or any other false belief. This will lift away from the other person all of your projected suffering and neediness, which will be a relief to both of you. Especially given that your attempt to heal them is probably hurting them more, and inducing even more guilt.
And now in your perception that you are not really sick, because you are not really sinful, you become the light of the world, in a position to now work ACTUAL miracles, TRUE healing, to be truly helpful, and to offer the kind of support that actually works. Now the person is more likely to respond, because everyone responds to love. Love can be trusted. Love is worth cooperating with. And love heals.
Now you are a miracle worker, alleviated from your own insane belief that you are deeply in need of healing, which you no longer see in others. Now you can recognize their illusions of sickness only for what they are, and offer genuine healing to cure and reverse their suffering. You're now in a position to allow the Power of God to work through you, to shine a light into their mind from your healed mind. And now you are capable of giving the miracles you have received.
"It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive."
"The ego's plan for forgiveness is far more widely used than God's. This is because it is undertaken by unhealed healers, and IS therefore of the ego. "
"By definition, he is trying to GIVE what he has NOT received."
"I give the miracles I have received."
"All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the FEAR OF AWAKENING. They are attempts to reinforce UNCONSCIOUSNESS out of fear of CONSCIOUSNESS."
The entire problem of the people of the world is that we're very confused about what is true. God, who is truth, has been deeply misunderstood. We've tried to replace God with a false God of vengeance, which we want to have nothing to do with.
"You who prefer specialness to sanity could not obtain it in your right minds. You were at peace until you asked for special favor, and God did not give it. For the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this of a Father who truly loved His Son. Therefore, you made of Him an UNloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father COULD give. And the peace of God's Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his REAL Father, having attacked his glorious equality WITH Him."
God has been framed as a murderous evil tyrant that wants us dead. We've associated him with all the properties of that which is not true, including darkness, evil, enemy, hateful, destructive, murderous, vengeful, sick, and death itself. We've even tried to make out that God is non-existence.
This "anti-christ" attitude is part of the separation idea of being opposite to God. In order to be opposite to God, we've made God out to be opposite to himself. We now believe God is nothing like he really is. We've turned him into a false God of war.
At the same time, we've mistakenly misbelieved and misunderstood and failed to recognize all false things for what they are. We think that non-existence is existence, that death is life, that hell is heaven, that suffering is atonement, that murder is justified, that fear is safety, that sickness is saving your life.
So now we have this worldwide problem that we're trying to move away from God, on the basis that we believe God is what we do NOT want. And we try to move toward the world of illusions, on the basis that we believe it IS what we want.
To put it another way, we now see God as an evil enemy to be feared, we want nothing to do with him, we do not want his affections or help, and we do not want to wake up to exposure to the fact of his existence. We are running away from him. We think that God is death and that we're running towards life. But we are confused, and we are actually running away from life towards death.
So now we have a state where we're all choosing to suffer on purpose because we are afraid of God. We're afraid of what we've made of him, what we think he is like. We don't want to go toward him because we think we'll stop existing. Even though moving away from him was an attempt to stop existing.
When we move away from God we are moving away from happiness and wholeness and love and peace and health and sanity. We'd rather choose suffering and unhappiness and despair and pain and sickness and death. We then want to keep our suffering and NOT let it be healed, because we literally believe it is defending us from God. We'd rather die than let him heal us with his poisonous offering.
This is the state of the world. A hugely common belief that we want the opposite of what God is offering. Even if that means we actually end up choosing to make, and maintain, even more suffering. Because we do not recognize it AS suffering, and do not think it's an insane thing to tolerate pain, and are quite content to put up with all manner of misery for as long as possible.
Not to mention the guilt, which we adore and cherish and want more of, and will preserve in an attempt to keep us and others stuck in bodies and suffering in order to protect us from God. The world actually believes that people leaving their bodies means they've move into the forbidden realm to be swallowed up by death. Something to be avoided at all costs.
The world is incredibly backwards. It has become acceptably normal to not question death, to put up with pain, to reject help, to not want healing, to fear questioning the reality of the world, on the basis that these are all threats to the protection it offers. The only reason we think the world is saving us is because we a very very mistaken about it and do not recognize it as a picture of crucifixion, with nothing to offer and no power to do anything.
It all boils down to this one simple thing. We're afraid of God and we don't want to go home. We think God will never forgive us, and we would rather die and be weak and helpless than admit to being mistaken. We are most afraid of the very thing we mistakenly believe is true, because it is false. And the very things we think are false, are actually true, and yet we hate them and want nothing to do with them.
Our minds have been reversed, our entire reality has been opposed, our sanity has been turned upside down, and our whole sense of what we want has done a 180-degree flip. Trying to convince the world to let God help is quite a challenge. The insane and fearful are heavily suspicious and mistrusting. The sick want to die. The lost want to stay lost and rely on their confusion for navigation.
But there is hope and a light because the reality of God's loving truth in heaven has sent its witnesses and its teachers and its healers and its power to resurrect the dead and lift us into the light. A light which at first we do not want and fear and dread, but which later we might come to trust as our salvation. It is only a false fear, which is a lie about God, that keeps us from happiness and health.
"For anti-Christ becomes more powerful than Christ to those who dream the world is real."
"And you ask help of Christ or anti-Christ, and which you choose WILL join with you, and tell you what to do."
"This is the anti-Christ; the strange idea there is a power PAST omnipotence, a place BEYOND the infinite, a time transcending the eternal. Here the world of idols has been set by the idea this power and place and time are given form, and shape the world where the impossible has happened. Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."
"It is extremely hard for those who still believe sin meaningful to understand the Holy Spirit's justice. They believe He shares their OWN confusion, and can NOT avoid the vengeance that their own belief in justice MUST entail. And so they fear the Holy Spirit, and perceive the wrath of God in Him."
"Who sees a brother as a body sees him as fear's symbol. And he will attack because what he beholds is his own fear external to himself, poised to attack, and howling to unite with him again. Mistake not the intensity of rage projected fear must spawn. It shrieks in wrath, and claws the air in frantic hope it can reach to its maker and devour him."
To put it simply, the nature of the mind is completely opposite to the nature of the body. Mind is of God, bodies are illusions. Mind functions naturally in a state of sharing, union, extension and oneness, driven by God's laws. Bodies function according to unnatural ego laws of separation, as separation devices, designed to imprison mind and completely oppose the mind's natural functioning. This is also why the notion that the mind is "part of the brain" is preposterous.
"A mind and body cannot both exist. Make no attempt to reconcile the two, for ***one denies the other can be real***. If you are physical your mind is gone from your self-concept, for it has no place in which it could be really part of you. If you are Spirit, then the body must be meaningless to your reality."
"The body IS separate, and therefore CANNOT be part of you. To be of ***one mind is meaningful***, but to be of one body is meaningless. By the laws of mind, then, the body IS meaningless."
"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master."
"The ego, which always WEAKENS the will, wants to SEPARATE the body from the mind. This IS an attempt to DESTROY it."
"For sin HAS changed creation from an Idea of God to an IDEAL the EGO wants; a world IT rules, made up of bodies, mindless, and capable of COMPLETE corruption and decay."
To attempt to APPLY a body TO a mind, imprisons the mind. Confusing mind and body, to suggest the body is the mind, or that you have no mind at all, leads to the mind identifying with the body. This makes the mind run completely opposite to its nature, and induces all suffering and sickness.
To again put it simply, if the mind in any way associates itself with the body, or allows or uses the body to define itself, the mind becomes sick and attacks the body. Bodies are prisons, and minds are freedom. Bodies are exclusive, and minds are inclusive. Bodies separate, minds join. They function totally differently, so trying to make the mind function LIKE the body, arrests the mind's natural function and induces illness.
"Thus is the JOINING of mind and body an INESCAPABLE belief of those who value sin. And so is sacrifice INVARIABLY a means for limitation."
"Learning must lead BEYOND the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it. This can be accomplished ONLY if the ***mind EXTENDS to other minds***, and does not ARREST ITSELF in its extension. The arrest of the mind's extension (tying it to the body's nature) is the cause of all illness, because ***ONLY EXTENSION IS THE MIND's FUNCTION***. Block this, and you have blocked health because you have BLOCKED THE MIND's JOY."
"No mind is sick until another mind AGREES that they are separate."
"If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick."
"The body needs NO healing. But the mind that thinks it IS a body is sick indeed!"
Extension, sharing, union, oneness, equality, transcendence, miraculousness, is the mind's natural function. Mind needs to function according to mind's laws in order to be healthy. But bodies are fundamentally opposite, as separation devices.
If the mind identifies with "being a body", or functioning by physical laws, or obeying physical limitations, the mind becomes sick. It's like something that's supposed to be completely free and open, being shoved inside a completely closed box. Mind and body are not compatible.
"Spirit makes use of mind as means to find Its Self-expression. And the mind that serves the Spirit is at peace and filled with joy. Its power comes from Spirit, and it is fulfilling happily its function here. Yet mind can also see itself divorced from Spirit, and perceive itself within a body it confuses with itself. Without its function then, it has no peace, and happiness is alien to its thoughts."
"Yet mind apart from Spirit cannot think. It has denied its Source of strength, and sees itself as helpless, limited and weak. Dissociated from its function now, it thinks it is alone and separate, attacked by armies massed against itself, and hiding in the body's frail support."
"You also believe the body's brain can think. If you but understood the nature of thought, you could but laugh at this insane idea."
"Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its powers decline if their bodies are hurt."
"the underlying fallacy is more likely to be the confusion of mind and brain"
The situation we find ourselves in is therefore very strange. We seem to be isolated and alone inside a body, trapped, as if separated off from other minds, physically unable to truly share or join. Even in intercourse we can't actually get inside of another person's mind, or experience them as ourselves, or really share anything with them.
Everything seems to happen to us alone, and not another. Everything seems to apply to me and not you. Even the form of our bodies suggest we are different, separate, special, and exclusive. That we are separated off by time and space. As if I can have little private thoughts inside a little private world that has no effect on anyone or anything outside of me.
This is not how mind needs to function to be healthy. This is totally opposite to its natural functioning. Mind needs to SHARE, to join, to be one-with, to unify, which is true communication and extension. Mind needs to be open and transcendental beyond limitations and walls and boundaries. Mind spreads out and can have the vision to see beyond physical limits and distances. Mind can be everywhere at once.
So somehow we have to find a way to transcend the body's anchoring, imprisoning, limiting factors, and restore the mind to functioning how it functions in heaven.
"Or would I teach that bodies cannot keep us apart?"
"What does it matter if they then appear in many forms? Their minds are one; their joining is complete. And God works through them now as One, for that is what they are."
"This is the function of your holy relationship. For what ONE thinks, the OTHER will experience WITH him. What can this mean, EXCEPT your minds are one?"
"The body is not capable of understanding. Only the mind KNOWS anything. A pure mind knows the truth, and this IS its strength. It cannot attack the body, because it knows EXACTLY what the body IS. This is what "a sane mind in a sane body" really means."
"A PERSON conceives of himself as separate, largely because he perceives OF himself as bounded by a body. ONLY if he perceives as a MIND can he overcome this."
"While you believe that YOUR reality, OR YOUR BROTHER's, is bounded by a body, you will believe in sin. While you believe that BODIES can unite, you will find guilt attractive, and believe that sin is precious. For the belief that bodies LIMIT the mind leads to a perception of the world in which the PROOF of separation seems to be everywhere."
"Sins are beliefs which you impose between your brother and yourself. They limit you to time and place, and give a little space to you; ANOTHER little space to him. This separating off is symbolized, in your perception, by a body which is clearly separate and a thing apart. Yet what this symbol REPRESENTS is but your wish to BE apart and separate."
"The belief you are a body calls for correction, being a mistake."
"Remember that all sense of weakness is associated with the belief you are a body, a belief that is mistaken and deserves no faith."
"If you are sin you ARE a body, for the mind acts not."
"It IS impossible to see your brother sinless, and yet to look upon him as a body."
"And so the illusion of a brother as a body is quite in keeping with the purpose of unholiness."
"To hold a grievance is to see yourself as a body."
"For faithlessness IS the perception of a brother AS a body, and the body CANNOT be used for purposes of union. If, then, you SEE him as a body, YOU have established a condition in which UNITING with him becomes impossible. Your faithlessness to him has separated you FROM him, and kept you BOTH apart from being healed."
"And while you see your brother as a body,APART from you and separate in his cell, you are demanding sacrifice of him AND you."
"He Who was always wholly spirit now no longer sees Himself as a body, or even as in a body. Therefore He is limitless. And being limitless, His Thoughts are joined with God's forever and ever."
Somewhat channeled just now... Thanks Holy Spirit.
Fear is a protection against guilt. It is put in place to hide guilt. If the guilt were to be revealed, it would condemn you and you would "find the guilt" i.e. "be found guilty."
We put fear into place because we do not want to deal with the guilt that has created the fear. Guilt always is the source of fear because Sin confirms something really happened, guilt confirms that what you did was wrong and you're to blame, and then because of that you can't help but be afraid of punishment in the future.
Anyone who has guilt will become afraid.
So we actually use fear to put a layer of protection and disguise on top of guilt, to cover it up. Then we dwell on how afraid we are. And we project the fear as well because we don't want to live with the fear either. We don't want to be "found fearful". So then we try to get rid of the fear too by projecting onto others and accusing them of causing it.
The whole point of that projected fear, then, is to reverse cause and effect, to make it seem like the cause of the underlying guilt is someone else, and not ourselves. When we do this we're throwing a decoy out there and trying to pin blame on it. IF we can blame someone else for causing our fear, i.e. if we can project responsibility for the fear onto someone else, then we can find them GUILTY. Its then their fault. They seem to be causing the fear. They seem to also be threatening to 'create' the punishment that you believe you deserve (because deep down you feel guilty).
So then having projected fear and blamed its cause on someone, covering up your secret plan to use it as a cover for guilt, you'll believe that they are the ones who are 'making you be afraid' - because by projecting you are completely "disowning" the fear and are trying to get rid of it. So if you can pull off this deception, even deceiving yourself, that someone else is causing this fear, then you've accomplished a tremendous switcharoo... a wonderful coverup story that prevents you from having to go back and look at the GUILT that caused all this fear in the first place.
Other people are not making you afraid. They are not turning you into fear. They are not attacking you or getting ready to punish you. But you'll still believe in punishment forthcoming while you cover up the guilt and don't heal it, because fearing that punishment (which HAS to come if you believe you are guilty) doesn't really get rid of the cause of the fear, and you still believe in guilt, and even though you're trying to make out that other people are the ones who are sinning against you, it STILL does not convince you that you are safe or innocent.
You'd rather be afraid than be guilty. Even though the fear is really about you becoming WORSE OFF than when you were 'just guilty', because now you are guilty AND afraid, the fear pretends to hide the guilt and make it 'unconscious', so that you seem to not be aware of it, so that you can pretend that you are ONLY having to deal with fear. And then of course you are ONLY having to deal with the idiots that you project the fear onto - its all about them, having disowned responsibility for the fear as well.
So even though fear sucks, and fear of punishment sucks, and being so afraid and so PROJECTING of fear that you believe you're actually WITNESSING the people show up who are there to come and punish you (for you, so that you can blame them ;-), you'd still rather be in fear and projecting of fear than be guilty.
You don't want to look at the fact that you CANNOT BE AFRAID unless you are guilty. Who can have anything to fear if they are innocent? Who, who believes they are not guilty, can possibly have a NEED for an ego device that *seems* to alleviate the guilt by covering it up and turning it into fear?
You also cannot be PUNISHED if you are not afraid. The only way you can find punishment is by projecting your fear onto other people, effectively recruiting them as your attackers to do your dirty work for you, WITH your will, pretending that it is against your will. If you are not afraid there is nothing to project, which means you will not READ INTO other people a suspicious frightening motive of bringing down GOD's WRATH of punishment for your sin.
Remember this all goes back to the underlying belief that you sinned by separating from God. That's what this is entirely all about. All the guilt is about that. All the fear that comes from the guilt is about that. All of the projection of fear is about that. And all of the punishment that you're sure will be forthcoming because of how guilty you are, is all about that. It's all about what you think God will and should do to you, which you are deciding FOR Him on His behalf - i.e. on your own. Which is a mistake.
So where are you on the scale of forgetfulness? Are you in the separation stage? Have you turned your experience into one of sin? Have you gone further and blamed yourself for the sin, demanding that you be responsible for it? Have you taken the guilt even further and realized that it means you must be punished, which induces fear? Are you in fear mode? Or have you taken fear and projected it onto others outside of you, describing all the ways that it is their fault that this whole thing is happening? No matter where you are on that scale, right now, you CAN get back to God's love by retracing your steps.
And that means, if you are terrified of punishment, you're pretty sure to be in a state of projected fear right now. You need to take back that projection so that you at least own the responsibility that the fear is yours, its in you, and you made it up. Then you need to rewind that more and ask yourself, WHY am I afraid? It ABSOLUTELY IS NOT because of any projected reason or outside person. Ever. Absolutely not. That's heading in the wrong direction TOWARD the ego. You need to turn around and go the other way, back the way you came. Back toward the Holy Spirit. Retrace... if I am afraid now, it's because I believe I SHOULD be afraid because I believe I AM GUILTY.
Under the fear is guilt. What is it you are so guilty of that it requires such a fear of terrible punishment? Why are you so fervently TRYING to orchestrate that punishment, bring it on, and make it happen, forcing it to occur, through the device of fear and fear's projection? Why do you deserve such a punishment? Did you sin? Did you do something wrong? Do you have a false BELIEF that says you're a guilty sucker and don't deserve FORGIVENESS? You always deserve forgiveness. Always. There is ALWAYS a way to return safely to God's welcoming love.
Retrace those steps. Go backwards. Undo the fear by undoing the guilt. Get out of the fear by recognizing you are NOT GUILTY and therefore have NOTHING to be afraid of. Recognize your innocence. Holy Spirit recognizes it for you while you pretend otherwise.
You are perfectly safe in God's love and He will not condemn you of the things that you think you are condemned for. You are certain that there is NO WAY you can be forgiven for what you did, and NO WAY that it can be TRUE that you are innocent and deserving of love. This is your mistake. This is what must be corrected. You MUST find a way to remember you are not guilty, or you will just keep feeling afraid.
You don't need to 'deal with' your punishing attackers. If you stop projecting your shit onto them you will not see them AS attackers and it won't be their fault you are afraid. You also don't need to really work on the fear, because if you get rid of the GUILT then the fear will automatically disappear completely. It has no foundation. And you don't even especially need to work on guilt because if you have NOT DONE ANYTHING WRONG, you have not sinned, and you have not separated from God, then there isn't any call for guilt and you are perfectly innocent.
Choose again. You are not stuck and you are not being victimized by anything but your own certainty that you deserve it. Choose again. You are worthwhile and lovable and deserve complete forgiveness.
God loves you still. There is a way to be free of this whole nightmare. Choose in the DIRECTION of the Holy Spirit and your way will be made straight.
This is an important point. When you are being forgiving, you do not continue to LOOK AT the thing that you were forgiving. Sight of it was the result of NOT forgiving.
Forgiveness is NOT ABOUT looking "at" bodies and at the world and regarding them as sinless and holy. This is not how forgiveness functions. Forgiveness does not make something real and then try to look past it, nor does it make something real and then attempt to endow it with qualities of love and perfection.
To forgive the world does NOT MEAN to keep looking AT the world in a loving way. To forgive the world does NOT MEAN to love the world and believe it is God's creation. To forgive does not mean that your SIGHT stops at the outside surface of material objects and still regards them as reality. I'm sorry but that is NOT forgiveness.
To forgive means to OVERLOOK. It means to SEE PAST. It means to NOT FIXATE ON. It means to NOT BE DECEIVED BY. It means to GIVE NO REALITY TO. It means to CANCEL illusions. It means to DIMINISH illusions in your sight so that you can see THROUGH THEM and PAST THEM to the truth (Christ) that was being hidden BY them.
The world stands like a block of sin before the face of Christ. So does all bodies. You have to OVERLOOK THEM if you want to see Christ in your brother. The Christ in him is BEYOND HIS BODY.
"It must reach out beyond itself, as you reached out beyond the body to LET yourselves be joined."
"Beyond the bodies that you interposed between you, and shining in the golden light"
"And place no value on your brother's body, which held him to illusions of what he is."
You have to OVERLOOK PHYSICAL OBJECTS. Your sight, your spiritual sight, has to take the place of your body's vision (which lies to you and only looks at bodies). To be forgiving, to forgive your brother, and to forgive the world, does not mean you're still SEEING THE WORLD or seeing bodies. Nor does it mean you still see exactly the same stuff you saw before but with a sense of innocence and loveliness. You are NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SEEING THIS WORLD.
Those of you who believe that God created this planet, are particularly apt to be mistaken about this. It is an error to say that your aim is to "love the world". Your love would dispel the world. "Eternity shines away the world." You cannot love what isn't really there. You can only love the reality and truth which is BEYOND the world. To want to keep the world and the bodies and keep SEEING them, and keep being BLINDED by sight of form, while trying to simultaneously reach a state of love and forgiveness, is IMPOSSIBLE. You have to let the world go. You are NOT being forgiving if you keep fixating on it.
All things in this world are the form of sin and error. You must learn to OVERLOOK these errors and see PAST them with reason. Only this way can you "see God in everything you see". It's not because you keep seeing the world AS God. You see God IN PLACE OF the world. Behind the world. He was hidden BY the world. That was why you made it, to shut him out. To forgive is to recognize that this illusory world IS NOT THERE, HAS NOT HAPPENED, AND DOES NOT REALLY EXIST. Only by looking PAST forms to the Christ BEYOND can you recognize God's Son.
When your mind stops at the outer surface of objects, you are blinded and the extension of your mind has been arrested. If you arrest the extension of the mind you foster separation and induce illness. It is unnatural to see this world and bad for your health. You need to see PAST its illusion in order for your mind to JOIN with the Christ that is hidden BEYOND the world and beyond bodies. It is the only way you can communicate and it is the only way you can love. Love shines PAST illusions and renders them unreal and irrelevant. The world is irrelevant. The body is irrelevant.
It's like in the Matrix movies... you have to learn to see the 'matrix code' instead of being deceived by illusions of a world that doesn't exist. Then you can get out of hell and get back to being in Heaven.
Only love is real and "love was never in the world". Love wants the world to end.
"Just as forgiveness overlooks all sins..."
"...brought to its forgiveness is gently overlooked, and disappears"
"He overlooks the mind and body, seeing only the face of Christ"
"Strength overlooks these things by seeing past appearances."
"By its ability to overlook what is not there, it opens up the way to truth"
"To forgive is to OVERLOOK."
"You can overlook your brother's dreams. So perfectly can you forgive him his illusions"
"For you are asked but to forgive all things that no-one ever did; to overlook what is not there; and not to look upon the unreal as reality."
"For it is your unwillingness to overlook what seems to stand between you that makes it look impenetrable"
"(body)... Its eyes ADJUST to sin, unable to overlook it in any form, and seeing it everywhere, in everything."
"Let love draw near them and overlook the body, as it will surely do"
"Thus are his sins forgiven him, for Christ has vision which has power to overlook them all. In His forgiveness they are gone. Unseen by One, they merely disappear because a vision of the holiness which lies beyond them comes to take their place."
"When you have looked upon each other with complete forgiveness, from which no error is excluded and nothing kept hidden, what mistake can there be anywhere you can not overlook? What form of suffering could block your sight, preventing you from seeing past it?"
"In your madness, you OVERLOOK REALITY COMPLETELY, and you see ONLY YOUR SPLIT MIND everywhere you look."
"To overlook nothingness is merely to judge it correctly, and because of your ability to evaluate it truly, to LET IT GO."
"See him as guiltless as I look on you, and OVERLOOK the sins he THINKS he sees within himself. "
"Condemn your Savior not because he thinks he is a body. Far beyond his dreams is his reality"
"But what is that to those who have been given one true relationship, BEYOND the body?"
"He holds not the proof of sin before his brother's eyes."
"This separating off is symbolized, in your perception, by a body which is clearly separate and a thing apart. "
"To see a brother in ANOTHER body, SEPARATE from yours, is the expression of a wish to see a little PART of him, and sacrifice the rest."
"And while you see your brother as a body, APART from you and separate in his cell, you are demanding sacrifice of him AND you. "
"What witness to the wholeness of God's Son is seen within a world of separate bodies, however much he witnesses to truth? He is INVISIBLE in such a world."
"In Heaven God's Son is NOT imprisoned in a body, nor is sacrificed in solitude to sin."
"If you but recognized how little stands between you and your awareness of your union! Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous, solid body, immovable as is a mountain. Yet, within you, there is a force which no illusions can resist. This body only seems to be immovable. This force is irresistible in truth. What, then, must happen when they come together? Can the illusion of immovability be long defended for what is quietly passed through and gone beyond?"
God's will isn't really a matter of "whether" you do God's will or not. If God wills something, it is done. But that doesn't mean you have no freedom.
ACIM teaches that "God does not coerce" and "even God would not oppose your will". Since your will is really one with God's will, or the same as, to in any way require you to will with Him or like Him would be like Him trying to force Himself against His own will.
God is not sitting there trying to "decide for you" the question of whether or not you'll will with Him or like Him. When you ask for guidance as to whether or not to do something, with the typical "should I do this?" kind of question, you'll probably be told that "you are free", instead of yes or no. In fact I get this response so often it's somewhat annoying, because I keep asking "should I" questions.
So God isn't trying to force you into anything or to choose for you whether you will with Him. Yet He does have a will, and He also wills something "for" you.
For example "God's will for me is perfect happiness". God does will or "want" that you be happy. In truth, God creates you happy, by His Will, and in your acceptance that you are as He created you, you automatically are happy. In effect, you are doing God's will by accepting your true nature.
But that doesn't mean God is pushing you into happiness, or requiring it, or forcing it, or demanding it. He loves you, and "love does not enter where it is not welcome". "Love waits on welcome, not on time".
So there is a component to your free will, that you yourself have to freely willingly will or "want" or elect to will with and like God. To be happy, God can't just force happiness on you. Anymore than he forcefully rips you of the world and puts you back in heaven, or anymore than he stops you from trying to hurt yourself against your will.
You have to be willing to be happy. And in your willingness, which is of your own free will, and yours to decide whether or not you will do so, you either choose to will what God wills for you, or you will something else. God does will that you be happy, but your refusal is up to you.
You can ask questions of guidance which may give yes or no answers, in terms of information, learning about a situation, asking whether something might be in someone's best interest etc. You can even ask for advice such as whether to buy the computer, or whether to stay at a job etc. This is part of trust. And the advice can come across as clear and wise and true, but it is still devoid of the component of force or demand.
When you move into believing that God is demanding, you are really becoming an idol worshipper. That means you see yourself as under tyrannical rulership by God, really the false ego God that you invented, and believe that God has cruel power over you to dictate what you must do. It's like cave dwellers worshipping a God in fear of retribution that, if you don't, there will be punishment. And then the admiration of God is more like trying to love something that's forcing you to do so.
"No one comes to the atonement except willingly" and "heaven is a choice I must make" means that you still, at all times, have the freedom to choose. Similarly ACIM says of angels that "they are free to establish their kingdom wherever they see fit", in reference to them setting trying to create a Kingdom on Earth. God would "prefer" that they establish their Kingdom in Heaven but he does not force them there.
Let's be clear that God very powerfully and strongly and certainly does have a will for you, a desire, an expression or broadcast of what He "himself" wants. What he supports. What he is in favor of. What he provides and gives and sees you as deserving. And whatever He wills, is DONE. But at the same time he cannot force it down your throat. If you don't want it, he waits patiently until you do. Just as if you do not want Jesus's help, he will wait patiently until you do.
Becoming one, or sharing interests, does not entail the giving up of your freedom. It really entails the reclaiming of your freedom, and freely electing to serve God. Freely assuming the function He has offered to you. Freely wanting to create with and like Him, together, as a team. Freely accepting God's harmlessness and desire that you be happy forever. Freely allowing God to give you everything, in acknowledging that He already did share everything with you in your creation. And at no point does it entail God ever "taking over" or going into a mode of demand.
God does not demand that you accept Him. You cannot really leave Him, because of His will that you be together forever. But you are free to block awareness of His will and pretend that He does not will what He does. You can deny His will just as you can deny your own will. Which has no effect on His will. And as you enter into unwillingness to will with God you enter into unwillingness to will freely, placing your will in a state of imprisonment. And then you will your own imprisonment by a tyrannical God that is really you playing the part of prison guard.
What God wills, truly, already is. And that includes the creation of you, the defining of what you are, what you are capable of, what you really have. It also includes your true nature, your innate built-in desire or character or "what you want". In a sense you could say that God "forced" you to "naturally" want to will with and like Him. To create loving living beings joyfully. To create the beautiful and divine. But at the same time, God "forced" you to also have total unconditional freedom. It sounds like a paradox but God permanently guaranteed that you can never "escape" being free.
You are a co-creator with God, as established in your creation by the fact that God DID grant you total freedom. Because in sharing all His nature and attributes and desire with you, He established you as similarly creative, powerful, unrestrained, unlimited, and completely free. And so God did bless you with the freedom to choose "whether to" will or not. Whether to will with or like God or not. But he did not grant you the freedom to throw away that freedom in any permanent way.
You can hide from what He has willed, but what He wills cannot be opposed, or undone, or attacked. His will is insurmountable and infinite and all powerful. But so is yours. As Jesus says, "Your will is as strong as mine", and He cannot oppose it anymore than God can. In fact God is incapable of opposing your freedom, because to do so would be to revoke the fact that He willed that you BE free.
God just wants you home, wants to love you, wants you to acknowledge what you are, wants you to remember your safety and certainty, wants you to be happy, wants you to feel free and unrestrained and unlimited, wants you to be willing to will with Him and like Him, and to create with Him. But it is by invitation only, and never by force or dominance. God even gives you all of His power.
"To acknowledge that all power is of (from) God is to gain all power."
So now, if you accept it freely, you are now as powerful as God, and God cannot oppose this. You have the power of God in you. You share His power and express and extend it. This makes you all powerful. As ACIM says, "I am not afraid but all powerful."
In some ways, in terms of the causation between God and His creative act of creating what you are and what you in-built nature is, and therefore what you are "likely" to want and desire when you are being true to yourself, God DOES have total power and authority and His will HAS fully "restricted" or "defined" the rules and scope of your freedom. Your function. Your ability. What you can and cannot do. That is not open for question and your rebelling against that is the authority problem and the separation.
But in other ways, when it comes to what happens AFTER your creation, how you USE your existence, how you express your nature, what you want to choose, what you are capable of creating, that is all entirely within the scope of your freedom. That is where you have absolute authority over whether you will or whether you are unwilling, whether you want to acknowledge God or not, whether you want to admit to co-creating with Him or not.
You can't stop your function and you can't change the rules and you can't make yourself be what you're not, which thankfully provides a guarantee that even in ego and dreaming you cannot actually change what you really are, and this therefore guarantees your place in Heaven forever, you DO have the freedom to deny it and pretend otherwise, to seem to want something else, and to reject your own freedom. What God wills is permanent, but since He willed your freedom you are free to deny it, but not change it.
It is in fact your freedom, within the scope of what you are, but not freedom or power OVER God, that has guaranteed that God did not enter into the insanity of separation with you. Because your will is free to block itself, but not to undo itself, you were able to "will" (un-will) to make a dream world unlike and without God. But because you were free to do this, God was not pulled into the separation or the insanity with you. In this respect you are not "one" with Him, ie you do not cause God or overpower His will, even if you dream of doing so. You can bring an illusion of suffering into your own mind, within your own self, but you cannot bring it into God.
"Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain and wholly without suffering of any kind. 10 If you deny Him you bring sin, pain and suffering into your own mind because of the power He gave it. 11 Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also deny what it creates because it is free.
You do not realize how much you have denied yourself, and how much God, in His Love, would not have it so. 2 Yet He would not interfere with you, because He would not know His Son if he were not free. 3 To interfere with you would be to attack Himself, and God is not insane. 4 When you deny Him you are insane. 5 Would you have Him share your insanity? 6 God will never cease to love His Son, and His Son will never cease to love Him. 7 That was the condition of His Son's creation, fixed forever in the Mind of God. 8 To know that is sanity. 9 To deny it is insanity. 10 God gave Himself to you in your creation, and His gifts are eternal. 11 Would you deny yourself to Him?"
You are free to imprison yourself. And untimately it IS only you that can seem imprison your own will. No one else can imprison you, not even God. And you can also set yourself free, per the secret of salvation, that you and you alone are doing this to yourself. But in order to become free, you do have to accept the "ground rules of the house of God", the nature that you have, the function He assigned to you, to serve WITH Him and accept that you are still as He created you.
It still requires you to want to accept that you can only be as God chose you to be, which the ego interprets to be a limitation, a requirement or restriction, a demand, and a lack of freedom. The ego sees it as you "having to" comply by certain rules and be a certain way in order to be in God's world. Which is true, in a sense, because the Kingdom does have conditions for entry, for acceptance, for being in it and of it. You cannot experience it without "complying" with its nature. And wanting to be of a different nature exiles you from it. You cannot hate and attack and expect to be aware of divinity.
It's the desire to be something else, something unlike God, something unhappy, something lacking freedom, something limited and less, something broken and breakable, something that God would not will, that is the ego. When you want to suffer, when you want to die, when you want to hurt, abuse and attack and murder, that is all a desire not to will like God would have you will. It's an unnatural will. It also isn't really free will, because its a way of making your will imprisoned and being unwilling. And the more unwilling you are to will with and like God, the less you acknowledge your freedom. And thereby your will SEEMS to become imprisoned, weak, diminished and hidden. Not free at all.
The ego's version of free will is really an imprisoned will which does not want to will anything. It opposes will and rebels against God. It sees itself as having a "separate will" or a will which has separated itself off from being anything like God's will, and this poses as "free will". Defiance. But it is not free will, really, it is is an illusion of freedom. It is really imprisonment, masquerading as freedom, which is why it is an illusion. And giving this up is not really a loss of anything, because the ego's version of free will is really a desire to have no freedom at all, or to have an illusion of freedom. And death is an illusion of freedom from God, who is life.
In death you attempt to assert that you have no will, no choice, no power, no desire to will anything that God wills. And this is considered "free will". It's a statement of defiance, an expression of a total unwillingness to do anything. To will anything. It's a refusal to live, because life is what God wills for you. It's a desire to not exist, because God wills that you exist. It's an expression of attack and revenge and hatred and hurt and abandonment, having done these things to yourself instead of God, knowing that God would never do these things. Death is an attempt to end your freedom and to stop God's will.
But it is in life, in resurrection, in choosing, willing, opening, trusting, having faith, uniting, sharing, loving, that you regain access to not only your own freedom and true nature, but also to God. And this flowering, blossoming, returning to how you were designed to be, does require your "little willingness". And that means a little bit willing to be like God, to acknowledge truth, to be like your true self, which is forgiving and loving and whole and healed. Which is happy and healthy and immortal. Which is joyful and peaceful and unconditionally loving.
And so you return to what you always were given, to what God willed for you already. And you open to what you have no say in, freely and gladly, knowing that it guarantees your happiness and peace and freedom. And you are restored to heaven and to the full inheritance of everything God has given you without limit. And thus your freedom leads to the restoration fo your awareness that you are the will of God and always have been. And simply by being what you really are, unlimited, you are simultaneously free. Free of coercion and demand and sacrifice and force. Free in God, because God decided you be so.
And then you resume your function, the extension of God's spirit, the joyful co-creatorship and authorship with God, and the celebration of your total freedom and unity, one with all of Creation forever.
The "one mind" or "one mindedness" is the mind of the soul in total union with all of creation.
The "right mind" or "right mindedness" is the same as miracle mindedness, the Holy Spirit's mind of atonement, a state of true perception, and the end of the dream.
The "wrong mind" or "wrong mindedness" is the same as false perception or various states of denial within perception.
HOWEVER, at times Jesus has referred to you having a right mind BEFORE the separation. e.g. "You who prefer specialness to sanity could not obtain it in your right minds. You were at peace until you asked for special favor." This suggests you and others (souls in heaven) had "right minds" prior to the separation idea. If being right-minded is being sane, it means you were sane before the separation, and right-mindedness as in atonement is a reflection of that.
It seems the right mind "ends" when one mindedness takes over but you cannot become LESS right-minded when this happens, so one-mindedness includes right mindedness.
"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 Holy Spirit is nothing more than your own right mind. He was also mine. The Bible says, "May the mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus," and uses this as a BLESSING. It is the blessing of miracle-mindedness. It asks that you may think as I thought, joining with me in Christ-thinking."
"A major step in the Atonement plan is to undo error at ALL levels. Illness, which is really "not Right Mindedness", is the result of level confusion in the sense that it always entails the misbelief that what is amiss in one level can adversely affect another."
"We said in a previous section that the miracle is an expression of miracle-Mindedness. Miracle-Mindedness merely means Right-Mindedness in the sense that we are now using it. Right-Mindedness neither exalts nor depreciates the mind of the miracle worker nor of the miracle receiver. However, as a creative act, the miracle need not await the Right-Mindedness of the receiver. In fact, its purpose is to restore him TO his Right Mind. But it is essential that the miracle worker be in his Right Mind, or he will be unable to reestablish Right-Mindedness in someone else. "
"In this sense, when their behavior is unstable, they are obviously disagreeing with God's idea of the Creation. This is a fundamental right of man, although not one he would care to exercise if he were in his Right Mind."
"Biblical quotation relates to the healing of a devil-possessed man, in which the sufferer was subsequently found healed, in his right mind, and sitting at feet of Jesus."
"He is invariable as the peace in which you dwell, and of which the Holy Spirit, that which is nothing more than your right Mind, reminds you."
"The ego, which is not real, attempts to persuade the mind, which IS real, that it IS its own learning device, and that the learning device is more real than IT is. No-one in his right mind could POSSIBLY believe this, and no-one in his right mind DOES believe it. "
"Innocent (or true) perception means that you NEVER misperceive, and ALWAYS see truly. More simply, this means that you never see what does not exist in reality. Whenever you lack confidence in what someone else will do, you are attesting to your belief that he is not in his Right Mind. This is hardly a miracle-based frame of reference. It also has the disastrous effect of denying (incorrect use) the essentially creative power of the miracle. The miracle perceives everything AS IT IS. If nothing but the truth exists (and this is really redundant in statement, because what is not true CANNOT exist) Right-Minded seeing cannot see ANYTHING BUT perfection. We have said many times that ONLY what God creates, or what man creates with the same will, has any real existence. This, then, is all that the innocent can see. They do not suffer from the delusions of the Separated ones."
"The world, in its original connotation, 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 either of 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. "
"Only One-Mindedness is without confusion. A separate, or divided, mind MUST be confused. A divided mind is uncertain by definition. It HAS to be in conflict because it is out of accord with itself. "
"The Holy Spirit is the mind of the Atonement. It represents a state of mind that comes close enough to one-mindedness that transfer is at last possible. As you well know, transfer depends on common elements in the old learning and the new situation to which it is transferred. Perception is not knowledge, but it can be TRANSFERRED to knowledge, or CROSS OVER into it. It might even be more helpful here to use the literal meaning "carried over," for the last step is taken by God. "
"Punishment as a concept is in total opposition to Right-Mindedness. The aim of the Final Judgment is to RESTORE Right-Mindedness TO man. "
"This is what his own Right-Mindedness cannot but dictate. The purpose of time is solely to "give him time" to achieve this judgment. It is his own perfect judgment of his own creation. When everything that he retains is lovable, there is no reason for any fear to remain in him. This IS his part in the Atonement. "
"NEVER confuse right-with wrong-mindedness. Responding to ANY form of miscreation with anything EXCEPT a DESIRE TO HEAL (or a miracle) is an expression of this confusion. "
"Only Right-Mindedness CAN create in a way that has any real effect."
"True denial is a very powerful protective device. You can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you. This kind of denial is NOT a concealment device, but a correction device. The "Right Mind" of the mentally healthy DEPENDS on it. "
"You who prefer specialness to sanity could not obtain it in your right minds. You were at peace until you asked for special favor. And God did not give it. For the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this of a Father who truly loved His Son. Therefore, you made of Him an UNloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father COULD give. And the peace of God's Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his REAL father, having attacked his glorious equality WITH Him. "
This pretty much explains why you have the freedom to deny God.
"If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of suffering. But to do this, you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgment of your Father IS the acknowledgment of yourself as you ARE. Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free.
You do not realize how much you have denied yourself, and how much God, in His love, would not have it so. Yet He would not interfere with you, because He would not know His Son if he were not free. To interfere with you would be to attack HIMSELF, and God is not insane. When you denied HIM, you WERE insane. Would you have Him SHARE your insanity? God will never cease to love His Son, and His Son will never cease to love Him. That was the condition of His Son's Creation, fixed forever in the Mind of God. To know that is sanity. To deny it is insanity. God gave HIMSELF to you in your Creation, and His gifts ARE eternal. Would you deny yourself to Him?"
Note also that "separation" as in the theoretical idea that you CAN BE separate (which is impossible), is totally different from "THE separation", which is another name for the fall of man, the tiny mad idea. We DID in fact have the idea, we DID believe it, and we DID "fall". This is why there appears to be a facebook. BUT, the fall is not actual real separation, it's just belief in it and a denial that actual separation is impossible.
"The Separation (not ACTUAL separation, but the state of believing it's possible) HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial. However, to concentrate on error is merely a further misuse of legitimate psychic mechanisms. The true corrective procedure, which has already been described as the proper use of the spiritual eye (or true vision), is to accept the error temporarily, BUT ONLY as an indication that IMMEDIATE correction is mandatory. This establishes a state of mind in which the Atonement can be accepted without delay."
So we did have the tiny mad idea, we did go into it through belief (which is really denial), and we did find ourselves in a "lower order reality". But this state in which we SEEM separate is not ACTUAL separation or real separation, which is impossible. It's just us MISTAKEDLY believing that it's possible and happening.
THE separation, the fall from Heaven, did occur. But it was not an actual separation.
"The separation was not a loss of perfection, but a failure in communication. "
The failure to communicate (to receive, to give equally), resulted in a state of denial, not listening, being unaware of perfection, a breakdown in the experience of oneness. It did not change anything perfect, it just closed the communication channels to a degree.
"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. This is an ongoing process, not in time, but in eternity. God's extending outward, though not His completeness, is blocked when the Sonship does not communicate with Him as one. So He thinks, "My Children sleep, and must be awakened.""
"Those who communicate fear are promoting attack, and attack always BREAKS communication, and therefore makes communion impossible."
"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. Together, we can laugh them BOTH away, and understand that time can NOT intrude upon eternity. It IS a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which MEANS there is no time."
"Adam's "sin" could have touched none of you, had you not believed that it was the FATHER Who drove him out of Paradise. For it is in that belief that knowledge of the Father was lost, for it is only those who do not understand Him that COULD believe it."
"When the "lies of the serpent" were introduced, they were specifically called lies because they are not true. When man listened, all he heard was untruth. He does not have to continue to believe what is not true, unless he chooses to do so. All of his miscreations can disappear in the well known "twinkling of an eye", because it is a visual misperception.
Man's spiritual eye can sleep, but as will shortly appear in the notes (reference Bob, elevator operator) a sleeping eye can still see. One translation of the Fall, a view emphasized by Mary Baker Eddy, and worthy of note, is that "a deep sleep fell upon Adam". While the Bible continues to associate this sleep as a kind of anaesthetic utilized for protection of Adam during the creation of Eve, Mrs. Eddy was correct in emphasizing that nowhere is there any reference made to his waking up. While Christian Science is clearly incomplete, this point is much in its favor."
"What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substance-less, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was."
"We have discussed the fall or Separation before, but its meaning must be clearly understood, without symbols. The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought that is PERFECTLY real in time, though not in Eternity. All beliefs are real to the believer.
The fruit of only ONE tree was "forbidden" to man in his symbolic garden. But God could not have forbidden it, or it could not have BEEN eaten. If God knows His children, and I assure you he does, would he have put them in a position where their own destruction was possible?"
"Eating of the tree of knowledge is a symbolic expression for incorporating into the self the ability for self-creation. This is the ONLY sense in which God and His souls are NOT co-creators. The belief that they ARE is implicit in the "self concept," a concept now made acceptable by its WEAKNESS, and explained by a tendency of the self to create an IMAGE of itself."
"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."
"The intrusion of the ability to perceive, which is inherently judgmental, was introduced only after the Separation. No one has been sure of anything since then."
"You who prefer specialness to sanity could not obtain it in your right minds. You were at peace until you asked for special favor. And God did not give it. For the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this of a Father who truly loved His Son. Therefore, you made of Him an UNloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father COULD give. And the peace of God's Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his REAL father, having attacked his glorious equality WITH Him.
In peace he needed nothing, and asked for nothing. In war he DEMANDED everything, and FOUND nothing. For how could the gentleness of love respond to his demands, EXCEPT by departing in peace, and returning to the Father? If the son did not wish to REMAIN in peace, he could not remain at all. For a darkened mind cannot live in the light, and it must seek a place of darkness, where it can believe it is where it is NOT. God did not ALLOW this to happen. But you DEMANDED that it happen, and therefore believed that it was so."
"Whenever projection in its inappropriate sense is utilized, it ALWAYS implies that some emptiness (or lack of everything) must exist, and that it is within man's ability to put his own ideas there INSTEAD of the truth. If you will consider carefully what this entails, the following will become quite apparent:
First, the assumption is implicit that what God has Created can be changed by the mind of Man.
Second, the concept that what is perfect can be rendered imperfect (or wanting) is intruded.
Third, the belief that man can distort the Creations of God (including himself) has arisen, and is tolerated.
Fourth, that since man can create himself, the direction of his own creation is up to him.
These related distortions represent a picture of what actually occurred in the Separation. None of this existed before, nor does it actually exist now."
"The Garden of Eden, which is described as a literal garden in the Bible, was not originally an actual garden at all. It was merely a mental state of complete need-lack. Even in the literal account, it is noteworthy that the pre-Separation state was essentially one in which man needed nothing."
"Free will is the attribute of the mind, NOT the Soul. The Soul always remains changeless, because it never leaves the sight of God.
The Creation of the Soul is already fully accomplished. The mind, if it votes to do so, becomes a medium by which the Soul can create along the line of its own creation. 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.
To "change your mind" means to place it at the disposal of True authority. The miracle is thus a sign that the mind has elected to be guided by Christ in HIS service. The abundance of Christ is the natural result of choosing to follow him."
So you see, we are IN a state of sleep, dreaming, denying, pretending not to be as God created us, imagining things are true which are not, being unwilling, and trying to give it reality through belief. But none of it is true, or really happening, what it represents (an actual separation) is fictional, and it's just an illusion masquerading as a separation.
"You are safe in God, dreaming of exile, but perfectly capable of waking to reality."
I believe I have received. Thank you God.
2000 years ago Jesus said "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."
Gratitude is an attitude of fully appreciating what is already present, or has been already given.
What you may not realize is, if it appears you do not have what you want, if you be pre-grateful for it ahead of time, believing that you have already received it as if receiving was "in the past", it comes to you!!
There is a law here. The law is, that where there is gratitude, the thing you are grateful for is being appreciated and therefore it must be present. Should you be grateful for the presence of something that the world seems to not contain, it will materialize. It has to, because gratitude extends and believes in what it is grateful for.
In other words, gratitude CREATES. God created through gratitude because gratitude appreciates what already is and God appreciates - is aware of and fully embraces - what He already is, which creates more of the same.
This seems like complete nonsense to the ego, how can gratitude create when the thing to be grateful for doesn’t seem to exist yet? The ego thought system is only grateful for what it "gets" in the future, not for what is HAS. It’s non existence is an illusion because all that God provided is ALREADY GIVEN, merely hidden temporarily. And so lacking it is NOT TRUE.
It operates similarly to the law of forgiveness. Forgiveness is fore-giveness, ie it gives love and truth ahead of time proactively SO THAT nothing goes wrong and therefore there is nothing to forgive. It brings about a state in which it’s own law is extended to ENSURE there is no problem.
Similarly, gratitude to God for what he HAS GIVEN, pro-actively CAUSES it to be present, acknlowdging that it must already be here, and therefore expressing and creating it so that it does not seem to be lacking. Gratitude undoes lack or the illusion of lack, just as forgiveness undoes the need to forgive by removing the illusion of unforgiveness or judgement. And remember that miracles supply a lack and that is why they heal, therefore gratitude is miraculous!
God’s power works in the opposite direction to the ego. The ego says, I presently lack and therefore need something and so I "desire"it and then tries to use its own will power to force it to happen, without God.
This morning I found myself doing this because I was "commanding" that something be healed, it was not working, the problem seemed real and not healed yet and I became quite intense and demanding about it. Then I became frustrated and angry. I had to admit that I was trying to force it myself and was using my own will. This wasn’t working. So in frustration I gave up, which was a good thing.
God works in the opposite direction. He does not focus on the lack of what you want, because absence is the idea that God is absent. He does not focus on the answer being in the future because that reinforces the idea that God is not here right now, and that He has been here already this whole time. He does not complain because complaint is the opposite of gratitude and complaint is a failure to appreciate what is present.
Complaint attacks what is here now, gratitude loves what is here now. However, this does NOT MEAN that you should love and be great full for what is currently showing up in form! Form is an illusion! Be grateful for the shit the ego gave you and you will keep it! You have to ignore form because God did not create it. You have to love and be grateful only for what God has given, what may seem invisible to you at first.
So to bring forth a miracle healing or manifestation from God, we must ACT LIKE God’s truth and in line with God’s nature. It’s no use attacking what is, or complaining, or trying to make it go away with intensity or will power, or to desire what you want as if you do not have it. Those are not forms of asking, or forms of receiving. They focus on lack and make it real.
The ego’s attempts to "get"are guaranteed to fail because they do everything other than be like God, everything other than receiving His will, and everything which actually pushes away what you are trying to bring about. As usual, the ego makes it appear like it is asking and desiring and wanting, when in fact it is doing the opposite. Seek and do not find. To desire something on the basis that God did not already supply it, and therefore it is not here now, and only exists in the separated state of the future, is a GUARANTEE that you will continue to lack and suffer!
If God’s nature is the truth and we are asking for God‘s help, then we first need to get rid of the idea of "needing help." Instead, let us acknowledge what is TRUE ALREADY. You have already received God’s healing. God already established your perfection when He created you, which you can think of as in the past. So the perfection, restoration, healing, what you want, is not in the future. It must be already present because God alreaday established it in the past, and so it’s is already here, now.
This seems somehow impossible to ego thinking. Is it even possible to get your mind to believe that it has already received what is already given by God, even if it *appears* that it isn’t showing up yet? Yes, it is possible! Is it possible to appreciate and be grateful for, what currently appears to not even exist yet? Yes!
That your perfection appears to not be showing up right now is an illusion. It is merely blocked. Any current appearance of you not being or having what God has already given, only means that your perfection IS here already but it is hididen. The notion that it is not here, showing up as illusions of "my healed self must be in the future", is an ego lie. Your healed self IS already here. Forms that are currently showing up can be blinding. They are not really there.
You must just bring about the recognition of, gratitude for, appreciation of and belief in the truth, that God has ALREADY GIVEN what you seem to lack, literally "in the past". Gratitude receives, by focusing on the acknowledgement of it being here now, of the healing having already occurred, and truly believing that this is so because it is in accord with God’s nature.
Eventually once you have let go of all of the egoic ways you are trying to bring about a result, you need to get purely into the mindset and belief that you HAVE received from God already, regardless of what is showing up, and regardless of whether it’s absence seems to continue to show up for a while. You have to ignore all ego signals, what form looks like, what conditions seem to persist, or any fearful doubting ego thoughts about it having not worked.
If you can get your mind into this seemingly "backwards" way of thinking, which boils down to "I believe I have already been given this, I have already received it, and I am grateful to God", or even more simply, "thank you", and hold onto that belief, God will answer. Believing it is important. It has to be true for you that you feel that you HAVE received it, even if it has not materialized in form yet, and you develop that conviction by thanking God.
If you are thanking God for having already supplied your lack, then it implies you HAVE, therefore it is true, and therefore you believe it. This helps you to see through any illusion that you lack or continue to be sick. It gives you a feeling of certainty and joy in spite of any illusory conditions, and you will stay true to that belief in spite of lingering forms or circumstances. And that’s means, you are now HAVING FAITH.
Faith is a state of genuine trust and knowing, not wishful thinking or hope. It is rooted firmly in the believing that God has already provided and therefore it is a DONE DEAL. It is belief that God’s way or truth is TRUE. This belief will ignore and pay no attention to what anyone says or any doubts or anything showing up in form. It bypasses illusions and all ego signals. It transcends what appears to be showing up, knowing that God’s HAS provided.
If you are completely certain that you have received, it will give you strong faith ie strong belief, which will make it impossible for you to be swayed by external illusions or claims to the contrary. It will also give you a sense that you know the days of your sickness are now limited because you believe God more than you believe the ego illusions.
This takes you beyond the ego’s nature. Now you are playing by God’s rules, according to His will for you that you be divinely happy and healthy. That you ARE that already, and merely need manifest it by focusing on it and believing in its presence. Jesus says to be vigilant only for the Kingdom of God. This is what it means. To believe only God’s nature and to align yourself with it and receive it as God already gave it. I am still as God created me says the same thing.
You are still as God created you, therefore the perfect Self that God created before time began is still here now, it has been fully given, it is true of you, it is present already, you are grateful for it, you believe in it and know it to be true, you trust it, you allow and accept it (atonement principle), and it is therefore your reality.
Believing this way, having this faith in a God, makes you supernatural.
A classical definition of sin might be that it's some kind of attack you perform which is "against the rules." Some breaking of the law or some unholy evil act which is disallowed and undermines everything that is good. In A Course in Miracles, the definition of sin is a lot broader than this. For example:
"The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible."
This suggests that the whole world is made of sin. And this isn't just a speculation, because ACIM goes on to say that physical matter is in fact a "granite block of sin" masquerading as something solid.
"The body's eyes see ONLY form. They cannot see BEYOND what they were MADE to see. And they were made to look on error, and NOT see past it. Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see ONLY illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside FORM of nothing. To this distorted form of vision, the OUTSIDE of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true."
Here we're told that the body's physical sight can only see error and not see past it. An error which is not "overlooked", is not forgiven, and so it is regarded as sin, demanding punishment. Everything that the physical sight sees is an illusion, therefore, because the physical sight is completely unforgiving and cannot transcend the illusion to reach the truth. These illusions - really a reference to anything the body can see - therefore all things physical - is called "the granite block of sin." Jesus uses the term "granite" symbolically because this is a very hard form of physical material.
"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master."
So now the physical body, which is part of the physical environment, is made by projecting the idea of sin outward and turning it into flesh, which symbolizes sin. Effectively everything that we regard as physical is made of the idea of sin, projected as physical matter. Physical matter comprises "outside surfaces" which you cannot see past with the physical eyes, and is really "nothing" pretending to be a solid block.
"Sin is the proclamation that attack is real, and guilt is JUSTIFIED."
Sin is also the idea of attack. If attack is real, then the world is real, because "the world was made as an attack on God." Being "the world of sin", the world of bodies was made as an attack on God. Its forms testify that God's son has been attacked. That is, "the world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son." So now all physical forms are a form of attack, or attempted attack, upon God and his son. And this is sin, because indeed if attack were possible, the world would be sinful.
"Sickness is but another name for sin."
Here Jesus goes further to include that any form of sickness is also the same thing as sin. Whether it be a headache or a broken body or a heart attack or a wound or severe death. These are all signs and proofs that sin is real. In fact, we even make the body sick to try to prove that our brother has sinned against us, per "brother at your hand I die", and the willingness to use the body as "a picture of crucifixion" to demonstrate that our brother is the one who caused our suffering.
"Sin is insanity."
Sin and insanity are also the same thing. Which means, the entire ego thought system, all mental illness, and all its physical expressions, is sin. Any belief in an opposite to God, any attack thought or grievance, all forms of sickness, all unforgiveness, it is all sin. This include all false perceptions, all physical perceptions, all body identification, all fixating on what things appear to be physically, and all blindness by perception of form, all testifies that sin is real. These are the beliefs of an insane mind which lacks vision and is unconscious.
This also ties in with the fact that sin is death, because "without the idea of death (sin) there is no world." "Sickness is but a little death", and since sickness is another form of sin, sin is death. This relates closely also to the fact that "the wages of sin is death", ie if you are in sin it logically follows that sin demands punishment and therefore you as a body must suffer and die in order to atone for your sin.
"They do not realize that, to deny God, is to deny their own identity, and in this sense, the wages of sin IS death. The sense is very literal; -- denial of Life perceives its opposite, as ALL forms of denial replace what IS, with what is NOT."
The denial of life perceives death, which is the opposite of life. Sin is the denial of life, and therefore induces death. All forms of death are forms of sin.
"If sin is real then punishment is just, and cannot be escaped."
"If sin is real, salvation must be pain."
"Pain is the cost of sin, and suffering can never be escaped if sin is real."
"If sin is real Its offering is death, and meted out in cruel form to match the vicious wishes in which sin is born."
Essentially, anything other than the truth of God, is the idea of sin. Just as it is also the idea of fear, and the idea of guilt, and the idea of sickness, and the idea of death. It is all the same single system of darkness, delusion and insanity. And WITHIN this system of insanity lives "the world", the unforgiven world, in which only the physical is regarded as real because "only the body makes the world seem real."
"The world is false perception."
When your vision is narrowed to see and focus only on the physical world or what the physical senses testify to, you are blinded by perception of form. And now you see only sin. Which means seeing any body, any physical sickness, any symptoms, any problems, any kind of suffering or unhappiness, any breakdowns or breakages, and dangers, any reasons to be afraid, this all means you've entered into a sinful perception and are now making sin real.
And this is the stuff of nightmares, because once you have closed your mind to the openness of innocence, you've decided only sin exists and cannot be escaped. When the mind is shutting out the light of truth and is becoming unforgiving, which means it is attacking and separating, other people will appear to be "only bodies", as if they are purely physical, with no component to them that is anything but physical. This is an imprisonment of yourself and them anchoring you both into the level of form and inescapable problems.
"For bodies cannot forgive."
To be in sin is to be insane, to perceive falsely, to give reality to physicality, to be unforgiving, to be in fear, to feel horrified and terrified in a nightmare, to regard problems as utterly unsolvable, to feel imprisoned and locked in with no hope, to believe all sickness is real and permanent, to forget to laugh, and to hate yourself.
There HAS to be more than the physical in order for there to be innocence. There HAS to be more than bodies, more than physical suffering, more than physical problems, and more than a physical world. There HAS to be a transcendence of all things physical if there is to be forgiveness, because to forgive is to overlook and NOT see illusions. Illusions not recognized are a false perception which is horribly blinding and upsetting. Illusions recognized dispels them and disregards the physical as nothing real at all.
"There is no sin", in ultimate truth, because "nothing real can be threatened." The immortal cannot be sick or suffer or die. God's creations are permanently perfect. There cannot be an attack and nothing can be in danger. Therefore, there cannot be a physical world, bodies cannot be real, and suffering cannot be true. Problems cannot really exist, and you cannot be alone.
Given that the world of bodies is the world of unforgiveness and sin, in which sin is not recognized as a mistake, recognizing the world as a mistake also recognizes that it is false. Mistakes can be undone and corrected. Forgiving the world is its undoing. First the veil of sin is lifted away so that we can recognize it is nothing but an illusion, we see through and past its illusion of being real and solid and physical, and see beyond it to the light of the real world. And in this light, the physical world, seen only in false perception, is gone forever.
When you are confused by believing the ego's world, you assign to illusions all the properties of reality. You take the properties of God away from God and from your real self, and give them to the non-existent world.
This is how you give your power away and empower sickness. You assign the permanence of heaven to make sickness seem permanent. You give God's irreversibility to sickness to make it irreversible sin. You try to make it last by trying to give it immortality. You impart truth to it to try to have it be the truth. You make it valid, and believe it is whole, and see it as natural and real.
Then having assigned all the properties of God, heaven and reality to an illusion, you are now faced with the natural relationship to these things. What is real cannot be changed, thus it seems sickness cannot be changed. What is permanent is always there, so sickness becomes irreversible to you. Eternal life is assigned to the sickness meaning it will last forever.
You give all power to the sickness and strip it from God and from yourself, leaving you in a state of powerlessness and weakness. You now see that sickness has become your God. The God of sickness. And it looms over you with strength and resistance and threat. And as you look upon sickness made real, you are looking the God of sickness in the face, and he is insurmountable.
"Allegiance to the denial of God is the ego's religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival. But consider what this means to YOU. UNLESS you are sick you cannot keep the gods you made, for only in sickness could you possibly WANT them."
"The rituals of the god of sickness are strange and very demanding. Joy is never permitted, for depression is the sign of allegiance to him. Depression MEANS that you have foresworn God."
You now actually worship sickness and death because you have assigned all the properties of God to an illusory world. Which means you actually believe the world IS God. If God is its creator, it is reality, and God is the world. And now sickness can never be changed because it is against God's will. And death is his doing. And you have no power over it.
In this perspective, you cannot but help but be AFRAID OF the power of sickness. It looms over you. It seems real. You cannot surmount it. You cannot even dare approach it for the belief that if you try to heal it you will fail. You see yourself as weak and powerless before it. It torments you and you suffer at its whim. And as it turns for the worst you have no freedom and no choice but to suffer more intensely. There seems to be nothing you can do.
In this perspective or way of perceiving, this belief system, you cannot but see yourself as powerless and incapable of miracles. You cannot possibly heal a real illusion. You cannot forgive it because it has reality and permanence and irreversibility. What you need is an entire change of perspective, a totally different way of regarding the world, and this fundamental pivotal change MUST take place in the PREMISE of the entire system.
If you do not uproot the whole system by recognizing that the world DOES NOT have the properties of God or reality, your efforts will continue to be undermined. You have to realize that God IS NOT the world, DID NOT create it, and therefore NOTHING in it has the properties of heaven. This means recognizing that the world IS an illusion, it is nothing, is does not exist, there is no sickness, every single illusion is ONE THING - a fake dream, a fiction, and to not BELIEVE or BUY INTO a single piece of it on any basis.
What you need is to change the premise of the whole thing. The whole world has to be considered to NOT have ANY of the properties of God. It cannot be thought to be really happening, it cannot be believed to be irreversible, it cannot be assigned power, it cannot be given credit, it cannot be seen as true, and it must not be regarded as alive. It is a dream of death.
"The world you see is an illusion of a world, God did not create it."
"Death the central dream from which all illusions stem."
"There is no world."
Changing your mind about the world means recognizing IT IS NOT OF GOD. And you must "deny anything not of God any power to affect you". "This is a powerful protective device."
Simply, by reassigning ALL POWER TO GOD, all life to God, all truth to God, all reality to God, all permanence to God, all irreversibility to God, all healing to God, and all existence to God, taking it AWAY from the world of sickness, you strip the world of what you THOUGHT was a big looming powerful enemy. Sickness stops looking like a threat. Sickness stops having a sense of unmoveability. It stops seeming serious. It stops having reality or truth. It stops being a nightmare. And it stops looking like it even exists. And what does not even exist cannot be DIFFICULT to heal.
When it is recognized as NOTHING, your relationship to sickness is vastly different. Instead of being confronted with an immensely powerful enemy which you cannot influence, you instead see YOURSELF as immensely powerful and FULLY able to influence sickness. And IT is now recognized as weak and frail and powerless to resist you. Because you now have the power of God in you because you have GIVEN all power back to God. And thus you have gained it. And it has been TAKEN AWAY from sickness.
"To recognize that all power is of God is to gain all power."
Give to God what is God's, and everything will be made right. Only God can heal the sickness because only God IS eternal life. And only God HAS power. And God IS real. And only God's laws apply. And only His truth is the truth. And HE has immortality and permanence. And you with Him as His extension. And NOW you are miraculous because you are now in a dominant relationship to the world. You have power OVER the world and over the body rather than the other way around, BECAUSE IT IS NOTHING AND NOT REAL AND DOES NOT EXIST.
Only in this perspective is it possible to escape the hierarchy of illusions or the illusion of difficulty. Sickness only SEEMS difficult to heal or change or affect BECAUSE you inappropriately assign it GOD'S PROPERTIES. And you have no power over God. You are confused about it. You think it IS reality. You think it IS ALIVE. You think it has power. It does not. If it HAS NO power, then it does not present ANY challenge, it can EASILY be influenced, it is EFFORTLESS to change it, and IT DOES NOT RESIST AT ALL. Therefore you who are all powerful WITH God in you can overthrow it, manipulate it, change it and demonstrate healing.
"There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is ***you who have the power to dominate all things you see*** by merely recognizing what you are."
"Do not look to the god of sickness for healing, but only to the God of love, for healing is the acknowledgment of Him. When you acknowledge Him (that all of his properties BELONG to him), you will KNOW that He has never ceased to acknowledge you, and that in His acknowledgment OF you lies your Being. You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do."
Make sickness be FALSE, UNTRUE, UNREAL, NON-EXISTENT, IMPOSSIBLE, UNNATURAL, FINITE, LIMITED, NOTHINGNESS, ILLUSION, POWERLESS, NOT THERE, CAUSELESS, NOWHERE.
Only in this view is there no grounds for you to believe or perceive that it can resist your will. And now the power of God which you have correctly given back to God, operates through you, to have power OVER sickness and death and the world. You can then overcome the world, raise the dead, and perform miracles. Because there is NO DIFFICULTY, NO hierarchy, and NO effort needed to do so. Because the Holy Spirit heals through you with the Power of God.
There is no difficulty in miracles once all power is given back to God, because the world is recognized as HAVING no power to resist His will. What is nothing cannot be hard to overcome, and as a miracle worker you don't have to do HARD things. In fact, miracle working should be easy and effortless. Even literally that you do practically nothing while the Holy Spirit does everything.
In the separation, you confused the true and the false. You assigned God's properties to the false world, BUT YOU ALSO assigned false properties to God. This turned God into an evil enemy to you in your perception of him. This was necessary in order to believe that the world you made was something you would want instead.
This means you actually framed God as opposite to his nature. As if God is evil, destructive, attacking, sinful, deadly, sick, suffering, weak, powerless, unreal, illusory, vengeful and special. While many people focus on how they are going to forgive the false world, which entails lifting truth from it, you ALSO have to forgive God and lift the FALSE from him.
You may not realize that you have assigned false properties to God. But you have in fact framed God as a special false God. You have tried to make out that God is evil and an enemy. The ego believes this. It wants nothing to do with God because IT believes and perceives God as "everything evil", while seeing itself as holy.
"No-one who hates but is afraid of love, and therefore MUST he be afraid of God."
"You are more afraid of God than of the ego, and love cannot enter where it is not welcome."
"And being deceived in yourself you ARE deceived in your Father, in Whom no deceit is possible."
This means you do in fact have within you various reasons to avoid God, to fear God, to not want God, and to hate God. Part of you wants God to be dead. You have to therefore actually forgive God of the projections and misperceptions that you have laid upon him, and recognize that he is not those things.
It is your attempt to AVOID looking at your "attack on God" blasphemy that compels you to focus on forgiving the WORLD instead. You do not want to look at this because you actually believe that your attack on God has made you GUILTY. And you do not want to revisit the idea of approaching God because you believe it means admitting to having sinned against him, and you think he's going to kill you for it.
"You do NOT see that EVERY sin and EVERY condemnation which you perceive and justify IS an attack upon your Father."
"Your brothers and your Father have become VERY fearful to you, and you would bargain with them for a few special relationships, in which you think you see some scraps of safety."
"For through guilt, you EXCLUDE your Father and your brothers FROM yourself."
"It is your Father Whom you would defend against."
If you think that God is evil you will not want to go home. If you think the world is NOT evil you will not want to go home. You've turned God into an enemy and do not trust him. That's why there is a whole process of "the development of trust". You have misplaced your trust in the ego world. You have to learn to trust God again.
"You CHOSE to forget your Father, but you did NOT will to do so."
To trust God you have to be willing to accept the possibility that God is not the scary monster that you think he is. That he is not going to hurt or attack or reject you. That he still loves you because he is still love. You have to take away from God the false accusations you've made that he is evil and vicious and not to be trusted. You have hurled abuse at God and have accused him of sin. This has to be undone.
You will only approach God, tentatively, if you can have a little willingness to be mistaken about him. And this requires that you trust and have faith that he isn't out to destroy you. You have to be wrong about God, because you have become mistaken about him and his nature. You cannot conceive of him without a body, or think of him as anything but selfish like your ego. This has to be reversed.
"And either the ego, which you made, IS your father, or its whole thought system will not stand."
"Your gods are nothing, because your Father did not create them." "You who have been unmerciful unto yourselves, do not remember your Father's love."
This aspect of forgiveness doesn't seem to be talked about very much in ACIM circles. A lot of time is spent talking about forgiving the world and its contents and the people that piss you off, but very little about looking at the fact that you rejected God, hate God, do not want God, and are trying to destroy him and his son. This picturing of God as an enemy has to be undone in order for you to feel safe to be intimate with God again.
You have to unlearn your rejection of God and learn to love him again. Perhaps the real reason that many people do NOT focus on forgiving God, or looking at how they have framed God as evil, is because it would suggest tremendous guilt and fear, to admit that you have tried to attack and kill off God himself. Fortunately God has not held any of this against you and dispels it entirely, and is his hands are held open in welcome to receive you as his most loved creation once again.
To want to go towards your brothers in Christ, to want to forgive anything, you have to be willing to forgive God. You have accused him and must correct this. The world was made as an attack on God. You can forgive the world but you also have to forgive the idea that you've attacked God. You have made God into a false God and have redefined what you think God is like. This has to be corrected. You have to learn to love God again, and you can start by admitting that you don't.
"You who prefer specialness to sanity could not obtain it in your right minds. You were at peace until you asked for special favor, and God did not give it. For the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this of a Father who truly loved His Son. Therefore, you made of Him an UNloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father COULD give. And the peace of God's Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his REAL Father, having attacked his glorious equality WITH Him."
"Allegiance to the denial of God is the ego's religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival."
"The "attack on God" made His Son think he was fatherless, and out of his depression he made the god of depression."
"Do not look to the god of sickness for healing, but only to the God of love, for healing is the acknowledgment of Him."
"The god of the crucifixion demands that he crucify, and his worshippers obey."
"You MADE the god of sickness, and BY making him, you made yourself ABLE to hear him. But you did NOT create him, because he is NOT the Will of the Father. He is therefore not eternal, and will be UNmade for you, the instant you signify your willingness to accept ONLY the eternal."
"You were willing to accept even death to deny your Father."
"You have interpreted the separation as a means which you have made for BREAKING your communication with your Father."
"You can give up the god of sickness for your brothers; in fact, you would HAVE to do so, if you give him up for yourself. For if you see him anywhere, YOU are accepting him."
"GOD is not at war with the god of sickness which you made, but YOU are. He is the symbol of willing AGAINST God, and you are afraid of him BECAUSE he cannot be reconciled with God's will. If you ATTACK him, you will make him real to you. But if you refuse to worship him, in whatever form he may appear to you, and wherever you think you see him, he will disappear into the nothingness out of which he was made."
"Embodiment of fear, the host of sin, god of the guilty and the lord of all illusions and deceptions, does the thought of death seem mighty. For it seems to hold all living things within its withered hand; all hopes and wishes in its blighting grasp; all goals perceived but in its sightless eyes. The frail, the helpless and the sick bow down before its image, thinking it alone is real, inevitable, worthy of their trust. For it alone will surely come."
"There is either a god of fear or One of Love."
"Or will you make another idol to replace it? For the god of cruelty takes many forms."
"The ego is not a traitor to God to Whom treachery is impossible. But it IS a traitor TO YOU who believe you have been treacherous to your Father." "You who have played that you are lost to hope, abandoned by your Father, left alone in terror in a fearful world made mad by sin and guilt, be happy now. That game is over."
I've recently been diving into doing more physical things than usual. Clearing out old junk. Reorganizing rooms. Throwing out old furniture. Buying and assembling and installing new furniture. Changing layouts. Cleaning. Just lots of physical stuff.
And while I do these things, on the one hand I feel more appreciative of some of the appeal of physical objects. Things look nice. The function better. They have flaws. But at the same time, I am seeing them more as all the same. Instead of seeing individual objects, I'm looking at the laws that drive them, and their sameness. The laws of physics which apply to them all.
Just about everything that happens in the world is more or less driven by physics. Snow melting. Ice forming. Objects falling over. Soup boiling over. Things not staying put. Stuff dropped on the floor from a pile of laundry. Bumping into things. Making food. Cleaning the house. It's all just basically physics interactions. Chemistry, forces and energies and forms and states and so on.
It's becoming part of my forgiveness practice to recognize that almost everything that happens physically is simply what was inevitable, given the states of the objects and the physics that's applying to them. The world is mindless and very automatic in its obedience to the laws of physics. Stuff just does what stuff does. It doesn't do it to specifically spite you, it just blindly follows the rules.
Objects falling off shelves, bumping into things, stuff dropping on the floor, pens rolling off desks, garbage cans getting full, water boiling, leaving the keys somewhere, changes in temperature, fingers trapped in a door, knees banging into table legs, hands cold in the winter, all the just normal everyday stuff. It's all just the laws of physics playing out. It's just part of the system.
It's almost like this whole world is just one big machine, sitting there poised to do what it was always set up to do from the beginning. Which makes everything that happens somewhat inevitable. If enough force is given to an object, it falls off its resting place. It has to because the laws say so. If enough wind blows, the branch will break. If enough impact is made, the window breaks.
In a sense then the world's laws are laws of inevitability, based on the idea of original sin demanding death as punishment. Kind of a system of logic, the laws of chaos are simply sitting there poised for action, waiting for something to trigger them. Then pretty much everything that occurs physically cannot be said to be "personal" as such, it's just stupid matter moving around and doing its thing based on its properties.
So if you slam your hand in the car door, you might swear at the door and kick it in a rage, but the stupid door was totally impersonal in its behavior. The amount of force on the hinges, the degree of rust, the tension in the springs, the amount of wind blowing, the position of the door relative to your body, all colludes to produce a corresponding change in state, and lo and behold your hand is impacted. It's just the system playing out.
If you can recognize then that the whole world is on a kind of autopilot, whenever anything physically happens it's really just yet another case of the world doing what it does. The laws are just governing the particles like they always do. Objects obey the laws so much that it's like they're dead, until the laws tell them to move, then they move, and then the laws tell them to stop and they stop. The world is like kind of a giant graveyard of trash that just sits there until something stirs it up. You can't really hold it against itself, it just follows the rules.
If this is all there is, if this is "life", where we plant certain objects in the garden, where we turn the dial to flip the radio station, where we cook foods and shove them in our bodies, where we walk to and fro mechanically and just about everything that occurs is one object doing something to another, that's not much of an existence. It's more like a lifeless prison.
It also means that death becomes inevitable, because it's basically built into the system. Death itself is part of the laws of the world. The laws of physics determine that there is going to be decay and separation and attack and damage and degradation and lack and sacrifice and suffering, eventually breaking things down until they are rotting in the ground. This isn't "personal", it's just the laws playing out. It's just the system. The machinery of death.
"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death."
If this is all there is, then life is meaningless and pointless and fundamentally cruel. It means life is not life, but a system of death pretending to be life for a while, all the while ensuring that death will eventually come. So then you seem to live a while and pretend you won't die, and then you die. Or as my wife likes to put it, "life sucks and then you die." That's all this world really has to offer, in the big picture.
"In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is NOT in Heaven is not ANYWHERE. Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible, and beyond ALL reason, and yet perceived as an eternal BARRIER to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."
There has to be a better way. There has to be something more sane and meaningful and lasting. There has to be a way to be free of all this, to break out of the laws of death. To break the laws of physics. To work miracles which raise you above and beyond the world, beyond the battlefield of attack, and into the celestial order. Only by moving beyond the laws of the world of inevitable death can you be free, and that means you have to surmount death and overcome the world, like Jesus did.
"Your holiness reverses all the laws of the world. It is beyond every restriction of time, space, distance, and limits of any kind. Your holiness is totally unlimited in its power because it establishes you as a Son of God, at one with the Mind of his Creator. Through your holiness the power of God is made manifest. Through your holiness the power of God is made available. And there is nothing the power of God cannot do."
"The 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."
"Very simply, the resurrection is the overcoming or surmounting of death."
"A body cannot stay without illusions, and the last one to be overcome is death."
""And the last to be overcome will be death." Of course! Without the idea of death there is no world. All dreams will end with this one. This is salvation's final goal; the end of all illusions. And in death are all illusions born. What can be born of death and still have life? But what is born of God and still can die? "
"We have repeatedly stated that one who has perfectly accepted the Atonement for himself can heal the world. Indeed, he has already done so. Temptation may recur to others, but never to this One. He has become the risen Son of God. He has overcome death because he has accepted Life."
"To overcome the world is no more difficult than to surmount your little wall. For in the miracle of YOUR relationship, WITHOUT this barrier, is EVERY miracle contained."
"God holds out His hand to His Son to help him rise and return to Him. I can help because the world is illusion, and I have overcome the world. Look past the tomb, the body, the illusion. Have faith in nothing but the spirit and the guidance God gives you. He could not have created the body because it is a limit. He must have created the spirit because it is immortal. Can those who are created like Him be limited? The body is the symbol of the world. Leave it behind. It cannot enter Heaven. But I can take you there anytime you choose. Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does so. And then, and then... I cannot speak of that."
"The Biblical quotation should read "In this world you need NOT have tribulation BECAUSE I have overcome the world." THAT is why you should "be of good cheer."
"The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life. If we share the same mind, YOU CAN OVERCOME DEATH BECAUSE I DID. "
"In me, you have ALREADY overcome EVERY temptation that would hold you back. We walk together on the way to quietness that is the gift of God. "
Do you think you know what the ego is?
Do you think you know what separation means?
How many of you believe the idea that "ego" means "separation", and that therefore any kind of separation is ego? Or that all forms of separation must be removed in order to have oneness?
This is NOT TRUE. And it's not what Jesus says in ACIM:
Jesus: "Selfishness is of the ego but self-fullness is of the Soul because that is how He created it."
Jesus: "You who prefer specialness to sanity could not obtain it in your right minds. You were at peace until you asked for special favor. And God did not give it."
BEFORE THE SEPARATION, there were many of us in God's Creation. Many Sons of God, directly created by Him. There wasn't just one Son. There being many sons IS NOT SEPARATION. IT IS NOT EGO. Here's why.
God's children are all created in the likeness of Himself. They are identical reflections of Him. They are all IDENTICAL. He loves them all EQUALLY and therefore they are all created in PERFECT EQUALITY. There isn't a single Son of God who is different to or unique from the others. They are like "clones". Perfect beings of a like order. A good analogy is spherical orbs of light which all look the same. These are souls.
There is nothing wrong with this. There is no ego there. There is no ego because there are no DIFFERENCES. There is no inequality. Every son is fully equal to all the rest. Every son has access to share everything with everyone. Every son is perfect and whole and complete within themselves and needs nothing. Every son has everything that all the other sons have. Every son is perfectly IDENTICAL to all the others in every way. In this there is NO ROOM FOR EGO.
The Sons of God in the Sonship are in perfect permanent harmony. It is perfectly normal and natural for there to be many FREE WILLED beings who all correlate and agree and are in accord with the Will of God. They each have their own minds which God created, and their own free will, and yet there is not even the slightest trace of disagreement. Every son is perfectly UNITED in the willingness to will like God. To create in His likeness and in their own. Even though all children of God are CO-CREATORS with God, there is no discord, no competition, no comparison, no differences, no exclusivity. NO ONE IS SPECIAL IN ANY WAY. And this leads to the perfect harmony of Heaven's peace.
Now. What is the ego really? The ego is NOT the idea of separation. The Sons of God are "separate beings" and this is NOT EGO. So to say that any kind of separation is ego is wrong. It is also wrong to say that having separation means you can't have oneness. That's bullshit. Oneness means OF LIKE KIND, being identical and in the likeness of God. It means they are ONE KIND. Jesus even says you can even be "one with yourself" - meaning you are of one single kind of state within yourself. That's what oneness really means, not "only one thing with nothing more than a count of 1."
WHAT EGO REALLY MEANS, in Jesus's terms as well, is any form of SPECIALNESS, which attempts to ISOLATE OFF some Son of God from the rest, describing him as DIFFERENT IN SOME WAY, unique, special, unlike the others, no longer equal to anyone else. THAT is the oppositie of the identicality of God's perfect creation.
Jesus: "You who prefer specialness to sanity could not obtain it in your right minds. You were at peace until you asked for special favor. And God did not give it."
WE (many) had our own right minds BEFORE EGO. Then we tried to believe in "special favor" from God, that we would be thought of as NOT IDENTICAL TO others, and therefore gaining in some way and losing in others in order to have exclusivity.
It is PERFECTLY OKAY for there to be individuality in Heaven provided the individuals are PERFECTLY IDENTICAL. There is nothing wrong with there being a million Christs. Having individuality IS NOT AN EGO THING. It only becomes an ego thing when it turns into a SPECIAL INDIVIDUALITY or an individual identity that is NOT LIKE THE OTHERS.
"EGO", in ACIM terms, really means... being exclusive, isolated, imprisoned, limited, lacking something that others have, having something that others lack, not being equal to anyone, being unique, spiritualizing something, demonizing something, condemning others for what they have which you lack, being in competition, being selfish, wanting to own and hoard and posses something in denial of others, denial of your brothers, denial of God, rejection and abandonment, failing to share anything with anyone, not-shared interests, privacy, private thoughts, your own subjective perception, withdrawal from Life, isolation into a specific point in spacetime (in a body), being cut off from abundance or sharing, a breakdown in communication, contrast, opposition, war and conflict, murder and suffering and sickness and death.
That is basically ALL THE SAME THING. It's just different ASPECTS of the same wish to be exclusive, to be different, or to be un-alike your identical brothers. That's what leads you to withdraw from sharing from the entirety of Creation and to narrow yourself down, withdraw and isolate into a little corner, and to then hide yourself in a body. Specialness produces body-identification and reincarnation and sickness and death.
So egotism, or selfishness, or specialness, forms a barrier around yourself which tries to keep something exclusively within, while also rejecting stuff as outside of you. The body is a symbol of that. It means you want to be seen as DIFFERENT and not identical. And that's why all bodies are unique and unalike. They were made as devices for proving separation. This special exclusivity and isolation is the same thing as sin. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards."
So in this more-accurate view of what ego is and is not, which is perfectly in line with what ACIM says about it, it's not your individuality or self or soul or free will that's a problem. The ONLY problem is your sense of SELFISHNESS which has attempted to set you APART from others in terms of BEING DIFFERENT TO THEM, rather than identical. To be un-equal is to be in disagreement and conflict. It is an act of war. And it produces a split mind. Your mind cannot stop being split and become "right minded" until all inequalities are ironed out and made equal again. Then, when there are NO inequalities, your mind can return to ONE MINDEDNESS, which is a mind experiencing a SINGLE STATE, ie "oneness" as in - ONE KIND.
You do not need to forego your free-willed individual soul or self. It has never been a problem. The ONLY thing that needs to be let go is the sense of being SPECIAL, exclusive or isolated. Any form of inequality is ego. Any form of equality is God's Will.
"You cannot enter into relationship with any of God's Sons unless you are willing to love them all equally".
Loving MANY BROTHERS EQUALLY is not an ego state.
"Healing is an act of thought by which two minds perceive their oneness, and become glad."
When TWO MINDS REMAIN TWO MINDS, BUT see each other as IDENTICAL, they become glad. Oneness means identicality and perfect equality and LIKENESS, it does not mean "there is only one Son" nor does it mean "many sons is an ego thing" nor does it mean "many sons is separation."
SEPARATION, as in separation from God, doesn't mean "being separate from one thing" it means being EXCLUSIVE an ISOLATED FROM THE REST. What constitutes "the rest" isn't necessarily "only God". Isolation isolates you from your brothers as well. It is the sense of isolation and inequality from your brothers that must be undone and undoing that DOES NOT ERASE YOUR BROTHERS. Attempting to do that or to claim that doing that means oneness is MURDEROUS. It's another way the ego interferes with the truth.
So what I've come to do is that whenever I think of ego or separation, think more in terms of exclusivity, isolation and inequality. It's FAR more accurate and lines up with absolutely everything Jesus says. We are to overcome our self-imposed imprisonment and open up to SHARING, to RECLAIM OUR IDENTITY AS *A* SON OF GOD, and return to sharing in all of Creation of which we are a PART.
Jesus continues his passage:
"For the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this of a Father who truly loved His Son. Therefore, you made of Him an UNloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father COULD give. And the peace of God's Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his REAL father, having attacked his glorious equality WITH Him.
In peace he needed nothing, and asked for nothing. In war he DEMANDED everything, and FOUND nothing. For how could the gentleness of love respond to his demands, EXCEPT by departing in peace, and returning to the Father? If the son did not wish to REMAIN in peace, he could not remain at all. For a darkened mind cannot live in the light, and it must seek a place of darkness, where it can believe it is where it is NOT. God did not ALLOW this to happen. But you DEMANDED that it happen, and therefore believed that it was so.
To SINGLE OUT is to MAKE ALONE, and thus MAKE LONELY. God did not do this to you. Could He SET YOU APART, KNOWING that your peace lies in His oneness? He denied you only your request for pain, for suffering is not of His creation. Having GIVEN you creation, He could not take it FROM you. He could but answer your insane request with a sane answer, which would abide with you in your insanity. AND THIS HE DID. No-one who hears His answer but will give up insanity. For His answer is the reference point BEYOND delusions, from which you can look back on them, and see them as insane. But seek this place and you WILL find it, for love is in you, and will lead you there."
One of the major teachings of A Course in Miracles, also present in Buddhism and Hinduism and many other belief systems, even present in the very first lessons of the Workbook, is that the physical world is a world of illusions. That many different objects only appear to be different, and their differences are meaningless.
In effect, the teaching is that you cannot judge a book by its cover, and you absolutely cannot take the objects of the world at face value. While most of the world believes that the world contains many many different things, different forms, objects, bodies, types, shapes, sizes, configurations, combinations etc, in truth there is actually only one thing here.
At first, to a person who is somewhat "blinded by perception of form", the world appears to be a tremendously complicated place filled with many different things. The differences are identified by how they appear, or what materials it seems to be made of, or how it behaves, or how it's constructed, or what it is used for, or what the symptoms seem to be etc. But these are all disguises.
Such a person will then believe that there really is a major real difference between a hammer and a screwdriver, between a car and a house, between a man and a woman, between a cake and some icecream. Places will all seem to be different and offer different seeming experiences. The next new toy will appear to be something you've never seen before. And everywhere you turn every single object seems to be distinct, separate and unique.
In such a view, uniqueness is valued highly, as though being unique and different sets you apart and identifies you and defines you. As if you stand out and be yourself by being unlike anything else. This merely emphasizes the sense of separateness between things and reinforces the belief that space and time are real.
The more a person thinks that there really are real differences between things, the more they will buy into what we call the "hierarchy of illusions". That is where some things are considered to MEAN something different to others, such as that a death is far "worse" than a mild headache, or that a million dollars is better than 1 dollar, or a burning house is a far worse problem than just that your fingernails need clipping.
For such a person, the world is seen as having the power to cause them, to victimize them, to do things to them. They see the world as both offensive and attractive. Some parts of it they will separate out and label as desirable, wanted, meaningful and valuable. At the same time other things which induce more unpleasant reactions will be relegated to hell and labeled as unwanted.
A person then will be living half a life, separated off, trying to maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff. Always on the run and living in fear, trying to hide from and prevent all the terrible suffering and tragedies that happen, while simultaneously strongly investing in, believing in and wanting to keep, the very same world which induces these things - for its supposed benefits.
This is clearly an insane state of mind, in which a person is in a relationship with a fickle, unpredictable, demanding, controlling, overpowering world, which sometimes throws them a bone and gives them something to seemingly celebrate, while quickly turning around and slapping them in the face the next day with some horrifying problem.
Such a life is a rollercoaster of constantly being thrown around by the waves of whatever's next, with no real peace and no consistency and no true invulnerability. It is a life of fear, wrapped up in an interpretation which frames parts of it as a life that is wanted. A life of judgement, in which some aspects of the world are despised and rejected while others are overly embraced and absorbed into. This is not a spiritual life, it's a life of contradiction and conflict.
What we have to all come to realize, and what a person generally WILL realize given enough time, is that the offerings of the world are not REALLY different things. It may take exposure to a great many things the world seems to separately give, in order to "tire" of the lure of these differences, to transcend them, to see through them, and to realize they are all the same.
This is real spiritual progression, where a person begins to see that the differences between objects are all artificial and meaningless. That having that super precious rare gem is not really that important, versus having a glass of water. Where the extremes of the values of things versus others, flattens out, and a person becomes far less attracted to, or put off by, any particular "temptation" that the world is offering that day.
What this means is that the learning becomes generalized. As a person matures more spiritually they will realize there isn't really a significant difference between things. That in order to retain a sense of integrity, peace, consistency and honesty, the difference forms of things have to be ignored. In order not to be constantly thrown around on the rollercoaster of hell, reacting to everything as if it means something, you have to learn to become more stable and unconditional.
Not changing moods based on conditions, not adapting to what's happening, not allowing the world to do things to you, not seeing yourself as either victimized negatively OR positively, not giving power TO the world to change or define you, not allowing circumstances to dictate what will happen, not giving away power to the extremes of the hierarchy of illusions, and no longer falling for the temptation to believe that the world in certain configurations means hell on earth.
Being deceived by the forms and differences of the world is unconsciousness. It is a state of unawareness and spiritual irresponsibility. It indicates a person who is selfish and wants to get things from the world, but at the same time doesn't want the world to give them the wrong things. It's a person whose relationships are all based on specialness and unholiness, a person who is themselves not whole, who is in denial of wholeness and therefore distanced from God in their "independence."
In order to wake up to reality, a person has to learn that this world isn't really offering anything different. It is really regurgitating the same stuff. It spews out the same illusions in different forms. Masses of materialistic products are made in which everyone now tries to create every single possible variation of a thing. And how many such variations does anyone really need? Their differences are insubstantial and superficial. Their different appearances are regarded as the defining factor as to how valuable they and what price tag they come with. But it's all made of the same lies and untruths.
The real truth is that there IS no difference between anything in the world. All appearances are illusions. All forms and shapes and sizes and amounts and values are utterly deceptive. They are all designed to tempt you to believe, to deceive you into believing, that physical reality is real when it isn't. That there is a world of many things, all of which are unlike the others, offering you constant distractions and side-quests and tempting pathways, all of which lead to the same ultimate end in death.
The truth is that there is not really any choices in the world. ALL of the things the world offers lead to death and destruction. Whether it appears to temporarily give you something you want or to take it away quickly, all forms end in death. They are made of death because they are made of the attempt to separate things out, to attack the other, to be unlike, unequal, in a constant state of war and conflict, incapable of peace and never offering anything consistent.
Fluctuating illusions cannot be reality. If something can change its form and be something one day and something else the next, it has no real permanent identity. A flower goes from a seed to a bloom to a wilted mess and not one of those states is reality. It is all the same thing. Be not deceived by what you see in the world. The world presents a picture of nothing pretending to be something, and it has absolutely no meaning.
The entire drive of A Course in Miracles is to teach us and help us to practice NOT being deceived by physical differences, by appearances, or by any sense of there being any variation in importance or relevance between one object and another. As we look around the room and OVERLOOK any particular reason to categorize things or to say they are more or less applicable to the ONE truth, we are training ourselves to no longer be deceived by the world and its lies.
"The belief in order of difficulties is the basis for the world's perception. It rests on differences; on uneven background and shifting foreground, on unequal heights and diverse sizes, on varying degrees of darkness and light, and thousands of contrasts in which each thing seen competes with every other in order to be recognized. A larger object overshadows a smaller one. A brighter thing draws the attention from another with less intensity of appeal. And a more threatening idea, or one conceived of as more desirable by the world's standards, completely upsets the mental balance. What the body's eyes behold is only conflict. Look not to them for peace and understanding."
"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives."
"Appearances deceive BUT CAN BE CHANGED. Reality is changeless. It does not deceive at all. And if you fail to see BEYOND appearances, you ARE deceived. For everything you see will change, and yet you thought it real before, and now you think it real again. Reality is thus reduced to form, and CAPABLE of change. Reality is changeless. It is this that MAKES it real, and KEEPS it separate from all appearances. It MUST transcend all form to be itself. It CANNOT change. The miracle is means to demonstrate that ALL appearances can change BECAUSE they are appearances, and CANNOT have the changelessness reality entails. The miracle attests salvation FROM appearances by SHOWING they can change."
"But appearances are shown to be unreal BECAUSE they change."
"Nothing so blinding as perception of form. For sight of form MEANS understanding HAS BEEN obscured. Only MISTAKES have different forms, and so they CAN deceive. You CAN change form, BECAUSE it is not true. It COULD not be reality, BECAUSE it can be changed. Reason will tell you that, if form is NOT reality, it MUST be an illusion. And is Not THERE to see. And, IF you see it, you MUST be mistaken, for you are seeing what can NOT be real, as if it WERE. What cannot see BEYOND what is not there, MUST be distorted perception. And must perceive illusions AS THE TRUTH. Could it, then, RECOGNIZE the truth?"
"Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. It sees their nothingness, and looks right through the thousand forms in which they may appear. It looks on lies but it is not deceived."
"Applying the same idea to each of them separately is the first step in ultimately recognizing they are all the same."
"Everyone in this world seems to have his own special problems. Yet they are all the same, and must be recognized as one if the one solution which solves them all is to be accepted."
"This world SEEMS to hold out many purposes, each different, and with different values. Yet they are all the same. Again, there is no order, but a SEEMING hierarchy of values."
"The spark of beauty, or the veil of ugliness; the real world, or the world of guilt and fear; truth or illusion; freedom or slavery, - it is all the same. For you can NEVER choose EXCEPT between God and the ego."
A glossary of christianity terms reinterpreted and clarified by Jesus in A Course in Miracles.
Here are some elements of ACIM which may sound christianity-oriented, but of course Jesus redefines and clarifies their meaning.
1. Heaven - is the kingdom of God which God created one with Him and which is immortal and eternal. You are part of it, as is everyone. It is reality. It is a living creation in which all things are alive forever. It is not Earth.
2. Hell - the attempt to oppose heaven, reality, God, yourself and others, by believing in a state which really does not exist, as if it does. A state opposite to the nature of God, which lacks everything and is therefore devoid of meaning. Onto this empty shell you can project ideas of hell or or heaven, which are seen as a reflection. A belief that hell is real turns the nothingness into hallucinations of something evil. Earth is part of the empty shell, the veil of illusions.
3. Being cast out of heaven - if you are not in heaven, you are dreaming of being exiled. God didn't cast you out, you left. Or at least, you believe you are no longer where God is. This produces an illusion of a world outside of heaven, which includes the Earth. God didn't abandon or reject you, you wanted to not have him be your father and to receive nothing from him. You became the prodigal son who thought he could be better off on his own.
4. The devil - anyone who denies God is against God. They are also against Christ, making them the anti-christ. Being against God you are attempting to turn yourself into a devil. The devil is your belief in an impossible opposite to God. It is your ego. Every separated individual is the anti-christ. But these states are not real. They are make-believe fiction and fantasy in which someone who is confused believes they are something they can never be. Thus there is no real devil or anti-christ, only people with mental illness.
5. Sin - the idea that separation is possible and real and has real consequences. That you can cause reality, therefore you can cause God. Therefore you have committed the "original sin" of trying to attack God. Except nothing real (immortal) can be attacked, so sin is really just a mistaken belief that sin is possible. When correctly recognized as a mistaken belief, it is regarded as error, and errors can be corrected without punishment. If sin were real, punishment by death is inevitable. But if sin is a false idea, then there is no death.
6. Salvation - to the ego-oriented person, salvation is anything opposite to God which takes you further away from God. In this light death is seen as salvation from life. In truth salvation is the return to God through willingness and acceptance that only his truth is true. To be saved is to be free from sin, ie error. Which means simply to be sane and to recognize correctly what is really true. Salvation is the same thing as atonement, true perception and true forgiveness.
7. Atonement - to the ego-oriented person, this is punishment for sin, demanding death. To pay for what you did. Ego says you attacked life so your life will now be attacked. Real atonement is the recognition that attack is impossible, there is no sin, and only what God created really exists. Atonement is the final miracle in which you recognize reality for what it is and reject anything not of God. Where you realize that only God's Kingdom exists and there is no world. That you are still as God created you, causing you to wake up from your dream and return to reality.
8. Evil - the notion that some power other than God exists and can cause changes in the immortal. Evil is nothing but mental illness, insanity, confusion, and just a belief in an opposite to God. It's an attempt to overthrow the kingdom and rebel against reality, making a person seem insane. Believing truth is false and false is true, all properties of nothingness and evil are assigned to God, while all properties of God are assigned to nothing. This produces hallucinations of enemies and attack and hell. There is no evil because it is nothing but a false belief in something impossible.
9. Repentance - you must repent of sins, or choose to stop being a sinner. In truth you cannot really be a sinner because sin is not possible. You can believe you are a sinner, however. And it is this belief that must be undone. To "choose again" is to repent by aligning yourself closer to God and rejecting the ego/devil.
10. Confession - really means to admit the truth, but only to admit the truth of God is true. To admit to having seemingly done something that is impossible in reality, may seem like honesty, but it's really admitting to something unreal. A true confession admits that you are christ and are purely innocent forever.
11. Word of God - the true nature of God expressed and manifested in creation. God's authenticity and honesty and trustworthiness. The expression of God's love, his voice, and his creations. It is the whole kingdom and its truth. 12. Faith - similar to trust, in terms of who or what you are placing your faith and allegiance in. Faith in the ego/devil means trusting a lie and moving towards death. Faith in God means trusting the turth and moving towards life. It's also tied into what you give "credit" to, and therefore what you value or want. If you value God you want God and credit him with being true. Therefore you trust him and side with him, and therefore have faith (know) that his laws are the only laws.
13. Resurrection - A return to life, meaning a return to immortality and eternity. This is possible only in the context that currently those who reject God are to some degree "playing dead" and are trying not to live. Resurrection is the assertion of pure life and is the opposite of choosing to die. It surmounts death and abolishes it and has power over it. It might be expressed or demonstrated as in Jesus's resurrection in which he showed through physical form that death has no power over him. It also includes the power to abolish sickness and death in all its forms, including physically in self and others.
14. Savior - Jesus is an example of a savior in that he united his will with God's, therefore uniting the will of the whole sonship with God's for us. Part of us therefore became united with God again in Jesus's resurrection. In this sense he has now in a position of being able to save ie help us - to become saviors.
15. Prayer - Ultimately communion with God in which everything is given and received. Love is received and love is expressed. It is a request for and an acceptance of everything. In its lower forms it devolves into specifics and requests which include a wish for some kind of attack or control or special favor.
16. Revelation - a true revelation is a state in which fear is totally abolished. It is a one-way communication from God to a child of God, and is like being imprinted with God. In the experience it is deeply personal and there's only you and God there. It does not include others. But its content can later be shared with others. It is not a mere insight or download or slight upgrade, it's a powerful world-blotting-out intense expression directly from God.
17. Soul - God created many souls which are individual beings who comprise the sonship and are the Kingdom. They are simultaneously all one as the Christ, also known as the one son of God. They are not children of Christ, they are children of God. They share everything with each other and therefore are each other. Souls are permanently perfect co-creators with God and create their own kingdoms of living beings together. You have a soul which is your real self/identity in christ, and you have your own kingdom of creations in heaven, which are your children.
18. Christ - Christ is also referred to as the one son, a part of the holy trinity, but christ is also EVERY son of God. Each soul is christ and you are christ just as Jesus is. Which means you are also part of Jesus and vice versa. We are all joined together in christ. Christ is the perfect holy state of being of all souls and the christ-mind is shared by all minds.
19. Trinity - Before the separation from God there was a duality, ie God and his Sonship. But in the separation God also added the Holy Spirit, producing a trinity. The Holy Spirit is the call to awaken, God's Voice speaking to His Son, which guarantees his healing and his return to reality. All three aspects of the trinity are now permanent and only the trinity is real.
20. Holy Spirit - God's creation which was added in the separation to keep a link between God and his children so that they could never be lost. It is God's guarantee of their union with him and the permanent potential for their return home to share everything with him. He bridges the gap between parts of mind that seem united in christ and parts which seem separate. He is the appointed friend and help and corrector and therapist and comforter and healer God has designated to lead us out of hell.
21. Forgiveness - really the recognition that there is nothing to forgive. In this recognition is the clear sane recognition of what is true and what is false. And only God's truth is regarded as true. In that truth sin is utterly impossible and nothing real can be changed. Therefore it's the acknowledgement that everyone is as God created them and nothing has ever happened to change God's will. It disregards all notions of an opposite to immortality and shines a beacon of light in the darkness for all those who think they are unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflection of your immortal nature, and therefore entails invulnerability in which no-one can ever be accused of doing anything to you.
22. Angel - beings created by God as part of the Kingdom. They are created below the sons of God (or from?) and act in roles of protection and guidance and healing. You can communicate and work with them even while on earth.
23. The fall of man - the separation from God, which was an attempted belief that separation is possible, a tiny mad idea, took place in the minds of souls. But also some angels became involved and believed in the separation. This produced what is termed "the fall" in which we exiled/projected ourselves from heaven, into a fictional realm of exile outside of heaven, which is not really anywhere. Lucifer, an actual angel, was included in the fall. He symbolizes the devil perhaps but all separated souls are just as much the anti-christ. This was an actual rebellion in heaven against God and a desire to be God, producing the authority problem and the rejection of God's fatherhood/authorship. A desire for their own kingdom they could rule without him. This produced spacetime, the world, and earth, which was the idea of hell as heaven's opposite.
24. Blasphemy - technically real blasphemy is impossible because God cannot be opposed or offended. But you can believe things which are seemingly against God's nature. Any form of fear, suffering, sickness, death, an annoyance, even a slight lack of joy, unhappiness, lack of peace, are all blasphemous in that they claim something that is not true in God's reality. Therefore they are trying to work against God's truth and oppose his laws. This is of course all a fantasy and there is no sin.
25. The last judgement - God's evaluation of you is the same as it was when he created you perfect, which is that you remain exactly as you were intended to be and nothing can change you. Therefore you are worthy of God and are perfectly innocent forever. Nothing has ever been done to affect your entitlement to his love and you have never sinned or attacked anything real. You merely dreamed of it in a nightmare of your own making, where you deceived yourself. The last judgement upon the world we made (earth etc) is that it is nothing and does not exist.
26. Church - perhaps a term best used as a synonym for the sonship or the kingdom, which are the same thing. The body of God, if you will, is the outer expression of God - his creation. All members of the sonship are part of the church of christ, and this membership is permanent.
27. Communion - while "holy communion" may be a symbolic act, real communion takes place in heaven as the perfect symbiotic union of God and his children. It is the total immersion and openness to God, receiving from Him and expressing in return. To commune is to know, to be, to share. On Earth this devolves into "communication" which can have varying degrees. The separation from God was really a communication breakdown, ie an unwillingness to receive or to see eye-to-eye. Miracles raise the level of communication until communion becomes possible again.
28. Creation - a term only applicable to what takes place in heaven and not on earth. It requires the perfect total whole extension or giving of what the creator has, to what the creation is. The creation inherits everything of its creator and has nothing else. It shares everything with him, having not left him, and therefore can only exist to share it. All creations are co-creators therefore because they inherit the ability to create. Creations are living beings of light, and can only create living beings of light. They cannot create physical objects or forms of matter or energy or other elements of spacetime. Earth is not a creation because it cannot create more earths. Everything in spacetime is a "dead end".
29. Crucifixion - while Jesus's activity on the cross is mostly referred to as "the crucifixion", crucifixion itself really means the attempt to crucify christ, which is everyone, through allegiance to the ego and to death. It's the attempt to prove that God's immortal son can be killed. Every form of fear and suffering and unhappiness and death is a form of crucifixion. This includes the making of an entire seeming universe of spacetime which is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son ie kingdom. It depicts all possible forms of death and is run by laws of death. Being hell, everything in it is crucified and crucifying. Ressurrection marks the ascension back to heaven.
30. Disciple - someone who freely wills to follow someone who may be more advanced, above, or wiser than themselves. Jesus does state in ACIM that if you were not to follow someone of greater wisdom you would be unwise. This indirectly suggests you should follow Jesus as his discipline and learn from him, but is not a mandate. We're also told that Jesus told the disciples to be physicians of the lord, that is to go out and heal the sick and raise the dead, and to heal themselves, with the power of the holy spirit. It is again implied that we are asked to do the same.
31. Garden of Eden - originally really the state of heaven, in which there was no need or lack of anything. Everyone had everything. It wasn't literally a garden with apple trees in it. Adam and Eve were just a couple of God's children. The tree of knowledge of life and death is symbolically the ego thought system, which if believed in (partaken of, eaten, consumed, believed) seems to "poison" the mind, make a person self-conscious of their shameful existence, and attempt to hide in the bushes of the darkness of the mind, to hide from God. They seem then to be expelled from heaven but really have believed in their own expulsion because they want to be exiled, having bought into temptation by believing the tiny mad idea of "the serpent" (ego).
32. God - of course, the prime first creator, the absolute reality, the only true law, the infinite immortal being who shares everything of himself in order to express and apply himself through creation. The father of all eternally living beings and the source of all existence. The all in all. The guarantee of eternal peace and perfection. God relates to every child fully and personally while relating to all children the same way, making him both personal and impersonal. Everyone knows God.
33. Holiness - related to wholeness and purity, innocence and the lack of belief in sin. A state of alignment with God's reality and with truth. Sanity, harmlessness, gentleness, light, healing, power, certainty and openness. Just one of many synonyms for the state of being in heaven.
34. Miracle - in the big picture everything real is permanently miraculous. Miraculousness is the nature of reality in which one thing is all things and all thing are one. This breaks all rules relating to limitation and separate boxes and isolation and exclusion. All expressions of love (God) are miraculous. God creates miracles. You are a miracle of God. God extends through you, God works miracles. You are a miracle capable of creating miracles. Miracles are expressions of life. Even in the world of dreams, on earth, miracles mirror creation in heaven, and are thought-creations which give life, provide love, fill a lack, resurrect, and correct the mind from its mistaken beliefs, producing healing. Since their nature is extension, they are received from God and given to your brothers. There are without number or limit and there is nothing they cannot do. They are truly supernatural - above the nature of the world, based solely on the laws of another world (heaven).
35. Temptation - really just the way that illusions of nothingness seem to symbolically assert and represent things which are opposite to God, as if to try to persuade you to buy into and believe in them. Illusions present themselves as things happening which cannot happen in reality, sins occurring, attacks having effects, real suffering, to "tempt you" to believe further that such things are possible. If you give them your belief, you buy into it and are deceived. If you see through the illusion and frame it in the truth, you deny it and reject its lies and do not believe in it. You can be tempted but not coerced against your will. Being tempted to believe sons of God are bodies is a major hurdle to be overcome because it is not true, but difficulty to recognize as false. The ego/devil is said to tempt souls deeper into hell, which is our own mind/beliefs making faulty decisions.
36. Commandment - not talked about much in ACIM except to say that God's will cannot be opposed, his laws are unbreakable, his nature has permanently established reality, and you cannot do anything to interfere with it. What God has created, no man can put asunder. This does not include the rather social-religious commandments or "guidelines for behavior" on earth. God does not coerce. Thou shalt be free. Thou shalt love your brother as yourself. Thou shalt live forever. Thou shalt come to no harm. Thou shalt be always happy. Thou shalt give and receive as one. Thou shalt share everything with everyone.
37. Worship - Appreciation and awe of God is appropriate, as is loving God and thanking Him, but he does not have an ego with which to receive any kind of praise. You cannot tell him how great he is as if to give him something he does not have. He cannot receive offerings of sacrifice or exalting words. He has no need of anything. But you can celebrate what has been given and rejoice and be glad that only his truth is true. You can thank him for what you are and for what you have been given, and for what your brothers have as well. But you're not supposed to idolize him or your brothers or jesus or turn anyone into a figure "above" you. Only God is above you and that's why you have awe of him.
38. Healing - in ACIM this usually refers to the transformative process of change whereby something begins in a less healed state and moves towards a more healed state. Miracles can induce healing but a "miracle of healing" is a level confusion. Miracles are a remedy, like a drop of detergent upon dirt, which causes the dirt to be removed. Healing is the result, but the miracle itself is not the healing. This is also why miracles can cause shifts in perception but are not the shifts, because the shifts are part of the healing effect, not the miracle that caused them. To heal you give healing and learn to receive healing as you give it. All those who become healed become instruments of healing. Your function on earth is the healing of the sonship as a miracle-worker.
39. Christian - apparently someone who follows christ, but you should recognize that you are christ as well. You are supposed to return to the state of owning up to being christ, recognizing that everyone is christ. Acting as christ and being christ-like is to be christian.
40. Second coming - really has nothing to do with a singular person coming down from heaven for a second time for a second go-around. It's really what happens when all those on earth are choosing to return to heaven and, of themselves, become the christ. The first coming was Jesus showing the way to return to heaven, and the second coming is us actually implementing and following that and doing the same.
41. Eternal life - really granted by God the instant he created you and everyone. It means permanence and the impossibility of anything ever happening that could interrupt, damage or change that permanence. This means it is a state of total immortality and invulnerability. Everything real lives forever.
42. Eternity - a state of heaven and reality in which everything real always exists, is always the same, never changes, and exists here and now and forever. There is no "time" involved, only presence.
43. Golden rule - Not an optional rule, but really the unbreakable law of God that you are everyone. Therefore how you treat them you are immediately and directly and personally treating youreslf. The part of you that is in them is the receiver of what you give, because giving and receiving are one. This produces an incentive for only shared interests and for giving only love, otherwise you will hurt yourself by trying to hurt another. What you do unto others you do unto yourself. By treating them how you would want to be treated, you directly do treat yourself that way and directly receive that treatment, regardless of whether other opt to reciprocate or not.
Some ACIM quotes...
"I told you that I could reach up and bring the Holy Spirit down to you. But I can bring Him to you only at your own invitation. The Holy Spirit is nothing more than your own right mind. He was also mine. The Bible says, "May the mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus," and uses this as a BLESSING. It is the blessing of miracle-mindedness. It asks that you may think as I thought, joining with me in Christ-thinking."
"The Holy Spirit is the only part of the Holy Trinity which is symbolic. He is referred to in the Bible as the Healer, the Comforter, and the Guide. He is also described as something separate, apart from the Father and from the Son. I myself said, "and if I go I will send you ANOTHER comforter, and he will abide with you."
"The Bible enjoins you to be perfect, to heal ALL errors, to take no thought of the body AS SEPARATE, and to accomplish all things IN MY NAME."
"The Bible instructs you to "KNOW thyself," or BE CERTAIN. Certainty is always of God. When you love someone, you have PERCEIVED him as he is, and this makes it possible for you to KNOW him."
"The Garden of Eden, which is described as a literal garden in the Bible, was not originally an actual garden at all. It was merely a mental state of complete need-lack. Even in the literal account, it is noteworthy that the pre-Separation state was essentially one in which man needed nothing. The Tree of Knowledge, again an overly-literal concept, (as is clearly shown by the subsequent reference to "eating of the fruit of the tree") is a symbolic reference to some of the misuses of knowledge referred to in the section immediately preceding this one."
"The Bible repeatedly states that you should praise God. This hardly means that you should tell Him how wonderful He is. He has no ego with which to accept thanks, and no perceptions with which to judge your offerings. But unless you take your part in the creation, His joy is not complete because YOURS is incomplete. And THIS He does know. He knows it in his own Being and its experience of His Sons' experience. 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."
"That is why the Bible says "There is no death," and that is why I demonstrated that death does not exist."
""No man cometh to the Father but by me" is among the most misunderstood statements in the Bible. It DOES NOT mean that I am in any way separate (or different) from you, EXCEPT IN TIME. Now, we know that time does not exist. Actually, the statement is much more meaningful if it is considered on a vertical rather than a horizontal axis. Regarded along the vertical, man stands below me, and I stand below God. In the process of "rising up", I AM higher. This is because without me the distance between God and man is too great for man to encompass. I bridge the distance as an Elder Brother to man, on the one hand, and a Son of God on the other. My devotion to my brothers has placed me in charge of the Sonship, which I can render complete only to the extent I can SHARE it."
"When the Bible says "Judge not that ye be not judged" it merely means that if you judge the reality of others at all, you will be unable to avoid judging your own."
"I have been correctly referred to in the Bible as "The Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world."
God has given you free will. Anything you choose is yours to choose. No-one else has any say in what your choices are. No-one has any right to decide for you what your choices are, to make commentary about your choices, to judge your choices, or to accuse you of making the wrong choice. It is none of their business.
Each person is solely responsible for their own personal freedom, which means that anything that a person experiences is entirely chosen, and not induced by anyone or anything else. God is the only cause of anyone. "I am forever an effect of God." One brother does not cause or create another brother. All brothers are equals as siblings precisely because they are not the cause of each other. No one else has EVER been the cause of anything you have experienced. If you believe otherwise you are confused.
You do not have the power to cause anyone else. No one else has the power to cause you. Being entirely responsible for your own freedom can only arise when you grant everyone else total responsibility for their own freedom. If you attempt to control, manipulate, judge, coerce, persuade, condemn, or otherwise alter other people's freedoms, you are denying your own and imprisoning yourself. It will not help you.
When you are entirely responsible for your own perfect freedom, which is a gift from God, you will recognize that absolutely nothing happens against your will. Not suffering, not sickness, not even death. "The power of decision is my own." Your sole responsibility is acceptance of atonement for yourself, so that you can offer it to others. But it is not for you to shove it down their throats, nor can you force anyone to be at peace, or to be loving, or to choose what you think they should.
When a person begins to lose sight of their own freedom, they lose touch with responsibility for the power of choice. And they begin to believe that causation and power are outside of them. They disempower themselves by blaming others. And then they automatically begin to try to make sense of why things are happening seemingly outside of their choosing, and it starts to make sense that someone else is choosing for you. And now you have assigned responsibility for your freedom to someone else.
When you think that someone else is responsible for your freedom, you are being irresponsible, and you will now depend on them making decisions that you approve of. You will encourage them to choose for you, provided it's the right choice that you indirectly want. If they do not choose what you want, for you, you will attack them for failing to give you what you want.
This then becomes the ego's mandate of "forgiveness to destroy", in which responsibility for freedom and for change is assigned to someone other than yourself, instead of you taking the responsibility to make your own decisions. You also cannot claim total responsibility for your own decision-making, while simultaneously believing that other persons are responsible for your decisions. Which means you have to allow other people to be entirely responsible for whatever decisions they make.
When you enter into coercion, control, blame, judgement, accusation, condemnation, taking sides, demanding that people comply with your beliefs, trying to force people to act a certain way, requiring people to make certain choices that you think are the right choices (for any reason), or have expectations or "needs" relating to what they do to or for you, you are entering into insanity, a special relationship, and false perception.
"God does not coerce".
"Your will is lost to you in this strange bartering, in which guilt is traded back and forth, and grievances increase with each exchange."
"Your will is free, and nothing can prevail against it."
You can easily spot when someone is moving into ego. Instead of being responsible ONLY for their own free will choice, they begin to displace responsibility onto other people. Causation is placed outside of them. They then begin trying to manipulate or "guilt-trip" others into acting certain ways, to comply indirectly with their wishes. The seeming "boundary" of freedom between them and others is disrupted, they trespass on the sacred territory of another, and the invasion of war begins.
When people are arguing about whether they should or should not do something, or what is the right thing to do, or who did what to whom, or who is responsible for causing other people to be sick, or who is putting who in danger, or any other dynamic where one person is accused of being responsible for another, the ego is involved. The two people are becoming tangled in a special relationship, anchored at the body level of insane illusions and fictional causes.
Interestingly, when someone is doing this, which always involves projection and anger, which is an attempt to make someone guilty, the person is claiming to be acting in the interests of freedom and the good of all, but are simultaneously rejecting their own freedom by trying to control the freedom of others. Or rather, they place their own freedom into the hands of other people and then try to accuse them of mis-handling it, meaning you don't really believe that other people are free to use YOUR freedom as they see fit.
To make a long story short, what other people choose to do is absolutely none of your business. This is why Jesus asks you to "be passerby". You are only free when you recognize that your brother is free. You cannot recognize his freedom if you are trying to control him, trying to get him to side with you, are waging a war and trying to win allies, or when you're accusing him of inappropriate choices (sin).
If you reject the freedom of others you are in fact shutting down your own freedom, but you do this in the name of trying to uphold your freedom, which is insane. You clearly cannot increase your freedom, or secure your rights, by taking freedom and rights away from other people. If other people are making poor decisions, then the consequences of those decisions are their responsibility only. You cannot be affected by them, unless you yourself personally make a poor choice as well. You cannot be cursed unless you curse yourself first, and other people's poor decisions DO NOT affect you against your will.
"Casting spells" merely means "affirming error", and error is lack of love. When man projects this onto others, he DOES imprison them, but only to the extent that he reinforces errors they have already made. This distortion makes them vulnerable to the curse of others, since they have already cursed themselves. The miracle worker can only bless, and this undoes the curse and frees the soul from prison."
When you move into an area of believing that other people greatly affect you, can destroy your life, can interfere with your health, can threaten your family, or can in any way do anything to you by their free choosing, you yourself have a mental health problem. You are denying your own freedom to such an extent that you think other people are the owners of your freedom. You have given them the power to do this to and for you, meaning also that you do not love yourself. And yet you accuse them of acting against your love.
You in fact want other people to be responsible for you, and in fact you want them to do things to you against your will, so that you can maintain that you are not free. You therefore use your enemies as devices to keep yourself imprisoned, and the more you hate them the more you succeed in imprisoning yourself. The only way to be free yourself is to grant freedom to everyone. Blaming people for imprisoning you or violating your rights is a great way to violate your own rights.
You might think that if you were to do this there would be anarchy, you would be vulnerable, idiots would run the country, fools would steal your possessions, stupid nutjobs would try to hurt your family, and the broken would try to infect you with their diseases. But these are actually part of your own attempt to reject health, reject life, reject protection, reject invulnerability, and reject safety. None of this can happen without your psychological consent.
You can't have it both ways. You can't be in the business of disempowering yourself and disowning your supernatural power of immortality, while at the same time claiming that other people are responsible for your wellbeing and are able to hurt you. You do in fact have a mind-over-matter power innate to all children of God, capable of rendering you immune and invulnerable to all the things of the world. You have an automatic God-given miraculous ability to heal anything and overcome anything. And nothing can prevail against you.
"Today it is the ego which stands powerless before your will. Your will is free, and nothing can prevail against it."
"Nothing can prevail against our united wills, because nothing can prevail against God's."
"NOTHING can prevail against a Son of God who commends his Spirit into the hands of His Father."
When you are in the business of making other people's business your business, you are not in business. You are out of business, which is why you are trying to get the business of others by being involved in their business. You busy yourself with their business because you have no business doing so. And by doing so, you have no business at all.
The people who are having an utter shit fit about whether or not to vaccinate need to pay attention to sanity and reason. You are immortal and you cannot die. No-one and nothing can happen against your will. So who are you accusing of being responsible for things happening to you? It is in fact you who is disempowering yourself and setting yourself up as a victim, and you want to have victimizers in your life who you believe oppose you, to pretend that you don't want their opposition, so that you can keep being a victim about it.
All forms of sickness are illusions produced by an insane mind, acted out upon a body. This is something that you do to yourself. "The mind makes this decision as it makes all decisions responsible for the condition of the body." Your mind has the power to decide whether or not to live or die, to be sick or well, to be happy or unhappy. No one has the right or the responsibility to take this power or freedom away from you. And no-one can. Only you can give it away, disown it, or try to lose it, by your own free will. That's your choice.
If you fear that you can be infected by another's contagion, or by some random environmental evil, then your mind is already sick and needs help. If you are not willing to receive the help, then you are in a bind. It means you do not want to be healthy and you want to die. And yet in this condition you will claim that you want to be healthy and not be sick. But you cannot be even believe that you can be sick while simultaneously bringing about the ONLY decision capable of making you suffer. Nor can you be blaming the cause of your suffering on a speck of particles, or a car crash, or any kind of external causation.
"No-one can die, unless he chooses death. What seems to be the FEAR of death, is really its ATTRACTION."
The real deeper issue behind all this covid panick, is the fear of death and "how to be safe". However...
"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives. Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped."
"There IS no safety in a battleground. You can look down on it in safety from above, and NOT be touched. But, from within it, you can find NO safety."
"The world provides no safety. It is rooted in attack, and all its "gifts" of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. It attacks and then attacks again. No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus."
When we are body identified, we place ourselves on the battlefield and accuse ourselves of weakness. Then we set ourselves up for being subject to a warzone and threaten ourselves with causes on the same level. We then try to escape this threat with magical means and silly maneuvers which are supposed to somehow make you invulnerable and safe, as if this solves the problem. The problem is not whether or not you are susceptible to a disease, the problem is that you are choosing to believe in disease in the first place, therefore threatening yourself with inducing it.
It then does not matter whatsoever whether you choose to get a vaccine or not. Getting one is insane. Not getting one is insane. Both are insane because they are based on a false premise. If the premise is "sickness is real and I am vulnerable to death against my will", then you are already insane. And making the decision to be vaccined OR not vaccinnated are both equally insane outcomes based on a lie.
"The world was made that problems could not be escaped." You cannot go either way and claim to be making a sane decision.
You cannot escape from or have external salvation from sickness, while looking for external solutions to an externalized problem. If the world does not exist, who is doing this to you? Who is deciding that you are weak and vulnerable and attackable and destroyable? This is nothing other than your resposnibility and your belief. "I can be attacked by nothing but my thoughts." ...
"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are."
If you are not able to accept total responsibility, which is atonement, then you are in a predicament. You say you want salvation but you don't. You say you want life but you keep choosing death. You say you want health but you believe in sickness and then panick in fear trying to scramble to find ways to defend agaisnt it, knowing it cannot work. What are you going to do? If you are not willing to entertain a miracle, then you are left with no other option. If you are not willing to forgive and rise above the battlefield, you have no other option.
The only remedy you are then left with is a solution which can at best seem to partially work, and at worst destroy you. This is true of any vaccine as much as it is true of ANY magical solution. No magical solution will ever induce wholeness, nor will it make you invulnerable, nor cause you to be what you are. Magic will not correct your mind, it will likely have no effect on your insane beliefs, and it will not ultimately save you from death. It is your thoughts alone that decide whether or not you are choosing to die, and this overrides all magic, and the world.
So you are then in a predicament because you cannot possibly choose a remedy that truly works, all the remedies are broken, the only action you can take is incomplete, and nothing external can truly cause you to be peaceful. "salvation comes from nothing outside of you."
"THERE IS NOTHING OUTSIDE YOU. That is what you must ultimately learn, for it is in that realization that the Kingdom of Heaven is restored to you."
A vaccine is, at best, an illusion of a solution. It might seem to work for some people and not for others. It may seem to work to a degree, but not totally. It absolutely MUST attack the body in some way as all magic does. It will not stop any virus from entering your body and beginning to take hold.
It will not prevent your body from being vulnerable. It will not ward off death nor will it cause you to feel safe. It might, potentially, seem to manipulate the body so that it might, perhaps, if your mind consents, avoid contagion or transmission of a disease some of the time. But it will not bring peace to your soul. God doesn't live in a syringe. Nor does God need booster shots.
If all you can choose is a senseless insane choice, a partial choice, a choice which you know cannot truly work, which can at best produce an illusion of health, and which may in fact hurt you, what are you to do? This is where you need to ideally be willing to turn to someone who knows better than you. Ask the Holy Spirit. Ask Jesus. Ask your angels. Get some guidance from a higher perspective. If you are not willing or ready to go there yourself, get their input. Let them decide for you.
And this again is where we must acknowledge the freedom of your will. No divine being is ever going to mandate a vaccination, nor are they necessarily going to always advise against it in a given situation. What is right for YOU, is dependent upon every speck of your mental state and what is appropriate, not only for you, but in the atonement plan and in the script for your life.
There may be a reason for you to elect temporary sickness. There may be a reason for you to meet certain people. There may be a good reason for YOU in particular NOT to choose a vaccine. There may be a cascade of outcomes that are only possible if you do, or do not, get medicated. There may be a good reason why you SHOULD, just as there may be a good reason you shouldn't. And it has absolutely NOTHING to do with anyone else, solely because the curriculum is individualized.
The Holy Spirit knows what is best for you given YOUR situation, where you are at and what you are ready for. He knows where your trust is. He knows what you are capable of and will accept. Turn to his advice rather than that of fear or the ego. And especially beware of the egos of other well-meaning people especially the ones who are religious about the "reasons why" you should or should not make a certain choice. EVERY reason on this level is fiction.
If you cannot or will not turn to the advice of a wiser counsel, and if you refuse health, and if you actively are choosing sickness, and if you are living therefore in fear of contagion, then your options are limited. Love does not enter where it is not welcome. You can be prayed for. You can be loved. But you may reject all support. You may have a death wish. You may want to die. It might be "your time", based on your plan. Who knows. I do not know and no-one else likely knows either. Matters are far deeper than some "statics" about viruses or medicines.
Long story short, if you made it this far. .... you are always absolutely free to make any choice you want to make, and it has absolutely nothing to do with anyone else. If anyone is trying to control your decision for ANY reason at all, they are denying their own freedom and are trying to make you responsible for them. They are like children looking for a parent to depend on, to decide everything for them.
This is because they have become undependeable and irresponsible. It's up to YOU to decide how to discern where they are at, and to be responsible yourself for your own choice. And whatever you choose, God loves you.
At the end of the day all you can do is make your own choice in freedom, and free from guilt, and do so decisively and with conviction. But not a conviction that turns into tyranny, or the attempt to recruit others to your cause. Let people be where they are at. Let them make their own decisions. Let them be mistaken and recognize that they are.
Not because they don't do what you want them to do, but because they are free of you. You have no business trying to coerce people to agree with YOUR fearful belief in laws that are not of God.
What I decide to do is none of your business, or anyone's. What guidance I receive regarding my own choices, is none of your business either. What I decide to do or not do has nothing to do with you either. And if you think that my choice affects you, you are deliberately disempowering yourself, because nothing happens to you against your will. This is not supposed to be a selfish free-for-all, or a war, where people are opposing each other and digging in their heels thinking they know what's true. Nothing in this world is true, it's just a dream.
Go within, and go above. That's the only place where there is any sanity.